A steady presence for 25 years, Montville Town Clerk Lisa Terry retires
Montville — Nearly 15 years ago, two cats got trapped inside the soda machine in Montville’s Town Hall.
Town employees, bureaucrats normally charged with the quiet business of keeping taxes in order and municipal government running, leapt into action: the machine was unplugged, signs went up in the lunchroom, the animal control officer was called, a can of Friskies was placed out as bait.
Lisa Terry barely remembers it. That’s what happens when you’ve been the town clerk in the same place for 25 years — even the most outrageous moments can blend together with the rest.
“It’s almost as bad as the bat we just had over there,” she said, offhandedly. A bat had flown into the registrars of voters’ office a few weeks earlier. Terry first had thought she was seeing a floater in her eye. Just another day.
Terry, who retired Dec. 22, prides herself on running the town clerk’s office for two decades with little fanfare, her only goal to keep the gears turning and make town residents’ visits to that office as pleasant as possible.
Yes, she was behind the scenes for years of historic votes, policy changes and economic development that have changed the face of Montville.
And yes, she’s had her opinions about all of it, and sometimes keeping those opinions in her head has not been an option.
“I’m kind of opinionated, and outspoken, so no, I haven’t done that. I have certainly offered my advice when asked,” Terry said.
“And I’m asked,” she added. “That’s the problem.”
Terry was hired to work part-time in Montville’s payroll department in 1990, leaving a job at New England Savings Bank. She later also worked in the assessor’s office and served as Town Treasurer, during the years that Montville’s Town Hall was run out of a small building down the hill toward Route 32 from the current town hall.
“Those were good times back then,” she said. “We were small. There was a lot of camaraderie.”
Margaret Skinner was Montville’s Town Clerk, then.
“She saw something in me,” Terry said. “I think she thought I possessed the qualities it took to be a town clerk, and asked me if I was interested.”
Terry was interested, but she also wanted to be sure. She volunteered in the Town Clerk’s office in Colchester one night a week for almost a year — never telling her colleagues in Montville — and decided it was the job for her.
“I liked how diverse it was. I loved the customers coming in — it was something different every night.
She was sworn in as Montville’s Town Clerk on Sept. 26, 1997.
Terry and Assistant Town Clerk Melinda Roberts, who was at her side for 19 years, were a steady presence in the Town Hall, there to issue marriage licenses and pet licenses and help people search through town records.
“I think Melinda and I, in 19 years, closed the office for maybe half a day,” Terry said.
She said she has liked being at the center of the town, meeting everyone and helping move people through necessary but sometimes frustrating town processes.
“You know the people, you read the minutes, you talk to so many people,” she said. “We’re such a hub.”
Helping prepare people to serve on the volunteer commissions and boards that govern everything from police salaries to water testing, she said, has been especially fulfilling.
“I liked to help people be successful,” she said. “These people — they’re just residents of the town, they don’t know Robert’s Rules, they don’t know parliamentary procedure. Agendas? Minutes? are you kidding?”
Along with keeping up with changes approved by the state legislature, Terry said the job has changed as more of the functions of the town clerk’s office have gone online.
“I think that town clerks should expand their jobs — our customer base is very slow,” she said. “All of our records are online now, so there’s almost no reason for customers to come in now.”
The ones who do come in to Terry’s office, though, make the job easy.
“We get the good customers,” she said. “We’re not enforcement, we’re not collecting. I’m not assessing anything — it’s birth certificates and sports licenses and marriage licenses. We’re always helping people, and when they leave they’re happy. So it’s not a bad environment.”
Terry said she’s gone out of her way to help with errands that don’t even technically fall under the scope of a town clerk’s office.
“We Google things for people all the time,” she said. “We do go out of our way to help people — we don’t say, ‘Well, sorry.’ We’re here to service the residents, because what other office can do that?”
On a weekday during one of Terry’s last weeks at work, she sat in her office with the door open while Katie Sandberg, who has been Terry’s assistant for the year since Roberts retired, manned the front desk.
Sandberg will take over as town clerk, and Terry said she’s confident in her successor.
“She’s very sweet and nice,” Terry said. “She’ll be fine.”
She knows, though, that the tidbits of town history she has in her own memory won’t be easy to leave behind.
“What the town loses in an employee like me is probably the history I have, not so much the day-to-day operations. It’s who I know, what I know,” she said.
She said she’ll likely volunteer on a city board in Sarasota, Fla., where she and her husband, Dean, bought a house and plan to live for half of each year once they’re both retired.