Table of Contents
Get our free local reporting delivered straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam — just clear, independent coverage of Marblehead. Sign up for our once-a-week newsletter.
Board of Health member Kristin duBay Horton said before the vote that she wanted evidence fellow member Tom McMahon's behavior would change. Asked two days later what would count as evidence, McMahon said he had none to offer.
"I have no idea. But the truth of the matter is, its up to me to make the change. Evidence isn't a requirement,” he told the Independent. “I'm an elected representative, not appointed.”
He continued, “So I answer to the Marblehead voters and they are the ones that decide at the ballot box. It's ideal to work well with board members, but not required."
The Board of Health voted 5-0 Wednesday to censure McMahon over his conduct toward a resident at its Aug. 24 meeting. He made the motion himself and voted for it.
Board of Health members here are elected, so the censure removes nothing: not his seat, not his vote, not his standing to act on regulations or permits. Only voters can do that, and they last weighed in June 9, when McMahon led three unopposed candidates with 4,548 votes and took the longest term, three years.
Chair Thomas Massaro, who told the room that running an orderly meeting is the chair's job and that he had failed at it, laid out what the board had: "What are we going to do? Take your library card away." He said he bought a gavel, and if the gavel fails, "I'll see what I can do about getting pepper spray or mace."
Massaro asked Wednesday whether the motion was even allowed, and could not find censure in town bylaw or state law. It does not need to be there. The U.S. Supreme Court held unanimously in Houston Community College System v. Wilson that elected bodies have censured their members since colonial times, and that a censure strips nothing from an elected peer and so is not actionable retaliation. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down a Southborough Select Board civility policy in Barron v. Kolenda (2023), holding that residents have a right to be rude to the officials they elect.
An apology and its edges
Asked why he told colleagues Wednesday, "I'm apologizing to my board members," McMahon said he had meant to reach further.
"If I remember correctly, I also apologized to the residents in general, no one specific,” he said. “But if that didn't come across then I should have been more clear there. Residents should feel good about coming and speaking to the board."
He did reach past the table that night, at least in part. Pressed on whether the apology went beyond the board, he told the room, "To the public, I apologize," and he continued to promise to let speakers finish before responding. duBay Horton told him the words "I'm sorry" never appeared.
Asked what better looks like, he named two habits.
“I have to let people finish speaking before I engage," he said. On his posting: "Sometimes I get baited into an argument and I take the bait." Board of Health member Julie Selbst, who said censure was not her first instinct, wanted the board's disapproval on the record because not everyone in town is on Facebook.
Resident Barbara Roy told the board Wednesday that after she questioned a McMahon Facebook post, he wrote to her that all correspondence between them would have to happen during public comment at Board of Health meetings. Asked about that exchange, McMahon described a different one, over recycling barrels Roy found a Peabody church to take. He said he commended her, that she later told a meeting he had claimed to have exhausted all resources finding the barrels a home, and that he interrupted to say he never made the claim. "Looking back I should have let her finish and THEN point out that I never made that claim," he said. He did not address the email.
duBay Horton said she had watched him challenge members of the public in some form at nearly every meeting she had attended with him. "I assume she meant what the people attending were saying? I'm not sure," he said. He had decided beforehand to listen rather than contest each account: "If that meant it made things look worse for me, so be it."
One slide, no denominator
The evidence McMahon returns to is a slide from social worker Gina Hart's May 21 presentation to the School Committee: 71.7 percent of students said they think their peers use alcohol at a higher level than the data indicates; 62.8 percent said so about nicotine; 49.2 percent. about marijuana. That measures what students believe about one another, not the accuracy of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey they filled out. How many students took it has still not been given to the board, so no share here converts to a head count — not those three, and not the 8.2 percent who answered yes to the question McMahon read as 92 percent on Aug. 24. He acknowledged reversing that figure the next day.
Lifetime alcohol use among high school students has fallen from 42 perfect to 32 percent, the trend resident Ryan Wilson cited that night. "But even if they were accurate and we decreased 10 percent of student drinking down from 42 percent to 32 percent, is that the best we can do? Should we just stop trying?" McMahon said.
Resident Albert Jordan, who has attended town meetings since 1974, told the board an apology was enough and that he did not want the town paying legal counsel to define a word. Board of Health member Dr. Amanda Ritvo voted yes and asked for a written plan for a next incident; Selbst called that the missing piece. "Sure," McMahon said. "I'm not exactly sure what that would entail, but Amanda is a pretty smart person so maybe she already has some ideas."
