Mall earth-removal hearing will test Swampscott bylaw on private development

← All news · September 3, 2026

The Select Board and Earth Removal Advisory Committee hold a Sept. 8 joint hearing on the Swampscott Mall redevelopment. The public record still lacks the excavation volume, truck routes, hours, blasting plan and a confirmed link between the hearing-notice applicant and the assessor's owner of record.

The Select Board and Earth Removal Advisory Committee will hold a joint public hearing Tuesday on an earth-removal permit for the Swampscott Mall parcel at Vinnin Square. The permit would decide whether excavation tied to the mall redevelopment can proceed and what limits the town places on truck routes, hours, dust, drainage, blasting, insurance and road damage.

The hearing starts at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 8 at Swampscott High School, Room B129, as item E.2. The parcel is 450 Paradise Road, also carried in the town’s permitting record as 555 Essex Street.

The applicant of record is Swampscott Multi Owner LLC, of 125 High Street, Boston. Press accounts describe the project as 160 apartments (Swampscott Tides) or 163 (Itemlive) over a ground-level garage, with new storefronts, managed by CenterCorp. The town’s public permitting record for this hearing does not list the unit count, garage or storefronts.

This is the first time in the public record reviewed for this story that the town’s earth-removal bylaw, built and tested this year on the Danvers Road quarry, reaches a private commercial development.

Permit depends on excavation volume

Article XIII of the general bylaws is not limited to quarries. Section 1(a) defines earth removal as moving “any form of soil … from its natural location, by any means,” and includes movement “whether or not such soil is moved from the lot to another location on the same lot.” A design that reuses excavated material on site, as the press says this one largely does, does not automatically fall outside the bylaw.

The threshold is volume. Under Section 3(a), removal of “more than 400 cubic yards of earth” needs a written permit from the Select Board.

The exemptions are narrow. Section 2(a) waives a permit only for earth removed in building “a residential building of up to three residential units,” or an incidental driveway or sidewalk, and only where the material removed does not exceed what the building displaces below grade. A project on the scale the press describes is not exempt.

Before it can grant a permit, the board must find that the removal “will not be contrary to the best interests of the Town.” Section 3(a) says removal is contrary to those interests if it would be “injurious or dangerous to the public health or safety”; create unreasonable or nuisance “noise, vibration, dust or other effects”; materially harm residents’ “health, safety or overall quality of life”; harm “natural resources,” including groundwater and wetlands, or break environmental laws “including the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act”; or “cause excessive traffic congestion or damage to roadways.”

Board must set operating conditions

If the board grants a permit, Section 4(a) says it “shall impose reasonable conditions … to safeguard the neighborhood and the Town and to protect the environment.” The section lists 18 categories those conditions must address, including method of removal, hours of operation, truck routes, duration, depth, slope steepness, drainage, replacement of loam and replanting, buffers for “noise, dust, aesthetics and safety,” pollution insurance and a pest-management plan.

The list is a floor, not a ceiling. Sections 4(c) and 13 require compliance with all other federal, state and local law, “including the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act,” and Section 4(p) bars any permit that would authorize a zoning violation. A permit also lapses within six months if substantial use has not begun.

Several required conditions have named gatekeepers or hard limits:

Committee report may delay a vote

The board may not be able to vote Tuesday night.

Under Section 14(b), the advisory committee “shall file with the Board a written report, with recommendations, at or within twenty-one (21) days of each hearing.” The same section says “no such permit may be granted until such report has been filed or until the Committee has allowed twenty-one (21) days to elapse after such hearing.”

If the committee has not filed its report by the close of the hearing, the bylaw blocks a same-night vote. Whether it has filed is not in the public record. If it files at or before the hearing, that bar would not by itself apply.

Key numbers are not public

The public record does not yet show the excavation volume, whether soil leaves the site or stays on it, the truck routes, the hours, whether Sunday work is proposed, whether blasting is proposed, the dust and mud controls, or the bond amount.

The advisory committee has carried the application on three consecutive agendas: July 20, Aug. 3 and Aug. 24. The committee is chaired by Joe Markarian, with members John Picariello, Tonia Bandrowicz, Gary Barden, George Allen and the Fire Department’s representative. No minutes from any of those three meetings are posted.

Notice record has gaps

Tuesday’s hearing is a do-over. The board scheduled the same joint hearing for Aug. 4, then pulled it at the top of that meeting. The chair, opening the session, said the item was “being rescheduled … we will be reposting it for a public hearing in September,” and later said it was tabled “so that we could repost it.” No reason was stated on the record. A resident challenged the skip from the floor during a later item and was pointed back to the opening announcement.

The Sept. 8 agenda is dated and was electronically stamped by the Town Clerk on Sept. 3, five days ahead. Its Open Meeting Law window clears. But the hearing notice printed inside item E.2 is the Aug. 4 notice reused unchanged. It still says the board “will hold a public hearing on Tuesday, August 4th,” names only the LLC and its Boston address, and does not name the parcel, 555 Essex Street.

Section 8 requires notice “at least fourteen (14) days in advance of the public hearing,” at the applicant’s expense, by newspaper, by posting on municipal bulletin boards, and by mail to owners within 300 feet. For a Sept. 8 hearing, 14 days back is Aug. 25, a date inside the town’s network disruption, when Town Hall’s online record froze and notices reappeared as phone photos of the corkboard (prior coverage).

Whether a correct newspaper legal notice ran is not verifiable from here; the newspaper’s legal-notice pages are unreadable to an automated check. This paper does not assert the notice did or did not run.

Other permits are still in play

The earth-removal permit is one of several approvals in motion on the site.

The Conservation Commission holds a wetlands filing, MassDEP file 071-0362, filed July 3, 2025 by Andrew Rose of CenterCorp. It proposes 957 square feet of fill in bordering vegetated wetland with no replication. The state’s wetlands register showed no Order of Conditions recorded as of Aug. 23, more than a year on, though that register lags and a blank can mean an open, withdrawn or un-updated file.

MassDEP’s technical comment is pointed: “No alternatives analysis was provided.” It recommends the commission require the applicant to prove it cannot reasonably scale down or redesign, and it warns that “fill of BVW without replication is strongly discouraged.”

The Planning Board acted earlier. It approved the site plan, petition 24-18, on Jan. 13, 2025, and amended it Jan. 12, 2026 to approve the plan as revised Dec. 1, 2025, with CenterCorp as applicant, through attorney Kenneth Shutzer, and Garrett Horsfall of Kelly Engineering as engineer. Under Section 7, that subdivision and site-plan work does not authorize earth removal; the Article XIII permit is a separate approval.

Some officials sit in more than one of these bodies. Bandrowicz is an advisory-committee member and also chairs the Conservation Commission that holds the wetlands file. Ted Dooley, now on the Select Board, is a former Planning Board chair and was an advisory-committee member of record earlier this year. George Allen, the Board of Health’s representative on the committee and a 40-year air-pollution scientist, pressed for more monitoring on the quarry permit this spring; whether that scrutiny attaches to this dig is an open question, not something the record shows him raising.

These are overlapping institutional roles, not evidence of a shared agenda.

Applicant name does not match assessor record

Section 3(b) requires the application to state both the property owner’s legal name and the petitioner’s.

The assessor lists the owner of both mall parcels as CC Swampscott Lot B5 Limited Partnership, c/o CenterCorp Retail Properties Inc., mailing to 600 Loring Ave., Salem, with a combined FY2026 assessed value of $25.29 million.

The name on the public hearing notice, Swampscott Multi Owner LLC, at a Boston address, appears nowhere in the Swampscott assessor. CenterCorp is the owner of record’s named agent and the applicant on the wetlands and site-plan filings. The earth-removal applicant is a differently named LLC whose link to CenterCorp is not confirmed in any record reviewed.

The underlying application is not public, so this is a mismatch between the notice and the assessor, not a proven defect. The principals behind the LLC are not identified here.

Sources

Gaps named above: the excavation volume, truck routes, hours and any blasting plan are not in the public record; whether the advisory committee has filed its Section 14(b) report is unknown; whether a Section 8 newspaper legal notice ran is unverified; the wetlands Order-of-Conditions status is read from a lagging state register and should be confirmed in the Conservation Commission file; the corporate link between Swampscott Multi Owner LLC and CenterCorp is unconfirmed, and the LLC’s principals are not identified.

Addendum (Sept. 4, 2026, 06:00 verification)

This piece went to print at 02:29. A post-publication check against the bylaw text found every Article XIII citation, quote and figure above matches general-bylaws-2026-08-11.txt, and every cached-record citation (the Aug. 4 quotes, the assessor cards, the MassDEP register, the Jan. 12, 2026 Planning Board minutes) matches its source. Two precision notes and one new fact:

What this does and does not establish. The database is a voluntary upload; a notice placed in a paper that does not participate would not appear. The full texts are unread, so whether the Aug. 10 notice concerns this permit (a re-notice for a Sept. 2 date that later moved) or something else is unknown. The publication dates are the database’s, not verified against print. On that record, the notice for the Aug. 4 hearing ran a day short of the bylaw’s 14 days, which is consistent with, but does not prove, the board’s unexplained decision to pull that hearing “so that we could repost it.” Whether any notice ran for Sept. 8 is an open question the board can answer from the bench. HUMAN-REVIEW: read the Aug. 10 and July 22 notices in full in a browser session.

Addendum (Sept. 5, 2026, 06:00)

The Aug. 10 notice is not about this permit. A fresh pull of the statewide database on Sept. 5, covering every notice mentioning Swampscott since April 18, returns the Aug. 10 Daily Item notice with more of its text: “The Swampscott Select Board will hold a public hearing on Wednesday, September 2, 2026 … at 6:45PM at Swampscott High School, Room B129 … to consider the approval of Application for a New On-Premises All Alcoholic Beverages License for First Watch Restaurants.” First Watch is the daytime breakfast chain that has announced a 450 Paradise Road location at Vinnin Square for late fall. That liquor hearing was noticed for a Sept. 2 meeting that was never posted, and it does not appear on the Sept. 8 agenda either. So the earlier reading, that the Aug. 10 notice might be a re-notice of this earth-removal hearing, is withdrawn.

What stands: as of Sept. 5 the database still shows no newspaper notice for the Sept. 8 earth-removal hearing, and Daily Item uploads now run through Aug. 31 and Salem News through Sept. 3. The July 22 notice for the Aug. 4 hearing remains the only one on file for this permit. The database’s dates remain unverified against print. HUMAN-REVIEW stands on the July 22 date; the Aug. 10 question is closed.