SOUTHAMPTON — The three people elected to the Select Board at Tuesday’s annual town election include one incumbent and two newcomers.
Francine Tishman won reelection to a two-year term on the five-member body. Tishman received 625 votes, beating out Nilda Cohen, who received 309 votes, and Dylan Mawdsley, who received 244.
Jon Lumbra and Joy Piper both won three-year terms to the board with 739 votes and 601 votes, respectively. Matthew Roland came in third with 513 votes.
Tishman said she was running to continue the work of stabilizing the town’s finances. She is the retired former president of a nonprofit working on employment issues for people with disabilities and a past member of the Finance Committee.
Tishman said Wednesday that she’s pleased that town voters had confidence in her. She said her first priority will be getting a handle on expenses, given that voters rejected a $718,467 override question on the ballot Tuesday that would have provided funding largely for Norris Elementary School as well as other municipal expenditures. She said that will mean the town will have to live “not within our means, but almost below our means, at this point in time.”
“That’s going to be a lot of work and a lot of difficult decisions that will impact a lot of people,” Tishman said.
Lumbra, the School Committee chairman and chief financial officer of the Dowd Insurance Agencies, said his background would provide the Select Board experience in the budgeting process and financial matters. Lumbra previously served as city treasurer in Holyoke. He said Wednesday that his short-term focus will be figuring out the impacts of the override failure and looking for any ways to lessen them.
“The long term is: how do we start to build some sort of forecasting so that we can look beyond a year-to-year budget?” he said.
An attorney and Southampton Conservation Commission member, Piper ran on a platform of increasing affordable housing and improving transparency and communication in local government. Efforts to reach Piper were unsuccessful Wednesday.