We don’t know the whole story and we most likely never will.
We know the Bremen Board of Selectmen met in emergency session Jan. 24 and decided to terminate the employment of Nancy Hanna, the one time town clerk and currently full-time Maine Medical Center patient.
The easy thing to do here would be to excoriate the Bremen Board of Selectmen for taking this extremely unsatisfying action and we are sorely tempted. However, we have seen this movie before: employer and employee parting company under less than ideal conditions.
On its face, we don’t believe the offered line of reasoning, that town meeting is coming and the selectmen needed someone in place now. They already had somebody in place: the acting town clerk, Martha Varsano.
As long as the details of the town’s business are attended to properly, it matters little whether the town clerk is officially acting or officially official.
We know Hanna is still in the hospital following a horrific traffic accident Dec. 13 and she is likely at the very beginning of a long road of rehab and therapy.
It remains to be seen if she will be physically capable of resuming her duties. In that respect, there is plenty of time to make that determination. If a parting of the ways is a must, that would become obvious in time.
We know that on its face, it appears unduly harsh to fire someone who is not even out of a hospital bed yet.
We don’t know about everyone in Bremen, but we are confident this is not the way most residents like to see their town officials do business.
