Trust, But Verify: Too many statements by this town administrator don't stand up to scrutiny

Photo by Severin Höin on Unsplash

I grew up thinking that Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "Trust, but Verify."  A few years ago I learned from the HBO Series "Chernobyl" that it's an old Russian Proverb that rhymes in Russian:  Doveryay, no proveryay.  As Reagan began interacting with Russian officials an advisor taught him some Russian Proverbs, and he adopted that proverb to use in nuclear disarmament discussions.

Even if we believe that the other party is completely trustworthy, we verify things anyway:  check your bank statement, and Google the story your uncle told you about the president.  Verification has gotten a lot easier since the 80's when peers that I've retroactively learned were untrustworthy convinced me that Mr. Rodgers was a former Army sniper and that Mikey from the cereal commercials lost his life to a tragic combination of soda and "pop rocks" candy.

With the internet at our disposal, there's just no excuse not to check out the details whenever anything turns up an eyebrow. Like many people, if something catches my ear during the day I check it out later after I finish the Wordle.

Too many things that Town Administrator Kate Hodges says have become things that I circle, dig into later, and can't verify.  

The Price of Road Salt

On the warrant for the November 14th special town meeting is a mid-year budget increase -- it will be Article 8. One item is a 167% increase in the line item for road salt, $50,000 to $133,695.

At the finance committee meeting on 10/28, Kate Hodges reported the increase was due to "astronomical" road salt price increases when they put the purchase out for bids.

At the Select Board meeting on 10/31she said the recent prices for road salt were "3x" the usual amount. This type of increase just seemed implausible -- everything is more expensive, but a 200% jump would be a statewide crisis. 

In reality, the $50,0000 budget we set for road salt was never realistic.   It would not have covered our expense for salt in any of the previous three years:

        2019-2020 actual: $51,624

        2020-2021 actual: $77,717

        2021-2022 actual: $114,129

I wrote a blog post asking that the selectmen dig into this a bit more.

At the Select Board's warrant review meeting on 11/3, Ms. Hodges provided some better numbers. She said the price of road salt has increased from $63/ton to $72-$85/ton. She said that the DPW expects to need 1750 tons this winter, which would mean that the new budget fairly anticipates what our cost will be.  The price increase is a more reasonable 20 or 30% increase.

So the full answer seems to be that salt prices are up 20 or 30% but that this is also a line item we have always underbudgeted. (I don't think that's abnormal in Massachusetts.)   Typically the overage has been covered by unused funds in other budgets, so I have a feeling "Truing up" this variable cost this month really means we intend to use that slack in the budget elsewhere.  

Issues with the May Town Election Warrant

Article 3 on the Special Town Meeting warrant will authorize the town to ask the State Legislature for a special act to validate the May town election. The town is required to post a warrant for the election 14 days prior, and the town did not do that.

At the Select Board meeting on 10/31, the Select Board discussed the article before giving it their endorsement. Kate Hodges provided the details, saying the warrant was posted six days before the election and that:

"The Select Board called the election in November or December"

That didn't sound right - the Select Board called the May town election in November or December? 

I requested a copy of the belatedly-posted warrant but the clerk's office responded that the town doesn't have it. 

 I followed up with Kate Hodges: on 11/2 she replied that she has a copy signed by the Select Board, but doesn't have a copy of one endorsed by the constable. (After posting the warrant, a constable signs it to certify that the election warrant was properly posted.) 

On 11/3, at the Warrant Review meeting in the auditorium she refined the details a bit Kate Hodges said:

"The election warrant was approved and signed at the same time as the Annual Town Meeting warrant" 

 

I fact-checked that and came up empty-handed.  The Select Board approved the Annual Town Meeting warrant on 4/20 but there was nothing on the agenda about the Election Warrant: there's no note in the minutes about it, and the video of the meeting doesn't seem to include any mention of it. The Town Meeting Warrant was posted and certified by a constable two days after that, on 4/22; the Election Warrant, as we know, was not. If the two were approved at the same time, why wouldn't they have been posted by the constable at the same time? 

I followed up with Kate Hodges about these ongoing inconsistencies, and have not received a reply. The town has so far refused to release correspondence about the issues with the warrant.

The Finance Committee's "Financial Analysis" of the Capital Group's Project 

This fall the town was pressured to publish a "Financial Analysis" of the Capital Group's project to make it more attractive to residents.  

On 10/17, the Select Board authorized the publishing of a pamphlet with some financial numbers -- once they were approved by the Finance Committee.

On 10/19, the Finance Committee met to approve some figures and did: they briefly reviewed a spreadsheet Dick Trussell had assembled.   I rushed out an email to the Finance Committee the morning of the 20th -- they'd approved an "Analysis" with an arithmetic error that changed the value presented by almost $1 million.

The Finance Committee member that drafted the analysis confirmed the error and reworked the entire analysis. (His rather transparent objective was to produce an analysis that damned the result of a "No" vote -- the reduced education costs didn't do that, so added entirely new buildings to the analysis.)

I anticipated that they would meet and review the new numbers. Instead, the town pushed ahead and published the amended values on 10/20 without any approval from the Finance Committee. 

The reality was that the town needed to publish the new values to meet the Capital Group's publishing deadline: Capital Group was producing a mailer, which most of the town received now, and the town was collaborating to contribute statistics for their marketing initiative.

Ms. Hodges was confronted about the documents she'd published contrary to the Select Board's vote to wait for finance committee approval. She knew that the Finance Committee had approved entirely different figures on 10/19, and she was present at that meeting.  Ms. Hodges attempted to claim that the finance committee had left room for alterations:

"...the committee did vote to approve the document but the conversation surrounding the agenda item was somewhat disjointed as ‘housekeeping’ and some other matters were thrown about. I think the spirit of the motion was meant to say, ‘this is the best financial analysis we have at this time"

This doesn't even resemble the truth -- on 10/19 the Finance Committee approved figures they were told needed no further correction. 

The Finance Committee called a Friday night meeting to review the new numbers, and one member abstained from endorsing them in protest. (The new figures still contain several arithmetic errors -- but they'd already been put to print.)

We Need Accurate Information From Town Officials

The same "Chernobyl" miniseries I referred to earlier opened with a quote from Soviet Nuclear Physicist Valery Legasov, who headed their investigation into the disaster at Chornobyl nuclear power plant in 1986:

"What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all."  

Because we rely on humans to operate the town for us, we're subject to all the problems that come with that: we make errors, we are corruptible, and we lie. The best we can hope to do is reduce those human issues to the minimum level possible.