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 Tom McMahon finished reading his statement and asked his colleagues to punish him.
"I'd like to make a motion that I be censured for my actions," he said. "Is there a second?"
Nobody spoke.
The chair, Dr. Thomas Massaro, broke the silence by asking whether the motion was even allowed. "Is there a way to — is there anything in any of the bylaws or anything?" he said. He could not think of a place in town bylaw or state law where censure appears.
The Board of Health met Wednesday night in a room upstairs from the Select Board, all five members present, because of what happened at its last meeting. On Aug. 24, McMahon interrupted resident Ryan Wilson repeatedly while Wilson corrected him on a Youth Risk Behavior Survey figure and read aloud the text messages McMahon had sent him beforehand, including one calling him a moron. Massaro cut off the exchange twice that night. Two weeks later the board had no room booked and no procedure to follow. Mary Alley Municipal Building is under construction, the regular boardroom was taken, and Massaro thanked the staff who hauled the Zoom equipment upstairs so the whole board could sit together.
Massaro opened by taking a share of the blame. Running an orderly meeting is the chair's job, he said, and he had failed at it. He said he had bought a gavel. "And if gavel doesn't work next, I'll see what I can do about getting pepper spray or mace."
McMahon said he knew he had erred long before any article ran, and that his Facebook statement had been viewed around 15,000 times. He traced his own position on public comment to the pandemic, when he said the board told residents it was not required to let them speak. That is why he ran. The two-minute timers other boards still use, he believes, send a message: We are allowing you to speak because we have to.
"There is a difficult component to dialog, though, and that's when you have to keep your cool during comments you might strongly disagree with," he said. "I can't snap like that. I have to be better, and I will be."
A board without a rulebook
Board of Health member Julie Selbst said censure had not been her first instinct, though a few people had contacted her urging it. What she wanted was the board on the record. McMahon had apologized on Facebook, and not everyone in town is on Facebook.
Massaro's frame of reference was Congress, where a censured member can lose a committee seat. This board has no such lever. "What are we going to do?" he said. "Take your library card away." He also volunteered that in one of his first meetings he had snapped at Public Health Director Andrew Petty. His colleagues coached him rather than punish him, he said, and he was grateful.
Board of Health member Kristin duBay Horton said she saw a pattern rather than a lapse. She said she had watched McMahon challenge members of the public in some form at nearly every meeting she had attended with him. What concerned her was the distance between a person at the microphone and a person at the table, and what that does to the teenagers the board says it wants to hear from.
She moved to table the motion until residents had spoken. That passed unanimously. For the next hour the room used the opening, and it did not line up on one side.
Albert Jordan, who has been coming to town meetings since 1974, said an apology was enough and the board had better work to do. He said McMahon had already been censured by the public, and he did not want the town paying legal counsel to define a word. A resident who said he attends nearly every Board of Health meeting recalled meeting McMahon campaigning by the dump out of a pickup truck, and said public comment got better once he was elected. Nobody in the room has never screwed up, he said, and in McMahon's case it happened in public. Terri Tauro urged the board not to handle it like principals in a school year.
Barbara Roy brought a different account. After she questioned something McMahon posted on Facebook, she said, he told her by email that all correspondence between them would have to happen during public comment at Board of Health meetings. She said she raised it with Massaro and was told not to worry about him. Roy then did what nobody at the table had done: She read the definition of censure aloud — a formal reprimand, a public and official condemnation — and asked the board members whether any of them had looked it up.
What the vote does not do
McMahon apologized to his board. Pressed on whether he had said the words to anyone else, he did not extend it.
"I'm apologizing to my board members," he said.
McMahon told the Independent he was in his driveway when he learned a Marblehead teenager had died last August, and that his daughter came outside and asked why he was crying.
Then he went back to the number he cited Aug. 24. After the survey results came in, Gina Hart, the social worker who ran it, showed students their own figures and asked what they made of them; 72 percent of those students said their peers drank more than the data showed. How many students took the survey has not been given to the board, so neither that share nor the 8.2 percent who answered yes to the question McMahon misread last month can be turned into a head count.
When his turn came, Wilson said he is not the obstacle McMahon describes. He said he had met with the superintendent about getting more out of the survey data and had heard from people involved with Parks and Rec who could be part of a solution.
"I'm doing what I can do as a citizen to help push things forward," he said.
His feelings were not hurt, he said. Then he called McMahon a bully, twice in the same breath, and told him his heart is in the right place.
"Your approach sucks; it just sucks," Wilson said. "You have to do better and find a better way."
"We're not going to replay [Aug. 24],” Massaro said.
Selbst seconded. 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.
Voters last weighed in three months ago. Three candidates ran unopposed on June 9 as the board grew from three members to five, and the order of finish set the terms. McMahon led with 4,548 votes — roughly a 500-vote margin between him and the second-place finisher — and earned the longest term, three years.
The board's fifth member, Dr. Amanda Ritvo, absent Aug. 24, said she would vote yes but wanted a written plan for a next time. Selbst called that the missing piece. duBay Horton suggested asking the State Ethics Commission rather than paying town counsel, and said before the vote that she wanted evidence the behavior would change.
The motion passed 5-0. McMahon had made it himself, and voted for it.
This story took careful attention to what the vote does and does not do. Reader support keeps that work free for the whole town — meeting coverage, context, editing and accountability reporting included. While this story is still fresh, help keep Marblehead’s independent local reporting available to everyone. 🟦 Become a member here.
