Select Board picks Slagle as next town manager
Current Townsend town administrator, previous Lowell director of development services
WILMINGTON >> The Select Board voted unanimously Monday evening to select Townsend Town Administrator Eric Slagle to be the next town manager of Wilmington, five months after the retirement of longtime Town Manager Jeff Hull.
Slagle does not yet have a start date for the new position and will have to negotiate a contract with the board. He was one of four final candidates interviewed by the board over two days last week. The others were Billerica Assistant Town Manager Clancy Main, Pepperell Town Administrator Andrew Maclean and former Woburn Mayor Scott Galvin.
Slagle, who has been in his role in Townsend for just under two years, said in a March 20 phone call that he was excited for the new opportunity in Wilmington.
“I am excited for the opportunities for growth in Wilmington. They have some exciting projects coming up,” said Slagle. “I feel really lucky to have this opportunity. The town lost the head of its finance team and its assistant town manager, so I have the challenge and opportunity to fill a team with folks I get to choose.”
During their deliberations on Monday, members of the board commended
Slagle’s experience in law and local government, and they praised the Town Manager Search Committee for its months of work in bringing the candidates forward.
“Wilmington is going in a new direction, how do we want that direction? When I listened to all the candidates I wanted someone who understood what Wilmington is, and how much of Wilmington we can still keep. Times are changing, but we are a town I am proud to be a member of,” said board Chair Gary Depalma.
“I listened to all four interviews, different people had their pluses and their minuses … In my eyes, the most well-rounded candidate was Eric. I think he came with a lot of experience. I think he presented well on many different fronts. He threw out some ideas that maybe Wilmington wants,” said board member Frank West.
During the board’s interview with Slagle on March 13, he touted his extensive background in municipal work and law. For nearly 17 years he worked for the city of Lowell in different capacities, first working in the city’s Law Department before moving to become the director of development services. Before his time in Lowell, he attended law school and work with municipal law firm KP Law in Boston.
“It gave me really good insights for a lot of the different parts of how a municipality functions,” Slagle told the board about working in Lowell.
In his time in Lowell, Slagle said he was involved in
the handling of things like litigation, workers’ compensation and collective bargaining. For a few months during what he described as a crisis, Slagle was running the city’s building department, and in another instance when the city clerk was suddenly let go, the City Council named him acting city clerk for a period of a few months.
When he took the job in Townsend in 2022, he said it helped him understand that all municipalities face what are essentially the same challenges, and the main difference is the scope of those challenges.
Slagle characterized his leadership abilities during the interview as that of a “player’s coach.”
“The best way for the town is to hire the best people, and to promote the development of staff in such a way that you are creating a culture of professional development in the town,” said Slagle.
Fiscally speaking, Slagle
said he follows a conservative philosophy, and emphasized the importance of maximizing stabilization funds to prepare for periods of economic downturns.
“So that the town can respond in a thoughtful manner to those emergencies and not have to react in the spur of the moment,” said Slagle.
He also preached the importance of having a longterm capital plan.
“I arrived in Townsend to fill a yearlong void in the town administrator position. The Board of Selectmen was doing their best to handle the running of the town. But one of the things that fell by the wayside was five-year forecasting,” said Slagle.
Having a five- or 10-year plan for anticipated equipment costs, like fire apparatus or public works vehicles, Slagle said, is important to avoid needing to make expensive emergency purchases.
“One of the things a lot of municipalities struggle with is preventative maintenance. Too many pieces of infrastructure across the commonwealth suffer from
a lack of maintenance,” said Slagle.
An important factor for a town manager is their relationship with the Select Board, and Slagle said a successful relationship would be one where any of the five members of the board would feel comfortable coming to him with a problem in the town. Most importantly, he said, would be maintaining proper communication between him and the board when the two parties may not agree on something.
West pointed out during the interview that the town would need to fill the vacant finance director and assistant town manager positions, which Slagle would have a hand in doing.
“I would be looking for a partner, a person who would have complementary skills to mine, specifically in areas of HR, and someone who has a different enough background from mine that we can bring different skills to the administration as a whole,” Slagle said of the assistant town manager position.
The issue of MBTA communities also came up, with
Slagle taking the stance that housing is an issue in Massachusetts that needs to be addressed, but that the controversial law may not have been the best way to go about it.
“I do understand that there is a housing crisis. I think we need more housing, but I am not thrilled with the one-size-fits-all nature of some of the MBTA zoning requirements,” said Slagle. “That being said, it is the law, and if I was the town manager, my advice to the board and Town Meeting would be that we need to comply with the law.”
Ever since Hull’s departure at the beginning of October, Wilmington Veterans’ Services Director Louis Cimaglia has been serving as temporary town manager, following a process that was chaotic in itself.
Townsend Board of Selectmen Chair Charles Sexton-diranian declined to comment in an email Wednesday morning, as the board had not yet formally been notified that Slagle will be leaving, and they have not had a chance to discuss their next steps.