The Select Board will convene a Special Town Meeting on Monday, May 11, at 7:00 P.M at the Wellesley High School Auditorium, 50 Rice Street. The Warrant for the Special Town Meeting will close at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, April 24, 2026.

Any person desiring to have an article included in the Warrant for the Special Town Meeting shall submit a petition signed by not less than one hundred (100) registered voters of the Town. Any such petition shall be submitted to the Town Clerk for signature verification.

After being signed by the Select Board, the full text of the Special Town Meeting Warrant will be available from the Select Board Office located at 525 Washington Street and will be posted at the Town Clerk’s Office at 525 Washington Street, Police Station at 485 Washington Street and on the Town’s website (www.wellesleyma.gov).

Motions to be offered to the Special Town Meeting must be submitted digitally to the Select Board Office at sel@wellesleyma.gov by 12:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, 2026.

WELLESLEY SELECT BOARD

The Wellesley Select Board and School Committee each debriefed a week after the conclusion of Annual Town Meeting, the first in decades that featured separately voted on town and school budgets. The budget presentations, discussion, and voting took place on the second night of Town Meeting, and went smoothly.

Select Board members who commented at their April 14 meeting (see Wellesley Media recording) said they thought the separation of the budgets worked well, and Executive Director Meghan Jop said that now that a process for doing so has been put in place, it should be easier to collect the necessarily information on shared service breakouts, etc.

Board Chair Marjorie Freiman said “for me, because [school] enrollment is dynamic, and we’re always going to have an examination of shared costs and direct costs, I liked seeing them separately. So I would support keeping the two budgets in separate motions…”

Beth Sullivan Woods agreed, saying that having the separate school and town budget presentations provides “a good chance to take a break and talk and then let people focus on the next thing.”

Board member Colette Aufranc also supported the separate budget presentations, though wondered how handling this would go for town staff going forward. Jop said “now that we have allocated how we would break up the budget based upon particular line items… I think it’s easier to employ,” adding that forms are in place now and people know how to fill them out.

There was some discussion of whether or not it would be a good idea to have additional departmental updates shared at Town Meeting, where one goal has been to make the legislative sessions more efficient. The board discussed doing a better job of letting Town Meeting members and others know when departmental leaders are sharing updates with the board. This would complement Swellesley’s weekly previews on town government meeting agendas and reports on departmental updates, such as from the fire and police chiefs.

Thousands turn to The Swellesley Report daily to keep current on Wellesley:

• Sign up for our free weekday email newsletter
• Send us story tips, photos, ideas: theswellesleyreport@gmail.com
• This is our actual job: Please support our work via a tax-deductible donation

The Select Board also discussed Town Meeting attendance (we’re working to get this from the town clerk, though the voting scorecards posted by the town give you much of this), audio/visual issues, and the order in which the Town-Wide Financial Plan is presented during Town Meeting. The plan this year had been to present the Town-Wide Financial Plan on night #2, ahead of the town and school budget presentations, but it got moved up to night #1 after members requested it be aired ahead of any appropriations-related motions.

The School Committee and School Department, which had earlier expressed reservations about moving away from an omnibus budget to separate town and school ones, also debriefed on April 14 about Town Meeting (see Wellesley Media recording, about 1 hour, 33 minutes in).

School Committee Chair Niki Ofenloch said she was pleased overall with out how things went. “We were not sure how the conversation or the vote would go with the separate motions this year and it seemed like it was pretty much the same as it was in the prior year, just with two votes instead of one,” she said.

New School Committee member Bob Sullivan agreed that things went smoothly at Town Meeting and that the schools’ budget book answered many questions the public had. But in stepping back, he raised a point about lots of potential town and school capital projects putting even more budgetary pressure on schools. He cited concerns raised during Advisory Committee meetings ahead of Town Meeting about student-facing vs. administrative headcount and overall district performance. “It’s going to be incumbent upon us to make sure that we have, particularly in this environment, the support of different constituencies,” he said, noting that not all Advisory members voted favorable action on the school budget. The schools need to ensure the data they have is made understandable.

Costas Panagopoulos, also a new committee member, agreed that the schools will need to focus on justifying any reductions in student-facing positions given the sorts of questions raised along the way (school administrators have spoken of how certain non-student-facing positions are tweeners in that they enable teachers to improve what they do). “Because Town Meeting members can’t look at the school budget line by line and make modifications, we don’t want to create a situation which because they don’t like one small part of this budget they end up voting the whole thing down. We escaped that kind of fate this time around, but that is not necessarily always going to be the case…,” he said, noting that some on Advisory appeared to be fine with the budget overall but not with certain elements of it. (Supt. Dr. David Lussier said later in the meeting that the administration understands the need to bring further clarity to staffing decisions.)

Panagopoulos also pointed to decisions made at Town Meeting on non-school topics (like not funding a Comprehensive Plan) that illustrate “that there’s an appetite in this town for doing certain things, but not all things.” The School Department and School Committee will need to come to Town Meetings with very strong cases for resources they might request, such as for school facilities master planning. “We should be ready for Plan B if [support] does not materialize” in the face of possible large tax increases, he said.

Linda Chow stood by the School Department’s transparency in answering questions about its budget well before Town Meeting, and described the separation of budgets as essentially pitting schools vs. the rest of the town. It also introduces the risk that one or the other budget could get voted down, and the uncertainty of what would happen in such a case, she said.

Annual Town Meeting 2026 recaps:

• Town Meeting dissolves following lengthy RIO zoning amendment discussion
• A marathon session for Public Works at Wellesley Annual Town Meeting night #3
• Wellesley Annual Town Meeting night #2: Split budget motions go smoothly, get approved
• First night of Wellesley Annual Town Meeting features twists & turns

Up next: 

• Special Town Meeting on May 11 to address MassBay land plans

Wellesley Annual Town Meeting dissolved on Tuesday, April 7 after two thirds of the three-hour meeting was spent hashing out a proposed zoning amendment on a topic—Residential Incentive Overlays (RIOs)—that’s been much debated by the town’s legislative body over the past couple of years. The session also featured the first motion, under a separate Planning Board-sponsored article, to get shot down at this year’s Annual Town Meeting.

(See Wellesley Media recording to view the meeting and the Town Meeting scorecard to track voting)

It was clear ahead of Town Meeting that the motion under Article 32 to eliminate RIOs in Single Residence and a few other districts would likely spark one of the longest and most colorful discussions, and it didn’t disappoint. Because, you know, housing.

This was a motion that spurred local advocacy groups to rally their troops to hit up Town Meeting reps in support of eliminating RIOs not only in certain districts, but all of them via a possible amendment to the motion. RIOs allow for higher-density building than underlying zoning would permit.

Opposition to proposed uses of the RIO bylaw, which went on the books in 1998, came to a head in October, 2024, when proposed zoning map changes for a pair of multifamily housing developments got shot down at Special Town Meeting. RIOs were also front and center at Annual Town Meeting last April because of a citizen petition that sought to return the RIO bylaw to its original state. As the proponent explained during presentations, the focus of RIOs would again be on allowing multi-unit residential development in commercial areas but not in single residence and general residence districts.

A diverse 16-member RIO Task Force was then formed by the Planning Board. The task force met more than a dozen times and made recommendations to the Planning Board, which voted 3-1 for the motion language under Article 32 presented to Town Meeting this week (the task force’s preferred approach was to nix RIOs altogether, though the Planning Board went with a less extreme approach with the intention to keep working on the topic). Earlier motion language was revised after the Select Board Board pushed back on a recommendation regarding the proposed addition of a development agreement requirement to the project approval section of the RIO bylaw.

Article 32 gets its hearing

You knew Article 32 was different when Moderator Mark Kaplan asked the Planning Board’s Tom Taylor to read the motion under it: Usually the motion language isn’t read in order to move Town Meeting along, making the assumption that members have already read the motions. But in this case, an amendment or more to the motion was anticipated, as was a point of order regarding the amendment, so Kaplan sought to get everything spelled out clearly. As Taylor read, Article 32 would allow RIOs in a few zoned districts, those defined as Commercial, Industrial, General Residence, and Educational.

Taylor followed the reading with a brief presentation on the motion, which he indicated had its roots in a citizen petition from last year’s Annual Town Meeting that sought to remove RIOs from all zoning districts other than commercial ones. The motion captured 61% of Town Meeting votes, but not enough to satisfy the two-thirds rule to pass. So it was clear this was a subject on which the town was divided, and could warrant further review and ideas.

The appointed Advisory Committee, which vets Town Meeting motions ahead of the big event, recommended unfavorable action, 0 to 11, with 1 recusal and 1 abstention on the motion under Article 32.  Committee members cited different reasons for their lack of support, including that the RIO Task Force and Planning Board could potentially come up with a better solution given more time.

Taylor said that the Planning Board’s position was that the motion under Article 32 was “an important first step—going farther or less far are inferior alternatives.”

But some opposed to Article 32’s motion language brought forth an amendment, presented by Kara Reinhardt Block, a RIO Task Force member and Town Meeting rep for Precinct D, situated in Lower Falls. She presented an amendment designed to remove RIOs from all districts, not including the the four previously approved RIO projects, such as the Terrazza on Linden St. Reinhardt Block has spoken out in the past about the potential for limited changes to the RIO bylaw to increase the likelihood of multifamily housing developments in only certain sections of town, and she reiterated this point at this Town Meeting.

Thousands turn to The Swellesley Report daily to keep current on Wellesley:

• Sign up for our free weekday email newsletter
• Send us story tips, photos, ideas: theswellesleyreport@gmail.com
• This is our actual job: Please support our work via a tax-deductible donation

Town Meeting member John Lanza rose to make a point of order, arguing that the proposed amendment should not be allowed for “going beyond the four corners of the proposed warrant article…” The original motion language was specific, he said, whereas the proposed amendment “seeks to abolish” the RIO district town-wide and is “the language of repeal.”

Moderator Kaplan then issued a prepared statement in which he contended that Article 32 did indeed give Town Meeting members “clear warning that the scope of Section 3.2.B of the zoning bylaw might be brought up for consideration at this Annual Town Meeting…” Earlier discussions at the Planning Board and Advisory Committee considered the possibility that an expanded motion might be filed, Kaplan noted, as part of his explanation for denying the point of order and allowing the amendment to be presented.

Reinhardt Block, given the go-ahead to speak by Kaplan, started out by saying that “there are many reasons to pause the RIO and fix it, but first and foremost among them is that the RIO is broken, and we have widely acknowledged that as a town body…” RIOs simply aren’t needed, Reinhardt Block said, given many other ways to build 17.4 units per acre in town (such as under the MBTA Communities Law) and the new availability of more developable land as a result of a huge amount of commercial property going on the market (she later shared photos of new or planned multi-family housing developments across town). [Read more…]

Shortly before the two-hour mark of Wellesley Annual Town Meeting on Monday, April 6, Moderator Mark Kaplan broke into Facilities Director Joe McDonough’s presentation about a proposed feasibility study for a possible Department of Public Works campus renovation with a breaking news report….

“Mr. McDonough, sorry to interrupt, but we have a little problem up here, maybe more than a little bit… we’re just going to take a 5-1o minute break to sort it out, ” he said, referring to what turned out to be a mechanical malfunction involving the stage’s fire curtain at Wellesley High School (See Wellesley Media recording).

Fire curtains are protection systems designed to descend from the ceiling during a fire to compartmentalize areas and allow people to pass through escape routes safely.

You’ll notice the backdrop behind McDonough changed before and after the incident.

Kaplan ended the third session of Annual Town Meeting letting attendees know that there was a possibility that the location would need to be changed for Tuesday night due to fire code. That could have had numerous implications, challenging the Wellesley Media team to stream and record the meeting, and leading to possible issues with meeting notification rules. “See you tomorrow night, somewhere,” Kaplan said, after instructing people to check their emails for updates on Tuesday.

According to the town on Tuesday, Annual Town Meeting will continue at Wellesley High’s Katherine L. Babson Jr. Auditorium on Tuesday, April 7 at 7pm for what should be the finale.

“The Wellesley Fire Department has determined the auditorium may remain in use on a temporary basis while corrective repairs are made. For this evening’s session, a fire fighter will be present during the meeting to monitor safety conditions, and a custodial staff member will be on site for additional support. These interim measures ensure that all safety protocols are in place while the mechanical issue is being resolved,” Town Clerk K.C. Kato wrote.

Our earlier Annual Town Meeting coverage:

• Wellesley Annual Town Meeting night #2: Split budget motions go smoothly, get approved
• First night of Wellesley Annual Town Meeting features twists & turns

Thousands turn to The Swellesley Report daily to keep current on Wellesley:

• Sign up for our free weekday email newsletter
• Send us story tips, photos, ideas: theswellesleyreport@gmail.com
• This is our actual job: Please support our work via a tax-deductible donation