SHELBURNE — All three Board of Health members resigned June 30 in response to the Selectboard’s decision to reduce their stipends by half.
The stipends were reduced from $1,250 to $600 for the chairwoman, Deborah Coutinho, and from $944 to $400 for board members, Robert Hicks Jr. and Robert Gonzales.
All three Board of Health seats remain vacant, Selectboard Chairman Matthew Marchese said. The town is currently recruiting new members.
The Selectboard made the stipend cuts after comparing previous years’ amounts to other similarly sized towns, Marchese said. He noted that the Selectboard increased the emergency management committee’s stipends after seeing that other towns paid these workers more.
“We were looking to be consistent with other towns,” Marchese said.
Another reason for the cuts, Marchese said, was that many of the health board’s responsibilities were recently outsourced to the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG)’s Cooperative Public Health Service. Townspeople voted in September to increase access to the cooperative, with the additional services including restaurant and septic inspections and enforcement of sanitation standards.
After the FRCOG took over public health inspections, the town’s board members were reduced to maintaining records located at Town Hall, Coutinho said.
“If people needed information that the FRCOG didn’t have, then we would have that information,” Coutinho said.
Coutinho said the health board members were not given an opportunity to meet with the Selectboard to discuss their duties and understand the stipend cuts. The Board of Health was notified about the cuts in a March 21 memo from Town Administrator Terry Narkewicz. The health board sent Narkewicz an email on April 1, the day the warrant closed, asking to appeal the cuts, she said.
“We just felt that there was no give and take with the Selectboard,” Coutinho said. “It’s a small town, and it wasn’t handled as well as it should have been.”
In addition to the health board, the Selectboard reduced the Board of Assessors’ stipend, reasoning that some of its responsibilities had been outsourced by automatization. However, the Board of Assessors contested this decrease at May’s Annual Town Meeting, making a motion for the amount to be restored. The vote was approved by the town.
Coutinho said the health board did not make a similar motion to increase its stipend at Town Meeting because it did not feel the “floor was the place for a discussion about our realistic analysis of the responsibilities.”
Marchese met with Coutinho after Town Meeting to discuss the matter, both said.
Coutinho has sat on the health board for roughly a dozen years, she said, and has been chairwoman for about three.
“It was a pleasure working for the town of Shelburne,” she said.
To express interest in a Board of Health seat, contact Town Administrator Terry Narkewicz at townadmin@townofshelburnema.gov or 413-625-0300, ext. 1.
Reach Grace Bird at gbird@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 280.