FARMINGTON – Selectmen confirmed on Tuesday night the appointment of Mary Pratt to full-time patrol officer with the Police Department.

They also approved reimbursing her $5,700 tuition for the criminal justice academy, from which she recently graduated. Paying to have a hired officer go though the training would cost the town more than twice as much, according to a memo from Chief Richard Caton III. Wages and benefits alone for an officer to attend the 18-week program add up to $12,383.

Pratt has a martial arts black belt and comes with high recommendations from classmates and faculty at the academy, Caton said.

She wants to come to a small town to do community policing, Caton said of the Turner woman.

Selectmen voted to have the town’s annual report printed by Wilton Printed Products for $2,564. They considered an option to pay the printer $1,769.50 for 1,200 copies of the 108-page report with the binding saddle stitched – stapled at the edge – rather than the more expensive flat-edged perfect binding, on which a title could be printed as has been in the last several years.

People refer back to the reports, and the perfect-bound version makes it easier, board members agreed. Although the cost of the perfect-bound reports will exceed the proposed budget by $164, selectmen said the additional money could come from the board’s undesignated fund.

They voted unanimously to go with a perfect-bound report, although Stephan Bunker did not vote, having just arrived from Fire Department training.

Town Manager Richard Davis told selectmen that he learned Tuesday of a third department overdraft, of $4,600 for the Highway Department. The recycling department currently has an overdraft of $5,786, and the wages for the Fire Department exceeded the budget by $3,000 for 2004.

Revenues for the recycling department have far exceeded expenditures, so money from one account needs to be reappropriated to cover the overdraft. Davis said selectmen need not schedule a special town meeting to deal with the overdrafts; they could be added to the warrant for the annual town meeting in March, at which residents will vote on the town’s budget.

Selectmen also approved increasing the monthly travel stipend for the recreation director from $100 to $140 to be consistent with the increase in mileage rate granted other town employees at the board’s last meeting. They had increased the mileage rate to 41.5 cents per mile up from 29 cents.

“It’s only fair, I think,” Charles Murray said.

Davis also reported on a meeting with Central Maine Power representatives regarding the town’s streetlights. The town pays CMP to maintain 448 streetlights. Between December 2002 and mid-November 2004, the company replaced 99 lights and repaired 246. Fifteen more have been replaced since mid-November, he said.