Select Board agenda includes first charter commission discussion

← All news · August 16, 2026

The Aug. 18 agenda lists a charter commission discussion, plus possible votes on a $2.5M note, the town's Lynnway position and trash service.

The Select Board’s Tuesday agenda includes the first cached 2026 board listing for “Discussion of Charter Commission,” a wording change that matters because a commission is not the charter-review committee board members discussed this spring and summer.

The item is discussion-only. The agenda’s only business items noticed for possible votes are the sale of a $2,527,823 bond anticipation note, the town’s position on the Lynnway corridor project, and a trash service update. A noticed “possible vote” is not a promise to vote. The consent agenda, which includes three meetings’ minutes and four appointments, is separately votable.

The meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Swampscott High School, 200 Essex Street, Room B129, with a Microsoft Teams option. Public comment comes before the business items. All five members are listed: Chair Katie Phelan, Vice Chair Danielle Leonard, Mary Ellen Fletcher, Ted Dooley and Wayne Spritz. Town Administrator Nick Connors is also listed.

Charter commission, not charter committee

For at least four months, the board has returned to the town charter. Until now, the record has used the word committee. Tuesday’s agenda uses Commission.

On April 15, at annual Town Meeting, Phelan recommended a full charter review committee on a review cadence she put at 2006, 2016 and 2026. That was the board’s answer to Fletcher’s Article 12, which would have moved the Moderator’s sole power to appoint the Finance Committee into the board’s hands. The board struck the article and pointed the question toward a full review. Fletcher objected that a full review “takes too long.”

On June 3, Connors backed a charter-review committee and flagged conflicts between the charter and town bylaws, including the spring Town Meeting date and petition-signature thresholds where the charter controls. At the June 17 meeting, during Connors’s six-month review, the chair returned to the issue. The charter sets an annual June review of the administrator, but Connors was hired in October, so “it just says every June” no longer fits. The town should “at some point update our … charter and handbook with the charter review committee,” she said. “We got to get that going.”

Ten days later, at the board’s June 27 retreat, “Review Charter” landed on the priority list as the only action item with no name attached: “responsible party TBD.”

Those references are to a committee, an appointed group the town could convene on its own. A charter commission is a different tool under state law.

Swampscott’s current charter was enacted as a special act, Chapter 106 of the Acts of 2016, “An Act Revising the Charter of the Town of Swampscott.” That route runs a locally drafted charter through Town Meeting and the Legislature. A charter commission under G.L. c. 43B is the other path: a petition signed by at least 15% of the town’s registered voters puts the question on the ballot, voters elect a nine-member commission, the commission studies and drafts, and its proposed charter goes back to the voters for final approval, not to Town Meeting and not to Beacon Hill as a special act. The town did not use that mechanism for its 2016 rewrite.

The agenda does not say which route the board has in mind. The June record says committee. Tuesday’s agenda says Commission. The two are not interchangeable.

A charter commission could reopen structures the town has held for decades: the five-member Select Board, representative Town Meeting, elected assessors and an elected Board of Health, and a Town Administrator who answers to the board, a deliberately weak-executive design. Tuesday’s discussion item does not decide any of that.

Possible votes Tuesday

The agenda lists ten items of new and old business. Three are explicitly open to a vote, plus the consent agenda. The rest, including FY26 year-end, transitional audit “next steps,” a “Kleinfeld” report, two police updates, board goals and the charter item, is noticed for discussion. The residential parking plan Connors promised on Aug. 4 is one of the police updates, with no vote scheduled.

The note. The board may vote to sell a $2,527,823 bond anticipation note, short-term borrowing the town later rolls into a bond or pays off. The agenda does not say what it funds, and the packet may. It comes against a fiscal backdrop the board has flagged all summer: Dooley warned on Aug. 4 that a future middle school means the town will “have to go bond for $100 million in the next five to seven years,” and the town’s levy headroom is projected to tighten by FY29. A $9.6M note the board sold in February is separate borrowing; nothing on the agenda ties the two.

Lynnway. This is a position, not a permit. The MBTA-led corridor redesign first reached the board on Aug. 4. The board took no vote and sent no letter of support. Instead, it joined a Marblehead-Swampscott-Nahant working group with Fletcher and Marblehead’s Erin Nunan, with Salem to be added, aiming at a meeting with the Lieutenant Governor. Fletcher called the MBTA’s Swampscott session “a gross waste of my time … They didn’t have a pen or paper”; Phelan’s read was “I don’t think we’re going to stop it from occurring, but if there are changes that we can make.” A Tuesday vote would most likely adopt the town’s recommendations or formal posture out of that regional process, not approve or kill a state project. Dooley has recused because he sits on the DCR’s Essex County stewardship council, and the DCR owns the corridor land: “I am conflicted out.”

Trash. Most of this issue is settled. The five-year Republic contract began July 1; the solid-waste line rose $206,980 to $2,004,282; the board set the new cart and bag fees on July 21: a second trash cart at $160 (4-1, Phelan the lone no), a second recycling cart at $50, and blue bags kept at $3. Automated collection began Aug. 3 (July 22 coverage). The open items are narrow: Fletcher has asked staff to price a 35-gallon senior cart, and she has raised, without a vote, moving trash onto a standalone user fee.

Other discussion items

The transitional audit returns as “next steps.” The review was ordered at 2025 Town Meeting over the board’s objection, championed by former Finance Committee chair Jerry Perry, and covers the water/sewer enterprise fund, Chapter 30B procurement and the recreation revolving fund. It follows the Fitzgerald-to-Connors transition. As of late July, Connors said the town had CLA’s final draft in hand and expected the finished report back in August. Tuesday’s “next steps” is very likely that presentation.

The parking update follows Aug. 4, when Connors disclosed that the board had voted in April 2025 to raise all town-wide fines to $75 and never implemented it. Ticket books still read $25 until officers began hand-notating the higher figure on Aug. 5. That account comes from a caption-derived record, not official minutes. Tuesday brings the residential, zoned-parking plan Connors said he would return with, noticed as a discussion, not a vote.

Also discussion-only: FY26 year-end, a “Kleinfeld” report (almost certainly the DPW’s stormwater consultant, Kleinfelder, though the agenda does not say), and board goals. The consent agenda includes three meetings’ minutes and four appointments: Glenn Kessler to the Harbor & Waterfront Advisory Committee, Catherine Wilson as a Historical Commission alternate, and Kelly Russo and Ken Schutzer to the Housing Authority. The last two warrant a caveat: the Housing Authority’s seats are normally elected or state-appointed, so appointing two members by board consent reads as vacancy-related rather than ordinary. The town’s own documents spell the second name “Schutzer,” while his legal filings use “Shutzer.”

Sources

Addendum — August 19, 2026

The meeting this piece previews did not happen. On August 18 — the day of the meeting — the town replaced the posted agenda at the same Agenda Center URL with a one-page notice: the Select Board meeting “scheduled for this evening, Tuesday, August 18, 2026, has been canceled. A new meeting date and time will be announced once confirmed and posted on the Town website.” No reason was stated, and as of early August 19 no new date has been posted. The pre-scheduled YouTube stream was retitled “CANCELLED” and never went live.

Everything described above — the Lynnway and trash votes, the parking proposals, the bond anticipation note, the transitional audit, the charter-commission discussion, the August 4 minutes approval, and the four appointments — is deferred, not decided. The board’s downstream deadlines (the fall Town Meeting warrant window and its October 21 recommendation deadline on the proposed 40R district) do not move with it.