Thomaston Board of Selectmen

07/21/26

Present: First Selectman Rich Sileo, Selectmen Michael Burr and Beth Campbell.

The Thomaston Board of Selectmen at the July 21 meeting approved duties for two new roles meant to reshape oversight of wastewater treatment and the Department of Public Works. 

The two jobs — one a merger of the Highway Superintendent and Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) superintendent jobs and the other a reporting coordinator — have been supported by the WPCA Board, the Board of Finance, and the Board of Selectmen. 

Both positions, as First Selectman Rich Sileo said at the Board’s April meeting, will help condense the responsibilities of the Public Works department and the WPCA into the Superintendent of Public Works post. Currently, the former is helmed by Director Glenn Clark, while the WPCA is operated by Facility Superintendent Bert Galpin and has a six-member board of decision makers. 

The impetus behind creating that new role, Sileo said, is due to Clark’s retirement, and would reshape and realign operations. 

The other role envisioned by Sileo is the reporting coordinator job. That position would take a lot of the reporting responsibilities that are currently assigned to the WPCA and Public Works departments. Those include the renewal of Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System permits or MS4, the management of storm water pollution prevention plan or SWPPP, and the maintenance of a dam emergency action plan, Sileo said. 

To cover the new superintendent role, Sileo said at a June 9 Board of Finance meeting, the WPCA will continue to pay the same amount they already pay for the WPCA superintendent position. The town’s budget will cover the rest, Sileo noted. The reporting coordinator’s salary will be covered by the town too, he said. 

Despite mostly agreeable reception to Sileo’s suggestion to create the positions, Selectman Michael Burr has remained a skeptic and publicly voiced his concerns about the new roles having a tall list of responsibilities. Burr brought up the same concerns again at the July 21 meeting in a tense exchange with Sileo.

“I don't want to sound like a broken record, but I look at this job description, and I have a hard time understanding how one person's going to do all this, but I lost that battle,” Burr said of the Superintendent of Public Works role.

Sileo said Burr could still review the list of job duties and amend it. He also said he combined the job duties of both positions, eliminated redundancies, and passed along some duties to the reporting coordinator position. 

Burr asked how Sileo thought the new hire would split their time and if that meant the town or the WPCA would have to pay more for the role depending on how much work the Superintendent performs for either department. Burr added that he would have liked to see these new roles be aligned with the budgeting cycle for next year. 

“Say the job on one side morphs to more than we suspected,” Burr said. “Now, is it going to be up to the Board of Finance to determine how much of each budget funds this position, or is it going to be a set thing that's going to be done right from the beginning?”

The Superintendent of Public Works will still perform more duties aligned with the WPCA work given that there are more responsibilities at that department, Sileo said. 

“We can not do this now, and we can talk about it, but the item on the table is not about ‘Should we do this, should we not do this?’” Sileo said to Burr. “The Town's already decided that. It's about ‘Does the job description look right or not?’”

Regarding the reporting coordinator role, Burr said he thinks the role could have some redundancies, particularly when it comes to reports submitted to the state like SWPPP and MS4. He noted there is an engineering firm that helps the town with some of these reports already. Sileo said the reports and reporting requirements do vary from time to time. 

There are years, however, when the Town could have submitted those reports without the help of an engineering firm, Sileo said. But the Town did not create the proper reporting for several years, he added.

“The transfer station and Public Works had not been doing (the SWPPP reports) so long that now we can't just start, we can't just re-up it ourselves,” Sileo said. “We had to hire somebody to do it.”

The exchange between Burr and Sileo then turned tense. 

“Well, it sounds to me like this person's not going to have a lot to do in the first year if we're hiring engineering firms,” Burr said.

Sileo said that was not true and there are job duties that do not overlap with the work performed by the town’s engineering consultants.

“You're trying to nitpick out two or three things, Mike. I'm telling you, there are more reports,” Sileo said. “I'll say it again. I've said it 100 (expletive) times. There are more reports out there. There are more things that we have not filed.”

Burr then asked Sileo “not to use f-bombs.”

“If you don't want to vote for this, don't. If you want it tabled and edited, fine,” Sileo said. “But I'm telling you, I'm not going to add an exhaustive list to a job description, because I need it open-ended.”

The job description for the reporting coordinator role eventually passed via a 2-1 vote. Burr voted against it.