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Asked what she would do about an electrical system that has left parts of Marblehead in the dark twice in three years, Kathleen Waslov did not pretend to have an answer.
“Not an expert in this area,” she said.
By the end of that night, Aug. 12, the Select Board and the Marblehead Municipal Light Board, meeting jointly, had picked her anyway. Waslov won the seat previously held by Adam Smith on a second ballot, 5-3, with a term that expires in June 2027. She was one of three residents who applied, and the first vote did not settle it.
Waslov, a retired management scientist who has lived in Marblehead 42 years, told the boards she stopped working in 2019 and turned to volunteering. She joined the Friends of Abbot Public Library — the easy one, she said, being a book lover — became its president, and was elected a library trustee last year. It was not quite enough.
Her application, submitted Aug. 6, made the pitch in plainer terms: 40 years of applying quantitative methods to management decisions, with an interest in clean energy and in keeping utility rates stable.
For most of that career she worked on risk and insurance for large companies, helping them set up their own insurance subsidiaries to cover their own liabilities and running the financial forecasts that made the case. Her resume lists a $50 million liquidity facility built at Strategic Risk Solutions and profit-and-loss responsibility for offshore reinsurance operations at Liberty International. She spent her last 15 years as a senior consultant at Willis Towers Watson.
Utilities ran through the work. She told the boards she learned rate making — how a utility decides what to charge customers — from the people at Florida Power & Light after NextEra bought the company. At BP, she picked up a forecasting method she had never encountered, one that projects a business not 10 or 20 years out but indefinitely.
“They don’t do 10 years, they don’t do 20 years,” she said, still audibly interested in it.
Pressed by Simon Frechette on the single most valuable thing she would bring, Waslov landed on decision science, the discipline of analyzing choices under uncertainty. She had used it at the library, she said, when a budget crisis forced the trustees to decide what to keep and what to drop.
“We have some critical decisions to make,” she said.
On the department’s three-part mission, she ranked reliability first. “We don’t want the lights to go out,” she said. Clean power mattered where it could be had, she said, and affordability is a community value, but the rates have to carry the cost of making the power. “It costs what it is.”
Asked about Chapter 164, the state law that governs municipal light boards and draws a hard line between the commissioners and the general manager who runs the department day to day, Waslov was candid.
“I tried to read it,” she said. “It’s pretty long.”
She had read the section on the duties of commissioners, she said, and she understood the split from the library, where trustees stay out of operations.
“We don’t see the employee records,” she said. “We don’t make management, hiring, firing decisions.”
She said she supports the town’s roadmap to reach net zero emissions by 2040 — “Absolutely” — and reported no conflicts of interest, noting she is not a contractor and will never hold a contract with the light department. She had, however, already been reading the department’s finances.
“I don’t know who the finance guy is, but I had a lot of questions about the balance sheet,” she said.
Before the vote, Jean-Jacques Yarmoff of the light board told the joint boards what the next couple of years demand. The department needs a strategic plan, he said, and has needed one for a long time. Questions about whether more transmission lines can be brought into town, or the distribution voltage changed, all run through it. Chapter 164 offers little help there, he said, because it does not say who owns strategic planning.
“We’re in charge of policy,” Yarmoff said.
Another light board member said the board needs someone with time to commit, given the workload ahead. Frechette put it more bluntly, noting the department already has a strong general manager.
“It’s a governance role, you know, and not a technical role,” he said.
The field offered sharply different backgrounds. Richard Connolly, a 1975 Marblehead High School graduate, spent six years in the Navy, helped commission the submarine USS Groton and built a career in nuclear power generation, retiring as an operations supervisor. He told the boards he is familiar with Marblehead’s power portfolio, that only two major lines feed the town and that the vulnerability needs attention. Asked how well he knew Chapter 164, he said, “Not very,” and added that he would learn from the longer-serving members. Dan Billings, an engineer who began his career in power plant work and is now a director at Foundation Medicine, described co-managing an $18 million annual technology budget and two cost-cutting efforts that each saved about $1 million a year.
Thatcher Kezer, running the roll call, explained the arithmetic: eight members across two boards, five votes to win. The first ballot split — three for Waslov, three for Connolly, two for Billings. Billings dropped off, and the boards voted again.
Jim Zisson stuck with Connolly both times and said why: “Based on direct professional experience, I have to go with Richard Connolly.”
Yarmoff, before the ballots, thanked all three and asked the two who lost to stay involved. Moses Grader called it another round of choices the boards were spoiled by. Dan Fox, chair of the Select Board, agreed. “Last few times we voted, we’ve had very qualified people, and it’s another case for that,” he said.
Fox told Waslov she would need to be sworn in at the town clerk’s office before her first meeting.
“Not tonight, guys,” she said.
Not tonight, Fox agreed. The light board meets again Sept. 1.
