Select Board goals have no vote, rankings or timetable

← All news · July 22, 2026

Minutes from the June 27 goal-setting retreat were posted about 26 days later. They put Ted Dooley's Economic Development Committee on paper, omit the word 'override,' and leave the board without adopted priorities.

The Swampscott Select Board’s June 27 goal-setting retreat produced no vote, no priority rankings, no departmental leads and no timetable for action, according to minutes approved July 21 and posted about 26 days after the meeting.

The item was noticed as “Discussion and possible vote on establishing Select Board Goals.” All five members attended: Chair Katie Phelan, Vice Chair Danielle Leonard, Mary Ellen Fletcher, Ted Dooley and Wayne Spritz. No vote was taken.

The minutes list a “next steps” section that defers the work: “finalize strategic priority rankings,” identify short-, medium- and long-term projects, “assign departmental leads,” build an implementation timeline, and “schedule a follow-up strategic planning session.” What the board produced on June 27 is a list. It is not yet a commitment.

The five members spent the morning of Saturday, June 27, in the Town Hall first-floor conference room writing down what they want the town to work on. It was the first goal-setting session of the post-election board. The only account of the retreat was posted this week, and it is the only account in the record reviewed for this piece.

The minutes were approved on the July 21 consent agenda and posted around July 22 or 23, attested by Shannon O’Leary, the executive administrative assistant to the town administrator and the board. For nearly four weeks, residents had no public account of the new board’s priorities.

Financial and economic goals

The list is long and unranked. The board grouped its goals into eight areas: financial, operational, public safety and enforcement, infrastructure, parking, economic development, community and communications. It also attached a ten-row table of action items, each with a “responsible party.”

The financial section records “long-term financial policies review,” “forecasting,” “budget sustainability” and “OPEB and retirement planning (2031 outlook).” The economic-development section names the Hawthorne property, the Hadley property, “Church parking lot,” “establishing an Economic Development Committee,” and a long-term economic-development plan.

Because the minutes are a consensus summary with no speaker attribution, no goal can be pinned to one member from the document alone. Several lines, though, echo promises made during the spring campaign.

Campaign promises in the list

The clearest match is economic development. During the race for the two open seats, all four candidates, Dooley, Spritz, Charles Patsios and Wayne Godfrey, agreed the town cannot cut its way out of its budget squeeze. Dooley put it as arithmetic: as he framed his signature proposal, the town “can’t cut anymore” and can’t raise taxes anymore, so it has to grow its way out. His answer was to stand up an Economic Development Committee.

That committee is now on paper. The retreat lists “establishing an Economic Development Committee” and assigns “Develop Economic Development Framework” to the administration. The board did not spell out the committee’s membership or its work. That structure lives in Dooley’s campaign plan, not the June 27 minutes.

The board also carried forward the campaign’s Hawthorne consensus, though it reframed it. All four candidates said the long-vacant Hawthorne site needed an open public process. The retreat folds Hawthorne into economic development and pairs it with an action item to “Evaluate Hawthorne and Church Parking Lot opportunities.”

The “Church parking lot” is the St. John’s lot next to Hawthorne, at 187 Humphrey Street. That is a cross-reference from prior coverage, not a phrase the minutes explain. Listing it as an economic-development target is not a decision to buy, sell or build.

Two campaign items did not survive. The immigration-enforcement resolution that all four candidates endorsed appears nowhere in the goals. The word the budget conversation has turned on, override, appears nowhere either.

No override in the goals

The retreat calls the town’s central fiscal problem “budget sustainability,” “long-term financial planning” and “long-term financial policies review.” It never says “override.”

The board’s own record has used the word. The March 2 joint budget minutes, from the pre-election board of Phelan, Fletcher, David Grishman, Leonard and Doug Thompson, three of whom carried over, warned that overrides are “likely needed as early as FY28, possibly annually without structural adjustments.”

Swampscott balanced its FY27 budget only by drawing about $1.6 million of its excess levy capacity, leaving roughly $2.9 million. The town’s own projection shows that cushion exhausted around FY29. Finance Committee member Cinder McNerney has called that drawdown “override-equivalent”: the same money out of residents’ pockets, without a ballot question.

The omission is not confined to the goals. Fletcher, the board’s Finance Committee liaison, said the word at the June 17 meeting: “we are coming to the end of our unused levy and we’re looking at an override,” per this paper’s July 20 coverage of the video. The official June 17 minutes, posted the same week, contain no dissent and no mention of an override.

One financial line needs caution. “OPEB and retirement planning (2031 outlook)” bundles two different things. The 2031 date belongs to the pension system, which the board has said is on track for full funding that year. OPEB, retiree health insurance, is a separate liability with no established funding date in this record. The single “2031 outlook” should not be read to mean OPEB is on schedule.

Charter review has no owner

Of the ten action items, nine name a responsible party: Finance, Administration or DPW. One does not: “Review Charter | TBD.”

It is the only owner left unassigned. A charter review committee is, in Phelan’s June 17 words, “slated” but not yet standing. “We got to get that going,” she said, because fixing the charter, including the mismatch between the June review date it sets for the town administrator and his October contract anniversary, needs a body that does not yet exist.

The retreat’s charter goal has no owner because the committee that would own it has not been created.

St. John’s lot appears in two records

The retreat places the St. John’s church parking lot under economic development. Another public record points in a different direction.

A fourteen-page letter this spring, signed by the chairs of five town bodies, urged that the Hawthorne area and the acquisition of 187 Humphrey be kept as “primarily open park land without any sizable structures.” Dooley is the board’s liaison to the Conservation Commission and Phelan its liaison to the Open Space and Recreation Plan committee, both among the signatory bodies.

The goals put the parcel in an economic-development discussion. The letter argues for parkland. The board has not chosen between them.

The minutes do not schedule the follow-up planning session where rankings would be adopted, leads named, and the Economic Development Committee and charter review placed on an agenda.

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