The Beverly City Council, meeting Monday, October 19 in the Beverly Middle School library while City Hall is renovated, opened with a surprise: Mayor Mike Cahill and the Cabot’s president and chief executive, Brian Rodolfo, and Richard Marino of Ward 2 used two of the night’s five public comment slots to read a resolution honoring Ward 4 Councilor Scott Houseman for organizing the business leaders who saved the Cabot Theatre in 2013, when it “might have been torn down or renovated for a different use.” The resolution says Houseman “recognized the cultural importance of saving the Cabot Theater” and its potential as an economic driver, reached out to the business community, and organized and chaired some of the earliest meetings of the group that founded the organization that runs the theater. Houseman said the group now called the founders met in secret for a year, starting with Bill Howard and Marino, to write the business plan the theater still uses. “I am speechless,” he said. The Cabot reopened in 2014, marked its tenth anniversary with interior renovations in September 2025, and celebrated a new exterior last week. “We all owe you such a debt of gratitude,” Marino told him.
Council President Julie Flowers said the council is still settling into the school, asked the public to sit on one side of a column and city staff behind the council so she can see them, and thanked Kim in the BevCam booth for streaming. Solicitor Beth Oldmixon, Assistant Solicitor Jesse Dell, Planning Director Darlene Wynn and the mayor attended. Each regular meeting has up to five public comment spots for people who live or work in the city, signed up through the clerk by 9:30 the morning of the meeting, three minutes each; Vice President Matt St. Hilaire kept time. Carol Rain, who had signed up, had spoken at the subcommittee meeting beforehand and did not return.
Flock cameras and sewer bills
Before the meeting, the Legal Affairs and Public Services subcommittees held a joint session with the police department on the city’s use of Flock Safety license plate cameras, a review Councilors Todd Rotondo and Danielle Spang were directed to schedule in April; Rotondo chaired it, with Councilor Hannah Bowen Sonia stepping in as public services chair. During public comment, Ward 3 resident John Dudley answered the police presentation point by point: the cameras are not like a CVS camera or a Ring doorbell because, to his knowledge, those “don’t feed into agencies like ICE”; many of the department’s success stories “have nothing to do with Beverly residents”; and the chief had described only minimal training. He said Flock’s contract terms give the company “an irrevocable, perpetual right” to use local data to train its products, that the company’s updated national terms this year removed guarantees against selling customer data, limited its liability for breaches and require arbitration in Georgia, and that cities in Illinois and Indiana that canceled faced heavy fees and found cameras still running. “Our community trusts our police department, but they do not trust big tech,” he said, urging the council to use its leverage with the mayor and chief to let the contract lapse in 30 days. “Otherwise, residents will continue to turn up the heat.”
Ward 5 resident Patrick Lucci raised what he called “a thorny issue that has been bothering me since I moved to Beverly in 2000”: the city charges sewer fees on water consumption at $7.29 per 100 cubic feet, not on measured discharge, which he argued conflicts with the state law allowing charges only for use of common sewers. Beverly, he said, is the only member of the South Essex Sewerage District, with Danvers, Peabody, Salem and Marblehead, that does not allow a second meter to deduct irrigation water, even though the district bills the city on actual sewer volume. By his conservative math, a household watering a 2,000-square-foot lawn three times a week pays $127.93 a month in sewer fees on water that never reaches a sewer, and 5,000 such customers watering from May to September pay about $3.2 million a year “in sewer fees for sewers that don’t get used.”
Votes
With Spang absent, every vote was 8 to 0. The council completed the three-step process to accept Millbrook Road as a public way. Dell explained that the first order, number 223, expressed the intent to lay out the way and sent it to the Planning Board, which endorsed the layout; the two remaining orders had been numbered together as 264 by mistake, so Legal Affairs split them into 264, the taking of easements, and 264A, the adoption of the layout and acceptance of the road, and the council passed each in turn. It approved a waiver of the city’s right of first refusal on an affordable ownership unit at 348 Rantoul Street, Unit 202, renewed Michael’s Auto Body’s 2027 Class II license at 2 School Street, reappointed Peter Dafkos of Brookhead Avenue as constable, and set public hearings for November 23 at 7:30 and 7:40 p.m. on National Grid petitions for underground facilities on Woodbury and Dane streets. The minutes of May 4 and May 18 were approved.
Also at the meeting
- Budget analyst Gerald Perry’s letter of retirement, effective no later than the end of the year, was received and placed on file with the council’s thanks.
- Houseman’s request that the mayor raise $20,000 for the Beverly Human Rights Committee, filed September 8, was the Finance and Property Committee’s only item. Chair Kathleen Feldman wanted a standalone discussion rather than “jam it into” a subcommittee break, and Houseman asked that it stay in committee until the mayor and committee chair Eric Nitzsche, who had planned to meet the week before, confirm they have talked. The committee will try to schedule it before the November 9 meeting, which falls a week later than usual because of the election.
- Mayoral reappointments of Laura Meisenhelter to the Zoning Board of Appeals and Ed Horack and Marilyn Hourican Osburn to the Commission on Disabilities, appointments of Andy Cohen and Tim Brady to the Harbor Management Authority and Nick Velonis to the Golf and Tennis Commission, six National Grid petitions for Rantoul, Elliott, Woodbury, Dane and Lothrop streets, one of them serving a new building at 478 Winter Street, and license applications for Landmark School at 429 Hale Street and a taxi operator on Simon Street were referred to committee. An update on cleanup of the former Varian site at 150 Sohier Road was placed on file.
- Flowers thanked Feldman, who chaired the finance committee in the room following knee surgery, and reminded residents that City Hall, including early voting during business hours and on weekends, is in the former bank building next to 191 Cabot Street. Councilor Kathleen Crowley invited families to pumpkins and pizza at Holcroft Park on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Sonia promoted the downtown trick-or-treat on October 29 from 4 to 6 p.m., with her mother’s float for the Ward 2 Civic Association; and Councilor John Mullady said the deficit reduction committee’s first community conversation was set for October 20 at 6 p.m. at the Council on Aging.
The recording is on BevCam’s YouTube channel and the agenda packet is on the city’s Agenda Center.
