WESTON, Vt. – On Saturday, Sept. 26, Weston voters elected two individuals to fill the vacancies on the selectboard. Duane Hart and Susan Morris will join Vice Chair Jim Linville and board members Katie Moriarity-Fitzpatrick and Brian Gehlich at the next selectboard meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 13, at 7:30 p.m.
A total of 115 votes were cast for Article 1, filling one selectboard seat for the remainder of the term ending in March 2029. Hart was chosen with a total of 64 votes. Candidate Nicole Dernier received 46 votes, and Denis Benson received one, with four spoiled votes.
Morris was elected by a vote of 54 out of 102 on Article 2, for the remainder of the term ending in March 2027. Dernier received 39 votes, Benson received five, and one vote was cast for former board member Pam Dickman, with two spoiled votes.
A resident of Weston, Hart has served as town road foreman, and was one of the complainants to present allegations of open-meeting violations by members of the selectboard and to call for their resignation.
Morris is a Weston resident, an attorney, and the current vice chair of the town’s development review board. Morris has also been vocal in her criticism of how the selectboard has been managed recently. At an Aug. 11 selectboard meeting, Morris told the board that “transparency is not optional, [but] the baseline expectation of public service.”
“Weston deserves leadership that is confident, lawful, transparent, and focused on the people it serves,” Morris stated at the time. It seems the voters of Weston wanted to give Morris a chance to help bring those goals to fruition.
One of the items Morris and Hart should expect to address as they begin their service to the Town of Weston will be to elect a board chair, as the selectboard has been without one since the summer resignation of Denis Benson. Another will be to determine the scope of the bridge design committee.