SWAMPSCOTT — The Select Board voted to approve the sale of a bond anticipation note for $6,996,964 during its meeting early Wednesday morning.
A bond anticipation note is a temporary vehicle that’s commonly used for capital projects, Town Treasurer Patrick Luddy explained. He said that the original bond anticipation was issued in 2022 for the costs of acquisition, and what the board did Wednesday was “basically a refinancing of that (bond), and that it’s not new funds for expenditures, but costs incurred when the Town acquired the property.”
“We have a bond anticipation note maturing on Oct. 23 for the land acquisition project that the Town took on several years ago,” Luddy said.
He noted in a follow-up conversation that the bond in question was regarding the Town’s purchase of the Hawthorne property.
“Our status quo has been to do a bond anticipation note one year at a time to see what happens with the outcome of the property to determine if it’s a tax-exempt use or if it’s going to be open space… So, up to this point, we’ve been issuing taxable notes. This issue here is to pay off the maturing note that’s due on Oct. 23,” Luddy said.
He continued, saying that the Town received four bids, though two were rejected because they were bid on a tax-exempt basis.
“The award went to Hilltop Holdings, which was the lowest net interest cost of the Town, so that’s our best deal, at 3.928%,” Luddy said, noting that he was looking for a vote on the issue so that the Town can close on it next week.
“We (the Town) scheduled the different steps in the debt issuance in July, and so we had to meet today to take care of this because that lines up with when we issued the bid, accepted bids for the note, and when we have to close next week; that requires a meeting this week,” Luddy said about why the Board met Wednesday morning rather than during its normally-scheduled meetings.
Select Board Chair Katie Phelan said, “We tried to coordinate whether or not we could do this in conjunction with an already-scheduled meeting, and because of the way the bids fell, we could not, so we had to have a separate meeting for this particular item.”
