CHESHIRE, Mass. — The Board of Selectmen endorsed the draft warrant for the annual town meeting and voted to transfer funds to compensate the town clerk for election work.

Following a public comment from its last meeting, board members discussed compensating Town Clerk Whitney Flynn for her hours during elections as they exceed her regular hours.

"Yes, election days are long, prior to elections there's set up. There's also state-mandated 9 to 5 hours on Fridays or Saturdays, where you have to be at the office to accept anyone who should choose to register to vote, and that's in addition to regular hours," Flynn said. "And then there's also state-mandated hours from Elections Commission for numerous days. And you know, there's multiple emails from the secretary of the commonwealth notifying that you must be in office to complete the certification of signatures during a lot of different days, just depending on how many elections are within that year. So they're mandatory hours by the state as well."

She kept track of her extra hours for the board to see. She has used other options to help pay poll workers.

"But what I would say is that there are opportunities with the [state] Division of Local Mandates to be reimbursed for a lot of those election costs," she said. "So essentially, I go through after elections, and I put in all of the vote-by-mail costs associated with that, I put in the like the poll workers hours if election workers come for early voting in office, which is mandatory for state and federal elections."

The Selectmen decided to move $2,500 from the book repair line into the elections line to cover for the extra hours but she cannot exceed that and will communicate her office hours around it.

The board voted to recommend the 31 warrant articles for the annual town meeting scheduled Monday, June 8.

Among the questions to be posed to voters is the operating budget, Article 8, to raise and appropriate $1,642,481 and Article 9, to approve the Hoosac Valley Regional School District's assessment of $3,402,982, an increase of $196,900, or about 6 percent. The budget was approved the School Committee in March.

Article 10 is to approve the Northern Berkshire Vocational Regional School assessment of $595,431 and Article 23 asks to use free cash of $14,137 for the town's portion of McCann Technical School's roof and window project.

Article 28, the room occupancy excise tax, would be capped at 6 percent as that is what most communities do.

In other news:

Following a walkthrough with engineers, the fire station's meeting/training room remains closed. 

Department of Public Works Director Corey McGrath informed the board in April that the fire station needs to have a geotechnical study done because of the chance of a subsurface issue.