By Cliff White 

Staff Writer

Charter amendments to eliminate the personnel review committee and to reduce the number of members on the budget committee discussed at the April 9 selectmen’s meeting will be voted on at Buxton’s Town Meeting this summer.

Both committees have struggled in attracting candidates for years, with only one member currently active on the personnel review committee, said Selectman Dan Collomy.

“Several years ago the [personnel review] committee started having difficulty having enough members to regularly conduct business, and that has made the committee less effective,” Collomy said. “They can never get a quorum, from lack of interest, I guess. Nobody wants to get involved.”

While the budget committee has 10 active members for the current budget cycle, chairman Peter Burns said he hasn’t had a full slate of 12 members for seven years and through some of the interval had as few as five members.

“I asked the selectmen to make this adjustment because 12 members was too many,” Burns said. “The committee would work well with an odd number and seven is that right number, in my opinion. It gives you the chance to still have one or two people miss a meeting and still have enough people to conduct business.”

The elimination of the personnel review committee would also help streamline the town’s hiring process, Selectman Jean Harmon said.

“One of the comments we would hear from people interviewing for positions is they had one interview with one group and another with another group,” Harmon said. “It sometimes made things confusing.”

Selectmen were not allowed into personnel committee hiring reviews or candidate interviews, Selectman Cliff Emery said.

“They didn’t want us to sit in, and when we asked to sit in they flatly refused,” Emery said. “We had no idea what questions the committee asked of the candidate, and so oftentimes we repeated the same questions in our interviews.”

Putting the hiring process entirely into the hands of the selectmen would be “taking a different approach to town hiring practices,” Emery said.

“There would be times where the person we may have been interested in hiring never got to us because they wouldn’t be sent to us from the committee,” Emery said. “There were times when that was volatile, to say the least.”

The issue driving the change is the lack of interested members, Harmon said.

“Positions have been available on the committee for several years and no one has been interested,” Harmon said.

In discussing the trimming down of budget committee positions, Burns said he would not be returning to the committee next year. He said the reduction would make the committee more efficient in case interest is not as great in future years.

“We have been fortunate this year in having a relatively large number of active members,” Burns said. “But I think that was just lucky.”

Also at the meeting, selectmen introduced a charter amendment that would allow them to avoid prior announcement of all articles that appear annually on the warrant. Currently, the selectmen must announce at a public meeting all warrant articles, including familiar ones – such as the article authorizing the selectmen to seek further funding from grants –a which have appeared on the warrant year after year. 

“What we don’t want to have to do is read at a selectmen’s meeting the last six or seven articles – that are on the warrant every year before we sign the warrant, just want to read new warrant articles that deal with issues of that year,” Emery said.

At a special town meeting that took place before the selectmen’s meeting, residents voted unanimously to appropriate $41,875 from the town’s surplus to pay interest on the $1.8 million bond approved in 2007. The bond is being used to build the new public works garage.