WILLOW CREEK — Town Clerk Margaret Hollis filed her re-election paperwork with her own office this week, formally launching her bid for a fifth term.
Hollis, 58, was first elected in 2014 and has since been re-elected three times, most recently in 2023 with 92% of the vote. As of Wednesday, no challenger had filed to run against her, and town hall observers consider it unlikely that anyone will.
“Someone needs to keep the records straight,” Hollis said when asked why she was running again. The response was delivered without irony, but those familiar with the clerk’s famously idiosyncratic filing system recognized it as a statement of fact.
Hollis’s tenure has seen the digitization of the town’s vital records (though she maintains her own parallel paper system), the consolidation of the Ice-Out ledger into its fourth binding, and the quiet accumulation of institutional knowledge that town officials say would be nearly impossible to replace.
First Selectman Pendelton offered a characteristically blunt endorsement.
“She’s the only person who knows where everything is. Including, I suspect, things I’d rather she didn’t know about. I’m not sure that counts as an endorsement, but it’s the truth.”
The election will be held in conjunction with the annual Town Meeting on the second Tuesday of March.