Community Forums are first rate, so go already!

Lebanon’s Community Forums have come to a close for the season without enough people taking advantage of them.

Here’s the kicker. You could look the constable or Fire Department volunteer or selectman in the eye, ask a question and get an answer. Imagine that.

The powerpoint presentations on Saturday were well constructed and chock full of information.

Constable Charles Denault is doing yeoman work. I’m not a big fan of paying him $45 an hour for his travel time from Kittery and back, but you can’t argue with his numbers. He’s making a difference in excise tax revenue at Town Hall.

Cross-referencing of Denault’s contact points with miscreants and matchups to new registrations should be doable. Let’s hope selectmen will follow through as best they can on this so that townspeople can be confident when it comes time to possibly appropriate more money for continued funding of the constable duties and position that their money is being well spent.

It is also appropriate to have a contact number on the town website so folks can contact Denault to at least leave a message. There is none now, nor has there been one for several weeks.

And speaking of money, Lebanon taxpayers are looking at almost $237,000 in cuts and expenditures for a failed former Rescue Department.

If that doesn’t frost your crumpets I don’t know what will. That’s more than a quarter of a million dollars out the window. With that money we could have done a lot of paving. We could have booked One Direction for the Lebanon Festival. Heck, we could have even given every town resident $40, enough for a cheap night out on the town.

Instead, someone, somewhere is eating dinner on us, methinks.

Just whose vote was it?

In an article written earlier this week titled “General Fund underfunded, auditors say,” The Lebanon Voice referred to Fiscal Years 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 as years in which $300,000 had been taken from the general fund to reduce taxes, leaving it at an unsustainable level. One reader said I was personally attacking my opponent in an upcoming House 20 primary race, Karen Gerrish, because hers was the only name mentioned. The reader thought Selectman Ben Thompson should also have been mentioned as he became selectmen in 2013.

In fact, Thompson had nothing to do with the votes, as the article was referring to fiscal years. The 2012-2013 fiscal year ended on June 30, 2013, and any vote on that fiscal year’s withdrawal to reduce taxes would’ve been made long before his election.

For the record, the two administrations that would have voted on the two separate $300,000 expenditures would have been Ronal Patch, Bob Frizzell and Karen Gerrish in fiscal year 2011-2012; and Frizzell, Gerrish and Jason Cole in fiscal year 2012-2013.  

And speaking of the article, we do believe when selectmen are in a meeting – whether it be afternoon or evening – minutes should be taken by a town employee, not a selectman or a selectmen chair.

This is what you call being penny wise and pound foolish. Why would you want an elected official writing the minutes of their own meeting.

Further, I would recommend that if a selectman or selectwoman wants to amend the minutes after they are presented by the secretary, the full board should review and approve the amended portion.

In producing the article, however, we had the opportunity to peruse meeting minutes going back several years. You can imagine this must have been a tedious, tiresome affair, which it was, but we were allowed some comic relief in that one meeting minutes referred to Lebanon Voice editor Harrison Thorp “snapping” at Ms. Gerrish.

I, for one, know I don’t snap at too many people, but I guess we can all get a little testy sometime, especially with certain selectmen. Anyways, a shoutout to the meeting minutes person: Thank you for that good laugh. I just wish Chip had been videotaping that one. I’d like to see it, myself.