Town Clerk's Office Gets Temporary Reprieve

When town government cut back the budget for part-time hours during the last budget cycle, Town Clerk Claudia Weber warned that her office would run out of money to cover the statutory workload, and it now has.

"The assumption was because of the economic times we would have less work, but that was not the case," Weber said. 

Revenues from taxes and fees collected by the Town Clerk's Office are actually up 19.3 percent year-to-date compared to the same period of the last fiscal year. 

"It takes time, people" to process all the documents, Weber said. For example, she estimated that processing a single land record request involves 15 steps and about half an hour; 4,546 such requests were filled last year. 

The Town Clerk's Office had operated with two full-time assistant clerks and about 45 part-time hours a week for more than a decade with a part-time salary budget held steady at around $40,000 a year until 2009-2010 when that line was slashed to $27,500. 

With that money exhausted, the Board of Finance reluctantly approved a $16,000 special appropriation Thursday night to get the office through the rest of the fiscal year. The board to pay for part-time hours there through June, electing to instead bring over Building Department official Paul Payne, who has been certified as a fire inspector, one day a week to fill the void. Due to the proprietary nature of the work in the clerk's office, however, cross-training was not an option. 

For the upcoming fiscal year, Town Clerk again requested $40,000 for part-time salaries, which the Board of Selectmen approved. But the Board of Finance cut that to $25,000, and Weber is warning she could be asking for another special appropriation this time next year. 

This could become a theme as the Board of Finance has also trimmed hours from the budget requests of the Parking Authority and the Human Resources Department.