I began this one a couple months ago, after Wiscasset learned it was losing three more officials – its longtime code enforcement officer and another police chief and harbor master, all a couple months after learning its school superintendent, athletic director-vice principal, and special education director were leaving. But like a turnover in the oven, this topic was on its own time to be ready.

Since then, as we have been telling you in these pages and much sooner online, has come more turnover in the police and school departments. What's going on? A lot of things, all of them normal and not confined to this town.

Some people still stay several decades in a job, in the public or private sector. It's just become the exception. The work world is fluid like the technology that shapes and responds to it. People move around a lot, not all of us, thankfully; but I know as many nice Maine natives as nice transplants, and would not have met the new ones had they not decided to live and work or retire here.

Would Wiscasset keep officials longer if it paid them better? Maybe, probably, but the ones who have left have all given us different reasons, like retirement or a spouse's job or other personal or professional reasons. They aren't specifying to us they left to make more.

Let's not fill in the blanks, as if there must be more to the story. There isn't always more. Speculation is human. But it's base and serves no one.

And so what if someone does leave a town job over money or politics, such as uncertainty over their job's future when it hangs by the ballot box? That's their call. And moreover, what can stop the bleeding? If Wiscasset pays more, Wiscasset taxpayers pay more. Therein lies a choice: Help keep officials and other workers, their training they gained in Wiscasset and their institutional knowledge, by paying them more, in hopes of a stabler machine, or keep the town's payroll affordable for the town. The latter may be short-sighted, but helps for now on taxes.

Whichever way you believe, tell selectmen so they can help make it happen, when the town negotiates contracts and proposes budgets.

The bright side in the meantime? Like any employer, a town saves money when it isn't upping pay or benefits in a contract renewal; and new people bring new ideas that might or might not work, but at least keep people thinking of improvements, cost savings and more.

Yes, the best turnover comes from a bakery. But when it's the other kind, however often, let's not flake out, be filling in those blanks, or feel burned by another brief tenure with the town. They just moved on.

Make mine a blueberry, for here.