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TRURO — The nor’easter that struck the Outer Cape on Oct. 10 and lingered for almost three days caused massive erosion at Ballston Beach. Sand dunes and bluffs were carved away, exposing the bare clay beneath.
The new scenery is unfamiliar — almost Martian in its hues and its bizarre ridged formations cut into the clay — and some observers were alarmed by the magnitude of the changes, worried that the pace of erosion has picked up dramatically.
TRURO — Town Manager Rae Ann Palmer has announced she will retire on June 30, 2020 after five years as the town’s municipal chief.
“It’s time,” she said on Tuesday. “It’s been a great five years. I feel we’ve done a lot of great work together.”
Palmer, who lives in Eastham, told her department heads on Friday she would not seek to renew her contract, which is up in June 2020.
Creating a cohesive team that works well together has been her proudest accomplishment, she said. But it has not been easy keeping all the town jobs filled. If the current candidate for council on aging director accepts the town’s offer, it will be one of the rare times every department head chair has been occupied, Palmer said.
“It’s really hard to hire people out here,” she said.
Still, she wrote in her letter to staff, “The town is filled with dedicated public servants who are committed to their jobs and who care about the community they serve. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to lead this team, and I will truly miss the staff more than anything.”
Palmer, who worked for the city of Hartford, Conn. for 22 years, was also the assistant town manager of Wethersfield, Conn., a suburb of Hartford, for another 10 years. She accepted the job of Truro town administrator in 2014. The charter commission then changed her title to town manager, giving her supervisory power over the police and fire chiefs, formerly the domain of the select board.
Palmer, whose base pay is about $130,000 plus a housing allowance, faced one extreme challenge during her tenure.
In May 2018, she sought and was granted a harassment prevention order against former Fire Chief Brian Davis after he was overheard saying she should be shot, according to court documents. Issued by Judge Toby S. Mooney of Orleans District Court, the order expired in June of this year and Palmer declined to seek a continuance.
A harassment prevention order differs from a restraining order in that it can be taken out against a person who is not a domestic or intimate partner.
According to court documents obtained by the Independent, when the Truro police served the order on Davis, they confiscated a number of weapons and ammunition from him, and secured them at the Truro Police Dept. This week, Truro Police Chief Jamie Calise would not say how many or what types of weapons had been confiscated from Davis, or who now held possession of those firearms. Calise said he needed to ask for legal advice before releasing such details.
Court documents state that Palmer requested the harassment prevention order following threatening statements Davis allegedly made on May 8, 2018 about her as well as about Fire Chief Timothy Collins and Collins’s girlfriend. During a discussion among several people in the Truro Dept. of Public Works break room, Davis allegedly said, “Someone should shoot [Palmer] in the head.” Davis then went on to make a similar statement about Collins, and to suggest a sexual attack on Collins’s girlfriend, according to a police narrative written by Det. Steven Raneo.
Davis was in the DPW building on that day in 2018 although he had retired from the fire department in 2015. He had reached the mandatory retirement age of 65, said Chief Collins on Monday.
“As the town manager I have a responsibility to act to protect staff,” Palmer wrote in an affidavit seeking the harassment prevention order. “I fear that this anger is escalating.”
It was not the first threatening statement Davis allegedly uttered. According to her affidavit, sometime in the week of April 23, 2018, he told DPW Director Jarrod Cabral that he had put a curse on Rex Peterson, Truro’s deceased town administrator, and that Palmer “should be dead.”
Davis allegedly made similar remarks directly to Palmer in 2014 when she first became town administrator, and again in January 2018, when he stopped by her office, she wrote.
Palmer would not comment on this matter. Davis, through his attorney, Matthew Kelley of Harwich, also declined to talk.
Select board member Robert Weinstein praised Palmer’s leadership and called her a friend.
“My take is she has brought a level of professionalism that the town sorely needed,” he said.
From dealing with sharks to affordable housing, “She’s done a lot; she will be hard to replace,” he said.
Editor’s note: Because of a reporting error, the print edition of this article published on Oct. 24 erroneously stated that Rae Ann Palmer was given the power to hire the police and fire chiefs when she became town manager. She has supervisory, not hiring, authority over the two chiefs.
PROVINCETOWN — Town Planner Jeffrey Ribeiro is resigning from his job this week to become the Truro town planner next week.
The Truro position offers slightly more money, but according to Ribeiro that’s not the reason he’s moving — it’s that there are more interesting opportunities coming up in Truro. The Provincetown planner’s time is so completely consumed by the demands of permitting and development, he said, that there’s little left for the rest of his duties.
The town planner is liaison and technical adviser to the zoning board of appeals, the planning board, and the historic district commission, and in a town with as much ongoing development as Provincetown, Ribeiro said, that aspect of the job tends to box out all other work.
“The staff here in Provincetown is great — it’s not just a job for anyone here,” Ribeiro said. “People are really interested in the work they’re doing, and that doesn’t happen everywhere. We have a lot of Leslie Knopeses here,” said Ribeiro, referring to the amusingly overcommitted star of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Rec.”
“And we have great boards,” he added, “the amount of work they do, and the degree to which they care about the underlying issues — it makes it hard to leave. I’m not paying lip service here. They’re authentically great.”
But, he continued, he has little time for working on housing issues, developing the local comprehensive plan, or hearing from the public.
“I was able to do more of that kind of work at the Cape Cod Commission, where I was before, and I’ll be able to do more of that in Truro,” he said. “It’s part of the job description here, too, but there is so much permitting work coming in, and it’s got to happen first. It’s urgent. The important but not urgent stuff just hasn’t been possible.”
Ribeiro is excited about working in Truro because of both the land available and the people.
“There’s a great group of younger people in Truro who are starting to get involved in a bigger way,” he said. “A lot of them grew up there, and they’re really engaged. In fact, there’s a lot of opportunity in Truro to address problems that both towns share. Provincetown couldn’t have businesses without water from Truro, but Truro also wouldn’t be so attractive without all those restaurants nearby in Provincetown. The workforce, the communities are tied together in a lot of ways. They’re shared communities with shared problems, and there’s a lot of room to work together.”
Because of Truro’s larger lot sizes, the town could make good use of its accessory dwelling bylaw, Ribeiro said.
“There are areas that could become vibrant villages, and that’s a discussion the town is having,” he said. “The Walsh property is an almost unparalleled opportunity. I worked on something at the commission called conservation-based affordable housing. The idea is, with a large property, you don’t have to make it into all one or all the other. The Community Preservation Act sets it up so you can do some of both.”
Both Provincetown and Truro have had trouble getting their local comprehensive plan revisions off the ground. Provincetown finished its last LCP in 2000, and the rewrite that was begun in 2016 and then revived in 2018 is now “in a holding pattern,” Ribeiro said. “The Cape Cod Commission has just promulgated some new rules that make the process easier for towns to move through. There are several towns on the Cape that are struggling with this.”
Writing a local comprehensive plan involves multiple community meetings on a half-dozen major subjects, such as economic development, affordable housing, open space, community services, and historic preservation. This kind of work is catnip to an urban planner, but this is also the work that Ribeiro wasn’t able to do in Provincetown, due to the steady demands of permitting.
Asked if the position had grown too daunting for one person, Ribeiro hesitated.
“I don’t want to say that,” he said. “I will say this though: I think one amazing thing about Provincetown is the scale at which it’s willing to tackle problems. The Year-Round Rental Housing Trust is innovative, outside-the-box, and it’s going to last. On climate adaptation, I think we are way ahead. As a town, we want to do big things that other communities don’t do. We don’t always have enough people to do all of those things. People here in this office encounter that every day.”
