Windham town hall offices shifting to four-day work week

By Ed Pierce

Starting June 21, Windham Town Hall employees will be shifting to a four-day work week.

Following a discussion during a Windham Town Council workshop earlier this month, Windham Town Manager Barry Tibbetts consulted department heads and other town hall staff and asked them how to best accommodate residents while creating a competitive work/life balance for employees.

Employees of the Windham Town Clerk's office will adapt 
to a new work schedule soon as Town Hall workers will be
shifting to a new four-day work schedule starting June 21.
PHOTO BY LINDA MORRELL

Tibbetts said other nearby communities have adopted four-day work week schedules and currently having a number of municipal vacancies, Windham needs to be as competitive as possible to attract and retain workers. During the previous workshop, several councilors expressed concerns about town hall offices being closed on Fridays and those seeking services having to wait until Monday for employees to be available.

“To be competitive, we need to be similar to towns around us yet be accessible for services,” Tibbetts told town council members during a meeting on Tuesday night.

According to Tibbetts, department heads told him that the greatest demand for town hall services is earlier in the day and not in the late afternoon and evening. He said many services available at town hall can also be found easily and accomplished online.

Because the town charter grants him the authority to determine operational hours for employees, Tibbetts said he’s willing to try shifting to a four-day work week for town hall staff on a six-month trial basis.

“After review of the proposed operational times, discussions with staff at multiple levels, comparisons with similar municipalities, I have made the decision to amend the operational open times for the town,” Tibbetts said.

The new hours effective June 21 will be 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays, and 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursdays, and closed on Fridays.

“This date coincides with the time-recording system for payroll. This change does not affect the total hours worked; those remain the same. I asked staff to provide what they thought were the best times for providing services to the public with a four-day work week schedule,” Tibbetts said. “The majority of the staff felt the following time, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., worked best for the public with an extended day. The town allows for numerous opportunities on-line to re-register vehicles, smaller recreational vehicles, trailers, pets, hunting & fishing licenses, recreational programming, voting registration, request vital records, and taxes.”

He said advances in technology opportunities further enhance the convenience of reaching the town hall and that if a resident cannot make the time frame of hours, a friend or relative can process a re-registration for them or they can use mail.

With the change, public entry to municipal offices on Fridays will not be available, excluding the gym at town hall, which has a separate access point.

In a memo to councilors, Tibbetts pointed out that some senior level and other staff members may work on Fridays to process necessary filings as needed, but public access to municipal offices will be closed.

“Fire, Police and Public Works currently work a variable schedule with no major impacts from this proposed four-day work week,” Tibbetts said. “There may be some union language changes to work through on existing contracts. The library currently has a six-day week and would look to maintain that schedule with modifications to hours open and closing while coordinating staff to have two consecutive days off.

Tibbetts said that the June 21 effective date for the change has been established to provide an eight-week window to let the public know about the new hours for the Windham Town Hall.

“It’ll be a bit of an educational process and it’ll take some time, but we need to move forward with this,” Tibbetts told councilors.

He says a summary report will be provided to the Town Council in six months about the effectiveness of changing the hours for operations and any next steps, along with tracking of transactions for analysis. <

Windham Center Stage Theater reopens with Edges: A Song Cycle

Cast members of Windham Center Stage Theater's production 
of Edges: A Song Cycle rehearse for their upcoming shows on
Aug. 6, 7 and 8 at Windham Town Hall.
PHOTO BY JOCELYN FRENCH

By Elizabeth Richards

The stage lights will come up at the Windham Town Hall for the first time in over a year when Windham Center Stage Theater presents Edges: A Song Cycle on Aug. 6, 7 and 8.

Edges is the first live show WCST has performed since they closed their children’s show, Pinocchio, in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  In early July, Edges ran for a weekend at the Gendron Franco Center in Lewiston. Now, WCST is bringing it home.

Pinocchio ran for one weekend before they made the difficult decision to close.

“We put everything on pause,” said Laurie Shepard, co-chair of the WCST board, who was also the director for that show.  “It was hard for the community, the kids who had worked so hard…but safety came first.”

Although they couldn’t reopen the show as they’d hoped they might, they did hold a drive-by awards ceremony where Shepard took the time to thank each child and celebrate the work that they had put in.

While closed, WCST held a virtual Winter Wonderland performance, something they’d never done before.  Shepard said there was a learning curve, and they had to really step back and change their thought process a little. 

As they open their season, they are still thinking outside the box, and trying to do whatever they can to offer great theater to the community, she said.

Because WCST performs at the Windham Town Hall, they did not have a building to sustain through the pandemic. That allowed them to concentrate on providing whatever theater experience they could during the pandemic, Shepard said. 

“We did the virtual production, and it was just about serving the community, not about ticket sales,” she said. 

Rachel Scala-Bolduc, music director for Edges, said that was one thing that WCST was really fortunate for.

“We didn’t really have to worry about maintaining our own space and not having any revenue,” she said.

“Like everybody else, we’re charting a very different way of looking at things,” Shepard said. “We’re just plugging away and excited to be back on our home base stage.”

Director Darnell Stuart said that originally, the group had talked about streaming Edges online.

“Things started changing with Covid, and we were able to change our direction and be able to put it on the stage, which has been a great, great experience for all of us,” she said. “All of us are seasoned theater people, so it was a great thing to be able to come back and do something we all love so much.”

The show is quite different from a typical WCST production said Scala, who is also one of the four-member cast. Part of the appeal was the small cast, she said.

“From the very beginning safety was our number one concern, so just the fact that it’s a small cast and it’s just singing felt very safe to us,” she said.

Her husband, Jon Bolduc, her brother, Matt Scala, and Bryanne Miller, make up the remainder of the cast. 

Scala-Bolduc said the close relationships that already existed between much of the cast also helped them feel safe performing together.

The show is unique in that it’s a song cycle, not a traditional musical.  There’s no dialogue, but instead a continuous sequence of songs, and cast members don’t play just one character throughout the show.

“Each song is a different vignette,” Scala-Bolduc said.

Scala-Bolduc said Edges is a fun show, meant for an adult audience, written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, well known for their work on Dear Evan Hansen, La La Land, and The Greatest Showman. 

Though Edges is not a well-known song cycle, she said, it’s one of the first things written by those famous writers, and the audience may hear a familiar sound in the music. 

Stuart said the show is centered around college students and the choices and decisions they have to make upon leaving school.

“It’s about commitment, love, the meaning of relationships…” she said. 

Although the show was written about coming of age, Stuart said, “When I first started listening to the music, and really delving into the lyrics, I realized that we are all at point in our lives, with coming out of Covid. We are all struggling with commitments, and identifying ourselves, and the meaning of things…the expectations of life as it has changed in the last year and a half.

“For me a big part of this production was saying we’re at a starting point again in our lives and now we’re taking this journey,” she said. “It’s just been a really incredible journey and we are so excited to be back on our little stage in Windham,” she added. “We have a wonderful theater community, and we want to get back in the game and do what we love doing the most, and that’s theater.”

The remainder of the season for WCST will include the Great American Trailer Park (also meant for more mature audiences), the children’s show, Madagascar, in March, and Steel Magnolias to end the season in the spring.

“We’re very excited to start our children’s show back up,” Shepard said. “We’re excited to get that program up and running again serving youth in not just Windham but surrounding communities.”

Tickets for Edges: A Song Cycle can be purchased on the WCST website (www.windhamtheater.org) or at the door.  Tickets are $15 for adults and $12 for seniors/students.

Friday and Saturday performances are at 7:30 p.m. The Sunday performance is at 2 p.m. <

Voters head to polls Tuesday in Windham, Raymond

Windham Deputy Town Clerk Pam Cleaves, left, and
Windham Town Clerk Linda Morrell prepare to collect
absentee ballots filed at a new secure dropbox near the
front door of the Windham Town Hall. The dropbox has
been in place since April and was installed as a
convenient way for voters to file their absentee ballots
during the COVID-19 crisis. Morrell and her staff will also
oversee Tuesday's state primary election in Windham.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE 

By Ed Pierce

Casting a ballot during an election is a right that residents of Windham and Raymond do not take for granted and voting has taken on added significance this summer thanks to COVID-19 restrictions in Maine.

With Maine’s Primary vote pushed from its original date of June 9 to Tuesday, July 14 because of coronavirus concerns, a few local positions will be decided at the ballot box and voters also will approve or reject the proposed RSU 14 budget for the coming year.

Windham Town Clerk Linda Morrell has watched many local elections come and go during her 26 years working for the town, with the last 19 spent supervising the counting of votes here.

Morrell will be back at it again on Tuesday, leading a staff of 24 workers working at the polls on Election Day.

“We’ve been doing a lot of training preparing our staff for this,” Morrell said. “We have two districts in Windham, District 24 and District 25, and with this being a primary, some workers will be assigned to work the Democrat District 24 and others the Democrat District 25, and the Republican District 24 and Republican District 25.”

All told, Windham has about 13,350 registered voters, Morrell said, but not all of them will be casting ballots at the Windham High School polling place on Election Day.

“The number of those requesting absentee ballots is up significantly because of COVID-19,” Morrell said. “In the past about a little less than a week away from an election we would typically have about 500 requests to vote absentee. As of this past Tuesday, we’ve had about 2,700 voters request absentee ballots.”

To help voters using absentee ballots submit their votes easily during the COVID-19 crisis, a secure dropbox for absentee ballots was installed outside the front doors to the Windham Town Hall in April. 

Along with the task of verifying and counting thousands of absentee ballots, Morrell and Windham Deputy Town Clerk Pam Cleaves will oversee poll workers working that day helping check in voters at Windham High School.

Morrell said that polls open there at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Poll workers are paid $12 per hour and some will work in shifts. Meals will be served to poll workers and Morrell said a few poll workers will be there the entire day from start to finish.

According to Morrell, her greatest nightmare on Election Day would be for voting machines to fail. If that happens Morrell said a repairman will be standing by to resolve any issues that occur Tuesday.

The best thing about working at the polling place on Election Day for Morrell is simple.

“You get to see a lot of people you don’t normally see otherwise,” she said. “I graduated from Windham High School in 1978 and sometimes I see people I knew in school who are there to vote.”

Morrell said preliminary election results are expected to be announced by 9 or 9 :30 p.m. Tuesday.

“We are going to try and handle this election with the utmost integrity and want all of our voters to have a great experience whether they are voting absentee or at the polls on Election Day,” she said.

Raymond Town Clerk Sue Look was busy preparing for Tuesday’s election and unavailable for comment.

On the Raymond ballot though, there are two open seats for the town’s Board of Selectmen to be filled following Tuesday’s voting.

Also on the ballot in Raymond, incumbent board members Samuel Gifford and Lawrence A. Taylor III are running for reelection unopposed for the three-year terms.

Voters in Raymond also will write-in possible candidates for two different three-year seats on the town’s Budget-Finance Committee. Incumbents serving on that board, Dana Desjardins and Crystal Rogers, did not choose to run for reelection and no other candidates filed at the deadline to run for those positions.

Incumbent Anna Keeney is seeking reelection to a three-year term on the Windham-Raymond Schools Board of Directors.

Raymond residents also will cast ballots to approve or reject the town’s proposed $5 million 2020-2021 budget, and vote to approve or reject  RSU 14’s $50.8 million proposed budget, with $10.73 million of that amount to be paid by taxpayers in Raymond.

All voting in Raymond will be conducted at the Jordan Small Middle School gymnasium, 423 Webbs Mills Road.

Like in Windham, polls in Raymond are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday.

As far as the ballot goes in Windham, voters will be asked to approve or reject RSU 14’s proposed $50.8 million budget and $626,443 for the annual Adult Education budget, with $23.15 million to be paid by Windham taxpayers.

Windham voters also will approve or reject a $2.6 million zero-interest capital bond referendum loan from the Maine Department of Education to renovate five RSU 14 schools bringing them into state health and safety compliance and funding other district facility improvements.

Windham’s polling place for residents of District 24 and District 25

Is at Windham High School at 406 Gray Road with voting scheduled between 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday.<