ISLE AU HAUT, Maine — Swordfishing boat captain and author Linda Greenlaw, perhaps Isle au Haut’s best-known resident, became famous after she made it through the 1991 “Perfect Storm” unscathed.
But figuring out what was going on Friday morning as islanders held their 2015 annual town meeting nearly a year to the day after it originally was supposed to take place was almost beyond the intrepid fisherman.
“I’m confused,” she said during a break in the action. “I came to this meeting not really understanding — we’re voting on last year?”
Greenlaw wasn’t the only one at the town meeting who struggled with how to proceed. Other residents of the small island community, which last held an annual town meeting and municipal elections in March 2014, slowly felt their way through a meeting that many believe to be unprecedented. If other Maine communities with a town meeting form of government have ever gone a year without a meeting or without collecting property taxes from residents, the Isle au Haut townsfolk who filled nearly every seat in Revere Memorial Hall couldn’t name them.
With an estimated year-round population of about 40 people, 38 full- and part-time islanders came out to the meeting. Some arrived from the mainland, getting to the ferry in Stonington despite ice-slicked roads that caused a spate of accidents around the state. Some came even though they are not official residents and could not vote, such as Rudy Graf, who lives part of the year in Newcastle and part on Isle au Haut.
“We hope this is the bottom and the community is going up from here,” he said before the meeting began.
The sentiment was seconded by Kendra Chubbuck, a year-round resident.
“I think this town meeting will bring forgiveness,” she said before it started. “I think it’s important we resolve everything.”
Islanders in the hall cast ballots to elect municipal officials for 2015, but not without some hiccups. After quickly electing a moderator, attendees spent more than two hours debating how to tackle the next articles on the warrant, which asked them to choose a town clerk, three selectmen and other officials for “the ensuing year,” but which really meant for 2015.
“We need to know how to accept where we are, which is an extraordinary situation,” moderator Ted Hoskins said. “We need to know how to work it so we can move ahead.”
In a normal year, the town’s municipal books close on Jan. 31, the budget is set at the March town meeting and the property tax bills are mailed in July. None of those things happened in 2015. Residents and town officials have said that First Selectman Landon DeWitt and former town treasurer Kirsten Barter, his fiancee, got behind in bookkeeping — very behind. That delayed the audit, and without audited books, the meeting could not happen, residents said.
“They did a terrible job,” resident Peggi Stevens said.
Barter resigned last summer, but it took many more months before town officials got together the paperwork that certified public accountant James Wadman of Ellsworth needed before he could finish auditing the books for the fiscal year that ended on Jan. 31, 2015. Finally, they did, and the 2014 annual reports were published and distributed a few days before Friday’s meeting began.
“Are the books caught up for 2015 so we can move fairly expeditiously into the 2016 meeting?” resident Bill Stevens asked.
Town officials told him that the 2015 annual town meeting needed to happen before the town could close the books on the fiscal year that just ended on Jan. 31, 2016.
“We have to have this one to get to the next one,” Second Selectman Danny MacDonald said.
Many attendees at the meeting expressed frustration as well as confusion, with some adding that even with the 2014 annual report done, they still do not know exactly how the town stayed financially afloat in the last year. Some property owners have voluntarily paid part or all of the 2015 taxes they estimated they would owe, but that sum was not nearly enough to cover the town’s obligations. Islander Matthew Skolnikoff said it would have been better if the selectmen had made the 2015 books accessible to the residents.
“I really feel they’ve done a disservice to us,” he said. “In theory, we’re supposed to be retroactively raising money for what we spent last year. But I’m not sure how we can raise money when we don’t know how much we have spent, how much we owe or how much interest has accrued.”
Skolnikoff speculated that the town may have used designated road funds from the Maine Department of Transportation and even donations given to the Isle au Haut lighthouse in order to pay for other municipal needs in 2015, which he referred to as the “mystery year.”
“As taxpayers and as residents, we need to know how the money was spent,” he said to the selectmen. “You have spent money all year. You know how you have spent the money but none of the rest of us do.”
DeWitt, who was elected to a one-year term as first selectman in 2014, said that the town is going to be OK, financially.
“We never raised money last year, and a lot of accounts are in the red,” he said. “But they’ll be replenished when we raise money.”
Many residents wondered if the town had to retroactively elect the people who actually ran the government in 2015 at their 2015 annual town meeting, or if they could elect new people and have a fresh start. At times it seemed that the town might never find a satisfactory answer to that question, after some people at the meeting began to point fingers of blame at others and the discussion grew heated.
“If this becomes a court to find out who did what wrong, we could be here much longer than just today,” Hoskins, the moderator, said. “We can also say as a town, we’ve got to move ahead and beyond this very difficult point.”
Ultimately, residents decided to stop debating and blaming and start voting.
“I think we need to move on,” Chubbuck said. “We’ve got to forgive. Let’s call the question, grow up and move on. We’ve been at this more than two hours. It’s time. We’re busy people.”
Islanders decided that they would vote for a new slate of town officials to serve out their terms until the 2016 annual town meeting, which they also voted to hold on the last Monday in April. Even if the audit of the budget and the town report aren’t finished by then, residents still will meet to elect their 2016 officials.
Until then, there will still be some new faces, including Karen Teague, who was unanimously elected to be the new 2015 town clerk and treasurer.
“Everything has been pen and paper with the treasurer until now,” Teague, who has worked as a paralegal, said in a break after the vote. “I’m hoping to move us forward to the new generation of computers, get us into QuickBooks or something. I will have a learning curve — I hope people will be patient.”
Residents chose John DeWitt, Landon’s father and the outgoing third selectmen, to be the 2015 first selectmen. He received 16 votes to 13 cast for Skolnikoff. They decided to keep MacDonald as second selectman and chose Peggi Stevens to be third selectman.
After islanders broke for lunch, they tackled the rest of the 79 articles on the 2015 warrant, appropriating sums they estimated were pretty close to what the town actually spent last year on things like education, solid waste disposal and roads and bridges. The afternoon session went much more smoothly than the morning session had gone, with less discussion and fewer raised voices, although there was some debate over when to send out the 2015 tax bills. It is likely that residents will receive both the 2015 and the 2016 tax bills this year.
“There is something you have here on this island that is exceptional,” Hoskins told islanders afterward. “You have been so willing to listen to each other and to move on. That is what allows a community to work. As we move through this next year, it’s not going to be easy, but life on an island is never easy.”