LISBON – In his first days as a town manager – 32 years ago in the tiny town of Monson – Curtis Lunt collected roadside garbage.

He ignored the clock. He was salaried, anyway. And he worked till his work was done.

“My motto has always been: You do whatever it takes,” said Lunt, Lisbon’s town manager for the past 15 years.

So when the quiet disagreements began over setting goals for the town, Lunt talked it over with town councilors and quietly bowed out.

Today is his last day on the job.

“We never had any public fights,” Lunt said. “We disagreed in private. Their interests didn’t agree with mine. We haven’t clicked for a while.”

No bitterness. No anger.

“I’ve been really blessed to have this job for so long,” Lunt said Tuesday, sitting behind a too-clean desk. “The town’s been really good to me.”

Today, he planned to finish cleaning out his office and say his goodbyes. An afternoon party was scheduled at Graziano’s Restaurant.

“They’ll probably roast me,” he said chuckling.

After that, nothing is certain.

He’ll take a few weeks off. He’ll spend some time with his wife, Sally. And he’ll decide whether to get back into municipal government or try something else.

“I need a break,” said Lunt, 57. “I’m not physically tired. I am burned out. I need to de-stress.”

He’s been going steady since he earned his public management degree at the University of Maine.

He went right to work as the manager in Monson.

From there, he went to Veazie and Skowhegan. He then spent a decade in Conway, N.H., before coming to Lisbon.

When he arrived, the town was reeling from the loss of manufacturing jobs.

His directive: fix it.

“It was jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said. The town was a little different. It seemed more blue collar. Annual town meetings drew hundreds of people.

Lunt went to work on the effort to fix up the Farwell Mill. And he began learning about tax increment financing plans, tax breaks meant to encourage business development.

“I’m a fix-it person, not a philosopher,” he said. He wanted programs. He got them.

In all, he helped get six TIFs passed, two for the Dingley Press. During his tenure, the town built a new elementary school and transformed the old one into a community building. He helped secure funding for a pair of paved walking trails alongside the Sabattus River.

And he fought off efforts to expand the size of town government.

“People don’t want bigger government,” he said. “They want more services. They want it to run more efficiently.”

He doesn’t mind the label: “cheap.”

“We haven’t added hardly anybody to the staff,” he said.

However, a far greater share of his time has been to make sure those people are trained in their increasingly complex jobs. Turnover in jobs has increased.

“You spend more time recruiting and hiring than we used to,” he said.

And he works to explain government to folks, some of whom are too busy to keep up with the town’s changes.

“You end up explaining things to people for a living,” he said.

That’s why the annual town meetings were ended and the council formed last year.

Those changes indirectly led to Lunt’s resignation.

The Sun Journal was unable to reach members of the council for the story. Lunt said the decision to leave was “mutual.”

“I think I stayed too long, longer than I intended,” he said quietly with characteristic bluntness.

“I’m a Yankee,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I think, whether you like it or not.”