The three candidates for a Boscawen Select Board seat – incumbent Lorrie Carey and challengers Loren Martin and Jay Westgate – sparred over how to fund capital projects, the hours town offices should be open, a potential conflict of interest, and several other topics during a candidate forum this week.

Carey, 61, is seeking her fourth term overall, and third consecutive, on the three-member select board. She currently serves as the board chair.

Martin, 54, previously served as one of Boscawen’s representatives to the Merrimack Valley School Board, before resigning in January. She ran unsuccessfully for the select board in 2023. 

Westgate, 43, has never run for elected office or served on a committee before.

The select board election will be the only contested race on Boscawen residents’ ballots when they head to the polls on Tuesday, March 11.

Members of the select board serve staggered three-year terms.

The candidates

Lorrie Carey

Carey has lived in Boscawen on and off throughout her life and has served on the select board continuously since 2019. She ran the family business – Marshall’s Flowers and Gifts – for 32 years before it closed at the end of 2023. Carey is now “mostly retired,” and she considers public service her “life’s work.” In addition to serving three terms on the select board, she served 18 years on the Merrimack Valley School Board.

Loren Martin

Martin has lived in Boscawen since 2019. She chairs Boscawen’s planning board and building task force and served almost two years of a three-year term on Merrimack Valley’s school board prior to her resignation.

Martin cited “personal reasons” at the time to explain her decision to resign, but she said in an interview this week that mounting frustration with her fellow board members contributed.

“The SAU appears to be running things, not the school board,” she said.

Martin serves as the director of assessing operations at the Chichester-based municipal services company Avitar Associates, where she has worked since 2003.

Jay Westgate

Westgate has lived in Boscawen his whole life. He is self-employed as a landscaper and devotes his free time to cleaning up the town’s streets. Westgate previously volunteered at Boscawen’s fire department.

On the issues

Priorities

Carey said her top priority is to complete the revitalization of Commercial Street, which she has helped spearhead. She also said she wants to “do more economic development” in order to replace the businesses that have recently closed in town.

“Let’s bring some business into this community to help us with our tax base and help provide jobs in our community so people don’t have to travel to Manchester, to Nashua, to Massachusetts to work,” she said.

Martin said her top priority is teamwork. She would also prioritize effective management, accountability, and transparency.

“There shouldn’t be behind doors discussions on 90% of town business,” she said, referring to the non-public sessions the board holds. “It should be before the taxpayers.”

Westgate said he would prioritize getting along with people and balancing the budget.

“At the end of three years, I would say as long as the town is still running and the earth is still turning, I must have did alright I guess,” he said.

 

Funding capital projects

Martin criticized the board’s practice of saving for multiple long-term expenses simultaneously rather than prioritizing one or a few at a time.

“I feel like it’s a million moving parts putting small pieces in and never really getting anywhere,” she said. “…Putting $20,000 here, and $5,000 there, $80[,000] here is getting us nowhere near where we need to be.”

Westgate largely concurred, though he said he supported capital projects like police cruisers. 

The current funding practices, he said, never get “to the amount you’ll ever need” to make large purchases, such as a new fire truck.

Carey defended saving incrementally and said not having done so previously has gotten the town into a tricky position with several capital projects looming.

“We kicked the can down the road and here we are,” Carey said. “We didn’t put the money aside, we didn’t save for the rainy day, and it’s raining like cats and dogs right now.”

 

Town office hours

Many town offices are not open to the public on Fridays and some residents are frustrated about that.

Westgate said all offices should be open five days per week.

Carey said certain staffing limitations make having the offices open five days a week a challenge. She said there are ongoing discussions in some offices to expand the hours currently offered.

Martin said she disagreed with the approach of letting office leaders choose when to be open.

“As a board, you are the boss for the staff and you dictate what the town hours are,” she said. “For full-time staff that are paid for full-time, I think the office should be open Monday through Friday.”

 

A potential conflict

Martin is an executive of Avitar, the firm Boscawen contracts to conduct its assessing. She said she would recuse herself from any discussions of that contract and would not complete any assessing work in Boscawen herself.

“There’s no direct result of me getting compensated for something specific with the town,” she said. “I still get compensated whether our company works in Boscawen or not.”

Westgate said in an interview following the candidate forum that he did not believe Martin had a conflict of interest due to her employment.

Carey said in an interview that she believed Martin would be able to “successfully navigate” the situation. However, she said she believed Martin would need to recuse herself from all discussions of assessment and abatement that the board undertakes to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, rather than the more narrow category of discussions that concern her company.

Martin said in an interview that Carey’s proposed scope was “far out there” and she disagreed with it.

“If a staff member of Avitar makes a recommendation on abatement, I’m probably the most knowledgeable on that,” Martin said. “And as long as there’s no direct impact on me personally, why would I recuse myself on that?”

 

Other topics

The two-hour forum also included questions about conservation land, favorite ice cream flavors at Richardson’s Farm (Carey loves butter crunch while Martin and Westgate said they were partial to Oreo), the potential for a marijuana dispensary, and more.

The forum can be watched on Youtube.

 

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.