Sorrento’s select board suspended the town clerk Wednesday night without pay for having the town cover her personal legal bills.
Rob Wilpan and Diana Gazis, who have been feuding with Town Clerk Kathi Moore for months, also voted to rescind the $2,000 reimbursement and to schedule a termination hearing for Moore for Wednesday, Aug. 16. Sorrento has been functioning with only two select board members since Jon Mickel resigned from the board in April.
After Wednesday’s contentious half-hour meeting held at the Sorrento Community Building, Wilpan and Gazis allowed Moore to go back inside the town office next door to collect her personal belongings.
This comes after months of allegations back and forth between the town clerk and the select board members.
In the spring, the select board discussed Moore’s job performance with her in public session at her request, Wilpan said. Moore improperly handled petition paperwork seeking to recall Wilpan’s wife, Janet Wilpan, from the RSU 24 Board of Directors, and at times has shown poor understanding of how to manage the town’s financial records, he said.
However, Moore said she has been consistently harassed on the job ever since this past February, when she insisted that the fire department start submitting receipts whenever they asked for reimbursement for fuel costs.
Moore’s efforts to require better accounting from the fire department led to a misdemeanor theft conviction in May against a now-former firefighter. After pleading guilty to the charge, Paul Bean was ordered to reimburse the town for $83.10 in fuel for his personal vehicle that he charged to a fire department credit card.
With roughly 70 people in attendance Wednesday, and interspersed with occasional shouts of objection from the audience, Wilpan and Gazis said Moore was told earlier this summer not to submit her personal legal bills to the town for reimbursement. Moore had gone on medical leave this past spring — because of work-related stress, she said — and hired Portland employment attorney Gregg Frame to help her navigate her employment rights with the town.
Moore later submitted her $2,000 legal bill anyway, along with other routine town expenses that selectmen normally approve at their bi-weekly meetings, and they signed the warrant to pay it. But it wasn’t until a week or so ago that they realized that Moore’s legal bills were among the stack of expenses that they had agreed to pay.
“You snuck it in,” Wilpan said, an accusation Moore denied. “We cannot pay for legal expenses for private attorneys.”
After the meeting, Moore questioned the legality of Wilpan and Gazis rescinding payment of an expense they had approved when they signed the payment warrant. She said she would discuss the matter with her attorney.
“Why didn’t they object to it before they signed the warrant?” she said. “What else have they signed that they didn’t know they were signing?”
Wednesday’s meeting was punctuated by residents interjecting to side with Wilpan or Moore, to accuse others of interrupting and being rude and to yell at each other to sit down.
“This is an extremely sad time in this town,” resident Newbold Noyes told the crowd.
The Sorrento town clerk also accused Wilpan and Gazis of meeting privately before Wednesday’s meeting, which would violate Maine’s public meeting laws, to discuss suspending her. She said she has not been treated fairly by members of the select board and fire department.
“It’s a kangaroo court,” Moore said. “I wasn’t given the chance to explain anything. They had their minds made up.”
Mickel, the former selectman, also criticized the way the board suspended Moore with little discussion.
“The right-to-know of our citizens is being violated,” Mickel said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Gazis said after the meeting that she believes Moore’s suspension was appropriate.
Other aspects of the town are functioning well, such as the new budget committee and the comprehensive planning committee, Gazis said. She also said the fire department does a good job but has received unfair criticism because of the actions of one now-former firefighter.
“These other things will go on,” she said.