Swampscott sent Lynnway letter after Select Board took no public vote

← All news · September 11, 2026

On Aug. 27 the Swampscott Select Board took no vote on a letter to Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll and sent it back for a rewrite Mary Ellen Fletcher said should return to a public agenda. On Sept. 3 a three-town letter went to Driscoll in the board's name. It never returned to a Swampscott agenda.

Six days after the Swampscott Select Board took no vote on a Lynnway letter and sent it back for rewriting, a three-town letter went to Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll in the board’s name.

The board had taken up the draft on Aug. 27 under an agenda item noticed for “discussion and possible vote.” It could not agree on the letter, sent it back to Vice Chair Danielle Leonard and Town Administrator Nick Connors, and set a weekend deadline for members’ comments. Mary Ellen Fletcher said the rewrite had to return to a public meeting. “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.”

On Sept. 3, a letter went to Driscoll in the name of the Select Boards of Swampscott, Marblehead and Nahant, according to The Daily Item, which reported it Sept. 10. It was not on the Select Board’s Sept. 8 agenda. During that four-hour meeting, the board did not mention it. The only Lynnway business was a housekeeping vote to approve the Aug. 4 minutes, from the meeting where the board first declined to take a position.

The public record shows no Swampscott vote on the Sept. 3 letter, no return to the public agenda Fletcher requested, and no public explanation of who approved the final wording or authorized use of the board’s name. The record does not show whether any law was broken.

The Sept. 3 Letter

The town has not released the text, and no Swampscott official is quoted in the coverage, so the letter’s contents are known only through The Daily Item’s paraphrase. As the paper describes it, the three boards ask the state for a meeting with transportation officials and say they support the project’s goals of better public transit and pedestrian and bicycle safety. Their concerns are traffic, mobility, emergency response, and the effect of Route 1A changes on neighboring towns.

The letter asks the state to weigh the Lynnway project alongside other work in the same region: the General Edwards Bridge replacement, the new Revere High School near Wonderland, and planned changes around the Lynn commuter rail station. It calls for coordinated construction schedules, alternative transportation options, clear performance measures, and mitigation if traffic or emergency-response impacts exceed projections. The boards stress they are not asking the state to abandon the project.

That is close to the collaborative letter the Swampscott board described wanting on Aug. 27: an ask to align the projects, not a demand to stop one. The Daily Item says the boards “signed off”; that is the paper’s word. The Swampscott record shows no vote.

The Aug. 27 Discussion

The board took up the Lynnway that night after Ted Dooley recused himself and left the room, as he had on Aug. 4. He sits on the state Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Essex County stewardship council, and DCR owns the corridor. That left four members, who split over whether to fight the design or work with the state to change it, a division covered in this paper’s Aug. 31 account of the meeting.

The board never voted. Instead, it set a process. A revised draft would go to members the next day; comments were due back “by Sunday,” Aug. 30; and the board would aim to have “something around Monday,” Aug. 31. The board asked Leonard and Connors to rewrite the letter.

When Fletcher asked whether the board would take the letter up publicly again, the reply captured the meeting’s stated priority: “we can put it back on the agenda and talk about it publicly, but this was specifically about just trying to get the letter out.” Fletcher pressed her condition anyway.

Leonard, who wanted the town to seek “a seat at the table,” had earlier framed the disagreement in a line the final letter echoes: “it is okay to burden Swampscott so long as the outcome and benefit is greater than the temporary burden.” Earlier still, when Leonard said she did not want to be afraid to push, Fletcher told her, “maybe you should write the letter and put your name on it, because we don’t all have that same” view.

The item ended mid-sentence. On the town’s recording, a member summarizing the plan, “We have circulate a draft, get your comments back, and then we’ll,” is cut off as the meeting moved on. The exchange survived because the town later posted a four-hour full-meeting video; its own recording had cut off before the item.

The Gap Between Meetings

Aug. 27 was a Thursday. Comments were due that Sunday. The letter went out the following Thursday, Sept. 3, and the next meeting was Sept. 8. The draft was finalized and sent in the six days between meetings, without returning to a public agenda.

Massachusetts law defines what a board may and may not do with a draft in that gap. The Open Meeting Law (M.G.L. c. 30A, §18) defines “deliberation” as any communication, “including electronic mail, between or among a quorum of a public body on any public business within its jurisdiction.” For a five-member board, a quorum is three. That threshold does not change when one member recuses, because it counts the members of the body, not the members active on an item.

The statute carves out one narrow exception: circulating “reports or documents that may be discussed at a meeting” is not deliberation, but only “provided that no opinion of a member is expressed.” A bare draft sent around to be read is allowed. Once a member voices an opinion on it to a quorum, the exception closes.

The Attorney General’s Open Meeting Law Guide (2018 edition, p. 6) adds two points that bear directly on a letter built from members’ emailed comments. Serial messages, from one member to another and then to a third, count as deliberation when they “together constitute communication among a quorum.” And “the expression of an opinion on matters within the body’s jurisdiction to a quorum of a public body is a deliberation, even if no other public body member responds,” citing Connelly v. School Committee of Hanover (1991).

Here the record stops. It shows members were asked to email comments to the town administrator and get them back over the weekend. It does not show whether any member’s opinion reached a quorum, whether comments moved only through staff or serially among members, or how the final text was approved. Those facts would decide whether the law was implicated. The public record does not contain them.

Three Boards, Three Records

The letter carries three towns’ names, and the visible authorization behind each differs. Marblehead’s Select Board voted unanimously on Aug. 16 to authorize a joint letter, the Marblehead Independent reported; its chair described wanting the state to “think beyond Lynn.” That vote and those quotes come from a source that could not be re-read from the corpus this week and rest on earlier reporting. Nahant’s process is not established; no Nahant Select Board minutes surfaced. Swampscott’s name appeared on the same regional letter after a meeting that produced no vote.

The episode fits a pattern this paper has traced. The board elected in April has repeatedly decided by consensus or a poll of members without taking a formal vote, as it did on the Lynnway itself on Aug. 4, when it “did not take a formal position” and reached only a “consensus” on a coordinated regional voice. The documentary record around the board has also thinned in several places: vanished committee files, executive-session minutes withheld for years, and meetings that left no video. The Aug. 27 discussion nearly joined that list; it exists only because the town posted a backup recording after its own feed failed.

Fletcher, who insisted this letter return to open session, has her own record on transparency. The board censured her 4-0-0 in April for conduct toward staff under its code, a discrete act and not an open-meeting matter, and as chair she defended the executive-session practice that drew a complaint. On Aug. 27, she asked for a public airing the board did not give.

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