PLAINFIELD — This year saw multiple town officials resign from their roles.
Things started to go off the rails in Plainfield in March, when town officials discovered the town report had not been mailed to residents in time to be in compliance with state law. This forced the town’s annual meeting to be delayed until April.
Robin Miller was appointed town clerk and treasurer in December 2022 to replace Linda Wells, who retired after 27 years of service. Miller had been hired by the town in July 2022 to work under Wells.
Miller told the select board in February that the town report was sent to the printer late because she had been working on clearing up financial discrepancies for it.
Board members did not realize at the time that the delay would mean the report would not be mailed out 10 days before the annual meeting, which is required by state law. Jim Volz, a member of the board who was serving as chair at the time, reported he had yet to receive the town report as of March 7, the day the annual meeting was scheduled to take place.
Volz took the blame for the oversight, stating he should have been paying more attention to deadlines with a new town clerk. Though it appears this delay created a level of distrust among some town residents for Miller.
Bram Towbin was elected to the select board following that delayed annual meeting in April. Towbin, who ran unopposed, replaced Sasha Thayer, who did not seek re-election. Riley Carlson ran unopposed for the last year on his three-year seat. Carlson had been appointed to the board in October 2022 after Tammy Farnham resigned from the board in June 2022.
Volz was not in attendance for the board’s first meeting in April following the annual meeting because he was tending to a personal matter. Towbin, who had previously served on the board for six years, suggested he could serve as the board’s chair, after he had again taken over the role of town road commissioner. Carlson suggested Towbin might be taking on a bit too much for his plate and volunteered to serve as chair. Both Carlson and Towbin then voted to appoint Carlson as chair.
A few days later, the board took an usual step and held a special meeting on a Saturday. Volz again was not in attendance.
During that meeting, Carlson and Towbin appointed Michael Billingsley as emergency management director. Thayer had been holding that position and wanted to keep it, though she did not seek re-election to the select board.
Both Towbin and Billingsley walked away from town business in 2020 because of their stated issues with Thayer. Volz again wasn’t in attendance for a board meeting in April 2020 when Thayer and Farnham decided to disband the town’s Hazard Mitigation Committee and create a new, similar committee in its place. Both Towbin and Billingsley wanted to be reappointed to the committee but were not. Towbin accused Thayer of “bullying” by silencing people she disagreed with on Zoom during virtual meetings, and Billingsley said he had been on the receiving end of Thayer’s “yelling attacks” while working with her.
The departure of the two long-serving town volunteers led residents to create a Change.org petition calling for Thayer’s removal from the board in spring 2020.
The Saturday board meeting in April of this year appeared to be a continuation of that clash. Thayer, who appeared to telegraph that she was about to lose the director’s position, was cut off by Carlson when she was reading her four-page statement on why she wanted to remain as emergency management director. The board didn’t hear from Billingsley during the meeting, though he was in virtual attendance.
After an executive session, and despite what appeared to be a clear conflict of interest between Thayer, Towbin and Billingsley, if not outright retaliation for what happened in 2020, Towbin and Carlson voted to appoint Billingsley as director.
The town’s fire chief, Greg Light, was not in favor of this change and wanted Thayer to keep the role. Light has since stated he will soon step down as fire chief because he has moved to nearby East Montpelier, though he plans to stay on the fire department.
In August, Towbin announced he was resigning from the select board and again stepping away from public service. He said he had been receiving numerous complaints about how Miller was doing her job and he couldn’t get support from his fellow board members to address it.
He had proposed the town use a time clock that Miller would use to punch in that the board would have oversight of because Miller had been keeping inconsistent office hours, and the board would be notified if a bill was paid late or a check was deposited late. But Towbin said he couldn’t get support from Volz or Carlson for these measures because they stated Miller is a fellow elected official, so they have no control over her job.
Miller said she conducts her job with professionalism and welcomes feedback. She noted Towbin never brought his concerns about her job performance to her directly.
Tim Davis was appointed in October to Towbin’s seat on the select board, the final two years of which will go back up for election in March.
Also in October, long-serving Auditor Lorraine Cappetta resigned. Cappetta said in her resignation letter that computerized books were not acceptable to her without proper paper documentation and Miller was refusing to keep a set of paper books for Cappetta.
Miller reported it was unnecessary to keep two sets of books. She said she has plenty enough to do with her roles and if there were changes she could make to help the office run more efficiently, like not keeping the second set of books, then she would do that.
Cappetta complained that she had brought her issues with Miller to the board “to no avail.” She asked that the town seek an outside audit.
The board opted not to seek that audit after being told there was a $100 discrepancy between Cappetta’s books and Miller’s books, and after they were told an audit would cost about $25,000.
Then earlier this week, Carlson announced he was resigning from the board. This was in response to Towbin submitting five petitions on Dec. 20 that would change how the town operates. The petitions, if approved at town meeting in March, would change the clerk and treasurer positions from elected to appointed, would let the town seek candidates outside Plainfield to fill those two roles and would change the town’s charter, to remove the section stating all officers shall be elected by Australian ballot and to add a section stating elected officials need not be residents or legally qualified voters of the town, unless specified by state law.
Carlson said in his resignation letter that no one who signed the petitions, including current town officials, saw value in asking the opinion of anyone on the select board. He said the petitions were “a mess” and ensured that town meeting “will be confusing and vitriolic.” Carlson said the petitions were submitted when the board is in the middle of its budget season, adding significant and unexpected work to the board’s workload.
“Serving on the select board is challenging in the best of times, and borderline impossible when someone quits in the wake of a major flood with his stated mission to ‘send a shock through the system’. To see Plainfield people are willing to sign their name in support of this approach, including many who I like and respect (and still do), has destroyed all motivation I had remaining for this work,” Carlson wrote.
He suggested Towbin withdraw the petitions so that the town can approach the conversation in a constructive manner.
Towbin said he didn’t understand why Carlson resigned nor why he was upset with the petitions because their goal was to give the board more authority by giving it the ability to appoint a town clerk and a treasurer. He said these petitions, if approved, would make it clear who is responsible for what. He said these petitions weren’t submitted against any single person, but from a desire to have an accountable, transparent town government. Towbin said anyone would have had difficulty trying to fill Wells’ shoes and the days of one person holding the clerk and treasurer positions for decades as an elected official are likely over.
Towbin said those on the board “demonstrated a complete lack of interest in any changes while I served on the board so I don’t understand the chairman being mystified at my not consulting them.”
Towbin has since announced he’s now collecting signatures for a possible sixth petition to be voted on at town meeting, this one expanding the board from three members to five. Carlson had suggested expanding the board in August, shortly before Towbin resigned. Before Davis was appointed, the board was told residents were hesitant to volunteer to serve on the board because they believed the task was more work than three people could handle.
Miller has decided she will not seek re-election as clerk and treasurer. The town will need to find replacements for her and Carlson.
eric.blaisdell
@timesargus.com
