Share This Article
Sudbury is no stranger to political skirmishes, from the potential siting of the United Nations in Sudbury to the Eversource transmission line buried beneath the Mass Central Rail Trail.
This month the town made the front page of the Boston Globe’s print edition based on several controversies swirling through the Sudbury Public Schools school district (SPS). Those include the departure of Superintendent Brad Crozier, the formation of an LGBTQ+ Parent Advisory Committee (PAC), and a series of Open Meeting Law (OML) complaints that began after the PAC was formed and during negotiations regarding the departure of Superintendent Crozier.
The May 20 Special Town Meeting was a rare event for many newer residents. But for those who have lived in Sudbury for more than a decade, the structural and political maneuvers drew direct comparisons to the “Lavendergate” era and a 2012 Special Town Meeting. Roughly the first half of the 2010’s are often referred to as the “Lavendergate Era” in Sudbury politics.
“Lavendergate” was what some residents thought to be a serious scandal, while others characterized it as manufactured outrage. Following a Town Meeting, a local restaurant and bar (Lavender) stayed open past the mandated closing hour for some local officials, residents, Town staff, and some Selectmen.
The Select Board is the alcohol licensing authority in Sudbury, making the incident, at minimum, bad optics. But opinions varied whether it was an indication of a structural governance problem.
What followed was an organized effort to make a change to the structure of Sudbury’s Town government by way of an update to the act that established the Select Board/Town Manager structure in 1994 — not unlike what was voted to update the Town Charter at the Special Town Meeting this May. The 2012 change was to increase the size of the Select Board from three to five members.
The similarities between Sudbury’s 2012 and 2026 political dustups provide useful context.
The Precipitating Events
While the Select Board expansion was hastened by the Lavendergate controversy, just months prior to the September 2012 Special Town Meeting there was also an employment controversy in the Sudbury Public Schools that was woven into the discourse about Select Board expansion.
In the months leading up to the Special Town Meeting, a teacher was put on leave, and SPS leadership refused to comment on the reasons, citing legal issues according to a 2012 Patch article. That article ran a little more than a month before the Special Town Meeting, complete with mention of a severance agreement.
The months leading up to the May 2026 Special Town Meeting followed a similar pattern. Criticism of the Sudbury School Committee spiked after the Committee established an LGBTQ+ Parent Advisory Council in October of 2025. A series of Open Meeting Law (OML) complaints followed.
Critics of the School Committee voiced frustration about transparency, process, and accountability — themes that carried through to the Special Town Meeting in May. One OML complaint cited “procedural irregularity, factual inaccuracy, and disregard for legal process.”
SPS legal counsel responded to each complaint and denied that any violation occurred. The Attorney General’s Office of Open Government hasn’t issued any determinations on any complaints submitted to their office in the last year, but several are pending review.
In the responses to OML complaints included in the November 24, 2025, SPS meeting packet, SPS counsel stated that many allegations in the complaints “did not relate to compliance with the Open Meeting Law.” (Page 20)
A few months later, the School Committee was mired in controversy again. This time it was another SPS employment matter, just like in 2012. Over the course of February, March and April of 2026, the School Committee was meeting in executive session and negotiating a separation agreement with Superintendent Brad Crozier.
During that process, a Change.org petition was launched calling for a “Vote of No Confidence” in School Committee Chair Karyn Jones, Vice Chair Dr. Jessica McCready, Elizabeth Sues, and Julie Durgin-Sicree.
The petition laid out grievances, stating the Committee had “lost focus on their core responsibilities,” and cited “Procedural and governance failures” regarding the PAC requests. The petition also accused the named members of “Bypassing District leadership and expertise,” and of “Undermining of the Superintendent,” noting that discussions regarding Crozier’s contract occurred “without formal agenda items, public deliberation, or a recorded vote of the full Committee.”
Another series of Open Meeting Law complaints followed. One that was filed by then-School Committee Member Nicole Burnard, alleged that Chair Karyn Jones “advanced a significant employment decision involving public funds without OML compliance or transparency to the public.” SPS counsel was present at the private meeting cited in the complaint, and responded that no OML violation had occurred.
In 2026, the issues with the school committee led to a citizen petition that sought to censure the committee with a non-binding Town Meeting vote of no confidence. That article forced the Select Board to call a Special Town Meeting. The citizen petition to amend Sudbury’s charter by adding a recall election provision was submitted to the warrant for that Special Town Meeting once it was called.
In 2012, the issues with the Select Board were quickly followed by a citizen petition to amend Sudbury’s struccture to expand the Board.
Neither proposed change was brought forward through an official review process.
The Structural Changes
The 2012 effort to expand the Board of Selectmen to five members was not the first attempt in Sudbury. The first attempt was decades earlier, in 1961 (Article 21) with additional attempts several times prior to 2012.
There was nearly an effort to add a recall election provision during the Lavendergate era, too.
A 2012 Patch article reports that the lead expansion petitioner, Mike Troiano, was considering four different articles for a Special Town Meeting. Those included adding a means for censure of elected officials, term limits, and a recall provision.
Support coalesced around the expansion of the Select Board to five. But the calls to action were strikingly similar in the 2012 expansion and 2026 recall efforts.
In 2012, when Troiano presented the Select Board expansion article at the Special Town Meeting, he told the hall, “Join us in passing this measure tonight and start the journey back to the transparency and accountability that will ensure Sudbury’s future is as bright as its storied past.” (1:55:00 below)
In May 2026, resident Josh Herting’s comments expressed similar sentiment when presenting the recall article, telling voters: “It’s about the future of Sudbury. It’s about the generations of residents who will serve here. It’s about preserving a system where elected officials always remember who they work for. They work for us. Tonight we have an opportunity to strengthen our democracy. To strengthen accountability and strengthen public trust.”
The Organizing Platform
During both eras, local political discourse was heavily driven by social media. The “One Sudbury” Facebook group, which was heavily utilized to promote the recall provision this year, has direct roots in the Lavendergate era.
Troiano is quoted in the minutes of a June 12, 2012, Selectmen’s meeting saying “…he plans to create a Facebook group tomorrow dedicated to what he will call “Lavender Gate,” and he encouraged people to contact him.” (Page 18). The group was created, then shut down about a year later. A new replacement group called “One Sudbury” was established by the same organizers.
That was just a few months before a Special Election to fill the two new seats that were created on the Board of Selectmen. Voters had passed the expansion from three to five members of the Board of Selectmen via a ballot vote at the Annual Town Election in 2013. In approving the home rule petition from the Special Town Meeting, the legislature had stipulated the expansion be put to a town-wide vote.
In 2013, Troiano was quoted in Patch explaining the intentions of the One Sudbury group. “To do this I’ve created a new “One Sudbury” group right here on Facebook, and I’d ask those of you who are ready to get behind a specific slate of candidates focused on effecting change in the way this town is run to join those of us who are already there right now.”
The Debates
The similarities extend beyond the events leading up to the Special Town Meeting votes. In both the 2012 and the 2026 Special Town Meetings, the articles were processed in almost identical fashion.
The recall article and the expansion article were the subjects of multiple amendments — seven for recall and two for expansion. There were two amendments debated on the floor for each article. All of them failed.
In both cases, the question on the main article was called after the second amendment failed. In both cases, the vote on the main article then passed without the main article being debated on the floor.
The amendments in 2012 included one to refer the article for study by a committee to be created by the Selectmen and Finance Committee.
The Moderator, Myron Fox, noted that he might not typically allow the question to be called without debate on the main article, but he felt the debate on the amendments was broad enough to cover the main article. He also asked how many attendees wanted to speak on the main article before allowing the vote to proceed.
The amendments in 2026 sought to increase the signature threshold for the petition stage of the recall process, and to eliminate the simultaneous successor election provision. Moderator Cate Blake did not comment on her decision to proceed to a vote on the motion to call the question.
The voters voted overwhelmingly in both cases to support calling the question. Both articles passed with relative ease at well-attended Special Town Meetings.
Civility Issues
Following the September 2012 Special Town Meeting, an opinion letter appeared in the Sudbury Town Crier. It was titled “Rancorous behavior has gone too far.” In it, Mark Kablack lambasted the proponents of the expansion article and asked “…when did Sudbury politics, or more importantly, when did the basic operations of Town government, get reduced to the lowest form of political blood sport?”
The critique was aimed largely at online bullying leading up to the Special Town Meeting, though it did question the “timing and rhetoric” of the warrant article, stating that it was “cloaked in spite.”
The 2012 Special Town Meeting was well-attended and featured grumbling, clapping, and quite a few “points of order.” It was animated, even contentious, but didn’t rise to the level of intensity observed at the May 2026 Special Town Meeting. One presenter in 2026, Joe Sicree, was heckled away from the podium before finishing his presentation. (1:25:00 below)
The town has the benefit of hindsight on Lavendergate. It led to years of well-documented uncivil discourse.
In 2013, resident Kirsten VanDijk, who supported the expansion of the Select Board, took the Lavendergate group to task in a guest column in the Sudbury Town Crier titled “Hypocrisy, lies and illusion.”
Two years later, in May of 2015, Sudbury’s struggles with civility were the subject of a Boston Globe article. The Sudbury Interfaith Clergy Association had stepped in to initiate a “Listening Project.” It sought to bring down the temperature in Sudbury. The Globe article described the Lavendergate fallout:
“The incident turned into a townwide drama that led to calls for a vote of no confidence in a selectman and the creation of a Facebook group called One Sudbury, which has become a place for residents to vent their frustration. Members of One Sudbury successfully pushed a change in the makeup of the Board of Selectmen from three members to five, with the hope that it would lead to a more representative government.
But angry exchanges between board members and on social media sites have continued.”
Will Sudbury follow the same trajectory in the wake of the May 20 Special Town Meeting?
If One Sudbury comments were used as a predictor of the vote on the recall article, the recall article would have passed with 90% of voters in favor at the May Special Town Meeting. The One Sudbury conversation ahead of Town Meeting was almost entirely dominated by supporters of Articles 3 and 4.
Yet the vote on the first amendment to Article 3 (recall) was 487-424 — showing a nearly evenly-split room. The final vote on the article itself was 473-394. It was a convincing margin of victory, but also highlighted that a significant portion of the town’s engaged voters were completely unengaged in the discourse on One Sudbury.
That phenomenon harkens back to insights in the 2015 Listening Project final report. The report noted: “The town as a whole seems to have suffered an impact on citizen participation. We heard from residents who had been personally deterred from getting involved in town government, or whose friends had been so deterred. 84% of survey respondents observed this cost. In the words of one survey respondent, “I believe more citizens would be involved in local government if not for the threat of being verbally attacked online and in the media – why devote hours of volunteer time just to have your personal life made miserable?”
That’s a concern the Select Board reiterated when Chair Janie Dretler stated its majority position opposing the recall article and the vote of no confidence article at the May 20, 2026 Special Town Meeting.
On the recall (Article 3) they noted: “Ultimately, this proposal will discourage residents from running for office. Campaigns require significant time, energy and money. Forcing candidates to face the threat of a second campaign within months favors those with the flexibility, time, and fundraising networks to sustain back-to- back elections. That burden will not fall evenly. It directly discourages working parents, young professionals, and residents without deep pockets from ever stepping forward to serve their town.”
On the vote of no confidence (Article 4) the Select Board stated: “We encourage all residents to remember that the people serving on our boards are our neighbors and volunteers. Disagreements over policy are natural, but the rhetoric surrounding our schools must return to a place of mutual respect and safety.”
Residents won’t have to wait long to see what kind of trajectory the May Special Town Meeting has set for Sudbury. In addition to ongoing discussions about a potential Fiscal Year 2028 override, the Sudbury School Committee is also gearing up for a Superintendent search.
With many difficult and broad-impact discussions ahead, one of Sudbury’s longstanding assets, strong civic engagement, will be put to the test.
