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12/07/2016 08:30 AMOn the fourth Monday of November, the Town Charter requires that a town meeting be held at which electors accept the annual reports of town agencies, commissions, and boards. Each year, the town dedicates the report to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the town. This year’s honoree was Lisa R. Carver, the town’s first finance director, who passed away far too young in February after a long illness.
First Selectman Carl Fortuna, Jr., spoke of Carver at the meeting and of the way she modernized the town’s budget process when she started working as finance director in July 2012.
“Just compare the 2012-’13 budget to the 2013-’14 budget document and you will see she revolutionized the budget process. She made it into a planning document,” said Fortuna.
For the first time, the town’s Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance could compare in one document the town departments’ actual expenditures to the department’s budgeted plan.
Even as she revamped the town’s financial reporting and budgeting shortly after arriving in July 2012, her cancer recurred.
As the dedication page reports, “After major surgery in December 2012, Lisa, while recuperating, compiled and produced the town’s most detailed, comprehensive, and transparent budget ever. She demanded budgets that were realistic and precise. She transformed the Old Saybrook budgeting process into a science and saved taxpayer dollars by uncovering errors and inaccuracies. Lisa was smart, funny, generous, politically astute, warm, and an absolute workhorse. She did not suffer fools. While she had three professional degrees and was usually the smartest person in the room, she was a good listener and consensus builder.”
Shortly after coming to work in Old Saybrook, she was so impressed with the town and its people that she convinced her husband Paul, a lifelong resident of New Britain, that they should move to Old Saybrook. They relocated to town in 2013.
“She was a remarkable person and I was lucky enough to call her friend. I still consider the day I hired her one of the luckiest days of my life,” said Fortuna.
Carver arrived at the Old Saybrook post after having managed the office of then-congressman John Rowland and, after that, having served as chief of staff for New Britain Mayor Timothy Stewart. Her credentials included a paralegal studies associates degree in 1982, a bachelor of science degree in accounting in 1985, and years later, a master in public administration degree from the University of Connecticut. She also passed the CPA exam and was a chartered financial analyst.
After accepting the framed recognition of Carver’s Annual Report dedication, Carver’s husband Paul spoke.
“Lisa appreciated two things: not to be made the center of attention but also, brevity. She would appreciate that this is the shortest town meeting in history,” said Paul Carver. And of his move to Old Saybrook after a lifetime spent in New Britain, he said, “My family feels loved and appreciated here.”