The Board of Health unanimously voted to revise a line item in its budget Tuesday to move the $90,329 allocated for a new position to be placed back into the trash disposal line item.
Board member Tom McMahon said he had previously assumed that the line item for the new assistant director position would ultimately be an ask that the Town ignored, considering the department, like many others, has a rather tight budget for fiscal year 2026.
McMahon kicked off the meeting by stating, “It’s not that I don’t think a position like this is needed. I think that we could use all the help we can get up there. I think that right now isn’t the appropriate time to fill it, given the rest of the town contracts going on.”
He added that the time may be right next year, and that since the position has been created, it would be easy to “vote to just turn it on when we’re ready.” By this, he means having a salary included in the line item next time around, which would allow the Town to fill the position.
Both McMahon and board member Tom Masaro were unaware that that line item would wind up being approved by the compensation committee last week. Masaro said, “I do think, though, if two members of the three-member board are surprised that something happened, that’s a management error as well as a membership error.”
“It just shouldn’t be that way, that something as important as this would be handled in this way, requiring emergency meetings while people are out of town and all of that,” Masaro said.
After only 5 minutes of discussion, a motion was made to remove the $90,329 from the line item for the new assistant director position and put it in the trash disposal line item, where it was originally, putting the trash disposal line item back to $2,284,354.
Before the unanimous vote, Chair Helaine Hazlett said that she knew of this request and that it was discussed at a Board of Health meeting while going over the budget and again with the board’s meeting with the Finance Committee.
“I’m sorry that these two gentlemen were not there (at the FinCom meeting), but it was a posted meeting,” she said. She added that it was discussed at least three times, which McMahon emphatically denied.
“We didn’t discuss any of that at the meeting. Helaine, when you say we discussed this, you have two people saying you didn’t,” he said. “These are all recorded meetings, and I think YouTube is the enemy of a lot of people who make claims of things that didn’t happen.
“We have all these recorded. If you can find a time stamp of when we recorded it (the discussion about this position), I’ll eat this paper. But it ain’t there.”
Hazlett then clarified that the line item’s existence was discussed, but not the position itself or the intentions for it to be funded in FY26. She added that while she understood the benefits to adding this position for FY26, she found it important to vote alongside her fellow board members and make the vote unanimous.
“Thank you for speaking to the importance of the majority, the unanimity of this board,” Masaro said. “None of us handled this very well to get to this point, so we all have to vote together.”
The bottom line for the whole department has not changed with this shift as the money has simply been moved from one line item to another.
