What a difference a year makes in local politics. In 2024, only one candidate, David Golden, was on the ballot for Select Board. This year, five people are competing for two seats in the May 14 town election.
Charlie Bletzer and John Mahoney are seeking re-election. They face three challengers: Scott Vecchi, Deb Iaquinto, and Bill Keohan. The winners will serve three-year terms.
Here’s a look at each candidate.
Charlie Bletzer
Bletzer is running for his third term. He first ran in 2021 in a special election for an eight-month term to replace Shelaigh Joyce, who had resigned. In 2022, he was elected to a full three-year term.
Bletzer says he is proud of supporting custodial services for the fire stations, work he says was being performed by firefighters when he first toured the stations.
“We have custodial services that go between the seven fire stations and do the heavy cleaning for them, and they’re maintaining the building a lot better,” Bletzer said.
In 2021, Town Meeting established a Facility Capital Maintenance Stabilization Fund which, with the addition of $500,000 approved by Town Meeting in April, now has $7.2 million in it.
Bletzer also touts support for the Nuclear Mitigation Stabilization Fund, which, with the addition of another $500,000 this year, now has $10.4 million in it. That money could be put toward buying 1,531 acres around the former Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Manomet should the land ever come up for sale.
“I’m proud of the fact that we’ve been a proactive board,” Bletzer said. “We’re thinking of the future.”
This year, for the first time, Plymouth voters who want to cast a ballot in person will go to one of just five polling locations instead of 14. The Select Board approved the consolidation in a unanimous vote Feb. 11. Bletzer said the reduction – which was made without much advance notice – will make it easier to manage elections and save money (including on police details).
“When you have 14 polling places, it’s hard to control,” he said.
Beyond the issues, Bletzer said, he works to provide individual assistance to residents.
“I’m here to help people,” he said.
Deb Iaquinto
“We have some big choices to make about growth, about economic development, about the environment, about property taxes,” she said. “We react very well to problems, we chase them down one after another, but I feel like what we need now is a proactive plan for the future.”
Iaquinto has spent most of her career in communications and change management, working for a global consulting firm. She plans to apply some of those skills to her position on the Select Board.
She wants the Select Board to do a better job at engaging stakeholders early in the decision-making process, she said.
“That’s a skill that’s missing from the leadership in Plymouth right now,” she said.
She cites the decision to reduce the number of polling locations.
“I was at the Select Board meeting when it happened, and it just kind of came up,” Iaquinto said. “It’s not that I think it’s a bad idea. It’s just kind of the way it played out.”
She said residents’ opinions could have been solicited through an online survey, or one handed to people who show up at the polls asking how far they would be willing to drive to vote.
“Just give people some options, evaluate those, and then a year from now make that decision, so that people will have had input and had time to think about it,” she said.
Iaquinto took an early retirement from consulting work when her company was acquired. She went back to school to earn a degree in education to become a public-school teacher. She taught English as a second language in Plymouth and Hanover and now teaches reading to kindergartners at Kingston Elementary School.
For this story, she met a reporter at the Plymouth Public Library on South Street, where she said she got the inspiration to become a public school teacher by tutoring immigrants in English in the library’s renowned program.
Iaquinto serves on the Plymouth Open Space Committee.
Her impression is that most political and policy discussions in Plymouth pit economic development against environmental preservation and argued that both are possible.
Bill Keohan
Keohan has a long history of volunteer service to the town.
He was the first – and longtime – chair of the Community Preservation Committee.
After the state’s Community Preservation Act was signed into law in 2000, Keohan gathered signatures to get it on the ballot in Plymouth. The town adopted the law in 2002, implementing a surcharge of 1.5 percent on property taxes to fund affordable housing, historic preservation, and open space and recreation.
Under his leadership, the committee recommended funding for hundreds of affordable housing units, the preservation of thousands of acres of open space, and the restoration of recreational areas and many town buildings, including the Spire Center, the Plymouth Center for the Arts, and the 1820 Courthouse, now a part of Town Hall.
“Look at the results,” Keohan said. “They have changed Plymouth for the better.”
Asked which project he is proudest of, he said:
“It’s like asking a parent who their favorite child is.”
Acquiring land has sometimes required quick work, Keohan said.
He pointed to Center Hill Preserve, 98 acres with half a mile of shoreline along Cape Cod Bay. In 2005, after noticing red and yellow tape on the land signifying impending engineering work, he got in touch with Scott MacFaden, director of land protection at the Wildlands Trust. For months, Keohan had been writing to the Jocelyn Diabetes Foundation, which owned the land, letting it know that the town was interested in buying the property. He called the foundation and found out that the town had 72 hours to submit a bid. The Wildlands Trust applied for funding to the Community Preservation Committee, which held an emergency meeting to approve recommending the purchase to Town Meeting.
With a letter from the town’s finance department in hand, Keohan said, he drove to Boston, doubled-parked on Atlantic Avenue, and went into a Coldwell Banker office to hand in the proposal, which was accepted days later.
Among other projects he touts are the town’s acquisition of what is now Hedge’s Pond Recreational Area and a successful effort to save the 1820 Courthouse from the wrecking ball.
Keohan served as chair of the Community Preservation Committee until 2024, when the Select Board removed him over disagreements about how much independence the committee should have from town officials in recommending how Town Meeting spends about $4 million in Community Preservation Act money annually.
In last year’s town election – after Keohan’s ouster from the Community Preservation Community – supporters mounted a symbolic last-minute write-in campaign to elect him to the Select Board. He did surprisingly well despite not running a campaign, getting 764 votes to Golden’s 4,804.
If elected to the Select Board, Keohan said, he would like to put conservation and preservation back on the front burner. He also wants to promote bringing more light industry to Plymouth.
“Small businesses are the backbone of a sustainable local economy,” said Keohan, who works as a real estate agent.
Keohan said communication between town government and residents needs to be improved.
“In all my life of public service, I have never seen [such] a disconnect between the town and its residents in the level of communication,” he said.
He promises greater outreach to residents if elected.
John Mahoney
Mahoney is running for his sixth term on the Select Board. He served from 2008 to 2020 and was elected again in 2022.
“I’ve always strived to put the community in a better position with respect to money or finances, land or water,” Mahoney said.
He cited his advocacy for the establishment of the Nuclear Decommissioning Stabilization Fund, which sets aside money to potentially buy 1,531 acres around the former Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Manomet.
“I can sit here today and tell you with a straight face that I’m the only person in the history of Massachusetts to set up a fund specifically to purchase a particular parcel of land,” he said. “If I wrong, I’ll correct myself, but I believe I’m the only one in the history of Massachusetts to do that.”
Mahoney said he first proposed the fund at Town Meeting in 2013.
“I told Town Meeting it’s not a question of if the plant is closing, it’s a question of when, and we have to be ready for it,” he said.
The plant closed in 2019 and is being decommissioned by Holtec International, which owns 1,675 acres around it, including the 1,531 acres Mahoney pushed the town to save for.
“Twelve years later, that account has $10.4 million in it,” Mahoney said proudly. He added that the fund is coupled with an agreement with Holtec that guarantees the town the right of first refusal on the 1,531 acres should it come up for sale. At Mahoney’s insistence, he said, the town has 270 days to match any offer. (The cost of the property, however, is expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars.)
“There’s no way that ever been done at the community level in [Massachusetts] history, and that’s as good as government gets, and I led the effort on that,” he said of the fund.
Mahoney is a man of numbers, a skill that is often on display at Select Board and Community Preservation Committee meetings. (He serves on the latter committee as the Select Board’s representative.)
Water is the biggest issue facing the town, he said.
“This community is going to [be built] out by 2040,” he predicted. “There’s only 15 years to go and it’s over. You’re going to be fighting over scraps of land, and if we don’t secure the proper level of water resources right now, we will be moving to the ocean, we will be moving towards desalinization.”
Scott Vecchi
Vecchi is a retired Plymouth police officer. Some readers might be familiar with him because of a 2024 story by the Independent’s Andrea Estes that focused on complaints lodged against him during his career. Today, he is ready to move on from that controversy.
“Unfortunately, when that story was written, I was still an employee of the town, and therefore, I was bound by the rules and regulations of the town,” Vecchi said. “There was a lot more that I was not allowed to say because it had to go through my attorney. I left that behind. That’s in the past.”
Vecchi – who is also an attorney and an emergency medical technician – served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq. He said he is running for Select Board because Plymouth is in crisis.
“Our town is so divided right now,” he said.
He cites the division over a business park under construction at 71 Hedges Pond Road, in Cedarville. Opponents are suing to stop the project, claiming that it is part of a rare ecosystem and is historically significant to Native Americans. In 2022, the town sold the land to the Plymouth Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to economic development in Plymouth, which in turn resold it to the developer, Standish Investment Group. Select Board Chair Dick Quintal, Town Manager Derek Brindisi, and Lee Hartmann, the town’s director of planning and development, serve on the board of the Plymouth Foundation.
“I don’t think any elected or appointed official should be on the board of directors for that foundation,” Vecchi said. “I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. It’s just that the optics of it are bad.”
Overall, he believes there is a lack of transparency in the way the town is run.
Citing the Hedges Pond Road project again, he said an archaeological study of the area should have been conducted in deference to the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe.
“If somebody’s saying, ‘Hey, look, people are buried here,’ that’s the time to tap the brakes and say let’s make sure we’re not disturbing those grounds,” he said.
Unlike Bletzer, Vecchi said he is “adamantly opposed” to the closing of nine of the town’s 14 polling locations.
He has been a Town Meeting member and a member of the Historic District Commission.
“When I was on the Historic District Commission, I loved it, because it was focused on keeping Plymouth historic, keeping the atmosphere that we want to bring tourists in,” he said.
Vecchi also served on the Charter Commission and is vice chair of the Plymouth Redevelopment Authority.
Next week, the Independent will publish a story on the other contested races in the May election. For information on how to vote, go here.
Fred Thys can be reached at fred@plymouthindependent.org.