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John Wolf

    ELECTION

    Lyons and Wolf Top the Balloting in Wellfleet

    A newcomer with political experience, Lyons hopes to bring changes

    By

    WELLFLEET — Challenger Sheila Lyons and incumbent John Wolf were the top vote-getters in a four-way race for two seats on the Wellfleet Select Board at the town’s annual election on April 29.

    Sheila Lyons at a Wellfleet Community Forum event in February 2024. (Photo by Teresa Parker)

    Lyons and Wolf beat incumbent Tim Sayre, who has been serving a seven-month term on the board after Kathleen Bacon resigned last summer, and first-time candidate Steven Kopits.

    According to unofficial election results posted by the town clerk, Lyons received 814 votes or 80 percent of the 1,007 votes cast; Wolf won 593 votes — just below 60 percent of total votes cast. Sayre received 240 votes, and Kopits got 226.

    Voter turnout was slightly up this year, according to Town Clerk Jennifer Congel, with 32 percent of just over 3,100 registered voters showing up at the ballot box. Last year, 28 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

    “I am happy to have the confidence of the townspeople to do business on their behalf,” Lyons told the Independent the day after the election. “People obviously wanted a change. Hopefully I will bring a positive change.”

    Lyons comes onto the board after serving for 12 years on the Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners and one term as Wellfleet’s representative on the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates from 2006 to 2008.

    Lyons, 67, will be seeking reelection to a four-year term as county commissioner this November, she said. She recently retired from her job as a health-care access specialist at Outer Cape Health Services, a position she held for five years. “I am going from one job right into the next,” she said.

    As a select board member, Lyons said, she hopes to support chair Barbara Carboni in “trying to bring order to meetings and make them more working meetings.” Her stated priorities are reviving the town’s local comprehensive plan and having an updated version “as a living document” for the town to refer to. The last local comprehensive plan available on the town’s website is from 2005.

    Lyons said she would also like to get the town’s debt under control. Under state law, a municipality may not authorize debt that exceeds 10 percent of the “equalized valuation” of taxable property in town; Wellfleet is currently at 9.96 percent, according to interim Town Administrator Tom Guerino.

    That means that any additional debt that the town seeks to take on would be pushing that limit, Lyons said, including asking voters to approve a $4.5 million fee to receive a permit to dredge the harbor mooring field.

    Lyons wants to revisit a mitigation plan that would meet the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requirements for a dredging permit. That plan was ultimately scrapped by the select board last August, and the board instead voted in favor of paying the $4.5 million fee in November.

    The mitigation plan was at first seen in “a negative way,” Lyons said. “It was all talk about how it wouldn’t work as opposed to turning the conversation around and discussing how we can make it work.” The negative spin, she said, “stops people from accomplishing things.”

    Wolf, who was reelected on Monday to a second three-year term on the board, has been a vocal opponent of the mitigation plan. He said he arrived at his opinion by talking with shellfishermen and aquaculture researchers who believed that the oyster restoration project in Blackfish Creek that constituted the proposed mitigation plan would not succeed. “I stand by my position,” Wolf told the Independent this week.

    Wolf has taken on a task assigned by his colleagues to get the town’s Congressional delegation to pressure the Army Corps to back down from the mitigation requirement, citing studies that found minimal marine life in the mooring field that would be harmed by dredging. He said that he has a meeting scheduled for May 2 with staffers from the offices of Congressman Bill Keating and senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey.

    Wolf said he plans to work with Lyons despite their differing opinions on how to proceed with dredging. “She brings a lot of political experience to the board,” he said. “I look forward to working with her and learning from her.

    “I am guardedly optimistic for continued positive change in the way things are going in town government,” Wolf added. “The town has turned some corners. I am looking forward to more of that.”

    Sayre told the Independent he feels that the select board accomplished a lot in the months he was on the board. “We hired a new town administrator who is well-versed in what needs to be done with the town, we have calmed down the meetings, and the meetings have gotten shorter while still dealing with the business that needs to be done,” Sayre said. “The townspeople elected the people they want to serve on the board.”

    Kopits called the campaign process “hugely fun” and said in an email that the outcome was “not a bad result for the first time I’ve ever run for elected office. The objective challenges facing Wellfleet remain as they were last week. The question is whether the addition of a new member fundamentally changes the dynamic of the select board. For my part, I will continue to do my best to serve the community.”

    Also at the April 29 election, Robert Wagner won a write-in campaign for a five-year term on the Wellfleet Housing Authority. He will replace Richard Ciotti, who stepped down from the board after serving for eight years.

    Lauren Hill and Melissa Lynch were elected to the Wellfleet Elementary School Committee. Yvonne Barocas will serve a one-year term on the board of library trustees, and Adam Miller and Kathy Shorr will both serve three-year terms as library trustees. David Agger was reelected to a three-year term on the cemetery commission.

     

    TOWN MEETING

    Wellfleet Adopts $24.9M Budget, OKs All Overrides

    Town service cuts are avoided, but spending must still pass at election

    By

    WELLFLEET — Town meeting voters approved nearly all of the 54 articles on the warrant on Saturday, including a $24.9-million operating budget, a $1.1-million capital budget, a $2.2-million sprinkler system for the elementary school, and $400,000 in Proposition 2½ overrides for two new police officers and two firefighters or EMTs.

    While the four overrides and one debt exclusion (for the sprinklers) passed by two-thirds majority votes at the meeting, they will need to be affirmed at a special election on Tuesday, June 21. If all are approved, property taxes on a house of median value ($619,000) would rise by $546, said former interim Town Administrator Charlie Sumner.

    At Saturday’s Wellfleet town meeting, left to right, former interim Town Administrator Charlie Sumner, Town Counsel Carolyn Murray, new Town Administrator Rich Waldo, and select board member John Wolf. (Photo by Michaela Chesin)

    Select board chair Ryan Curley asserted that an increase in the residential tax exemption from 20 to 25 percent would “offset most of the tax increase” for year-round residents, although his analysis appeared to be faulty. For the owner of a median-value house, the increased residential exemption would save about $240, not the $408 Curley mentioned.

    The meeting drew 266 voters to the ballfield across from the Wellfleet Elementary School.

    Select board members and town staff urged voters to pass the operating override to avoid cuts to various town services, including recreation, child-care vouchers, library staff and operating hours, and amnesty day at the transfer station.

    The 2.4-percent increase from the previous fiscal year will ensure that the budget is level-funded, Sumner said, without needing to depend on debt exclusions or using other one-time revenue streams, local receipts, and reserves, like draining the ambulance fund each year, as was done in the past. Sumner had already resumed his retirement, but attended the meeting with new Town Administrator Richard Waldo, who started on May 31.

    “The last time we had an operating override was over 15 years ago,” select board member Mike DeVasto said. Silverman confirmed that the last operating override was at the 2005 Annual Town Meeting, for $400,000.

    “I can’t express how excited I am to put that chapter in the rearview mirror,” said DeVasto of the town’s extended financial debacle. “I can confidently say that we are in a better place than we were prior to the accounting crisis.”

    Select board member John Wolf said that the town also faces “a credibility gap,” which must be addressed by the new town administrator and finance department staff.

    Wolf warned against taking a punitive stance toward “the outright incompetence that has taken place in the past.” But he questioned DeVasto’s rearview mirror metaphor, saying that “a good helmsman is aware of what’s going on in the back as well as what’s coming up ahead.”

    The biggest item on the warrant was the $2.2-million fire suppression system at Wellfleet Elementary School. Steven Kopits asked if the expensive system was “absolutely necessary.” Fire Chief Rich Pauley replied that the town was violating state law and that fire marshals could close the school building down.

    “Should there be a fire, the cost of sprinklers would be modest in comparison to the town’s liability,” Wolf commented.

    Supplemental funding of $334,500 for a fuel storage tank at the marina was approved. The new tank would be underground in the same location as the old tank, according to Harbormaster Will Sullivan.

    Police Chief Michael Hurley and Fire Chief Pauley urged voters to approve increases in their departments without further delay. The need has been present for several years, they said, but funding was put off due to the town’s financial disarray.

    Voters approved Article 46, placing a community impact fee of 3 percent on “professionally managed” short-term rentals. Article 47, also adopted, expands the provision to include owner-occupied properties.

    The money collected from the impact fees will be placed in two stabilization funds established by the town meeting: 35 percent of the funds will go into an affordable housing stabilization fund, aimed at providing housing for those earning less than 80 percent of area median income (AMI). The remaining 65 percent will go to a mixed-income housing stabilization fund, to benefit those who make more than 80 percent of AMI but still struggle to afford housing in town.

    Other articles approved at the meeting included authorization of an easement for the Herring River Restoration Project and a nonbinding resolution asking the select board to draft a tree preservation bylaw.

    The 54-article warrant was dispatched in just over four hours, a significant improvement over last year’s annual town meeting, which took six and a half hours.

     

    WELLFLEET ELECTION

    John Wolf Wins Select Board Seat as Write-In and Will Replace Carlson

    All articles are approved and budget will go up 13 percent

    By

    WELLFLEET — The town has a new select board member, John Wolf, who says he wanted to get on the board to address the severe accounting crisis at town hall.

    Wolf defeated incumbent Justina Carlson, who, like Wolf, was running as a write-in candidate, by a margin of 374 to 332. Incumbent Helen Miranda Wilson, the only candidate printed on the ballot, was re-elected with 609 votes.

    Thirty percent — that is, 922 — of the town’s 3,018 registered voters took part in the June 30 election. Along with voting in Wolf, they approved all 10 debt exclusions and one budget override, that is, purchases that will raise the tax levy beyond the 2.5-percent legal limit. The election results will cause the town budget to go up by 13 percent, adding $534 a year to the tax bill on a home valued at $551,000, the current median assessment.

    Wolf plans to make hiring the right person as the new town administrator his top priority. He also wants all meetings to be recorded and available to the public. He is urging caution on the future uses of the 254 acres of shellfish flats purchased by the town in 2019.

    But first, he said, he needs to win over the 332 people who voted for Carlson, his opponent.

    John Wolf.

    “I appreciate the trust that those who voted for me have in me,” Wolf said. “I have to earn the trust of those who didn’t.”

    One of his big fans turns out to be Carlson herself.

    “John Wolf is a real gentleman,” she said.

    The three candidates for two select board spots, Carlson, Wolf, and Wilson, spent election day waving at voters. When it was all over, Wolf offered to take down Carlson’s campaign signs along with his own.

    “At 11:30 at night he dropped my signs off at my house, after a very long day,” she said.

    Carlson said Wolf campaigned hard, and seems to want the job. She admitted that she is tired, and happy to have the extra time to devote to her personal life.

    “I gave 10 years to the town [seven as a water commissioner] and worked hard and I’m happy to move on,” she said. “It’s a lot of work and a lot of years.”

    Select board service is not for the meek. The town administrator and town accountant both resigned earlier this year amid a financial crisis resulting from years of high turnover and inadequate staffing and supervision of the accounting department. The select board was criticized for not seeing the crisis sooner.

    “We don’t have degrees in finance,” Carlson told critics. “The select board worked incredibly hard. These issues were not the select board’s responsibility by charter. And the finance committee was nowhere to be found.”

    Finance committee member Stephen Polowczyk laid the crisis at the select board’s feet. “Someone was asleep,” he said on June 24.

    But if voters were displeased with the accounting chaos that will take months to untangle, according to Interim Town Administrator Charlie Sumner, they didn’t show it at the election.

    By 663 to 243, voters agreed to hire two firefighters for $168,000, which will permanently raise the tax rate. The rest of the purchases listed below will raise the tax rate for the life of the corresponding loans. By 693 to 217, voters approved purchase of portable radios for the fire dept. for $85,000; by 623 to 286, to buy an emergency response boat for the marine department for $290,000; by 544 to 353, to purchase a replacement ¾-ton pickup truck and plow for $60,000; and by 544 to 347, to buy a replacement roll-off truck for the DPW for $240,000.

    Voters supported spending $50,000 for engineering to replace a revetment at Mayo Creek by 577 to 304. They voted to spend $35,000 to replace the baseball backstop at Baker Field by 559 to 334. They approved $138,000 for design work to improve the Main Street and Route 6 intersection by 563 to 331. They raised $250,000 to compensate homeowners needing new septic systems to install new innovative or alternative systems by 620 to 267. They approved $50,000 to engineer a permeable reactive barrier at East Commercial Street to improve quality at Duck Creek by 507 to 353.

    By a 702 to 194 vote, they approved spending $1.9 million to provide a wastewater treatment system for a future affordable housing project at 95 Lawrence Road.

    WELLFLEET SELECTS

    John Wolf Says He Will Do His Homework

    It’s time, he says, for new blood on the select board

    By

    WELLFLEET — John Wolf pulls up to the Flying Fish in a massive Mercedes work van, fitted with disproportionately small magnetic campaign signs and a license plate that reads TRBONE (a tribute to his decades-long career as a jazz trombonist).

    John Wolf.

    Wolf, who is “Wolfie” to his friends, has just spent a couple of hours meeting with the Herring River Restoration Committee. “That’s an issue I was not really up on,” he says. “I had a very vague idea of what that was about. I really learned a lot.”

    Wolf sees his lack of experience in town affairs as one of his greatest strengths, because he loves to learn new things. He positions himself as the most pragmatic candidate in the race. “I’m not going to guess,” he says. “I’m going to actually do my homework.”

    A native of Washington, D.C. who lived in St. Louis for 23 years, Wolf fell in love with the Cape during family trips as a child. In 2010, he moved to Wellfleet full-time, and today he works as an HVAC and restaurant mechanic, serves on the Marina Advisory Committee, is a commercial operator and licensed captain in the harbor, and is an active participant at town meetings.

    Wolf is also a moderator of the occasionally controversial Wellfleet Community Space Facebook group. He does not think remaining a moderator while running for office is a conflict of interest, but says he would step down if elected.

    When someone (who Wolf would not name) approached him about running for the select board, Wolf said, “You must think I have a vacancy of the cranium.” But he changed his mind and entered the race as a write-in candidate, in part because nobody new was running. “That’s not healthy,” he says.

    Wellfleet’s financial troubles were another factor in Wolf’s decision to run. “The financial problems don’t have one single cause, but the nexus of it lies with the select board,” he says. Though the town administrator is directly responsible for town finances, the administrator answers to the select board, and Wolf thinks that board has not done a good job asking questions or requiring accountability.

    Wolf proposes to put the town’s auditing contract out for bid, rather than staying with the same firm, which Wellfleet has done for 25 years.

    Wolf describes affordable housing as a “critical need on all sorts of levels” and says, without providing specifics, “We’ve got to find a way to streamline this. It shouldn’t be taking so long.” He says he wants to increase transparency in town government by requiring that all board and committee meetings are videotaped, and he proposes improving the “flawed” town administrator hiring process by selecting a search committee publicly and strictly adhering to their recommendations.

    Wolf knows that his views on national politics are a subject of gossip. He is a self-described “small-L libertarian,” and brings up unprompted a recent social media post that said, “Just what we need, a gun-toting Trump supporter on the select board.” Wolf flatly rejects the characterization and calls the focus on national party affiliations a distraction. “If they want to not vote for me because they think I voted for Joe Biden or they think I voted for Donald Trump, then that’s a vote that I don’t need.”

    Though Wolf won’t be telling anyone who he voted for in 2020 anytime soon, he will be on the campaign trail in the coming days “becoming as well informed as possible” while repeatedly explaining the proper way to fill out a write-in ballot.

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