At 1 p.m. on September 12, 1991, every contract the City of Chelsea had signed was voided. The Board of Aldermen was abolished. The mayor, John “Butch” Brennan, had resigned, and a businessman named James Carlin, working for a salary of one dollar, took control of a city that could not make payroll for its teachers, firefighters or police. Chelsea became the first Massachusetts city since the Great Depression to be placed in state receivership.
Thirty-five years later, almost to the day, the four city managers who have run Chelsea since local control returned will sit on one stage to talk about what happened and what it built. “Chelsea: Then and Now, 35 Years Since Receivership” is set for Wednesday, September 16 at 6 p.m. The city moved the event this week from the council chambers at City Hall to the Chelsea High School auditorium at 299 Everett Avenue because more than 150 people have said they are coming. Admission is free; the city asks for an RSVP at chelseama.gov/chelsea-then-and-now.
Who will be on stage
Guy Santagate, the first city manager, served from August 1995 to June 2000. Jay Ash followed from 2000 to 2015, then left to become Governor Charlie Baker’s economic development secretary. Thomas Ambrosino, the former Revere mayor, ran the city from 2015 to 2023. Fidel Maltez, who took office on January 1, 2024, holds the job now. Adam Chapdelaine, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, will moderate. Stephen McGoldrick, who served as chief of staff to the state receiver, will open with an account of how the city got there.
The three former managers have each offered a line for the occasion. “Few cities have written a comeback story as extraordinary as Chelsea’s,” Ash said. Ambrosino said Chelsea “continues to set an example of resilience.” Maltez called the anniversary a recognition of “what can be accomplished when a community comes together with courage, vision, and determination.”
How a city goes broke
The numbers from 1991 are small by today’s standards and were catastrophic then. Chelsea’s whole budget was about $46 million. The deficit was $9.5 million, growing toward $10.5 million on a structural basis. The city had roughly 28,000 residents, a narrow tax base of 1.8 square miles, and had lost federal aid and state aid in the same stretch of years. In April 1991 voters rejected a $2 million Proposition 2½ override by three to one. The school department had asked for $15.7 million and been given $11.6 million; Boston University, which had been managing Chelsea’s schools under a contract since 1989, laid off 87 teachers and could not open school on September 6.
Brennan asked the state for help. On September 11, 1991 the Legislature passed Governor William Weld’s bill naming a receiver with what one account called almost unilateral control: the sole power to write budgets, issue bonds, borrow from the state, modify or abrogate contracts, and if it came to it, file for bankruptcy. Elected officials became advisory. Fire Chief Louis Addonizio called it “a violation of civil rights” that stripped “all the powers that the citizens have.” He was not alone in that view, and the receivership was designed to run until at least 1994.
What the receivers did
Carlin lasted ten and a half months and moved fast. He removed department heads; fourteen of seventeen were gone by the time the receivership ended. He cut the treasurer’s office from twelve employees to six. He ended overtime, which had been running at $2 million a year, about five percent of the budget, telling department heads “I’m not going to approve any, so don’t bother to ask.” He closed two fire stations. He negotiated a $5 million lump-sum payment from Massport and collected $1 million in unemployment compensation reimbursements the city had never claimed. By June 1992 he had plugged a $10 million gap and submitted a balanced budget for the following year. Weld described him as “decisive.” Carlin’s own description of the goal was plainer: he wanted residents to feel government was “performing as government should perform: no games, no corruption, fair, consistent.” He died in March 2025 at 84.
Lewis “Harry” Spence, who had already served as court-appointed receiver of the Boston Housing Authority, took over in 1992 and stayed through the end. His job was less about cutting and more about building the structure that would replace the old one. Under his tenure the city drafted a new charter, which voters approved in a special election on June 21, 1994. It abolished the office of mayor and the Board of Aldermen and created the council-manager form Chelsea uses today: an eleven-member City Council that sets policy and an appointed city manager who runs the government. The charter took effect in August 1994. When Spence died in August 2021 at 74, School Committee member Rosemarie Carlisle summed up his tenure: “He came in and straightened things out for us. When he left, everything was in place for the city to move on and become a better Chelsea.”
The receivership ended in the summer of 1995 with the deficit gone and the city’s bonds rated triple-A. Santagate was sworn in as the first city manager on August 18, 1995. That same year the National Civic League named Chelsea an All-America City, the first of four times.
The part that was not about money
The collapse was as much moral as fiscal, and the anniversary coverage has not hidden it. A federal corruption investigation that followed the receivership produced convictions of four former mayors who had served between 1977 and 1991, along with a police captain and several officers who were jailed, indicted or forced out. A local account on the twentieth anniversary described a city in “social, moral, and economic bankruptcy” where corruption was “weeded out almost overnight” once outside control arrived. A 2002 MIT thesis on the period argued the state also used the receivership to advance regional planning goals on Chelsea’s land, a reminder that the loss of home rule had costs beyond pride.
Why the timing matters
The panel lands in a season when Chelsea is asking itself structural questions again. A nine-member Charter Review Committee chaired by Council President Roberto Jimenez-Rivera began meeting on August 31 and is taking the charter apart section by section through January, with the city manager article up first. The first comprehensive master plan since 1970 is in its final drafting phase. And the city won its second consecutive All-America City award in June, the fourth in its history, on the strength of programs that would have been unimaginable in 1991.
Whether the council-manager charter that came out of receivership still fits a city of about 40,000 that has rebuilt its infrastructure and its finances since is precisely the question the review committee is taking up. Wednesday night is a chance to hear from the four people who have run the city under it.