All four candidates for Swampscott Select Board said this spring that the town cannot solve its budget squeeze through cuts alone.
That was the most consequential point of agreement across one debate and two candidate forums before the April 28 election. Edward “Ted” Dooley, Wayne Spritz, Charles “Charlie” Patsios, and Wayne Godfrey also agreed that the long-vacant Hawthorne site needs an open public process and that the board was right to pass its resolution limiting how town property and police are used in federal immigration enforcement.
None of those issues was a standalone question on the ballot. Voters chose Dooley, who received a press-reported 1,064 votes, and Spritz, who received 1,008, for the two open seats. Patsios received 598 votes and Godfrey received 398. The two outgoing members, Doug Thompson and David Grishman, did not seek re-election.
The board that sat for the first time on May 6, Chair Katie Phelan, Vice Chair Danielle Leonard, Mary Ellen Fletcher, Dooley and Spritz, now owns the next steps on all three issues.
Budget: Candidates Saw Override Pressure, Not Cuts Alone
Asked at the March 27 debate whether Swampscott can realistically avoid a Proposition 2½ override, the four candidates split on framing but not on the underlying answer: none presented cuts alone as a real solution.
Dooley put it as arithmetic: “we can’t cut any more, we can’t tax any more, we have to grow more,” and said the town will likely need both an operating override and, separately, a capital override for the aging middle school within a few years.
Spritz gave the most direct account of the town’s levy position: it is “running out of that excess levy. We’re going to hit a brick wall.” Patsios said “we’re not going to solve the problem by cutting,” while holding open a conditional path: an override could be avoided “if we change the things being discussed today.” Godfrey drew the same distinction in reverse: a “major” override is avoidable, but “small and incremental increases” are not.
As this paper reported on May 13, Town Administrator Nick Connors’s five-year projection puts the town’s excess-levy capacity, the cushion between what Swampscott is allowed to tax and what it does tax, exhausted by FY29. At that point, the bottom line “would technically require an override.”
Annual Town Meeting on May 18 then drew $1.6 million of that cushion to balance FY27, raising the average single-family bill about $617 instead of $346 and leaving roughly $2.9 million. Finance Committee Chair Eric Hartmann told the floor that by FY29, “we need another half a million dollar override if we can’t find ways to either cut our expenses or increase our revenues.”
That is an operating override, separate from the roughly $75 million middle-school debt-exclusion question expected around the end of the decade, which goes to its own ballot.
Phelan committed at the April 8 meeting to a working session of the Select Board, Finance Committee, and School Committee chairs on excess-levy and reserve policy. The question is whether that session produces a policy that caps the excess-levy draw, and whether FY28 budgeting begins groundwork for an override ask, or whether the board keeps describing the cliff without changing course.
Hawthorne: Open Process, No Shared Endpoint
On the long-vacant Hawthorne site at 153 Humphrey Street, all four candidates said the years of indecision should end through an open, public process. They did not agree on what should be built there, or whether anything should be built there.
Dooley and Spritz named a specific mechanism: a Request for Information. “Discussion is a means to a decision, not delay,” Dooley said, arguing the town should have gone to an RFI immediately. Spritz framed it as repair: “we need to rebuild trust in the community that was broken at some point where we bought this billet of land for $7 million,” then review the public input already gathered before going out to RFI.
Patsios, who put the cost of holding the empty building at roughly $400,000 a year, floated two paths, lease-and-preserve or sell, and called the board’s handling short-sighted without committing to one. Godfrey, who lives in the neighborhood, said the site was “near and dear to my heart” and should be prioritized “in ways that the gentlemen here have expressed,” adding that “we do need to come to consensus as a town.”
The new board’s first move on Hawthorne was already in motion before it seated. On April 27, the outgoing board voted unanimously, after a brief “four-one” misread the chair corrected to “five-O,” to lease 153 Humphrey to a private restaurant-hospitality operator identified in prior coverage as Johnny Ray’s Performing Arts Center venture. The lease is $10,000 a month for about twenty-six months, a deal the meeting estimated at roughly $622,000 in net benefit, food and beverage excluded.
The lease was framed as temporary. At that same April 27 meeting, not the May 6 reorganization, as earlier coverage stated, Phelan told the departing Thompson and Grishman that she and Leonard would “hopefully be in an agenda very soon to talk about a long-term RFP for Hawthorne. So we can live up to the promise that this is temporary.”
That promised RFP is where the campaign consensus will first matter. As this paper reported May 27, a fourteen-page letter signed by the chairs of five town entities, coordinated largely by Conservation Commission Chair Tonia Bandrowicz, now urges that the long-term plan be “primarily open park land without any sizable structures,” opposing private development. The letter is an attempt to set the RFP’s parameters before it is written.
Dooley, who campaigned for an open RFI, is now the board’s liaison to the Conservation Commission, one of the signatory bodies. His own position on the letter is not on the record.
The test is whether the long-term Hawthorne RFP is genuinely open to multiple feasible uses, as all four candidates said it should be, or arrives pre-steered toward parkland without structures before residents can compare options. The RFP language, when it appears on an agenda, is the document to read.
Immigration Resolution: Four Candidates Backed It
The clearest agreement was support for the town’s resolution on federal immigration enforcement. On April 8, the board adopted a counsel-redrafted version “much of which is what people have seen before,” a revision of a first resolution it had passed in mid-to-late March, not a fresh start. It passed on a unanimous voice vote.
The resolution bars town property from being used as a staging or operations base for federal immigration enforcement, denies access to non-public areas without a valid judicial warrant, states that Swampscott police perform no federal immigration-officer functions, affirms the town still honors criminal warrants and legal obligations, and urges peaceful expression.
All four candidates backed it. Spritz was most forceful: the board “did absolutely the right thing,” and “as an American Jew who saw what happened in the Holocaust,” he was “not going down the route where masked, unidentified law enforcement officers come in without warrants.”
Patsios was most personal. The child of Greek immigrants, he described a tenant family whose father was deported, said “I know their pain,” and said that whatever the town can do “it should do it,” while admitting “I don’t have an answer.” Godfrey urged know-your-rights information on the town website and praised residents conducting courthouse “ICE watches,” conceding the town’s limited power. Dooley said, “I support what the Select Board did, and I think it’s important for people to know that they are safe.”
The test is whether the board holds that line if federal enforcement pressure reaches town property or town staff: no town property for staging, and no non-public access without a judicial warrant.
What To Watch
- Budget: A tri-chair policy that caps the excess-levy draw, and FY28 budgeting that prepares an override ask rather than another year of spend-down.
- Hawthorne: A long-term RFP that stays open to competing uses, rather than one written to a parkland conclusion already reached in committee.
- Immigration: If the resolution is tested, whether the board enforces the limits it passed.
Each can be checked in an agenda, a warrant article, or a meeting vote over the next year.
Sources: March 27, 2026 candidates’ debate (NZltd0P5RMw): override exchange [21:53, 39:26], immigration [1:04:28]; April 7, 2026 candidates’ forum, Select Board segment (sKjBAvikjtI); April 8, 2026 SB candidates’ forum (QZ3QRj8dgeA): Hawthorne [53:11, 56:34, 58:50]; April 8, 2026 Select Board meeting (F9gmYU1kcoQ): revised immigration resolution [1:10:58–1:14:42], five-year projection; April 27, 2026 Select Board (btO9I3hWOh4): Hawthorne lease vote and RFP commitment [3:05:11–3:05:38]; May 6, 2026 reorganization (HT0RswRSnfY); Annual Town Meeting Night 1, May 18, 2026 (RdT7wDYrSzU): FY27 levy draw and FY29 override warning. The School Committee segment of April 7 (6QcvKzGNwJY) contains no Select Board candidate content. Canonical names and roles from data/people/ and committee rosters in data/committees/; “Wayne Godfrey” and the four vote totals are press-attested (Patch, 2026-04-28) and appear in no meeting record. Prior coverage: 2026-05-13_fy29-override.md, 2026-05-19_atm-night-1.md, 2026-05-23_article-10-pulled.md, 2026-05-27_five-committee-parkland-letter.md.