Swampscott has spent about $2.9 million repairing private sewer laterals as part of the federal cleanup of Kings and Fisherman’s Beach, even though those pipes are legally the responsibility of homeowners. Now town officials have to decide whether to keep paying for that work with public money.
The decision is coming fast. A July 1, 2026 State Revolving Fund deadline requires the town to sign the next-phase loan contract months before a planned December 2026 Town Meeting debate over whether homeowners should be assessed for future private-pipe repairs.
The work is tied to a consent decree the town entered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on November 23, 2015, requiring Swampscott to address sewage discharges into Kings and Fisherman’s Beach. By the town’s account, a $125,000 fine was negotiated down to $65,000.
Kings Beach closes when enterococcus, a bacteria indicator used by public-health agencies to flag the possible presence of sewage, rises above safe levels. At Kings Beach, the problem is chronic.
How Sewage Reaches The Beach
Swampscott, like most older communities, has two underground pipe networks: a stormwater system that carries rainwater untreated to the ocean, and a sanitary sewer system that carries household waste to treatment. They are supposed to stay separate. When a cracked or misconnected private sewer pipe leaks into the storm drains, contaminated water can move through the stormwater system and out to the beach.
The federal framework for finding and fixing those crossovers is called IDDE, or Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination. It has driven Swampscott’s sewer work for years.
At Kings Beach, the relevant path runs through the Stacy Brook culvert, which surfaces near the Eastern Avenue / Humphrey Street outfall on the Swampscott side. The beach sits on the Lynn–Swampscott line, and drainage reaches it from both communities.
George Allen, an environmental scientist who won a Board of Health seat in the April 28, 2026 election, has argued in public comment that the beach is fed by separate Lynn-side and Swampscott-side brook-and-culvert systems that should be measured separately. His shorthand was “two towns, two brooks, one beach.” The record names Stacy Brook on the Swampscott side; it does not pin down a polished name for the Lynn-side system.
The record supports a pathway, not a precise apportionment: stormwater carries sewage bacteria to the beach when private laterals leak. It does not establish how much contamination comes from each source.
Kings Beach is also separate from Fisherman’s Beach, which drains through a Marshall Street outfall. A completed $1.7 million ARPA-funded project there relined about 710 feet of main and rehabilitated 56 laterals and 31 manholes, wrapping up in the summer of 2025. DPW Director Gino Cresta told the Select Board that work “dramatically improved the bacteria going out” at Fisherman’s Beach.
$2.9M Went To Private Laterals
The dollar figures reached the public record only this spring. At the April 15, 2026 Select Board meeting, Cresta said the town has invested about $9.8 million since 2017 in main and lateral relining. About $2.9 million of that went into private sewer laterals, the pipes that run from individual homes to the public sewer.
Cresta said Swampscott learned from Norwood, Massachusetts, that relining public mains without also relining leaking private laterals does not stop the pollution and can force crews to open the same streets twice. Swampscott relined the private side while the streets were open, at public expense.
The work covered roughly 547 laterals across Phases 1 and 2A, including about 470 in Phase 1 and about 77 in Phase 2A. About $600,000 came from federal ARPA dollars; the rest came from the rate-payer-funded Water/Sewer Enterprise Fund.
Cresta estimated that about 90% of those relinings were done from the public main, with no contractor ever entering the home. Most homeowners whose pipes were fixed never knew. Officials discussed a unit line item around $2,500-$3,000 per lateral; dividing $2.9 million across roughly 547 laterals puts the all-in average closer to $5,000-$6,000. Roughly 300 to 400 laterals remain.
The UV Pilot Did Not Capture A Storm
In 2025, Swampscott and Lynn jointly ran a trailer-mounted ultraviolet disinfection pilot at the Eastern Avenue outfall. The engineering firm Kleinfelder designed the pilot, which used a weir wall inside the Stacy Brook culvert to back up water so it could be pumped through a UV unit that killed bacteria before discharge.
The pilot treated dry-weather flow only. It was meant to test whether UV could handle a one- or two-inch rainstorm, when contaminated stormwater surges.
It never captured that condition. On August 19, 2025, Cresta told the board the pilot had been shut down about two weeks early by mutual agreement among himself, the mayor of Lynn, and Kleinfelder. He gave three reasons: they “never got that one big storm” and had no guarantee one would arrive in the remaining two weeks; “we’re starting to override the cost”; and stopping ended generator noise for nearby neighbors. Swampscott’s commitment, Cresta said, was “three hundred [thousand] and that’s what we were getting.”
The pilot produced dry-weather data and a written report. The Aug. 19 record does not characterize the results. Residents should be cautious about claims that bacteria were “way down,” which are not established in the primary meeting record.
Separately, WSIAC vice chair Brian Drummond, in March 4, 2026 public comment, described operational failures during the run: high tide overtopping the weir and pushing seawater through the UV unit, seaweed clogging the suction pumps, and no one on the Swampscott side with clear authority to halt and correct it mid-pilot.
The Report Only Two People Reviewed
When the draft study came up on October 8, 2025, board member Mary Ellen Fletcher asked who had reviewed it. Cresta said that on the Swampscott side, it was “me,” plus Elizabeth “Liz” Smith, the founding WSIAC chair who resigned in June 2025 and whom Cresta had made a pilot “administrative assistant.”
The roughly 32-page draft then went to Lynn, then to MassDEP. The town’s elected water-and-sewer body, the Select Board functionally sitting as commissioners, had not seen it. Neither had WSIAC, the volunteer technical committee created around 2024 out of resident advocacy on Kings Beach, including Smith’s own.
MassDEP’s Eric Wald phoned Cresta, who recounted that Lynn was “ready to release” the report and Wald “didn’t think that was a good idea” until both towns’ assumptions were aligned. Fletcher’s view was: “I’m just wondering if the water and sewer commission should get it first.” Drummond made the broader complaint in March: WSIAC had been “denied the ability to review draft consultant reports — we only see finished products.”
Allen’s measurement critique is related. He argues the town measures the wrong thing: enterococcus concentration at the discharge, when what matters for the beach is dose, or concentration multiplied by flow. He also argues that turbidity, which EPA beach models use as a real-time surrogate, should be measured jointly by both towns at both culvert outflows in wet weather.
Allen now holds a Board of Health seat with shared beach jurisdiction. The record establishes that he proposed the measurement protocol. It does not establish that any such joint 2026 protocol has been funded or implemented.
Betterment Debate And July 1 Deadline
The current fight is who pays for future private-pipe repairs. At the April 27, 2026 meeting, outgoing board member David Grishman, who a year earlier had defended the UV pilot, drew the line on a $3.5 million Phase 2 capital line: “I can’t approve that if we don’t have a mechanism where the town can recapture all or a vast majority of those costs. It would be fiscally irresponsible.” The board pulled the line and deferred it.
The mechanism under discussion is a betterment, a Massachusetts town’s authority to assess property owners for a public improvement that benefits their property. A betterment can be set below full cost.
Finance Director Patrick Luddy explained April 15 that there is no legal way to reach back and assess the roughly 547 homeowners whose pipes are already done. Betterment is a tool for future phases only. Whether to use it, and at what share, is what the board committed to work out through a public process aimed at a December 2026 Town Meeting warrant article.
Two principles frame the debate. Outgoing member Doug Thompson put the case for the town paying at all: “the public purpose overpowers the private benefit, which is to get out of the consent decree, to get the beach clean.” Vice Chair Danielle Leonard put the case against clawing anything back: residents “didn’t even know that they were having the work done.”
Meanwhile, Article 10, a companion bylaw requiring a sewer-lateral inspection at property transfer, was not adopted. After a 5-0 Select Board recommendation on April 27, Fletcher moved to indefinitely postpone it on the Town Meeting floor May 18; the motion passed unanimously. The board now intends to bring the inspection bylaw back linked to the betterment policy, after a fall public process, in December.
The new Select Board will have to decide before July 1 whether to keep paying for private pipes with public money while the recovery policy is still being written.
Sources: Aug. 19, 2025 Select Board (edMKbk_CisM) — UV pilot closeout, Fisherman’s Beach figures, ~$300K commitment. Oct. 8, 2025 Select Board (bwKCrBZ6QpM) — 32-page draft review, MassDEP’s Eric Wald, “they have not seen it yet.” Apr. 27, 2026 Select Board (btO9I3hWOh4) — Grishman’s “fiscally irresponsible,” $3.5M Phase 2 deferral. Supporting: Apr. 15, 2026 Select Board (h4iiDoNKOQU) — $9.8M / $2.9M / 547-lateral history, consent-decree account, Luddy on betterment, Thompson and Leonard; Mar. 4, 2026 Select Board (7OVHHxADCuQ) — Drummond on draft-review exclusion and pilot failures, Allen’s measurement protocol. Prior coverage: data/news/2026-05-15_article-10-sewer-laterals.md, data/news/2026-05-23_article-10-pulled.md. Rosters: Water & Sewer Infrastructure Advisory Committee and Board of Health committee files.