Sexual harassment complaint against Rickford Kirton surfaces

Rickford, Keep Your Hands to Yourself

This is a story about boundaries—how they get crossed, how that crossing ripples through a workplace, and how a town ends up paying for one person’s inability to read the room.

Picture a typical civic ceremony. A weekday afternoon. Folding chairs on new sod. Town staff juggling sign-in sheets and bottled water. Elected officials milling around, shaking hands, lining up for a photo. Everyone knows the drill: smile for the camera, keep it moving, get back to work.

And then a line gets crossed.

A senior administrative assistant—someone who’s kept the wheels turning through more budget seasons than most people can count—feels an elected official step too close. An arm where it doesn’t belong. A comment that isn’t professional or appropriate. The kind of thing that forces a polite, practiced smile to crack, because “just ignore it” won’t cut it anymore. She goes home, writes it down, and—after a day or two of thinking, replaying, feeling that adrenaline flush all over again—files a complaint.

That’s the part many folks never see. The paperwork, the meetings, the second-guessing: “Will they think I’m overreacting? Will this cost me?” It’s not dramatic; it’s exhausting. And it shouldn’t be necessary—certainly not from the people we elect to lead.

Why this matters isn’t complicated

Town staff aren’t props. They’re not there to be “charmed,” touched, or toyed with. They’re employees. They deserve the same respect anyone reading this expects at their own job. Leaders set the tone, full stop. When the person at the mic doesn’t respect boundaries, that disrespect trickles down: the awkward jokes, the cornering after meetings, the whispered “he didn’t… did he?” in the hallway. Culture rots from the top.

Yes, Rickford Kirton has denied wrongdoing. Yes, he’s tried to frame the complaint as politics. But the only reason a complaint exists at all is because someone experienced conduct that made them feel unsafe enough to put their name on paper. That alone should trigger clarity and humility from a would-be leader: apologize, reflect, change. Instead, we got deflection and a hard pivot back to campaigning.

So let’s say the quiet part out loud: keeping your hands to yourself is a minimum standard, not a partisan wedge. You learn it in grade school. You don’t lose it when you put on a suit.

It wasn’t a one-off “oops”—it fits a pattern

When you zoom out, a single incident rarely stands alone. What emerges around Rickford Kirton is a pattern of pushing past lines:

• Professional boundaries: He and his allies hounded two professional Town Managers (let’s not forget about Robert Smith) until they decided it wasn’t worth the abuse anymore. When told “no,” the response wasn’t to convince or collaborate—it was to pressure and punish.
• Institutional boundaries: When the budget process didn’t go his way, he helped force a referendum. When the referendum didn’t deliver the power shift he wanted, he sued the town. That’s not stewardship; that’s brinkmanship.
• Community boundaries: Online pile-ons. Grandstanding at meetings. Claims of conspiracy when colleagues or staff don’t bend the knee. It’s performative conflict dressed up as “accountability.”

If you’ll steamroll a manager’s job description, threaten the town with litigation, and weaponize process to score points, why would we expect you to respect a staffer’s personal space?

Power dynamics aren’t abstract here

Some people hear “harassment complaint” and imagine a he-said-she-said tossed into the ether. But in municipal government, power is the context. An elected official—someone with public stature, influence over budgets and jobs—has a responsibility to reduce risk for staff, not create it. It’s on the official to give extra space, use extra care, and be painfully obvious about consent and professionalism in every interaction. That’s what “public trust” means in practice.

It’s easy to wave that away as sensitivity. It’s not. It’s risk management, basic decency, and the reality that every employee deserves to work without bracing for a comment, a touch, or a retaliation.

“Leadership” isn’t volume; it’s restraint

What would leadership have looked like?

• Acknowledging impact, not minimizing it.
• Owning that an elected official’s proximity and words carry outsized weight.
• Modeling the boundary—hands off, compliments out, keep it professional—so everyone else gets the message.

Instead, we got more heat, more drama, and more time spent on damage control. While staff answered press inquiries and HR did triage, the town’s real work—paving, plowing, programming, planning—didn’t get any easier. That’s the hidden cost of this stuff: every hour spent cleaning up a leader’s mess is an hour not spent serving residents.

“But he fights for transparency!” (Does he?)

Transparency isn’t shouting. It isn’t turning a budget into a hostage situation. It isn’t suing your neighbors when the democratic math doesn’t break your way. Real transparency is boring: timely reports, clear agendas, respectful deliberation, clean process. If you can’t handle the small, personal boundaries—space, touch, tone—why should anyone trust you with the bigger, institutional ones?

The human side you don’t see on camera

Here’s what no one puts in a press release. After a complaint, the staffer avoids certain hallways, leaves five minutes early to skip the lobby crush, edits emails twice to scrub any wording that might be twisted later. Colleagues whisper “I’m sorry that happened” as they pass by. A manager quietly reshuffles duties to keep people apart. HR logs another long day. Weeks go by. The adrenaline fades; the vigilance doesn’t.

That’s what “just a moment” costs. That’s the tax on morale. That’s what your vote either perpetuates or prevents.

What Bloomfield needs instead

We don’t need louder. We don’t need meaner. We don’t need more performative outrage. We need officials who:

• Respect boundaries—physical, professional, procedural.
• Protect staff from pressure, not apply it.
• Do the work—read the packets, ask clean questions, accept outcomes, iterate next time.
• Keep their hands to themselves and their focus on the people who live here.

If you can’t meet that bar, you don’t belong in the room—never mind at the head of the table.

A plain, unglamorous standard

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about minimums. Don’t touch staff. Don’t invade their space. Don’t make comments you wouldn’t want said to your spouse, your kid, or your boss—especially not in public, especially not from a position of power. If that feels like “politics,” the problem isn’t the policy; it’s the person.

Rickford Kirton wants back in, with a slate built around his style—pressure, provocation, and, when that fails, punishment. We’ve seen this movie. It doesn’t end with better services, lower taxes, or stronger schools. It ends with fewer good people willing to work at Town Hall, because who wants to sign up for that?

The ask

If you’ve ever sat through a public meeting and winced, if you’ve ever told a colleague “that’s not okay,” if you’ve ever wished we could get back to steady, boring competence—vote like it. Send the simplest message a town can send a politician: no more lines crossed, no more excuses.

Keep the work professional. Keep the culture safe. And yes—Rickford, keep your hands to yourself.