MMA.ORG
Adam Chapdelaine
Annual Report to the Members
Submitted by MMA Executive Director & CEO Adam Chapdelaine, January 2025
Welcome to the MMA’s annual conference, Connect 351 — newly rebranded and in a new location at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center! We have record attendance this year, with nearly 1,500 of you here, including 400 first-time attendees!
I’d like to talk about you, the work that you do, and how the MMA is laser focused on helping you reach your goals and achieve success in your communities. I’d like to start with a quote from author and speaker Simon Sinek. Simon is pretty great, and I’d recommend his podcast. He is also known for his books “Start With Why” and “Find Your Why.”
The following quote has been attributed to him: “Stop looking for a course of action, and instead become obsessed with understanding the cause of action.”
This quote really struck me because here at the MMA, all of you — appointed and elected officials in municipal governments all across this Commonwealth — are our “cause of action,” and we are indeed obsessed with it. We firmly believe that local government is foundational to democracy, and that all of you have been entrusted, by the residents in your cities and towns, with ensuring public safety, public health and delivering a broad array of services that establish the basis of the quality of life in your communities.
Moreover, we know that the work that you do is not easy. We deeply understand that you regularly must make decisions in a challenging financial environment. We appreciate that you are faced with ever-increasing expectations from residents that are of course difficult to meet when combined with tight budgets. We see that many of you are subject to treatment by members of the public that we wouldn’t wish upon our worst enemies. We know that you are facing all of this in an ever-changing statutory and legal environment with new laws, regulations and court rulings that impact the work that you do.
But we also see that in the face of all of this, you persevere. You continue to deliver high-quality services to your residents, you continue to produce balanced budgets year in and year out, and, amazingly but not surprisingly, you continue to innovate and find new ways to serve your community both efficiently and effectively. All of this, both the challenges that you face and the actions you take in response to them, are, indeed, the MMA’s “cause of action.”
So, what do we do about this cause? Well, I have to tell you that everyday, I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I get to wake up and come to work with a group of people that share my passion for local government. The team here at the MMA is truly obsessed with all of you as our “cause of action,” and we organize our work each year such that it is focused on advocating for you on both Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill, providing training and professional development opportunities for you and your teams and communicating with you about all things that may have an impact on municipal government in Massachusetts. Let me provide a little detail on how we do all of this for you.
To start, let’s look at the work of the MMA’s Membership Division, led by Candace Pierce. The Membership Division organizes all of the membership group meetings that many of you attend on a regular basis. This team serves the Massachusetts Mayors’ Association, the Massachusetts Municipal Management Association, the Massachusetts Select Board Association, the Massachusetts City Councillors’ Association, and the Association of Town Finance Committees. In addition, this team also serves the Massachusetts Municipal Human Resources association, Women Elected Municipal Officials (known as WEMO), Women Leading Government (as part of MMMA), and the newly formed Massachusetts Municipal Communicators. All of these groups combined to hold 44 in-person meetings over the course of 2024!
The Membership Division was also responsible for the MMA’s DEI work over the course of the past several years, and that work has paid off with the recent hiring of our first Chief Equity Officer, Jillian Harvey.
The Membership Division also organizes what has grown into an incredibly robust webinar series. These webinars are offered on a regular basis, but are also available to all of you on mma.org and through our On-Demand Library. In 2024 alone, we were able to offer you 50 webinars (almost one per week!), and these 50 offerings ended up with 12,146 registrants — with the highest single webinar attendance reaching 1,179 attendees! All of this work, both the membership meeting planning and the webinar offerings, is focused on providing all of you with opportunities to connect with and learn from your peers — notably, to learn about the topics that are most pressing on the local level and critical to your success. I’d also like to note while sharing these accomplishments that Candace Pierce, the Membership Director, has announced her plans to retire this April. Standing before all of you, I’d like to thank Candace for stellar service and wish her all the best in her next chapter.
Next, I want to talk a bit about the Legislative Division, led by Dave Koffman. As many of you are likely aware, the Legislative Division is charged with advocating for the needs of local government on Beacon Hill. They take the lead on advocating for adequate funding and for permissive legislation that allows cities and towns to chart their own course. They also lead the opposition to legislation that could impose unfunded local mandates on municipalities or curb the ability of each of your communities to maintain local control. This includes countless meetings, weighing in on hundreds of issues, and tracking thousands of bills on whether they impact cities and towns. And we know that we are facing a really tough fiscal time right now, but trust me, these are the people you want going to bat for your issues. We are confident that the work of this team has state and federal decision-makers well aware of your needs and the pressures that you face.
Another part of the work that they do is with you, through the MMA’s Policy Committees and the seasonal Legislative Breakfasts that we hold across the Commonwealth twice per year. As some of you may know, the MMA has five policy committees, and in 2024, the Legislative Division organized and hosted more than 50 policy committee meetings and convenings, with more than 100 members serving on these committees and taking part in these vital policy discussions. As for the Legislative Breakfasts, we held 20 events over the course of the past legislative session, with a total of more than 800 attendees!
But here’s why I want to highlight this work. You may recall that last year, I told all of you that the MMA’s power stems from its members. Well, I believe that as firmly now as I did then, and it’s for this reason that the Legislative Division spends so much time with so many of you. Our clout stems from your involvement — engaging with you, learning from you, and then advocating for you is how we get this work done.
Next, I want to talk about our Communications Division, led by John Ouellette. As author Elizabeth Bourgeret said, “Communication is the lifeline of any relationship.” And when we think about our relationship with all of you as members of the MMA, we know that we need to communicate with you both early and often. And this is why we have developed a diverse portfolio of communication channels so that we can reach you with important information. Of course, you know our flagship publication, The Beacon, which has 11 issues each year and is sent to a distribution list of more than 6,000 members. Anything that you need to know about local government in Massachusetts can be found in the Beacon. But we also know that sometimes you need information on more than a monthly basis. That’s why the Communications team has developed the Weekly Review, which goes out 48 weeks a year, has 2,600 subscribers and contains up-to-date and late-breaking information that is important to you serving in local government. And of course, we have our website, mma.org. The website is truly the on-demand, go-to source for municipal news in the Commonwealth — boasting more than 450 news updates posted to the site in 2024. Going forward, we are excited about continuing this good work, while also exploring new and innovative ways to communicate with you.
Next, I’d like to mention the Administration & Finance Division, or A&F here at the MMA, led by our Deputy Executive Director, Katie McCue. While they might not have the same flashy stats as the other divisions, none of the work of the MMA would be possible without this team. From human resources to accounting, to database and events management, this team is really the engine that enables all the other wheels to spin. This team also manages our wildly successful MMA-Suffolk programs, which by the end of 2025 will have held 24 Certificate programs, 18 finance seminars and four human resources seminars, graduating more than 1,000 local officials statewide. Now that I think of it, maybe they do have some flashy stats. I am thankful for all of the work that they do, and I know the other divisions appreciate them immensely as well.
Finally, I want to make mention of another critical part of the team here at the MMA: MIIA, led by Stan Corcoran. Many of you are from communities that are part of the MIIA program and some of you are not. Regardless, what I want to share today is how the team at MIIA is integral to the collective effort at the MMA that is focused on providing local officials with the programs and services that they need. I am grateful to the MIIA team and I am confident that they will continue to play a critical role in serving communities in the 21st century.
To wrap up, let me say again that, at the MMA, our WHY — our “cause of action — is YOU. We greatly enjoyed working for all of you in 2024, and we are ready to continue those efforts in 2025. Thank you for the confidence that you place in us!
Respectfully submitted,
Adam Chapdelaine
MMA Executive Director & CEO