Morning everyone
Thank you so much to everyone that has helped me in my first year as a new clerk, your advice has been super helpful.
Our town council has a cemetery committee which is joint and includes two other smaller parishes. The relationship between this committee and the town council was strained with the previous town clerk and RFO refusing to clerk their meetings because of how they treated her. In order to help build bridges I offered to become their clerk once again which would help repair the relationship. I’ve only ever attended one meeting (not as a clerk) and was really attacked by three members of the committee, raised voices, accusations and cutting me off when I spoke. In spite of this I still offered to be their clerk and RFO (I was still the RFO regardless).
I will be the clerk for the first time next week so will be preparing associates documents to send out this tomorrow.
Three weeks ago they asked for their end of year accounts (they were provided these in May along with the full town council accounts including the AGAR). They weren’t satisfied with the accounts though as there were anomalies. (These were down to how Scribe was set up previously as the budget lines didn’t completely match their budget). So to help I prepared manual accounts which provided more detail. I asked the committee to let me know if this is what they were expecting (I can’t see what the previous clerk and RFO sent last year so was working a bit blind and all of this was done by email).
I didn’t hear anything until yesterday when I received an email telling me they had a meeting without me and were concerned about their accounts, sending me three pages of anomalies. They want all the anomalies rectified before I send the documents and agenda out tomorrow.
So my question is, can they have a meeting like this? It wasn’t made public and not shared amongst other town council councillors. They’ve had this meeting in secret to scrutinise the accounts. Has this meeting been a legal meeting? All committee members attended including the clerk from another parish who was the clerk of this meeting? There was no agenda on the notice board or on our website. Surely they should’ve had an EOM with me present so I could answer their questions!
How do I move forward with this, I’ve already been verbally attacked by some members before I was even the clerk so I can’t see this getting better.
I was appointed last November with the understanding I would receive training, a mentor from another parish etc etc and received no training apart from our local association of local council so have literally had to learn the job myself with no help. I’m not perfect and still make mistakes but nothing catastrophic or illegal.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thank you
