NORWICH, Vt. — The Norwich Selectboard chair and the town manager clashed Thursday after the chair wrote in a memo that the manager had broken the board's digital media policy by criticizing a resident while attending a meeting remotely over Zoom.

The exchange came during the board's regular meeting, when the town manager raised the chair's memo, which was included with correspondence in the meeting packet. He said the memo accused him of disobeying the policy. "To me, that is defamatory," he said, and asked the chair to publish an example of when it happened.

The chair responded that during an earlier meeting, while the manager was on Zoom and a resident was in the room, the manager began to respond to her, and the chair asked him to stop. "You told me you had to say something, you proceeded to say it," the chair said. "It was very negative and attacking to her over Zoom. That is against select board policies."

The manager then read from a transcript of a May 27 board meeting in which he said he had been "disgusted" by what the resident wrote about him on a community listserv, which he called false, and said, "I mean this is the history of Norwich."

The chair said that remark was the problem. "When you're on the screen speaking to the public, saying this is the history of this town, that is not a nice thing to say about our town," the chair said. "We expect you to be the champion of this town."

"It wasn't an accusation, it was a fact," the chair said when the manager objected to the memo. A board member then suggested ending the discussion, and the board moved on.

Earlier in the meeting, the manager criticized a board member for raising a question about the town's legal billing in a published packet. "I really wish we would be more judicious about what gets placed in published packets that go out to the world," he said. The manager said the law firm had credited the town for the discrepancy.

Separation agreement approved

At a special meeting before the regular session, the board met in executive session to discuss an employee-related agreement and then approved an agreement and general release with a former town employee, authorizing the town manager to sign it.

The chair said afterward that the action concerned the separation of the town's former public works director, and thanked him for almost five years of service. The chair said he came on when the department "needed to be built up again from practically from scratch."

The board also met in executive session at the special meeting to discuss a settlement proposal in pending litigation over a development review board decision. No action was announced on that item.