Select Board Chair Katie Phelan says she loves being on Swampscott’s beaches most of all. She can typically be found at Phillips Beach with her seven- and nine-year-olds and their friends. 

“I just constantly have to remind myself, ‘Can you believe this is our life?’” Phelan said. “It sounds corny, but my husband and I say it all the time, how nice it is to be in a place that’s physically beautiful, to be in a place that you’re proud of, to be in a place that brings you joy.”

Phelan, who grew up in Connecticut, attended Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, where her interest in politics began.

“I was there during a political election, so I worked for a myriad of press,” Phelan said. “I worked for a couple different candidates because they were coming through New Hampshire, which was really exciting. It was, ‘Okay, I want to be engaged in some way. I want to find something that aligns with me and then make that go further.’”

She went on to attend New England School of Law in Boston, where she met her husband, a “Swampscott townie,” during orientation.

“There’s a deep sense of pride of Swampscott of being from Swampscott,” Phelan said. “It’s an acknowledgement of both good and bad because if you’re not from here, it’s really difficult to figure out where you fit in, what your niche is, how you make people trust you, make people understand you.”

She moved to Swampscott with her husband in 2015. Phelan said she now is able to bring an “interesting perspective” because she’s not originally from the area. She acknowledged the “dichotomy” she and her husband represent, one a lifelong townie, the other bringing an outsider’s perspective.

“He’s an encyclopedia of history of what’s happened here, and that definitely has given me the ability to see both sides of a lot of things,” Phelan said. “But you don’t have to be from here to love it that much. You can still get it without being from here.”

It wasn’t until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that Phelan started to think about joining Swampscott politics. Phelan works as an in-house counsel at Global Partners LP, but when the pandemic hit, “we just had different priorities.”

Her neighborhood became a pod, what she called a “fantastic microcosm of community.” They would talk about different things, like how the trash barrels changed in size. Phelan was the one who said that the group should advocate and make a difference.

“My husband was at his mom’s house reading the Swampscott Reporter and there was an article with what seats were available,” Phelan said. “He took a picture, and he said, ‘What do you want to do? Where do you want to put your time?’”

Phelan decided against joining the School Committee, since her husband is a teacher in Lynn. A lot of the other committees, she said, were “really nuanced,” with a focus on a specific subject matter. So she decided to commit to the Select Board. 

Now in the first year of her second term, Phelan was appointed chair of the Select Board in May. She said she pulls from her experience as the youngest of three children to be the “sort of mediator role” that she’s always been placed in throughout her life.

“It’s hard because especially in this position, you’re not going to make everybody happy all the time,” Phelan said. “Rarely do you have the ability to make everybody happy, but you always have the ability to let people have a forum to listen to. I always feel like that’s the priority, to give people a space to feel heard…People need to feel like when they speak there’s action.”

Phelan said that now in her second term in office, she’s “in a repair situation.”

“There’s a lot of people that feel like there’s – whether it’s reality or perception – that there was a lack of transparency, that there is information that’s not getting communicated well, that they’re not being heard, that their voices don’t matter,” Phelan said. “A lot of what I am trying to do is just be really thoughtful about how we bring those parties back to the table, how we engage, how we keep the community engaged that is already engaged and how we re-engage the community that no longer feels engaged and how we put some boundaries in place so that doesn’t happen again.”

Part of this commitment includes Phelan’s recent requests of the School Committee, Select Board and Finance Committees to “really think about how they define success for this financial summit.” 

“I think setting some clear boundaries when you start will only help you going forward,” Phelan said. 

Phelan noted that part of the challenge facing the Select Board and the town is being in an “interim situation.”

“We want to empower the interim town administrator to make decisions, but if another town administrator gets hired outside of the interim, then we want to also allow space for them too to have their own vision or work with us to come to a collaborative vision,” Phelan said. 

As chair, Phelan is also working on big town projects like the Hadley boutique hotel, which she said is “moving along, which is fantastic.” For the Hawthorne reuse project, Phelan said the “utmost importance to me is transparency in public participation.” The board is also in the schematic design review process for Pine Street’s housing development. 

She said much of her work is driven by a focus on the town’s children.

“I always talk about my kids because it’s such an amazing reason why people come here, to raise a family, to educate their family in this beautiful place,” Phelan said. “It’s a common thread, even for people who lived here their whole lives…I think it’s important to bring that realness in regard to that. It’s okay to have emotions. It’s ok to be so passionate about something.”

In terms of the town, Phelan said she can empathize with stressful situations because everyone goes through them. She may not feel the same way as someone else about a town project, but “I acknowledge they’re feeling this way and therefore I can act a different way.”

“I just want to bring a little bit more of that to the board,” Phelan said.

On her fridge, Phelan keeps a magazine clipping featuring the women who’ve served on Swampscott’s Select Board. She said she looks at each day, recognizing what it means to be in her position.

“I am literally just one name in that amazing article about the amazing women, but I am so proud to be just one line in that article of the history of Swampscott,” Phelan said. “I’m really proud to be a part of it. I’m really proud to move through something hard and come out on the other side being like ‘that was really hard, but we accomplished it.’”