The town joins a contract it was not part of

In 2023 the school signed its own solar agreement and the First Selectman notarized the paperwork so it could meet its deadline. In 2025 he said the school should not have signed alone, and the town was added as a party.

In January 2023 the Board of Education approved a power purchase agreement to put solar panels on the elementary school. The vote was seven to nothing. The town was not a party to it. There was no town meeting ^[1].

The following month the school needed a notary so it could file its application before the deadline, and the First Selectman notarized the town’s page for it ^[1].

Hold that in mind, because it is the fairest thing anybody can say about him here, and it is the reason the rest of this means what it means. He did not object in 2023. He helped.

Two years later the school came back to the same agreement, and the First Selectman had a different view.

At the Board of Selectmen on January 13, 2025, the board split on the record over whether the town should involve itself at all. One selectman argued that it was simply not the town’s business: the solar is the school’s, the school is the one who will be working on it, it is the school’s authority, and the Board of Education has control of the school building, and the selectmen should not be usurping what the Board of Education should be working on ^[2].

The First Selectman, presiding, rejected that. He said the town had to vote on it. He challenged her for having voted against the solar referral at planning and zoning. And then he asked her who she worked for: the town of Andover, or the faction on the board of education that does not want to work with us ^[2].

Another selectman broke in to steady the room. He was for the solar, he said. His worry was a different one, about whether the savings the vendor was promising were real ^[2].

In February the selectmen voted four to nothing, at the Board of Education’s own request, to route the project through a separate town meeting ^[3a]^[3b]. In March, at the Board of Selectmen, the First Selectman said the Board of Education should not have signed the agreement alone, and moved to have the town attorney draft an amendment adding the town as a party ^[4].

On March 13, 2025 a special town meeting voted 53 to 24 to add the Town of Andover as a party to the elementary school’s solar agreement ^[5].

The solar company’s own representative told that meeting he had never seen a town be a party to a school project ^[5].

In June the selectmen approved the second amendment to the agreement, and the First Selectman’s signature is on it ^[6].

Be careful about what this does and does not show, because there is a version of this story that overreaches.

The town’s involvement did not obviously slow anything down or cost the project anything. The legal work was coordinated with the school’s own solar attorney, and the record reads like ordinary review, not obstruction. If somebody tells you the town’s insertion wrecked the deal, they are going beyond the record.

What the record shows is simpler and, in the pattern, more telling. A school signed a contract it had every right to sign, and the town’s chief elected official helped it do so. Two years later the same official said it should never have signed alone, moved to have the town written into it, and put his name on the result.

Nothing about the panels changed in those two years. What changed was who believed he had a say.

The town joins a contract it was not part of

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