WELLFLEET — The election of two select board members this May just got a bit more competitive. Days before the deadline for taking out nomination papers, County Commissioner Sheila Lyons announced that she is throwing her hat into the ring for a three-year term on the board. Previously, incumbents John Wolf and Tim Sayre had been running unopposed.
Former select board member Kathleen Bacon also picked up nomination papers ahead of the March 7 deadline, according to Town Clerk Jennifer Congel.
Bacon was on the board from 2017 to 2020 and was elected again after Helen Miranda Wilson retired early from her fourth term in 2022. But Bacon gave up her seat last fall after just one year, citing the stress of serving amid constant turmoil on the board. Bacon told the Independent that she has not yet decided whether she is going to run this spring.
Lyons, 67, has served three four-year terms on the Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners, two consecutively, from 2008 to 2016, and then from 2020 to 2024. Before that, she served two terms on the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates, representing Wellfleet from 2006 to 2008.
Lyons had been debating whether to run for select board or for Sarah Peake’s seat in the state House of Representatives. Last week she told the Independent that she decided against entering the House race; on March 3 she confirmed that she was all in for a seat on Wellfleet’s executive branch of government.
The question for her, she said, was, “Where was I going to be more useful?” After the Wellfleet Community Forum’s Feb. 26 meeting, at which an audience of over 200 discussed some of the issues plaguing the town, including a lack of participation among townsfolk, Lyons made her decision.
“After nobody came forward at the meeting, I thought, ‘What’s the matter here?’ ” she said. Lyons is president of the forum’s board and helped facilitate the meeting. “I decided that if nobody stepped up, I would do this.”
Lyons said she also plans to run for reelection as county commissioner.
She believes that distrust of routine government work has led to a state of dysfunction and inertia. She believes she could change that. “I bring a belief in town government and that it should function how it is supposed to,” Lyons said. “We have a structure of how things get done, and we have agreed on that structure. If we work with it, we can get a lot of things done.”
Recently, Lyons said, the roles of various town bodies have gotten muddled. “Everybody wants to feel like they know how to make things right, but as the select board, you aren’t there to do other people’s jobs,” she said. “You are there to set policy.”
Lyons said she was particularly upset by the board’s vote to strike down an oyster restoration project, known as a “mitigation plan,” requested by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the town to receive a permit to dredge the harbor. Instead, the board has positioned itself to ask voters to pay a $4.5-million permit fee at the upcoming town meeting, now scheduled for May 20.
“When we need big things like our roads to be fixed through the state or our dredge to be done by the federal government, we are petitioning to get our investments back,” Lyons said. “Why you want to block that, or feel it’s a bad thing, that’s the feeling on the board that I don’t understand.”
In addition to serving as county commissioner, Lyons has worked for the last five years as a health-care access specialist at Outer Cape Health Services, where she said she applies her master’s in social work by helping patients navigate health insurance issues.
“It has helped me know my community on a whole different level,” Lyons said. “I hear firsthand of the struggles of housing, of raising children here.” On the select board, Lyons said, she would want “to bring those voices forward.”
Lyons is also an advocate of civility, she said. “I think I would bring support and civil rationality,” Lyons said. “Select board meetings are business meetings that are open to the public. It’s not a time to debate issues with the public; it is about dealing with the business at hand.”
In spite of itself, Lyons said, “the town is still getting things done.” She said she would prioritize completing the town’s wastewater plans, developing a five-year capital plan, and renewing the town’s local comprehensive plan. That plan should be revisited every five years, Lyons noted; the last local comprehensive plan posted on the town’s website is from 2005.
“I would like to be there to support progress,” she said.
