Town/Schools Looking at Joint CFO Position

By Adam Swift

The town is looking to hire a Chief Financial Officer who will split duties with the municipal and school sides of the government. The Town Council and School Committee actually approved a consolidation of some school and town finance oversight in 2014, but the town has not enacted that consolidation over the past several years, according to Town Council President James Letterie. At Monday night’s School Committee meeting, Town Manager Tony Marino updated the committee on the process and timeline for hiring a CFO. “We are going into budget season again, and as the board probably knows, we are looking for a town CFO as one of the positions on the school side and on the town side,” said Marino. “Finding good finance people is getting harder and harder and there aren’t a lot of good people out there.” Marino noted that there is already a lot of collaboration between the school department and the municipal government, especially when it comes to facilities and human resources. “It just makes sense that we look for a town CFO slash school business manager,” said Marino. “It would be a dual report to (superintendent of schools) Lisa (Howard) and I. The budgets, while not combined, certainly all come from the same source of funds, so it just made a lot of sense.” Marino said the position would not replace any positions on the school or town sides, and that school business officer manager Noel Velez and assistant CFO Robert Powers would both report to the new position. While the CFO would oversee some of the big picture items, such as end of the year reports, Howard said the business office would still oversee the day to day financial concerns of the school department. “I was originally going to post this as an assistant town manager/CFO, but doing this allows us to do a couple of things,” said Marino. “This allows us to advertise a salary at a little higher rate … and it also creates more efficiencies for us.” Marino said the town is working on a final job description for the posting and is bringing in a search firm to help find candidates. He added that it is likely that the difference in salary between the original assistant town manager posting and the new hybrid position would come out of the school budget, but that the figures were negotiable. “The town has $150,000 earmarked right now, so if we advertise the position at a little higher rate, $170,000, we are thinking the schools would pick up that delta of $20,000 for this year and go from there.” Letterie said the consolidation was approved for HR, facilities, and finance in 2014, but that the finance portion has fallen off in recent years. “So now we are just reinstating something that has already been approved,” he said.