Corrected and updated 6:00 a.m. June 24, 2022
Riding a wave of new volunteers, the Select Board Tuesday night filled 14 vacant seats on key town boards and committees and reappointed more than four dozen others who told the board they were ready to serve another term.
But the surprise of the night came when Chair Rich Maiore nominated himself and newly elected Select Board member Don Ludwig to represent Harvard on the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee. The delegations of Ayer and Shirley include current members of their respective Select Boards, he observed. He said he would be interested in serving and that Ludwig would be as well.
Just before the vote, member Kara Minar asked whether the board was voting to replace members of the Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee or the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee. “The framework committee,” answered Maiore. Although the committee was shown in the fiscal 2023 annual appointment list as having two openings, unlike the entries for the nearly four dozen others on the list, the entries for the Devens jurisdiction committee had been left blank, its current members—co-chair Victor Normand and Lucy Wallace–unnamed, and with no indication that Maiore or Ludwig were their recommended replacements..
The roll call vote that followed was unanimous, 4-0, with member Charles Oliver absent. But minutes later, during public comment, Kara Minar appeared to have second thoughts. “Did we just vote to bounce Victor [Normand] and Lucy [Wallace] off the Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee?” she asked.
“We voted to have two new members,” answered Maiore.
In emails to the Press Wednesday morning, Normand and Wallace both expressed surprise at the vote. “I was unaware that my tenure was under review,” wrote Normand.
Wrote Wallace: “I was not asked if I wanted to continue to serve. I had not understood there to be term limits. If asked I would have said yes,” she said, adding that she was not informed of the decision to replace her.
On Wednesday morning, Minar was seeking a way to rescind the Tuesday night vote. And Maiore appeared to have second thoughts as well. “There was confusion on a few fronts last night,” he wrote the Press. “I thought Vic and Lucy had been notified and would be there, and some Select Board members confused HDJC and DJFC.”
“We will discuss further at our retreat in early July,” Maiore wrote. “If the board is interested, we’d then have Victor and Lucy join us at a Select Board meeting in July to discuss the right member make-up for the DJFC.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected to show that Select Board chair Rich Maiore stated that members were voting to fill seats on the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee, not the Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee.
