18 December, 2015
For the last few weeks the Board of Selectmen had 2 candidates to replace the retiring Ken Clark as Hopkinton Fire Chief. The candidates were current Framingham Fire Chief, Gary Daugherty and Hopkinton Deputy Fire Chief, Stephen Slaman. Prior to Tuesdays Selectmen meeting (Dec 15th), Framingham Fire Chief Gary Daugherty dropped his candidacy for the position.
During the Selectmen meeting, John Mosher stated he would be comfortable allowing Stephen Slaman to take over the Chief position but would also be open to having Slaman start on an interim basis. Todd Cestari stated that he would rather have choices; "with an important decision like this, i'm much more comfortable with it having be a difficult decision versus a no decision, it's no reflection on Mr. Slaman, but I think we should get ourselves into a position where we make a choice from multiple candidates."
Brian Herr seemed a bit indecisive towards the topic as he was skeptical towards how another search and interview process would produce a result that is different than the current. Herr stated that he does like the idea of having choices and is a bit "wishy-washy" on the topic. John Coutinho felt that Stephen Slaman should be put in as Interim Chief and the search should be opened back up to be "absolutely sure" the right choice is made; "we owe it to the townspeople to make sure we do our best job."
John Coutinho stated that the committee did not take a position on the third candidate and since one of the two candidates dropped out, other candidates should be considered.
Selectmen Brian Herr asked to hear from the Chair of the Personnel Committee Rob Levenson who backed Deputy Chief Slaman as becoming the permanent Chief; "we made a commitment to you that any candidate we recommended would be able to do the job, we also said we weren't going to present multiple candidates just for the sake of presenting multiple candidates... we did the screening." Levenson was in disagreement with opening another search process.
In the end the Selectmen voted to allow the Town Manager to enter into negotiations with Stephen Slaman to be the Interim Chief. A new search or interview process is expected to start very soon for the permanent Chief position.
