TOWNSEND — The legal dispute between the town of Townsend and its own town clerk took a turn Thursday after Town Clerk Harrison Mayotte made a motion of voluntary dismissal, while the town, the defendant in the matter, aimed to block the dismissal.
Mayotte is the plaintiff-intervenor in the case of Christian Roman-Ramirez V. Town of Townsend, was filed in April by Board of Health Chair Christian Roman-Ramirez, who alleged that the town had failed to respond in time to a public records request surrounding the budgets of town department revolving funds.
Roman-Ramirez ultimately dropped his complaint after Mayotte joined it, but Mayotte kept the case going as the plaintiff-intervenor, and later filed an amended complaint with similar allegations of the town failing to respond to a records request about liability insurance policies going back to 2015.
In a statement to The Sun Wednesday, Mayotte said the town had finally “delivered substantial historical insurance records to the resident who requested them,” and with that in mind he filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss the case without prejudice on Thursday.
“This took far, far too long,” said Mayotte. “The public was initially given two coverage-denial letters and told the production was complete. Months later, a ‘deep search’ located years of actual insurance policies. The Clerk’s Office stayed on the request, obtained the records, and delivered them to the resident. That is a victory.”
Mayotte described a process in which the town released two coverage-disclaimer letters in March in response to the liability insurance records request and called the search complete, which was followed by an appeal by the resident requesting the records.
“They said complete. It was not complete,” Mayotte said in his statement. “The records existed, and the public should not have been forced to wait more than six months for the Town to conduct the search that should have occurred at the beginning.”
Mayotte said those records revealed that “two insurers declined to defend or indemnify the Town in RFS Corp. v. Town of Townsend, a case in which RFS alleges approximately $1 million in anticipated profits and related damages arising from the award of a roughly $4.76 million public-works contract.”
RFS Corp. filed its lawsuit against the town in September of last year in response to allegations that Townsend Fire Chief Gary Shepherd was given nearly complete plans for a water main improvement project in town before it went out to bid. Shepherd’s company, Shepco, ultimately ended up being awarded the project over other bidders like RFS Corp. That case is still ongoing.
“The public had every right to know what insurance it purchased – and whether taxpayers were protected from a million-dollar claim,” Mayotte said. “Instead, the policies remained unavailable until the Town was forced to look deeper.”
After Mayotte filed the motion of voluntary dismissal, the town, the defendant in this case, filed an objection to Mayotte’s motion on Thursday.
“The Town objects to the notice NOT because it wishes to continue defending itself against Mr. Mayotte’s meritless claims. The Town’s taxpayers deserve better,” said the town’s objection. “However, in the only 14 weeks since Mr. Mayotte’s intervention, and even after the original plaintiff Christian Roman-Ramirez’s voluntary dismissal of the underlying Complaint, the Town has incurred substantial cost, expense and inconvenience at the hands of Mr. Mayotte.”
The town noted in the filing that it had made two motions to dismiss earlier in the case, and that by the time of filing it had incurred $15,000 in attorney fees in just this case. Mayotte has a second lawsuit he filed directly against the town alleging retaliation by the Select Board in response to the plaintiff-intervenor case, which Town Administrator Kieran Meehan said last month will also incur legal costs to the town.
While being the defendant, the town said in its objection that the problem with Mayotte’s motion to dismiss is that it would be “without prejudice,” meaning Mayotte would be free to bring the complaint forward again in the future.
In a statement to The Sun Friday in response to Mayotte’s claim of victory and his motion to dismiss, Meehan said Mayotte’s statement “contains a number of factual inaccuracies that warrant clarification and correction.”
“Over the last few months, I have been in communication with the Townsend resident who requested records relating to the Town’s liability insurance. Based upon the nature of her request and the context of the pending 2025 litigation, I understood that she was seeking information regarding the Town’s insurance coverage for that lawsuit,” said Meehan. “During our initial search, Town staff and I believed we had identified all responsive records. However, a subsequent, more comprehensive review of legacy archived files located additional responsive documents.”
Meehan said it would be “inaccurate to suggest that the recent production of historical insurance policies revealed previously unknown information or forced the Town to disclose information it had withheld.”
“The Town’s insurance coverage determinations made clear that no insurance coverage was available for the underlying litigation (RFS), and it has long been publicly known that the Town is represented by Town Counsel, not insurance counsel, in that matter,” said Meehan. “Assertions that residents are only now learning what insurance coverage the Town maintained, or that this information was intentionally delayed, are simply not supported by the facts.”
The same resident who made the original liability insurance records request had submitted another request earlier last week, Meehan said, which this time was directed at the policies, “not merely the previously produced coverage determinations.”
“Town staff immediately conducted another review of archived records, located the responsive policies, and produced them shortly after receiving that request,” said Meehan.
In her own statement, Select Board Chair Valerie Goodrich echoed Meehan’s assertion that the liability insurance records had been public for some time.
“Because those letters were released months before Mr. Mayotte filed his lawsuit against the Town, I cannot accept this claim of victory that his costly action somehow now forced this information into the public record,” said Goodrich. “The later production of a decade’s worth of insurance policies, unrelated to his lawsuit, followed discussions with the same resident who had previously requested those documents and adds nothing new about the 2025 litigation. The coverage disclaimers already explained what coverage the Town had, what provisions were implicated in the case, and what coverage was declined.”
Goodrich criticized Mayotte’s lawsuit for costing the town in legal fees, and said the number of court filings involved has been “staggering.”
“Mr. Mayotte chose to pursue a case that even the original requestor themselves had no interest in advancing, used generous filing extensions granted by the board to make new claims against that same board, and refused to reasonably negotiate an end to it or acknowledge the strain on town administration,” said Goodrich. “I struggle to see how that served the residents of Townsend or meaningfully improved transparency. As someone constantly weighing budget numbers against priorities, I cannot help but think about what our Town would have done with that $15,000.”
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