Are the Classroom Walls Closing In on Gary Christenson?

On July 28, 2026 -- the same day the Attorney General's Office told the Malden School Committee it was too late to grant an extension on a complaint accusing its chair, Mayor Gary Christenson, of violating the Open Meeting Law -- Christenson sent the City Council a two-page memo attacking a different elected official over a different Open Meeting Law matter. The Attorney General had just found that Councillor Karen Colón Hayes committed an individual violation of the law. What the Mayor's memo does not mention is that Malden's own City Solicitor investigated the same conduct eight months earlier and cleared Colón Hayes of wrongdoing entirely.

Three people are likely to be on the ballot for Malden Mayor in November 2027, and this week put all three on opposite sides of the same open-government fight. Karen Colón Hayes is the councillor the Attorney General's Office just found violated the Open Meeting Law. Jennifer Spadafora is the former School Committee Vice Chair who is arguing the Mayor shouldn't chair that committee in the first place. And Gary Christenson is the man doing both jobs at once -- using one colleague's violation to go on the attack, while a complaint against him in the other role sits unanswered. To see why Christenson's two-page memo is more revealing than it looks, it helps to know exactly what happened in the case he's citing -- and who else already looked at it before the Attorney General did.

A Complaint From a Colleague

The matter traces back to November 19, 2025, when Councillor Jadeane Sica filed an Open Meeting Law complaint against a fellow member of the Council, Karen Colón Hayes. The complaint concerned paper 432-25: the appointment of Jeffrey Donahue, recommended by Mayor Christenson, to fill a vacancy on the Northeast Metro Tech Regional Vocational School Committee left by the death of longtime member James Holland.

Sica's complaint alleged that Colón Hayes had engaged in private "daisy-chain" or "hub-and-spoke" communications with at least five other councillors -- collectively a quorum -- to shape the outcome of the Donahue vote before it ever reached open session.

Cleared, Then Reversed

This is the part of the story the Mayor's memo skips. City Solicitor Alicia McNeil investigated Sica's complaint by interviewing all eleven councillors and issued her findings on December 18, 2025. Her conclusion was unambiguous: "In this case Councillor Colon Hayes did not violate the OML."

McNeil found Colón Hayes had discussed the Donahue appointment -- not merely mentioned it, but discussed its substance -- with only three other councillors: Peg Crowe, Ari Taylor, and Chris Simonelli. Adding Colón Hayes herself, that made four. A quorum of the eleven-member Council is six. Calls with Council President Amanda Linehan, Councillor Ryan O'Malley, and Councillor Stephen Winslow, in the Solicitor's assessment, were procedural -- about whether the item was on the agenda, not what to do about it -- and so did not count.

McNeil did add a warning of her own. "Although Councillor Colon Hayes did not violate the OML, the content of the text messages and voice message are worrisome," she wrote, urging the Council to "refrain from even the appearance of deliberation" going forward.

Seven months later, the Attorney General's Office reached the opposite conclusion. In its July 8, 2026 determination, the AGO counted the O'Malley and Winslow conversations as deliberation after all -- the deciding difference. "Councillor Colón Hayes's individual communications reached a quorum of the Council and improper deliberation occurred," the determination reads, citing a text message in which Colón Hayes told a colleague she was "hoping that this can quietly be [tabled]" in favor of another candidate. Where McNeil had counted four councillors reached on the substance, the AGO counted six: Colón Hayes, Crowe, Taylor, Simonelli, O'Malley, and Winslow.

"In this case Councillor Colon Hayes did not violate the OML." — City Solicitor Alicia McNeil, December 18, 2025. Seven months later, the Attorney General's Office found the opposite.

A Resident Asks the Question City Hall Hasn't

For the July 28 hearing, Malden resident Bonnie Galayda submitted public comment laying out the discrepancy in plain terms, asking why McNeil's December 18 letter itself noted that "additional information was discovered" at a December 16 Council meeting that "raised doubt as to the veracity of the responses to the investigation" -- and then never revisited her conclusion in light of it.

A 45-Day Clock

Beyond the finding itself, the AGO's determination orders something with its own deadline: the release, within 45 days of July 8 -- by roughly August 22, 2026 -- of every written communication, including texts and emails, that councillors exchanged about filling the Voke Committee vacancy. The Council must also certify to the Attorney General's office that the release was completed. Whatever those communications show beyond what McNeil and the AGO already excerpted is, for now, still to come.

The Same Night, a Different Complaint

All of this is what item 345-26 on the July 28 Council agenda was actually about: a mandatory after-action accounting for a violation the Attorney General had already found and closed. It is not, on its face, connected to the still-pending complaint Bruce Friedman filed against Mayor Christenson in his separate capacity as School Committee chair -- the subject of Part 1 of this series, and a complaint the AGO says was never even brought to a School Committee vote on how to respond. But Christenson chose that same evening -- the day the AGO told his own Committee its extension request came too late -- to submit a two-page memo on the Colón Hayes matter instead, positioning himself as the defender of Open Meeting Law compliance in someone else's case.

What the Mayor's Memo Says — and Doesn't

Christenson's memo accurately describes the AGO's bottom-line finding: that Colón Hayes "violated the Open Meeting Law by improperly engaging with a quorum of the City Council," including by "attempting to sway votes" and suggesting the item be removed "quietly." Those characterizations track the determination's own language.

What the memo does not mention, in two full pages responding to what he calls "a series of inaccurate statements," is that his own administration's Solicitor investigated the identical conduct in December and concluded no violation had occurred. A reader of the memo alone would have no way to know that McNeil's office once agreed with Colón Hayes' account, or that the AGO's reversal turned on a specific, arguable question -- whether a hike and a "which items are on tomorrow's agenda" phone call count as deliberation.

A Third Candidate, Making the Structural Argument

Meanwhile, Jennifer Spadafora -- long-serving member of the School Committee, who resigned the Vice Chair role earlier this year -- recently published a call for Malden to change its City Charter so the School Committee elects its own Chair, rather than the Mayor serving in that role automatically. "When the same person is both the city's chief executive and the Chair of the School Committee, it can create a power imbalance," Spadafora wrote. "Even when everyone is acting with the best intentions, it can make it more difficult for the School Committee to function as an independent governing body."

Three likely candidates for Malden's November 2027 mayoral race are now on record, in the same week, around Open Meeting Law and public body governance: one candidate was found to have violated it and was publicly attacked by the Mayor for doing so; another argued the office of Mayor should be structurally walled off from the body at the center of the Mayor's own unanswered complaint; and the Mayor himself presides over a School Committee that has yet to respond to allegations against its own chair, while missing the deadline for a desired extension. ("Because the complaint was filed with the public body on June 25, 2026, the request for an extension of time should have been made no later than July 16, 2026. Where the request was made more than 14 business days after the complaint was filed with the Committee" the Division of Open Government declined the city's request for an extension.) And all this was happening while the City Council is under an order to release its members' private communications within 45 days.