Community Life Center task force includes members of boards that will review it

← All news · June 25, 2026

The task force studying a senior-and-community center held its first public forum at the Clarke School on June 25. Three members also sit on town bodies that will later review the study for budget, capital-plan fit, or recreation context, and the task force has posted minutes for only one of its 2026 meetings.

The nine-member task force studying a proposed Community Life Center for Swampscott includes three members who also sit on town bodies that will later review parts of the same project.

Eric Hartmann chairs the Finance Committee, which vets the town budget and capital requests before Town Meeting votes on them. Kate Greehan sits on the Capital Improvement Committee, which ranks capital requests of $20,000 or more and sends the Select Board a prioritized list. Janell Cameron is secretary of the Recreation Commission, which is likely to have a role in the center’s programming and operating context.

The task force, chaired by Anneka Kumli, held its first public forum Thursday, June 25, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. at the Clarke School on Middlesex Avenue. Members reviewed the project’s purpose, the results of a public survey, and site work done so far, then took questions from residents.

For residents, the forum moved the long-discussed senior-and-community-center idea closer to two public questions: what the building would cost, and where it would go. The task force’s makeup adds a third question: how the town will separate the group shaping the recommendation from the boards that will later review it.

Three review boards have seats on the study

The Community Life Center is a senior-center-and-community-center hybrid, a capital project the Select Board and Capital Improvement Committee have discussed across several budget cycles. The contracted consultant, the Abacus firm of David Eisen and David Pollak, framed it at the task force’s January kickoff in three tiers: small, medium, and large. The committee’s own record and this paper’s prior coverage put the range at roughly $5 million to $30 million. At the upper end, a project that size would likely become a debt-exclusion ballot question, a tax increase residents would have to approve at the ballot box.

The task force roster includes Chair Kumli and, as the standing-staff seat, Recreation Director Charlotte Daher de Garcia. Three other members have second roles on boards tied to the project:

Staffing a feasibility task force with people who know the town’s systems is common in a small town. The Finance Committee chair sitting on a body whose work his own committee will later vet for funding is the part the Select Board has not publicly addressed. Whether Hartmann would recuse himself from any FinCom vote touching the CLC is not on the record.

Hartmann is also the town’s leading voice for capital restraint. Approving the FY27 budget in April, he said of a negotiated spending figure: “I’m not happy about it, but I’m happier than I was when we first started the process, and I don’t feel there’s a lot of fat on this budget.” That voice now sits on the body shaping a future capital ask.

Most 2026 meetings have no posted minutes

The task force’s work is hard for residents to follow. By the June 25 forum, the body had held roughly nine noticed meetings in 2026, but it had posted minutes to the town’s Agenda Center for only one of them, its January 26 session. Even that was not the first meeting; members opened it by approving minutes from a December 8, 2025 gathering.

The working meetings from late February through late May are agenda-only in the public file. That does not prove minutes were never drafted. It means residents cannot read them.

The gap matters because the task force’s product is, by design, driven by public input. The Finance Committee and Capital Improvement Committee keep the same agendas-yes, minutes-no posture, but those bodies deliberate over numbers. This one’s recommendation is meant to grow out of what residents say — and yet the deliberations that shaped what residents saw at the forum are not visible in the town file.

Forum discussed sites but named none in the agenda

The forum’s main public numbers come from late-May press coverage, not from the June 25 meeting itself, whose substance is not yet on the public record. Reporting by Itemlive on May 27 put the survey near 400 responses and quoted Eisen: “everybody wants a community life center, and everybody wants everything in it.”

That same reporting named two town-owned parcels as candidate sites: Hawthorne-by-the-Sea and the former Clarke Elementary. It also quoted Kumli’s siting posture: “focus on property that the town already owns, that’s ideal.”

The June 25 agenda confirms only that the task force had reached the stage of discussing “potential sites in Swampscott.” It does not name them. The forum was held inside the Clarke School, the former elementary building that now serves as town recreation space and one of the town-owned sites press coverage has placed on the candidate list.

Hawthorne already has competing plans

Kumli’s preference for town-owned property points the search toward a small number of parcels. The one with the most public pressure is Hawthorne-by-the-Sea at 153 Humphrey Street, which is already claimed three other ways.

The Select Board voted 5-0 on April 27 to lease the building to a private restaurant-and-performing-arts operator, John Nicastro’s “Johnny Ray” venture, for about $10,000 a month through June 30, 2028, as a short-term bridge. A five-committee parkland coalition, led by architect Tonia Bandrowicz, wants the long-term plan to be “primarily open park land without any sizable structures,” plus town acquisition of the adjacent 187 Humphrey Street. The board is also building the long-term RFP that will decide the parcel’s permanent use: it chose nine scoring questions on June 17, with the weights still open, according to press coverage. A closed-door land-assembly discussion of 187 Humphrey runs alongside it in executive session.

The task force is the fourth interest around the same waterfront parcel. Its claim is the least settled, a candidate site under evaluation rather than a decision, but it still competes for the same ground as a lease, a parkland push, and an RFP.

Size will decide the funding question

A debt-exclusion Community Life Center would not arrive on an empty ballot. The town’s five-year capital plan already carries placeholders for a roughly $75 million middle school and a roughly $20 million high school HVAC project in the back half of the decade, though dates and dollar figures are not locked.

Where the task force lands on Abacus’s small-medium-large scale will shape the financing. A small build might fit into incremental funding. A large one would become another debt-exclusion question competing for the same taxpayers’ support.

That recommendation has not been made. When it is, it will route through Hartmann’s Finance Committee and Greehan’s Capital Improvement Committee, two boards already represented on the task force.

Sources