Bob DeCosta Announces Write-In Campaign For Select Board Seat

His name won't appear on the ballot, but Nantucket charter boat captain and former Select Board member Bob DeCosta is running for election nonetheless.

DeCosta, an island native who operates the Albacore charter boat, announced Monday that he will be mounting a write-in campaign for one of the two seats up for grabs on the Select Board in the May 19th town election.

"I want to try to get control of all these overrides and the spending," DeCosta told the Current Monday morning. "It just seems to be that we're funding the town through overrides now, and we need to get our fiscal house in order. When I see the price tags for what things are going to cost, for the potential costs of coastal resiliency and all this other stuff, it's frightening."

DeCosta said he planned to file nomination papers to run again for Select Board earlier this year, but opted not to when he saw that Amy Eldridge was running for a seat on the board. Eldridge, however, announced on April 6 that she was withdrawing from the race.

"When Amy announced that she was going to run, I said okay, somebody that is a local who knows the island is going to run - great," DeCosta said. "I'd always said that I only wanted to do two terms and then have fresh blood in there. And then when she withdrew a couple of weeks ago, I was like, now what? And so I started toying with the idea of doing a write-in, and then people started calling me and asking me to do it. I don't know if I'll win, but it gives people an option."

DeCosta previously served on the Select Board for two terms, from 2011 through 2016, and his tenure overlapped with that of two current members, Matt Fee and Dawn Hill.

While he has been out of office for a decade, DeCosta has stayed involved in local government. Beyond watching just about all the Select Board's meetings, he's spoken out in recent years, urging accountability from Vineyard Wind following the blade failure in 2014, arguing in favor of dredging the Madaket ditch, and frequently commenting on spending articles during Nantucket's Annual and Special Town Meetings. Over the past year, he has served on a town work group that is exploring a redesign of the proposed new Department of Public Works facility.

"I follow what's going on," DeCosta said. "And for a long time, I thought I could get more done being on the outside. I felt like I could get my input in when I walked into a meeting, when it needed to be put in. But I also know from six years of experience that when you're on the board, and you bring something up, it gets a lot more attention than when you're standing at the mic in the audience. I think that I can work with this board, this present board. Matt and I worked together for six years."

A big change since then, DeCosta said, has been the advent of Zoom and remote participation in board meetings, which he believes will allow him to be present for all or most meetings despite his busy work schedule on the water during the summers.

DeCosta, who acknowledged the challenges of mounting a write-in campaign in any election, will be up against three challengers vying for the two seats being vacated by incumbents Malcolm MacNab and Tom Dixon, both of whom decided not to run for reelection. The other candidates are Brad Smith, Jill Vieth, and Cliff Williams.

DeCosta also mentioned that with his son, Ray, working for the Nantucket Fire Department, he would have to recuse himself from any related matters that come before the board should he win reelection.

"It seems, since I've got off the board, that the can gets kicked down the road a lot," DeCosta said. "We bring in consultants, we need to bring in this guy, we need to study this. We need to study it. We never make a decision. I would like to see us just make a decision, and if the decision isn't the right one, then you can always change it. Sometimes it's like the old saying: if it's called common sense, why is it so rare?"