Water Superintendent

The superintendent in day-to-day charge of Billerica's water system, appointed first by the elected Board of Water Commissioners (see Water Commissioner), then by the selectmen as Board of Public Works, and now within the Water Division of the Department of Public Works under the Director of Public Works. The title has varied: Superintendent, Superintendent of Water Department, Supervisor or Superintendent of Water Systems, and Superintendent of Water Works.

The water works were built in 1897-1898 with wells and a pumping station on Boston Road and a standpipe. Norman A. McMillen is the first superintendent named in the commissioners' reports, at $1,000 a year, from the year ending February 1901 until 1913. George A. Stowers followed; a 1919 fire-insurance survey said he was elected yearly by the commissioners, had held office six years, had an automobile and usually answered fire alarms himself. In 1933 and 1934 the water department was run under Superintendent of Public Works Robert E. Wyman and then by a committee of the selectmen. Fred O'Hara, who had joined the department in 1914, signed the water reports as superintendent from 1935 until his death on October 27, 1963.

After the wells could not keep up, the town decided to take water from the Concord River. Town meetings in 1950 and 1952 approved a river intake, sedimentation basins and a filtration plant at the Boston Road pumping station, and the new pumping station and filtration plant went into service on January 23, 1956. Additions and improvements to the plant were voted under a 1973 article, and later reports list a separate supervisor of the filtration and storage plant. In 1981 the post became Superintendent of Water Systems under Richard A. Bento, who became Superintendent of Public Works in 1986. John McGovern then led the water division for 37 years; under him the 1956 plant at 250 Boston Road was shut down at 3:47 pm on May 18, 2006, when the new Water Treatment Plant on River Street Extension came on line. By the 2020s the plant was delivering about 1.5 billion gallons a year. Todd Melanson succeeded McGovern after the town advertised the post in June 2023.

Sources: Billerica annual town reports 1901-2025 (water commissioners' and water division reports, lists of town officers, 1919 insurance survey, 1963 public works report, 2006 water division report), and the town's June 2023 Water Superintendent job posting. Walter R. Sullivan is listed as acting superintendent from 1961 while O'Hara was still listed. The superintendent before 1900 and the end of Stowers's service (last named in 1919) and the start of O'Hara's (first signed report 1935) are not recorded in the surviving reports.