This agenda initially flew under my radar. Tonight, the Select Board is scheduled to interview three candidates for Southborough’s Fire Chief.
The interviews will be held at the Public Safety Building, in the training room, at 32 Cordaville Road.
No hybrid option is listed for watching the meeting remotely. However, it is an open meeting, which means the public is allowed to attend.
(The interviews will be followed by an Executive Session, which is closed to the public. The listed topic for that discussion is negotiation of the Fire Union contract.)
The decision to possibly hire one of the applicants is scheduled for Monday morning, April 8th at 8:00 am. That meeting will be hybrid (at the Town House and over zoom.)
The board is seeking to fill the position vacated when Chief Steven Achilles retired on February 7th. Since then, Boxborough’s former Chief, Paul Fillebrown, has been filling is as an interim chief.
Tonight’s scheduled interview times and names are listed as:
6:00 PM – Brian Harrington
7:00 PM – Laurent McDonald
8:00 PM – Andrew Puntini
As of yet, no resumes are posted, so I can’t verify the candidates background. (I have theories based on Google searches, but not verifiable yet.) I can confirm that none of the names overlap with current personnel listed in Southborough’s department.
I reached out to the Town Administrator to ask if resumes will be posted before the meeting. If they are, I will update this post.
Updated (4/5/24 8:47 am): Yesterday afternooon (prior to the meeting), Select Board Chair Andrew Dennington emailed me to explain why the board was holding an in-person only meeting and not posting resumes. (Unfortunately, I didn’t see the message until this morning.)
The in-person only meeting, was set to be recorded, just not streamed live. He explained that was “to avoid any potential risk of someone attending online and then informing candidates in real-time of the questions that are asked.” The video isn’t yet posted, but will be to the Town’s YouTube page. He noted, “We followed a similar procedure with the first round of DPW Superintendent interviews about a year ago.”
As for the resumes, those aren’t posted “out of respect and consideration of the candidates who ultimately will not be chosen”. However, he confirmed the identities of the candidates:
- Brian Harrington is a Deputy Chief in Hudson
- Laurent McDonald is the current Fire Chief in Oxford
- Andrew Puntini is a Captain/Shift Commander in Foxborough and on-call firefighter in Ashland
