Swampscott Select Board sends no Lynnway letter after split over state design

← All news · August 30, 2026

The board took no vote Aug. 27 on a letter to Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll about the state's Lynnway redesign. Members split over whether to oppose the design or work with the state for changes, and a rewritten letter is due back in September.

Swampscott Select Board members could not agree Aug. 27 on what to tell Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll about the state’s planned Lynnway redesign, so the town sent no letter.

The board took no vote, though the agenda listed the item for discussion and possible vote. Instead, the four members present spent much of an hour split over whether to fight the design or seek changes from the state. They asked Vice Chair Danielle Leonard and Town Administrator Nick Connors to rewrite the draft. Leonard said the next version will be “not a demand.” It is due back on a public agenda in September.

The Lynnway project is outside Swampscott’s control. The state wants to rebuild 2.2 miles of the road with bus lanes in the middle and passenger platforms on the median. The road belongs to the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. Swampscott cannot approve the project or block it, but the corridor is the town’s main route south to Boston and carries the 441 and 442 buses from Marblehead and Swampscott through Lynn.

The discussion also showed a wider split on the board elected in April. Its earlier divisions centered on the Hawthorne property. This one cut across how members think the town should use its limited leverage with the state. The exchange survived only in the full four-hour meeting video the town posted the next day; the town’s own recording cut off before the item.

Bus lanes and median platforms

The Lynnway Multimodal Corridor is an MBTA-led redesign of Route 1A through Lynn, in partnership with MassDOT, DCR and the City of Lynn. It is in design. As board members understood it, construction money has not been committed, and work would not begin before 2028. The state has said it used a $20 million federal RAISE grant for planning, according to the project page and earlier reporting in the Swampscott Tides.

The design drew the board’s concern. Over about 2.2 miles, the figure a member cited from the plans, the state would dedicate a center lane to buses running roughly every 10 minutes and build raised platforms on the median. Buses would cross a lane of live traffic to reach those platforms. Northbound buses turning onto Commercial Street would swing across the full width of the road.

Several members called that geometry dangerous or unproven. Their objection was less about better bus service than about how buses, turning cars and general traffic would move through the corridor.

Why the letter stalled

The board had taken up the same issue Aug. 4. It took no vote then and sent no letter of support. Instead, it joined a Marblehead-Swampscott-Nahant working group aimed at a meeting with Driscoll. Leonard and Connors then drafted a three-board letter to Driscoll and circulated it.

The draft drew, in the board’s account, “varied” feedback and no consensus. Some members read it as a list of demands. “The philosophy behind the letter doesn’t align,” Leonard said, describing what went wrong the first time.

Where members stood

The split ran between opposing the design and working with the state for changes, with members spread across that line rather than paired two against two. Diarization on the four-hour recording is unstable; the attributions below rest on members being addressed by name and on positions each has taken before.

Mary Ellen Fletcher opposes the design itself: the center bus lane, the median platforms, the Commercial Street turn and what she called a “flawed” study that looked only light-to-light on the Lynnway and ignored signal timing and other projects on the corridor. Fix “a 25-year problem of the light timing” first, she argued, and let buses stay in the right lane, and “that would solve the original problem.”

Fletcher also criticized the state’s outreach. Of the MBTA’s spring session at the Senior Center, she said in comments the Tides published, “I don’t think they had any intent to listen to what our concerns were. They didn’t have a pen or paper, absolutely nothing.” That complaint came up again Aug. 27. Fletcher’s position would spend the town’s voice on opposing a design she thinks will backfire, even though the state may build it anyway.

Wayne Spritz landed near Fletcher. “I just can’t, I just don’t support it,” he said. “I think it will cause more problems than what we gain back from it.” He would retime the signals first, then measure what congestion remains. He also questioned whether the ridership payoff is real for a town he called a “long spoke” that has to connect through Revere to reach anything. His position also points toward stopping the design rather than shaping it.

Leonard took a different approach. “Mary Ellen had said, I want to find a solution that does not burden the folks in Swampscott,” she said. “I have a little bit different of a thought, which is it is okay to burden Swampscott so long as the outcome and benefit is greater than the temporary burden.” Leonard said the town should seek “a seat at the table” and gather data before calling the design wrong. Otherwise, she said, “we’re just doing what they’re doing,” showing up without evidence and declaring the answer.

Fletcher was not persuaded. “Then maybe you should write the letter and put your name on it, because we don’t all have that same” view, she told Leonard.

Chair Katie Phelan attended the state’s spring meeting and came away feeling unheard, but said she wants a firm, constructive letter, not a rejection. “I’m not against the project,” she said. “I want this project to be done really well where there’s not a burden on people in Swampscott.” Phelan said the town likely cannot stop the project, so it should press the state to coordinate the Lynnway work with other Route 1A projects rather than let them collide. That sequencing issue was the one point all four members could name.

There was also a counterpoint to the “no pen or paper” complaint. A member read from the state’s materials that 1,800 people took part in its events and online survey over a couple of years of outreach. The dispute is whether that outreach heard Swampscott.

The fifth member, Ted Dooley, was not in the room. “I am recusing myself again,” he said, and left. He sits on DCR’s Essex County stewardship council, and DCR owns the corridor land. None of the Lynnway positions aired that night were his.

Rewritten letter due in September

Leonard and Connors will circulate a rewritten letter that is collaborative and not a rejection. “How I envision the version of this future letter going is not a demand,” Leonard said, “and it’s not even saying we don’t appreciate the project… it is simply saying could we figure out how we align all these projects together to make the least impact.”

The letter is expected to rest on the two asks the board could agree on: a coordinated regional planning committee — MassDOT, MBTA, DCR and the affected towns from Lynn to Nahant — to sequence the projects and align signal timing across Routes 107 and 129, and enough data to justify the design.

The draft was to go to members within a day, with comments back over the weekend. Fletcher insisted it return to a public agenda rather than be settled “behind the scenes.” “The letter is, we’re speaking for the town of Swampscott,” she said, “so for us to just do it behind the scenes on our own is defeating the purpose.” The next regular meeting falls in September.

One gap remained in the discussion. Asked whether the town had talked to Lynn’s mayor, whose city the project runs through, a member said no. “I have not asked for his thoughts or opinions,” the member said.

Sources