WELLFLEET — When voters head to the polls on May 5 to fill two select board seats, they will find only two candidates on the ballot. Barbara Carboni, who has served on the select board since 2022, is running for re-election. Josh Yeston, an advertising executive who moved to Wellfleet two years ago, is the other candidate.
Michael DeVasto announced on Feb. 18 that he was not running for re-election.
Yeston, who maintains a house where he previously lived in Bedford, N.Y., told the Independent that he has visited Wellfleet since he was a child and now lives in a house on Griffins Island Road that his grandfather bought in the 1970s. He said that he and his wife, Emily, who is CEO and co-founder of the skin care brand Doré and a board member of Twenty Summers in Provincetown, began staying in town for six-month stretches in 2020.
That’s when Yeston, who is 36, said he began following town politics online. In the four years since then, he said, he has watched every select board meeting as well as most conservation commission, planning board, and zoning board of appeals meetings. He was chair of the Wellfleet Cable Internet and Cellular Service Advisory Committee, which he joined in 2023.
In that role, Yeston oversaw the creation of Wellfleet’s oceanfront Wi-Fi network that spans Lecount Hollow, White Crest, and Cahoon Hollow beaches. The goal was to improve access to emergency services, but the project proved controversial among beachgoers who preferred that the beaches remain oases separate from online life and pointed out that the town had already installed direct landline access from the beaches to emergency services.
The cable advisory committee also supported Verizon’s application for a state grant to provide Fios access to more remote areas of town, including to Yeston’s own house in the National Seashore.
Yeston described himself as action-oriented. “I’m very good at taking people’s passions and people’s goals and helping them put together a plan of action,” he said.
Yeston works as a creative director for hire. His company is called Josh Robert And Yeston Inc., and his title is Whatever You Want Director.
His website says that “Josh was a creative leader for HBO’s SXSWestworld activation which was called ‘One of the best publicity stunts of the 21st century.’ ”
The reason he wants to be on the select board, Yeston said, is that he loves helping others. “That’s what fills my cup,” he said. “My passion is to be somebody else’s champion.” He added, “I don’t have an agenda. My agenda is supporting the town.”
If elected, Yeston will turn to a list of his top priorities: improving government transparency, addressing the housing shortage, and identifying new sources of capital for the town.
Artificial intelligence could be used as a search engine to identify grants, said Yeston, who would like to create a task force to find and apply for grants for the town. “There’s a tremendous amount of funding at the state level,” he said. “The state wants to support Wellfleet. We are a brand name in the Commonwealth.”
As for improving transparency, Yeston wants to see AI tools like ChatGPT used to summarize municipal meetings. “The power of AI allows anyone to distill three-to-four-hour meetings into pages of summarized notes,” he said. The notes, if vetted by a designated person who had been there, he said, would help the public understand what happens in town government. He was not sure exactly how this would be done or who would be responsible for vetting the summaries, but he suggested that could be decided in a public forum.
To make town officials easier to talk to, Yeston said, he envisions holding office hours. “I think it’s important for people to be able to engage with their public leaders outside of formal meetings,” he said. He would also encourage town administration to create a weekly newsletter to keep the public up to date on government matters.
Yeston said that he wants to make housing more affordable and to alter zoning to allow for more mixed-use development. “Wellfleet needs to be a year-round community,” he said. “We cannot be just a resort community.”
At the same time, however, he said he is “deeply conflicted” about the residential tax exemption, the program that makes year-round residency more affordable by offering homeowners who live here an exemption on a portion of their property taxes. “I think we need to think really critically about having a very strong reason to increase it,” he said. It’s a problem, he said, because he feels part-time residents have little say in the matter.
Yeston also wants to renegotiate the National Park Service’s annual payment to the town in lieu of taxes for its property, which he said is currently based on 1961 land values. “Two-thirds of our town is protected land,” he said. “We can’t build on it, yet they don’t pay their fair share for that benefit.” He said he would lobby the town’s representatives in Congress to push for this.
Yeston also has ideas for restructuring town government. He said that he would be in favor of establishing term limits for boards and would support a measure that would give the select board the authority to remove a member of another board or committee.
Yeston said he’d like to see the town ramp up its recruiting to address staff turnover. “All it takes is a Google search, if you’re a prospective employee, to understand that there’s been a lot of turnover,” he said. “It will take a proactive approach to recruit the best talent and assure them that they have job security.” He said he also wants to discuss with department heads how AI could make their jobs easier.
Yeston said that many people had encouraged him to run for select board, including current board member Sheila Lyons. He said he would bring a level head to the select board and feels he could work well with everyone on the board.
“It’s very hard to raise my blood pressure,” he said.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 13, incorrectly reported that Yeston lives in a house that his grandfather built in the 1970s. The house was built in 1959; his grandfather bought it in the 1970s. Also, the state grant to provide high-speed internet service to remote areas of town did not go to the cable advisory committee as previously reported; it went to Verizon, with support from the committee.
