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Date: 4/7/2022
GRANVILLE — At next week’s town election, two candidates are looking to fill a seat on the Select Board left vacant after Ted Sussmann decided not to run for a fifth consecutive term.
Scott Bergeron and Sarah Meiklejohn will be on the ballot on April 11 to fill the open seat.
Bergeron has been a Granville resident for 50 years, and has spent much of that time in the realm of public service. Bergeron became a volunteer firefighter in 1986, and an EMT in 1988. In 1999, he switched gears to become a part-time police officer, where he served for eight years and rose to the rank of sergeant. He then moved to full-time policing in Granby, Conn., where he worked for 14 years before retiring last year.
Bergeron said he would treat the Select Board position somewhat like running a household with a set budget.
“We have a lot of needs in different sections of town that we have to balance out,” said Bergeron.
One of the top needs he would like to see addressed if he gets the job is the town’s highway department, which he said is in desperate need of a new building. The current building, he said, is out of code, and he would like to see a five-year plan started before major issues begin in the building.
Bergeron said that the bug had been put in his heart to run for Select Board about six months ago, but he didn’t want to run against Sussmann because he went to school with him. When he learned Sussmann would not run, he decided to go for it.
“I think I will mirror a lot of Ted’s thought processes on how he approached subjects,” said Bergeron.
Meiklejohn has lived in Granville for more than 30 years, and has previous experience serving on town boards. She served on the regional School Committee for 15 years, nine of them as chair. She has also been a piano teacher for more than 30 years, and once worked as a paralegal in Maryland before moving to Granville.
“As a family, we believe in community service, and I had done that before with the School Committee,” said Meiklejohn. “I wanted to do it one more time to give back to the community.”
Meiklejohn and her husband John Meiklejohn worked with Braver Angels, an organization that aims to get people on opposite ends of the political spectrum to engage with each other in spite of ongoing political divisions.
“You need to listen and you need to try to think out of the box to find answers to problems that hit small towns like ours,” said Meiklejohn.
Should she win the job, Meiklejohn said she would work to open up communication and transparency between the town’s government and its residents. She said the online posting of board and committee meetings and their minutes has been inconsistent, and Town Administrator Matthew Streeter has been overworked.
“Residents often don’t know what is going on,” said Meiklejohn, “We need to take a step back and look at Granville as a whole instead of putting out fires one at a time.”
Polls will be open noon to 8 p.m. at Town Hall, 707 Main Rd., Granville. Also on the ballot are several candidates running unopposed: Richard Pearce for a one-year term as moderator; Christina Teter for the two remaining years of the town clerk’s term; Brian Falcetti for a three-year term on the Board of Assessors; Laura Bauver for a three-year term on the Planning Board; Robert Gleason for a three-year term as library trustee; and Kevin Stromgren for a three-year term as constable. A one-year unexpired term on the Planning Board is also up for election, but there are no candidates on the ballot.