A letter to the editor in today’s Gazette suggests the Greensboro Select Board doesn’t have the expertise to manage the complexities of a housing development project like the one Rural Edge has proposed. It does seem town leadership is finding it difficult to pull things back together and mend divisions after effective communication broke down during consideration of the Rural Edge project last year.
Even now, as the need to have a vote on whether the project is to proceed, how that vote is to happen has opened up further division. An Australian ballot vote had been suggested and the select board had seemed to agree on that course, though it now turns out they hadn’t vetted that option. Their legal advisor has now explained various options for the process, now leading them to warn a floor vote at town meeting.
Some have suggested Greensboro should consider engaging a town manager, perhaps part-time, to help coordinate the town’s business activities.
While Greensboro continues to move various projects forward in fits and starts (and restarts in the case of the town wastewater system project,) Hardwick seems to have been moving projects forward in a more controlled and effective way. Part of that is likely due to the size of the towns and the funding available for staff to support the select board’s efforts. Another piece of the difference may be due to having a town manager, though that alone isn’t enough because Hardwick has had its share of challenges in recent decades, despite having a town manager.
In its defense, Greensboro has been effective in contending with the aftermath of two consecutive years of flooding, so it’s not a matter of being ineffective at dealing with everything. Rather, it seems issues that are not in the normal course of town business for a small town: wastewater, housing development and closing a beloved elementary school, as recent examples, may require more expertise or oversight than a volunteer select board and committees are able to bring to the tasks at hand.
Is having a paid town manager part of the difference between how Greensboro and Hardwick are handling their business? Could Greensboro select board members find ways to approach their issues in the way Hardwick’s town manager is helping that town approach them, but without hiring a town manager?
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.