'Aggressive' Swampscott Beach Cleanup Efforts To Be Detailed At Select Board Wednesday

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — More detailed plans of how Swampscott intends to spend $3.5 million in proposed water and sewer rate increases to speed up repairs to pipes that feed toward King's Beach and Fisherman's Beach are on the agenda for Wednesday night's Select Board meeting.

Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald said at last week's meeting that the increase in bonding the increases would mean about $90 in sewer rate hikes for the average town homeowner. He said that comes at a time when a comparison of rates shows that Swampscott would rank 46th lowest out of 55 Greater Boston communities who pay rates through the Massachusetts Water Resources Administration.

"I realize that we don't want to see any of these increases," Fitzgerald said. "But this would be a reasonable approach to address some of these serious issues."

(Also on Patch: Split Swampscott Select Board Vote Spreads Out $2.1M ARPA Funding)

The Select Board voted 3-2 last week to spend $2.1 million in American Recovery Plan Act funds on a set of 10 initiatives that did not include sewer infrastructure — with the exception of $50,000 for Fisherman's Beach — with the intent to instead use rate-payer funding through a state enterprise fund to expedite the sewer repair.

"We're going to come in and we're going to have a presentation and we're going to talk a little bit about some of these additional aggressive efforts that would help the town do our best to manage our status of good repair," Fitzgerald said of Wednesday night's Select Board meeting at the Senior Center (6:30 p.m.).

Fitzgerald has often stated at public meetings over the past two years around the beach water safety issue that while the town intends to do what it can to keep up with sewer lining and contamination remediation efforts as part of a consent decree with the state Environmental Protection Agency, those efforts alone are unlikely to make King's Beach — which was unusable 90 percent of a rainy summer in 2023 because of stormwater runoff and high bacteria levels — suitable for swimming.

"I've said this many times to repeat it," he said last week. "But I am going to say it again. We could spend millions and we're still going to have a problem. That's why I will be more aggressive. But I will also be more aggressive at looking at supplemental strategies.

"Because if we want to use that (King's) beach in our lifetime, we're going to need a supplemental strategy."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)