SWAMPSCOTT — As the Finance Committee reviewed the town’s five-year capital plan on Thursday night, members focused on a familiar question: How can the town balance necessary spending amid growing scrutiny over Swampscott’s financial outlook in the coming years?
The Committee, joined by Treasurer Patrick Luddy and Capital Improvement Committee Chair Ryan Hale, went line-by-line through the proposed plan. The CIC has approved the current draft, assigning priority to items that they saw as “must haves,” including critical infrastructure projects like seawall repairs and road paving.
Still, across multiple items, members of the Finance Committee, who have spent the past few weeks undergoing a similarly detailed review of the fiscal year 2027 budget, pressed for clearer numbers with more detailed explanations.
“Just saying ‘we need to buy it’ without exploring other options for cost avoidance or cost sharing is a behavioral thing,” Finance Committee member Jarred Guthrie said. “We really need to push on that … we need to institute some fiscal stewardship.”
That pushback came up repeatedly, especially when projects lacked clear need or detail. Hale mentioned throughout the meeting that the CIC had met with the heads of multiple departments throughout their review, and their approvals were based on strong cases made in those meetings.
Finance Committee members still signaled that they needed more details on the plan as presented Thursday night, with several line items drawing additional questions or being set aside for follow-up.
Those discussions were especially had around equipment purchases and larger capital projects, where members pushed for a closer look at how costs were calculated and whether creative alternatives had been fully considered.
For example, in reviewing a proposed Department of Public Works vehicle replacement, members questioned whether options like renting, sharing with neighboring communities, or contracting out services had been seriously evaluated before landing on a purchase. While some pointed to logistical challenges of those options, the discussion was characteristic of the committee’s approach in thinking outside the box to reduce costs when possible.
The conversation took a sharper turn when the committee turned to a $1 million proposal to reconstruct the track at Upper Jackson Park, a project that the CIC categorized as a lower priority in a constrained budget year. While the facility is used regularly by students and residents, members said they struggled to weigh the request without clearer details.
“This to me, in business, is what we call the suspicious million. Where it’s just a million dollars,” Guthrie said. Hale agreed, saying that the round numbers were a plug rather than a physical quote from vendors, leading the committee to wonder on the actual scope of the track project.
Others on the Committee, however, cautioned against putting off maintenance entirely, noting that delaying the repairs could lead to higher costs, or the eventual loss of the facility.
“If we let it go into that kind of disrepair … that’s a really negative reflection on Swampscott, frankly” Finance Committee member Cinder McNerney said. “We should maintain what we’ve got, and we should be able to use what we’ve got.”
Questions about long-term costs also surfaced in discussions about road paving, where members agreed with the CIC’s high priority. Hale cautioned that the numbers in the proposal might not reflect things like rising construction costs and uncertainty around state funding levels.
“The cost of labor and the reimbursement we get under Chapter 90 — it’s not tracking with inflation,” he said. “There’s a risk that it may continue to go up.”
In many cases, the question was less about cost and more about a lack of detail. Proposed placeholders for things like the Pine Street development drew skepticism from members who again questioned what Finance Committee Chair Eric Hartmann described as “round-number syndrome,” saying that they could not evaluate a project without a defined scope or timeline.
“I wouldn’t support a placeholder in the current year,” Hartmann said. “Placeholders are okay in out years, but not the current year.”
Throughout the meeting, Committee members made it clear that they would struggle to support capital investments without clear numbers and reasoning. Their hesitance, they said, was part of the larger question of how the town evaluates and prioritizes spending as financial pressures continue to build.
Getting those clearer cost estimates, timelines, and justifications for these large projects, they said, would make the decisions both easier and more defensible as the budget process moves forward.
Toward the end of the meeting, Hale pointed to the role of the capital plan itself, saying it is meant to prevent exactly the kind of last-minute costs the town is now facing.
“What you see here is a lot of deferred maintenance,” he said. “For as long as I’ve been on the committee we’ve been trying to encourage the town to … look at the schedule of our assets … put in placeholders … we really do want to get to the point where we have a long-range capital plan.”
For now, the plan remains a work in progress for the Finance Committee, who will continue their review after getting a future-focused town budget forecast from Town Administrator Nick Connors, which is expected to be delivered to the Select Board next Wednesday.
