The fallout from last week’s Oak Bluffs special election continues as town officials question why the election was improperly posted and department heads face the reality of a more frugal future with still more cuts to come — including the spectre of layoffs.

Last Thursday 559 Oak Bluffs voters turned out for a special election to roundly reject two Proposition 2 1/2 override questions that would have restored some $484,361 in line items for various town departments.

The election was controversial from the beginning as voters grumbled about the lack of notice and town clerk Deborah deBettencourt Ratcliff declared that she had never received a properly posted warrant.

Selectman and board chairman Kathy Burton said there was confusion about when to post the warrant and who was responsible for posting it.

“The warrant comes from the selectmen’s office, then goes to the constable and then returns to town clerk,” she said. “The constable actually posts it. Somehow something happened where it didn’t get done until Thursday which was obviously too late.”

This week town administrator Michael Dutton admitted that he was unfamiliar with the special election posting rules.

“I had assumed the posting of the warrant for the town meeting identifying the election date would satisfy any posting requirement,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Gazette. “According to town counsel, we should have posted a separate warrant seven days prior to the election.”

Mr. Dutton took full responsibility for the error.

Ms. Burton has called a special selectmen’s meeting for Monday at 5 p.m. to discuss procedure for future special elections.

“We’re all very concerned about this, so on Monday we’re going to talk about exactly what happened, what we have to do to make sure this doesn’t ever happen again,” she said.

Meanwhile, the question about the legal status of the election results was cleared up this week by town counsel Ronald H. Rappaport, who learned from state election officials that because the overrides were voted down, the results are valid.

As the reality of the steep cuts sank in this week, town leaders began to grapple with the fact that more cuts inevitably lie ahead.

Ms. Burton said the town will need to find at least another $100,000 in its “bare-bones” budget, at the expense of the needs of other town departments, to pay for a town accountant and to restore cuts made to the fire department’s truck maintenance program.

“I don’t see any alternative other than restructuring and combining positions, and unfortunately we may be looking at layoffs,” she said.

Ms. Burton said it was too soon to identify which positions would feel the axe but she did say town hall would be spared. “We can’t cut anymore positions in town hall because we’re struggling with the number of positions already,” she said. “We’ll have to look outside the town hall and get job descriptions and see if there is anyway to downsize.”

Apart from accounting and firefighting, the department with the most to lose from the last week’s special election is the town highway department, which saw $230,000 slashed from its paving and road resurfacing program. This week highway superintendant Richard Combra Jr. talked about what the cuts mean.

“In the past we’ve had a paving plan that covers the worst roads in town and resurfaces them,” he said. “We have to put that on hold after Thursday’s vote. We can do small repairs with some state money we still have, but our infrastructure is in dire need of repair. Now we’ll have to put that off to the future which will make the repairs much more expensive because costs will keep going up.”

Mr. Combra said the price of asphalt has doubled in the past five years and he expected oil prices to rise as well.

“We’ll just have to patch potholes and hope things stay together,” he said.

The Oak Bluffs School will also have to make do without two teaching aide positions. While he was prepared for the cuts, Dr. James H. Weiss said there was “no question” the teaching aides were important positions.

“We believed that we needed those assistants to work with some of our special education youngsters,” he said. “Now we’ll have to reallocate our teachers to serve them and it means less individual time for each student.”

The town shellfish department will also be out some $30,000 next year. This year the shellfish department used the money to buy some two million quahaug and bay scallop seed from the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group.

“We’ll only get half that amount this year,” said shellfish constable David Grunden on Thursday. “The other $15,000 is to hire labor to get work done as opposed to funding a benefitted position.”

Mr. Grunden recently told selectmen that his department had suffered greatly after the town cut its full-time shellfish deputy position last year to a part-time position. “We’ll basically have to cut just about every single little program that we run in some way or another because currently without the staffing, compared to the summer of 2009, the shellfish department is down 48 hours a week and we just cannot make up that time without the staff,” Mr. Grunden said.

Oak Bluffs council on aging director Roger Wey said his two employees will feel the squeeze in their salaries after his budget was slashed $7,750, but he said he understands why voters turned down the overrides.

“People can’t afford additional taxes and next year will be even more difficult,” Mr. Wey said. Still, Mr. Wey, a former longtime selectman, was wary of the prospect of cuts in accounting.

“The town needs an accountant even if they have to take the money out of stabilization for one year,” he said. “You need someone steering the ship.”

This story has been changed from the original to correct a name.