Last modified: Thursday, May 15, 2008 2:08 AM EDT FLANAGAN: In Mansfield, exit strategy for town manager If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, Mansfield voters - the few who cared, anyway, and they were the only ones who mattered in the election - were looking for peace when they went to the ballot boxes on Tuesday. Those wishes were made known when they chose selectman candidates Jess Aptowitz, 1,581, and Kevin Moran, 1,570, the moderates on the matter of Town Manager John D'Agostino, over D'Agostino critics Robert Goldman, 962, and Dan Pascucci, 410 via write-in campaign, by substantial margins. Will the voters get what they want? I'd say yes, but only if the new selectmen can use their apparently amicable relationships with D'Agostino to join with a couple of the old ones - Sandra Levine and Ann Baldwin - to find a way to engineer a quick exit for D'Agostino. Who knows? If they could negotiate a fair, low-cost deal, maybe even Selectman George Dentino would go along with it. Sure, that's unlikely. My bet is that Dentino would hold out for a firing or resignation that would be cost-free to the town, but the history of dealings with governmental professionals in Massachusetts over the past few decades weighs against such an arrangement. Some kind of parachute is always provided to a departing official; taxpayers can only hope that it isn't pure platinum. A virtual certainty, though, is that unless D'Agostino's exit is arranged, Dentino will continue to find ways - and ways and ways and ways - to keep reminding his colleagues that D'Agostino diminished his effectiveness with the words that led to a sexual harassment suit by electric department employee Kimberly Stoyle, then finished himself off by firing Jack Beliveau as department manager allegedly for supporting Stoyle, and cost the town a lot of pretty pennies with the resulting litigation. Sure, Dentino overdoes it with the sniping, but can you blame him when other people at the table act as if the emperor's new clothes are suitable wear for town hall? Bogged down Despite the bickering on the town's top board, Mansfield government has managed to keep chugging along. Few citizens, I expect, are happy with the prospect of a debt exclusion from the Proposition 2 1/2 limits to make capital improvements to town buildings and equipment. But when they look at the fix some of their neighboring towns are in, Mansfield taxpayers must feel better off than most that their operating budget can sustain most of the current level of services without an override. Still, town hall seems to have lost its spark. A year ago, the town was getting ready to pioneer automated trash pickup in the region. Last week, the question of providing a new car for supervision of the commuter rail parking lot got dumped perfunctorily. Similarly, the lingering question of the town partnering with the Mansfield Music and Arts Society on a performance hall - a proposal worthy of a thorough public airing if it is going anywhere at all - got back-burnered. The town's back burner may be getting pretty crowded. We suspect the meals will be stuck to the pan and thoroughly spoiled if they stay there until the end of D'Agostino's contract in November 2009. And we can only wonder what potential industrial park or shopping center tenants make of the fix at town hall. Now, if you and I were in D'Agostino's shoes, we'd do the right thing for the town and step down, right? We wouldn't be looking out for our family's interests and trying to make sure the bills will be paid until we land a new job, right? As for that $500,000 a judge is holding us personally responsible for, we'd just let the chips fall where they may, right? On second thought, we just might stay. But everybody knows D'Agostino needs to go. D'Agostino knows it himself. It's time for peace at Mansfield Town Hall and a return to the kind of progressivism the town's government has been known for over the past two decades. The only way to achieve it is to show the town manager the door. We're happy that Tuesday's election turned out in a way that this might be accomplished with a minimum of further acrimony. MARK FLANAGAN is opinion page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.