BYRON — It has taken five years, but the small community of 103 residents has recovered financially at a “huge cost” after the theft of tens of thousands of dollars by a former town official, the chairperson of the Board of Selectmen said.

“I feel like we’re in a good place. It’s sad that it happened,” chairperson Linda Joyal said last week.

Former Town Clerk/Treasurer/Tax Collector Allison D. Freeman pleaded guilty in November 2022 to theft by deception and was ordered to pay back $29,500. A judge sentenced her to three years in prison, but suspended all but 30 days.

Freeman resigned from her positions in April 2018, citing intimidation and harassment by the spouse of a selectman. Shortly before that, RHR Smith & Co. started an audit of town finances, a requirement that had not been done for five years.

The audit identified $73,811 was missing.

Of that amount, the town sent $43,964 in reimbursements to land owners and residents. It was money from falsifying tax records, Joyal said.

Freeman “sent separate tax records with a different property tax rate to large owners and charged them more money,” Joyal said. “Then, when she got the checks submitted, so would only record the money that they were actually billed through the commitment. Then she would use the rest of the money to skim cash from the town.”

The town spent $63,000 on auditor fees over and above what the insurance reimbursed the town, a bill that had to be paid over three to four years, Joyal explained.

At one point, selectmen stopped the forensic audit because it became so costly, she said.

“For instance, if there was $1,500 missing, we were spending $1,500 to find it,” Joyal said. “There were a lot of other places there was money missing, but there was some point, as a board, we had to decide to stop it. It was a huge expense.”

Referring to board members James Ramey and Rick Comstock, Joyal said, “We’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money to rebuild everything. When I came into office, we barely had enough money in the checking account and in savings to cover our operating expenses.

“Now, we’re in a much better position,” she said. “We did get the money from the insurance company because (Freeman) was bonded.”

“Over the last five years, we have come back,” Joyal said. “We’ve grown the general fund from $400,000 to $1.2 million. That’s everything, including our rainy day savings.”

Another issue to be resolved was money for fire protection.

The town had voted to put money away for the Fire Department because 13 years ago the past administration traded the firetruck to Mexico for a 15-year contract for fire coverage.

“When they did that, the townspeople voted to put money away each year, so that when that contract was up, they would have money, bargaining power, to go to another town or Mexico for fire service.

“When I came in, there was no savings account set up for the Fire Department,” Joyal said. “We went back through and found where the town had voted to put that money aside, but it had not been done. When we asked where that money was, we were told it lived in the general fund, which I guess could happen. But we had to take that money out of the general fund, because it had never been put in a savings account.”

At the end of 2022, the Fire Department had $93,624 in an interest-earning account.

It’s another step toward financial stability.

Another is that since 2018, town finances have been audited annually.

“Our audit goes to the state auditing department now, every year,” Joyal said.

“Because this happened, it opened a lot of state eyes as well,” she said.