In a terse letter to the Town Clerk last Thursday, Planning Board chair Michelle Catalina resigned her post, effective immediately, she said.
“With my work and family commitments increasing, I find I can no longer do justice to the many hours required by this position,” Catalina wrote.
Catalina was elevated from associate member to a full member of the Planning Board to fill a vacancy in January 2011. She held on to the seat in the 2011 town election, running unopposed. She was named chairman this year.
Catalina did not return a request for comment. After a Planning Board meeting last Monday, she appeared before the Board of Selectmen Tuesday and the Finance Committee Wednesday to seek support for a Town Meeting warrant article to hire a full-time town planner. Selectmen endorsed the development of such a proposal, but asked for a detailed job description and a recommended management structure.
In an email to several town officials Thursday afternoon, Catalina described her meeting with the Finance Committee.
“The upshot of last night’s meeting with [Finance Committee] is that there is no [money] for a town planner unless the [Planning Board] is willing to use the [$100,000] they were given for the master plan and to additionally calculate the cost of savings from not using town counsel as extensively as in the past,” Catalina wrote.
Town Meeting allocated $100,000 to the Planning Board last spring for the second phase of a project to revise the town’s decade-old master plan. The board at the time said the money would be used to hire a consultant to perform an impact-analysis on Devens and a public outreach campaign.
“It sounded to me like [Catalina] got blown out by FinCom,” Planning Board vice-chair Peter Brooks told the Press.
Brooks said he “didn’t have any inkling” Catalina’s resignation was coming. He did, however, characterize recent Planning Board meetings as “quite tense.”
“Michelle was proposing rules of conduct for board members, which suggests to me that she was not happy with the conduct of board members,” Brooks said.
With Catalina’s resignation, the job of running Planning Board meetings falls to Brooks until a new chairman is named. Brooks said he hasn’t been in contact with the other members of the Planning Board — Tim Schmoyer, Joe Hutchinson, and Rich Marcello — and he plans on discussing the appointment of a chairman and a fifth member at the next scheduled meeting, Dec. 17, and proceeding from there. The board will be looking to fill the vacancy quickly, Brooks said. The associate member position on the Planning Board is currently vacant.
The Planning Board has been very focused on planning for the future disposition of Devens, Brooks said, and Catalina had taken the lead on that issue.
“We’re not only down a person, but we’re down a person who has been very connected to what’s been going on in town,” he said.
