The town of Winthrop’s Citizens Advisory Commission on Climate suspended its operations Tuesday, saying the Town Council has shown little to no interest in helping to solve the problems that many residents face from rising sea levels.

In an abbreviated session of its regular monthly meeting, the climate commission approved a formal request of the Town Council to approve a $5 million allocation for drain and pipe replacement in the Morton Street area, then said it would suspend its work pending any response.

Commission members described their act as a show of frustration after they held more than a year of meetings aimed at developing coping strategies for the rising storm threats facing Winthrop, only to see the necessary federal money dry up and the town put itself out of compliance for large chunks of state funding.

“It’s now on the council to decide,” a co-chairman of the climate commission, Norman Hyett, said after the meeting. “There are lots of needs in this town, and they’re going to have to decide whether people are going to be on their own – and it’s everybody’s property and everybody is responsible for their own property – or whether the town is going to band together to try solve the problems for communities. That’s what it gets down to.”

Get attention

The commission’s other co-chair, Ana Tavares Leary, described the frustration of watching citizens from flood-prone areas of Winthrop trust the commission to craft solutions, only to see its recommendations go no further.

“People come here every single month, asking the same questions: What action are you guys taking,” Ms Leary said. “So if this is the only way we can get their attention – suspending for a few months until we get a response – great.”

The commission’s action stands as one of the more immediate fallouts of the town election last month, which was won overwhelmingly by a slate of candidates opposed to Winthrop complying with the state’s 3A law. That law requires most communities in eastern Massachusetts to add zones allowing multifamily housing or face a broad loss in state funding.

Winthrop could comply with 3A and keep its state grant funding by rezoning and taking zoning credit for three areas of town that already have large multifamily units. Yet the winning slate led by the Town Council president, Jim Letterie, argued for an increasingly lonely strategy – 3A-compliant towns now outnumber non-compliant ones by 118 to 11 – of defying the state and absorbing the associated financial costs.

Lost grants

That cost for Winthrop has so far included being rejected or deemed ineligible for more than $2 million in state grant money specifically offered to towns by the state for purposes related to flood mitigation and rising sea levels, Mr Hyett said. Town officials listed at least six state grants for environmental and related resilience work for which the town of Winthrop has been declared ineligible due to its 3A stance.

Mr Letterie did not respond to a request for comment on the climate commission’s action. He has said recently, however, that he still holds out hope that the state legislature will either repeal the 3A law or craft an exemption for Winthrop – even while acknowledging there are no signs so far of that happening.

And in another setback for that perspective, a statewide effort – led by activists in Winthrop and other towns – to put a referendum question on the 2026 state ballot, that would repeal the 3A law entirely, appears to have failed. While state officials said that while they cannot yet make an official declaration, the number of petition forms submitted by the anti-3A campaign appears to have fallen far short of the required level of nearly 75,000 signatures.

The group seeking the 3A repeal filed only “small amounts” of petitions with voter signatures, said Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the state secretary of the commonwealth. “In total, those petitions filled approximately half of one banker’s box, while the other petitions filed around 10 to 15 boxes worth of petitions,” Ms O’Malley said. “Our office is still processing all of the filings, and we expect to be able to release the total number of certified signatures by early January.” Leaders of the 3A repeal effort did not respond to requests for comment.

The town climate commission meanwhile has gone through the work of identifying 10 areas of Winthrop – led in urgency by the Morton Street area – that need substantial work to protect homes, including the construction of barrier walls and improvements in underground drainage pipes. Altogether the commission estimates the necessary work in those 10 areas as costing about $80 million, with federal and state money seen as crucial components.

The commission was formed by the Town Council more than a year ago by the council member representing Precinct 6, John DaRos, who then filled one of the two commission seats reserved for council members. But Mr DaRos resigned his council seat shortly after the Letterie slate swept last month’s election. And while Mr Letterie has not said who he would appoint to fill new commission vacancies, he specifically rejected the idea of choosing Mike Kinlin, the losing candidate in the Precinct 2 council race and a supporter of 3A compliance. “He just said, ‘Hell no,’” to the idea of naming Mr Kinlin to the climate commission, Mr Hyett said of Mr Letterie.

Political assessments

Another commission member, Celeste Ribeiro Hewitt – also a candidate for Town Council on the losing side of the anti-3A election sweep – said she believes Mr Letterie’s actions with regard to the climate commission suggest that he “does not want climate to be a mechanism for someone to get traction politically.”

“If 3A was the issue of the last election, and the reason for the sweep,” she said, “I think he likes that position and would like to keep it that way.”

The commission’s concerns, however, go beyond 3A and local politics, Mr Hyett said. The federal government has sharply cut back money for storm mitigation and emergency response, while the Winthrop government still hasn’t shared with residents its plan for responding to a major emergency, Mr Hyett said. “If there is a catastrophe, a major storm, we’re basically screwed,” he said.

“We feel like people come here looking for hope, and looking for us to help with solutions,” Mr Hyett said. “And with 3A, there’s no solutions, because we just keep losing money.”

Ms Leary repeatedly expressed her feeling that the commission is unfairly being seen as letting down residents who feel it was created to help them. “There’s a disconnect when residents come to our commission meetings, and have a misaligned view of what it is that we can achieve for them, unless we take a stronger approach with the Town Council,” she said.