Town Election heads to the polls

Registered voters will have their final chance to take part in this year’s town elections when the town’s five polling places open at 7 a.m. Tuesday. April 14.

When the polls close at 8 p.m., tabulations will begin to determine the outcomes of the three townwide board races being contested this year, as well as Town Meeting members elected in the town’s ten precincts.

Voting has actually been underway since late March by mail and in-person at Town Hall.  The contested races include three candidates for two Select Board seats, three candidates for two School Committee seats, and two candidates for one open Planning Board seat. The other eight townwide offices are not contested. 

Only one candidate will be on the ballot for two Constable positions, meaning one will be determined by write-in votes.

With incumbents opting not to run for both Select Board and Planning Board, at least two challengers are guaranteed a win. 

On the Town Meeting side, there are at least eight candidates in all 10 precincts seeking 80 three-year terms, making a write-in candidate unlikely. With only 58 incumbents seeking to return, Town Meeting will likely have more than two dozen newcomers.

LIST OF POLLING PLACES:

Precincts A & B: The Center at the Heights, 300 Hillside Ave.

Precincts C & D: Newman Elementary School Gymnasium, 1155 Central Ave.

Precincts E & H: Needham Golf Club Community Room, 49 Green St.

Precincts F&G: Rosemary Recreation Complex Multi-Purpose Room, 178 Rosemary St.

Precincts I & J: Town Hall, Powers Hall, 1471 Highland Ave.

Select Board Candidates

Rich Adduci 

Rich Adduci leans back in his seat, and points over his shoulder at the sign posted outside of French Press Bakery and Café. It’s one of the seemingly ubiquitous “Not our vision” signs, posted throughout Needham Center, showing the opposition of many local businesses to the Envision Needham Center project. “Those signs, seeing them all…

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by Daniel Barbarisi

Cathy Dowd

Asking Cathy Dowd about her time in the Central Intelligence Agency is just as perfectly unsatisfying as one might hope it would be. She can’t talk about it, all these years later, because, well, it’s classified. But she offers a few tidbits that are enough to pique the imagination. She joined the CIA after graduating…

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by Daniel Barbarisi

Bill Dermody

Bill Dermody sits in Bagel’s Best in Needham Center, and he can’t help but remember it all. He’s been in Needham for nearly all of his 66 years, so this isn’t just a bagel shop to him. He also recalls what came before, sees it in his mind’s eye. “This was a bank, before this.…

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by Daniel Barbarisi

School Committee Candidates

Michael Greis

Before moving from a Cambridge condo to his Needham home in 1991, the only thing Michael Greis knew about Needham was that it housed major defense contractor GTE. An employee for IBM at the time, Greis would drive back and forth from Needham’s Industrial Park to visit GTE customers, but had no other interactions with…

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by Kay Matipa

Lauren Soper

Needham native Lauren Soper finds it hard to take her foot off the gas.  Not because she’s busy — in fact, she’s careful never to use that excuse, despite balancing a career and five children; it’s just the way she’s wired. “I’m a big believer [that] we need to model whatever we want [our kids]…

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by Kay Matipa

Matt Spengler

Though he grew up in Newton and attended Harvard for undergrad, Los Angeles is where Matt Spengler launched his career in education. “I never wanted to be a teacher, I never expected to be, but I just ended up in LA working for an education nonprofit,” Spengler said. With an undergraduate degree in political science,…

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by Kay Matipa

Planning Board Candidates

Oscar Mertz

Oscar Mertz thinks big — and small. The Planning Board candidate spent 33 years at Boston-based Elkus Manfredi, one of world’s preeminent architecture firms, working on projects — retail, mixed-use, residential, entertainment — all over the world. However, when he and his wife, Cathy, bought their current Needham home (they had first moved to town…

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by Seth Bauer

Gary Lesanto

When it comes to property, Planning Board candidate Gary Lesanto has been on every side. Over his career he has built (as developer and contractor) more than 50 homes, though only three in Needham, including his own. He’s been a commercial property owner, a property manager, and an investor. Retired now from building houses, he…

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by Seth Bauer