When the Swampscott Select Board voted 5-0 on April 27 to lease the long-vacant Hawthorne site to the Swampscott Center for the Performing Arts for the next twenty-six months, residents had reason to assume the long-running question of what to do with the property was settled — at least until the lease expires in June 2028. The lease cleared four meetings of public deliberation. It cleared four candidate forums where every candidate in the April 28 town election agreed the new board should run an open RFI process for whatever comes next. It generated, by the town’s projection, somewhere in the range of $600,000 in net benefit to Swampscott over its term. The framing in the room on April 27 was that an empty building was the worst available outcome, and that the lease bought the town time without prejudicing the eventual decision.
Within ten days, a fourteen-page letter signed by the chairs of five separate town entities reached the desks of Select Board Chair Katie Phelan and Town Administrator Nick Connors. The letter argued that the long-term plan for the Hawthorne site — referred to by its street address, 153 Humphrey — should be “primarily open park land without any sizable structures.” It opposed any sale of any portion of the property to a private developer for retail or residential use. It supported town acquisition of the adjacent church parking lot at 187 Humphrey Street to enlarge the assembled parcel into a coherent waterfront park.
The five signatories were the Climate Action & Resilience Committee, the Conservation Commission, the Open Space & Recreation Plan Committee, the Tree Committee, and the Swampscott Conservancy non-profit. The letter was reported in Swampscott Tides on May 18 under the byline of Monica Sager. Phelan and Connors did not respond to Tides’ request for comment.
Tonight, the Select Board holds its first regular meeting since the close of Annual Town Meeting. The agenda is executive-session-only. One of the items on it is “187 Humphrey St. Real Property.”
How a five-signatory letter actually got written
The mechanism behind the letter is unusual enough to be worth pulling apart. There was no joint resolution by the five bodies. There was no cross-committee meeting. There was, instead, one person.
The Climate Action & Resilience Committee’s April 7 minutes — newly posted to the town’s online Agenda Center in May, after years of being parked on a request-access Google Drive — record the moment the letter was approved at CARC. Under item 7, the minutes state that “CARC reviewed draft letter written by Toni Bandrowicz,” and a motion to incorporate her letter and send it to the Select Board carried.
Bandrowicz then carried the letter, with CARC’s sign-off in hand, to four other bodies for chair-level approval. The Tree Committee, where she does not formally sit, signed on 4-1 at its April 9 meeting. The Open Space & Recreation Plan Committee — where she serves as Vice Chair — almost certainly signed on at its April 14 meeting (the precise venue is one of several cache gaps the project is still closing). The Conservation Commission — which she chairs — signed on at one of its April meetings. The Swampscott Conservancy, the only non-town non-profit on the signature list, signed in its own institutional capacity.
Three of the five chair-signatures route back to one person’s active institutional role: Bandrowicz drafted the letter as a CARC participant, signed it as Conservation Commission Chair, and signed it as OSRP Vice Chair under Chair Tania Lillak. The Tree Committee chair (Richard Frenkel) and CARC Chair (Martha Schmitt) are the two signatures that do not involve her directly — and Frenkel is himself a CARC voting member, which means even that signature was secured through a working relationship that runs through CARC’s table.
Schmitt’s signature is the formal CARC Chair sign-off; Bandrowicz’s individual contribution at CARC was the letter itself. This is, in operational terms, an efficient way to produce the appearance of broad institutional consensus from a working group that, at the chair level, has substantial overlap with a single architect.
The substantive position
The Tides report quotes the letter directly. The long-term plan should be “primarily open park land without any sizable structures.” Limited structures are acceptable — a small concession that distinguishes the letter from a purist no-build position — but private development, “especially for the purpose of creating private residential units,” is opposed. The letter aligns its position with the 2024 BakerTilly Advisory Group redevelopment study, which described the combined 153-plus-187 Humphrey parcel as “a key anchor on the western end of the Humphrey Street Corridor.”
187 Humphrey Street is the adjacent church parking lot. It is privately held. The Select Board cannot acquire it without a willing seller and an appropriation — both of which would normally be visible months before an actual transaction would close. What the executive-session agenda item tonight enables is a confidential discussion of whether the town is interested in opening such a process at all, and at what price.
The Hawthorne lease that was approved in April covers 153 Humphrey. The PAC operator (Johnny Ray, whose other ventures include the Beacon Restaurant in Marblehead and the Warwick Theater) takes possession of the building on a $10,000-per-month lease through June 30, 2028. The lease is explicitly framed as a short-term bridge to a long-term decision. The board’s stated next step, articulated by Phelan at the May 6 reorganization, was to open a long-term Hawthorne RFP after the new board had settled in.
The five-committee letter is not, in its own framing, a counter-proposal to that RFP. It is an attempt to set the substantive parameters the RFP will be allowed to consider, before the RFP has been written. The letter wants the RFP to be an RFP for open-space management of an assembled parcel that includes 187 Humphrey — not an RFP for redevelopment.
The institutional embedding
What makes the letter politically distinctive — beyond its single-architect mechanism — is that the bodies it routes through are bodies the new Select Board is institutionally embedded in.
Phelan is the SB liaison to the Open Space & Recreation Plan Committee — the body where Bandrowicz is Vice Chair. She would have seen the letter’s coordination from inside OSRP’s deliberations.
Ted Dooley, newly seated to the Select Board after winning his April 28 election, is the SB liaison to the Conservation Commission — the body Bandrowicz chairs. Dooley’s campaign-trail position on Hawthorne was the cleanest articulation of the RFI-not-delay frame: “Discussion is a means to a decision, not delay.” That position aligns substantively with the letter’s request for a parkland-direction decision and rhymes oddly with its operational push to set substantive parameters first. The two readings — “let’s discuss” and “let’s settle that it’s parkland before we discuss” — can be made compatible, but they are not identical.
Phelan and Connors’s reported non-response to Tides is not, on its face, a refusal to engage with the letter. It is the standard SB-Chair / TA posture on a matter coming up in executive session. But it does mean that the only public record of the letter, as of tonight, is the press account, the verbatim text the press did not publish, and the four-line agenda item that will not produce open-session minutes.
What to watch tonight
The executive-session agenda enumerates four items. The 187 Humphrey real-property item is the third. The first is the biannual review of executive-session minutes spanning 2021 through January 2025 — ninety-three sessions enumerated, the largest single-meeting batch in the corpus, and the first observable Phelan-Chair implementation of the commitment she made in October 2025 to systematically review unreleased exec-session minutes for potential release. The second is a four-union collective-bargaining strategy session covering police, AFSCME, SEIU, and the firefighters’ union. The fourth is non-union contract negotiation for the Library Director and the Inspector of Buildings.
Three of the four items are routine. The 187 Humphrey real-property item is not. It is the agenda’s only corpus-novel address. It is on the agenda the week after the letter’s public reporting. It is on the agenda of the first regular SB meeting after the new board was seated and after the new SB-liaison structure was confirmed. And it is on the agenda in executive session, which means whatever direction the SB takes will not be visible in open session minutes — only in eventual real-property action, if any, that crosses an open threshold.
The structural question, after the meeting, will be discoverable from indirect evidence. Does the board issue an RFP for the assembled-parkland concept? Does it ask staff to begin an acquisition conversation with the church? Does the long-term Hawthorne RFP that Phelan committed to at May 6 come back with parkland-direction parameters baked in, or with the open-direction language Dooley campaigned on? Does the Conservation Commission’s late-June or July meeting produce an Order of Conditions framework that would govern any waterfront work?
Each of those is a public-record event that will tell the reader, in a few weeks, what the executive session decided.
The reading underneath
There is a way to read this story that makes Bandrowicz the protagonist — a savvy organizer who turned a substantive position into a five-signature letter and timed it for the Select Board’s first post-ATM meeting. That reading is not wrong. There is another way that makes the Select Board the protagonist — five committees signed a letter, the SB has its first chance to formally consider it, and whatever direction the SB takes is the substantive event. That reading is also not wrong.
The sharper read is structural. Swampscott has more than thirty active committees. Most residents cannot name half of them by function. The Climate Action & Resilience Committee, the Conservation Commission, the Open Space & Recreation Plan Committee, and the Tree Committee are not household names; their work is mostly invisible between agendas; their minutes are sporadic in three of the four cases. And yet a single architect, working from one CARC table, can produce a fourteen-page document that lands on the Select Board Chair’s desk as the institutional consensus of the town’s climate, conservation, open-space-and-recreation-plan, and tree-policy ecosystem — plus a non-profit conservancy on top.
The Select Board chair’s no-comment-to-press response is not evasion. It is the mechanism working as designed: a coalition letter that requires individual chairs’ sign-off to assemble can also be answered, on the receiving end, by a deliberate decision to engage in executive session rather than in open press response. The architecture of the coalition and the architecture of the response match each other. Each is efficient at producing a substantive direction without producing a contemporaneous public record of the deliberation that produced it.
For the resident who has heard about Hawthorne for years and whose mental model of the question is the April 27 lease vote, that gap is the new feature of the story. The lease vote did not settle the long-term question. It deferred it for twenty-six months. The letter is the first move in what those twenty-six months of deferral will look like.
The first response is tonight.
Source meetings, documents, and cache references for this piece: data/committees/climate-action-resilience/minutes-2026-04-07.md (CARC letter approval, item 7); data/committees/tree-committee/minutes-2026-04-09.md (Tree Committee 4-1 sign-on); data/committees/conservation-commission/_committee.md (Bandrowicz Chair, Dooley liaison); data/committees/open-space-recreation-plan/_committee.md (Lillak Chair, Bandrowicz VC, Phelan liaison); data/committees/select-board/agenda-2026-05-27.md (May 27 exec-session agenda, item 3 — 187 Humphrey real property); data/people/tonia-bandrowicz.md (the cross-committee architect file); data/people/katie-phelan.md (OSRP and Tree Committee liaison roles); data/people/ted-dooley.md (Conservation Commission liaison and campaign-trail RFI position). Press: Swampscott Tides 2026-05-18 (Monica Sager) — “Swampscott Committees Push for Hawthorne Waterfront Park Over Development”. The April 27 Hawthorne PAC lease vote is from btO9I3hWOh4; the May 6 SB reorganization is from HT0RswRSnfY.