Methuen council plans special meeting for Tuesday

METHUEN — Only a day before their terms end, city councilors are expected to consider overriding three mayoral vetoes Tuesday.

After their approval earlier this week, Mayor D.J. Beauregard announced he would veto all three, including a “no confidence” vote in former Superintendent Brandi Kwong and the School Committee, and a bid to offer city health insurance to elected officials. The proposals also include a change in policy for road improvements on private ways.

“I don’t control the City Council,” Beauregard said of the meeting scheduled for Tuesday to override his vetoes. “They’re elected by the public to make their own decisions as an autonomous body.”

The 7 p.m. meeting will be held virtually and in person at City Hall, 41 Pleasant St., with public comment allowed, according to the agenda and a clarification posted by council Chair Ron Marsan.

“If they successfully override my vetoes, we’ll have to agree to differ,” Beauregard said. “I did what I thought was right.”

Marsan said the meeting was requested by three other councilors but he declined to identify them.

“It’s immaterial,” Marsan said. “Once they ask for it, I have to schedule the meeting.”

Councilor Jana Zanni Pesce said while she supports holding the meeting, she was under the impression it had been called by the chair and unaware of the three councilors cited by Marsan.

Pesce, who sponsored the health insurance resolution, fought back against an accusation that the council was attempting to ram through proposals at the last minute.

“I think it looks worse that the mayor waited until the last minute,” Pesce said. “If he was going to veto it, then he should have done it right away.”

She also said it should be the current council that considers overriding vetoes rather than the incoming group.

In January, four new members will be sworn in, changing the makeup of the nine-member council.

In a memo to the public, Beauregard said Pesce’s resolution, which allows councilors and School Committee members to receive city insurance, was approved without a thorough analysis of the potential fiscal impact.

The assessment was completed before the resolution was amended to include School Committee members and only took current insurance rates into consideration even though the rule change will go into effect the next fiscal year.

Pesce said this criticism is “semantics” since the financial analysis used to determine the cost for the council could be duplicated for the committee by using basic multiplication.

The resolution has been heavily criticized for being self-serving and possibly costly. The fiscal impact could range widely – depending on who chooses to opt in – and potentially cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Pesce has said the resolution is a return to a previous council policy that had only been changed within the last two years and is a matter of improving equity between elected officials, who she said are legally deemed part-time employees, and other part-time employees who are already able to receive city insurance.

Beauregard’s criticism of the road improvement resolution focused on the potentially murky impact on city finances. The resolution seeks to streamline the process for residents looking for city help to improve unaccepted roads, in part by reducing the number of conditions on what work can be done and which roads qualify.

Beauregard said in his memo that the resolution, which could increase the number of city projects, is not fiscally responsible.

The proposal was crafted as a way to offer some relief to residents living on the various roads across the city that were never accepted as public ways.

The mayor was blunt in his criticism of the council’s choice to vote “no confidence” in school officials.

“The resolution is divisive and does not offer practical solutions to the serious challenges our schools are facing,” Beauregard said.

“It solves no actual problems and does not hold anyone accountable in a substantial, actionable way.”

Only days after the council initially approved the “no confidence” resolution, Kwong said she would take medical leave until the end of the year, at which point the school superintendent had already announced she would resign.

© 2025 The Eagle-Tribune (North Andover, Mass.). Visit www.eagletribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.