stash - I don't think it's true that "all the other town committees rotate chairmen every year". For years (decades?), Ernie Brown was the chair of the ZBA; that stopped when he finally retired. When I started on the Finance Committee in 1999 people would be chair for a year or two and then someone else would take over, but when John Hanold came along he was into it and nobody else wanted to do it so he was there for a while. I think the Selectboard may have been unusual in having had a defined rotation system, which stopped a few years back when Ed Voudren, Sam Lovejoy, and Pat Allen were on the board.