A voting sign seen on Election Day Nov. 5 at the Mount Vernon Community Center. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

MOUNT VERNON — Talks are underway to hire the town’s first dedicated manager and expand the Select Board from three to five members, moves aimed at improving efficiency in town governance.

Select Board Chairperson Robert Grenier said the overhaul of Mount Vernon’s town government would take place over the next two years if both measures are approved by voters at a town meeting. He said the two changes were recommended in a report last year by the town’s Governance Committee.

“One of the main points is that we’re trying to manage the town with a Select Board, and there’s really no one at the town hall during these hours that were open,” Grenier said. “The only person that’s at the town hall all the time is the town clerk. So we’re basically managing a $3-4 million business with the Select Board, which meets every other week.”

The town struggles, he said, to conduct any business outside of those bi-weekly meetings. Even two Select Board members collaborating to work on a grant application constitutes an official quorum of the three-member board, making any meaningful work difficult to complete without breaking public meeting rules and regulations.

Expanding the Select Board to five members would help ease that struggle and allow board members to collaborate on projects, Grenier said. Hiring a town manager would further shift workload from elected officials to a dedicated, expert manager.

“We can’t do that, as a board,” he said. “We can’t oversee the fire department. We can’t oversee the transfer station. We’re not at the town office all the time, right?”

A new manager would be paid a salary in the $75,000-$90,000 range, Grenier said. The manager would be responsible for overseeing the town’s more than 20 employees and conducting the day-to-day business of the town, including managing its $3.17 million budget.

The new town manager job may not include the titles and responsibilities of the town clerk and treasurer, as it does in neighboring Fayette, since Mount Vernon already employs people in those positions.

Fayette was one of five nearby towns with town managers and five-member select boards that Mount Vernon’s Governance Committee consulted before writing its final report last year. In every interview with the leadership of those towns, officials said having a five-person select board “provided more stability, diversity, and broader representation of town residents,” according to the committee’s report.

Hiring a town manager also had broad support from the five consulted towns. In an increasingly divided political climate, the town officials said, a town manager “provides neutral fact-based information to the Select Board, which information assists the Select Board in setting policies and goals in the best interest of the town.”

Grenier said the Select Board needs to move relatively quickly — discussing the pros and cons of the move and informing the public as much as possible — to ensure some of the changes would be ready for a vote at the 2025 town meeting in June.

But Dan Shea, another member of the board, said there is no need to rush the process. The Select Board has not even adopted an official position yet on the committee’s recommendations, he said.

Shea said he hopes to hear both sides of the conversation, and maybe even talk to towns that have rejected a change to a town manager form of government.

“If there’s one thing that the Select Board wants to do, it’s to not rush into this, (but) to take our time and to have conversations over the next six months with a broad a group of people,” Shea said. “I don’t think anyone on the Select Board is ready to endorse the idea, but we are excited about the possibility and are anxious to have a series of conversations with folks in the community.”

Grenier said he plans to hand out information sheets to residents Saturday and Sunday at the Mount Vernon Transfer Station, and that the town will hold public hearings in the next several months.

“Between now and town meeting, which is in June, we’ve got to really talk it up,” Grenier said. “We’ve got to explain to people what this benefit would be, and then, probably between now and then, work towards getting a five-member board.”

In all, he said he expects the process to take two years. But the wait is worth it, he said, for the benefits a town manager could bring Mount Vernon’s 1,700 residents.

“The Governance Committee talked with all the town managers around here, and the committee felt that that was one of the reasons why they pushed their recommendation to go to a town manager — because all these towns around, it just works so much better,” Grenier said. “The office staff, all of this stuff, just everything works much better.”