The Town Manager’s Office

What the Town Manager Does

• Appoints the department heads, and the Select Board has fifteen days. Charter section 5-2(b) gives the Town Manager the appointment and removal of all department heads and of every subordinate officer and employee for whom the charter names no other method. Her appointment of a department head becomes effective only if the Select Board approves it within fifteen days. Sections 6-2 through 6-5 name four of those heads outright: the Finance Director, the Director of Public Works, the Director of Planning and Community Development and the Director of Parks and Recreation are each appointed by the Town Manager and serve at her pleasure.
• Builds the budget. Section 7-3 puts the total town budget on her desk, including the School Committee’s own adopted budget, together with a budget message that has to explain the town’s financial policy for the year and summarize its debt. She sends it to the Select Board, and once the board adopts it she forwards it to the Finance Committee.
• Buys everything. Section 5-2(p) makes her the town’s chief procurement officer, responsible for purchasing supplies, materials and equipment and for approving the award of every contract in every department.
• Can redraw the organization chart, with a hearing. Section 6-1 lets her write an administrative code that consolidates, creates, merges, divides or abolishes any town department or office except the school department. The Select Board must hold a public hearing on it within sixty days and vote it up or down within thirty days after that hearing.
• Answers to you, at Town Meeting. Section 5-2(f) requires the Town Manager to attend all sessions of the town meetings. Section 5-2(e) puts her at every Select Board meeting with a voice and no vote. If you are registered, you can be the one asking.

What the Charter Splits Between Them

Longmeadow has been governed under this charter since the voters approved it in May 2004, and it has been revised twice since, in 2007 and 2019. It divides the work three ways, and the division is worth knowing before you decide whom to write to.

• Town Meeting holds the legislative power outright. Section 2-6 says all powers of the town are vested in it except as otherwise provided, which means the budget and the bylaws. Nothing in the manager’s authority reaches that.
• The Select Board holds the executive power of the town under section 3-2(b) and is its primary policy body. It appoints the Town Manager, Town Counsel, special and labor counsel, the registrars of voters, and the members of every appointed board the charter does not assign elsewhere. It sits as the town’s water and sewer commissioners and as its license board, and it signs the warrant that decides what Town Meeting gets to vote on.
• The Town Manager runs what the charter gives her: the departments and their heads, the budget, the purchasing, the personnel policies and the collective bargaining, the town’s insurance and its emergency plans, and the maintenance of town property.

Here is that relationship in one visible act. Thirteen days after the June 2, 2026 annual town election, the Select Board sat down to reorganize, elected its own Chair, Vice Chair and Clerk by three unanimous votes, and got on with the agenda. The Town Manager was in the room for all of it, as the charter requires, with a voice and no vote.

Contact & Engage

• Municipal Offices: Greenwood Center, 231 Maple Road, Longmeadow, MA 01106. Open Monday through Thursday 8:15am to 4:30pm, and Friday 8:15am to noon.
• Town Manager’s Office: 413-565-4110.
• Report a problem: potholes, water, sewers and snow go to the Department of Public Works, 170 Dwight Road, at 413-567-3400.
• Show up: the Select Board generally meets the first and third Monday evenings of the month at the Greenwood Center, and the public is welcome.