On November 2, 2026, Jeffery Smith sent the following letter to the Select Board (Chair Schaaf, Vice Chair Tinker, and Clerk Spencer), asking them not to renew Town Administrator Justine Caggiano’s employment contract.
Dear Chair Schaaf, Vice Chair Tinker, and Clerk Spencer:
I am writing to ask the Select Board not to renew Town Administrator Justine Caggiano’s employment agreement, and to give her the written non-renewal notice required by Section 19 of that agreement on or before December 31, 2026.
The agreement runs through June 30, 2027. Under Section 19, if the Board intends not to renew, it must give her written notice at least six months before that date. Missing that deadline entitles her to six months of severance pay regardless of the Board’s later judgment. I am putting this record in front of you now so the decision is made on documented performance, not by default when the notice window closes.
1. The Board has never done the evaluation its own contract requires.
Section 8A requires the Board to review and evaluate the Town Administrator every year from the date of appointment. At the July 13, 2026 Select Board meeting, Vice Chair William Tinker stated on the record that he had requested that evaluation, that it is part of her contract, that it has never made it onto the agenda, and that the Board is contractually obligated to do it. A Board that has never conducted the required annual evaluation is not in a position to rubber-stamp renewal. Completing that evaluation is necessary either way. On the record below, renewal is not warranted.
Separately, I was told directly by a current member of this Board that Ms. Caggiano has on more than one occasion threatened Select Board members with lawsuits. I am not asking the Board to litigate those threats in this letter. I am saying that a Town Administrator who puts her own supervisors under threat of suit is not in a normal employment relationship with the body that must evaluate and correct her. Section 8A assumes the Board can supervise. Threats of personal litigation against Board members are incompatible with that supervision. That is a renewal problem whether or not any suit was ever filed.
2. Unauthorized commitment of the Town: Zekos Auction Group.
Ms. Caggiano signed a contract with Zekos Auction Group on August 26, 2024 without an open-session Select Board vote authorizing that contract. At the September 15, 2025 meeting, when the Vice Chair stated on the record that the Board had approved hiring Zekos’s services but had never approved a contract, her response was: “just because you didn’t understand what you were voting on doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” The Town later confirmed in writing that no contract-authorizing vote and no executive-session minutes exist for the relevant dates. The resulting dispute, described in the Vice Chair’s own motion as a $15,000 invoice, was settled for $6,600, paid May 28, 2026 from the Town’s Legal account. A Town Administrator who binds the Town without a clear Board vote, then tells the Board it simply failed to understand its own action, is not someone the Board should extend.
3. Records the Town cannot stand behind.
On August 5, 2025, after a Planning Board meeting and in front of multiple attendees, Ms. Caggiano told me she had deleted all of her text messages, while public records requests for those town-business texts, for which I had paid $450 in required fees (Invoice #02, $300; Invoice 25-03, $150), were still pending. Town Clerk Ryan Witkos confirmed in writing on August 18, 2025 that she has no town-issued phone and that the deleted messages cannot be recovered.
4. Office presence without a telecommuting agreement.
Personnel Policy 10.14 requires any Town employee who telecommutes to have an approved telecommuting agreement on file. On January 13, 2026, the Town answered my public records request for any such agreement for Ms. Caggiano: no responsive records. Separately, a public records request for attendance and time-off records for all Town employees, covering July 1, 2024 to present, produced only aggregated payroll cost-center totals, with no sick-leave tracking at all and no day-by-day attendance log, for Ms. Caggiano or for any other employee. The Town’s own written petition to the Supervisor of Records on that request admits that its payroll system “does not have the functionality to handle accruals according to some Town employees union contracts.” There is accordingly no record by which anyone, Board or resident, can verify on which specific days she was actually present in the office. I have personally raised with this Board, more than once, that she is frequently absent from Town Hall during business hours, often arrives late, and commonly works from home. None of that is covered by any agreement or record the Town can produce. The Board already knows this.
5. The Board–Town Administrator working relationship has broken down.
I am not asking the Board to punish anyone for filing a workplace complaint, and I take no position here on the merits of Ms. Caggiano’s hostile-work-environment allegations. Those merits turn on an investigator’s report the Town has never released. What the Board can and must weigh for renewal is supervisability, the content of the complaints she put on the Town’s email system, and how those complaints later reached a resident’s public-records file while the findings stayed secret.
On June 30, 2025, Ms. Caggiano emailed the Select Board a “formal complaint of a hostile work environment against Selectman Bill Tinker and Finance Committee Chair Chris Culross.” She alleged derogatory comments, unprofessional conduct, harassment based on her protected class, and bullying that she said caused a severe medical emergency. She demanded a third-party investigation and no retaliation, and listed as witnesses the Town Clerk, the Assessor, her Executive Assistant, a Planning Board member, a former Select Board Chair, and a Conservation Commission member. The Board hired DHS Works, which billed $5,790 for 19.3 hours.
On October 29, 2025, she emailed a second “formal complaint of a hostile work environment,” again naming Mr. Tinker and copying Town Counsel and the Town Clerk. She alleged that on October 27, 2025, Mr. Tinker “plagiarized my intellectual property,” that “the Select Board violated my contract and approved job description,” and that Mr. Tinker had attempted to hinder her role by obstructing the chain of command between her and employees, “sharing with residents about my ‘medical leave,'” and “defaming my character publicly.”
I have copies of both complaint emails. They did not come to me through the Select Board Investigation records request that sought the investigator’s report. The June 30 complaint was produced to me in the Town Administrator emails production under Invoice 25-03, a $150 fee I paid (Emails & Texts for Town Administrator). The October 29 complaint was produced to me in the November 3, 2025 production of emails between the Town Administrator and the Town Clerk for October 20 through November 3, 2025. In both cases, the Town released to a resident the raw accusations against a sitting Select Board member, while still withholding the only document that would show what an independent investigator actually found. That report’s withholding is now in active litigation in Worcester Superior Court (Smith v. Town of Hardwick, 2685CV01074), which the Town is defending at ongoing legal expense through KP Law.
I ask the Board to consider what that pattern means for trust and for Mr. Tinker’s ability to do his job. Why were these personnel complaints, naming a sitting Board member and alleging protected-class harassment, medical harm, plagiarism, medical-leave gossip, and public defamation, released into a resident’s public-records productions at all, while the investigator’s findings remain sealed? Whatever the answer, the practical effect is that the accusations circulate and the adjudication does not. That is a broken supervision relationship.
It got worse. On May 30, 2026, I posted Ms. Caggiano’s own complaint emails, the same ones the Town had produced to me under public records law, to a local Facebook group. Patricia Tinker, Vice Chair Tinker’s wife, commented on that post, and raised the same subject at Hardwick Town Hall two days later. Per what Mr. and Mrs. Tinker have told me, on June 1, 2026, Ms. Caggiano represented to others that Mrs. Tinker had caused a disturbance at Town Hall, which they say was entirely false. Ms. Caggiano then had Mrs. Tinker removed from the building by police and had papers served on her at home. They further tell me the matter was investigated and found unfounded.
I believe Mrs. Tinker was retaliated against for speaking about the Town Administrator’s own complaints after those complaints had already been released as public records. Having an employee, the spouse of a sitting Select Board member, removed from Town Hall by police on a disturbance claim that was later found unfounded is entirely improper. I do not understand how this Board condones that behavior. An administrator who answers public criticism of her own filings by calling the police on a Board member’s spouse has no business being renewed.
A Town Administrator who has twice put this Board in an adversarial posture, whose unresolved complaints against the Board’s own members are now in residents’ hands, whose related records fight the Town is still paying to defend, and who escalated a public-records discussion into a police removal of Mrs. Tinker, is not someone the Board can effectively supervise for another contract term. Renewal extends that breakdown for years.
What I am asking you to do
- Vote not to renew Ms. Caggiano’s employment agreement.
- Serve the written Section 19 non-renewal notice no later than December 31, 2026, so the Town does not owe six months’ severance by silence.
- Place the contractually required Section 8A performance evaluation on a near-term agenda, on the record, whether or not renewal is already decided.
- As part of that evaluation, obtain and disclose the Town’s KP Law fees to date attributable to Smith v. Town of Hardwick and related Select Board investigation counsel work.