Stowe hires new finance director

“Stowe is amazingly dynamic,” Fuller said of this medium-sized town with city-scale infrastructure and services. “I’m really excited. The challenge of new things is something I love.”

Stowe Town Manager Charles Safford says about 40 people applied for the job after Mark Lyons moved to North Carolina at the end of February. From that pool of applicants, town officials interviewed five, then narrowed the field to two finalists. Fuller emerged as the choice after the closer review.

Fuller will be paid $71,248 per year and will get the standard benefits package that all nonunionized town employees get.

She impressed the department heads with her resume: three years as assistant controller at Seventh Generation; four years in a similar job at Small Dog; and 20 years as general manager and accountant at Granville Manufacturing Co. in Granville, a family-run wood products maker. She also has a master’s degree in accounting from UMass-Amherst.

“She’s done some pretty impressive things in her career,” Safford said. “It seems like she could fit in with the team and the community.”

Fuller has lived in Stowe for three years, supporting her mother, who lives at Copley Woodlands. She likes watching sports with her mom and has a black Labrador retriever named Honey, a rescue dog.

When it comes to municipal finance, Fuller is still learning the specific ropes, but she ticks off her responsibilities with ease, as if she’s done plenty of homework about the job. She said accounting for a town government such as Stowe, with its myriad departments — police, fire, emergency highway; water, sewer and electrical; parks and recreation — is much more complicated than in private business.

The main task in running the town’s finances isn’t to make money, since most of it comes from property taxes, but rather to get the most out of every dollar. There are accounting standards to abide by, which have become more stringent after a spate of Vermont embezzlements about four years ago. And the town’s books have to be understood not only by the elected officials and hired professionals who craft the town budgets, but by the people who pay the bills.

“Your town government is you, the citizens,” Fuller said. “I’ve got to be able to say, in plain language, what these financial statements mean.”

The town finance office is meant to run with two full-time employees and a part-timer, but had been operating with 1.5 employees for the past couple of months, Safford said. He praised Linda Kelly, the assistant finance director, and Nicole Adams, in payroll and accounts payable, for keeping the financial ship steady.

“It was really a team effort,” Safford said. “Now we’re coming to a very time-consuming time of the year, as we close out our books” on the current fiscal year.