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Select Board Chair Dan Fox called Kevin Harutunian to the table first Wednesday and said he hoped he had not just mispronounced the name.
“I wouldn’t have told you,” Harutunian said.
In an interview the Select Board had budgeted at 50 minutes, the Topsfield town administrator went on to explain that he is also that town’s finance director, procurement officer and personnel director and that he shovels the walkway on snowy mornings. By the end of the night, the board had decided he was the one to run Marblehead.
No salary was announced; the agenda called for the board to negotiate his contract in a closed executive session after the vote. The job was posted at $200,000 to $215,000.
“Grew up in Beverly, local guy, know Marblehead really well,” he told the board. He said he had played sports with and against people from Marblehead, that the town’s reputation is “stellar” and that Kezer had spoken well of the board.
Kezer, administrator since June 2022, retires Dec. 31 with his contract running to June 2028. Harutunian becomes at least the sixth permanent administrator since Anthony Sasso’s 18-year run ended in 2012, after Jeff Chelgren, John McGinn, Jason Silva and Kezer served two to five years apiece.
Read Harutunian’s resume and cover letter below.
Four titles in Topsfield
Harutunian has run Topsfield since December 2019, negotiating every collective bargaining agreement and working with the Tri-Town School Union and the Masconomet School District. Before that he was chief of staff to Beverly Mayor Michael Cahill from January 2014 to December 2019, after a commercial real estate career he started out of Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont.
When Fox asked how he handles the finance job on top of the administrator’s, Harutunian described a finance team that meets every Tuesday for 60 to 90 minutes.
“By title I’m the finance director, but we work as a team: the treasurer, the accountant, assessor and our procurement office,” he said.
Asked for examples of savings, he said Topsfield merged its highway, parks and cemetery departments after finding that two of them had each bought a zero-turn mower and were not sharing, saving about $20,000 the first year. The town was also among the first in Massachusetts to buy robotic lawnmowers, which he said freed crews to edge infields and line fields. When he arrived, four or five departments applied for competitive grants, he said; last year 11 or 12 of the town’s 17 departments won them.
Select Board member Rossana Ferrante pointed out that Topsfield is a different size than Marblehead — about 10,000 fewer people — and asked how his hands-on style would scale.
“So I still delegate,” he said, and described his treasurer’s team building a budget presentation with artificial intelligence tools after he set the direction.
His longest answer was about doughnuts. To mend a generations-old dispute between the town and a downtown property owner over septic issues, he said, he went to the owner’s basement office in Salem in jeans and a sweatshirt, brought doughnuts and kept stopping by every few weeks for eight months. The owner agreed to let the town use the front of the property for 30 years at no cost, and the town turned it into a public space with American Rescue Plan Act money and a private donation.
Nothing in the interview put an operating override or a budget the size of Marblehead’s under his own name.
“My truck’s the last one in the parking lot pretty much almost every day, because I’m not going to leave before everyone else does,” he said.
What the board asked for
When Harutunian asked what the board would expect of its next administrator, Select Board member Erin Noonan and Moses Grader talked about learning the town’s culture. Fox was blunter. “One of the first things that I would like to see you do is help us hire a new finance director,” he said.
Aleesha Nunley Benjamin left the chief financial officer’s post in August, and the 2014 and 2022 administrator changeovers each came with finance turnover.
Fox also asked for a five-year capital plan like the one Harutunian said he had submitted in Topsfield about three hours before the interview. Ferrante offered “3 Cs”: connect, a capital plan and a communication plan.
“We are in desperate need of a communication strategy for the town,” she said. Fox later added a fourth, character. Select Board member Jim Zisson said the town has never given department heads or administrators performance appraisals; Harutunian said Topsfield does them every year.
Harutunian turned the questions around twice. Asked what residents care about most, Grader said Marblehead’s volunteer, decentralized government, and “it takes a special person that appreciates the culture as a town administrator to kind of lead it forward.” Harutunian said Topsfield already is one and is working toward Climate Leader status, and that its business socials, with no chamber of commerce in town, have grown from 25 people in the back of a coffee shop to 75.
Asked what they were proudest of, Noonan named the work to close the structural deficit and the commitments the board made in the override’s memorandum of understanding. Zisson said he was “proud to be entrusted by the voters to make important decisions in the best interest of the town.”
The $15 million override passed June 9, 4,278 to 3,594 according to the results as reported, and its $4.3 million first-year share goes entirely to town departments; six of its 16 promised positions are filled. Free cash stood at $6.1 million going into the year, about $5 million has been committed and the memorandum steps its use down to $3 million by fiscal 2029. The memorandum assumed health insurance would rise 7 percent; the first-quarter update reported 11 percent without giving the dollar base needed to translate it.
Before he stood up, Harutunian handed the board a 100-day entry plan and the communication strategy his Topsfield staff wrote in August. Fox thanked him for his “preparedness,” and the board took a 10-minute recess before the next interview at 6 p.m.
The runners-up
Jennifer Callahan ran Oxford from 2018 to April. Her resume lists five Government Finance Officers Association Distinguished Budget awards, an eightfold increase in the stabilization fund, more than $30 million in outside funding and a $10 million school debt exclusion in 2023. She was the state representative for the 18th Worcester District from 2003 to 2011.
Clancy Main has been chief financial officer of the Haverhill Public Schools since May 2025, managing a $136 million budget and 1,800 employees across 17 schools, and worked in Billerica from 2017 to 2025 as town manager, assistant town manager and in other roles the resume does not date.
The Collins Center at UMass Boston ran the $16,000 search, which drew about 15 applicants, Noonan said as screening committee chair. John DiPiano’s Oct. 20 Open Meeting Law complaint over the override’s first joint financial review names committee member Molly Teets among others, and the board voted last week to have town counsel answer it.
Topsfield now needs a town administrator, a finance director, a procurement officer and a personnel director. Marblehead needs a finance director, and Fox has already said whose job it is to find one.
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