The town administrator brought in to help clean up a scandal in Coventry is leaving her post early, amid talk of hostility directed at town employees by Selectboard members.
Amanda Carlson stepped into the role in 2016, becoming the town’s first full-time administrator. Since September, she had been working remotely from Rhode Island and was expected to leave her position in the spring.
But during a Selectboard meeting Monday, she said she had accepted an offer for another job starting immediately. Instead of explaining her early departure, she referred to comments made earlier in the meeting by a citizen who expressed concern about Selectboard members’ treatment of town employees.
In the days since, town officials have declined to identify a specific Selectboard member behind the strife. But they all acknowledged the conflict exists.
“It’s become a hostile work environment,” Kate Fletcher, town assessor and delinquent tax collector, said in an interview Tuesday. Fletcher works in the town offices.
Two people familiar with the conflicts said privately that selectboard member David Gallup is the source of the recent problems. They noted other problems in the past involving other board members.
Gallup could not be reached Wednesday or Thursday after repeated attempts to contact him for comment.
Carlson’s departure could spell more uncertainty for a town still rebuilding after a yearslong scandal in which $1.4 million of town monies went missing and a federal investigation of the former town clerk ensued.
Carlson announced her resignation during a Selectboard meeting attended by two board members, Chair Scott Briere and Phil Marquette. The third member, Gallup, who also works for the town as the road commissioner, was absent.
Carlson said she had hoped to stay on longer and didn’t explain why she was leaving, telling the board members she wanted to avoid “restating everything.”
Comments made earlier in the meeting by Martha Sylvester, who serves as clerk of Coventry Fire District, “very well summed up the feelings” driving her departure, she said.
Sylvester told the board she was concerned how Selectboard members treat town employees. “How do we make them realize that — so what (if) you’re an elected official? You’re still a boss. You’re still an employer,” Sylvester said.
Carlson told Sylvester she agreed with the concerns, but said any policy the town drew up wouldn’t be enforceable because elected officials are ultimately responsible to the voters.
“So what happens if you have one board member who goes awry and that board member is doing detrimental things to the town and continually being out of control with employees?” Sylvester asked. “How is an employee supposed to feel comfortable underneath of that when there’s no clear guidelines, no clear anything?”
Carlson again said she agreed, “but the only thing you can do with an elected official … is bring it to a public meeting and bring it to the voters.”
Sylvester added she feels the town is “going back to where we were four years ago.”
In 2016 — when Carlson was hired — Coventry was reeling from a controversy that drew statewide attention. Cynthia Diaz, the former town clerk, treasurer and tax collector, was alleged to have written checks to herself from town accounts and to have collected cash tax payments that were not deposited to town bank accounts.
Diaz was ousted in 2017 and has been the subject of at least four fraud investigations since 2005, after approximately $1.4 million went missing from town coffers. She denied embezzling money from the town and was convicted on two counts of state income tax evasion, for which she did community service.
In May 2017, the town won an insurance claim of nearly $500,000 to cover losses associated with the alleged fraud from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, the maximum payable.
As of August 2019, federal investigators were still questioning people in Coventry about the missing funds.
Officials have sought to rebuild the town’s standing, and finances, in the years since. Without Carlson, considered a key part of that effort, the Orleans County town of about 1,000 may face further challenges ahead.
“She’s been the entire foundation of the change and the building block of bringing our town out of the abyss,” Fletcher said of Carlson. “It’s a tremendous void.”
Using a chess metaphor, Fletcher said the town avoided “checkmate” when the money went missing years ago. Losing Carlson, she said “now we’re down without our queen, so to speak.”
Like Fletcher, Sylvester in an interview would not identify the specific board member who she said was creating the hostile environment, concerned it would fuel the conflict.
But “nobody wants to come into a job where you know you are going to be belittled, you know you are going to be bullied,” she said.
Sylvester said she had witnessed a selectboard member swear at and talk down to employees during the past six months. In her role with the local fire district, she shares space with board members and town employees, and she said she doesn’t like going to the town offices herself.
“This has been going on repeatedly for months and months and months,” she said.
“There seems to be one current Selectboard member that doesn’t seem to be able to pull his head out of his ass,” Sylvester said.
Briere, the board chair, said Wednesday he doesn’t think there have been any extraordinary problems among officials.
“There’s some differences in opinion between certain people and there’s a member on our board who also is” a town employee, Briere said before pausing. “It’s, I guess, complicated.”
Briere disputed whether those differences were a large factor in Carlson’s early departure and declined to be specific on the problems he saw.
Marquette, the other Selectboard member who attended Monday’s meeting, gave similar answers to those of the board chair.
“It’s personnel things that are going on,” he said Wednesday. “Other than that, not much to say about it.”
Carlson on Tuesday said she had moved to Rhode Island weeks ago for personal reasons and had applied for work there. She will continue to help with town business until another administrator is hired.
Working remotely made it difficult to resolve office conflicts, she said, a point echoed by Briere and Marquette.
“It’s just really difficult to have those relationships and have that connection with them working remotely,” she said.
Asked if a Selectboard member had been hostile toward her, Carlson said she couldn’t answer personnel-related questions.
She spoke optimistically about the town’s future.
“I think we’ve done so much work over the last four years to completely change how the town functions,” she said. “Somebody coming in now just has to maintain that all.”
