The seat he did not take, until he did

The charter has always let the First Selectman sit with the town's boards. For his first four and a half years in office he did not attend a single Board of Finance meeting. Since October 2025 he has been at almost all of them.

Andover’s charter lets the First Selectman sit as an ex officio member of the town’s boards ^[1]. The provision is old. It long predates the man currently holding the office, and there is nothing improper about using it.

Here is how he used it.

We went through the attendance block of every set of Board of Finance minutes in the town’s archive, back to 2015. It is a mechanical thing to check, because Andover’s clerks write down who was in the room: the members, and then the town administrator, the treasurer, the board clerk, representatives from the Board of Education, and, when nobody from the public showed up, the words “Public Present: none.”

The First Selectman is not listed at a single Board of Finance meeting from 2015 through 2024 ^[2].

Not one. Fifty-two readable meetings in the 2020 through 2024 stretch alone, and he is at none of them.

He has been First Selectman that whole time. The selectmen’s minutes of June 8, 2020 open with his name calling the meeting to order. So these are not somebody else’s years. They are his, and for four and a half of them he did not attend the finance board at all.

He first appears on May 7, 2025. From October 2025 forward he is at most Board of Finance meetings, in consecutive months, without a gap: October 22, November 19, December 17, and then January 28, February 25, March 24, April 1, May 6 and May 27 of this year ^[2].

The Board of Education is the same story, and we do not have to infer it, because he said so himself. In February 2026 the superintendent said on the record that for six years he had been publicly questioning her, the board, the teachers and the principal every single time. He replied that he had just started attending board of education meetings in October ^[3].

That is his own account and this article takes him at his word on it. He is not a long-standing fixture at the Board of Education. He became one nine months ago.

Both boards, at once, in the autumn of 2025.

There is a version of this section that reaches for more, and it is worth saying what we looked for and did not find.

We looked for a history of some other, gentler practice, a liaison who used to attend and report back, so that his presence could be set against a tradition. It is not there in any usable form. Selectmen were liaisons to town commissions ^[4], and a finance board member served as liaison to the regional school board ^[5]. But the Board of Finance’s own chair said plainly, in 2021, that the board’s only liaison committees were the community center and CIP ^[6]. There was no liaison to the Andover Board of Education. The tidy story is not true, so it is not here.

We also looked, across six years of records, for any instance of him pressing to sit inside the closed portions of those boards’ meetings. There is none. The only cross-board executive-session arrangement anywhere in the record runs the other way: in October 2021 the selectmen asked the Board of Finance to send someone to theirs ^[6].

None of that is needed, because the census does not need it.

For four and a half years he held the seat and did not take it. Then, last autumn, he took it at both boards in the same season, and he has not missed many since.

Ask yourself what changed.

The seat he did not take, until he did

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