By Brett Yates
At the Pittsfield Select Board’s May 19 meeting, chair Ann Kuendig announced the upcoming formation of a new regional body composed of representatives from the five Route 100 towns of the Quintown Valley. The area stretches along the upper White River from Granville to Pittsfield, with Hancock, Rochester, and Stockbridge in between.
According to Kuendig, the chairs of the five select boards already meet informally once a month. But after a consultation with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns (VLCT), they realized that, in order to conduct inter-municipal business, they would have to follow the state’s open meeting law.
“So now we’re going to put an agenda together and formalize this,” Kuendig said.
The forthcoming body doesn’t yet have an official name.
“One of the main reasons that we’re meeting is to see what regional approaches we can take to issues that every individual town has to deal with, and one of them is town office vacancies,” Kuendig explained.
In Vermont’s municipal governments, elected officers must be town residents, but that’s not always true for appointed positions, whose requirements vary. Therefore, one person could, for instance, serve as the road commissioner in several different towns. Pittsfield currently has two vacancies on its Planning & Zoning Commission, which, per VLCT, non-residents could fill.
