After four and a half years as Harvard’s town clerk, Marlene Kenney will retire at the end of next week, drawing praise for her years of public service here.
Kenney has been a model public servant and will step out of her busy corner office in Town Hall after some of the most tumultuous years in the town’s and the nation’s history.
Less than a year after she took office, she organized the April 2018 Town Meeting at which the construction of the new elementary school was approved—by far the largest town meeting in recent memory. That same year, the election for state representative was decided for Lori Trahan only after a districtwide recount; and as the town’s chief election officer, Kenney was in charge of tallying Harvard’s votes a second time.
In the past two years, Kenney has had to implement the many election changes necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, including mail-in balloting and special measures to protect in-person voters and election officials at the town’s polling site.
While the presidential election of November 2020 still echoes with false claims of stolen and fraudulent ballots, no such allegations have ever been made about Harvard’s results during Kenney’s tenure. In 2020 Kenney and election officials also oversaw two additional elections—a Town Election and state primary—and two outdoor Town Meetings. And last year, as she was wrapping up her duties, Kenney was called upon one last time to organize an emergency Special Town Meeting at the end of December, just as the holidays approached.
Kenney has always been a friend to the Press, ready to help us hunt down census numbers, support our coverage of elections, and, in her capacity as public records officer, locate and provide municipal documents critical to our reporting—without our having to prepare a formal FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) letter.
The Press and the town have been lucky to have Marlene Kenney as town clerk. We wish her well. We’ll miss you, Marlene.
