Swampscott approved a $1 million track rebuild after its capital committee first ranked it C

← All news · July 28, 2026

The Upper Jackson Park track moved from C to B after Select Board pushback, passed Town Meeting in a $11.7 million capital plan, and is now drawing a $15,000 matching pledge from Big Blue Bargains.

Swampscott is borrowing $1 million to rebuild the Upper Jackson Park track after the town’s capital-ranking process first gave the project a C.

The Capital Improvement Committee later moved the track to B. The Select Board chair said the board considered it an A. Town Meeting then approved the money unanimously as part of an $11,709,310 capital-borrowing package.

The newest money is smaller: Big Blue Bargains, a nonprofit thrift store inside Clarke Elementary School, has pledged to match resident donations dollar-for-dollar up to $15,000. The town is taking checks at the Town Hall customer-service counter, with an online option coming.

The track decision shows how Swampscott can move a project past its capital-ranking process and assemble money from several sources while the town is close to its debt-service limit and losing room under Proposition 2½.

The capital committee first ranked the track C

The Capital Improvement Committee screens every town capital request of at least $20,000 with a useful life of at least three years, then gives the Select Board a ranked plan. Projects are sorted A, B, C, or unrated. Ryan Hale chairs the committee. Finance Director Patrick Luddy is the staff liaison.

This year, the committee ranked only the FY27 lines. It left later years unrated because scope and timing were too uncertain.

The ranking is advice. The Select Board can override it, and Town Meeting has the final vote. That is why the track’s first grade matters.

On April 8, the board reviewed the committee’s rankings and pushed back on several of them. The track drew the sharpest exchange. The committee had graded it C based on a “population served” criterion. Select Board member Danielle Leonard, the board’s liaison to the Recreation Commission, challenged that reasoning. Track programs generate fee revenue, she argued; the football field’s fees are not comparable; and the track serves more residents than some items the committee ranked A.

Mary Ellen Fletcher asked whether alumni or corporate money could help pay for the project. She cited athletic fees of $450 a season for high-school athletes and $275 for middle-schoolers, and floated the New Balance Foundation, Puma, and the Institution for Savings. Superintendent Jason Calichman and Town Administrator Nick Connors agreed to come back in June with a naming-rights framework. Repairing the track, rather than replacing it, was deemed not viable.

No one argued that the track should be dropped. Leonard’s case was that the C undervalued it. No sponsor promised money. Fletcher named possible funders, and Calichman and Connors agreed to return with a framework.

The project moved from C to B

Within the week, the committee upgraded the track from C to B. At the April 15 board meeting, Chair Katie Phelan said the committee had moved the track “from C to B after this week’s meeting” and that “this board has made it clear that the track is an A.”

By Town Meeting, the grade was settled. The $1 million track line was part of Article 9, the FY27 capital-borrowing plan totaling $11,709,310. The Finance Committee presented the track as a strongly recommended B-ranked project and item number seven on the list.

Town Meeting passed Article 9 unanimously on May 18. A project first marked C nine weeks earlier passed without a dissenting vote.

The track funding includes borrowing, state money, fees, and boosters

The $1 million appropriation is the largest piece. The town’s Track Boosters laid out other pieces for the board on March 18, when Christina Colella and her son Anthony, a Swampscott High junior and track athlete, spoke during public comment:

Those figures are the boosters’ public-comment claims, made while advocating for the rebuild, not audited town numbers.

Big Blue Bargains pledged a $15,000 match

The June naming-rights framework has not appeared in the public record. There is no New Balance, Puma, or Institution for Savings deal in the posted record. That does not prove no private conversation happened.

What has appeared is Big Blue Bargains, a nonprofit thrift store inside Clarke Elementary School that steers its proceeds to Swampscott programs. Connors announced in his July 21 town administrator’s report that the shop had pledged to match community donations for the track dollar-for-dollar, up to $15,000. Donations are accepted at Town Hall customer service, and an online option is coming. The Swampscott Tides covered the pledge July 24.

“We saw at a Select Board meeting that there needed to be a new track and wondered if it was something we could get involved with,” Rachel Taradash, a Big Blue Bargains board member, told the Tides. “This checked a lot of boxes for us. Things people can use and participate in are great. The schools can use the track for sporting events, but the rest of our community can use it as well.”

Larger capital votes are coming

The town’s five-year projection shows its cushion under Proposition 2½ exhausted around FY29. The pre-election board’s March 2 budget minutes warned that overrides are “likely needed as early as FY28.” The FY27 budget already balanced only by drawing about $1.6 million of that cushion, spending a Finance Committee member has called “override-equivalent.”

The same window includes a $75 million middle-school debt exclusion, penciled into the warrant for FY29 and pointing toward a construction vote around 2030, plus a separate $20 million high-school HVAC project in FY31. See this paper’s May 30 coverage. Those projects would need ballot votes.

The track moved through with capital borrowing, state money, booster spending, athletic-fee arguments, and now a thrift-shop match. The larger school projects cannot be funded that way.

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