Board of Assessors moves to executive session to consider exemption and abatement applications

The Barnstable Board of Assessors convened Jan. 22, 2026, for a routine meeting in which members approved the minutes of a prior meeting, recorded no public comments and voted to go into executive session to consider applications for statutory exemptions and abatements.

The meeting record lists Board members Robert Dolan, Bruce Beardsley and Joseph Clancy as present, with Melissa Motta, Director of Assessing, noted in attendance. The agenda included a status update on the board’s annual recertification process, but the excerpted minutes provide no substantive details about that update.

A motion was made and recorded in the minutes to approve the previous meeting’s minutes; the transcript excerpt preserves a vote-line for each listed member but the formatting in the excerpt is ambiguous and does not provide a parsed yes/no/abstain tally in open text. The minutes themselves show a later statement, “These Minutes Approved on: 3/12/2026.”

The board also moved to enter executive session, citing M.G.L. Chapter 59, Section 60 to discuss real estate and personal property exemption and abatement applications that are not open to public inspection, and Section 32 regarding returns of property held for charitable purposes. The minutes additionally note the statutory exception permitting discussion of litigation strategy if an open meeting would harm the government’s litigating position. The excerpt does not include any discussion of the substantive merits of individual exemption or abatement applications; those items were handled in closed session per the cited statutes.

The minutes list administrative closure items including signing exemption denials and abatement denials (if applicable), announcing any executive-session results, scheduling the next meeting and adjourning. The public excerpt does not include text of any denials, the identities of applicants, or the vote outcomes on specific exemption or abatement applications, which is consistent with the board’s stated reliance on M.G.L. Chapter 59 to keep those matters confidential in closed session.

The minutes record that the meeting was adjourned and include the notation that these minutes were approved on March 12, 2026. No members of the public were recorded as present for or participating in the public portion of the meeting.

Next procedural step: the board handled exemption and abatement matters in executive session; any formal actions arising from that closed session would be reflected in subsequent public records or later open-session votes if required by law.