TOWNSEND — Water Superintendent David Vigeant filed an Open Meeting Law complaint against the Townsend Select Board this week after he was apparently suspended by the board during an executive session last month.
Vigeant filed the complaint Monday against the board, Town Administrator Kieran Meehan and the town’s legal counsel for their actions during the July 22 board meeting, which included an executive session agenda item “to discuss the reputation, character, physical condition or mental health, rather than professional competence, of an individual, or to discuss the discipline or dismissal of, or complaints or charges brought against, a public officer, employee, staff member or individual.”
In his complaint, Vigeant claimed that the town’s legal counsel “kept shutting down any defense” during the executive session meeting, and he requested that the Select Board “negate all proceeding in the executive session listed,” as a response to his complaint.
Vigeant’s 10-day suspension without pay was related to what Select Board Chair Valerie Goodrich said in a July 27 letter to Vigeant was a “failure to take action” in response to multiple incidents involving a Water Department employee the Select Board alleges Vigeant had known about. The incidents specified by the board in their suspension notice to Vigeant included the employee, identified in the notice only as “Mr. Keefe,” “requiring Water Technicians to hug him at the end of every shift.”
Vigeant submitted that letter to the state Attorney General’s Office with his Open Meeting Law complaint, and under each of the listed alleged incidents involving the employee he handwrote brief responses.
“It looked mutual and no one complained,” Vigeant wrote under the claim that the employee was requiring technicians to hug him.
In another incident where the Select Board said “Mr. Keefe engaged in a physical altercation with an individual who was not in the Water Department,” in Vigeant’s presence, Vigeant wrote “never happened I was there.”
Under a third listed incident in which the Water Department received a “resident complaint during which Mr. Keefe was observed by a resident berating a Water Department employee,” Vigeant gave the employee’s full name.
“Kevin Keefe was not named but worker were yelling,” Vigeant wrote.
In their June 30 meeting the Select Board had an agenda item to “Accept Resignation of Kevin Keefe (Effective 08/14/2026).”
In the July 27 letter to Vigeant, Goodrich wrote that the water superintendent’s “alleged lack of knowledge regarding Mr. Keefe’s conduct, as well as your failure to report violations of the Town Policy that you were aware of, raises serious concerns regarding your ability to perform the supervisory duties of Water Superintendent in a reasonably competent manner.”
In an email from Vigeant to Goodrich, Meehan and other town officials dated Oct. 22, 2025, seemingly in relation to the incident in which Keefe was alleged to berate another employee, Vigeant said officials are “using me as a scapegoat because the Town Admin and selectboard did not do their job correctly.”
“You said I did not report it. When it was already reported. The Superintendent does not discipline the [town administrator] does and the select board. This is the boards and the TA failure. You did not do a proper investigation on any thing my part,” said Vigeant in that email.
In a statement to The Sun Thursday, Goodrich confirmed receipt of the Open Meeting Law complaint and said it would be reviewed by the board at a future meeting. Goodrich otherwise declined to comment on Vigeant’s complaint, citing the obligation of board members to “avoid deliberating on the merits of a complaint outside a properly posted meeting.”
The Select Board is scheduled to meet Wednesday at 5 p.m., with an executive session agenda item to discuss Vigeant’s complaint.
Vigeant’s complaint comes amid another battle involving him and the town playing out in the courts. In April, the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission ruled that Vigeant had violated conflict of interest law when he provided plans for a $4.7 million town water main project to Shepco, a local business owned by Townsend Fire Chief Gary Shepherd, before the project went out to bid.
Vigeant was ordered to pay a total of $10,000 in civil penalties, but he is now appealing the decision in Suffolk Superior Court. At the same time, Shepherd is facing his own Ethics Commission inquiry for the same case, which was finally brought to a public hearing on Aug. 5, with a decision still pending.
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