The evening of 2024-03-11 was a meeting of the Mendon Town Board.
Bud Smith, former Highway Superintendent, was at the meeting to comment. It was good to see him again. Unfortunate that he was there to express displeasure with John, the Town Supervisor. Complaint itself seemed to be around how John is supervising the Town.
Also had Andy, current Highway Superintendent, using the public comment time to give his report. Apparently, he is no longer at the table. Which seemed odd to me, as the Highway Superintendent has been at the table for longer then any of the current elected officials filling the various roles. Understandable, Andy expressed dissatisfaction with this change. Regardless, using the public comment portion of the meeting to still give his report to the Board struck me as a creative workaround.
There was some interesting discussion around the voucher process. The Board has identified places where the process could be improved and streamlined. While that is good, I do wonder how much of this is fallout of recent changes in staff. As much as we may try to make things easy for our inevitable replacement, there is always a certain amount of knowledge that is lost. Regardless (again), taking the effort to improve how things are done is commendable.
Three of the agenda items were to approve contracts to outsource certain tasks. In the interests of full disclosure, one of those is me filling the role of ‘IT Consultant’. While the verbiage was changed, at the core this was a renewal of what has been done for a few years (and by a different consultant before me).
The other two contracts covered HR, payroll, and financial services, which effectively replaces the finance department. While it can be nice to have the person in the office, this shows there can be other viable methods of handling the necessary job functions. It will be interesting to see how this plays out long term. As with so many things in life, we won’t know the outcome until adequate time has passed.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the March 11, 2024 meeting of the Mendon Town Board.