Massachusetts town offers position to burgess

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Ronald San Angelo
Ronald San Angelo

NAUGATUCK — Ronald San Angelo, former two-term mayor and current Republican burgess, has been offered a job as town administrator of Hanson, Mass.

The Board of Selectmen in Hanson voted unanimously Saturday to pick San Angelo over two other finalists, Selectman Donald Howard said.

San Angelo said he plans to call the interim town administrator today to begin negotiating a contract.

“If the contract meets reasonable terms — I believe it will — I will accept,” San Angelo said.

After living in the borough all 50 years of his life, the offer means San Angelo will likely move to Hanson, a town of about 10,000 in Plymouth County, equidistant from Boston and Cape Cod.

San Angelo said he was impressed with the location, scenery, people and quality of government in Hanson, but that he did not apply for the job out of dissatisfaction with the borough.

He has applied for a number of similar positions in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but none so far away that he can’t come back and visit his family in the borough, he said.

“It’s my hometown,” San Angelo said. “I will absolutely love it ’till the day I die. This is a new adventure and an exciting opportunity.”

San Angelo served as a state representative before being elected mayor in 2003. After two terms, he took a job as a project manager for the state Department of Information Technology and is now a senior technology project manager for CGI, based in Andover, Mass.

He said has been applying for town administrator positions because he wants to get back into local government.

“Most of all, I love helping people, and I miss the one-on-one experience of helping people solve their problems,” San Angelo said.

San Angelo’s salary will be negotiated, but his predecessor made about $100,000, Howard said.

The job offer is also contingent on a background check and a physical examination, Howard said.

The position opened more than two months ago and received about 40 applicants, Howard said.

A search committee narrowed the field to 11 candidates, including San Angelo, who were interviewed. Of those, four were chosen as finalists for a second round of interviews.

One candidate withdrew, leaving San Angelo to compete against two others from Massachusetts with town administration experience, Howard said.

The five-member Board of Selectmen picked San Angelo because they liked his enthusiasm for small-town government and his experience working with tight budgets, Hanson said.

“We had a very good administrator prior to Ron, and hopefully he’ll turn out to be the same type of a man,” Howard said.