The evening opened with a television clip from the early 1990s. “Chelsea, Massachusetts is not the worst city in the country, but it is certainly the most destitute,” the narrator said. “Its main distinction is it’s the only city in the United States where democracy has been suspended.” Then the lights came up in the Chelsea High School auditorium on Wednesday night and Stephen McGoldrick, who served the state receivership “all 1,436 days,” walked out to explain what happened after the cameras left.
“Chelsea: Then and Now,” the city’s marking of 35 years since the state took over its government in September 1991, put the four men who have run Chelsea since local control returned on one stage: Guy Santagate, city manager from 1995 to 2000; Jay Ash, 2000 to 2015; Thomas Ambrosino, 2015 to 2023; and Fidel Maltez, who has held the job since January 2024. Adam Chapdelaine, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, moderated. The event ran a little under two hours, the last of which was questions and a presentation. Our history of the receivership, published before the event, is here.
“Chelsea never went bankrupt”
McGoldrick, who went on to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and the Collins Center at UMass Boston, where he ran the searches that hired both Ambrosino and Maltez, said Chelsea’s collapse was political before it was financial. “Chelsea did not fail because of a single event. It failed because weak accountability structures allowed corruption to compound over time.” He corrected a myth along the way: “Chelsea never went bankrupt. Bankruptcies are not allowed in Massachusetts for municipal governments. The rupture was in the political establishment more than the financial establishment.”
He had brought the receiver’s final report to the Legislature, a 1994 document called “Reflections on the Prospect of Chelsea,” which he called “a very rare print edition and maybe the only one in circulation,” and read from it. The receivership’s first question, he said, was whether to preserve Chelsea as a city at all; a November 1991 referendum answered that “overwhelmingly.” The report promised that by September 1996 “every public school child above kindergarten age will enter a new facility,” a capital investment of “well over $100 million.” It described a police department that in 1991 “was an object of mistrust for significant portions of the Hispanic community, for several federal and state law enforcement agencies, and for many honest and dedicated officers who worked within it.”
The passage he called “the crown jewel” was a warning to the first council under the new charter. “If Chelsea has 12 chief executives instead of one, it will not flourish,” he read. “A potential and short-sighted legislative body can make any city charter unworkable … Chelsea will not get another chance after this one.” He closed with the receiver Harry Spence’s last line in the report: “Be careful, I was warned by residents when I started work here in 1991. If you spend enough time here, you’ll fall in love with Chelsea.”
Santagate: “like having a child get chemotherapy”
Santagate, who is 88 according to Councillor Lisa Santagate, his third cousin, said his first job was “to restore faith in local government instead of dealing with crooks who would look you in the eye and steal money from you.” He rejected the receiver’s own metaphor. “The receiver would say that receivership is like having a child take castor oil. And I said, no, it’s like having a child get chemotherapy,” because removing an elected mayor and turning the aldermen into an advisory board is “far into our way of life.” He said the state could have avoided it: it lent Chelsea $5 million, then another $5 million, when it should have forced the city to balance its budget through the tax rate. “Friction was necessary.”
His turning point was a former vice squad officer who had gone to prison for fraud, came back asking for his job, was refused, ran for alderman and won. Santagate would not swear him in. “A judge ruled I should swear him in. I wouldn’t do it. She said, ‘I’m going to put you in jail.'” The Supreme Judicial Court took the case and ruled 7 to 0 for the city. “That was a turning point, that the old boy network was gone.”
Asked what he saw driving in that day, he said: “The waterfront property all rehabbed, the downtown, there’s no vacancies at all. I didn’t see one vacant store.” He said the official population understates the real one. “You must have 50,000 people in the city at least.”
Ash: “It took 13 votes to make me city manager”
Ash declined the first question put to him and instead thanked the room: the councils “who have stood tall over and over again to do the right thing, even though it took 13 votes to make me city manager,” the legislators, the employees, the volunteers. He turned to Santagate. “When the story is written about Chelsea, there’s one hero and the rest of us. This guy here to my right is the hero.”
His own turning point was the downtown urban renewal plan, which needed council approval after the economic development board and Planning Board had passed it. The property owners’ lawyer, he said, came to the council with photographs of vacant city-owned buildings to argue the city had no standing to call anyone else’s property substandard, and a councillor Ash called his friend “tore him apart.” The plan passed 11 to 0. “We never took any property by eminent domain. Technically, we did take them, but we negotiated every one of those agreements.” The proof, he said, was the FBI’s Boston field office coming to Chelsea, “a place that had a reputation that, well, frankly, the FBI had been at Chelsea before.”
What worried him when he left for Governor Baker’s cabinet in 2015, he said, was that the city would go back to electing a mayor. “There are any number of you in this room that back in the day would have been running for mayor and could have been mayor.” He said the charter changed what a councillor sees looking down the hall toward the old mayor’s office: not a job to want, but “a partner in government.” “The toughest thing about leadership is knowing when to follow.”
Ambrosino: “I had more power as city manager in Chelsea than I did as mayor”
Ambrosino, the former Revere mayor, said the pandemic did not change the relationship between the city and its residents so much as prove it. The nonprofits, “mostly women leaders,” had built trust that the city borrowed when it needed residents to engage during 2020, and so had the work after 2016 “making sure our immigrant community understood that this was a safe and welcoming place for them.” Asked to compare the two jobs, he said the difference was the absence of competition between the council and the executive. “Frankly, I had more power as city manager in Chelsea than I did as mayor.” He called Chelsea “the best job I ever had in my entire career.”
He said he arrived to find Ash had left “so much money” that his priority became spending it on neighborhoods, streets, sidewalks and sewers, and that the downtown was the next job when COVID interrupted. “I know that has been a focus of Fidel’s efforts. He has put his attention exactly where I would have done it.”
Maltez: “2025 was probably one of the hardest years of my life”
Maltez said he came to city government in 2017 with an engineering degree and no experience, and that Ambrosino’s interview question was whether he would personally pick up a mattress on Cottage Street. He said the defining problem of his term has been the federal government. “In 2025 it flipped. Immigration enforcement was very dark. It was scary times. It felt like being back in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.” He named two jobs for the next decade: continuing the economic development work of his three predecessors, and “seeing this administration through.” Asked what he wanted Chelsea to look like in 15 years, he said: “not going back to mismanagement, not going back to overcommitting our funds, not going back to saying yes too much.”
Would Chelsea ever elect a mayor again?
A resident of Admiral’s Hill asked each panelist whether they saw the city reverting to a mayoral form of government. Ash: “I think it would be a mistake … I much prefer to select people based upon a job interview than a popularity contest.” Chapdelaine said the question is one of accountability: a council can hold an appointed manager to account every week, while a mayor answers to voters every two or four years. Santagate said an elected chief executive “has to stay popular,” which “is in conflict” with doing the right thing. Ash added a story: Santagate topped a mayoral primary in the old days and lost the general election when “all the corrupt people in Chelsea at the time got together” behind his opponent. “The best thing that ever happened to Chelsea: Guy Santagate was not able to get elected mayor.”
Former Councillor Juan Vega, who said he was a no vote on Santagate’s hiring in 1995 and “never changed my vote,” told the panel he had been wrong. He said only about two-thirds of the public had accepted the manager form at the time, and that an outsider in the job would have been “torn apart” and the charter likely repealed. “It was you, Guy, who set that tone.” He called Santagate “the godfather of this entire experiment and certainly the hero of the story.”
Asked by a legislator in the audience what decision each would make differently, Santagate said he was struggling because “I didn’t do many wrongs.” Ash said leaders make ten critical decisions a week and the best get eight right, then confessed: “I wish I didn’t put the Dunkin’ Donuts on Eastern Avenue.” Maltez said his regret was the same building, “but it’s not on Eastern Avenue, it’s on Williams Street,” and that his lesson was engagement: “When we want something done as an administration, we have to go all in and in some ways be obsessive about it.”
The key
Before the close, Ash called Santagate to the front of the stage and, on Maltez’s behalf, presented him with a key to the city. “I’ll remember the rest of my life,” Santagate said.
Council President Roberto Jimenez-Rivera used the last minutes to pitch the charter review now under way. The last review, in 2020, happened “in a year where community engagement for anything that wasn’t basic needs and survival was pretty minimal,” he said, and the committee is going through the charter section by section to decide “what might need an update. Does every part of it need an update? No. But some of them might.” Residents can weigh in at chelseama.gov/charter-review.
The panel had spent the evening explaining why the charter that came out of receivership worked. Whether it still fits is the question the committee he chairs has been meeting on since August 31.