The line, drawn and erased

In February 2022 he told a resident the selectmen have nothing to do with the school. In June 2023 he told the Board of Education the school is a town asset. Everything since has followed from the second sentence.

On the night of February 15, 2022, a resident stood up at the Board of Selectmen and asked about the mask mandate at the elementary school. The presiding First Selectman cut the question off before it got going. He was not unkind about it. He was clear.

This board, he said, does not have anything to do with the school mandate or how it is addressed. That is the Board of Education. And then, so that everyone understood where the boundary ran, he listed what the selectmen do control: the town hall, the library, the museum, and facilities of that kind ^[1].

The school was not on the list.

He was right, and he was saying something ordinary. Connecticut towns run this way. A board of education is not a department of the town. It is a separately elected board with its own statutory duties, and one of them is the care and operation of the school buildings and grounds. The First Selectman knew that, and said so, from the chair, to a room full of residents.

Sixteen months later he was sitting at the Board of Education’s table saying the opposite.

On June 14, 2023 he came to the school board to talk about the community center. He answered their written questions. Then he took up the memorandum of understanding the board had asked its attorney to draft, and he set out the town’s position. The town of Andover, he said, is the school district. The town owns all the land. The town owns all the buildings. The town is the owner of everything. There are no deeded properties to a school or to a board of education ^[2].

The board’s memorandum, he said, was not necessary.

Asked whether the school should simply budget to pave its own upper parking lot, he said it should go to CIP, the town’s capital improvement committee, because it is a town asset. This building, he said, is a town asset. And a few minutes earlier, on how the money should be thought about: it is all town money, and he does not split hairs ^[2a]^[2b].

He said other things at that meeting too, and they belong here. He said he does not come over and tell the board of education how to spend its money. He said he was not going to kill their budget. He took responsibility for not having put a board member on the building committee. He is not a man who came to that table to declare war, and this article is not going to pretend he did.

But the position had moved, and it did not move back. In December 2024, at a meeting of all three boards, he told the Board of Education that the school is not a board of education building, it is a town asset, it is part of the capital, and that the school’s capital projects would have to route through the town’s committee ^[3a]^[3b]. The board pointed out, on the record, what that actually meant: the capital committee makes recommendations, and those recommendations go to the Board of Selectmen for approval ^[3]. In June 2025 the same framing came back again when he challenged what the school had done with its own unspent money ^[4a]^[4b].

It is worth being precise about what has and has not been shown here.

The town does own the land. The assessor’s record is unambiguous, and it has been true since the 1960s ^[5]. Nobody took anything from anybody. And in February 2022 he was answering a question about a mask mandate, not delivering an opinion on property law.

But that is the point, not a problem with it. He was not making a legal argument in 2022. He was telling a resident where his board’s authority stopped.

He knew where the line was.

Then he moved it, and he has been governing from the other side of it ever since.

It is all town money. He does not split hairs.

The line, drawn and erased

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