WELLFLEET — Seasoned civic volunteer and Mosquito Squad owner Curt Felix wants a seat at the select board’s table because, he says, etiquette is lacking there.
Felix announced a write-in campaign last week to replace Kathleen Bacon, who will step down from the board after the special town election on Sept. 27. Eight months remain in Bacon’s term. Felix is running against Timothy Sayre, the only candidate to have submitted nomination papers for the position.
Felix said he decided to run because he wants to “change the tenor and tone” of town board and committee meetings, which he said have suffered from increasing discourtesy in recent years.
Felix has seen it firsthand, he said. He has served on several boards and committees since he moved to Wellfleet in 2000. He was on the wastewater committee for 13 years and the board of water commissioners and the dredging task force, each for six years.
He has also served on the board of the nonprofit Wellfleet Community Forum for nine years and has been part of the county-appointed Cape Cod Water Protection Collaborative for nine years.
“I’ve been yelled at during a lot of meetings,” Felix said. “Volunteers and town staff have been aggressively and nastily addressed by people in town. It has created a really negative environment.”
The lack of pleasantries doesn’t just make meetings uncomfortable to sit through, Felix said. He believes it is a root cause of a staffing crisis that has emptied the town of full-time municipal staff members in the finance, health, building, and administrative departments. “I know of five to six town staff members we have lost because of the town’s current environment,” he said.
Felix believes the problem affects volunteer positions, too. According to a report in the select board’s most recent meeting packet, there are 33 vacant positions on 16 of the town’s boards — or roughly a quarter of all existing positions.
“It’s not an issue of pay or housing for volunteer boards,” Felix said. It’s that “people don’t want to serve on boards because they don’t want to get yelled at.”
Despite having suffered from that sort of hostility, Felix said he still wants to serve. He said that his experience has prepared him for the role of select board member, and if elected, he will “most likely” run for reelection in May.
“It’s important to have people on the board who are really familiar with town government,” Felix said. He said that when he learned that Sayre was the only person to take out papers for the upcoming special election, he decided to run. “Tim seems like a really nice guy, but he doesn’t have any experience serving on town boards,” said Felix.
With a background in biology from the University of Vermont, Felix said he hopes to lead the town forward in achieving its nitrogen-reduction goals through a Targeted Watershed Management Plan (TWMP) that would utilize alternative technologies to treat wastewater while minimizing the impact on taxpayers.
Felix feels he has a “fiduciary duty” to reduce the cost of municipal projects. He pointed to his work drafting a dredging mitigation plan, which he said would have allowed the town to save $4.5 million in permit fees to dredge the harbor’s south mooring field — a plan he called a “no-brainer.”
After hearing opposition arguments, the current select board rejected the mitigation plan, suggesting instead that it would go to the town in May to ask for authorization to pay the $4.5 million to get a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The town’s reliance on Proposition 2½ overrides and debt exclusions is due to a lack of foresight, Felix said. “We need to start scheduling when the town retires its bonds so we can plan future capital investments in a more systematic way,” he said. “If we understand what that schedule looks like, we can do a much better job of figuring out what the priorities are for the town and how to fund them.”
The Sept. 18 special town meeting warrant seeks $2.7 million in borrowing authorizations to hire a town planner and to begin work on a wastewater treatment facility to serve housing at Lawrence Hill, the Wellfleet Elementary School, and the police and fire stations, as well as a few surrounding properties.
Last spring, town meeting voters approved roughly $3.5 million in overrides. “I don’t think it is sustainable, and it’s what the DOR cautioned against,” Felix said, referring to a list of recommendations for better financial management the Dept. of Revenue gave the town last February.
Felix said he knows his engagement in town affairs and his pesticide business may make him seem like a controversial figure. “A lot of people know me; some people don’t like me,” he said, but “I’ve always had the town’s best interest at heart.”
