[Leming]: Are we just doing 8.1 or Section 8 as a?
[Leming]: Oh, just 8.1.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So just for the folks watching, I already did publish a blog post about Section 8 on my website.
[Leming]: So hopefully, none of the recommendations I'm going to make on this tonight come as a surprise.
[Leming]: If you're interested in reading about it more, it's on my website, mattLeming.com.
[Leming]: So with 8-1, my main issue with it is that I don't
[Leming]: really see a benefit to keeping it over public participation that's already in the city council agendas.
[Leming]: So what this does is it lets anybody who gets a petition that is signed by 25 voters to put essentially anything they want on a city council agenda or school committee agenda.
[Leming]: And then folks are free to
[Leming]: basically submit as many of those as I want.
[Leming]: Either body has to hold a hearing on it.
[Leming]: And then, yeah, but I mean, the thing that gets me about this is that
[Leming]: people are already allowed at city council meetings to show up and say anything that they like people have done that before to speak about different issues, and they're still free to do that in the, in the future so
[Leming]: My recommend so my recommendation.
[Leming]: My first recommendation is just to strike the whole thing I do see I see it as something that could easily be abused, particularly because the signature count is so the threshold to get something on an agenda is so low.
[Leming]: I did communicate with one member of the charter study committee about this and there, I think the justification for this was that previous in previous years advocates had such a hard time getting elected officials to respond to them.
[Leming]: And so they just want a mechanism to sort of get elected officials to listen and respond, I think.
[Leming]: In some of these, if there's a hearing on the agenda, I don't think that elected officials necessarily are put in a position where they have to respond to something.
[Leming]: There is a mechanism for doing so in section 8-2.
[Leming]: But yeah, my personal view of this, and I can't make a motion because I'm not on this subcommittee, but if my colleagues
[Leming]: my colleagues feel similarly, then I would recommend this be struck, or if not, then at least the threshold of 25 signatures be raised.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: My main thing with this is I don't see the material benefit of having this, given that we already have public participation, what I've seen happen in those public participations, where they often do take the form of a discussion regardless.
[Leming]: One thing that's on my mind with this and the back and forth about the potential legal ramifications
[Leming]: really do a whole lot to enforce my confidence in this measure.
[Leming]: But one thing that I dislike is just the idea that having a free petition in their section in there could make it unclear to residents that they're perfectly free to come to a city council meeting anyway without a free petition and just say what they like.
[Leming]: So there's that.
[Leming]: I do see a way that, especially with the 25 signatures, I do see plenty of opportunity to abuse this.
[Leming]: And I think from what I've heard, this whole subcommittee is generally in favor of at least raising that threshold.
[Leming]: Just just a general comment just a little bit more broadly than this like I do notice that, you know, when making different arguments for and against different parts that go into this charter.
[Leming]: People have like.
[Leming]: I think people have been pretty selective about when they use public support for these different things in their favor and when they just want to ignore public support in favor of their own opinions or experiences.
[Leming]: I mean, you know, I've heard folks from the Charter Study Committee say that they really want a certain part of the charter to pass or be changed because public feedback or comment supports that.
[Leming]: But then there's other parts where
[Leming]: If opinions happen to disagree with the public feedback that they've gotten, then you try to discount that.
[Leming]: So I think that if we're going to have this argument, sorry, have these debates, then we should at least be consistent with how we treat survey data, for instance.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: And otherwise, I think that
[Leming]: This particular section, again, I just don't see a whole lot of material benefit on it.
[Leming]: I'm still open to having that be explained to me.
[Leming]: But yeah, no, that's my take on it.
[Leming]: Well, so I did have questions I was hoping the Collins Center could address as to the relationship between this and 8-3, if that's acceptable.
[Leming]: So I went over these two and thought about them in pretty big detail with
[Leming]: So my understanding of both of these is that basically for 8-2, a citizen collects 250 signatures, and there's a committee that's formed, but I'm gonna mainly focus on the signature counts.
[Leming]: Then they then collect signatures from 5% of voters, which for Medford would be about 2,200.
[Leming]: My understanding is that that's registered voters, which would be the 44,000 number, correct?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: And then that forces the city council or school committee to vote on that particular issue.
[Leming]: And if they vote no or they do something in lieu, then those citizens have an additional two months to collect an additional 5%, so 4,400 total.
[Leming]: And then that initiative gets voted on the ballot.
[Leming]: Is that inaccurate?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And so with 8-3, it's a bit more stringent.
[Leming]: It basically says if the city or council or school committee vote on something and a group of citizens disagree with it, they basically have three weeks to collect signatures from 12% of voters, which is about 5,300.
[Leming]: which would temporarily stop that measure and then put it up for a special election.
[Leming]: So I guess the only thing I, the only kind of twist here was I understand that the advantage of 8-3 would be that it stops the, it stops the measure temporarily to wait for the special election.
[Leming]: But other than that, is there sort of like any substantive difference between an initiative and a referendum?
[Leming]: So could somebody effectively use an initiative to accomplish what they would have done in 8-3 regardless, just with the lower signature count and more time to get those signatures?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: But okay, but what I'm saying is for an initiative measure, if the council or school committee does something, can the citizens just have an initiative measure to undo that?
[Leming]: Or is that not allowed for some reason with the initiative rules?
[Leming]: Yeah, so I guess what I guess, so I do understand the advantage here of having 8-3 be able to temporarily stop that.
[Leming]: But I also see it as like three weeks to collect 5,300 signatures just seems like kind of an impossible standard for somebody.
[Leming]: And it just seems a lot more likely to me that citizens that oppose a particular motion would just go with the 8-2 route.
[Leming]: Or is there, I just want to sort of understand the logic, because I've kind of been thinking about these different situations.
[Leming]: And I just don't understand why somebody would spend three weeks collecting 12% of signatures when they also have the option to basically collect 10% of signatures in, what is it, three, five months.
[Leming]: OK, so the referendum never doesn't actually get placed on the ballot.
[Leming]: OK, so there is no special election under 8-3.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yeah, yeah.
[Leming]: I'm just trying to understand why somebody would prefer a referendum, which gives them less time to collect more signatures when they could just go for an initiative.
[Leming]: Oh.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Well, no.
[Leming]: So I do understand that that is one
[Leming]: The only advantage that I can see is the stopping it under the referendum so they get three so they do get three weeks to stop it, it just seems like that's a very.
[Leming]: I just don't just when it comes to collecting 5300 signatures I just don't see why any group of citizens would prefer to.
[Leming]: to go for the much higher standard instead of just going for the 10%, which they could just collect anyway.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Yeah, that's the only advantage I can see.
[Leming]: Sorry, I was a bit confused at the sudden promotion.
[Leming]: No, no, I mean, I was actually just genuinely curious on the logic behind the two of those.
[Leming]: I mean, I think what you, to me what you did say about the justification for the timeframes and what Chairman McDonnell just said also do make sense.
[Leming]: Are we not talking about recalls?
[Leming]: Well, yeah.
[Leming]: So we brought up the percentages and keeping them all at 15%.
[Leming]: And so with recalls, we're going to get into this conversation, because these are related.
[Leming]: I do have a couple of concerns.
[Leming]: One is the two-year terms.
[Leming]: issue.
[Leming]: So my reading of the Charter Study Committee's final report was that the recalls did seem to be targeted at the mayor having a four-year term.
[Leming]: I mean, that's what was written there.
[Leming]: Like they said, we do need recalls because we're proposing to extend it.
[Leming]: But they apply to all elected officials.
[Leming]: And having the
[Leming]: having a recall on a two-year term, and I've received this feedback, it's actually in the, the Charter Study Committee collected like four comments about recalls, and three of them disfavored it.
[Leming]: One of them just seemed to think it was only for, seemed to only favor for the mayor.
[Leming]: But like one thing that we always hear is that, is that like basically the recall period for a two-year term is just the next election.
[Leming]: So that is one criticism of that that I always hear.
[Leming]: The other thing with the percentages in reference to a recall is for the proposed ward, district, et cetera positions, the standard seems to be very different for at-large positions versus ward positions.
[Leming]: So 20%
[Leming]: Right now, in this current draft, it says 20% of voters.
[Leming]: You have 40 days to collect that.
[Leming]: That's about 8,800 signatures for at-large Councilors, school committee members, and the mayor.
[Leming]: That's about 1,000 for award Councilor.
[Leming]: Or if we go with districts, it's about 2,200.
[Leming]: So the standards for those just seem to be
[Leming]: very different, and it seems that certain positions could be more subject to the, let's say it like, for lack of a better term, the threat of a recall, whereas others, it's just much harder to mobilize that number of people in that period of time.
[Leming]: The other concern that I also have is just with 8-7, which says that the city council can just put a recall, like my reading of it anyways, that the city council can just put a recall on the ballot, which
[Leming]: for any of these positions, which is another thing that makes me a little bit iffy about that, because that just seems like a lot of power for this body.
[Leming]: Okay, so 8-7 does not imply that the City Council can just do that, okay.
[Leming]: Okay, because this is another thing that I communicated.
[Leming]: Okay, so so that so that so that's that's a misconception on my part under this the City Council does not have that authority.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Thank you for thank you for clarifying that.
[Leming]: Regardless, it did seem like a lot of the recall was to prevent a situation like the one in Fall River from happening.
[Leming]: So that, I think, was the most egregious instance of the need for a recall and a constitutional crisis that happened there.
[Leming]: But it also seems like this draft of the charter does kind of solve that, because it automatically throws out any elected official who is convicted of a felony.
[Leming]: So that does seem like some of those extreme cases are addressed by that.
[Leming]: area.
[Leming]: So those are those are my kind of so okay.
[Leming]: So those are my thoughts on the recall.
[Leming]: And if my reading of 87 was incorrect, then I apologize.
[Leming]: I'll update whatever it before on that.
[Leming]: But but yeah, so that's just to put it out there for my colleagues.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: No, just want to reiterate the other point of recalls that I disfavor, but maybe we just want to emphasize it in this case.
[Leming]: And I don't know how this is played out in other municipalities.
[Leming]: It's just that the at-large positions have a much, much higher
[Leming]: amount of effort required to initiate that recall than award Councilor, and everybody gets equal votes on this body.
[Leming]: So in a situation where it takes 1 4th or 1 8th of the signatures to get one elected official on the ballot versus another, that's something where, like, have you seen that dynamic affect any other municipalities or can you comment on it?
[Leming]: But for like a ward position, that just makes them more?
[Leming]: Well, yeah, but that does make them, I mean, doesn't that, in effect, make them more vulnerable to potential threats of a recall?
[Leming]: Well, it's a smaller pool, but the amount of manpower required to get those signatures is.
[Leming]: Is there a lot for at-large Councilors in comparison?
[Leming]: Why is that?
[Leming]: I'm just curious, just actually.
[Leming]: The other thing the other thing on my mind with like, and this only applies to out large positions really and like the mathematics of a recall is that for like let's like hypothetically let's say we did like a recall on like a member of this body, the actual threshold of votes to be able to get onto this body seems like for a lot of positions, it would be.
[Leming]: It's a lower threshold to get on than it would be to keep your seat.
[Leming]: So I received the least votes to get elected to city council out of anybody on this body.
[Leming]: Actually, I think I believe four people received less than half the ballots cast.
[Leming]: But in order to retain your seat in a recall, you need more than half the votes.
[Leming]: So that's another thing that makes me iffy about this is that it's a different standard for keeping your seat in a recall versus actually getting on in the first place.
[Leming]: And I understand that's a hypothetical, but just from a mathematical standpoint, that's the other thing making me iffy about applying recalls.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: No, that's all I got.
[Leming]: That's all I got.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Yeah, that was, so in another piece of the Charter Study Committee's review, there was, I believe it was in North Brookline, where two select men put on a, or like, I guess, put on a pride parade, and then people started collecting signatures for that recall to get them voted off because they put on a pride parade.
[Leming]: I believe that was part of the Charter Study Committee's research.
[Leming]: And that never even made it onto the ballot, but it made the news.
[Leming]: which is kind of another thing that, like another component of this.
[Leming]: So City City agency is defined under one seven.
[Leming]: Um, my understanding it says any multiple member body, any department, division or office of the city of Medford.
[Leming]: So my understanding is that would
[Leming]: cover it?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So just some general requests for the consultants and city staff either to clarify what's currently
[Leming]: in the zoning or what some of the options could be moving forward.
[Leming]: So I'm currently working in a city group that is investigating the possibility of starting up a community land trust and we were looking at a couple of different potential city-owned parcels around the city and some of them were
[Leming]: some of them were constrained by current zoning.
[Leming]: So even if we were to decide to put a community land trust in some of these areas, it would be very little community owned affordable housing that could actually be built.
[Leming]: So I would like to know just for a future meeting or
[Leming]: what are the options for even an email?
[Leming]: What some options for something like that would be like, um, what are the cities?
[Leming]: Uh, there's a city.
[Leming]: What are the cities are currently currently offer in terms of an inclusionary overlay?
[Leming]: Um and is there a possibility of putting
[Leming]: is infill zoning going to be a part of this?
[Leming]: That's another thing that I would like to see just kind of mentioned or explored.
[Leming]: I've also been pushing a lot for a transportation demand management program because, which I understand we're going to discuss in April, but Everett has implemented that very successfully, and I would
[Leming]: like to see if some of the consultants would be able to reach out to some of the planners within Everett to understand some of the details of how they've implemented that and whether it's only applied to urban areas or whether something like that usually goes into residential areas.
[Leming]: Essentially just a little bit more information on some of these
[Leming]: not specifically the zoning maps, but some of the rules that could apply to residential areas.
[Leming]: So, thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So not to go down, not to explore various steps of the rabbit hole too much, but just to remind the planners and consultants, some of the folks at Housing Medford and I did work on a draft of an ADU ordinance a couple of months ago, which we
[Leming]: discussed pretty extensively.
[Leming]: So I just want to make sure that that draft is on your radar.
[Leming]: And if it's sort of buried in layers of emails, then I can resend that to you.
[Leming]: Um, as well.
[Leming]: Um, I understand that some parts of it might have changed because the some of the recent like state laws been updated since then.
[Leming]: So it's possible that, um, that that version of the ordinance parts of that version of the ordinance could be irrelevant.
[Leming]: But a lot of the work on rethinking 80 years has been done by local housing advocates.
[Leming]: Um, do y'all currently have that drafted?
[Leming]: like sitting around somewhere.
[Leming]: I know that Danielle, we had a meeting about that.
[Leming]: I'd explored the topic specifically.
[Leming]: Parts of it were, it was like,
[Leming]: the owner occupancy requirement I think was the was kind of the biggest like area of disagreement.
[Leming]: There were sort of good points on both sides about that and there is also like you know converting whether just like details of like converting a garage to an ADU versus like an attached ADU things like that but a lot of it should be in the draft of the the draft ordinance that we went over.
[Leming]: Although I do understand that it was
[Leming]: many moons ago at this point that we last discussed that.
[Leming]: But it is coming up on the timeline to get to that part of the discussion.
[Leming]: So I'll just re-share the documents, because I'm actually looking at a document in my Google Drive which has
[Leming]: a lot of edits from the both of us from almost a year ago.
[Leming]: So that probably is a good refresher, but it doesn't have to be re like we don't have to go and down the rabbit hole too much during the meeting.
[Leming]: But thank you.
[Leming]: Hello, thank you for the comment.
[Leming]: So part of the very small comment that I made earlier, which I requested the consultants to look into, were different provisions to essentially incentivize or allow different forms of affordable housing in, in,
[Leming]: residential areas.
[Leming]: And so that's what I'm hoping to hear about at the next meeting.
[Leming]: Two points about affordable housing, which is that generally the more housing that they're
[Leming]: that there is in a given area, the more affordable it becomes.
[Leming]: I mean, usually when they're making like an apartment building or construction, developers are strongly incentivized to make a certain percentage of the units there be affordable, which normally means that the income can't
[Leming]: go above 80% area and area median income if you're going to live there.
[Leming]: We can't just make it so that you have to have 100% affordable units for developers otherwise nobody would try to develop there and they wouldn't be able to
[Leming]: make a profit.
[Leming]: And that's just that's the reality.
[Leming]: So when mandating affordable housing, there are parts of that under the zoning, which we'll get to later, which do which strongly
[Leming]: incentivize that.
[Leming]: So the TDM program that I've been pushing to for, um, in other communities, those actually do contain strong incentives for affordable units.
[Leming]: Um, I have to look at the details of the green score.
[Leming]: I'm not sure if that's, if that's a part of that, but it, it could be, um, yeah, the just, I'm just kind of thinking, um,
[Leming]: Yeah, so, oh yeah, and so there are other instances in Medford where we do have 100% affordable units like in Wachling Court, but the thing about that is that it's usually a bunch of layered government grants to actually be able to build that.
[Leming]: That's kind of something that goes outside of zoning itself.
[Leming]: So the point is when making affordable housing, it's not like something where we can
[Leming]: wave of magic wand to make it happen, but in creating this new zoning, there are very strong incentives that we can do to kind of make it so that when developers are making their spreadsheets, it would be the most profitable option for them to create a percentage of affordable units.
[Leming]: And again, in general,
[Leming]: the more units that you end up creating, the more new building that there is, the more affordable a community becomes in general.
[Leming]: So thank you very much.
[Leming]: I think that what you bring up is a wonderful point that is being experienced by many people in our generation.
[Leming]: Yeah, a lot of the reason we're doing this in the first place is to incentivize affordable housing in the city so to hear my colleagues say that this won't do anything to help affordable housing is wrong.
[Leming]: I mean it's, it's just plain wrong I'm sure he's going to come up with a retort for that but we talked about.
[Leming]: like we're talking about building more, we're talking about mandating a certain percentage of affordable units.
[Leming]: That's all like, that's a lot of what I, that's a lot of what I campaigned on.
[Leming]: I mean, my colleague yesterday was basically saying that when residents were coming up to him and asking him about zoning, like he couldn't explain it to them.
[Leming]: And now he's coming here and saying that,
[Leming]: Now he's coming here and saying that he can say definitively that it's not gonna help affordable housing.
[Leming]: No, I mean, it's politically convenient to demonize this whole zoning process.
[Leming]: I don't know why, but like that is a huge reason behind doing this in the first place is to help out with Medford's affordability problem.
[Leming]: So that's wrong.
[Leming]: Like, I'm sorry.
[Leming]: I don't know why you'd say that.
[Leming]: Yeah, most of this Council likes to engage in
[Leming]: productive projects and facts, most of us.
[Leming]: But, you know, these issues do become politicized and that's inevitable.
[Leming]: One thing I would like to point out, because when I answered the question initially, I tried to focus on
[Leming]: what the zoning is doing to help out with this.
[Leming]: But the fact is that for a long period of time, this city council, not this current term, but this body in general didn't really care too much about affordable housing or just never really that high on anybody's to-do list.
[Leming]: One of the projects outside of zoning that we've been engaging in is the
[Leming]: implementing the Affordable Housing Trust, which is basically it's just a pile of money that the city can build up and then put towards affordable housing projects.
[Leming]: I believe it was back in 1989 or so that cities were allowed to make them, and Somerville created their Affordable Housing Trust way back when.
[Leming]: Medford, when it was initiating its linkage fee program, it could have created an Affordable Housing Trust,
[Leming]: but it never did.
[Leming]: It created trusts for water and sewers, parks.
[Leming]: It created trust for the parks, never created an affordable housing trust until 2023.
[Leming]: So in creating a lot of the infrastructure, the instruments of municipal governments that so many other communities took for granted when it comes to supporting affordable housing, Medford
[Leming]: is really behind the curve when it comes out.
[Leming]: We have a lot of catching up to do.
[Leming]: And the city council, part of the reason that we've been so productive in so many different ways is because we have been busy implementing a lot of these things that so many other communities take for granted.
[Leming]: One of those is the affordable housing trust one of those is trying to fund a nexus study to update our affordable housing linkage fees that we could actually put some money towards affordable housing.
[Leming]: And I hope that with all of our efforts, including the zoning including everything else that we're able to put a dent.
[Leming]: in this problem.
[Leming]: So, I mean, my colleague said, there's a lot of other factors that play into this.
[Leming]: This is an issue that goes into the federal government.
[Leming]: This is an issue that you can blame the federal government on, the state government.
[Leming]: And yes, it is an issue that gets politicized.
[Leming]: Zoning is gonna get politicized.
[Leming]: It already has been in these chambers.
[Leming]: But even so, we are going to push forward because
[Leming]: I knocked on about 8,000 doors to get elected.
[Leming]: And the thing that I kept hearing from the most people from the residents of Medford was, why hasn't anything changed significantly in like the last 50 years?
[Leming]: And zoning is a really big part of that.
[Leming]: So, thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you all for listening and apologies for making this meeting go on for longer than it needed to.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: We met to draft a newsletter.
[Leming]: Thank you very much to Councilor Lazzaro for doing that.
[Leming]: And we also
[Leming]: to discuss some preliminary questions regarding the open data policy and sent to the mayor and chief of staff a number of questions to send out to department heads to clarify what sort of internal data department heads have.
[Leming]: I would move to approve.
[Leming]: Yes, I'd like to thank my colleague for putting this forward.
[Leming]: So to offer a little bit more insight into the background of this.
[Leming]: So a lot of the parents who have been advocating for these programs have been doing so for years and years, and they haven't, I think at this point, a lot of them have just been advocating so long, they feel like they're talking to a brick wall.
[Leming]: So part of the,
[Leming]: purpose of this is to just make sure that everybody that the parents, Council, the city and Medford recreation are on the same page in terms of vision for what these programs look like and they're, it's, it's,
[Leming]: a lot of details that like, well, I guess seem like details to the folks, to some folks, but a huge deal to the parents, like whether or not the programs are going to be designed for just kids or kids and teens, whether they're going to be sports based, what times are going to be.
[Leming]: So I think the parents would just like some clarity with Medford recreation on what, on what that would look like.
[Leming]: And it would be,
[Leming]: productive to get these discussions on the public record.
[Leming]: I also am excited to hear that my colleague is working with neighboring communities and implementing and starting up these sorts of after school programs.
[Leming]: I think that's a wonderful initiative.
[Leming]: Ready?
[Leming]: We'll now have a meeting of the Medford City Council Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: One absent.
[Leming]: Meeting is in order.
[Leming]: First thing we're going to do is work on and approve, potentially approve the monthly, the, sorry, monthly newsletter.
[Leming]: Just gonna really quickly share my screen.
[Leming]: So I'd like to thank Councilor Lazzaro for drafting this month's newsletter and sending it out to folks.
[Leming]: drafted a couple of changes to this, just a few minor changes to the, excuse me, just a few minor changes to the blurb, as well as some minor grammatical changes.
[Leming]: Do y'all have access to?
[Leming]: Oh, okay.
[Leming]: I can put,
[Leming]: Well, I'm just going to make sure that in terms of one moment, I can put the link to this one in the zoom chat if you're on zoom.
[Leming]: I'm just going to share this.
[Leming]: Zoom again.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Share.
[Leming]: All right, now I'm just gonna paste the sharing link into the chat for this one.
[Leming]: I just wanna look over the edits.
[Leming]: And yeah, so basically it's just a, I think this is getting pretty routine right now, by now, which is great.
[Leming]: I basically just clarified the only edits I made to Councilor Lazzaro's text, which she sent out to the committee yesterday was to,
[Leming]: have the was to clarify the status of the Salem Street Corridor rezoning, um, its status and the Community Development Board, um, as well as on the Governance Committee.
[Leming]: I just want to clarify that mainly what we talked about were changes, um, to City Council composition, since that was probably the most, uh,
[Leming]: that we probably spent the most time discussing that particular topic.
[Leming]: So I just figured for clarification purposes, I wanted to add that in there.
[Leming]: Then that is, that's about it.
[Leming]: I added a the in there, the calendar year 2025.
[Leming]: Councilor, oh, I see Councilor Tseng put his,
[Leming]: put his up first, I'm just going to turn his mic on.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Do you think we should also clarify exactly what was referred out of governance in that case?
[Leming]: I mean, it's not for sure.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: I'm just going to say the committee referred
[Leming]: Refer discussion of any potential edits.
[Leming]: Yeah, something along those lines.
[Leming]: Yeah, I would, I would say, um,
[Leming]: combined, it would probably make it a little bit cleaner to combine the points about CCOPS and the welcoming city ordinance from the January 14th meeting.
[Leming]: So that's one way to sort of shorten it a little bit.
[Leming]: We also so that that's yeah and then January passed a resolution for more activities.
[Leming]: We approved.
[Leming]: I don't know if that's a good way to describe it.
[Leming]: Right.
[Leming]: Hold on.
[Leming]: I'm going to unshare the screen to keep some emails private, but I'm not gonna
[Leming]: I just added your emails to this.
[Leming]: I mean we really did just do a lot of January 14 meeting.
[Leming]: And i'm also just going to go and combine the two liquor licenses.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: I mean, I think this is overall pretty good.
[Leming]: I'm just going to wait on Councilor Tseng to finish his thoughts on the City Council composition.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think what you have right there is fine, Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Did they, do you know if they pushed it off?
[Leming]: Okay, I'll just put it a later date.
[Leming]: We also, wait, so just from the commissioner,
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: January 29th meeting.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: And we're developing an open data policy.
[Leming]: I guess we don't need to get that specific.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think just just saying we began our work developing an open data policy or January 29 the meeting is sufficient.
[Leming]: I mean, you should be really quick.
[Leming]: bullet points.
[Leming]: We also haven't actually had that discussion yet.
[Leming]: So we have yet to, um, but no, I think that what we have now is we have now is fine.
[Leming]: Any other comments from Councilors?
[Leming]: January 28, we passed the resolution.
[Leming]: Is it Lunar New Year or the Lunar New Year?
[Leming]: Is it Lunar New Year or the third?
[Leming]: Never mind.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Any other comments from councilors?
[Leming]: Do we have a motion on the floor?
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: On the motion to approve
[Leming]: the current draft of the newsletter.
[Leming]: Including edits, right?
[Leming]: Including edits by Councilor Callahan, seconded by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, will you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Wait, what?
[Leming]: Sorry?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: The clerk is he's still he's still preparing the notes.
[Leming]: Sorry about that.
[Leming]: Your apology is accepted.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Affirmative.
[Leming]: Negative.
[Leming]: The motion passes.
[Leming]: Next thing we're going to discuss is the development of the open data policy.
[Leming]: So we
[Leming]: introduce this as something to refer to committee.
[Leming]: Initially, Councilor Tseng and myself, and prior to the meeting, after Councilor Tseng and I did a bit of research on this, we distributed a sample ordinance from the city of Cambridge, as well as an executive order from the city of Boston, which gives sample language of other open data policies.
[Leming]: Um, we also drafted a couple of questions to, uh, give out to, uh, department heads to just basically get some more information about what kind of data they're sitting on.
[Leming]: As we, uh, uh, develop some of the parameters of this policy, uh, Councilor Tseng, is there anything you'd like to say?
[Leming]: I can read them.
[Leming]: So before I go to other Councilors, I'm not going to read through the entirety of the Cambridge and Boston sample ordinances.
[Leming]: Given that Cambridge and Boston tend to be a lot more well-financed to support things like this, I developed a list of questions for some of the department heads that I think have relevant data sets, along with just inquiries about their
[Leming]: staff capacity to implement these things.
[Leming]: So the first question goes to the mayor, which is just what is the administration view as practical concerns to enacting an open data policy along the lines of Boston and Cambridge's policies?
[Leming]: And this is because it is the mayor is the person in charge of department heads.
[Leming]: So they will, they do have a lot of ability in overseeing this, even with the ordinance enacted.
[Leming]: The general question for department heads, the general request for the mayor is to request that city departments report to the resident services and public engagement committee on what data or records are currently
[Leming]: commonly requested them, what data or records they collect and what data or records they would feel open to sharing with the public and why or why not.
[Leming]: I also thought of six or five other departments that I know I've specifically worked with or tried to work with their data in the past.
[Leming]: So these are just kind of more targeted questions.
[Leming]: First, the elections office.
[Leming]: How far back does elections data historically go both in a digital format and paper archives?
[Leming]: And do you have the staff capacity and resources to digitize Medford's election data from before 2005?
[Leming]: So this one in particular is interesting because the elections website just kind of posts PDFs and sort of inconsistent formats.
[Leming]: And the data only goes back to 2005.
[Leming]: I do know that they have paper records in the basement that go back further, but
[Leming]: I do need to respect the staff capacity of the elections office when it comes to their ability to go down there and write down all of those data points from previous generations.
[Leming]: even though I personally would be interested in seeing it.
[Leming]: From the Finance Office, how far back does Medford digitized budgetary data go?
[Leming]: Are there legal or ethical concerns with publishing the bulk data in an analyzable format?
[Leming]: Do you have the staff capacity and resources to publish bulk budgetary data consistently for public use?
[Leming]: The idea behind this one is that usually budget data is published in either different meeting records or in a big PDF that's released every year, and that's excellent, but it would be useful to have data in a
[Leming]: kind of more of a spreadsheet format so that could be analyzed with software so that residents can track if they wanted two different uses of the budget over time and how that's evolved over the years, which I think would help inform the public conversation around this.
[Leming]: From the assessor's office, how far back does Medford's historic assessor's data go?
[Leming]: Are there legal or ethical concerns to publishing bulk property value assessment data in an analyzable format?
[Leming]: And do you have the staff capacity and resource to publish bulk assessor's data consistently for public use?
[Leming]: So the assessor's data right now publishes everything via the Vision Government Solutions website, which is actually, so all assessment data is available online.
[Leming]: But again, if you wanted to analyze like the average assessment value of all Medford property or the all Medford property in like West Medford or something like that, it would be very difficult to do that via what's currently available.
[Leming]: I do know that the assessor's office has internal data.
[Leming]: that they use that they could just put online in spreadsheet format, so I don't think this is big ask.
[Leming]: From the DPW, does the DPW use spreadsheet data internally to keep track of road repair streets and so on?
[Leming]: How far back does this data historically go?
[Leming]: Are there any legal or ethical concerns with publishing this data openly?
[Leming]: Again, just residents want to see how what roads are being repaired and just being able to analyze that historically, so that's more of an open-end one.
[Leming]: And from the building department, the same question about
[Leming]: inspections, permitting requests, and so on that would be publishable as a database for the properties around Medford, legal, procedural, ethical concerns with publishing the data, how far back they decided to go historically, and the staff capacity question.
[Leming]: So the motion on the floor would be to send these questions out to the mayor and the relevant department heads, but I'm also interested in hearing if my colleagues have any
[Leming]: thoughts or anything that they would like to add.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan and then Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Um, would we be able to just, um,
[Leming]: add that because in the second line, the general request, I think, um, covers a lot of what you mentioned.
[Leming]: It's a request to the mayor and city departments to report to this committee anything that they think would be interesting.
[Leming]: Essentially, Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: I could take that, but I see that Councilor is saying also, did you want to address that or do you have your own?
[Leming]: Yeah, so
[Leming]: This does come with the caveat in a lot of these questions about staff capacity.
[Leming]: So we are asking that, and that is a concern, especially if, I mean, we can't just copy the open data policies of cities that have a much larger budget than ours wholeheartedly.
[Leming]: But there are, the point of these questions is to sort of figure out if there are,
[Leming]: low-hanging fruit, I hate that term, but it is used to describe the situation, that they could just easily post to their website.
[Leming]: So I know, for instance, that that's the case with the assessor's office.
[Leming]: They already work with spreadsheet data internally, and it really wouldn't be any skin off their back to just put it onto the website instead of the typical databases.
[Leming]: And with the elections office, it's really not that much data.
[Leming]: It's really just typing out the spreadsheets that they normally publish in PDF formats into something that's a little bit cleaner.
[Leming]: Councilor?
[Leming]: But yeah, that is a concern.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: Did you?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan and then Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay, we could add that as an additional boil point under General Councilor was our.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Missing the horse for the forest.
[Leming]: Yeah, missing the horse for the forest.
[Leming]: Putting the cart before the trees, something like that.
[Leming]: So yeah, I'll address some of Councilor Lazzaro's points.
[Leming]: So my thinking on this is like when residents are discussing a budget, oftentimes those discussions do get a little bit, let's say,
[Leming]: misdirected because it is, unless you've dug through those giant PDFs before, it is a little bit difficult to find them, whereas if hypothetically a bunch of Excel sheets of budgetary data were available for multiple years,
[Leming]: Then you could get like a few residents who are very interested in that to just like comb through those and like really be able to find out what the patterns are.
[Leming]: I think the state does a very good job of providing that data at a very bird's eye view for the city.
[Leming]: Now I think that
[Leming]: staff capacity to support this would really come into play when like if we're like asking departments to develop these databases or APIs and stuff like that, which is mentioned in the Cambridge's open data policy.
[Leming]: I just don't think that we have the software engineering capacity to do that, but if it's something as simple as asking the assessor's office to publish
[Leming]: their PDFs, or sorry, their Excel spreadsheets of historical assessment data openly so that that can be combed through.
[Leming]: I think that's a good place to start.
[Leming]: That wouldn't have too much task capacity.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro?
[Leming]: Yeah, no, I always appreciate good conversations here about staff capacity because we do need to be
[Leming]: realistic about that, and that does tend to dominate a lot of conversations in this room, so it's always welcome.
[Leming]: But in any case, Councilor Tseng, did you record in a master document all of the proposed edits that we've been speaking about so far?
[Leming]: No, I think I think that was that was about it.
[Leming]: There was requests.
[Leming]: Um, that the mayor and city departments, I suppose, would capture Councilor Callahan's initial comment on that.
[Leming]: That could be an additional one.
[Leming]: But otherwise, I think that that's pretty much everything.
[Leming]: Otherwise, I think that that's all the edits that we discussed so far.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: You going to email it to me?
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: On the
[Leming]: Wait, oh, amen.
[Leming]: One moment, I'm gonna, sorry.
[Leming]: Everybody's, okay.
[Leming]: Sorry, I'm like doing a, I'm doing a, okay.
[Leming]: Okay, for the amendment, just.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Tseng, I believe I actually heard Councilor Lazzaro second that one.
[Leming]: Yes, yes, Councilor, I think, I feel like people who attend on Zoom often miss the valuable seconds.
[Leming]: So I'm gonna say that it was Councilor Lazzaro who seconded it this time.
[Leming]: With apologies to all.
[Leming]: So.
[Leming]: Thank you, thank you.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Four in favor, one absent, motion passes, meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: I'll try to be brief as possible.
[Leming]: No, no, I'm just putting in the chat right here a zoom chat spreadsheet that was literally I just copied and pasted it from the from something that the assessor gave me.
[Leming]: So if folks are
[Leming]: see their property tax bills and they're a bit confused about this, then this is a read-only spreadsheet.
[Leming]: But if you go to File, Download, then you'll be able to download the spreadsheet and input your FY 25 and 24 assessed home values
[Leming]: into under the green column and that should give a breakdown of the of your third and fourth quarter payments as well as the impact from the override and I hope that that can clarify.
[Leming]: any confusion that residents might have had when they got their tax bills in January.
[Leming]: But at the end of the day, if you add up the Q1 to Q4 tax bills, then it should just add up to that $8.80 per $1,000 of assessed property value instead of 837.
[Leming]: But you do have to add up all of them in aggregate.
[Leming]: So yeah, I just wanted to share that resource for folks.
[Leming]: I put it out over my own mailing list, and I'm just hoping it could be out there for people to look over and mess with to understand the numbers.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Yeah, so just looking at the original text, and I just peeked at the B paper, I'm more inclined to support the text of the B paper.
[Leming]: With the original text of this resolution, I have mixed feelings about it.
[Leming]: Whereas the city did not educate or prepare our residents in their overwhelming tax bill, I do agree that
[Leming]: better communication could have been done prior to the release of the third quarter tax bill just to explain to everybody what was happening.
[Leming]: So I can get behind that.
[Leming]: But the line here, whereas the increased taxes have negatively affected our homeowners, things like that.
[Leming]: I worked with a lot of parents who are homeowners who worked very hard to see these passed.
[Leming]: I was on Monday night in a meeting with some of the school committee of Melrose who just tried to have an override and it failed.
[Leming]: And they had to lay off 17 teachers because of that.
[Leming]: And in Medford, we didn't have to do that because of those parents who worked so hard to see these overrides passed.
[Leming]: So I don't think it negatively affected homeowners because
[Leming]: A lot of those homeowners had kids, and their kids are benefiting by teachers not being laid off.
[Leming]: And the homeowners are going to benefit with extra staff in the DBW to repair a road.
[Leming]: So again, I definitely think that there could have been more education around the calculation of the tax bills earlier on.
[Leming]: and obviously any tax increase will have its upsides and downsides, but I don't see a need to budget inch when I say that we absolutely needed the override and it is doing a lot of good.
[Leming]: We had a school committee meeting that involved a budget that was not depressing for the first time in ever.
[Leming]: People actually got what they wanted because we actually had extra money to invest in our schools.
[Leming]: So the overrides were a good thing.
[Leming]: That's all I have to say.
[Leming]: No, I was just gonna recommend that.
[Leming]: No, I was just gonna recommend to go to admin finance.
[Leming]: I mean, parking is part of the culture here.
[Leming]: So to clarify the rule change, it was on the January 14th agenda, which I'm looking at now, the refer to committee for further discussion was put before the hearings section.
[Leming]: So I'm not sure if that is necessarily supposed to be that way.
[Leming]: But the point is that
[Leming]: I think this body needs to start being honest with itself.
[Leming]: We do talk a lot.
[Leming]: And once we get going, it's kind of hard to stop.
[Leming]: And once you start with the refer to committee for further discussion, which I'm sure I did two weeks ago, then that's like really when that meeting goes.
[Leming]: So the point of the rule was to make it so that the hearings come directly after the reports of committees.
[Leming]: And it's just meant to be one of those automatic,
[Leming]: automatic things.
[Leming]: And then we get to the refer.
[Leming]: So it's a small change.
[Leming]: But last time, we did have the folks from the establishment just kind of waiting here until 11 when we could have cleared them really quickly.
[Leming]: But we kind of forgot about it and then decided to suspend the rules.
[Leming]: And so this is just meant to, the idea behind this is that we
[Leming]: usually get through the beginning of the meeting pretty automatically, reports of committees and so on.
[Leming]: And then I just would like the hearings to come directly after that, to not become the culture that we suspend rules and start taking things out of order until the hearings are done.
[Leming]: Well, in that case, it does sound like multiple Councilors have kind of different thoughts on how to address this.
[Leming]: So I would motion to, I'm not sure whether to table it or to send this to committee so that it could be worked on a bit further pending Councilor Scarpelli's discussions.
[Leming]: Okay, well, governance committee is pretty busy, but we'll find a time.
[Leming]: Yes, and just to just be clear.
[Leming]: So I do understand the intention behind the referred to committee for further discussion.
[Leming]: I've just found that when Councilors get to talking about their own resolutions, they do kind of tend to go off.
[Leming]: So
[Leming]: uh, you know, talk a little bit more than maybe is intended.
[Leming]: And so the intention is just to get the hearings out of the way before that process starts.
[Leming]: But if, uh, but either way, I would motion to refer this to governance.
[Leming]: So to support this, I've been in, I've had some conversations with the mayor about this particular project, because I've been generally advocating for her to fund an affordable housing nexus study, which would help us to, which would help the city to establish an affordable housing linkage fee program, which would end up
[Leming]: getting a lot more money into affordable housing than that initial investment.
[Leming]: And my understanding is that the revenues from this sale would be able to fund that.
[Leming]: Now, I do share my colleagues' concerns about potentially changing the character of the neighborhood, but I think
[Leming]: a lot of that would be addressed with zoning.
[Leming]: So developers can't necessarily do whatever they want with it.
[Leming]: I do sympathize with the need for right of first refusal, but as the attorney just explained, we can't legally do that.
[Leming]: So given the options, I think it would be best to vote in favor of this.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Oh, I'm on, I guess.
[Leming]: So I'm on the community land trust working group.
[Leming]: It's still very early in the process, but there are a number of city-owned parcels that we're currently investigating.
[Leming]: This isn't one of them.
[Leming]: There are just better options out there for other pieces of land that could be there.
[Leming]: I don't wanna like name any particular parcels because we still need to like
[Leming]: look into each one particularly like individually but this isn't this is just proposing to use the proceeds of that and one of them is to afford a nexus study which would then be used for for the purposes of actually developing a program that would then fund the affordable housing trust.
[Leming]: So it is pretty
[Leming]: needed to get that initial capital in order to fund the studies that would then put more money into the Affordable Housing Trust.
[Leming]: So I mean, I mean, I think that getting getting this through as soon as like, as soon as possible without any delays would be
[Leming]: would be the appropriate move personally just because we have been talking about a nexus study since last year when we were updating the linkage fees and we can't really do any more with the linkage fees until we get that study underway.
[Leming]: So I understand that selling off city-owned land is a pretty, can be a pretty sensitive topic, but if this land hasn't been used since 1950, then I really don't see much of a reason to delay much more on this personally.
[Leming]: Thank you, Chair Sang, for letting me speak.
[Leming]: Just
[Leming]: To clarify for the folks at home, neither Councilor Callahan nor I are on this committee, which means that we can't vote or make motions, but we are at the invitation of the chair able to speak.
[Leming]: The one concern that I had was eliminating the part that says the mayor and city council is that you likely would need some support from the executive branch when advertising for the positions that go
[Leming]: that would go into that.
[Leming]: So it would help to, you know, have the support from the executive branch to be able to put out feelers.
[Leming]: I fully support having it be confirmed by having them be confirmed by a vote of the city council, though.
[Leming]: So that's just that's just one thought as a potential consequence of removing the mayor and city council, keeping it just city councils that I think would be you do need some staff support for this kind of thing.
[Leming]: I would imagine.
[Leming]: Um And also the city solicitor would be Under under the mayor as well.
[Leming]: So that's another concern I would have with removing that explicitly.
[Leming]: I did have some questions about this for the call in center.
[Leming]: If I'm if I'm able, um
[Leming]: So this struck me as a, so two questions.
[Leming]: One, is this something that is typically in ordinances in other cities?
[Leming]: And if so, what usually results from that?
[Leming]: So have there been, are there usually like pretty substantial changes that come out of this?
[Leming]: committees, periodic reviews.
[Leming]: Are there any specific instances you can think of where this might have affected policy in the past?
[Leming]: I just feel like a little bit more historical context would help me out with this one.
[Leming]: So the real point of this is to make sure that the ordinances are consistent with any updates to the charter.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'd also just suggest as a potential compromise here, and I understand that this option wasn't really investigated too much by the Charter Study Committee, but having a 5-4 system, five at large, four district based as a possible in between option.
[Leming]: I can't make a motion for that, but I
[Leming]: think it does.
[Leming]: I think that that would address some of the concerns with some of the words being too small and also expand the council, which I hear which I think a lot of residents have really been asking for.
[Leming]: I do agree with my colleagues on some of the
[Leming]: issues with expanding the council, namely the length of meetings.
[Leming]: So I would support a change to the council rules limiting individual councilor speaking times that would only go into effect after the expansion of the council, if that were the decision that this body ended up making.
[Leming]: That would be
[Leming]: that those rules wouldn't necessarily go into the charter itself.
[Leming]: But I strongly believe that it would help to make meetings more efficient and keep a keep a cap on the time that these meetings end up going to.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor...
[Leming]: No questions, just like to say I'm very glad to see this get up and running.
[Leming]: And I fully support the initial investment of the Affordable Housing Trust.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Just looking at this, it says 98,285 on page 9, but I'm seeing 526 right below that on the construction.
[Leming]: The 526 is for a playstead, so I apologize if there was an error.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So, yeah, I was thinking that that might have been a typo.
[Leming]: So just want to make sure that that's caught before it's referred to.
[Leming]: Would we need to add into that a motion to rescind
[Leming]: the money given from the stabilization funds along with that?
[Leming]: No questions again, but I just like to say, I'm glad to see this happening.
[Leming]: Glad to see a space being made for a daycare and afterschool programs and welcome to city hall.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you, Liz.
[Leming]: Wonderful presentation.
[Leming]: I'm glad to see this.
[Leming]: Glad to see this coming for the council.
[Leming]: Actually, just if you could clarify, Council President Bears, since your comment earlier indicated you might know something about this.
[Leming]: So I'm actually also a member of the EAU Church, just like Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Could you clarify sort of the
[Leming]: ethics issues behind behind this, if any, or like you mentioned that we could still vote on this, because we're not personally benefiting by this even if we are members of the church.
[Leming]: Oh, I... You were just gonna do the same thing.
[Leming]: Yeah, no, I was, well, I was just gonna say, like, I'm personally comfortable voting yes on it, but just to align with Councilor Lazzaro and keep consistency, I'm just gonna abstain.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Two minor questions.
[Leming]: First, what do you think the timeline is going to be for hiring the three workers?
[Leming]: Like how long do you think it'll be before we can see them working on potholes around the city?
[Leming]: And two, can you give us a ballpark estimate of how much
[Leming]: the city was spending on contracts per year to hire out outside crews to do spot repairs?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Just for some, Council President Bears, just for some clarification, so you mentioned, I believe part of that motion was, for instance, making all NR2 into NR1.
[Leming]: Just to clarify, is that a, I mean, would that mean that all of the current NR1s get updated to include two-unit dwellings and historical conversion of two to three units, or would that mean that all
[Leming]: And our twos get that requirement for two-unit dwellings removed.
[Leming]: Well, I'm sorry.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: I don't know if I could support President Bears's motion.
[Leming]: I mean, I think you do need additional density, particularly around the T stops.
[Leming]: I mean, I personally don't see the need to sort of increase the
[Leming]: the amounts of single unit dwellings quite that much.
[Leming]: So yeah, I personally like it as it is.
[Leming]: Would the motion be to send it to regular meeting then?
[Leming]: Kids need air conditioning, so I'm going to be supporting this and I'd move to adjourn.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So I'm a data scientist by trade.
[Leming]: And whenever I communicate with residents and add an email, I usually like to run some numbers.
[Leming]: I often look at historical housing prices and things like that that come from the state data bank.
[Leming]: And whenever I try to bring any of that data
[Leming]: Whenever I try to bring my eye over to the city, it's always a bit of a challenge.
[Leming]: If you go on the elections website, for instance, they do release historic elections data, but it's all in kind of PDFs.
[Leming]: It's occasionally a Google spreadsheet.
[Leming]: It's all very inconsistent.
[Leming]: If I try to look at historical data from the assessor's office, it is all available.
[Leming]: In a website if you want to look up a particular address, but if you want to do bulk analysis of the trends find the average price find the average assessed price of a certain neighborhood, for instance, that state is very difficult to come by, even though it is available within the assessor's office.
[Leming]: So this is a way to inform discussions among residents as well as department heads and city staff when they're making these sort of decisions.
[Leming]: It's a way to make all of our decisions a lot more numbers driven by making data from different apartments accessible in a format that is easiest to analyze.
[Leming]: So I'm personally very excited about this.
[Leming]: I'm very excited to get into the weeds about this in committee and
[Leming]: I look forward to the discussion in the coming months about it.
[Leming]: Thank you, President Bears.
[Leming]: Before I was in public office and about six months after, I was a mentor for a very wonderful charity called Partners for Youth with Disabilities.
[Leming]: It's basically like a big brother, big sister kind of a program, except it's for youth who have a number of disabilities.
[Leming]: I was working with a kid in Somerville who was on the spectrum, and it was also something that I studied a little bit more abstractly in grad school.
[Leming]: Working with him, we met up usually once a week.
[Leming]: I understood the challenges that not only these kids go through, but also their parents, as well as the amount of extra support that kids with disabilities need.
[Leming]: And very recently, Councilor Callahan and I, as well as you, Council President Bears, were approached by a group of parents of
[Leming]: kids and teenagers with disabilities who had been advocating for years for more city support for their kids.
[Leming]: Oftentimes they just wanted to have a group that would let them meet up after school to play board games, or really do any kind of
[Leming]: socialization to get them out of the house, any kind of support.
[Leming]: And so the purpose of this resolution is to first give these parents, a number of whom are here tonight to speak about their experience, to give them a platform to talk and make public some of the challenges they've been through over the years, and also to prioritize some staff support
[Leming]: for their kids during budget season.
[Leming]: It could come through increased support to the Medford Recreation Department.
[Leming]: It could come through other positions, but I'll stop talking because I'm looking forward to what they have to say.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: So, so I do I do agree with the idea of having an additional motion but there's a. So I've been talking to a lot of different city staff about where the appropriate budget request would be initially it was a part time position under Francis office, I spoke to Kevin Bailey I think that.
[Leming]: The most concrete ask would probably be a therapeutic recreation specialist, as well as an office manager under the recreation department, which would give them enough staff to be able to support these programs and likely integrate into that collaborations with other towns surrounding cities.
[Leming]: It could also come in the form of
[Leming]: something this would cost the city less, but I think we should have more staff in the Recreation Department in addition to this.
[Leming]: A community development block grant fund with a non-profit like Communitas.
[Leming]: Patricia was partnering up with her church in order to find a space for that.
[Leming]: Partnership with an organization such as that would also be another concrete ask.
[Leming]: I would make the motion to
[Leming]: request for the budget season additional staffing under Medford Recreation or another department that could support this kind of programming for the upcoming budget season.
[Leming]: So preferably under Medford Recreation, but if there is flexibility there and it would be more appropriate to be in another department, that could fulfill that motion.
[Leming]: That's that's not really in the I mean, that's a separate process.
[Leming]: Yeah, that's that's kind of a separate process.
[Leming]: I would just like to thank all of the advocates and all of the people who had lengthy discussions about this in the preceding months and years.
[Leming]: As is often the case, it's us sitting here on City Council that are
[Leming]: passing these ordinances, but it's really the residents of the city who make, lend us their expertise, make their voices heard, and convince us to support policies that make Medford as welcoming a city as possible.
[Leming]: It's really them that deserve the credit for this.
[Leming]: I think this is a
[Leming]: an appropriate measure to pass given that we're going to see a change in administration in about a week.
[Leming]: So I'm very proud of all the work that went into this.
[Leming]: And I'd just like to thank the folks who are here today, particularly from Medford People Power and the ACLU who helped us out on this.
[Leming]: So thank you very much.
[Leming]: Yes, I sent an email to both the chief of police as well as the school committee requesting feedback on the draft of the welcoming city ordinance.
[Leming]: I invited the chief of police to come to the relevant committee meetings where we were going over this.
[Leming]: Didn't hear back.
[Leming]: I heard back from a couple of members of the school committee and incorporated their feedback into it.
[Leming]: So yeah.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank everybody who spoke out about the ordinance.
[Leming]: Just one small point to address.
[Leming]: So even if something like this were to affect federal funding, I would be fully in support of it anyway, because that doesn't factor into my calculus.
[Leming]: But you do need to consider that we've already been through one Trump administration.
[Leming]: PolitiFact, it does state that while he did issue executive order attempting to cut funding to sanctuary cities, to welcoming cities, those actually largely failed.
[Leming]: I mean, they were held back by courts.
[Leming]: Most of those ended up being struck down in court.
[Leming]: So maybe it will succeed the next time, but it actually didn't succeed the first time.
[Leming]: It was just well-publicized.
[Leming]: So that's the only point I want to make about that.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President.
[Leming]: So this is something that was originally introduced in May.
[Leming]: And it was an idea of the veteran services director, Veronica Shaw.
[Leming]: So I know that it's often beneficial for folks on city council to take credit for this, but really the credit for the idea and all the work for this goes to both Mrs. Shaw, as well as the very supportive staff at
[Leming]: housing families who've agreed to initiate a pilot program around this.
[Leming]: Essentially, the Veteran Services Office has a small amount of discretionary funds, which Ms.
[Leming]: Shaw wanted to use as an incentive to landlords who choose to rent to veteran renters, which would help with some of the discrimination often faced by this country's veterans in attempting to find
[Leming]: housing.
[Leming]: So this a lot of the legwork behind this was informing that partnership with housing families.
[Leming]: The amendment that we see here in, uh, in the city's ordinances, section 2765 housing incentives did come after very lengthy discussion with legal.
[Leming]: Basically, the wording of it is to keep in is
[Leming]: to keep in line with the fact that one, the city can't just give money directly to individual citizens.
[Leming]: We need to partner with a nonprofit and the under state law, the only individual in the city who has the right to create a contract with a nonprofit is the city's mayor.
[Leming]: So the wording of this is a little bit wonky, but it basically says that the,
[Leming]: mayor in collaboration with the veteran services director can form a partnership with one of these nonprofits and that the funding would come from the veteran services office for this for this particular program.
[Leming]: So I'm very excited about it.
[Leming]: There's a lot of work that is
[Leming]: already gone into forming this program.
[Leming]: And because I basically see this as a very minor amendment to the duties of the city's ordinances of the veteran services director, I would motion to waive all three readings and pass this directly.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Sure.
[Leming]: So
[Leming]: Right now, they're the two moving parts that are first the homeworld petition going into the State House, which.
[Leming]: I believe they should be hopefully submitted when they convene.
[Leming]: And then if it gets approved, it will allow the city to do those regular updates.
[Leming]: The other part of that is we were advised by the planning department that
[Leming]: It would be best to finish the affordable housing nexus studies before we went forward with actually updating leakage fee ordinance to include a direct link to the affordable housing trust and as I explained there are some
[Leming]: legal reasons behind that.
[Leming]: So if the ordinance were passed before there was a study justifying it, then it could be struck down in court.
[Leming]: So the draft language for that is all finished.
[Leming]: It's all completed.
[Leming]: I've been corresponding with the mayor and she's getting the money
[Leming]: she's told me to actually fund this $80,000 Nexus study to put money from the Capital Improvements Program into the Affordable Housing Trust.
[Leming]: And then once that's underway, we could just officially pass the edits, which again, have already been discussed extensively in committee.
[Leming]: Sure.
[Leming]: So that whole project kind of split off into two things.
[Leming]: So a couple of the things that I was working on initially ended up kind of being papers that I submitted to Inns Associates for the planning process.
[Leming]: The commercial vacancy tax, um, I think it became clear during the 1 meeting that we had on it that it would require.
[Leming]: probably meeting a few more meetings with building department and other parties to planning department to figure out the future of that, but I also submitted a request to the planning folks to include a building vacancy
[Leming]: uh, tax, which is a building vacancy, I would say a fee, which is something that has been implemented in other cities without the need for a home rule petition.
[Leming]: And it's not quite the level of a tax, but that's kind of like the other manifestation of that.
[Leming]: Um, it would just come up later in the zoning process.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: We have a residence guide in English.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng, for making that.
[Leming]: It needs to be made multilingual.
[Leming]: We'll do that later.
[Leming]: Modernizing city council communications has really been the major project of this.
[Leming]: Um, we have basically every meeting we draft a newsletter, send it out.
[Leming]: We also have YouTube streaming, which is pretty cool.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank all my colleagues for creating the listening sessions.
[Leming]: So far we've had three with the Arab community, the Portuguese speaking community and seniors.
[Leming]: Um, it was found in practice that these were kind of difficult to like, it was difficult to like organize all of these in, um,
[Leming]: Um.
[Leming]: Practice and kind of like a one off fashion.
[Leming]: So we're going to continue to do that.
[Leming]: But Councilor Lazzaro and I have also decided to start scheduling regular listening sessions at the senior center.
[Leming]: Uh, next year.
[Leming]: Um, we.
[Leming]: Past a and also, um, like to thank Councilor Cal and for work on the upcoming listening session at the West
[Leming]: Harmon Zuckerman, PB – He, Him, His): Have a welcoming ordinance like to thank Councilor Tseng for introducing that last year.
[Leming]: Sorry for all the jumping around that you're doing.
[Leming]: I just kind of made a text list so that I can do this quickly.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Harmon Zuckerman, PB – He, Him, His.:
[Leming]: : A welcoming ordinance.
[Leming]: Harmon Zuckerman, PB – He, Him, His.:
[Leming]: : Which was passed for first reading last night.
[Leming]: And hopefully will be passed for a third reading on January 14.
[Leming]: I don't know if this was in there, but if this is in the governing agenda, because it was kind of put on there as an ad hoc thing.
[Leming]: as a result of the veteran services director efforts.
[Leming]: But we're working right now on a veteran veteran rental assistant program, which is set to be discussed in council on the 14th and hopefully passed for a first reading them.
[Leming]: But I still have to submit that paper.
[Leming]: Um, Councilor Callahan and I, this is another one that's not on the agenda, but these things kind of crop up are also working with some, um,
[Leming]: uh, mothers of kids with disabilities, uh, to, uh, create after school programs for them.
[Leming]: Uh, there, a lot of the stuff mentioned here is some of the commission, uh, work that Councilor Tseng is working on.
[Leming]: I know that there are, uh, he's doing a lot of behind the scenes work on a human rights commission ordinance.
[Leming]: Um, I don't, I'm not always a hundred percent aware, um,
[Leming]: what is going on behind the scenes.
[Leming]: Some of these were introduced before I was on council, but whenever he does have progress, I make sure to make time in the committee so that we can move on those.
[Leming]: I know that the, I believe that the data policies that are mentioned there haven't been worked on, worked on a whole lot, but that could be something that we start on the next year.
[Leming]: And that is all that I have.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: Withdrawn.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Present
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I find the records in order and move to approve.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President.
[Leming]: At the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee, we discussed and heard public comments in favor of the Welcoming City Ordinance, which we are discussing tonight.
[Leming]: We also drafted a newsletter and briefly discussed some scheduling of the City Council's upcoming listening sessions.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you, Council President.
[Leming]: So I didn't do this earlier because I wanted to hear what the folks from the DBW in the room had to say during public comment.
[Leming]: And it is a point that I have a lot of sympathy with considering that I work a job where I get
[Leming]: uh, urinalysis testing in front of my colleagues at least three times a year.
[Leming]: So, um, but there are, there are, uh, other issues with this resolution that I have mainly OML considerations, which has been discussed in this council before.
[Leming]: And I want more information about the private investigator issue, uh, as well as, uh,
[Leming]: the fact that I'm not sure about the city council stepping into strictly school committee issues.
[Leming]: So I'm going to go and invoke rule 21 on this.
[Leming]: We can move on.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: No, I'm keeping, I'm keeping my rule 21 invocation.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'm just going to share my screen really quickly to this Google document that I have.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Can everybody see that?
[Leming]: Hello?
[Leming]: All right, great.
[Leming]: So we went over the text of this in the most recent meeting of the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee meeting.
[Leming]: Following that meeting, I had some lengthy discussions and feedback from the City's legal teams, as well as some lawyers that work with the ACLU who are involved with Medford People Power.
[Leming]: And I was kind of doing a little bit of back and forth to figure out what sort of language both parties could agree upon.
[Leming]: Before I get into it, I'll also quickly add that this version that I'm working with contains a slight change from what was forwarded to my colleagues earlier today, because just before the meeting, I believe it was Councilor Callaghan who noticed some misspellings under whistleblower protection.
[Leming]: I ended up amending that in this current draft.
[Leming]: But essentially, the reviews by the city's legal team
[Leming]: clarified the relationship throughout a lot of this ordinance with respect to the city's working relationship with federal agents and federal law and sort of how that works out in practice.
[Leming]: So there's a couple of points here.
[Leming]: For instance, the use of local resources.
[Leming]: What you can see here is in green, these are the edits that were provided.
[Leming]: And these are sort of edits that
[Leming]: This kind of covers situations where if someone is detained and they end up getting fingerprinted as a result of a criminal proceeding, then that biometric data would end up going into a sort of a centralized government database, which is just how criminal
[Leming]: enforcement works, both on the federal and local level.
[Leming]: But that doesn't really say, but that's kind of like separate from its potential relationship with ICE.
[Leming]: And there's just a few, there's a few other things here that
[Leming]: kind of that site-specific federal laws.
[Leming]: One thing that came up that the ACLU lawyers pointed out was this phrase right here, an officer employee of Medford Police Department may participate or assist with an operation led by a federal immigration agency to detain persons for civil immigration enforcement purposes unless it is in direct response to a request for immediate response on a temporary basis for officer safety purposes.
[Leming]: or assistance in the apprehension of an individual for whom there is an active arrest warrant issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
[Leming]: This officer safety phrase in quotes is actually fairly common to include in these sorts of ordinances.
[Leming]: And there is a history of court decisions about the use of officer safety and asking for assistance.
[Leming]: So I'm comfortable including that in there.
[Leming]: Otherwise the most the biggest changes that Yes.
[Leming]: Yes, yes, it does.
[Leming]: The main, so I'll get to that.
[Leming]: So the main points that the city brought up was the complaints enforcement, et cetera, bits that were added in there at a point in the editing process where
[Leming]: We originally had this complaints, this complaints procedure, but that actually that actually was redundant to the internal policies of the Medford Police Department.
[Leming]: So we ended up deleting that and this other cause of action that there that ended up that turns out that that just replicates things that are already in involved in state and federal law.
[Leming]: But otherwise, yeah, this replicates state and federal laws.
[Leming]: But otherwise, these changes
[Leming]: basically just make this ordinance consistent with, um, just clarifies the relationship of the ordinance with federal law.
[Leming]: I'd be pleased to answer any specific questions from my colleagues about it.
[Leming]: Yeah, so I just would like to reiterate that I did reach out to all members of the school committee as well as Chief Buckley and asked all of them to submit their feedback.
[Leming]: I invited the chief over to the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee meeting with any concerns or feedback that he might have.
[Leming]: I did not receive a reply.
[Leming]: to that request and I did receive some from the from the school committee and their feedback was incorporated into it into this draft.
[Leming]: The concern that I had, the concern that I ran into from the administration regarding the
[Leming]: regarding the police mainly had to do with the enforcement clause, which I was told could interfere with police union negotiations.
[Leming]: And in this current draft, that ended up being nixed.
[Leming]: So I would like to point out that there were efforts to include that feedback into this draft.
[Leming]: The other thing I'd like to point out is that there is a timeliness issue to this.
[Leming]: The new administration takes office in late January, so I do think that more so than other ordinances, having a policy that protects our undocumented populations in early is essential to me.
[Leming]: Um, I don't see I don't really see the need to try to weigh the three readings.
[Leming]: That's unanimous.
[Leming]: And, you know, obviously, my colleague is voiced his concern.
[Leming]: So I would be fine with going for the with just approving the first reading tonight.
[Leming]: I would ask that that motion be amended to specifically accept the edits that were that were proposed in this in this current draft because I didn't hear that.
[Leming]: that that was explicitly said in the motion.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Otherwise, that's all I got.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: No, so I corresponded with the folks at both the folks at KP Law and Medford People Power, including Lauren Jean about this earlier today.
[Leming]: So the, I believe it was Jean was talking about 5103C.
[Leming]: Was that what she mentioned?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Yeah, so I put into this current draft the one change that was proposed for that, that they proposed for that, which was that no Asian officer employee of the city in performance of official duties shall make any inquiry about citizenship, immigration, or residency status.
[Leming]: And they specifically wanted to make it so that they couldn't
[Leming]: ask about immigration status.
[Leming]: But I am not 100% sure where else this would have weakened it.
[Leming]: So yeah, I did respond.
[Leming]: I did respond.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: So the deleted one was the struck through version was no officers or employees of the city of Medford may inquire about the immigration status of a victim, suspect, arrestee, 911 caller or other member of the public with whom they have contact except as required by state law or to provide a public benefit and the
[Leming]: replacement was no agent, officer or employee of the city in the performance of official duties shall make any inquiry about the citizenship, immigration or residency status of any person seeking to enforce rights or obtain benefits or discriminate in the enforcement of rights or the granting
[Leming]: of benefits on such basis, unless federal or Massachusetts law so requires for the termination of eligibility of benefits or as may otherwise be required by law or a court of competent jurisdiction.
[Leming]: No police officer or any city employee shall inquire about the citizenship or immigration status of any victim or witness of domestic violence or any other crime except as required by law.
[Leming]: That's it.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Thank you, Vice President.
[Leming]: Collins and everybody for all your work on this.
[Leming]: I have been thinking for most of this meeting about the exact definition of bulk surveillance data.
[Leming]: I would also ask that KP law in considering a definition of bulk surveillance data also include a provision to
[Leming]: include data that is synthetically generated to be similar to bulk surveillance data.
[Leming]: So in my day job, I'm actually a machine learning researcher and that is one loophole that could potentially be used to get around the acquisition of
[Leming]: that sort of bulk data is you could actually train models that could generate data that's similar to bulk data without actually handing the data itself over to another entity.
[Leming]: So in coming up with that definition, I would just ask that KP Law consider that.
[Leming]: And I'd also be willing to talk to them myself about that.
[Leming]: This actually is like an issue that legislatures are running into when they're trying to come up with the appropriate definitions for this technology.
[Leming]: So, yeah.
[Leming]: request guidance on language for... Yes, an amendment to that is to request legal guidance on the use of synthetically generated data in the definition of bulk surveillance data.
[Leming]: Request legal opinion on the use of synthetically generated data in our definition of bulk surveillance data.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Go ahead.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Can you going back to the timeline in the beginning and thinking about parking, is there
[Leming]: Is transportation going to be included as a discussion topic in itself?
[Leming]: And if so, what month is that planned for?
[Leming]: No, I was just going to confirm.
[Leming]: Yes, I would like to point out this doesn't solve the issue of quite informing residents before things happen, but a good deal of effort is put into summarizing these meetings in the City Council newsletter in about as high level terms as possible, which I typically do include links to these
[Leming]: plans in the planning and permitting descriptions of what happens.
[Leming]: So it's not a perfect solution to all of the concerns that were brought up by my colleague, but that is one mechanism where we're trying to really simplify what is happening in this committee as it happens.
[Leming]: Justin.
[Leming]: Justin.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng, come on.
[Leming]: Is it in a mode where everybody can just turn on their own, or do I need to approve it?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Apparently not.
[Leming]: I'm trying to figure out how to, okay, wait, what do I need to press before we start the meeting too?
[Leming]: What?
[Leming]: No, no.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Can you move it so that I can see if it's green?
[Leming]: All right, and.
[Leming]: All right, now it's on.
[Leming]: pull up the agenda real quick.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right, I think we can get started.
[Leming]: Welcome to the meeting of the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: I don't believe we need to take a roll call for attendance because nobody is on.
[Leming]: Zoom right now.
[Leming]: The first paper that we will be considering tonight is 23055, offered by Councilor Tseng, a resolution to consider the welcoming city ordinance.
[Leming]: This was actually, this was an ordinance that was actually offered in one of the predecessor committees last year by my colleague, essentially,
[Leming]: It is an ordinance that officially codifies a policy of non-cooperation with federal authorities, specifically ICE on non-criminal matters.
[Leming]: Prior to this, I requested feedback from both the school committee, because it does contain some provisions relevant to the Medford public school system, as well as Chief Buckley.
[Leming]: I did hear some
[Leming]: Some pieces of feedback from members of the school committee.
[Leming]: So there were some concerns with the bargaining sessions, the bargaining sections with the police, as well as the potential enforceability within the Medford public school system.
[Leming]: But essentially, most members of the school committee did approve the current draft that
[Leming]: as it was written.
[Leming]: There is one issue with the ordinance, which is that the section numbers I outlined in this draft, and I'm just gonna share my screen really quickly to show everybody, were actually conflict with the CCOPS ordinance that will be considered tomorrow.
[Leming]: So I have here a,
[Leming]: version of it where I changed the section titles to fit into the municipal code a little bit better.
[Leming]: But other than that, I don't really see too many issues with it.
[Leming]: I will
[Leming]: go ahead and let Councilor Tseng speak on this, then my colleagues, if they would like to add anything, and then we can move on to a public comment period, if folks have anything to offer on it.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng, I'm going to turn your microphone on.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Thank you and I would also like to thank the many
[Leming]: folks in the activist community who put pressure on the Medford City Council to get this in front of us today.
[Leming]: I think it's a very particularly timely ordinance, much more so than we typically see in city council.
[Leming]: So I'm excited to see it pass.
[Leming]: We'll move on to public comment.
[Leming]: So if you
[Leming]: If anybody in the room has anything they'd like to say, either in person or on Zoom, please feel free to raise your hand on Zoom or line up at the podium.
[Leming]: And we would love to hear you.
[Leming]: Go ahead and press the thing.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Now I can.
[Leming]: Name and address for the record, please.
[Leming]: Hi.
[Leming]: Name and address for the record, please.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Name and address for the record, please.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Name and address for the record, please.
[Leming]: Thank you very much for those
[Leming]: Thank you very much for your words.
[Leming]: Wendy, I see one hand on zoom.
[Leming]: Mister Matthew page Lieberman, I'm asking you to unmute please state your name and address for the record, please.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I see one more at the podium.
[Leming]: Eileen, can you name and address for the record, please?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Seeing no one else at the podium, and oh, one more hand on Zoom.
[Leming]: Penelope Taylor gonna ask you to unmute and please state your name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Seeing one additional hand on Zoom.
[Leming]: Muneer Germanis, can I ask you to unmute and please state your name and address for the record, please?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right, looking for any other public comments.
[Leming]: Going once, going twice, and oh, Mike Denton on Zoom.
[Leming]: Please state you're asking you to unmute.
[Leming]: Please state your name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Last few Zoom hands have been very last minute.
[Leming]: So going once, going twice and public comment is closed.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Can you point out the word first that was misspelled?
[Leming]: Oh, yep, yep, yep.
[Leming]: I see it.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: I have my little copy right there.
[Leming]: And for legal questions, I know we did bring Miss Rodolo.
[Leming]: Is she still here?
[Leming]: Just this is our representative from who works with the ACLU who agreed to come along to answer any of the more nitty gritty questions about the by the ordinance draft.
[Leming]: Sorry, can you can you repeat?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: My impression in speaking with folks at Medford People Power is that this is all fairly boilerplate language that has been replicated in other cities as well.
[Leming]: Did you have anything?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think I think a report of
[Leming]: There is no update is also fine as well.
[Leming]: But noted.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: So I could answer one part of that.
[Leming]: I have been told nicer, and I did a little bit of research on similar ordinances that have been passed in other cities at this point.
[Leming]: Yes, the language is fairly boilerplate.
[Leming]: I did pass this by the mayor, who then referred it to KP Law.
[Leming]: So I think that any and
[Leming]: My impression with that is that any specific legalese or whichever could very likely and pretty easily be dealt with in a regular meeting.
[Leming]: So yeah.
[Leming]: But in terms of the context for other cities, I would like to let Laura here speak about that.
[Leming]: Go ahead and press the button.
[Leming]: I'm sorry.
[Leming]: It's a new system.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Does that answer all your?
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Any other comments?
[Leming]: Do we have a motion on the floor?
[Leming]: Councilor Tang?
[Leming]: Yes, as well as the edit so kindly pointed out by my colleague about the small typo.
[Leming]: And that edit as well.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: There's always something.
[Leming]: On the motion to refer this to regular council pending the section edits and the typo, all those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: No one's on the same, so we could just do it.
[Leming]: It doesn't have to be rolled.
[Leming]: It does not have to be rolled.
[Leming]: All opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Thank you, everybody.
[Leming]: So, this... So, we'll be taking this up at a future regular meeting of the City Council.
[Leming]: We'll likely have more discussions there, but it's out of committee.
[Leming]: Now, for the real reason everybody's here, we're gonna edit the newsletter.
[Leming]: I know that y'all been waiting so patiently.
[Leming]: Come on, come on.
[Leming]: We're gonna go out of order.
[Leming]: I just wanna get this done.
[Leming]: One moment, City Council newsletters.
[Leming]: 2, 4, 3, 5, 4, the resolution to publish this city council newsletter.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank Councilor Tseng for drafting this particular issue of the newsletter.
[Leming]: We had, and do apologize that it was only sent out in the, wait,
[Leming]: Why that's there.
[Leming]: That was only sent out in the middle of the day, but essentially the only real difference between this newsletter and previous ones is that they're first there is some.
[Leming]: There is some tentative language on it, which we did last time, like keeping the future tense as well as the past tense and just kind of letting me edit that later when we go into review.
[Leming]: And there's also a nice little point by point breakdown because this is the end of year newsletter.
[Leming]: the holiday edition of the most significant accomplishments of city council this year, which would be something nice to discuss as to whether we want to do that.
[Leming]: Bye.
[Leming]: Thank you all for showing.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: So essentially, the first bullet point goes over the override
[Leming]: The second discusses progress on zoning.
[Leming]: The third bullet point talks about the establishment of the stabilization funds.
[Leming]: Then the policies to fund the affordable housing trust as well as tax deferrals and the proposed rental assistance program for veterans, communications methods, wildlife feeding ordinance, and the solid waste ordinance, and the leaf blower ordinance, environmental, as well as the upcoming work on the charter committee.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan, if you can
[Leming]: Yep, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I believe that's referring to the HERO Act one.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think I think I put it broadly because I think we re maximize it for seniors, and then we did the time for that that's, that's a really tricky one but I had an in depth discussion with the with Tim cost with Ted cost and about that.
[Leming]: We so technically passing one of the provisions of the Hero Act that we did pass was actually redundant.
[Leming]: And so it didn't like it didn't add up to.
[Leming]: So if we hadn't already maximized deferrals for seniors, it would have maximized them itself.
[Leming]: But because we already had done that, it's like it didn't really, he said that there was some utility and actually passing it because then we could go on like a list of cities that had passed it and
[Leming]: Yeah, but he said, but the more important one was the fact that we tied it was the fact that we end up tying it to inflation to an inflation.
[Leming]: So the deferrals would go up every year.
[Leming]: And I think that's, that's, that's the important part.
[Leming]: Yeah, I am also disinclined from like putting out a very detailed legislative explanation of consumer price indexes and whatnot.
[Leming]: But I think it, I think it captures
[Leming]: Yeah, it's it is it is a good thing that it was passed.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And I guess my other thing is that some of these are sort of what we will do future work, the veterans rental assistance program is not technically passed yet.
[Leming]: But I mean, I think it's fine.
[Leming]: We have been working on these things.
[Leming]: And I would say that these are the main bullet points.
[Leming]: And then the
[Leming]: normal, the kind of general business of what actually happened in December is here as well.
[Leming]: So yeah, pending the tenses here,
[Leming]: Does anybody have any particular suggestions about things that should be changed?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: I'm just deleting these spaces after the periods of the document.
[Leming]: Councilor, feel free to just keep your mics on.
[Leming]: Okay, great.
[Leming]: So wait.
[Leming]: Or in our, maybe, was it November?
[Leming]: Was it the November's newsletter?
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Anybody else have any suggestions?
[Leming]: That would be too difficult.
[Leming]: That'd be too difficult to format in LaTeX.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: No, it's really hard.
[Leming]: motion to accept and publish the newsletter is motion to Publish the Proven publish the newsletter pending.
[Leming]: Uh, the events of December 11th because I think there is one.
[Leming]: Yeah, December.
[Leming]: Yeah, two committee meetings pending the December 11th many meetings and to receive and place on
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Bizarro, seconded by Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: All those approve?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: Opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: And finally, okay, so that won't be going out until tomorrow because we still have the future to consider
[Leming]: those committee meetings haven't actually happened yet.
[Leming]: Okay, lastly, 24073 offered by Councilors Callahan, Sangam, Lazzaro, resolution to establish a City Council listening session.
[Leming]: So this is just a
[Leming]: opportunity, if any of us have anything, to update folks about listening sessions.
[Leming]: City Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Okay, just the rescheduled West Medford Community Center listening session.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Sounds good.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'll look into scheduling that and making sure folks are available for it.
[Leming]: I know I personally won't be available on the 4th, but I'm sure that somebody will be.
[Leming]: Any other updates?
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Before, do we have anybody who wants to say anything publicly?
[Leming]: Any public comment?
[Leming]: Going once, going twice.
[Leming]: On the motion to adjourn by Councilor Lazzaro, do we have a second?
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: Opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: started.
[Leming]: Welcome to the meeting of the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: We have three items on the agenda tonight, and we're going to take them a little bit out of order and
[Leming]: start by looking at the resolution to allow the director of veteran services to offer housing incentives to veteran renters.
[Leming]: We're joined here today by Teresa DuPont and Veronica Shaw to offer a bit of a recap of where this was at.
[Leming]: This was an idea that veteran services director Shaw had in which
[Leming]: she would have the ability to use extra funds that were allocated to the veteran's office to essentially have a voucher program for veteran renters so that landlords could get an extra bonus if they choose to rent out to veterans.
[Leming]: We passed this by legal.
[Leming]: It was found that it would have complications.
[Leming]: There are complications in
[Leming]: letting the city distribute money directly to people to interested parties.
[Leming]: We would have to and Council told us that we would have to first go to a nonprofit and that led to a partnership that was largely initiated by the city staff with housing families.
[Leming]: We have a memo here
[Leming]: that housing families pass to us, which describes the outline of this program.
[Leming]: And because it was not, I don't believe we only got this memo yesterday, so it wasn't distributed in the official agenda packet.
[Leming]: So it's fairly, so I'm just going to read it into the public record real quick, and then I'll let Teresa and Veronica speak about it and answer any questions that we might have.
[Leming]: The memo from housing families as follows.
[Leming]: As a longtime community resource partner of the city of Medford, housing families help support the Medford community by providing homelessness prevention and housing services to income eligible residents.
[Leming]: Recently, housing families was approached by the city of Medford's veteran service director, Veronica Shaw, city councilor and city councilor Matt Leming to propose a new partnership and a pilot veterans housing assistance program.
[Leming]: The program would provide a rebate incentive to property owners in Medford.
[Leming]: who lease their units to residents identifying themselves as active or retired service people.
[Leming]: This program aligns with both the City of Medford and Housing Families' missions of providing housing assistance to residents.
[Leming]: The City of Medford has already identified a funding source through the Veterans Services Office's general operating budget.
[Leming]: This funding is required to be dispersed through an intermediary organization.
[Leming]: Housing Families is uniquely qualified to
[Leming]: support this program as our organization currently supports several assistance programs for Medford in the greater Boston area and are located locally in Malden.
[Leming]: The intended program eligibility guidelines will be as follows.
[Leming]: One head of household must be an active or retired service member as defined by Mass General Law Chapter 115.
[Leming]: Property must be owner occupied by resident of Medford.
[Leming]: Three, proper documentation must be submitted to verify eligibility, including but not limited to an executed lease agreement, verification of address, copy of active service documentation, or certificate of discharge as allowable by Mass General Law, Chapter 115, Section 3A, and the completed W-9 from the recipient or property owner.
[Leming]: Four, program payments will be distributed in the form of a paper check.
[Leming]: Five,
[Leming]: property owners must apply for annual recertification to qualify for subsequent payments.
[Leming]: Six applications will be received on a first come, first served and rolling basis until program funds are extinguished.
[Leming]: Seven, any remaining funds after the annual cycles will be rolled forward to provide funding for future applicants of this program.
[Leming]: Uh we ask that the city council offer their support of this program.
[Leming]: Best regards, Chief Executive Officer, Housing Families
[Leming]: further questions from my colleagues, I'll go ahead and hand it over to Teresa Dupont and Veronica Shaw so that they can speak about this and answer any questions that we might have about it.
[Leming]: I see, Councilor, hold on, I still need to get used to leave you.
[Leming]: Okay, I don't think it's on the weird.
[Leming]: I actually can't see your light.
[Leming]: It's sort of blocked by the other light.
[Leming]: No, I mean, literally, the lamp is blocking the red thing.
[Leming]: So I can't
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: OK, go ahead and press it.
[Leming]: Can you press it again?
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: What?
[Leming]: This is weird.
[Leming]: OK, now I'm seeing.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Aha.
[Leming]: Yes, it was distributed by the clerk.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: It should be, I distributed it.
[Leming]: News, hold on.
[Leming]: Yeah, it should have been.
[Leming]: I am searching through my email.
[Leming]: Documents for committee meeting.
[Leming]: It was sent to your Gmail.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: I'm looking at it right now.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Yeah, so the documents for committee meeting, it should have both a copy of the Google
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Pending any further questions, go ahead and press the button on that.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Try speaking.
[Leming]: pressing the next on button.
[Leming]: I think you're can you hear me?
[Leming]: Actually, so I could, I could talk about that a little bit.
[Leming]: So with regards to the
[Leming]: ordinance change, the paper in front of you is the proposed language that originally was referred to this committee.
[Leming]: And I was planning on talking about that a little bit after the presentation.
[Leming]: So we would have to refer that to legal so that council can say what is the best way to frame this.
[Leming]: I do have some proposed language and if they
[Leming]: folks have any more input on sort of the maximum amount.
[Leming]: That's also very, you know, we can be amenable to that at this stage as well.
[Leming]: But what you have in front of you is just the previous paper version of this paper that was referred to committee that most definitely will have to be changed.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Any other comments?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan, wait.
[Leming]: Next on, I keep pressing the next on, I'm not sure what, okay.
[Leming]: Mic on.
[Leming]: All right, thank you.
[Leming]: So with just a couple of logistical things related to this, I'm going to share my screen really quick here.
[Leming]: All right, so in order to do this, what you have in front of you is an additional authority added under the Director of Veterans Services.
[Leming]: The draft language was what I originally penned under the assumption that the veteran service director could do this independently.
[Leming]: Obviously, they cannot.
[Leming]: And so what I would propose is to replace that language with the following, which says the director of veteran services shall at their discretion and his funds are available.
[Leming]: have the authority to partner with a nonprofit organization which may offer cash incentives of up to $750 annually to landlords who offer rental housing to veterans.
[Leming]: I think that the best way forward is to first discuss this language, pass it to legal counsel, and then simultaneously pass this package to the regular meeting.
[Leming]: to a regular council meeting, and then once we have feedback from legal, revise the language there in accordance with whatever the recommendations might be, if they have any better way to phrase this than what I came up with.
[Leming]: Oh, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: We could potentially move it to the fee schedule.
[Leming]: That could be a solution to it so that it is,
[Leming]: updated automatically, that could be one solution.
[Leming]: But I think that either way, this language is going to have to go by council.
[Leming]: And so I am comfortable referring this to a regular council meeting and then doing
[Leming]: a little bit more research and potentially revising this to go into the fee schedule, for instance, and then voting on it there.
[Leming]: Council Lazzaro.
[Leming]: That being said, do we have a motion on the floor to refer this to regular council and legal?
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Callahan, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Thank you both very much for your work on this.
[Leming]: And we will likely be looking at it at the next regular meeting.
[Leming]: Moving on, the city council newsletter.
[Leming]: I apologize for the last minute nature that we've been sending these things out at.
[Leming]: We're sort of doing a rotating schedule whereby different councillors
[Leming]: draft different portions of the newsletter.
[Leming]: But in that latest email, you should have a link to this Google Doc here, which contains the draft of Councilor Collins, as well as a couple of points that I added from late October, which events that occurred after our last meeting.
[Leming]: Now,
[Leming]: Councilor Collins version of the newsletter actually does contain a couple of
[Leming]: points that we are going to discuss in the meeting literally right after this, which I don't think has been done in a newsletter previously.
[Leming]: So I do think that news, personally, that newsletters should report things that have already happened.
[Leming]: But one way to get around this is to
[Leming]: potentially approve this language contingent on what happens in the next meeting.
[Leming]: And then if we do, in fact, pass those, I could, with the permission of this committee, while formatting the newsletter, just change everything to the past tense.
[Leming]: Because when we're reporting things out, I think I would rather have more current events happen instead of waiting a month before we tell people what happened in a committee meeting that's happening today.
[Leming]: So that could be one way to write this, even though, technically, we're, as of this moment, the things discussed in this newsletter haven't happened yet.
[Leming]: But that being said, Councilor Callahan, I can see that your mic is still on, so I'm not.
[Leming]: Okay, cool.
[Leming]: Um, do we have any other specific suggestions to the content of the newsletter as it stands in this this Google document?
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: That's very reasonable.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Yeah, that's from my draft.
[Leming]: So I just keep those there for consistency's sake, but those wouldn't be in the formatted version.
[Leming]: I could even just delete those now for clarity.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Do we have any other comments?
[Leming]: Give folks a moment to go through it before we take any motions on this.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: No, no.
[Leming]: So I think I think in this case, the motion would be specifically to approve it contingent upon the what is voted on in the next meeting.
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Lazzaro, seconded by
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: And the very last item on the agenda is just a brief update on what's going on with the City Council listening sessions.
[Leming]: So I know that there has been a little bit of behind the scenes activity, mainly because these listening sessions just require Councilors kind of running around and trying to coordinate with different groups, get something on the calendar.
[Leming]: But I'm just going to go ahead and give the opportunity to Councilors Lazzaro and Callahan, who I know have been working on some of these initiatives as well.
[Leming]: So whoever would like to go first, Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Wonderful.
[Leming]: Council call him.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Well, I am very, very glad to hear that these, these issues are happening and we are
[Leming]: actively reaching out to members of the community that, again, like you're saying, normally do not come into these chambers.
[Leming]: And I'm looking forward to the reports of the listening sessions that have happened and just a brief outline of some of the feedback that we've gotten there.
[Leming]: Just, yeah.
[Leming]: So thank you all very much for your wonderful work on this.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: it.
[Leming]: All right, so the one for the Arab.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Great, I don't think we, do we necessarily have to take a vote on that one?
[Leming]: No, yeah, okay, cool.
[Leming]: All right, great, sounds good.
[Leming]: Wonderful, all right, is there, all right, is there any public participation?
[Leming]: I'm not seeing.
[Leming]: Anybody bite on zoom or in the chambers, see that Teresa's knitting over there.
[Leming]: So, oh, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I feel like accessing these groups is sometimes it's a matter of personal connections and trying to communicate with folks who you know might have those connections.
[Leming]: I know a couple of parents who might be able to tap into their parental networks to figure that particular one out.
[Leming]: So that could be one.
[Leming]: I mean, that could be something to pursue in January.
[Leming]: In terms of students, because that was another one on our list, my thoughts on that would be you'd really have to get more formal, sort of a more formal,
[Leming]: lines for that, like probably reaching out to the principal of Medford High to see if they're okay with it, or reaching out to student government.
[Leming]: So in that case, I would imagine that
[Leming]: Yeah, in that case, you definitely need to have a slightly more formal.
[Leming]: And then there's also just different community centers and social centers around the city, which is where the senior center idea comes from.
[Leming]: I know I was thinking through reaching out to groups of veterans, in which case the VFW would be a good solution for that, a good way to address that.
[Leming]: But yeah, I also think that we did kind of have a bit of a lull in scheduling these listening sessions over the summer because when we were scheduling our ambitious schedule, we didn't understand that it was the summer.
[Leming]: And nobody was really around.
[Leming]: So that's just something that happens.
[Leming]: But I'm glad to see that they're picking up now.
[Leming]: And I think that, you know, when Councilor Lazzaro and I were brainstorming, we're like thinking of the regular sessions at the senior center.
[Leming]: The logic behind that was that it is an easy kind of like it is an easy month by month thing where we can put as little brain power as possible into reaching out and scheduling to a new group.
[Leming]: So that's just a way to sort of keep it going.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Do we have any motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: On the motion to adjourn by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: That was Councilor Tseng, right?
[Leming]: Okay, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: Thank you, everybody.
[Leming]: know if he's going to be attending in person.
[Leming]: If they know if Scott's going to be attending building commissioner.
[Leming]: My understanding was that he had some recommendations for changing some stuff about the green score to make it not conflict with the building code.
[Leming]: But if we already have that written down somewhere so that it could be amended during the meeting, then that would be fine too.
[Leming]: Okay, okay, just as long as you see what's happening.
[Leming]: Adam, any word on when Councilor Scarpella is gonna show up?
[Leming]: Or did he give you any indication of that?
[Leming]: All right, let's do that.
[Leming]: So welcome to the planning and permitting committee of November 13th, 2024.
[Leming]: During this meeting, we're just going to we are going to go over mainly the proposed green zone.
[Leming]: Green score zoning ordinance at the end of the meeting, we'll have a short presentation.
[Leming]: I mean, very short on the Salem street corridor, which is going to be coming up the next regular.
[Leming]: meeting of the City Council.
[Leming]: Just as a reminder, if you would like to be recognized and speak, please raise your hand on Zoom first and I'll recognize you.
[Leming]: But the goal of this meeting is to refer out the green score by the end of it for the regular City Council meeting next week.
[Leming]: And with that being said, I will turn it over to Paola, unless any of my colleagues on city council have anything they'd like to say first, feel free to raise your hand really quickly.
[Leming]: Oh, Adam.
[Leming]: Oh, okay, sorry, I thought that.
[Leming]: Okay, sorry, that was- That's okay, don't worry about it.
[Leming]: Yep, yep.
[Leming]: Don't worry about it.
[Leming]: Go ahead, go ahead and take a roll.
[Leming]: She is absent.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So do any of my colleagues on City Council have anything they'd like to say first?
[Leming]: No?
[Leming]: All right, in that case, Paola, take it away.
[Leming]: Are you able to share?
[Leming]: I think he's a reminder it's generally it's generally only acceptable if the chair recognizes folks from the floor, but go ahead.
[Leming]: Oh, Councilor Council President Bears.
[Leming]: Thank you, thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: that's on.
[Leming]: We don't see the Excel.
[Leming]: Oh, yep, now we do.
[Leming]: I see it.
[Leming]: If there are any questions, feel free to raise your hand on Zoom.
[Leming]: Director Hunt.
[Leming]: Any other questions?
[Leming]: All right, continue.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Keep going.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Any other input from anybody else on the call?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Mr. Commissioner.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: I just ask you to unmute.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Director Hunt?
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: I might have mistaken that pause as a... No, no, it's okay.
[Leming]: Director Hunt?
[Leming]: Go ahead.
[Leming]: Personally, I'm thinking that a lot of these points can be, I mean, a lot of these do seem to be relatively minor changes at this point.
[Leming]: And, sorry, I was looking at Zach to see if, and I think that,
[Leming]: This is likely subject to the building commissioner's previous changes that he recommended.
[Leming]: This is still likely able to be referred to regular council.
[Leming]: And if the Planning Department and the building commissioner do come up with any recommendations over the next week, we could incorporate those during a regular meeting.
[Leming]: So with that, is there any further discussion?
[Leming]: you know, I do think like these are important technical points, but they can also be done between the consultants and the staff and sort of hammered out during some of the, during some longer meetings between individuals and recommended to the council or the CD board later.
[Leming]: With that, is there any other comments from
[Leming]: staff or city councilors?
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Do we have any motions on the floor?
[Leming]: I'm aware of that.
[Leming]: Okay, thank you.
[Leming]: I'll get to that.
[Leming]: I'll get to that.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Motion to refer out to the regular meeting pending discussion.
[Leming]: And I did.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: Do we have a second on that?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: And with that, I do see that Mr. Fiore's hand is raised.
[Leming]: So we will move to public comment.
[Leming]: Just to check, because this was a little bit unclear, like it was kind of a last minute switch to Zoom.
[Leming]: President Bears or Councilor Callahan, can you verify that there is, is there anybody physically in the audience at the hall right now?
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Okay, in that case, we'll move on to public comment and I'm going to ask Mr. Fiore to unmute.
[Leming]: Mr. Fiore, if you'd be able to provide your name and address for the record.
[Leming]: I was taking notes on what you just said.
[Leming]: So you're wondering if the effects of irrigation on green roofs, zoning related to tree height and their ability to affect solar panels.
[Leming]: And could you just rephrase your first question again?
[Leming]: Okay, so inclusion of cool, is there inclusion of cool roofs in the green score inclusion of the effects of irrigation on green roofs or anything about that zoning related to tall trees?
[Leming]: I do know that there is some work being done with regards to the tree that there is some work being done on the tree ordinance.
[Leming]: I think that was, that's primarily Councilor Collins and Councilor Callahan who are doing or
[Leming]: spearheading a lot of the work on that.
[Leming]: If Councilor Cowlin, if you have any information related to trees, feel free to raise your hand, but otherwise, otherwise, Paola, can you confirm whether or not there's anything related to cool roofs or anything related to irrigation on green roofs in the current draft?
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Thank you, Paola.
[Leming]: I think that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I appreciate that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right, and not seeing any other folks here for public comments.
[Leming]: So Council President Bears.
[Leming]: I also emailed it to Mr. Feuer during his public comment, so I feel like we just really rushed to get those documents all at the same time.
[Leming]: So there is a, there's, Director Hunt?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: We have a motion on the floor.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, can you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Do you have the exact text of the motion, by the way?
[Leming]: Yes or yes.
[Leming]: One absent the motion passes the chair is referred out to regular meeting.
[Leming]: And the other item on the agenda is just a quick, very quick update on the Salem Street corridor.
[Leming]: Is that, Paola, as well, you had that update?
[Leming]: Wonderful, thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Leming]: Well, sorry.
[Leming]: We, we went over ground rules at the beginning, raise, raise hand.
[Leming]: And then, uh, and then, and I saw that, uh, director hunt raised her hand.
[Leming]: And so then I'll, uh, did you have, um, okay.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli, director Hunt.
[Leming]: Thank you, Director Hunt.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Scapelli.
[Leming]: Do we have any motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Sure, yeah, let's go into public participation for this item.
[Leming]: Mr. Fiore?
[Leming]: Well, the city does have a number of folks who volunteer in certain service that usually they're on boards or those sorts of volunteer positions.
[Leming]: So I was on the CPA.
[Leming]: So the city does utilize volunteers for a lot of different tasks.
[Leming]: I don't know if we've utilized them for that one specifically, but Council President Bears.
[Leming]: Yeah, no, the community liaisons I think is a very good point.
[Leming]: So those are folks that are probably most similar to what
[Leming]: Mr. Fiora was just talking about, but you're right in terms of just strictly location-based.
[Leming]: I'm not sure if we have one of those.
[Leming]: Paola.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you, Paula.
[Leming]: So with that, unless someone else has entered the city hall physically, I'm not seeing it.
[Leming]: Yeah, not seeing any other folks who'd like to do public participation.
[Leming]: So we'll close that.
[Leming]: And with that, do we have any motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: We have a second.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: On the motion to adjourn by Council President Bears, seconded by Councilor Callahan, Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Four in the affirmative, one absent.
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: The meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: Thank you very much for coming out tonight, everybody.
[Leming]: I'd also like to point out that people are confused about this because an organization that Councilor Scarpelli is in the leadership, I've sent people out an email saying that this was what was written in the ordinance.
[Leming]: So if you send an email.
[Leming]: I mean, you can't send an email out saying that this is what it's about.
[Leming]: You're causing confusion and saying there's confusion in the community.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you, Council President Bears.
[Leming]: The only amendment to this that council advised was to remove the up to and up to 100% in the very last paragraph of the resolution.
[Leming]: but otherwise both council and the assessor thought that this was perfectly acceptable.
[Leming]: So I would motion to amend this to remove the two words up to in the very last paragraph and pass it.
[Leming]: No, I just wanted to clarify that in our correspondence that I had with Paul Raihee, he said that he did select the contractor already that will be doing this work, the same company that did historic renovations for Faneuil Hall in Boston.
[Leming]: So I don't know the name of that company specifically, but I had a back and forth with him about with him and some members of the CPA about this.
[Leming]: So that
[Leming]: already is selected as my okay so he did that already Yeah, okay.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President.
[Leming]: At this committee meeting, we heard a brief update from Councilor Tseng on the progress of the Human Rights Commission updates, and we drafted a newsletter which was subsequently released, and that's what happened.
[Leming]: I have a motion to approve.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President Bears.
[Leming]: I have a motion to suspend the rules and take public participation out of order.
[Leming]: This is just a very brief comment.
[Leming]: So I do definitely hear what Marianne is saying about during any construction phase, it's likely that parking would be unavailable during that time.
[Leming]: But the RFP, just to really highlight this, the RFP does call for the construction of a parking garage in any developments that are created so long term.
[Leming]: ideally going by what the RFP says, this wouldn't affect parking availability in the area.
[Leming]: So that's the idea, but I just wanted to, again, I'm hearing what Marianne is saying about the temporary unavailability during construction, but I did want to highlight that for folks in the room.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President.
[Leming]: So this is pretty much a cut and dry resolution which would adopt the two parts of the HERO Act that City Councils explicitly need to approve.
[Leming]: I've talked to the Veteran Services Director and the assessor
[Leming]: about this.
[Leming]: So clause 22.
[Leming]: that would allow for the city to go up to the full amount of exemptions for veterans, although we already do that in other parts of general laws, chapter 59.
[Leming]: So it wouldn't necessarily add to that, but Ted tells me there's no harm in adopting it anyway, just for future purposes.
[Leming]: The real effect of that would be
[Leming]: The real important part here is clause 22 I, which would basically increase the amount of folks tax exemptions on a yearly basis according to increases in the consumer price index.
[Leming]: So it's another mechanism to make these kind of dollar amount exemptions automatic without a city council or the state having to come in and
[Leming]: do that explicitly.
[Leming]: So that's one of the new things that the HERO Act allows.
[Leming]: So I yeah, it's a you know, it's a fairly straightforward adoption of provisions of state law.
[Leming]: And I would motion to send this to legal for review.
[Leming]: I talked it over with head he recommended to send it to legal for review first.
[Leming]: Yeah, sure.
[Leming]: Yeah, so this is, there's already, I mean, Ted's already seen the text of this and he approved everything, but I could add onto that motion just a request from the assessor for a memo, an additional memo to outline his approval for it in the public record if my colleagues think that that is appropriate.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Sounds good.
[Leming]: So moved.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Just like to really quickly request that when, at the meeting when TDM is discussed specifically, I would appreciate some forewarning on that because I think it would be appropriate to invite the Lower Mystic TMA to that meeting.
[Leming]: They have been asking about it, so I'm not sure if there will be a specific meeting about that in itself or if it will just come up.
[Leming]: as a topic in future meetings, but in any case, I'm forewarning that you'll appreciate it.
[Leming]: Councilor Lueb, go ahead.
[Leming]: Yes, I do.
[Leming]: There are some folks from there that have been speaking with me, and they even previously met with City staff, but I think it would be
[Leming]: wise to invite them to the planning meetings.
[Leming]: I mean, I can't go to them because of, obviously because of open meeting law considerations, but I know that just on some emails, their contact information is available and they previously met with me and Laurel Siegel, but that was a while ago.
[Leming]: So just having them be more included in the workflow, I think would be a good idea.
[Leming]: There's no more public comment or input from staff.
[Leming]: I wanted to make a motion to refer to a regular meeting.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Just to add to that, so this actually came up at an event at a small house party where we were talking about these measures.
[Leming]: Somebody asked me, well, if you're proposing to put $500,000 towards the GDW for road repairs, I live on a private road, how would that affect me?
[Leming]: I had no idea.
[Leming]: So I ended up emailing Tim McGibbon, CC, the fellow who asked me, and what Tim said was that
[Leming]: there is no, so just by the fact, by the nature of it being private, there's no legal obligation for him to actively repair these roads.
[Leming]: But he said that they, if, when they have capacity, they will do it anyway, just to keep the city nice, and putting a permanent road repair crew into being going will just give them,
[Leming]: more capacity to do that.
[Leming]: So that was his perspective on that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: That's correct.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: All right, Justin, you on?
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: Ready?
[Leming]: Do I have to do a roll call?
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: No, no.
[Leming]: All right, welcome to the meeting of the Medford Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: This is the first meeting that I've been in where we are testing out our new AV system.
[Leming]: So you might notice some technical difficulties going on with that.
[Leming]: I believe what you do, Councilor Callahan-Lazzaro, is press the
[Leming]: Yep, Kevin Harrington is kindly instructing.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Yeah, if you want to, the way that this works is you put yourself in the queue.
[Leming]: And then when I put next on, that means that I can end up sort of choosing people in the order that they press their little mic button.
[Leming]: So I could also try to make it so that we could all just talk at once, but I'm going to have to get used to these new controls here.
[Leming]: So thank you.
[Leming]: The first thing that
[Leming]: We are going to go over this session is the draft of the Medford City Council newsletter for October 2024.
[Leming]: I ended up, I was the one who drafted this.
[Leming]: It essentially just goes over everything that we've covered in the past month.
[Leming]: I would like
[Leming]: You know, I sent the meeting out, I sent the document out to all my colleagues prior to this, and just invited everybody to offer their comments as some folks are doing right now in this at the moment, like, even as we speak.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng, I would like to also draw your attention just to the governance committee, as well as Councilors Lazar and Callahan to the committees that you chair, just to be sure that the descriptions that I wrote for those are accurate.
[Leming]: So if you have any thoughts or questions or ways that you think things should be edited, feel free to let me know.
[Leming]: Let's see.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: Kevin, it says that her mic is on.
[Leming]: Hold on.
[Leming]: Here, but it's.
[Leming]: We're going to, let's, I understand that we're just, I just want to do, finish editing the newsletter and then we will.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So, all right.
[Leming]: So if councillors, that's reasonable enough.
[Leming]: If councillors would like to spend a little bit of time editing it while we go through Councilor Tseng's presentation on the next agenda item, then feel free to do so.
[Leming]: I understand that
[Leming]: Due to some emails flying around, not everybody has been able to do so.
[Leming]: But if Councilor Tseng would like to offer a brief presentation on the state, on the Human Rights Commission, then as he wants to, then he can go.
[Leming]: Then feel free to take it away.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: So for the very brief update on the State of the Human Rights Commission, we will move on.
[Leming]: Are there any other comments from Councilors?
[Leming]: Okay, we'll move on to public comment.
[Leming]: I see Steve Schnapp's hand raised on Zoom.
[Leming]: I'm just gonna ask him to unmute.
[Leming]: No, no, go, go for it.
[Leming]: Without that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Is there any other public comment?
[Leming]: Anyone else who'd like to speak?
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Seeing none, do we have a motion on the floor regarding this paper?
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Motion by Councilor Lazzaro to keep the paper in committee, seconded by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes, for an affirmative, none absent, the motion passes.
[Leming]: Would also like to note for the AV folks that there might need to be a better system for roll call in the future as well.
[Leming]: So it's just kind of because it's good
[Leming]: Yeah, it's better to be able to do it quickly instead of have everybody queue up each and every time.
[Leming]: So there's kind of a note for the future with this new audio-visual system we have.
[Leming]: But in any case, I'd like to thank everybody for attending for the brief update.
[Leming]: And I hope that we'll be able to have something public as soon as we can on the Human Rights Commission.
[Leming]: Moving back to the newsletter draft, which we can hopefully hammer out and set a record for pretty fast committee meeting.
[Leming]: I'm just going to share that once again to Zoom.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So it looks like we just have a couple of typos, which are entirely my fault.
[Leming]: So I'm just going to go ahead and accept a few of these.
[Leming]: Let's see.
[Leming]: And if any Councilor has anything in particular that they'd like to point out in the newsletter or discuss, then just feel free to raise your hand.
[Leming]: The Councilor is saying, I see that your hand is raised.
[Leming]: Is that from before?
[Leming]: That was from before.
[Leming]: Okay, cool.
[Leming]: The links I put there solely to
[Leming]: The links I put there mainly to just help myself later when I go into latech and create it and format it myself.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: And I'm just going through this through and accepting Councilor Tseng's edits.
[Leming]: It's clear that Harvard Law student is much better at editing texts than a very tired scientist.
[Leming]: Unequally tired.
[Leming]: A very tired Harvard Law student is clearly better with the English language.
[Leming]: All right, that looks... Wait, Councilor Tseng, is this comment that I'm seeing here...
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: And I understand that I was trying to remember that meeting following the four hours and 42 minute Q&A session, which of the resolutions from the October 15th meeting we tabled.
[Leming]: And I asked the clerk earlier, and he said that
[Leming]: According to his memory, we did not table the commemoration of Sarah Bradley Fulton Day, but we did table the commemoration of the two DPW staff members who returned a lost wallet for the next regular meeting.
[Leming]: Is that correct?
[Leming]: Um, at the commemorations and acknowledgement section, uh, we, I put the, I put the two, uh, commemorations from the October 15th meeting in there, but we tabled a couple of stuff really, really quickly.
[Leming]: And I was having trouble remembering exactly which ones we table and which ones we very quickly passed.
[Leming]: So, um, I would, do you want me to run down and check?
[Leming]: Can we just, how do we make these all just so that people can unmute themselves?
[Leming]: How do we?
[Leming]: No, no, I mean, this is just a regular time.
[Leming]: So, in the, you know, in some of the earlier ones we might have accidentally left off.
[Leming]: a couple of them or not put all of them on there especially because the initial one was covering a four-month period and it was pretty lengthy as it was but um I think I think moving forward it's probably it would just be nice to show people um who and all was commemorated at these these different meetings.
[Leming]: Sorry?
[Leming]: When was that passed?
[Leming]: What date was Larry's passing?
[Leming]: Really?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: It's hard for me to find the records of the ones I can get the date.
[Leming]: Well, the date of the resolution would have been the 15th, but the date of his passing.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: October 14.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Does this seem like an appropriate addition?
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Do we have a motion on the floor?
[Leming]: Chairman.
[Leming]: Was that a second Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: I'm just going through and looking at it and accepting.
[Leming]: public vote in.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Motion by Councilor Callahan to approve and release.
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, would you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Four in the affirmative, one absent.
[Leming]: The motion passes and we have another newsletter.
[Leming]: Do we have any other motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Seconded by?
[Leming]: On the motion to adjourn by Councilor Lazzaro, seconded by Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, would you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: For the affirmative one absent, the motion passes.
[Leming]: Thank you everybody and have a wonderful evening.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Speaking of.
[Leming]: As we were saying, we lost Councilor Collins.
[Leming]: She walks in the door.
[Leming]: Would we withdraw the motion so that we can allow for more discussion from the colleagues who just arrived?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: This is just to add on.
[Leming]: I fully agree that the cost of these facilities needs to be determined.
[Leming]: Probably also the very basic question of which parks and what would be an ideal number to shoot for across the city.
[Leming]: How many of these facilities do we want to build?
[Leming]: It's just a question for Councilor Tseng what resident when you're putting this forward, what resident complaints were you specifically responding to?
[Leming]: Was it folks that were visiting certain parks who wanted this?
[Leming]: What was, could you just talk a little bit about the feedback you were getting that led to this?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: On that, I would motion to request feedback on the cost, potential cost savings and need for these sanitary facilities in public spaces around Medford from Tim McGivern and Alicia Hunt.
[Leming]: as well as their recommendation, as well as their long-term recommendations on this problem.
[Leming]: Yeah, I was trying to think of a way to word it.
[Leming]: But essentially, given the resources, the intent of it is given the resources the city has now, how much do they think that their resources should be prioritized to implementing this?
[Leming]: I'm just unsure how that would be implemented.
[Leming]: Would it be an email to all city staff and then request a general request for feedback?
[Leming]: new wording of the motion could be, and feel free to feel free to jump in if any of my more experienced colleagues have recommendations to edit it, but a motion to request feedback from department heads on the
[Leming]: idea of installing permanent sanitary facilities in public spaces, including our parks, with the invitation to have one-on-one meetings with council members if they feel the need to.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So, when I first in the time before, and I ran for council in the time that I was running one thing that I learned is that there are
[Leming]: a lot of people in the city who hold politics above personal relationships.
[Leming]: Because when I said that I'm running as a progressive, those are my ideals.
[Leming]: And then you end up making a decision that maybe some person doesn't like, you kind of notice that there's a lot of folks in the city who will turn on you after that.
[Leming]: And that's happened
[Leming]: to me quite a few times with relationships that I've had with various folks around the city.
[Leming]: I've noticed that Larry was one of the few people who truly did not matter to him.
[Leming]: There's a few other people like that where you could tell it's just whatever happens politically, whatever happens in the chambers, it just doesn't
[Leming]: matter to them.
[Leming]: They'll always value their relationship.
[Leming]: They'll always value who you are as a human being above all of that.
[Leming]: They really know how to remain neutral and respect the person.
[Leming]: And so it made me respect and miss him a lot more, even though I haven't known him as long as some of my colleagues had.
[Leming]: gave him a phone call, gave him a phone call over the summer.
[Leming]: And after he'd been hospitalized, talked for a little bit.
[Leming]: Remember, I just asked him about the history of the, you know, Medford politics, because we're having some contentious meetings here.
[Leming]: And he said to me, Matt, it's always been that way.
[Leming]: So this was a guy who, he'd been around the block a few times, and he knew that at the end of the day, it's the person that matters.
[Leming]: It's none of this, all of this is ephemeral.
[Leming]: So I miss him.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: I'm going to try to respond to one thing there.
[Leming]: I didn't hear a specific question, but you did say that Medford's not like our surrounding towns.
[Leming]: No, I said Winchester.
[Leming]: Yeah, we're not like Winchester.
[Leming]: 90% of cities in the state of Massachusetts have had an override.
[Leming]: Medford has one of the lowest operating budgets per capita of any city.
[Leming]: midsize city in the state of Massachusetts.
[Leming]: And that is in large part because we are one of the 10% of cities that has never had an override.
[Leming]: So you're right.
[Leming]: We are not like our neighbors that have had overrides and we have less money for it.
[Leming]: Saying that we can address the budgetary problems of the Medford public school system with free cash is like me saying the government gave me a $1,200 check from COVID.
[Leming]: So I don't have to look for a job right now because that check is going to last me another
[Leming]: another two weeks.
[Leming]: It's the same thing.
[Leming]: The government gave us, the government gave the city of Medford some money.
[Leming]: It was a one-time thing from COVID and the proposal that we can plug ongoing costs from free cash.
[Leming]: All that would do is drain our reserves and we'd be back at square one in five years.
[Leming]: If these overrides don't pass straight up, there will be layoffs in the school system and the roads will continue to be in disrepair.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So adding on to what Councilor Callahan said, partially this is due to the lingering costs of COVID, which resulted in both decreased funding going to the school system, partially that was just because you have fewer students going into public schools, and partially because
[Leming]: there was a lot of activity in the healthcare system from COVID.
[Leming]: So there is a sort of a, so the cost of health insurance, which we have to pay ended up rising.
[Leming]: Those are some of the more short term reasons why we need this now.
[Leming]: Longer term,
[Leming]: The way that Prop 2 NAP is designed is the total amount of money that the city can take in basically can't go up by more than 2.5% every year.
[Leming]: While inflation has averaged for the past 44 years at 3.1% over time, that compounds.
[Leming]: So the budget today
[Leming]: is only a fraction, well, it's only about 78% as valuable today as it was back in 1980.
[Leming]: So Prop 2.5 has this effect long-term on municipal budget where it squeezes resources.
[Leming]: Most cities in Massachusetts have addressed this with the intended mechanism for overcoming this, which is periodic elections.
[Leming]: This is just the first time we're doing that.
[Leming]: That's part of the reason.
[Leming]: the fact that we're so late to the game there is part of the reason that again we are 320 out of 351 cities in terms of our per capita budget and that is the reason why our schools could definitely be doing
[Leming]: better.
[Leming]: That is the reason why you see so many potholes.
[Leming]: This is one step in addressing that situation.
[Leming]: Once again, free cash, one time funding is not an actual longer term solution.
[Leming]: If we just went with free cash, that would be drained in a couple of years, even shorter than the four to five year span I put, I said earlier, and then that's time.
[Leming]: I'm sorry, just to go back on that 3 to 5% thing.
[Leming]: It's not 3 to 5% in totality.
[Leming]: It actually is recommended to generate 3 to 5% in free cash every year.
[Leming]: So that is correct.
[Leming]: I'm not sure where you're getting.
[Leming]: You can Google it.
[Leming]: You can look it up.
[Leming]: I encourage you to.
[Leming]: But the point is, you generate three to 5% in free cash, and then it goes that can aggregate over time.
[Leming]: And then that can go towards one time capital expenditures, like for instance, two new fire trucks for the fire department.
[Leming]: That's how these big, that's how these sort of, I'd say, midsize expenses are accounted for.
[Leming]: Again, if I have a savings account and I'm living above my means, then eventually the savings account would run out.
[Leming]: So you're not supposed to plug the school budget every single year with free cash.
[Leming]: because it would run out eventually.
[Leming]: We did that with $1.75 million this past year with the understanding that we would then do an override to try to fix the problem in the long term.
[Leming]: Free cash is not a long-term solution.
[Leming]: That keeps getting repeated, and I really just want to drive the point home.
[Leming]: It is not actually an answer to this problem.
[Leming]: So in terms of how much free cash we actually have left, I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but I'm just remembering the expenditures off the top of my head.
[Leming]: I believe after it was certified this past June, the number was 34 million, but I believe enough of that has been earmarked for various one-time expenditures at this point so that the actual number is, correct me if I'm wrong, would be about
[Leming]: 10 to 11 million in reserves right now just because I see so much I can see someone shaking their head in the audience but I believe.
[Leming]: So again, this is ballpark numbers because we did allocate free cash first for the stabilization funds, which recently went to things like those light posts that were falling over, that were, you know, rusted.
[Leming]: They went to $3 million for the MSBA study.
[Leming]: It went to pay for HVAC systems.
[Leming]: It went to pay for, there was a,
[Leming]: Yeah, there's a long list of items that were in some memos from a couple of months ago that I think some of my colleagues could help me out.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming, thank you.
[Leming]: I'd just like to really emphasize that if you're interested in learning more about the shortfalls in the school, in the Medford Public Schools budget, then the videos and the presentations that were given during the budget season at the Medford School Committee meetings, I believe around June, would be where you want to go.
[Leming]: So those are on YouTube.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So for the size of the override, what I'll say is that we got, we went 44 years without an override, and this is the first time that we're asking the voters to do an override, which has become very commonplace in other communities.
[Leming]: And so, yeah, if we, you know, there potentially is,
[Leming]: a debt exclusion in the future for the high school as a capital project, but just in terms of level expenses, the overrides are a mechanism to undo, to overcome the effects of inflation long-term.
[Leming]: So I will just point out that we've gone this long without an override, and this is the first time that we're asking for it.
[Leming]: We've survived pretty long so far.
[Leming]: And we're pretty late to the game, to be honest.
[Leming]: Will another override be needed in another 44 years?
[Leming]: Maybe, because inflation will keep going up.
[Leming]: But right now, we know that we need this, or else, again, the roads will continue to be in the state that they're in, and we will have to have
[Leming]: a lot of layoffs.
[Leming]: That's not a scare tactic.
[Leming]: That's just the truth.
[Leming]: It's just math.
[Leming]: So thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So I would like to point out that in asking for specifics for these things, there is a bit of a kind of a circular logic that goes in because if hypothetically we were to put forward to the voters the exact pay scale of each teacher in each line item, that's not really possible because union contracts haven't actually been negotiated, haven't been negotiated yet.
[Leming]: So that would be premature.
[Leming]: No, no, no, no.
[Leming]: And so, I mean, it goes for a lot of things.
[Leming]: It goes for the development of the plans for a fire station as well.
[Leming]: So you don't have to have the plans completely finalized and approved, but you can have a estimate for the full cost of the station from the people that are developing the plans beforehand.
[Leming]: Right now,
[Leming]: estimate is $30 million.
[Leming]: And it goes, I mean, it goes for the salaries as well.
[Leming]: So, you know, we are, we put in the ballot questions, the areas where it would go to, but we can't say it will go to 10 teachers.
[Leming]: It will go to 15 parents, et cetera, because those need to be negotiated after the fact.
[Leming]: On the other hand, if, on the other hand, if we do
[Leming]: I've also heard people say, OK, how can you promise higher wages, for instance, if those contracts haven't been negotiated?
[Leming]: So this becomes a bit of a chicken and egg problem when asking for specifics versus not being specific enough on these valid questions.
[Leming]: I'd just like to make that general point, so thank you.
[Leming]: Well, just to make the point that if you have a, you know, we, this is a request to pay slightly more property taxes, but it also goes along with the general point of, yeah, $37 a month.
[Leming]: That's, that is slightly more, you know, with the, to go along with the general point of you get what you pay for,
[Leming]: Again, we are a very underfunded city.
[Leming]: And we would like that to not be the case.
[Leming]: And this is a step in the right direction.
[Leming]: That's all.
[Leming]: I'm sorry, where is the woman who asked the question?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Sorry.
[Leming]: No, I just wanted to point out.
[Leming]: So there was, so I've seen this, um,
[Leming]: error that people have been doing with the DLS calculator the past week or so, where they're taking the $7.5 million that comes from questions seven and eight combined, and then they're just adding that to the $30 million and then saying... I think she just added the $2 million for the estimated... Yeah, that is actually...
[Leming]: So first, just to make the point that disagreeing doesn't mean it's a fear attack, it just means I disagree with you.
[Leming]: Just want to put that out there.
[Leming]: The actual answer to that is that the communities that haven't had to do Prop 2.5 overrides to keep a level budget are either the communities that have just much bigger budgets overall than we do, like Boston, or in cases like Cambridge, they invested in areas like Kendall Square years and years ago.
[Leming]: Medford could have invested in that
[Leming]: kind of development a long time ago.
[Leming]: We just never did that.
[Leming]: And smaller communities that don't really have the opportunity to do that sort of commercial development.
[Leming]: Some towns are basically just residential properties and not a whole lot of commercial activity.
[Leming]: They have to do these sorts of overrides regularly.
[Leming]: So Medford kind of avoided this by just doing cuts and cuts and cuts until we became a very underfunded community.
[Leming]: And now that we're at this point, there's really not much of a choice except for either kicking the can down the road more, which doesn't solve the problem, or doing one of these overrides like Our Neighbors, or we could get a time machine and do a lot more commercial development.
[Leming]: But of course, that's not an option.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I mean, I think we've already gone over the free cash issue quite a bit.
[Leming]: It wouldn't.
[Leming]: That's the answer.
[Leming]: We used $1.75 million in free cash to plug the budget with the understanding that we would have an override coming up on the ballot.
[Leming]: I think what my colleague is saying is that we should do that
[Leming]: another year and then do an override the next year or so.
[Leming]: But it's, I'm honestly a bit confused why it keeps coming up as a solution to all of our problems.
[Leming]: Cause it's not like you just can't use free cash year after year for salaries.
[Leming]: That's not the way it works.
[Leming]: So thank you.
[Leming]: Let's move on.
[Leming]: We still have a City Council meeting to go to.
[Leming]: Now, Councilor Collins said a lot of points that I was going to make, which is to get the bird's eye view.
[Leming]: Most of this council is pretty, is fairly new.
[Leming]: About half of us are in our first term.
[Leming]: And so we are trying to lay the foundations for the further growth and development of the city.
[Leming]: The most important thing, the most important component of that is the zoning overhaul.
[Leming]: a couple of meetings ago, I brought up a linkage fee proposal which would essentially raise the fees that developers pay for the first time to the city for their developments for the first time in 30 years that passed this council six to one.
[Leming]: I think that you'll find that we are intensely focused on the financials so that we will have growth for the next 10 years, for the next 20 years.
[Leming]: In general, this city,
[Leming]: a lot of the political history of this city has been sort of attempting to kick the can down the road or just say, oh, or just come up with like vague ways to say, oh, we should all come together and find solutions, but not actually ever backing anything.
[Leming]: This council is actually laying the foundations and passing actual ordinances and legislation so that we won't have to worry about that in the future.
[Leming]: So yes, we are building a foundation that should have been built a very long time ago, and these overrides are really meant to address more short-term concerns.
[Leming]: So thank you.
[Leming]: So speaking a bit more of a bird's eye view of this, I do wish that things were better between the fire union and the mayor and that that process had gone better for both parties.
[Leming]: And I am sorry at how that has evolved.
[Leming]: My view of this is that
[Leming]: even is that the debt exclusion is about funding and it's not, I don't see it as necessarily being tied to whatever plans come out.
[Leming]: That's just how I view it.
[Leming]: So that.
[Leming]: I'm going to try to give more of a personal perspective of that.
[Leming]: It's a good question, one that hasn't been directly addressed in these chambers too much.
[Leming]: I think, honestly, what we're seeing here is a bit of a generational divide.
[Leming]: So I think that previous generations of politicians quite literally came from a different part of town.
[Leming]: I've literally analyzed this myself.
[Leming]: I put up a blog post about it.
[Leming]: And so there's a lot of people in the city who are used to having this personal relationship with their elected officials, because they're literally the people that they grew up with.
[Leming]: But over time, the demographics of Medford have shifted.
[Leming]: You have a much younger generation of voters, a lot more people moving in.
[Leming]: And so there's a,
[Leming]: And so most, I mean, most of the city Councilors these days live in just literally a completely different geographical part of Medford.
[Leming]: And so I've spoken to, you know, there's been a lot of angry meetings and there is like some folks who've come up and said, you know, very
[Leming]: unpleasant things to me, who I've later had very good one-on-one conversations with, and they've said, well, Matt, people are scared.
[Leming]: And I do think that in some cases that is the case, because they feel like they don't really know, at a personal level, some of the folks here, just because we do come
[Leming]: we are like literally living in a different part of town.
[Leming]: Um, so I think that, I think that these sorts of things will heal, um, will heal over time.
[Leming]: Um, I think it's a matter of, I'm trying to figure out like who, uh, that comes to these meetings is willing to have a nice one-on-one conversation, develop those relationships.
[Leming]: Not everybody is, but some people are, so it will heal with time is my take on that.
[Leming]: I had a question on Medford's current definition of dormitories.
[Leming]: And I'm just trying to get an idea for myself of the practical cases where these different definitions would differ.
[Leming]: Our current one is building designed for or occupied as a residence for students or staff owned by or under the supervision of an institution or an educational use which is not operated as a gainful business.
[Leming]: With the wording for that, could that be understood as, could you like have an apartment complex or a house which is owned by an institution of some sort, even like a private equity firm, but ends up housing mostly students?
[Leming]: Would that be reclassified as dormitory under our current ordinances?
[Leming]: I think my other concern with this definition is specified building designed by or occupied as a residence for students or staff so it's that
[Leming]: It's that or right there.
[Leming]: So what I'm thinking is that one year it could be occupied by all renters who are working in Boston.
[Leming]: They all move out and then a bunch of students move in there and suddenly it's reclassified as a dormitory automatically just because it might not have been designed for that purpose, but now they're occupied.
[Leming]: It's now occupied by them that you see what I'm saying there.
[Leming]: Yeah, I'm just trying to understand how... I'm just trying to go over the implications of the current definition, just add food for thought for changing it in the future.
[Leming]: Well, I could make that as a motion, but I would like to bring up with the Cambridge definition.
[Leming]: Director Hunt, what do you think of the idea of striking the phrase for persons whose permanent residence is elsewhere?
[Leming]: So I guess I'll motion to adopt the Cambridge definition of a dormitory striking the words for persons whose permanent residence is elsewhere.
[Leming]: And.
[Leming]: And.
[Leming]: So striking whose permanent residence is elsewhere and.
[Leming]: Just whose permanent residence is elsewhere and.
[Leming]: I'll second that motion.
[Leming]: Is that correct?
[Leming]: Clerk, can you turn your microphone on, please?
[Leming]: You may repeat.
[Leming]: It's very quiet.
[Leming]: I still can't quite.
[Leming]: Just for the audio recording.
[Leming]: I can hear you.
[Leming]: It's just very quiet.
[Leming]: I think it's through someone else's mic.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Summary's good for me.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Rose, we had a we had a very short city council meeting, but sorry, I wanted to, I just wanted to add on to what Zach was saying about the long term financial plan of the city, which was a lot of what city council doing is right
[Leming]: Right now, is establishing sort of the instruments of municipal finance and governance that other surrounding towns have sort of taken for granted for a very long time and I don't think that's always obvious to people who are looking in a good example is the stabilization funds.
[Leming]: you know, we decided to create a couple of rainy day funds and allocate some cash into them.
[Leming]: And that's something that the vast majority of cities in Massachusetts have had forever that this city council only recently actually instituted.
[Leming]: Only last year we established an affordable housing trust so that we put some money towards affordable housing.
[Leming]: That was something that Somerville established like 30 years ago and it's been collecting money ever
[Leming]: ever since.
[Leming]: Our zoning really should have been overhauled a very long time ago.
[Leming]: With regards to a lot of the HR issues that were just being discussed earlier, that's not just a case for getting retrograde, it's not just a case for the teachers union, it's a case for all
[Leming]: pretty much all city staff.
[Leming]: We asked HR that during a meeting a couple months ago, and they said they don't have the financial software to do those calculations.
[Leming]: They literally have to calculate everything by hand on paper.
[Leming]: That's not something that most other organizations have to do.
[Leming]: A lot of our long-term financial planning, just to be clear, is establishing
[Leming]: be, it's just getting things that other areas have taken for granted.
[Leming]: So I just wanted to make that point.
[Leming]: I'll get off the panel.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Yeah, I see these photos and they look horrifying.
[Leming]: So thank you for putting in this request.
[Leming]: Just only question, you said that these are 40 years old, are the new telephone poles that you plan to install, what is the expected shelf life for those?
[Leming]: Thank you, I'd just like to know, could this funding have come from the CPA and are there other Brooks Estate projects at the moment with active CPA funding?
[Leming]: Got it, so this is an historic preservation.
[Leming]: I think that clarified my question.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: No, I didn't entirely follow that.
[Leming]: I would motion to approve and send this to regular meeting.
[Leming]: Motion to approve and send to committee.
[Leming]: Motion to regular meeting.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Chair Callahan?
[Leming]: Just a question about, so to be clear, this is the resolution, host a future discussion, invite MassDOT to it.
[Leming]: What would be the logistics of that?
[Leming]: Would that be another committee meeting that they and the Bicycle Commission are here?
[Leming]: Would it be a public forum, open meeting?
[Leming]: Can you clarify that a little bit?
[Leming]: Just asking for clarification on that.
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: I find the records in order and motion to approve.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President Bears.
[Leming]: At the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee meeting, we drafted and approved the summer newsletter.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank Councilor Callahan for drafting that.
[Leming]: And we then discussed and edited the Residence Guide to City Council, which is in this current agenda.
[Leming]: I would like to thank Councilor Tseng for drafting that as well.
[Leming]: That's all.
[Leming]: Motion to approve.
[Leming]: Motion to table for later in the meeting.
[Leming]: I would like to make a an additional motion to make an additional amendment to the request for information from Mr. DeRocco, which is, I'd just like to know what is the, just what is the estimated value of the
[Leming]: taxable, the property that would be taxable on the on the Medford side of the Tufts campus, thereby getting an estimate of how much they would pay in taxes if they weren't exempted from that.
[Leming]: I will go to Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: I was actually going to make a motion to invite the members of the school committee to come.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I'm ready.
[Leming]: You didn't say please.
[Leming]: It's please call the roll.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Um, so
[Leming]: Right now, sorry, just to, Council President Bears, just to clarify, was your suggestion to replace the Southwest parcel there that differs between A and B with mixed-use one?
[Leming]: Okay, yeah, for I mean, yeah, for the for the stuff that's like right next to the mistook I could definitely see the argument for making that into mixed use one but for yeah for the rest of that area like I run around that kind of spot of that parcel land all the time and it.
[Leming]: It's very underutilized.
[Leming]: There's like two banks there.
[Leming]: So I think it absolutely makes sense to build higher properties there.
[Leming]: Yeah, yeah, no, no, that.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yeah, I thought I misheard.
[Leming]: I thought you were suggesting to make that entire thing.
[Leming]: No, excuse one.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Um,
[Leming]: General question about this, because I'm kind of thinking about what that would look like between mixed use, between option A and B. Which of the mixed use three versus mixed use four would developers normally be inclined to go for?
[Leming]: Is there a situation where we decide on one and then developers are like, well, I don't think it's worth it to do that, but they wouldn't do that for the other?
[Leming]: What I'm thinking of is like when we do pass one of these, would there be any difference in sort of estimated uptake of that?
[Leming]: So just sorry, just just to summarize, like, so in theory, it sounded like that was kind of an implicit endorsement of option A, which is, you know, has more of the mixed use mixed use for which is sort of denser, but not quite as high.
[Leming]: But what you were just saying now is that developers were, they didn't in
[Leming]: In practice, they didn't really seem to care about the specific heights as much as the sort of depth of affordability when they were building housing.
[Leming]: When they were building housing.
[Leming]: more.
[Leming]: So follow up to that.
[Leming]: So what all of the different rules and incentives that are, um, that make developers make these decisions?
[Leming]: Would those be baked into the zoning at the ordinance level?
[Leming]: Or would those be baked into rules that are sort of decided to staff level as a result of studies?
[Leming]: kind of trying to avoid is that when, you know, all of this has passed, if we end up baking in some rules that end up being really difficult to change, it just end up not working, or that end up just discouraging development, and then would have to go back and sort of redo all this versus, you know, some of these incentive zoning programs that we're talking about that could potentially be changed, sort of more at the staff level after, you know, a consultant does a study on that.
[Leming]: No, no, I'd like to hear more about this subject, but I don't have any more specific questions.
[Leming]: Uh, Councilor, let me, sorry, just a real, um, personal idiot check question on my part here.
[Leming]: So, I mean, with option with option,
[Leming]: be like, we would need incentive zoning, correct, to implement the other programs that we're talking about as part of our, as part of the zoning overhaul.
[Leming]: So, like, would, like, we would need this in, we would need kind of those incentives to build higher for, like, for implementing, like, a TDM program, for instance, or some kind of, some kind of green incentives.
[Leming]: Is that,
[Leming]: And so if we go with option A, that's just all out.
[Leming]: Is that no?
[Leming]: Well, on the next slide that we were just looking at.
[Leming]: Listen, I'm a very simple person, you gotta.
[Leming]: the Medford Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: We have two items on the agenda.
[Leming]: One is the resolution to publish a City Council newsletter.
[Leming]: The other is a resolution to create a residence guide to City Council procedures and processes.
[Leming]: So I am just going to go ahead and
[Leming]: share my screen as to the draft that we came up with.
[Leming]: First, I apologize, I wasn't able to get this particular draft out during, wasn't able to get this particular draft out to folks before yesterday, but
[Leming]: We do have a version here now.
[Leming]: This was drafted by Anna and I also did some edits.
[Leming]: This version of the newsletter is essentially meant to, I'm just gonna see if there's a cleaner way to sort of zoom in on this.
[Leming]: Okay, so this version of the newsletter covers the July to September 2024 period because we essentially skipped this over the summer because we only had two regular meetings during that month.
[Leming]: And otherwise, this just sort of, this just covers the different pieces of committee work that were done.
[Leming]: Throws in the commemorations as well.
[Leming]: So if,
[Leming]: So essentially, just going over very briefly, July 23rd, the condolences to the family of MPS teacher Robin Irving, September 10th, to family of Frank Zizzo, September 10th, recognized September's National Recovery Month, and then celebrate the importance of the Chevalier Theatre and Gene Mack Gym on the 17th.
[Leming]: The general business goes over
[Leming]: The newly created stabilization fund September 10th covers the whole petition to the.
[Leming]: state house, as well as the approval of the wildlife feeding ordinances.
[Leming]: A couple of other financial things that were also done on September 10th, the electrical vehicle charging revolving fund and the refunding loan order, essentially to get better rates on some city bonds.
[Leming]: September 17th also,
[Leming]: approved late night hours for Panda Express.
[Leming]: And on July 23rd, this details how we chose to not move forward with a second independent audit of the city, since we already had an independent audit every year, as noted during the meeting in July.
[Leming]: And just some of the individual committees are only just starting to meet again.
[Leming]: So the governance committee, I noted here how
[Leming]: It hasn't met, but it did receive a referral from a regular meeting to start considering charter reforms.
[Leming]: The Charter Study Committee wraps up its work.
[Leming]: So that's just a mechanism, essentially, to start discussing that process.
[Leming]: Planning and permitting committee did meet over the summer and this just goes over some of the activity that we've been doing for INS Associates and the planning department and the public health and community safety committee worked on the wildlife feeding ordinance.
[Leming]: Noticing a typo here just now.
[Leming]: I do think, uh, Emily, uh, Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Are you recommending to start off this whole paragraph by saying the city is working very hard to address the rodent problem?
[Leming]: What about overgrowth ordinance?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: I mean, they were sort of mixed into that one committee meeting, but I don't know.
[Leming]: There's a lot of traffic today.
[Leming]: Can you look up the, wait, what was the date of this committee meeting again?
[Leming]: That's Tuesday, September 17th.
[Leming]: I mean, I think we did work on both of that committee meeting.
[Leming]: I believe if my memory serves right, so I could just say that.
[Leming]: And then we have the one in August.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Sorry, can you speak up?
[Leming]: My brain's blinking a little bit here.
[Leming]: What is a good way to summarize all the discussions on the overgrowth and rodent control ordinances?
[Leming]: Those are, to be honest, those are kind of like mixing together at this point for me, between the wildlife feeding and the overgrowth and rodent control.
[Leming]: I mean, the crossed out stuff isn't going to be...
[Leming]: In a sense, it will help us reduce our issues with rats and other unwanted animals.
[Leming]: Additionally, I'm just going to say,
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And then again, I'm going, once I actually format this, I'm just going to blow it up with links to the actual drafts of the ordinances themselves, which is half the purpose of this thing to begin with.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: It's a bit of a bit of a long paragraph, but it basically summarizes that the public health and community safety committee is trying to work on the rodent issue.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Justin, how close are you to City Hall?
[Leming]: Trying to think of, I could just say mini constitution, but this is analogous to a constitution.
[Leming]: Anna might have an idea.
[Leming]: City Charters, the Charters.
[Leming]: I should say finalizes.
[Leming]: City Charters, the Governor.
[Leming]: All right, Councilor Tseng has just entered the room.
[Leming]: Alright, I like things in lists of three but I'm having trouble thinking of something besides this as an example of what the charter covers.
[Leming]: Yeah, that this is, I mean, it was, I think, I think this is work on the charter is probably going to be covered pretty extensively in future newsletters.
[Leming]: And this is really meant, I mean, really all that happened is that's fair.
[Leming]: Now we
[Leming]: there was a resolution that was referred directly to committee.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: I was thinking maybe finalize this recommendations or finalize its drafts.
[Leming]: Um, clarify Councilor, is Councilor Scarpelli here?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Um, I'm going to go ahead.
[Leming]: And, um, is there any other parts of the newsletter that folks would like to comment on?
[Leming]: I think that we need to go over.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: In that case, is there any public, is there any public participation in this matter?
[Leming]: There's nobody currently in the chamber, but there are some folks on Zoom.
[Leming]: So if you'd like to offer input onto this current draft of the
[Leming]: under this current draft of the newsletter, feel free.
[Leming]: In that case, do we have a motion on the floor?
[Leming]: Motion approves it for publication.
[Leming]: I have a motion to approve for publication by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: I did see iPhone on Zoom, but I'm not seeing it anymore.
[Leming]: So I don't think Councilor Scarpelli is on Zoom.
[Leming]: So we can just do a voice vote.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: We'll get this formatted and hold on.
[Leming]: did have a note from Zoom reminding members to turn their mics on when they talk just so that it can be, just so that everybody can hear them that's listening in and for the recording.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Now, 24370 offered by Councilor Tseng, a resolution to create a residence guide to City Council's procedures and processes.
[Leming]: So I have the draft that Councilor Tseng shared.
[Leming]: And again, apologies that this is not, this was not in the initial agenda, but folks put in some work over the weekend.
[Leming]: And if that is, all right, seems to be good.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Just one that comes to mind.
[Leming]: It says that we pass
[Leming]: resolutions right there.
[Leming]: I think, or sorry, we pass ordinances right there.
[Leming]: I think that some, the use of the word resolution is also, would also be good just to kind of include right there.
[Leming]: Like we pass resolutions, then an explanation of what that is, ordinances, and zoning regulations.
[Leming]: Councilor Cownie.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: just to follow up on that, there always is a balance that needs to be struck with these kinds of things.
[Leming]: And I don't think that we can write, I don't think we can write anything down on a piece of paper that will work for every single person.
[Leming]: What I think would happen is,
[Leming]: matter what we end up approving in this committee, it'll go out and then people, some people will really help out.
[Leming]: I think overall do very good, but people will also start to come to us with like problems with like, I had no idea what I was talking about here.
[Leming]: And over time, we'll get real world feedback from that.
[Leming]: So it could be a process whereby we could go back and
[Leming]: update it later.
[Leming]: So that's a way to say that I completely agree with everything that Councilor Lazzaro said.
[Leming]: I am not opposed to releasing an imperfect product because I don't think that, I think that any discussions we have here
[Leming]: we'll just end up becoming theoretical and the best feedback we'll get is if we release something and then people use it and then bring that to us over time so we could release a version two, you know, after a while.
[Leming]: That's my thoughts on that.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Council Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think this would need to be referred to, I think a good way to form that motion would be to,
[Leming]: Um move this for approval to the regular council subject to the edits that we've given to Councilor Tseng this session.
[Leming]: Before we do that, I just wanted to ask, is there any public participation?
[Leming]: I see we have some folks on Zoom who might want to offer input on this.
[Leming]: Alright, I'm not seeing any raised hands.
[Leming]: Oh, no.
[Leming]: Oh, we have Eileen
[Leming]: Learner on Zoom.
[Leming]: Hold on a minute.
[Leming]: Yep, I have to unmute.
[Leming]: So I think, I believe that Councilor Tseng, we saw your comment in the chat and I believe Councilor Tseng just said that he would add something to the participation rules about the fact that we will have a sign up sheet and typically do.
[Leming]: It's just our, we don't have a city messenger at the moment.
[Leming]: So that might've been why this particular draft
[Leming]: didn't include that.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: Okay, yep.
[Leming]: Justin just said that he
[Leming]: Justin just said that he added it.
[Leming]: So the version that we refer to the regular council meeting will have will tell people explicitly that they can sign up to participate and don't have to wait in line.
[Leming]: Thank you, Eileen.
[Leming]: We have a motion on the floor.
[Leming]: That were recommended at this meeting.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Clerk, do you have that written down?
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: Opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passed.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Do we have any other motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: Opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Motion passed 3 to 1.
[Leming]: Thank you, everybody.
[Leming]: Have a wonderful Tuesday.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you, and I'd be happy to second that motion, but I have one question for Marian O'Connor and I,
[Leming]: I apologize if this already touched on during your initial, when you initially spoke about this just now, but can you talk specifically about the mechanisms for enforcing whatever the overgrowth ordinance is?
[Leming]: What concerns day-to-day do you run into when somebody has a lot of stuff in their yard that is attracting rodents?
[Leming]: And what would you be looking for in a new ordinance that would help you in your ability to do your job better when you do run into those situations?
[Leming]: It does.
[Leming]: Is there any other mechanisms that you've seen, you've heard about people using in other municipalities besides ticketing that just, that could work better?
[Leming]: Because I often hear about enforcement of ordinances being an ongoing issue, especially with limited staffing capabilities.
[Leming]: So if you've given any, if you've sort of heard about other instances of
[Leming]: municipalities that are able to enforce what they do have, and would love to hear about that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: and circulate those requirements.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Ken, can you turn the mic on?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: And thank you.
[Leming]: I'd just say I'd be willing to support these hours as well.
[Leming]: I understand the concerns with consistency, but kind of two reasons.
[Leming]: So I think that part of the issue that we didn't want to approve the raising canes permit was just because of the, I think it was a little bit more visible from more houses.
[Leming]: Yeah, I understand that there are residents across the street, but it's also not, I mean, Riverside Avenue is a fairly large road, and we did approve the special permit for Pinky's Pizza, which is a lot more of a closed-in neighborhood.
[Leming]: So I just, yeah, I think 1 a.m.
[Leming]: in this case does make sense, just given the location.
[Leming]: That's my two cents.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Thank you for the presentation, Paola.
[Leming]: So the question I have is that we have a couple of programs that are proposed on our wish list, which sort of relate to zoning incentives.
[Leming]: So I've been pushing for the transportation demand management program to be implemented in
[Leming]: some forms that we could get developers more involved in the regional TMAs.
[Leming]: I've also, but there's also other aspects to this, like an inclusion, like affordable housing overlays and a few other programs that could affect, that could affect a developer's decision to build,
[Leming]: to build housing, like the linkage program they were discussing last night.
[Leming]: I guess my question is, in the other cities that you've been studying, do they normally have a bunch of different incentive programs overlaid with each other that are integrated, or is it normally better to keep it more or less simple?
[Leming]: personally speaking, my end all be all is Medford does need more affordable housing.
[Leming]: So whatever our zoning can do to disincentivize developers from building luxury units and to integrate more affordable housing and to make that more profitable for them would be ideal and whatever the best mechanism to do that is, I would support.
[Leming]: I would also, though, like programs that
[Leming]: incentivize developers who come into Medford to sort of be more integrated into what's happening in the surrounding communities, just so that we're not so isolated.
[Leming]: And that's why I'm pushing for the TDM to be an important part of the ordinance.
[Leming]: So that's where I'm coming from.
[Leming]: And then the third
[Leming]: thing on my Christmas list is to make it so that it's not some, all of these rules put together are not some Byzantine kind of overly complex structure that developers can't really understand.
[Leming]: So I understand that that could end up getting a little bit contradictory after a while, but it's sort of those three things are what's on my mind right now.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President Bears.
[Leming]: So this is the result of a lot of discussions that I've been having with the Office of Community Development as we try to
[Leming]: update the linkage program, the capital improvements program.
[Leming]: So this is essentially when developers come in to the city, they need to pay fees into certain buckets, which will help to improve the city as a whole.
[Leming]: What we're trying to do with this program is first to update the original amounts that were proposed in 1990 when this was established.
[Leming]: and we're also trying to add a fifth bucket in addition to the ones already mentioned in the letter for affordable housing to provide a more constant source of revenue to the affordable housing trust.
[Leming]: We previously discussed changes to the ordinance at earlier meetings.
[Leming]: The issue is that
[Leming]: some of the changes that we're proposing after legal review, it turns out you would need to go back to the state to actually update those in a couple of ways.
[Leming]: So in order to actually do these updates every
[Leming]: three years as is required by that ordinance.
[Leming]: One study to do that could cost as much as $150,000.
[Leming]: And so doing that every three years is too cost prohibitive.
[Leming]: Just performing the nexus study to establish a new bucket entirely for the affordable housing trust would probably cost about $80,000.
[Leming]: The planning department has been going around trying to find consultants who are willing to do that.
[Leming]: Medford has a bit of a unique linkage program.
[Leming]: you know, they are having trouble finding a consultant for a reasonable price that can do that.
[Leming]: So what this would do first is it would just extend that to save the city a little bit of money because the full linkage program really wouldn't update that much within a three year period that you would actually need to do that study.
[Leming]: 10 years is a more reasonable timeframe to do these.
[Leming]: We've gone 34 years without doing one.
[Leming]: So I think getting away from that three year mark is reasonable.
[Leming]: And the second, which is very important, is literally just copied and pasted from a similar program that Watertown did in
[Leming]: 2022, where instead of just having these linkage prices set and just consistently get undervalued by inflation at the same time, there will be automatic updates from year to year so that the city is not losing money over time.
[Leming]: And, you know, the less that we do, if we happen to have, you know, staff or boards who just
[Leming]: don't do what they're supposed to do and perform these studies every few years, we would just be losing money over time.
[Leming]: So again, it's a fairly simple update, but it does need to go to the state for approval.
[Leming]: So I would motion to approve this home rule petition and send it to the mayor.
[Leming]: The linkage funds are for?
[Leming]: No, the linkage funds don't go to the schools.
[Leming]: It listed in the letter.
[Leming]: So, okay, so this is- Water, sewer.
[Leming]: Yeah, so it's the police department, parks and rec, roads and traffic, water and sewers.
[Leming]: Yeah, the authorizing legislation kind of gave a list of buckets that it could potentially go into, and affordable housing was one of them.
[Leming]: But when they actually implemented it in 1990, they only chose those four.
[Leming]: Yeah, this would just allow for, this would just allow those automatic inflation based updates.
[Leming]: And so it's a very specific, it's a very specific price index that's stated in the proposed change.
[Leming]: And this was already done over in Watertown.
[Leming]: So it is becoming standardized.
[Leming]: neighboring cities, it would also save the city money by expanding the requirement to actually do these studies from three to 10 years, because these studies are pretty cost intensive.
[Leming]: So moved.
[Leming]: So when determining whether or not something will get through the state house, oftentimes you're reading the tea leaves.
[Leming]: But in this case, it was solely because they had already approved similar language with that same price index for the city of Watertown.
[Leming]: So they
[Leming]: the state legislature would want consistency going on there.
[Leming]: There wouldn't really be much of a reason for the city of Watertown to go for one price index and then Medford to just arbitrarily choose another.
[Leming]: So that's the justification behind that particular choice right there.
[Leming]: In terms of the Affordable Housing Trust, as Council President Bears said, that is independent of any votes that took place tonight.
[Leming]: This was solely, the vote here was solely to ask the state to extend the period between these very expensive studies from three years to 10 years to save the city.
[Leming]: a little bit of money, and also to allow for automatic adjustments to be applied for these, because right now, I think that when they instituted this, they assumed that the cities would just do these studies every three years, and Medford in practice just never did that.
[Leming]: We're supposed to, we never did.
[Leming]: So this just allows a mechanism to prevent that, those fees from being eaten up by inflation.
[Leming]: Right now they're worth less than half of what they were in 1990.
[Leming]: The affordable housing trust fund, sorry, the affordable housing trust linkage program.
[Leming]: So that is, there is currently a draft that essentially establishes a fifth bucket in addition to the four that currently exist to go into the affordable housing trust.
[Leming]: The affordable housing trust was already created by this council in the previous term.
[Leming]: And the state, the language of the state ordinance also allows for
[Leming]: also allows for affordable housing to be one of those buckets.
[Leming]: So essentially all the ordinance would do is create a chain there that puts money into the bucket.
[Leming]: The thing is that in order to do that, you do need another completely new study, which would cost about $80,000 in order to figure out what exactly the amount of money that you're charging developers to go into the Affordable Housing Trust would be in the first place.
[Leming]: And right now, I've been working with the planning office to figure out how to fund that study, what the study would look like, and just generally corresponding with them.
[Leming]: In all likelihood, we wouldn't actually pass the ordinance until the study were conducted.
[Leming]: And so, you know, we would have a bit more of a basis for it, but I could talk for a while about the whole situation there.
[Leming]: So the point of doing these studies is that this can be looked at holistically.
[Leming]: The reason that we're not just
[Leming]: The reason that you don't just kind of arbitrarily come up with a number is because those situations might occur in the first place.
[Leming]: Right now, the planning office is trying to come up with funding to do a more comprehensive study on the other four buckets as well, just so that these situations don't actually happen, because you're right, you do need to account for a lot of other things, including what the city is already doing, the current costs of materials, labor,
[Leming]: et cetera, et cetera.
[Leming]: And so that is the purpose of doing one of these, uh, one of these studies in the first place.
[Leming]: Again, the city hasn't done one in 34 years, so we really need to do one.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President Sell.
[Leming]: Like my colleagues, I don't really like to hear a lot of the conspiratorial narratives, but I have a purely technical question about this that I hope that perhaps Councilor Scarpelli or somebody else could address.
[Leming]: If this information is already out there, I'd just like to know, are there any particular
[Leming]: papers or types of information that could be received with this resolution that could not be addressed with a simpler FOIA request.
[Leming]: Sorry, can you repeat that, a what request?
[Leming]: FOIA, Freedom of Information Act request.
[Leming]: So my question is, could somebody simply submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the mayor
[Leming]: to the city to get the information requested in this resolution?
[Leming]: Or is the resolution asking for information that could not be gotten through a Freedom of Information Act request?
[Leming]: It's just a technical question that... I don't know.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: No, I just, I am just...
[Leming]: I guess my point was first, I just wanted to know purely technically if there is any extra information that could be gotten from the council resolution that could not be obtained from a FOIA request.
[Leming]: And also just submitting a simple FOIA request on your own and then publishing the results of that when it was received, which would effectively get a lot of information out there.
[Leming]: It could be just as an effective means
[Leming]: transparency.
[Leming]: Obviously, that wouldn't be the case if the answer to the first question was yes, there are certain documents that can be received.
[Leming]: But that was that was what I was asking.
[Leming]: Oh.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President Harris, for putting this forward.
[Leming]: So I will be supporting the resolution, though one thing about it that I would like to point out is that there are sort of two...
[Leming]: The advocacy for putting this particular one on this particular question on the ballot.
[Leming]: There were two.
[Leming]: There were two sort of groups of advocates that were trying to get it through one of them.
[Leming]: One group was basically trying to make it so that anybody could grow these sorts of medicines for personal use and it would be less regulated.
[Leming]: The other, which ended up being the question that we're seeing on the ballot with the sort of regulatory body is very similar to what is currently seen in Oregon, whereby you have a,
[Leming]: body, an unelected commission that essentially does allow for people to use these medicines, but it generally puts a very high price on them.
[Leming]: So it turns it into a for-profit, it turns it into a for-profit industry.
[Leming]: So I will be supporting it.
[Leming]: I think that any
[Leming]: Any progress is good.
[Leming]: Although I will be pointing out that it is slightly different from the same resolution that this body supported several months ago.
[Leming]: So thank you once again for your efforts.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Go ahead and get started here.
[Leming]: Meeting of the Medford City Council Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Four present, one absent.
[Leming]: Meeting is called to order.
[Leming]: First item that we're just, that we're going to discuss is
[Leming]: 24-354, the resolution to publish a City Council newsletter.
[Leming]: A draft of the newsletter was forwarded to everybody in the agenda packet.
[Leming]: I also, earlier today, forwarded a copy, an updated
[Leming]: Copy of the newsletter with some suggestions to reflect events from the meeting last night.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan, you have a?
[Leming]: Okay, yep, yep.
[Leming]: I'm just going to share my screen really quickly, one moment.
[Leming]: Okey dokey.
[Leming]: So this newsletter, as per the.
[Leming]: As per the schedule that we voted on earlier, was drafted by Council President Bears.
[Leming]: I submitted, I forwarded the link to everybody here, made a couple of suggestions, and then Councilor Bears earlier today also edited those to provide his own suggestions.
[Leming]: So if folks have anything that they'd like to add to the newsletter,
[Leming]: feel free.
[Leming]: I'll start with Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I'm trying to find exactly where.
[Leming]: I just, you said elected with voted, sorry.
[Leming]: Well, yeah, okay, so it looks like that was our in the latest updates from Council President Bears.
[Leming]: It looks like he already struck that out and replaced it with.
[Leming]: And are you seeing the changes that I made?
[Leming]: Is this fine with you?
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Anyone else have any suggestions for the current draft of the newsletter?
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Yeah, with the final PDF, why it would end up being formatted, I'm not 100% sure about that.
[Leming]: But I do agree, this generally does make it more readable.
[Leming]: This is helpful.
[Leming]: What date was that?
[Leming]: OK, yeah.
[Leming]: And I do remember what exactly the date was that we met with the.
[Leming]: It could be a good idea to just briefly summarize what was discussed or just state that we did it.
[Leming]: Yeah, okay.
[Leming]: I always write things in a very boring way, so let me know if-
[Leming]: like these two are, you know, sufficiently descriptive.
[Leming]: Yeah, I was actually, and and I were kind of talking about how to present how to present that so I was, I mean, we like I did take notes from them, I was kind of thinking that maybe.
[Leming]: some kind of a quarterly report on it, but we were sort of thinking like, okay, you know, do residents see these listening sessions as being semi-confidential?
[Leming]: Like, do they not want notes of what they talked about to be public record?
[Leming]: So I think that those things would need to be discussed.
[Leming]: It would definitely be a good agenda item to bring up formally for the next resident services meeting.
[Leming]: I'm not sure if we would have time or be able to discuss it extensively
[Leming]: this particular meeting because it's not on the agenda, but maybe we could.
[Leming]: Councilor Calderon.
[Leming]: Yeah, no, I mean this, it is it is definitely something and I was also kind of thinking like that this would actually come up in the next agenda item because some of the stuff that we did here at the listening sessions would be relevant to the city guide that we're talking about, but I do agree that having it.
[Leming]: be discussed and sort of like the ideas like sort of codified and shared with the rest of the council is definitely gets to the spirit of those listening sessions.
[Leming]: To the
[Leming]: newsletter.
[Leming]: Is there any other, and again, I apologize for some of the last minute updates, but the goal with these is to summarize the most recent events leading up to the current meeting.
[Leming]: Is there any other feedback that individual, that Councilors have about the current draft of the newsletter that you'd like to see?
[Leming]: Really, oh, oh.
[Leming]: Yeah, that's why we've been kind of.
[Leming]: Oh, okay, okay, I did not, sorry, I didn't know that, okay, so.
[Leming]: Sorry, I was so to be clear about the process for doing this.
[Leming]: I have Google documents that I share with the individual Councilors who need to who are drafting that current one.
[Leming]: I did not know that people who just view these things don't actually see the current edits Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Wait, sorry.
[Leming]: Suffering from.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And I'll also just kind of scroll through this and very slowly to give everybody, I will fix, I will address this issue the next time so that, I'm just gonna start from the top, okay?
[Leming]: And just, again, apologies that I didn't know that it was invisible to people who just had view access to this.
[Leming]: So, sort of summarizing the updates, Council President Bears has added the resolutions commemorating individuals at the last meeting, Sylvia Janis, Don Alasky, as well as Tom Lincoln, and the passing of former Medford Police Department Detective Lauren Kane.
[Leming]: So we added those to commemorations and acknowledgements.
[Leming]: There was the acknowledgement of the Stop the Stigma campaign from a June 11th meeting.
[Leming]: I added in...
[Leming]: The appointments from the June 25th meeting to the Affordable Housing Trust, the Community Preservation Committee, and the free cash allocation to the study for the new Medford High School.
[Leming]: Council President Bears has added details about the stabilization funds that we also allocated free cash to right here.
[Leming]: So, you know, just kind of detailing what happened later on last night in the meeting.
[Leming]: And we approved the new South Street historic district ordinance for its first reading.
[Leming]: Again, just summarizing what happened yesterday.
[Leming]: Some edits to the Public Works and Facilities Committee, which recognize the fact that
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro's resolution to host a discussion of MassDOT plans for the Medford Square Main Street intersection.
[Leming]: Planning and Permitting Committee, the zoning related recommendations of both Medford's comprehensive climate plan and how they can best be incorporated into the zoning update project.
[Leming]: And at the May 28th regular meeting, first round of zoning updates from the zoning update project.
[Leming]: June 12th committee meetings, zoning up the project, council's priorities, policies and plan recommendations implement, and a draft timeline of what elements of the project should be started first.
[Leming]: Then, the licensing of the methadone clinic that we referred to committee yesterday, as well as the planning, the,
[Leming]: zoning update projects, timeline, and maps from the planning and permitting committee.
[Leming]: Those, yep.
[Leming]: features.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: 25th point.
[Leming]: Okay, so that's about all.
[Leming]: Does do any Councilors have any suggestions for further edits to this draft?
[Leming]: And once again, my apologies for the fact that most most people here couldn't see the updates until just now.
[Leming]: Move.
[Leming]: We have a motion on the floor on the motion by Councilor Tseng seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: 4 in the affirmative, 1 absent.
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Moving on.
[Leming]: 24-370 offered by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Resolution to create a residence guide to City Council's procedures and processes.
[Leming]: be it resolved that the Resident Services Public Engagement Committee create and publish a short guide in English and commonly spoken non-English languages to the City Council for residents to understand the City Council's procedures and processes.
[Leming]: I imagine this could just be a general discussion of our ideas of what this should contain.
[Leming]: Are there any comments on the floor?
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: So to summarize what I've heard, people generally like the idea of having a short one page for people to go through, but with the possibility of having supplementary documents that explain in more detail what the different rules and processes are, the having something just right at the top for people who've literally never been to city council meetings before, and just like very quick,
[Leming]: like quick and dirty sort of points like, you know, when we take a vote, why there's not necessarily public participation there, as well as basic info about what the city council is in charge of and what falls under purview of other departments.
[Leming]: In terms of format, I mean, I, I think it would be a good idea to have a one pager and like you see that little plastic thing right there where they have agendas out.
[Leming]: So just have something like that sitting out there.
[Leming]: So it would be a good idea since this will be printed to have everything in black and white.
[Leming]: So try to not like, and this is just my initial take, try not like indulge too much in like super colorful graphics, but just kind of keep like a very
[Leming]: basic presentation.
[Leming]: The important thing would be to have it done in multiple languages.
[Leming]: Not that we don't have to have graphics or anything, but just make it so that it looks reasonable when you print it off on a laser printer.
[Leming]: That's the other piece of feedback I have.
[Leming]: But I do agree that a nice one pager for people who come in here have never attended a meeting before and can just kind of like take that as something to hold would be
[Leming]: very, would be a very nice thing.
[Leming]: Leading up to this meeting, I actually was thinking that having a nice, colorful graphics-based thing would be a really cool product to show people.
[Leming]: But I'm also thinking about practicality.
[Leming]: When people come to a city council meeting, it's often in person.
[Leming]: And I've heard a lot of people say, this is my first city council meeting.
[Leming]: I have no idea what's going on.
[Leming]: And when we get these agenda packets,
[Leming]: very often, and this is something that I even mentioned last night, the PDFs are sort of like very nice looking, very presentable, very colorful.
[Leming]: But when they're printed, and again, this is just like a super practical issue, it just doesn't translate well into black and white.
[Leming]: And that will be the reality of residents that are actually holding this guide.
[Leming]: So I think simplicity is
[Leming]: There's a movie that I saw a clip of one time as well, where it discussed the process of designing a new type of tank within the Pentagon.
[Leming]: And throughout the design process, different generals kept on giving their different pieces of input to the design of this thing.
[Leming]: And the end product was something that had been completely designed by committee and was like, like totally impractical.
[Leming]: So I do think that
[Leming]: there is that element of that in making this as well.
[Leming]: My point in saying that is that we are giving these suggestions and I have my own opinions on this, but you know, you know, you're the, you're the artist, so.
[Leming]: You know, I think it's important.
[Leming]: That is true.
[Leming]: We're discussing what's essentially an artistic project and we don't have the one artist on city council on this committee.
[Leming]: So there, I could see some issues with that.
[Leming]: But no, that is to say we are making these suggestions, but it is important to filter through what is the most essential information for someone who has no idea what's going on, try to put that front and center.
[Leming]: The goal of this is that if somebody's entering these chambers,
[Leming]: They don't know anything.
[Leming]: They can read this piece of paper and get the 411 and oftentimes having too much information in one place could end up not being beneficial for that.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Is there a color printer in this building?
[Leming]: So I do, with Anna's suggestion,
[Leming]: I am inclined to think so having, starting out with like a city council guide that looks clean, smooth, one pager would be great.
[Leming]: And then probably expanding to having something out front for that, you know, if we have like a nice city council one, we could also then do a general city hall one, which may be, okay, this is your first time in city hall, if you are a,
[Leming]: small business owner, go to this department on this floor, you can talk to this person and something like that.
[Leming]: But I, so there should be room to be able to scale it to other departments, but the initial model, just to keep the project simple, I feel like, you know,
[Leming]: don't, you know, we just started out by knowing what our scope is and just getting the first guide right.
[Leming]: And then after that, after that, expanding to that, that's my opinion.
[Leming]: Yeah, makes sense.
[Leming]: So,
[Leming]: Personally, with the survey, I think having a draft first, I think it would be more effective to have a draft and then put that out and ask for feedback on it.
[Leming]: This is just kind of my initial thoughts on it.
[Leming]: And then say, is this helpful to you?
[Leming]: Please give us feedback.
[Leming]: And then update it from there just so that people sort of have an idea of what you're talking about.
[Leming]: That's just my thinking on that though.
[Leming]: So it would, again, you're the artist.
[Leming]: So don't let me, I'm not gonna tell Van Gogh what shade of yellow to use in the process.
[Leming]: Councilor Callaghan, tell us your thoughts right now.
[Leming]: Everybody in this packed room is waiting for your thoughts.
[Leming]: Sorry, I was too busy making jokes.
[Leming]: On the best way to get feedback for the guide from residents, the discussion was... No, that's cool.
[Leming]: I feel like if we're kind of looking at, I don't think that there would be much of an issue with
[Leming]: you as an individual, as you're coming up with like an initial draft for this, posting this to one of your accounts just to get some feedback from folks and then bringing it to the body, which, and I'm mainly saying that just because that possibly would be a way to
[Leming]: speed up the process and not have to like, you know, vote a vote, a draft of something out of a meeting and then get approval from the general body.
[Leming]: So I'm just trying to think of ways to kind of simplify the process of drafting a one pager here.
[Leming]: Yeah, cool.
[Leming]: In terms of future directions, we did receive a, I mean, just because we said we were going to talk about this on the last agenda item, we did receive some feedback from some folks that are listening sessions who are saying that, you know, they go into city hall, they don't know
[Leming]: like where to go from there.
[Leming]: So I know that we're talking about solely a city council, one pager guide for residents, but scaling, like moving forward, it would be good to have, it would be good to, you know, at least start thinking about, you know, if somebody literally enters the building and they wanna talk to someone about getting a license, then having something right there for them to,
[Leming]: look at maybe having a greeter if that's a thing that City Hall has capacity for like I don't know the equivalent of a receptionist just right in the middle of City Hall would be a nice nice thing to have as soon as we
[Leming]: get the funding for something like that.
[Leming]: But anyway, those are just some informal notes from our listening sessions.
[Leming]: Is there any further discussion on this agenda item?
[Leming]: Yep, on the one pager.
[Leming]: It's very, very controversial motion Councilor Tseng, do we have a, do we have a second on that?
[Leming]: We have two.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Well, before we vote, do we have any public participation?
[Leming]: Anybody interested in public participation?
[Leming]: Okay, seeing none in the chambers and none on Zoom, we'll go ahead and call the vote.
[Leming]: Roll call.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Four present, wait, four in favor, one absent.
[Leming]: The motion passes.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: On the motion to adjourn, seconded by Councilor, was that a second, Councilor Callahan?
[Leming]: Madam Clerk, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Four present, four affirmative, one absent.
[Leming]: The motion passes.
[Leming]: Meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: Thank you, Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: So the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee has primarily met on the first, we had a committee meeting on the Human Rights Commission reform.
[Leming]: which was the, which reflects the efforts of Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: We designed a social media policy.
[Leming]: A lot of our efforts went into the modernizing City Council communication strategy.
[Leming]: Social media policy was designed by, I believe it was Councilor Tseng and
[Leming]: Lazzaro, a lot of our efforts in modernizing the communication strategy has just been in developing new routine habits to get information out to the public, namely the
[Leming]: newsletter, which we're drafting and releasing every month.
[Leming]: So there've been a couple of administrative challenges in terms of building a mailing list for that and working out the relationship between the administration and city council and releasing those to the public.
[Leming]: But we, at this point, we're going to be drafting the third newsletter tonight.
[Leming]: And I think we have a pretty smooth routine going.
[Leming]: The other aspect of modernizing communication strategy is the fact that these meetings are now being live streamed to YouTube, which was kind of more of a something that I worked with the clerk's office behind the scenes on to
[Leming]: to get that to happen, kind of like did a lot of chasing down of some of accounts and whatnot to figure out how to put that together.
[Leming]: The other aspect of this that we have been working on is meeting with underrepresented groups, namely the listening sessions that were proposed by Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: We have had a subcommittee meeting on that in which we designated which councilors are going to be responsible for which underrepresented groups in the city.
[Leming]: Thus far, we've had two listening sessions, one with
[Leming]: the senior center, which was organized by Councilor Lazzaro, the other with the
[Leming]: Portuguese liaisons, which I facilitated and which was attended by myself and Councilor Callahan last week.
[Leming]: Those have gone very well in terms of just getting outside feedback from, you know, folks that are not usually engaging with City Council and City Hall as much as we'd like.
[Leming]: Otherwise, the
[Leming]: Something there's the project outside of this that we have that's gone through the committee has been a veterans housing initiative so that's not on the governing agenda, but it did come up in response to.
[Leming]: the project the veteran services director wanted to spearhead.
[Leming]: And so that's currently going through a legal process behind the scenes, kind of like figuring out how that interacts with public appropriations law.
[Leming]: And
[Leming]: Yeah, one of the one of the challenges of this committee is that it's more about it has a lot of ongoing projects so we're never going to stop streaming to YouTube hopefully we're never going to stop releasing a newsletter so it's just about creating more.
[Leming]: transparency and engagement habits within city council.
[Leming]: So we can't really check any one of these off, uh, in a project based fashion.
[Leming]: It's just like a, there's just a lot of ongoing things that we're going to be doing in continuity.
[Leming]: So that is, there is a bit of a capacity problem with like a capacity issue with this particular committee.
[Leming]: Um, so thank you.
[Leming]: That's all I got.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: And it just re-entered the room.
[Leming]: Just like to say that
[Leming]: When I was a member of the CPA, Tom Lincoln, he was one of our frequent customers.
[Leming]: He just brought in application after application to repair the Brooks Estate, and he's the driving force behind the upkeep of that property today.
[Leming]: This is just a case of an
[Leming]: ordinary citizen of Medford, seeing something that they wanted preserved, seeing a project that they could really get behind, and putting their time and energy into it.
[Leming]: And it's really paid off.
[Leming]: I look forward to telling Mr. Lincoln how much I admire him when he does come to the next city council meeting.
[Leming]: Congratulations, Mr. Lincoln.
[Leming]: You're a great citizen.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Just keep mine short and I'll say Sylvia, we love you.
[Leming]: We'll miss you.
[Leming]: We'll miss your humor and your presence in the clerk's office.
[Leming]: I don't think that
[Leming]: The clerks often get enough credit for all the work that they do behind the scenes and all the institutional knowledge that they bring to City Council and City Hall and the help either just with purely procedural stuff or just with moral support when we've had a rough evening.
[Leming]: And Sylvia will be dearly missed.
[Leming]: That being said, enjoy retirement.
[Leming]: Have a good time.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I'd just like to say, it looks like you've assembled a real dream team here.
[Leming]: Thank you very much for... No, I'm serious.
[Leming]: I looked through the descriptions of everybody.
[Leming]: I know that I spent a lot of time just focusing on, you know, trying to find good people for the board.
[Leming]: It looks like everybody here is far, far more qualified than
[Leming]: when it comes to anything related to affordable housing.
[Leming]: And thank you so much for your efforts in assembling these six people.
[Leming]: I know that they'll do fantastic work.
[Leming]: I look forward to recommendations from these folks when it comes to both any affordable housing policy ideas and ways to get money into the trust fund.
[Leming]: So just,
[Leming]: Thank you for your efforts and that's all I got.
[Leming]: Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Just wanted to say, I remember back when I was getting my appointment to the CPA,
[Leming]: I remember I waited in this room until about one, one o'clock in the morning, watching a very good meeting.
[Leming]: It was a great meeting, but also just say that when I saw at his name on the, on the agenda, I was kind of thinking like, you know, I really don't want to have somebody else go through that.
[Leming]: That's, that's not, not always the,
[Leming]: most pleasant thing to go through.
[Leming]: So I was kind of behind the scenes asking folks to do that, to move this paper out of order just so that she didn't also have to wait till one in the morning to get appointed.
[Leming]: But just wanted to say right over your resume, I think it's wonderful to have a social worker with heights of the community on the CPA and I know you'll do good work there.
[Leming]: So yeah, that's all I got.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I would just like to thank you for figures two and three, which very clearly show the amount that has been matched by the state every year since 2018.
[Leming]: Um, as well as figure three, which very clearly shows that historically they're 29% of CPA funds have gone towards affordable housing.
[Leming]: I would recommend modestly that maybe the color coding is could be updated because we get these in
[Leming]: It looks beautiful in the PDF.
[Leming]: It looks absolutely wonderful, very clear in the online PDF.
[Leming]: But I will say that just in the printed version, it's not quite clear that the state matching has been very consistent year to year, in spite of what has often been said in these chambers.
[Leming]: So thank you very much for that.
[Leming]: So just two questions.
[Leming]: So to clarify, if somebody wanted to build an ADU on their house and they lived in a historic district, then you would require that the ADU be built with materials similar to the one that are used to currently construct the house?
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: The other one, and I've kind of been curious about this ever since I first saw this map a couple of months ago.
[Leming]: Could you talk about the houses between, I believe it's 84 and 102, or are they just like newer buildings?
[Leming]: Oh, okay.
[Leming]: Use your arrow keys.
[Leming]: You can go back with the arrow key.
[Leming]: I just have one question for the members of the Historic District Commission.
[Leming]: When you were deciding which district to choose for those, what other areas were you sort of considering?
[Leming]: And can you just delve a little bit more into the specific rationale for choosing South Street?
[Leming]: I feel like we need a bit more of an extensive presentation.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I don't want to meditate too much on this, but I would like to clarify because I said that I talked to the administration about free cash.
[Leming]: And I want to clarify what I mean when I say that I talked to the administration is I Googled Bob Dickinson, the finance director's phone number, left him a voicemail, and then he got back to me and we talked for like, you know, half an hour about
[Leming]: free cash, because when I saw, you know, $9 million, I was kind of like, what's going on here?
[Leming]: And so then, you know, the finance director has been working in this area for years, and me, who, as an elected official, doesn't suddenly mean that I know everything about finance, I talked to him about it, I asked my questions.
[Leming]: And he explained, you know, what the situation was, it's not a simple issue.
[Leming]: Cities are kind of on a one year delay.
[Leming]: So in many ways, we're dealing now with what was budgeted last year, and we are
[Leming]: going to be in our budget, and we're trying to predict what the budget will be next year.
[Leming]: They always come up with conservative estimates.
[Leming]: Part of the free cash comes from the fact that the police department couldn't hire 10 police officers, so that's $800,000 extra in free cash.
[Leming]: Obviously, if we want to be able to fill those positions, that is not revenue that we can expect to come in.
[Leming]: next year.
[Leming]: Part of it just came from poor, inaccurate estimations in previous years of what healthcare costs would be.
[Leming]: Those things are always hard to predict.
[Leming]: And part of this is the fact that we
[Leming]: implement, you know, we have these one time very big studies to try to invest in our city.
[Leming]: Obviously, we're debating many of those tonight costs like 15 million bucks to replace the HVAC systems for the middle school.
[Leming]: So we need to, we need to spend, we need to
[Leming]: fix that.
[Leming]: And we can't just say, Oh, here's $9 million.
[Leming]: Well, we should use that on salaries, continuing costs, which will just sink, which will just like eat up all of that money in a couple of years.
[Leming]: So, you know, in order to appropriately finance the city, it's not
[Leming]: It's not an easy thing to explain, but at the end of the day, free cash goes to one-time costs.
[Leming]: You cannot count on it as an ongoing source of revenue, especially to handle salaries.
[Leming]: The other thing to note is that being an elected official doesn't mean that people will suddenly make an effort to call me
[Leming]: to give me information and include me in on things.
[Leming]: It's my job to go out and seek that information and try to educate myself on things that happen, you know, just because, you know, being elected basically means that I get to sit in the seat and talk for however long I can.
[Leming]: I'm allowed to, and vote on ordinances.
[Leming]: If I was not involved in the financial task force in order to figure out how things work, any city councilor can do this.
[Leming]: You call up somebody, you seek out that information, you build up those relationships, and if you choose not to do that, then you won't be included.
[Leming]: That's just how it works.
[Leming]: So I'd just like to clarify that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Part of this that gives me pause is the fact that Medford, the mayor's chair of the school committee and so I mean I know that that's two different positions but by two legally different positions.
[Leming]: I, yeah, I, I know but the.
[Leming]: it could change if the charter changes, but effectively the person who is occupying both the position as mayor and the position as head of the school committee in Medford are the same person.
[Leming]: And so the chair of the school committee did get a raise already.
[Leming]: And so that's,
[Leming]: That's I'd say that I'd say that that's the part that that's that's the one part of this that does give me that does give me some pause the logic of having not received an increase in the past.
[Leming]: 10 years, that does make sense.
[Leming]: But the person who is essentially doing the job that they have done that whole time has received a raise that we approved.
[Leming]: So that's the only part of this that I'm questioning right now.
[Leming]: Thank you, Paola.
[Leming]: I do appreciate the energy that has clearly been put into breaking down a very
[Leming]: complicated set of topics down and simplifying it for us.
[Leming]: I would personally be of the mind that I do want to engage in the rating exercise, but I fully agree that it can be done offline.
[Leming]: And perhaps there could be a motion to do that before the next meeting, before this has ended.
[Leming]: What I would like to ask you is in terms of these
[Leming]: general topics that you've seen from the comprehensive plan and the cap plan.
[Leming]: And I do understand that there are certain things that are very broad and there's certain things, like you said, the heating that were very specific.
[Leming]: What
[Leming]: very, and it's going to be very difficult for y'all to come up with something that can integrate all of the themes from both of these into one comprehensive zoning plan.
[Leming]: What, from your impressions,
[Leming]: could there really be, do you really see there being like contradictions when you're actually trying to implement these things?
[Leming]: So if, you know, there is, could be, you know, there could be a need for better transportation, there could be a need for more affordable housing, there could be a need to
[Leming]: make buildings more energy efficient.
[Leming]: Do you see any of these things in a single zoning plan strongly contradicting each other when you really get down to the nitty gritty?
[Leming]: I'd like to hear your general thoughts on that.
[Leming]: Okay, so when we're rating things, it's not like we're saying you should do this instead of this.
[Leming]: Well, so I asked to be recognized before the chair made the proposal, but I was actually going to make a motion to just have this emailed to Councilors after the meeting so that we could submit our feedback.
[Leming]: And then outside the meeting, maybe
[Leming]: have Paola forward the sticky note page to us and then move on because I don't, given the fact that we all do tend to talk quite a bit, I do it too, I'm doing it right now.
[Leming]: I think it would take more time than what we have left.
[Leming]: Affordable housing and transportation.
[Leming]: Well, maybe I just won't second then.
[Leming]: Maybe I just won't second.
[Leming]: Oh, no, second.
[Leming]: I second.
[Leming]: Oh, oh, oh, really?
[Leming]: Really?
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I found them in order and motion to approve.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Thank you, council president.
[Leming]: It is so much easier to criticize action than it is inaction.
[Leming]: And unfortunately for decades, this city
[Leming]: has really not done a whole lot to address the structural underfunding that has led up to this fiscal cliff.
[Leming]: I want to be extremely clear that if this override doesn't pass, as the mayor said, we will be here next year.
[Leming]: We will have to lay a lot of people off.
[Leming]: The roads will continue to be in the state they're in.
[Leming]: And as my colleague said, they will continue to get worse.
[Leming]: The fire department will not get its headquarters.
[Leming]: We need this.
[Leming]: as Council Vice President Collins said, this is the most important vote that is coming before this Council tonight, that has come before this Council so far this term.
[Leming]: Now, I don't know what it means to
[Leming]: do an override right.
[Leming]: I'm sure that they've had, that they've done it differently in other cities.
[Leming]: And I know that my colleagues on council, my colleagues on school committee and the mayor may have slightly different views on this.
[Leming]: They announced the financial task force months ago via press release.
[Leming]: It was never a secret committee and they had to work out a compromise to bring what we're seeing today.
[Leming]: Okay?
[Leming]: And I'm not going to sit here and criticize people who are trying to address the issues that people have been talking about in this city for decades.
[Leming]: And I'm sure that a lot of people will come around and say, you know, we need more development.
[Leming]: We need to work, do more with less, whatever that means.
[Leming]: We need to
[Leming]: I mean, we're already down to the bone, okay?
[Leming]: I've been to the school committee budget meetings.
[Leming]: They've already stripped the school budget down as far as it can possibly go.
[Leming]: If this doesn't pass, we don't know what we'll do next year, okay?
[Leming]: So I just wanna make the point that this is, I think, any kind of action, any kind of action
[Leming]: any kind of choice that the voters have, that we can give the voters is praiseworthy.
[Leming]: I commend my colleagues for doing this.
[Leming]: This is going to be historic in this city.
[Leming]: This is what we need right now.
[Leming]: And big picture, I just want to really drive that point home.
[Leming]: You know, unity is not doing what
[Leming]: the loudest people in the room say we should do.
[Leming]: Unity is fixing the problems that the vast majority of the city have told us about, even if our solutions aren't perfect.
[Leming]: So thank you very much.
[Leming]: I heard a, I heard a groan in the audience when council, when the council president listed the large amount of speakers that, uh, that still had to go.
[Leming]: And so I think everybody wants to get to public comment period.
[Leming]: So I'm going to leave it at that and thank all those who've spoken so far.
[Leming]: And I look forward to hearing what folks have to say.
[Leming]: No, this is just a quick one.
[Leming]: So Councilor Scarpelli brought up twice or several times the fact that his
[Leming]: previous paper was a rule 21.
[Leming]: I just want to be clear about that.
[Leming]: So first off, if anybody would like to look at the May 28th meeting, the city council meetings are now on YouTube.
[Leming]: So you're free to look up how that particular debate went.
[Leming]: But I rule 21'ed it because it was a
[Leming]: vague resolution.
[Leming]: It was just to generally discuss options for the school budget.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli had previously submitted a similar resolution several meetings before, and he was asked by the council president to make his resolutions more specific so that people would know what he specifically intended to bring to the table.
[Leming]: The last one was a resolution to discuss subcommittee processes, and it ended up in
[Leming]: Um, it ended up veering into a letter that my colleagues had signed.
[Leming]: Um, so it just generally got off topic.
[Leming]: So I just wanted to clarify that I wanted the resolutions of themselves to be specific so that we will know what is being talked about.
[Leming]: We could have talked about that resolution today, but my colleague decided to withdraw it, um, at the beginning of the meeting.
[Leming]: So we never did.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: I can't see it.
[Leming]: Can you share your screen?
[Leming]: Okay, what part would you want me to scroll to?
[Leming]: She's on Zoom right now, so she can share the screen.
[Leming]: I'll second that.
[Leming]: Nothing in particular to add.
[Leming]: Thank you, Chair.
[Leming]: So my thoughts on the feral stray cat issue is, one, I'm concerned that somebody could use that as an excuse to just keep putting food out for wildlife, and it would be very hard to disprove any sort of, to disprove intention.
[Leming]: there.
[Leming]: That's the first thought that comes to my mind.
[Leming]: The second is, how often do people who engage in spay-capture-neuter-release programs end up catching stray cats with food versus other means?
[Leming]: Oftentimes,
[Leming]: get a stray cat, like some of them are friendly, you could pick them up off the ground.
[Leming]: I would be interested to hear staff opinion on some of these issues, but those are just the problems with that that are coming to mind.
[Leming]: My mom does the capture and release quite a bit.
[Leming]: So a lot of this is just coming from what I'm thinking about she does,
[Leming]: Yes, I did.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So the resident services and public engagement subcommittee consisted of myself, Councilor Callahan and Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Met, we basically just discussed procedures for these listening sessions and divided the different groups that each subcommittee member would schedule.
[Leming]: listening sessions with over the next year or so.
[Leming]: And then we, that was pretty much it.
[Leming]: It was a pretty informal meeting.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: We drafted and approved the second newsletter of the Medford City Council, which is now available on the City Council web page.
[Leming]: If anybody is interested in checking out the final version, we also met to discuss the
[Leming]: proposed ordinance change to allow the veteran services director to offer an incentive to landlords that are willing to rent out to qualified veterans and address the veterans homelessness issue.
[Leming]: There was a motion to send that to legal for review.
[Leming]: And that was, those were the items that were discussed.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I'd also like to add that in addition to my colleagues' efforts on this.
[Leming]: So I talked to legal about what options city council has in helping the tenants.
[Leming]: And honestly, as we've been hinting, there isn't really a whole lot that we can do given the current tools that we have.
[Leming]: There's a lot that we could have done if different choices were made 30 years ago, if the city had decided to plant that tree 30 years ago.
[Leming]: We could have put up the money to do that, but we can't right now.
[Leming]: But right now, this city council is asking, trying to ask the state to give us the tools to prevent that.
[Leming]: And not only are we seeing these real estate management companies not respond to their own tenants, not sit down to negotiate, but we're also seeing them actively fight tooth and nail to prevent cities from having those tools in the first place because they're making so much money from this.
[Leming]: What they're spending their time doing, and I'm sure that a lot of people in this room have received those mailers, is put out information, mass text robocalls that are scaring average homeowners, average residents into thinking that these initiatives that this city council is pursuing is going to hurt them.
[Leming]: It's not.
[Leming]: It is going to prevent your neighbors from being driven out of the city.
[Leming]: Okay? That's what we're seeing, is a very small number of bad actors put out propaganda to prevent the city from having even the minimum amount of tools necessary to prevent this from happening in the future.
[Leming]: So I know that, you know, people come here and they don't like to see it when their neighbors get kicked out because right now these problems have a face to them.
[Leming]: They have the face of your neighbor saying that we're going to have to leave because a big company is telling us to leave.
[Leming]: And then it feels bad.
[Leming]: But when people say, Oh, you know, somebody should have done something about this 30 years ago, somebody should have done something about this before.
[Leming]: That's because everytime anybody's tried to do anything about it,
[Leming]: big money interest will come in and prevent it from happening through these sorts of opposition campaigns, which we're seeing in Medford right now.
[Leming]: So I'd like to point that out, that that's an important piece of context.
[Leming]: The Charles Gate Realty Group is not giving silence.
[Leming]: What they're doing is giving large donations to state senators, state representatives, telling them to nix these initiatives at the state level.
[Leming]: That's what's happening right now.
[Leming]: I'd also like to just, the CPA seems to come up a lot here, but something like $2.4 million is already going to affordable housing initiatives to rebuild Walkling Court.
[Leming]: Please do not interrupt. Councilor Scarpelli, Councilor Scarpelli,
[Leming]: I sat on the CPA prior to being elected to this council.
[Leming]: Now, affordable housing projects that involve building do come along less frequently than open space and historic preservation projects.
[Leming]: And so typically a larger portion of funding needs to be dedicated to those.
[Leming]: One project, because the CPA has not really been around all that long.
[Leming]: Now, funding,
[Leming]: a mediator, I suppose, is not a solution to these problems.
[Leming]: They're trying... Councilor Scarpelli, they're trying to find mediation.
[Leming]: They've said that they're trying to find mediation.
[Leming]: So putting more money towards somebody else that's also trying to find mediation is not a long-term sustainable solution to this
[Leming]: to this problem.
[Leming]: Now, I agree with what Vice President Collins just said.
[Leming]: This has gotten off topic, but I hear so much misinformation about the CPA being thrown around these chambers that I did feel like addressing that.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I just stopped the video
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I would motion to table this until the next regular meeting, because I would, like, that wasn't in the text that I received at all, and I would like to actually read over what Councilor Scarpelli just said in order to study it and process it a little bit more.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Motion to recess.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: President Bears, I'd like to, because the amendment made it very clear this is a financial paper, I'd like to invoke Rule 21.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: So this here is a draft of a home rule petition which would allow us the authority to, which would allow the city of Medford the authority to actually impose the commercial vacancy tax on landlords that own vacant commercial storefront properties.
[Leming]: businesses or businesses that are effectively closed all the time.
[Leming]: When I was going door-to-door campaigning, I ran into people who talked about the fact that in West Medford and South Medford, there are a lot of businesses that don't, that are just a lot of buildings that are owned by landlords who just never
[Leming]: rent them out to businesses.
[Leming]: There was one woman who was trying to get in contact with the owner of the dry cleaner that was closed at the time in West Medford for about a year and a half.
[Leming]: She said that this person wouldn't even pick up the phone to talk to her.
[Leming]: She wanted to open up a gym there, but that's obviously difficult to do if you can't even talk to the person who owns the building.
[Leming]: So there's, I did research on this.
[Leming]: There's not a whole lot of default authorities that cities have to leverage this sort of attacks.
[Leming]: So what I've been doing is two different things.
[Leming]: The first is the home rule petition draft that is in this agenda packet.
[Leming]: And this would just give us the very basic legal authority to be able to enact attacks such that it would
[Leming]: B, it would effectively disincentivize property owners from doing this.
[Leming]: And there are a few specifics in here.
[Leming]: First off, it says that the proceeds from the tax will be put into a special fund that will help to aid in the repair upkeep of these properties, as well as funding local mechanisms to incurrent tenant occupancies, such as advertising for these properties and so on and so forth.
[Leming]: Sometimes, and this gets into the fact that sometimes these properties are vacant for reasons that are outside of the property owner's control.
[Leming]: Maybe the building is not in good enough shape to attract a tenant at all, so they would need extra funds to repair the building.
[Leming]: and such.
[Leming]: There's also another clause in here that specifically would enable landlords who own the property to terminate the tenancy of any business that currently has a lease with them but it's just not doing anything with that and this was because a specific
[Leming]: scenario is brought to my attention where the tax would be the tax in this place would be placed on the owner of the property but sometimes they may have a lease in which the person who they may have a lease with a business owner who
[Leming]: it's really in their authority to make sure that they're actually running a business day-to-day in that case.
[Leming]: What I've also been doing, so this here is just meant to ask the state to give Medford permission to be able to enact this vacancy tax.
[Leming]: This obviously isn't the entire ordinance, so we just give the basic legal authority to do so.
[Leming]: If and when the state
[Leming]: does give permission to Medford to enact such a tax, there would obviously be other rules that are put in place.
[Leming]: For instance, a tax wouldn't be applied immediately after vacancy starts, there would be a grace period, there would just be other
[Leming]: that are put in place to make sure that these scenarios I've heard about where, you know, you're not just unfairly penalizing people who may be in a situation where tenants are just not, where tenants are just not trying to rent out good businesses and their properties and so on.
[Leming]: But this, again, this is just about giving the city the basic legal authority to do that simultaneously.
[Leming]: And this is,
[Leming]: Um.
[Leming]: Relate this is related to this initiative, but I figured it would be it would best go into zoning.
[Leming]: Um I've also put in work around a vacant building ordinance, which is something that the city currently does have the authority to do.
[Leming]: Um there's it's similar.
[Leming]: They have had similar initiatives over in East Hampton and some other
[Leming]: The city doesn't have the authority to levy a tax for profit, but we do have the authority to levy a fee in order to make something cost neutral.
[Leming]: So the vacant building ordinance that East Hampton implemented basically
[Leming]: would charge the owners of vacant buildings, something like $1,000 a year to as long as long as the buildings are buildings are vacant to maintain a public vacant building database which would be maintained by staff members and so.
[Leming]: You'd only be allowed to charge enough for that to pay for the staff cost of maintaining that.
[Leming]: So, again, that is one initiative that we're looking into, and that would likely create the foundation to enact commercial vacancy tax.
[Leming]: in Medford, if and when this particular petition is approved, if this council does end up passing it.
[Leming]: But overall, this is my effort to address a problem that I heard about from residents time and time again, which is they don't like to see so many closed down storefronts in
[Leming]: Medford.
[Leming]: They think that the issue is sometimes, not in all cases, but sometimes landlords that just for whatever reason either don't want to or don't have the funds to be able to rent out their storefronts that they own to
[Leming]: businesses and so this is an effort to help give them to help build up the funds to either help advertise for tenants or repair their properties as it may be.
[Leming]: So the only change I would
[Leming]: I personally suggest the text the clerk pointed out that typically homeworld petitions don't have the word resolved.
[Leming]: They have the word enacted there so I would motion to change that.
[Leming]: After we hear comment from both the economic development director who I can.
[Leming]: see us on Zoom, as well as any members of the public who are interested in seeing this.
[Leming]: I would personally like to refer it to the regular council meeting, but I also look forward to hearing what my colleagues have to say about it as well.
[Leming]: So, thank you.
[Leming]: So I do respect the sentiment that things like this can have unintended consequences.
[Leming]: Again, like I said, the Home Rule petition itself would only give the city the very basic legal authority to be able to rent, to be able to enact this tax to begin with.
[Leming]: It says nothing about timelines post vacancy to
[Leming]: uh after which the tax would apply um so the idea behind this would be if the state does grant us the authority to do this it would be just one uh it it would
[Leming]: Hopefully the ordinance would be able to be crafted so that it makes it so that these negative consequences would be very practically disincentivized in the actual implementation.
[Leming]: Some other concerns that I did have though is that I went to a meeting very recently where a developer just outright told me that keeping some of the properties that he owned
[Leming]: vacant was actually profitable for him because it would make a tax, it would make, he could just write off, write it off as a loss in his taxes.
[Leming]: So sometimes it is beneficial to landlords, it is in their best interest to keep these properties vacant and that is
[Leming]: really that is really one factor that this is meant to disincentivize.
[Leming]: I do look forward to seeing how that grant application goes.
[Leming]: Obviously there is no one tool that the city has that will be able to fix the problem that we've been experiencing for a long time, which is vacant storefronts, but
[Leming]: a combination of carrots and sticks are needed to be able to address this problem.
[Leming]: And like I also said, the idea behind this is that the funds would go, is that the revenue from this tax would go into a fund specifically meant to help out those vacant storefronts when they do, if they are in a state in which they can't be rented out.
[Leming]: Again, like, like, 11 thing that some members of the Chamber of Commerce told me about that dry cleaner over in West Medford is that there's very significant repairs that need to be made to it to be before it can be rented out on the tune of.
[Leming]: I think 70, don't hold me to it, but I think it said something like $70,000 worth of repairs at the time needed to be made.
[Leming]: And I don't know where that money would come from.
[Leming]: So the idea behind this is to be able to collect some fund, which is specifically meant to address those issues.
[Leming]: But I do respect the views and the efforts of our economic development director, but it is my belief that
[Leming]: multiple tools and initiatives are needed to help to address this problem.
[Leming]: Absolutely.
[Leming]: So, often homeworld petitions are written in very simple, short, plain language.
[Leming]: Essentially, this would just give the city permission in the 1st place to be able to then implement an ordinance.
[Leming]: So my view, my view on this is.
[Leming]: we will go to the state, ask them for permission to be able to just have the right to do this in the first place.
[Leming]: This text obviously is not detailed enough to act as an ordinance or a set of rules in itself, but it would grant the legal authority to then be able to implement that.
[Leming]: As I said, there are initiatives in other cities right now.
[Leming]: They've basically been doing the same thing.
[Leming]: In East Hampton, they've implemented a vacant building ordinance, which effectively lets them tax owners of vacant buildings at certain very small rates just to maintain a database.
[Leming]: Again, my concern with that is that that's not really enough to justify
[Leming]: to justify a tax write-off.
[Leming]: So I think what would happen if we did that is that it would incentivize some owners of these properties to, if we just had a vacant building ordinance, it would incentivize some owners of these properties to rent out, but other owners, it would just, you know,
[Leming]: it would basically just be another number on a spreadsheet that they could account for.
[Leming]: So this essentially would allow us to levy a tax that would be enough to disincentivize them from doing that.
[Leming]: So, to address a couple of the points first off the city does not have a good handle on the number of vacant storefronts I talked to the building commissioner he had a part part of this just has to do with capacity and this was our conversations about the vacant bill about the vacant building ordinance that I also passed to zoning.
[Leming]: They had a spreadsheet that had been last updated, I think, in 2015, but I don't think that they actually had the capacity to be able to figure it out and therefore get a handle on the problem.
[Leming]: Another pattern in this
[Leming]: in this conversation is, so I understand that there are unintended consequences, but there are things that I think would be more appropriate to solve using other means, like as Councilor Tseng was saying, I think it is more appropriate to worry about, to handle the idea of store of businesses that we don't want being in places we don't want with zoning rather than something like this.
[Leming]: This really is meant to address the,
[Leming]: the small number of bad apples in the city.
[Leming]: The tax incentive comment actually came from a developer that I was in a meeting with where the conversation was something like, I was talking about this initiative more at a high level way.
[Leming]: I said, listen, there's a lot of vacant properties.
[Leming]: I'm developing a commercial vacancy tax initiative around that.
[Leming]: And the response from the developer was something like, Oh, well, I actually want to keep a few of my properties vacant because then I could just write that off as a loss on my taxes.
[Leming]: And it's more beneficial for me.
[Leming]: You don't really understand how this works.
[Leming]: And it was sort of phrase like that.
[Leming]: So that was and saying that saying something like that to a public official where
[Leming]: It's not in the public interest at all to have someone that owns these properties deliberately try to keep them empty.
[Leming]: So I think that we could definitely look into the specific tax rules that enable this to happen.
[Leming]: But in regards to all the details of implementation and so on that we've been talking about, again, Home Rule petition step of this, if it is approved, would just allow the city to have the basic tools it needs.
[Leming]: to be able to craft an ordinance like this in the first place.
[Leming]: So when we're at the, as Councilor Lazzaro was saying, we do not need to have every single detail of this figured out at this stage.
[Leming]: Hypothetically, I'm not saying we should do this, we could
[Leming]: we could we could even submit a home rule petition it gets approved we find out it's really not what the city needs maybe the uh grant that the economic development director uh submitting goes through and you know we find out that that really does address the problem and then down the line we find out we don't need it but at the same time we could also run into a situation where the grant doesn't go through or it just
[Leming]: doesn't work and we actually do really need this tool in the toolbox if we're going to do something about that.
[Leming]: And in that case, it really would be useful to have a home rule petition submitted sooner rather than later so that several years from now we could potentially have something like this in our toolbox.
[Leming]: So, you know, I don't want with something like this, I do understand that there is, as Council Vice President Collins was hinting at, there is a
[Leming]: There definitely is an optic situation where submitting something like this can send a message to business owners and property owners through the city.
[Leming]: But I also, at the same time, I don't want to get into analysis paralysis when this is really just the step 1 in the process.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Just like everybody watching this, to understand just a couple of basic things about the city's financial situation.
[Leming]: So first off, this is a very long time coming, and it would be easy to sit here and talk about this or that decision, complain about everything
[Leming]: under the sun about why we're here right now.
[Leming]: But at the end of the day, the problem is systemic.
[Leming]: So Proposition 2.5 prevents the city from increasing its total tax levy, the total amount of money we take in from property taxes, by 2.5% every year.
[Leming]: The average inflation from 1980 till today
[Leming]: 1980 was when Prop 2.5 was passed.
[Leming]: That average rate has been 3.08%.
[Leming]: So that means that the value of the budget in 1980 adding up would be about three quarters as
[Leming]: The modern budget would be about three quarters as valuable as it was back then.
[Leming]: This is somewhat offset by growth.
[Leming]: Cities that have had a lot of development in the past 44 years, Cambridge over with Kendall Square, Somerville with Assembly Row have not had to pass an override.
[Leming]: But Medford hasn't seen that development just in the longer term.
[Leming]: There are a variety of reasons for that.
[Leming]: Um, so I think that this is not a panel of judges criticizing others decisions.
[Leming]: It is our job to come up with solutions.
[Leming]: I'm not going to sit here and either be administrators or the school committee.
[Leming]: five loaves of bread and two fishes and tell you that you need to feed 5,000 people.
[Leming]: That's just not how this works.
[Leming]: I think that we need to get real about the budgetary situation and say that we do need an override of some sort just because the system that we're in inherently leaves us with a broken budget.
[Leming]: The problem is that
[Leming]: passing it to if we were to pass it to if we were to pass an override that money would not be available from now till the next fiscal year so there's the matter of bridging that gap it is not in the city council's authority to set to raise any of these line items it is
[Leming]: not in the authority of the City Council to say, hey, we need to take, you know, $6 million or $2.7 million from free cash and use that to fund the school systems in the interim.
[Leming]: That is up to the mayor.
[Leming]: The City Council is working on a lot of other things, a lot of other initiatives which will address this fiscal shortfall in the long term.
[Leming]: Not all of our solutions are perfect.
[Leming]: We just got done with a committee meeting where
[Leming]: I was proposing a commercial vacancy tax to help to address the vacant storefront problems in Medford.
[Leming]: It's not a perfect solution, no solution is, but I'm trying to bring solutions forward to help address our problems instead of just complaining about the decisions that are made by other people and acting like I have no power in this situation.
[Leming]: So that is, so that being said,
[Leming]: That is what I personally think should be done about this situation.
[Leming]: I understand that there are arguments against taking free cash out of reserves.
[Leming]: We're looking to fund a new high school.
[Leming]: Having an amount of free cash is important in order to get a good interest rate for the loan for that new high school.
[Leming]: So in that way, spending that money now could end up just affecting the city's bottom line 10 years from now.
[Leming]: the mayor's proposal.
[Leming]: But I do think that in this situation it is more necessary.
[Leming]: It is necessary to make that that decision.
[Leming]: I look forward to seeing, um, what the mayor's proposal is.
[Leming]: Um if she doesn't if she doesn't want to do that, or if she finds cuts in other areas.
[Leming]: Obviously, I wish that other decisions have been made beforehand.
[Leming]: I think that an override should have been passed a lot earlier so that we wouldn't be dealing with this right at the edge of that fiscal cliff, but it is what it is.
[Leming]: People aren't looking for people sitting behind, sitting in these chairs to come up with complaints about a budget situation that obviously nobody likes.
[Leming]: People are coming here to find proposed solutions to these problems, even if these are not ideal.
[Leming]: I thank you for going through a budget that is just not enough money to go around at the end of the day and coming to us with what you can.
[Leming]: and that's all I have to say about that.
[Leming]: This council really can't make a whole lot of decisions about this realistically until we get another number from the mayor around what her proposal is, but we'll be able to come up with more definite answers after that, so thank you.
[Leming]: This is a subcommittee meeting of the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee dedicated to scheduling and hashing out listening sessions.
[Leming]: So I guess the purpose of this is just to spend a little bit of time trying to figure out what groups we are specifically going to reach out to, when, what the best times would be.
[Leming]: So if any of my fellow subcommittee members have any ideas, feel free to take it away.
[Leming]: So sure.
[Leming]: I mean, yeah.
[Leming]: So is there kind of a gist that you might have for that?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So I think feel free to send that to all of the council when you have that figured out.
[Leming]: And also, this is only three of us, so we don't need to have the chair recognize some of this.
[Leming]: So, okay, so go ahead and send around that.
[Leming]: That sheet, but so, I guess, in terms of.
[Leming]: How that work, how that works out sort of in practice, I'm just kind of thinking of the upcoming 1 on the.
[Leming]: 31st that Councilor was are on our schedule to go to.
[Leming]: I think that that's sort of just in the context of like a.
[Leming]: senior center's regular coffee hour.
[Leming]: What I'm thinking about right now is just in terms of organizing the listening sessions and what they'll actually look like when we're going to them.
[Leming]: For certain groups, if it's like a super organized listening session, like people were brought together for that specific purpose, I imagine that could work out.
[Leming]: But if it's two city councilors who are showing up to a regularly scheduled coffee hour,
[Leming]: go into like a chitchat sort of a thing as well, which, yeah, go ahead.
[Leming]: Yeah, so what I'm, okay, I'm just, I'm just sort of thinking about the logistics that we'll be going through when we actually schedule these things.
[Leming]: So there's, so we definitely need a, you know, a point person in the communities, which obviously we have five community liaisons.
[Leming]: agreed to discuss seniors, vets, and then high school and tough students as well.
[Leming]: I'm thinking that probably the flow of these things is going to be, we scheduled the next one, which May 31st in this case.
[Leming]: The Councilors that go there take notes, they report back at the next resident services and public engagement committee meeting.
[Leming]: what they discussed, just try to offer as succinctly as possible, maybe 10 minutes during a session, what was talked about, what people were telling them, and then schedule the next one.
[Leming]: and then just kind of keep doing that for about, you know, the rest of the term, so.
[Leming]: Can you just, is it okay to just pass it around, like email to everybody in this meeting and just include it in the minutes as a, uh, if I send it to you right now, can you send it to us to look at right now?
[Leming]: Or just share it on your screen, or yeah, just share it with me.
[Leming]: I could put it on the screen in Zoom or something.
[Leming]: That's helpful.
[Leming]: Whichever.
[Leming]: Should be myself and Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: So at the last resident services meeting, it was agreed that
[Leming]: Basically, the chair would just check in with everybody and figure out who's available for what it becomes.
[Leming]: And then we 2 Councilors would be sent to each of these sessions.
[Leming]: It becomes a little bit of a. Problem and set theory to not violate open meeting law with 2 Councilors because.
[Leming]: Basically, only 1 person from this subcommittee can actually attend those while the subcommittee still exists.
[Leming]: Then.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro or Councilor can just attend.
[Leming]: I think they have a little bit more flexibility not being on the subcommittee.
[Leming]: And then.
[Leming]: then Council President Bears and then Council Vice President Collins are also even have even more freedom to go to any of the listening sessions, just not being on the resident services meeting.
[Leming]: It becomes a little bit more constrained with us three being on this subcommittee because no two of us can attend.
[Leming]: Yes, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: So Councilor Callahan, once you email the document when you're ready, but in the meantime, is there any other business other than figuring out who specifically is going to reach out to which groups?
[Leming]: It's seniors, seniors, vets, high school and tough students, and then the five reps, the five community liaisons.
[Leming]: So which is Portuguese, Haitian, Arabic, Spanish, and I forget what the fifth group.
[Leming]: I didn't, okay, so you just sent it, so I'll wait a little bit for the email once it does come through.
[Leming]: Yeah, I apologize.
[Leming]: I was recording some of that, but I started looking through the document that you sent, which I just received just now.
[Leming]: So I would appreciate if Councilor Tseng would forgive my lapse in attention.
[Leming]: Sorry, so I have 10 groups total because Justin, Councilor Tseng just added Asian American communities to the list.
[Leming]: Yeah, ICCM.
[Leming]: Asian.
[Leming]: I actually do have a graphic that shows where historically city council has been represented in the past.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: So do you think it would be productive to try to figure out what the next couple of listening sessions we're going to try to schedule over the next couple of months after the senior center and who's going to take charge of them would be?
[Leming]: Yeah, so in terms of assigning who's going to handle which, I think there are a few obvious ones that I can think of.
[Leming]: So I would handle vets.
[Leming]: I think Justin would handle high school.
[Leming]: Tufts would be handled by our esteemed counsel, Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: I mean, yeah, okay.
[Leming]: I was just thinking about Tufts because she's an alum and I can't think of anybody else.
[Leming]: You would do Tufts?
[Leming]: I could do Tufts, yeah.
[Leming]: Yeah, just a few of the... I was just trying to think of the more obvious.
[Leming]: Yeah, I'm just, I'm just writing them down for my own.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: I'm just like trying to.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So Justin, oh wait, so sorry, Justin, you said the Asian speaking community liaison addition to high school students and tough students.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Arabic.
[Leming]: Wait, but you said, is there an Asian American liaison?
[Leming]: But that adds to number 10.
[Leming]: So would you?
[Leming]: Okay, so that leaves the Haitian community liaison, I believe.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Okay, so I'll leave Anna with Haitian because Justin already has three.
[Leming]: So right now the divisions I have between the nine original groups that were assigned were, Emily has already scheduled something with the seniors.
[Leming]: Justin has high school students, tough students, and the Arabic community liaisons.
[Leming]: I have vets, veterans, and the Portuguese community liaison.
[Leming]: And Anna has Spanish speaking, African American,
[Leming]: Haitian and the West Medford Community Center community liaisons.
[Leming]: Well, that leaves Justin with four, me with two.
[Leming]: Let's see if we're trying to divide it equally among the groups.
[Leming]: That makes sense.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So the final listing, Anna has Spanish speaking, African-American, uh, the West Medford community center, ICCM.
[Leming]: I have the vets, Portuguese community liaison and Haitian community liaison, Justin high school students, tough students, Arabic speaking community liaisons.
[Leming]: And obviously council is already scheduled something with the seniors.
[Leming]: So yeah.
[Leming]: Awesome.
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: That appears to be that.
[Leming]: So is there any other order of business in the seven minutes between now and the start of the Committee of the Whole meeting?
[Leming]: Yes, sure.
[Leming]: Okay, Continuous Town Halls.
[Leming]: This does seem to be kind of getting into more like campaign strategy in certain parts of the document.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Would it be possible to have what, to get like an edited version of the document where you kind of just take in the listening session stuff and then leave out the.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: So do we need to turn any thing that was discussed so far in this committee into an official motion?
[Leming]: Or are we?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So, so otherwise, yeah, I have, I wrote down who's assigned to what and yeah, do we have any motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Motion.
[Leming]: Oh, okay.
[Leming]: Okay, motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: On the motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Nay.
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: This is just related to the free cash and getting the fire trucks.
[Leming]: Just questions on the logistics of that.
[Leming]: You said we're probably not going to get those trucks till 2026.
[Leming]: When would they exactly be paid for?
[Leming]: Do we give them the money now and then we get the trucks in 2026 or how would that exchange work?
[Leming]: Um, I didn't bring the entire contract with me, but, uh, the, just to the question that I'm getting at is if we don't get the fire truck, uh, within the fist, the fiscal year that it's ordered, would that, could we just end up paying for that in a later fiscal year at a free cash or,
[Leming]: I'm just wondering when that money would actually go to the company.
[Leming]: I just had a question because Chief Buckley mentioned that the maintenance services are being cut and I'm seeing the line item here for motor services going from 75 to 65 and motor repair supplies going from 120 to 100, but it looks like the actuals for the motor services is about 5,000.
[Leming]: Sorry, it was about 5000 this year.
[Leming]: And the actuals for the motor repair supplies is about 36,000.
[Leming]: So is that is that it's kind of like typical utilization of that line item?
[Leming]: Year to year?
[Leming]: Is this just uniquely?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: My apologies.
[Leming]: My apologies.
[Leming]: It was a slip.
[Leming]: And that was recorded too.
[Leming]: So, okay.
[Leming]: Oh, man.
[Leming]: It's going to be a long night.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: I was focusing on the motor services expenses.
[Leming]: It says that the actuals so far this year were about $5,000 out of a $75,000 allocation.
[Leming]: That is as of December 31.
[Leming]: Well, even so, the actuals are typically a little bit over 50%, but that just seems very low given the amount.
[Leming]: So I don't know if this is just a unique year where we haven't had a whole lot of repair problems.
[Leming]: Would you say that that's typical?
[Leming]: I guess the nature of the question is do you typically go under your allocated repair budget?
[Leming]: Are there some years where it's higher, some years where it's really low?
[Leming]: What does that usually look like?
[Leming]: Cool, thank you.
[Leming]: Just generally speaking, it would be useful, although I realize it could be a lot more effort for first-year Councilors to kind of see how
[Leming]: these budgets have progressed over the years, just for context.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: This is just more of a general engineering staffing question, but I figured while I have you all here, I might as well ask it.
[Leming]: We're doing the zoning overhaul, and I think I've talked to Owen about this, but just something I'd like to get a bit more understanding on.
[Leming]: Part of it, which I've been having a lot of meetings on, is implementing
[Leming]: transportation, demand management, zoning, ordinance, and I've been kind of shopping around different departments, begging people to fund and put somebody on a TDM study in the future, which would be required at the staff level.
[Leming]: Just from my understanding, how much staff time does it usually take to coordinate that, even once you've found a firm that's able to get something like that off the ground?
[Leming]: Sorry, one of the on-calls?
[Leming]: Does that make sense?
[Leming]: Okay, so you would reach out to an on-call consultant who would then find the firm to actually do this?
[Leming]: Okay, so it wouldn't actually take any staff time for the people that are being budgeted here?
[Leming]: You just kind of ask for them to do that?
[Leming]: And about, I understand that your staff are a capacity, but about how much time does that usually take to check in?
[Leming]: The words are pretty similar to be fair.
[Leming]: Just like to say, we're very grateful to have you here.
[Leming]: Welcome to the city of Medford.
[Leming]: And I'm sure that everybody here is an elected official can tell you our own stories about how chaotic the November elections were and how.
[Leming]: personally stressful it was I would just encourage you if you see anything in the elections office that you think could be fixed in terms of making things more efficient or you know just anything you see then please feel free to bring it to council's attention or to fix it
[Leming]: fix it yourself.
[Leming]: So I went to the, you know, I chatted with some of the elections workers a couple of weeks ago and just kind of saw how they were doing manual data entry on what looked like very outdated software, just spending a lot of time entering the voter registration cards prior to the March elections.
[Leming]: I'm not an expert on things like that, but it did seem like there was some room for improvement, either in terms of whatever software they're using, um, or just.
[Leming]: I'm not I'm not really sure if you would have any ideas on that, but if there is a way that council can help support that in the future and make the elections department more.
[Leming]: Scalable or efficient or less prone to having these kind of mistakes that we've seen in previous years, we're all ears.
[Leming]: Yeah, it was a lot of the clerks there just taking in these handwritten cards and just typing in names, and it seemed like it was taking them five minutes.
[Leming]: Yeah, and I was just kind of looking at it like, okay, I hope that this can be done better, but obviously it's a state-run system then.
[Leming]: This is my favorite presentation so far.
[Leming]: What are their names?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: It's clear that you've been busy since you started here, and we're very grateful to have you.
[Leming]: Is it two questions?
[Leming]: First, is it logistically possible either technically or administratively to connect to get the school system as well onto the same Internet connection, potentially for more savings?
[Leming]: You mentioned their Medford City Hall,
[Leming]: library and some other place that wasn't the public schools.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Second question.
[Leming]: What was the $131 spent on a part-time employee?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So hypothetically, if we did have a city solicitor, how much do you think it would decrease the line some of the line items here as well?
[Leming]: So how much would so.
[Leming]: KB law, it sounds like from what you're saying would be necessary, even in the case that we did have a city solicitor for more specialized services, how much of the services that.
[Leming]: They're providing now, and an approximate dollar amount, do you think could be done by by in house legal?
[Leming]: Something that rewards institutional knowledge, which would be acquired over a period of time.
[Leming]: So I would guess initially they'd be relying on KP law a good amount.
[Leming]: But it also sounds like from what you're saying, FOIA requests and whatnot, you're personally handling a lot of the tasks that would otherwise fall on in-house legal counsel.
[Leming]: I'm sorry, I misheard that.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President.
[Leming]: So we discussed three items at the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: The first, we approved the social media policy, which was drafted by Councilor Tseng and Councilor Lazzaro, passed, reported favorably as a paper to the regular committee meeting.
[Leming]: We also established the first public listening session, which will
[Leming]: occur at the Medford Senior Center, 10 a.m.
[Leming]: on May 31st, and we also scheduled the first subcommittee meeting to sort of hash out the rules and procedures for these listening sessions, the first
[Leming]: the first meeting of that subcommittee will be tomorrow at 5 15 between myself, Councilor Tseng Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: And finally, we approved the first draft of the human of the new Human Rights Commission ordinance.
[Leming]: Thank you very much to Councilor Tseng for all the work you put into that.
[Leming]: And it was
[Leming]: referred favorably to, okay, okay, sorry, it was kept in committee.
[Leming]: Apologies for that.
[Leming]: And yeah, that's what happened.
[Leming]: So I would motion to approve.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: I would like to refer to the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee mainly because that primarily covers Veterans Affairs.
[Leming]: I've also invited over the Veterans Services Director, Veronica Shaw, for this, but essentially this is a paper that would allow the Veterans Services Director to establish a program
[Leming]: under which she may offer monetary incentives to landlords who choose to rent out to qualified veterans.
[Leming]: I've been asking KP Law for legal advice around this, as well as talking with the city's chief of staff around this issue.
[Leming]: So yeah, I would motion to refer to the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
[Leming]: I have Google Maps open right now.
[Leming]: I could share.
[Leming]: Yeah, I was trying to pull it up.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think that's so.
[Leming]: Director Hahn, just for clarification, what board would grant the special permit?
[Leming]: Would it be this one or the Community Development Board?
[Leming]: Or where would they get that?
[Leming]: Council President, I also have an additional question.
[Leming]: Just to clarify on a point that was brought up by Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: So he stated that if there's room that's taken up to display cars, the four cars that you intend to sell, there will be less
[Leming]: space that would be used to repair the cars or to work on them.
[Leming]: What are your thoughts on this?
[Leming]: Are you just not using that space within your shop right now to fix cars or what's the space currently being used for?
[Leming]: Okay, so you don't use the space that you're proposing to use to display cars for anything, correct?
[Leming]: Okay, just to clarify that part.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Yeah, I would also just like to say, I go to Pinky's a good amount here and there.
[Leming]: What I do like about it is the fact that they do have a temporary parking spot just off Summer Street that's right in front of the store.
[Leming]: So just the idea that drivers would just come there really quickly, get pizza, and then go back with very little fuss makes a lot of sense to me visually.
[Leming]: So I could see that, but obviously,
[Leming]: hear from the neighbors and the houses directly surrounding there, but you know, y'all make very good pizza.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli, so I, I do I do support this, this resolution, I did some googling on this prior to the meeting you know there were stories of homeowners falling behind on property tax payments the city seizing an entire house worth, you know, 400,000 plus dollars to pay off $150,000 debt just
[Leming]: keeping the difference.
[Leming]: So my question has to do more with, so I couldn't find online, and this could just be a failure of Googling on my part, Senate docket number 2129, or the relevant bills in the state house that were supporting this.
[Leming]: And I also would like to see a
[Leming]: It mentions here to send a letter to support our state legislators.
[Leming]: I would like to see a draft of that letter personally, or just some idea of the specific legislation in the state House and Senate, if there is any.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: This is basically a resolution to address some of the concerns brought up at the last council meeting.
[Leming]: The idea behind this is pretty simple.
[Leming]: We've discussed the newsletter very extensively and
[Leming]: regular council so far and the resident services public engagement committee meeting.
[Leming]: The idea behind this is basically just to have it as an agenda item during those meetings in which we plan to draft and finalize and release the newsletter.
[Leming]: So I would motion to send this to the resident services and public to reverse to the resident services and public engagement committee.
[Leming]: Present
[Leming]: Sorry, this is just a general question, and this could be addressed by either Danielle or Alicia.
[Leming]: I just have a general question about the importance of really getting the definitions right, because it has been mentioned a few times.
[Leming]: So what is some of the complications and the consequence of having unclear definitions that you all have seen in the past that mean that we need to
[Leming]: really focusing on this right now and I'm asking that mainly just to get a just to get a better understanding myself of the process.
[Leming]: Oh, absolutely.
[Leming]: Just, you know, I was, I mean, having consistency across all of our zoning in terms of definitions is definitely something I understand, but I was just curious about what the real world consequences of having unclear definitions have been in the past.
[Leming]: So thank you.
[Leming]: Canine daycare perhaps.
[Leming]: Canine care facility.
[Leming]: Motion to change it to doggy daycare.
[Leming]: Don't wanna have you all repeat what you just said, but just kind of a basic question about this.
[Leming]: I think it was one of you might've told me about that landlord in Somerville who just kind of kept on renting, like stuffing tenants into the same place and then charging them a thousand a month for it.
[Leming]: And that just kept adding up.
[Leming]: So the two questions are, how often do you see things like that happening?
[Leming]: just in your positions and what can this definition do practically to help you prevent that from happening in the future?
[Leming]: That's infill zoning, right?
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: That's gonna be part of this?
[Leming]: just a technical thing.
[Leming]: So I think at the end of this is going to say that we're going to start talking about ADUs pretty like pretty soon after this.
[Leming]: So I so will it and I'm not I'm not sure if the will the definition of tiny home necessarily be settled by the time we actually get to the ADU discussion because tiny homes are as it says here a part of they can be an ADU.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: President services and public engagement committee meeting of Medford City Council clerk, please call the role.
[Leming]: Resolution 24015 offered by Councilor Tseng, resolution to discuss modernizing City Council communication and outreach strategy.
[Leming]: I believe the only point on this was the discussion of the
[Leming]: we have a motion to approve.
[Leming]: Social media policy.
[Leming]: Draft which was drafted, which was submitted by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Um, Councilor, do you have a. Take it away.
[Leming]: If you have anything to present.
[Leming]: Any other Councilors?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Any comments from any of the councilors?
[Leming]: Any comments from members of the public on this particular agenda item?
[Leming]: Okay, seeing none, do we, I don't particularly have any comments on this.
[Leming]: The draft looks good.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank Councilor Lazzaro for her work on this.
[Leming]: Just a question of procedure.
[Leming]: So would we want, Councilor Lazzaro, it sounds like you had some recommended edits for it.
[Leming]: So would- Yes.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Okay, so Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Any other councilors?
[Leming]: Do we have any motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan?
[Leming]: And refer it favorably out of committee.
[Leming]: Good.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Okay, a motion from Councilor Callahan to
[Leming]: approve the paper favorably out of committee, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Motion on the affirmative, one no, motion passes.
[Leming]: I'm just gonna stop sharing my screen.
[Leming]: Resolution 24-069, resolution to discuss a modernization of the Human Rights Commission's enabling ordinance offered by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Do we, Councilor Tseng, take it away.
[Leming]: Council.
[Leming]: Thank you very much, Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: And an electronic copy of this document should be available in the meeting minutes of this, so that will be submitted.
[Leming]: Any other discussion from councilors?
[Leming]: Do we have a second on the motions made by Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: Motions made by Councilor Tseng, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Do we have any?
[Leming]: Before we vote on that, I'm gonna open it up to public participation.
[Leming]: Oh, they're on the end of Councilor Tseng's slide right there.
[Leming]: you.
[Leming]: Uh yeah.
[Leming]: Good clerk.
[Leming]: Would you be able to read them out?
[Leming]: All right, if anybody would like to speak publicly on this matter, feel free to raise your hand on Zoom or step up to the podium if you're here in person.
[Leming]: Just say your name and address for the record, please.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Anybody on Zoom seeing a hand from Lunier Germanus, I'm going to ask you to unmute.
[Leming]: Please say your name and address for the record.
[Leming]: And yeah.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: David Harris can ask you to unmute and please state your name and address for the record once you're unmuted.
[Leming]: Mr. Harris, you're on mute.
[Leming]: I'm asking you to unmute.
[Leming]: There's a button on Zoom.
[Leming]: Thank you, Mr. Harris.
[Leming]: Do we have anybody else from public?
[Leming]: Matthew Page Lieberman, seeing your hand raised on Zoom, please, I'm gonna ask you to unmute and please state your name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Do we have any other comments from either councillors or members of the public?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Matthew, I could see your hand is still raised on Zoom.
[Leming]: Did you have something else you wanted to add?
[Leming]: Or sorry, you seem to have muted kind of suddenly, so I wasn't sure.
[Leming]: Okay, well, so seeing no further discussion, Clerk, would you be able to read off the motions by Councilor Tseng and then we'll take a vote on it?
[Leming]: Okay, well, Clerk, can you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: City Council.
[Leming]: 24073 offered by Councilors, Callahan saying and Lazzaro resolution to establish City Council.
[Leming]: Listening sessions.
[Leming]: I understand that there are.
[Leming]: A few updates on this particular, um, uh, Councilor
[Leming]: wanted to have some further discussions about just hashing out what exactly those listening sessions would look like.
[Leming]: So do we have any, do we have any councillors who want to talk about this?
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: And I thought that was a good place to begin and I fully agree with the sentiment that you know, it's important with a
[Leming]: public outreach and public engagement to get things moving, you know, as soon as we can earlier.
[Leming]: So one thing that I have kind of been wondering just about the logistics of open meeting law is that do you think that if there's
[Leming]: say, like two Councilors on one side of the room and just depending on the layout of the room, like one Councilor in another room talking to a different group of people with that.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan and then Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Oh, Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: On the motion of, well, first off, do we have a second on the motion of Councilor Callahan to disband the subcommittee that we established last meeting.
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan and then Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpella, do you have a, whatever comes to mind?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Motion withdrawn.
[Leming]: What is your, what is the new motion.
[Leming]: Okay, motion from Councilor Callahan to let the chair of the resident service, sorry, was that the chair of resident service?
[Leming]: Okay, the chair of the resident services and public engagement committee appoint councillors to attend these listening sessions based on one or two of them based on their availability.
[Leming]: Do we have a second on that motion?
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Any further discussion on the motion?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Clerk, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: For in the affirmative one opposing motion passes.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: So, let's see.
[Leming]: Are there any other.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Um, let's see.
[Leming]: Is there so I guess that would be you me or Councilor Tseng, uh, I could let's see.
[Leming]: I'm just trying to think of which ones that I have the contact information for.
[Leming]: I could reach out to some of the community liaisons, but obviously, if other folks would like to do that as well, you know, it'd be perfectly free to.
[Leming]: Okay, so we'll set up a subcommittee to figure that out.
[Leming]: And I'm not 100% sure, but do you think that we need to vote officially on saying this is the listening session at this time at the Senior Center?
[Leming]: Okay, we should.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay, motion by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Callahan to establish a listening session, May 31st at 10 a.m.
[Leming]: at the Senior Centre.
[Leming]: Clerk, will you please call the roll when you're ready?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Four in the affirmative, one opposing.
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Do we have any public participation?
[Leming]: Any members of the public would like to speak?
[Leming]: Just kind of looking at Zoom.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Matthew Page Lieberman asking you to unmute.
[Leming]: Please state your name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Yeah, so I apologize that that wasn't included in the agenda itself.
[Leming]: There were just some late submissions, but I did verify with the clerk that we could still hold the meeting as long as it's in the meeting minutes.
[Leming]: So the- That's fine.
[Leming]: Oh, the meeting minutes are posted on the civic clerk website, right, with the agenda packets?
[Leming]: Okay, yeah, they should be they should be posted on the civic clerk website along with the agenda materials after approval by the council.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Yes, yes, you're more than free to send in comments.
[Leming]: We didn't actually vote on anything related to that tonight.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: And it looks like all the public comments that we have.
[Leming]: Do we have any, any motions on the floor.
[Leming]: Council, Councilor Callahan motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Do we have a second.
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Clerk, will you please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Five to zero.
[Leming]: Oh, sorry.
[Leming]: I am so sorry.
[Leming]: I'm so sorry about that.
[Leming]: So that was, that was a yes.
[Leming]: Correct.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng I, yes, that was the yes.
[Leming]: Five zero motion passes.
[Leming]: Meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So not to open this can of worms again, but I just like to kind of, well, I just like to, to understand, um, some, uh, some parts of the HR and, uh, back pay process.
[Leming]: So when, so there, there are complaints about, um, employees receiving retroactive pay.
[Leming]: Could you just, um, just talk about like the reasoning behind some of those delays, like, you know, I've heard outdated systems.
[Leming]: And so sort of what happened.
[Leming]: from your perspective there?
[Leming]: And would a more updated software system be able to help with that?
[Leming]: Because it sounds like you were doing everything by hand.
[Leming]: Everything was by hand.
[Leming]: Wow.
[Leming]: That makes sense.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Is it, this is just a question coming from a councilor going through his first budget process, but is it typical in other cities to have between 10 to 15% of the city's budget going towards health and or life insurance?
[Leming]: Like, is that it?
[Leming]: That's the biggest ticket items.
[Leming]: That's typical, okay.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So I know we've talked about this a little bit just over the phone, but I'd like to, one thing that I'm personally concerned with is just the amount of vacant buildings around Medford, vacant storefronts and whatnot.
[Leming]: So, and I've been looking into
[Leming]: that would allow the city to hopefully get a slightly better grasp on that problem.
[Leming]: Can you talk a little bit about what extra technology or staff capacity the building commission would need in order to keep better track of the vacant buildings in the city and, you know, who owns them and what could possibly be done about that?
[Leming]: And is there capacity to have a public interface of the vacant of vacant properties and people who may be interested in reaching out to the owners of them for.
[Leming]: business opportunities could get in contact with them directly.
[Leming]: Oh, no.
[Leming]: Most of my questions were answered in the succeeding conversation.
[Leming]: a lot of this is in the fee schedule and appendix A, I also did.
[Leming]: There's also a motion to request that legal advice as to whether the fee schedule could just be automatically updated in later years based on some index of inflation.
[Leming]: I think that we have a lot of legal questions coming out of council these days, so I was following up.
[Leming]: with the city's legal advisors and trying to get a specific answer to that question.
[Leming]: The turnaround time is always a little bit long for those, but it is in the works.
[Leming]: Did you ever receive the request from this council?
[Leming]: I did.
[Leming]: And to your knowledge, were there fees that hadn't been collected in the past?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: ballpark and it's totally fine if you don't have this number, but like how much revenue do you think was lost by those practices annually, if you can even provide?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So at the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee, we first discussed the first April newsletter of the Medford City Council.
[Leming]: So I sent copies around of that or drafts around that to all of my fellow council members and flagged down potential edits to those, as well as a schedule that Councilors would go by month to month to draft the newsletter prior to submitting it.
[Leming]: to the committee.
[Leming]: Most of the committee session was dedicated to editing the newsletter, so it was a bit of a bit of a Word document session as I took in edits and suggestions in real time and tried to correct my own draft language there.
[Leming]: Following that, there was a
[Leming]: motion to send the newsletter to regular session, but that motion didn't receive a second, so we decided to, so we ended up voting on a motion to approve the newsletter entirely and send it out.
[Leming]: So it was, so the first draft of it is currently on the Medford City Council page.
[Leming]: We're currently discussing
[Leming]: methods of circulating that around the community with the communications director and the clerk.
[Leming]: Additionally, we voted to establish listening sessions, ended up voting to establish the subcommittee consisting of myself, Councilor Callahan and Councilor Tseng to
[Leming]: organize those in order to establish monthly listening sessions in which a few City Council members would meet up with the community of seniors, the community of tough students, veterans, as well as the five community liaisons in Medford in order to have City Council do active outreach to different members of the community.
[Leming]: And, yeah, that was pretty much all we discussed.
[Leming]: How much does business differ from Monday to Thursday versus the weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Yeah, like how much to share your figures, but yeah, just yeah, just just ballpark, like how much more people you see on the weekends versus the weekdays.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: So the Friday and Saturday hours would be the ones that would help that business the most?
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Any further questions for the petitioner?
[Leming]: and just to say a couple things about the CPA.
[Leming]: So I'm not sure where the 25% number came from.
[Leming]: I believe on the CPA, the minimum is 10% for open spaces, historic preservation, and affordable housing.
[Leming]: Now I understand that Cambridge requires 80% to go to affordable housing, but I believe that the reason that they do that is because they have money coming from other sources for historic preservation and open spaces.
[Leming]: So their operating budget is about
[Leming]: five times the size of Medford, they do have more money to throw around for, you know, building a playground or repairing a church or something like that.
[Leming]: So I think that the use of CPA money within Medford is a little bit different from the use of CPA money within other communities, especially Cambridge, which, again, has a lot more funds.
[Leming]: And the same really goes with Harvard and Tufts.
[Leming]: So Harvard's endowment, like you were saying, is above $50 billion.
[Leming]: Tufts is $2.4 billion.
[Leming]: So when we're talking about money here, it's like Cambridge.
[Leming]: And I do admire a lot of what Cambridge has done with affordable housing, but we're really talking about another order of magnitude in terms of funding.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: I would like to emphasize the point that there was a motion that Councilor Tseng was absent.
[Leming]: He was on vacation at the moment.
[Leming]: So there are four people of the five committee members of the most recent Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee Councilors Scarpelli through the chair.
[Leming]: You let your objections to the newsletter be known, which were you consistently let everybody on this body note since we've been discussing the newsletter.
[Leming]: Um.
[Leming]: But then at 8 34 PM, you then left the meeting without notifying anybody.
[Leming]: And because of that, like I was chair, so I didn't think it was appropriate to second motion from the chair.
[Leming]: And obviously, Councilor Callahan disagreed with the motion to send it to the regular, um, to the floor because there was the opinion that the perfect cannot, uh,
[Leming]: be good, can't be the enemy of the perfect, whichever way that goes, and that we needed to get a newsletter out in a timely way.
[Leming]: If you had decided to stay at the meeting and attend these meetings consistently, we would be debating this at the floor.
[Leming]: Apologies.
[Leming]: If Councilor Scriabelli had decided to stay at the meeting and hear the rest of the discussion, then we would be voting on the newsletter on the floor right now, and I hope that in the future, resident services and public engagement committees
[Leming]: We can do that second.
[Leming]: I know that it just in response to some of the discussion about public fear and outrage in response to some of these, I would like to point out that a lot of the more recent
[Leming]: concerns and emails that we've been seeing were the result of a text sent around to many other, to most residents in the city, or a huge number of them from the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, which has obviously consistently opposed these measures in other cities.
[Leming]: So I think that that should be noted.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I'd also just like to point out a few things about the process, since this is a resolution to discuss City Council subcommittee processes.
[Leming]: So what we're doing in the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee is we have a continuing resolution, which is a resolution to innovate in the City Council's communication processes.
[Leming]: And so that basically means that we come up with
[Leming]: a number of ideas, one of which is the newsletter.
[Leming]: And so in earlier committee meetings, we had motioned and agreed to, as a committee, come up with a schedule by which people draft the newsletter, and then every month have a different city councilor, not necessarily somebody on the committee, if they want to volunteer and have the time to put forward a draft of the newsletter, which would then be edited at a committee meeting.
[Leming]: So if there are concerns, I mean, I think that the,
[Leming]: Vagueness of resolutions or the specificity with which individual papers say that we're going to, you know, do X, Y or Z in committee is a continuing concern.
[Leming]: Obviously, that's been a concern with this with this very agenda.
[Leming]: But if it does make, I mean, we obviously can bring forth a another.
[Leming]: resolution that more specifically states that we're going to put out a newsletter every month via committee for consideration at the regular meetings.
[Leming]: It's just that with communications it is necessary to be timely and get something out there every month because events happen every month and we need to be consistent in our communications and
[Leming]: we get criticized for being intransparent.
[Leming]: And the newsletter is a way to address that.
[Leming]: So it's important to be timely.
[Leming]: So thank you very much.
[Leming]: And that's all I have.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I said no.
[Leming]: There's another item.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: I'd just like to point out that I second the motion because we still have to get to 24097, which actually discusses the home rule petitions.
[Leming]: We were still on the subcommittee processes and we hadn't been really discussing that, so that's all I have to say.
[Leming]: No, when I've chaired meetings before, I've definitely like not noticed like which side of my or you just picked the hand that went up last.
[Leming]: No, so just to be a bit more clear about the practicalities of this.
[Leming]: So if the Affordable Homes Act does end up including a provision for us to implement a local option for a real estate transfer fee, the home rule petition proposal in Medford would be moot.
[Leming]: There just wouldn't really be any point in filing that because we would then have, we would then have it by default what the state gives us.
[Leming]: So we would likely have to file
[Leming]: another resolution into a regular meeting in that case and just drop the Home Rule petition if we do get it from the Affordable Homes Act.
[Leming]: So hopefully that just clarifies sort of what the process looks like because
[Leming]: The 18 Home Rule petitions that have been filed, if you actually go and read them, and they're all on the State House website, they're all kind of slightly different and they're a little bit, they just have very different provisions depending on what individual city councils discussed at any given time.
[Leming]: And so if the Affordable Homes Act is passed, all of those would probably just be rejected.
[Leming]: outright officially because then, you know, everybody would have what the state gave them.
[Leming]: That being said, just to, again, repeat what my colleagues have already stated, there is a definite point in filing these.
[Leming]: The fact that 18 other communities all filed Home Rule petitions very likely is telling the State House that affordable housing is an issue, and all of that effort by local legislators then led up
[Leming]: to what Governor Healey's proposing with the Affordable Homes Act.
[Leming]: So the relationship between local and state politics is often a bit of a black box, but yeah.
[Leming]: Justin, can you try saying something?
[Leming]: Can you hear me?
[Leming]: Martha, you could also try to click on the little arrow next to the microphone button.
[Leming]: It could be that your input is wrong.
[Leming]: So sometimes Zoom selects a different input than what's the default on your computer.
[Leming]: So that could be the issue.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Two questions.
[Leming]: First, so I noticed the change of definition from the SPGA, Special Permit Granting Authority, to just the Community Development Board.
[Leming]: I was just wondering what is the, what are sort of the consequences behind that change?
[Leming]: So could you just explain a little bit to me about changing from one term to the next?
[Leming]: Because I did notice that when I was going through the ADU ordinance.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: And the second question, which is sort of related.
[Leming]: So I noticed the distinction between approval of a project by the community development board and sort of lower threshold for approval by just the planning department, the administrative review.
[Leming]: And one proposed change that I'm trying to make to the AD ordinances to sort of reduce that, just for instance, from a community development board
[Leming]: review in all cases to just administrate a review by the planning department.
[Leming]: I guess, are there other sort of, in your analysis of our ordinances so far, do you sort of notice other cases where something that normally would have a, would need a permit by the community development board would better be suited to just be reviewed at the staff level?
[Leming]: I'm just kind of thinking like smaller projects, maybe.
[Leming]: What's your sort of informal take on that so far?
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: We have, we recently instituted an affordable housing trust fund last year, which is about 30 years too late to be fair, but is there any, what are the usual sources of income for affordable housing trust funds that you know about so far?
[Leming]: We've identified a few potentially, if the transfer fee goes through, that could be one, also CPA funds, and we were working on linkage fees.
[Leming]: Are there any other common sources of funding that you can think about?
[Leming]: Many- Sorry, what?
[Leming]: Cell towers?
[Leming]: Cell towers.
[Leming]: You said rental fees?
[Leming]: Okay, short-term rental fees.
[Leming]: Yeah, Airbnbs.
[Leming]: Okay, so that's something that we're legally able to do is charge Airbnbs like 50% to put into the Affordable Housing Trust.
[Leming]: But we already charge fees.
[Leming]: Uh, yes, so question, so I saw I saw some of this happen when I was on the CPA and we're funding the walk link court redevelopment.
[Leming]: So, you know, the CPA funds were a necessary requisite to get state and federal funding is there, but.
[Leming]: Part of my concern with funding affordable housing this way is it does sort of mean that somebody trying to put together a funding package is just putting up a lot of overhead, keeping up with these different applications and the requirement of all these applications.
[Leming]: Is there any way, just at the local level, like possibly dispersing funds from an affordable housing trust that you can
[Leming]: feasibly and without breaking the system, reduce the burden for people that are trying to apply for all these different grants just to fund the project.
[Leming]: Just your thoughts on that in general, I'd appreciate.
[Leming]: No, no, thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Why are insurance costs going up?
[Leming]: Two questions.
[Leming]: The first, what are recommendations that you would have for both making projects more predictable for developers, which is something you've touched on a few times in the presentation, and second, to decrease timelines, which is these delays can oftentimes disincentivize development completely.
[Leming]: So I'd love to hear your thoughts on those two items.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Second question, this is a little bit more big picture, but I would be interested to hear the thoughts of experts on it.
[Leming]: So I did read the Boston Globe Spotlight series on the fact that in greater Boston, one unit of housing costs between $500,000 and $600,000 to build.
[Leming]: I have a blog, and I ended up quoting that article on that, and it was, you know, the reasons, of course, were very complicated.
[Leming]: Fewer people are going into construction.
[Leming]: The overseas cost of copper goes up.
[Leming]: Zoning is too restrictive on the local level.
[Leming]: And in general, the picture it seemed to be painting was that more and more developers are just having trouble making the equations work, which you sort of touched on here, I guess.
[Leming]: What is just your picture on how that's going to evolve?
[Leming]: Do you think that it's going to hit the point where it's not going to be feasible at all to sort of
[Leming]: build any sort of affordable housing on the private market?
[Leming]: What factors do you see that could potentially improve that?
[Leming]: I know you mentioned greater, like the federal government taking this a bit more seriously than they have in the last 20 years, but just your thoughts on the feasibility of it.
[Leming]: I'd like to hear.
[Leming]: So the fact that a lot of companies have kind of made, put manufacturing overseas, which just makes things harder to help.
[Leming]: What areas has that been the most successful in the United States?
[Leming]: Every so often I'll read about like 3D printed apartments and whatnot on the news.
[Leming]: I think that's probably a bit more of an extreme example of what you're talking about, but things like that I haven't seen quite as much around in the greater Boston area.
[Leming]: And one final question.
[Leming]: I think one issue that we've been seeing in Medford, I know, but also pretty much like a lot of other areas of the United States is a large amount of investor capital going into the housing market and generally speaking, private
[Leming]: private equity seeing real estate as a return on investment more than anything else.
[Leming]: And one thing that I would like as a local politician as a way to sort of distinguish between people who actually live in their houses and even people who maybe live locally and own as opposed to a company out of New York that's making like a shell
[Leming]: that's the company buying up a bunch of apartments and kicking out all the tenants, flipping them and jacking up the rents, which is something that is happening more and more regularly in Medford.
[Leming]: Do you know of any strategies that other communities have had this kind of like
[Leming]: fight that general problem or any strategies of distinguishing between one kind of buyer that actually does plan to live in the home or at least will have a face-to-face relationship with the people that live in their homes as opposed to those who mainly just see it as an investment.
[Leming]: There's short term rentals are a big part of the problem, but it's also generally an investment, even in longer term luxury housing, as opposed to focus on affordable housing, mainly because luxury housing is seen as being more profitable.
[Leming]: So is there?
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn?
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So just two questions.
[Leming]: So on average, do you think that roads are on average deteriorating a bit faster these days than they did maybe 10, 20 years ago?
[Leming]: The question is mainly coming from a resident that I spoke with a few months ago who said that with the increase in electric vehicles, which on average tend to
[Leming]: weigh a lot more because of their batteries than gas-powered vehicles that those would end up having.
[Leming]: To be clear, I'm supportive of the electrification of vehicles.
[Leming]: That's not the angle I'm coming at this from.
[Leming]: So I just want to be clear about that.
[Leming]: The motion is adjourned.
[Leming]: resident services and public engagement committee, April 23rd, 2024.
[Leming]: Clerk, would you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Okay, so.
[Leming]: First paper on the agenda to 4015 resolution to discuss modernizing council communications and outreach strategy.
[Leming]: So.
[Leming]: The so on the current agenda packet, um, pursuant to the motions that were
[Leming]: I. Asked Councilors if they be willing to draft or if they were willing to get on a schedule to draft a, um.
[Leming]: ended up creating a schedule of those who had who replied if there are any proposed changes tonight that any Councilors would like to make more than willing to hear them.
[Leming]: We also, I also submitted a draft of the Medford City Council newsletter, which once it is approved in committee, we will be able to then circulate it around.
[Leming]: Councilor, Council Vice President Collins submitted some recommendations to me after the release of the agenda, which I placed in
[Leming]: this year and this year draft of the document essentially just asking for some more consistent language as well as links to the website for some of the for some of the ordinances projects that were mentioned in the draft as well as
[Leming]: just smaller things like use of the word committee, to be clear, and use of, and the addition of dates to each of the items that were worked on.
[Leming]: If any councillors have recommendations or anything that they would like to add to the newsletter, I would be more than willing to hear it.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: So just, okay.
[Leming]: And the other two you had mentioned, I'm writing this down.
[Leming]: We're take out the second mention of leaf flower ordinance.
[Leming]: Planning and permitting, page 12.
[Leming]: Discussion on disability notification.
[Leming]: Oh, I think, yeah, so that was removed.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Uh, okay.
[Leming]: So how an initial meeting about, okay, let me just, just kind of thinking here, um, send a paper to committee.
[Leming]: Let's see.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: My thoughts on that are, I mean, we would call it
[Leming]: So this first newsletter, first up, is going to be a bit odd because it is the first one, but I'm sort of trying to mention the key points that we've done since the beginning of the term.
[Leming]: Future newsletters, I wouldn't really imagine, would have
[Leming]: quite as much as this they would just cover the last month but I don't I don't I also don't really think that we would need to necessarily stick to the calendar month that we're going it would like my in my perception would just be like what have we done since the last newsletter so we would be like writing it in that month but it would be for like since the last newsletter these are the things that happened yeah I mean that's that's just kind of my initial thinking I mean we could
[Leming]: you know, be strict as to only covering the events that happened in April or May and so on.
[Leming]: But, I mean, I also don't really see why we can't be a little bit more flexible about it.
[Leming]: And I see a hand raised.
[Leming]: Is that, is the iPhone Councilor Scarpelli?
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: So a lot of this was discussed at the last resident services and public engagement committee, which you were not present at, so.
[Leming]: Yeah, there's the other again that there is a standard set of city listservs that would go out to We could investigate other Potential listservs that go out to so we're talking with the senior center about theirs.
[Leming]: I mean the you know, the point is that we do we do need to have a product to send to different outlets if we are going to Communicate what City Council is doing.
[Leming]: So any other questions?
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: This is a newsletter that City Council is trying to circulate through the community.
[Leming]: That's what this is.
[Leming]: Councilor, sorry, Councilor Bears.
[Leming]: I am prone to make
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: in the process of updating and vetting our zoning ordinances with the city's zoning consultant and associates, which has worked with the city of Metro previously, including on our comprehensive plan, could be linked to.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: just stop share for a moment so I can check my email without it being broadcast.
[Leming]: Okay, and I'm seeing also additional in my email, additional recommendations from Council Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Council Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: So I'm looking at what you just emailed me, and I just copied and pasted that into my draft document.
[Leming]: So is everything you just mentioned in that email, or could you forward the recommendations to me?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Cause cause yeah, I, I don't want to use like all the meeting time while everybody watches me edit.
[Leming]: So I just do one, but that's a great idea.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Um, but I did just like copy and paste.
[Leming]: I did just copy and paste those in there.
[Leming]: In the meantime, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Yeah, so I think that we don't have to have the exact draft 100% figured out, like the exact formatting 100% figured out for the first one.
[Leming]: So what I just like to focus on timeliness for this particular draft, just to make sure that we have something out.
[Leming]: And then in future ones, as we kind of get into the swing of things, we can come up with a more standardized format as we see what people like.
[Leming]: So I do agree that that is,
[Leming]: I do agree that having upcoming projects in there would be great.
[Leming]: I also heard another recommendation from Council Vice President Collins, for instance, that we include the paper numbers in there just so that people can cross-reference it.
[Leming]: It's just that I got a lot of very last-minute input here, so researching all the paper numbers personally takes a bit of time.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro?
[Leming]: So on the draft schedule, you're assigned to do the next one.
[Leming]: I look forward to your draft.
[Leming]: I look forward to it.
[Leming]: I do want to emphasize, this is the first newsletter.
[Leming]: We really don't need to overthink it.
[Leming]: I know I, but it's like you said, perfect can't be the enemy of of good in this case.
[Leming]: So I'm hearing.
[Leming]: So, I think that there's a reasonable amount of work I could I could do on this draft prior to going to the to the regular meeting.
[Leming]: But I think a good part of having it rotated and again, we did have I.
[Leming]: Send an invitation for all Councilors to, uh, who wanted to volunteer to draft a newsletter for a given month and have it be edited by everyone else.
[Leming]: And those who volunteer are currently on the schedule.
[Leming]: So it is a opportunity for people to kind of, like, put their own practices into it.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: It should be in the agenda.
[Leming]: You're the only other person here that can second one.
[Leming]: So it's up to you.
[Leming]: So
[Leming]: Okay, so do we have any other.
[Leming]: Okay, so the first off there was, there are some additional edits as you can see on the screen from Councilor Collins.
[Leming]: So, I, again, I don't want to use this entire time to just to just do that considering also we have another item on the agenda to get to.
[Leming]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so she sent me some edits earlier and this is just some different phrasing of, and I could also, you know, but yeah, yeah, this is just some different phrasing that she wanted when I incorporated her edits earlier.
[Leming]: So it's just, it's just wording issues.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Okay, so a link to upcoming meetings.
[Leming]: So, I think what I'm going to do is if this is motion to be approved out of this committee directly to be sent out, then I'll just incorporate these edits on my own time and then send it out in addition to the other edits, obviously, that are in the suggestions right here.
[Leming]: So meetings is one.
[Leming]: OK, so just like email for the clerk something, whatever, whatever is, you know.
[Leming]: So my understanding is that the links to the upcoming meetings for Zoom, and the clerk could correct me on this, is that they're basically only generated a week beforehand, and there are technical reasons for this.
[Leming]: So if this is a monthly newsletter, I don't know if we'd be able to put all of the links.
[Leming]: So I think for the initial one, probably the best we could do is just like, here's the clerk's email if you would like to opt in.
[Leming]: Yeah, OK.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: OK, cool.
[Leming]: Any further discussion?
[Leming]: Any?
[Leming]: So by approving it, you'd mean send it, yeah, send it.
[Leming]: With the edit as amended.
[Leming]: What is that?
[Leming]: Okay, so we have a motion, two motions on the floor.
[Leming]: Clerk.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Wait, sorry.
[Leming]: So on the motion, Councilor Lazzaro, to approve the drafting schedule and approve the newsletter to be sent out,
[Leming]: as edited during this meeting.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Lazzaro to get feedback from DPI.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Okie dokie.
[Leming]: These late night meetings with three people.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And that is that 24-073 offered by Councilors Callahan, Councilor Tseng and Councilor Lazzaro resolution to establish city council listening sessions.
[Leming]: Any discussion on the floor regarding this one?
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Do we have a second on those?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: I have a motion by Councilor Calhan to form a subcommittee to establish listening sessions.
[Leming]: Is there any discussion from Councilors?
[Leming]: Yeah, there are three person.
[Leming]: There are three people subcommittees with only three voting members.
[Leming]: But I think any is pretty much as long as long as it's an open meeting that anybody can attend.
[Leming]: Exactly.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Sure.
[Leming]: Do you want to vote on your motion first?
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Callahan, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Okay, so what are the groups you'd like to reach out to?
[Leming]: Who are the, what are the five community liaisons?
[Leming]: I know that, do you know them off the top of your head?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay, I guess the other question I had is just open meeting considerations with the listening sessions.
[Leming]: So the listening sessions, would they be here or would they be?
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Cool.
[Leming]: Any further discussion?
[Leming]: Is there any public participation?
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Any public participation?
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Seeing none, do we have any other motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Okay, motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Present
[Leming]: This is more just a curiosity question, but with the health insurance, is there any possibility or is it feasible at all to switch health insurance providers or is that just a non-starter?
[Leming]: Correct.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Councilor Levee.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'd also like to echo my disappointment that I didn't do better in the bingo game.
[Leming]: Connie is 104th birthday, but I really enjoyed the cake and the company.
[Leming]: Uh, just a quick, just a brief question.
[Leming]: If you just give us an idea of this.
[Leming]: So you mentioned that you had a goal of increasing engagement among the senior community.
[Leming]: in Medford, about a little over 12,000 people, you said.
[Leming]: Can you give us an idea of how many more you think you'd be able to get involved in the next five, 10 years, and what do you think it would look like?
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Saint, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Just a real brief question.
[Leming]: So, virtual access as a virtual access being covered by open meeting laws had to expire in Massachusetts March of next year, which may or may not go through, depending on whether or not the governor.
[Leming]: puts another extension to it.
[Leming]: But my question is, if that does go through, and this may not even necessarily affect this budget season, but if it does go through, would that affect your job at all?
[Leming]: Or just the technologies you're using, the workflows and so on?
[Leming]: March 31st, 2025 is when it's set to expire.
[Leming]: I believe they've already extended it once.
[Leming]: They could extend it again,
[Leming]: Thank you very much.
[Leming]: We're very pleased to have you on Medford.
[Leming]: Just in your time here, what have been some of the more common concerns that veterans have been bringing to you?
[Leming]: We're starting to have Council Vice President Collins bring us food.
[Leming]: To pick it out?
[Leming]: That's it?
[Leming]: I'm a fan of Indian food.
[Leming]: Hello.
[Leming]: Sorry, I switched from one Zoom source to another.
[Leming]: So I undid my co-host status here.
[Leming]: So I can't unmute myself.
[Leming]: But the only question I had that came to mind was, for each of these different sections presented, how many additional studies
[Leming]: would need to would need to take place.
[Leming]: I'm asking that because my to sort of because some of my areas of interest namely the transportation demand management would require an extra study.
[Leming]: So I'm just wondering if another consultant would need to be hired for any other part of this presentation to to be possible.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: My initial question was related to the inclusionary zoning and whether it could be lumped in with the nexus study for the linkage fees, but I believe that Alicia just answered that.
[Leming]: My other question was related to the TDM study, which is more of a hypothetical at this point because I don't think any
[Leming]: any like solid movement has been made on staff to get that through.
[Leming]: But does that necessarily, does the TDM study necessarily need to be done before the ordinance itself is put in place?
[Leming]: Because my impression is that just from reading over the TDM ordinances and other municipalities, as well as the staff level implementation of the program, that the ordinances not
[Leming]: quite as heavily dependent on the contents of the study itself as the as inclusionary zoning might be.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: With TDM, my impression, and I should say that I'm perfectly aware that I've been asking your office to do a lot of different things.
[Leming]: I was talking to Todd about TDM as well.
[Leming]: My impression with the ordinance is that it's needed to specifically allow exceptions zoning variances without going through the ZBA and that's something because TDM does allow applicable projects to do that.
[Leming]: It's just that.
[Leming]: In order to sort of get past the ZBA, you would need it to say so in the ordinance.
[Leming]: But the lower level staff implementation of this is actually where you start getting into the point system trade-off that's really the meat of any TDM program.
[Leming]: And I will also say that I have spoken, we are talking with
[Leming]: the lower Mystic Transportation Management Association.
[Leming]: They are very interested in expanding to Medford, but they also have been aware since previous efforts in this have flopped that the ordinance part of the TDM program is very important to making it work in a particular area.
[Leming]: I can also say that I added most people to this, to the draft ordinance, if you're interested in looking over it.
[Leming]: Yep, so I would like to motion to have the committee chair send around the request for input from members of the council on any policy items combined with a request to get an update from the Department of Planning, Development and Sustainability by the end of June on the status of funding and procurement for these studies discussed, though.
[Leming]: There was a previous motion that was passed that essentially asked for an update from them by May for the linkage fee study.
[Leming]: So just wanted to point that out for the second one.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: And I will amend that to May.
[Leming]: Although if Alicia doesn't think that that's feasible, I'm perfectly willing to hear feedback on that from her.
[Leming]: Yeah, that sounds good.
[Leming]: So the appropriate motion instead be to add the appropriate studies to the memo?
[Leming]: Okay, so motion to have the committee chair send the request for input from members of the council on any policy items and to get in to add the appropriate studies with their own section to the memo of and associates.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: just a question for Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: So it says here the building department, the office and the PBS.
[Leming]: Do you have a good idea of where this project once it is implemented would primarily be maintained?
[Leming]: Would it be the building department or PBS?
[Leming]: And what's do you have?
[Leming]: Can you just, like, give us an idea of the amount of staff time that it would take to get this off the ground and maintain a longer term?
[Leming]: If
[Leming]: Just on another one of the points that was sort of brought up and some of the public discussion I would like to point out.
[Leming]: We'll just talk a little bit about the back end of some of this stuff I have.
[Leming]: I know that people do tend to send a lot of emails to council members sometimes they're not.
[Leming]: Sometimes I'm not able to reply to all of them, especially if they're on some of these
[Leming]: hot button issues.
[Leming]: Some of them slipped through the cracks.
[Leming]: I apologize.
[Leming]: I've, excuse me, I've had, I had one experience recently in an email where a woman sent us an email about the transfer fee, and I asked if she wanted to talk on the phone about it.
[Leming]: You know, just I've never met her before.
[Leming]: I didn't even know what she looked like, but I wanted to talk with her on the phone about it.
[Leming]: And she refused.
[Leming]: I don't know how to build bridges in a community when people refuse to even talk to me.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So my reason for co sponsoring this is really just I mean, it's pretty simple.
[Leming]: We've had a couple of meetings that have gone on till very late this term, it seems to be a pattern.
[Leming]: Last time on March 12, a lot of people who came up for public comment were saying rightfully so that they didn't want to have to wait so long to offer their public comment.
[Leming]: Even now, it's
[Leming]: and a half hours into the meeting that we're that we're discussing this, and I would personally favor, um.
[Leming]: More efficient meetings to accommodate these agendas.
[Leming]: So.
[Leming]: And I look forward to continue to listen to continue
[Leming]: just would like to say that I do sympathize with the inaccessibility of the email list at the resident services and public engagement committee we are working on proposals to update the website so I
[Leming]: I mean, I personally just look on the City Council page when I when I want to get the when I want to get the agendas myself, so I but we.
[Leming]: We are trying to increase transparency on the technological front.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Just a point of clarification from Councilor Scarpelli, through the chair, the resolution doesn't specify, is the intention to come before a regular meeting, a committee of the whole, private meeting?
[Leming]: Just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.
[Leming]: So well, so is the is the current intention behind this to if we pass this, that they'll meet with us and receive a place on file.
[Leming]: Just going on some of my thoughts from the linkage fee updates.
[Leming]: Is it possible to tie, is it possible or legal to tie these to any sort of consumer price index just to make them sort of
[Leming]: automatically go up with inflation every year so that future updates aren't quite as necessary?
[Leming]: Or does anybody see any problems with potentially implementing it that way?
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: I don't know the legalese on that either, but I would be interested to know about the opinion of KP Law in doing that.
[Leming]: So I'd like to motion to request the legal opinion of KP Law on tying the city's fee schedule in Appendix A to the Consumer Price Index.
[Leming]: Could be a CPI increase.
[Leming]: Also, what you said earlier about just a concrete, about a set percentage increase every year, just their legal opinion on doing that.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: No.
[Leming]: Next President Collins.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: What's he saying?
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: President Fares.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Leming]: I'm just joining on zoom at the moment.
[Leming]: It would be, uh, good to have a copy of this shared on screen if that's that's possible.
[Leming]: Um but generally so generally speaking, the 1st 2 4056, which just brings the linkage fees, um, in compliance with the state acts.
[Leming]: It has a couple of, um.
[Leming]: It has a couple of changes that sort of range from sort of basic housekeeping stuff.
[Leming]: For instance, I believe it was 90.
[Leming]: It was, hold on, just scrolling down to the exact places where I saw these.
[Leming]: It was 94-10-1.
[Leming]: 2.2 and the 94-10-3-2 and 94-10-4-2.
[Leming]: There's like some very basic errors in the linkage fee ordinance where it says provide a fund for police and fire facility capital improvements through a linkage grant too.
[Leming]: And then all of those all the linkage fee ordinances for police and fire and sewer
[Leming]: All of them said to donate it to the Parks and Recreational Facilities Trust.
[Leming]: That's just a basic copy and paste error that's present in our linkage fee ordinance.
[Leming]: So I offered corrections to that.
[Leming]: I also offered corrections in, and these sections all repeat, by the way, like essentially these four language fee ordinances are basically the four language fee buckets that are specified in chapter 94-10 are all sort of copied and pasted from one another.
[Leming]: So I just, there's a lot of repeating changes, but in 94-10-1-2-3-4.4, if you'll
[Leming]: Yeah, so if you just scroll down to like 9410.
[Leming]: I'm sorry, just kind of like going on my own one of them.
[Leming]: Yeah, this would be the page that I'm specifically looking at looking at at the moment is page 4.
[Leming]: Yes, yes, right there.
[Leming]: So it says, so in this it says calculations of linkage fees may be based on the methodology established by previous studies that outline methods for an escalating linkage fee formula.
[Leming]: So the purpose of this is to explicitly allow a mechanism to let future updates of linkage fees be tied to something like a consumer index fund because the Office of
[Leming]: Planning development and sustainability tells me that the study to actually recommend raises to these linkage fees, which we another resolution that went through the regular council meeting, ask them to conduct another 1 of those studies.
[Leming]: Those are very expensive.
[Leming]: So this is a mechanism to just sort of let them rely on 1 study.
[Leming]: and then update it based on a predictable formula from year to year.
[Leming]: This basically explicitly allows the Office of Community Development to explicitly update the linkage fees without having to do another expensive study every three years.
[Leming]: Other changes to this basically take the explicit power to change linkage fees away from the Community Development Board while still letting the Community Development Board have power to
[Leming]: to.
[Leming]: Offer regulations around the linkage fees themselves and the authority to conduct public hearings while giving explicit authority to update linkage fees to the mayor and the Office of Community
[Leming]: Um, and that's the special act.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: So, to be clear, the special act that was written in 1989 has no mention whatsoever of the community of the community development board.
[Leming]: Um, it only gives authority to update linkage fees to the mayor and the office of community development.
[Leming]: So I tried to look, like, parse through this as carefully as I could and just tried to find language that where it said the Community Development Board has the power to update linkage fees.
[Leming]: And I shifted that back to the Mayor and the Office of Community Development.
[Leming]: There is still language in here saying that the Community Development Board gets to set certain regulations and also conduct public hearings.
[Leming]: But for the most part, it's a shift of power back to staff because, again,
[Leming]: One, the Community Development Board never was given authority by the state in the first place to update linkage fees, and two, they never did it.
[Leming]: And that's another thing that's made more clear here is if you'll go to page, to the top of page five,
[Leming]: Yep, right there.
[Leming]: This kind of just changes the language from no more than three years, which is a little bit unclear, to at least every three years that it requires the linkage fees to be updated.
[Leming]: Again, this is exactly what it says in the States Act.
[Leming]: It says that
[Leming]: every three years linkage fees need to be updated which the community development board which was given this authority previously never did and according to the states act they never had the authority to actually do so this just this really just tries to bring it in more in compliance but it does give the community development board the authority to give public notice and public hearing so that the linkage fees can still have public input
[Leming]: which I think is reasonable.
[Leming]: It just doesn't give them explicit authority to actually update them itself.
[Leming]: Let's see.
[Leming]: Then I believe those are all the updates that are strictly related to 24-056.
[Leming]: The related to 24-057, which starts on page 11.
[Leming]: It's just, it's basically, a lot of it is besides like some slight change to the language behind 94.10.5.1 around the purpose of it.
[Leming]: It's like basically all these linkage fee sections are just copied and pasted.
[Leming]: So this is really just a copy and paste section around adding a fifth linkage structure to the, sorry, adding a fifth linkage bucket to the,
[Leming]: existing linkage fee structures.
[Leming]: And so this gives explicit authority for the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability to put linkage fees into the Affordable Housing Trust, which needs sources of revenue.
[Leming]: And so there's really not a whole lot to this section that's different from the previous four sections.
[Leming]: It's really cookie cutter language.
[Leming]: So, yeah, I think the
[Leming]: The more important thing about this is actually the implementation of it.
[Leming]: So, once we put this language in here, and we pass it all explicitly, just let the affordable housing trust be funded by linkage fees, which again is explicitly allowed by the state.
[Leming]: as was reviewed by KP Law, then it would be up to the Office of Planning, Development, and Sustainability, which I've been in correspondence with them about, to conduct a linkage fee study that would, one, update the normal linkage fees, two, figure out what the linkage fees ought to be for the Affordable Housing Trust, and three, come up with a reasonable formula for
[Leming]: updating these linkage fees every three years so that another study doesn't explicitly have to be done.
[Leming]: That's about all I have to present these changes, and I look forward to hearing from my colleagues as to what they think of this.
[Leming]: Well, the absolute next step is, so I just noticed some very basic housekeeping stuff in this draft that I submitted, which is, and so I'd like to, so I was just going through it right now, and I noticed that I, in rewriting, in writing the affordable housing bucket 94-10.5, could you, Councilor Bears, could you scroll to page 14, please?
[Leming]: Where am I screening it?
[Leming]: Yeah, I might have, just really quickly, I might have left some references there into 94.10.4, oh, sorry, 94.10.1, when they should be changed to 94.10.5 in the fifth one.
[Leming]: So there's just a lot of repeating text here that... I see one here, yeah.
[Leming]: So 10, five, six, uh, yeah.
[Leming]: So just, uh, I guess, motion to correct the references to, uh, in 94, 10, five to 94, 10, one where appropriate.
[Leming]: Cause again, it's just some very basic drafting drafting errors.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: I think I counted.
[Leming]: I counted three.
[Leming]: But could I just motion to have them all sort of?
[Leming]: Okay, thank you.
[Leming]: But other other than that, like, again, at the ordinance level, I don't think that there's really the the only the only sort of thing that I can think of is potentially some the relate likes, whatever.
[Leming]: If somebody has any strong opinions about the relationship between the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability and the Community Development Board, I know that I shifted around a few of the, in this draft here, a few of the powers from one to the other, again, giving the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability the explicit authority to update the linkage fees themselves.
[Leming]: So if there are any recommendations from PDS to change those, then I would be amenable to that.
[Leming]: But otherwise, I think that other than that, and those are very minor,
[Leming]: Errors that I just pointed out.
[Leming]: I can't think of a whole lot else that would really need to be done with the ordinance itself.
[Leming]: Most of the important steps, once this is passed, would be at the implementation phase.
[Leming]: So I would love to hear from PDS about this, if they have any thoughts themselves.
[Leming]: second um just my understanding of keeping in committee for what reason sorry what would it be sorry if we're going to report it favorably out um what would we report it back to regular to a regular session or would how would this be included in the zoning like what motion would be yeah so favorably not favorable we just reported that doesn't we don't really do that but we would just report it out
[Leming]: Councilor Levee.
[Leming]: Yeah, I think, and I need you to clarify this, but I think that that would be part of the process that Council President Bears was talking about.
[Leming]: Sure, I just, just to be clear, I'm not a voting member of this committee, so I don't think that my, I didn't want to prioritize my comments, but while we have a pause here, I'd just like to point out that I think when we say under-resource and under-staffing, I would just like to say that it's not just about the number of staff there, just backing up the conversations that we had about the finance department.
[Leming]: This is also partially an issue of software.
[Leming]: A few weeks ago, I went to the, you know, there was like a had like an hour to go before a city council meeting.
[Leming]: So, some of the people working the elections there decided to show me what their day to day was like, and they showed me the software that they're using to enter.
[Leming]: Voter information into their computers and it was a ridiculously slow process given the resources that they had and this was something that absolutely necessarily had to be done.
[Leming]: So that's so
[Leming]: be able to invest not just in more staff members, but in an updated infrastructure that would allow the existing staff members to do their jobs more efficiently would also be very critical for this.
[Leming]: I would also like to echo what my colleague Councilor Scarpelli was saying about the idea that the 42,000 voters that the city
[Leming]: currently has on its registered voter list is very likely not up to date.
[Leming]: I looked at it myself.
[Leming]: There were former roommates that I'd had that moved out of the city years ago on it.
[Leming]: But again, I think that we should be
[Leming]: we shouldn't necessarily be blaming the elections department for not doing um uh for deprioritizing tasks that aren't uh aren't necessary for the for the next election but i do i fully agree that there are a lot of things that need to be updated in terms of data so thank you yes just on this question of inactive voters and the size of the voter registration list i just think it's important to note that one
[Leming]: Mainly I'd like to just know what, how the search for a new election manager is going.
[Leming]: Chancellor Leibnig.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: This is just just asking if anybody knows this information.
[Leming]: So I remember when I was asking about a couple of these positions a few months ago, specifically the salary increases response that I got was that they need to do a study to figure out what the salary increases ought to be.
[Leming]: And I know that.
[Leming]: that was being brought up for the economic development director specifically, but that position did end up being hired.
[Leming]: I'm just curious, is there any of these positions still under any study to figure out what exactly the salary increase should be, like the city solicitor in particular, or is that floating around at the staff level at this point?
[Leming]: I found them favorable.
[Leming]: I found the records in order and move to approve them.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: We discussed Councilor Tseng's paper to develop a
[Leming]: more comprehensive communication strategy for City Council.
[Leming]: In particular, we decided to adopt a monthly newsletter and that motion, we passed a motion to do so.
[Leming]: So the way that that is going to
[Leming]: work is councillors will be on an alternating schedule, taking turns drafting the newsletter, after which it will be approved at the monthly Resident Services and Public Engagement meeting, and we will then meet to approve it, amend it as necessary, and then send it out to
[Leming]: the appropriate avenues as well.
[Leming]: Steve Smearty was there, so we talked with him as well about developing this newsletter and general communication strategy.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro also agreed to develop some social media, to draft some social media
[Leming]: to bring to the next to the public engagement meeting next month as well.
[Leming]: So I sent out a request to my colleagues to develop the calendar that we will then be relying on to
[Leming]: to rotate responsibilities for drafting the newsletter.
[Leming]: I decided to draft the first one to provide an example of the formatting, which will then be discussed at next month's meeting.
[Leming]: And I would like to thank my colleagues who have responded thus far that they are willing and able to draft newsletters in the coming term.
[Leming]: And I would also encourage those who have not found time to
[Leming]: do so to, if they're willing and able to, to do that as well.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: This is just a question of accident, kind of wondering this, and I would like to know the answer.
[Leming]: I've been wondering it for a while.
[Leming]: So if a firefighter is sick, why could, is it an option to get like a doctor's note, some form of documentation?
[Leming]: Could that be?
[Leming]: That is so that's that's everything for that's that's 24 hours.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Absolutely.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Leming]: So this is the first of a three part series of linkage fee resolutions that I'm bringing to the table.
[Leming]: Basically, this is a fairly simple one.
[Leming]: Linkage fees are fees that developers pay to the city, um, in order so that we can benefit the police and fire department, um, parts of facilities, um,
[Leming]: or sorry, roads and traffic facilities, parks and recreation.
[Leming]: So Medford has four linkage fee buckets at the moment.
[Leming]: These were established via an act that was passed by the state in 1989 and implemented in Medford in 1990.
[Leming]: By ordinance, we're required to update these fees every three years.
[Leming]: I mean, in our ordinances, it requires the Community Development Board to do that every three years.
[Leming]: It's just that
[Leming]: the community development board has never done that so this is this act is really just kind of asking politely for the community development board and in conjunction with the office of planning development and sustainability which used to be the office of community development to please conduct a study to update those linkage fees so that they can be um
[Leming]: you know, raised for the first time in about 34 years and potentially add a lot of new revenue to the city from developers.
[Leming]: Strictly speaking, the Medford City Council under our own ordinances and the State Act does not have the authority to update the linkage fees ourselves.
[Leming]: So this is really just a request to other boards and offices of the city to do so.
[Leming]: The other aspect of this is that I believe a reason that they haven't done that is because it takes the studies to actually, in order to update the linkage fees, you need to hire someone to conduct a study to do that.
[Leming]: Those studies are oftentimes pretty expensive to do.
[Leming]: So, I can imagine, but that's a very small cost compared to what we would end up gaining in the long term by actually updating our linkage fees.
[Leming]: So, this also requests that any new study conducted also
[Leming]: have some kind of an escalating formula so that they can be updated every three years without having a new expensive study.
[Leming]: Other cities like I believe Watertown have done the same thing by connecting their linkage fees to the consumer price index.
[Leming]: I've had meetings with KP Law about sort of what
[Leming]: other municipalities have done around this.
[Leming]: I've attached a memo regarding that in this package itself, which addresses not just this resolution, but also the other two resolutions in this package as well.
[Leming]: That's my presentation of the first of the three resolutions, and I would motion to pass this.
[Leming]: So, I have been discussing this pretty extensively with the office of planning, development and sustainability and what folks there believe is that the reason I mean, the reason it hasn't been updated is because.
[Leming]: Medford what they believe in the office and I've also passed this by KP law is that Medford has a kind of a unique linkage fee structure.
[Leming]: And so finding a consultant who's actually who's qualified to undergo the study that's necessary in order to raise
[Leming]: the linkage fees an appropriate amount because the issue with just raising it on our own is that a developer could say they don't like that, just challenge it.
[Leming]: Exactly.
[Leming]: So that's another reason that I've also requested that the City Council make sure that we include that in
[Leming]: That in our upcoming budget money for such a study to to take place.
[Leming]: I think I think it's more to do with just capacity in the office to pursue only so many different projects at once.
[Leming]: than it is anything else.
[Leming]: And this is going to be the subject of an upcoming resolution.
[Leming]: But there's also a bit of confusion, I think, about whose authority it actually is.
[Leming]: So the state act says that it's the Office of Community Development, which is now the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability, and the mayor to update the linkage fees.
[Leming]: But our ordinances include the Community Development Board,
[Leming]: Um, so they don't.
[Leming]: So the state act that's a lot that gives us the right to have linkage in the first place never mentions any community development board in there, but it's kind of split in our ordinances.
[Leming]: But that that's that that is something that will come up in the next.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: And I would like to second Councilor Scarpelli's motion.
[Leming]: I think that the, I think I originally motioned to pass it.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And I can't, I don't, it was seconded.
[Leming]: Yeah, and from my conversations with the folks in the Office of Planning Development and Sustainability, they said that it does fund a substantial number of projects with the roads and whatnot.
[Leming]: What Alicia Hunt told me is that, and this is what makes her think that the linkage fees right now are too low, whenever she does talk with the developer and she presents the linkage fee to them, like how much they'll have to pay, they never give her any pushback.
[Leming]: You know it's a good sign.
[Leming]: Good sign.
[Leming]: So she thinks that they're compared to like a lot of other cities are probably far too low and we're missing, missing a lot of potential revenue.
[Leming]: Not a precise one.
[Leming]: But I've heard speculation from people who have kind of done work with linkage fees in the past, and people have said it could increase three to four times just informally, like when I was talking to KP Law.
[Leming]: The guy that I was talking with, he worked with linkage fees and other communities.
[Leming]: He was like, yeah, you haven't updated this since 1990.
[Leming]: You go up like 10, 15 times.
[Leming]: I'm not sure.
[Leming]: So it'll be some kind of an order of magnitude just considering how long it's been since we've actually updated it.
[Leming]: But that's what the study is for.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Sorry, just just to clarify some of the issues that were brought up between the between the title.
[Leming]: So it's a bit of a weird thing because the state act specifies the office of community development, which Medford used to have until they were merged.
[Leming]: So.
[Leming]: Uh, in order to so there's a in the letter from KP law, which is also the agenda packet.
[Leming]: There is a recommendation that we change the, like, in order to, like, truly be in compliance with the state act, we need to request that the state act be changed to specify the office of planning development and sustainability instead of the office of community development changing.
[Leming]: Changing requesting a home repetition to change a state act is.
[Leming]: It may be necessary that we have to do that to change the wording of the state act, but I'm going to try to see if we could do that at the council level and get things done a little bit more quickly.
[Leming]: There's also the question of the escalating fee aspect as well, though.
[Leming]: So if we have to amend the State Act in order to allow for that, which we may or may not have to do, but might as well submit other changes to the titles in the State Act as well.
[Leming]: Give me one second.
[Leming]: It's on page 13.
[Leming]: There's a bit of a mix up in the agenda.
[Leming]: Page 13 of 27 on our current document.
[Leming]: The text of this resolution is under the 24-0471, so it's kind of like it's... Got it.
[Leming]: Yes, so this was, so,
[Leming]: This was in response to the fact that the Community Development Board has not actually never did update the linkage fees every three years since it was established in 1990.
[Leming]: I noticed that the State Act specified that these recalculations need to happen at least every three years.
[Leming]: The Medford's municipal codes states that they need to happen no more than every three years, which is kind of like a confusing wording thing.
[Leming]: As I was looking through the linkage fee, or sorry, the other part that is a little bit strange is that the state act only specifies the mayor and the office of community development.
[Leming]: As having the authority to update linkage fees, not the community development board.
[Leming]: So, I think that the community development board probably should have some.
[Leming]: Role to play in terms of public hearings, especially, but it seems to give authority to the community development board to actually do that.
[Leming]: Instead of the office of community development, I couldn't really figure out specifically.
[Leming]: why that was, but also just in looking over the linkage fee ordinances, there were just like a lot of other things that did need to be updated.
[Leming]: So there's a, there's a typo in there because we have four different trusts.
[Leming]: They all specify, like you have like a lot of texts that sort of copied and pasted four different times in chapter 9410.
[Leming]: It turns out that they all specify technically that we have to put linkage fees into the parks and recreation trust.
[Leming]: All like, so that's, it's just parks and recreation is copied and pasted four times under the, you know, police and fire, water and sewer, et cetera, et cetera.
[Leming]: So, which I think is just, and I noticed that when I was going over the linkage fee ordinances with the fine tooth comb.
[Leming]: So there's kind of a lot that has to be updated there to really get the specifics.
[Leming]: Which section is that in?
[Leming]: that I believe, it's not the one that's quoted here, but it's, I had like a Google Drive, like I had a Google Drive folder at another time that I could go to to find it.
[Leming]: One moment.
[Leming]: It's, hold on, I'm looking for,
[Leming]: Yeah, it was... I'm just looking.
[Leming]: I believe it was repeated in... Okay.
[Leming]: Sorry, I didn't expect to have to do this in real time.
[Leming]: You don't have to.
[Leming]: You can come back later.
[Leming]: Point is I was just going through it with a fine tooth comb.
[Leming]: I think that it does need to be looked over in order to just kind of like get some of the different authorities right and get the wording right.
[Leming]: So I would motion that this paper be sent to the admin administration and finance committee.
[Leming]: So I ran it by the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability.
[Leming]: Alicia told me that she, Alicia Hunt, Planning Director, told me that she would hand it to the head of the Community Development Board.
[Leming]: I never heard any response from them specifically.
[Leming]: The third in the three-part series of linkage resolutions.
[Leming]: This one is a very straightforward one.
[Leming]: This was another part of my discussion with KP Law.
[Leming]: They said that
[Leming]: based on their reading of the State Act, we are able to have a fifth linkage bucket for affordable housing, which is commonly done in many other communities in order to fund affordable housing.
[Leming]: We just established an affordable housing trust last year, which is currently being set up.
[Leming]: So this is a very
[Leming]: straightforward resolution to add a fifth linkage bucket as well to Medford's ordinances in order to add another revenue stream for the affordable housing trust.
[Leming]: I would motion that this be sent as well to the
[Leming]: and finance committee.
[Leming]: I would also motion to request that the, uh, study we requested the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability earlier that that study also include.
[Leming]: Um uh, additional, uh, an additional study about the addition of of affordable housing to the linkage
[Leming]: The other concern there, I do respect the idea that this could potentially be taking revenue streams away from other sources.
[Leming]: But if linkage fees are going to be updated for the first time in 34 years, and they could potentially be raised by an order of magnitude, I think that overall, this would be adding enough revenue not only to the affordable housing trust, but to the other four currently existing linkage buckets as well.
[Leming]: pulling revenue away from these other sources in any case.
[Leming]: But thank you.
[Leming]: I just want to say that I do sympathize with a lot of the comments that were made by Ms.
[Leming]: Murphy.
[Leming]: We are working on a good landlord tax credit proposal, which would incentivize landlords who willingly keep lower rents.
[Leming]: And I also sympathize with a lot of the issues that this country tends to see with Section 8 housing.
[Leming]: The state of affordable housing is not, it's not simple.
[Leming]: And there's no one silver bullet that can be done to fix it.
[Leming]: I think a lot of the conversation that we do have here is, you're doing one thing, why don't you do something else?
[Leming]: We do need to do multiple things in parallel to even make a dent in this problem.
[Leming]: Trying to do that with a few resources that we have at this level.
[Leming]: Another point that was made by Mr. Castagnetti about the supply and demand problem.
[Leming]: Another issue with that is that real estate is one issue where the supply can be uniquely constrained just because you can't make
[Leming]: you can't manufacture more land.
[Leming]: If there are demand for iPhones, for instance, you just be able to make more iPhones and just create as much of them as you want.
[Leming]: There's only a very limited supply of land and given a lot of things like zoning, different regulations, there's only so much you can build on that land, whereas
[Leming]: Yeah, so the supply is constrained, whereas demand can just keep going up and up and up.
[Leming]: And that's a lot of what we're seeing these days, especially with different changes in the economy and an increasing population.
[Leming]: I would also recommend looking at the Boston Globe's spotlight series on the rising costs of development of housing.
[Leming]: Again, they said it costs between $500,000 and $600,000 to build one unit of housing in Greater Boston these days.
[Leming]: The reasons are, again, not simple.
[Leming]: Some of it's local, some of it has to do with the state of the global economy, but this is just one small part of the many issues that people have brought up tonight.
[Leming]: I just wanted to offer my general sympathies on people trying to stay informed on city council and city government just in general.
[Leming]: As Councilor Tseng said, we are working on several initiatives at the moment to keep people informed a bit more of a comprehensive manner, but I think a lot of people also discover that to really.
[Leming]: Unfortunately, the state of things is that without any local news to really understand what's going on, it kind of has to become like a hobby or part of your.
[Leming]: Social life so you have to like know, you know Which subreddits which Facebook groups to go to which YouTube channels to look on to find which pieces of information and a lot and I
[Leming]: I don't like it.
[Leming]: That's kind of like the state of affairs.
[Leming]: But realistically, a lot of people that are super involved in the city do have a number of these different sources and people they talk to to sort of figure out how these things work.
[Leming]: So yeah.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: All right, welcome everybody to the... Welcome everybody to the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee of March 13th, 2024.
[Leming]: Clerk, can you please call the roll?
[Leming]: I don't see him on Zoom.
[Leming]: Yep, Councilor Scarpelli was at the previous meeting, but might be, oh, Justin Singh is, yep.
[Leming]: All right, so we'll wait a little bit for Councilor Scarpelli, but I know he was at the previous meeting, so he should be here momentarily.
[Leming]: The only discussion item on the agenda for tonight is 24-015 offered by Councilor Tseng, resolution to discuss modernizing council communications and outreach strategy.
[Leming]: Do we have any presentations on the floor, Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: I'd like to say there is a
[Leming]: motion in the previous meeting, which was passed for Council members to submit their ideas for modernizing City Council communications.
[Leming]: Nobody submitted anything in the meantime, so just provide an update on that.
[Leming]: In any case, feel free to go on with the presentation.
[Leming]: I'm sorry, one moment.
[Leming]: We had Ms.
[Leming]: Kaya said the sound is not working for the public in the chat on Zoom.
[Leming]: Apologies.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Oh, okay.
[Leming]: Apologies continue.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng sorry for the interruption.
[Leming]: Okay, on the motion of Councilor Tseng, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Do we have a second for that motion first?
[Leming]: All right, thank you, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Absolutely, Mr. Smierti.
[Leming]: Can you be unmuted?
[Leming]: We only have one person raising their hand at the moment, so Ms.
[Leming]: Kaya, would you prefer to speak?
[Leming]: And then Councilor Bizarro.
[Leming]: Mr. Smearty.
[Leming]: Yeah, sorry, there's two at the moment, but Ms.
[Leming]: Kea, did you have a follow-up that you wanted to add to that?
[Leming]: You raised your hand again.
[Leming]: Not sure if that clarified the question for you.
[Leming]: Yeah, I was going to help answer.
[Leming]: I know that Councilor Lazzaro was
[Leming]: first, but Councilor Tseng if you could answer if you want to provide an answer to the question, I would like to answer.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: I guess just to offer my own point of view on the question, as part of my campaign website and whatnot, I maintain a blog and a newsletter myself, and that's just
[Leming]: pretty much the form where I say whatever's on my mind is directly as informal as possible.
[Leming]: But there is a distinction between that and something coming out of an official government body, in my view.
[Leming]: I personally would see the newsletter as just straight up facts about what is actually being discussed in City Council, what we're doing, what we're voting on, what we have voted on.
[Leming]: And I think that if
[Leming]: if we were voting on something that were coming out of my personal campaign website that there would obviously be a lot of disagreements on that.
[Leming]: But if we're as a city council voting on something that is just supposed to be very fact based, then that's everybody can agree on, you know what we're discussing and what we're doing.
[Leming]: So it's really just the goal would really just to be keeping keeping people informed of current activities.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: Yeah, yeah.
[Leming]: A motion of Councilor Callahan to have Justin Tseng read all the motions.
[Leming]: I personally think newsletter is the best, the best description for that kind of thing.
[Leming]: Cause well, I feel like people that are more like certain generations would understand a newsletter is like an email older generations might understand the newsletter and it's more original, like physical things.
[Leming]: It could be.
[Leming]: I think that's pretty much the clearest word we're going to get out of this multi platform.
[Leming]: I get what you're saying.
[Leming]: I definitely understand what you're saying.
[Leming]: It's just that it's one of those things where I feel like attempts to come up with another word would just make it a bit more muddled.
[Leming]: That's just me, though, personally.
[Leming]: Did you get the original email?
[Leming]: I got the original.
[Leming]: I think at this point... I just had a question.
[Leming]: This could be something that Steve can answer, but in terms of getting the email list, what would... Is there any... I understand we just talked about opt-in laws.
[Leming]: Maybe this was covered earlier on in the meeting, but where would we get the emails from?
[Leming]: Would we be like... Yeah, Councilor Callahan, the clerk.
[Leming]: Sorry, I just saw that Steve had his hand raised on Zoom.
[Leming]: the social media accounts would all be maintained through the clerks up as I imagine.
[Leming]: Yeah, I do like just just kind of something that's on my mind while we're talking about that.
[Leming]: I do feel like we do need to treat each social media platform as sort of an environment in itself.
[Leming]: So there's plenty of precedent for having city council type pages on like Facebook, for instance, but I feel like.
[Leming]: reddit is kind of a different environment for that sort of a thing it's where a lot of people get their information but like an official reddit posting it yeah it is definitely like the specific policy is definitely up for discussion uh councillor i thought you were first okay councillor callahan um if we really want for this to get to as many people as possible um i suspect that we need to
[Leming]: I definitely agree with that.
[Leming]: I just with with each platform, I think that it would be good to have a specific strategy in mind to look at what other folks have done for that, because with what's that we would need a way to get lots of different phone numbers for that, which may not have a moment.
[Leming]: That is pretty that could be a very intensive process.
[Leming]: But I definitely hear your point about different communities and, um, what?
[Leming]: Not using these different social media platforms.
[Leming]: Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: Mr. Smearty.
[Leming]: I feel like a survey would be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[Leming]: On the motion, do we have a second?
[Leming]: Seconded by Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: The motion of Councilor Tseng, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: We don't have to do a roll call, by the way.
[Leming]: Yeah, we can just move to join and approve.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: On the motion by Councilor Callahan to join and approve the other five motions.
[Leming]: All those in favor?
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: That's right.
[Leming]: Sorry, I literally just looked up.
[Leming]: I just wanted to move the question on the, because we, we, we motioned to join them.
[Leming]: We didn't actually vote on them.
[Leming]: Oh, nevermind.
[Leming]: I don't know.
[Leming]: I don't know.
[Leming]: I don't know.
[Leming]: It was something.
[Leming]: Anyway, I would like to recognize my esteemed colleague, Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Yeah, I can work with you.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: And do we have any further comment from members of the public?
[Leming]: Seeing none, do we, Councilor Callahan?
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: Okay, on the motion by Councilor Callaghan, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro to adjourn.
[Leming]: All those in favour?
[Leming]: All those opposed?
[Leming]: Nay.
[Leming]: The motion passes.
[Leming]: Have a good night.
[Leming]: Welcome to the meeting of the Planning and Permitting Committee, March 13th, 2024.
[Leming]: Clerk, can you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: The only
[Leming]: item on our agenda today is paper 24033 offered by President, Council President Bearss and Council Vice President Kit Collins, zoning ordinance updates with the, and his associates team.
[Leming]: I'm gonna go ahead and recognize the chair, Kit Collins, who I am chairing this meeting in lieu of today.
[Leming]: Kit, take it away.
[Leming]: Absolutely recognize Council President Bears.
[Leming]: Thank you, Council President Bears.
[Leming]: Do we have Councilor Callahan?
[Leming]: Thank you, Council Vice President.
[Leming]: Did Ms.
[Leming]: Ennis want to respond to that?
[Leming]: Council Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Any more comment from members of the council?
[Leming]: Any comment from members of the public?
[Leming]: Yep.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Any questions, comments from my fellow, Councilor Callahan?
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I do have one question, which could either be answered by Scott or Alicia, or perhaps, and his associates.
[Leming]: What do you think would be, how would sort of the projects that individual Councilors brought forward be incorporated into this?
[Leming]: So for instance, I have some ADU things I'm working on, as well as the Transportation Demand Management Program in committee.
[Leming]: Do you,
[Leming]: how would you see that sort of being incorporated into this overall process?
[Leming]: Are there some things that could be done independently or should it be sort of integrated into these meetings?
[Leming]: Yeah, thank you.
[Leming]: And I see that Ms.
[Leming]: Inez had her hand up prior, put it down and then has her hand up again.
[Leming]: So would you feel free to, yeah.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli, did you wanna speak?
[Leming]: I didn't see your hand up, but you were saying something earlier.
[Leming]: Thank you, Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Do we have any motions from the floor?
[Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Leming]: Oh, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Uh, do we have any motions from floor just if I could?
[Leming]: So is that all in one motion?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: OK.
[Leming]: And while the clerk is typing that out, I see that we have, I'd like recognizing, I see that we have a paddy kaya on Zoom.
[Leming]: Is that our hand up for a while?
[Leming]: So just
[Leming]: I'll just go ahead and recognize her name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Thank you, Ms.
[Leming]: Kaya.
[Leming]: I fully agree transparency in this process is
[Leming]: very important.
[Leming]: We've been, this council has been trying to work on that for the entirety of the term.
[Leming]: It's obviously imperfect, but point taken.
[Leming]: Council Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Do we have a second for that motion?
[Leming]: I'm very sorry, Council Vice President.
[Leming]: That second was already taken by Councilor Callahan here.
[Leming]: My deepest apologies.
[Leming]: Do we have any more motions on the floor?
[Leming]: Okay, was that a third motion?
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: All right.
[Leming]: Well, we still have two motions to be voted on.
[Leming]: So, uh, or can you, uh, read up the first one and then we'll take roll call vote.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Would you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Motion passes.
[Leming]: All right, do we have any further input from members of the public?
[Leming]: All right, seeing none, Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: On the motion of Vice President Collins to keep the paper in committee and adjourn, seconded by Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Meeting is adjourned.
[Leming]: Thank you everyone for coming out tonight.
[Leming]: Motion to move the question.
[Leming]: Thank you, and I'd like to thank everybody for waiting so long across two meetings.
[Leming]: It's unfortunate that we did have to.
[Leming]: Can everybody hear me okay?
[Leming]: OK, so what I'm going to talk about is what we're actually voting on tonight, why there is a housing need in Medford, Massachusetts, and how this helps that, and why this particular policy is unlikely to affect seniors, average homeowners.
[Leming]: It's really more targeted at high-end real estate deals.
[Leming]: Hey, excuse me.
[Leming]: Excuse me.
[Leming]: Excuse me.
[Leming]: So at the state level, Governor Healy and many of our neighboring communities have proposed different forms of a real estate transfer fee.
[Leming]: This is because Massachusetts is in a housing crisis right now.
[Leming]: Medford in particular needs to build 671 more units in order to even meet a minimum 10% affordable housing requirement mandated by the state of Massachusetts.
[Leming]: Each of those units cost between $500,000 and $600,000.
[Leming]: to fund and to build and it was only last year that we even instituted an affordable housing trust which would be able to dedicate revenue towards putting towards addressing that problem.
[Leming]: I have right here a letter
[Leming]: from 21 residents of 208 Main Street, in which they say that they are being evicted right now because a major real estate company bought up their apartment complexes and told them they have to get up by next month if Medford had been serious about funding, any form of affordable housing 10 years ago, they, this would not be the case for them.
[Leming]: So,
[Leming]: Currently we have the Community Preservation Act funds.
[Leming]: Before I was elected, I sat on the Community Preservation Act, or sorry, on the Community Preservation Committee, and we were able to dedicate maybe $800,000 a year to fund
[Leming]: to fund affordable housing developments.
[Leming]: We ended up dedicating about $2.4 million to walk link or but we only pay 2% of the price tag for that.
[Leming]: So we need more revenue streams in order to put any sort in order to build up any sort of corpus of money that can be dedicated to affordable housing residents are being priced out of the city, and we need to more actively engage that now.
[Leming]: What is what is being voted on tonight?
[Leming]: What is being voted on tonight?
[Leming]: Many residents, I believe, came here tonight under the belief that we were voting to pass a 2% tax on all real estate transactions in Medford.
[Leming]: That is most definitely not the case.
[Leming]: That is not the case.
[Leming]: Because what this is, is a resolution to discuss the transfer fee to develop it.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And there's different forms that these transfer fees can take at the state level what Governor Healy is pushing for.
[Leming]: is is a transfer fee that wouldn't tax any price below $1 million.
[Leming]: So if you sold $1 million property, you'd pay zero if you sold a $1.2 million property $4,000 split equally between the buyer and the seller.
[Leming]: That is one example of a transfer fee policy.
[Leming]: neighboring communities have submitted transfer fee policies that
[Leming]: exclude seniors transactions between family members and owner occupied residences completely.
[Leming]: So in other words, under these different examples of a transfer fee policy, if you lived in a home and you were selling it to somebody else who also intended to live in that home,
[Leming]: it wouldn't it would not apply to you.
[Leming]: Okay, this is really meant to address the situation like the one being experienced by the residents of 208 Main Street.
[Leming]: Now, the trouble that we've gone through with this is the fact that
[Leming]: This was originally on the February 20 agenda.
[Leming]: And it was because there was a lot going on in that meeting it was tabled until today so that allowed three weeks for it to sit on the city council agenda, and a lot of misinformation
[Leming]: was, I believe, spread around the community.
[Leming]: It's an unfortunate timing issue.
[Leming]: Something this important should not be sitting on an agenda without any discussion for this long.
[Leming]: And so I know what my personal ideas about what a real estate transfer-free policy should look like, but because of a meeting law, I don't know what my colleagues as of yet think.
[Leming]: We haven't been able to discuss it amongst ourselves.
[Leming]: Okay?
[Leming]: Now,
[Leming]: The point is that even if the vote on this is successful tonight, we're not passing real estate transfer fee policy, we are passing a resolution to discuss and develop it.
[Leming]: And this will then contain a number of exclusions, etc, etc.
[Leming]: Now, even if we were to develop one, we were to pass it,
[Leming]: It's and so on.
[Leming]: This is a home rule petition.
[Leming]: It does not mean that Medford would then have a real estate transfer fee.
[Leming]: What it means is that we would ask the state to pass it and the state may or may not choose to do that.
[Leming]: And if the state.
[Leming]: No, listen.
[Leming]: Okay, they may or may not choose to pass it.
[Leming]: If they do, we still don't have a real estate transfer fee.
[Leming]: We get the option to then develop our own.
[Leming]: Now 18 other communities have requested a real estate transfer fee from the state.
[Leming]: None of them have even been debated yet.
[Leming]: The version that Governor Healey is trying to push in the Affordable Homes Act may or may not give us the option by default.
[Leming]: So that is what is happening tonight.
[Leming]: We're not discussing anything like rent control or any of the other home rule petitions that people have brought up.
[Leming]: This is a resolution to find out, do we want a real estate transfer fee?
[Leming]: What exclusions would be in it?
[Leming]: Because at the end of the day, Medford really needs to be serious about addressing the affordable housing situation.
[Leming]: People come to us a lot and they talk about the roads.
[Leming]: They talk about improving the schools and
[Leming]: and a lot of other things.
[Leming]: The fact of the matter is that Medford increasingly is pricing out the working class, and those are the people that repair our roads.
[Leming]: Those are people that improve our infrastructure.
[Leming]: They can't afford to live here anymore.
[Leming]: Okay?
[Leming]: So that's what this is.
[Leming]: Now, thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you very much.
[Leming]: They're currently interviewing people.
[Leming]: I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible that the state would approve it.
[Leming]: But even having having the home rule petitions like this come to the state house from multiple communities does really emphasize to, um, the state government that this is something that communities really need help on.
[Leming]: I just like to touch on to, um, two other points because I was conversing
[Leming]: this is a particular item that I think that I think has received a lot of outsized attention compared to a lot of other things City Council is doing when it comes to affording the to funding the affordable housing to us.
[Leming]: We're not definitely not putting all of our eggs in this basket.
[Leming]: Later on in the agenda, I have three resolutions to update linkage fees, which haven't been updated since the 1990s.
[Leming]: There's other things that are going through committee right now related to shortening the
[Leming]: that there is a window that developers have to sit on property, which would therefore shorten the overall development time.
[Leming]: It's just that this particular resolution, I think, just due to some unfortunate, um, timing and obviously poor optics.
[Leming]: What was the three weeks in between meetings has just received, um, a lot of
[Leming]: Any answers?
[Leming]: Go ahead.
[Leming]: The basis for a lot of these programs is often money.
[Leming]: So Somerville has a community land trust.
[Leming]: It's just that they've had an affordable housing trust since like the 90s.
[Leming]: So it's been accumulating money for years so that they could actually do that.
[Leming]: I hear a lot of,
[Leming]: programs like that that could address the housing crisis, the basis of it is always money, which we again we literally just instituted an affordable housing trust last year and this is one of the revenue streams we're investigating for it.
[Leming]: Go to Councilor Leming then we'll go back to public participation Councilor Leming know I was just saying that we should move on to the next.
[Leming]: It was just a minor point.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: But again, we haven't actually discussed the details of what this would look like.
[Leming]: I'd have to go to the committee to do that.
[Leming]: But in other transfer fee proposals, transfers between family members where usually no cash is actually exchanged or it's pretty standard to exclude those from consideration.
[Leming]: you know, and if you gave a, you know, million dollar home to your child, like they're not giving you a million dollars for it.
[Leming]: So there's no cash sort of tax.
[Leming]: So that would, I just want to put that out there that typically in these proposals, those are exempt.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'm glad someone reads them.
[Leming]: What a, what an evening it's been.
[Leming]: So, so I just would like to address some of the just sort of reiterate what I said earlier in my initial comments which is to say that the.
[Leming]: The way that this got broken to the public was really not ideal, and I do wanna recognize that.
[Leming]: Normally something like this would be put on the agenda, discussed at a council meeting, and then a lot more public information would come out then, and then something a little bit more solid would be developed in committee.
[Leming]: What happened was our February 20 meeting, we ended up, you know, addressing the fire for the firefighter issues and of course that just ended up pushing the whole meeting to past midnight.
[Leming]: So this was tabled.
[Leming]: And then we also had the election on March 5 so that
[Leming]: was another delay and basically just it meant that there was three weeks where again, this was on the agenda with zero details to the public.
[Leming]: And Councilors here were also a little bit hamstrung in terms of what we could promise the details would look like because again, we hadn't actually discussed it yet.
[Leming]: I was trying to
[Leming]: I was trying to write on my website about what different RETF policies could look like, what the process was, and just generally try to clarify things there.
[Leming]: But again, it was difficult because I can't promise anything because the proposal itself hasn't been developed.
[Leming]: I do wanna, I would like to recognize that and acknowledge that the way that this was broken to the public, especially in this instance, wasn't ideal.
[Leming]: And we do have a lot of improving to do in that space.
[Leming]: So thank you.
[Leming]: Yeah, what's that piece of paper?
[Leming]: I've been curious all evening.
[Leming]: I gotcha.
[Leming]: This is only like the first resolution on the agenda.
[Leming]: I am so sorry.
[Leming]: Okay, so basically this is, this is sort of supposed to be three resolutions but I think it was, it was now I'm just getting emotion table until the next meeting table to the meeting on March 19 Councilor living seconded by Councilor gala.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: I submitted a brief list of budget recommendations.
[Leming]: I wanted to make it a little bit more of a focused a couple of focused items because I.
[Leming]: You know, I didn't want it to be too redundant to some of the issues and very important issues that my colleagues brought up concerning the staff concerning the budget for the schools, for instance, but these, but I just like to make sure with these relatively modest requests that we have money set aside for three studies that I believe will be.
[Leming]: for the long term financial health of the city, a linkage study, which should be coming into, which should be brought up at the council meeting next week in order to update the linkage fees in the city, a nexus study, which will determine how much to charge the developers to put into
[Leming]: affordable housing and a transportation demand management study, which would also be carried out by the planning office in order to implement at the staff level the transportation demand management program, which is currently in the planning and permitting committee.
[Leming]: The rest is just really repeating what was said before about the need for more and permanent election staff.
[Leming]: which I think the last, the previous election and the fact that we've had a lot of loss in that department has really shown the importance of.
[Leming]: A permanent salary for one community social worker who has been on a sort of a revolving set of funds for a while now, it's a very important position.
[Leming]: And I had a conversation about having increased salary for the part-time library workers.
[Leming]: That is a position that I haven't seen a whole lot of advocacy for or mention of just previously in other city conversations.
[Leming]: So I thought it would be useful to represent them in some of these budgetary priorities.
[Leming]: Yes, I just like to thank the, I just like to riff off what my colleagues were saying.
[Leming]: The problem that we're facing is not misallocations of funds.
[Leming]: It's the fact that Medford doesn't have enough funding to begin with.
[Leming]: We have one of the lowest operating budgets for any major city of our size in the state of Massachusetts.
[Leming]: And so we are not going to get everything that we discussed and wanted to tonight.
[Leming]: One point that I would like to make is that there are a few
[Leming]: There are a few items that were discussed that I think would substantially help with growth and getting more revenues in the future.
[Leming]: And I think that it would be.
[Leming]: Good to prioritize those those particular items.
[Leming]: So, for instance, I'm going to.
[Leming]: I think this will be more of a discussion point next week, but I'm going to strongly insist on having the money for these studies, the linkage fee study, for instance, that we could update those because that's something that in particular will help us get more revenues into the future and hopefully get us out of this.
[Leming]: get us out of this problem.
[Leming]: And a lot of the financial software that was discussed, I think falls into the same category.
[Leming]: So when it comes to priorities, we should be looking at things that long-term will help with more revenue and more growth in the future.
[Leming]: Um, I don't know.
[Leming]: Anyone have anything else they want to chat about?
[Leming]: You did make the motion to raise our salaries to $89,000.
[Leming]: So it was seconded.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Just a quick point of information from Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Could you repeat the section of the Mass General Law that you mentioned earlier?
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: So I think that a rental registry would be be an excellent idea.
[Leming]: The two things that I just like to get some information on which I believe Council President Bears touched on a little bit here is first of all, how much would it what would be estimated cost and effort be to send out the notification every
[Leming]: Property owner in the city and what would be the capacity of your office?
[Leming]: Do you estimate to design and upkeep a rental registry?
[Leming]: At this time.
[Leming]: Part of this is not so much to ask questions, but I previously was on the CPC, so I just felt like adding a little bit more context about the nature of the potential relationship between the CPC and the Affordable Housing Trust.
[Leming]: Typically, affordable housing projects that come before the CPC are just
[Leming]: you'll get like a big project once every couple of years.
[Leming]: So the Walkling Court development was, I mean, I think that that would, the final price tag for that would be over 100 million, of which the CBC is donating $800,000 this year.
[Leming]: And the trouble with the CBC, and please correct me if any of this is inaccurate, but it's just, you know,
[Leming]: is that they have to spend a certain amount from taxes every year.
[Leming]: The benefit of the Affordable Housing Trust in this case is that it allows money to be collected over time so that when one of those projects does come along, you could end up then putting towards a greater amount of capital towards that project.
[Leming]: There was a bit of trouble with multi-year funding towards the Walkland Court redevelopment that the CPC was running into during my time there.
[Leming]: I think that
[Leming]: I think that the issue that we're sort of seeing with the Affordable Housing Trust and potential revenue streams into it is volume.
[Leming]: So the CBC will be a very important feeder into it.
[Leming]: It is, however, like I said, the walk-in core, just for an example, I believe, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's something over $100 million the CBC takes in
[Leming]: Again, just ballpark here around $2 million-ish a year, of which a third of that can go to affordable housing.
[Leming]: So if we are going to be able to fund affordable housing developments like that, the CPC could be an important source of funds.
[Leming]: However, it is necessary to have that coming from
[Leming]: different areas.
[Leming]: So this will come up in the regular meeting, so I don't want to just sort of clarify the CBC and the Affordable Housing Trust.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Any other questions from members of the Council?
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Thank you, and I also ask that I'm just gonna... That's fine.
[Leming]: I'm just gonna talk, and I'm going to...
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: So I got messages from about 30 people opposed to this, including three or four from firefighters.
[Leming]: I ended up having long conversations, you know, with two of those firefighters.
[Leming]: I had dinner with another one on.
[Leming]: Friday, Thursday, and I even went to the South Medford fire station and rang their doorbell and tried to start a conversation with the fellow there who obviously wasn't expecting to talk to a city councilor but the point that I'm getting at is that
[Leming]: City Council, just like the rest of, like many other people in Medford, has been in a bit of an information vacuum about the nature of what's been happening with union negotiations between the mayor and the leadership and the firefighters union.
[Leming]: And so what I'm trying to say is that
[Leming]: We didn't really know too much about what was going on behind closed doors compared to the rest of the public until last Thursday when this came onto the agenda and suddenly became in the interest of both parties to put as much information about what's been happening behind closed doors for months.
[Leming]: as possible.
[Leming]: So I did talk to the I did talk to the mayor, I tried to talk to different firefighters, I tried to get past a lot of the spin.
[Leming]: A lot of you know, obviously, during the union negotiations, union contract negotiations, relationships fell apart.
[Leming]: And there's a lot of there's a lot of bad blood that's going around.
[Leming]: And I heard a lot of that.
[Leming]: And so what I'm going to say is,
[Leming]: What I'm going to try to do is make my thinking about this as transparent as I possibly can, and so I'm going to say the points that appeal to me most for voting down, and then I'm going to say the points that I see in favor of this, and then I want to listen to public comment after that, and I'm not going to say anything else.
[Leming]: The point in opposition to this that meant the most to me was the morale in the fire department.
[Leming]: There are promotional issues.
[Leming]: If you bring in somebody from the outside, firefighters cannot advance in the normal routes.
[Leming]: I hear that loud and clear that so I received an email from a firefighter.
[Leming]: Dan Craven, and I think he phrased it best.
[Leming]: He said, four promotions normally happen in this scenario.
[Leming]: Firefighter, Lieutenant, Captain, Deputy Chief each get promoted to fill the vacancies created by the Fire Chief's retirement.
[Leming]: There are already established promotional lists for Deputy Chief, Captain, and Lieutenant.
[Leming]: The Mayor has instead called upon your Honorable Body to remove the Chief's position from civil service law so that she can hire him outside the Medford Fire Department.
[Leming]: which would in turn effectively nullify the normal promotions.
[Leming]: I take that very seriously.
[Leming]: He then goes on to talk about all of the studying that's required for these tests, why they're so difficult to do.
[Leming]: And I've also heard about the behavior that from the mayor personally, which obviously didn't appeal to a lot of people during this.
[Leming]: What I'm going to say that I need, if I am going to vote against this, I absolutely need to be convinced of a few things.
[Leming]: First,
[Leming]: the sick time situation as my colleagues have both brought up.
[Leming]: Now, I have tried to ask as many firefighters about this as possible.
[Leming]: I have been told that they actually were sick and I'll be perfectly honest, 21 out of 23 people call in in a day and then they come in later, I don't believe it.
[Leming]: I'm just gonna say that I do not believe it.
[Leming]: I have, otherwise when I try to ask about that, I think that there's some ongoing, you know, potential litigation.
[Leming]: So people have been advised to not talk to me about what's happening behind closed doors.
[Leming]: And one in my position in this is that we absolutely cannot have, we cannot have the fire department making the five o'clock news about these issues, okay?
[Leming]: That is my bottom line.
[Leming]: I understand morale issues.
[Leming]: I understand everything else.
[Leming]: I do not want to see the Medford Fire Department with a culture that encourages these kinds of issues like sick time and whatnot.
[Leming]: And if
[Leming]: If an outsider can fix the culture that encouraged that, then I would vote for an outsider.
[Leming]: The other thing that, the other thing, and this was a fact that was confirmed by both sides, I specifically asked this of both the fire department and of the mayor.
[Leming]: Now, one issue is that the civil service
[Leming]: test is fair, it allows for promotions.
[Leming]: I was told about, you know, a situation in 1999, where two people took the promotional exam to go from deputy to fire chief, one of them was less popular, but scored higher, that person became fire chief.
[Leming]: This past time, three to four people signed up to take the exam, only one of them actually took it.
[Leming]: Okay, so if you're telling me that it is a competitive process to be fire chief, then that is not something that given that fact that I believe now I have heard I've heard that fact has been confirmed to me by both sides.
[Leming]: What I have heard from
[Leming]: why that was from the mayor was that folks wanted to select their friends.
[Leming]: What I've heard that that was from the fire department is that it is a big decision.
[Leming]: People need to talk to their families about whether or not they want to take the advancement exam and so on.
[Leming]: I even talked to one of the deputy chiefs that signed up for that but did not take it.
[Leming]: But the point is that
[Leming]: It did not convince me that it was a competitive process.
[Leming]: So that being said, the morale issue is something that I do take very seriously.
[Leming]: I don't expect what I just said to appeal to everybody in this room, but my goal here is to make my thinking on this as transparent as possible.
[Leming]: That's where I'm at with that.
[Leming]: I've tried to talk to as many firefighters as I can.
[Leming]: I hope once all of this blows over, I can hang out with you all some more, maybe do a Q&A session, just try to make City Council a bit more accessible and transparent.
[Leming]: But that's my thinking.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: And I look forward to listening to members of the public.
[Leming]: The two things that I brought up were first off the issue of the sick time abuse that occurred in early February.
[Leming]: The point that I was bringing up was that I
[Leming]: need to be convinced that whatever future leader that is hired, is appointed, does not lead the fire department to a position where they're making the five o'clock news in the future.
[Leming]: That to me is the bottom line behind, like even beyond a lot of the morale issues that have been brought up.
[Leming]: My perspective is that,
[Leming]: doing this would lead to people thinking that they could never make it to the top, which obviously affects motivation.
[Leming]: But at the same time, if you bring an outside officer to lead a new unit, that is more effective at inducing culture change than having somebody that has spent their entire career in that particular body.
[Leming]: So I have not seen anything that can convince me that the current civil service process will effectively address any sick time abuse issues that are currently happening.
[Leming]: That's where I'm at right now.
[Leming]: And I don't think this was another point that I brought up.
[Leming]: It wasn't necessarily a question, but it was kind of supporting that point was the fact that there was one person who actually took the exam this past time to go from deputy to higher chief.
[Leming]: And so I don't want to speculate as to the reasons for that.
[Leming]: Four people signed up, one person took it.
[Leming]: That is a fact that has been established by both sides.
[Leming]: But to me, that is evidence against
[Leming]: the idea that the civil service position, when applied every single promotional round, would actually hire competitive leadership.
[Leming]: Those were the specific points that I brought up.
[Leming]: Now, to my colleague's point about, you know, potential litigation here, I do respect that.
[Leming]: I do respect that this is not something that firefighters of the union can necessarily speak directly to.
[Leming]: Again, I have asked folks that I can find, and they typically have referred me to either representatives from the union or union lawyers, which that's the response that I've gotten.
[Leming]: Those are my thoughts.
[Leming]: That is the result of where... That's the result.
[Leming]: Basically, to summarize, if an outside leader can keep the fire department from making the news with corruption allegations in the future, then I will be voting for an outside leader.
[Leming]: That's a fair point.
[Leming]: So I think the nature of the point of who went to the news is like, okay, so it was the mayor that presented the news release there.
[Leming]: And I thought about that too, like clearly the idea here is the mayor, like, there's the sick time issue that happened, the mayor brought that to the news.
[Leming]: And so, this absolutely is a situation where
[Leming]: The mayor brings something to the news.
[Leming]: It is public points against the fire department.
[Leming]: There's totally political maneuvering here.
[Leming]: Here's the thing, if the fire department is gonna do that, you can't put yourselves in a position where somebody can give your actions to a local news source and it's worth reporting.
[Leming]: Okay, does that make sense?
[Leming]: I'm only an ensign.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you, Chair.
[Leming]: Councilor Newton.
[Leming]: Sorry Feedback there.
[Leming]: Yes we met.
[Leming]: We heard a proposal by or we heard a, um.
[Leming]: Presentation by
[Leming]: you know, City Council's activities, what we're doing.
[Leming]: There was some discussion as to potential avenues, like ways to advertise sort of what we're doing.
[Leming]: that we were concerned about.
[Leming]: As well as concerns that we could be there could be, you know too many messages coming out of city City Hall.
[Leming]: We, um and we ended up passing a motion by Councilor Tseng to give to requesting all the members of the committee to offer.
[Leming]: Feedback for their specific ideas about what
[Leming]: And we, for the next one, we intend to invite over several folks from City Hall who can, like Steve Smriti, Kevin Harrington, and so on, who can offer other contacts for different outlets.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Okay, apologize for the technical issues, everybody, but I believe we are good right now to start.
[Leming]: This is the meeting of the Planning and Permitting Committee, Medford City Council.
[Leming]: Clerk, can you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Wait.
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: And I am going to be chairing this committee at the request of
[Leming]: Vice President Collins, who's normally the chair of this committee, leave the first item.
[Leming]: The first and only item on the agenda is paper 22-310, offered by President Bears and Vice President Collins, housing home rule petitions.
[Leming]: And I will leave this to any
[Leming]: Yeah, just gonna go ahead and leave this to any individual Councilors that, oh, yes.
[Leming]: Just gonna leave this to any individual Councilors that would like to speak.
[Leming]: Mr. Chair, if I can.
[Leming]: Absolutely, yep.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: And I would like to pass this off to Vice President Collins as the sponsor of this paper.
[Leming]: So feel free to feel free to take it away.
[Leming]: Go ahead.
[Leming]: Absolutely, Councilor Collins or Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli.
[Leming]: Are there comments from any other councilors before Vice President Collins continues with her presentation?
[Leming]: Seeing none, go ahead, Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan, then back to Councilor Collins.
[Leming]: And I would like, sorry.
[Leming]: All right, oh, sorry, yep.
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli, was that a motion to table?
[Leming]: Councilor Scarpelli?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Do we have a second?
[Leming]: Seeing no, seeing no second for that, for the motion to table.
[Leming]: I'm going to move on to Councilor Callaghan and then Councilor Collins.
[Leming]: Councilor Collins, or Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: I'm going to go back to Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: And then after that, we're going to let some of our speakers talk and then open it up for public comments.
[Leming]: So Vice President Collins and then the speakers.
[Leming]: We are now going to open it up to members of the public.
[Leming]: I'd first like to recognize some of our invited speakers.
[Leming]: Katie McCann, and Eduardo Palacios from City Light, Fever, and Bona.
[Leming]: If you'd like to say anything, go ahead.
[Leming]: Eduardo, could you also state your name and address for record?
[Leming]: Apologies that I forgot to ask you that explicitly.
[Leming]: Yeah, just just say your name and address.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you guys.
[Leming]: Katie, name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Good.
[Leming]: I'd like to open it up to members of the public.
[Leming]: Do we have anyone that would like to comment on this?
[Leming]: Name and address for the record.
[Leming]: just notifying you you have 30 seconds.
[Leming]: and I did see that Councilor Callahan had her hand raised twice, but I would like to finish up the public comments period before moving on.
[Leming]: Are there any other members of the public that would like to speak?
[Leming]: Name and address for the record.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Any other members of the public?
[Leming]: Okay, seeing none, the chambers are on zoom going to close the public comments period.
[Leming]: Uh, Councilor Callahan was there.
[Leming]: Is there anything that you'd like to like, just like to speak to.
[Leming]: Thank you, Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Okay, we have a motion from Vice President Collins, second from Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Let's do it.
[Leming]: Clerk, would you please call the roll?
[Leming]: President Bears.
[Leming]: Vice President Collins made a motion, seconded by Councilor Cal, and President Bears amended the motion.
[Leming]: Sorry, that was a parliamentary procedure for doing that.
[Leming]: Do I have to get Vice President Collins' permission to amend the motion, or is that too different?
[Leming]: Okay.
[Leming]: Okay, do you have the text for that clerk?
[Leming]: Okay, well, in that case, could you please call the roll?
[Leming]: Yes, motion passes.
[Leming]: All right, we are right at 7 p.m.
[Leming]: Is there any further comment?
[Leming]: Vice President Collins.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: All right, motion from Vice President Collins to keep the paper in committee.
[Leming]: Second from Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: So two birds, one stone.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you.
[Leming]: So this is, I'd like to thank the council for considering this very long text.
[Leming]: Essentially, this is just a resolution to decriminalize plant-based medicine.
[Leming]: You know, these are not the same as opioids that cause a public health crisis.
[Leming]: They are non-addictive.
[Leming]: They have been shown to be able to treat things like PTSD and addiction.
[Leming]: This has already been done, as it said, by seven other Massachusetts communities, so we would be the eighth.
[Leming]: This is meant to first encourage local law enforcement to deprioritize this issue.
[Leming]: I don't believe that this council has the authority to outright
[Leming]: to decriminalize it, and it is meant to support the state-level initiative to do just that, which is currently being sponsored in the Massachusetts Senate by Senator Jalen.
[Leming]: Just to clarify one part of this and offer a little bit of context is in the part of the reading that was waived.
[Leming]: This resolution calls that the Bedford City Council, sorry,
[Leming]: to do well so okay so basically there are there's just for a little bit of context there are a couple of different ways to decriminalize this one of them and another avenue that is currently being pursued is a signature collection method which would basically create a an unelected commission that would add its own that if passed in massachusetts would add its own regulation to these plant medicines this has already been passed in
[Leming]: Oregon, and long story short, it's made the price of these plant medicines go between $1,000 and $3,000.
[Leming]: So doing things this way through elected representatives would just help to decriminalize it and not create this sort of artificial price.
[Leming]: So I think that this is a very important step forward to creating a nuanced and science-backed drug policy in the state of Massachusetts.
[Leming]: And I'd like to thank this council for considering it.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I just want to clarify that.
[Leming]: So the US military is regulated federally.
[Leming]: So I am personally subject to urinalysis several times a year.
[Leming]: So I haven't personally tried these things.
[Leming]: But in my day job, I'm also a neuroscientist.
[Leming]: So I don't study plant medicine directly.
[Leming]: So my colleagues have.
[Leming]: And I've talked with experts who have also
[Leming]: uh specialize in this themselves so I would so I think that if you know if this were to go to committee for further discussion we like um I guess I guess my I guess my
[Leming]: My concern with that is that this is more of a statewide issue.
[Leming]: And so it's really trying to support it at that level.
[Leming]: I would assume that if seven other Massachusetts towns have also passed similar resolutions, then they're
[Leming]: their law enforcement is not so uniquely different from Medford that Medford has some unique public health considerations specific to this city.
[Leming]: So I and you know, if it were all if it were referred to committee, I would also encourage us to speak not only to law enforcement, but to also, um,
[Leming]: public health experts, people who specifically study this, people who specifically study this, and other stakeholders as well.
[Leming]: I personally would like it to be voted on tonight, but obviously if that isn't the will of this council, then it would go to committee.
[Leming]: Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: I'd just like to say that many members of this community, people I consider to be very close friends have encouraged me to vote in favor of this resolution.
[Leming]: What I will say is that
[Leming]: I'm an officer in the U.S.
[Leming]: military.
[Leming]: The Hatch Act does technically allow reservists to comment on these sorts of matters when not on active duty.
[Leming]: It is my belief, however, that even though I do commend my colleague for writing a
[Leming]: very thorough and very well said resolution that voting on this resolution would adversely impact my ability to do my job.
[Leming]: So I just want to put that out there, and I will be abstaining from this.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Yes, so is it sorry?
[Leming]: So I didn't do this with my last motion is appropriate.
[Leming]: Just start by motioning to refer to admin finance motion to refer to admin finance on the motion of Council.
[Leming]: So, this is a so basically going going around Medford, I think it's pretty clear that we have a bit of an issue with vacant storefront properties not only storefront properties like in West Medford that have been
[Leming]: unoccupied for a year and a half, going on two years, but also storefront properties that are effective, that are just not open consistently or often.
[Leming]: This was a policy proposal that I brought up door-to-door continuously when people kept talking about the fact that stores are just not occupied and generally found
[Leming]: I couldn't find a single person who actually opposed it when I was going door to door.
[Leming]: Now, I'm going to be the first to say that this is a nuanced issue.
[Leming]: The reason that people choose to create or choose to leave property unoccupied is
[Leming]: there could be a lot of different reasons for that.
[Leming]: And so I hope that in committee we're able to craft a policy that can incentivize businesses to open up shop to, or sorry, incentivize landlords to open up shop to good businesses around town and thereby boost the revenue in the city.
[Leming]: What we would like to avoid is
[Leming]: you know, businesses just deciding to rent it out to like, you know, a random, a random pawn shop or something so that we just have those springing up left and right around town or just, you know, another another kind of business that I don't want to insult by just bringing up an example.
[Leming]: But the point but the point is, like, I don't want to insult pawn shop owners.
[Leming]: I shouldn't I shouldn't have said that.
[Leming]: You know, but but but yeah, I hope that my point I hope that my never going away.
[Leming]: Yeah, I hope I hope that my my point is heard there.
[Leming]: But, uh, you know, uh, in any case, uh, I would just I just think that this is an issue that Medford City Council really needs to, uh, really needs to address and be active about at this point.
[Leming]: So I welcome any discussion on motion.
[Leming]: I apologize to any and all.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Callahan.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Yes, and I do wish my colleague were still sitting here so that I could respond to some of the points that he brought up, but he seems to have had to step out temporarily.
[Leming]: But just to clarify the intent of this, I knocked on someone's door in West Medford, and this person was a business owner, owned some gyms in a couple of other areas, and she told me
[Leming]: that she was trying to open up a gym in West Medford, and she had attempted to contact the landlord several different times, and the landlord wouldn't even return her phone calls.
[Leming]: Okay, so speculative squatting, waiting for somebody to give a good price on property, et cetera, is a strategy that landlords do.
[Leming]: this now if the commercial vacancy tax were implemented successfully, it would be applied very rarely.
[Leming]: The intention of something like this would be to get landlords to come to the table and work and work with the economic development director, work with different parties.
[Leming]: We do need carrots.
[Leming]: We also need sticks so that people so that people don't just
[Leming]: own properties and get too complacent with them, but they're incentivized in different ways to own commercial storefront property, not just for their own personal gain, but also to beautify the town.
[Leming]: So the intention of this, and I hope that we can hammer out something in committee that works full
[Leming]: that we're trying to do, and I think that's what we're trying to do in both parties is to get something that just gets landlords to the table and understanding that, yes, they do need to rent out something.
[Leming]: Suitable in the properties that they own.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: I'd just like to, not that I'm responding, but I'm addressing.
[Leming]: Yes, tell me, what's the chair?
[Leming]: What do you think?
[Leming]: In a completely unrelated, completely unrelated.
[Leming]: What do you feel?
[Leming]: Yeah, just just just totally unrelated to anything happening on this side of the room.
[Leming]: I don't.
[Leming]: I don't really understand it.
[Leming]: But so the intent of this is to only apply to the commercial storefront property.
[Leming]: It's just a thought that came to think.
[Leming]: I mean, that's a that's a question that I had.
[Leming]: So I was going to motion to refer this to the committee on planning and permitting.
[Leming]: Perfect.
[Leming]: So would the, wait, so to be clear,
[Leming]: we would pass it and then the police chief would come back with his recommendations.
[Leming]: Sure, that's fine.
[Leming]: Aye.
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: President Bears.
[Leming]: Councilor Keohokalole.
[Leming]: Justin, from what you can remember in previous terms on council, do you know the, would you be able to offer the reason that some of these were left in committee so long?
[Leming]: So if there's anything that, if there's anything specific comes to mind just to offer the historic context for that or a reason it just kind of dwindled.
[Leming]: Is there anything that you know about personally?
[Leming]: I was just going to comment that the city's had a couple of new hires even ever since January for a number of positions that I thought they were waiting to hear back on that compensation study before they move forward with hiring them.
[Leming]: I mean, is it possible that some portion of it was already complete?
[Leming]: There are just a lot of new hires for senior level positions and just across City Hall that we've been informed about.
[Leming]: recently, so clearly some compensation, some agreement about compensation must have been reached with or without the study.
[Leming]: Motion to request an update on the classification and compensation study.
[Leming]: Yeah, just it just seems like in general with a lot of a lot of the larger projects, those are those can be a little bit more difficult to pass forward in themselves without because, like, they're affected by outside factors.
[Leming]: But for some of the some of the smaller things on this that are going to be pushed ahead by.
[Leming]: uh individual Councilors so i know it was Councilor collins that proposed the good landlord tax credit the last meeting and i submitted uh for consideration at the upcoming meeting a resolution on the commercial vacancy tax um those seem like they can be pushed ahead sort of whenever uh there is time to do so at the admin and at these meetings um
[Leming]: Barring progress on some of the, uh, some of the need to do, um.
[Leming]: Things like the annual budget process and revenue generation property to an F planning.
[Leming]: So, I'm talking to with regards to the.
[Leming]: Vacancy tax specifically, um, I'm talking to some folks at the planning office about sort of best practices for doing that.
[Leming]: But of course, that also does need that would also need to be voted on at the next regular meeting.
[Leming]: Should, uh, should it pass there?
[Leming]: Yeah, just to just add a question coming from a very new Councilor.
[Leming]: So, how long what would you I know that I'm seeing the timelines on this on the, uh, the actual calendar there, but.
[Leming]: So how long just taking the commercial vacancy tax, the landlord tax credit, which are two very new proposals, would you estimate it takes from going to that first resolution to somebody potentially paying that tax or receiving a tax benefit from that on the ground in real life and actually putting that into the budget?
[Leming]: With the commercial vacancy tax, I don't think it would be, if it were implemented, it would specifically apply to vacant or effectively closed storefronts.
[Leming]: the number of businesses that that would apply to would be very, very small compared to the number that would be applied to the good landlord tax credit, which could be hundreds of people around town.
[Leming]: It would be much more targeted and it wouldn't be enough to significantly affect the total tax levy.
[Leming]: It's more of an incentive and not a revenue generating mechanism.
[Leming]: Great.
[Leming]: So, although I'm not sure how much we're able to discuss something that hasn't been referred to committee, so if there's a... just, yeah, just pointing that out.
[Leming]: Motion to adjourn?
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: Present.
[Leming]: And I will go to just just a question for reduced for introducing these ordinances.
[Leming]: So, the commercial vacancy tax could potentially.
[Leming]: be worked on in both planning and permitting committee, as noted in here, as well as admin and finance.
[Leming]: So what would the process for something being developed simultaneously in two different committees look like?
[Leming]: This is just specifically regarding the plant medicine decriminalization ordinance, just to state.
[Leming]: The goals of that may have already been addressed by the resolution that was submitted for the next regular meeting.
[Leming]: I think that
[Leming]: There is some work that needs to be done at the state level before that could be implemented as an ordinance locally.
[Leming]: So I don't necessarily want a motion to strike it now before I do a little bit more research, but it may be an update to the governing agenda in the future.
[Leming]: Um, well, there's just a small point about this, but this particular section, so I do very much appreciate my, my colleague Councilor Tsengs, uh, capacity for, for work, but he is listed as the lead Councilor on 11 of the 12 projects.
[Leming]: And so I don't have specific recommendations at this time for who should lead which project, but I.
[Leming]: I am of the opinion that perhaps we should spread the work out a little bit more among the committee when designating lead councillors.
[Leming]: I'm also not wholly clear how much we're really committing to the lead councillor for some of the unproposed or some of the ones that have yet to be proposed as well.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Are you going to Councilor Tseng?
[Leming]: Yes.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank everybody who has come forward to speak so far.
[Leming]: And I appreciate Pete and I appreciate that everybody sees this as a place where they can
[Leming]: to express their thoughts.
[Leming]: I'd just like to bring up one point that's been coming up in a couple of different public comment periods, which has been the safety issue specifically.
[Leming]: Safety concerns can stem from several different things when it comes to
[Leming]: violent crime specifically, which I think was a sentiment in a few public comments.
[Leming]: I did some reading this past week, which is influencing my own thinking about this.
[Leming]: I'd just like to share it, which was a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas.
[Leming]: So it's one study, but I think it's pretty relevant to this, which
[Leming]: You can go through the whole thing online if you'd like, but the significant section says, despite its centrality to public and political discourse, we lack even basic information on fundamental questions regarding undocumented immigrants and crime.
[Leming]: This stems largely from data constraints going beyond existing research.
[Leming]: The authors in this study utilize data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which checks and records the immigration status of all arrestees throughout the state.
[Leming]: Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S.
[Leming]: citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.
[Leming]: Our findings help us understand why the most aggressive
[Leming]: immigrant removal programs have not delivered on their crime reduction promises and are unlikely to do so in the future.
[Leming]: While the news does report on unequal rates about crimes that happen in immigrant communities versus everywhere else, I think it is important to keep in mind what the scientific research says.
[Leming]: Thank you.
[Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng.
[Leming]: Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: We appreciate that there's not enough staff working in the elections department and that the folks on the commissions are
[Leming]: I'm a member of the community.
[Leming]: I'm largely there as volunteers of the community.
[Leming]: So that is that is an issue, and I have sympathy for the, uh, lack of capacity to complete the work required for all the elections that you need to manage.
[Leming]: Um.
[Leming]: I do sympathize with what Councilor Callahan said about the expectations for the report in order to
[Leming]: If I were a person that knew nothing about the election and I read this report, I don't think I would be able to recount events and all the issues that happened.
[Leming]: My idea with what a complete detail-oriented report would be is if I could have that being somebody who knew nothing.
[Leming]: In order to know everything that happened on the election, you would have to have
[Leming]: This report, you'd have to have a number of different posts on the Internet, and you'd have to talk to a number of different people to find all the details, notwithstanding things that have already been mentioned by my colleagues here.
[Leming]: So.
[Leming]: That is what I was expecting and that is what I would like to see because it's important to know in details all of the issues that you experienced and all of the ways that you are potentially lacking support, which may have caused these issues to come up to begin with so that we can then try to fix them.
[Leming]: So that is...
[Leming]: That's all I'd like to say.
[Leming]: Thank you very much for coming out here tonight.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank my colleague for his words.
[Leming]: I would tend to agree with him that the optics on this are terrible when teachers that are underpaid see the headline, politicians are looking to increase other politicians salaries.
[Leming]: morale is a real issue there.
[Leming]: That and that is something that is really on my mind in this process.
[Leming]: Um, I personally would be more amenable to one of the, uh, to either, uh, the raised to something around 24 21,000.
[Leming]: Sorry, we're getting the wrong numbers on the, um,
[Leming]: basically the equivalent of cost of living adjustments over since fiscal year 2020 of 2 to 2.5%, which would be, I think that would be a little bit more reasonable and putting that adjustment over a period of several years in order to not strain the budget immediately.
[Leming]: But that being said, so,
[Leming]: The city council, the city council salaries are something that are make or break for a lot of us.
[Leming]: The city council right now is a majority is majority renter.
[Leming]: And so having that having
[Leming]: the salary to be able to justify 20 plus hours of work that we put into this every week, I think, is fair.
[Leming]: When it comes to the school committee members, if they're putting in 20 plus hours a week, I think that in order to improve the school system, I think that a similar
[Leming]: to be able to justify.
[Leming]: Similar compensation is fair.
[Leming]: We had a candidate this past time who was put it who was putting in shift work during a lot of the campaign working as a server and so having the having the salary to be able to justify the time that they put into that if we're going to expect them to put in.
[Leming]: There have been a lot of people, there are a lot of people in the city that Medford relies on who are volunteers.
[Leming]: We are, and Medford, they are the foundation of the city in a lot of ways.
[Leming]: Volunteerism is incredibly helpful for running the city.
[Leming]: It is foundational to Medford's functions.
[Leming]: But we,
[Leming]: We can't expect to run essential functions on the back of volunteers.
[Leming]: There are people who would make great school committee members who would be willing to do it for free.
[Leming]: A lot of those people have been
[Leming]: cornerstones of the community.
[Leming]: A lot of them have come up against these raises, and there are a lot of people who would make great school committee members who would be completely unwilling to work for the current stipend.
[Leming]: And I think that being able to
[Leming]: being able to raise the salaries by a certain amount would allow us to have more people at our disposal when it comes to running the school system.
[Leming]: Just first off, I would like to thank MTA President Gehan for bringing up the issue about the paraprofessional receiving disciplinary action.
[Leming]: I know that Ms.
[Leming]: Cherry also commented on it, but any information that you're free to email about that to me, I would very much appreciate just to
[Leming]: learn more about that particular situation.
[Leming]: This is just a broader point that echoes a lot of what's been said.
[Leming]: For a long time Medford's been penny smart and dollar stupid.
[Leming]: So we're talking about
[Leming]: the, when we're talking about the total operating budget of Medford, it's just above about $200 million.
[Leming]: Somerville's is between seven and 800 million.
[Leming]: Cambridge's is about a billion.
[Leming]: If you're considering the sort of per capita operating budget, so the amount of money spent per person in a municipality, Medford's is one of the lowest for a substantially sized city in the state of Massachusetts.
[Leming]: Basically,
[Leming]: We have been trying to cut costs here and there for a very long period of time, and that's the reason that right now we can't pay teachers what they deserve to be paid when we're talking about when we're talking about exchanging.
[Leming]: in the grand scheme of things, relatively small amounts of money here and there when we're talking about cutting staff costs, that can save money in a given fiscal year.
[Leming]: It does not save money in the long term.
[Leming]: We need to start thinking about fiscal responsibility in terms of investing in ourselves in the long term, not saving money in the very short term.
[Leming]: I would, but yes, I,
[Leming]: Once again, I very much sympathize with the teacher's views on this.
[Leming]: The optics are terrible, and I appreciate your presence here tonight.
[Leming]: Thank you very much for your time.
[Leming]: Zachary.
[Leming]: Second.
[Leming]: start of your audio visual troubles.
[Leming]: It's, it's inevitable.
[Leming]: Yeah, just, Sunday hours are listed twice here on this resolution, so just for clarification, are you proposing to open until 12.30 or 12 on Sunday?
[Leming]: It's just listed twice.
[Leming]: Yeah, just a question as a new Councilor.
[Leming]: Does the lower requirement for quorum affect open meeting law?
[Leming]: So are fewer Councilors allowed to meet outside to discuss committee-specific work?
[Leming]: Just a question for Councilor Lazzaro.
[Leming]: In your years working with and running the Malden Warming Shelter, could you just give us an idea of how many people that came into the shelter were evicted during the winter months, just to offer an idea of how many this resolution would likely affect?
[Leming]: Yeah, I mean, it seems like a pretty common sense thing.
[Leming]: If you got evicted in the winter, that could potentially be lethal.
[Leming]: So just having rules in place to prevent that from happening definitely seems worth this body's time.
[Leming]: I'd like to thank Vice President Collins for bringing this forward.
[Leming]: I knocked on a lot of doors this past campaign and a lot of people that I spoke to are small landlords that oftentimes rent below market rates who are
[Leming]: who were sometimes comparing themselves to other landlords that lived a few towns over and never maintained their properties, essentially see land in Medford as something which they can extract as much money from as possible.
[Leming]: And I very much sympathize with what Councilor Callaghan was saying, that it is oftentimes difficult when digging through state code to try to find ways of distinguishing between one type of landlord and the other type of landlord.
[Leming]: And this is a very
[Leming]: it's a good tool for doing that.
[Leming]: The other thing I'd like to point out is beyond incentivizing lower rents, which is a city council now that I believe has a majority of renters on it.
[Leming]: If that was counting correctly, it also can be used to incentivize landlords who actively maintain their properties,
[Leming]: who choose to do repairs on time, who really take care of their tenants in that way too.
[Leming]: So I think that this is something that potentially a lot more people could get behind because it will incentivize basically upkeep in Medford if it's implemented correctly.
[Leming]: So thank you very much.
[Leming]: I'm going to go to council.
[Leming]: I mean, first off, I'd like to thank you for coming out here tonight and.
[Leming]: presenting the case.
[Leming]: Just a few resources I'd like to point out.
[Leming]: So I served on the Community Preservation Committee, which was actually just meeting across the hall from us.
[Leming]: They allocated about $206,000 to repair the Tufts basketball court, which should give kind of an order of magnitude for how much a project like this would cost.
[Leming]: They also allocated part of the funding for the new McGlynn Playground.
[Leming]: project that just broke ground I believe a few days ago and that was being pushed both by one of the assistant superintendents of the school as well as a community member with no official involvement but who just really wanted to push that project through so that so I think that an avenue
[Leming]: really this body, we have the power to approve funding once a project comes forward, and there is a construction company, sufficient planning that has been made for that, but we don't really have the power to just point a magic wand and say that this will be done.
[Leming]: So I also spoke this morning with one of the community
[Leming]: development block grant manager, which is another similar pool of funding.
[Leming]: And she was actually just asking about trying to flag down more projects exactly like the one you were just talking about right now.
[Leming]: So I would be pleased to meet up with you afterwards or just email you later and just give you the contact information for some of these folks.
[Leming]: Because I think the money is there.
[Leming]: With these sorts of projects, there's always sort of like weird
[Leming]: kind of like eligibility issues.
[Leming]: So like maybe the, you know, if it's like an indoor track, it's only used by students, not the general public, there could be like something going on there.
[Leming]: But generally speaking, this is like for these kind of projects where they take like, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars and they could be done in like a short enough timeframe.
[Leming]: I think that there's definitely money sitting there for this.
[Leming]: It's just a matter of getting a proposal into the right committees, advocating for them can't be done in three weeks is probably like,
[Leming]: a year-long timeline just because of the clock that these sort of things are on.
[Leming]: But yes, there are options that you have if you are really interested in repaving the inward track.
[Leming]: So thank you for bringing it to our attention.
[Leming]: The Medford Charter Study Committee meetings are open to the public, and we do allow public comment at the end of each one of our meetings.
[Leming]: So anybody is free to attend those.
[Leming]: They're virtual if they want to.
[Leming]: It should it should be on the Medford public website website.
[Leming]: Sure.
[Leming]: Just for the meeting minutes, which I'm taking right now, and I'm a person that doesn't have the most experience in the world as secretary, but are the meeting minutes supposed to be like more like a transcript, so everything everybody says, or is it supposed to be just like a summary of the key points that were said during a meeting and that's acceptable?
[Leming]: Also, if we already finished the state ethics training for something else, we have to take it again.
[Leming]: Yes, I'm not sure if I was supposed to wait till the end, but this seems like a good slide to ask my question.
[Leming]: So you mentioned the city council reviewing these charter changes.
[Leming]: Can you talk about
[Leming]: the tendency of the city council and these other towns to approve the recommended changes of the charter study committee and if there has been trouble in that how much
[Leming]: it came into discussions as to like the likelihood of the city council to approve whatever changes we gave.
[Leming]: I'm Matt Leming.
[Leming]: I'm a postdoc over at Massachusetts General Hospital where I work in deep learning for neuroimaging diagnostics.
[Leming]: I was involved in the same group as Melvin, Laurel, and a few other people on this committee as well.
[Leming]: That was a citizen's advocacy group for charter review.
[Leming]: I'm interested in charter review because it's the political foundation of this entire city.
[Leming]: And I would like to see a lot of changes happen in this city.
[Leming]: And the charter review seems like the most fundamental one.
[Leming]: So I do have an interest in seeing that happen.
[Leming]: And this committee seems like the best hope of getting that done.
[Leming]: What's on my mind is sort of,
[Leming]: Going off of the question that I asked earlier and what Maury just said, I do know that some city councilors are nervous, just about the idea of this and I would say, you know,
[Leming]: perhaps needlessly so.
[Leming]: But what I would be interested in hearing is just a little bit more about the experiences of doing this in other towns, specifically, which issues brought contention from the city councilors and the mayors that later approved it.
[Leming]: I heard you say that the
[Leming]: Mayor term limits were rejected.
[Leming]: And that makes sense why, you know, they wouldn't want that kind of a change.
[Leming]: But what I'm thinking is like what other issues were sort of hot button things that brought contention from the city council in the past, as well as some strategies for combating those.
[Leming]: And you already said some strategies like the public forum with mayor and councilors invited, that was great.
[Leming]: But yeah, that's what's on my mind right now.
[Leming]: We do- Sorry, when is the next meeting set for again?
[Leming]: And should we, sorry, should we clarify as well that it's a three minute time limit?
[Leming]: I don't know, Joan or Matthew, if you, all right, we'll go.
[Leming]: Hello, my name is Matt Leming.
[Leming]: I live at 112 Willis Avenue.
[Leming]: I'm a 29-year-old renter here.
[Leming]: I do a lot of work in housing Medford as well as housing advocacy through the Unitarian Church in Medford.
[Leming]: I work as a scientist down at Mass General Brigham.
[Leming]: Yeah.
[Leming]: Well, the, the three areas, the CBC focuses on is open areas and recreation historical preservation as well as housing obviously my chief area of interest is housing.
[Leming]: I mean I'm a.
[Leming]: I'm a renter here, I'm a postdoc, I make like $53,000 a year.
[Leming]: I would like to stay in Medford long-term.
[Leming]: Obviously, a part of doing that is being able to afford to live here, so I'm very personally invested in housing affordability in this city.
[Leming]: I've, so just, sorry, I'm a little bit,