The Hawley Select Board’s Office

The Select Board as Executive

When a road goes unplowed in Hawley, the response does not cross an administrator’s desk, because the town does not employ one. The three elected members of the Hawley Select Board, Will Cosby, Hussain Hamdan, and Robert MacLean, run the town themselves. The town’s own Select Board page puts it plainly: the Selectmen are the town’s executive officers, and in a town this small the board runs the town’s operations and supervises its workers directly. The Town Bylaws and the General Laws of Massachusetts grant the board its powers: it acts as the primary policy-making body, appoints residents to town boards and committees, recommends the budget to the Annual Town Meeting, signs the warrants that decide what the meeting votes on, and serves as the town’s licensing authority. In Hawley the same three people wear two more hats: the Select Board also sits as the town’s Board of Health and as its Zoning Board of Appeals, so a septic permit and a zoning variance are decided by the very board you elect. Most Massachusetts towns of this shape hire a professional Town Administrator to carry the daily machinery; Hawley keeps that machinery in the hands of the people it elects, supported by a small office staff. That changes what an election here means: when you vote for a Select Board member, you are not choosing someone to supervise a manager, you are choosing a working executive. The people who answer for the plowing schedule and the next year’s budget sit at a public table at the Town Office on Pudding Hollow Road every other Tuesday evening at 7, and the seat across from them is open to any resident who walks in.