Last week, the Press reported on the Select Board’s initial thoughts on finding a replacement for Town Administrator Tim Bragan, who announced his July retirement. Those thoughts were expressed at the board’s March 5 meeting, where Chair Rich Maiore tasked Bragan with gathering information from executive search firms, including estimated cost.
At that same meeting resident Ben Myers read a letter signed by 73 residents, voicing their concern about the upcoming search, mainly that it should be external and professional to “be assured of a credible and competitive pool of applicants from which to choose.”
This week, the Press spoke to a few of the residents who signed the letter. Most preferred not to comment for the record, but resident Stephanie Opalka provided a statement on behalf of the four or five people who were involved in crafting it. “The letter to the Select Board was motivated by concerns about past hiring processes, including a lack of transparency and limited searches for multiple qualified applicants for management positions. The tendency has been to hire from within without a full, open hiring process.”
In addition, the writers said hiring a town administrator is the Select Board’s “most important job,” and the board should use a search firm to find and vet candidates. Furthermore, the writers said it was equally as important to create a search committee consisting of “a diverse group of town employees, various board or committee members, and town residents who can interview qualified candidates.”
In response to a question regarding Bragan’s participation in the search process, the statement said, “There is no recent precedent for the outgoing town administrator to be involved in the search or the review of resumes.” Bragan had already sent his recommendation for the process to the board: That it first consider hiring Assistant Town Administrator Marie Sobalvarro before looking elsewhere.
In his recommendation letter, Bragan stated “A prior Select Board, back in 2013, saw the wisdom of creating the Assistant Town Administrator position not to just handle Human Resources and Procurement, but to be a possible homegrown successor for the position. They had the forethought of planning for some type of succession to be able to take place.”
No evidence of 2013 plan for ‘homegrown successor’
But there is no evidence to support those statements. A human resource position was first proposed in 2013 by then-Finance Director Lorraine Leonard. The minutes of the Jan. 7, 2014, meeting of the Select Board state that Bragan spoke in support of the human resource position during his staff report to the board. In that same report, he told the board that he had “added Assistant Town Administrator to the job description and envisions the position to be 30 hours a week.” That was the only reference to the new position in Select Board minutes until a May 6 meeting, when Bragan announced in his staff report that he would “have the advertisement ready for the Human Resource position at the next meeting.” The town had approved the creation of “a Human Resource/Assistant Town Administrator position” a month earlier at Town Meeting.
The Press asked Lucy Wallace, who was a Select Board member in 2013 and 2014, if she remembered any discussions about the position providing a succession plan for the town administrator job. In an email, Wallace said “It was never, in my mind, considered a succession plan for TA. Obviously, an assistant TA could apply, but hiring a new TA would require a broad search and interview of several candidates.”
Wallace was also one of the residents who signed the concerned citizens’ letter. She had this to say about why she signed it: “Except for schools, the TA supervises all other departments and town employees, and, therefore, impacts (directly or indirectly) the work of the volunteer committee members. Under the Harvard Charter, the TA now hires nearly all town staff and department heads, which further limits public engagement in filling these positions and extends the ‘power’ (some would say) of the TA. Therefore, I think the search committee for the new TA should include representatives of town employees, committee members, and the general public. We should feel the incoming TA will be responsive to all these constituencies.”
Bragan is expected to provide the Select Board with quotes and process information from search firms at its next meeting, scheduled for March 19. At a Finance Committee meeting on March 12, during a discussion about the remaining balance in the Reserve Fund, Finance Director Jared Mullane told the committee that those quotes were running in the $10,000 to $15,000 range.
Mullane had included $15,000 as a placeholder in his list of possible upcoming Reserve Fund requests. The other two requests were covering the snow and ice removal budget and lead paint abatement at Bromfield House, both of which must be done this fiscal year. The committee voted that day to use $80,000 of the fund for a school legal settlement (see story on page 3). If all the requests were granted, the Reserve Fund would be in the red by almost $15,000, and that’s not allowed, Mullane said. FinCom Chair Eric Ward said the search firm fee is the only request that might be considered optional, and member Noyan Kinayman questioned why the job couldn’t just be posted like other town vacancies. Mullane said one benefit of using a search firm is to get an outside perspective.
