Select Board dissolves Fire Chief Search Committee, hopes fresh eyes will find ideal candidate

The Select Board has disbanded the Fire Chief Search Committee, one week after it completed its task to recommend three finalists to be Grafton’s first full-time fire chief — only to have its top choice, Glastonbury, Conn. Fire Chief Michael Thurz, reject the town’s job offer.

Search Committee Chair Lydia Bogar questioned why the Select Board did not go ahead with either of the remaining two finalists, Chief Robert Valentine of Groveland and Chief Jeffrey Legendre of Bolton and why the board felt it necessary to start over with a new candidate search and new committee. Her committee meets Wednesday to wrap up business, including its final meeting minutes.

Bogar also offered to make some tweaks to the job advertisement, which Select Board Chair Peter Carlson called “premature.”

“They’ve already finished their work,” said Doreen DeFazio, the Select Board representative on the search committee.. “Aside from completing their meeting minutes, there’s really not much to be done.”

Select Board member Ray Mead, himself a veteran of Grafton’s fire department, was the only dissenting vote on dissolving the committee, which takes affect on October 29.

“They are an experienced committee on the fire chief search,” Mead argued.

“Their job was to find finalists,” Carlson said. “They have completed that task. Their job was not to make sure we hired a new fire chief — that’s on us”

Grafton Fire Chief Mickey Gauthier is retiring at the end of December, bringing about a new era in the fire department — as recommended in a department study, his replacement will be a “strong” chief, able to hire and fire and lead efforts to recruit, train, and retain on-call members. Gauthier has offered to petition the state to delay his retirement further, but most of the Select Board has suggested that an interim chief might be a better alternative.

Before finding a new search committee to start anew, the Select Board wants to discuss the search’s direction with fire department officers. It was suggested last week that the job requirement (created by the Select Board) that candidates have administrative experience may have limited the pool — possibly including promising internal candidates.

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