Library entrance request never reached Town Meeting after administrator said no, minutes say

← All news · August 2, 2026

Library Trustees minutes say Town Administrator Nick Connors twice refused to put a $100,000 children's-room entrance request on the warrant. The Select Board formally controls the warrant, but the FY2027 warrant carried no library article, and the five-year capital plan puts the entrance in 2031.

Swampscott’s Select Board formally controls the Town Meeting warrant. But Library Trustees minutes say a $100,000 request for the library’s children’s-room entrance died earlier, when Town Administrator Nick Connors refused to put it on the warrant.

At the trustees’ April 6 meeting, the minutes say the request “should be resubmitted to the warrant. Jonathan asked for this and Nick said no and he controls the warrant and has said no twice.”

“Jonathan” is the library director, whom the minutes name as Jonathan Nicols. “Nick” is Connors. The words are the director’s account, written down informally by the trustees. They are not Connors speaking, and no refusal has been independently confirmed. Connors’s side is not in the public record.

The result is clear. When Town Meeting met May 18 on the FY2027 warrant, there was no library article. The request never reached the floor.

That leaves the civic question the public record does not answer: how does a department request die at the administrator’s desk before the board that controls the warrant, or the voters who act on it, ever see it?

Town Meeting approved the entrance in December

The children’s-room entrance was not new. Town Meeting had approved it seven months earlier.

At the December 1, 2025 Special Town Meeting, Article 8 appropriated $350,000 to borrow for a new side entrance to the children’s room. It passed unanimously on the required two-thirds vote, with no debate. Capital Improvement Committee Chair Ryan Hale confirmed his committee backed it.

The condition was in the article: a $250,000 grant would cut the town’s net cost to $100,000, and the project would proceed only if the grant came through.

It did not. By the library’s December 15 minutes, the ADA grant had not been awarded. The town’s $100,000 share now depended on the library raising $250,000 on its own.

That was the backdrop to the spring request. By March, the trustees put the full project at $300,000 to $350,000. The Friends had voted $50,000, conditional on the library raising the rest, and another $50,000 was hoped for from state aid. The director “met with Town Administrator Nick Connors,” the March 9 minutes say, “who would not commit to adding any funds towards this project.”

The $100,000 the trustees wanted “resubmitted to the warrant” in April was the town’s share of a project Town Meeting had already approved in principle.

FY27 warrant omitted the entrance

The FY27 warrant has 14 articles. None is for the library entrance.

The town’s FY27 capital article gives the library one line: $70,000 for interior upgrades, including painting, ceiling tiles and patron spaces.

The entrance appears only in the five-year plan printed with the warrant. The Capital Improvement Committee’s recommended FY2027-FY2031 plan lists the “Library Children’s Room Side Entrance” at $350,000 in FY2031, the last year of the plan. It lists a separate “Library Rear Entrance” at $1,000,000 in FY2029.

The record shows the children’s-room entrance pushed to the far edge of the plan. It does not prove Connors’s “no” put it there.

Administrator drafts the first warrant list

The Select Board owns the warrant on paper. The board’s Procedures, Policies and Regulations manual says the board “is responsible for the preparation and approval of the final Town Meeting warrant.” The charter gives the board the power to open and close it.

That is the public part. The board votes to open the warrant, then later votes to close it.

The first list comes earlier. According to a document check recorded in the town’s file on Connors, the board’s annual calendar has the Town Administrator “release the initial Town Meeting warrant” on the first Wednesday of March. The Select Board opens the warrant on the third Wednesday of March and closes it on the third Wednesday of April.

The administrator, by that calendar, gives the board the first draft. A department request that never reaches that draft can disappear before the board votes, with no public marker that it was left out.

That is the practice the trustees’ minutes describe. “He controls the warrant” is not charter language. The charter says the board controls it. But the administrator drafts the initial list, and the FY27 warrant matched the outcome the director described.

A citizen petition could have forced a vote

There was a route around the administrator’s draft. Three groups of residents used it on the same warrant.

A citizen petition needs only ten signatures to force an article onto an annual Town Meeting warrant. The board manual says such articles “must be included on the warrant exactly as submitted.”

Articles 12, 13 and 14 reached the floor that way: a ban on anticoagulant rodenticides on town property, a ban on the sale of foie gras, and a bylaw restricting open wood fires.

The library filed no petition. The sources do not show whether the trustees considered one, ran out of time, or lacked signatures.

A petition also would not have guaranteed funding. A $100,000 appropriation still would have faced Finance Committee and Select Board recommendations and a Town Meeting majority. It would have guaranteed a floor vote.

What the record does not answer

Connors has not answered in the public record. There is no administrator’s account of the request.

The Select Board’s February-to-April records have not been reviewed to determine whether the board ever saw the library’s request before the warrant closed. That is the record that would show whether the article was Connors’s call, the board’s call, or something else.

The trustees’ minutes also cut against casting Connors as the only gatekeeper. The budget and contract freeze the library felt in the spring is minuted as a Select Board decision. The board “decided not to negotiate any employee contract(s) until after May 2026,” the minutes say.

One more number remains unresolved. The trustees minuted their FY27 operating budget as up 2.2 percent and “functionally a cut.” The warrant’s budget table shows the library rising 1.2 percent, from $883,185 to $893,349. Both numbers are in the record; their baselines have not been reconciled.

Connors has proposed warrant changes

The warrant process is already before the board.

On June 3, Connors and Town Clerk Kathleen DuPont proposed moving the warrant cycle earlier so it reaches homes about two weeks before Town Meeting. They also flagged the citizen-petition threshold and backed creating a charter-review committee.

Connors is the administrator whose office drafts the initial warrant list. He is also asking the board to review how the warrant process works.

There is a closing detail in the same May minutes. The library is upgrading its own meeting room’s technology “for future Select Board meetings” — hosting, in its own building, the board that holds the warrant it could not get onto.

Sources

Note on names: the library director has no profile in data/people/ and the trustees’ roster file is a stub; the corpus renders his surname variously (Nicols, Nichols, Lewis-Nichols), so this report names him only as the minutes do and otherwise refers to him by role.