Last month, buried within one of the Franklin County commissioners’ biweekly meetings was a discussion about roughly $30,000 in funds — a small sliver of the $11.5 million budget that the commissioners oversee.
The question at hand was whether commissioners had the authority to allocate that money, most of which was put toward their own health insurance benefits, or whether the final say went to another body, one made up of town officials from across the county.
In June, this group, the county’s budget advisory committee, had voted against the change, with some bemoaning the impact of a growing county budget on their towns. The county’s commission board — which recently grew from three to five members — continued to pay out the benefit stipends to commissioners anyway, and requested an opinion from the county’s lawyer about the committee’s decision and whether funds could be shifted to cover their stipends.
The lawyer’s answer, released at the September meeting, was no: attorney Gene Libby said that transferring funds to restore the health insurance stipends was “inconsistent with the Legislature’s intent in establishing the Budget Committee, as well as the plain language of the statute.”
Effectively, Libby told commissioners that the committee’s cut was legal and that commissioners could not transfer money from another department or contingent funding to cover the cut.
Commissioners, who hold near total authority over county policy and staff compensation, were concerned about the opinion and what it said about the budget advisory committee’s role in county governance.
“They are, in my view, an advisory committee, not a legislative committee,” Commissioner Tom Skolfield of Weld said. “And that’s what they’ve turned into, is a legislative committee. And we find ourselves in a bind because of it.”
The Franklin County Budget Advisory Committee was enacted by legislation in 1991. The first version of the bill did two things: it shifted responsibility for final approval of the budget from the Legislature to the commissioners; and it created the budget committee — initially a purely advisory board made up of municipal officials. A couple of weeks later, the law was amended, adding four lines that had been copied from Aroostook County.
Those four lines have governed how budgets are set in Franklin County ever since.
The system works like this: commissioners submit an itemized budget to the committee at least 60 days before June 30, the end of the fiscal year. The committee, which consists of 11 municipal officers from the county’s five commissioner districts who are elected by fellow town officials, “may increase, decrease or alter the estimated budget.” The committee then holds a public hearing and adopts the final budget.
Commissioners can change that final budget if three out of five members vote in favor of doing so. If that happens, it then returns to the committee, which may only reject the changes by a two-thirds vote.
“Those actions are final and not subject to further action by either the county commissioners or the advisory committee,” the section concludes.
During previous disagreements, the committee typically hasn’t had enough votes to reach the required two-thirds majority. Even when they have — such as in 2020, when the committee opposed cuts for outside agencies — commissioners have either refused to release the contested funding or otherwise circumvented the difference.
Per the county lawyer’s opinion, that may not be possible this time.
‘A disparate set of discontents’
The budget committee cut roughly $87,000 out of the original budget proposed by the commissioners earlier this year. This included the around $6,000 health insurance stipends that the commissioners were set to receive along with their $12,000 paycheck, as well as $6,000 that was supporting a part-time position and $700 that had been budgeted to record forums on the Sandy River watershed.
The other cuts were absorbed by the county, in part by shifting the part-time position to be covered by a budget for the Unorganized Territory.
Richard Morton, the vice chair of the Farmington select board and a member of the budget committee, said that the eight committee members who voted for the cuts did so for different reasons: some felt that budget was too high overall, and others thought that the board’s expansion should have resulted in smaller salaries for each commissioner.
One element of the proposed budget that seemed to galvanize the committee was a new salary structure for non-union employees, which multiple committee members said they couldn’t understand.
“It really was a disparate set of discontents that generated those eight votes,” Morton said.
He noted that he personally thought commissioners should receive the health insurance stipend, like other elected officials do, but he voted for the cuts because he thinks the county government is overstaffed.
“My view was that the staff had increased significantly and they’re claiming they can’t do the work that’s necessary but I don’t find that credible,” Morton said. “I felt they could shoulder the load among themselves.”
Commissioner Bob Carlton of Freeman Township, who serves as the board’s chair, said he thought the committee had an agenda when they cut the county’s budget.
“They wanted to cut one department: Commissioners’ Office,” he said. “They didn’t cut it a little bit — they gutted it.”
Carlton said the county’s administration is essential to sustain millions of dollars in grants, including a federal program that supports substance abuse recovery programs. Reducing recidivism at the Franklin County Detention Center, Carlton argued, would make far more of a difference to the budget than anything the committee had cut.
Carlton did say that commissioners could have done a better job defending some aspects of the budget, such as the new salary structure for non-union employees, which was designed to keep their pay equitable with the union employees. But county staff had worked hard to provide information that the committee requested, he said.
“I can understand their frustration. I can,” Carlton said. “But they didn’t ask good questions.”
‘We don’t do a very good job of telling people what we do’
The health insurance stipend amounts to 35 percent of the benefit that a full-time county employee would receive and, per the county’s personnel policy, awarded to the five commissioners and the treasurer. That means a Franklin County commissioner makes more than $18,000 a year, in salary and benefits.
Commissioner Tom Saviello of Wilton said he has been refusing the stipend since the start of the current fiscal year because he was “honoring the budget process,” and he hoped the other commissioners would consider doing the same.
Saviello noted that unlike a municipal budget, where executive and legislative functions are divided between the select board and voters at the town meeting, the commissioners only had the budget committee to provide the check on their fiscal decisions.
Commissioner Jeff Gilbert of Jay said that the budget committee had “advisory” in its name and that it was up to commissioners to serve as the executive branch of the county government. He saw the benefit stipends as one way to get younger people onto the board of commissioners. Gilbert estimated that he spent up to 20 hours a week on county business, making it a difficult position for many to fill at $12,000 per year.
Commissioner Fen Fowler of Farmington said he had been frustrated with the “rather unfortunate” reductions to commissioner benefits, and said he felt the committee’s cuts were largely a reaction to the salary increases for non-union staff. The explanations for those increases could have been better articulated to the committee, Fowler said.
“Sometimes the democratic process doesn’t give you what you want, but that is the process,” Fowler said, noting that he thought the budget process was improving.
“The questions they were asking were very good,” Fowler said. “I learned a lot sitting in the audience.”
He said that while he is taking the benefit money while the legalities are being discussed, as are most of the commissioners, he was not opposed to returning it if the opinion was that the committee cut was final.
While agreeing at the September meeting that the commissioners needed to follow the law, Skolfield disagreed with the committee’s cut, along with Fowler, Gilbert and Carlton.
“I don’t think the advisory committee should have the power to set compensation,” Skolfield wrote in an email. “We will proceed within the budget that we have been allotted.”
Carlton said that he worked 15 to 20 hours per week on county business, counting meetings, phone calls and travel time, particularly in his large, sparsely populated district, and he didn’t believe that commissioners were overpaid.
“We don’t do a very good job of telling people what we do,” he said.
‘I don’t want this to be an adversarial process’
At the September meeting, commissioners asked the county’s legislative delegation to request a ruling from the attorney general’s office on the question of who has the final say on the county budget.
There’s more at stake than commissioner stipends. County officials are concerned that the legal opinion could impact their flexibility to react to new challenges or opportunities that come up throughout the year.
County Administrator Amy Bernard said that she is most concerned about potentially not having the ability to move funds within each department budget, which she said could complicate expenditures that can’t be predicted during the budget process, such as paying for hearings for employees facing disciplinary action.
The chair of the budget committee, Tiffany Maiuri of the Wilton Board of Selectpersons, said that in the long run, she expects the ruling will be a positive development for the county.
“We’ve only ever operated on four lines of statute all of these years,” she said. “I fully support getting some clarity.”
Beyond the legal clarification, Maiuri said that she would like to see a more collaborative process between the committee and the commissioners.
“I don’t want this to be an adversarial process,” she said. “I want it to be collaborative. I really believe [the committee and commissioners] want the same thing: the betterment of the citizens of Franklin County.”
Franklin County is one of several in Maine that does not have a charter. Maiuri believes it would be useful to develop one and outline what processes the government should use to determine things like salary raises, expectations and evaluations, training and certification requirements.
In effect, she said, she’d like to see the county run a little more like a municipal government.
“This would be a great thing not only to have the checks and balances, but to have the citizens more involved,” Maiuri said.
Carlton, meanwhile, is concerned the budget debate is a distraction from the work the county is doing on opioid abuse, flood prevention and the potential impact of the Coburn Gore border station on Route 27, and that it will limit the commissioners’ ability to do their jobs.
“What are we here for?” he asked the board at the September meeting. “People elected us to do this and now we’re being legislated into a corner where we can’t do anything.”
Morton said that it was unlikely what he termed a “runaway budget committee” would effectively seize control of the county from commissioners.
“There were eleven conscientious people all trying to figure out a way to impact the budget in a positive way and not interfere with the commissioners doing their job of running the county,” Morton said. “I want the county to operate at the highest level possible that we can afford.”
Correction: Richard Morton’s quote should have stated there were 11 conscientious people, not 11 contentious people.
