MONTPELIER — Bill Fraser attended his final City Council meeting as the capital’s longest-serving city manager on Wednesday night.
Fraser was voted out by the City Council in February and plans to exit the role at the end of the month. Fraser’s ousting followed a potential 24% tax increase that the city decided to prevent by cutting municipal staff, a decision he pushed back on. Councilors also cited a desire for new leadership as a reason to prematurely end Fraser’s contract.
Fraser’s exit entitled him to a severance package of almost a quarter of a million dollars after the council triggered the involuntary nonrenewal clause in his contract. Kelly Murphy, the assistant city manager, plans to take over the role until a replacement is hired.
“You’re always juggling something,” Fraser said. “We have police, fire, public works, rec, parks, finance, I’m sure I’m forgetting something. There’s just a constant information barrage and push and pull for priorities. Sorting that and keeping yourself on an even keel while facing these pressures, and criticisms.”
Fraser got involved in local government thanks to his family — his parents were both public educators and his grandfather, Emile Fraser, was a state legislator in Maine — and the Watergate scandal.
“I was in junior high during the Watergate era,” Fraser said. “We all watched the hearings on television and politics and government just kind of became a thing. So I got interested in it.”
He officially got his start in politics working an internship in the town manager’s office in Brunswick, Maine.
“You see the people that you help right in front of you,” Fraser said. “You see the results right in front of you every day as opposed to working in state or federal government where you can work on something and it’s hundreds of miles away.”
After four jobs in local government, including a stint as town manager in Ogunquit, Maine, and a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, Fraser became Montpelier’s city manager in 1995.
“One of the reasons I stayed here and my family stayed here for as long as we did is that it was a great place to live and raise a family,” Fraser said. “Also the work has just been really challenging and interesting for a small little city like this. We have ambitious goals and we have people with a lot of values and it’s really never been a dull place to work.”
One of the toughest, and most meaningful moments for Fraser was leading Montpelier through the floods that hit the capital in 2023. Fraser led the city through the flood, which put downtown Montpelier under several feet of water, and cost the city’s businesses more than $20 million in damages. Despite all the devastation, Fraser said residents “showed real resiliency” during that time, noting that 2,000 people signed up on the city’s volunteer list despite only having 8,000 residents.
“They care about the community. They care about their downtown. They care about their neighbor,” Fraser said. “There are differences of opinion about policy and about taxes and budgets and all those things, but when it comes to the health and welfare of the community and each other, people are right there, and that’s one of the great things about Montpelier.”
At the end of Wednesday’s meeting, Fraser said he was not going to miss the late nights and was looking forward to the next chapter in his life.
“I want to be retired,” he said. “I’m going to vacation, play in a band. Maybe do some part-time consulting or whatever, helping communities, but I don’t really want to work full time anymore.”
