The Woodstock town spending freeze is over. On Friday morning, August 1, town supervisor Bill McKenna announced that the other members of the town board had come in and signed the vouchers. Everything has been paid and will be paid.
Councilmembers had previously refused to sign because they could not get a breakdown between emergency and non-emergency expenses.
The questioning of payments stemmed from a refusal to approve bills or any other business during the July 22 meeting, when the board voted 3-0 to terminate the employment of maintenance worker Michael Innello. Courtis proposed the resolution because the board had learned McKenna withheld information he was a Level 3 sex offender.
“We have asked that the vouchers be separated out to only include emergency funds necessary,” councilmember Bennet Ratcliff had said abouut what had been presented at an earlier meeting. “This is a consolidated amount of vouchers and doesn’t include which ones are emergency funds and which ones are non-emergency funds.”
“Every one of them,” McKenna said when asked which were considered emergency. “I instituted the spending freeze because a majority of the board refused to pay the vouchers. I’m the fiscal officer responsible for the fiscal health of the town, and I will not spend more money that you’re not going to be paying.”
At a July 31 meeting, after an executive session to discuss Innello’s status, the majority of the town board had continued to refuse to vote on vouchers and other spending items.
McKenna, exasperated, had said, “They still should be approved, and I’m asking for approval of all the bills. Either approve or don’t.”
Don’t approve was the choice.
Councilmember Laura Ricci had questioned whether the town should stop senior classes if the town was not going to pay instructors, for example.
“It’s like when the federal government shuts down, they close the national parks,” she said. “So, if people aren’t going to agree to pay the bills, I don’t really care for an itemization of which is emergency and which is not.”
McKenna had directed town clerk Jackie Earley to cancel the summer camp trip and Friday ice cream at the camp. “If they’re not paying bills, we can’t spend more money,” McKenna said.
Further tension mounted during discussion of moving $150,000 from the highway reserve to address a washout on MacDaniel Road when McKenna said the cost could be anywhere from $100,000 to $600,000. The cost was not known because engineering must be done to figure out how to secure the road from the washout, McKenna explained.
At that time, McKenna had said that a list of unpaid bills was available at his office for the board’s review.
Join the family! 
