NEWBURGH, Maine — Local officials have set dates for a special town meeting, an election and for the continuation of the annual town meeting, which was halted June 22 after voters postponed action on warrant articles related to spending for lack of current audit information.
The purpose of the special town meeting, set for 7 p.m. Thursday, July 7, is to seek voters’ permission to spend money from the fund balance for municipal operations from July 1 until an annual budget is adopted.
The election for the remaining year of Leonard “Buddy” Belcher’s unexpired seat on the Board of Selectmen is set for 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Aug. 9. The deadline for filing nomination papers for the opening is July 6, according to a public notice posted on the town’s website.
Town Manager Cindy Grant and Erik Stumpfel, the town’s legal counsel and town meeting moderator, said last week that a majority of the roughly 60 residents in attendance adjourned the annual town meeting until Aug. 20, by which time they expected to have current audit information and a replacement for Belcher who resigned less than a week earlier.
Questions about the budget that a majority of voters thought an audit could answer came on the heels of the abrupt resignation of Deputy Town Clerk Gina Belcher and her husband, the former selectman. Their resignations came amid a recent negative campaign waged against them by a former selectwoman who distributed copies of documents about Gina Belcher’s conviction for theft of public money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture more than a decade ago.
Documents filed in U.S. District Court in Bangor show that Belcher pleaded guilty to embezzling $22,150 from June of 2001 through July of 2002 while employed as acting county executive director of the USDA Farm Service Agency office in Bangor. She paid restitution and a satisfaction of judgement was filed in court in September of 2008.
In a June 13 resignation letter, the Belchers alluded to what prompted them to quit.
“After the past several weeks of the hate and discontentment with several residents, the accusations, threatening phone calls and mean and hurtful phone messages, mixed with a very scary health scare this past weekend, we have decided that in the best interest of our health and family, we need to make this decision immediately,” they wrote.
While the Belchers expressed regret about leaving the town in the lurch, they said they did not want to put their family through an ordeal.
Gina Belcher had the following to say about what she considers a smear campaign aimed at her, her husband and possibly other town officials.
“It’s a witch hunt, and I don’t believe that I’m the only target,” she said last week.
“I’ve had four jobs since this happened,” she said. “It was a misdemeanor 13 years ago. I have paid my consequences dearly, and I guess what’s important to my husband and I is we are good people.”
Court documents confirmed Gina Belcher was convicted of a misdemeanor.
“I made a horrendous mistake a long time ago, and it’s taken us this long to recover and get back to a good place. If anything, our fault to the town is that we did not disclose this, but it was no longer on my record. We knew nothing like this would ever happen again. We would never put the town at risk,” she said.
“The audit will be impeccable. There is nothing that will be found,” she added later.
“Our life is more ruined now than when it happened,” she said. “I admit that I made a horrible mistake, and I’m not minimizing that, but it was 13 years ago. I’ve proven myself since that.”
Former Selectman Helen Mogan said last week that while she has no reason to believe Belcher did anything wrong while town clerk, she felt that residents had a right to know about Belcher’s background, given the town’s recent experience with Cindy Dunton, the former deputy clerk and treasurer who embezzled nearly $200,000 from the town.
Dunton pleaded guilty to Class B theft in April 2011 and months later was sentenced to five years in prison with all but 20 months suspended. She is gradually paying restitution.
The resignations were the subject of a brief statement Stumpfel read during the town meeting on June 22.
“We would also like to state that as this point in time, there is no reason nor evidence to suggest that there was any type of mishandling of funds or wrongdoing within the office,” the statement read. “We would further like to remind the population that this is a personnel matter that cannot, by law, be discussed in an open forum.”