PROVINCETOWN — At the town’s annual election on Tuesday, May 14, voters will choose between two candidates for one seat on the select board — incumbent Leslie Sandberg and challenger Jere Miller — and among three candidates for two seats on the school committee.
Current school committee member Ngina Lythcott is running for a fourth three-year term, while Terese Nelson is running again after serving three terms from 2000 to 2009. Sean Ganas joined the town’s economic development committee in early 2023 and is now a first-time candidate for school committee.
The ballot also includes two Proposition 2½ overrides that were approved at town meeting on April 1 but must win a majority at the annual election.
Question 1 would increase the town’s budget by $373,342 to expand the Provincetown Schools Early Learning Center for infants and toddlers; Question 2 would allow the town to issue $11.7 million in bonds to fund the development of new facilities at Motta Field. The financing for the overhaul passed by a large margin at town meeting.
In three other races, only the incumbents filed to run. Mary-Jo Avellar is the only candidate for town moderator, Julia Perry is the only candidate for a seat on the charter commission, and Donna Skezer is the only person who filed for a five-year term on the housing authority.
There are also three seats for which nobody stepped up: a three-year term on the housing authority and two three-year terms on the board of library trustees. According to Town Clerk Elizabeth Paine, with five or more votes, a write-in candidate would be eligible to take the seat; otherwise, the select board will hold a joint meeting with the committee having the unelected position and a majority vote of the two boards meeting together would fill the seat.
Select Board
Incumbent Leslie Sandberg, 61, was first elected in a three-way race in 2021. That campaign was hotly contested and included some of the largest fundraising totals ever seen in Provincetown — $33,315 between the three candidates, $19,355 of which was raised by Sandberg.
This year’s campaign has been more muted.
Judges at Orleans District Court have placed challenger Jere Miller under three restraining orders in the last seven years at the request of his ex-wife, Kristen Reed, who is chair of Truro’s select board.
Miller served 18 months probation between July 2019 and January 2021 for violating one of those restraining orders.
Signs and mailers have been sparse this year, but both candidates told the Independent they want to focus on the town’s housing crisis.
Miller, 56, served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1998 to 2002 and earned a master’s degree in nonprofit leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. He self-published a children’s book in 2020 called Family: A Battle at Kruger.
In addition to writing poetry and screenplays, Miller works as a carpenter and a deckhand on lobster boats.
Sandberg has a master’s degree in public policy from American University and was press secretary for the Minnesota attorney general before moving to Provincetown in 2015.
She works in strategic communications for her consulting partnership, Rose, Sandberg and Associates. She said her two principal clients right now are the Cape Cod and Islands Association of Realtors, for whom she works on contract as government affairs director, and a Maryland economic development start-up called the Si3 Group.
“I don’t lobby municipal or state governments for the Realtors Association,” Sandberg said. “I bring public policy information to the members, and they make their own decisions on what they want to advocate in their towns.”
Sandberg said that in addition to the town’s housing crisis, coastal flooding is a priority issue for her.
“We have a good select board right now that is engaged on housing and other issues and that works well with the town manager,” said Sandberg. “Government is about solving people’s problems, and I’d like to keep working at it.”
School Committee
Ngina Lythcott, 78, moved to Provincetown in the 1990s after serving as dean of students in the schools of public health at Columbia University and Boston University.
Lythcott, who is African American, said she was encouraged by friends to run for the school committee in 2015 when the school’s population of Jamaican students was growing.
“Jamaican people have been working here for generations, but they didn’t always bring their children to enroll in our schools,” Lythcott said. “Jamaican culture values education very highly, so when they started trying out our school, we didn’t necessarily realize what a compliment that was.”
Provincetown’s International Baccalaureate curriculum has been immensely successful, Lythcott said, and is attracting students from around the Outer Cape. She wants to help the IB program continue to grow in the next three years, she said.
“The IB program includes underlying values of community and generosity and aims to help create adults who are responsive community members,” Lythcott said. “When I joined the school committee, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
Terese Nelson, 68, moved to Provincetown in 1995 after two decades in Trenton, N.J., where she built a child-care program at the First Presbyterian Church into a toddler-through-sixth-grade academy.
“It was a day-care program mostly serving the children of state government employees, and we would open at 7:30 in the morning and close at 6 p.m. because that’s what the working mothers there needed,” Nelson said. “We served breakfast, lunch, and snack, and we basically expanded a grade every year as the kids grew older.”
Nelson’s two children went to school in Provincetown starting in the late 1990s, and her youngest was among the last to graduate from Provincetown High School in 2013. Nelson’s grandson is now in the preschool program here.
Nelson served on the school board when it decided to close the high school and said the real fight then had been to keep the middle and elementary schools running.
“We had to fight for our budget because there were people who believed we didn’t need a school system anymore,” said Nelson. “The school is growing now — it’s attracting students both with the early childhood programs and the middle grades — and I’d like to help get the superintendent and the principal the resources they need.”
Sean Ganas, 52, moved to Provincetown with his husband and son in 2022. He works remotely as the director of student financial services at Boston College and previously worked as director of admissions and financial aid at the K-12 Bancroft School in Worcester.
His son is in fifth grade in Provincetown, and Ganas said that having parents on the school committee is helpful. The committee’s most important job is advocating for the schools within town government, he said.
“We are fortunate that our school is growing, and it’s important to provide the resources to manage that growth,” said Ganas. “Between having a son in the schools and having worked my whole career in schools, I think I can help support the teachers and administration here and use my background in education to contribute.”
