Lincoln Select Board Renews Town Administrator's Contract Through 2029

LINCOLN -- June 8, 2026, Lincoln Select Board renews town administrator's contract, approves Farrington trail easement, and takes up Hanscom base study. The board voted unanimously Monday to extend Town Administrator Tim Higgins's contract through June 30, 2029, effective July 1, and accepted a public trail easement on land tied to the Farrington Nature Link project, where a June 2025 town meeting appropriated $850,000 in Community Preservation Act funds for the permanent protection of 65 acres. The board also heard a briefing from Adam Freudberg of the Massachusetts Military Asset and Security Strategy Task Force and Erikk Hokensen of MassDevelopment on a joint Air Force-Commonwealth pilot study examining potential reuses of Hanscom Air Force Base real estate, military housing, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and planned military construction are explicitly excluded. Eversource Arborist Matt Mitchell reported that of 271 trees initially flagged along the outage-prone 320-H8 circuit, Tree Warden Ken Bassett approved 152 for removal and 18 for pruning, with tree-caused outages on that circuit averaging six and a half hours against a statewide Eversource average of 3.3 hours. The board also voted unanimously to submit a letter to the Cannabis Control Commission requesting a one-year waiver from the state's cannabis delivery mandate and to appoint Wayne Ogden to a two-year term on the Affordable Housing Trust; the state Department of Energy Resources approved a $1 million grant for decarbonization of the Lincoln Library.