By Bill Yacavoni
Editor's Note: Bill Yacavoni is the former longtime auditor for the town of Duxbury. He circulated this letter via email to Duxbury voters in advance of Town Meeting this week.
I have read the recent articles in the papers regarding the town of Duxbury. I attempted to help you people out both in May and July of last year and spent in excess of $10,000 in time and out-of-pocket costs in doing so. Someone in your town needs to put an end to this management.
Are you actually going to sit back and let this group continue to pull your town apart both financially and from an operations standpoint? Your select board does whatever they want, usually without knowledge of the situation, and then when it goes wrong, they blame everyone but themselves.
The personal vendetta by the select board against the town clerk has cost the town way more in legal fees than the amount they want him to repay. Oh, by the way, do you taxpayers understand the select board approved 26 payroll warrants each year? Those payroll warrants showed the clerk's gross pay and withholdings, including the amount he was withholding for health insurance. Possibly if they spent a little more time reviewing warrants and less time writing articles to newspapers, this might have been dealt with much earlier.
If you taxpayers allow this situation to continue, you will only have yourselves to blame. Remember, you taxpayers authorized this board to borrow in excess of $300,000 they did not need to borrow. They said it was to build back up the town's surplus – is that even legal? Enjoy your property tax bills when you get them – it could be a shocker. That is unless the select board uses some of the surplus from the money they never needed to borrow to offset taxes.
As a final note, I audited the town for many years for a fee of about $2,500 annually. When I was removed as auditor, as part of the 2013 select board blame game, your new auditor Bonnie Batchelder submitted a quote of $3,000. That was a fair price as the audit takes about four days. Somehow she said records were so bad, she needed $12,000 to do the 2013 audit and $24,000 more to "review"' my last two years' worth of audits. Since none of my numbers were changed from those two years, I assume she found no issues with those audited numbers. That was money well spent, wasn't it?
Now since Batchelder has been in there all of 2014 with the select board's hand-picked treasurer, the financial records must be in "tip top" shape. I assume Batchelder's audit contract would reflect that and she would have returned to her audit price of $3,000 – it might be worth asking at Town Meeting. Lots of wasted money they could have used to fix up those dirt roads. I don't envy taxpayers in your town.
Good luck tomorrow, and don't be bullied. After working with some of you and the select board, I can honestly tell you, there are many of you that could do a better job running this town than the present group and do things in the best interest of the taxpayers.
