Opposition was a plus for Newburyport’s mayor
Debate over Whittier Tech proposal lifted Reardon’s profile
NEWBURYPORT — Sean Reardon is having a moment.
He’s sitting in the corner office of City Hall, in his one and only dream job, a rising political star in the state’s top-right corner after his leading role in torpedoing plans for a costly regional tech school.
On a shelf in the corner of Reardon’s office is a framed print of Ted Lasso’s sign: “Believe.”
It’s a memento from his campaign in 2021, when he was way behind in the primaries after nearly a year of campaigning, trailing a city councilor backed by the departing mayor. But a final siege in the closing weeks shrunk the gap, and Reardon pulled out a win by just 27 votes.
He’s the fifth generation of his family in town, and when he was a kid, the then-mayor, Dick Sullivan, lived two doors down.
“I had a front-row seat and he seemed larger-than-life,” Reardon said on a recent sunny day as he sat at a huge round table next to his desk in the mayor’s office. “There are days I still can’t believe I’m in this office.”
His first year in office as mayor was relatively unremarkable. But in the fall of his second year, that changed after Whittier Tech in Haverhill announced its plan to build a nearly half-billiondollar school. As debate erupted across the region, Reardon suddenly emerged as the face of the “Vote No” faction.
Reardon, a former teacher and School Committee member from a family of educators and coaches, had problems with the plan from the get-go, and kept finding more.
By Jan. 23, when the school district used its powers under a regional agreement to conduct a vote in the 11 cities
and towns that send students to the school, Reardon had been all over the regional media for months. He kept his concerns front and center, particularly how the costs are apportioned by community.
Capital costs for Whittier divide by overall K-12 population in each town or city, not by the number of students who choose to attend the trade school. Thus, Newburyport, which sends just 29 students to the school, would end up paying the equivalent of $68,321 per year, per student, for the next 20 years, just for the building. Haverhill, the largest city in the district and source of more than half of its students, would pay just $8,241 per student.
Ultimately, nearly threequarters of district voters sided with Reardon, including 87 percent in Newburyport, and it was heavily voted down in every city and town not named Haverhill.
“I feel uncomfortable calling it a win,” Reardon said. “It was emotional, speaking out so publicly and being the face of it. It took its toll, even though I wasn’t speaking out against a school. I was speaking out against a bad deal.”
Whether it’s a win or not, Reardon has made clear he wants to spend his political capital on revising the 1967 regional agreement to operate the school. In addition to how the costs are split, he wants to make it easier for a school to leave the agreement, which currently requires unanimous approval from the other 10 communities.
The timing could be right to make such regional changes because one positive to come out of the Whittier squabble was that for the first time, the northeast corner of the state felt like a region, with Reardon and Newburyport serving as the catalyst.
“I had not met many of the other mayors and managers until the vote started to come into focus,” said Kassandra Gove, the mayor of Amesbury, the only other city in the district, who also took on a very public role during the Whittier debate after announcing she was voting against it.
“That’s been a nice benefit of this discussion, and what was unique is that our select boards and city councils got to know each other as well, which really doesn’t happen much, so that opens up opportunities for future regional collaboration,” Gove added.
For now, though, as the dust settles on Whittier and discussions begin about what comes next for the school, which is in need of serious repairs, Reardon is taking a moment to appreciate the acute civic participation it demanded of northern Essex County.
“People got so engaged during the final weeks,” he said. “And the fact that so many of the cities and towns had record turnouts for a special election, one that was held on a random Tuesday in January, makes me feel proud.”
In his office hangs the helmet that belonged to his grandfather, who was the fire chief in Newburyport for 28 years. He points to it as a symbol of a strong community service bent that runs through his family. His father was a teacher and the girls basketball coach at Newburyport High School, which two of his three children attend. His wife is also from Newburyport.
As he goes back to the normal business of being a smallcity mayor — building a new recreation center, coming up with plans for an empty school building, fighting the erosion that constantly threatens Plum Island — Reardon said that in many ways, his current reality exceeded the dreams he had as a kid of someday sitting in the corner office at City Hall.
“As a kid who grew up here, who just wants to make his hometown the best it can be, I always knew this was the best job to have,” he said, “and I can’t believe that dream came true.”