Select Board to hold first commercial earth-removal hearing for 555 Essex

← All news · July 31, 2026

The board and ERAC will hold Swampscott's first joint earth-removal hearing for a commercial redevelopment, then revisit whether to sell or lease Hawthorne and review parking fines.

Swampscott’s Select Board meets Tuesday with its first joint public hearing on an earth-removal permit for a commercial redevelopment: the 555 Essex Street parcel, the Swampscott Mall site at Vinnin Square. The board and the Earth Removal Advisory Committee will hear the permit application for digging and hauling earth from a retail-district site, after using the same bylaw process this year on the town’s only quarry.

The board also reopens whether the town-owned Hawthorne property should be leased or sold, and hears the standardized parking-fine schedule it asked staff to bring back.

The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. at Swampscott High School, 200 Essex Street, Room B129, and streams on Microsoft Teams. Public comment, item D, comes before the business items. All five board members are listed: Chair Katie Phelan, Vice Chair Danielle Leonard, Mary Ellen Fletcher, Ted Dooley and Wayne Spritz, with Town Administrator Nick Connors. The agenda was clerk-stamped Friday, July 31, at 11:36 a.m., inside the Open Meeting Law’s 48-business-hour posting window.

555 Essex hearing extends quarry process to mall site

The applicant is Swampscott Multi Owner LLC, listed at 125 High Street in Boston. The address and parcel match CenterCorp’s Vinnin Square redevelopment, which won Planning Board site plan approval in January 2025 and an amendment in January 2026. The link between the LLC and CenterCorp is an address match in Planning Board records, not a corporate-registry confirmation.

The public record does not yet say how much earth would be removed, how long the work would take, or whether any blasting is proposed. ERAC took up the application on July 20 and again on August 3; no minutes from those meetings are posted. Tuesday’s hearing is where the scale of the excavation is supposed to become public.

Swampscott’s Earth Removal Advisory Committee spent this spring rewriting the annual permit for the town’s only quarry, on Danvers Road, ahead of a fall of development blasting (July 24 coverage). Article XIII, the earth-removal bylaw, and the joint ERAC/Select Board process were built and tested around that quarry. The two bodies already held a joint hearing on the quarry permit on June 3.

Tuesday is the first time that process reaches a commercial dig. The board’s decision, and any conditions it attaches, will set the working template for how Swampscott polices large excavations on private development sites.

Some officials hold seats in more than one of the town’s land-use debates. Tonia Bandrowicz is an ERAC member and also chairs the Conservation Commission, vice-chairs the Open Space and Recreation Plan committee, and drafted the five-signatory letter pressing for open space at Hawthorne. Joe Markarian chairs ERAC and sits on the Hawthorne Reuse Advisory Committee. Dooley chaired the Planning Board that reviewed the 555 Essex site plan, was an ERAC member of record earlier this year, and moved the Select Board’s June 17 approval of the rewritten quarry permit. Those are overlapping institutional roles, not evidence of a shared agenda.

The hearing may also show whether the air-monitoring scrutiny that surfaced over the quarry follows the earth-removal process onto a commercial site. George Allen, elected to the Board of Health in April after 40 years as an air-pollution scientist, testified on June 3 that the quarry’s 2025 sampling was “insufficient … to determine compliance with health-based standards for PM10 or crystalline silica.” He described that as a critique of the data, not a finding of harm. Allen took the Board of Health’s ERAC seat on June 17, bringing the committee to five voting members, and ERAC’s July 20 agenda carried air monitoring as a standalone item. Whether that scrutiny attaches to the 555 Essex dig is open.

Hawthorne sale question returns

The board takes up the Hawthorne RFP again with nine listed dimensions, and “lease vs. sale” is first. That reopens a disposition question the board appeared to settle on July 7, when it reached consensus to lease the property and keep ownership “in perpetuity,” with “no desire to sell.” The April 27 short-term lease to the Preservation of Affordable Housing was framed as a 26-month bridge that did not decide the long term. The July 7 consensus had looked like the longer-term answer. Tuesday’s agenda lists a discussion and possible vote.

A sale would affect the open-space demand now before the board. The five-signatory coalition, anchored by the Conservation Commission and Open Space committee, has asked that Hawthorne, at 153 Humphrey Street, remain “primarily open park land without any sizable structures.” A sale would undercut or close off that demand, depending on terms.

Discussion No. 3 on the agenda covers open-space proportion and community use, the coalition’s target. Residential use also stays live. It drew the board’s sharpest split on July 21, with Fletcher an “absolute no” and Phelan and Dooley preferring to score residential down rather than exclude it. A motion to exclude residential was seconded that night but tabled without a vote (June 23 and July 21 coverage).

Parking-fine schedule returns

On July 21 the board directed staff to bring a standardized fine schedule to an August agenda. Tuesday’s agenda lists it as a discussion item, not a scheduled vote.

The board’s stated problem is inconsistency. Swampscott issued 576 parking citations in the first half of 2026, against a three-year average near 860 a year. Current fines run $75 at the ocean and Phillips Beach, but $25 at Fisherman’s Beach and $25 on Humphrey Street.

Dooley pushed a two-tier approach, separating public-safety tickets, such as a blocked fire lane, from nuisance tickets. He argued that a fire-lane violation should cost well above $25; the July 21 analysis characterizes his position as treating fines as deterrence, not revenue. Enforcement is an officer’s duty under the union contract, so shifting it to a dedicated non-officer position could require mid-contract bargaining.

Other agenda items

The Town Clerk’s block includes the September state primary warrant, appointment of election workers, and the appointment of Registrar Michael Paquette. The appointment follows the July 21 appointment of Michael Brison as temporary registrar, for no more than four weeks, after the death of registrar Paul DeBole.

The board also recognizes three retirements it moved off July 21 so families could attend: Heidi Whear, Director of Aging Services; Fire’s Glenn Bartram, 28 years; and the Library’s Isarella Abrams, 31.5 years, effective July 31. A Town Meeting zoning update is listed without detail.

The agenda includes a discussion and possible vote on the Lynnway Multimodal Corridor Project, a regional Lynn corridor effort that appears in the cached Select Board record for the first time, with no prior discussion on file and no named proponent.

July minutes still missing

Nothing on Tuesday’s agenda approves the July 7 or July 21 Select Board minutes. The cached Select Board minutes run only through June 27. No July minutes are posted, and the agenda carries no item to approve them, extending a posting gap into a second month.

ERAC’s July 20 minutes are not posted either, leaving no public record before Tuesday’s hearing of how the mall-dig application was first handled.

Sources