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The first half of the Select Board's retreat Friday was about money — a 10-year plan built on the $15 million override voters passed in June. The second half was about the people who have to carry it out, starting with the fact that the town administrator will not be one of them.
Town Administrator Thatcher Kezer goes in December. Select Board member Erin Noonan asked whether the town should examine how its departments are built before it fills the jobs that come open, while the people who have run them are still there to explain how the work gets done.
"I'm wondering if this is an appropriate time or not a good time because of the transition with you leaving in December," she said.
She wanted an outside consultant, hired while those people are still at their desks, to examine structure, staffing, workflows and service delivery, interview department heads and employees, and come back with a phased plan.
The retreat took the morning at the Marblehead Municipal Light Department, where sheets grading last year's goals in green, yellow and red lay among the laptops, coffee cups and picked-over paper plates. Nothing required a vote, and none was taken.
Select Board Chair Dan Fox called out the math at one point, an hour and 15 minutes left and six pages to go, as members made their way through 17 proposals.
Enough detail to be useful, not enough to drown in
The morning's first argument was about how much the board needs to see. Select Board member Jim Zisson wanted a monthly financial report, because the quarterly override review is too late to learn of a problem: budget-to-actual variances, revenue and expenditure risks and a read on volatile accounts such as overtime, legal expenses, snow removal, energy costs, interest income and local receipts. He called it basic block and tackling.
He also wanted a forward look at open purchase orders. That would bury them, Kezer said; departments open requisitions for a year of expected spending in the town's Munis system, so the list would run mostly to supply orders. Select Board member Rossana Ferrante suggested a floor, maybe $50,000. Fox asked why the board needed it at all.
Kezer's larger caution was scale. The system holds thousands of line items and tens of thousands of transactions, about 98 percent of it routine, he said, though he gave no total the share could be counted against. He offered an example from Framingham, where injured firefighters blew out a medical line.
"Hey, our medical line items are significantly over what we budgeted, but the department's bottom line is good, so we're not concerned," he said. "And that's about all you needed to know about the whole fire department."
It landed as an exception report: department salary and expense totals, flagged when something moves.
"Budget to actual is green, if you will," Zisson said. "There's nothing really to talk about. We just highlight if you've got a yellow or red."
Fox did not want the board grinding through accounts in public. Chief Financial Officer Aleesha Benjamin said the town accountant is already building a year-to-date report of what has been spent, encumbered and left in the first budget the override pays for, due next month. It goes to Kezer, who said it need not be an agenda item unless something in it is.
"You want to keep it simple and light," he said, "and then revise it as necessary."
Getting October right before October arrives
The calendar worried Ferrante. The memorandum of understanding tied to the override commits the town and schools to a quarterly review of what each draws from it, the first in October, and she said nobody had settled the data, the format or the presenters.
"Where is it coming from? Who's it coming from?" she said. "I think it's very important that October happens."
What was printed as a standing subcommittee became a scramble to be ready. Kezer said the memorandum caps what each side draws, and the review is where both show they held to it. Benjamin said hers would run the forecast against where the town actually landed.
"This is what the override is," she said. "Here's your revised budget. Here's where we are."
Members debated whether the town and schools should report separately to their own boards or together; Fox and Zisson preferred together. Zisson wanted one consistent set of slides. At past override presentations, he said, the school side's material "just looked different than ours."
Select Board member Moses Grader argued the review has to track the restorations the override promised, not just the spending.
"So we're not just cutting checks because we have the money," he said. Town Moderator Jack Attridge urged the board to track the projects attached to past overrides. Fox will convene the School Committee chair and its finance lead with Kezer and Benjamin; a practice run comes first.
Zisson also wanted major professional services bid out, starting with legal counsel. Kezer said legal services are exempt from Chapter 30B, the state procurement law, and that a firm's accumulated knowledge of a town outweighs its hourly rate. He has already consolidated legal spending into one account.
"Before people can just willy-nilly engage with legal counsel, it has to come through our office," he said.
Fox left the review to the administrator.
Examining departments before refilling them
Noonan's case was partly about leverage. She recalled a consultant's report on the Police Department that found, as she remembered it, more cruisers than the town needed. An outside eye brings the buy-in with it, she said, so the change does not land on one administrator alone.
Fox merged it with the succession proposal printed beneath it.
“Once you have an operational review, you can plan a transition," he said. "Because right now we don't know what it looks like."
Grader called it central to the town's next phase and the problem structural: Marblehead runs roughly a dozen separate governments, each with its own elected governance and, in many cases, its own administrative capacity.
"We have designed these inefficiencies into our form of government to keep separations of power," he said.
He wants stronger townwide finance, technology, procurement, human resources and facilities services without touching elected boards' policy authority. The departments, he said, often do not trust the capacity of the centralized operation.
Noonan pushed further. The review should question the vertical departments themselves, not just consolidate back-office work. The town has no facilities department, and nobody has decided whether one belongs under Public Works or on its own.
Kezer offered an example in motion: Public Works and Recreation and Parks are discussing moving functions, staff and equipment between them, partly because nothing now maintains the rail trail or empties the barrels along it. Staff will price out levels of service and timelines, which depend on how deep the board wants to go.
Where the board's reach ends
The liaison question drew the sharpest disagreement. Ferrante proposed clarifying which members are assigned to which departments, boards and committees. Nobody could produce the list. Grader warned that board-to-board liaisons are one thing, but Public Works answers to the Select Board itself, and a member dealing directly with a department head cuts the administrator out.
"I'm very jealous of the prerogatives of the town administrator because their job is tough enough," he said. "They're not a town manager. They're not a mayor."
Ferrante did not accept the framing.
"I don't think this is about undermining," she said. "I think it's a mistake to have people siloed."
Kezer said only that the arrangement is fraught and depends on who is doing it. The goal softened from formalize to evaluate.
Zisson raised performance evaluations after finding the town does not do them, the administrator included.
"We were told we don't do that here," he said. Kezer recommended starting at the top: the board evaluates the administrator, who builds department head reviews through human resources. Union employees would be a bargaining matter. He described his own practice as the military rule.
"Praise in public, criticize in private," he said.
Ferrante argued reviews serve the people being reviewed.
“They know where they stand," she said. Members left the system to the next administrator.
An employee efficiency group and town administrator office hours at the Widger, Tower and Jacobi buildings went to the parking lot for Kezer's successor, as did quarterly meetings of elected board chairs that Fox said he would start holding. A proposed issue tracker was folded into the biweekly administrator update after Kezer likened heavy reporting to a test probe overloading the circuit it measures.
Communications narrowed too. Fox floated an ad hoc committee of residents who would volunteer a strategy; Kezer said the town needs one real communications function high on the organizational chart, because communications is a different animal than it used to be. Attridge proposed the goal the board kept: establish best practices. Members also kept a bylaw review, the personnel bylaw Kezer called "woefully outdated" first; an evaluation of the Capital Planning Committee; and a long-term capital and debt forecast, last year's 10-year capital plan still marked open.
Noonan took the operational review. Kezer said he wants it far enough along that a game plan is waiting when his successor arrives.
"Let's do it," Fox said.
