Since January the Chelsea City Council has taken 48 roll-call votes. Councillor Manuel Teshe of District 7 was marked absent for 20 of them. No other councillor has missed half as many. Calvin Brown is next at ten, then Tanairi Garcia, Deron Hines, Giovanni Recupero and Norieliz DeJesus at seven each. Three councillors, Roberto Jimenez-Rivera, Lisa Santagate and Leo Robinson, have not missed one.
The figures come from the clerk’s minutes, which record the roll call at the start of every meeting and the names on every roll-call vote. They are the city’s own record, and they are the only record. Chelsea’s minutes do not give reasons for absences, and the council has no rule that requires one.
Six meetings out of 14
The council has held 14 meetings this year with a legible attendance table. Teshe was absent from six: the March 3 special meeting on the council’s rules, the regular meetings of March 9, March 23 and April 27, the June 22 special meeting at which the fire chief swore in ten firefighters, and the August 17 special meeting that approved the warrant for the state primary. He arrived at 7:35 p.m. for the June 8 meeting, 35 minutes after the call to order.
June 8 is the meeting that explains why the roll-call count runs ahead of the meeting count. Teshe missed the first vote, on the eminent domain taking at 305 Commandants Way, and was present for the two biggest votes of the year, the West Chelsea overlay district and the $272 million budget, both 11 to 0. Then he was gone again. The minutes mark him absent for the seven roll calls that followed, from the La Colaborativa grant through the $15.4 million sewer separation loan, the FY27 Community Preservation budget and the Chelsea Opportunity Academy funding. The meeting adjourned at 10:15 p.m. His June 8 record is one late arrival and one early departure.
What was decided without him
The 20 missed votes were not ceremonial. They include the accessory dwelling unit ordinance on April 6, the school bus camera order the same night, Recupero’s three-family zoning petition on April 27, which failed 2 to 6 with Teshe and Brown absent, the referral of the inclusionary housing rewrite to the Planning Board, the order setting the June public hearing on the Commandants Way taking, two rounds of prior-year bills, the sewer loan, and the two August 17 orders that ran the September 1 primary. Nothing he missed was decided by a margin his vote would have changed. That is a description of how this council votes, which is almost always unanimously, not of whether his vote mattered.
The chair who has met once
Teshe chairs the Sub-Committee on Planning, Development and Transportation. The committee has met once this year, on February 9, to hear the Chelsea Housing Authority and its development partner on the Fitzpatrick-Prattville 40R district. In the meetings he does attend he is active: 27 motions under suspension, the second highest total on the council, and the March 30 motion that sent the City Manager’s housing rewrite back for revision, which passed 7 to 2 over Todd Taylor’s objection. On June 22 he voted no on the Hines amendment that set the inclusionary fee at $275,000, then yes on the ordinance.
No rule, and no consequence
The city charter says a member of an appointed board or commission “shall be deemed to have vacated office” after missing regularly scheduled meetings for three consecutive months without leave. The charter’s own definitions exclude the council and the school committee from that rule. The Charter Review Committee, which Jimenez-Rivera chairs, has a draft change on its August 31 agenda that would let a board vacate the seat of a member who misses three consecutive meetings or half the meetings in a year. It applies to appointed bodies. There is no proposal to apply anything similar to the council.
The council’s Legislative budget for the year is $648,527, of which $512,527 is personnel. The packet does not break out what each councillor is paid.
What we do not know
Teshe was 23 when he was elected and has never faced an opponent. His biography notes that he works in Boston as a paralegal and law clerk on immigration cases and has said he intends to go to law school. Whether work, study, illness or anything else explains the absences is not in the record, because nothing in Chelsea’s process asks a councillor to say.
The full attendance table for all eleven councillors is here, and his 2026 voting record is part of our council record series.