STRONG – Chairman of the Board of Selectmen Clyde Barker said Monday that he is running for re-election in March because he doesn’t want to leave the town with only one experienced selectman and because so many people have expressed their support and asked him to run again.
“The people voted for me to put me in office, and now I’m the senior selectman and they haven’t got enough people on the board that knows what’s going on,” he said.
He announced his decision Friday, explaining he “can’t leave the town the way it’s in shambles now.”
On the last weekend in January, a series of contentious meetings about whether or not the town should pay to maintain Church Hill Road ended with Selectmen Jeffrey Murphy and Jeff O’Donnell resigning and Barker and Roger Corson withdrawing their re-election papers.
Barker said Monday that since he withdrew his papers, he had gotten “a lot of calls for support from ex-selectmen, selectmen from other communities, town managers, and even higher officials” urging him to “stay on because of the job I’ve done.”
“And I haven’t done it alone,” he said.
He added that if he had not reconsidered his decision not to run, the town would have to elect four new selectmen in March, and Tonia Boyd, a relative newcomer to the board, would have been the only one with any experience serving in the position.
Corson had agreed to stay on until the March elections so there would be a quorum of three people to perform such functions as paying town bills and taking votes, Barker said.
He said he does not blame the three selectmen who quit for their decisions. “It’s been a very very hard year,” he said. “It’s a hard situation and I’ve talked to each one” of the men who decided to leave their posts. “There are good reasons why they’re not running,” or why they resigned, he added. “Health – the stress factor. I’ve begged them to stay, and they’ve had enough,” Barker said.
As for why he initially withdrew his papers, Barker said one reason, aside from health issues brought on by stress, was the fact that he has lost respect for some Strong people because of some of the issues he has dealt with recently as a selectman.
“I respect people,” he said, “and when anybody can call you names in public, and talk about things they shouldn’t be, you lose respect for people, and when you start to lose respect for people you’ve respected all your lifetime, you start thinking of (doing) other things.”
“You usually work things out, but this is a hard situation,” Barker said. “Just because you’re a selectman, you’re not God.”
“You can take just so much and you can’t take any more,” he said.
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