Sudbury residents have until September 7 to tell the town what should happen to Camp Sewataro. The one decision actually due on the property is not on the form.
The Liberty Ledge/Sewataro Advisory Committee, the LLSAC, released its community survey on July 28.[1] It runs through September 7, and it feeds a report due to the Select Board by October 31.
There is a date on this property that carries a consequence, and it is not October 31. The camp’s operating agreement runs to September 9, 2027, with a single five-year extension that can be noticed only between January 1 and June 30 of that year. The camp’s operator told the committee on July 16 that the option “needs to be mutually exercised. We are a go” (1:17:43), and that “the Select Board needs to be a go for this to happen” (1:18:03). Town Manager Andy Sheehan told Town Meeting in May that any future change in use of the property “or even the continuation of the existing use, with very few exceptions would have to come back to Town Meeting” (3:26:41).
So there is a decision, it has a deadline, and by the Town Manager’s own account it requires a Town Meeting vote. As of July 31, no warrant article had been filed. The committee reports two months before the notice window opens, under a charter that never put that decision in its assignment, on the strength of a survey that never asks about it.
What the form asks, and what it cannot hear. The committee built the form to keep the answers honest: a residency gate, a one-response attestation, an attention check, and the open-ended questions placed first so nobody is primed before they say what they think. Every one of those is a safeguard about who answers. None is about what is asked.
The first structured section asks residents to rank up to four priority uses from nine rows: open space and passive recreation, active recreation, entertainment programming, summer camp, educational programming, community events and gathering spaces, market rate housing development, affordable housing development, and other. Housing holds two of those rows. Open space and passive recreation share one, a consolidation the committee made on July 23 in the same discussion that split housing into two (1:35:06).
Eight of the nine are proposals. One is the use already operating there, and it has been for sixty-six years. A young Italian immigrant named Franklin Secatore bought the tract off Haynes Road in 1940 and spent twenty years turning forest into meadows, lawns and ponds; his daughter opened a camp on the family homestead in 1960 with twenty-five children, ten of them her father’s grandchildren.[2] Camp Sewataro runs there today under a named operator and an executed agreement with the town.[3] On this form it is a row the same size as entertainment programming, ranked against eight propositions as though the question were equally open for all nine.
The second section is an eighteen-item agree/disagree battery over four categories: open space, summer camp, additional programming, housing development. Nine items pair two uses, such as “Future use should prioritize open space and summer camp.” Nine force a tradeoff, such as “The property should be developed as housing rather than summer camp.” All eighteen are required. The ranking section before them is optional.
Not one of the eighteen names a single use. Every statement names two, so an answer cannot be attributed to either half, and a resident who wants one of them and not the other has nothing to agree with. The pairing is uneven in two further ways. Camp, programming and housing are each the losing side of a tradeoff three times, and open space never is: the form asks three separate times whether to give up the camp for something else, and never once whether to give up open space for the camp. And where camp or programming leads a pairing it is named “the primary use of the property”; housing leads by being what the property is “developed as.” The pairs are offered as inverses of one another and do not say the same thing.
The committee saw the problem itself. On July 23, working from the fifth draft, one member warned that combining uses “will muddy the data. So you could have camp without housing, an anti-housing opinion may make it difficult to see if camp’s really the top priority” (1:03:42). Another had read it through and “found it very confusing and I kept thinking, oh, didn’t we already ask that” (1:05:29). The answer was that “there’s an inverse of every question,” so agreement and disagreement across paired items should recover a preference (1:04:47). Then it published.
Every one of the eighteen statements asks what the property should be. Not one asks whether what it already is should continue. The 2027 deadline appears nowhere on the form. A resident can rank Summer Camp first, and can write anything at all in the four free-text boxes. Ranking Summer Camp first records that camp beat the eight other categories on a list. It does not record whether a property that has been a camp for sixty-six years should remain one, and it is the structured items that produce the numbers the October 31 report will chart.
The town already answered. This survey is not the committee’s first canvass. It ran a public input session on June 24 and reported the results to itself a week later. Residents produced 195 distinct prioritized use recommendations. The number one result, in the committee’s own words, was “by a landslide” camp operations: 36 separate notes covering preservation of the existing administration, a longer-term lease, and extended operations into weekends and winter, carrying a weighted score of 156 against 23 for the second-place idea (1:00:56). The summary given that night was that “the community supports Camp Sewataro and is interested in greater recreation use of the property” (1:02:02). Housing turned up in the one-and-two-vote periphery of the chart (1:08:15). Four weeks later the committee published a form on which the landslide result from its own session – continuing and expanding camp operations – is not one of the things a resident can rank.
The only property this happens to. Sudbury has bought, built and improved a great deal of land. Search the town’s index of warrant articles[4] and only one property has ever drawn one proposing to study what it should be instead. Fairbank Community Center has thirty-three articles in the index and every one of them is an investment: roofs, design, construction, parking, a gymnasium, solar. Broadacres has three, all acquisition. The CSX corridor has six. Haskell Field has eight.
Sewataro has five, and three of them propose hiring someone to study what the property should be: $200,000 in 2022 as Article 16, defeated; a second $200,000 the same year as Article 57, indefinitely postponed without a vote on the merits; and $20,000 in May 2026 as Article 19, defeated 200 to 75. The Select Board’s recorded position was Support on every Sewataro article in the index.
The difference is in the titles. When Fairbank and Haskell get a planning article, it is called a Master Plan. When Sewataro gets one, it is called a Land Use Consultant, or Visioning. A master plan asks how to improve what is there. A visioning study asks what the property should be instead.
Select Board member Charlie Russo made the 2022 request himself and described the result last September without softening it: “It was a crush. It got shot down big time, which was the town voters telling us, we like it how it is” (2:20:26). Cost does not explain it. The year before the 2026 defeat, Town Meeting approved $500,000 for a Fairbank and Haskell landscape master plan, 174 to 28: twenty-five times the money, passed by better than six to one.
Three days after Article 19 was defeated on May 4, the LLSAC held its organizational meeting. It later wrote the survey itself.
The silence is older than the survey. The committee was not asked to consider the camp. Its founding charter, adopted by the Select Board on February 24 and posted on the town’s website, runs two pages.[5] Across both of them the word “camp” appears once, in a scheduling note: “If possible, a second site visit could take place while the summer camp is in session.” The words license, lease, operator, renew, 2027 and Town Meeting do not appear at all.
What the charter does specify is who sits on the committee. Seven voting members: one from the Select Board, one at-large resident, and one each with expertise or professional experience in recreation, accessibility and disability, planning and zoning, finance, and housing.
There is a housing seat. There is no camp seat, no conservation seat, and no open-space seat.
The housing seat was not an oversight. Member Radha Raman Gargeya wrote the charter and read his draft aloud to the Board at its February 24 meeting. The Town Manager suggested folding housing into the planning seat, on the grounds that the two “are often sort of cross pollinating.” Gargeya declined and kept housing separate (2:41:03). In the same discussion, the number of at-large seats, the only ones not attached to a subject, was cut from two to one. When the committee was seated, the Board appointed Gargeya to the seat reserved for itself.
What had been recommended. Ten weeks earlier, the Board had in front of it a different design. Sheehan had been directed the previous September, on a three-to-two vote, to review the camp agreement and report back. That was also where the question residents are asking now was first put, and it was put by a sitting member of the Board, who said the town had bought the property “specifically so that housing would not be built on it” and asked for an assurance that the review “is not an end around about how we kill the operator, the agreement with the camp operator, so that we can put housing up there” (2:29:38). The assurance was not given, and the motion passed without it.
Sheehan delivered on December 16. He recommended a nine-member committee of residents, one from each of the town’s six precincts plus three at large, authorized by Town Meeting in 2026, appointed by the Town Moderator, given a year to work, and reporting to the 2027 Annual Town Meeting with a warrant article to implement whatever it found. He did not think it needed seats built around particular kinds of expertise; what mattered more, he said, was that it “be broad based representation” (1:08:22). He recommended that sitting members of standing committees not hold seats, several having already taken positions on the property, and he told the Board the work did not need a consultant at all.
He was explicit about why the appointments should not be the Board’s to make: “some people may view the board making the appointments as politicized right out of the gate. So it was just a further attempt to shield the board and to give the community an assurance that it is a fair start to the race” (1:11:28).
He offered this as a starting point rather than a demand, and said so: “I don’t expect the Board to accept it without modification.” No vote was taken that night, and none was ever taken on his design at any meeting afterwards. On January 6 the Board created a two-member subcommittee of its own to carry the work instead, and moved on. The recommended form was never moved, never seconded, and never put to a question.
When the charter came to a vote on February 24 it passed three to one. The dissenter, member Dan Carty, had said minutes earlier: “this is nowhere close to what the Town Manager suggested to us a few months back… I don’t think it’s even directionally close to what Andy suggested to us” (2:50:07).
The Board also went to Town Meeting in 2026 for $20,000 to hire a visioning consultant, five months after its own Town Manager had told it, on the record, that this stage of the work did not require one. It did not go to Town Meeting for the thing he had recommended asking Town Meeting for, which was authorization of the committee itself.
How the seats were filled. Twenty-five residents applied for six places, and on March 31 the Board narrowed the field category by category. It excluded one applicant because service on the Finance Committee was said to preclude membership “on any other town committee or commission” (3:23:13). When the Board reached housing and found no designated applicant, however, it counted another candidate’s service on the Housing Trust as the needed qualification (3:29:18). Service on another town body disqualified one applicant and qualified another in the same sitting.
The Town Manager’s advice came up in that discussion. A member noted that the Board “were just asking for citizens and not necessarily members of committees” (3:27:44). The answer was that the charter had deliberately been written otherwise: sitting on a relevant committee was not a bar, so the rule was “not a exclusionary thing” (3:28:28).
The interviews followed on April 8 and 9. Vice chair Janie Dretler asked every applicant: “Do you have any family members who are employed by or attend the camp?” (0:08:51). By the second night Carty had added a counter: “Have you ever come out in opposition to the purchase of the property or for the agreement with the current camp operator?” (0:05:44). Nobody answered yes. Two applicants said their children attend the camp, and both were pressed on whether that affected their ability to serve (1:30:06).
In the same round of questioning, Kay Bell volunteered that she sat on the Sudbury Housing Trust (0:28:38). No member asked whether that affected her ability to assess housing as a use of the property. Jennifer Pincus discussed another children’s use that could “make the camp go away” (0:21:41), and Debbie Dineen had written that the town should improve public access “or plan to sell all or part” of the property, though she said she was describing the ends of a spectrum rather than advocating either outcome (0:31:35). Neither applicant’s fitness is the point. Both were appointed, and neither their stated views nor Bell’s housing affiliation was subjected to the kind of conflict inquiry applied to parents of camp children.
The seat that was never filled. On April 14, the Select Board made its appointments category by category. When it reached housing, one applicant remained who plainly fit the seat. Rachel Henschel has a city planning degree from MIT and manages commercial connections at a utility, working daily with market-rate and affordable multi-family developers. Chair Lisa Kouchakdjian moved her (2:06:12). The motion sat without a second until Carty supplied one. Then Kouchakdjian explained why she would vote against it:
“the only thing that sort of bothered me about Rachel was that, you know, we had information that Rachel was very supportive of the camp being extended, and you know, I’m in this process we have these categories but I’m also looking for applicants that are not going to be biased one way or the other” (2:09:34).
Dretler then described her concern as a conflict of interest and identified her test: whether an applicant had family members who worked at or attended the camp (2:12:55). Henschel’s children attend the camp. Later that night, Dretler said of Henschel and another applicant with children at the camp: “It’s a conflict, both of them were a conflict” (2:34:04).
Support for extending the existing camp agreement was treated as evidence of bias. Henschel’s nomination failed, four votes to one.
The Board did not then look for another housing candidate. Told there was nobody else qualified, Kouchakdjian answered that “we have another person who does qualify for housing, and that’s Kay, because she’s been on this and she’s been there for what, three months” (2:12:55). She was referring to Kay Bell, appointed minutes earlier to the accessibility and disability seat, whose recent service on the Sudbury Housing Trust would now be counted as supplying the housing perspective. A member objected that the Board had just spent twenty minutes refusing, category by category, to let any candidate count in two at once (2:12:55).
The final appointment went to William Pimental for finance. His two children are enrolled at the camp. He was asked to seek an opinion from the State Ethics Commission, and Dretler abstained on his appointment pending the answer, but he was appointed. Carty, by then voting against nearly everything: “just saying oh, you can’t, if you’ve got a kid that’s been to that camp before you can’t participate in this, that to me is pretty, it is extremely anti-democratic” (2:17:38).
The charter’s housing seat was never separately filled. Three months later the Housing Trust came before the committee, its chair Carmine Gentile reading a prepared statement asking that the site be comprehensively evaluated for housing (1:31:27).
What the pattern produced. The committee that wrote this instrument had a designated housing perspective in the room and no designated perspective for the use already operating on the property. At every stage, continuing what is already there was handled as something other than an option. The charter did not put the property’s existing use in the committee’s assignment. Housing got a designated seat and the camp got none. Camp affiliation was screened for as a conflict, while an applicant who had written about selling part of the property was asked nothing of the kind, and neither was a sitting member of the Housing Trust. A qualified housing nominee was voted down after her support for extending the camp was named as bias. The survey then offered “Summer Camp” as one generic use among nine, as though preserving what is there and choosing something new were the same kind of decision.
Sudbury voted to buy this property in 2019, with a camp on it, and has declined twice since to pay anyone to reimagine it. The form closes on September 7 and will produce a set of numbers about what the property could be. None of them will say whether it should go on being what it is, and that is the only question with a deadline.
Sources
- Liberty Ledge/Sewataro Advisory Committee, community survey, released July 28, 2026 and open through September 7. link ↩
- Robin Jones, “Good old-fashioned fun at Camp Sewataro,” Sudbury Town Crier, November 6, 2013, carried on the paper’s Wicked Local platform. article ↩
- Camp operator agreement and amendments, Town Manager’s Camp Sewataro property page. link ↩
- Town of Sudbury index of Town Meeting warrant articles: the 2019 acquisition (Article 25), the 2022 consultant articles (Articles 16 and 57), the 2026 visioning article (Article 19), and the 2025 Fairbank and Haskell landscape master plan (Article 44). link ↩
- Liberty Ledge/Sewataro Advisory Committee charter, adopted by the Select Board February 24, 2026. link ↩
- Select Board minutes: September 9, 2025 (the source for the three-to-two vote directing the review), January 6, February 24, March 31
- Meeting recordings, the source for every timestamped quotation above: September 9, 2025, the directive; December 16, 2025, the Town Manager’s report; January 6; February 24; March 31; April 8 and April 9 applicant interviews; April 14 appointments; public input session of June 24; committee meeting of July 2, the input results; committee meeting of July 16; committee meeting of July 23
- Liberty Ledge/Sewataro Compilation Report
- The Sewataro File, the Monitor’s standing reference for this property