Lenox — By a large voice vote on Tuesday, August 13, Lenox citizens approved amending a 1991 town bylaw to allow county residents to be selected for its open town manager position as opposed to mandating that those applicants live in Lenox or reside in the town within a year of employment.
The August 13 town meeting confirmation must still pass muster with the state legislature, an event that Interim Town Manager and State Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D – 3rd Berkshire District) said won’t be problematic for officials. A corresponding bill is slated to be filed with state officials August 14 to amend the town’s Act of 1991, he said. “For making such a minor change, I think it’s going to be fast tracked,” Pignatelli said, adding that the timeline for approving the amendment will still take two to three months. “I see no issues with it whatsoever in Boston.”
In the interim, he said the Screening Committee can select and approve an applicant for the position, with that applicant even taking office before the state legislature rubber stamps the process.
The old bylaw provides a year for the chosen applicant to reside within the town, and the newly passed amendment offers a similar leeway for residency within Berkshire County.
“Any candidate who is smart enough to understand how the process works will look at the intention of the town meeting, the unanimous support of the Board of Selectmen, [and] they will put their name in,” Pignatelli said. The advertisement for the position will be “fine-tuned” in the next couple of days and the process will start, he said.
The action was prompted by the July 1 departure of decade-long Town Manager Christopher Ketchen who accepted a position with the Commonwealth’s Division of Local Services.
Although the meeting’s warrant originally included several provisions related to relaxing other town manager requirements including an education standard, the Screening Committee pared down the session’s articles to a single statement: to insert the words “or the county” to the town manager’s residency requirements that had been limited to only citizens living within the borders of Lenox. See the amended article here.
The Screening Committee recommended the process to the Select Board, Select Board Chair Ed Lane said. “They just wanted to get a better mix of people, a bigger pool to draw from,” he said.
Local Realtor and resident Anne Meczywor spoke in favor of the proposal as she has had a front-row seat to the “tremendous shortage of properties” in town, both for sale and rent. “We will shrink our potential pool of really excellent people exponentially if we limit it only to people who are directly in town within a year,” she said.
While Albert Harper, who has been active in local government, preferred the town manager be a Lenox resident with a vested interest in the community, he said he would ultimately vote for the proposal. “I understand the exigency of the situation right now, that we need to find a new town manager, and we may need to go outside of the town, so I’m going to vote in favor of expanding the route that we can select from,” he said.
Harper also suggested asking the Select Board to buy a residence for the town manager as part of the office’s employment package, action taken by other municipalities, “so that we don’t have this problem again.”
Mary Jo Piretti-Miller, a member of the Screening Committee and a Realtor, urged residents to eliminate the local residency requirement due to the housing shortage. According to Piretti-Miller, only eight homes are listed for sale within Lenox and boast a minimum price tag of $510,000, a situation she labeled as a “buzz kill” for any town manager applicant.
However, expanding the reach of applicants geographically wasn’t the first choice of some of the meeting’s attendees. Judy Moss voiced concern that a candidate can live within the county but far from Lenox, resulting in a negative impact for the town. “It’s really important for our town manager to know what our community’s about,” she said. “By making ‘Berkshire County’ the change, you’re talking about somebody could buy a house in Clarksburg—that’s an hour away from here which means that, all of a sudden that person is not here as much.”
Although she admitted finding a home in the neighborhood could be “difficult at times,” Moss pointed to the position’s salary as a factor. “They need to be and know who our community is,” she said. “That’s what has made Lenox what it is today, not somebody living out of town.”
Screening Committee member Susan Wolf counted 43 applications to the original advertisement, with most of those applicants not meeting even the basic requirements for the job. She said the group “agonized” over proposing a change to the Town Manager Act, but the amendment was needed to offer a good pool of applicants.
An amendment proposed by Kristine Haas that would have expanded the residency requirement to only towns adjacent to Lenox failed, prompting residents to call for a vote on the original article.
As for Pignatelli, he said he is enjoying his interim stint as Lenox town manager. “I’m glad to help out the town for a few months while they find that permanent replacement,” he said. “The town’s in amazing shape.”
