SOMERSET — On Monday, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin's office announced a slate of appointments, including a new supervisor for the town of Somerset.
Jim Olivier, of Putney, has been named the official in charge of what would be municipal affairs, if Somerset were still a legal municipality. He succeeds Larry Cassidy of Dummerston.
According to the 2010 federal census, three people live in the remote former logging company town deep in the Green Mountain National Forest.
George Kuusela of Bellows Falls, who held the appointment for eight years, said that of the three people counted in the census, only one lives in Somerset year-round. “The other two are snowbirds,” he said.
“You don't have any town clerk, treasurer, secretary,” said Kuusela, a former state representative. As a result, “you do anything.”
The supervisor's primary responsibility is to propose a budget for the town's operations and to collect the taxes, most of which come from TransCanada, the power company that owns the Somerset Reservior, said Kuusela, who received 5 percent of the tax revenues plus mileage reimbursements as his sole compensation.
Three listers do assess the property values. “Sometimes the people aren't happy with the appraisal,” he said, and when that happens the supervisor also gets to mediate those disputes.
But “you mainly get phone calls from people who aren't happy with the roads,” said Kuusela, whose job also entailed contracting with the Vermont Agency of Transportation for road maintenance.
A new supervisor
Somerset hasn't been a legal town since 1937, when the Legislature voted to dissolve it. The operations of the town are proscribed by state statutes that apply to “unincorporated towns and gores.”
According to several histories, during the 1930s other towns were bristling at tiny municipalities having equal representation in the Statehouse and, as a result, Somerset and the neighboring Bennington County town of Glastenbury were disincorporated as of Jan. 1, 1938.
The act required all town records be transferred to the Windham County Clerk, and what little municipal business there is falls into the hands of a supervisor for each respective town.
Olivier said he comes into that position as someone whom “Pete Shumlin thought would be appropriate for the appointment.”
A Harvard-educated lawyer, Olivier was the founding president of Landmark College in Putney and, later, worked for 13 years as director of Putney Student Travel.
He said he has worked closely with the governor, who co-owns the travel business with his brother, Jeff Shumlin. The governor served on Landmark's board of trustees during Olivier's tenure.
As a veteran of the Putney Selectboard, where he served several terms in the 1990s, Olivier said that he knows what it takes to run a town and is familiar with the Somerset terrain from outdoors activities, like boating on the reservoir.
But as far as his new duties, he had little to say.
“I haven't done it yet,” he said.