(Chelsea Update would like to thank Tom Ehman for this letter to the editor. Publisher’s note: Pat Kelly read her letter of resignation to the Board of Trustees on March 5.)
Dear Dexter Township Trustees:
It is doubtful that it would be productive to explore here the reasons for the abrupt resignation of Pat Kelly, Dexter Township supervisor, with two years left in her term of office, so I wish to instead, suggest some things the Board of Trustees might consider between now and April 23 when her replacement needs to be selected.
First, transparency should be a major consideration. Applicants should be recruited using the township website, the Dexter Leader, and the Sun Times as well as any other media outlet that serves the township.
The board should interview all the applicants and then make a selection. The board should not consider an applicant who lives with a current Board member because our republican form of governance can hardly function properly with two of the seven Board votes coming from the same household (bed?).
Second, the board might consider hiring a township manager. If a manager doesn’t do their job they get replaced but if an elected official isn’t doing theirs, the public must wait to the end of their term to try to vote them out of office.
To control costs, the supervisor, clerk, and treasurer’s salaries could be substantially reduced because the manager would be doing the heavy lifting. The manager would maintain the township website and also do some of the clerk’s and treasurer’s work and possibly some zoning enforcement to justify the manager’s salary.
Presently, the township employs a deputy clerk (in the past the clerk’s wife) and employs a deputy treasurer (currently the treasurer’s daughter). The added benefit is that many additional folks might be willing to serve the township as supervisor if the position merely entailed helping set board policy and moderating the board meetings.
This may be a tough sell to a board that has rubber-stamped the requests by the clerk and treasurer who are permitted unchallenged to indicate the amount of deputy’s help they want while denying the supervisor a deputy even if the deputy was willing to serve without pay.
The township manager concept to modern township operation is extremely important. Under the statute, nobody is really in charge of the township’s day-to-day business except the Board of Trustees and they historically delegate authority to an officer based on trust.
Somehow that trust was lost and board meetings have become embarrassments and the board would normally continue as is until hopefully the next election process remedied the problem. The supervisor’s resignation may have mitigated that problem. Under the present system, egos or control and authority are the driving force and under the manager scheme, job performance and thus immediate job security are the driving force.
Third, at the budget meeting on March 18, the board should consider a set amount to fund the clerk’s office and the treasurer’s office until a manager is hired. If the clerk and treasurer wish to consume that payroll, that’s their choice.
If they want to work less and pay a deputy, that’s also their choice. But the open-ended possibility of abuse that now exists is avoided. In the case of the clerk’s office, when there is an election to be administered, that budget would receive an extra appropriation for that year.
At the special meeting on March 5, the board tentatively considered a 27-percent salary increase for the supervisor, clerk and treasurer, 8-percent increases for the clerk and treasurer’s deputies, and 3 percent for the two office co-managers all of which adds to the township’s ongoing retirement benefits obligation.
It has been eight years since there have been salary increases for the supervisor, clerk, and treasurer, during which time there was a severe downturn of the economy. But now with a slight uptick – a 27-percent raise? There was a time when township service was truly service as opposed to an adjunct to existing pensions, etc. An attendee in the audience, Jim Drolett and husband of the treasurer, got angry when the supervisor, in a rare instance of parliamentary success, was able to convince the board to just update the budget and leave final action on the raises until the budget is finalized on March 18 following a public hearing, rather than adopt the salary that night.
Interestingly, the Supervisor (D) and Jason Maciejewski (D) appeared ready to vote against the officer’s raises and Bill Gajewski (R) (whose election platform was no new taxes and to cut costs), Harley Rider (R), Elizabeth Brushaber (R), Carl Lesser (R) (who is usually extremely careful about spending taxpayer’s money), and Michael Howard (R) were prepared to vote for the 27-percent raises. So much for our Republican Party (conservative?) notion of less expensive government.
In the near future, the board should consider advertising in a special newsletter or with the summer tax bills the fact that the www.dexter-twp.org website contains up-to-date information on board decisions and that meetings can be watched on new.livestream.com/DexterTownship.
My final suggestion is to the public at large: Folks who are interested in the future of Dexter Township should attend a board meeting and see and hear for themselves how the township is governed.
Tuesday, March 18 will be a very important night in the future of the township.
Tom Ehman (I)
