The Cornville Town Hall on West Ridge Road, where the Cornville’s annual town meeting is held each March, is shown on April 1. The town meeting was started in March, but has been tabled twice while waiting on an audit.  Jake Freudberg/Morning Sentinel

CORNVILLE — Some annual town business in Cornville is still pending after voters tabled two attempts at town meeting in March, while raising questions about the town’s financial records.

The Select Board is waiting to schedule a third attempt at finishing the annual town meeting warrant until the completion of the town’s annual audit later this spring, Selectman Melvin Blaisdell, the board’s chair, said.

“(The audit) won’t be here until the end of April, after tax season,” the longtime selectman said after the board’s monthly meeting Monday.

Cornville voters so far have approved 15 articles on the 25-article warrant, according to Town Clerk Tammy Locke.

They approved the first 14 articles at the originally scheduled March 1 town meeting, Locke said. Residents came back March 15 and approved just one more article before a motion was made to table the meeting again, she said.

The articles approved so far include most of the town’s annual spending. Total proposed spending on this year’s warrant totals approximately $866,000 for the town of about 1,300 people.

Remaining articles pertaining to spending, according to Locke, are $5,000 for Cornville’s annual membership in the Kennebec Regional Development Authority and $23,000 to update tax maps, maintain records and print bills.

Other pending business includes updates to the Road and Entrance Design Standards Ordinance and the Cornville Waste Management Ordinance and some procedural items related to the collection of property taxes.

Residents have also not yet voted to accept state and federal funds or determined the sum of money the town will take from surplus to offset taxation.

Blaisdell said, for now, the town is operating on what was approved at town meeting in 2024, for both budgetary and administrative items.

“If you don’t have a town meeting to change it, then it stays,” Blaisdell said of warrant articles approved last year. “Don’t worry, I checked with Maine Municipal on this one because this is the first time ever that it happened.”

But Kate Dufour, director of communications and advocacy for the Maine Municipal Association, said the situation is not as simple as just operating the town based on what voters approved in 2024. The association provides education and information to its municipal members as well as advocacy of municipal concerns.

Maine statutes have no provisions specifying that municipalities can do that, as they do for school districts, Dufour said.

If a town has a charter, that document may describe certain provisions about what would happen in a scenario like Cornville’s, Dufour said.

Cornville does not have a charter, Blaisdell and Locke said.

Several Maine towns, depending on the timing of their town meeting and fiscal year, include an article in each year’s town meeting warrant to authorize the spending of a portion of the current budget in the next budget year until the next town meeting. Often, it is for three-twelfths of the previous year’s budget in towns that operate on a Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 budget year and hold their town meeting in March, such as Cornville.

No such article was presented or approved at the 2024 town meeting, according to meeting minutes on file at the Town Office.

Without being granted that authority from voters in some way, town officials would not be able to make expenditures based on the previous year’s budget, Dufour said.

Jamie Strout, a Cornville resident on the town’s Budget Committee who said he made the motions to table the March 1 and 15 meetings, said in a March interview that he understood leaving unfinished business puts the town in a tricky position.

Strout said financial records presented to voters ahead of the March 1 town meeting raised questions, and he was not satisfied with the answers from the three select board members — Blaisdell, Derrick Kinney and Jessica “Jake” Daigneault.

His questions, he said, were about certain line items, like the town’s membership in the Kennebec Regional Development Authority’s FirstPark showing as unpaid and lower-than-expected $100 in revenue from plumbing permits.

“We were questioning whether they had been received, hadn’t been received; whether it had been paid, or not,” Strout said.

Strout said he does not suspect any money is missing but thinks the town’s accounting software and its new treasurer contributed to the problems.

“We seem to have some deficiencies in our recordkeeping, I guess you’d say,” he said.

Blaisdell, the selectman, said the town is purchasing new financial software better suited for municipalities. The town was using a QuickBooks product, and the new software is from Northern Data Systems in Falmouth, he said.

Cornville Treasurer Christine Quinn, who was elected in March 2024, said she is still getting a grasp on the job. The position is part-time — about four hours a week — and training was slow in the beginning, Quinn said.

“So, I’m still learning,” Quinn said Monday. “I took a couple classes last year with Maine Municipal, and the (select) board is backing me taking more education this year, learning more about the treasurer position and budgeting and whatnot.”

Quinn said she is hopeful that the upcoming audit and new accounting software will address any issues with the town’s books. She expects a learning curve with the new software, too.

“It’s a learning process,” Quinn said. “I’m looking forward to it.”