VERGENNES — Panton Town Clerk Pam Correia will help out at Vergennes City Hall once a week, marking a return to her 1990s workplace.
Correia has been Panton’s town clerk since August 2017 after working in Bristol’s town offices for several years. In the 1990s she served as an administrative assistant to then Vergennes City Manager Mel Hawley.
In a Tuesday special city council meeting, councilors approved an intra-municipal agreement with Panton that will allow Correia, whose hours are less than full-time in Panton, to work for Vergennes every Monday, on a short-term basis.

City Manager Dan Hofman presented the board with an agreement that called for Vergennes to pay Panton $28.20 an hour for Correia’s services, an amount that includes wages and all withholding. He referred to the contract as “a temporary understanding.”
Hofman later told the Independent he was pleased with the cooperative relationship Vergennes has with Panton and other surrounding communities.

“This is a collaboration,” he said. “More municipalities should look at this kind of stuff.”
Vergennes City Hall is currently understaffed after Hofman decided not to retain the city clerk hired in January. A search is under way, and officials said they began interviewing some of the 15 candidates late last week.
Former longtime Vergennes City Clerk Joan Devine, who retired in February, is serving as an interim, but only on a part-time basis. In the meantime, Hofman told the council that with her experience Correia could help with a backlog of recording and handle general duties. At Tuesday’s special meeting the council also formally set the city’s 2020-2021 municipal tax rate at 92 cents per $100 of assessed property value, the same rate as for the 2019-2020 fiscal year.

Hofman and councilors believed they had set the rate at an earlier meeting, but realized they needed a formal motion to do so before June 30. They handled that housekeeping task on Tuesday.
“I thought it was implied we had established that (rate),” Hofman said. “But I guess we have to have it on the record.”