BARTON — Bob Croteau wasn’t there when the Selectboard met Monday morning, but Gary Poginy had plenty to say to the absent board chair.
“I’m very upset that one of the Selectboard members of our town feels the need to target our business,” said Poginy, a resident who runs Carriage House Café and Grill with his wife, Bonnie.
The business’ liquor license was set to expire Oct. 31, and because of how the month’s meeting calendar fell, the Poginys wouldn’t have been able to apply for a new license until Nov. 5. The couple requested a special meeting to avoid lost revenue.
But according to Town Clerk Kristin Atwood, Croteau told her office he wouldn’t attend a special meeting “for businesses failing to do their jobs correctly.”
“He feels the town should deny the request for a special meeting,” Atwood wrote in an Oct. 23 email to board members and the Poginys.
That message wasn’t true, Croteau said Thursday.
“Her email put the language in my mouth,” he said. “That was not an accurate portrayal at all.”
He said he couldn’t go to the meeting because of work, and when he spoke to Atwood’s assistant, he explained he didn’t want the board to hold a meeting he couldn’t attend.
“It just very much excited, angered, frustrated a lot of people,” he said of the email, adding that he has been a supporter of the Poginys’ business.
The other board members, Doug Swanson and the recently elected Toni Eubanks, approved the license application with little discussion. But the swiftly solved situation is another example of conflict in this Orleans County town.
In August, a resident accused board members of conflicts of interest and open-meeting law violations. In September, another local business owner complained about how officials handled a bid for winter sand — the board initially accepted a late bid over one that had met the deadline.
Rifts with residents and between town officials have run through the incidents.
Croteau believes board members, past and present, have tried to make him look bad by scheduling meetings when he’s unavailable.
He said residents who raised ethics complaints want to tarnish his reputation. And he believes Atwood has used her position to do the same.
“Kristin definitely used that perch to inflame this,” he said, referring to the clerk’s email. “To send that out, it did not change the course of having the meeting and approving their licenses.”
Atwood said Thursday she did not make up the comments in her email.
“It just fits the character of what he says and the character of what he does as a board member,” she said.
In her email, Atwood also wrote that she would “hate to see a taxpayer in good standing and vital business in our community suffer over the fact that this month there are 5 Tuesdays and thus a longer than normal timeframe between meetings.”
Normally, she said Thursday, the Poginys’ application would’ve been on a regular meeting agenda before the end of the month.
At the Monday meeting, Gary Poginy said his family had made a mistake with the paperwork and apologized for it, thanking the two board members present.
He read aloud the alleged comments by Croteau and said “that stance on a business in our small community is unheard of, uncalled for.”
He described hearing about another alleged comment from Croteau — that Bonnie Poginy would “learn her lesson” by not getting paperwork in on time.
Croteau said he never said that.
When Zoning Administrator Joyce Croteau — the chair’s wife — went to visit Gary Poginy afterward to clear the air, Poginy told her to get off his property and then complained to the town clerk, according to Bob Croteau and Atwood.
Poginy did not return a call for comment Thursday.
Croteau said he has known the couple’s families for years and was dismayed that political conflicts had become personal.
He had no words, he said, for “how disappointed I am that it would come to that.”
The two board members at the Monday meeting also voted to toss some of the ethics complaints filed this year. They discarded a conflict-of-interest complaint against former board member Paul Sicard because he resigned in August.
