The Town Administrator’s Office

Kristine Trierweiler

When a water main gives out on a Saturday, or a permit stalls, or the town has to decide what a budget can carry, the person with the most operational control over the answer was hired rather than elected. Kristine Trierweiler is Medfield’s Town Administrator, appointed by the board effective January 2019, and the board that hired her is the board that holds her to account. She is only the second person to hold the job: Michael J. Sullivan became the town’s Executive Secretary in 1975 and its first Town Administrator in 1984, and he retired in January 2019 after more than forty-four years.

Medfield’s charter puts the executive branch in the hands of a three-member Select Board and then hands the daily machinery to this office. In the town’s own words, the Town Administrator is appointed to assist in the administration of the executive branch, is responsible for assembling the budget, keeps the board advised on unusual budgetary matters, prepares a long range fiscal plan, and carries out the special studies and analysis the board asks for. The office holds supervisory responsibility across the departments, maintains the inventory of town-owned property and the town’s purchasing system, and recommends changes to town services. The Town Administrator is also Medfield’s ADA Coordinator, so an accessibility complaint about a town building lands on this desk.

The budget is where the office reaches you most directly. The Town Administrator assembles it department by department, then it goes to the Warrant Committee for review, and only after that does it reach the Select Board for a recommendation and Town Meeting for the vote. That is three rooms before a dollar is real, and the last of them is the one any registered voter can walk into. In the spring of 2026 the office sat inside that whole sequence in public: the Select Board’s own minutes of March 31, 2026 record the Town Administrator asking the board to recommend Articles 13, 14 and 15, the operating budget, the override stabilization fund and the override budget, and explaining why the non-override budget had to pass first so the town would keep running whichever way the ballot went.

The office is also where a resident’s question turns into a plan. When a resident asked at that same meeting how the town would handle roughly $120 million of long-range capital needs, it was the Town Administrator who answered with the capital budget, the Municipal Building Stabilization Fund and the Permanent Planning and Building Committee’s new long-term prioritisation work. You can ask a question of that size too. The address is 459 Main Street and the line is 508-906-3011.