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Five residents are scheduled to appear before the Select Board tonight for two open seats on the Finance Committee, the panel that will help steer how Marblehead spends the largest permanent tax increase in its history.
The board meets at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Select Board's Meeting Room at Abbot Hall, 188 Washington St., with a remote option by Zoom. The interviews are the third item on an amended agenda, following public comment and the town administrator's update. The board may vote on appointments the same night.
The applicants are Michael L. Klawitter, Dennis MacDonald, Mike Maniaci, Renée Sidman and David A. Weber. Each submitted a letter of interest and a resume.
The vacancies were created when Finance Committee members Alec Goolsby, the-then chair, stepped down at the end of his term and Mike Janko resigned. The committee has nine members appointed by the Select Board to staggered three-year terms, leaving it two short of full strength.
The committee functions in an advisory capacity for all of the town's financial matters. It reviews the budgets of every town department, holds a public hearing on all Town Meeting warrant articles calling for the expenditure of town funds and publishes a report of its recommendations that is delivered to each home before Town Meeting.
Those recommendations carry weight. In the spring, the committee voted unanimously to recommend Article 29, the contingent fiscal 2027 appropriation that also put a three-tier Proposition 2 1/2 override on the June ballot. Town Meeting passed the article 1,227 to 159.
Voters then approved a $15 million operating override June 9, 4,278 to 3,594, along with a separate $2,298,575 trash and recycling override, adding roughly $17.3 million in permanent taxing capacity. It was the town's first operating override since 2005. Turnout reached 8,092 ballots, 47.5 percent of Marblehead's 17,040 registered voters and the highest for an annual town election in records dating to 2006.
The committee is already absorbing the costs of the leadership turnover that followed. In August, it voted unanimously to move $67,000 out of its reserve fund, including $41,000 for an accrued vacation payout to Town Administrator Thatcher W. Kezer III, who retires Dec. 31, and money toward executive recruiting to replace both Kezer and former Chief Financial Officer Aleesha Nunley Benjamin, who left in August for the same post in Nantucket.
Michael L. Klawitter
Klawitter, a Marblehead resident for 17 years, spent his entire 25-year career at one firm. He joined Loomis, Sayles & Company in April 2000 as a portfolio assistant reconciling trades and cash balances on portfolios run by Dan Fuss, the firm's longtime bond inve his way through four promotions before concluding his career there in January.
He was selected in 2002 for a newly formed bank loan team, became a research analyst in 2009, an investment strategist in 2013 and, in 2016, a vice president and portfolio manager. In that last role he was one of two heads of a team managing $2.4 billion, co-managing the Senior Floating Rate and Fixed Income Fund along with institutional accounts inside and outside the United States, and helping run multiple collateralized loan obligations. Loomis Sayles is an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers, which reports $1.2 trillion under management.
A CFA charterholder and member of the CFA Society of Boston, Klawitter holds a Master of Science in finance from Boston College's Carroll School of Management and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His resume notes he has used Excel for more than two decades to build financial models across asset management functions.
"I have learned the importance of listening carefully to differing perspectives, asking thoughtful questions, working collaboratively, and ultimately reaching sound, well-reasoned conclusions," Klawitter wrote.
Dennis MacDonald
MacDonald is the newest arrival among the five. He and his wife, Kristin, recently moved to Marblehead to be near their daughter, who married into a longtime local family. Before relocating, they lived in Bridgewater, Connecticut, a small town in Litchfield County that, like Marblehead, runs on open town meeting.
He served more than 15 years on Bridgewater's Board of Finance across three elected terms, holding the chairmanship for many of those years, and was separately elected town moderator, presiding over town meeting proceedings. His letter argues the two towns face the same fundamental problem: heavy reliance on residential property taxes to cover rising fixed municipal costs.
MacDonald retired a decade ago as a senior vice president at Reed Exhibitions, a division of RELX, where his work spanned security, home improvement, sports, medical, book publishing and entertainment events, and centered on contract negotiations with municipal leaders, venue operators, labor unions and vendors. Since retiring he has chaired the board of Ives Concert Hall, served as trustee and chairman at Bridgewater Congregational Church and volunteered on operations at Lime Rock Park raceway. He attended Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and has three children and four grandchildren.
"While Bridgewater has a smaller population and overall budget, the departmental line items, fiduciary requirements, and municipal challenges are fundamentally the same," MacDonald wrote.
Mike Maniaci
Maniaci is the only applicant who runs a business he built from nothing. He started Piedmont Mortgage Corporation in Atlanta in 1995 as sole shareholder, grew it to as many as 20 employees and two branches under a full-commission structure, and closed it voluntarily in 2011 with no debt or adverse findings, according to his resume. He reopened Piedmont in Marblehead in December 2014 to originate conventional, government and Small Business Administration mortgages, with licenses in Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts and formerly Texas.
He has worked in the industry since 1991, beginning at American General Finance in Roswell, Georgia, then Liberty Mortgage and Great Oak Mortgage, where he was the top revenue producer before leaving to start his own company. He also serves as president of Buckhead Investment Group, which he founded in 2012 to fund residential rehab and construction projects and now manages a portfolio of rental properties and Delaware statutory trusts.
Maniaci holds a bachelor's degree in business administration with a minor in economics from Salem State University, earned in 1990, and studied abroad at Ealing College in London. In his letter, he cites six state examinations passed over 30 years across three different state agencies.
"As the head of a mortgage company I am regularly responsible for analyzing budgets, identifying cost efficiencies as well as managing state inspections," Maniaci wrote.
Renée Sidman
Sidman and her husband, Jason, have owned a home in Marblehead for 14 years and are raising two sons, Caleb and Micah, in the public schools. Her career splits neatly in half: 14 years at Fidelity Investments, then more than a decade in North Shore health care.
At Fidelity, from 1999 to 2013, she moved from a human resources associate role through systems analysis, technology risk and business analysis to senior data quality analyst, supporting the High Income and Strategic Advisors trading floors. She left in 2014 for North Shore Physicians Group in Peabody, where she built dashboards for 31 outpatient clinics, 1,200 staff members and 160,000 patients, and rose to director of data analytics.
She became director of ambulatory operations analytics for Mass General Brigham in March 2024, managing a team of 11 analysts, and in April her portfolio expanded to cover seven community hospitals, including Salem Hospital, three specialty hospitals and the system's express care sites. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she double-majored in political science and women's studies, and served as president of the board of directors at Congregation Shirat Hayam in Swampscott from 2017 to 2019, overseeing a $2 million annual budget and a staff of 75.
"I translate complicated data into consumable visuals for my administrative colleagues to leverage," Sidman wrote.
David A. Weber
Weber has spent the past year in the room where the override was built. He is a member of the 2037 Master Plan Advisory Group and was one of 12 core team members of the "For Marblehead" campaign, attending Finance Committee warrant deliberations, hosting information sessions at the Council on Aging, Dunkin' and Abbot Hall, writing letters to the editor for all three local news outlets and speaking at Town Meeting in support of the override.
He retired six years ago after 35 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he still consults part time for the Sloan School's Initiative on the Digital Economy. His first 18 years there were spent running the MBA program and other master's programs; the last 17 moved into external relations and fundraising, including developing the strategy for Sloan's share of a $6 billion MIT capital campaign. Before MIT he spent a decade at General Motors in manufacturing engineering and management.
Weber is co-owner, chief financial officer and treasurer of Creature Comforts and Pawsitively Marblehead, a retail and pet services business employing 30 people. He holds a bachelor's degree in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin, an MBA from MIT Sloan and a master's in higher education administration from Harvard. He has served as rear commodore, vice commodore and commodore of the Marblehead Yacht Club, and has lived in three homes in town, including John Glover's historic house on Glover Square. In his letter he pointed to the memorandum of understanding covering fiscal 2027 through fiscal 2029 that came out of the spring budget talks.
"Nothing would make me prouder than to be a part of FinCom at this pivotal time as we move forward together to strengthen our town's fiscal future," Weber wrote.
Also on the agenda
The board is scheduled to vote on a conditional offer of employment for police officer Luke Morris. Police Chief Dennis King wrote that Morris grew up in Marblehead, graduated from Marblehead High School and served in the Marine Corps from July 2021 to June 2025, receiving an honorable discharge. The offer would take effect Oct. 24 or on the first available police academy date. The hire comes weeks after the board authorized King to pursue a local public safety register, after the department sent notices to 41 names on the civil service list for two openings and received two completed applications.
A possible vote is listed on a letter of support to the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities regarding Broughton Road.
The consent agenda includes minutes, a Marblehead Festival of Arts request to use the second floor of Abbot Hall for the Artisans' Marketplace during Christmas Walk weekend, Dec. 5-7, and a lease agreement for a private drain connection at 44 Evans Road. Two contracts are up for votes: a $10,589.81 change order with Comm-Tract Inc. to extend the town's fiber optic network to the harbormaster's building and a Massachusetts Historical Commission grant of up to $50,000 to survey about 130 properties in the Old and Historic District.
Closing the agenda is a review of the town administrator profile, added Tuesday, with a vote scheduled. The board has been working toward hiring Kezer's successor since June.
