Morristown on hot seat for high budget

One of the biggest targets? Paychecks, which are slated to increase across the board, after the town administration tweaked the pay scale to keep its roster of more than 40 full-time employees intact.

In an interview Tuesday, town administrator Eric Dodge said two years ago he recommended the town change its scale for incremental pay increases for non-union employees. Essentially, he said he squashed what was previously a 30-step scale into 25 steps and advanced all non-unionized town employees.

That change essentially moved everyone up five years’ worth of step raises. Those are different than cost of living increases, which everyone is getting — about 8 percent this coming year — and much different than raises based on performance, which Dodge said he opposes.

“I do not do merit raises,” he said.

Changing the step scale means an entry-level employee is hired at what used to be a person’s sixth year of town employment. For example, he said the lowest step is $19.25/hour.

“It was previously much smaller,” he said, noting the starting wages for some positions were like those at McDonald’s.

Dodge said his rationale for across-the-board salary increases was, in a word, retention. He said when he was hired in 2021 — fresh from the selectboard, where he had been serving — there were help-wanted signs all over the state.

“The conversation was, constantly, how do we find people? How do we find people?” he said. “If we can retain the people we have by bringing pay to a more market rate value, we create an environment where they want to come to work.”

Selectboard member Don McDowell delivered a 12-minute speech Monday night — near the end of a nearly-four-hour meeting — in which he defended the work of town employees, saying they make less than some towns of similar size.

He said he and his fellow board members knew early in the budget development process that the final product was going to be “a huge, huge number,” and he empathized with people whose tax bills and expenses across the board, from health insurance to driveway plowing, are increasing upwards of 30 percent.

“I’m not trying to defend the budget on the backs of Blue Cross Blue Shield and the guy who removes the snow out of my driveway, but I just want people to be thinking about that,” he said.

Wages up

One of the hot-button salary increases is Dodge’s own, which is a proposed $101,754, compared to about $63,000 when he was first hired as an interim administrator.

“That’s excessive,” village resident Kathy Chafee said during Monday’s meeting. “That’s what people are thinking out there. Nobody gets a $40,000 raise in two years. Nobody.”

Dodge said he, police chief Jason Luneau and town clerk Sara Haskins are the only non-unionized town employees who are not part of the revamped step scale. As such, they must defend their proposed salaries to the selectboard. Dodge said last spring he negotiated a two-year contract with a base wage of $45 per hour and a minimum 4.5 percent cost of living increase — meaning if the cost-of-living increase is over 4.5 percent, like it is currently, he would get that.

“The thing I take exception to is the wording that I’m giving myself a raise,” Dodge said. “I negotiate and speak with the selectboard, and they make the decision.”

Travis Sabataso, a candidate for selectboard bent on defeating the budget and having a seat at the table to rewrite it, recently sent a voluminous inquiry to Dodge seeking the rationale for dozens of line items in the budget.

When asked to justify his increased salary, Dodge replied he “based it on current salary ranges of department heads in Morristown. I didn’t set the rate above all positions.”

Not all, but most. Dodge is now the third-highest paid employee in town, behind two police officers — Luneau and Det. Lt. Todd Baxter are slated to earn $113,000 and $105,500, respectively, next year.

When asked why the town hired a full-time human resources director in the current fiscal year before budgeting for it next year, Dodge acknowledged it “wasn’t best practices,” but the town had dealt with “an employee matter” last year that ate up a lot of resources.

Dodge added, “A failure of the budget at town meeting doesn’t mean the HR position gets cut.”

All told, the 6,800-word exchange between Sabataso and Dodge is far too lengthy and granular to reprint here, but Sabataso has put the whole thing online at bit.ly/3I7kFi1.

Here are the proposed changes in salaries by department:

• Town administration, which includes Dodge and his assistant: up $25,000.

• Town clerk’s office, including assistants: up $18,000.

• Planning and zoning: up $15,000.

• Community development coordinator: up $9,400.

• Human resources, a new position this year: starting at $74,000.

• Recreation department, after moving the recreation director from part-time to full: up $10,000.

• Police department, with increases in wages for the chief, the desk officer and all patrol officers, the latter of which are union-negotiated and includes a new cop: up a total of $207,000.

• Emergency medical services department: up $32,800.

• Highway department: up $111,500.

• Finance office: down $16,000, a combination of raises and a decrease with a staffer now installed as human resources director.

Board: no backroom budgeting

Monday’s selectboard meeting got heated during an exchange with regular meeting attendee Tom Cloutier and board chair Bob Beeman.

Cloutier said residents have not had access to enough information about the budget to know what’s in it.

“We know the numbers, but we don’t know what they are inside,” Cloutier said. “I don’t mean you guys are behind the walls doing something crooked or you’re taking money away, I don’t believe that at all. We’re just not getting the information.”

Beeman said the information is now on the town website, and the onus is on taxpayers to read it or call the town offices and request it.

“See, everybody’s gotten lazy, and we’ve got to serve it to you on a platter,” Beeman said. “Do you want me to come to your house and explain it to you at your kitchen table?”

McDowell chafed at suggestions that the board and town were not being transparent with the budget.

“Transparency is a word I don’t like. It’s a political term that has lots of different meanings,” McDowell said. “There’s nothing going on behind the scenes. There’s nothing going on behind locked doors. There’s nothing going on nefariously. Just the opposite.”

It is perhaps illustrative that the squeaky wheels in Morristown are getting the grease.

Dodge said he spent hours consulting with the town finance department and responding, line by line, to Sabataso. And Beeman noted that vocal residents demanding more granular budget information convinced the town to post the departmental line-item budget sheets onto the town website — morristownvt.org/finance.

Sabataso points out that he works for the town of Essex, which recently separated from Essex Junction, losing roughly 45 percent of its grand list in the process.

“We, like all towns, also saw massive inflation-related expenses and salary increases. Even with this, Essex is keeping their tax increase in the low 20 percent range,” Sabataso wrote last week in an email to Dodge and the selectboard. “If Essex can absorb all of this and still propose a tax increase around 10 percent less than Morristown, I question why Morristown can’t also do better for their residents.”