Meet the Candidate: Brent Putnam

This is the third in a week-long series of Q&As with the four candidates vying for two seats on the Falmouth Board of Selectmen. (Click to view previous stories on candidates and .) The town election is May 17. 

Name: Brent Putnam

Age: 40

Occupation: Computer industry

Education: Falmouth High School, Cape Cod Community College

Why are you running for selectman?

There’s still work to be done. Three years ago, I made the campaign promise for more open, accountable, fiscally responsible town government. We’ve made some significant progress, but there’s still work to be done. So I’m running again to finish the job. 

What are the major issues facing the town today? 

A lot of people, I’m sure, are going to talk about the nitrogen issue, the sewering. But really that dovetails with what I think is the biggest issue, which is finances. The federal government has less money, the state has less money, and therefore the town has less money. I think we need to become more self-sufficient. Our capital plan is nonexistent. Years ago, someone made the decision to take some of the regular maintenance items out of the budget, so where the operating budget used to have operational expenses—for example, replacing a roof and such—those sorts of items were pulled out of the budget in order to avoid overrides. That accomplished the task, obviously, but then what we saw was that every year there was an override on the ballot. And every year the people of Falmouth were being asked to vote to pay for money for new cruisers, new roofs, new things that should have been part of the operational budget. So, in fact, the town government was sort of lying to the people. We were saying ‘oh no, there’s no tax increase,’ but every year we were asking for a tax increase. We’ve got to fix that, because the last couple of years what we’ve seen is that people are saying, ‘we’ve caught on to this, and we’re not going to do this anymore.’ So we’ve got to come up with a better way of dealing with the finances; we’ve got to come up with a better plan for how we’re going to pay for the regular maintenance and infrastructure that we have. We’ve finally gotten the operating budget under control this year, for the most part. There are still some issues and concerns, but until we get the capital projects and the capital budget under control, it’s going to be an issue. 

What do you think the role of the selectman is, and what qualities and skills do you have to do the job? 

The selectman’s role is to be the executive board of the town. Our job is to provide direction and leadership through policy and recommending actions to Town Meeting. I think over the past three years I’ve proven myself to be an outside-the-box kind of thinker, an individual who’s not unwilling to ask hard questions and raise difficult issues. At the same time, I’ve been able to work with other members of the board and at Town Meeting to get things done.  

There are a lot of divisive issues in town. How would you encourage more constructive dialogue between the public and the Board of Selectmen?

I’ve tried to bring everyone to the table and under the tent, so to speak. A perfect example is that a couple weeks back, the Board invited individual proponents of some of the alternatives to sewering to come in and explain to us what they had been doing, to explain what the obstacles were, and explain what we could do in order to move forward. Two or so years ago, there was a plan presented to the town that basically said, we’re going to build a new sewer plant and put sewers everywhere, and it’s going to cost us half a billion dollars. And of course, every time someone gives you an estimate for something, you have to double it. I’m sure they do a good job of trying to do these estimates, but the reality comes out far different. So when that was presented, there was a huge backlash. If you expect to avoid any sort of divisiveness, you have to include people in the process. And my aim, at that meeting before Town Meeting, was to make sure that everyone was there who had a stake in that process, everybody who had ideas on how we could solve the problem. The problem isn’t sewage, the problem is nitrogen. The traditional idea that we take care of nitrogen with the sewers is an outdated idea that we have to think creatively about and look beyond, because the people in the town of Falmouth aren’t going to pay for that sort of thing. So there are divisive issues. How are you going to bring the Board together with the people? You do exactly that, you bring the people in, give them a voice, make sure that they understand that they’re a part of the process, make sure that they have a voice in the process, and there will be no divisiveness.

Where do you see the town in 10 years, and how will you help it get there?

That’s one of those difficult questions because it’s not so much ‘me,’ it’s ‘we.’ We all live here, we all love this place, and regardless of what I individually think the town should be, it’s going to be a collective effort. I think I’d like to see the town move forward together to make sure that all interests are represented and that all individuals are included. Is the end result going to be something that we’re all happy with? Maybe not, but that’s the nature of a participatory government. We all get a say in what happens, but ultimately there’s going to have to be a certain degree of compromise. That said, I’d like to see the town in 10 years have a more diverse economy and be more immune to the instabilities of the economy and state government. I’d like to see us be more proactive about things. There are some days when I feel like I’m just going from one fire to another. From the perspective of managing the town, that’s very difficult and not very productive. We’ve got to get ahead of the issues and start planning ahead, which can be difficult. But we at least have to have a framework in place so we have the flexibility to move more quickly when opportunities present themselves and to adjust to the issues of the economy when that happens. It’s hard to put a finger on what’s going to happen in 10 years, because the world changes so quickly. 

Where do you stand on the wind turbine issue?

From a general perspective, the town made a series of decisions. It wasn’t just a Board decision, it was a series of decisions at Town Meeting to move ahead with the bonding of the original turbine, and then to accept the grant from the Feds for the second turbine. There were a series of decisions made by multiple bodies in order to put those turbines there. Realistically, you could say it was a town decision. Obviously, there have been some concerns raised by neighbors in terms of noise and pressure sensitivity and so on. And there are some folks in this race who seem to think that we can just tear them down. Good luck with that. The second turbine was paid for by a federal grant, and if we’re not going to keep it there, the Feds are going to want their money back; there are restrictions attached to that. The first turbine was put up using a revenue bond, and if we tear that down, we’re going to have to pay that money back. There’s nothing free there. We have to address the concerns of the neighbors, and the Board started to take those steps a few months ago by turning it down. On the other side, we’ve had people come up and say, ‘why did you turn it down, you’re costing the town tens of thousands of dollars a month.’ Maybe, but at the same time we may have averted a complete shutdown; it wasn’t but a week or so after we made that decision that the town’s lawyers were in court because the neighbors around the turbines had sued the ZBA for their failure to ask for a special permit. The court denied their injunction asking to shut down the turbine entirely. All indications are that the court made that decision in part because the town was taking steps to address the concerns. If we had failed to do something, there’s a good possibility that the court could have said, ‘look, the town is not listening, they’re not doing anything, and so we will shut it down and force them to do something.’ So there’s two sides of the argument, and it’s going to be a delicate issue. We’re going to have to be cognizant of the fact that it’s a huge investment that the town has made, and there are strings attached to that investment. But on the other hand, there are the concerns of the neighbors, and we are working through finalizing the sound study. We did that study last fall, the state didn’t like it, and we’re making the necessary updates in order to meet the state’s requirements. Town staff is meeting with our consultants in order to determine what steps we can take and how we can address the concerns of the neighbors. At some point in the near future—I’m hoping in the next month or so—we’ll have enough information for the board to begin actually looking into this and making decisions. 

Regarding budgets, what do you think needs more funding, and what do you think can be cut?

It’s not so much what I think, it’s what the people think, and we’re getting to the point now that there are going to be some difficult decisions to be made. There are places where I think we can save money, but as far as what should be cut or what shouldn’t be, those are decisions that the people are going to have to make. I think as we go through the next year, the Board is going to need to have some open dialogue and some workshops to look at some of these issues regarding the capital budget and the operational budget, and to make some decisions based on public feedback as to where we should be going with the budget. There may be some programs that need to be cut, there may be opportunities for consolidation and regionalization of services. But ultimately we’re going to have to put it to the people and say, if you want X,Y and Z, you’re going to have to pay more money for that. And whatever you don’t want, we could probably take that savings and apply it to something else in the budget. But I think the Board is going to have to have an open dialogue with the people over the next year as we start to work through this, certainly with the capital budget, and helping to continue to stabilize the operating budget. 

Are there any other specific issues that you want to speak to?

For too many years, the Board behaved as through it was still under the assumption that it was the old three-member board. And I think in the past couple of years, we’ve seen a shift. The Board used to be a three-member board, and they were full-time selectmen. They managed not just policy, but also the day-to-day work of the town. We went to a five-member board, which is all part-time now, and a full-time Town Manager. Of course, in that process you give up a certain degree of control. One of my favorite quotes is from a retired general who coined the phrase, “in command but out of control,” which is where the Board of Selectmen is. We’re in command, but we’re out of the day-to-day control of the situation. I think the Board is beginning to move in that direction; we’re beginning to hand the day-to-day stuff off to the people who should be doing it—the town management and staff—and retaining the control aspect of how things are moved along. That can be difficult, because it requires trust in your Town Manager. But we’re going to be hiring a new Town Manager in the next few months, and there’s an opportunity there, literally, to start with a clean slate. We can start with a Town Manager who knows their job, and with a Board that’s finally come to grips with its job.