Select Board meeting returns Thursday with bond note, possible Lynnway vote and no disruption agenda item

← All news · August 25, 2026

The Aug. 18 Select Board meeting the network disruption canceled returns Thursday, Aug. 27, at 5:30 p.m. at the Senior Center, 200 Essex Street. The same docket is back, nothing was decided in the gap, and the disruption itself is not listed for discussion.

The Select Board returns Thursday to the same business the town’s network disruption postponed last week: a $2,527,823 bond anticipation note, the town’s position on the Lynnway redesign, trash-service follow-up and a charter commission discussion.

The makeup meeting is Thursday, Aug. 27, at 5:30 p.m. at the Swampscott Senior Center, 200 Essex Street. The canceled Aug. 18 meeting had been set for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in Room B129 of the High School, which shares that address. The meeting moves next door to the Senior Center, starts an hour earlier and uses new remote-access credentials.

Residents can attend in person or join by Microsoft Teams (meeting ID 277 042 983 962 093, passcode 7iM6iH9D) or by phone at +1 323-694-9686, conference ID 391 794 807#. The Teams ID from the canceled meeting no longer applies. Public comment (item D) comes before the business items, so residents who want to speak should join at the start.

Same docket, no intervening votes

The board has not met since Aug. 4. Everything on the Aug. 18 agenda was deferred, not decided, and returns Thursday intact: the same ten business items in the same order, and the same three sets of minutes — July 7, July 21 and Aug. 4 — carried over verbatim for approval. No vote happened in the interim, on the docket or on the disruption.

One consent-agenda line changed. On Aug. 18 the board was to appoint two members to the Housing Authority, Kelly Russo and Ken Schutzer, each to a three-year term. Thursday’s agenda lists only Russo. Schutzer’s appointment is no longer there. The agenda gives no reason, and the record does not establish one. The town’s Housing Authority page already lists both as sitting board members, but that does not explain why one appointment fell off and the other stayed. The town spells the name “Schutzer”; his own legal filings use “Kenneth B. Shutzer, Esq.” The two other consent appointments — Glenn Kessler to the Harbor & Waterfront Advisory Committee and Catherine Wilson as a Historical Commission alternate — are unchanged.

Bond note, Lynnway, trash and charter commission

The substance of the docket was previewed when it was first noticed (Aug. 17 preview). Nothing on it has changed since.

A $2,527,823 bond anticipation note. The board may vote to sell the note, short-term borrowing the town later rolls into a bond or pays off. The agenda does not say what it funds. It comes against a fiscal backdrop the board has flagged all summer: on Aug. 4, Ted Dooley warned that a future middle school could force the town to “bond for $100 million in the next five to seven years.” A separate $9.6 million note the board sold in February is unrelated.

The Lynnway corridor. The board may vote on the town’s position on the MBTA-led redesign of the Lynn–Swampscott waterfront road. This is a position, not a permit; the state controls the project. Aug. 18 was the reported target for the board to adopt the recommendations of a Marblehead-Swampscott-Nahant working group. Dooley has recused himself because the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation owns the corridor land and he sits on its Essex County stewardship council: “I am conflicted out,” he said Aug. 4.

Trash service. The board may vote on an issue mostly settled: the five-year Republic contract began July 1, automated collection began Aug. 3, and the board set the new fees on July 21. What remains open is Mary Ellen Fletcher’s request that staff price a smaller 35-gallon cart for seniors.

The charter commission. The agenda lists a discussion item, but it carries the widest long-term stakes. It is the first time this year a board agenda has used the word commission rather than the charter-review committee the board has discussed for months. A charter commission under state law is a voter-petitioned, elected nine-member body that can rewrite the structure of town government, with its work going back to voters rather than Town Meeting. The agenda does not say which route the board has in mind.

Also on the docket, as before: FY26 year-end business, the transitional audit’s “next steps,” a “Kleinfeld” report (almost certainly the DPW’s stormwater consultant, Kleinfelder), two police updates — elementary-school circulation and parking proposals — and board goals.

Network disruption not listed

Nothing on Thursday’s agenda addresses the network disruption that canceled the Aug. 18 meeting. There is no line for it. If the board speaks to the incident, the first place it could do so is the Town Administrator’s Report (item C), near the top of the meeting; the board’s own comment period (item G) is the other channel.

That would be the first time the board, in open session, could give a public account of the disruption. It would also be the first town account of any kind since the three-sentence “Public Notice: Service Disruption” the town posted Aug. 19, which Itemlive attributed to Town Administrator Nick Connors. That notice said the town “experienced a network disruption,” “immediately took steps to secure our network,” and had IT staff and “third-party specialists” working to “securely restore files and systems.” The town has named no affected system, cause or timeline, and has not called the incident a cyberattack or a breach. Thursday’s meeting falls in the second week of the disruption, which Itemlive dated to Aug. 18.

Notice posted 49 minutes before deadline

The reschedule notice was stamped by the Town Clerk on Aug. 25 at 4:41 p.m., seven days after the day-of cancellation. For a Thursday 5:30 p.m. meeting, the Open Meeting Law’s 48-hour posting window closes Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. The stamp landed 49 minutes inside it, with no weekend or holiday exclusions to widen the margin. That is a timing fact, not a compliance ruling, which turns on the posting method the town has designated with the Attorney General, a filing not in this paper’s record.

The agenda itself carries a mark of the disruption. It appeared online as a flatbed scan of a typed, printed page bearing the Clerk’s inked stamp. It is the first typed Select Board document to surface since the incident, and a step up from the phone photographs of the corkboard that other boards’ notices have come in as this week (Aug. 25 coverage).

Whether Thursday’s meeting will livestream is unclear. The town’s SCTV video portal, both its live feed and its archive, has been dark since the disruption began, and no new YouTube live event for the meeting had appeared as of early Aug. 26. The agenda footer says that if virtual and broadcast services fail, “the meeting will proceed as scheduled” — in person, at the Senior Center, at 5:30.

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