New Session, New Members, New Leadership for City Council and School Committee
By Ellen Putnam
The new City Council is sworn in on Monday evening
Photo Credit: Cari Roche
Newly elected and re-elected City Council and School Committee members took office this week, and each body elected new leadership for 2026, setting the tone for each body’s work this session.
An unusually contentious vote for City Council President, for one, suggested that the City Council, despite being largely politically aligned (9 of its 11 members are registered Democrats), may struggle to collaborate effectively this term.
The City Council President leads meetings, sets agendas, makes subcommittee appointments, and sits on all of the City Council’s subcommittees. Usually, any jockeying for the position is done behind the scenes, with the City Council voting unanimously for its president at a nonbinding caucus in December and then officially electing the president at its first meeting in January.
At this Council’s December caucus, however, the vote split 6-5, with all four new members (Brad Freeman, Christopher Park, Jason Chen, and Elizabeth Kowal), along with two returning members (Maya Jamaleddine and John Obremski), voting for new Ward 4 Councilor Brad Freeman, and with the remaining five returning members (Ryan Williams, Manjula Karamcheti, Kim Vandiver, Cal Finocchiaro, and Devin Romanul) voting for returning Councilor At Large Ryan Williams.
(The City Council did unanimously elect Freeman in the binding vote on Monday.)
The last time the City Council held a vote for President that was not unanimous was in 2018, when it became apparent that then-Mayor Rob Dolan would leave office to assume the position of Town Administrator in Lynnfield, and the position of Melrose’s interim mayor would go to the City Council President. It took five votes for the City Council to decide on Gail Infurna, who then served as mayor until 2020, when Paul Brodeur took office.
It is unusual for a first-term councilor to be elected president, in part because the position requires knowledge of the City Council’s rules of order, and of the dynamics among different councilors. The only time in the last 20 years (at least) that a first-year councilor was elected president was in 2020, when nine of the eleven city councilors were new, and then-Ward 6 Councilor Jen Grigoraitis was elected to the position.
While Freeman himself is new to the role, the chairs for the City Council’s six subcommittees will all be returning members. The chair of each subcommittee tends to change each year, giving multiple councilors the opportunity to lead, although Councilor At Large Maya Jamaleddine is remaining in her current role as the chair of the Legal and Legislative Committee.
The City Council does not have any high-profile issues coming up in the immediate future, but in the spring, when the Council begins what is often its most consequential work of discussing and voting on the mayor’s proposed budget, residents will see whether members will be able to work together effectively.
The new School Committee
Photo Credit: Cari Roche
In contrast, there was no public contention for leadership roles on the School Committee. Seamus Kelley and Matthew Hartman were unanimously elected as Chair and Vice Chair, respectively. (Both were elected to the School Committee for the first time in 2023.) New members Melissa Holleran and Sheri Leo also took their seats this week, replacing outgoing members Jen McAndrew and Dorie Withey.
At Tuesday’s School Committee meeting, Superintendent Cari Berman provided an update on the 17 positions the Melrose Public Schools will be hiring with funds from the $13.5 million override voters passed in November. She shared that the hiring process for those positions has begun, although it remains to be seen which positions, if any, Melrose will be able to fill before the end of the school year.
The School Committee will be embarking on its own budget process shortly, and it will be negotiating new contracts with the Melrose Educators Union (MEU).
With funds available from the override, the School Committee will have more room to bargain with the MEU - but, on the flip side, the availability of more funds could make the bargaining process more fraught. Residents may remember that during their last contract negotiations, the MEU voted to go on strike, although a deal was reached before schools had to actually close.
