The Lincoln Squirrel – News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

government

My Turn: Change how FinCom members are named

By Bob Domnitz (on behalf of petitioners)

Several weeks ago, 130 residents signed a citizens’ petition asking that our Special Town Meeting consider an amendment to the General Bylaws of the town. If adopted, the amendment would grant authority to the Select Board to appoint the members of the town’s Finance Committee. That authority is currently held by the Town Moderator.

The Finance Committee (FinCom) is one of Lincoln’s most important volunteer committees. Its work is complex and its analysis and recommendations have a decisive impact on town operations and residents’ taxes. Despite its importance, FinCom receives limited direct engagement from residents.

As signatures were gathered for the petition, the vast majority of residents said they did not know how the members of FinCom were chosen. They thought that the moderator’s role was limited to presiding over Town Meeting. No one could recall a contested election for the position of Moderator, and no one could recall that a moderator had ever expressed a viewpoint on town finances or FinCom appointments.

The disconnect between FinCom and residents has been compounded by the current practice of relying on FinCom to screen potential candidates for membership. Vacant positions have not been advertised, and public interviews have not been held.

If endorsed by Town Meeting, the citizens’ petition will make the Select Board the appointing authority for FinCom. Residents look to the Select Board for overall management of the town. It seems natural that they ought to be the authority that appoints FinCom. The town usually has a contested race for Select Board, and candidates differentiate themselves based on their views and policy preferences. That process helps align our Select Board with residents.

Adoption of this amendment will empower the Select Board to solicit and publicly interview volunteers for FinCom, following the same public process they use for other committees that they appoint. Appointment by the Select Board will therefore create a clear link between residents and FinCom.

Although many Massachusetts towns continue the tradition of a moderator-appointed Finance Committee, the trend is toward other methods of appointment. A substantial minority of towns now rely on appointment by Select Boards, direct election by residents, or appointment by a committee composed of various town officials.

By considering this amendment, the town has an opportunity to strengthen transparency, accountability, and resident engagement in a vital part of our local government. Embracing best practices that encourage diverse perspectives and open public participation will not only enhance the Finance Committee’s effectiveness but also foster greater trust and collaboration within our community. Together, we can ensure that Lincoln’s financial decisions reflect the voices and values of all its residents, building a stronger, more inclusive future for our town.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Town Meeting procedures to be finalized on Wednesday

Town Moderator Sarah Cannon Holden will allow a single speaker to present dissenting views and accompanying slides at the podium on the Nature Link proposal at the Special Town Meeting on June 25. After the pre-STM moderator’s meeting on Tuesday, June 11 at 6:30pm, she will ask the dissenters to identify their representative speaker. The agenda and Zoom link for that meeting can found here.

“After conversations on the [Town Meeting Study Committee], it became clear that with regard to dissenting opinions, we need to develop more procedural guidelines than have been followed in the past. I welcome supporters, dissenters and the undecided to attend,” Holden wrote on LincolnTalk on June 6.

In past years, the procedural moderator’s meeting has usually been pro forma. But in 2024, more than 300 residents who opposed to the Housing Choice Act rezoning measure asked Holden for more than the standard two minutes from the floor, and also the opportunity to show slides. She ultimately granted the speaking request but not the slides.

Corrections

The June 3 story headlined “Community center bids come in high; $2.3m fund transfer sought” misstated the dollar amount by which the Finance Committee hopes to increase the town’s fiscal 2025 reserve fund in order to cover unanticipated expenses this year. Those expenses total about $635,000, but the reserve fund already has about $616,000, so the transfer request will be $50,000 or less, depending on the final numbers. The FinCom will finalize details at its June 10 meeting.

The same story also misstated the source of expected additions to the reserve funds. The total balance of $11.1 million will rise by about another $2.6 million in the fall from underspent amounts and/or revenues in excess of the FY25 budget assumptions, not from property tax income.

Impetus for citizens’ petition on FinCom still unclear

The last item on the agenda for the June 25 Special Town Meeting is a citizens’ petition asking voters to have Finance Committee members named by the Select Board rather than the Town Moderator. But exactly why the organizers are pushing the measure is still unclear.

The Lincoln Squirrel obtained a copy of material that was given to people who were asked to sign the petition, which says that FinCom members are “appointed by a single individual through a closed process.” The proposed change would “encourage fresh ideas and broader perspectives” as well as “increase transparency and access.” The material also says that FinCom meetings are not routinely recorded or opened to the public via Zoom unlike several other committees, though it’s unclear how the proposed change would affect that.

In a reply to an email from the Lincoln Squirrel last week, one of those petition organizers, Suzanne Szeto, declined to comment on the underlying motivation for the proposal, saying that the group will discuss it at the June 16 Select Board meeting. Asked in a follow-up email if she would share names of other organizers, she replied, “I am sorry I don’t have the answer to your question and would appreciate if you could stop emailing me on this! Thank you!”

 

Citizens’ petition seeks change in FinCom appointments

A citizens’ petition that will be on the agenda at the Special Town Meeting on June 25 will ask voters to change the way members of the Finance Committee are appointed.

FinCom members are currently appointed by the Town Moderator, but the petitioners seek to have the Select Board appoint members instead.

Suzanne Szeto of Giles Road and The Commons in Lincoln, one of the organizers, emphatically declined to comment last week on the motivation for the proposal, saying that the group will discuss it at the June 16 Select Board meeting. 

Stephen Breyer to appear at Walden Woods Project

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

The public is invited to attend a special event with the honorable Stephen Breyer, a retired associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in a conversation moderated by historian Douglas Brinkley, at the Walden Woods Project in Lincoln on Friday, May 30.

The outdoor event will be held rain or shine in an enclosed tent. We ask guests to arrive promptly between 5:15 and 5:30pm for the introduction at 5:40pm. Advance registration is required for admission. Click here to:

Preceding the conversational program will be the first public showing of a nine-minute introduction to the feature documentary, “Henry David Thoreau.” The film, by Ewers Brothers Productions and Executive Producers Ken Burns and Don Henley, is scheduled to air on PBS in 2026.

Breyer served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 2022. His other books include Active Liberty (2005), Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s View (2010), The Court and the World (2015), and The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics (2021). Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and a CNN Presidential Historian. Six of his books were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” and seven became New York Times bestsellers.

The event is co-sponsored by Lincoln250, Concord250, the Bemis Free Lecture Series, and the Lincoln Historical Society.

Town Meeting free of controversy and “nay” votes

Lincoln’s Annual Town Meeting set a non-pandemic record for brevity, wrapping up in under three hours as every warrant article was approved by unanimous voice vote in a rare controversy-free edition.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the March 29 meeting was the confluence of past and future. It started out with a demonstration of the new voting clickers and later moved to a reenactment of Lincoln residents debating at a 1775 Town Meeting whether to allocate money for the war that many saw coming (see related story and “My Turn” piece).

Votes approved funding to buy the clickers last year and were thrilled on Saturday with the instant tallies during a test run, when they were asked to indicate whether this was their first Town Meeting or not (result: 149 no, 24 yes). They also tested the multiple-choice function. Ranked-choice voting will be an option in the future.

Saturday’s vote means that “we can add clickers to the list of techniques that the town moderator can use to ask for a vote,” Select Board member Jim Hutchinson explained. Voice votes will be the first go-to method and standing votes are still an option, but it’s at the discretion of the moderator. The only substantive and unavoidable change from traditional vote-counting is that voting by clicker is anonymous, so attendees can’t see how their neighbors are voting on an issue.

Hutchinson also encouraged officials to use the clickers to get a sense of attendees at future Town Meetings and those of boards and committees even if it’s not a formal vote. “We believe this is a good way to get more feedback from residents,” he said.

Budget

Revenues and expenses will grow by 7.9% in the budget approved for fiscal 2026. However, property owners will see a tax increase of only 0.9%, largely due to the Finance Committee’s use of $902,000 from free cash for tax relief. It’s a big change from 2020, when the tax rate ballooned by 14% due to borrowing for the school renovation project. “Preferred items” that were approved in addition to the FY26 base budget included a new police officer (the first in 25 years) and a part-time administrative assistant in the Planning Office.

These two charts show how Lincoln’s property tax rate has grown over the last decade in comparison to neighboring towns (click image to enlarge).

Future town budgets will be more unpredictable than usual, given the “sweeping and rapidly evolving” presidential orders on public health education, the environment, immigration, and more, said Select Board Chair Kim Bodnar. Pending the outcome of a flurry of legal challenges, “we have insufficient information to warrant making changes to budget and programs” in Lincoln, but the town will need to “evaluate what we need to do to maintain compliance with federal laws… while remaining true to the town’s vision statement and commitment to keeping Lincoln a welcoming community for all our residents, students, staff and visitors.”

Town Meeting Study Committee

Andrew Pang reported on the work of the committee, which was formed after last year’s controversial Annual Town Meeting (ATM) debate and vote on Housing Choice Act rezoning. Among its accomplishments so far:

  • The pre-ATM moderator’s meeting, seen by some as “proverbial smoke-filled room,” is now hybrid for greater transparency.
  • Publication of a Town Meeting primer
  • A two-minute timer visible to those who speak at the audience microphones, though by law, the moderator reserves the right to allow speakers to go longer. The group is also working on improvements to the audiovisual technology that’s used when an overflow room such as the Reed Gym is used.

Pang acknowledged that there have been “perceptions that differing viewpoints were not welcome” and said that the committee is “working on digesting and assimilating those comments [and will then] develop criteria and rules.” Other suggestions that the group is studying are having separate sessions for Town Meeting debate and voting; allowing remote participation in debate, which is complex from a technical standpoint. Remote voting is not permitted by state law, nor is absentee or early voting, he noted. Most would agree that boosting Town Meeting turnout is desirable, though Lincoln had the highest average rate in the immediate area in 2014-2023 (8.4% of registered voters, vs. a low of 3.7% in Bedford).

Pang urged residents to offer feedback on how Town Meeting went using this website, which the committee will consider as it reviews the primer and makes future recommendations. They expect to issue its final report to the Select Board in October and to residents at the November State of the Town meeting.

Water Enterprise Fund

Voters approved a bond issue of $6.79 million to fund Water Department projects, chiefly a water main replacement through the center of town for $6.2 million. Department Superintendent Darin Lafalam recapped his March 4 public hearing presentation outlining Lincoln’s aging water main infrastructure as Water Commission member Steve Gladstone noted that the town has never replaced an entire water main. Bids just came in for the first of two phases from the top of the hill on Bedford Road down Lincoln Road to Ballfield Road and were in line with estimates; work on that piece will take place this summer.

The bond interest and principal will be repaid from water rates, which rose 10% this year and are slated to do the same in the next two years as well.

Zoning amendments

A comparison of Lincoln’s previous ADU regulations (left), and what voters adopted last week to align with new state law (click image to enlarge).

Voters also approved zoning bylaw amendments to have the town’s rules on accessory dwelling units (ADUs) follow recent changes in state law. Those changes relax the rules around units of up to 900 square feet, though the town retained additional restrictions on units from 900 to 1,200 square feet. ADUs up to 900 square feet are now allowed by right with no special permit required.

Asked why the town didn’t simply adopt the same rules for all ADUs rather than keeping different ones for larger units, Planning Board Chair Margaret Olson said, “the Planning Board prefers to make small incremental changes [because] it’s extremely difficult to get regulations right.” It may make further changes in the future; “we’ll see what happens… but we’re making the minimum necessary changes today.”

My Turn: Revolution comes to Lincoln Town Meeting

By Lynne Smith

The 1775 Lincoln Town Meeting featured a heated but civil debate about the need for a tax increase to equip Lincoln volunteers to fight the British.

This debate came alive last Saturday at the 2025 Town Meeting as seven reenactors, led by Rick Wiggins as Eleazer Brooks, argued the topic. The passion and clarity of the different views rang out in the Donaldson Auditorium as they must have done in the Old Town Hall 250 years ago.  Those in favor of the tax were eloquent about the need for Lincoln volunteers to be armed and ready. Those opposing the tax and the revolution explained the difficulties caused by a tax increase, the loss of their sons to work the farm, and their hope that the problems with the British could be resolved without resorting to war. 

I was deeply moved by the elegant language of the reenactors. It was, in fact, a recreation written recently, but it captured the serious tone and reflected the views of the speakers, pro and con. That our town records preserved the outcome of this 1775 meeting illustrates the value our Lincoln forebears had for free speech and civil debate. Thank you to Kim Bodnar, the Lincoln Minute Men, and the Lincoln250 Committee for reminding us of what we are celebrating this year — and what we hope to continue.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

What you need to know for Town Meeting on Saturday

(This information is provide by Assistant Town Manager Dan Pereira.)

Annual Town Meeting is this Saturday, March 29. The Town is providing as much information as possible in advance to ensure a smooth experience for all.

Website

Please visit our Annual Town Meeting web page for up-to-date meeting information. It contains links to meeting procedures and materials, services, and background on the key articles being presented. 

Logistics

  • Voter check-in begins at 8:30am and Town Meeting begins at 9:30am sharp!
  • View our Ballfield Road parking map, which highlights available parking locations as well as the entrance to Town Meeting, so you can plan accordingly. 
  • View our auditorium seating map, which provides an overview of the room layout and handicap seating as well as public microphone locations. Microphones can also be brought to your seat if you are unable to get to a microphone.

New this year — voting clickers

Electronic voting devices or “clickers” will be introduced this year in order to expedite hand counts, if necessary.

  • You will receive your clicker when you check in, along with your voter card. You need both to vote.
  • Article 3 will include a few fun questions to demonstrate the electronic voting process.
  • You should not leave the school building with your clicker! When you leave, please drop your clicker in a designated receptacle.
  • If you want to leave and return later, please return your clicker to an attendant at check-in and they’ll provide you with a “clicker ticket,” which will allow you to get a new clicker when you return.

Food

  • Coffee and treats will be served by the Lincoln Girl Scouts throughout the duration of the meeting.
  • Twisted Tree Cafe will be offering lunch in the school cafeteria; view their menu here. We are planning a 45-minute lunch break at some point around midday.
  • If you are new — or still feel new — to Town Meeting, please join the Newcomers Lunch Table in the cafeteria, sponsored by the same IDEA Committee that organized the Newcomers’ Party in January. We will be glad to see you! Look for the blue tablecloth and friendly faces.

Services

  • We have reserved parking close to the entrance for handicap and mobility-impaired residents. 
  • Assisted listening devices are available — just approach AV personnel at the console in the middle of the auditorium and they will assist you.

Broadcast

The meeting will be broadcast (for viewing only) on your local Cable TV channel (Comcast Channel 8/Verizon Channel 33) as well as on the Town of Lincoln TV website.

Budget request for fiscal 2026 up by 7.9%

The Finance Committee is proposing a budget of $53.2 million for fiscal 2026, an increase of 7.9%. Residents will vote on the budget and other matters at Annual Town Meeting on March 29.

Property tax revenue is expected to rise from $33.80 million to $34.69 million, and local receipts (motor vehicle excise taxes, service and permit fees, etc.) are projected to go up by 67% ($2.33 million to $3.90 million).

Expenditures will remain fairly stable, with one major exception: the FinCom plans to add $4.07 million to the stabilization fund, whereas it did not allocate anything for that purpose in fiscal 2025. This allocation will help restore much of the $4.75 million that was used last year to reduce the amount that will be borrowed for construction of the community center. Capital expenditures sought include $1.40 million for Community Preservation Act projects and $1.05 for Capital Committee requests (see tables below). Details on the proposed budget can be found beginning on page 1 of the PDF (browser page 8) of the Financial Report and Warrant.

The Finance Committee will host a virtual Q&A session on the proposed FY26 town budget on Tuesday, March 25 at 7:30pm (Zoom link here; meeting ID is 849 2072 7318, password is fincom). To keep Town Meeting as short and focused as possible, the committee hopes to address comments and questions in this virtual Q&A session before the in-person gathering. Click here to see a video of the February 25 budget presentation.

Click on the charts below to see larger versions.

Proposed Town of Lincoln budget — fiscal 2026

Capital expenditures

Community Preservation Act expenditures