Some changes at the Town Office are on the warrant for Dresden’s Town Meeting.
The town’s selectmen are asking voters to approve changes to the Town Office hours and the first job descriptions for other elected officials.
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The warrant also includes a municipal budget that’s up by 6.4 percent, driven largely by increases in the highway accounts.
Town Meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Saturday at Pownalborough Hall. First, though, voters will elect town officials by ballot on Tuesday. Voting is scheduled for 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Pownalborough Hall.
There is only one contested race for elective office. Allan Moeller Sr. is running for re-election as third selectman, and his challenger is Dale Hinote.
Longtime clerk, treasurer and excise tax collector Kim Rzasa is not running for re-election. Property tax collector Ann Pierce is running unopposed for re-election and also for election as excise tax collector. Joseph Atkinson is running unopposed for treasurer.
There are no candidates for town clerk or a seat on the budget review committee.
Hinote said he’s running for selectman because he’s interested in fostering a sense of community and getting more people involved in town government.
“We’re not just a collection of people who happen to live in the same governmental area. We should be a community, and I think that’s something we should enhance in Dresden,” he said.
Hinote said he would like to have more community activities in Dresden, something he has some experience organizing as an officer of the Dresden Historical Society. He also is a member of the Pownalborough Courthouse Stewardship Committee.
Hinote also wants to make sure lines of communication are open between town officials and residents.
He is a former state employee who has been substitute teaching in Regional School Unit 2 and is seeking a permanent job as a social studies teacher.
Moeller is Richmond’s public works director. He said he first ran for the Board of Selectmen four or five years ago wanting to help improve Dresden’s roads, and he wants to continue working on that.
“I’ve got some unfinished business, like the roads,” Moeller said.
The last article on the warrant asks voters to approve job descriptions for town clerk, treasurer, excise tax collector and property tax collector.
First Selectman Phil Johnston said that at a special town meeting last spring, voters objected to a proposal to have the selectmen appoint people to those positions, which require some specialized skills, but they were open to creating official job descriptions.
Johnston said the job descriptions — which are based on language from the Maine Municipal Association and Dresden’s previous unofficial job descriptions — will be important with newcomers succeeding Rzasa.
“For continuity and clarity and coordination, it’s important to have something in place that helps describe what the responsibilities of these positions are,” Johnston said.
The job descriptions say that the officials will report to voters and the selectmen.
“The intent is that the selectmen should be directing and coordinating the efforts of everyone in the Town Office,” Johnston said.
If there’s dissatisfaction with an official’s performance, it will be up to voters to dismiss that official at the end of the one-year term common to all of those offices or through a recall process, which Dresden instituted a few years ago.
The selectmen also are proposing to change the Town Office hours.
“The thinking is that if we standardize them, then everybody will know,” Second Selectman Gerald Lilly said. “Right now you can’t find anybody that can say when the office is open, because they’re odd hours.”
The office is open between three and seven hours Mondays through Saturdays, for a total of 29 hours a week.
The proposed hours, totaling 30 per week, would be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays.
Lilly said the selectmen decided the office can be closed on Mondays because so many of them are holidays, and there’s not enough traffic on Saturdays to justify opening the office, particularly since vehicle registration renewal became available online.
Most of the rest of the warrant deals with housekeeping and the budget.
The proposed town budget is $704,725. That’s $42,600 more than the town appropriated last year, an increase of 6.4 percent.
Of that increase, $38,301 is in the highway accounts. The cost of the town’s plowing contract will rise by $5,301. The selectmen are recommending the same appropriation for paving as last year, but the town would spend more on other road maintenance, sand and salt.
Moeller said Dresden used much more sand and salt last winter — about 2,800 yards of sand, compared to 1,800 the previous winter.
“Hopefully, we don’t have another bad winter,” he said.
Moeller said improvements are planned this year for Calls Hill Road on the Wiscasset end and Bog Road, including its intersection with Blinn Hill Road.
One area where Dresden can save money in the budget is on ambulance service. At the end of a five-year contract with North East Mobile Health Services, the company proposed a one-year contract for $7,750, an increase of about $3,000.
The selectmen will ask voters to authorize them to enter a contract for up to three years with Gardiner Ambulance Service, which asks communities to reimburse them for uncollectible medical bills instead of charging a fee.
There’s a warrant article to appropriate $3,000 to cover those reimbursements. Lilly said when Gardiner provided the town’s ambulance service before the contract with North East, the most the town ever had to pay was $2,600.
Susan McMillan — 621-5645
Twitter: @s_e_mcmillan
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