A joint meeting of the Woodstock Town Selectboard and the Village Trustees that was to prominently feature a discussion of the annual performance review of municipal manager Eric Duffy on Tuesday evening was abruptly adjourned after just over five minutes after town resident and local attorney Nicholas Seldon failed to yield the floor during public comment.
Seldon is the husband of former Woodstock Police Chief Joseph Swanson, who in late April filed a $5 million civil lawsuit against Duffy, the five Village Trustees, and the selectboard over his demotion from head of the police department to patrol officer.
The trustees and selectboard had established a special rule at the outset of the meeting that all public comments would be limited to only two minutes each. Trustees vice chair Jeff Kahn told the small crowd of listeners online and in person at Woodstock Town Hall that it was due to a packed agenda for the joint meeting.
Two minutes into the joint meeting of Woodstock’s two governing bodies, Seldon took the floor to present his comments about the municipal manager’s performance. Seldon was the second speaker during the public comment portion of the meeting, following Woodstock Village resident Bob Quasman, who briefly offered an endorsement of Duffy’s performance as municipal manager.
Seldon was in the midst of talking about three unnamed women who he said quit working for the town because of management and conflicts with Duffy when town selectperson Susan Ford interrupted Seldon to tell him that his two-minute time limit for public comment had concluded.
Despite Ford’s repeated protestations, Seldon persisted in reading from prepared remarks. Apparently frustrated, Ford then stood and made a motion to adjourn the meeting on behalf of the selectboard. The trustees then followed suit on their behalf.
The Zoom stream of the joint meeting ended abruptly. The whole meeting was over after five minutes and twenty-three seconds. Kahn later told the Standard that the two governing bodies would not reconvene that evening, delaying public discussion of Duffy’s performance review for a future joint board meeting at a time and date yet to be determined.
For more on this, please see our July 10 edition of the Vermlnt Standard.
