Selectmen Explain Town Manager Decision

This past Thursday, April 7, the announced that they had offered the Winchester had been without a Town Manager for the last 10 months, after the board and Mel Kleckner, who is now the decided to go their separate ways.

According to the new vice chairman of the board, Roger Berman, there were a number of factors as to why the town decided to offer Twogood the Town Manager position and Town Clerk position. Lannon had been Winchester's Acting Town Manager and Town Clerk since the departure of Kleckner last summer.

“We were deeply disappointed in [Mel’s] performance,” Berman said. “There were a number of issues that had languished and needed to be addressed. Some of which we knew about and others we found out about after his departure.”

Kleckner received a severance package of approximately $123,000 after he and the board failed to renegotiate his contract. According to Berman, that lump sum payment is one of the reasons the board held off on appointing a new Town Manager until April.

“The parties mutually agreed to go their separate ways and one of the terms of Mel’s contract was the town was required to make one large lump sum severance payment,” Berman said. “And that money wasn’t in the budget. This contract was agreed to before I was on the board and I regard that payment as an overly rich severance package.”

Berman said that the board decided, after looking at consulting firms that would search for a new manager, to postpone the search until after the winter. According to Berman, these firms could have cost the town as much as $60,000 to do a search.

"In essence, these last few months have been a trial period," Berman said. "We embraced the fact that [Twogood and Lannon] know the job, people enjoy working with them and that we should move onto other issues."

But the newest member of the board, Doug Marmon, stood behind the statement he made last week saying that the decision was made behind closed doors and without listening to the community.

“After dithering for a year the board acted in secret to preempt public input into the process of Town Manager,” Marmon said. "Mark is a fine public servant, but there will be doubts among the citizenry as to whether he was the best man for the job or the most convenient."

But Forrest Fontana, chair of the board, said that the selectmen did conduct the search publicly.

“Having an interim team of Mark and Mary Ellen is as public as we can be,” Fontana said. “They’ve been operating in front of everybody and the selectmen all thought they did a terrific job. We made no commitment to them when we appointed them in these interim positions. But this process was very public. We can have public input without having a public hearing. People can reach out to the board or come to meetings. We always welcome public input.

“But there are a few people that have a distorted view of what happened because they weren’t involved.”

According to Fontana, as far as the board was concerned, the search for a Town Manager was never an issue.

“The candidates for election made an issue out of a non-issue,” Fontana said. “There was never an issue with the Town Manager search. They made promises without doing their research. That should never have been a campaign promise.”

Twogood and Lannon still need to finalize their contracts and won’t begin in their new positions until the summer.  

“We’d like to ask for patience and allow this process to finish,” Fontana said. “Twogood and Lannon excelled at the position in their interim roles for the last few months. They’ve dealt with the budget, the contracts, elections; and we feel very comfortable in the decision we made.”