Melrose

Decision

Adopted

Date

April 18, 2024

Decided by

Board of Health

Also

Runs the seven-community regional program

What the records show

• The campaign’s letters were written centrally, localized afterwards. Circulating an updated pediatrician letter in December 2024, a Massachusetts General Hospital physician told the group that “the letter should be customized by naming the city and town prior to submission to each BOH.”
• The same message sets out the timing strategy. “Where possible, we should continue to meet with city and town officials in advance of hearings, and prior to the tobacco industry poisoning the atmosphere.”
• The recipients of that message are the campaign: clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s, municipal employees of Melrose, Somerville and Brookline, academics at Boston University, Northeastern and Brandeis — the names that recur town after town here.
• Melrose employs the coordinator who appears in nearly every other town’s file. She runs a seven-community program funded by the state’s Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program; her correspondence reaches dozens of municipalities outside it.
• This production supplies the other half of exchanges the towns produced in part — 3,203 files in seven batches through September 2026.

Document Library

The complete public-records production, as released by the custodian.

Every document opens as a PDF. Files produced in other formats — Word, Excel, Outlook messages — were converted for readability, with the original one click away behind a grey tag (.DOCX). Nothing has been withheld, compressed or edited: the count above is every file the custodian released. A few archives and calendar files cannot be rendered as PDF and appear in their original format.