Meetings are held remotely. From wellfleet-ma.gov, hover over a date on the calendar on the right of the screen and click on the meeting you’re interested in to learn how to view and take part remotely.
Thursday, May 20
- Rights of Public Access Committee, 9 a.m.
- Local Housing Partnership, 4 p.m.
- Select Board, 6 p.m.
- Shellfish Advisory Board, 6:30 p.m.
Tuesday, May 25
- Select Board, 6 p.m.
Thursday, May 27
- Zoning Board of Appeals, 7 p.m.
Conversation Starters
Books of Genesis
Wellfleet’s town finances are, by all accounts, a mess. But facing the select board on May 17, less than one week into his new position as interim town administrator, Charles Sumner told the board and the audience that he’d hatched “the genesis of a plan” to fix things.
An accounting contractor who’d cut ties with the town was coming back on board, Sumner said. And at the select board’s May 19 meeting, he said, he would present “another retired finance officer from a Cape Cod community — I’ll leave it at that,” whom, Sumner said, had been recommended by several people he and former town administrator Harry Terkanian “know and trust.”
It remains unclear how the town would pay for two new hands on deck. They might split the salary allocated in former Town Accountant Heather Michaud’s section of the budget, Sumner said. But if both candidates do agree to take on work for Wellfleet, Sumner said they’d work as a tag-team to think about the town’s future and correct the issues in its past.
“We would have one person look back at transactions, at activity, correct mistakes, errors, omissions that were made,” he said. “And we’d have the other party going from today forward, creating a chart of accounts and accounting processes and procedures that we would want for the new fiscal year.”
It will “take several months to work our way through this,” Sumner said. His was a rosier prediction than Michaud’s, who said before her departure that fixing the town’s muddled finances would likely take two to three years.
The long-awaited report from the auditing team investigating Wellfleet’s finances will come before the select board on May 25, Sumner said. —Josephine de La Bruyère