The only New Sharon selectman with more than a year of experience on the board said he intends to resign because a longtime selectmen is not returning, leaving too many duties for the board.
But the board’s newest member, Travis Pond, is already attempting to remedy the problem, successfully proposing at Town Meeting that selectmen’s salaries be cut in order to hire an assessor to take on some of those duties.
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And both he and the remaining member, Lorna Nichols, believe they can pick up the slack.
“Anytime someone with years of service leaves, there’s always a loss,” Nichols said Friday. “But that means other people then need to step up to the plate.”
The issue in the Franklin County town, with a population of 1,300, highlights the challenges many of the state’s small town governments face.
Residents at the annual Town Meeting last Saturday voted 127-83 to elect political newcomer Pond over Maynard Webster, who was chairman and served as a selectman for 38 years.
Webster’s departure prompted Selectman Forrest Bonney to announce his intent to resign, because the board is now made up of members, including himself, who lack the experience to effectively pick up the duties that Webster performed.
Webster “kind of ran the town more as a town manger or town administrator at a selectman’s price,” said Bonney, who has been on the board for three years. “It’s going to be difficult for anyone to pick up the pieces, and I didn’t want to be the one to do it.”
Bonney said he is not sure when he will officially resign and plans to speak with the two other board members about the process and timing.
Bonney said that Webster took on a number of roles in town government, such as filling responsibilities normally assigned to a town manager or administrator and performing tax assessment work.
The town has no town manager to handle those duties, but in Maine that is not unusual.
Among the state’s 492 municipalities, more than 200 don’t have a town manager “and generally speaking, those are the smaller towns,” said Eric Conrad, spokesman for the Maine Municipal Association.
“Even cases where people are in office for five or 10 years, in small towns wearing a lot of hats is not uncommon,” Conrad said.
Bonney announced his resignation in an email to Pond and Nichols on Sunday, the day after the election.
Pond said in a telephone interview that some of the work done by Webster could be done by hiring an assessor with money that was cut from the selectmen’s salaries.
Voters at the annual Town Meeting on Saturday voted to support Pond’s motion to cut selectmen’s annual pay from $7,000 to $5,000. Pond said he made the proposal with the intention of using the money to hire an assessor, taking assessing tasks out of the select board’s hands.
He said it is too early in his term as a newly elected selectman to comment on whether he shared Bonney’s concerns about the workload.
“It wouldn’t be fair to give an assessment at this time,” he said.
Selectmen have not met since Bonney said he planned to resign.
Pond said Wednesday that according to the rules governing municipal resignations, the town would have to call a special town meeting to elect a new selectman when Bonney officially resigns. At that same meeting, residents could also vote on whether they wanted to hire a tax assessor.
Webster did not want to comment on Bonney’s plans to leave, which he said Bonney made on his own.
“He drives his own boat,” said Webster.
Webster also didn’t want to talk about Bonney’s portrayal of the amount of work Webster did for the town.
“I don’t want to sound pompous,” he said.
Nichols, who was elected last year, said she and Pond have been in constant contact, researching what needs to be done and what people want to see done. She said they plan to pick a chairman at their next meeting.
Bonney, a retired biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, said he plans to stay on with the New Sharon water district, where he is a trustee and licensed operator.
Kaitlin Schroeder — 861-9252
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