Selectman decries delay in receiving information > Official says town office stalls flow

MOUNT DESERT — Mount Desert Selectman Joanne Smith has complained to the town’s Board of Selectmen about what she says are problems with the flow of information between the town office and the board.

According to Smith, at least three letters addressed to the town’s selectmen either have not been forwarded to members of the board in a timely fashion or have been withheld until she has made a request to see them.

Town Manager Dick Vander Zanden has denied there is a problem with how his office passes correspondence to the board.

In a statement submitted to the Board of Selectmen this week, Smith said she would “like the record to show (her) shocked dismay and official protest” about the matter.

“Citizens, taxpayers and interested parties have the right to know that all letters written to the Mount Desert selectmen will be received by them all … and in a timely fashion,” Smith wrote in her statement. “That selectmen have to hear about such letters secondhand, and have to ask for them, is a disgraceful and intolerable situation.”

In an interview this week, Smith said that a letter from the president of the Seal Harbor Village Improvement Society was withheld from all of the members of the board until after a selectmen’s meeting was held on the issue discussed in the letter.

She said she has not seen a copy of another letter written by the co-chairmen of the summer residents association, apparently addressed to Chairman John Butler. Smith said she learned about it only after Butler noted he had made a reply to the letter, thanking the two men for their comments.

Smith said she heard about the receipt of another letter, from summer resident Henry Harris, about three weeks after it had arrived at the town office. “I had to go into the town office and ask for the letter. I shouldn’t have to hear about letters secondhand,” she added.

In that letter, Harris notes that Mount Desert has a town manager who has both the “ability and training to carry out all the new requirements” associated with a job that has grown more complicated. Harris also commented that local government “should try to be as responsive and benign and considerate as possible. If a town manager cannot, for whatever reason, be all of the above, then the people are not being served, and their morale will only become worse,” Harris’ letter said.

Smith points the finger of blame on Town Manager Vander Zanden for what she considers an obstruction in the flow of information. “The process has broken down and the town has a town manager who wants it broken down, she said.”

Vander Zanden, commenting earlier this week on whether information is sometimes not passed on to the board, said any letter addressed to the board is passed on to board members. Some letters, if they are addressed as a personal letter to the chairman of the board, may not be passed on.

“There have never been public letters that haven’t been made public,” Vander Zanden said. “We publish everything.”

Smith said she intended to see that the “flow of information to and from the people reamins accurate” while she serves on the board. “I will not be a rubber stamp,” she said.