Devens gets a new leader as jurisdiction debate heats up

MassDevelopment’s newly appointed Executive Vice President of Devens Operations Michael Sweeney made his first appearance before the Devens Committee at its April 1 meeting, joining its five members and a smattering of attendees via Zoom.

He arrived at a moment when the agency’s refusal to discuss—before 2030—the future of the state-managed Devens Regional Enterprise Zone has frustrated those who feel the study of future options should begin now. Sweeney, who had joined MassDevelopment roughly three weeks earlier, apologized for not appearing in person; two young boys, he explained, had complicated his evening.

In his new role as EVP, Sweeney is effectively the community’s chief municipal officer, overseeing the delivery of police, fire, public works, recreation, and other services that in a conventional municipality would be managed by a town administrator or mayor. What followed was a wide-ranging conversation that touched on his background, his vision for Devens, and the increasingly charged debate over who should govern the former military base after MassDevelopment’s authority expires in 2033.

Sweeney brings a varied public-sector resume to the job. A history major and attorney by training—UMass Amherst and City University of New York—he served as deputy general counsel and then interim and permanent executive director of the Massachusetts State Lottery for approximately seven years, overseeing, by his account, a major technology overhaul and the replacement of lottery machines at some 7,500 retail locations statewide.

Sweeney later served as executive director of a Worcester law firm and most recently led a Boston nonprofit originally founded to help workers 50 and older stay in or return to the workplace, a mission later expanded to serve anyone 18 and older seeking to re-enter the workforce. The nonprofit lost most of its federal funding in the wave of cuts that swept through such programs in 2025. Earlier in his career he was planning director for the city of Lawrence, where he worked on affordable housing, economic development, and major facilities projects including a Depression-era stadium renovation.

“When I saw the job description, I was really excited about it,” Sweeney said, citing the combination of community building, housing, technology, private business, and government that the Devens role entails.

A vision, from top to bottom

Devens Committee Chair Laura Scott welcomed Sweeney and said she hoped he would commit to providing regular updates at the committee’s monthly meetings, a practice, she said, that had lapsed. Sweeney agreed, saying he or another appropriate staff member would attend and that questions he could not answer on the spot would be followed up promptly.

Scott pressed further, asking about his vision for economic development and housing at Devens. Sweeney, acknowledging the limits of having been on the job a mere three weeks, said he saw room for growth but that the capacity of the area’s resources and infrastructure “would have to underpin any development vision.” He said he was already meeting with Devens businesses to understand what attracted them, what was keeping them, and what their hopes for expansion were.

The capacity for growth that Sweeney referenced is not simply a matter of available land or infrastructure. Development at Devens is bounded by environmental thresholds established to prevent regional harm as the former base grows. While the 2024 Massachusetts Leads Act eliminated the rigid numerical caps on commercial square footage and residential units that had previously been written into Chapter 498, the state law that governs Devens, it explicitly preserved those underlying environmental limits. The thresholds are defined across three documents: Chapter 498 itself, Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) regulations that set the hard capacity limits that would trigger mandatory state review, and the Devens zoning bylaws administered by the Devens Enterprise Commission (DEC), the area’s permitting agency.

Sweeney said he was “very big” on working out a vision of what further development could look like, “literally from the top of the map to the bottom of the map,” identifying challenges area by area and ensuring that development protects Devens’s natural resources while meeting cutting-edge sustainability standards.

Sweeney drew on his experience as Lawrence’s planning director to illustrate the opportunity he sees at Devens. Lawrence, he noted, is roughly 9 square miles—counting the Merrimack River—with one of the highest population densities in Massachusetts, its street grid and building stock shaped by decisions made when mill workers needed to walk to work. Retrofitting that city for modern life, with fire codes, cars, and large delivery vehicles, has presented challenges that are difficult to overcome.

“I think Devens is not burdened with that type of framework,” Sweeney said. “It’s given all of you, and now me, in conjunction with you, a really unique opportunity to make this what it is and what it will continue to be, a very special place.”

An ‘end run’?

That optimistic note did not last long. Committee Chair Scott then shifted the conversation to the March 27 edition of the Harvard Press. Its page 3 story, headlined “Harvard panel eyes end-run around MassDevelopment on Devens future,” reported on the Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee’s (HDJC) discussion of a planning timeline and a possible strategy for building consensus among the three towns without waiting for MassDevelopment, absent from the table for the past three years.

The timeline, drafted by Harvard committee member Paul Green, estimates that reaching consensus on the future of Devens and delivering the study required by state law could take as long as six years, underscoring the urgency, in Harvard’s view, of beginning that work now rather than waiting for the 2030 deadline set by Chapter 498. The committee also discussed placing warrant articles simultaneously on the Town Meeting agendas of all three towns as a way to build public consensus and apply pressure on MassDevelopment to re-engage. Missing from that discussion, however, were the other parties that the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee (DJFC)—the multistakeholder body formed to develop consensus on Devens’s future—has spent two years bringing to the table: the Devens Enterprise Commission and Devens businesses, neither of which has a role in a Town Meeting vote, and Devens residents, who while enfranchised to vote in the Town Meetings of their host communities have no independent voice as residents of Devens.

Scott characterized Harvard as pursuing a single goal: resuming jurisdiction over Devens by the surrounding towns, to the exclusion of other options. She defended Devens residents’ experience under MassDevelopment, noting that the committee had written previously in a letter to the Press that residents were satisfied with the agency’s services. And she pointed to the legal obstacle the Press story had identified: Under Section 23 of Chapter 498, MassDevelopment must be a signatory to the final joint report submitted to the governor and the Legislature. The towns cannot file it without the agency.

No formal voice

Scott also raised a broader concern: Devens residents and businesses, who have the most at stake in any future governance arrangement, have no formal voice in the process under Chapter 498, the state law that created Devens. The law was written before anyone lived at the former Army base, she noted, and designates the three surrounding towns, MassDevelopment, and the DEC as the parties responsible for delivering a report to the Legislature in 2033, leaving residents and businesses in an advisory role at best.

“We want a participating, voting voice in this decision,” Scott said. “This is our home. We’ve invested our equity in these houses, just as the businesses have. We have a lot at stake here, and to cut us out of the process doesn’t seem reasonable to us.”

Making that voice heard by the legislators who will ultimately decide Devens’s fate is a parallel goal the committee has begun to pursue. Scott on behalf of the committee has invited state Sens. Jamie Eldridge and John Cronin and Rep. Dan Sena to a future meeting to hear residents’ concerns; and committee member Lisa Kendrick has invited the presidents of the Nashoba Valley and North Central Massachusetts chambers of commerce to attend as well. Committee member Aaron Faber-Chen is drafting a set of questions on jurisdiction, housing, and health care for them to consider.

Sweeney was measured in his response to Scott’s concerns. He said his goal was to build good working relationships throughout the region, including with Ayer, Shirley, and Harvard, and that he would be engaging directly with those communities on the jurisdictional issues. Scott pressed him directly: “So you don’t have any decision or thoughts at this time about MassDevelopment rejoining the DJFC?” Sweeney declined to say.

“I think it’s not appropriate at this moment in time or at this meeting for me to dive into the entirety of that jurisdictional question,” he said, adding that MassDevelopment has a role to play and that he would examine the issue further.

A more complicated picture

John Katter, who represents Devens residents on the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee and attended the April 1 meeting as a member of the public, offered a more detailed account of where the process stands. He recommended that Sweeney watch the video of the March 24 HDJC meeting rather than rely on secondhand accounts, but credited the Press story with “calling it down the middle.”

But Katter said he was scratching his head over Harvard’s pursuit of an “end-run.” The DJFC, he noted, had spent two years developing a consensus framework that identified four options for Devens’s future: becoming its own town; resuming historical town boundaries; some form of hybrid governance; or continuing the status quo. Those options had been identified, he noted, with Harvard’s representatives at the table with representatives of Ayer, Shirley, the Devens Enterprise Commission, and Devens residents and businesses, as well as MassDevelopment itself before the agency withdrew in 2023. Harvard’s apparent interest in eliminating options and accelerating the process, he said, was at odds with that work.

“We spent a lot of time … gaining consensus that there are four options, and what we’re seeing is they’re being eliminated one after the other,” Katter said.

Katter said he worried about the potential impact on Devens businesses of accelerating the jurisdictional process before completing a proper study, particularly on questions of taxation and utility costs. And he noted that any plan must also account for people not yet living at Devens, whose interests could be affected by decisions made now.

“My next meeting at the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee will be to get some clarity,” he said. The committee was scheduled to convene for its next quarterly meeting April 8 in Ayer.