The three newly elected members of the five-person Brattleboro Selectboard — from left, Amanda Ellis-Thurber, Isaac Evans-Frantz and Oscar Heller — are sworn in by Town Clerk Hilary Francis on March 24, 2025. Photo by Kevin O’Connor/VTDiggerBRATTLEBORO — As local leaders race to revise a for thcoming municipal budget after a March Town Meeting defeat of a $25 million plan, they are split over how to decrease spending by July 1 to avoid a projected tax increase of 12%.“I’m very optimistic that we can make cuts of a sufficient nature and add revenues of a sufficient nature so that we have a budget that is more structurally sound than the one that was rejected and everything’s hunky-dory,” Selectboard Chair Elizabeth McLoughlin said Thursday at the first of a month of special follow-up sessions.But when three newly elected members to the five-person board introduced the idea of a municipal hiring freeze, they faced pushback from McLoughlin and Town Manager John Potter, the latter who said that only he should be making decisions about specific people and positions.“I manage the staff,” Potter said.READ MORE The 2 1/2-hour session — part of a series to continue Tuesdays and Thursdays in April before a May or June revote — ended without a decision. Instead, a divide emerged between local leaders who drafted the defeated budget and fledgling board members who campaigned on the promise of fiscal change.“The thing I want to do is economize and find ways to reduce the budget,” said Oscar Heller, a newcomer and board vice chair. “I’ve been told over and over again that doing it by attrition and by hiring freeze is the much-preferred way rather than considering actual reductions, so we have to be able to talk about that.”Heller served this winter as chair of an advisory Town Meeting Finance Committee that issued a rare public resolution questioning why local leaders, facing double-digit increases in staffing, health insurance and trash disposal costs, weren’t studying decreases in the biggest single source of spending, personnel.“We recognize that the concept of staff cuts is painful,” the resolution said, “but we believe that considering it is an essential part of the responsible management of the town.”Now seeking to review employee numbers over the next several months, Heller proposed the hiring freeze.“Unfilled positions are a rare opportunity to possibly decrease ongoing costs without firing somebody,” he said. “That doesn’t mean no position can be filled, it just means that filling an empty position becomes an intentional decision of the board.”Heller noted that although the former selectboard voted for up to nine new police positions last fall — declaring a rise in crime an “emergency” and using $675,669 in unassigned general funds — the town still had at least one of those ancillary positions open and available for savings.“I’m looking for ways to find small budget compromises in the face of what was already a really big quick increase for the department,” he said. But the town manager objected, saying that administrators were screening applicants for the support post.“It’s very disruptive to the management of the town to be having conversations about individual staff positions,” Potter said.Heller disagreed, noting it felt like “a bridge too far” to be told the board couldn’t discuss whether to fill open positions.“I am out of fighting energy on this topic for tonight,” Heller went on to conclude, “but the energy will return tomorrow.”Potter has opposed staff cuts for months, most recently in a memorandum in which he offered scenarios about what could happen as a result.In one case, Potter said a cut of a finance department worker could mean “overworked staff miss a critical deadline for a scheduled debt payment, triggering penalties and damaging the town’s credit rating,” according to the memo. “Residents are left paying more in taxes to cover the financial mismanagement.”In a second example, a cut of a human resources employee could mean “job postings for critical roles were delayed for months.” the memo said. “Instead of saving money, the cuts created a staffing crisis, leaving emergency services stretched thin, road maintenance delayed, and essential town resources overwhelmed.”In a third, a cut of a clerical worker to support town boards and committees could mean “meetings become disorganized, with missing agendas, delayed minutes, warning and procedural errors,” the memo said. “Instead of a smoothly run government, Brattleboro becomes bogged down in inefficiency and confusion.”Many locals have complained about the memo, with resident Eric Caron noting at one meeting that such “doomsday things” are “not professional, those are threats.” The local website ibrattleboro.com, for its part, commented through a column headlined, “Town of Brattleboro Budget-Cutting Scenarios Win Award for Short Fiction.”“A drop in the tax rate increase,” ibrattleboro.com co-founder Christopher Grotke countered in his own scenario, “made the taxpayers of Brattleboro very happy and reinvigorated their trust in a lean, highly-effective municipal government.”Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro sees more division than subtraction in efforts to cut defeated budget. ...read more read less