Irasburg resident Charlie Jaquish makes a property tax payment to Town Clerk Danielle Ingalls on Monday. Ms. Ingalls said she was saddened by Irasburg’s situation. “It’s a small town, usually known for its charm,” Ms. Ingalls said. “It’s sad to see it get so much bad publicity, with neighbors fighting against neighbors.” Photo by Chris BraithwaiteIRASBURG — When he walked into the town clerk’s office on May 17 to pay a $200 installment on his taxes, Paul Turner had no way of knowing he was about to stir up a hornet’s nest.
What followed, to use Mr. Turner’s own term for it, was “all this whoop-de-do” that cost the town treasurer her job, divided the community, and plunged the town government into a bitter legal dispute that will cost the taxpayers a lot of money.
That will be particularly true if, as one of the lawyers involved confidently predicts, the town ends up paying the bills of the lawyers on both sides of the dispute.
What has many people in Irasburg upset is the discovery that the selectmen can fire a treasurer who was elected by the voters at Town Meeting. To do so they invoked a rarely used law governing the security bonds required of town officials.
There’s no doubt that the selectmen — and other town officials including the town clerk and the auditors — had trouble getting along with their new colleague, Town Treasurer Linda Stone.
Nor is there any doubt that they were less than satisfied by the way she did her job, and said so at every opportunity.The sign for Selectman Ken Johnson’s locksmith business overlooks Irasburg common.
The question that troubles some people in town is this:
Even assuming, for purposes of argument, that the voters elect a treasurer who is incompetent and hard to get along with, where does the remedy lie?
“In five more months there will be another election,” Mr. Turner said in a recent interview. “It isn’t like they had to wait ten years. They could have got along for a year.”
“Everyone who comes in here feels the same way,” said Bob Booth, proprietor of Bob’s Quick Stop, a popular stop south of Irasburg Village on Route 14 for a tank of gas, a sandwich, a cup of coffee and the local gossip.
“They voted Linda in,” Mr. Booth said of his fellow townspeople. “Even if she wasn’t doing a good job, they should have waited until next Town Meeting to replace her.”
Mr. Booth offered the results of an entirely unscientific poll of local opinion: “At least 90 percent of the people who come in here say Linda got railroaded, that they gave her a raw deal.”
Ousted Irasburg Town Treasurer Linda Stone on her front porch.Mr. Turner’s role in the whoop-de-do was accidental, entirely innocent, and properly belongs in the middle of a rather long story.
The trouble started at Town Meeting in March. The voters split the ticket when they filled two offices that, in most Vermont towns, are awarded to a single person.
Danielle Ingalls, the incumbent, was elected town clerk over Ms. Stone by a three-vote margin. But Ms. Stone won the treasurer’s job over Ms. Ingalls by eight votes.
In doing so, Ms. Stone interrupted what had looked like a smooth transition between the woman who had presided over the Irasburg town office as clerk-treasurer for three decades, Barbara Lawson, and her granddaughter, Ms. Ingalls.
In a recent interview, Ms. Stone said she had run against Ms. Lawson at the 2009 Town Meeting on a platform that the town office’s expenses were too high. She said she was also troubled by her suspicion that Ms. Lawson planned to resign in mid term and pass the torch to her granddaughter, who was working as her assistant.
Ms. Lawson had no such power, of course. When an elected town officer resigns, it’s the selectmen who appoint a replacement until the next Irasburg’s modest town office has been the focal point of the struggle over the town treasurer’s position.regular Town Meeting, or a special Town Meeting called to fill the vacancy.
In a brief speech before the vote at the 2009 Town Meeting, Ms. Stone recalled, Ms. Lawson said she wanted to serve for another year, and did not plan to resign in mid term.
In the event, Ms. Lawson did resign in 2009. The selectmen appointed Ms. Ingalls town clerk (Ms. Lawson did not resign as treasurer) and opted not to call a special Town Meeting.
Thus Ms. Ingalls brought the incumbent’s advantage to the 2010 Town Meeting, and prevailed.
But in taking the treasurer’s job, Ms. Stone clearly ruffled some feathers in town government.
When she went to the selectmen’s meeting on March 12, Selectman Ken Johnson greeted her this way:
“My question is, why did you even want to run for the position?”
“Because I wanted to,” Ms. Stone replied.
Another selectman, Randy Wells, tried to make peace with a remark that proved to be all too predictive:
The envelope, containing $200 cash and bearing the name Lorenzo Corleone, that caused all the trouble in Irasburg. “We don’t need personal animosity, or for lack of a better word, pissing matches.”
(We are indebted, for these quotes, to another reporter for another newspaper. Jennifer Hersey Cleveland of the Newport Daily Express followed the Irasburg story as it unfolded. Our account is drawn from recent interviews, and from a small mountain of documents supplied to the Chronicle by Ms. Stone and by Irasburg’s town attorney, Duncan Kilmartin of Newport.)
The minutes of that March 12 meeting provide a somewhat drier account:
“Linda Stone presented a resume to the Selectboard and expressed how she was very qualified in her opinion for the Town Treasurer. She also stated that she was getting help from some area Town Treasurers. She also expressed her concerns for her ability to work with her coworkers because she felt like they were disrespectful. The selectmen asked if she would work during posted hours, Linda stated that she could set her own hours and she wanted to come in when the Town Clerk was not in.”
(Those minutes, like all the minutes cited in this article, were written by the woman the selectmen chose to serve as clerk of their board, Ms. Ingalls, the town clerk.)
Among the difficulties Ms. Stone encountered was lack of access to town records.
“They wouldn’t give me the combination to the vault,” she said. “I’m lucky I had the key to the door.”
That came up at the next selectmen’s meeting, on March 22. By Ms. Cleveland’s account:
“Fire department treasurer Todd Blanchard said that former town clerk and treasurer Barb Lawson had access to the safe and asked, ‘Why can’t Linda have the combination?’
“Because Lawson served in both positions, Selectman Ken Johnson said, she was privy to both sets of records. Now that two different people hold the positions, each has control of her own records, some of which are confidential.”
According to the minutes of that meeting, “Ken stated that he was going to research the prices on a fire proof locking 2 drawer file cabinet” for Ms. Stone’s records.
Mr. Johnson was in a good position to do so. A locksmith by trade, he operates Total Security, Inc., out of a house that sits prominently on the west side of Irasburg common.
And the cabinet, like Paul Turner, would play a major, if entirely passive, role in the coming storm.
The minutes also noted that “there was much discussion among those attending with the discussion closing with repeating the letter drawn up by town attorney Duncan Kilmartin addressed to Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz.”
It seems that some days prior to the March 22 meeting, Ms. Stone had appealed to the secretary of state for help.
Ms. Markowitz apparently responded by setting up a telephone conference with Ms. Stone and the selectmen.
Mr. Kilmartin’s recollection is that two of the latter, Mr. Wells and Roger Gagnon, were painting the town office at the time, and so were easy to find, while Mr. Johnson was unavailable.
When he learned of the conference, Mr. Kilmartin dispatched a set of 16 of sternly worded questions to Ms. Markowitz, beginning with this one:
“1. Is your office representing the Treasurer, and, if so, in what capacity?”
It went on to demand an account of what information Ms Markowitz had been given before the conference, and what opinions she had rendered to the selectman.
Particularly challenging was question number 7:
“Was this meeting not illegal, in that it was an unwarned, unannounced ‘secret meeting’ of the Irasburg Selectboard which you had initiated or appointed Ms. Stone as your agent to initiate which fell under no exception to the public right to know law and the requirements that all selectboard meetings be announced in advance and be open to the public?”
Whatever answer he got from the secretary of state, Mr. Kilmartin replied that “your response is not helpful to assisting the Treasurer in understanding and correctly applying the law. In fact, I find your responses misleading, and in some instances a direct contradiction of the facial language of the law….”
Following the March 22 meeting, Ms. Stone sent her own e-mail to the Secretary of State:
“Deb – I feel like a little woman out in the middle of the sea trying to fight a bad storm. I held my own Monday evening at the selectboard meeting with Duncan and the selectboard, but I really hate to spend the next year cowering to these people. My thoughts are I am not going to. I will either get reelected or not. But the year I have in office will be the longest year for them.”
As Mr. Kilmartin had before her, Ms. Stone urged the secretary of state to come in person to a selectmen’s meeting “and put everyone in their place.”
But, in the early stages of her campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor, Ms. Markowitz seemed in no mood for a face-to-face confrontation with Mr. Kilmartin.
“Hi Linda,” she replied. “I am glad you feel like you did a good job sticking up for yourself. It is beyond the services I can provide to come up to your meeting. I am happy to direct you to the laws that apply but suggest you enlist friends and local attorneys to help you in a more specific way. I wish you the best. Deb.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Stone was having great difficulty satisfying the town auditors. On the selectmen’s orders, they were checking her books every two weeks, and made it clear they did not like what they saw.
“Still all screwed up in the middle of May,” said a handwritten note at the bottom of a list of problems with the town books, signed by the town’s three auditors, Carmen Lamarche, Kim Royer and Carlotta Corcoran.
Ms. Stone is quick to admit that she made mistakes. But she insists they were minor mistakes that could have been fixed with some help from her fellow town officers.
She detailed an early mistake, when she wrote a check that didn’t match the order that the selectmen had signed. Selectmen control town spending by reviewing and signing off on lists of expenses prepared for them by their clerk — in Irasburg’s case by Ms. Ingalls.
Selectboard Order #5 for March through April included a series of four charges at Bond Auto Parts in Barton, summed to $255.62 and signed by the three selectmen.
When Ms. Stone added up the invoices she came up with a total of $185.77. She confirmed that amount with a call to Bond Auto, and wrote a check for the lesser amount.
Though she’d saved the town $69.85, Ms. Stone said she was wrong to change the amount authorized by the selectmen.
In retrospect, she said, she should have written the check for the wrong amount, and left the town with a credit at Bond Auto.
The selectmen heard other complaints that spring. Ms. Ingalls and Auditor Carmen Lamarche reported on May 17 that Ms. Stone told them she kept some town documents at home. Her unwillingness to post regular hours when people could do business with the treasurer was also cited.
At their April 5 meeting, barely a month after Ms. Stone’s election, the selectmen took action. From the minutes:
“Danielle had gotten legal advice from Duncan on what to do if the auditors can not balance the books. Duncan’s advice was to write a formal letter from the selectmen stating that Linda had until next meeting to satisfy the auditors and if at that point in time the auditors are not satisfied the selectmen will request Linda to raise her bond to $1,000,000. The selectmen will proceed to contact the bond holder and inform them of their request and the reason for the request. Randy made a motion to follow Duncan’s advice, Roger seconded, approved.”
Ms. Stone, along with other town officers, had routinely been bonded for $500,000 by the insurance branch of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns (VLCT). Now she might have to double that bond.
The selectmen’s power to demand bonds of any amount, and enforce that demand, is covered in three sections of the Selectboard Handbook published by VLCT:
“…However, the board is not limited by statute as to the amounts in which the bonds must be set, so that it may exercise its discretion and set the bonds as low as zero dollars….
“If an officer fails to provide the required bond ten days after he or she is requested to do so, that office must be deemed vacant. 24 VSA Section 832…
“Selectboards have sometimes set an extremely high bond in an effort to remove a town official from office. This is not wise or practical, however, since the town is responsible for paying for the bond.”
Later, in legal argument aimed at getting Ms. Stone her job back, attorney Charles Merriman expressed his concern about the remarkable power Section 832 puts in the hands of selectmen. The “unfettered discretion” it gives them to decide that a bond is insufficient, he argued, “is the definition of arbitrariness and abuse of power.”
In another filing, he argues:
“This allows the Selectboard to confuse its fiduciary duty to the Town with its political agenda to remove a duly-elected public officer it finds personally offensive, denying Plaintiff any due process or an opportunity to defend herself against spurious allegations of misconduct in an impartial forum.”
At any rate, Ms. Stone apparently went right to work on the problem.
The documents provided to the Chronicle include an e-mail from Tammy Gagnon at Poulos Insurance in Newport to Tricia Asher, an underwriter at the Cincinnati Insurance Company in Ohio:
“So I have a situation where a town treasurer would like to have her own bond…. I feel bad for her, she is someone I have known for years and the town is just really giving her a hard time (apparently the selectmen wanted someone else to get elected but that didn’t happen.) Small town politics, got to love them.”
Ms. Stone also tried to get together with the auditors, but her schedule at her other job made that difficult. The documents include a letter to the town from the scheduler at Northeast Kingdom Homecare, Inc.:
“If it is at all possible for you to reschedule Linda for the times that she has off from NEKHC we would greatly appreciate it as well as our client.”
At their next meeting, April 19, the selectmen reluctantly backed down. From the minutes:
“The first order of business was to address the auditor’s inability to balance the treasurer’s books. Ken began by asking why the books would not balance. Linda said that the reason she could not balance the books was because she was set up by the auditors and the Town Clerk. After much discussion it was decided that the selectmen would not raise her bond for now, but if the auditors were still not able to balance her books next time they audit her bond will be raised….”
Meanwhile, though there is no mention of it in the selectmen’s minutes, Ms. Stone’s locking file cabinet had arrived in the town office.
It appears on Order # 8: “Total Security Inc., supplies (filing cab.), $2,385.” All three selectmen signed the order, and Total Security was paid on April 22.
The cabinet is the subject of a letter Ms. Stone sent the selectmen on May 18:
“Contrary to what the Selectboard is being apprised of, I am utilizing my cabinet but I make this clear, I did not request a cabinet costing the Town of Irasburg $2385.00. I requested a 2 drawer file cabinet with keys so I would be able to gain access to my records in the off hours that the Town Clerk wasn’t available…. You took it upon yourselves to purchase the filing cabinet from Total Security.”
Then Ms. Stone voices a suspicion that, as events unfolded, cost her her job:
“If I am suppose to be the only one who has access to the combination to my filing cabinet besides Mr. Ken Johnson and my Assistant Treasurer, I ask you how you have come up with the assumption that I am not utilizing my filing cabinet? Does someone else have the combination that I am not aware of?”
On the day before, May 17, Paul Turner handed his $200 tax installment to Ms. Ingalls, in cash. At that point a difficult and unpleasant municipal problem began its descent into the theater of the absurd.
Mr. Turner recalls that the town clerk told him she could not give him a receipt. “She said the treasurer would send me one,” he said.
“I should have told her who I was,” he added, “but I’ve been up there a lot of times. I pay my taxes in installments.”
A resident of Irasburg for 34 years, Mr. Turner lives about a mile from the village on the Lake Region Road. His brother, the late David Turner, was a town selectman “for probably 30 years,” Mr. Turner said. “I never thought to give her my name,” he said of Ms. Ingalls. She’d written him receipts before, he recalled. “It isn’t like I’m a total stranger there.”
Ms. Ingalls put the cash in an envelope and, when Ms. Stone came into the office sometime later, turned it over to the treasurer.
“I had no idea where the money had come from and who left it with Danielle as she couldn’t remember the person’s name,” Ms. Stone wrote to the selectmen on June 3.
Ms. Ingalls said Monday that Mr. Turner left the office while she was sealing his money — uncounted — into an envelope. “I ran outside to catch him,” she said, “but he was driving away.”
Ms. Ingalls said she and Ms. Stone tended to keep different hours. When they were both in the town office, she said, “we didn’t speak much. We kept our jobs separate, and kept to ourselves.”
Ms. Stone put the envelope into her file cabinet, with its combination lock.
But, clearly worried by the odd transaction, she sought the advice of a friend and mentor. Val Mason had served as Albany’s town clerk and treasurer for almost 11 years.
“Well, I’m a friend of Linda’s,” Ms. Mason said in a recent interview. “When she was elected I told her should she need any help I’d be glad to help her.”
To do so, she said, she would have to disregard the advice of Irasburg’s attorney. Ms. Mason said Mr. Kilmartin had called her sometime after Ms. Stone’s election and said “I’m suggesting you don’t help her.”
When Ms. Stone called to tell her about the mysterious envelope in her filing cabinet, Ms. Mason said, she told her she wasn’t sure what was inside. “She said ‘I think it’s cash.’
“I said ‘You didn’t count it?’ She said ‘No.’ I said ‘You should have counted it.’
“This worried me, with all the things that were happening,” Ms. Mason said. “I said I’d be glad to go in and count the money.”
The two women opened the file cabinet on Saturday, May 22, counted the $200, and signed an informal affidavit to that effect.
There was a name written on the envelope in a neat, rather elegant hand: “Lorenzo Corleone.”
Ms. Stone told Ms. Mason that the name had not been on the envelope when she put it in the filing cabinet.
“She said she did not put the name on that envelope,” Ms. Mason recalled. Since she saw the envelope for the first time that Saturday, Ms. Mason said, “I cannot say whether she did or did not.”
But she did recall Ms. Stone’s reaction when she saw Mr. Corleone’s name: “The look on her face — it was disbelief.”
Someone must have seen the two women at the town office that Saturday, Ms. Mason said, because Mr. Kilmartin called her the following Tuesday. Here’s the conversation she recalled:
Mr. Kilmartin: “I thought I told you not to help her.”
Ms. Mason: “You suggested, Duncan, and you know I have an attitude.”
“I said ‘Duncan, what difference does it make? Somebody comes in the office to give money for taxes. The money got accepted. Whoever accepted that money should have issued a receipt. The problem is that a receipt was not issued.’”
In her June 3 letter to the selectmen, Ms. Stone reviewed the events of that Saturday:
“Val Mason did come in to confirm that there was not a name on the envelope. When I opened my filing cabinet when Val was in attendance, there was a name on the envelope, which I did not put there.”
The implication was unavoidable. If Mr. Corleone’s name wasn’t on the envelope when Ms. Stone put it in the cabinet, someone must have opened the cabinet and put it there.
Ms. Stone credited the $200 to Mr. Corleone’s taxes.
But in mid-June Mr. Turner mailed the town another $200 tax payment. This time he sent a check, and included a note:
“Please send me a receipt for this check and for the previous $200 pd. Thank you, Paul Turner.”
In short order, he found selectmen Johnson and Gagnon at his door.
“They said my money had been credited to Mr. Corleone and they would see I got the credit,” Mr. Turner recalled.
Ms. Stone came to his house that same day, he said, with essentially the same message.
“A day or two later, I got a receipt for the other $200, Mr. Turner said. “Then there was all this whoop-de-do. If they’d sat down together for ten minutes they could have solved it all.”
How did Lorenzo Corleone get into the picture? Nobody seems to know, or for that matter to know Mr. Corleone. His name appeared in the Chronicle’s routine reporting of property transfers as the purchaser of a single-family home on 24 acres of land in October 2008.
At a selectmen’s meeting in June, Mr. Kilmartin said that Mr. Booth at Bob’s Quick Stop identified Mr. Corleone to a town employee as the mysterious taxpayer.
But Mr. Booth said last week that he knew nothing about his role in the drama until he read it in the paper.
And it upset him. “I’m not happy about what they put in the paper about me,” Mr. Booth said. “It’s not good for business. I try to stay neutral and stay out of things.
“They put it in the paper that Jason Laramie came down and asked me about it, and I said I knew who it was. I have not a clue who it was.”
Mr. Booth said he’s met with the selectmen twice to try and extract a published retraction from them. “Duncan’s the one who said it,” Mr. Booth said. “He’s the one who should apologize.”
In an interview last week, Mr. Kilmartin did not disagree. “It came from me as I was trying to explain to citizens a series of events,” he said of the story about Mr. Booth’s role. “It was based on a misunderstanding. We composed a correction which the Newport Daily Express has so far declined to print.”
In June a voice of reason was injected into the situation. It came from John Cushing, the town clerk and treasurer of Milton. Called in to help, he’d met with town officials at a special selectmen’s meeting on May 10.
“I can feel a great deal of tension between some of the elected officials,” he said in the two-page letter he addressed to Selectman Roger Gagnon on June 10.
He recalled Bev Lawson’s long tenure as clerk-treasurer, but noted that the voters had opted to replace her with two people.
“I feel that is why we see the difficulties you are facing,” he wrote.
“I believe Linda can perform the duties of Town Treasurer,” Mr. Cushing continued. “She has attended at least two seminars for treasurers. The Irasburg accounting system is unique to Irasburg and she will need help in meeting the expectations of the Selectboard. There is going to be a learning curve for anyone coming into the office new and replacing a treasurer of 30+ years anywhere.”
After urging Irasburg’s town officers to work together and communicate, he ended on a apologetic note:
“In closing I do not feel I have done a great deal to help. I do not believe you would want to adopt what I think would be the way to fix this issue…. The Town Treasurer will need to learn your system and it will take some time to do so. The people spoke in March and personnel changed. I believe that by working together as a team the issues will work themselves out for the Town of Irasburg.”
As Mr. Cushing pointed out, it would be impossible for Irasburg’s voters to elect a new treasurer with a mastery of the town’s accounting system, since it is “unique to Irasburg.”
If the town’s old books could have offered any guidance, Ms. Stone got no help there. “I had no knowledge of where the 2009 financial records were, or 2008,” she said. “Nobody knows where they are.”
Ms. Stone did not arrive at the town office without considerable experience in keeping track of money.
According to her resumé, she worked for Community National Bank as an “ATM coordinator” from December 2004 until October 2007. From February to October 2004 she worked as an administrative assistant at the Ethan Allen Credit Union.
While there, Ms. Stone said, she discovered that an employee who left the credit union in December 2003 had embezzled funds.
The man was charged with embezzling about $17,000 by the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department in November 2004, and pled no contest to the charge the following May. He was given a deferred sentence of five years and ordered to pay back $7,438 to the credit union.
By June, it seems, it was too late for the voice of reason to find an audience in Irasburg.
The minutes of the June 28 selectmen’s meeting provide a dry account of what must have been a most unpleasant session. Ms. Ingalls reports that “Ken began by addressing some concerns they have with Linda’s job performance.”
She must set her office hours, Mr. Johnson said, and stop taking town documents home. The minutes close with a warning:
“Ken then explained to Linda that if she continued to make false accusations against him and other Town officials we could sue her for defamation of character.”
Three days later Ms. Stone got the letter she must have been dreading for months.
“Dear Linda,” it began, “We sincerely regret having to write this letter.”
Still in a personal vein, the five-page letter recalled the split decision at Town Meeting.
“Thus, we recognized that there might have been bruised feelings resulting in your early accusations and defensiveness, which would not have surfaced if one of you had won both posts.”
Getting down to business, the letter gave Ms. Stone ten days to double her bond to $1-million.
In justification, it repeated the complaints that had been made about her performance.
But then it turned to the question of how Mr. Corleone’s name got into Ms. Stone’s filing cabinet — a matter which “brings into question your truthfulness, honesty, reliability, and therefore your ability to perform the duties of Irasburg Town Treasurer.”
It continues:
“Most importantly for purposes of this letter, you have falsely accused Ken Johnson, Selectboard member, of either going into the Treasurer’s secured fireproof safe and placing the name of a taxpayer on an envelope containing what is believed to be “tax money”, or providing others with the combination or access to the Treasurer’s safe, who then secretly went into your safe using the combination Ken provided, took an envelope with Danielle’s handwriting on it, and placed on the envelope, which contained $200, the name of “Lorenzo Corleone.”
The letter went on to say that Ms. Stone had confessed to the subterfuge:
“As you have acknowledged, it was you who wrote the name on the envelope, and the same is shown by a comparison of the handwriting on the envelope for the words “Lorenzo Corleone” with various specimens of your handwriting….”
Ms. Stone continues to insist that she neither wrote Mr. Corleone’s name on the envelope nor acknowledged doing so. She did acknowledge that the handwriting on the envelope looked a lot like hers, she said, and added a comment to this effect: “That’s the scary part.”
A copy of this letter, it said, would be sent to the people who handle the bond underwriting at VLCT.
“Ken Johnson abstained from this decision,” the letter concluded, over the signatures of Roger Gagnon and Randall Wells.
VLCT would not increase Ms. Stone’s bond, but she believed she could do business with Cincinnati Insurance. At the company’s request she sent the selectmen a form to confirm that she worked for the town.
In a July 7 letter, Mr. Gagnon replied that since she was not the selectmen’s employee, they would not fill out the form.
And again, the letter emphasized the main reason the selectmen were acting against her:
“Finally, please note that our letter demanding an increase in your bond springs from several reasons, chief among which is dishonesty and fabrication of evidence to support your false accusations directed against Selectman Ken Johnson and other town officers.”
The two letters make it clear that the selectmen’s focus had shifted from Ms. Stone’s job performance to what they viewed as a personal attack on one of their own. Oddly, it was not a direct attack, but one that could only be made by inference.
The July 1 letter, again:
“Knowing that Ken Johnson is a trusted locksmith, whose reputation as an honest and trustworthy locksmith is paramount to his livelihood, and that he was the only one, other than yourself and possibly your assistant Treasurer, who had access to the combination to your safe, you decided to defame and slander him by claiming that someone had secretly entered your safe….”
Monday, July 12, was a busy day. If the selectmen were going to declare the Treasurer’s office vacant, they would presumably do so at their regular meeting that night.
At eight o’clock Monday morning Ms. Gagnon at Poulos Insurance got an e-mail message from Mr. Kilmartin. In an apparent reference to her April message to Tricia Asher at Cincinnati Insurance Company, with it’s comment about “small town politics,” the attorney wrote that “as a result of this erroneous information, especially in your initial e-mail, I contacted Ms. Asher directly….”
At 8:45 Ms. Gagnon send a concerned e-mail to Ms. Asher in Cincinnati:
“So I received an email from Duncan Kilmartin, he said he spoke to you??
“He had asked me if he could call Cincinnati directly and I told him I didn’t think you guys would speak to him that normally the agent would be the one to speak with the customer and any other inquiries. Sorry if I was wrong. I assume you got a copy of his email this Am. So apparently they are not going to complete the form, even though Linda’s attorney said that VT law does state that the town is the employer, but anyway I really don’t want to be in the middle of this, I was just trying to help the poor girl out.”
Ms. Asher replied at 8:59 that she had, indeed, heard from Mr. Kilmartin “and I was not very happy with that.”
It was a long and perplexing conversation, the underwriter said, “as he did not come out with Linda’s name and situation until about 20 minutes into the conversation when I asked what this conversation was involving.”
But the bottom line, Ms. Asher wrote, was that without the employer’s statement from the town “we are unable to consider the bond.”
At 9:42 Ms. Gagnon tried a new tack:
“Ok, so here is another suggestion. If the town says she is not an employee, wouldn’t that make her self employed and then she could fill that out herself??”
Eight minutes later, Ms. Asher’s reply from Cincinnati was firm, final, and carried a hint of impatience:
“Unfortunately, she can not complete the Employer General Statement as that would not be objective. Also, noting the e-mail from Duncan Kilmartin and the conversation we had, this situation would be adverse selection for our company due to the increase of the current bond she has, that we do not write, and the need for the increase…. Therefore, we are not interested in writing this bond.”
Mr. Kilmartin’s intervention, however much it annoyed the insurance underwriter, had apparently done the trick.
Meanwhile, Ms. Stone was fighting back in court.
At 5:20 Monday afternoon in Orleans Superior Court, Judge Walter Morris signed a temporary restraining order:
“Wherefore the Court orders Defendant to vacate, without prejudice to renewal, its demand that Plaintiff secure additional bond, pending hearing on Plaintiff’s request for injunctive relief.”
It followed an unusual, “ex parte” hearing conducted without the selectmen or their lawyer present, and extended only for three days.
At the selectmen’s meeting that night, the minutes indicate, Ms. Stone essentially threw herself on the selectmen’s mercy:
“She asked if the selectmen were going to give her more time to get the bond or if for the good of the Town would they be willing to start over. She stated that she wanted to be part of the ‘team’ and that she was trying but was unable to be a part so far. She stated that she knows where her mistakes are and has been trying to fix them..”
The selectmen didn’t relent, but they did give Ms. Stone another ten days to raise her bond.
Ms. Stone was not without her supporters in Irasburg, and one of them attempted to speak for her, the minutes report:
“Bev Hall asked to be placed on the agenda for unannounced reasons. Ken asked Bev Hall what it was she wanted to discuss and Bev began explaining that in the past there were mistakes on Town Reports and various things Ken interrupted by saying that the past was not relevant to the meeting and that there would be no further discussion on the topic.”
As the new deadline approached, Mr. Kilmartin got a letter from Ms. Stone’s lawyer. Charles Merriman of Montpelier is a specialist in municipal law who, last July, was in the home stretch of his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination for secretary of state.
His client was trying hard, Mr. Merriman wrote on July 21:
“…Treasurer Stone has worked diligently to obtain the bond. However, Treasurer Stone’s efforts have so far been unsuccessful, largely because of your active, unauthorized and improper interference with Treasurer Stone’s efforts.”
Later in the letter, Mr. Merriman gets more personal:
“To cut to the chase, Duncan, let me simply state that you and I see this case very differently. As I said in Court, I see this case as the height of municipal foolishness. I attribute the foolishness to the advice given to the Selectboard, not to the Selectboard.
“Nevertheless, it is the Selectboard that is now in the middle of this mess. If the Irasburg Selectboard continues to refuse to assist Treasurer Stone in her efforts to obtain the bonding and/or refuses to rescind its order, we are headed for a massive legal collision which will cost the Town a lot of money and, in the end will leave Treasurer Stone in her office. Let’s not run up the legal bills for the Irasburg taxpayers. Let’s get this settled.”
Mr. Merriman considered that paragraph an offer to settle the lawsuit he had filed against the selectmen, and against Mr. Kilmartin himself, he said in an interview last week.
However, Mr. Merriman said of Mr. Kilmartin, “He said the letter was not a settlement offer, so he wouldn’t share it with his clients.”
Why did Mr. Merriman take the unusual step of including the selectmen’s attorney as a defendant?
“Because the evidence in the case is that he was calling the shots,” Mr. Merriman said.
“They’re not sophisticated guys,” he said of the selectmen. “Those letters got penned by their attorney, I’m virtually certain.”
Asked if he wrote the letters the selectmen sent to Ms. Stone, Mr. Kilmartin replied “No comment. It’s irrelevant.”
The letters alone would not be sufficient to bring Mr. Kilmartin in as a defendant, Mr. Merriman conceded. “It’s possible he was being directed to craft those letters.
“The really damning evidence we have is that he went out on his own and contacted the insurance companies…to screw up Linda’s ability to get coverage.”
“He has absolutely no right to do that,” Mr. Merriman said. “You can’t start off and say ‘Look, Linda, you must get additional coverage,’ and then go out and undermine her. That’s just nonsense.”
“Is it unconstitutional to comment on the performance of public officials?” Mr. Kilmartin said when asked about his contact with the insurance company.
“If a citizen observes the following: He hears, at the first selectboard meeting after Town Meeting, the treasurer say she will not work in the town office while town clerk is present, will not set her hours, and believes she’s been treated with disrespect by other town officials, would it be unconstitutional or illegal for a citizen attending that meeting to call up the bonding company with whom the town deals and tell the bonding company what they’ve heard and seen, and their opinions in connection with what they’ve heard and seen about the treasurer?”
Mr. Kilmartin continued:
“If the court said ‘You can’t do that, Mr. Citizen,’ you’d be writing an editorial championing the free speech of citizens.”
To the observation that he is not a citizen of Irasburg, but the town’s attorney, Mr. Kilmartin replied “So what? What’s the difference?”
Mr. Merriman said Mr. Kilmartin is delaying a resolution of the case by “papering the court with unnecessary paperwork.”
“This case should have been brought to trial right away, in the interest of the town,” Mr. Merriman said. He offered two reasons:
“First, from the standpoint of tearing the town apart. The longer it lingers the worse it gets.”
The other reason, he said, “is that it’s costing the town a fortune.
“In addition to his fee, they’re going to pay me every penny I charge,” Mr. Merriman said. “Under the law, she is the town treasurer. The town has an obligation to pay for her defense.”
That would be true whether Ms. Stone wins or loses in court, Mr. Merriman said.
“But she’s going to win. This is not even close. She was elected by the voters to fulfill a role. The selectboard does have the power to increase her bond, but they can’t do it in an arbitrary and prejudicial way.
“It’s inane for the town to claim their power to increase Linda’s bonding supercedes and trumps the power of the voters to vote her into office.”
The key to the case is the legislative intent behind the bonding statute, Mr. Merriman argued. “It was emphatically not to give the selectboard the power to fire people they don’t like. That is exactly the way Duncan and the selectboard are using it.”
Legal expenses aside, Mr. Merriman said, his client’s demands are reasonable.
“I want to get her back in the office, and properly compensated for her lost wages. We’re not talking pain and suffering or all that gobbledygook.”
Ms. Stone’s supporters tried to give the Irasburg voters a direct say in that matter, as her second deadline passed on July 22.
At the July 26 selectmen’s meeting Bev Hall presented a petition, signed by 121 townspeople, calling for a special Town Meeting to consider a single article:
“Shall the voters of Irasburg require its duly elected Town Treasurer, Linda Stone, to post an additional bond in the amount of $500,000 over and above the $500,000 coverage already provided by the Town’s insurance carrier?”
There were more than enough names on the petition to compel the selectmen to act.
From the minutes:
“Ken stated that the selectmen would review the petition and let the voters know. Bev stated that she appreciated it, and she felt that “one was picked at and not another.”
The selectmen emerged from an executive session with Mr. Kilmartin that night to declare the treasurer’s office vacant, and call a special meeting for July 28 to appoint her replacement.
At that meeting the selectmen appointed Suzanne Cartee treasurer, and approved her choice of former auditor Carlotta Corcoran as her assistant.
On August 9 Mr. Kilmartin gave the selectmen a five-page opinion letter on the question of the special Town Meeting. The power over the bonding of town officials lies with the selectmen, not the voters, Mr. Kilmartin wrote.
“Under Vermont law, as articulated by the Vermont Supreme Court, the Selectmen are under no duty to hold Special Meetings on application of the voters for useless, frivolous or unlawful purposes, or where relief sought by the petitioners is beyond the power of the Town Meeting to vote or order.”
There would be no special Town Meeting in Irasburg.
Bev Hall said she had also collected enough signatures to force a special Town Meeting to elect a Town Treasurer. But in a lengthy footnote to a legal argument he filed on August 2, Mr. Kilmartin said that Ms. Stone had not yet satisfied a selectmen’s demand that she “settle her accounts” by August 4. If she failed to do so, he said, she would be disqualified from election as treasurer both at a special Town Meeting and at the regular Town Meeting in March 2011.
In a letter to the selectmen on August 9, Ms. Hall asked them to take her petition for a special election off the agenda.
But she also requested “the ‘accumulated fees’ for the services of Attorney Duncan Kilmartin, from January 1, 2010,” and asked that these be put on the agenda of that night’s meeting of the selectmen.
She did get a copy of “the only bills received in 2010 from Rexford & Kilmartin for services.” The attached bill was for services rendered in another case that did not involve the town treasurer.
The reply continued:
“Also in response to your request to discuss fees accumulated, this item will not be added to the agenda for tonight’s meeting.”
Ms. Stone and the selectmen are due in court on Friday, October 29, to argue Mr. Kilmartin’s motion to dismiss her motion for a preliminary injunction.
In documents filed on October 14, Mr. Kilmartin said the case could not proceed without the Vermont Attorney General. Since Mr. Merriman appears to challenge the constitutionality of Section 832, Mr. Kilmartin argued, the case brings into question the bonding power of selectmen in towns across Vermont.
“Thus the State of Vermont and its Attorney General is an absolutely necessary and indispensable party to this proceeding,” Mr. Kilmartin wrote.
Mr. Kilmartin also filed, as Exhibit C, a marked up copy of the handwritten “Lorenzo Corleone” from the envelope in the filing cabinet, and the same name as Ms. Stone wrote it on a tax receipt.
He wrote that “A qualified document examiner employed by the town has found 17 points of identification between a known sample of Linda Stone’s handwriting and the words inscribed on the tax receipt.”
The exhibit does not name the examiner. Nor does it include an opinion on whether the two samples were, indeed, written by the same person.
Perhaps the last word should go to the innocent catalyst in what one out-of-town observer has dubbed “The second Irasburg affair.”
“There’s no real wrongdoing as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Turner said. “They should settle this and move on. I guess they just don’t want to move on.
“I guess next March there’s going to be some changes made.”
