total time: 28.4 minutes
total words: 1581
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelly. Shelly is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and change maker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. Hey, Manfred Breit's listeners, before we get to our interview, I wanted to make you aware of an event happening at the Chevalier Theatre on Sunday, December 4th at 3 p.m. Supporter of the podcast, Mae Markerbrick, got in touch with me with more information about the Chevalier Organ Society. In 2002, the Chevalier Theatre Organ Society was organized for the purpose of restoring and installing the Wurlitzer and the Chevalier, and this has been a labor of love and a major accomplishment by a small group of people in Medford who raised the necessary funds to do this work. At this point, the Wurlitzer will be played at a debut concert by renowned organist Peter Krasinski at the Chevalier Theatre on Sunday, December 4th, 2022 at 3pm. In the future, the Wurlitzer will be used for concerts, silent movie accompaniment, educational programs, and enhancing of other entertainment at the Chevalier.
[Unidentified]: Hope you can check it out! All right.
[Danielle Balocca]: Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everybody.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Happy Thanksgiving Eve. I'm so happy to be here with Kit Collins.
[Danielle Balocca]: If you could just introduce yourself, just remind us who you are.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Kit Collins. I use she, her pronouns and I'm a Medford City Councilor.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Thank you so much for being here. Thanks.
[Danielle Balocca]: All right. So first question that we talk with everybody about, we ask everybody about on the show is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what you like to eat there?
[Kit Collins]: Love this question. Well, I know the first time I was on last year, earlier this year, I had to represent South Medford. I said Colette Bakery, but I had transformative experience at Oasis in South Medford Square this summer. And now I'm just telling everybody about it, even though everybody already knows. So absolutely love Oasis.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, we also just heard about Deep Cuts Deli that was in, or I think it still is in West Bedford. They're moving into the old Carroll space, which I'm really excited about.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, it's big news.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. As a non-media, they have some good options there too.
[Kit Collins]: They do. I think it's going to be a really fun addition.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great. Well, thanks. So we're interested today to talk with you about ARPA. So you could just like, I know you recently had a city council meeting where you were briefed. It sounds like on the ARPA survey, but I think we'd, we'd like if you could like sort of define what ARPA is.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking. I, I think it's ARPA is something that we've talked about in City Hall and the council chambers, what feels like a million times at this point over the past year and for good reason. But I think it's, it's a great reminder that this is still like a fairly, you know, to some people obscure piece of federal funding. So I get it's, it's great to start the conversation kind of at the beginning with what this is. So when we say ARPA. That stands for the American Rescue Plan Act, and this is a federal decision that allocates one-time funding, you know, meted out over the course of several years to cities, to federal agencies, and even to some local regional nonprofits as part of the American pandemic recovery. So through the American Rescue Plan Act, through ARPA, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts got a certain tranche of money, and municipalities such as Medford also got a certain tranche of money. How much money was dependent, I'm sorry, was decided by an algorithm that factored in things like, are you a city or are you a town? Are you a state or are you a city or are you a town? Are you a nonprofit? And these are the sort of higher level decisions that were out of the hands of municipal leaders that decided how much money does every entity receive. Okay, so I'm 90% sure that that first allotment of the overall ARPA allocation for the city of Medford started arriving in 2021 and all ARPA funds. So ARPA is really constrained in a number of ways. It's constrained in what it can be spent on. It's also constrained in when it must be spent by. So this is limited in purpose and it's also limited in time. All of these funds must be dispersed. They must be spent by the end of 2026. So when you think about how to spend millions and millions of dollars, you know, 2026, at least to me at this point, probably not for much longer, feels like a pretty good ways away. To spend almost $15 million is a tall order, you know, even for a municipality that has, as we're all very well aware, like four times that amount just in a capital improvements backlog alone. But the more important piece of this background is how deeply ARPA funds are constrained and what they may be spent on. This is something I started to think a lot about even as early as last year because, you know, when we, when the city learned of the amount of our ARPA allocation, you know, it's hard not to start envisioning, you know, with some enthusiasm and some hope and ambition, like, wow, like $48 million could do such amazing things for our city. And it's hard not to start thinking about that wishlist of what we'd like to see that spent on. But overgirding this, this entire trench of funding must be spent on It can only be spent in four categories. Those are urgent COVID-19 response efforts. So for example, if the Board of Health was ordering PPE to give out for free, you know, in the winter of 2021, that would fit within that category. Supporting immediate economic stabilization for households and businesses. So any local stimulus would fall under that category. For example, on the Commonwealth side, so not in the city of Medford, but in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if anybody got a stimulus check from MAS, it would have fallen under that category. That third category is addressing the systemic public health and economic challenges that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. So I think this is actually like one of the more progressive things I've seen in federal legislation lately. I'm not saying existing inequalities that have been made worse by the effects of the pandemic, spending can go to programs that seek to ameliorate those. And then lastly, and I say this last because it's the by far biggest chunk of ARPA spending in Medford, is ARPA funds can also be spent on revenue replacement. And what that means is, you know, there's money that the city would have made if the pandemic never happened that it didn't make because we did have a pandemic. So ARPA funds can also be used to essentially plug that hole in the annual city budget to allow business as usual to go on. So that's not doing anything new. That's not doing anything transformative. It's just saying, Gosh, we have an $8 million hole where we need to pay staff salaries and heat our municipal buildings. ARPA can be used so that we can do that. So those are, just to reiterate, those are the four categories that all ARPA spending has to fit into in order to be spent.
[Danielle Balocca]: And so has any of that money been spent already? I know there is like a big budget. drama recently, and I feel like ARPA came up a lot. Was any of that money already used to kind of support that budget?
[Unidentified]: Yeah, absolutely.
[Kit Collins]: So as of last week, when the city council received a briefing on the ARPA community survey and overall sort of status update on ARPA funding in Medford, almost 60% of our ARPA funding has been spent or at least committed and allocated. So just a little over 40% of our ARPA allocation that we haven't yet committed to projects. I think it's important again, to emphasize that the majority of that ARPA funds that we've already allocated has gone to revenue replacement. It hasn't gone to specific new programs. It hasn't gone to new initiatives that we wouldn't have done otherwise. It's been to plug the hole in the city budget that's been created because we had a pandemic and that affected city revenue.
[Chelli Keshavan]: I guess my question then becomes when we're looking at something like the survey that was sort of shared community-wide, and I can call on myself, I am always on the next Zoom meeting yelling about something that I personally feel passionate about, but that may or may not translate into actual capacities for ARPA dollars. And being a lay person, you may or may not know that, I'm not being cohesive here, but I think what I'm wondering is when you're talking about something transformative, re-imagining, thinking about new programming, Where does maybe a community voice meet what may be capacity within this 40% remaining to be allocated where maybe what is the intersection as far as you see it now.
[Kit Collins]: You know, Jelly, I think that that gets to exactly the heart of my main preoccupation with the ARPA spending process. And to me, the first part of that is, has the city done a good job of communicating to residents how much of a voice they can conceivably expect to have when so much of this ARPA allocation is effectively spoken for? Is that transparently known by the residents? When residents take a community survey, can they be expected to have a reasonable sense of how much they're really weighing in on, how much they'll be able to weigh in on, you know, even with all best intentions on the part of the city and any decision makers, how much room for input there really is. And maybe you can tell by, you know, the sort of questions that I've been contemplating that I think we could have done a lot better. I wish that from the beginning there had been a more legible and transparent effort to let constituents know, Hey, this trench of money is a once in a lifetime opportunity. You know, we'll never get handed almost $50 million by the feds again. This is the potential to be transformative. And at the same time, the vast majority of that is going to go to revenue placement to set expectations. I, you know, I was, I. I think that I've had to do a little bit of expectation mitigating, even just in myself as a constituent, as well as as a Councilor, because I think like a lot of other people who are kind of paying attention to this process when we first started hearing about ARPA, which, you know, to me was 2021 when it seemed like folks were really starting to get a better sense of what this would mean for local communities. You know, I think me, like a lot of other people, we're thinking, oh, my God, this is so great. We should use this. We should pilot an office of housing stability. We should hand out local stimulus. You know, I'm a I'm a big fan of, you know, just direct aid. You should do local stimulus checks, you know, like Malden did. Hard to not leap ahead and start rattling off those ideas. Everybody in the city has a wish list for things that they'd like to do or things that they'd like to see expedited. But again, it comes back to how much of that money we can reasonably expect to have to spend on revenue replacement. And even more importantly, I wish that there had been better communication from the jump about, Hey, actually there are only four categories of things that we. can spend this money on. And some of those categories are broad, but there's also a lot of things that are just not eligible because they don't fit into those categories. And so you brought up the community survey, which recently closed and we got briefed on those survey results last week. And there was also a public meeting for that and the slides from that presentation are now on the city website. So I, I feel torn. You know, I, There, there's, there's a lot of threads to pull on there for me, including to me, the results of this community survey illustrate that we, you know, are, are another piece of evidence that we do not have the communications capacity by a long shot that we need in the city to reach a representative sample of our community. The survey skewed white, incredibly homeowner, skewed privileged. It didn't get a snapshot of frankly, the people in our community who, you know, are kind of. is in large part here to benefit folks who are already marginalized, folks who probably bore the grunt of the pandemic. It didn't get a snapshot of those folks. It didn't really touch that many folks in the community at all. I think it had less than 500 respondents. And for comparison, I'm on the Solid Waste Task Force, our community survey about next steps for solid waste in Medford got more responses than that. That's not And I want to clarify that's that's not a commentary on the city staff that were doing the survey that were responsible for the survey like this that's not the responsibility of any one person or department to make sure that the survey is seen and taken. I think it links into my emphasis on the fact that so so much of our funding has been spent on revenue replacement because illustrates We have to work really, really, really hard just to keep our baseline where it needs to be at kind of bare bones level. And then when you look at the fact that we don't have robust communications and outreach structure at all, to me, that doesn't seem like the same problem.
[Danielle Balocca]: I'm wondering if there are like any like big takeaways for you from other than like the makeup of who answered the survey, but anything else that you're kind of taking away from that briefing?
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, that's, it's a good question. I think. One of the big lingering questions for me is, is kind of similar to the concerns that I had going into the community survey, which is, you know, everything else aside, it's, it's still good that we are reaching out to constituents to learn how folks, you know, ideally want to see this funding be spent and that's being done in good faith. And at the same time, since the beginning of the year, I've been hearing residents say, how do I know that my feedback will really be heard? How will I know that it will be incorporated? How do I know that it will be at all? How, how will that be done? And I have the same questions now that we have the survey results. To me, it's, it's, it's certainly colored by the fact that the survey results are not a representative sample of feedback from the community. And so they're a bit. It's certainly an incomplete and imperfect picture at all. But even putting that piece aside for now, I think given that, so we have a little more than 40% of ARPA that's left to spend in Medford. And there's some unknown amount of that that's going to be spent on revenue replacement for next year, for the year after. The administration has said, we expect as municipal revenue goes up, that the amount that we'll have to spend on revenue replacement will go down. And my question is, If that's true, that's great. But I'm not sure what the evidence is that our municipal revenue actually will be going up, at least by a truly significant amount.
[Danielle Balocca]: When you say municipal revenue, is that include like businesses or is it like tax collection or all of that?
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, it can be all inclusive. So for example, like when you, if you, if you have a property tax bill, when you pay that, that that's municipal revenue, you know, when, when deep cuts daily opens up and they start paying, you know, local sales taxes, you know, when their property tax bill, if they have one in addition, like large developments. That all, that all counts as municipal revenue. And so again, you know, that's, that's certainly the picture that I, that I hope to see happen. I, I, you know, hopefully, you know, folks who tune into city council meetings know that, you know, this entire council is unified in wanting to see municipal revenue go up in trying to do things that will make it so. I think that's a really shared goal across the council, but at the same time, you know, as, as a Councilor, I'm, I'm not going to take that on face. And so. for me coming out of the community survey, not knowing exactly what that's going to look like. And I think if the administration knew exactly what it was going to look like, then they'd certainly want to share the good news. So we've heard, okay, the amount that's going to be spent on revenue replacement will go down. Big question mark for me, if that's true, and if so, by how much? And so then the amount that is unallocated that doesn't have to be spent on revenue replacement that can instead be spent on other programs, on other projects, you know, One, how much? And two, you know, I would love to see a specific plan or process sketched out for how the community feedback that we did receive will inform all those remaining remaining funds. How will they be distributed among those spending categories? And even within funding categories, how will they be committed to different projects or programs?
[Chelli Keshavan]: Lots of thoughts. I'm appreciating all of what you're sharing and my thoughts are not organized in response. I'm thinking about how I'm thinking about the nature of survival mode that went on during. sort of the meat of lockdown in years one and two, and how maybe entities that sort of owned a status quo power, maybe their survival mode looked more like returning to a homeostasis for status quo, and you're talking about sort of revenue replacement being a large allocation, and maybe that speaks to that avenue, maybe. And then I'm also wondering about other minds, other mindsets who feel like a true reimagining is the solution and felt like lockdown was maybe finally a moment where there was enough mandatory change that could sort of feed at that kind of energy. All that to say, I'm wondering if as a Councilor you have faced conversations of sort of who we, the collective Medford, are? Because sometimes in discussing ARPA dollars, I wonder about concentric circles and are folks in Medford thinking about me, my family, my spouse and I? Are we a city? Are we our schools? Are we, you know, what is it? And when we're lifting lived experience of one, is that You know, truly beneficial for all, you know, these kinds of questions are coming to mind. So wondering if you face any of that. And assuming you kind of fix.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, thanks, Chelly. I think that's really profound actually. And I think that, you know, for all the, you know, and I'll say it pretty candidly, I think for all of the ways that I wish our ARPA communication rollout had been different and all of the underlying conditions that are the reason that our ARPA rollout wasn't and won't be more transformative. I think that there's a lot of really important takeaways that we can that we can take as almost like a silver lining for having ARPA as a foil of conversation, including this question of when we get a pseudo-windfall of revenue that makes us really force the question of, How do we envision investment in our community? What would it take for that investment for there to be buy-in for a more equitable, equitably distributed, transformational investment? What would it take to get to a place where there's buy-in for that? What would it take to get to a place? where that is actionable and doable. I am optimistic that those questions won't go away at the end of 2026 when all of these funds have been committed. To make one attempt at answering the question of, you know, how are these questions of like, what is a community? What does it look like to invest in a community? To take one stab at answering that question, I will note, and this is on one of the slides from the ARPA presentation that the council got on November 16th, Of the folks who did respond to the survey, which again was a very, very small fraction of the community, folks were given a list of eligible categories for spending. The top shows, I will say revenue replacement wasn't on that list because it makes sense to not offer folks as an option for something that is kind of a default or mandatory spending of the ones that were offered. Water, sewer and street improvements was a top chosen area for spending. Beneath that, improvements to outdoor green and park spaces. And underneath that, investment in social services such as housing, food assistance, mental health services, child care, etc.
[Unidentified]: So. You know, that's that's.
[Kit Collins]: A very bird's eye view look at like three incredibly broad funding categories. I think that it is at least slightly useful in describing, you know, is your average survey respondent, what are they looking for? And I think overall, the question, the answer is we are looking for public sector investments. I think a lot of people, you know, when they look outside and they say, okay, I want our physical infrastructure. I want this investment to go towards our physical infrastructure. You know, perhaps thinking this is stuff that we all use. These are things that are hard to pay for. These are things already in need of repair. You know, maybe folks are thinking about accessibility. Folks are thinking about rising tide, lifting all boats. Maybe folks are thinking about needs that were really shown in acute light during the pandemic, such as a need for outdoor spaces for recreation and gathering. and, you know, supportive systems such as mental health services, like school aged kids, child care for working parents, etc. I think that I would love to see like an ongoing process of trying to parse and figure out what community members envision, how community members envision investment, how they envision transformative investment, both in the context of what we have left to spend and also in general, because I think that's, you know, ideally, if we had a more participatory budgeting process, which we for sure do not in this community under a strong mayor system, under a current city charter, that would be crucial information to have. And I hope that you know, as a long-term outgrowth of this, there can be some energy directed towards what does the really, what does community really want to see invested in?
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, that sort of idea of like the money reflects our values. And I, I, it makes me think like the whole time we're talking about in like early pandemic when the city council voted to like an, or they proclaimed like racism, a public health crisis in Medford and the idea of being like more resources would be allocated to like the issue of racism in Medford. And I guess I was one of those categories that you listed and how money can be spent did feel like it could directly apply to that. And I just like wonder if that's if and how that's come up in these conversations.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, that's a that that's that's a beautiful prompt, Danielle, and I think it gets to I mean, I think that you put it well, both as it applies to ARPA and also how it applies to even just the the general city budget, the one that we look at and develop annually by we I mean, mayor, the budget being a statement of values. I think it illustrates to me that whether as residents or even as city councilors, really the budget is the statement of values. You know, the way that you said it, Danielle, the budget is the statement of values. We can make proclamations, we can make declarations, we can commit months and days to official causes, but Talk is cheap and proclamations are cheap and allocation of funding is how we evaluate if our elected leaders. all of them are really putting our values into practice. And like I said, that goes for the annual budget as well as it does for our ARPA spending. And I'll say that even though I've already talked about how a lot of our ARPA spending was effectively already spoken for due to our very, very large replacement needs. But when it comes to transformational investment, investment in social services, investment in these genuine public health emergencies, investments in the most marginalized members of our communities, Got to follow the dollar.
[Chelli Keshavan]: So, as usual, Danielle segues so nicely. You had touched on taking us back to 2021 and the way you wrapped maybe your mind around ARPA as a Councilor at that time versus where you might be at this time. I'm wondering if you might speak to that.
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I'm really happy to speak to that because I think it probably I would assume that the evolution of my understanding of ARPA probably tracks with a lot of just normal constituents who don't hang out in City Hall twice a week. So ARPA was spoken about. I mean, I, I feel like I had a lot of conversations about ARPA when I was a candidate in the spring, summer, and fall of last year in 2021. And at that time, my experience was that of kind of not having the level of detail in my understanding as I do now on how constrained ARPA is in what it can be spent on. I knew that it was constrained. I knew that it wasn't a blank check. I didn't kind of have the level of detail in my understanding as I currently do. And I also at that time felt like I was hearing a lot of conversations that were of the wishlist variety. And I don't say that to be critical at all. I think it speaks to the fact that, you know, maybe it would do it just easier for everybody if, you know, state and also local communications from the GECCO had been Yes, we're getting some number of millions of dollars, but please keep in mind that a lot of that is just going to go towards plugging our city budget. And then we're going to be really constrained what we can do to rest. But before that message really got out, you know, my thinking was, okay, we know this is constrained. We don't know how much we're going to get. And we also know that We still, you know, this will follow the same budget allocation process as the annual city budget does, which is to say the mayor makes the decisions. The city council actually doesn't have appropriating power on ARPA, just as we don't have appropriating power in the municipal city budget either. As folks who turned in doing you know our city budget process this year or in years past will know the budget is developed by the mayor and the city council gets to vote it up or down. We can make line item subtractions. We cannot make additions. It's actually the same thing with ARPA and that funding decisions ARPA funding and spending decisions are made by the are made by the mayor. We have had are funded project discussions and city council department heads that come before us to get our feedback to get final sign off, but we can't nominate projects to be funded, and I think most of the projects that we're going to see in the city in the council chambers that are funded later this year. are essentially already spoken for. So which is to say, I had a nascent awareness last year, the community wants to have feedback, community wants to weigh in. But this is not participatory budgeting. And it seemed to me even kind of last year, there was a bit of a mismatch in expectations both for what money could be spent on and how much input the community was going to be able to have. So this year, you know, just being on the council, my understanding has You know, just thanks to being able to be in the room, and having access to our wonderful city staff, we have had discussions about our allocations when projects have come before us just needing our vote approval for the spending to be allocated. We've had conversations with our first federal funds manager, Molly Kivy. who left the city in July. We had this presentation last week with the new federal funds manager. And I think the, the broad strokes that I really think would be helpful to impart to the community are again, you know, not to be a broken record, but it's a short timeframe. There's really very few things that it can be spent on. So much of it has already committed. And, you know, that big, that big question mark for me is the one that's remained really from the beginning of what will community input, how can Will community input be like a truly meaningful process and what will that look like?
[Chelli Keshavan]: Granted, we know that budgets from other communities can look different, even wildly different. Has ARPA been a space where Medford can say, maybe there are pieces we should be adapting or we could be adapting, or are there places for learning or things that other communities are doing really well? And has this at all become a moment where we can make ourselves available for learning as a city?
[Unidentified]: Yeah, I think that is a really great question.
[Kit Collins]: And actually that was touched on in the presentation by the federal funds manager that the city council got last week and the public got before that. There are programs in Walden and Somerville that I know the city of Medford is at least hoping to emulate. A lot of these have been suggested by our current department heads. They include funding youth programming, rental assistance and fuel assistance, a language access plan, which is one I'm really excited because that's a really big hole that our city needs to fill, continuing invest in rideshare programs, facilities upgrades. And another one that's been floated is free yearly memberships to the Chamber of Commerce. So these are all programs that have been done in, like I said, I think those are all pulled from Malden and Somerville. A lot of those dovetail with ideas that our department's had, our department heads already had, and we're hoping to submit for funding. So a lot of those I feel really passionate about, a lot of questions about. I think some of them really do get to chronically underfunded priorities. You know, like I said, language access, direct assistance, because these are really hard times for a lot of people. And so it's my hope that we will have enough wiggle room budgetarily that we will be able to emulate many of those programs in Medford.
[Danielle Balocca]: Is there any like concern about like sustainability when we talk about like developing new programs? So like, for example, one thing I hear a lot about is like the afterschool programs at like elementary schools. And so I wonder if like, if we're putting money into something that isn't going to continue to, there isn't going to be that consistent source of funding. Is there a concern for how like we'll sustain those things?
[Kit Collins]: Well, I'll tell you that I have a concern for how we'll sustain this. No, I mean, not to joke about something that's serious, but I think that's a very astute question. I think depending on the financial data, the financial forecasting data that we have for the city, depending on who you ask, because I know that the city's in a bit of a financial backlog. Um, we didn't have a financial manager for a long time. Our career finance director is still catching up. We don't have financial forecast data for next year. So which is to say a lot of it is up in the air. I think you'd get different perspectives based on who you ask, but throughout that has been a question and a source of unease for me during our Just kind of to give you one illustrative anecdote during the budget hearings in June, you know, we go through department by department. We were looking at the, I guess, like the executive office department budget, and I noticed the line item for translation had gone from Gosh, I don't remember how much it was. Let's call it $1,000. They've gone down to zero. And I said, oh, gosh, like how are we funding translation services at zero? Are we not going to have translation? And fortunately, we got the answer. Don't worry. That's just being ARPA funded instead. So, you know, OK, great. We're going to have translation services next year. But at the same time, given that the council has not received what I would call any sort of assurances of how our revenue is actually going to increase in the short or midterm. It makes me think, okay, so after 2026, well, what's going to happen? You know, we, we heard explicitly from the administration in June that we could expect next year's budget season to be pulling the belt even tighter than we've pulled it this year. And that, that really gives me pause.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Yes. I think that's a really perfect example though, of that, like the priorities, like how, why wouldn't we put translation in our like general budget instead of relying on these temporary margins?
[Kit Collins]: Exactly, Danielle. I couldn't have put it better. The last thing I would say about ARPA is just, you know, I think the biggest priority on my mind for this conversation was just to hope to shed a little bit of light on the procedural constraints of this issue. you know, again, eligibility requirements for what it can be spent on and when it must be spent. And also, you know, just again, to sort of as context add in where the responsibility and the decision making lies for spending for, you know, attributing projects to ARPA for allocating that money to specific purposes, you know, because I think oftentimes does I would really understand if it appears convoluted to the average resident, that would be just like the most understandable thing in the world to me, because we have an executive office, we have budgets, we have a federal funds manager, these things could talk about the city council. And I think it's just helpful for people to know, especially for folks who are interested in giving feedback and having their feedback meaningfully incorporated and heard. I think it's just important that it be you know, know where those decisions really lie. And the federal funds manager doesn't make decisions for what gets funded. City council does not, cannot make decisions for what gets funded. It's the executive office, it's the mayor that decides what gets funded. And I think it's also just really important to keep emphasizing, you know, we, I think we enjoyed a lot of talk about. what we would all love to do with $48 million in the city of Medford. And because of the financial situation that our city is in, so, so much of that one time transformative bucket of money had to be farmed into the city budget, you know, to keep the lights on in a matter of speaking. And to me, that is, you know, just sort of yet more fuel for the conversation that we've been having in the city council chambers and, you know, community wide all year, if not longer about Are we doing the best job that we can at funding our values? Are we doing the best job that we can in investing in our community and investing in our values at investing in the most vulnerable members of our community? And are we making a meaningful and concerted effort at bringing up that baseline so that, you know, the next time we're so lucky as to have a lot of funding or revenue to work with, we could do something transformative with it instead of being in a spot where we have to use it to keep the lights on. Yeah. You know, that that's the future that I want to see for Medford is to be able to invest in these transformative, you know, potentially life-changing programs to just really make life better for our community.
[Danielle Balocca]: I think we'd probably agree with that.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Yeah. Yeah. The distance between folks who are farthest from opportunity and their lived reality is daunting right now, I think.
[Unidentified]: Yeah. Well, thank you, Kim.
[Chelli Keshavan]: I love this. Thank you so much for being here. This is amazing.
[Kit Collins]: Oh, yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's really great to get to discuss this. Thank you for bringing it up.
[Danielle Balocca]: Is there anything else you want to mention? Anything you have in the works or things people should know about before we say goodbye?
[Kit Collins]: Okay, let's see. I do want to, on a less glamorous note, I do want to mention another project that I'm working on. The Solid Waste Task Force, of which I am a member, is having a public workshop on Tuesday the 29th at 6 p.m. in the council chambers. So speaking of community engagement, if folks want to learn more about what the Solid Waste Task Force is up to and want to learn how to weigh in on what we want the future picture of waste management in Medford to look like, please consider, please consider joining. We all throw out trash and recycling and actually speaking of budgets, it's a huge part of the city budget. So it might surprise you by how interesting it really is, despite the title.
[Danielle Balocca]: I've seen some new updates to like collection of like mattresses and like couches and things like that. So I wonder what sort of idea. But yeah, I always think the garbage man is the unsung hero of this.
[Kit Collins]: Oh, my gosh. Totally. This guy should make six figures.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. And we'll look forward to hearing more. Great. Thank you both so much.
[Chelli Keshavan]: Until next time.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks. Take care. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Idonis. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites!
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