By Steven Fletcher
Staff Writer
—
MANCHESTER — The town's selectmen are planning to meet with Glenn McKiel, the town's police chief and harbormaster, and Town Administrator Wayne Melville to discuss a local committee's report citing a number of concerns over harbor management.
But that meeting is not expected to come until Aug. 23 — the selectmen's next meeting that's expected to include a full slate of members. And that time frame isn't soon enough for at least one member of the board.
Selectwoman Mary Hardwick said Wednesday she believes the board should, as the Harbor Advisory Committee recommends, call for an outside audit of the town's Harbor Department and its management.
She cited the advisory committee's concern over a $31,000 shortfall over two years in town collections of mooring fees, and told the Times she felt that the board's decision to wait until next month to review the committee's report is "kind of shameful."
"I guess we're saying that there's no problem," she said.
The selectmen received the Harbor Advisory Committee's report late last month and intended to discuss the document on July 19, but two members of the committee, according to Selectmen's Chairman Thomas Kehoe, will not be present, and at least one member will not be present for the planned meeting on Aug. 2.
According to Kehoe, the selectmen will not take action on the report until the meeting with McKiel and Melville to discuss its content.
Kehoe said he wants to separate "fact from opinion" in the report, and develop a plan of action before proceeding. He said he does not know what action the board will take concerning the report — which documents the missed collections, and raises other concerns about management of the mooring list and other issues.
McKiel has said he's aware of the lag in revenue collections, and has pegged the problem due to a software change that lost track of some 105 moorings between 2006 and 2007. McKiel, who arrived as chief and harbormaster in 2007, has also said he's looking into means of collecting the overdue fees.
According to board member and past Selectmen's chair Susan Thorne, the selectmen agreed that all members should sit at the table before discussing the report, and decides when they will deal with it, how they will deal with it and "if" they will address committee's concerns and suggestions.
"(The harbor committee) is an advisory committee," said Thorne, "and advice can be given and has to be taken in a context of extenuating circumstances."
The Harbor Advisory Committee — now chaired by Karen Crawley, after former panel chief James Starkey was not re-appointed — is looking to meet with the board of selectmen concerning the report, and assigned a subcommittee last week to work on revising and updating the current harbor regulations.
Their report outlined a $31,000 financial discrepancy within the harbor department records, and presented several suggestions to the board of selectmen for harbor management. The selectmen declined to re-appoint committee chairman Starkey after he had raised the concerns and brought the committee's report to the selectmen.
The report asked that the selectmen look into the current mooring situation, consider establishing a full time harbor department, and request an independent audit of the Harbor Department records.
According to Melville, who spoke with the town's auditing firm of Powers and Sheldon, the records available from 2007 are so incomplete that they may not provide enough documentation to undertake an audit.
Melville referred to the record efforts as "forensic reconstruction," a process that McKiel and then-Harbor Department clerk Michele Gavin undertook last year — and until Gavin resigned last week.
According to Gavin and McKiel, the project remains "incomplete," as Gavin wrote in a letter of resignation obtained by the Times.
In the letter, Gavin said the job of restoring the harbor records could not be done in eight hours a week, the current budgeted schedule. Fandotech, an outside database company, will keep record of town moorings for the next financial year through a service called Online Mooring, according to McKiel.
"It's not enough time," McKiel said of Gavin's hours. "I advocated for an increase for this administrative cycle, but budgets being what they are, that was not approved,"
McKiel had requested that the clerk's hours be increased to 16 per week in a memo sent on Oct. 28, 2009, and obtained by the Times last week. He said the increase in hours would result in increased revenue for the town and service for residents.
Hardwick said that she, too, believes the board should increase the clerk's hours to more than 25, and that the selectmen should find funds to do so.
She also feels the town should not expect McKiel to handle the harbor department coupled with his responsibility as the town's police chief. She felt that his police duties stood as more important compared to his harbor duties.
Since his appointment as harbormaster, McKiel has restored the department's collection to levels equal to revenue collected before 2007 and has increased mooring enforcement within the harbor — issuing 288 boaters for mooring violations in 2009.
Many of the violations targeted what McKiel called "rogue moorings," in which residents set their own moorings in the harbor without a town permit.
Steven Fletcher can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3447, or gt_reporter@gloucestertimes.com.
