The Winthrop Town Council voted 5 to 3 at a special meeting on Tuesday, October 27 to dissolve its Rules and Ordinance Committee for a six-month trial period, sending everything pending before the committee to the full council, after an hour of argument over whether the meeting had been properly called at all. Councilors Patrick Costigan, Joseph Romano, Paul Reardon, Martin Finn and Vice President Suzanne Swope voted yes; Councilors Max Tassinari, Kurt Millar and Kim Dimes voted no. President Jim Letterie, participating remotely, opened the meeting and then turned it over because he could not get onto the video feed.
Who called the meeting
Tassinari moved to adjourn at the outset, saying he had received only a printed agenda taped to his door and never the signed motion from four councilors that the charter requires for a special meeting. Town counsel told the council the charter imposes two requirements, a motion by at least four councilors filed with the town clerk and distribution of that motion and the agenda to every councilor along with posting, and that he had seen a filing with four names on it but could not say whether it reached each councilor. Romano, who said he filed the request with Costigan, Reardon and Swope while the clerk was on vacation, said the clerk’s office produced the notice. The motion to adjourn failed 3 to 5. Before that, a motion to make Tassinari chair for the night failed 4 to 5 and Costigan was chosen instead.
Speakers during public comment, several of them regulars at council meetings, called the session a power play. A Precinct 2 resident said the charter “was written in 2006” and that the council majority “got a vote on a slate” and was changing the town; a Precinct 6 resident said the chair should have been the vice president under the charter and that four of the motions carried Monday’s date, missing the council’s own Thursday deadline; a Precinct 1 resident said she would rather see “robust debate among the public every two weeks” than items disappearing into committee; and another speaker requested that no major ordinance, zoning or rules change get a final vote until it has been public for 30 days with a dedicated hearing and a plain-language summary.
The committee vote
Millar, who chairs the committee, read a statement calling the motion “a question about whether this council will follow its own current established rules,” said the committee had been assigned matters it had not finished, and said dissolving it “creates an appearance that the process itself is being manipulated to achieve a preferred result.” If one recommending committee goes, he said, they all should. Romano said debate at the full council is more transparent than committee meetings “where at most we have three to four people,” that nothing would be voted without discussion, and that ordinances still require public hearings. Tassinari said this was “the fourth or fifth special meeting this year” and that the dissolution “reeks of manipulation” by five members who “come into a room of eight and already have their minds made up,” which he called a violation of the open meeting law. Dimes said calling the meeting on short notice “goes completely against” the transparency the majority said it wanted.
AI ban withdrawn
Dimes withdrew her motion to prohibit councilors from using ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude and similar tools for council business until the town adopts an artificial intelligence policy, after Romano proposed replacing the ban with a special committee named by the council president and Reardon, who works in information technology, said a blanket ban is “basically unenforceable” because “people aren’t going to give their browser history to us.” Dimes said her concern was ordinances and reports built on sources nobody had verified and that only Boston, among municipalities she checked, has a written policy. She said she will return with a new motion to create the committee.
Zoning for the center business district
Romano moved to send a series of zoning amendments to the Planning Board, which must hold its own hearing before the council does: designating the Town Council instead of the Planning Board as the special permit granting authority in the center business district; three alternatives on fees in lieu of parking, including a $25,000 per space payment capped at 10 percent of required spaces or no payments at all; removing a mixed-use frontage provision; and cutting the maximum building height in the district from 48 feet to 35 feet. Tassinari said lowering the height limit on land people already own “is going to create damages” and “open the town up to a limitless lawsuit”; town counsel said anyone can sue but that referring the items to the Planning Board keeps the council on “steady ground.” Millar invoked council privilege on each motion, which carries it to the next meeting, and did the same with Romano’s motion clarifying that items go only to committees defined in the rules unless the council votes otherwise and with a rewrite of the council’s rules that adds a town manager question period, an open forum for councilors at every meeting and the resume requirements for board nominees the council adopted earlier this year.
The recording is on WCAT’s YouTube channel and the agenda and motions are on the town’s Agenda Center.
