BARNARD — For most of Barnard’s Town Meeting, the hour required to dispatch the town’s business breezed by uneventfully as it does almost every year. Familiar names were reelected by voice vote to town boards, positions and commissions and the articles and proposed budget passed without objection.

Until Tim Johnson got up to speak.

Johnson, who served 21 years on the Barnard Selectboard, more than 14 years as a volunteer fireman and whose family name is practically synonymous with Barnard and civic participation, announced he was getting a divorce — from the town.

“I will not seek any elected position for the town,” declared Johnson, who lost reelection to a Selectboard seat at last year’s Town Meeting.

Standing in front of his wife and five young children, who were all sitting in the center front row, and with his voice at times choking in emotion, Johnson said he was “going to remove myself” from the “town and community.” He claimed he and his family have been unfairly tarred by members of the community and recently the animosity has even extended to his children being bullied at school.

At one point he likened the mood in Barnard to the polarizing politics and culture war battering the country at large, hinting that the town was following the nation down the same dark path.

The aspersions cast at his family have become unendurable, Johnson said, and have taken an ugly personal turn that needs to stop.

“I will defend and myself and family by any means necessary. I will defend it vigorously,” Johnson said during a 15-minute address that capped Town Meeting before his family stood up in unison from their seats and marched out of the room as others sat in silence.

Johnson, 47, who runs a logging, forestry and firewood business in Barnard and was a longtime volunteer in the town of barely 1,000 residents, pushed back against what he blasted as “false attacks and complaints” about his business practices to calling out hypocrisy among town officials who he said hold him to account for running askew of regulations they overlook and abide in others.

“I have to follow the rules, but other don’t,” he said.

Later, talking with the Valley News, Johnson elaborated on a number of issues which he said are unevenly applied in Barnard, ranging from alleged permitting and zoning violations to misconduct directed at him by a town employee whom the Selectboard failed to discipline.

“You can drive up and down Route 12 and look at people’s properties, piles of firewood, piles of whatever, and you can clearly see it’s a commercial operation in violation of our zoning laws, and all these town officials that are supposed to be policing it drive right past and don’t care,” Johnson cited as an example of selectively enforced regulations.

“I have to follow the rules, but others don’t,” he said.

Johnson acknowledged he has somewhat of a divisive reputation in Barnard but maintained he was always fair and even in dealing with others when it came to applying the rules, even if he always did not agree on the wisdom of a particular rule.

He emphasized he held “no animosity to the board,” referring to the three members of the town’s Selectboard sitting at a table.

“I’m not perfect. I’d be the first one to admit that,” Johnson said, acknowledging that he is known to display “abrasive and aggressive mannerisms” but explaining that is “a result of the blows I’ve taken over the years.”

Johnson said he found it galling that people in town for whom he worked, clients who did not hesitate to call upon him to log their land so they could take advantage of current-use tax breaks, were some of the same people to lodge complaints against his business operations.

In the past year, Johnson contended, the attacks against him have turned nasty and personal and, while he may have had differences of opinion with fellow Selectboard members and others in town, “I never, not once, attacked your families.”

Addressing himself to what he called Barnard’s “older generational families,” Johnson asked rhetorically, “honestly, can you say things are better now than before?”

At that point, Johnson and his family left the room.

In routine Town Meeting business, residents approved by voice vote articles to tap $200,000 from the accumulated budget surplus to reduce the property tax rate and to transfer another $200,000 from the surplus into the highway reserve fund for road projects.

(Approval to transfer funds from the surplus budget into the highway budget led to an amendment passed from the floor to reduce from about $1.07 million the money sought to be raised from taxes as proposed in the warning).

Voters adopted a fiscal year 2024 highway budget of about $1.8 million, of which $876,700 is to be raised in taxes and a fiscal year 2024 general budget of $836,300, of which $552,800 is to be raised from taxes.

Elected officials

Number of voters: 83

Number on checklist: n/a

Moderator: Paul Doton

Selectboard: Rock Webster

Auditor: Pat Hasson

Delinquent Tax Collector: Diane Rainey

First Constable: Wes Hennig

Second Constable: vacant

Town Clerk: Diane Rainey

Treasurer: Diane Rainey

Library Trustee: Susan McNulty

Cemetery Commissioner: Phil Lewis

Cemetery Commissioner: Chris Campbell

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.

CORRECTION: Barnard Town Meeting voters approved using $400,000 from the town’s ac cumulated budget surplus to reduce fis cal year 2024 property taxes and to pay for road projects. An earlier version of this story misidentified the source of the $400,000.

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