A majority -- or near majority -- on the BET would prefer not to continue to employ the current Comptroller of the town. The charter says the Comptroller serves at the pleasure of the BET and is appointed every two years, upon the commencement of board's new term.

What is at stake in this controversy is the very basic question of who runs the town: the elected officials or the career employees.

The Board has many specific grievances with the current Comptroller. The Board has publicly mentioned some of the problems, relating to specific managerial failures within the finance department. And there are the unmentioned problems, such as the appearance that the Comptroller was more part of the problem than part of the solution during the Ragland/GPD/Linck/KPMG scandals of two years ago. The BET has to be careful about what they say publicly for fear that they will be sued for tarnishing his reputation. But the fact remains that the Board needn't have any specific reason at all for declining to rehire the man.

The problem is the town's usual problem when it comes to failure to exert authority over employees. (As examples, you have basically every major town official who has left in the last 4 or 5 years!) The problem is the above-mentioned fear of lawsuits, and this is perpetuated by the town's law department which invariably advises in favor of continuing the employment (i.e. ignoring the problem) or making a huge payoff to make the employee go away happily. There are two reasons for this: The law department personnel are naturally more allied with their fellow town employees than with the taxpayers; and the law department has every reason to be super-averse to litigation. Litigation means more work for them -- though their salaries are fixed, regardless of the workload. The town would owe a big favor to the imaginative citizen who provides an across-the-board solution to this dilemma.

A sidebar tidbit that further illustrates the law department's leanings is the following: At a key upcoming meeting on the fate of the Comptroller, certain of his supporters will be out of town. The town's law department is now attempting to say that BET members may participate in meetings, including voting, by conference call. This is a reckless opening of a can of worms. Such a ruling would enable all town boards and commissions to meet only in cyberspace. Next month members of all the town's boards and commissions could each sit at home in front of their conferenced-in computers, as long as just one member were at the designated site of each public meeting. Maybe that would be a great idea (we might get super-sharp, time-constrained people to serve on these boards,) but the decision to go down this road should be well thought-out, not arrived at as part of some tactical law department maneuver to support the Comptroller.