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Town considering new hires for fire and building departments

AMBROSE CLANCY PHOTO The Town Board at its work session Tuesday. From left, Councilman Paul Shepherd, Deputy Supervisor Chris Lewis, Councilman Jim Colligan and Councilwoman Amber Brach-Williams. Supervisor Jim Dougherty was absent.
AMBROSE CLANCY PHOTO The Town Board at its work session Tuesday. From left, Councilman Paul Shepherd, Deputy Supervisor Chris Lewis, Councilman Jim Colligan and Councilwoman Amber Brach-Williams. Supervisor Jim Dougherty was absent.

The town is considering hiring a fire marshal and adding another employee to the building department.

The topics were discussed in a private — or executive — session after the public work session Tuesday, but were not listed as reasons for closing the doors to the public.

Deputy Supervisor Chris Lewis, leading the work session in the absence of Supervisor Jim Dougherty, asked her colleagues to vote on a motion for an executive session on the issues of “personnel and possible litigation,” both topics allowed under the New York State Open Meetings law to be discussed in private by elected officials.

Councilman Paul Shepherd asked for a discussion on the motion to “elaborate on the personnel issue.”

Ms. Lewis responded that “it involves two departments, income levels and things like that. I’m not sure if we’ll be talking about expansion.”

Mr. Shepherd noted that the discussion is not “appropriate for an executive session.”

Town Attorney Laury Dowd said it would be about “hiring people,” but Mr. Shepherd noted that there had to be specific people under discussion if the meeting was to be behind closed doors. Ms. Dowd said there were specific people involved.

When the vote was taken to go into executive session, Mr. Shepherd cast the single “no” vote. After the meeting, Mr. Shepherd said that on reflection “my no vote was ill-informed.”

Also after the meeting, Ms. Lewis told the Reporter the expansions under discussion were the building and fire departments. Building department employees are overwhelmed with work, Ms. Lewis said, and there’s the possibility that a person could be hired on a part-time or per diem basis.

Also under discussion was hiring a fire marshal for the town, on a part-time or a per diem basis as well. There had been the possibility that the names of people could have been included in the discussion, which called for the executive session, Ms. Lewis said.

In other business: The board is formulating an email  policy for town employees and elected officials. Currently there is no policy, except, as Ms. Dowd told the Reporter after the meeting, “just a general policy on polite email behavior.”

The initiative would require, among other things, that email be preserved for six years. Ms. Dowd told the board that emails are essentially under the “state’s archives act” and must “be treated as paper records. They need to be preserved.”

After the meeting, Ms. Dowd said the new policy was not in response to  a recent Freedom of Information request for board members’ communications from resident Edward Katta.