all right good evening and welcome to the board of selectmen interviews for town manager we're going to start off as we normally do with the so tonight we're just going to quickly go through the process that will happen this evening for us we will have released collins will be joining us for his interview at six fifteen and at seven thirty mr kevin questions will be the same to each each of the my fellow board members will be able to ask questions as we go along also and then at the end we will ask any other follow up questions that we need to  it's just makes it easier on everyone if we keep everything the same and on the twenty fourth on our meeting on the twenty fourth we will discuss and make a vote on the twenty fourth so this will give us a couple weeks to either reach out individually one on one to the candidates to ask them other questions while of questions etc but that's when that will so now we have ten minutes before the interviewee comes in do we want to discuss the process if everyone is comfortable with that so as you ask the question they complete the response then for that particular question will we be able to ask for it that's where for if you're comfortable with that just all i ask is because we're still trying to figure out the the microphones and studs if you just wait until you're recognized to to ask the question that will work and that's we all just take trying to be king self so there's ten questions the follow up question relates to the question that was just asked so it's relative to that one question if i have a question not relative to that one being asked and it's not one of those questions you wait to the end yet and we do get it and then we could do you know a couple questions each follow up does that sound reasonable i just said this people from the audience here if there's a compelling question allowed to go to the microphone not allowed to put it in writing i would say if this something that isn't answered maybe they could get their questions up to the selectmen and we can kind of address that on the twenty fourth i just rather not i'm not you know i mean it's just seems we have a limited time right after this meeting i would think they could send it to the board of selectmen and we could get it on our packet i just think it all the other correspondence has been totally outside of town hall  i'm just thinking where it's we have one candidate that works and i guess one way to think about it is if someone has it for tonight's meeting i think it's important that we all get our own time i suppose if we had extra time at the end it would i guess it wouldn't be horrible to have the public speak at all but i just think given the limited time i'd prefer not to if it's i don't know yet when i do you know but i but i suppose if it is a question that you know want to you know put to the candidate they they could call the any one of us or all five of us and that by that way they'll let us know how important it is to them i mean you know i certainly don't mind taking calls i don't think anyone does here on these kinds of things and  i don't think we're going to get inundated with a hundred phone calls with a hundred different questions so why don't we i don't have a preference i just don't want to wait and have people think that they're going to be able to ask questions and not be able to do it that's all know that you know usually when you go on interviews you know you get called back a couple times so i'm sure that either of the interviewees wouldn't mind calls from us  that is to keep the questions consistent from candidate to candidate you all know what's going to ask and you all have the ability follow up and sometimes community have second interviews with the candidates you have that option as well but i think in fairness to the candidates if all the questions came from the board at least there's a uniform format for the candidates and somebody from the floor could ask a question of a candidate that is right just you know appropriate perhaps but not ask that of of this another candidate and then the board swing issues that maybe isn't necessary i did a candidate say come early so that if you want to begin early you can do that if you take less time in the second candidate can come in before seven thirty i did ask you to be here by seven o'clock when you're say for the public is essentially all five of us sent in our questions to tom growing tony la chapelle when they called those questions and we were left with i guess ten questions i think they're excellent questions to the search committee and they kind of compiled them on together and came up with the ten final questions to ask you guys and there will be follow up questions from on the board members to so a brief opening statement not more than five to eight minutes recapping your career highlights in why you feel well suited to the position of foxborough a ton of time to foxborough time manager also please tell us what attracted you to this particular opportunity absolutely i think the best way to do that is to explain to you the guiding light in my career and i'll do that without focusing on my accomplishments because i know you all have my resume i'm happy to take those kinds of questions but i think you have a better appreciation for me as a candidate to understand what has guided me over the last twenty two years my professional business career i was very fortunate when i started in my business career  to start in a venture capital investment banking firm which is referred to as the catbird seat of business and i was hired by by the name of jim a gallon as the managing partner from a gallon like insurer and he's been my mentor for the last twenty two years and as i explained that over the next few minutes you'll understand how and why i am in front of you tonight because a lot has to do with the influence that the gym has had on me and his wisdom in the business world jim is very successful individual managing companies starting companies up fresh and then also as an entrepreneur also as an investor and i was very fortunate that he that he hired me to be a financial analyst with a gallon world one of the other things that he had impressed upon me when i started i really didn't appreciate it until until the months started to tick by was that as much as great to start your career in a very lucky start your career here in  the investment banking world that you really should get operating experience if you really want the full package you want to have a skill set it's going to carry you for the rest of your life and i really appreciate what that meant until the months went by and then we would be sitting at  quarter but jim having already operated companies and knew how to get from a to b he would work with the management of the company over the next quarter to help them achieve  their goals because he understood all the nuances of business from merchandising and marketing and sales financial planning real estate et cetera and so i got a front row seat you know working with him is he in part of that knowledge to me as he worked with these with these business owners so i did realize at that point that at some point i wanted to get operating spirit because i saw the powerful package it was much more powerful than just you know being you know very good you know finance person so you know well known retail expert and so we would do consulting to the retail companies you can name many middle market retail companies at the time and we did work for them and then we also do due diligence for investment houses at the time who are looking for an expert to review them to review those companies so then the portfolio came to the end of life as we do about four and a half years so that you know the funded and fully invested and and all the partners are going to go their separate ways internationally  netherlands and other fund china for another venture capital fund spin off from advent and then jim was going to the u k to expand t j maxx is brand over and u k i was invited to go to any one of those but for personal family reasons  decide to stay around and get a job stateside and so this is the opportunity for me to look for that operating role in the meantime i did stay stay on as a consultant and help the firm wind down   so i really got a you know got that experience that i was looking for and really felt much stronger for because i really understood that business i really understood stables but along the way of course it was a lot of travel  young family of three children and fox were schools here and and so it's getting a little bit much and so i had i reached a point as much i love the company i really don't want to leave that i was going to do something different to decide to do something different to thing that jim had pressed upon me back when i started with him is giving back to the community he was chairman of the finance committee back in westwood and told me about how fun that was and giving back to the community that it was it's really all happens at the local that was adopted a town meeting actually created the streamlining of the function that i'm in now we streamlined this the financial department within the town so it had a single accountability in this position was created ironically as a result of it and i had no idea that i would be in it something i'd ever really given thought to until he had decided that this is something that i thought that that i could do it actually then working side by side with andy and i think i have i know the i know the job i know the  i know the issues as you know i'm involved in many of them i know the people the boards the committees the department heads the community and and i understand the process and i respect the process randy i just want to ask about your experience at staples and i said i was going through the resume and you know i did see that you had moved a number of times through staples so i just wanted to ask as you just described this this was for the purpose of obtaining operational experience yes can you describe were these lateral moves what types of moves were these within stay on each one was was a promotional move you know for me increasing compensation even though the were particular hung up on titles  staples it was really all look at the job done and and in compensation and so they were they were all increasing responsibility with each one of them there was increased increased increased so you know level of of visibility you know to the top of the house and what was the largest number of personnel that you were responsible for staples dot com we built an operation from scratch basically and as i just follow up on lori and yes i was a vice president at staples and randy's career and mine overlapped although i didn't know him at the time i never met him at staples didn't work with him at staples knew nothing about him but i can stipulate that at staples especially in the early years when randy was there the company was growing so quickly that they identified talent and they moved that talent around as quickly as they can as they could because they were putting out fires every place and when they found talent they moved them so i think it's it's quite fair to say that the jobs that he had at staples were a recognition of the contribution that he had made in the brand that he established for established for himself and that's why they've moved them around a number of times i would say that when he announced he was leaving staples i read it in the fox reporter and that's how i first realized oh this guy works for us but i would say that after i read that i did talk to a number of people at e you know in my role so although along the way have done a fair amount of research you know in addition to understanding the issues of the community i've done a while i've been here i did a twenty year study or study of twenty years of of all of the preparation history for the town so i could understand how the town is appropriate its money and its and understand the financial dynamic of the town and as well as  the demographics not only the social demographics but also how we fit into other communities and actually i post those types type of statistics on the website so i feel like i have an excellent grasp of where  not only financially with the other communities and as far as how we've appropriated money over the years but as far as the you know the key key challenges that i see as you know i've been involved you've been gracious enough to include me in your goals and objectives setting sessions and i look forward to the upcoming one but i do see you know if i would hit a couple of highlights some couple the key issues that  see that we have in front of us and there's not a lack of them i don't mean to leave any off by exclusion but i would say the sewer strategy and the funding of that is probably one still one of the top priorities as you know i'm involved in in that state that we have maintenance and repair of aging town buildings you know as we all know the townspeople have been very generous in what they have done for us on the school side with the public safety side and now the library as we know there are do to manage the day to day whether it's the the hodgepodge of e mail systems that we have the old and i would say less than functionally rich telephone system that we haven't it's not common across  in the residents more so we can hear you give them a better venue to to communicate with us about about areas where they need they're looking for service and then i would say with the any of these ongoing litigations of that the town has i think it's important just to settle them all but also to you know to learn from them so those are some of the some of the key issues that i see i mean there are several others but those those would be some of the top ones that i see think in the in the letter of interest with what the question also talked about your initial priorities and i just want to cover that because in your letter of interest you said if i'm fortunate enough to be interviewed for this position which you are i would like to share an interesting idea that i have about how i can streamline the administration of our municipal government while also allowing for a quantum improvement in efficiency and capability at no cost this is a creative reorganization idea that i do not think any other candidate would be able to offer so i imagine that that would be one your priorities could you shed some light on what you meant by that sure there are there are many many many areas of responsibility that the town manager has  and the majority of the responsibilities revolve around human resources ministration benefits administration meant and grant funding and those four areas  encompass more than the majority of the town managers time and first i'd like to say i think that our town manager and he has done an absolutely outstanding job for the town with the resources that he has but we have been next level i don't believe that we can really do that or do it consistently without an assistant town manager and i'm proposing to add this position but adding that has been a problem has been proposed in the past but we always have funding issues always difficult just to maintain what we have to add another senior level position you know in the town government is not an easy thing to do so my proposal  is to add this at a net zero incremental costs actually a savings to the town if i'm hired by not filling the finance director position and having the town manager retain the finance director responsibilities and direct reports the net result would be the town manager in essence being the chief administrative officer chief administrative officer and the chief financial officer this isn't an accountant would need to be promoted to be a town accountant to unburden the town manager from those day to day responsibilities and to maintain the check and balance between the town accountant and the senior executive in the town because both have to sign a warrant this is been  norfork is is one example i'm sure there are others and it is a trend in municipal government to consolidate functions where possible and again the primary focus areas and i won't go into the details but i have many many things points to discuss within these areas that i think we should be doing just within those areas human resources benefits mr grant funding that will then allow the town manager to operate at a strategic know reach out to the rest of the community and the chamber of commerce and try to work on things that would stimulate economic development porton things that are actually going to help us sustain our services this would add a net then on the surface would add a net of four direct reports to the town manager going from twelve to sixteen but i think if we hire the right assistant town manager i would expect that individual to be able to have at least three professional finance department quite well and i don't see this as a stretch at all you know given given the team that i have there and my capabilities there and regardless without in the system town manager the town manager i don't believe no matter how good the person is we'll be able to raise the bar in a meaningful or lasting way no matter who is appointed because the role is well overburdened with all of these day to day responsibilities as the administration of town government has become much more difficult and much more complex to manage than it was thirty years ago and in fairness because i did i did make this next statement to the search committee and i do still stand by it i have no interest in the town manager job without the assistant town manager being  being something that we would begin the process to recruit immediately upon hiring the town manager that is not an ultimatum it's just i have no interest in a job like this unless we can raise the bar that's that's been a hallmark of my career is achievement not just stepping into a role to take the role for what it is and keep the trains running i think this board in the community expects more and my statement here is that we can do it we just need a little administrative help to do it in and with my proposal it would be at no additional cost of the  i just want to ask the question the second half of the question again how would you establish these you know your priorities that you have identified  here i think your heart i know this is what you just described is an important step one to you but how would you address the other priorities that you've identified as as you know in our form of government here the top manager is not a one man band the  manager serves the elected leaders the town fathers this group here so you can have some great ideas but it really requires a collaboration with this board in the way that that this board has set it up which i think is fantastic ones that i had laid out to initially ancillaries question and i think that the town manager in most of those cases would do that on his own and really needs the support of the board and the board of support certain things and those those things aren't our priority at that point because there are many role town manager and finance director together right and i know there's many towns that do not do that for other reasons they like the accountability separate for the from the financial department in some of it has to do with history of the town and other other reasons because if tried it in when things come together it's hard to separate them later are you saying that if you are hired as a town manager you need an assistant if that role of financial director stay separate you still need an assistant with there would be yes still need an assistant manager but my my proposal is not to hire the finance director position so in other words you'd have to have should have the finance director and town manager correct maybe no separate finance director everything would be through you correct and to your point about well gee what what if this i think we're losing to a lot of this have you know have the finance director position filled and determine whether or not you you still want you know either me in the town manager all you want me back and fine instructor or you want me out of the picture and you'd want to hire another town manager maybe the assistant that was hired hopefully somebody who would be groom you know be somebody a good succession of succession candidate and then refill the finance director position i'm willing to i'm willing to take that risk that if you don't like it and if the solution  is that well in order to get us back to where we were then then you know you're left without a seat i'm willing to take that risk you saw i'm confident i can make it work so i guess my concern with that plan would be whether or not would have redundancy built and if you know you get hit by a bus we training the now promoted town accountant to be able to fill in your shoes if you know i would  so you know if i was i want to get hit by the boss and hopefully that one could that individual step in as as the town manager and then if that individual did not have the capability to handle both roles and then you'd still have no increase in your budget because you c would be interested in you know in that role ok thanks and you know questions for that ok the relationship between the what it's like when the time manager is important for the same for the success of tom government describe your understanding of this relationship when blood membership changes what do you do to ensure continued good relations with the new members in i guess i'll start with in my current role as i as i do report to you today i think most of you know that i have a i have a policy in terms of my interaction with this board in my current role i do not view myself as a policy maker and must have been drawn into the policy realm different as a town manager i can consider myself you know i should be involved in the discussion to the extent the board wants me to be involved discussion but in my current role i have not solicited members of this board unless iterations of this board over the last six years many different political philosophies i understand the nature of the board it's it is it is political by nature and that's not a negative thing that's a positive thing you're representing your various constituencies are your values and beliefs and they're not always the same but that's that's the democratic process so my my approach to that has been with regardless of who the board member is that  that i'm dealing with is that i respect your opinions i am not bashful about debating them with you as many of you know but at the end of the day when this board decides the baits or debates discusses and then decides then it's my role to accept and move on to the next issue and not to not to fester over whether i was in an agreement or not that's my philosophy  'm somebody who separates personality from the issue i have a unique ability to do that i think probably you know most in the world can't cannot do that but i've been able to do that you know my and my life and i pride involves because they're interested they're passionate about the community and you have to respect that and everybody comes from different place and so on and i am i've tried hard to be respectful of that i think passionate as you've seen me with the expression of my views but when it's  time to decide we decided we move on that's that's my view and so i would and so by demonstrating that that's how i would that's how i would show the board that you know i'm a i'm a team player and i hope i've shown that myself department has we listened to all of their proposals respectfully and on the financial side as you know we try to be we demonstrate consistency it's we it's been unfair to to be inconsistent you know on the compensation side so  take direction from this board here on the municipal contracts and so we bring back the proposals here and get the board to weigh in to to help us with you know should we consider this should we not consider this you know is this inconsistent with what we've done in the done in by focusing on focusing on the issue and try to bring folks to a common understanding and i know and he works hard at that and i've assisted him to work hard that in some cases that's not satisfactory to the employee and they know they have rights in the judge and i've been involved in all different flavors of that because nobody wants to to get to that point we know we try to foster you know positive fair you know working relationships for employees because they are the ones providing the services to the town and and we value them and  similar labor disputes so you're sitting at two questions what is the strategy but when you say sit at the table with andy how long has it been that you've been sitting at the contract negotiations from the beginning when  started and he started he included me from the beginning i think we have police and fire contracts open right away so i've been involved all the way through i think early on right up through the arbitration process and some of them but  consistency and fairness each some situations are unique and different and you know you have to really have to consider all angles of the various scenarios and we had we address each proposal that's brought forward you know we continue to come back and talk we did it's not a you know discussion over it's we continue to come back that's that's the hallmark of it one of the traditions that really the least that i've observed in my years of andy is that you know he never closes the door i think that's healthy and we should never do that no matter how far apart we may be on particular issues it's important to keep the dialogue going because we're not going to resolve it by not talking but we have to i guess i'm looking style wise are you are you like a negotiator or are you looking for a compromise at that point what would you say is your strategic approach there depend on without blowing your  current it depends on the depends on the situation you know if it's if it's monetary issue you know it's it's fair it's got to be what's what's fair and equitable you know what what the town can afford and what's fair and equitable for all and consistent on it understand it's help them to understand you know what we see and hopefully get to calm it's about you know getting to getting the common ground not coming in this early with a with a preconceived you know  outcome it's really focusing on getting to common ground and this and this compromise along the way as we all know and all these situations and that's the key is understanding you know where you know where you can compromise and still maintain an element of fairness whether it be a monetary issue or a non issue just in very general terms how would you characterize the relationship with the majority of unions i guess i would say you know the administration will probably hard to understand that you know in the municipal government environment particularly in these days there's just so many dollars to go around and it's frustrating for everybody everybody's looking for you know for  more and it's hard to accept you know what what the town what the town has has to offer and can offer so with that as a backdrop understanding that you know you probably never going to really going to have a group jumping up and down saying that was that was fantastic i think they respect it at least the approach that's been taken you know to date certainly you know with andy as as the lead on this  and respectful approach listening never gives up i think they at a minimum appreciate that early least i hope they do and that would be a tradition that i would certainly want to continue would not want to change that strategy one one bit so we could  try to maintain you know the positive aspects of always continuing to try continuing to try to come to common ground within the means of the  there were a lot of questions on the union side of things and we've had a lot of discussions at this board you've been part of those discussions that if you look at the state's part of the state has not kept its bargain in terms equitable funding to cities and towns that has continued recently although with the additional federal money the governor is now talking about maybe adding something back but even he added something back the he the state doesn't even keep up with inflation so we've talked about the fact that from a financial standpoint we barely keep our head above water so giving increases in the three percent range are difficult to impossible and we've reached out and talked as a board about zero percent raises we know that the police department wants additional people we know the fire departments asked for additional people we know that the highway department asked for additional people we know that the town hall has asked for additional people so from a from a strategic standpoint when you talk about negotiations everybody wants more people and they want more money and we have not enough money to go around today so just talk for a few minutes about you know how do you think that you're going to bridge that gap because many of the towns around us have not been able to bridge that gap and as a result they've had to make some very tough decisions how do you think we look in that sense and you prepared to make tough recommendations if you're the town manager the short answer is yes absolutely we've been we've been fortunate here as you know we've had some one time funds come in we've had some extraordinary new growth that only takes you so far and we've been lucky we haven't been penny wise and we have been foolish with that with our one time funds and we've been able to to to to hold that and not unnecessarily increase operating budgets to the point where they're unsustainable so we've been consistent with the hallmark that this town has we've been conservative we realize there's always down pressure on on revenue and upward pressure on spending and so that means the tough the tough choices when it comes to wages and personnel and i think you know and until there is a paradigm shift in the delivery of local municipal services or a very significant and sustainable increase in recurring revenue i think we will likely have this is a challenge perpetually and you know when when proposition two and a half came into place that's really when it that's really when it started and it really hasn't hasn't gone away i think we've had some good things going our favor with the stadium the development you know it's that are in our prudent the prudent financial management you know supported by this board townspeople a town manager we've been we've been fortunate to weather the storm but the storm is getting pretty pretty heavy out there at this point time and i've looked out at least a couple of years and i think we're going to have to continue with the approach that we took to balance this year's this year's budget which is a rolling wave of zeroes to to the next you know group of unions i know nobody wants wants to hear that but that's the medicine that some of the unions are are taking and labor groups are taking non union taking and i think that's that's part of the ingredient to keep a solvent there are other on the revenue side of things i mean there are some opportunities at the appropriate time i think that we should we should consider again i'm not a tax and spend there but i certainly think that you know there are lifelines out there available to the town and certainly the meals tax is one that i don't think we've seen the last of that because that that's revenue that  think the sioux a strategy is going to help us you know real that in another areas but size rawan i think we need to do everything we can to be supportive of that because to bring in more recurring revenue so we can sustain services the wildcard here is the state as you've articulated larry they've been extremely unpredictable and we are certainly lower than we been almost ten years ago and so it's really hard to maintain services and so again unless something changes significantly we will probably continue to have these challenges all the more reason why i think we really need to look more seriously at every one of these streamlining of services regionalization opportunities consolidation here big efforts you know beyond what we already have you know regional sewer we already have in some of the other regional or internal things that we've done to consolidate central dispatch as an area that you know a lot of us were hoping that we would be able to get off the ground but the some of the running communities decided they were to regionalize on fire protection and on a regional regional dispatch i think we need to revisit that and i think any one of the opportunities that that that comes along to we need to be proactive in pursuing i think we need to look long and hard at it and i know it's hard for the communities or for any community because of the parochial nature of communities but that is one of the key ingredients in my view for us to maintain the services that people in communities depend on to streamline the delivery of the services my view is the government is not a jobs program the government the local government here is about the delivery of services and anything we can do to streamline the delivery of services we need to be doing and i know regionalization many concepts about this board is have to consider at least one of them they're tough choices but i don't think we should we should stop considering them so that it's a variety of variety of tough choices along the way that as well as being proactive on revenue generation but i think that that we want to need to continue to press a view on the iran in order to maintain the quality of life that people expect in this community but who knows we may you know we been fortunate we may hit the wall at some point time and then we really will have some some tough choices to make like the community had to make about nine years ago the follow up questions that describe the process of strategic planning that you would put in place in facts will be specific to foxborough when discussing what you believe to be the future challenges and opportunities facing the town i think it starts on the on the operating side with the financial you know the multi year financial forecasting that you know we've talked about before we've got a plan in place to well there are many things that they'd like to do to advance the ball as well so there are there are plenty of needs out there and so i believe part of the strategic planning process is not just forecasting out of the trajectory that we're on or what our what our crystal ball is telling us on revenues it's getting more into a prioritization discussion of needs and i laid out at the beginning of our conversation here i laid out some that i thought were important you know roads in vestment and some technology infrastructure etc i think it's not just operating you know it's capital it's all of the things that require that allow us to deliver the services to the community and it's not a one board you you know true master planning you know around the resources that the community has the land resources that the community has and you know some of this is being done some great work is being done particularly in the conservation area on the plane what does great work but i'd like to see that  focus to bring that all together so we look at all of the commercial residential conservation and recreation land and needs around the town so we can have a long term view on  not just you know guesses on what the new the new values new growth might be to drive revenues to the community but but what do we think as from a master planning perspective what do we want foxborough to look look like down there as opposed to able to do certainly the town manager is going to be able to drive without without additional resources but i think it's it's important the that we do that and as far as you may not consider the strategy but i think this more strategy discussion here at this table one of the things i'd like to see us do if the board would concur is to look at a year's worth of agendas that is that this board handles you know on on a on a week to week basis and separate from the policy of strategic matters from the administrate of the ministerial matters separate those out and have the discussion i know certain members here have have brought bro in the past and take a look at what really belongs at this table and what are some things that the board is willing to delegate to the administration so we can have more time and more focus at this table in the precious time that you people provide to the community so we can focus on these higher level issues in and plan so i think that that's another way to squeeze more more time into the strategic planning process so i guess i just let it speak in the microphone would you describe that it sounds like really it's well you're engaging many partners in this it's you know this board the community folks let me just add it will little bit differently is that if we're going to if you don't have a board of five who are you know i think everything's ok the way it is we're going to stay status quo doesn't sound like you're going to have fun in this job so you're  really asking this board yes we're ready to you know want to go this journey of strategic planning with you is that fair statement not i'm not sure that the board is averse to strategic planning if that were to be the case i don't see the town manager their purpose to go in particular directions or to a particular level on certain things you know that i have to i have to you know abide by that and you know take my direction according t ok how would you proceed during the first hundred twenty days of your tenure to evaluate personnel and departments in foxborough what kinds of metrics would you use for these evaluations and have you perform evaluations at a very detailed level and actually i would like to i would like to bring the annual formal employee performance review process to the community i think we all benefit from that from constructive feedback it's not a negative thing it's you know it's it's  begin the development of an annual review process but that starts with you can have a review before you've set the goals as you well know so it would be it would be a goal setting process that we would we would set the  i think the communication is going to be critical beyond just employees and department heads so i would invision having regular meetings with union presidents representatives from the  so that we can you know we're all in this together the the challenges that we have here you know with the state situation and our regionalization opportunities or a reluctance to pursue them so i really it's communication my very key focuses in the first several days how quickly would you get the assistant manager if all works out well is that that's got to be part of the first absolutely i just that is it is a given if you were looking to hire me my my goal would be to have that position posted and start the process immediately upon the completion of your hiring me if you did hire me to start that process right away and and hopefully within a thirty six ninety day process have that individual on board ok thanks and i just disagree with the role that you have now as financial director some of the things that you're doing now with your staff such as the evaluation in the region stuff is can you talk to us a little bit about what you're doing now and maybe how that relate to as a town manager or not relate to a town sort of position i do we do have regular staff meetings within the finance department we have regular the direct report you know one on one meetings and so we have a you know constant constant dialogue constant communication we're very fortunate in the finance department unlike some other communities where you know where you know where or with the different factions can be months before they're actually a former selectman race the issue last year about the d p w department and the water and sewer and the potential combination what are your thoughts on that topic i think they're worth exploring  obviously they're much more complex than just bring it full would you know to this board in the board wants your commissioners i believe this you know legislation that ultimately would have to be filed and so therefore i think it would have to go to town meeting but it's certainly you know  they may not be because we're relatively lean within those departments they may not be a lot of economic benefit but there may be some operational and coordination benefits and i think the  streamlined we can be the better off we are so i don't have any preconceived notion on whether that you know that that's a good that should happen to should happen i think it's certainly worthy of consideration and we've done similar things l department fully supporting the municipal operation and and so it's less expensive and it's it's actually delivering a higher service level you know to the you know to the employees and ultimately the town and it's working well so i love consolidation opportunities not for the for the sake of consolidation but if they make sense on the merits more efficient delivery service i think really that's that's got to be a key focus and it's certainly worth considering they describe one or two significant changes you personally implemented in a recent position you count where those changes successful if not why not and related to this describe a passage you ation that you wish you would handle differently and tell us what you lived and how you might handle handle it differently today sure it's really one of the great successes that we had a major change was the implementation of a new financial system for the town where the twenty year old financial system it was a challenge in front of you know certainly from a bringing resources to bear to figure out what we needed because we did it from the ground up we did it the way you should do it define your functionality requirements and make a business case and and get the resources in and we did that but i think what makes what we did with the financial system i think more powerful is that we did it in partnership with the school department and it's probably no secret you know many school departments across the state like to maintain their autonomy and once they have a consolidated set of financial systems with a municipal side if the relations aren't that great you know you know many school departments you know don't don't like that but the good news is that we have excellent working relationships  serving you know both of our needs very well and nobody's concerned about you know what anybody you know what we can each see because you know we can the town of town could always see everything that the schools finances and the beauty is now the school can see all of the town finances as well so you know we're an open book with too small not to be another example i guess i would i would give would be the you know the website you know that was challenging just from again from a resource perspective and funding perspective and how do you do it and without having content manager to manage the site so we were fortunate to find you know find a great company that had great tools that allows all of the municipal department heads or department ministre has to manage their own content and keep it fresh without it but i'll bring in any additional  me come back to that one hundred k describe your management style as well as your experience with human resource management and then you want to look at his age and someone comes in closes the door for me so i'm always very accessible i i have really come to thoroughly enjoy every the partment that i work with  relationships with just about every department i can think of a part of i don't have great relations with the employees i think they see that me i'm a i'm a regular guy you know i can fly high and you know in low either with the  work or with all different kinds of individuals i just enjoy i enjoy people i consider myself a people person and i guess i would be looking for a job like this if i was somebody who is looking to  t you know i my desk all day i really enjoy working people up large as you know the percentage of the budget goes to the school seventy cents on the dollar seventy percent of the budget goes towards fifty when you because when you take that's when you when you net out you know debt service and benefit and everything like that so it's about when you split it's probably about fifty fifty ok can you just briefly talk about your relationship with this superintendent the school committee on a day to day monthly quarterly your relationship they have with that entire have great partnerships you know we continue to have more partnerships we would be consolidating their department or have common financial system or be able to split the baby as it were when it comes to the prioritizing the town appropriation each year i don't think that any one of you can recall a town meeting debate certainly since since i've been here on on the split of resources between the school in the end and the town side so we're all you know reasonable fair minded professionals and you know we sit around we have we have the tough discussions but we always always work it out i think that's because everybody can see can see the you know the same information the same information set and that's what we try to be is very transparent with all the information so the school superintendent school business manager sees the unvarnished financial facts of the town they bring it back to the school committee or the school committee liaison sees it as well and so we have we have great great relationships i mean you know my philosophy is that when you're when you're struggling and you have limited means there's really not a lot of room for gamesmanship and really that's just the games and shifts really is as a distraction so it's a lot easier to say these are the facts let's see if we can have a prioritization discussion and it's worked out well for us i would just add to that jim is a member of the school committee i can certify that that the randy had a good relationship with the school committee and with the superintendent but particularly with the school's finance manager paul jackson thinks very highly of the working relationship and in fact i can remember my first year on the committee just getting on the committee we had a significant budget surplus and while some people are young we spend every nickel of it we knew that the town had the need for  six hundred thousand dollars plus accounting system and because the schools had respect for the town side the schools chose not to spend that money and to return it to the town so they would help fund that pro that new system which would benefit both sides so i think there is a good relationship there it's healthy that  was unprecedented in school department and i think it comes back to the school department in spades we don't want to quibble over the nickels and dimes between the two we have a good understanding of what the real priorities are for the community thank you  can as you know you work with me i'm passionate about you know important important issues of the day and i know that you're all passionate people too and so i respect that but then again that that's a hallmark of  i think one of my positive traits here is that i can be positively passionate and debate the issue you know to the end of the day with any one of you past present  future but at the end of the day with me i hope you all know that it's never personal it's always about the issues and so i don't see it  everybody's very passion about this community and i respect that i respect everybody's coming from and so again i go back to one of the closes one of the points that i made earlier which is we discuss debate passionately and then we decide and then we accept and we move on to the next issue and that's my philosophy and that's what you can expect from me and which hopefully what you've seen from me would i would say that i'm very cognizant of the issues that need to be filled here and he has left us with a great tradition which i want to be very respectful of nobody can replace andy and but i think i think he's his traditions  should be should be honored and by that i mean the values that he brought to serving the community day in and day out and those those traditions are very very important to me and and i would look somebody who i believe can bring you all of those qualities along with the respect that the process deserves this democratic process that we have that's what you have in me follow up questions you know but one question and i say this i met randi three years ago i started the advisory committee from a financial perspective very well versed very well qualified resumes in your skills here i'd be surprised if anyone had reservations about any of the financial what we're looking at here is a town manager ok so when you look at your skills and qualifications it says impeccable financial director  look at town manager so you're moving up you're moving to a different role in the skills are a little broader human resources maybe not being friendly with every department because that's what you have to do you have to play the bad guy sometimes and it's a different role moving to a role where you're not schooled professionally there are skills that you will need or you can see getting from outside seminars additional skills that you would need or shortcomings just because you haven't gone that route in your career yet sure i'll answer the last question first there is one particular credential that  my mentor encouraged me to to attain operating experience understand how things work and that's that's what i've done i'm somebody who i can dissect the process and that's been my my history in my career and i think i already have a pretty good understanding for how how we deliver services here with all the different departments that the town manager is charged with overseeing so i think i already start from a good place and then i  do believe i do believe i bring the management abilities to become more engaged with the departments in the department heads to understand and benchmark how they're delivering their services so we can help them to take it to the next level if there is a next level for them so i do believe in mike in my career and i have managed again with a large organization staples particular staples dot com and the other areas i  was involved in and here supporting in the areas that we're charged with human resources procurement legal policy issues i've had i've had exposure to to all of those in my entire professional career so i don't see any particular area other than this particular designation that i think is important that the cheaper german officer have at i really don't see it's a little biased i don't see the fish and sea and any of those areas with you know some people at home might be thinking about those questions we asked and thought some of them might be odd for randy with his experience but when we put the questions together we didn't know any of the candidates were going to be so we had to put generic questions together that would allow us to interact with any candidate a microphone please ok so i'll read the ten questions you'll answer mine by wind my fellow board members will chime in and as a follow up to any of them and at the end if there's something that was an answer but i want to buy you should probably know me and in that time i have served in a number of communities small communities to creasing professional opportunities and went back to a small community a couple of years ago and i can say with absolute no reservations whatsoever i love this profession i jumped out into the private sector for a little bit i decided years and decided to come back into into management i just you know what i what i learned was that well that position was wonderful but when i get up in the morning it just didn't give me the zip you know the fun that i the enjoyment that i get out of being in the public sector as you know when i was younger i ran for selectman and i was fortunate enough with the voters made the horrible mistake of me and i had a great time serving on that board and sort of got my interest in and public sector work and i've been doing it for a long time and i can tell you that i and enormously enthusiastic about the work i just love it i don't know how many more years i'm going to do it but i know that probably drives me kicking and screaming into retirement and when i retire i'll find something else to do because but i'll be doing this probably for a while anyways  terms of this position as you probably know i was not initially a candidate for this position the number of people had called me some folks who live here that i know some other folks that work here  and they had suggested to me that i should take an interest in it i have not applied for any other position in the almost two years that i've been and hang him and i really didn't dissipate being a candidate for a position we just had my  and hang up and went very well things are going great there but i don't so the first couple calls i guess i kind of decline but the time i get the third or fourth collar said you know i asked a few questions well why did that person think i'm going to be a good candidate and so frankly i started to look into it did a little research about the town spend some time here met a few people and i will tell you candidly that it's struck me as a wonderful opportunity it has the obvious advantage of being a lot closer to home i will confess to you the commute from easton to hang on is a is a tour is a tough one usually i'm coming home at night after the the rush probably hiding that's what i do and we feel very strongly both of us that we like to live in the community where i work again being a town manager for me as they used to say in the navy commercials isn't just a job it's an adventure i really love doing it and we like to live in the town and be part of the community it was not possible for us to move to hang them  i started making inquiries about the department heads in the staff and frankly have got some top notch people here really outstanding randi absolutely outstanding see a full has a very strong reputation number of your other department heads i police chief your fire chief your building specter all in particular stand outside of the community have very very strong reputations so the opportunity to be part of a really good  hundred eighty something committees they have a government study committee appointed and i suspect that at the end of a year or two they will probably move to a charter of some milk and try to bring some organization because i think the perception is that they need something but it's not there yet you have that and frankly i'm much more comfortable functioning in an environment that has a clear charter of roles for everybody and much more comfortable so all those elements frankly after i looked into it just seemed to make an awful lot of sense and i talked to tony in the screening committee and to tom and said gee i would i would love to be a candidate if it's possible you know to enter the process a little later when they were very what they were they were looking for somebody who was fairly new and young and they were it was a wonderful group of selectmen that i worked for all very senior professional people and they taught me a great deal able to get it that was an ill fated fourteen months at one point the tanit out a charter for about three years before me and at one point about ten or twelve years into the charter we actually former top managers from lunch and had our own table at the monthly manager's meeting some people would last well hardly anybody lasted much over two years i think kate the first time manager lasted three and survived i think an even dozen attempts to her it was it was a town that had adopted a strong charter very small community need given a lot of authority to the manager whoever they hired and it was not the authority they had given to this person who inevitably would be an outsider was was far more than that than i think the town really was truly comfortable with and so they had a whole series of managers i was one of them and all very short term until finally ironically a fellow that i had hired as the economic development director managed to stay for four years i think one was there for that long and then they had another string of managers and it was just been a difficult situation but i learned some there went to seabrook that was i had my own nuclear power plant and daily demonstration outside the window very entertaining lots of t v experience which is not something you typically get as a small town manager but had television stations in the office all the time and again it was a growing experience it was another small community and is typical of folks in this profession andy by the  way a very much admired and revered manager in our circles is a notable exception i think he may be the only manager with the possible exception of a fella from milton who actually was were in their positions for as long as they were extremely unusual and highly commendable if you can do it but much more typical is being in communities three to four years especially smaller ones and moving moving up the trans if you will so either larger communities or more responsible ones moving from ministry of assistant to th manager and that's sort of what my professional career was went to easton and finally did what most of us are trying to do and that was finding a fairly decent sized community that has lots of challenges and hopefully some stability and then i had fifteen wonderful years there managed to raise in and i raised our two boys the and got them right through high school and the whole nine yards and had one of the most wonderful experiences of our lives it also in many ways was a professional highlight of my career that management team and the board of selectmen changed a lot that was a tradition we had a stunning and i have not reflected in my resume i don't think but we had a stunning series of wars and recognition in our community fifteen consecutive awards from my i know you folks have just joined the my health insurance pool used in one my is a large time lost control program for fifteen consecutive years a record that has never been even close to equaled much less matched we won the m m a's miscible innovation award on a couple of occasions for an economic development program and on another occasion for  mouse used to come to east and to see how we did things it was great the southeastern region the services group which fox four was a member of was formed in east and by that management team and i was very proud to be a part of that  overjoyed in fact it was a wonderful time i left east on after fifteen years and pursued the private sector opportunity and as i say that was wonderful but i'm a government guy and i love doing it and i dropped on my head too many times and i grew up in the sixty's so it's not completely my father you know i actually thought public service back then was a good  thing and one of the jump back in i had a very strange juxtaposition of events when i was right smack in the middle of interviewing for the ashburn him position i got orders to deploy we got what's called a verbal warning  so i was right in the middle of doing the contract negotiations with the selectmen and i was down at our annual training in georgia and they gave us the word when we're done here so i called them and said i have to withdraw from the process and the other three selectmen said why and i said well i have to deploy later this year and they said well we got that we heard that but why would roaring and at the so i was a candidate a finalist for the position in north reading just about of the same time in fact i was meeting with the select international him on wednesday night and thursday night with a selectman in north running and when they said to me we know you're deploying but we would like you to come here anyways i mean after all it's was thinking about the out for him position because when i met with the selectmen i was so taken with them three selectmen she kind of didn't believe me she thought i was up to something so i said well come on out and i asked the board if they'd meet with us and this board was so gracious they said look you're deploying in three months we don't want you to come here five days a week you come here three days a week and we're going to take a life insurance policy on in case anything happens and there was some crazy isn't forthcoming i said these are the kinds of folks that i want to work for so i took the position the deployment got the lead for two years and it was not till two thousand and seven that we finally left july of two thousand and seven but it was  they were unbelievably supportive they were there was just incredible and took good care of me and my family for which i was enormously grateful i had told the selectmen frankly when i took the job the three selectmen that hired me in fact one of them is back on the board now after getting off that i would probably not stay more than one or two contracts and they understood and he said you know it's a small town we get it and i said you know i'm coming back into the profession and you guys have been so great i'd like to do this  and when i get home from the deployment you know it became a choice and i told the board we'd like to move here but he has to give a per job so i'm going to need a salary that at least partially replaces that  unfortunately we had to go on the slide wellens of the recession the town was was and continues to be in very difficult financial shape and they just weren't able to do the salary so i interviewed for the ham job and got very lucky and  you learn what do you think the key risks in opportunities are and how will you establish your initial priorities could you go through that again i want to gerald apart yet describe the research you've done on the town and what did you learn financially are pretty good shape i think you've got about a five million dollar fund balance uncommitted fund reserve fund balance that's not bad i believe you're double a three bond rating taking a look at the difference between revenue and surplus i think candidly the town could probably put more into reserve and you could probably very well make a very credible pitch for aaa i don't know if we'd get the aaa but i think you've got the sort of assets that make it a credible argument one of the things i did in easton was present to moody's on three separate occasions twice once we went to new york twice we brought moody's up to east into my presentation we did increase the bond rating successfully one step and we were able to maintain it over the years even though you remember in the early ninety's we had a recession almost as bad as this one but we managed to retain the rating looking at your financials i would say you're better than a double couple of warning signs i saw unary even though generally speaking your finances are very strong i mean there's a lot of communities the size of fox but i would love to be sitting on a five million dollars fund balance another cup two and a half million and stabilization so generally on the balance sheet in the audit and that reason was because at the same time that your overall revenue was declining particularly growth revenues in local receipts attributable to development actually your local receipts went up with growth  went down you had roughly a million dollar loss you drew from free cash in order to maintain the operating budget and also to fund the capital budget is a marginal note that indicates you're aware that using  surplus revenue fund balance to support the operating budget is not a good practice it certainly is something that's that's indicated insupportable in these kinds of times but kind of going to make a fundamental decision if you want continue that practice because frankly your revenue budget balance right now is such that if you want to maintain the same size budget you're going to have to keep dipping into that fund balance and you're not replenishing it as quick as you're dipping into it  that is not a sustainable position for very long as i i know you folks are well aware the second thing i noticed in your financials was that well in the budget to reduce the property liability package last year and this year by one hundred fifty thousand dollars so we've actually brought it from around four down to around three now and that's been with two successive bidding processes which  i can tell you the market places the world of insurance is softening right now is the is the lingo goes and there's an excellent opportunity to save some money there so i generally speaking  financials are pretty good i would say but there's a couple danger signals the other area that's a real problem is something called hope out other post employment benefits and in the case of foxborough the only one you have is retiree health insurance you get a sixty one mil million dollar actuarial liability which at the present time has no funding the arc of the annual cost that should be putting into is somewhere around five million  dollars you were not able to you put in about a million so what happened is your liability just grew by formal million dollars it will continue to grow at that rate a less you begin to funding it this is a debate that we just had in hang on and we made a conscious decision to put a million dollars into open funding this year it was difficult because i will tell you frankly that million dollars came from cutting the operating budget we were very proud of the fact as a community we were able to put that money and cut the budget but do it in ways that did not impact public service and i think one iota i'm up a little unusual in terms of public sector in that i think that any public sector budget anybody that wants pros hang them on even the two budgets that i've written the federal governments the state any fed any public budget can be cut ten percent with no loss of service of the public absolutely positively creativity thinking out of the box reorganizing lots of ways to do it but we've done it and hang a budget is pretty close a million dollars less than it was two years ago though that's something that's a real material weakness in the town's finances because you know what happens is hope it doesn't get smaller each year it gets bigger and if the way you pay it is to simply pay the normal cost cost that you have annual leads to pay the obligations to existing employees of retirees what happens as the bill begins to exponentially increase it's not an arithmetic progression it's a geometric progression and  it's not long you do some projections you have you actually do some projection and it's not long three four five years out before it becomes a very destabilizing factor to the times finances it is now because gadsby forty five it is now a reportable requirement in your financial statements and so that is now carried on your books and it is realized as a loss so a surplus revenue would have otherwise been nine million and i think you and others are fund balance was about nine they don't hold for  against that opec and so that's why you end up with five million when you're actually caring more in the books that's a problem foxborough is no one home in every city in town is the problem the good thing about is you have the financial base you have a tremendously powerful financial base to be able to deal with that problem it's just going to make it's going to require some some pro already setting you've got almost twenty five percent of your base in what's called c i commercial industrial and personal property that's a great ratio lots of towns would be enormously envious of that and you've got the potential for continued development on route one you've just got great assets you're poised beautifully  you know to really tackle these issues all of that is some of what i've noticed doing my research and it's part of what got me very excited you've got big town issues here in a small community a small community by the way that has a great a great feeling about itself one of the most enjoyable things i do in and interviewing is a kind of slipped quietly into town one morning before the pictures appear in the paper and all  than i did i went on the commons one day last week and i sat down to breakfast and didn't announce myself but the but the waitress who i started to engage and just in time and i made up some story story if she's reading about what i said moving into the area thinking of moving to the community and what do you think and she said well i don't live here but a lot of these folks do and she made an announcement this fellow would like to know about foxboro so i had a great time engaging with people and the comments are and these are all folks who live here and the commentary was incredibly positive you know that because you live here i don't but the feeling that people have about this community the the history the educational system the sense of  community it's a normal sleep positive take valid asset there the energy of all the folks who live here and who volunteer in town government the incredibly positive feeling of people have to take the reality of what you've got for a financial base good department heads good elected and appointed boards and you've got the chemistry to really do some fantastic things i could probably talk to you for at least beginning to get a feel for what the issues are and i don't think that any of those is what i would call particularly daunting in any sense they are all quite soluble  issues in all the kinds of issues of deal with many many times before so they are i don't have an easy ready solution for the for the dog dog playground that's a toughie but there is nothing to get people impassioned in the window and like dogs leash laws and dogs when i don't know what it is it just sets us on fire but the other issues all appear to be fairly easy to resolve  already but also going back to your comment about the ten percent the ability to reduce budget by ten percent about the ten percent of your ability to reduce a budget by ten percent you mention and hang on you've reduced it by million dollars i see hundred thousand coming out of the insurance where did you find the other let me get one hundred thousand just brought it with one of the things that i did and that's part of the budget this year beginning last summer and going into the fall and winter when i gave the selectmen my proposed budget i told them i'm going to give you an adjunct piece to that and a done them which will have as many ideas to reduce the budget or create revenue as we can think of and i engaged all the department heads any employee that wanted to submit an idea members of town boards committees and commissions we just had this gigantic sort of communal brainstorm if you will and i wrote them all down and this is the product of that and if any of these ideas work for you they are not copyrighted i'd love us in the public sector we approved but as you go through that i will tell you that the the key projects we did in that we did a departmental fee analysis we did a comprehensive we got an intern in town great die great bargains in turns on a graduate student they give you a graduate level work for free or for very little we pay them i think ten dollars an hour for ten hours a week something like that but he created over a quarter million dollars in the revenue force he took every department feet analyze it in terms of when the last time it was reviewed found the statutory authority for it found of there was a statutory limit and if we at began asking a series of questions about was the feat covering the cost of the service because you know if the fee doesn't then the taxpayers are subsidizing the person who was getting that service exclusively and that's clearly not good tax policy and the result of the analysis was that we found that many of the department fees had not been raised in a long long period of time some cases they hadn't raised in decades so some of them went to town meeting and all that were proposed to town meeting town clerk fees harbormaster fees and your couple others and then the rest were could be increased by the selectmen they were all increased pretty much across the board different levels some new ones were created in the sum total of it we created about a quarter million dollars of new revenue now in a community with an eighty million dollars budget or your fifty three fifty four million dollars budget this memo actually just went to the board of selectmen and hang them today and i will tell you that what we're able to do is convince the mouse to reduce the fee over the remaining four years of the ten year contract extend the contract by another six years ten years from now whom will pay less for the fee to see a mouse ten years from now they will pay less than they're paying right  now because we don't have a comparison for the six years the years that are not in the current contract we can't say exactly what will save what we can say as we have four years left in the contract right now we just drop the fee outre normally the savings to the town is seven hundred seventy three thousand dollars over four year period now you'll find that in that memo and at the time it was being written we were just beginning to explore it we had reason to believe it was going to go favorably but we didn't conclude the negotiations to just very recently we actually have them done once and then we went back a second time without it and the savings as i say three quarters of a million dollars now when i tell you that you really don't always know where the opportunities are until you get on with an activity like this guy i can't tell you where the opportunities are in foxborough but i can tell you w they are they're there and i know and that's not a reflection on anyone if someone takes my budget and hang on the new person goes in there they're going to find places where they can economize reorganize realize savings that i didn't think of maybe other ideas that have been on the table and been percolating but haven't been acted upon that memo that i gave you i think is thirty something odd ideas i think only a handful of them were acted on this year the sum total of everything that was done is in excess of two million dollars two million dollars now when we started that exercise no one would have believed that that sort of result was possible  believe me no one would have thought it but at the end of the exercise out was that was the result and there and we're still going to still loads of ideas it will be talking about this year they were able to sell the mills excise tax and it was great resistance and hang them just as there has been here but the way we were able to sell it was to say to the voters look here's we're going to do we're going to put it in a fund and in a stabilization fund a lot a lot of you have multiple ones and we're going to use it specifically for the purpose of the fraying what would otherwise be large capital purchases instead of asking you for quite so much in the form of an override for a large capital purpose will offset it with this revenue  ok you have goals and objectives here i see that the board just recently did that in ordinarily when i begin a community what i'll do is i'll ask the board you know have you set goals and you're way ahead of  me honestly most of the boys of work for have not done that so you're way ahead and i know probably you in india had a good good hand in getting it done what i would probably do and always do have done in the past was go to the department heads in key folks from boards of committees probably the chairs or ask the staff that works with different boards to do something real simple put down on a piece of paper the three major challenges that they see facing their department board committee commission and input down three four five challenges that they see the community facing because sometimes those are the same things and when i take objectives for the town which gets parceled out to all the various departments and becomes the basis for their annual performance review it's a simple process that i've been using for years with great success and i apologize i was not able to make multiple copies but this is the goals and objectives for we say for the time i'm going to straight about is really for all the departments and that's what the that's what that kind of an effort produced last year and hang on they had not gone through an exercise like that before in the board loved it and in fact we're in the middle of redoing it for this year that's one of the things that i would do the other thing is kind of logical and fairly obvious and that is have a whole bunch of meetings with folks all of you individually one on one department heads the chairs of boards committees and commission the chair the executive director the chambre of commerce and all of those meetings and discussions are all about assessing what the communities needs are who the key folks are what they think about the community what they think about issues and what i'm trying to do in a very very fast fashion basically about thirty days by just blitzing this is try to have as much contact with as many people as possible in thirty days get a real hopeful hopefully in such and such happened and this is were you know the the issue is with the bridge is supposed to go on things like that what it amounts to for all intents and purposes is  is an intense listening process and i've already begun that is probably fairly evident but i would build on that and a good deal more depth until i felt that i had leased was conversant with the issues facing the community and the folks that participate in town government here and that's kind of how i start off and i look in your and ok the relationship between the what it's like when the time manager is important for the success of time government describe your understanding of this relationship also what membership changes what do you do to ensure our continued good relations with the new map this first question terms of your relationship the relationship between us has to be one of great trust didn't like getting a phone call about something i didn't know was going on and i sure didn't like reading it in the paper communication is probably the most important activity for the t a a and a trusting relationship is the most important element to it but now there are many manifestations to trust on one rule that i hold absolutely inviolate i work for five people i work for a board i don't work for five individuals i work for a board that means it's incumbent on the board to act like a board and tell me what you want as a board i cannot respond to conflicting requests from board members it is in any administrator would tell you that's not possible now i would be naive and i'd be less than honest if i told you it doesn't happen it's the nature of the business what i try to do when i get it conflicting when i've got a clear guideline from the board about something some purpose objective something you want to accomplish and a single board member speaks to me and with a request that is clearly at odds with that board expressed goal then i simply say to that board member look you and i both know the board has expressed this and you're asking me to do something which is contrary to majority you have got to take that back to the board and generally speaking i my experience with board members over the years has been they respect that they get it and that's step that's kind of easy now what's harder is when a board member asked me to do some an individual board member asked me to do something which i suspect is contrary to the will of the board the majority will in that case usually when i'll do is i'll say look how about this what if we put on a gender and have a discussion with the board i'm uncomfortable acting on the single leave from one board member and i think we really need to have the benefit of a board discussion about this you know i try very hard because i know the reality is that all five of you have your constituencies people that support you and those are different people and so you are subject to different  pressures and being asked to do different things and your philosophy personally is different the you do you politics wouldn't be interesting no would it be productive if everybody thought the same i wouldn't be doing it so it's a natural consequence of the process that you five ladies and gentlemen will have different opinions about things i respect that i understand that out of that diversity of opinion if we all respect the process comes a tremendously beneficial process i've learned something unique and hang on that i have not experienced you know every time you think you've seen just about everything something new comes along i've never worked in a community where they had five hundred o citizen participants in the government nothing happens and hang on without a vast amount of discussion the weakness to fact is it is an inherently inefficient system and it drives an administrator crazy because what we do we are essentially efficiency people that we're business people and so we think we want the organization to be effective and efficient we want the tax dollars spent wisely and in a way that response of the citizens needs so inefficiency makes us crazy but the strength of that sort of a process is that when something finally comes out of the mill it is broadly and it is adopted in broadly accepted as soon as it finally gets there because it has passed through so many of the stakeholders in the community before it goes out to the general public as a formal proposal that was a bit of a refreshing experience for me i've learned something i've learned a lot in every community i've been and that's the key thing that i've seen happen so what's the lesson well i guess the lesson is if the board combines its unique talents and perspectives in the people that you represent in a  deliberative way you will produce outstanding policy so when i'm asked by a board member about something and i think it might be the version i ask for a discussion and i phone board members i'm sure you were all very good faith people and all the good faith selectman i've worked in over the worked with over the years have all been wonderful that's when you know what's absolutely do that compromise is what makes politics work it is in fact politics is the that that relationship between the board and i is one that needs to be you need to trust me and the only way you're going to trust me is if you really really believe when i say to you i work for all five of you i really do now why you're going to trust me because the last thing you want me to do is start taking sides or participating in any sort of board politics you don't want me going there i will not go there trust me i will not go there now over the years it's been my experience everybody loves the sound of that but sometimes board members get upset because i just will not participate in anybody else's agenda unless i get it from my board it's critical for the success of the of the organization for it to work that way you have a charter that charter clearly presumes you guys set the policy you're the boss when tommy is down in session you set the policy i give you the benefit of my best thoughts i give you the benefit of everything that i can see both pro and con and believe me i am vigorous in giving you what i see as the pros and cons i bring that to from the departments to you and then you make your decision and by goodness i promise you i will execute those decisions zealously and effectively it's the way the process has to work you probably hear a little bit of my military background creeping in there and i'd be a liar if i didn't tell you that  of it and the military the civilian authority runs the military the military has to understand that relationship and act upon those policy directives without question or the system breaks down you have a charter the government where it is incredibly important for your town manager to give you the benefit of the best thinking that the staff can give you but then absolutely respects the board's role in setting policy and executes your wishes critical so that's who i am that's not everybody's cup of tea sometimes board members want a manager who's going to be more participatory and different different agendas i'm not that's not who am i second question i'm so second part of that question the second type was changes when the voice changes i have not done my research deep enough yet to know if you have one but i love written policies for the board because you give the new board member the policy book and say hey here's the way the ball the board does its business it's great for the new board member coming on it's great for the staff because we know what your expectations are and believe me something as simple as processing our license application or a little over an alleged liquor violation if you don't do it the same way can be really tricky business and i encourage the board to take a look at their policy book once every couple years make sure you're still happy with it not so great to sit down and chat with the new board member and say here's the charter his home i think it works his home maybe it's been working  what do you think is it is this yours is your perspective same thing with the by laws ask the new board member for the benefit of their thoughts you know about about the goals and objectives and like i say it can need to be a very formal process and some communities have a you know formal new selections handbook and i've actually helped write one of those ones where it can be a very informal very interactive process that adds up to essentially the same thing the point of the exercise is to get the board the new board member into the board's culture every board has a culture it's the way you do business and you want the new board member to fit into your culture so that you can work cooperatively together doesn't mean that you're not going to have a differences of opinion that's fine and that's what makes democracy work but you want to do it in a way that's respectful and productive like you've been doing it enjoyed reading a lot though that's great that's great and the other just as a follow up i think you know the term used culture of the board i think recognizing the culture of the town itself is very important and the relationship is so important between the town manager and the board of selectmen in you know researching and i do say this in only the kindest way reading different articles about your  history with other towns i know there's always two sides to the story and so what i have read i was just wanted to ask if you could please expand upon the relationships that you had with the boards at the time of your departure as i've read minutes from meetings and certain articles it appears that there's a certain element of controversy that occasionally follows your departure so could you expand upon that could be more specific in terms of any particular place  e i read some minutes in ash in the town of ashburn ham and articles related to them started having some conversations with people in hand so just wanted to ask sure if you could on the first thing i think you need to bear in mind is that you've had an unusual situation here you've had one manager for thirty years i can assure you with absolute one hundred percent assurance that that is not the norm the norm for managers is for slightly under four years school superintendent slightly over four years there's a reason that we stay in communities an average of four years and i had my i had used them for fifteen years the reason has nothing to do with how well we do our jobs it has to do with a lot of other factors  a an asset of value beyond what i well i know how much you appreciate a man and he has been a colleague of mine for many many years and a friend and then on a number of committees with him and boards with him and  some other places so you have a highly unusual situation which is wonderful i am and i'm kind of sit here and tell you that i can do it and he did nor am i going to tell you i'm going to be here for thirty years it's unlikely extremely unlikely that anyone you hire will do that andy is singular he is the one no one else has done what he did i think mr cronan in milton i think made it to the thirty year mark before he retired most unusual so much more normal that we tend to stay four to five years and if we beat the forty five year od that's great and is a number of us that have been doing it the following year after i was hired one left while i was deployed in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight and when i can it was only one left and he's now gone as well for whatever reason that's the tradition ausborn him they have extremely rapid turnover board members when i was away deployed unfortunately there was a four hundred thousand dollars stake made by the town accountant and it was discovered literally the day of the town meeting what he had done was very simple there was an override for a school project he had put the revenue from the override on the revenue side of the balance sheet but he neglected the put the bond debt service on the expense side of the budget so their budget purportedly balance but it was in fact out of balance by four hundred thousand dollars that's a five million dollars budget so we're talking almost ten percent of the budget of the revenue purportedly supporting the budget was not there they  passed the budget anyways because they knew i was due home in a few days and in fact i was already in a mess in the united states and i was communicating back and forth of the office fight email and phone and when i arrived home they said kev we've got quite a problem now that was on top of the fact that this was right at the beginning of the economic slide and it hit smaller communities sooner and harder than it did back east here so ashburn ham was already in the throes of  a loss of growth revenue related to grow to construction in the six months that followed as we tried to fill that budget gap a controversy it quickly emerged  and that controversy was were we going to cut the four hundred thousand dollars out of the town budget exclusively or were we going to share it with the original school i feel strongly that four hundred thousand was an impossible amount of money to reduce a lot of the time budget again over ten percent of the time budget since we were well into the fiscal year by the time i got home got my arms around the problem problem and discovered all of this we were now a quarter into the year so take that ten percent increase it to twelve thirteen percent affectively what needs to get cut to rebalance the budget i said to the board we have got to ask the school to take some of this got to members of the board said no they did not favor the school taking any of the cuts there was an enormous amount of controversy course your ta manager on being a time manager is always right at the center of it right or wrong  audit the mistake was discovered the town accountant unfortunately was separated from town service but i had to fix that problem and it was particularly and to fix there was a lot of strong feeling about that now when i left ashburn ham it was for exactly what i told you the board that had hired me we had made a sensually a temporary arrangement until i finished the deployment and you never anticipate it was going to take two years to do it the agreement was when i came back from the deployment they would increase my pay too little i was making seventy thousand roughly seventy one on him which was a salary far below i was somebody with my experience would typically command but because the board was so kind with the altered work week they let me work two days at home and three days in the office i was willing to accept a reduced salary but i said i'd like to move the town they wanted me to move to town but i said it's to you know we've got to get a salary more nine hundred thousand dollars range because my wife would lose her job when we moved unfortunately because of that budget situation it was not possible to pay me that salary and the strength of feeling on the part of everybody who was a participant in that it was was quite extensive and i you know if you've read minutes and you've read the papers i'll let you make your own judgments who's right and who's wrong we have ventu i was able to reduce the budget by around three hundred thousand about four and we got an override in the summer operational override for one hundred twenty five on thousand  was enormously hard work to get that budget closed and by the time we did it it was in the it was almost the middle of the fiscal year and there were a lot of very very strange politics amongst all the puts us appends that went through that there are now two new selectman which probably give you some why some reflection for how strange and difficult that was but it was my job to get it done and i'm very proud of the fact that we got it done and it was a collective effort but it was very difficult to say the least but i didn't leave for any reason other than they there was no way they could pay me one hundred thousand dollars this just was not going to happen and i could not continue doing that commute easton to ashburn him one i just commented on the range question of serving as a selectman in another town and serving on a school committee and serving on the board of selectmen you know i look at foxborough we've had just in the last few years three selectmen who were not reelected we've had others that have retired we you know it's a tough profession because if you're on this side of the table you come in with the very best interest but you don't always agree with everybody on the board and sometimes people aren't reelected for various reasons it's also tough on that side because one of the things you said that is difficult is you mention that you don't work for any one of us you work for all of us and i think that the challenge that most superintendents find in the challenge that most town managers find is that the slippery slope between i work for all you versus i work for individuals because boards change and as people are elected and people aren't elected voice change and it's very difficult many town managers many superintendents get caught up with the political agenda and i think that's why you see such a turnover in so many communities on the elected side of things but you also see the same thing on the town side and it be it's interesting to hear you talk about that relationship but it's much easier to talk about it than it is to do it every day because i can tell you from my own experience that  you know individual selectman call the town manager individual committee members call the superintendent there are people that come in and out of the town hall there are people that don't come in and out of the town hall so there's lots of that activity and it's a much harder job one of the one of the  that andy was outstanding at is not getting caught up in the difference of opinion between five people sitting here and that's very difficult to do this year is did you say you're a selectman in another to as lot turnover first selectman over fifteen years can you tell a little bit about the stuff that you did regional wise regional health insurance regional purchasing training i think i can relate a little bit i understand hang in some of the other towns but east and i think we share a lot of the demographics to some level with them as your i was as i said earlier gifted with wonderful department heads and easton incredibly talented people who when we went through the recession in the early ninety's ninety two ninety three roughly run in there and it wasn't long after i'd gone east and we decided collectively to department head meeting one day  that we would host the conference over at stonehill college on regionalism and we invited three or four of the neighboring communities and stonehill very graciously hosted at the martin institute was a whole series of separate groups there was a treasurer's group an accountant's group and the d p w folks continue to me to this day in foxborough was one of the leaders in that discussion group that came right out of that day the south asian southeast regional services group which has done a tremendous variety of purchasing over the years paper goods will as fault i just read i think your eyes fall bid was about ten or fifteen dollars a ton better the sources bid than the state bid surcharge came directly out of that activity the regional health group pre dated down a little bit but was about in the same era and it was a product we were we were in the county and it was very obvious massachusetts cities and towns by statute thirty two big can purchase their health insurance on their own through a consortium known as the j p a joint purchase arrangement or through the county we were purchasing through the county and it was very clear that the three county commissioners who were running the program and did not have professional help were not conversant in the principles and were not making the sorts of changes that were necessary to have a cost effective program so we tried to form a joint purchase arrangement and have the member communities have a voice an actual board of directors they refused with the exception of the chairman who was incredibly innovative but he couldn't get the other two to go along with it so easton and i think it was easton norton and rein  arrangement in the state with the exception of myer itself which of course is much much larger but i believe it's the largest municipal j p n the history of success they've had the continual innovation and plan design speaks for itself their rates are great and everybody tries to join them and thank goodness they they know enough about how it works to be very selective in who they allow when we did a lot of other regional initiatives we did some equipment department heads and i were all called at different times would go and give talks all over the state literally on regionalism and and how to do it and it's sort of an interesting comment on regionalism because knowing them we're so parochial we love our three hundred fifty one cities and towns in a in a land mass that smaller than most you know a quarter of most states outside of new england in michigan you don't find that that kind of environment put me in the category of being from proponent that there is not a position or a service that a single minister polity does that cannot be made regional and thus achieve great savings and that includes town managers you know i wish somebody would hire a time manager to be tommy to the three communities because with the right staff it's not that hard to do and you can save a lot of money ditto with any position in any service think about the rest of the country where the exception the rest of the country the model is to do government services typically in a county basis or a council of government c o g basis in jurisdictions that are vastly larger than massachusetts we are the only ones who think you need three hundred fifty one fire departments and three hundred fifty one well everything you can think of go up to new hampshire and you cannot be you cannot do solid waste disposal on your own you're mandated by law to join a region you cannot have a school administration in new hampshire on your own you must join a region there you are for all the criticism they get and that new hampshire hall and norwell when you you probably may have done or heard done some reading about that when it's done it's going to save a fortune and it's we just awarded the bid for the construction of the facility they'll be breaking ground  within four weeks will probably be ready to staff the facility sometime this fall that's a whole new regionalism effort and that's the first one in the state by the way under the new nine one one and here it's nine one program i'm very proud of that effort eight fire chiefs and police chiefs and four time manages who we thank goodness i have wonderful professional regard for one another and have been able to pull this thing  together i'm a late comer i've only been working on it for the last twenty odd months they were working on it for a year before that but the success speaks for itself  it's time manager you're responsible for the gershon of union contracts describe your prior experience in this area what role do you play in the actual negotiations and what is just strategy for resolving impasses or some allied disputes i see in the charter that if i'm reading it correctly that the town manager negotiation the contract i would presume that i do that after sitting with you to get what's called parameters of the general guidelines you want to see achieved you know what should the what should the call of the consul living adjustment of the areas in the contract that you'd like to try to make some progress on one of the tools i give the board is this document which boards a phone very useful over the years it's a comparison chart that lists all the benefits all the money benefits if you will between all the various unions in the nonunion by the way because people tend to forget very often the nonunion folks get forgotten because they don't have collective bargaining rights and they don't negotiate a contract every one or two or three years so typically the nonunion folks kind of lag behind because nobody takes a look at that by law and make sure that they stay competitive  whatever a non department head who is not part of that is sort of an objective person and a financial officer so the accountant the c f o and try not to you because there be multiple negotiations going on at the same time i try to split those duties up we sit down and we craft what we think of the objectives for that contract no one knows our contract better than department head that administers it believe me because these contracts are complex they know the places where you know we need to do things so they'll have their own agenda in terms of what they'd like to do we take that we put it on a piece of paper i give you that sort of analysis and i say ok here's where we see in consistencies and consistency between contracts is not the only goal but it certainly is an important one because as you all know when you get into collective bargaining the first thing that the union representative wants to do is say what his or her bargaining unit is not getting that someone else is that's why that is such an important tool so we talk about it and you tell me what your goals are we tell you what we think the weaknesses are you tell me which of us you might say well you know this year we want to have a one no more than a two percent  or this is not a year when we can afford a cola or we'd like to make some progress on the contrib share the health insurance or hey we notice that this bargaining unit doesn't get any educational and son of would like to give them something as an incentive to get them to do it i've been put together there are bargaining goals as a formal piece of paper and then i sit down with the bargaining unit representative i will tell you right off my approach to bargaining and you probably noticed i teach this is a graduate level my approach is to be absolutely one hundred percent honest with the union and their representatives nothing i ever tell them at the bargaining table is anything less than the one hundred percent on volunteers truth simple reason to say something which isn't true or something that you've spun and once once and you lose credibility forever so from the get go it has to be absolutely honest now some of my colleagues don't agree with that approach i will tell you over the years i have bargained with dozens and dozens of union unions i lost track of how many contracts i've done now and without exception i well maybe one exemption that i can think of but except for that want to exception i think if you talk to those bargaining unit representatives those shop stewards union presidents or even the attorneys because i very often will bargain with an attorney without on my own attorney i think they will tell you without exception that we have craft we have had some short bargaining we've had some long protracted bargaining but at the end of the day there are no hard feelings because here's the reality on this day i'm bargaining with those employees and we are equals at the table as with the losses so if an employee wants to send something my way verbally they have every right to do it and i'm going to tell you bargaining can get pretty heated sometimes i like to think i almost never lose my temper at bargaining because that's not  helpful but the next day when you're done with the bargaining you go back to being the leader of these employees somebody that they've got to trust and they've got to have some confidence and to accept that leadership and if you poison the relationship at the bargaining table in order to achieve some short term gain then you've destroyed the long term relationship and not not good obviously so it is a necessary ingredient that when you walk away from the table that everybody feels that you've been honest and as fair as you can be not going to a great necessarily and the union isn't typically going to say thanks very much that was wonderful gosh thanks  but if they go away feeling they were treated fairly and we did what we could for them we did it on a sleeve we did it respectfully and we made them and we did everything we could to make them understand we're doing as much as we can you are valuable you are the most an importan asset the community has we understand that and we're going to do what we can for you then it's going to be successful would humbly say back i don't put anything in place what i do is i suggest to the board when i think would be a good idea one of the realities about the way the system manager board town meeting system works is you know the heartbeat of the community far better than i do even if i live here i will not know what you know all having lived here either all your lives or a long long time the system depends on the manager being able to make suggestions and execute policy sometimes policy that's not popular and the board being the folks that are the political representative the talk to the people and say what's possible sometimes you'll see me suggest something and  you got to give kev a verbal backhand for that dumb idea well that's ok that's the way the system is supposed to work i'll throw lots of stuff out there so long range planning his my sort of idea i don't know if it works  but done it a couple times easton we got a facilitator who happen to live in town a didn't charges that was great and we got a whole bunch of folks in a room and bunch of consecutive saturday mornings everybody who wanted to come and we did some long range people wanted to see the town five years later and we broke into groups and over the course of about six months we basically engaged the entire community those people who cared to show up and participate and everyone who showed up dissipated and we end up spinning off groups you know a public works group an education group and a police group and we would come back and share reports and over the course of about six months and probably going to say four or five large group meetings that were facilitated and probably another seven or a small group meetings of the individual groups we put together a strategic plan for the town a five year plan of where and the key question that was asked is where would you like to see the town of easton insert town of foxborough five years from now according to these questions and those questions really you know how much development would you like to see would you like to see us try to attract tourism  and all sorts of leading questions and people answer them in a composite that was to give us a five year vision we took the five year vision turned it into a one year plan actually was a two year plan some one your goals and some to your goals and everybody sort of law it's a labor intensive effort and everybody sort of lost interest in doing that much work every year so somewhere around there we stopped doing five year plans but we had a five year plan and updated it a couple of times and for about seven or eight years it was a pretty good tool if that's something you feel you folks would be interested in it's a it's a it's a perfectly replicate a bill kind of an exercise there's less and vicious ways to do it you can send questionnaires otes to  strictly valid number of people in town questionnaires and get one of those great in turns i love to get in put the statistical information into a computer and see what it tells us sort of a shake and make quick way to get at the same kind of thing lots of folks out there that help with this sort of stuff colleges loved to do this with communities and they will provide lots of free labor that's a that's a real quick answer for a real complicated process just as let you know we've been talking about a road we rode program we don't spend anything on roads we don't even maintain them to the tune to a degree and so we've talked about we had don't have a road maintenance program we don't have a ceiling program exciter and so we get further behind every year and we've talked about trying to get in turn to come in and work with us and audit him and tory all the rose to the idea we just haven't been able to execute and get an intern that's willing to commit and help us do that so that that's a good idea i've had seven or eight in turns and i'm proud to say that six of them are current serving managers in the state of massachusetts you know and six different communities they're out there believe me and they're they're not that hard to get i guarantee you i can get high quality in terms for you by the way  kevin and now the same amount of time that we had and he so i just to be fair you know we still have five more questions so you know i just want to discuss should we continue and so any other follow up questions to that ok i would you proceed during the first hundred twenty days of your tenure to evaluate personnel and departments in foxborough what kinds of metrics would you use for these busy so what i recommend to my boards is the goals and objectives that i mentioned earlier and that goal an objective setting process has the benefit of being fairly quick i'm not going to say it's completely quick but it's fairly quick and it forms the basis of each department heads goals and objectives and understand when i say goals and objectives i'm not that's sort of a simple moniker to give it but remember it what i'm really talking about is the professional development plan for that employee combined with what it is that we expect them to get done and in the course of the year the evaluation process that i've that i have used in the past with some success and there are a lot of them around i would say there right now and in government there are not a lot of performance measurement systems around there's just the field and the reason is because they're controversial the notion of evaluating someone in the public sector and held to a standard is not something you see practiced everywhere sad to say in fact the three hundred fifty one cities and towns i will bet you there are less than thirty of the do it that's a sad commentary but i have never not done it in the communities of working system i use a simple twenty five percent of it is based on subjective criteria which are communicated to the employee began and that's things like do you do affective evaluations on your subordinates seventy five percent of you die way ssion mathematically is based on those goals and objectives and those goals and objectives and sometimes subgoals or we call them tasks are written in such a way that they yield a yes no or quantifiable answer did get done you can't have ambiguity in the process because it does ambiguity in a department head feels they were unfairly treated then you have destroyed the veracity of the system the reason confidence in it and it's not going to work the reward is a combination of financial reward i eat progress on a on a pay plan on a step chart and i know you have one of those in recognition and it's a combination those things i'm sure you all know people love financial rewards but they like recognition a lot more human beings respond far more positively to recognition than they do solely financial rewards  now you can't put that system in place universally because unions sometimes embrace it and sometimes they don't but in eastham we have this system and it worked for over a decade it works so effectively we actually had the unions to the union the clerical union the d p w put on their list of bargaining items the adoption of that system and they were willing to a seed to being evaluated by their  managers mid and upper level management and have their pay tied to that not i never heard of that and not so i know it probably exists somewhere but that's how successful it w and so that's the system i tend to use and i would recommend as being a very valuable one it's not the only one but it's a good one we're actually right in the middle of putting a system in place and hang on because they don't have one and they've asked me to develop one and we're right in the said significant changes you you personally implemented in a recent position you've held where those changes are successful if not why not and related to that describe the past that you wish and that you wish you would handle differently and tell us what you learned and how you might handle it differently now ok a couple successful projects  well i have to tell you in all respect i think you said that i've personally done i don't do anything personally while everything a time manager does is done in a collaborative way certainly everything t more concerned about getting progress done in recognizing my subordinates then i am and worrying about credit for myself you will decide whether i'm doing something right or not i don't need you to herald and i don't expect it and frankly i don't want to but i do want the department heads and employees that work for them to be recognized  so if i could just offer the house again yeah yeah at the beginning of the time yeah so a couple collaborative projects and i probably already mentioned a dozen of them a right one we just did well let me let me speak to something that i think is of greater value and more important while in use than when i got there the department had the staff was very disorganized didn't think in terms of being a staff didn't think in terms of being a and over the course of a few years because it took that long and thank goodness i had a couple of wonderful mentors my secretary shelley meehan and wayne southworth who was at the time the water superintendent who is now one of the most pleasant things i ever got to do in my professional career was convince him he'd be a great d p doubly director i pointed him he was a great deeping of a director we we had we had a group of people but we didn't have a team it will long be what i will always say was the proudest professional accomplishment in my career that somewhere along the line that group of people begin to understand that they were part of something that was bigger than them that they were indeed a team and that they spoke about being a team to the point where we'd be in a department head meeting and someone would say something divisive and always remember ernie come out of the town accountant is now retired he was an ex marine you know he was very abrupt in the way he spoke i love them but i really would chastise that department head for being less than cooperative with the rest of the group and he used to yell at them remember we were a team almost to the point where we had a plaque made for him when he retired remember we're a team really is still alive and if you talk to him he will speak with great fondness about those days the benefit of having those folks think as a team and act as a team is that became the place where whatever difficult problem the town was confronting whatever challenge the board of selectmen threw at the group and i encourage the board to challenge the heck out of that group i said tell the board think of the most impossible thing that you think can be done but which you think is necessary and tell us to do it we loved the word impossible absolutely loved it and that group functioned at such a high level that's what produced all those all that recognition and all of the words but that was not my achievement it was the group's achievement but it's one which as part of that group i am enormously proud of when i'm asked by people what's the this thing of the thing that you're most proud of professionally that you've ever accomplish it's not a water pipe they could build it's not a park that the finished of a building is the human part of this it's the group dynamics that matters because that's what gets all the other stuff will get done if you have that sort of a group of people working on it and i'm proud to say we get that accomplished and it just spread to all the departments and it's still going on over there it's wonderful to see it's still working so that's that's my that's my  our greatest achievement that's a good lesson learned though i'm sorry your lesson learned something that you would do differently today than the way you did it oh goodness is i guess i guess in sort of a general sense it's been my very decidedly unhappy duty in the course of my career to fire a number of people  have a very deep and abiding philosophy that when i get to the point where i have to fire somebody it's my failure not theirs that's not p c i'm not a politically correct guy even a little bit  gets me in trouble all the time but it's really true because when an employee gets to the point where they end up having to be fired almost invariably is because along the way their shortcomings were not pointed out and they were given an opportunity to repair them it used to be the case and i remember when i was going to easton i was asked the very same question and i actually remember i had fired five people up to that point in my career three of them had as a direct consequence of being terminated turn their lives around you know they always say sometimes particular with substance abuse issues the last thing that gets removed that convinces an employer a person to straighten selves out is they lose their job because next is the family and that's usually with the draw the line and i was very proud of the fact that three out of those five had very successful because that was the last thing they needed to stop the other two didn't and their lives unfortunately turned out very sadly i followed them i guess it's something i don't want to see what happened so i guess what i would tell you is in each and every one of those cases if i could go back to the beginning to use three years before i ended up firing them and pay more attention to whatever it was that ultimately made me fire them that would be something i would love to do very very regrettable to fire anyone and if any of you have had that experience i remember when when she'd been fired me and it was a life changing event for the simple reason up to that point in my very young life i had never had any sort of a failure any and then suddenly one day i had to select one saying would like you know the late fourteen months after i took the job and moved my family halfway across the state and bought a house i remember what that felt like i remember how much i learned from the experience  and i i said to myself i will not fire anyone until i'm absolutely positively convinced that there is no alternative you quite literally when you fire people potentially destroy lives and families dots that is a weighty thing and it is not something to be done cavalierly or lightly i hear people say all the time you know that you want terminate people you know and you know that's that's a good thing because you're the boss and you go show you know what for don't put me in that category folks that's not who i am i'll do it if i don't see alternative but i work awful hard before i ever get to that day employer will get an enormous benefit of the do to the personnel board one day and they said course you realize that you don't do the collective bargaining here in town you're sort of a staff guy to help us and i said huh and they said does that upset you and i said that's a trick question right and loads of experience i mean i've been i've been the h r director because i didn't have one on staff basically for all but the last two years i know you don't have an h r director here i know you don't have an assistant  here i know you're talking about the possibility of doing those sorts of things if the time is right and the budget supports it those are very good investments so we'll see  long as it is required of the manager to do it i've been doing it a long long time i'm trying to give you some short answers for a change if i looked the way you speak a little more to your management style you know are you hands on hands i'm very very i guess this is probably self evident at this point it's a very collaborative style i like  when we have an issue or problem something it's got to get dealt with i like putting together a group of people to try and solve it i like having a great deal of respect and collaboration for the employees the department on employees that work for them the members of boards and i'm a strong proponent of the team approach to solving any problem i guess in a nutshell that's probably my style it means a lot of meetings a lot of talking a lot of time i love this job it doesn't matter where i do it i love this job my wife will tell you to a fault i work all the time it doesn't feel like work to me because i like it and so it's my hobby it's my job so i just as i've been probably exhausting you here in this interview and i apologize that tends to be the way i do it a lot of talking a lot of working collaboratively toward a solution behind that philosophy there is a very clear system goals and objectives clear written goals and objectives which don't just hold the employees to a mediocre standard i don't  don't believe in mediocrity folks i like high performance i love doing things that have never been done before i love working in a in a town that is the first one to do something or if another town does something it's really good building on that do it better so the goals and objectives holding them to very high standards honoring their work with a variety of forms of recognition of which one is is money but all they are in one porton forms of recognition and holding them accountable annual reviews that's a fairly formal system that backs up that collaborative style i don't want you to have the impression at that collaborative styles that i mean the mood you know all over the place you know it's focused that document the goals and objectives is what gives it focus staff that has had somebody for thirty years you must have given that some thought up till you walked into what are your thoughts on approaching that situation with a little unusual than my thoughts my thoughts are frankly that i've got shoes to fill which are impossible to fill i know that and so i will likely start off by telling you in the department has in this community i do not purport in any way to try to be what andy was to you i can't that would be ridiculous of me to suggest that i will have thirty years of success like he did i mean heck i'll be fifty seven years old i don't think i'll be working and not only probably will be working at eighty seven i'm sure she knew that doing something so i guess the first thing is to be honest with people and say look i cannot replicate what he and he did and please give me a chance to have my own style my own way of doing  things but i like to think that i'm extremely adaptable no one stays in a career as a time manager for twenty or thirty years if they're not adoptable because your career again and is is very much different most of us will work in a number of different places in the in the span of a thirty to forty year career and you have to adapt you don't bring your ways in your system and say ok here i am at doesn't work you might bring a system but as you asked me earlier how do you do long range planning i said well here's an idea but it maybe it doesn't work so you adopt it maybe you don't do it at all maybe do something entirely different maybe you've got a system already in place something then indeed put in i like to have monthly department had meetings and i like to have the department heads rotate the chairmanship of those meetings and i like to have the department head meeting in a physically different place every month and i like to start it off with fifteen or twenty minutes of the department head giving everybody was a great system indeed might have done it a different way in the staff might be comfortable with a whole different way of doing it and if they are great we'll do it their way i'll suggest ideas and i'll say right if you thought about doing this and they might say she great idea or i might ask them to go through a formal team building exercise where we bring in a facilitator and we go someplace off campus out of town over stonehill college or something and we sit around for a whole morning and we talk about how do we make this team stronger i don't know exactly what it will look like but i can tell you that i understand i'm coming in on the heels of a highly unusual situation  l candor and all humility but i might be able to do some things that are almost as good hopefully thank you anything else and i'm very happy that over the course of my long career that has been rare so i can count on less than one hand the number of times that's happened i don't think that there's one simple answer that i can give you that will say here's the cookie cutter approach to how you make human beings like each other but i can tell you how you make work together and that is you just you frankly have a thought look you don't like me ok i get it i'm sorry you know tell me what it is you don't like i'll do what i can to change it it isn't very often that the manager can have the expectation that the board member is going to change so it's usually pretty much i got to do it we're all unique people where they get the composite of all of our life experiences in our gene pool and everything else so can you change enough to give somebody who just  personalities just don't it's with open water no you probably can't but you can at least civilly address one another and i'm really that's a huge value you know civility and the core in this meeting you will never find me stray from that i don't care what you say to me a way to say that you will not see me stray from it and so and i demand that the department heads do the same thing so hopefully even though there could be a strong personality difference there can at least be discourse toward and civility toward the work we do i'm sure you folks have had people in your careers that you didn't like you got to work with them you know in the in the military side of things i've had folks that while i'll tell you there's nothing  like there's nothing like spending a year in combat to understand what how necessary it is this spite the fact that you may intensely dislike each other to cooperatively work together  war for all its ugliness teaches you a lot and i've had that experience and it's taught me a lot so pretty much anything that happens in the world outside of that world doesn't seem quite as bad it's a wonderful perspective lender you know but the worst thing that can happen to you is is being shot out or having somebody a terrible hurt or worse after that nothing seems that bad which is probably why tend to stay pretty calm that's the best i can do for you i don't have a clear easy answer to how you make that work because there isn't one at  i talked about my ill fated fourteen months there and that we had our own for a time we had our own table and the monthly manager meetings all the former when in town managers and then not long after go to two tables it was sort of a joke in the profession  i don't know to this day exactly what happened i know i was there fourteen months had a contract to board member said one of the two fellows had just gotten elected who had been in office literally two or misconduct there was no direction of duty or anything like that quite the contrary they actually said in public meetings that i was doing an incredible job for them but two days after i took the job by the way one of the fi selectman came to my office and said i just want you know his name is bert gold and he's famous that way and bert said i just want you to know that i'm going to make a motion one and i to fire you a suburban on the job three days what could i possibly have done and he said you didn't do anything but i've been on the board of selectmen for twenty five years at that point i think you twenty five years are a long time whatever was in the charter of been around for three years and he said when the charter passed in the manager form when you took away all my power and i'm not a happy all the authority work really couldn't function in a board environment you know collaborative the whole notion of collapse oh so he was always there trying to do it and and he succeeded quite a number of times and i don't quite know how you get appointed but up that way he's kind of famous so i don't know exactly what happened if you'd asked me at the time i would have said gee i really wish that hadn't happened but as i stand back and i look if at some twenty five years hence now i'm glad it happened i'm so glad it happened because it taught me  will survive be your profession your career will go on so you'll probably get a better job which i did and you'll find out all about who your real friends are and who the pretender you know when you're in a job when you're in you're in public life you've got lots of friends when you're down and something like that happens you find out real fast you don't quite have as many friends as you thought you did but the ones you do have you can absolutely rely on  that was the first time i discovered how wonderful some people in my profession were because i was getting calls and they were offering support and coverage minton and work and i also found out  very young very ambitious guy high speed doing all kinds of things and frankly probably a little bit too self dependent i learned just how fast you can get knocked down and how important your family is to you and i wouldn't trade it i wouldn't trade experience for anything it was great when i was a great but it was a real learning experience that i value thank you one question and he basically had an open door policy for well at least for me i got to going to that what what do you have an open door policy was like yeah i'm going to chop open door policy is sort of an intriguing thing because on the one hand you know you have an agenda and you know you have meeting set up and it's not like i can have a meeting with five people and then one of you drops in and i say to those five people whose time i'm taking up a hit the road i got to talk with board member so within reason yes typically what i'll do my board members call me all the time always out i'll just say hey i'm in the middle of a meeting or i'll have my secretary stays in the middle of a meeting the car just as soon as he gets out and know the no other way that i do it as i have programmed times like with the chairman of the board i set up a time every week so that if we if the schedule gets crazy busy then as at least once a week when we know we're going to sit and we're going to talk i extend my day with phone calling typically i'll be calling people you know well after the evening and try to figure out what an acceptable hour the morning is to call people i've learned at six am is not but maybe seven is so i do a lot of phone calling in order to be able to have contact with people i don't want to lie to you and say that the door is open in the sense pop in any time and i'm in the middle of a meeting with god i didn't mean literally but ok you know ok thanks that some select might have said to me no no no when i come by i want you to drop what you're doing and i have been kind of got you know you've been wonderful in patient listen to me prattle on here for what two hours and you know i there's not a whole lot left to tell you and i really cannot think of a single thing  o i guess if i give you a concluding thought i did not initially come to this recruitment process i was sort of a very late comer to it and i honestly didn't to support coming into the process i'm happy and hang them there are things that i would change if i could the as i like to say the semi organized chaos that we call a governmental system makes me crazy but then on the other hand it produces a great product but it's hard for a professional to do that but by and large it's a good place it's a wonderful place  and so i really didn't to support leaving it but this position as i've investigated more talk to more people offers some incredible opportunities and i won't repeat all that just like in a nutshell you have a good solid board not trying to blow any smoke up your nose because i'm interviewing but you've got a good solid board here you have your differences that's obvious but you treat each other in a respectful way and in fact civility and discourse is a political tradition in this community trust me i've been in places where it wasn't and i wouldn't be here if that wasn't part of your tradition you've got solid good strong department heads and is an opportunity to become part of this community something in and i haven't been able to do in a long while now and we really really are looking forward to it this position has kind of the possibility of this position and a challenge that represents any opportunity to do things with you has grown on me ever since believe it or not it's only been a couple of weeks since i've been in this process and it has grown on me and now i'm quite committed because there's a lot of people who says that any time manager should becom imaginative and it would be and i tell you this in all sincerity it would be an honor and a privilege to work with you and be part of this town parlors town government you know and whatever you decide i know you have a difficult decision and i wish you the best with it you will find me saying to anyone who asks whatever you decide you know better than anyone who you need to work with and the qualifications you need your choice whatever it is is the right one guaranteed because you know what you need and you know who you need to work with so good luck with it and it's been a real pleasure being with you and others there's no plagiarism involved in taking any of those revenue enhancement ideas if any of them work for you good luck but of course i'd love to help you implement it myself grants were there any other follow up questions for kevin now well kevin thank you very much  so that kind of wraps everything up for this evening yeah we will be meeting on the twenty fourth i think in that in the meantime if you folks have questions for our reality you know kevin you can