The Select Board has proposed releasing, or releasing with redactions, nearly all of the roughly 93 executive-session minutes it reviewed from 2021 through January 2025. The sessions it proposes to keep fully sealed number eight. Six are the 2022 land-use deliberations around the town’s vote to buy the Hawthorne property, the parcel now at the center of a public fight over its future.
The proposal appears on the board’s July 7 agenda as item F-3, under the consent agenda. The agenda is a primary source: the board’s own statement of what it proposed to do with each set of minutes. Whether the board adopted it July 7 is not yet confirmed. No minutes from that meeting have been posted, and no press has reported the vote. The dispositions below are proposed, not final.
Six sealed sessions bracket the Hawthorne vote
The agenda groups the sessions by year: 15 in 2021, 17 in 2022, 24 in 2023, 34 in 2024, and three from early 2025. Each meeting gets one of four dispositions: approve and release, release with redactions, approve with no release, or no action. Most are marked for release or redacted release.
Only eight sessions are marked “Approved + NO Release.” Two are from December 2021 and are labeled collective bargaining. The other six are labeled “Land Use and Real Property” and fall on May 11, May 19, June 7, June 29, July 7, and July 13, 2022. Three came before the June 14, 2022 Special Town Meeting vote to buy Hawthorne, and three came after it.
The proposed treatment of those six sessions stands apart from later land talks. The board proposes releasing 2023 real-property sessions from April 19, May 9, and June 7 with redactions. Many 2024 sessions are also marked for redacted release. The only land talks marked for full withholding are the six from spring and summer 2022.
Town Meeting approved the purchase 214-3
At the June 14, 2022 Special Town Meeting, the first article was the Hawthorne purchase. Town Meeting authorized the town to borrow $8.875 million to acquire the Hawthorne-by-the-Sea site, priced at about $7 million, its assessed value, along with two open-space parcels off Archer Street. One Archer Street parcel was under a $400,000 agreement, and the town was prepared to take the other by eminent domain. The article passed 214 to 3.
Peter Spellios, then a Select Board member, gave the board’s presentation for the purchase. He called it a “second chance” to secure oceanfront land that residents had envisioned for public use more than a century earlier. He said undeveloped land made up barely one percent of the town and that the board “strongly favors open space” for the site.
The six sealed sessions are the closed-door deliberations on either side of that public vote. The agenda does not label them “Hawthorne.” It labels them “Land Use and Real Property,” and the June 14 package included the Archer Street parcels as well as Hawthorne. But the dates line up with the Hawthorne vote: three closed sessions in the weeks before Town Meeting authorized the borrowing, and three in the weeks after, as the town moved toward an October 2022 closing.
The dissent at the 2022 vote was not about secrecy. Bonnie Levine, a Precinct 6 resident who spoke from the visitors’ section, told the meeting she was not a Town Meeting member and could not vote. She argued the town was chasing “an historic dream” at the expense of revenue and the upkeep of parks and beaches it already neglected. “Almost $9 million for this, for an historic dream, is just that,” she said. Her objection was cost and the limits of who got a say, not the closed process.
The item was on the consent agenda
The disposition table did not come to the board as its own debated item. It was on the consent agenda, the section a board approves as a block, without discussion, unless a member pulls an item out. Five years of executive-session decisions were bundled there for one vote.
The same July 7 agenda put Hawthorne’s future in open session. Item E-8 was a discussion and possible vote on the Hawthorne RFP, organized around nine categories: lease versus sale, housing, open space, parking, demolition or reuse, environmental standards, walkability, streetscape, and fit with the hotel-and-commercial corridor. On the same night, the board planned to discuss what should become of Hawthorne while proposing to keep sealed the 2022 land-use sessions around how the town came to own it.
The review followed an Open Meeting Law complaint
The review followed a May 12, 2025 Open Meeting Law and public-records complaint from Liz Smith, a defeated 2025 Select Board candidate, the founding chair of the Water & Sewer Infrastructure Advisory Committee, and now a Finance Committee member. Smith sought release of the board’s withheld executive-session minutes.
The board’s KP Law-advised answer was that only one set could be released. Chair Katie Phelan committed to reviewing the rest twice a year “to ensure the reason they have not been released still exists.” May 27, 2026 was the first large, agenda-visible review of that promise: an executive-session-only meeting that listed the same 2021-through-early-2025 sessions. The July 7 agenda is where the proposed release decisions appeared on paper.
Smith’s complaint came after similar criticism from the Town Meeting floor. In March 2025, Spellios, arguing over the separate Pine Street housing deal, said the board had held 25 closed sessions “where this matter was or could have been discussed” and released nothing: “not a single meeting minute of the 25 executive sessions has been released.” That was Pine Street, not Hawthorne, but it raised the same issue: major land decisions made behind closed minutes that remained unreleased.
The July 7 table is the first session-by-session release plan the town has shown for the five-year period. It proposes opening most of the record. It proposes keeping fully sealed six 2022 land-use sessions around the Hawthorne purchase.
Sources: July 7, 2026 Select Board agenda (data/committees/select-board/agenda-2026-07-07.md): item F-3 exec-session minutes disposition table (FY2021-FY2025 groupings; the eight “Approved + NO Release” sessions: two 2021 collective-bargaining, six 2022 “Land Use and Real Property”; 2023 land-use “Release with Redactions”); item E-8 Hawthorne RFP with nine categories; masthead spelling “Catherine Phelan” (person file: Katie Phelan). Passage of F-3 not independently confirmed: no July 7 minutes posted, no press coverage. May 27, 2026 agenda (agenda-2026-05-27.md): exec-session-only review of the same 2021-Jan 2025 sessions. June 14, 2022 Special Town Meeting (WvWyI4PfZfI.txt, analysis WvWyI4PfZfI.md): $8.875M borrowing, Hawthorne about $7M assessed, two Archer Street parcels, Article 1 passed 214-3 [2:00:54]; Spellios “second chance”/open-space presentation as Select Board member [0:30:06]; Bonnie Levine’s floor remarks, self-identified non-member from the visitors’ section [1:38:34]. March 19, 2025 Special Town Meeting (M8L6TViD_NY.txt [1:44-1:45]): Spellios on the Pine Street sessions, “not a single meeting minute of the 25 executive sessions has been released.” data/people/liz-smith.md: May 12, 2025 OML/public-records complaint, WSIAC founder -> June 2025 resignation, current Finance Committee seat. data/people/bonnie-levine.md: Precinct 6 resident, non-voting status. Prior coverage: 2026-05-31_committee-transparency-survey.md (Phelan biannual-review commitment; May 27 review as pending, no release then reported), 2026-06-23_hawthorne-rfp-nine-questions.md (nine-category RFP; 153 Humphrey Street; parallel 187 Humphrey St. closed track), 2026-05-30_hawthorne-property.md (dual-track vote; April 27, 2026 PAC lease). Names and roles cross-checked against data/people/ and data/committees/select-board/_committee.md.