Roger Biagiotti Jr.

Roger Biagiotti Jr. (died 2002) was a Billerica police officer for nearly forty years and a long-serving member of the town's boards and committees, among them on the Planning Board, the Personnel Board and the Finance Committee and in Town Meeting. He worked for the town highway department from 1945 to 1948 and joined the police department in 1949, when he was listed among its permanent intermittent patrolmen; by 1950 he was a regular patrolman. On August 22, 1948, he married Lillian M. Bevis of Cambridge, who later worked at the polls as a precinct election officer from 1976 to 1990 and died on September 11, 2002.

In 1959 he and other officers petitioned town meeting to accept the state law giving police officers an additional day off duty, and in 1962 he was a deputy director of civil defense. He was elected a Town Meeting member from Precinct Six in 1967, and in March 1968 he was elected to the Planning Board, which chose him vice-chairman; within the year he became its clerk and then its secretary, and he was re-elected in 1973, defeating Richard F. Patton. His years on the board, with Joseph H. Johnson Jr., Albert A. Dickinson, Joseph Collentro, Bernard A. McDewell and Frederic R. Brown, were years of what the board called "extraordinary growth": in 1968 and again in 1969 the number of subdivisions and approvals reached an all-time high, the largest being Tower Farm Estates on the Boston Road, on the former Jones property, with some 271 lots. From 1969 he was the board's representative on the Permanent School Building Committee, where he served as secretary under John T. Glavine and later chairmen until the committee held its final meeting on December 5, 1977.

The selectmen appointed him to the Personnel Board in August 1974; he was its vice-chairman in 1982 and its chairman by 1985. He also served on the Permanent Street Acceptance Committee in 1974, the Town Charter Committee in 1985 and 1986 and the By-Law Review Committee from 1987 to 1989, and he was a member of the Democratic Town Committee from 1968 to 1992. He left the police department in 1987 and was a special police officer until 1992. He returned to Town Meeting in 1987, later representing Precinct Eleven, and served on the Finance Committee from 1986 until his death. He died on March 24, 2002, and the annual town meeting that spring observed a minute of silence in his memory.

References

1. Billerica Town Report 2002, In Memoriam: Roger Biagiotti Jr., died March 24, 2002; police department 1949-1987, Planning Board 1968-1979
2. Billerica Town Report 2002, town meeting minute of silence: Roger Biagiotti Jr., list of town service 1945-2001
3. Billerica Town Report 1959, warrant Article 17 (additional day off for police officers) submitted by Roger Biagiotti Jr. and others
4. Billerica Town Report 1968, report of the Planning Board: election of Roger Biagiotti Jr., extraordinary growth