August 11, 2026 (Duxbury) — The news last night was full of stories about an August 4th Office of the Inspector General report that said that the former town administrator of Norfolk failed to properly supervise one of his subordinates, Blair Crane, the town’s former DPW director. Crane in turn was found to have made a series of mistakes with procurement and accounting.
What news reports failed to mention is that Blair Crane is currently the operations manager for the Duxbury Highway Department and the Recycling & Transfer Station.
Reached for comment, Duxbury Town Manager Rene Read had no comment. Crane and DPW Director Sheila Sgarzi did not return telephone calls.
The OIG’s full letter is included below so Duxbury residents can judge for themselves.
I don’t know enough about Mr. Crane or the context in Norfolk to report insightfully on this story. Municipal accounting is very complicated and town departments are small, so there often is not enough money to hire one person to perform the substance of a job and another to perform the administrative tasks. As a result, People who are good at operations end up responsible for administrative tasks for which they are not trained and are not suited. Sometimes, such people knowingly fudge the rules, but other times, they are just not good with details. Often such people make inadvertent errors or don’t understand that it’s important to follow the rules exactly. The ultimate cause is not as much personal failures as structural ones: the failure to divide up the jobs by skills, so people are only performing the tasks they can do well.
For some perspective, Marshfield just spent more than a year fixing its accounting system and budget process, caused in part by a system-wide failure to match expenses to the right bucket. Instead, the town was treating appropriated funds as one large pile of available funds, and there is a lot of blame to go around.
My own perspective here is that Crane is recognized for being good with trees and is probably good at the other operational aspects of his job, so we should give him a chance to do a job he’s good at.
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