WESTFORD — After over 25 years of service to the town, longtime Town Clerk Patty Dubey will retire at the end of this year.
Dubey has lived in Westford since 1986 and previously served the town as assistant town clerk when she was hired in 1998. She served under two different town clerks — Nancy Cook and Kaari Tari, who accepted a job as Concord’s Town Clerk in 2017.
“When my children were little, this [assistant town clerk] job became available. Nancy Cook, the town’s clerk at the time, suggested I apply for the position,” she told WestfordCAT.
She says she always had an interest in public service.
“I always liked the idea of working for the town,” she said. “When I was a senior at Chelmsford High School, the clerk came into our Modern Problems class and asked us to register to vote. I thought ‘what a cool job she had.’ ”
After college, Dubey says she worked in the private sector before accepting her assistant town clerk role in Westford. She says she left her old employer “on a good note.”
“I ended up applying and getting it. I [initially] took a pay cut, but [in a way] I didn’t because I didn’t have a commute, and it was a lot less wear and tear on me,” she said. “When I gave my notice, he [my boss] told me ‘that is a no-brainer. I know that you have always liked doing that stuff.’”
She later applied for her current role in 2017, noting that she originally “wasn’t going to take the job.”
“I was at the point of my final years of working,” she said. “I got persuaded to apply. It was Jodi who really encouraged me, I have to give her a lot of credit.”
Reflecting on her role
Over her more than two decades of service with the town, Dubey says she has witnessed a number of changes in her office.
“When I first started, we still typed out all of the certificates on a typewriter and we hand-wrote licenses,” she said. “[Even] using a typewriter in 1998 was considered archaic.”
She added, “It has been more involved. The expectations are much higher on the state-level on what you’re tasked to do and the residents are savvy and they expect certain things [now].”
Dubey also says she’s seen “interesting days” in her office, including when Town Hall was evacuated “in a day” in 2008.
“The second floor was falling in, so we had to be off-site for two and a half years. We [Town Hall employees] were everywhere, the police department, highway and others,” she said. “It gave each of the different groups of town a little more understanding of how each operated when we worked in Millennium.”
She says one of her proudest accomplishments was combining each voting precinct into two voting locations — at Westford Academy and Stony Brook Middle School.
She says her biggest challenge, however, was the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closures of town offices.
“Many town halls were closed to the public during COVID,” she said. “We married people in that fire station next door, but we got through that. We had early voting there too, which has added a lot of duties on all town clerks,” she said.
Retirement plans
Dubey says she plans to travel to Key West to celebrate her retirement and 42nd anniversary with her husband, but plans to remain involved with the Select Board and Housing Authority, which she was unanimously appointed to on Dec. 12.
“I’m still going to be doing the minutes for the SB, so I’ll still be involved,” she said.
She says her retirement is “bittersweet.”
“I’ve really enjoyed my job and really enjoyed the people,” she said. “It makes you feel like you’ve contributed.”
She added, “100 years from now people will see things I’ve signed and wonder ‘who was that person.’ You just feel like they know you were here and you’ve made a difference.”
Dubey is officially set to retire on Jan. 1, 2024.
