Williamstown Board Names Town Manager Search Committee, Seeks to Learn Lessons
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday announced the first appointees to a Town Manager Search Committee and said it will differ in at least one respect from the recently concluded search for an interim police chief.
"Moving on to our next search, that committee will be subject to the Open Meeting Law," Hugh Daley said. "There will be minutes. There will be portions that will have to go into executive session, like when we consider resumes."
Preliminary screening committees, like the search committee, are permitted to go into executive session "if the chair declares that an open meeting will have a detrimental effect in obtaining qualified applicants," according to the Open Meeting Law.
The entire process of the Interim Police Chief Advisory Committee was exempt from the OML because it was serving as an advisory committee to an authority (in this case, the town manager) who could have made the decision at his or her sole discretion.
The same argument could be made for the Town Manager Search Committee, where the hiring authority under the town charter is the Select Board. But Daley said at Monday's meeting that he and Jane Patton, who are serving on the town manager search panel, intend to keep those meetings as transparent as possible.
A lack of transparency in the interim police chief hiring process has made it difficult for residents to assess the acrimony that resulted from that committee.
At Monday's Select Board meeting, Natalia Romano delivered a five-page report signed by seven of the eight residents appointed to the committee that discussed what worked and what did not work in the panel's deliberations.
Appended to that report were three separate statements, two signed by three members of the committee who expressed deep concerns about the process and one by a different member who said the interim town manager "acted in good faith and objectively" when he decided not to hire the candidate who emerged as the search committee's first choice.
The Select Board is hoping for a smoother process this time around.
On Monday, Patton announced that Jose Constantine, Melissa Cragg, Dan Gura, Chris Kapiloff, Ngonidzashe Munemo, David Moresi, Susan Puddester and Abigail Reifsnyder have been appointed to serve on the committee with herself and Daley.
Patton said there will be two more appointments. On Monday evening, she was waiting for confirmation from one of the appointees before naming them publicly. The Select Board also wants a member of the town's Diversity Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee to serve on the search committee, but Patton said it wants the DIRE Committee back at full strength before making that pick.
"What you will see [on the search committee] is a broad cross section of members of the community with varying degrees of experience," Patton said.
Daley said the Select Board heard and considered a resolution from the DIRE Committee that the board "Ask the Williamstown hiring authority to publicly commit to following the recommendations of the search committee." But the Select Board does not intend to cede its authority to make the final call and will instead direct the Town Manager Search Committee to pass along two or three finalists to be interviewed by the Select Board.
The question of the hiring authority's commitment to acting on the committee's recommendation is at the heart of the rancor coming out of the interim police chief search process.
A statement signed by Erin Keyser-Clark, Wade Hasty and Hugh Guilderson opens by quoting a letter from then-Town Manager Jason Hoch clarifying what he saw as the search committee's authority.
"From that, the committee will recommend a candidate that it recommends to me for hiring," Hoch wrote. "My plan is to follow the committee's lead and not wander off in a totally different direction. Moreover, if I have reservations about the viability of a candidate, it's my intention to share that as a result of my pre-screening as the committee chooses applicants."
Keyser-Clark, Hasty and Gulderson said interim Town Manager Charlie Blanchard, who took over for Hoch at the end of April, changed the rules at the end of the interim police chief process.
"Mr. Blanchard did not 'follow the committee's lead,' but rather substituted his choice for that of the committee. There were no negotiations with the committee's first-choice candidate," the trio wrote.
That account is supported by the narrative in the official report signed by seven of the eight search committee members (Aruna D'Souza, who resigned from the committee in protest of the process, did not sign the final report).
"In the [May 10] meeting, the committee shared its top choice for Interim Chief and several members shared the rationale behind that choice," the report reads. "After this presentation, in a departure from the original process and expected outcome, the Interim Town Manager unexpectedly began providing his own rationale for selecting the committee's number two choice rather than its number one.
"The interim Town Manager … stated that as the new hiring authority, he merely needed to accept the committee's recommendation of the two candidates as advisory, and that he planned to hire the candidate he felt best for the position."
Both the full committee report and the two statements from members critical of the process make clear, as did D'Souza, that they support the candidate Blanchard selected, then-acting Chief Mike Ziemba.
"Our criticism is directed squarely on the failure of the interim Town Manager to transparently and honestly follow the process that had been agreed upon prior to his arrival," one of the minority reports reads.
On the other hand, Ralph Hammann leans on the written charter created for the Interim Police Chief Advisory Committee at its outset, which states that the town manager is the hiring authority and that the committee's role was "recommend 1-2 finalist candidates to the hiring authority."
"I do not believe the charter was changed," Hammann wrote, referring to Hoch's email saying he would "follow the lead" of the committee. "From the beginning, it was my clear understanding that we were merely an advisory committee."
For his part, Blanchard told the Select Board that he appreciated the time and effort that members of the interim police chief search panel devoted to the process.
"I'm sorry that the ending worked out the way it did when there was apparently a lack of clarity in what I felt the role is based on my position as town manager under the charter," he said. "I did try to make it clear in the discussions I had with the committee what the basis for my decision was.
"The part of the [committee] report that has the detail of what you went through with the process was very good, and I'm sure that's going to be very, very helpful for the next search."
Romano noted the difficulty of beginning the process under one hiring authority and ending it under another.
"You were kind of put in a difficult position in that way," Romano said. "I hope there's no antagonism going forward. It simply was what it was. We stand behind Mike Ziemba and wish you well in your leadership of the town."
In other business on Monday, the Select Board had a protracted discussion about the cannabis production bylaw amendment going before the June 8 annual town meeting, taking comments from the chair of the Planning Board and several critics of that board's bylaw draft.
The board also elected Andy Hogeland chair, Daley vice chair and Jeffrey Johnson as secretary. Hogeland was named to fill the Select Board's seat on the board of the town's Affordable Housing Trust. Patton was continued as the board's representative on the Community Preservation Committee.
Tags: search committee, town manager,
