Select Board debuts slate of warrant articles

Proposals range from setting up HR dept. to public shade trees

BY WILLIAM J. DOWD

Marblehead Select Board recently debuted the warrant articles that it will sponsor for Town Meeting’s consideration in May.

The eight-article lineup is eclectic, from expanding the setback for public shade trees to setting up a proper human resources outfit.

Volunteers arrange flowers into beautiful bouquets on Monday, Feb. 13 in the SPUR office.The arrangements were anonymously delivered on Valentine’s Day to deserving individuals in Marblehead and neighboring communities.

BY LEIGH BLANDER

A mom battling cancer. A man in his 90s living alone. A Ukrainian refugee family. A family that just survived a house fire.

These are just a few of the people who received special Valentine’s Day bouquets created by volunteers at SPUR, the nonprofit based in Marblehead.

“It brings me joy,” said Julie Marquis, who works at Marblehead

BY LEIGH BLANDER

Bank and joined volunteers at SPUR’s office on Anderson Street the morning before Valentine’s Day to arrange flowers. “We’re doing something nice for other people.”

This is SPUR’s ninth Valentine’s Day campaign. More than 100 volunteers participated in three different projects.

First, they arranged and delivered 35 bouquets to people in Marblehead, Swampscott, Salem and Lynn who were anonymously nominated by someone in the community.

Kim Nothnagel from SPUR started to cry as she read one of the nominations — for a woman whose grandmother just died.

“She is one of the most generous humans I’ve ever met,” Nothnagel read. “She’s spent the last several years caretaking for her grandmother. Her grandma passed away this past week, and she is adjusting to a new daily student announcements, readings, displays, videos and a visit from Keith Jones, a Black activist, educator and hiphop artist with cerebral palsy.

Marblehead Town Administrator Thatcher Kezer introduced the slate of articles, starting with a proposal to amend professional, nonunion town employees’ benefits. Unlike union benefits that are generally revised every three years as part of the collective bargaining process, benefits for non-unionized employees are not, Kezer said.

“Some of the concern … is their benefits have not changed in a significant amount of time,” he said, adding that the article would make non-unionized employees’ benefits “somewhat comparable” to union benefits.

Kezer said the proposal that will ultimately be presented to Town Meeting targets benefits like longevity pay, sick-time bonuses, vacation time, bereavement and personal leave, and floating holidays, among others.

For example, under one possible change, non-unionized employees could earn additional

“We have a lot of commonalities,” Jones told the Marblehead Current, explaining his message to students. “We all like to eat, we all like to breathe, and we all like to laugh. And we all need to have a foundational respect for other people’s humanity and who they are.

Jones will also be speaking to educators.

“The climate for acceptance is set by adults,” he added.

At the Lucretia and Joseph Brown School, which is named after a Black couple who lived in town at the turn of the 19th-century, there are daily announcements about famous Black Americans, including Zalia Avante-Garde, the first Black winner of the National Spelling Bee; Robby Novak, who started a YouTube channel for kids about kindness,