The agenda for the January 6th meeting of the General
Government subcommittee contained the following item:
2. Review/discuss Town Manager Evaluation form
.
At the January 11th meeting of the Town
Council, Councilor Carrasco announced that he had minutes for the subcommittee
meeting. However, he was still typing them up and they would be reported at a
later meeting.
At the January 27th meeting of the Town
Council Councilor Clemence had apparently assumed the chairmanship of General
Government in light of Mr. Carrasco’s accession to Council Chair. She reported
that she had no minutes and no meeting scheduled.
Let me ask the reading audience, “Do you remember
the last time a Town Council reported an evaluation of the Town Manager?” I can’t.
The hiring of a Manager ranks as the primary
responsibility of the Council. Hand in hand with that is, of necessity, their
oversight of his tenure.
But, without any kind of review mechanism, how much
oversight is there?
The Council has already managed to accede to a “no tax
increase” increase in taxes through a revaluation process that has increased
homeowner property taxes by eight to ten percent despite a decline in the tax
rate. It seems to me that there has been precious little questioning of that coupled
with little, if any, information about whether the tax bills of other classes
of property owners experienced a commensurate decline.
In addition, there has been no discussion of any
further effort to constrain any kind of tax increase in the next budget.
All of this has happened while the public has been
preoccupied with the drama surrounding our schools.
Regrettably, the fact is that we have surrendered
the control of our schools to the state.
Let’s allow that to work itself out.
But let us not neglect paying attention to the
balance of our town government over which we still can exercise direct control.
We need to push our Town Council to address the
issues of Town Manager performance evaluation and property taxes.
Why question his evaluations? Mayor San Angelo is just getting used to running the show, we can do that next year after he gets the Casella contract renewed and,nKes,sure we,have,a,board of health that is not too liberal about tree,hugger ussues, because Casella does so much for our community.
ReplyDeleteMr. Vecchia, who I hope is feeling better, may not have said nice things in the evaluation because he does not like getting the run around, but as many of us know, being a TM and keeping your position requires a clever distribtion of information to the Council to ensure control to prevent the taxpayers from taking control back from.our valued Industrial base that deserves the full faith and,devotion of the Town Government so there will not be any layoffs in Town Hall.
We might have awful schools and seriouss health threats, but at least we are one of the only towns in the State to keep the town employees off the unemployment line thru the great recession , at least those that co-operate with management.
Just one more garbage extension and our taxes,will go down eventually and,we will get free trash pickup (65 gallons !) and free trash monitoring.
Yes yes. Keeping the town hall employed must be the utmost priority when facing difficulty in the town. Sure, schools here are the worst, no one wants to move here, people move out, businesses don't set up here, and a landfill keeps the lights on, but saving the jobs of those responsible for this mess must remain the top priority.
DeletePuke.
Ron, you are a Pawn.
Chris Clark actually crowed about the fact there were no layoffs during the Great Recession as if that was evidence of his management skill.
ReplyDelete