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Manuele resignation leaves Winsted in a bad situation

After more than a year in office, Finance Director Robin Manuele submitted her resignation to the town on Wednesday, March 12.Manuele previously served as the assistant comptroller for Bristol and will be returning to the position when she officially stops working for the town on April 4.During her time as the town’s finance director, Manuele implemented many new accounting procedures, including requiring dual approval for any transfers between town bank accounts, new tax department deposit procedures and detailed revenue and expenditure procedures for all town departments.Her hard work deserves to be applauded, especially considering she had to work to clean up a more than 30-year legacy of misdeeds and crimes committed by former Finance Director Henry Centrella, who served as the first finance director for the town.However, for Manuele to leave at the beginning of the budget-creation process for fiscal year 2014-15 has put the town in a bad situation.In Winsted, the construction and approval of any proposed fiscal budget demands the knowledge and experience of a finance director who can answer tough financial questions and troubleshoot any numbers that may not add up.An interim finance director, one who may be hired in a hurry, may not have that same knowledge and experience to handle a proposed town budget, let alone a proposed Winsted town budget which is often very complicated with its line items and procedures.If Manuele was dedicated to making the town a better place, she would have resigned after the budget-making process was over, or at least given the town much more advanced notice, by at least several months, before she decided to resign.Furthermore, there has been some question to why Manuele has decided to resign. There have been some conspiracy theories spread across several Winsted-related Facebook pages, including one theory that she was not prepared for the challenges of getting the books in order after the Centrella era.However, when Town Manager Dale Martin announced Manuele’s hiring last year, Martin said that she was ready for the challenges that faced her.If Manuele truly wants to leave Winsted in a better place she would state the reasons why she resigned. Keeping quiet about anything that may or may not have happened during her tenure in Town Hall will not help to improve the town’s governmental system.In fact, keeping quiet will ensure whatever may have happened to Manuele may also eventually happen to her successor and any other future person who takes the job of the finance director.

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