“Point of order.” Then: show us the whole list.

The objection produced a motion, the motion reached the Select Board, and Middleborough learned its town manager search had been narrowed by criteria the committee never approved.

By John Barrella | August 19, 2026

John Barrella serves on the Town Manager Search Committee and the Finance Committee, and publishes The Goat News. This column reflects his views alone.

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On July 29, in the studio at 1 South Main Street, our Town Manager Search Committee was one motion away from going behind closed doors to review resumes. I raised a point of order before that motion could carry — not because of the motion, which was routine, but because of what we were about to review.

The committee had been handed a narrowed list.

Thirty applications had become roughly eight. The narrowing was done by our consultants at Municipal Resources Inc., using criteria this committee never voted on, never debated in open session, and in some cases never saw in writing until the handout circulated the week before. My request was simple: let the seven people the town appointed to screen candidates actually see the pool they are screening from.

Let me be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying the candidates MRI advanced are unqualified — several are serious people. Buzz Stapczynski made a fair point that night about executive-level experience, and Bob Mercier was right that applicants told they were out of the running have a legitimate expectation that their names stay quiet. Those concerns are real.

But confidentiality was never the obstacle it was made out to be, and the privacy of preliminary applicants remains intact. Nobody was asking for names to be published. Chapter 30A, Section 21(a)(8) exists precisely so screening committees can review candidates without exposing them — it is the reason this committee goes into executive session in the first place. A committee that can lawfully review eight names in confidence can lawfully review thirty. The protection scales with the list.

And it matters more than it may appear, because of what this committee actually is. We do not hire the town manager. The Select Board does. Our job is to screen applicants and forward a slate of finalists, which makes the integrity of that screening the only thing we contribute. If the list we hand over has already been narrowed by criteria we never approved, the board is choosing from a filtered field and doesn’t necessarily know it. Every problem with a pre-screened list travels downstream to the people who make the appointment.

That point of order did not end in the hallway. It produced a motion — one this committee made and approved, and one town counsel subsequently reviewed and found legitimate — authorizing us to go to the Select Board and ask for the full applicant pool. When the committee reviewed those additional resumes, it found what I feared in July: there were candidates worth our consideration who had never reached us. MRI had put forward the original seven and no others.

That motion is the only reason any of this is public. It surfaced at the Select Board table, not through a leak or a rumor, and Select Board Chair Teresa Farley responded by saying plainly that the committee had not been given full information and that the process had been flawed from the start — to the point of recommending the town part ways with MRI and run the search correctly.

Sit with the counterfactual. Without that motion, the committee reviews eight names behind closed doors, forwards a slate of finalists, and no one — not the public, not the Select Board members casting the actual votes — ever learns that thirty applications became eight by criteria this committee never approved. The process wouldn’t have been caught. It would simply have been finished, and Middleborough would be hiring a town manager off a list nobody knew was incomplete.

I’d also resist any suggestion that I saw this coming on instinct alone. Before that meeting I went back to the committee’s charge, read the open meeting law provisions we’d be working under, and talked with people who have run municipal executive searches and know where they tend to go wrong. Recognizing a problem early is far less mysterious than people assume. It is mostly doing the reading and asking someone who has seen it before.

Nor is this column the committee speaking. I am one of seven members and I speak only for myself.

Residents should hear something that gets lost when a process problem makes the news: this committee is working. Chair Joe Mandile heard a point of order that night rather than gaveling it down. My colleagues pressed the consultants on criteria, qualifications, and accreditation, and asked hard questions about whether the remaining field was deep enough to produce four names worth forwarding. That is what a functioning body looks like.

Which is why I am not standing here with demands for my colleagues. We already agree this committee should be reviewing the full slate.

What matters is how we finish. Working directly with the town’s human resources office, rather than through an outside consultant, removes a middleman from a process that did not need one. It puts the full set of applications in front of the committee charged with screening them, and lets us build interviews around what this job actually demands — managing a budget under real constraints, capital planning, labor relations, and the capacity to work with a Select Board and a Finance Committee that will not always agree with you. That is what best practice looks like: a structured, criteria-driven process run by the appointed body, with the reasoning captured along the way, so that when the Select Board receives our finalists it knows exactly how they got there.

Capture it in the minutes, too. Minutes are what the next committee inherits. If the criteria used to cut thirty applicants to eight are never voted on, never recorded, and never explained, nothing stops the identical thing from happening in the next search. Practices that live only in habit stay invisible until they fail. Practices that live in the record can be corrected while there’s still time.

This is why The Goat News exists. A process objection was raised at roughly 5:35 p.m. in a room where the minutes record that no members of the public were present. Nothing about that hour was designed to reach you. It reached you anyway — and that, more than any single hiring decision, is what a town gets from writing things down.

The Select Board will make the appointment, as it should. What this committee owes them, and owes you, is a slate assembled in the open, from everyone who applied.

A note on sourcing: The minutes reproduced with this column are watermarked “draft.” The committee approved these minutes at a subsequent public meeting; the approved electronic copy has been requested from Recording Secretary Nancy Kefalis and will be substituted here when it arrives. Nothing in the draft differs materially from what the committee approved. Readers are welcome to verify both against the town’s Agenda Center — which is, after all, the argument.