NORWICH — There are no contested races for Selectboard this year, but two seats on the town’s governing board are set to turnover.

Matt Swett and Kimo Griggs are running unopposed, Swett for a two-year term and Griggs for a three-year term.

Swett, 53, moved to Norwich in 2000 and has been on the Fire Department for more than 20 years. Griggs, 68, is a retired college professor who recently returned to the town where he grew up.

Discouraged about national and international politics, Swett said he decided to pour his efforts into local government.

“Town politics is where you can enact the most change,” Swett said in a phone interview. “That’s why I’m doing it.”

Instead of focusing on a particular issue, Swett said he is coming on the board with his “eyes wide open.”

Although Griggs returned to Norwich every year to visit his three brothers, he still has “a lot of learning and listening to do.” Like Swett, he is “not going into this with an agenda or problems to solve.” He wants to see what the “desires and dreams of residents are, then work with that.”

The two will take their seats following what has been a year of often tense, sometimes contentious board interactions, where sharp tones and cutting comments were regular features of conversations on issues ranging from meeting procedures to the town budget.

Chairwoman Pam Smith and former chair Roger Arnold are not running for reelection.

“For personal reasons, I have decided against running for another term on the Selectboard at this time,” Smith wrote in an email to the Valley News.

Arnold, who has served on the board since 2019, did not respond to requests for comment.

Current board members Marcia Calloway, Priscilla Vincent and Mary Layton each have one to two years left on their terms.

Vincent joined the board the same time as Smith. She will miss the expertise both Arnold and Smith bring to the board, but is also excited for a new dynamic, Vincent said.

“Everyone you take out or add to the board really changes how the board feels,” Vincent said in a phone interview. “I think it’s going to be a happy board, which will be nice.”

Vincent noted there have been “disrespectful” comments made at public meetings. While she hopes the board can keep their comments more collegial, she still would like there to be diverse points of view and “spirited discussions.”

In his two decades with the volunteer fire department, Swett, now the town’s deputy fire chief, said he’s seen many town officials come and go, and he worked well with all of them.

“I genuinely like and respect each of the members of the current board and have found that they each often add valuable, unique observations and opinions to help make decisions on complicated topics,” Swett said.

Renovating Tracy Hall, adding affordable housing and increasing efforts to make Norwich more diverse are Swett’s goals as an incoming board member.

“It would be great if this next slate of Selectboard members gets along really well,” Swett said.

As recently as December, Griggs was still teaching architecture at University of Washington in Seattle. He grew up in Norwich, but moved away after high school. Last summer, he and his family moved back, but he returned to the West Coast in the fall for one more semester before retiring.

“I’m a pretty even tempered person,” Griggs said in a phone interview.

When it comes to the board members, Griggs said he is “extremely impressed by the dedication people have shown.”

Tensions on the current board have been evident for about a year.

Elected in 2023, Smith became chairwoman last March. She beat out Calloway, the former chair, in a 3-2 board vote.

 In a recording of the March 6, 2024 meeting, Arnold, who often votes with Calloway when the board is split, supported Smith, but not because he thought she’d make a good chairwoman. At the same meeting, Arnold said he considered Smith ill-informed, and since the chairwoman works closely with the town manager, he hoped Smith would “develop new empathies for the town manager form of government and the pressures and challenges that come through that office.”

Arnold then nominated Calloway to be the board’s vice chairwoman.

Calloway declined the nomination stating, “I don’t think that (serving as vice chairwoman) would be effective at all because Pam doesn’t listen very well, so I wouldn’t be useful.”

The board then elected Layton as vice chairwoman.

Calloway declined to comment for this story.

At the following meeting on March 13, Smith introduced the “Chair’s Report,” an agenda item of her own creation where she briefly outlines board business she carried out between meetings.

“I think a penalty flag would’ve been thrown at that meeting for unnecessary roughness. There were some comments that were not respectful or collegial,” Smith said during her first report.

Later that month, in an email to the board included in the March 27 meeting’s packet, Calloway described the “Chair’s Report” as “inappropriate” and an attempt to “exceed the limited authority provided by law” to the chairperson.

Last month, tensions continued through the finalization of the proposed 2026 fiscal year budget, when debate again turned into something less than civil.

During the Jan. 8 meeting, Arnold accused Smith of “grandstanding” when she asked Town Manager Brennan Duffy several detailed questions about his proposed spending plan.

“I don’t appreciate the general tenor,” Arnold said to Smith.

“That’s rich coming from you,” Smith shot back.

When Arnold tried to speak again, Smith refused to recognize him. “Roger, I think you’ve said enough,” she said.

At the same meeting, after the board spent some time debating whether to add $10,000 to an administrative assistant position, resident Peter Orner, watching over Zoom, voiced his frustrations at the state of the deliberations.

“You’ve now spent upwards of half an hour on this issue, and it’s exhausting to the public, who are here interested in the large budget issues,” he told the board over Zoom. “It’s wasting a lot of time, and it’s showing an inefficiency in the way that the board functions.”

Layton, the longest serving current board member, said in an interview this week that tensions on the board are not new.

“Over the 10 years, I have seen discussions that are as heated as we’ve seen recently and even more so,” she said.

Layton praised her departing colleagues — Smith for her hard work and Arnold for the progressive viewpoint he brought to the board.

“I really believe in Norwich as a base in bringing up new leaders,” she said. “I think we have a lot of talent.”

Smith and Arnold are expected to attend their last regular Selectboard meeting on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. in Tracy Hall.

Town Meeting ballot voting is scheduled for March 4 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Tracy Hall. The board, including its new members, is scheduled to hold an organizational meeting the following day.

Emma Roth-Wells can be reached at erothwells@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.