After voting against reducing the city clerk’s salary to a stipend, Westbrook city councilors voted Monday to hold a public hearing on allowing city employees to run for office.
City Councilor Ed Symbol was the only councilor to vote in favor of reducing the clerk’s salary and against allowing city employees to run for office.
The debate over the city clerk’s position comes after Barbara Hawkes, Westbrook’s city clerk for 14 years, announced she would be retiring at the end of her term this year. With a turnover for the position guaranteed, Symbol thought it was the best time to make some changes.
Ruthie Noble, the deputy clerk and a city employee for the last eight years, became the center of attention after Councilor Michael Foley recommended a public hearing to change the policy on city employees running for elected positions, a practice that is now prohibited. Foley had said at a July 30 Committee of the Whole meeting that he would like to see Noble run for the position.
The city’s director of human resources, Tina Crellin, said in an interview Wednesday that the suggestion to allow employees to run for office brings up a number of management concerns.
“A change is this policy would absolutely tie the hands of the department heads to effectively manage their staff, or the mayor’s office to effectively manage the department heads if a department head happens to be running for office,” Crellin said. Management of employees who are running for office could be seen as politically motivated. The city has policies in place restricting some highly visible political activities.
Council President Brendan Rielly said that though it may seem like a conflict of interest for the deputy clerk to run for the clerk’s position while the clerk’s office runs the election, that has been the case with Hawkes, who has overseen elections while running for re-election. Rielly said a candidate who wins an elected position would have to resign employment with the city.
Noble had previously advocated for the city clerk’s position to be appointed. “The politics of the campaign get in the way of the work that needs to be done,” she said Wednesday.
Noble said she hopes the rules will change so she can run for the city clerk position, but also said that anyone running for the clerk’s position from the clerk’s office puts more work on others in the department during elections.
“It creates a real hardship when you’re down one person in a small office,” Noble said.
Noble said that in a recent workshop, she spoke to Maine’s deputy secretary of state, Julie Flynn, who said a clerk should “absolutely not” handle any local ballots if the clerk is running for a position in the election. If the city council changes the rules to allow city employees to run for elected positions, Noble would be unable to handle the ballots, leaving Hawkes and other staffers – as Hawkes has had to do herself in years past – the responsibility.
Noble said she’s waiting to see what happens with the position. A public hearing on the issue of employees running for office is scheduled for Monday night, a hearing Noble will pay close attention to, especially now that the council has rejected the idea of scheduling a public hearing on the question of reducing the clerk’s pay to a stipend. Noble would not run for the position if it didn’t come with a salary.
“I would say that I’m surprised by the council decision to vote down the public hearing,” Noble said Wednesday. “(The public hearing) had momentum early on.”
The salary question was prompted by the fact that the clerk is the only elected official receiving a full-time salary with benefits. Considering the duties of the clerk to be more akin to a full-time employee instead of an elected official, Symbol said he wanted to see the position filled by a hiring process rather than election. An election ensures the position is filled by a Westbrook resident. Symbol led the charge in the spring to ask voters whether they wanted to appoint or elect the city clerk.
Voters defeated the referendum question, 1,115-854, on May 22. Symbol then decided that if voters wanted to keep the position elected and local, the pay for the position should be on the same level as other elected officials. His proposal to provide a stipend for the position would have reduced the clerk’s pay from $49,000, plus benefits, to $5,000.
The mayor receives a stipend of $6,500, the council president a stipend of $3,500 and the rest of the council a stipend of $3,000. Chuluda supported Symbol’s efort to make the clerk a stipend position, though he was opposed to making the position appointed.
But, according to Rielly, “The message that came from the vote was, leave the clerk’s position as it was.” He described the move to pay a stipend for the position as “not the smartest of moves, and certainly not the most responsive” to the voters.
Symbol said the question of pay “is not even close to what was on the ballot.”
Because the position remains elected, Symbol also raised the concern that there is no contract for the salary the clerk receives. There is also no oversight for the position.
“Really, the city charter just says (the clerk is) going to run the elections,” Symbol said.
Rielly said any change in the structure of City Hall should be done either to save money or to improve services. He didn’t believe changing the clerk’s position would do either of those things.
With the question to hold a public hearing on the stipend defeated at Monday’s meeting, this November’s elected clerk will be receiving the full salary.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
