ORANGE — Town Administrator Matthew Fortier is poised to get a replacement executive assistant after the Selectboard voted this week to offer the position to Cara Iacoponi.
The Selectboard interviewed three candidates at its Wednesday meeting and came to a split decision after two rounds of voting. Fortier said Iacoponi will start in March, replacing Brianne Bruso, whose resignation was announced at the Dec. 10 Selectboard meeting.
Selectboard members asked identical questions to Iacoponi, Abigail Bilbrey and Jessica Omundsen as part of the public interview process before deliberating. Member Jane Peirce and Vice Chair Julie Davis, who attended remotely, voted in favor of Peirce’s motion to offer the job to Iacoponi. Member Mike Bates struggled to make a decision and abstained, while Chair Tom Smith voted against the motion, stating he preferred Omundsen, who is also the town’s assistant collector. The Selectboard is currently a four-person body, as Andrew Smith resigned to become assistant town clerk.
But the roll call vote created a dilemma, as town officials were unsure if the motion had enough affirmative votes to carry.
“I’ve never had this happen,” Tom Smith said.
Bates conceded the matter’s urgency and changed his vote to the affirmative when Peirce made a second, identical motion. This created a 3-1 outcome, though Fortier later said a quick online search of “Robert’s Rules of Order” indicated the initial vote was sufficient.
During her interview, Iacoponi explained she has a background in public-sector work, starting in academic administration. She also said she has worked as a grant manager and executive assistant for Northampton “during a time of substantial expansion as well as leadership changes.”
Iacoponi also said she is a big fan of project-tracking tools.
“For data management, in my current consulting role, I’m working with a team to develop a system in which they work through several decades of grantee paper files that have already been archived, and partially scanned, to figure out what is missing and figure out … what is missing between different documents,” she explained. “So this is not only just a digitizing project, but also a digital record data-cleaning management project with [the spreadsheet-database hybrid] Airtable.”
Iacoponi acknowledged that the position may present problems she is unable to fix personally, though she vowed to track down someone who can. She also confirmed she knows she will sit next to Fortier during Selectboard meetings and record minutes, the latter of which she said she has experience doing.
Bilbrey explained he graduated from Uxbridge High School in 2006 and then from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in history. She then spent several years teaching English in Japan. She now works for Point32Health, a nonprofit health and well-being organization.
Omundsen mentioned she has worked for Orange for about 2½ years, starting as the water/sewer administrative assistant before adding the assistant collector’s responsibilities roughly a year into her employment. She said she will finish her bachelor’s degree in May and has made the dean’s list every semester. Omundsen also said she has an associate’s degree in health information management.
Once the interviews had concluded, Davis mentioned she loved Bilbrey’s personality and Omundsen’s institutional knowledge. Peirce praised all the candidates and commended their interviews.
“Abigail, I would love to work with you. You seem like so much fun,” she told Bilbrey, who was seated in the back of the meeting room. “I wish we could hire all of you.”