Tierney Farago, the town administrator for Chelsea in Orange County, is new to the position and new to Vermont. So when she read about a course designed to help town managers gain key skills, she applied. 

Farago, 30, is one of 18 municipal leaders from 14 small towns in Vermont who are participating in what is being called a “boot camp” for town managers at the University of Vermont, which was announced this week in a press release.

Vermont Local Government Institute is a certificate program that started in September and ends in February, and is free to participants thanks to a $28,000 grant from the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships at UVM.

“Vermont’s towns are very small. Often our municipal leaders are working alone or they are working with a part time staff and there is a need for this kind of professional support,” said Patricia Coates, the institute’s director.

Developed in partnership with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, the Vermont Town and City Management Association and UVM Professional and Continuing Education, the course covers a broad range of topics from open meeting law to grant management. 

Many small towns have seen high turnover among local administrators and the new hires are often coming in with less municipal experience, according to Ted Brady, executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, or VLCT. Town officials are also grappling with increasingly complicated and time-intensive workloads, such as applying to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for flood recovery funds. 

Given that many town managers do not have a lot of resources and often, not much managerial experience, the formalized training can really help fill the gap, Brady said.

Winooski City Manager Jessie Baker shares an update on a downtown development project to the Winooski City Council Monday night, Nov. 4, 2019. File photo by Jacob Dawson/VTDigger

Some veteran municipal managers, including Bill Fraser, the city manager in Montpelier, and Jessie Baker, the city manager of South Burlington, are helping to teach the course, according to the release.

“I want to help newcomers to the profession feel like there are no dumb questions,” Fraser said in the release. 

The first round of participants include new and mid-career managers as well as a treasurer and a selectboard member, Farago said. 

So far she said she likes it a lot. “I feel like it’s a really broad spectrum of information, I don’t feel like it’s too specialized so it applies to a lot of different municipal positions,” she said.

Chelsea Town Administrator Tierney Farago is one of 18 municipal leaders from small towns across Vermont attending a pilot “boot camp” for town managers at the University of Vermont this fall. Photo courtesy of Gayle Durkee

Farago said she has never worked in human resources, for example, so getting insight into how to conduct interviews and hire people is going to be really useful in her position.

The course is the first of its kind offered in Vermont, aside from a two-year certified public managers program at UVM, said Abigail Friedman at VLCT’s Municipal Assistance Center that helps small member towns with various requests. Staff at VLCT came up with the idea for the boot camp and helped develop the course. Friedman said she hopes it will help prepare new leaders and improve local governance statewide.

“We got a really great cross section of the state in this first cohort,” said Maureen Hebert, director of strategic initiatives at the continuing education center, called PACE, at UVM. “The networking piece making them connected via this whole program, and then being able to share resources will be really powerful.”

The part-time program includes in-person, virtual and self-directed study with courses covering leadership, human resources, grant writing, financial management and training in diversity, equity and inclusion. It aims to enhance networking and resource sharing among municipal leaders to help them better address challenging issues that Vermont continues to wrestle with such as housing and climate change.

While the program is funded for two years, the goal is to see how it works, make changes and make it valuable enough that a town might be willing to pay for a portion of the training going forward, Brady said.