Paris town clerk drafted to replace fired manager

PARIS ― At an emergency meeting of the Paris selectboard Thursday, June 25, Town Clerk Ann Pastore got an offer she couldn't refuse.

Literally.

Selectboard Chairman David Ivey won't let her say no.

At the hastily-called meeting, selectmen voted 4-1 to make Pastore the town's interim town manager, replacing Sharon Jackson, fired three days earlier by a 3-2 vote of the board.

Pastore knew the morning after the firing that she would be offered the job.  That led to speculation among town residents, upset over Jackson's dismissal, that the faction which ousted her — including Ivey and fellow selectmen Troy Ripley and Glen Young — were meeting in secret to make arrangements for the operation of town government in the post-Jackson era.

During an interview Friday, Ripley acknowledged selectmen are sharing data outside of meetings, such as information Ivey has gleaned from consultations with the Maine Municipal Association, but he insists no decision making is taking place.  Ivey offered Pastore the job, Ripley said, simply because her position as the number two person in the town office made her Jackson's natural successor.

Selectman Ray Glover did not appear to think so, however.  During Thursday's meeting, he requested a closed-door executive session to discuss Pastore's personnel file.  

Ripley and Ivey have questioned how Glover gained access to Pastore's personnel file, given that selectmen do not enjoy direct management oversight of town employees.  Glover said Friday that he never read Pastore's file, but as the former chairman, he was advised of its contents by Jackson.  Selectmen do have access to personnel files, Glover said, in part because they would adjudicate any appeal of disciplinary action by the town manager.

Selectmen were in executive session for 14 minutes to review Pastore's records.  When then returned all but Glover voted their confidence in her as interim town manager.

The next morning, citing concern that, given Glover's nay, she did not have the “full confidence” of the selectboard, Pastore announced she would decline the position.  She then took the rest of the day off, using comp hours banked during overtime work on election day.

Ivey said later that day that he had talked to Pastore and “calmed her down.”  She would accept the job come Monday, he said.  She just needed to “sleep on it,” said Ivey.

Pastore, for her part, said she'd already slept on it and went to work Monday still intent on turning down the offer to take on the town manager duties.

However, Ivey refused to let Pastore decline her battlefield promotion. 

On Tuesday, Ivey said once selectmen voted Pastore in as interim town manager they could not accept her resignation except at a public meeting.  Ivey said he has no intention of calling another emergency meeting, meaning Pastore must fulfill town manager duties in Paris at least until the next regularly scheduled session, set for 7 p.m. on Monday, July 13.

Pastore's role as town manager will largely be limited to putting out fires, fielding public concerns and signing checks.  Jackson remained at the town office for more than two hours after her firing, signing checks and other approved paperwork, and otherwise preparing for an orderly transition of power.

At the June 25 meeting, selectmen also divvied up among other employees the town manager duties not bestowed upon Pastore. 

Road Foreman Frank Danforth was named road commissioner.  Deputy tax collector Liz Knox stepped up to interim tax collector.  Finance clerk Sharon Gendreau General was called upon to be interim treasurer. Assistance Director Sheila Giroux had welfare director added to her duties. 

Verbally assailed by a citizen after the June 25 meeting over Jackson's firing, Ripley said he had confidence  the called-upon employees can successfully run Paris until a new town manager is hired.

On Friday, he repeated that assertion, recalling a saying from his days in the U. S. Army special services.

“The true test of any organization is its ability to function in the absence of its leaders,” he said.

Pastore, in particular, has been an acquaintance of his since childhood, said Ripley, expressing his full respect for her abilities.

Selectboard squabbles

Nearly nine days after Jackson's dismissal, selectmen continue to snipe over matters of procedure and protocol. 

Ripley continues to resent Glover's attempt to keep the board from entering executive session June 22 to review Jackson's contract.  He faults Glover for not announcing that Jackson had asked in writing for the review to be done in open session — a fact other selectmen were not aware of, he says — until after haranguing the board for nearly 15 minutes, demanding that someone, Young, Ripley or Ivey reveal why they wanted to review Jackson's contract.

The contract, Glover said, was a public document, and selectmen could not close the doors to the public unless they had matters to discuss which could damage Jackson's reputation, or invade her rights to privacy.

Ivey maintains that Glover's intent was to draw his rivals into reveling some complaint about Jackson.  Young, who made the motion to terminate Jackson, could not be reached for comment. However, Ivey and Ripley have held their guns, refusing to say anything about Jackson's job performance.  They continue to withhold all statements indicating why they voted to fire Jackson. 

To do so could put the town on the losing end of a wrongful termination suit, says Ivey.  Ripley will only say a majority of the selectboard acted on their their right under the contract, agreed to by Jackson, to terminate her without cause.

However, Ripley notes that Glover seemed to have far less concern for how an executive session might reflect on Pastore's reputation.  He also points out that, despite Glover's protests on June 22, selectmen went into executive session January 29^th under the exact same language “to review the town manager's contract.”  Jackson came out of that meeting with a five-year extension and a $5,900 raise.

Glover says the difference is that, identical motion language aside, in January selectmen planned to negotiate a new contract while in June, the call was to review an existing contract. 

Glover also says he simply had someone else in the town office in mind for the interim town manager role.  Ivey questions why Glover did not simply nominate that person.

Ivey and Ripley also fault Glover for not offering the benefit of his long municipal tenure — including 16 years as a selectman preceded by 20 on the planning board — during the transition.  Glover says he's held his tongue because Ivey “hasn't asked” for his opinion.

Instead, Glover has dedicated himself to acting as traffic cop, pointing out every wrong move made by the board majority.  To start with, he says, the June 25 emergency meeting was not permissible because Ivey had not given a full 48-hours' notice to all selectmen, nor had he provided an advance agenda.

However, despite concern voiced from some quarters, Glover denies the town should have shut down during the transition.  He agrees with Paris Hill residents Jack and Kathleen Richardson, who say the town should not collect any tax payments until a recommitment is accomplished. 

The recommitment simply draws an line of accountability, for auditing purposes, between Jackson and her successor.  Payments should not be accepted “by the letter of the law,” says Glover, but given that interims have been named and a succession is planned, he doubts any judge would go so far as to make Paris return any payments.

What's to come?

Ivey says the selectboard will discuss and possibly vote on a town manager search process at its next meeting. 

At the June 25 meeting, about 25 people were turned away after the municipal meeting room filled to capacity.  However, that was a special meeting with a limited agenda.  Because the July 13 meeting is a regularly scheduled session, at which selectmen routinely take “citizen comments,” it could move to the fire station if subject to a similar turnout.

Sources in the town office, and on the selectboard, say the leading candidate to succeed Jackson could be Paris' town assessor John Brushwein.

All agree Brushwein has done a bang-up job as assessor.  Although that and code enforcement are his primary areas of expertise, Brushwein reportedly served stints as town manager during his 20-year tenure on Mount Desert Island.

Brushwein cannot serve as interim town manager, however, because, as assessor, he'd end up having to report to himself, a no-no on any corporate flow chart.

Still, Brushwein appears to be in line for a promotion even if he does not get the nod for town manager.

Former selectmen Gerald Kilgore said in a Thursday interview that CEO Gerry Samson, of Buckfield, is serving only until Brushwein straightens out the property valuation mess inherited from his predecessor.  Samson retired recently as the Lisbon CEO.

Political intrigue

According to Kilgore, and corroborated by Glover, Jackson had a plan in place before her firing to reduce the hours of previous CEO Claude Rounds once Brushwein was done his assessing fix.  If Rounds had resigned in protest, Brushwein would have been given both jobs.

That might have come as welcome news to Ivey, Ripley and Young, had they known about it.  Ivey and Ripley deny knowledge of any plan to oust Rounds, who resigned of his own accord earlier this month to take a job in Lewiston.

Although most agree Rounds knew the books backwards, he drew the ire of many, including Young, who actively campaigned for office in 2007 on an anti-Rounds platform.  Accused of being overbearing, Rounds drew the threat of at least one lawsuit during his four-year tenure in Paris.

Kilgore says he agreed with that assessment. 

“I told Sharon, he's going to take us down,” he says.

Kilgore chose not to run for re-election to a sixth term after his aunt, former selectman Barbara Payne advised him of Rick McAlister's interest in the job.

Kilgore said Thursday that he took out nomination papers because, like McAlister, Ripley pledged not to run if he did.  Recognizing that a Ripley win would tip the balance of power on the selectboard, Kilgore said he hoped his taking out papers would block Ripley's candidacy.

Ripley denies ever promising not to run if Kilgore did.  He also denies Kilgore's claim that he called a half-hour before deadline to ask if Kilgore still planned to turn in his papers. 

Kilgore says he turned in his papers because he told Ripley he would. However, because he had no intention of running, and made no effort to collect signatures, his papers contained just four names, all from people who came to his home expressly to sign, says Kilgore.

However, the ruse did not work.  Ripley did turn in his nomination papers and, because he made no initial effort to say otherwise, Kilgore looked for a time like he had been unable to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot.

Based on the action taken by Ripley at his very first meeting, Kilgore now expresses deep regret, saying he wishes he had run, or had at least campaigned harder for McAlister.

In the meantime, the next year leading up to the end of terms for Ivey and Young promise to be nothing, if not interesting.

Ivey is now in the catbird seat as board chairman, having seemingly accomplished all of his goals when he ran for office in 2007, in tandem with Young as protest candidates to the Jackson administration.

Moments after Jackson's firing, the Rev. Anne Stanley explained in the town office parking lot what she had heard Ivey say back in 2007.

“He [Ivey] stood right in my driveway and said he had three goals,” Rev. Stanley recalled.  “He said he wanted to get rid of Gerald Kilgore, to get rig of Claude Rounds and to get rid of Sharon Jackson.”

Local teacher lives Mideast history

OXFORD — The battle between Israeli and Palestinian forces hit a 30-year peak recently and , although she left a week after the current round of fighting broke out, an Oxford native was on hand to witness the divide.

Erin Kate Morrison lost her SAD 17 teaching job to budget cuts in last year.  With time on her hands, she spent part of last summer hanging with counselors from Otisfield’s Seeds of Peace camp, where she worked the year before.

Seeds of Peace brings together youngsters from the Middle East and other parts of the world in the hopes that by becoming friends as teens, they will resist the urge to fight as adults.

It was while at a teachers’ workshop for the camp that Morrison met up with a colleague who found her a job in Israel.

Morrison spent four months at Bridge Academy, an American school in on the Palestinian side of the wall in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank area.  Most of her students were born in America, and hold duel citizenship.  However, except for Morrison, the school’s principal, Nabil Kayali, and one student, all are Muslim.

Morrison spent the first few weeks emulating the local woman who kept covered — the weather, while mild for natives, struck Morrison as oppressively hot.  Finally, a college advised Morrison that she need not remain under cover.  People, the woman said, would understand that Morrison was not Muslim.

“Everybody there loves American,” says Morrison.  “They absolutely despise and spit on American government. I was excited that people were able to distinguish the two.”

Still, it was a culture shock. 

“I was the only white person,” Morrison recalls.  “I was the only blonde.  When I walked down the street, I was stared at until I was out of their vision.  It was horrible.”

Morrison says she never felt threatened, even though some friends from Seeds of Peace remained wary of going into East Jerusalem.  The eyes upon her seemed more intense curiosity than sinister leering, she says.

The hardest part was having students who, while some spoke beautiful English, tended to converse in a separate language.

“I was trying to adjust, teaching literature and poetry, even though my background is history, and I couldn’t even begin to decipher the language,” says Morrison.

Worse, she arrived just before the start of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holy celebration marked by daily fasting.  While Morrison was not expected to sweat under scarves, covered head-to-toe, she was mindful of respecting the high holy days.

“That first month I was like, this is so hard, what am I doing here?” she recalls.  “I was like, I can’t communicate.  I’m so hungry.  Everything is so different to me.”

But questions of culture went both ways.  With an Irish Catholic background, Morrison often found Muslims as ignorant to the subtle differences between Catholic and Christian as most Americans are to the distinctions between Sunni and Shiite.

“Here people will talk about a lot of things, but I think most shy away from talking about religion,” says Morrison.  “Over there, that was the first thing.  I was seen as Christian and that became part of my identity, immediately.”

Morrison says she was surprised just how great a part religion plays in the lives of Israelis and Palestinians.

“They talk about God in everything they say,” she recalled.  “At Seeds of Peace, you have this notion of, why can’t people live together, but then when you get here and it’s a lot deeper.  Everything is embedded in religious belief to a degree that’s hard for Americans to understand.

“That idea that how the government is going to run is based on religious thought — that just doesn’t happen here,” Morrison points out.

Perceived, she thinks, as a pushover by students for her sunny disposition, and ever-present smile, Morrison soon had to lay the hammer down.  The correct answer to a directive to pay attention in class was not, she made clear, “Okay, God willing.”

“They have this firm faith and belief that, if it’s God’s will, it’s going to happen,” she says.  “I was like, ‘No, you control this, not God.”

Still, Morrison says the school had the support of parents.  In most cases, each child had at least one American parent.  However, families chose to send their children to the Branch School, which teaches in English and uses American text books, she says, because American schools, and American culture, are seen as too permissive.  Morrison and her fellow teachers enjoyed an ability to simply dismiss unruly students unknown in the States.

“They value education a lot over there,” says Morrison, especially mindful of her students who will live in Palestine once their education is complete.  “There are not a lot of options over there.  If they don’t have an education, they will be doing absolutely nothing.”

Morrison likes to joke that teacher-parent meetings were a breeze at her new job.

“I had one where the father didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak his language.  So, we just sat there,” she says, with a laugh.

However, if the culture and the school atmosphere took some getting used to, other aspects of life on the Arab side of the West Bank proved eerily easy to assimilate.

When the fighting broke out in Gaza, less than two hours away, local Palestinian protests went virtually unnoticed.  Celebratory gunfire was common at a nearby stadium, says Morrison, while protest fires tend not to look much different than the fires local build to burn their trash.

A security lockdown is no big thing, she says, considering that one has to pass through checkpoints to go virtually anywhere.

“The sad part is that, for my students, this is not new,” says Morrison.  “For them it was not a big deal, whereas I was like, ‘Am I in a movie?’

“There were AK-47s everywhere, like it was an accessory,” recalls Morrison.

Morrison says she truly bonded with her students in Ramallah and, not surprising, built up a healthy respect for their world view.

“The rockets and the killing was nothing new,” she says.  “We just heard about it here because they actually shot a missile into Israel and killed, like, one person.  But the Israelis are the ones who control the checkpoints, and they weren’t letting things in — even basics, like water, flour and medicines.  The Palestinian people live behind this big cement wall that reminds them every day that they live in a caged society.

“I’m not justifying any actions, by any means,” Morrison stresses. “I just explain it to people here by asking, ‘What would you do if your child had no food, or no medicine?’

Despite the impression Morrison feels is given by the one-sided reporting she sees in Western news sources, the militant Hamas organization does not represent all Palestinians, she says.

“I think what people don’t understand is that, in America, it’s all about networking and who you know, and if that doesn’t work, money talks,” explains Morrison, “But there, that means nothing — absolutely nothing.  It’s all about what I.D. you hold.

A blue identification card can get one past the Israeli checkpoints.  A green i.d. keeps one pretty well esconced on the Palestinian side.

Morrison says she met one Palestinian man who owned a grove of olive trees passed down to him along family lines.  However, because those trees are on the Israeli said of the fence, he has to hire someone else to tend to them.  He can only view his orchard from afar.

“I don’t think they can live together in a society,” says Morrison.  “I just don’t think that’s feasible, because of the religious divide.  I think the solution has to be to give the Palestinians their own country.  But where people are naturally going to want to possess their ancestral lands, even that might not work.  It’s just a big, big mess.”

Morrison returned to the States in December, when her visa expired.  The escalation in tensions made it tough, she says, to get the visa renewed in time to return for the spring semester.  Still, she keeps in touch with her former students through Facebook, and hopes to return this spring to see some of them graduate.

“Being over there made me realize how much I love to learn about other cultures,” she says.  “Even if you think you have an idea of what another culture is like, you really have no idea until you have been immersed in it.  If they told me today you can go back, I’d split in a second.”

And how does Morrison’s mom, Oxford Town Clerk Ellen Morrison feel about that?

“Even though she was not right where the fighting was, I was still nervous, because she was so isolated,” she says.  “As a mother, I guess it’s best that I don’t know every story about what it was like for her over there.”

Still, Ellen acknowledges that Erin came home a much different person than the one who left the Oxford Hills four months earlier.  As is often the case, Morrison says she learned as much from her students as she hopes to have taught them.

“I learned a lot about myself,” she says.  “Once I was pulled away from my family, my language and my culture, it made me really think about what’s important for me.   For me, there was a lot of personal growth.

“And I don’t feel like that learning is done,” she says, “so I really would like to go back.”

Paris paying for ‘sloppy’ assessments

PARIS — Paris Assessor John Brushwein exited stage left Friday — bound for Poland and an extra $5,000 in pay — but, on his way out the door, he left selectmen with a thing or two to think about.

Four days before his departure, Brushwein sat down with town fathers for a 30-minute overview of property valuations in town.  Having spent the balance of his 14-month tenure fixing the “sloppy work” of his predecessor, Kevin McGillicuddy, Brushwein said the heavy lifting is far from over.

"Every property needs to be re-inspected, is basically what I'm telling you," he said.

McGillicuddy resigned in September, 2007, following a firestorm of criticism from a packed house of irate taxpayers, upset over a partial revaluation.  Although Paris tax rate dropped from $16.20 to $13.50 per $1,000 of value, some homeowners said their valuations had shot up as much as 48 percent.

Brushwein said McGillicuddy achieved his goal, setting local assessments at 90 percent of fair market value, based on recent sales.  In doing so, he ensured taxpayers would continue to enjoy the full value exemptions, including homestead and tree growth discounts.

However, Brushwein brandished another number, the “coefficient of dispersion,” or quality rating, saying that some homes in Paris are valued much higher, or lower, than the 90 percent ratio.  The target quality rating (defined as the average deviation from the average sales ratio) should be 10 or under, said Brushwein.  In Paris, it’s 16.

That, he noted, indicates that “people are not being treated equally.”

In the months after taking up the assessing reins in Paris, Brushwein dealt with McGillicuddy’s assessment by awarding out 145 abatements, cutting $1.6 million for local valuations and wiping nearly $23,000 from the tax rolls.

The problem, said Brushwein, was that McGillicuddy’s valuations tended to be “land high and building low.”  There is no way to amend one portion of the tax bill without revaluing the other, said Brushwein.  However, a town-wide revaluation could cost as much as $300,000.  Fortunately, said Brushwein, McGillicuddy did not adjust land values for undeveloped property, which helped set the average ration at 90 percent, despite some wide variations.

 In addition, Brushwein said, McGillicuddy had set up 25 different tax neighborhoods, where base values change due to local conditions.  That, said Brushwein, seems far too many for a small town like Paris.  However, with just 36 “non-distressed” sales in Paris in 2008, it would be difficult to amend neighborhood borders.

Of course, Brushwein said, he had a Herculean task just to identify the 25 neighborhoods, since McGillicuddy left no records of where one ended, and another began.

That, he said, was just one example of the data errors, mapping issues, and missing information with which he had to deal.

In some cases, McGillicuddy had combined lots in the same ownership, even when a road, a river, or another property, divided those lots.  The merger effectively eliminated the first acre base value of the second lot, wiping out, on average, more than $25,000 in taxable valuation.  Brushwein said he was never able to figure out how many of Paris 2,988 property accounts were the result of improper combinations.

Brushwein also described tax cards with bad or outdated information.  Some had improper building dimensions, in one case taxing for 450-square feet of space that did not exist.  In another case, no value was set for a large deck, clearly seen on a photograph taken of the property.

“Somebody took a picture of it,” said Brushwein.  “It seems real hard not to have noticed it.  There are errors that, to me, are just hard to grasp.”

However, the piece de resistance was the improper valuation of a building “in close proximity” to the town office.  For three years, said Brushwein, McGillicuddy failed to set a value for a new 3,000-square foot second story addition. 

On the flip side, Brushwein also found whole buildings that were still being taxed even though they no longer exist.

Finally, Brushwein noted a number of other discrepancies, including acreage measurements and building characteristics listed on tax cards that did not match data entered into the town computer system.  In a particular pet peeve for Brushwein, more annoying, he said, than Paris’ inconsistent lot-numbering system, , McGillicuddy seems to have made haphazard use of the “caps lock” function on this keyboard, resulting in a number of tax records entered in all capital letters.

“That’s the first thing I fixed," he said.

“For what I’ve seen, it’s a lot of sloppy work,” said Brushwein.  “If you have sloppy assessments, it’s very hard to make the taxpayers feel as though they are being treated fairly.”

Because a full revaluation is “unreasonable and financially unrealistic” in the current economy, Brushwein says the best his replacement can do is put together an in-house inspection plan, to visit properties one-by-one to verify that town records match what’s on the ground. 

As records are corrected and tax maps amended, the new assessor should monitor sales in order to eventually adjust values, paying particular attention to those lots listed far above, or below, fair market value.

“I think these issues need to be sorted out,” said Brushwein.

After his talk, former selectmen Janet Jamison spoke up from her seat in the audience.

“How can we protect ourselves in the future from incompetence?” she asked. 

“Well, the first thing is proper oversight,” said selectboard Chairman Raymond Glover.  “The previous town manager did not oversee the assessor properly."

Glover said it was current Town Manager Sharon Jackson who “took [McGillicuddy] to task for things he was doing, or wasn’t doing.”

“She brought a lot of things to our attention that we weren’t aware of,” he said.  “From here, it’s just proper hiring practices, checking credentials and conducting a good interview.”

On Tuesday Jackson said she has received "a couple" of applications for Paris' open assessor’s job.  The position will be advertised until February 27, she said.