Fish House options reach Select Board with no public outreach and no vote

← All news · September 9, 2026

Kleinfelder gave the Select Board four options for the town-owned Fish House: temporary flood planks, a $2.4 million lift, relocation, or replacement. The draft study was built after a grant miss cut out public outreach, and the town's own historic-district bylaw requires a commission certificate before the building can be lifted or moved.

Swampscott’s Fish House options reached the Select Board on Sept. 8 with no public outreach, no vote, and a consultant telling the board it should not decide yet.

Kleinfelder, working with Woods Hole Group and McAllister Marine Engineering, delivered what it called an “advanced draft” of a Fisherman’s Beach coastal-resilience study. The town had pursued grant funding for a larger effort, Kleinfelder project manager David Petersen told the board, was “unfortunately unable to get the grant,” and proceeded with “a lesser scoped project.” Asked later whether the town had paid for it with ARPA money, a board member confirmed it had. That smaller scope cut out the public: “we didn’t have much of a public outreach or any real public outreach piece at all,” Petersen said.

“I don’t think you can make a decision based on where we are today,” a speaker at the table told the board. The Swampscott Tides attributed the line to Petersen; in the transcript it falls in a turn whose speaker refers to differing opinions “within our committee,” which reads as a town committee member rather than the consultant.

For the Fish House, parcel 19-278A-0 at 391 Humphrey St., the town-owned building at Blaney Beach, assessed this year at $2,912,200 and built around 1900, Kleinfelder’s scored options for the building come down to four paths: ring the whole structure with temporary, drop-in flood planks ahead of each storm, offered tentatively at about $650,000; raise the building three feet on a new foundation that doubles as a flood barrier, at $2.4 million; move it; or replace it with a new structure above the 13-foot flood line. The consultant screened out wet and dry floodproofing as wrong for a historic wood building close to the waves.

Historic District Commission certificate required

Whatever the town chooses, it cannot simply do the work. The Fish House sits inside the Swampscott Fish House Local Historic District, created under Chapter 40C by Article IX, Section 7 of the town’s general bylaws. The district’s stated purpose names the town’s “fishing” character.

As this paper reported Aug. 13, the bylaw binds the town to its own rules. Section 7(F) says no building permit for alteration of an exterior architectural feature and no demolition permit “for demolition or removal of a building or structure within a district shall be issued by the Town or any department thereof” until the Historic District Commission issues a certificate. The bylaw’s definition of “to alter” includes “the moving from one location or position to another.”

Together, those clauses mean a three-foot lift and a relocation are both regulated conduct, and the town is a regulated party over its own building. The Select Board appoints the commission’s five members; the commission elects its own chair. If the commission fails to act within 60 days, the bylaw directs the commission itself to issue a Certificate of Hardship Due to Failure to Act. Silence approves. Ordinary maintenance and repair that does not change design, material or outward appearance is exempt. The commission’s posted 2026 record shows no Fish House case; whether one ever came before it is an absence in the posted record, not proof that none exists.

Two facts Kleinfelder raised make that review matter more. Moving or replacing the building would likely cost its National Register status. Relocation, the presenter said, means “you would lose a National Historic Registry listing because that listing is tied to its location along the coastline as a working fish house.” That is why the move and replacement options scored poorly. The $2.4 million lift was the only option described as both keeping the listing and letting the building “be resilient on its own.” The cheaper plank system would also preserve the designation, but it would require a crew before every storm. The consultant also flagged permitting because the building “is within a high velocity zone under FEMA,” the most exposed wave class.

One legal layer Kleinfelder did not mention is Chapter 91 tidelands jurisdiction. The town’s own pier filing at this parcel, DEP file 071-0365, sits in “Land Under Ocean.” As this paper has reported at Mission on the Bay, the state’s waterways jurisdiction reaches the shoreline here. That is a reporter’s overlay, not something Kleinfelder put before the board.

Flood paths reach beyond Fisherman’s Beach

The study’s second finding undercuts the narrow scope. Protecting Fisherman’s Beach and Puritan Road alone does not save the rest of the corridor. In the modeled storm, water still enters over Whale’s and Eisman’s beaches and works its way back up Humphrey Street.

The Humphrey Street pump station, which Select Board member Mary Ellen Fletcher has pressed as critical and which a board member recalled the town “lost in 2011,” is not saved by the scoped work. “We can’t save the pump house without doing the entire road,” a board member said. The same board voice called the Whale’s-and-Phillips stretch “our most vulnerable area” and concluded, “we have to do the whole corridor.” The consultant added one caveat: the pump station by itself could be ringed cheaply with temporary barriers, since few flood paths reach it. For the broader area, the choice is the whole corridor or nothing.

The wall is elevation 13

The recommended shoreline defense has been described twice, in different words. At the Aug. 4 Climate Action and Resilience Committee meeting, chair Martha Schmitt presented a plan the Tides described as a permanent 13-foot floodwall along Humphrey Street, a barrier at the parking-lot exit, barriers at the boat-launch driveways, and an impermeable 13-foot wall along the building’s rear; Schmitt said it “wouldn’t cost that much more.” The Tides reported, and the committee’s minutes record, a peak still-water level of 13.9 feet for the 500-year storm in 2070.

On Sept. 8, the consultant described a 13-foot still-water design elevation, a flood wall along Humphrey Street and the north side of the lot as the recommended option, and deployable barriers at the lot’s two openings. The “13-foot” figure is an elevation, not a wall’s height; the 13.9-foot figure is a modeled peak water level, a different quantity, and neither number revises the other. The ground sits near 10 feet, so the structure reads as a two-and-a-half- to three-foot wall raised to elevation 13.

Next: comments, outreach, grants

The board agreed to a sequence rather than a choice. The Harbor and Waterfront Advisory Committee and the climate committee will send comments; Community and Economic Development Director Marzie Galazka and Town Administrator Nick Connors will fold those in; the report gets finalized; then comes the public engagement the study never had; then the town pursues grants. The report returns to the Select Board at the first meeting in October.

The board’s chair cautioned against repeating the pier saga, chasing grant money before the town has a community-backed path. The room read the options as, in one speaker’s phrase, “four white arrows all pointing at the same thing.”

Since a 2024 warning that storm surge was undermining the building’s footer, the town has floated defending the Fish House, relocating it, repairing it in place, and moving it uphill as a museum. A town “Climate Futures” sign already tells passersby the Fish House “is relocated.” Across three years and at least five directions, Swampscott has not voted on one.

Sources

Correction and addendum (Sept. 10, 2026, 6 a.m.)

A post-publication check against the Sept. 8 transcript and the bylaw text found the following, all now corrected in the body above: