Chilmark select board chair not seeking re-election

The chair of the Chilmark Select Board announced she will not run for a second term this spring, but said that she’s leaving the board in good hands. 

“I think I was lucky to always have a helpful board along on this ride with me,” Larsen said in an interview with The Times. “Both of my fellow members are capable, smart, and strong in their support of the town. So they made it easier.”

The other members of the select board are recent electees Matthew Poole, the former health agent in Edgartown, and Jeffrey Maida, the former manager of the Net Result in Vineyard Haven. 

Larsen has been a member of the select board, which oversees municipal work and serves the public, since 2023. She was elected after Warren Doty stepped down and made her way to the top position in 2025 after former chair Jim Malkin’s term ended. 

Larsen is not the first female chair, and she said she hopes she won’t be the last. She added that she takes pride in her advocacy for women through her tenure. 

“We need more women at the top,” she said. “I feel I did my best to advocate for women whether it was constantly correcting ‘selectmen’ to ‘select board member’ [or] conducting a classification and compensation study to make sure Chilmark employees were being equitably paid.”

Larsen has deep ties in the Island community. She was a school administrator at Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School after moving to the Island forty years ago. She and her husband, Daniel, opened Edgartown Seafood before selling the business in 2023. 

Under Larsen’s leadership, the Chilmark Select Board navigated a variety of issues. In January, cell service considerations were on the agenda, and the board members recently denied Verizon’s request to build new infrastructure, which the members agreed was not enough to quell unstable signals. 

Also in January, the board underwent a request for proposal process with the Chilmark Community Center, put out bids, and chose the Community Town Affairs Council to run summer programming.

And after a presentation by a concerned resident in a select board meeting in October about the presence of forever chemicals in her water, there have been significant expansions to the board of health’s PFAs testing programs.