DANVERS — After extensive interviews of the two remaining finalists for Danvers town manager last week, the Select Board is expected to announce a decision Tuesday night at Town Hall.
The finalists, Jill Cahill, Gloucester’s chief administrative officer, and Sean Fitzgerald, who recently stepped down as Swampscott’s town administrator, were publicly interviewed at the Senior Center on March 12. A third finalist, Belmont Town Administrator Patrice Garvin, withdrew from consideration before the public interviews.
Cahill, asked to describe her management style, said her department heads would say she’s transparent and honest.
”I follow through with what I say. I say it the way it needs to be said in the first place so we don’t need to keep repeating things,” she said.
But, she added, kindness and personality are also important in developing relationships with managers, which is key to building mutual trust. Trust is crucial to working as a team, Cahill said.
Asked what the biggest challenges and opportunities she would face in Danvers, Cahill immediately named housing, changing populations and a changing economy.
Economic development and housing go hand-in-hand, she said, and while it’s exciting to have Danvers’ commercial tax base, along with industrial parks, medical facilities and biotech firms, there’s a lot of retail in the local economy “and that is changing quickly.”
“I think that exploring how to diversify those retail areas of your community would be important,” she said.
“And we need diverse types of housing because we need workforce on the North Shore,” she said. “We have an incredible talent pool here — if people can live here — and if people can live here, then companies will move here and we’ll have an incredible number of jobs here. It betters our education system, and they all go hand-in hand.”
The residency requirement for the job was made clear from the start, and is not an issue for Cahill. “Danvers is a beautiful community,” she said, “and I am lucky to be in a position where I would be able to move.”
In regard to diversity in the workplace and community, Cahill noted that many communities are facing similar issues when it comes to welcoming new people.
“We have tried to make sure that our workplace is welcoming and strengthens peoples’ ability to do their job,” she said. “…Everybody wants to live in a place where they feel safe and comfortable, and that is an important role of government, to make sure that people know they are safe. We set the example as leaders.”
On school funding, she described it as one of the most challenging parts of the job, explaining her role in Gloucester.
“The School Committee develops their budget, the mayor has one vote on the committee. We work very hard and try to keep ahead of the game, to try to arrive as close as we can with a livable number,” Cahill said.
Asked about the rapid growth occurring in Danvers, she said, “Some feel it should be slowed down, that we’re losing our town feel, our historic feel.”
With the requirements for cluster housing, with specific land use and densities, Cahill said, it seems like the the town didn’t think it far enough through to anticipate the shortages in services that are about to take place.
“At the end of the day,” she said, referring to the MBTA zoning law, “we’ve learned that it’s the law, and we all follow the law. … Does that mean we like it? No. The impacts are real, and we’re feeling it very strongly in Gloucester.”
On recruitment and retention of employees, Cahill was asked what her approach has been in getting good employees and keeping them.
“We’ve really had to broaden the pool,” she said, noting that finding department heads with municipal experience has been challenging. “So we’ve really had to look at what a person brings to the table: Do they really have management experience, a passion for the work and a commitment to the community? Three of our most recent hires had no municipal background, and we all worked together to teach them. So we’ve had enormous success looking outside the sphere.”
Also, she said, there are a lot of high level managers who have retired from the private sector and want to give back to the community.
“We go in being as fair as we can — not with any presumptions of being hard-nosed, or with any definite yeses,” Cahill said, on collective bargaining. “We’re open and we listen … It’s important to be fair and open to having discussions. Whatever they put on the table, let’s talk about it. These are people we work and talk with every day. Its really critical that we maintain a relationship. We can’t let that break down during negotiations.”
Fitzgerald said his experience as a public servant over the last 30 years has prepared him for the Danvers post “in a very unique way.”
He said he learned early on that “getting collaboration among boards is really important. One of the things I’ve done is to coordinate a land-use board summit for meeting among boards that deal with land use so that there can be some synergies among the thoughts about how economic development, school planning, capital needs and town priorities are coordinated among the land use boards, with the issues of environmental protection and historical preservation.”
Communication is really important, he said and he provides frequent updates that bullet activities that are happening. “The last thing we need.” Fitzgerald said, “is for any board member to be surprised about development or projects that might be moving forward that need input.”
“Danvers has a great strategic plan,” he said, “but they don’t have a master plan. Typically that master plan is the glue that ties all your various boards and committees together, and there are goals and expectations in a master plan that can help a community achieve that broader potential across a decade.”
On his management style, Fitzgerald described it as collaborative, trying to coach and support his team and also for them to help him out. “We’re all colleagues in public life and these jobs are getting harder and harder. It’s important for us to be able to turn to each other and help and encourage one another to be successful.
“I take it as a point of pride to try to develop staff,” he said. “I hired an intern in Swampscott who then became assistant town accountant and then accountant, and town treasurer and advanced him through his masters. I see professional development as one of my greatest joys in public life, and we need individuals to see public service as a way to help our communities.”
Asked what is one of Danvers’ biggest challenges and his approach to solving it, Fitzgerald immediately responded that it would be to dial in municipal finances and get down to the fundamentals.
“I’ve pulled the FY26 budget and I’ve really gone through it,” he said. “I’m a municipal wonk, so I sit…and go through it line by line, and it’s little things I see that make the difference.
“It’s a good budget,” he continued, “but you’re a little over $100,000 away from levy capacity, and that’s gotta be a little disconcerting to some folks.
“I get the demand for services, but the community is diverse, and you’ve got a real challenge in meeting all those needs, so you need to look not just at supporting these core services, but at redrawing the pie…
“You’ve got Route 1, you’ve got Route 128, you’ve got Endicott Street — you’ve got lots of places that really can help balancing the financial responsibilities,” Fitzgerald said.
Swampscott, he said, had a similar situation when he arrived. It had only $200,000 in extra levy capacity, but after six years, officials built it up to more than $6 million, they built stabilization accounts up from $2 million to more than $10 million.
“It was hard work,” Fitzgerald said. “We had to go through years of really tightening the budgets, we had financial summits. We brought the financial boards together and we looked at how we compared to peer communities and got a sense of where we were high and where we were low.”
Board member David Mills asked Fitzgerald what his sense is of Danvers’ efforts to be inclusive and work to be done to make Danvers more welcoming to all people.
Mills said he personally knows “lesbian women who are terrified to walk out on the street holding hands here. There are three rainbow flags I know of in Danvers, there are hundreds in Salem, and there are hundreds in Beverly. And there is a terrifying group of white supremacists here in Danvers, so I would like your sense of what else Danvers can do to make the town safer and more welcoming to these young people.”
“Unfortunately today,” said Fitzgerald, “it’s hard, so hard — there’s more vitriol out there and I think we need to combat that with more kindness and more conversation.
“I support diversity, equity and inclusion, I support that down to my toes. I see it as an opportunity to be more engaging,” he said. “I believe we need to see innate value and innate dignity in every person we meet. It’s hard because there’s a national dialogue going on out there that says it’s not important.”
Asked about development and the effects that growth can have on neighborhoods, Fitzgerald said he likes “to think of development as doing good things and preventing bad things.”
“Nobody ever thought we could put a hotel in Swampscott,” he said, “but we did, and it’s coming in.” He explained he met with mayors who successfully coordinated hotels and worked with them to pull together the framework of how Swampscott could do it. These are complicated projects, he said — you have to think like a developer.
Asked about the pressures for development that many residents are unhappy about, Fitzgerald’s response was direct. “I don’t like the top-down approach. I think that’s been unwelcome in many cities and towns, but we’ve got a housing crisis.
“You have a wonderful downtown. It could be better supported if you had a few mixed-use strategies that would help protect the character of the downtown and add more units to help support a market,” he said. “I think this would help you put the town in a better position to avoid something adverse happening.”
On the residency requirement, Fitzgerald said he’d read the town charter and understood that he would have to respect it.
Select Board members are scheduled to announce their decision during Tuesday’s meeting, 6:30 p.m., in Town Hall’s Toomey Hearing Room.