In Search of Purpose
The Survivor Stake a Claim
Part 1 of a multi-part series examining the role of Plymouth County Government
The debate on whether Massachusetts even needs county government reached a boiling point in the 1990s. Governor William Weld, riding a wave of reform-minded momentum, pushed to dismantle what he and many others saw as a costly and redundant layer of administration. The movement was not new; complaints about patronage jobs, opaque budgets, and overlapping duties between state, county, and municipal agencies had simmered for decades. But Weld’s tenure marked the most aggressive effort in modern history to finish the job.
From the State House, the message was clear: the Commonwealth could function without most of its counties, and taxpayers would be better off if it did. County governments, Weld declared, had become “obsolete, inward-looking bureaucracies with dozens of departments and department heads that serve themselves and not the taxpayer.”
The political backdrop was perfect for a sweeping reform. Middlesex County, the Commonwealth’s largest, had just defaulted on $24 million in debt, its sheriff headed to federal prison for conspiracy to commit racketeering. Weld seized on the moment, telling reporters the collapse was “a poster child for why county government is a bad idea.” The solution, in his view, was not patchwork fixes but elimination.
Over the next few years, Beacon Hill moved swiftly. County by county, the Legislature voted to dissolve or hollow them out: Berkshire, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Suffolk, Worcester. Their powers, and their payrolls, shifted to the state. Roads, sheriffs, jails, registries, and courthouses went under direct state control.
Even today, many institutions still bearing the “Plymouth County” name — the Sheriff’s Department, the Trial Court — are in fact state-run. The sheriff remains an elected figure, but falls under the state’s chain of command. The county courthouse is part of the Massachusetts Trial Court system. The name endures; the authority does not.
Plymouth County, however, did not disappear.
“It was a remarkable time,” County Treasurer Thomas O’Brien recalled of the 1990s. “We were seeing institutions disappear that had been here since before the Revolution. Plymouth County came close to being one of them.”
What Survival Looked Like
Plymouth County’s survival was not the result of overwhelming public demand or a sweeping display of institutional competence. It was, instead, shaped by its peculiar history and position in Massachusetts’ government.
Formally established in 1685, the county traces its lineage to the original Plymouth Colony, its earliest records written in looping seventeenth-century script on parchment that still survives in the Registry of Deeds. For much of its history, county government mattered here. It built and maintained roads, ran the jails, recorded deeds, adjudicated disputes, and oversaw public health. It was also a significant landholder, owning government buildings across the South Shore and other properties. This includes, to this day, a farm and a large parcel in Plymouth.
By the late 20th century, that role had diminished. State government had already absorbed key functions, and county budgets had been pared back. In the political climate of the 1990s, it was not hard to make the case that the county government’s time had passed.
Plymouth County, however, had allies. Former Senate President Therese Murray, then a state senator representing Plymouth and surrounding towns, opposed abolishing it. Local leaders, including then-State Representative Thomas O’Brien, who would later become county treasurer, pushed back against Governor William Weld’s plan to dissolve the county. Their advocacy, coupled with internal reforms, spared Plymouth from the chopping block.
“People want county government,” former Norfolk County Treasurer Bill Connolly told researchers from Bridgewater State University. It is worth noting that, in the dozens of interviews the South Shore Times conducted in the course of its reporting, only elected officials and those currently or formerly employed by county government provided positive rationale for its continued existence.
Even before Weld’s effort, the role of counties had been waning. “You have to look at the history of counties. Prior to 1972, counties did a lot,” former Plymouth County Commission Chair Daniel Pallotta said. “They were strong and vibrant and provided a lot of services, some of which are still here. As the Commonwealth needed money, they slowly took the counties apart. In 1972, they took the District Attorneys and the court officers. All the court buildings were county-owned, and they took them. Plymouth County still owns the superior court, the Wareham and Hingham courts, and the state rents them. Then they took the highway. They still needed more money, so they took the hospitals; each county used to have its own hospital.”
That last transfer came decades later. In 2010, the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department, along with all other county sheriff’s departments in Massachusetts, was placed under state control. The move shifted employees to the state payroll, integrated the departments into the state’s budgeting system, and reclassified them as independent state agencies.
What remained was modest: the Registry of Deeds and a scattering of public programs. Plymouth County government operates under a three-member Board of Commissioners, elected countywide to four-year terms, and an Advisory Board made up of representatives from each of the county’s 27 municipalities. The elected commissioners serve as the executive branch; the Advisory Board functions as the legislative branch, approving budgets and special assessments.
For another decade, it remained a low-profile operation: three part-time commissioners, a treasurer, and a small staff providing regional services that made sense to share: the registry, cooperative purchasing programs, agricultural extension work, and dredging harbors.
“You don’t measure county government here in the billions or the hundreds of millions,” Treasurer O’Brien told the South Shore Times. “We work in the millions. It’s a small, lean operation. But we’ve found ways to make that work for our communities.”
Not everyone agreed. Former Plymouth County Commissioner Anthony T. O’Brien once called county government “an unnecessary middleman” and “inefficient, bureaucratic, and wasteful.” Notably, he has since run for county office multiple times and, according to his LinkedIn profile, has been a deputy sheriff with Plymouth County for the past decade.
Treasurer O’Brien has long argued that regionalization is the path forward. Nearly 15 years ago, he pointed to the county’s role in processing parking ticket payments for then 33 towns and administering grants for projects like Scituate’s wind turbine as examples of its value. “This isn’t the time to abolish Plymouth County,” he said. Despite more than a decade of work at the state level, many of those regionalization efforts have yet to come to fruition.
Pallotta, in 2013, summed up the county’s political position bluntly after commissioners were criticized for doubling their own pay. “We’re the bastard child of government,” he told The Patriot Ledger. “Everybody is trying to kick us.”
Through it all, the debate over whether Plymouth County should even exist never stopped. And despite its small footprint, the county often found itself in controversy, whether over allegations of nepotism, election maneuvering, land disputes, or even a commissioner allegedly caught up in a barroom brawl, according to police reports. The survival of Plymouth County government was never quiet.
COVID: Plymouth County's Big Bet for Relevance
For a decade, Plymouth County had searched for programs and services that could both generate revenue and strengthen its case for survival. Its biggest shot? COVID.
When the coronavirus pandemic struck in early 2020, Congress responded with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Signed into law on March 27, the $2.2 trillion package was designed to stabilize the economy and protect public health. It sent direct aid to individuals, expanded unemployment benefits, offered forgivable loans for small businesses, and delivered billions to state and local governments. One provision allowed any local government with more than 500,000 residents to apply directly to the U.S. Treasury for funding.
With its population just over that threshold, Plymouth County qualified. Then-Commission Chair Dan Pallotta remembers the choice clearly. “I applied for the CARES money when I was chairman. I got a letter saying you can apply for this money, so I did. A week later we got phone calls from the state asking us to withdraw the application. They said it was too much money for us to handle, we were too small to administer it, we would end up going to jail. In reality it was pretty simple to administer. We refused and the bipartisan board went along with me. We knew if the state got the money they were going to take a huge chunk off the top.”
Treasurer Tom O’Brien recalled the same moment in previous interviews with media: “We were told by the state, ‘Send it up to Boston, we’ll take care of it.’ But the federal law didn’t require that. And I thought: why should we hand over this money when we can put it straight to work here?”
Pushback came quickly. Secretary of Administration and Finance Michael Heffernan wrote that “the Commonwealth is better positioned to manage multiple federal funding streams.” Inspector General Glenn Cunha warned that “Plymouth County does not have expertise in COVID-19, public health, or public administration... [it is] not suited to evaluate competing needs.”
In a formal letter dated April 30, 2020, Brockton Mayor Robert Sullivan, alongside Plymouth Town Manager Melissa Arrighi, called on the Plymouth County Commissioners to turn over the $90 million in federal relief funds to the state. “Although counties were technically allowed to apply for this money, we feel this should be reserved for other parts of the country where county governments are robust operations that routinely administer local affairs,” they wrote.
At the time, the grant amounts the county was preparing to administer were nine times its annual operating budget and larger than any grant it had ever managed in its history.
Pallotta stayed firm. “We gave out 99% of our money and the state gave out 52% of theirs. Plymouth County received an award from the National Association of Counties for our administration of the CARES money. The state was fined $2.1 billion for misappropriation of CARES money. This is another reason why we need counties. We need to keep them in place to administer federal funds.”
The county’s performance was hard to ignore. O’Brien oversaw an aggressive distribution operation—hiring consultants and auditors, building application systems, and moving funds quickly to towns, sometimes with oversized ceremonial checks. “We wanted to make sure no money could be clawed back... and that every penny got spent... at the end of the program… our administrative costs were under 1 percent,” O’Brien said.
That efficiency caught the attention of Senator Patrick O’Connor, who admitted Plymouth County had changed his view on the relevance of county government. “Before I questioned whether we needed them, yes. But they proved me wrong,” he said. That sentiment was echoed by more than half a dozen current and former elected officials who spoke to the South Shore Times.
Just under a year after passing CARES, the federal government enacted the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in March 2021. This $1.9 trillion stimulus package was designed to support longer-term pandemic recovery, including bolstering public health, restoring local services, and revitalizing economies. ARPA created a State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund of $350 billion, providing substantial direct aid to every state, county, city, and town to address COVID-related needs
If the CARES Act was Plymouth County’s high-stakes test, then ARPA was their encore. And this time, their earlier performance had already set the stage.
For Dan Pallotta, the rationale for Plymouth County to handle the money again was clear. “There was a federal mandate to distribute ARPA funds at the local level: the federal government considers the county to be the local level,” he said.
“With ARPA, we became the model for the rest of the country,” O’Brien said, noting that other counties studied Plymouth’s approach to CARES distribution and decided to follow suit. Because they had already proven their ability to manage large-scale federal relief, the pushback that met their first effort was far more muted the second time around. “Other counties looked at what we did with CARES, saw it worked, and followed our lead,” O’Brien added, framing Plymouth’s ARPA administration as both a local success and a national example.
Post COVID
The county didn’t just distribute the funds: it turned the process into a sustained public relations campaign. Commissioners and Plymouth County Treasurer Tom O’Brien have made regular appearances at local government events, often arriving with over-sized Publisher’s Clearinghouse–style checks to commemorate individual CARES and ARPA grants awarded to cities and towns.
The ceremonies have been a recurring feature of county business. Over the past year, nearly every commissioner's meeting has included discussion of upcoming or recent check presentations. For county leaders, these events served a dual purpose: marking the financial support communities received during the pandemic recovery and reminding residents, in a highly visible way, that the county still plays an active role in local governance.
The ARPA program was not without controversy. One local state legislator was blunt in his assessment of the county’s approach. “They had no track record. No demonstrable ability. They basically just took a $90 million gamble with taxpayer money to prove themeselves. Who’s allowed to do that?”
Nowhere did tensions run higher than in Hanover. By the close of 2024, the town had left more than $1.1 million in federal relief on the table, a gap that both sides agree came down to missed deadlines, though they disagree sharply on why. Plymouth County officials say the rules were clear, posted online for years, and communicated clearly to communities. They point to repeated emails from their outside auditors, including one in June 2024, flagging that Hanover had applied for less than 15 percent of its $2.62 million allocation.
Town leaders counter that while they were working through complex projects like the Sylvester School, they received no indication from the county that their submissions were in jeopardy until late September, by which point Town Manager Joe Colangelo said it would have been risky to spend money without assurance of reimbursement.
The dispute burst into public view when County Commissioner Jared Valanzola, speaking on WATD radio in earlier this year, said a Hanover select board member was “asleep at the switch” and that the town “missed out on $1.1 million.” The comments drew immediate pushback from Board Chair Vanessa O’Connor and Vice Chair Rhonda Nyman, who demanded a joint meeting with county officials and questioned why no direct warning had been issued to the few communities lagging behind.
Numerous Hanover officials told the South Shore Times that they still believe funds were diverted from Hanover to other communities in a “political” maneuver.
The county’s ARPA website lists only the initial allocations from the program’s launch, not the final numbers. County officials say the totals “continue to evolve” as distributions are finalized.
Documents reviewed by the South Shore Times show that some communities are set to receive significantly more than first projected. Brockton, for example, is currently set to receive more than $1.7 million more than its original allocation. In Hanover, though, the number is fixed, and the political fallout still lingers.
Adding to the debate among Hanover officials: former County Commissioner Dan Pallotta, who left office at the end of 2020 after declining to seek reelection, was hired in early 2022 as ARPA Funds Manager for the City of Brockton. Records show he was paid $100,000 per year in 2022, 2023, and 2024 for that role.
Relevance and Power
For Plymouth County, the fight over COVID relief was more than an argument about money. It was a test of relevance, power, and the county’s place in modern government. It would not be the last. The story expands far beyond spreadsheets and grant deadlines, touching on everything from family connections to parking tickets to sports betting, all part of the tangled web of Plymouth County government.
Sarah Farris and Deborah Chiaravalloti contributed to this story. This reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.