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Illustration by Tim Bower

Flashback Friday: Municipal Meltdown

August 15, 2025
By Gabrielle Gurley

A majestic grove of evergreen trees overlooks the town swimming pools in West Boylston’s Goodale Park. For Dennis Mulryan, it’s a sentimental spot. The longtime resident of the Worcester suburb worked there as a lifeguard, met his wife poolside, and saw his son take up his old job of keeping an eye on swimmers. But on a muggy afternoon this past summer, there were no youngsters splashing around in the water; instead there were pine cones and needles covering the floor of the kiddie pool and a heap of concrete chunks sitting at one end of the main swimming area. After more than five years of budget cuts, the parks department doesn’t have the $1 million needed to refurbish the 1950s-era facility. 

The pool has been closed for two years now. Not that residents didn’t knock themselves out trying to keep it open with volunteers and donations, including a $6,000 bequest from a former town moderator. And Mulryan, the chairman of the town’s Board of Parks Commissioners, surely went beyond the call of duty. A scuba diving enthusiast, he learned how to plug leaks with putty while underwater, and did his best to keep things patched up. But the discovery of more extensive structural defects sealed the pool’s fate. 

A volunteer parks commissioner in scuba gear armed with a tube of putty? Is this what it has come to for Massachusetts cities and towns? Increasingly, yes. 

The West Boylston pool story stands out because it was an attempt to hold things together almost literally with chewing gum, but other Massachusetts communities have their own examples of retreat from services that had long been taken for granted as worthy, if not essential, roles of local government. In Saugus, the complete shutdown of the town library made headlines earlier this year. In Stoneham, residents faced a possible elimination of all high school sports. And the town of Randolph stopped providing school bus service to all except special education students and others with extraordinary needs. 

Local governments on the ropes aren’t exactly new to the Bay State. Chelsea and Springfield have both served as poster children in recent years for fiscal dysfunction. The difference now is that the problems are not just hitting struggling older cities, but are increasingly finding their way to middle-class suburbs. Today’s communities on the edge are the West Boylstons, Stonehams, and Sauguses—places where libraries and pools were never regarded as perks, but as time-honored touchstones of community life. 

For more and more Massachusetts cities and towns, the financial equation isn’t adding up. The costs of local government are simply rising at a rate far faster than the revenues used to pay for services. Though homeowners have been howling over steadily rising bills, overall property tax collections are held in check by Proposition 2 1/2, the state’s landmark tax cap measure. State aid to cities and towns, which has become an increasingly important source of funding for local governments because of the property tax cap, has risen only modestly in recent years—after deep cuts during the state budget crisis several years ago. Add soaring health care and pension costs, and you have a recipe for municipal disaster. One result has been a creeping government-by-subscription, with residents now asked to pay out of pocket for everything from trash pick-up to joining the high school football team, while local officials cast about for creative fixes to keep core departments running. 

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