Mike Williams was on the Chichester select board for one year. That was long enough.

“If I had known that I’d be in this position today,” he said, “I never would have run.”

Williams resigned his position on Wednesday, days before growing tensions about the town administrator position erupted at a marathon town meeting on Saturday. As more than 160 residents filled the school gym, he sat in the back row rather than the front table and was glad for it.

“My decision to resign results from the inability to be effective at coming to decisions with reasoning, facts and evidence,” he said in an interview. “It appears to me that there’s more of a mob mentality with some agitators pushing that … and I feel it’s better for the entire town for me to step aside.”

In a more than six-hour town meeting, Chichester residents voted 87-77 to kill the executive section of the proposed budget, which would effectively fire their town administrator and administrative assistant and prevent the town from hiring replacements.

This cut will be reconsidered at another town meeting on April 5. Until then, Chichester will continue to operate as if the meeting had never happened: a newly-elected selectman will not be sworn in, and town business continues, as it has since January, under the proposed spending plan.

If the cut survives reconsideration, it means Chichester will have to carry out the functions of a town administrator — most prominently handling payroll for all town employees, including police, firefighters and teachers — without spending any money to do so. Not on checks, not on postage, not on office supplies

A few months after resigning, Town Administrator Jodi Pinard returned to her position with a significant pay increase that raised residents’ eyebrows. Frustration both with that outcome and with the non-public process leading up to it fueled the move to defund all executive functions, a $235,000 reduction.

Under the original proposal, the full executive section would have gone up 25%. Pinard’s salary would’ve gone up to $120,000 a year, a $31,000 increase. This was broadly part of a move by the select board to bring town compensation on par with neighboring communities, they said. But they did not conduct a study of executive pay themselves. They relied on information supplied by neighboring Allenstown.

“I don’t think anybody in this room, they got more than a 25% increase ever in their life,” said Dave Colbert.

It wasn’t just about the money — substantial increases to other town office positions were either included in the budget or narrowly approved by the same voters.

In this dispute of Pinard’s pay, Williams saw “an irrational hatred of one person.”

Pinard did not attend the meeting and could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Because the full executive section — not just the administrator line — had been reduced to zero, the Board of Selectmen would not be able to rearrange money to cover the gap per state law, even though Chichester uses a bottom-line budget, residents were told.

“If you zero out one of the lines, it’s called the ‘no means no’ rule,” Town Attorney Katie Cox Pelletier explained. “You cannot move money into any of these line items, or spend it for that same purpose in any other way.”

The “no means no” rule would not only apply to the town administrator position but also to its assistant, to a floating town hall position just filled a few weeks ago, and to $16,000 in postage, office supplies and payroll expenses. It also applies to contracted services, meaning they couldn’t hire out the work, either, according to Cox Pelletier.

Some didn’t see that as an issue. The town would find a way to make it work.

“What did we do before we had a town adminstrator? From what I understand, the selectmen did the work,” said Matt Stolnis, the newly-elected selectman who will be sworn in after the continued meeting. “I don’t have anything better to do than be a selectman. I’ll make sure it gets done. We’re going to pay our people… but I’m tired of this emotional argument of ‘think of the firefighters, think of the children.’ There’s ways to do this.”

Republican State Rep. Cyril Aures joined Stolnis in volunteering to step in.

“We are good to go,” Aures said. “We’ll get the job done a hell of a lot better than it’s been done, and we won’t be paying tax money.”

Many others saw that as risky, and far easier said than done.

“To insinuate that volunteers can go in and run a municipality is asinine,” said Alisa Mullen. “To think you’re just going to elect yourself as the person who's going to go and do it? Who’s going to appoint these volunteers? … Who gets to choose who goes in and has access to all of that information?”

“I’m sure Cyril is a stand-up guy, I’m sure Matt Stolnis is a stand-up guy,” said town Treasurer Andrea Deachman. “I’m not sure everybody that gets paid from this town wants two volunteers to see their social security numbers and birthdays and their addresses.”

If, for any reason, the payroll didn’t go out, the town attorney noted when asked by a resident, it would also put it at risk of lawsuits from its employees.

The two remaining selectmen, Richard Bouchard and Steve MacCleery, said they’d be open to a conversation about pay rates if voters agreed to reconsider the cut.

A reconsideration of this amended budget will happen at a 9 a.m. meeting on April 5 at the Chichester Central School. The remaining warrant articles, which were continued after the more than six hours of debate on the budget, will also be taken up.

People came into the gym Saturday knowing the meeting would be intense. And it was.

It was the first time an attorney had sat at the head table for as long as Deachman could remember. Cox Pelletier called, and then brought in, a colleague for a second opinion on multiple occasions. There was a medical emergency in the audience, widely speculated to be heat exhaustion-related. A disagreement between Deachman and Aures during the break ended with him shouting at her, and those nearby rushed to separate them.

Everyone seemed to agree that having three weeks to cool off would be a good thing. The move to do that passed by a larger margin than most other votes at the meeting, and won backing from residents who’d defended the cut all day.

Wendy Moses, though, saw a string of mistakes in how things had been going down — it wasn’t the town she knew. The issue of a specific hire and pay rate should’ve been resolved before the town meeting.

“It should have never even come to this point,” she said. She imagined her late husband, a fourth-generation town resident, looking down from above with other town elders and wondering, “Town meeting — what the hell is going on?”

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com.