Connors review exposes Select Board split over finances

← All news · July 19, 2026

Swampscott's Select Board gave Town Administrator Nick Connors an Excellent on fiscal management June 17, then its Finance Committee liaison said she disagreed as unused levy capacity runs down.

The Select Board gave Town Administrator Nick Connors an “Excellent” on fiscal management in his first public performance review June 17, then exposed its own disagreement over town finances.

“As far as financial, I don’t share that agreement on financial and on budgeting,” MaryEllen Fletcher said, the board’s Finance Committee liaison and its most consistent fiscal dissenter. “We are coming to the end of our unused levy and we’re looking at an override.”

Fletcher’s objection came during an otherwise warm review of Connors. Chair Katie Phelan answered by putting the responsibility back on the board: “If we look for improvement for you, then we have to look inward also, cuz we’re the ones kind of driving that bus.”

The review was also overdue and limited. Connors’s contract and the town charter both call for the board to evaluate him; the board negotiated a six-month review on top of the charter’s annual one. Feedback was collected in April, and Connors told the board April 27 that the compilation would be “presented publicly in May.” It arrived June 17 as the last item of a long meeting. The public heard Phelan read a category summary aloud, not the evaluation forms, which the board agreed in April to keep confidential.

Connors received two Excellent ratings

Five people rated Connors: the three continuing members, Phelan, Vice Chair Danielle Leonard and Fletcher, plus departed members Doug Thompson and David Grishman, who solicited feedback before the April 28 election reshaped the board. The two members seated since, Ted Dooley and Wayne Spritz, did not rate him because they were not on the board during the period under review.

Phelan read the combined scores by category. Personal characteristics: Excellent, with a “strong consensus of high performance across all of the reviewers.” Fiscal management: Excellent, “one of the strongest and most consistent of Nick’s categories.” Five categories drew what the reviewers called a “high S,” a mix of satisfactory and excellent, leaning excellent: professional skills, relations with the board, reporting, employee relations and community relations. Three came in at Satisfactory: policy and governance, citizen relations and supervision.

Phelan named growth areas: more visibility with residents, faster response to email and delegating more to staff.

She also warned that the scores were not precise. “Not all members answered all of the sections, so it does sort of skew the results,” she said. Supervision was the most-skipped category because members who had not served as chair or vice chair felt they lacked the standing to judge it.

Fletcher challenged the fiscal grade

The one Excellent that was not about temperament was the one a reviewer rejected on the record. Fletcher cast the lone vote against the FY27 budget in April, objecting that the town was spending down unused levy capacity while cash sat idle in a revolving account. On June 17, she used the review to press for a decision the board keeps deferring.

“We have to have conversations here as far as what is this board’s philosophy on finances,” she said, “so that he has really clear guidelines on how to put these budgets together.” She also said communication “really needs to be worked on,” and objected that the form asked members to grade employee relations they had no honest way to assess.

Phelan said it would be unfair to “penalize him for being here six months and making him responsible for our unused levy.” Connors “is carrying out what we direct,” she said.

Swampscott balanced its FY27 budget by drawing about $1.6 million of excess levy capacity, leaving roughly $2.9 million. The town’s own five-year projection has that capacity exhausted around FY29, when Finance Committee Chair Eric Hartmann warned Town Meeting of a possible half-million-dollar operating override. The board’s March 2 joint-meeting minutes put the pressure earlier, warning overrides could be needed “as early as FY28, possibly annually without structural adjustments.” Finance Committee member Cinder McNerney has called drawing down excess levy “override-equivalent,” the same money out of residents’ pockets without a ballot question.

A newly seated member urged the board to take up the Finance Committee’s Town Meeting recommendations for minimizing future levy use “well ahead of budget season.” The board floated August or September financial summits and a late-June goals discussion aimed at a “financial policy” or mission statement.

The written summary was not posted

The June 17 read-out followed an April 8 compromise over how much of Connors’s evaluation the public would see. Fletcher said her understanding from town counsel was that the evaluation forms were “all public.” Thompson warned that withholding them “may not be defensible.” Phelan held to a summary-only process under Connors’s contract.

The board settled on confidential forms and a public summary. On June 17, that meant a verbal category summary in open session, with the written consolidated summary going to Town Clerk Kathleen DuPont “so she can hold it if somebody should wish to see” it. The forms stayed private. The written summary sits with the clerk, available on request rather than posted.

The process adds to a public-record pattern this paper has traced, including the board’s staff-protective posture and uneven public record documented in the May 31 committee-transparency survey, and the fully sealed 2022 Hawthorne sessions in the July 8 executive-minutes report.

The process is also out of step with its own rules. The charter, Phelan said, “contemplates a June annual review,” but Connors’s contract anniversary falls in October. His tenure began Oct. 6, 2025, “so we would be looking at October for his annual review.” The charter language “just says every June” and is not written as a recurring annual process. Fixing it, Phelan said, means updating the charter and handbook through a charter review committee that is “slated” but not yet standing: “we got to get that going.”

Everyone also disliked the form, which the board used for the first time on June 17. Phelan said the feedback called it “not the best form,” said she “really disliked the prior form,” and Fletcher called the application “a little tough.” Phelan has asked Leonard to research a standard form the board can agree on before the next review.

The praise for Connors was clear. Staff, one member said, “are for once happy” after “the climate that was in that building,” and the atmosphere at Town Hall has shifted “to Nick’s credit,” Phelan said in her summary. The unresolved question is whether the board will set the financial policy Fletcher said Connors needs before the next budget season.

Sources