Wiscasset’s town office will have a new face and a longtime employee will have a new office. The town manager’s longtime administrative assistant Kathleen Onorato will move into the vacant office where treasurers used to work and she will relinquish some of her duties to new administrative assistant Robin Plourde, Town Manager Dennis Simmons said in the Nov. 1 selectmen’s meeting at the town office and over Zoom and YouTube.

He said, with Plourde’s hire, “we can get caught up on some things like the town website and I can give her some tasks to do off of my plate, so that I can get caught up on some of the stuff I’m working on, without overwhelming Kathy.”

“Great,” Selectman Terry Heller said.

Onorato explained in a phone interview Nov. 2, in her new office, she will continue with the finance and human resources work she has done for years. Simmons is still treasurer, she said.

Plourde, meanwhile, starts Nov. 7, Onorato said. 

Simmons said in the meeting, Plourde has been administrative assistant for Lincoln County commissioners and for Gardiner’s city manager. “So she has quite a few years of experience.”

Also Nov. 1, Simmons told selectmen an electronic module was on order, to replace one that burned out in the town office’s roadside message board; and public works is getting caught up on downtown street-sweeping. 

The board nodded two Maine Bureau of Highway Safety grants for the police department. According to documents released ahead of the meeting, the grants are $6,729 each, one for distracted driving enforcement, the other for impaired driving; each calls for a $1,682 match. The town will cover those, Onorato said Nov. 2. 

And selectmen approved business licenses for Back River Bistro, 65 Gardiner Road; Marcoux Family Farm, LLC, 179 Gibbs Road; Lucy Begonia’s, 681 Bath Road; and an online business, Pure Light Yoga, 156 Young’s Point Road.