The Select Board approved the earth-removal permit for the Vinnin Square apartment project Tuesday night in about fifteen minutes, even though no newspaper notice for a Sept. 8 hearing appears in the statewide legal-notice database this paper can search. No one rose to speak, and no one was watching online.
The board treated the item as a new hearing. A new hearing needed a new notice. But the notice printed inside the agenda item was the Aug. 4 notice reused word for word. It still promised a hearing “on Tuesday, August 4th,” still named only “Swampscott Multi Owner LLC” and its Boston address, and still did not name the parcel at 555 Essex Street.
Whether the hearing was legally new or a continuation of the one pulled Aug. 4, a September hearing needed a September notice, published fourteen days ahead, by Aug. 25. None appears in the database.
The item nearly slipped past the board unrecognized. Turning to it, the chair asked from the bench whether “this hearing was postponed or was — is this a new hearing? Can’t recall.” Voices from the table answered: “It’s new.” “We never opened it.” “Never opened,” the chair repeated. “Great.”
The board voted to open the hearing, heard the applicant, voted to close it, and approved the permit, each step by voice vote with no tally announced [31:07–46:40]. No one on the bench raised notice, advertising, or abutters during the hearing.
The fourteen-day rule
Article XIII, Section 8 of the general bylaws requires notice of an earth-removal hearing “at least fourteen (14) days in advance,” at the applicant’s expense, by newspaper, by posting on municipal bulletin boards, and by mail to owners within 300 feet.
The Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association’s statewide legal-notice database, which the Daily Item feeds, holds Daily Item notices through Aug. 31 and Salem News notices through Sept. 3. It shows no notice for a Sept. 8 earth-removal hearing.
That absence is not proof that no notice ran. Papers upload to the database voluntarily. A notice placed in a paper that does not participate, or one not yet posted, would not appear. The dates in the database are the papers’ own stated publication dates, unverified against print.
The record that would settle the question is the Town Clerk’s affidavit of publication, a public document the office can produce. Until it does, this paper writes only that no notice appears in the database, not that none ran.
The notice pattern
The database shows a pattern: the land-use offices counted fourteen days, while the Select Board office counted thirteen.
The counts below come from the database’s stated publication dates and remain subject to human review against print or the Clerk’s affidavits:
| Body | Rule | Notice published | Hearing | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Planning Board | 14 (c. 40A §11) | Apr 27 / May 25 / Jun 29 / Jul 27 / Aug 31 | May 11 / Jun 8 / Jul 13 / Aug 10 / Sep 14 | 14 each |
| Select Board (earth removal) | 14 (Art. XIII §8) | May 21 | Jun 3 (Amrize quarry) | 13 |
| Select Board (earth removal) | 14 (Art. XIII §8) | Jul 22 | Aug 4 (555 Essex) | 13 |
| Select Board (earth removal) | 14 (Art. XIII §8) | — | Sep 8 (555 Essex) | none on file |
| Historical Commission | 7 (Art. IX §4) | Jul 31 | Aug 6 (demolition delay) | 6 |
The Planning Board’s five hearings this spring and summer were each noticed exactly fourteen days out. The Zoning Board of Appeals ran fourteen days on the notices tied to its operative hearings as well.
The Select Board office’s two earth-removal notices this year both ran thirteen days: the June 3 Amrize quarry hearing and the Aug. 4 hearing on the same 555 Essex permit. The July 22 notice for the Aug. 4 hearing also printed the start time as “7:00 P.M.” for a meeting the agenda set at 6:30. Its third earth-removal hearing, Sept. 8, has no notice on file at all.
The Historical Commission’s July 31 notice for the Aug. 6 demolition-delay hearing on the two Puritan Road-area houses this paper covered last month ran six days against its bylaw’s seven-day floor.
What the laws require
The rules differ by body. Earth removal, under Article XIII §8, needs one publication at least fourteen days out, plus posting and mail to owners within 300 feet. Planning Board and Zoning Board hearings, under state law c. 40A §11, need publication once in each of two successive weeks, with the first at least fourteen days out, plus posting and mail to abutters. Demolition delay, under Article IX §4, needs newspaper and Town Hall notice at least seven days ahead. Liquor-license hearings run on c. 138 §15A, and wetlands hearings on c. 131 §40, each with its own clock.
The two-publication rule for zoning matters is also why a single short-looking Zoning Board row cannot be read as a clean miss the way a single earth-removal notice can. The uploaded row may be the second insertion, not the first.
Why Aug. 4 was postponed
The transcript adds the first stated reason the Aug. 4 hearing was pulled. Presenting for the advisory committee, a member addressed only as “Joe” said the committee itself had asked the board to postpone.
The committee’s chair of record is Joe Markarian, though a conflicting June self-attestation by another member leaves the identification unconfirmed. This paper attributes his words by role.
Article XIII §4 lists about eighteen conditions a permit “shall include, but not be limited to,” he said, and the draft addressed few of them. “The only difference between the permit you have in front of you and the one that you had when we last met is the fourth paragraph on the first page,” he said. That was a new paragraph explaining why many of those conditions were left out as, in his words, “inapplicable, impractical, impossible,” or redundant with what planning, zoning and building officials already control.
The presenter also offered a blunt assessment of the bylaw’s teeth: “there’s no mechanism to enforce. There’s no penalties.”
That is his judgment of how the bylaw works in practice, not a description of its text. Article XIII does give the board power to inspect, suspend or revoke a permit, order work stopped, and go to court to restrain violations. The committee intends to bring amendments to spring Town Meeting to separate one-off projects like this dig from the quarry the bylaw was built around.
The dig itself is modest for the site. The applicant’s team said about 1,000 cubic yards of soil will leave the property, against roughly 30,000 moved for the new elementary school, because most of the excavated material can be reused on site.
The project runs between 160 and 163 apartments by varying accounts. Who owns it remains unreconciled across the record: the notice names Swampscott Multi Owner LLC, the assessor lists CC Swampscott Lot B5 Limited Partnership care of CenterCorp, and the applicant’s attorney named the Davis Companies as builder and Menino Construction on site work.
Whether the advisory committee has filed the written report Section 14(b) requires before a vote is not in the public record. If it filed at or before the hearing, the same-night vote stands clean.
First Watch dates
The licensing office shows the same calendar drift. It noticed the First Watch liquor-license hearing first for Wednesday, Sept. 2, a meeting the board never posted, and then, in a Sept. 7 Daily Item notice, for Wednesday, Sept. 23, a date on no agenda.
The town’s “Tentative Select Board Meeting Dates” sheet, created Jan. 14 and never modified since, still carries the pre-election board on its masthead and lists Sept. 2 and Sept. 16, not Sept. 8 or Sept. 23. Its own text calls the schedule the dates meetings are “typically” held.
Why the licensing office chose its dates is not established, and this paper does not assert it. The only reference to the calendar from the bench Tuesday was the town administrator’s vague “the next meeting — I think it’s the last meeting of this month,” with no Sept. 16 or Sept. 23 date stated.
If the board means to hold the First Watch hearing Sept. 23, an agenda for it must post by Monday, Sept. 21, at 6:30 p.m.
Legal context
None of this decides whether the permit is vulnerable, and this paper offers no prediction.
As legal context only: Massachusetts courts do not treat every notice defect as fatal. In the line of cases running from Kasper v. Board of Appeals of Watertown, 3 Mass. App. Ct. 251 (1975), through Ranney v. Board of Appeals of Nantucket, 11 Mass. App. Ct. 112 (1981), courts ask whether a notice substantially complied with the law and whether the defect actually prejudiced anyone. An objector who showed up ready to be heard was not prejudiced by a flaw in form.
Those are zoning-notice cases under c. 40A. This is a general-bylaw permit, a different footing. A challenge to a general-bylaw permit, if no other appeal route applies, would likely run through certiorari under c. 249 §4, which carries a sixty-day clock from the proceeding complained of. The opinions are public at masscases.com.
What weight a short or missing newspaper notice carries here is a question for a court.
Sources
- Select Board meeting, Sept. 8, 2026:
data/professional_transcripts/CIgSIXBiVUQ.txt,data/analysis_markdown_prof/CIgSIXBiVUQ.md(bench speech attributed by role; diarization tags rotate and are unreliable) - Select Board agendas Sept. 8 and Aug. 4, 2026, and Aug. 4 caption-derived record:
data/committees/select-board/agenda-2026-09-08.md,agenda-2026-08-04.md,minutes-2026-08-04.md - Earth Removal Advisory Committee roster and chair question:
data/committees/earth-removal-advisory/_committee.md - Statewide legal-notice database, Apr. 18 – Sep. 5, 2026:
data/reference/legal-notices/masspublicnotices-swampscott-2026-09-05.md(voluntary upload; dates are the papers’ stated publication dates); First Watch Sept. 23 notice (record 908826) attested indata/committees/select-board/agenda-2026-09-08.mdresearcher note - Tentative meeting-dates sheet:
data/reference/town-documents/select-board-tentative-dates-2026.md - General bylaws (Art. XIII §§4, 8, 14; Art. IX §4):
data/legal/source/general-bylaws-2026-08-11.txt,data/legal/swampscott-demolition-delay-bylaw.md - Press:
data/reference/press/2026-09-08_tides_earth-removal-permit-approved.md - Prior coverage: Vinnin Square earth-removal hearing preview, notice under the wrong owner, the record returns as photographs, silence is a yes
Gaps and human-review flags: every day-count above is drawn from the voluntary database’s stated publication dates and awaits confirmation against print or the Clerk’s affidavits of publication; whether a Sept. 8 notice ran is unresolved; the ERAC presenter’s full name is unconfirmed; the project’s ownership and unit count are unreconciled across sources; whether the advisory committee filed its Section 14(b) report is not in the public record; the licensing office’s source for its First Watch dates is not established; the Sept. 8 approval was a voice vote with no tally announced.
Addendum (Sept. 10, 2026, 2 a.m.)
The town posted its official minutes of the Aug. 4 Select Board meeting overnight, along with the July 7 and July 21 minutes. All three carry the line “Minutes approved by the Select Board on September 8, 2026,” the same night the board opened the 555 Essex Street hearing as new.
The Aug. 4 minutes record that “at the start of the meeting” the chair announced the earth-removal hearing “would not take place on August 4, 2026 as originally scheduled,” that “the joint meeting and public hearing had been rescheduled,” and that “the hearing will be reposted for a future public hearing in September.” The minutes give no reason for the postponement. The advisory committee’s request, which its presenter described Sept. 8, is not in them.
The minutes also reprint the hearing notice as it was published, with “Tuesday, August 4th” and “Swampscott Multi Owner LLC” and no parcel address. That is the same text the Sept. 8 agenda carried.
So the town’s own approved record says a September re-posting was promised. The statewide legal-notice database still shows none. Whether one ran in print remains the open question this paper cannot close without the Clerk’s affidavit of publication.
Source: data/committees/select-board/minutes-2026-08-04.md (official minutes, posted Sept. 9–10; the caption-derived record this article cited under that filename now lives at minutes-2026-08-04-captions.md).