State: SAD 31 official must return payment

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SAD 31 board of directors Chairman John Neel will bring to his board the problem of how to resolve to the state’s satisfaction the apparently illegal payment of a board member for work done on two school renovations, he said Thursday.

Neel, SAD 31 Superintendent Jerry White, Maine Assistant Attorney General Sarah Forster and Maine Department of Education Commissioner Susan Gendron discussed the issue in Augusta for almost 11/2 hours Thursday.

Gendron’s message was that the more than $14,000 that board member Bruce Hallett earned as a liaison on the $3.9 million renovation of Penobscot Valley High School and the interconnected Hichborn Middle School last year must be fully repaid, said David Connerty-Marin, DOE spokesman.

Gendron “sent them back [to SAD 31] with a mission to bring it [the issue] to their board,” Connerty-Marin said Thursday of Neel and White. “They need to come up with a plan for these payments and the board has to take action. They [board members] are responsible for fixing the situation as the governing body of the district.

“The money needs to be returned to the district by Hallett,” Connerty-Marin added. “I don’t know what potential ways that might happen, but the board cannot repay itself.”

Nor will taxpayer funding be used, Neel said.

“The board has a lot of options,” Neel said. “We can [seek that Hallett] pay it out of pocket …We can do different things to raise the money, but it cannot come out of any school budget.”

Hallett, Neel said, was paid from a state reimbursement of about $240,000 the school district expended as part of an earlier attempt to design a new high school and middle school that the state Board of Education voted not to fund.

One option Gendron suggested, Neel said, was to credit Hallett for stipends he earned as a board member that he generously donated to Enfield Station School, but that money probably will not come close to equaling $14,000.

Neel, and probably White, will discuss the Augusta meeting when the school board meets on March 19. Because of the school board not meeting for about two months, Neel hopes to have the Hallett issue placed on the agenda of the school board’s regular meeting on April 16, he said.

Gendron has been seeking the immediate return of the money since writing a letter to Hallett dated Nov. 6. She wrote another letter last month essentially repeating the request. At the time, Connerty-Marin said continuing inaction eventually would prompt the involvement of the state Attorney General’s Office, which is the state government’s legal service provider.

Hallett has declined to comment on the issue, except during one school board meeting in November when he said he worked only to benefit the school and its students. White has said Hallett’s work saved SAD 31 as much as $100,000 in features that originally had been cut because of lack of funds.

But Connerty-Marin has called the quality of Hallett’s work irrelevant, citing a state law that specifies a “member of a school board or spouse of a member of a school board may not be an employee in a public school within the jurisdiction of the school board to which the member is elected.”

School board attorney Bruce W. Smith wrote that Hallett’s hiring violated state law, and White and Neel admitted it was a mistake. White said Hallett was hired based on White’s interpretation of a 1999 state law that was superseded by another law enacted in 2002.

Hallett has not returned the money, however, and the school board has taken no action to recoup it.

Board members did not consult Smith before hiring Hallett, although they have spoken to him since the issue came to light, Smith said. Smith, however, did explain the law fully to Hallett and other board members in early 2004, board minutes state.

Burlington Selectwoman Beth Turner, who attended part of Thursday’s meeting at her governing board’s request, declined to comment on the meeting.

The Burlington Board of Selectmen has been unrelenting in its efforts to recoup the funding, commenting scathingly upon SAD 31’s apparent lack of fiscal management, oversight and ethics in letters to Gendron and local newspapers.

“We respectfully request that your office follow up on this entire Hallett issue as we seriously doubt that any resolution will be reached at the local level of MSAD 31,” states one letter, which is signed by Selectmen Dennis Kingman, Clarence Bearce and Turner.

The selectmen also criticized some board members’ bullying tactics for trying to discipline SAD 31 board Vice Chairwoman Noreen Shorey of Burlington for speaking critically of Hallett’s hiring while ignoring Hallett and the hiring itself over the four months since Gendron’s first letter.

“We have one board member being taken to task for shining the light of truth on wrongdoing while we hear nothing but praise for Mr. Hallett profiting more than $14,000 from the illegal act,” states the letter to newspapers. “Once the meeting’s true agenda was shown [to intimidate, humiliate and quiet her] Noreen Shorey did the proper thing. She left saying, ‘I walked out. I did not walk off.’ Way to go, Noreen!

“This is an old political trick where you change the topic by putting blame on someone else; put the bearer of bad news on trial,” the letter continued.

SAD 31 serves Burlington, Edinburg, Enfield, Howland, Maxfield and Passadumkeag. Of the school district’s towns, only Burlington has filed a complaint over Hallett’s payments – for which critics have blamed Kingman and Turner for what the critics call the two’s dislike of the SAD 31 school system. Kingman and Turner, a former SAD 31 chairwoman, have denied this.

Neel defended the conduct of White, Hallett and the school board, saying that at no time was there any intent to defraud taxpayers or the school system, a notion with which Gendron agreed, he said.

And Neel and White immediately admitted the board’s error in paying Hallett when Gendron and Smith pointed it out to them. Neel credited Gendron for being understanding on Thursday.

“They seem willing to help us resolve the issue. They are not putting the hammer down,” he said of state officials. “It comes down, really, to school law. There are different laws: there’s labor law and then there’s school law. Under labor law, this wouldn’t be [illegal], but under school law it is, and that’s what we have to respond to.

“The money,” Neel added, “will be paid back.”

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