HULL — September 16, 2026 — A divided Select Board voted 3-2 to adopt a policy directive backing the municipal light plant’s plan to stay at its current site and build a new garage, acting at a resident’s request from the floor and minutes after town counsel told the board that deciding how to spend a particular sum is the Town Manager’s call, not theirs.
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Vice Chair Jerry Taverna moved that the board support the municipal light plant and its separately elected commissioners in staying at the plant’s current location and moving forward with plans to design and build a new garage. The motion carried 3-2. Taverna attached no figure to it: “No dollar value added.”
The motion came from the floor. Resident Lisa French asked the board to adopt that policy and to have the financing of a permanent garage explored, Taverna responded “So moved,” and Chair Brian McCarthy asked for it in the form of a motion.
The vote landed on top of a seven-page opinion from town counsel, dated Aug. 12, on the board’s jurisdiction over the light department. Summarizing it at the table, Town Counsel Brian Winner described a charter that makes the Select Board the town’s chief elected policy-making body and the Town Manager its chief administrative and chief financial officer, then drew the line between them at execution:
The expenditure of a particular amount from a particular fund to accomplish a specific task is really a managerial question. Brian Winner, Town Counsel (1:56:34)
That bears on the board’s July directive, which carried a $110,000 feasibility study. Taverna read the opinion’s conclusion aloud: the July 22 vote concerning the $110,000 study “should be understood as establishing town policy rather than compelling the town manager to make a particular expenditure.” Winner cautioned that the finding was tied to the questions asked, and that a decision the charter vests in the manager cannot be turned into policy by voting on it.
Two members objected to voting at all. Irwin Nesoff said the plant’s governing body sits outside the board’s reach: “The Municipal Light Board is a separately elected board that we have no authority over.” He also said the light board has commissioned a study on whether and how to build a garage, and asked why the Select Board would endorse the answer in advance: “Why would we vote to support a permanent garage before that study is in, before we have any information, before we have anything?”
Greg Grey called the vote “ill-advised” and said “making a decision on something with no bones behind it is kind of foolish.” Taverna’s answer was procedural: “Because we didn’t dot an I and cross a T in our last vote.”
McCarthy, voting with the majority, said the joint facility will not clear town meeting, pointing to a public safety building plan the chair put at $60 million to $70 million and calling further spending on the joint design a waste. “The town can’t afford this,” he said. McCarthy also said the state had awarded the town another grant for the work, giving the figure as $460,000 and then $462,000 in the same exchange.
Town Manager Jennifer Constable asked that the matter return on a posted agenda, and said the joint building grew out of an assessment that identified the light plant and the public works yard as two of the town’s most vulnerable facilities, with engineers concluding a shared site was the most cost-effective route. The award is in hand, she said, and “the state is aware that there might be a change in the scope.” The town’s share of the design and planning work to date is 13 cents on the dollar.
