[Zac Bears]: Paper 22-354, Committee of the Whole. Meeting notice, Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022 at 6 p.m. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Caraviello?
[Zac Bears]: Present.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Collins?
[Kit Collins]: Present.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Knight? I do not see Councilor Knight. Councilor Scarpelli? Present. Councilor Tseng? Present. I believe President Morell is absent again. Vice President Bears?
[Zac Bears]: 5 present, 2 absent. The meeting is called to order. Councilor Knight will be joining us, I believe, soon. And President Morell, once again, as I said last night, is out due to a COVID infection in her family, and we are wishing her all the best. There will be a meeting of the Medford City Council Committee of the Whole on Wednesday, June 22nd at 6 p.m. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the fiscal year 2023 city budget. City Council will discuss the proposed budgets for the Medford Police Department, Traffic Supervisors, Traffic Commission, Executive, Elections, Licensing Commission, Bicycle Commission, Chevalier Theatre, Workers' Compensation, Insurance, Pensions, Bonds and Interest, Legislative, previously tabled, and Information Technology, previously tabled. The city council has invited Mayor Brianna Lemgo-Kern, Chief of Staff Nina Nazarian, Finance Director Bob Dickinson, Police Chief Jack Buckley, and all relevant department heads or Medford Public Schools administrators to attend this meeting. For further information, aids, and accommodations, please contact the city clerk at 781-393-2425. Sincerely yours, Nicole Morell, Council President. Thank you everyone for being here. I think we will start off with our police department as well as the Traffic Supervisors and Traffic Commission. And I believe we would all be welcoming Chief Buckley to make a presentation before we have questions from the council.
[Jack Buckley]: Thank you. Good evening. Thank you for inviting me before the council to present the fiscal 23 budget. If I get distracted moving back and forth, it's just some of the paperwork I have to kind of present a brief introduction to the budget this evening. Before you on the police side of services is a 14-625087 budget. On paper, it represents a 1.2% deduction from the prior fiscal year's budget as it relates to police services. qualify that though by stating that the budget as it's presented to you has no funding for 10 unfilled police officer positions. Those 10 unfilled police officer positions equate to about $608,000. The only difference between the 1.2% and the $608,000 is the required increases to contractual personnel costs that is obligated. So some costs go up every single year and I'm required to pay them, but even when we decrease them, it sort of offsets. So budget as before, the biggest impact you'll see is the unfilled positions 10 patrol positions they have unfilled will be unfunded for this fiscal year, and we do that in 2020 of the fiscal year. through the COVID crisis and the police department through some hard work and dedication of the police officers and the command staff, we're able to get through that fiscal year and then the next fiscal year, we're able to replace those numbers. So, the hope there is that, you know, we can get through this year and keep moving forward and build up our police department. Now, changes to personnel expenses across the board, pretty much salaries remain constant in the same from where they are currently today. As I said to you, there's A decrease of 607,000 because of the 10 unfilled the police officer positions. We also have a decrease in $6,000 on matrons fees. And there's multiple reasons for that. The number of arrests are down. We also hire more female police officers who can sometimes offset those costs for female matrons. We do propose an increase of $20,000 to civilian overtime. Civilian overtime should be interpreted here to mean our public safety dispatchers, the civilian personnel. I've also submitted from last year's budget increase for $100,000 for training. Keep in mind that a lot of that training is required training. Most of it is put forth by requirements under either post and police reform or the MPTC mandates for new training for police officers, but also there are some initiatives from the police department where we want to try to increase supervisory training, you know, higher skilled leadership in the police department to advance, but we've also continued to dedicate ourselves to crisis intervention training. And I'm briefly if I could some of this training that the reason for the increases, I've mentioned supervisory training that comes with FBI leader training and frontline leadership training crisis intervention training which we've talked about for several years past now we continue to push for the 100%. Fulfillment on those those costs. There's always the requirement on the state law, the state mandates for police certification for CPR first aid and first responder training. That's for every police officer, including with that goes along with firearms training and de escalation training. We continue to. So 2020 was a down year we weren't able to hire many police officers and the 2021 we hire 20 police officers with those 20 police officers can be fast require need for training and increased funds for the training of police officers who are brand new want to the police department. I'm also very, very happy to report that the entire police department is now trained in what we call ICAT. And so ICAT is Integrating Communications Assessment and Threats. Better way to look at ICAT, and if I could define it in a simple word, it's de-escalation. That's sort of been the bedrock word over the last few decades. And I can write as many policies I want on what the escalation is, but unless you train your officers unless you put them in under scenarios and put them under pressures to react and teach them how to do it. It's useless right a piece of paper does not train a police officer so you need some hard concrete training. It's just a, it's a new, it's defined as like a new way of thinking about use of force and use of force training. It's about diffusing critical incidents. And in many cases in the scenarios it's it's with unarmed individuals who struggling from mental health crisis, or sometimes other crisis that they're involved in, but sometimes it's also involves armed individuals in crisis, right. And the one thing that's sort of excluded, which changes the thing would be firearms, you know, if you're under the firearm, it trains the changes a little bit of the way that the escalation. But quite frankly, it is essentially should be looked at as de escalation training, we have completed that training for every single police officer all the way up to my level, I go through the de escalation, it's not something we just put in patrol levels, we, we are dedicated to it, we impact We believe we impact our offices in our city tremendously when we put these sort of trainings. It builds on our crisis intervention training. It builds on our mental health first aid training. It provides a better form of police services. Part of the state mandated trainings that every police officer also underwent was duty to intervene. We of course had our legal updates. Every year we're required to undergo legal updates on procedures and law. We did trainings in procedural justice, a training and talking to individuals in crisis. And we also undergo, as I've said numerous times in the past years, we continue to upgrade our policies and procedures. Some of them are required based on the police reform act. Some of them are required to move towards accreditation as a police department, but I will continue to tell you, putting forth a policy without the, so-called correlated training is sort of useless, right? I can't just tell you to abide by certain rules. The other thing that we've kind of keyed in this year and spent some significant time trying to train and create peer support teams and crisis intervention teams, and I don't want to dwell on a lot of certain calls, but we've had a heck of a year. My police officers have seen some things that are really tragic and have been quite impactful. I have a very young police department, and regardless of that, it impacts young and old. So we've spent significant time on the health and wellness of our police officers. We've done required suicide prevention police officers. It's the number one killer for police officers in the country. But we're finding very, very much success in training police officers, both within our department and reaching out to the greater Boston crisis intervention and support teams to bring them in and have conversations with our police officers, kind of making sure that they're okay after. These are things that were not done earlier in my career. It just wasn't a part of policing. It wasn't because the Metro Police did it wrong. It's just that nobody in police did it. I think that goes a long way in creating and building a better police department for the community. And on top of that, we've talked about POST, but we continue to comply with all the new standards, demands, and requirements of the POST commissions. Jumping over to our expenses, right, and ordinary expenses in the budget, based on some of what I just said, we did add an increase of about $4,000 to planning and training because we expect to increase and keep our training numbers up. There's a significant decrease to academy tuition by about $53,000. That goes hand in hand with the 10 police officers we expect that will be unfunded. There is a $38,000 increase to computer maintenance. Now, that's just an account name, but essentially what is in that account is all of the many of the warranties. If you've ever worked in software or tried to buy even like Microsoft Office, it's all subscription based. So now we have annual subscriptions for a number of things. We're over one year in our new police station and a lot of the systems in our police station require all of these upgrades and upkeeps, right? We don't want anything to fall out into disrepair or to fall out of use and services. So the requirements to keep our maintenance on our software systems and some of our hardware systems That bill is going up and it's it's these required bills that we have to pay and it's an increase in $38,000, you'll see that you know we have a modest increase of $1500 to building and material supplies, public safety supplies. You know, you look at public safety supplies uniforms and what we term as copy supplies but that's our photocopy machines paper products everything we need to do to produce documents, etc. This is just the cost of doing business in 2022 with the increased prices right we can't avoid certain increases to pay for things that we need to run our police station. Um that being said, uh we have an account of other equipment of $20, 000 and it is that will be a uh significant decrease of $20, 000 in that account. And give me a second here to kind of jump around a little bit. And so I talked a little bit about the training in the Bedford Police Department. You know, well, this budget will get us through uh You know, fiscal 2023. I think it's important to talk a little bit about a lot of the changes that happened for the Metro Police Department in the year 2021. We've serviced over 36,000 calls for service. That's the highest in about five years. We continue to get calls and increase calls and continue to respond. I'm fond of saying we do more with less, and I think that's everybody in this country these days, but it continues, and I'm pleased to comment. I'm proud to say that in the past, we've had a Health and Human Services. You've heard us. We've partnered with the Office of Prevention and Outreach, but we were able to create a new behavioral support unit. So originally, our Health and Human Services was a police officer trained in not just crisis intervention training, but a lot of mental health services, but we had a full time clinician on board. We were seeing a lot of success with that. And I petitioned the Department of Mental Health who have a large jail diversion grant that they They have a strong support for what they call co-response program. And after numerous conversations with the Department of Mental Health and based on the state funding, we in the city were able to obtain 291,000 annual grant to continue that program, but to increase it to two co-response clinicians and one full-time youth and family clinician. I can't tell you how happy we are. with this program and we expect it to grow even more as the years go forward. It's a multi-year grant at that dollar value. The two new clinicians will be starting next week. And so this next fiscal year will show a big change and a big impact for this. And essentially this behavioral support unit deals with mental health and substance use disorders. A large percentage of our calls revolve around that. The difference right now is that they can a clinician can either respond with a police officer, or we can respond, we can see that this is not necessarily a police matter it's a mental health matter, or a other sort of crisis, and we can have a clinician dispatch to the scene and they can deal with the situation. And in some instances, in many instances, I could say that we would just leave, we just walk away and the clinicians do all the work they do all the follow up. It's a direct access to clinical support through Elliot human services. And it's hard these days to find clinical support for different things. And when we show up at your house, and we're able to give you a clinician to speak to you right away, and they can reach out to Elliot services and create that direct contract, we see a significant improvement in what we're trying to do and reach out. Earlier today, I talked about the advances in leadership in the police department. We continue to provide extensive training. Good leadership is good policing and provides good support for the police officers. So we have pushed for this, but One of the interesting things that we've changed in this past year is we've created assessment centers. It's a civil service process. In the past, police leaders were promoted or defined simply by, you would go to a statewide examination center, you'd take a test and you'd get ranked on the test, and we would pick you based on how you ranked on that test. The department itself had no real input on those tests. And again, there was standard statewide. The assessment center now, it's, We're able to put forth candidates who to undergo real world applicable scenarios. And we're able to test the decision making abilities were able to test the quality of the decisions and their ability essentially to lead during crisis and other times and how they handle. And it is, it's, you know, we expect to see. the future of the police department. I mean, the idea is if any leader sits in one place, you should be reinforcing the place. So when it's my time to go, somebody else can step up and lead. And so when lieutenants have time, a new lieutenant steps in the role. And so investing in leadership is a priority of mine, and we continue to do it. I mentioned to you that 2020 was a real difficult year for hiring police officers. Essentially, there were no academies, right? So you couldn't, even if you wanted to hire them, and COVID was a strike. We hire 20 police officers. They're an incredible group of officers, this Friday and Saturday we graduate two more classes. We have a young department and they're full of energy, and it's a, you know, these are just general nice men and women who who just cannot wait to serve their communities. And I see this as a clear change, right? They're coming in with different attitudes, the academies are changing. And I say to you that the investment in new offices and these younger generation offices, it's just an investment in the future of this community too, because they look at things like, I'm not that old of a person, but age changes things and they move forward. So I'm very, very happy at being able to continue to support that. There's three systems we introduced into the police department to change our management of the police department. The first one is called PMAM. It's essentially a professional management system for our policy and documentation. Anyone who's listened to me publicly speak about the police department told me we're trying to, I've heard you say, I'm trying to redo all our policies and procedures. In theory, there should be about 250, 260 policies and procedures for an accredited police department. We're not there yet. It takes a lot of time and effort to do it, but the PMAM system allows us to sort of put them in a library, document them, send them out during different shifts for training. We can monitor the police officers as they're following the policies, make sure they understand and they can respond back to us with questions and policies and just a clear cut. We've also introduced another new system software called I a pro I pro is, you know, is associated exactly what it sounds like it's documents records and reviews all of our internal incidents and our internal affairs systems. But it provides something that is new and software we call it early intervention right so it can start the flag if you see certain offices who may come up, you know, like this issue this issue and you say well that's an anomaly and it sends an email to somebody to check and make sure that, you know, a that that office is okay but that somebody supervisory level should be putting eyes on what's going on with those police officers to prevent anything in the future from going bad, many police departments across the country have had success with that program. Coupled with that we have something called blue team. And the best way to sort of describe blue team is it's an upgrade to a street level reporting systems. So for police officer goes out and use. Let's say a use of force situation right they write a police report, but they also have to do a use of force for That historically has been a piece of paper that gets stored in a folder somewhere. Now we're electronically documenting it all. And we'll be able to, through the software, just sort of have a better look and a better view of what we're doing when it comes to use of force, complaints, and other performance matters for police officers. It sort of puts it all on a dashboard for us to see 2022. And we're able to look at this differently than trying to pull pieces of paper out of folders and put it all together in comparison. community engagement. Um we've also since the summertime created um one of the things that I'm very proud of is uh community engagement unit and this is a group of officers who essentially volunteering to step up and engage themselves in our community through both social media and a number of community events. So, you know that we've had uh Faith in Blue. We had earlier this year. Uh they've attended uh pride I forget the name of it, but the coffee shop that just opened. My officers go up there, the community engagement unit, they take part in that. And it's just, I think, being visible out there and interacting with our community in different ways. But it also increases our social media presence, right? So I'm not very good at social media, we don't do it, but I think we have one heck of a social media platform out there for a police department. And I think the city should be proud of the information that we put out there and the things that they see. And this is the unit and the officers who are associated with this unit that kind of advanced that. and that sort of all developed and took place in 2021. Finally, and you have it before you, last year was the first year we produced a an annual crime statistical report. And so you were able to have that in front of you. There's a lot of information in there. So I'm sure the facts of that are something we can talk about in the future, but it provides you crime statistics in comparison to the prior three years. That also tells you a little bit about our police department, gives you an idea of the command structure, some of the events that we were involved in, the mission of the police department role, the police department, then you have all the kinds of statistics. I will also add to because of this, because of Councilor Tseng, you had put a resolution forward on the 2020 Motor Vehicle Uniform Citation Data Analysis Report. And so we were looking at that and in the final document in there, I don't know how many pages it is, there's a response to that, kind of our assessment of what's going on there. And I will tell you in very brief times, I know this is on this, The Medford Police Department, as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and everyone else involved, all believe it's high time to start keeping better statistical data when it relates to that. It's just not that easy, right? So I'll give you one example. So you'll find me and read the report. That study that came out, we asked them for their data. We wanted to analyze the data. They refused to give it to us. So we then have to scramble to kind of find our own data for those times. and it's never going to match up if you're not comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. But we do have new systems in place and you'll read about them in there and it's going to be able to give us a future of a clear future of what we're doing in motor vehicle stops and some commitments on how we're going to address a lot of the concerns that were listed in that report. So I hope you can consider that my response and it is in the report. And the reason we put it in there is we want everyone to see it. That will be on our website and everything else. So it's not a document that went between the police chief and the city council, but we put it publicly so they understand where we're going. Um, so that was the big, uh, uh, that was, I think that was the final, but I always take a moment before questioning just to thank, uh, uh, the women and men of my police department and, uh, our, our police department, uh, I should say they, um, continue to do a tremendous job. Uh, we have a good police department in the city that we do. I know a lot of police departments are undergoing change, a lot of a lot of police departments are doing well with that change and a lot of police departments are not doing well with that change. And I can tell you wholeheartedly I believe our police department is doing a fine job, willing and able to move forward and adapt and, you know, represent to this community what a police department should represent to the community. That being said, I want to also just thank a few other people. It's a tough year for this. I appreciate the support of Mayor Lungo-Koehn and her staff. There's also that daily interaction. I never forget to thank the Methodist Fire Department and Armstrong Ambulance, right? We don't go on calls without them. They're sort of hand in hand that we handle those things. So Chief John Friedman has been very helpful, but all the women and men on the fire department and Armstrong Ambulance, And now I've gone down that road, right? I can't forget to thank members like the DPW, but, you know, Mike's here from, you know, he's done all the maintenance on our cruises and kept us running in another tough year. So I'm sure that I started this, I'll forget somebody, but it's always like, you know, Marion O'Connor, Penny from Office of Outreach and Prevention. We don't survive without those partnerships and that success. So I just wanted to take a moment since I'm here annually to talk about those things just to say thank you. to them for the impact that they've had on our police department. So that's it. And if there's any questions, I'm sure you have a few questions back and forth. Oh, if I may, before I say I wanted to say, just in case I may turn to Lieutenant Joe Gagliotti, he's now in my administration of finance, he's handled a lot of my budget issues and billing, but Linda Colosso is the office manager, she knows more of this than I do, so I apologize if you see me turn back, I may have them come up if there's certain questions related to budgets, I should have introduced them first because they carried me to this point and I feel like their eyes are on the back of my head saying, why didn't you introduce me and thank me? So I thank them also as far as everything that they've done, but that's why their presence is here. So I beg your indulgence if I have to refer to them for something.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chief. And thank you for the detailed presentation. I know that there's a lot of work going on and I'm sure that we will have a few questions. I'm going to go to Councilor Scarpelli and then Councilor Collins and Councilor Caraviello. And then I'm guessing maybe Councilor Tseng after that. So Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Chief, thank you so much. Um, you continue to make us proud in this community. Um, I'm proud of our police department. Um, I think that, uh, when you see things that are going down the tubes around you in other areas, uh, you find the police fire DPW always standing above it. And, uh, you know, this presentation is no different. Um, super thorough, uh, The questions I had, you've already answered. I mean, my biggest fear is losing officers and maintaining a certain level that's not only keeping citizens safe, but also more importantly, you know, the officers on the street. So I think it's important. I know we've had questions in the past and I think they've been remedied, but the, The concerns and issues with the communications. I know that we had some issues in the past the old station and the antenna systems that were set up, have that those have been rectified since.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, I can tell you that our communication system is light years from where it was. It's all new equipment. We moved into a new building, and speaking broadly for the whole facility, yeah, you're going to find little things and quirks that something's not working right. We've got to bring somebody in. But communications-wise, we couldn't even hear our officers out in West Medford. And now we're finding no gaps. Awesome. That's great. So we're quite pleased with that.
[George Scarpelli]: Right. And the other one is our fleet. I mean, we've always had issues in the past. We've seemed to have done a better job making sure that we stay ahead of the game. Do you see that catching up with us? Is this something that we should be aware of moving forward with our fleet and the age of our cruises? Because I know they look fancy and they look new, but people don't realize they run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. So it's deceiving.
[Jack Buckley]: So as it relates to the fleet, we are, you know, the last time we bought cruises was 2019 and Those are our newest cruises, and those cruises have been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So we don't have a lot of spare cruises to swap out and rest on cruises. But in 2019, when those came in, we're still using some of the cruises that were there from 2017 or 16 and 15. And I can tell you that we are in need of cruises, and I won't It's actually interesting Mike's here and I would if you wouldn't indulge I'll have Mike come up and speak quickly on it. But I don't want to like, I think it's important to say that we're kept alive because of Mike and his team and the DPW. We transferred all the crews of maintenance to the DPW last year or something. I keep pointing over here. He's over here. February. I can't be any happier. Right. I mean, this this is the sort of the lifeblood of everything we do. I can't be happier with the the performance of the DPW, performance of Mike and his team. But if you'd indulge in it, it's up, but he can tell you a little bit about the cruisers and systems.
[George Scarpelli]: I know the budget's a little tough, but even looking forward, hearing Mike's opinion would be huge if he would indulge us.
[Mike Wentzell]: The cruises do run 24, 7, 365. We put forth a lot of effort in reducing the downtime to the cruises. I have Price quoted several options for the administration and for the chief. I've done an F-150, I've done hybrid cruises, electric cruises, regular cruises, undercover cars, and I've presented it all to the administration. As of right now, I believe we're just waiting for free cash. I don't know what the numbers are to how many cruises we're gonna get. And I have tried, we've been talking about developing a plan where we replace X amount of cruises every year moving forward. That way, we're not in a position where we're losing equipment. We have three or four 2019s. We have a couple 2018s. And there's still a couple of 2010s out there that we're keeping running. We have one Crown Vic left. Believe it or not, we've actually been able to keep that running. It's older than Justin. What's that? That car's older than Justin. Crown Vic. But I have to hand this to my guys. My guys do all the work. They really keep up on it. And, you know, we try not to take too many cruises at a time and leave them shorthanded. And, you know, so we really do a shuffle with this to keep the time down because of the age of the fleet. Um, so I think you've been pretty happy with the performance and in regards to the, to the, uh, to new equipment, I really don't know what the plan is. Um, I do know that I've, uh, offered to them several options and price quotes and, but the other thing you have to look into is getting vehicles now. You're looking at a year if you order a vehicle you're looking at a year minimum before you even see it. So just because the manufacturers are not producing vehicles. I know Ford. one of my vendors, not even to order anything until September of 2023, on the government side. On the private side, you can order whatever you want, but on the government side, they told us, 2023, don't even bother. So it's gonna be, you know, once we get this all squared away with the free cash and everything, then I can start, you know, getting some POs and putting some orders in, then I can get a lead time on how many vehicles and when we can get them. So, I've done I've done options with Chevys with undercover cars and and Chevys with regular cruises. So, I mean, I have a stack of stuff with my vendors this thick just for the police department. We're just waiting for the finance to get all squared away.
[George Scarpelli]: Well, I I'm going to be honest with you. We appreciate your hard work and I know that this council has been oh god for You know rolling system where we add to a year and in making sure we stay ahead of the game and, you know, especially now with the admission changes and trying to be, you know, environmentally cautious and, you know, looking at hybrid I'm glad you're looking at that and. But again, I think that this is something, unfortunately, we know how difficult the budget is right now, but as the new year approaches, that's something that I'll be calling for with my fellow Councilors, that we sit down with yourself, the chief, and his team, just to look at the best practices that we can prepare ourselves, whether it be, you know, looking for grants or looking for other options, whether it's negotiations with developers as they come in and how they can support the city. I think it's important we have to look at, we have to be pretty creative in what we have to do to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve because one thing we do know, we need every officer in a vehicle.
[Mike Wentzell]: Right, I do believe you did a grant request with the casino for an F-150 Mach Cruiser, right? So we did do that. I don't believe we've heard anything about that yet.
[Richard Caraviello]: Your request is in the list of packages that hopefully will be approved. That was discussed. OK, great.
[Mike Wentzell]: Other than that, we're just, everything's running smooth. I think, I believe we've saved the city quite, quite, we work very well together. We've gotten a streamlined system going since we took over. I believe we have saved the city quite a bit of money by transferring aid. Yeah, with the budgets and everything.
[George Scarpelli]: Mike, again, thank you. I know that typical Medford, we do a lot because of the people that spearhead that. And because of you and your crew, I think that that's probably one of the best moves we made is shifting our city vehicles over to the DPW. And so I applaud you guys. So thank you.
[Mike Wentzell]: You really should applaud my guys, because they're the ones that do the work.
[George Scarpelli]: Send that message there.
[Mike Wentzell]: I will. Thank you. Thanks.
[George Scarpelli]: Um, other than that, I, you know, chief, I, I can't tell you how comfortable I feel in our community when, you know, talk about outreach. Um, I don't think that there's a police officer that's on your team that doesn't, I don't think anybody's talked to me about not being able to be approached. I mean, whether it's Officer McGillivray at every event with his canine or, you know, new officers like Officer Walsh, I see her around everywhere. You know, so it's refreshing to see that, you know, you, it looks like you've taken a huge effort to making sure that our police officers are entrenched in our community. And, um, I think it's paying dividends. I mean, people really feel safe and comfortable. And, um, you know, I'm proud of us, uh, police department and with your leadership. I mean, uh, You know, I work in a community that's gone through a few police chiefs in a matter of a few years, and you know that the community feels it. And we're lucky to have the stability that we have there. So I applaud your team. And like I said, this alone, you know, this report alone, I'm just glancing at it just now, but it's so thorough. And it answers so many questions that I now get to help helps me support when I say, you know, this is why I support the police department, this is what it is, you know, being what, you know, it's nice to learn that we're, we're ranked fourth in the big cities for the safest communities in Massachusetts. That's, that's a huge accomplishment. When you're talking about steps to the city of Boston, and a highway that is a, you know, direct pathway for criminals to jump from Medford and on the highway and they're gone. So it just shows you how well we're doing. So I have no other questions. I wish, you know, I wish I saw the whole budget and we could achieve really whatever you really need. But I don't think you've ever come to this podium and said, call me once you've been given a number and you've turn to your team and you've made it work and it only gets better. So there's gotta be other ways that we can support you. And I think that, you know, like I said, with the fleet, I think that's something that I'll be pushing for, come forward to make sure we have a plan that's open and we're looking forward to doing that. So thanks chief.
[Jack Buckley]: So thank you. And I very much appreciate those kinds of words, but there is a reality to this. It is sometimes easy. It's not me, it's the team, it's not me, it's my, the people under me. But this job has changed a lot. It's extremely, extremely difficult job. And the officers who go out in the street in the night have a lot difficult. I mean, there's a lot riding on what they do. And we have a group of police officers did not, they'll make mistakes, right? But they come to work and they do their job and know that they're accepting of what's going on and they're accepting of changes and sometimes the commonwealth of Massachusetts and maybe even the police department confuses them with how much we put on them but come to work and put a smile on their face and I'm glad to hear from when I hear from the community that the officer was smiling because there's days that I don't necessarily always feel like smiling but we do. I bet. So, thank you. But thank you.
[Zac Bears]: And thank you team. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Vice President Bears, and thank you so much again for being here today, Chief, and to your staff as well. I had just one question. Thank you for the thorough overview. I noticed under the abbreviated personnel section of our budget sheets that we have here, the IT tech position that was budgeted for in fiscal year 22 and is not in fiscal year 23 budget. Was that position filled in the previous fiscal year or?
[Jack Buckley]: That position was filled only one year. It's probably three years ago.
[Kit Collins]: Okay. I was wondering if it was an actual loss of. No, it's not.
[Jack Buckley]: It's not a, it's not a current loss of IT tech hasn't been filled for a few years now.
[Kit Collins]: Gotcha. Okay. Thank you for clarifying.
[Jack Buckley]: Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Collins. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Mr. President. What's the average age of the department now? I know Well, they're all young kids now. I don't even know anybody.
[Jack Buckley]: You know what? I don't know the answer to that question right off. We have a young police department. I have 32, 33 police officers with under three years on the job. And it's somewhat of a challenge. We hit a unique sort of period. And hiring still comes in waves, right? I know when I got hired, in the 98 99 era. It was class of 12 with me and then I believe 11 or 12 hired while I was still in the police academy project that some 2530 years later, they're all going to retire at the same time. And then you're going to have large gaps. We had a similar bubble to that. I think we lost nine to 11 police officers. the COVID era did not help us being able to replace them because there was no way to hire somebody to put up in a police academy. And we got through that and now we're hiring and they are coming out really young. We get young, one young lady who's 21 years about to graduate the police academy and that's a big undertaking. I applaud her for it, but we are young.
[Zac Bears]: Chief, do you think that the police department's average age is younger than the city council's average age?
[Jack Buckley]: So I'm still at the end table.
[Richard Caraviello]: So yeah, you talked about change and how it change happens over the years. And you know, I've been the reason changes, you know, the older officers are retired. And, you know, I try to explain this to my own kids that, you know, change happens when people pass on because the mentality dies with them. And as these officers move on to the younger officers have grown up with a different mentality. and the older officers. So again, that's really where the change comes from.
[Jack Buckley]: So I value that opinion, but if I can add to it on your comment. So we are losing a lot of experience, right? And this job experience means something, right? But we can replace experience. And we have a lot of Sergeant McGilvery runs a field training program. And he's got vast experience. And he's done a great job in this year putting our officers into a rigorous training program. And that costs money. And it's not, it's just an open fact. We're here at a budget, we're here to talk money, and that costs a significant amount of money. And what tends to happen is sometimes when you take young officers, they'll go out into a midnight shift and they'll have a lot of experience around help. I'm sending officers into experience where they're the most experienced officer in the roll call room is three years in the job. So we have to invest in the training, we have to invest in pulling them from shifts and teaching them and giving them the experience, real life experience. And again, it's not classroom training, right? It doesn't do any good to tell you real world scenario training, we do a lot of that and put them under some pressures because I don't want my officers first. pressure experience to be something that is when they're out there along. So we try to work and operate that way. So, but yeah, it's a valid point to thank you.
[Richard Caraviello]: So in your, in your budget, you have a, you have an overtime budget of $1.2 million.
[Jack Buckley]: Yes.
[Richard Caraviello]: So if you had more offices, would that reduce that overtime budget? So interestingly, I mean, it's, it's kind of, it seems like it's kind of almost like a break even.
[Jack Buckley]: So we've been able to always going to be over 10 is always going to be able to avoid it can't do it as it was more obviously sometimes when you get pandemics and even as we're talking today with COVID was still losing offices and personnel staff. We've done a pretty good job of. keeping our overtime around the 1.2 million. I think we probably went 50,000 over that this year. And that's from years when we were doing 1.8, 1.9, 2 million in overtime. But the difference is this, we're also categorized. And I'm not trying to hide, it's all categorized. My training overtime budget here, that's when I spend overtime money on training, I put it in another line.
[Richard Caraviello]: Well, no, I wasn't questioning the training, but I was just, you know, overtime for offices. Yep. If you had five more offices, would that overtime budget drop?
[Jack Buckley]: Ah, so if we had additional offices assigned to patrol, yes, it would impact overtime. That's a clear answer. But my only hesitation is if I got five more offices. I would, it may not always just go to patrol because there's other areas we need to support this that so but that over time is mostly directed to its patrol over time, some major detective cases, etc. So, but yes, you're correct if you say that more offices would reduce the need for um, where are we with our body cameras.
[Richard Caraviello]: I know that's been talked about, I know we talked about buying, do we ever buy them?
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, so we have, the process is ongoing, right? So we're receiving parts of our equipment, you know, holders and chargers and docking stations. And it's just that if you imagine every police department in the country is looking for a body-worn camera right now, there's a backlog. So we still expect to get them here. September ish, be able to roll them out. The only delay in this is the production and delivery of the actual camera.
[Richard Caraviello]: What about cameras throughout the city? I know that's been talked about too.
[Jack Buckley]: It's been talked about across the city. We do not have any. Most of the communities that have cameras pole-mounted cameras, cameras at intersections, essentially were funded through UASI, the United Area Security Initiative, right? And so they use those funds that we're not a member of UASI and we've never received a fund. So to take, you know, budget funds out of, you know, out of my regular ordinary expenses to put pole cams, I needed elsewhere for patrol. So we don't have any anyway, right?
[Richard Caraviello]: That might be something you want to ask in the mitigation funds. Because, you know, I sit on the, I chair that committee there and A lot of the communities have asked for public safety and you know, you got one of the ones and they complained that they're not giving away enough money. So that's why I'm hoping that the request that you asked for. We met last week and I said, that was the complaint that, you know, they have all this money and they're not, they've actually given away, the call for money has been less than it has been for last year. So maybe that may be something you might think about going down the line with that.
[Jack Buckley]: I would add that the reason there's probably less call is that administrations or police departments are tied up. Like we don't have, We don't have five minutes to do even grant work right now. And so it's, it's just kind of hectic and crazy and certain things fall through.
[Richard Caraviello]: So I had, so I had a chance to go over some of the stats here that you provided. And I don't see a stat here, the hate crime that everybody keeps saying about all the hate crime we have in the community. I don't see any stat on.
[Jack Buckley]: I don't have the book in front of me and I don't know if.
[Richard Caraviello]: Is it, is it categorized under something here that, I mean, do we I mean, do we have a lot of hate crime in the community?
[Jack Buckley]: Let me let me if you indulge me. My crime analyst, Rob McIntyre crime statistics, he may be on zoom. And if he's on, can we see if he's there? It'll be Rob McIntyre. Maybe he's here. And if you get maybe he could kind of chime in on I don't have a report in front of me and he Yeah, I mean, I don't see I don't see a category in your list here.
[Zac Bears]: Mr. McIntyre, if you could comment on that. Yeah. So that's always so.
[Robert Mcintire]: So any kind of hate crime that's reported on the crime stats through NIBRS, what ends up happening is any particular type of crime that we categorize can have a bias associated with it. Medford for the last three years has had what we usually refer to as a nominal number. Last year, I believe it was seven that we had. Most of them tend to stem around vandalism, whether it's graffiti found or permanent marker in a bathroom stall. Those are the more common ones.
[Richard Caraviello]: But there's no actual people being assaulted or like that type of hate crime, you know? No.
[Unidentified]: No. Okay, thank you.
[Richard Caraviello]: Other than that, you know, I've been a proponent, I think, earlier in the year, I think I asked for cruises. One of my requests was, as we said, we should be buying a couple every year so we don't get this backlog. So again, I hope that going forward, That would happen. But other than that, I thank you for your work. And again, I know you're in a difficult spot. You're training a lot of young men and women now. And they say, it's tough to give them the real world experience when you don't have a lot of veterans to put with them to teach them. I know you're in a tough time. And they'll grow over time and they'll learn. But right now, I know it's just a little difficult, but thank you. It'll get better. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Cabrera. Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Chief Buckley, as you know, I'm always very grateful for your work and for your responsiveness to the Councilors. I'm also grateful for the work that the men and women of your department do. You guys keep us safe, and I think we're all grateful. It's a top priority of mine to make sure that you have all the resources you need to succeed, and in the 21st century, to succeed means adapting to changes and reforms. a lot of the new kind of measures that have been implemented slash are being implemented. Do you think this, would you, I know you've talked about potentially getting more administrative help to deal with these, you know, the administrative side of reforms and trainings and changes and all of that. Is that in this budget or would you ideally have more support in that realm?
[Jack Buckley]: So these are always I love these questions because if you're asking me to write a blank check and I would think a lot of administrative support. I think, you know, if you, if you look at the police department, just to carry on our daily function, and things like traffic calming and in sort of control and the parking issues, etc. That the police get involved that we always need bodies, we can always put more bodies to that. And when I say bodies there, it's police officers. But I believe right now we have five full time civilian employees. One's, you know, Linda, Diane, Alva, my secretary, Rob. Yep. Okay. And so, you know, I I had the occasion one day to speak with Medford, Oregon Police Department. It's quite interesting how often we could call from Medford, Oregon and how often Medford, Oregon called from Medford, Mass. I mean, it's unbelievable. But I was talking with them and they were indicating, we asked how big is the department and Medford, Oregon is a big department, a big area. And their police department offices is very similar to us. They have about 50 civilian workers in their things. So what you can provide for services and abilities. You give me a body, I'll put them to work. I say that all the time, right? And yes, adding civilian help and administrators or any help will allow us to produce better work, 100%.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you for the answer. I didn't know that about Bedford, Oregon.
[Jack Buckley]: I saved all the emails, so you'd be surprised.
[Justin Tseng]: Wow. I guess my next question. Councilor Scarpelli got the question about the cruisers. Sorry, lost my train of thought. Councilor Caraviello mentioned hate crimes. I think there've been residents asking if perhaps there are some hate crimes that are underreported or understudied. I know in my personal experience, sometimes that's the case. Is there anything that we can do to that end or is it really like,
[Jack Buckley]: So I'll tell you what we are doing and what we're trying to do, because the trying part is a little bit about related to our software that we run in our reporting systems. All of the police reports that sort of filter out. We have a civil rights officer, Kevin Burifuri, great police officers, but he's got a career on the federal side. U.S. Coast Guard, he was the EEOC officer, he knows his stuff really well. He reviews our police reports for his own take on these sort of, in case something is missed by the reporting officer or there's something that is not underlying that he will reach out and kind of follow up on all of those cases. That's one of the things we're trying to do where we don't clearly get a report of a hate crime. And I'm not telling you they're not existent, but a lot of times they're not being reported. It's difficult thing about the underreported, right? Yeah, because it's hard to track. And I think we could do a campaign and try to get people to come to us. Part of that is, I think, I've always equated the diversity of our police department with this response to it, right? I think sometimes it matters. And so that It's one of those things that we want to sort of work on and build and bring forward. But in combination with that, I talked a little bit about our reporting software. And there's only so many things we can tweak because it's probably a 25 year system or something like that, right? And quite expensive. But we have a button that says, you know, the police officer believes there's a bias involved. And you click a bias, say, yes, it's my understanding that a bias is involved in that which sort of bias. And we're having trouble being able to expand on trying to get that to the front, you know it's a column late in the report and so you don't always see it in the front page, and sometimes the data you put in can't be extracted in certain programs. So we're trying to work through that and create a data system of reporting for bias. I could tell you that it would be easy just to throw the software out and buy a new one, but it's not that easy, right? Because we can't get rid of what we have in our system. So we're working on those issues. We're trying to be keenly aware of the issues of bias and hate crimes. I think having the civil rights officer and he gets trained and all this does help us tremendously. He's had success when he's gone out and met with people and resolve these issues, but there's always a fear. I don't think there's a police chief in America will tell you that the underreporting of hate crimes isn't a concern of theirs because You've got to reach out to those communities or the individuals who feel that the police may not be able to help them, or that they don't want to just leave their community themselves and be seen as people to police. Those are issues that we're all facing and open to ideas. And that's why, you know, I happen back to my community engagement here. We want a community to look at, you know, I don't want this this image is, you know, I wear my uniform for a reason, right? I don't want people to fear this uniform. And so I try to smile and laugh and interact and I want all my officers to do that. And I know it's not as simple as that. I know there's a lot more than that. I know that some of these, um, some of our community members come from, you know, militaristic countries and this oppression. And I know that people look at the police sometimes as very oppressing and the hope that we can change that one day. Right. And I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but that's sort of the issue. And it's an overwhelming problem that police chiefs face in this country is that how do you get this underreporting of hate crimes to address it. So it's we're aware of it, looking for solutions, but trying to address what we can do right now.
[Justin Tseng]: And certainly I've seen your officers at, you know, different events for different communities here in Medford, like the Haitian event and the Haitian flag event. That was, it was nice to see them there and interacting with people. So I appreciate the work that you guys are trying to do. And I mean, in the future, I hope we can, you know, create even more opportunities for forums where we can build that trust within, you know, our community. I guess on the topic of cruisers, I know some, these are mainly out of state, so I don't know if this is a Massachusetts versus out of state thing. Some communities have policies where officers can take cruisers home, which kind of incentivizes taking care of that. I know that would be a huge, huge undertaking and logistically super complex.
[Jack Buckley]: My officers would love it if you did it, but you don't have enough money to do that.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I mean, again, logistically impossible, but I'm just wondering with that. Do you think that would help us maintain the quality of vehicles over a longer period of time.
[Jack Buckley]: So, the better. So I'm friendly with a lot of Massachusetts State troopers right and they have their own cruises and they take it home and they are responsible for every aspect of that cruise, right, they don't have to pay for the maintenance, etc. But they don't get to joyride around it, you know, the off duty is not but they They are all clean. They're all have limited like it drives when you work right and so it's not being driven 24 hours a day, they are keenly aware to when this small problem start to build up and they get repaired quickly. And so I believe that if you asked the state police. And that's the unit that I equate to in Massachusetts that take home the cruises that they believe is a very successful program. But you imagine how large their fleet is.
[Unidentified]: Yeah, right.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, right. I do think there's a lot of value. I watch these guys cleaning their cars on their own, you know, detailing their cruises on their own, and I see them and they and you don't necessarily get the level of care when you have sort of like a community pool car, right? One obviously gets gets in, the other officer gets out, they just get driven back and forth. And they don't stop. They're always sort of running at the entrance.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I just wanted to ask that since I know Councilor Caraviello earlier this term introduced something about making sure that we're replacing our fleet, which we all know is, you know, we're doing our best with it, which is great, but, you know, it'd be nice to get new cruisers in there. And that's a question that came up for some residents from, you know, who'd moved to Medford. It was, you know, in my home, in my community from out of state, you know, this is what we do, why don't we do that? So I just figured it might be good to ask you for your take on it.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, I mean, I would tell you I support it, but it's a dream, right? And it's- Logistically, yeah. I firmly believe that you invest in those things that you take ownership in, and that it's a perfect example of what that is. Thank you. If you get there someday, let me know. I'll be there.
[Justin Tseng]: I think I'm good. If another question comes up in my mind, I'm sure I'll just email you. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Do you wanna come up here for my questions or? Yeah, sure. Thank you. Keep it on the vehicles for a second. These may be coming from President Morell, who isn't here tonight.
[Jack Buckley]: update looking at your phone's not giving it away.
[Zac Bears]: Well, it was even even you've heard these before. Update on potentially moving to electric vehicles.
[Jack Buckley]: So we continue to study this issue, right? And I don't think anyone's sort of averse to this. I think I think I'll tell you where my mind is right now that we very much move to hybrid vehicles. Just think about some of the conversations we've had. We are running at 24 hours a day. I just asked the question, when do we charge? Yeah, take some time to charge these vehicles and we in an all electric vehicle. I don't, I don't, I don't see the times that we could fit them in and charge them and we certainly don't have the charging stations in place. I see Mike in the monitor want to say something, but hybrids are, you know, I know that A lot of police departments, Boston State, other police departments around there, they're enjoying them. There's not much of an issue.
[Zac Bears]: And there's potential cost savings there as well.
[Jack Buckley]: Potential cost savings, yes.
[Mike Wentzell]: So I believe Weston or Wayland, they got a Mustang Mach-E and they were flashing it all over Facebook. Look at us, look at us. I immediately received a phone call. Look at this, look at this, look at this. The problem with electric vehicles right now for our fleet, you will have to purchase three of them. to replace one cruiser because they run 24 hours a day. Financially, I don't think we can do that. So me personally, and I had this conversation with the chief, undercover cars, like my cruiser, his cruiser, people that don't run them 24 hours, absolutely, we could go the electric vehicle route. But for a black and white every day, I do not recommend it. simply for the charging time. They have come a long way with fast charges and all kinds of stuff to get them charged within an hour or so, or two hours. But the lead time on that, you'd still have to replace one cruiser with two electric vehicles. So I just, I don't think the technology's there yet to be able to put them in the black and white fleet. The chief and I have discussed and I've priced out the Explorer hybrids extensively and I'm still talking to one of my vendors about purchasing those. So we're strongly leading towards that route as to get into the electric game. But for the most part, we also agreed that the fire chief, the police chief, things like that, the detectives, they would be the ones that we would start off with the electric vehicles because they don't want all the time.
[Zac Bears]: OK, thank you. That's helpful. And I appreciate all the research and work that you put into looking into it.
[Jack Buckley]: And just a final point that if available and we weren't in dire straits and had to go to all gasoline, I had myself would buy hybrid vehicles right now. I mean, I just think that this will go. As for Weston and Concord where I was out driving their electric vehicles, they have Mustangs and Teslas and they were donated by community members. So it's just- Wow. Wouldn't that be nice? Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. We've talked about this before I think I asked it last year regarding the shift from the sedan to the SUV and I understand that's basically the only thing that's being made at this point.
[Jack Buckley]: Correct.
[Zac Bears]: But one other question is around around trucks, you know, I've all I've seen the, I think one that we have now is there more than one pickup truck that we're
[Jack Buckley]: We have one pickup truck and we've request requested through this casino mitigation fund grant for another pickup truck. I'll be very clear that that we finding we're finding right now that in advancing our traffic sort of enforcement to be able to put signs and speed trails. We have four speed trails now and actually the pickup truck we're asking for the casino and the mitigation fund would come with another speed trail. These sign boards and the speed trails have a vast, vast impact on traffic in our community of a lot of value. And it's hard to take line cruises a transporter number one, I don't think it does a value to the crew, I think it's killing the life of those of these explore cruises. And so you need a little bit more. And that's really where the design our current pickup truck is assigned to our traffic unit for the express purpose. It's a cruiser. So that helps, but it's for the express purpose of transporting our traffic tools around. We need a delivery vehicle. Okay, essentially what it's for. We do not intend to mine pickup trucks for every one of our cruises. The casino mitigation will be strictly if we granted that, it will be strictly for the same purposes for traffic assignments for putting signboards and moving I mean cones and barriers and other things and you know we hope to increase through some other grant sources more visible signs and to enhance traffic safety. So that's the purpose of the pickup trucks not to change our whole fleet to a larger pick up a fleet of trucks and vehicles.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chief. And I do apologize for the temperature in the room. I can see people are a little cold. The air conditioning system, I mean, God knows who, how old it is, but it blows that way. So we don't even get it. We're sitting here in like five degrees warmer than everyone behind us. It must be down low, I don't feel it. Yeah, a lot of capital needs. I think that's the long story short.
[Jack Buckley]: I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Medford's the 20th largest municipality in Massachusetts. We sometimes forget that. those have grown up here and live here. We look at this as like a nice bedroom community that we treat different, but we are a large city. We have large city problems and there are large city demands and that includes on funding and everything else that comes with it, right? But if with right systems in place, you overcome those troubles and you move forward and you correct them when you can correct them. So I always like to kind of point that out. I try to remind people that we are a large city police department with large city issues that we have to deal with. And I don't know why it sometimes gets lost. And I think it's just the feeling around here. It's a, Medford's got a unique feel and a unique community. It's a great community, right? And we feel close-knit and tight and sometimes like a town, large city, right? And we rank up there, so.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chief. A couple more questions. Just a clarification around staffing. So you said it's the, that minus 10 is a reduction in vacant positions, but not active layoffs.
[Jack Buckley]: Correct.
[Zac Bears]: At that level of 73, how many positions, or even across the whole 102, how many vacant positions are there?
[Jack Buckley]: We have 102 active police officers, counting the seven that are coming out of the police academy Friday.
[Zac Bears]: So there'll be no vacant positions as of Friday?
[Jack Buckley]: Based on that, yes, there will still be the 10 unfunded.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, yes, yes, just unfunded. Okay, that's helpful. Do you foresee any impact? I know this has been an issue on construction details of timing and staffing with the, going from the 83 to 73 patrol officers.
[Jack Buckley]: So the answer would be yes, right? And, but we, I think part of that is not just a staff and part of it's just a historical change, right? I mean, we have a lot of times in front of where this, We have a younger generation of police officers who are focusing on their careers and their jobs, and they're not as active as other police officers when I come out. desperate to buy a house and do all these sort of things to get this thing done and you're more active in the work a lot. We don't have as many personnel currently who work there who want to work. And so that's, it's one of our challenges on a daily basis is to get, you know, other, our officers to work a little bit more in and of themselves. So certainly though, coupled with that, if you lose 10 officers or you don't fund 10 offices, that's 10 additional offices you may lose for that. But last year we struggled, right? There was a lot of construction. in this city. And sometimes one large construction site is not a problem. It's when you have a construction site, a construction site, a construction site, and they impact each other, you're scrambling for extra bodies, and that's it. This year, we don't have that. We've worked with Eversource pretty carefully right now to try to get them out of the city and to kind of, you know, work with us and cooperate. And this year, that's how it's working. And so we're filling our construction details right now.
[Zac Bears]: All right, great. Yeah, wouldn't it be great 10 was it seven eight years now ever source has been with us. You mentioned a little bit the post stuff and the you know compliance with the state laws. Just wanted to you know, just want to clarify, you said that you know it's a lot of work it's taken a lot of time, but, but you feel like you're able to keep up with it or.
[Jack Buckley]: So we're keeping up with it, right? We're almost done. So it's going to be every year from now on, right? But the idea, I guess, is this is the first year, and they're doing A through H. And next year, they're going to do, that's brand new for all those offices and brand new for the chief of police. And next year after, it'll be I through, say, P, and that'll be brand new for those offices. But in three years time, it's just going to be repeat for the new offices. And systems will be done, and systems will be in place. The difficulty we're having is getting clarification from the post commission so that, and I don't necessarily always blame them, the legislature, just drafted this huge police reform packet, and they did so. And I'll say this, you know, freely from my position with a lot of it without a lot of input from police. One clear example is they just randomly picked letters a to H. Turns out HOH, it's like 10, 11,000 police officers in Massachusetts. It's a vast majority. They thought they were dividing it up equally, but we could have told them that that's not it. So little things like that are really causing a lot of problems. The standards, though, that we're being able to ask and judge and compare police officers, I will tell you without getting into it, on July 13th, the Post Commission addressed the Massachusetts Police Commission and delivered a message on June 14th to the chiefs of police that we got. And we all looked at it and said, this is due tomorrow. So little things like that are constantly changing, make us go back and redo work and make us reevaluate the things that we're doing. Having said all this, look, the theory of police reform and the theory of post commission and standardized police training and all this sort of stuff. I am a strong proponent of it. I am not a proponent of the cluster that they have created to try to get there. And they refuse to sort of But the legislation says we have to do this and make issues go forward. It is a nightmare for police departments and for police chiefs trying to figure this out. And so I mean, well, I won't get into the hours that you put into it, but it's, we'll get there eventually, right? And get it, but it is a lot of work.
[Zac Bears]: If there's one thing this council can sympathize with, at least in the past few weeks, it's floating deadlines and changing directives and not knowing exactly the information that we wish that we had. So I personally can sympathize with that. I know you've been dealing with it for a lot longer than the past few weeks. I noticed in the report that professional standards commander position was vacant. Has that been filled?
[Jack Buckley]: So it's in the process of being filled. So you asked me, are there any unfilled positions? I count that being filled, even though we're assessing that new captain now. And so that position will be filled and it still gives us the 73 police officers underneath it.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and then the last thing is, I'll just say is, you know, I think I'm not on the subcommittee, obviously, but I've been watching some of the meetings. And, you know, I think there's an ongoing conversation around surveillance technology, and I appreciate the engagement with that. And I'm hoping we can find a, you know, not to speak for the members subcommittee, of course. You know, I'm personally just looking forward to how those conversations play out and hopefully finding a an approach that works for everyone involved without putting too much more on the plate of the administration of your department.
[Jack Buckley]: Well, I will tell you I'm never shy to have a conversation. And you can see how long sometimes some of these conversations last with me. But I mean, I just always express, especially now this upcoming year, me losing 10 bodies doesn't mean that I'm going to do 10 less, 400 hours less hours of work a week, right? I have to replace that. I hesitate to use the term man I was but I think everyone knows what I'm talking about this there's a lot of things that have to be diverted to that and bringing in new systems is something that, you know, I'm going to be really cautious with because there's commitments that I'm willing to make if I can do them and if I can't, I can't. That being said, I think conversation is has been. better than I expected, right? You know, sometimes there's a fear that somebody's in there just to put a stranglehold on the police department, and there's been a lot of reasonableness, and I think we can eventually come to some terms. And so, you know, Council Collins has really been involved in that. We have a lot of good conversations. So, when not It's not a fear here, but it's just a management type situation. Like I can't, like, I will always say to you, I can't commit to something if I can't do it. I'm not going to promise you something and never fulfill it. And I want people just to understand that where we stand and what we can do as a police department and what we can't do. And, and thus far, we were listening and having those conversations and work on those things. So yeah, thank you. Yeah, it'll be, they are interesting conversations. I'm still waiting on a definition. Some of the things they talk about, they're really interesting. You can read the secret. I'm like, they really have this stuff. You're talking to a chief of police who's been here for 25 years. I'm like, that stuff exists. It's shocking to you sometimes.
[Zac Bears]: No, exactly. And I appreciate that response. I think that's kind of the approach of this council on everything is how can we find as much as possible, build consensus around something to make sure that what we implement is workable. And so I appreciate that collaboration. Those are all my questions. I'll go to Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Chief, I just got two questions for you. How many officers are going to be retiring this year through the wage?
[Jack Buckley]: I believe there's three.
[Richard Caraviello]: Three. And will they be replaced immediately? Are you getting people ready to go into a class?
[Jack Buckley]: So if the budget turns out to end up being the way it is, right, I will have the funds to put three more. We actually have from our last round, three offices on conditional letters of employment, right? So they would never hide because their standards of that you have to pass certain physical fitness standards to be able to get into a police academy and we wanted them in the police academy, they were unable to make that. But these are You know, it's a really good diverse three police officers in there that I would love to get on this police department, so I would be pushing to fund those right away and get them to a police academy.
[Richard Caraviello]: And then one last question is, are you going to let the retirees do details and work when you're short staffed? I know this, but if you want to be the private chief, the private chief, I know he was dead against it. I don't know where you stand on it.
[Jack Buckley]: I've drafted two forms of agreements with the unions right now. The first one, of course, was to have just a retiree who might go out and look like me, right? And then post-commissioner actually put the kibosh on that, right? They put a lot of restrictions. Even if you're a police officer who's retired working, you have to go through certification and all this training, this and that. And it didn't turn out It's not gonna be feasible for us to do this. So then we spent a lot of time redrafting language for retired police officers to work in a civilian capacity, right? Baseball hat, maybe khakis.
[Richard Caraviello]: I mean, I see them in other cities.
[Jack Buckley]: They have all the experience in the world. They're taught and trained to care. We would still give them, you know, first aid responder, CPR training and all this sort of stuff. And we could get those out in the street. As of right now, and I don't want to put this that it's on the table of the unit. So this chief of police is willing to stop them tomorrow with with everyone. I mean, I know you struggle.
[Richard Caraviello]: I know you struggle with this. I say no matter where you go, this whole state is construction going on and everyone's looking for detail officers.
[Jack Buckley]: So if we could if we could make that happen. I mean, you have spoken with the mayor and she's in support of it herself. And so it's almost ready to go. It's just you know, it's And maybe I'll just attribute it to one of those things that may be falling through the cracks a little bit with how busy everything is. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Thank you, Chief. Let's maybe move to, I believe you guys are presenting traffic supervisors and traffic commission as well.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, so we are. So, and these are generally a lot easier, right? So I can, I'm looking just right at my budget. So traffic supervisors, there's a slight decrease. We went from, we're on a budget, we're looking for $344,875. and last year, it was just maybe, you know, 1500 dollars more. Sorry, I didn't do the math on this one. Simply, we have 25 traffic supervisor post positions. We fill those traffic supervisor positions. That's their salary. It's a monthly salary and we provide under ordinary expenses, their uniforms, right? They get boots and uniforms. That's all of that is. It's essentially level funded across the board for those positions and on its face value, that's what it is to provide the salaries and the uniforms.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chief. Any questions, Councilor Caraviello?
[Richard Caraviello]: Chief, walkie-talkies for the traffic supervisors. The leftover ones, I'm over them again. I've heard from some of the people that do it that, you know, I know they're not supposed to be policemen, but people think they're policemen and you know they kind of get abused a little bit. I know they try to direct traffic as best as possible, but sometimes they get into a little bit of a jam. do we have extra walkie talkies hanging around the building that they get? So it's a safety issue.
[Jack Buckley]: So when we built the new station and now we're looking at a year and a half or so when we got new portable radios, right? We have our old ones and we're gonna run them through a system to make sure, I mean, we do need 25 of them, so it's not that easy. The difficult part is if we don't make the 25, they're pretty expensive radios, right? They're six, seven, $8,000 they can be up to. But we're thinking that we can do that. We can provide it. get it, you know, you're out there and you cross and things can happen and it's a safety issue for them. And I, you know, we've delegated that to look at for this next school year. And so it is a strong possibility that could happen, but no promise because I haven't tested the equipment yet. It's been sitting there for about a year.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Caraviello. Any further questions on traffic supervisors? I just had one question, Chief.
[Jack Buckley]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: How many, do you know how many of these are vacant? Are we able to staff all our needs around this?
[Jack Buckley]: going to ask you if I could just make it and make a comment on all of that stuff. So, we continue to you know, need, we're in a continual need for a traffic supervisor. This is a great job, right? It's a pretty good salary. You, you, you, depending on your post, you're working, you know, like an hour in the morning, an hour afternoon. Pardon me if I get those exact hours wrong but it, it's, it's and there's union benefits that go with it. a level of sort of really excellent work coming out of our traffic supervisors for many, many years, and now they're starting to retire, right? They're starting to get sick and retire. And when we had that last year, when school kind of back in session, we were moving, we were missing a lot of traffic supervisors, and we cannot, we could not find quality replacements for them. Do they have to retire at 65? They do not, no. So if anyone would put the word out, we try to do it on social media. We are looking. It is a, like I'm telling you, it's a fantastic job. I truly appreciate all the work that they do. But the workforces, they've been there many years. And some of them are planning retirement for this upcoming year. And the biggest part of the problem I had, there were times last year where there might have been five or six traffic supervisors off duty and not working. I have no other replacement for that. And it was getting extremely difficult because what we do is, if one is out, we'll put a police officer to cover that hour or half. I can't do five, I can't do six. And now we're looking at posts that are going to be unfilled because, I mean, I do have to provide a level of police service. And these are children, right? And so it's a major problem that I hope to avoid in this fall. So if we can get the word out publicly that we're hiring, and it's a great career, come work for the city of Medford traffic supervisors, and it's union contractual benefits. And, you know, come on, come on, let's just get to work. And we'll train you. give you radios and move it back up. But yes, that is always an issue for us over the last couple of years. And we've been spoiled because that workforce has done, they've been great for us. They've come year after year, they show up. And now it's just, it's one of those things that time is moving on and some of them are thinking about retirement or taking an active role in retirement. And we need to find a workforce to replace them. Otherwise, I mean, the alternative is closing down bus stops and traffic routes. And I don't, you know, I will do whatever I can to avoid that. And so we have to find a workforce. So if you're out there and you're looking for work, stop by city hall, apply for traffic supervisors.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, chief. I appreciate that answer. And, you know, hopefully we can see what we can do to get the word out around that in concert with the city. Any further questions on the traffic supervisors? All right, let's move to the traffic commission. I'm seeing no change, but if you have any comment.
[Jack Buckley]: No, no change. I mean, I was just gonna, I don't have that. Oh, great, great, yeah. No change, yeah, there it is. Where's that? I have bifocal contacts. It puts stuff. It just goes crazy. So it's no real change. And again, the traffic commission, I think everyone's familiar traffic commission, but there are times that we order, um, you know, okay. Uh, stop sign has to go up there and a line painting here or something, anything that's traffic related that we need to do and change handicap signs, but we need the materials and the contractor work to do this. And that's what this funds on a year to year basis. and we've survived with that budget for a couple of years. It seems to work. You know, some years it gets busier than others but other than that, I think we would survive level funded with that and moving forward.
[Zac Bears]: Any questions on the traffic commission? I have one. Um just on in terms of kind of the policy of how decisions are made. I know that, you know, and I'm not discounting it at all. I know that resident input is is significantly considered in decision making This is my characterization. If you want to dispute it, I'm more than open to that dispute. That maybe even resident input is sometimes coming ahead of best practice in certain cases. You know, there's been some suggestions for some intersection fixes and things of that nature that really would improve safety significantly. But, you know, residents are, you know, I don't want to park 10 feet further down the street. So I don't want to get the intersection fixed. Is that something that the traffic commission is working on in terms of how it makes decisions to kind of move in the direction more of a best practice or safety first model.
[Jack Buckley]: So, yes, and let me see if I get without this isn't a dispute I actually sort of sort of agree with you, it's just, it's how it's happening. Yeah. We've become accustomed over the traffic commission historically hasn't had the. They've been very busy, they do a lot of things, resident private parking here and there, they've helped this community tremendously. But the city's changing a lot right and a lot of the demands that people now want intersections fixed and intersections changed, I want a traffic light put up at these things. These are all things that are under the purview of the Traffic Commission to approve. Yeah, the problem is is they're multi million dollar projects.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Jack Buckley]: And you do not want to just have, you know, I don't think the process should be that the residents of the neighborhood could come here and then the traffic was to say, yeah, go ahead and put that light up and then you know the DPW commissioners looking at me said, who's going to pay for that because you just, you know, you're looking at approving a budget that doesn't have anywhere near the amount of funds to do that. What's changed for us in the city right now is we've have a traffic engineer. So, you know, Todd and Amy do a tremendous amount of work. And so I'm working with the traffic commission to kind of think about and understand the process that maybe the neighborhoods need to go through the engineers and they should look at budgets and what they have and what projects are lined up and design things and come up with ideas. because I'm not a traffic engineer. I know Todd and Amy show up at all the meetings, but if, if, if neighborhood comes and says, we want, you know, a four way intersection with lights there here on there. And I'm like, okay, good, go ahead. And then they come back and say that $6 million and I'm looking at it. Rather have a go through that process first and whatever's proved, have that full approved plan. That's already been vetted through the city. The traffic engineers have already come up with plans and designs. We know that where it is that comes to the traffic commission and then we rule on that. the community input could be there but then when we do talk with the community and we present these plans there's at least some science behind it or some some thought behind it rather than you know I mean I'm a police chief we have an economic development the DPW commission but you know I know a lot about road safety but I'm not a traffic engineer I think the process is just just needs to be tweaked and how they started and how they get there we've become accustomed in the city to sending everybody the traffic commission for a solution And yeah, it's easy for me if you want me to decide there's a stop sign, right? But when you want to redesign intersections, it's fast becoming one of the major issues. Everybody wants their corner redesigned and intersections and major intersections, but it's faulty to come directly to the traffic commission with that. I think we should just reverting it back. I think it should be going to the because the prioritization of they already do this. They already prioritize projects. They already know where the funding's coming from. They already know how to do the job and ultimately, when that is all designed and done, it comes to the traffic commission for approval because we approve regulatory tech techs, right? And so, we we have the authority to approve a a traffic light in this thing. It's not the design of it. It's just that the fact that it Yeah, community import, but I think it has to go in a different direction, not just a traffic commission. I can't go directly to it. So I hope that made sense when I sort of explained it.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Just to kind of give a little follow up in a little more detail. I'm going to try to avoid litigating a very specific case. But, you know, this council has had site visits in neighborhoods over the past couple years with residents looking at, you know, little neighborhood, different neighborhood intersections or roads, conditions, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is just a straight up road condition DPW and then they go through their process and assess it maybe they would then come to you for certain changes. But you know, for example, there was a quick build kind of proposal for Mr. Blake. for an intersection that would have just been paint and, you know, a flex post, that kind of thing. So not one of those high cost, you know, total redesigns. And, you know, my understanding of it is that, you know, we had like 25 people out saying, this is great at our site visit. You know, people didn't end up coming to the traffic commission. There's one person who's really not happy about the change and it's on the table. You know, is that something that you're looking at kind of,
[Jack Buckley]: Is it really just like we have to get the people to turn up at the traffic commission meeting, or is it possible that, you know, so a little bit of both right we yeah yeah when those issues come up there right we need to get it out there we need to have more people in the community to show up at the traffic commission and kind of have their report on what it goes. The second part of that is it. If, if, if Todd and the traffic engineer Todd name you put together a plan and they say hey listen we've looked at this we think it's deserve it to be there, and we think this will suffice like these line paintings and these columns will satisfy us and get us through that. And one neighbor objects, I think you're gonna see the traffic commission, I'm only one commissioner, but I think you see the traffic commission say, of course, you're the experts and you have to make the community safe, we'll lean towards that. And so we want that sort of backing when we go to those public meetings. But the second aspect of that is true, we need more people to show up at the traffic commission.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, thank you, I appreciate it. I think we artfully avoided being too specific. We did. Any further questions on the traffic commission? I wanna just open up for public participation on the police budget, the traffic commission and the traffic supervisors. If you are in the room and you'd like to participate, please feel free to come to the podium. If you're on Zoom, please feel free to raise your hand. Seeing none, thank you, chief. And thank you to everyone, all of you for coming. We appreciate, of course, all the work that you do. And this was shorter than 2020, I'll say that.
[Jack Buckley]: And 2021. Yes, thank you. And again, I do appreciate the time. I do appreciate the conversation. And I appreciate the support. So thank you for everyone. I'm getting out here a lot earlier than I thought, so.
[Zac Bears]: Take food, please, if you would like to take some food. We thought maybe there'd be more people, so feel free. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.
[Richard Caraviello]: Mr. President, Councilor Caraviello. At the time, you know, we've all kind of gone off track. If we can kind of limit our questions to the budget. I know we've all asked questions that don't really relate to the budget, but when we get a bunch of go ahead and we keep, we're going to be here for like a minute. Yes. We could sort of limit our questions to budget questions. I'm involved as much as I'll say it. But yeah, as I said, we got a lot more to do here. We'll be here for quite some time if we just keep discussing things that really irrelevant to the budget.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello. And just to note for the public and for the clerk, Councilor Scarpelli is moving over to Zoom for the rest of the meeting. Next, we can take up elections, elections department.
[Unidentified]: Good evening.
[Zac Bears]: We have Director Gail here to present. Oh, I have a hand up for the chief of staff.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. Thank you, vice president bears. I, I hadn't, um, expected, uh, elections coordinator, Sandy Yale to present this evening. I apologize for the confusion. Obviously we don't have a position, the position filled for that department at this time. But I certainly defer to the council, either she or I could present this evening. Obviously, I may have my own comments. We've recently posted the position.
[Richard Caraviello]: Did she make the budget?
[Zac Bears]: The question to Chief of Staff's area is, did the coordinator Gail create the budget?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you very much, Vice President Bears and Councilor Caraviello. The budget was created as a combination between the budget director, myself, and we did consult with elections coordinator Gail. Obviously, elections coordinator Gail has some of the more detailed information on the matter. So there is gonna definitely be questions that I would wanna defer to her on.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. I mean, it's not really up to us to decide who should present it. If you believe that Coordinator Gale should present it, we're more than happy to have her present it. Yeah.
[Nina Nazarian]: I'm happy to defer to Coordinator Gale and then jump in if there's any additional comments that I have. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you.
[Gale]: Good evening.
[Zac Bears]: If you could just point the microphone towards you, sorry, Sandy. Thank you.
[Gale]: Good evening. First, I'd like to humbly thank the administration for allowing me to present this. This budget was created back in April with help from one of the people in finance, the assistant director at the time. And it had some changes and Nina and I have discussed those changes. I mean, the chief of staff and I have discussed those changes. So I would like just to read our small overview of our department. The registrar voters election office conducts elections and maintains vital voter registration data for the city of Medford. Essentially we work for the residents of the city of Medford. The office tracks and maintains voter registration data Office staff registers new voters, documents applications for absentee and mail-in ballots, processes the ballots cast for early voting, maintains and securely stores blank and processed ballots for all elections. We follow and adhere to all city, state, and federal voting laws. Each full-time person is trained in the operation and use of the Poll Pat system. The poll pad system for those of you who don't know allows us to create our own database for voting elections, meaning that rather than sending it out to a vendor, the vendors come and will train us on how to do it so it can be uploaded to the poll pad and reduce the amount of paper. That was very important to us is that we get sort of in the 21st century and go a little more green. We also are trained in the Office of Campaign Finance, State Ethics Commission, and record retention. We maintain a current list of eligible voters, as well as all residents for the city of Medford. On March 29th, we separated from the city clerk's office. In that time, we have confirmed three election commissioners by collaboration with the mayor's office and the city council. We've scheduled community-wide voter registration, and we are participating currently in the anonymous voting program sponsored by Secretary Galvin's office. We created and implemented a supervised voting program for nursing homes, for those facilities, so their votes are protected, and we know that the votes are accurate. Through ARPA money and support of the mayor, We have purchased new voting booths. There's one in that corner and there's one to my right behind me. This is the first time in 39 years, the city has purchased new voting equipment. Additionally, with the support of the mayor and through ARPA money, we purchased poll pads to take Medford into the 21st century. with voting. We make a pledge to reduce paper as much as possible, and we're implementing a community-wide education service and series. We've done the series once in May. It was extremely popular. With the help of the Medford Cable TV, we're going to run the same series that were recorded in October again. I think it's very important that the voters of Medford understand the terminology and how things are progressing. Some of the upcoming critical issues that we have is cybersecurity. In the last 24 hours, we have received three requests for two online trainings for cybersecurity as well as an in-person training that's being offered by Secretary Galvin's office. The reason that cybersecurity is so important for this election season, this is what is considered the federal midterm election. And they are thinking, higher up thinking cybersecurity people, that actors will begin dry runs of how to infiltrate every election system, be it by application or whatever, showing up and saying I'm so-and-so and I'm registered to vote. So there's a lot of training that's going to have to go around for not just office staff, commissioners, but for poll workers too. The other piece of that is poll workers are going to have to be trained. And this is still in conversations and talks about different scenarios and how to diffuse them on election day. the dry run would be for the 2024 presidential election. So those are the things that we're working on. It would be our goal to continue with the community-wide voter education series, as well as collaborative projects with the Medford High School. One of the commissioners and myself did a registration up there in June, and it was amazing to me how many young people are going off to college in the fall and didn't realize that they could still vote in their own city or town. So in conversations with staff at the high school, it was brought to my attention that perhaps I could go there in October and educate these young people on the importance of voting, why it's important that you vote in your hometown, because you're gonna go to college and then you're gonna come back and you're still gonna be a resident here. We continue to offer professional five-star customer service, so each voter and resident knows their value and importance. Their voice, which is their vote, is very, very important to us. We work collaboratively with other departments, DPW, the police department, and community development to increase the response to our annual street listing and city census. And I'd be happy to take any questions that you may have on the budget.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Questions from the council. I have a few, oh, Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Vice President Bears, and thank you so much, Sandy, for being here today and taking us through your budget. This all, you know, is very comprehensive. My question is more of a general one. I know that, you know, across all of City Hall, you know, the belt is being tightened this year by necessity. I see that your department is overall taking about a 13.5% deduction from last year. I know that a lot of thought went into those strategic reductions. I also know that the profile of an office such as yours is only getting more important as time goes on. Just earlier today, I was listening to the news about the midterms. I think that as with a lot of issues, we would be remiss to think that election security, streamlining of elections, modernizing, professionalizing of elections is something that Medford doesn't have to be. concerned about. So I'm really glad to see the focus so far that's been put on this office in our city. And I guess I'm curious overall, what your through this budget, you know, do you feel empowered to do the work that you think needs to be done by this fall for going forward? And what would be what would be the key priorities in your mind for making sure that we're ready for 2024?
[Gale]: Thank you, Councilor Collins for that question. I did have an opportunity to speak with Chief of Staff Nazarian prior to this meeting. And one of the line items that concerned me, actually there were two, is the salaries part-time. And initially when the budget was done back in April, I believe it was bumped to 65,000. Now what comes out of that salaries part-time is everybody and everything elections. So in the city right now, well, as of last year, it costs us about $26,000. That is early voting, the mail-out voting, the in-person voting at the polling locations. So I did speak with Chief of Staff Nazarian about raising that back up. It had been cut to 61, and I asked to go back to the 65 because this is the first election season coming off of re-precincting. There's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done. You have an entire city of 41,000 voters, give or take, that don't know where they're supposed to go vote. So it's our responsibility to make sure that they know which polling location they're going to. And then on the splits that the legislature so creatively created for us, Um, one of them has 66 registered voters, and one of them has 77 registered voters. That's not enough voters to constitute opening a new polling location. So what we've been given permission by the state to do is one of them is 6-2-A. 6-2 is the Brooks School. So we'll run 6-2-A with the 77 voters out of that precinct, but I have to have two inspectors and two pullpacks to go with that. The warden and their ballots will look a little bit different, but they'll still be able to be fed through the same machine. I've been in contact with LHS as the vendor to create the disks to be able to read those two separate ballots. I have the same issue in 72 and 72A. There are 66 active voters in that polling location and we'll do the same thing there. So that's four additional staff. Right now, I had one orientation. I am concerned about having enough staff. It's, if people are watching the news every day, it's tough everywhere to get election workers. So the ones that I get and that I have, I want to keep. That line item is the one that I really would like to see boosted back to where it was. The other line item that got cut, and I'm sure this was just an oversight, was overtime clerical. So the two remaining people, because of the structure that I suggested and the Chief of Staff agreed to, in the Department of Elections or Registrar of Voters or whatever it ends up being, we've cut one position. So the office has always been maintained by three full-time people. And then we've brought in temporary, say 20 to 25 hours a week, four weeks prior to the election to help us process everything that comes in, which is all about scanning. So it's not something that anybody can key enter, but it's scanning. And that's a tremendous help to us. Or they answer the phones because they're ringing off the hooks. they took out all of the overtime for clerical. So I asked that $12,000 be put back in that line item to cover the overtime for the two existing positions that are in that office. And those are the two things that really jumped out at me. I wanted to be more detailed initially when I did this. I wanted to be more detailed about exactly what was being spent on what. And if you go to data processing, the $22,000 that's there, that money is there for the annual street listing. My hope is that by the time next year comes and the system has all been cleaned up and I can The schedule to do that is November the 10th. So confirmation cards are being in the process of being mailed out. They'll go out, the inactive voters will be notified that you are now on the inactive list. If you wanna vote, you either need to do the census or you need to sign an affirmation and show ID at a polling location to vote. That makes you an active voter. My hope is that I do not have to spend that much money, as much money as I spent this year, to send out the annual street listing and then the confirmation notices.
[Kit Collins]: So. Great. Thank you very much. That's very helpful. And just, I didn't catch it the first time. What was the amount that you had originally wanted to see for clerical overtime?
[Gale]: Thank you.
[Kit Collins]: Appreciate it very much.
[Gale]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Just one question. I know we're doing the senior abatement program again this year. Will some of those people be assigned to your office to help you?
[Gale]: That is still in discussion at this time. I can't say for sure or not at this time. So that is, it is something that I know that's out there. The issue is the technology that we use. And some are fearful of it. So it has to be the right fit. Yes. You're welcome.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello. I had a few questions. You know, this Council has made it very clearly a priority to improve and, you know, essentially single-handedly to improve the governance of the Elections Department, to modernize the department, to bring it into the 21st century, to staff it properly, and to make sure that there is, you know, a fully staffed modern elections department in the city of Medford that's getting everything right. And, you know, And then I don't mean everything right on election day, that's been the one thing that's been going well, it's everything right the other 363 days a year. And now that's changed too with early voting and mail voting, there's an election months before an election instead of election days. One thing that really perturbs me here and disturbs me quite frankly here is that this budget's being reduced after a year in which it was significantly increased because the, maintenance and operations of elections is so much more difficult now than it used to be. Just today, the Votes Act became law.
[George Scarpelli]: That's correct.
[Zac Bears]: Permanent mail-in voting is now the law. Extended early voting is now the law.
[Gale]: Correct.
[Zac Bears]: Now down to, I think, 10 days before the election, you can register, and from 20. I mean, the needs and the demands on an elections department by state law just grew immensely. But instead, in this budget, we're cutting. the budget for elections. And I'll just, you know, I don't think I need to remind anyone, this is a democracy, right? This is a democratic government. I was elected, you know, the mayor was elected, the school committee was elected, my fellow Councilors were elected, and this is the department that manages the process by which we are elected. Nevermind the fact that we also elect state representatives and state senators and federal officials, and we're about to elect a new governor. And from what I can tell, we're cutting the head count when the workload's going up. And that just is really worrying to me. And I know that it's quote unquote difficult times and quote unquote, we can't find anything anywhere. We're not talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. We're talking in the tens of thousands of dollars here to have the adequate funding that we need for elections. One of our council priorities really focused around elections as well. So, you know, this question. My first question I'll go to is around the re-precincting. This is our first election where we have new precincts in the city of Medford. We do it once every 10 years after the census. That means that the lines have shifted. And so some people are in a new polling place. Do we have a budget in this? Is there any money in this budget to send the postcards out to let voters know about their new polling places? No, okay, so we're not going to be able to let voters know. that their polling place may have changed.
[Gale]: And that may have been my error that I did not include it at the time. Okay. So that very well could be my own error. But when I look at professional services and training, professional services, the money could come from there for those postcards. The issue with the postcards is you have the confirmation mailing that's going out within the next week. So I wanted to get those out by the end of June. And then I don't want to mail the polling location postcards until the end of July. right at the end of July so that you've got, and there'll be other ways that we can put where you're voting. Mass.gov, the Secretary of State site is absolutely fabulous for anybody who has access to a computer. You can go right there. It will tell you where you go to vote. So we want to do reverse robocalls and send out a postcard and post the actual street index that I just received that data today for the street index and I will work with tomorrow reconfiguring the data and then I have to separate it out the way the extracts come in from the state. It's a little bit of a process. So I should have that completed by Friday and then hopefully we can get that up on the website which may also help let voters know because I think what you're going to find is at least 80% of people's voting locations shifted to accommodate that 4,000 resident number, not voters, but residents, plus or minus 5% in each polling location.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. On the re-preceding as well, is there any know, I believe the way that the process worked, again, the state jumped out in front of us, they made their district lines before we made our precinct lines. Does that have any budgetary impact? Is there going to need to be additional staff in precincts where there's any, you know, where there may be a precinct that's divided between two districts, two legislative districts, state representative districts?
[Gale]: No, I don't believe so. And by using the poll pads, the beauty of the poll pad is it is an electronic device that is not connected to wifi. So we upload the data here and then whatever is in that poll pad goes out to the polling location. So for example, if your regular polling place was say one, one, which is the Andrews middle school, and you went to the Andrews middle school, and they typed in your name, your name would appear there, but it would tell you the voter is in the wrong location they need to go to, and then it would give the correct polling location.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, thank you. My last question is just going to be around some of the staffing around the budget. Is there, as far as you're aware, could you give me an estimate of how many, obviously there used to be three, now going to be two full-time staff, but there's also all of the people who come in for the election months, election season. Could you give me an estimate of how many people you manage in a given year?
[Gale]: Probably around 90.
[Zac Bears]: Around 90, okay. And then I guess, I'll ask you and then I'll potentially ask the Chief of Staff, as it was a council priority and we heard it wasn't going to be included in the budget. Where is the department head position in this budget.
[Gale]: I didn't see all I saw was elections coordinator slash manager. Okay. And I didn't see. I know that that, you know, in that specific title. I didn't see. Department head.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Madam Chief of Staff, can I ask you the same question, where's the department head position in the budget.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, Council Vice President Bears. As was posted to the city's website today, and I believe elections coordinator Gail is aware of that posting, the city posted, actually it was yesterday if I'm not mistaken, the elections manager position, which would be the department head position. So that is there in the budget and is presented on that paper accordingly.
[Zac Bears]: Is there anyone in a department head position who has a title of just manager in the city of Medford?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, Vice President Bears, we do have those positions.
[Zac Bears]: Could you name them please?
[Nina Nazarian]: Facilities, and we also have, I'm trying to think of others off the top of my mind, but not immediately coming to mind. We do have a federal funds manager that's kind of a It's not a direct department head position, but it's quasi in some ways.
[Zac Bears]: What is the budgeted amount for the facilities manager salary?
[Nina Nazarian]: I don't have that information in front of me at this moment, but I can attempt to pull it up.
[Zac Bears]: I will look it through my sheets of paper and see if I can find it. Sorry about that. Take me just a minute. Page number. Facilities Managers, oh, and it's actually not a manager, it's Facilities and Grounds Director is the title of the position, and it's 96,638. And that position manages zero headcount employees. Is there any department head, and since the one example is actually not a manager, it's director, is there any department head that manages up to 90 full-time and part-time employees per year that is only being paid at a rate of $70,000 per year?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you vice president bears. So, I am not able to answer that question at this point in time I'd have to analyze different pieces of information but allow me for one moment to. explain the process that the city went through to determine the appropriate CAF on this. And I will also say that the city looks at these types of ranges and these types of CAFs, not only using data that comes from external sources, but also looks at that information from the purposes, perspective of internal equity and that's critically important here. So we received information that we collected through our human resources department as to positions for elections department head type roles. In addition, Sandy, our elections coordinator Gail was kind enough to share information that she had collected from other communities. When taking out communities that are not the same size or not even comparable to the same size of the city of Medford, we found ourselves in a reasonable range to assign a CAF 12 to this position. Obviously, this would need to go before the council to be CAFed. And obviously, when we looked at that data, all of that data, plus we considered the information that was in front of us with other CAFs across the organization, we develop the CAF that is being presented here. The CAF that is shown is the lowest step one of that range, which is not uncommon for the city to potentially have four different positions when it is posting a position. It very well may be that the city needs to hire somebody to hire CAF and would need to either allocate those resources through the existing budget or in some other way, if appropriate. Again, if I said CAF in that statement, I meant to say STEP. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: When you say equity, internal equity, could you define that please?
[Nina Nazarian]: Absolutely. It's important that we look at positions that the organization has, and that we don't find ourselves in a scenario. As an example, the city council had presented and proposed a calf 16 which, frankly, I don't It's really not appropriate in my opinion for the city council to state what calf a position should be at. But a calf 16 would be higher than many of our department head positions, as an example, and in terms of job complexity and that's why this. role is one that has to be done this this classification process has to be done, and a comprehensive manner across the entire organization. We do our best while we're working on a classification and compensation study to evaluate internal positions in comparison with job complexity And to your point, Vice President Bears, direct reports, responsibilities, amount of, you know, the specific criteria of the job, there's a process by which that is all evaluated under a comprehensive classification and compensation study.
[Zac Bears]: Well, I appreciate that you've given a response. I think there's no higher responsibility than the proper administration of the democratic process and that equates to the governance of the city of Medford. And just looking at the budget, so we've been presented as we've looked at every department so far, I can't see any department head position that's been with so many direct reports and with such a high level of complexity, responsibility and need to comply with state law that's been treated in such a way. So thank you. Are there any further questions for the elections department? Councilor Caraviello. Madam Chief of Staff, the question is, when will the administration be proposing a new cap for the position.
[Nina Nazarian]: At this point in time I don't have a specific schedule but obviously we would probably want to come before the City Council as quickly as possible. I haven't looked at the City Council's calendar for the summer months, but taking into consideration as quickly as possible in the summer months, if not July.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Anything further on elections? Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. If you'll indulge me I know we just had a reminder to stick to strictly line item related questions but I just did want to state for the record and thank you. I'll just preface by saying thank you chief of staff Nazarian for your responses and thank you again coordinator girl for being here. But I appreciate your going just a little bit into the issue of, you know, proper funding for the part time roles to make sure that you have the capacity that you and by you I really mean the city needs to make sure that our upcoming election which will be here really before we know it goes smoothly goes the way that we need it to go securely, you know, leaves everybody feeling secure. know, the issue of funding is an issue of being able to attract candidates, being able to retain candidates. I know that that's a concern of yours because you have a vested interest in making sure the election goes well. That's your job. Just speaking for myself as a councillor, to echo Vice President Bears' point, looking at the functioning of the elections office overall, I have the same concerns about you know, the most top line staff members, you know, that we have to carry out city business, that issue of making sure that we are offering the level of funding to maintain the capacity that we really need to serve our most essential function. So I just wanted to state that for the record. You know, as it's been said, I know this is a very, very difficult budget decision, but These elections are coming up too fast. These problems, you know, the issue of modernizing our elections department, I would characterize an issue to confront and solve with urgency. These things are so much on the short-term horizon that it's really hard for me to countenance putting off an essential investment to make sure that these things go the way that they need to. So thank you for indulging me. I just wanted to say that for the record.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Collins. Anything further on elections?
[Richard Caraviello]: Mr. President, one last question. Like we've done in the past, we've put the horse before the cart again. I mean, we shouldn't be posting a job until this council approves it first. So again, just a procedural thing. And that's how we've gotten into some pretty sticky positions in here over the past. Yeah. So I would think the prudent practice would be before you post a job, send it to the council and approve the cap. What if you go and hire somebody and we don't approve the cap?
[Zac Bears]: Apparently, they just get paid anyway, even though we don't have a full opinion allowing it.
[Richard Caraviello]: The proper procedure should be coming to us first to approve the position with the cap before you post the job.
[Zac Bears]: Madam Chief of Staff, I see your hand up. Is that a further comment?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, thank you. A couple of different things I want to touch on. I'll go in reverse order. The first is the question presented by Councilor Caraviello with regard to the posting of the CAF or the approval of the CAF by the city council. There is no specific order in which the CAF must be approved or the budget must be approved. Both obviously need to be done. In the case of a specific In the case of one specific calf that we have not been successful in getting approved by the city council, historically I won't touch on that and I don't think it's relevant to tonight's discussion and to be brief and ensure that we're utilizing the city council's time appropriately. All I will continue to say is at this point, we would be presenting both before anything final is is extended as an offer. That's one of the first things, the next thing and I wish I didn't have to do this but I want to make sure that the record contains the facts on this budget specifically. This budget was, my understanding, and I didn't participate in all the direct communications between Coordinator Gale and our budget manager, but my understanding was that this budget was originally submitted by Coordinator Gale to our budget manager. That original submission had a amount of part-time salaries for poll workers as $55,000, despite the statements that were made here tonight. Furthermore, this revised budget was shared with coordinator Gail and at the time we did discuss and discuss back and forth the matter of. the fact that one position could be removed. Coordinator Gale appeared to be in support of that. And we have email communication exchange on that subject. In fact, I felt very supported. I felt the organization was very supported by Coordinator Gale at the time, because at that point in time, it was clear that Coordinator Gale felt that everyone needed to chip in into this budget matter to support these costs. We made adjustments, we went back and forth, and I believe that this budget reflects what was agreed upon by coordinator Gail and myself in this budgetary process, which obviously I also went through other channels on to get other stakeholders to make sure I wasn't making any mistakes or having any oversights. I'm not sure if there are any other specific things, but I just wanted to mention that the overtime elections line also does not appear to have ever been questioned before this evening. So again, I wish I didn't have to make these comments, but I think it's important for me to make sure that the record is set straight as to what interactions I had and what communications I had on this subject. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam Chief of Staff. Just before that, for the record, there are significant discrepancies you know, at least $6,000 between what's before us now and what was quoted by the top line sheet that was given to us by the city administration as the 2023 original requested. There is a reduction of at least $6,000 from what we got in that top line sheet. I know of course there was a question as to, you know, every number that I've stated throughout the entire budget process has been given to me by the city administration and confirmed by the city administration in some capacity or another. coordinator Gail.
[Gale]: I want it to be known clear that in no way did I ever disagree with the cutting of one full-time position. in the registrar voters office, the elections department. That's not what I'm disputing at all. The office, as I said, has been maintained for a long time. it was maintained with two full-time people and one temporary person. In 2019, that third person was brought on as permanent full-time. So I absolutely did and had communication with Chief of Staff Nazarian about that. It was which position were we going to do away with? So the office is still maintained by three full-time staff. Now, I'm confused because the budget that I initially received from Chief of Staff Nazarian last Wednesday night at 933. I was having a little difficulty understanding exactly what I was seeing. And I went to finance and asked Mr. Lovell for help. And he came over and looked at what I had and said, no, that's not the budget you are supposed to be looking at. I then received from Mr. Lovell, the budget that I'm operating off of, which is salaries part-time, FY23 proposed $64,000. So if I misquoted by 1,000, I'm sorry, but what I have is FY23 proposed $64,000. And if you look to the column change, FY22 to FY23, it was $61,000 because I needed those election workers. This budget has never been done in a way that you know exactly what you're getting for your money. And when I created this budget back in April, I was line iteming everything to detail because I wanted everyone to know, but in no uncertain terms, do I want anyone to misunderstand that I agreed with Chief of Staff Nazarian in regards to one of the positions being cut and what the one that we cut was the lowest position in the office. So I just wanna put that on the record. We did exchange emails. I did email her this morning regarding the concerns I had. First, it was about that line item. And then I think my problem was I just had multiple budgets because I didn't see the one that was coming before the council until last night. So it is different than, what I had to work with, receiving it last week.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Coordinator Gale. And yeah, I believe we, if I can just find it all here. Yeah, you know, we received these budgets within the past two to three days as well. So, um, I know there's been a lot of drafts going around. I think again, this speaks to the city council's wish that, uh, you know, that a more It would have been nice to see how the budget was developed and the assumptions that were made to reach the initial proposals and then the proposals after amendments requiring cuts since June 2nd. I think we've made extensively that case and sent a number of resolutions regarding that to the administration. So I won't belabor it, but just again, it's another point of confusion in a series of points of confusion. Any further questions on the elections department? Thank you, Coordinator. Thank you, Madam Chief of Staff for co-presenting. Maybe we could go through a couple of these, bang out a couple of quick ones. Start with the Chevalier Theater. Then maybe we could look at the Licensing Commission, Bicycle Commission. Chevalier Theater. Any presentation on the Chevalier Theater, Madam Chief of Staff?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, thank you, Vice President Bears. On this budget, it's a level funded budget, but I would like to mention that there were some requests from the Chevalier Commission. One in particular was a replacement of a fire alarm panel. Since that was a capital item that was referred to be placed on the capital improvements plan. So that's gonna be worked into making sure that that's captured in the capital improvements plan. And then secondly, request was for HVAC maintenance and the guidance that was provided to the contact at the Chevalier Commission was that we would include that in the facilities budget. So that's all I have on this subject. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Any questions from the Council on the Chevalier Theatre? Any questions from the public on the Chevalier Theatre? Seeing none, we'll move to the licensing commission. We don't actually have that sheet in front of us. It's one that was only included in the digital budget book. I will go to it now just so that I can, if my fellow councilors don't have the benefit of a screen nearby. Let me see if I can find it. License commission, no change, 5,800. Any presentation regarding the license commission, Madam Chief of Staff?
[Nina Nazarian]: Not in particular, just that it's a level funded board and committee.
[Zac Bears]: All right, any questions from the council? Seeing none, any questions from the public? Seeing none, we'll move to the Bicycle Commission. I will pull that one up. Bicycle Advisory Commission, $1,500, no change. Madam Chief of Staff, if you have any presentation.
[Nina Nazarian]: Same comments, level funded board and commission.
[Zac Bears]: Any questions from the council? Any questions from the public? Seeing none, move to, let's go to insurance. That's another one that's only available digitally. So give me one moment to pull that up. This is one of the major expenses of the city currently proposed at 27,938,312. an increase of $1,488,651 over the prior year, or about 5.6%. I believe this is inclusive both of the, let me pull the spreadsheet breakdown, it is Medicare for the city and school, The largest expense is the health, life and dental insurance for our city and school employees. It's also accounts for unemployment insurance, certain amounts of fringe benefits as well as property insurance, insurance premiums and police liability. Any presentation, Madam Chief of Staff.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. I defer to Finance Director and Auditor Dickinson. By and large, all I really can say here is it's a budget that's always increasing, and we continue to evaluate cost opportunities and to reduce. Thank you.
[Bob Dickinson]: Essentially, ditto that, we make a projection based on trends That's where we came in at. So I have to pay it.
[Zac Bears]: Any questions from members of the city council? I have two questions. One just, do we ever come in under budget on this one?
[Bob Dickinson]: I do not know that.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Is it possible based on the projections that costs could be lower than the expected 5.6% increase?
[Bob Dickinson]: It's always possible. It would be nice.
[Zac Bears]: And this is less a question more a point when a 27.9 I think if I got that right million dollar budget is increasing by five or 6% a year. And the revenues of the city are constricted to two and a half percent a year. That's exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about how cost growths are outpacing our ability to raise revenue. You know, this is a significant expense, it's a high growth expense I think anyone who has health insurance for any capacity understands how expensive it is whether it's private insurance or, you know, through your employer or I was on the individual market for a couple years that was no fun. Again, I think it just drives home the point that our costs are outpacing our revenues and the city needs to do something about that. There are limited options before us to do something about that. And if we don't do something about that, these costs growths will crowd out important investments that we need to make in our city and our schools. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Mr. President, do we know when the last time we went off the bid on our insurance? I don't know when the last time we did that.
[Zac Bears]: Which insurance?
[Richard Caraviello]: On the insurance costs.
[Zac Bears]: For the health insurance? I believe that's through the GIC. I'm not sure how the process works.
[Richard Caraviello]: It's through the GIC. I know that's coming due soon, coming to an end.
[Zac Bears]: I don't know. Could we describe what the process is for how we determine our health insurance costs potentially?
[Bob Dickinson]: I'm not aware, I don't know that right now. Madam Chair and staff, I see your hand raised.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, yes. Vice President Bears, to you and city councilors, Councilor Caraviello. So the process that the city of Medford has in place is governed by statute because the city accepted a public employee commission under section 19 of I believe chapter 32. I'd have to double check the chapter, but there are very strict procedures in which the city has to follow in order to consider alternatives. And it's my understanding that historically that the city went to the GIC and adopted this plan given rates and actual losses that were impacting the city's costs. Once in the GIC, In order to consider alternative options, there is a lengthy procedure for that. I mean, you can actually evaluate it, but by and large, it's reasonably known by industry standards that you're not going to get better rates. The other advantage to the GIC is that it offers many different plans so that employees can pick a plan that is appropriate for them and their families. In any event, as for specifics on further details relative to GIC, I don't know the specific last time that the rates were evaluated. But again, the city is locked into the GIC unless it puts the GIC on notification by a certain date in December that it wishes to consider removing itself. The city is presently in negotiations with the public employee committee. Those negotiations began recently. And so there may be updates in the future. And furthermore, some of the ways that the city can potentially address cost increases is plan changes. Those plan changes would be probably undesirable to employees, but those are the kinds of things that have to be considered throughout the process to evaluate costs pertaining to healthcare.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Any further questions on insurance? Seeing none, any further questions from the public on insurance? Seeing none, we'll move on to workers' compensation. This is also digital only. Yeah, well, there was, I think, a miscommunication by myself with the chief of staff. I thought we were going to be getting physical budget books on Tuesday, and then I was made aware that we were only gonna be getting digital budget books, so I said we didn't need the budget sheets for these departments. That's why we are where we are with that. It is available online, although it's kind of difficult to... It's not as easy as having a book. Workers' compensation, expenditure summary $646,000. That's a reduction of $106,500 from the prior year, or 14.15%. Any presentation from Director Dickinson or Chief of Staff Nazarian regarding workers' compensation?
[Bob Dickinson]: The reduction is simply due to there were some settlements in the prior fiscal year, so we have some coming up, so assume that that's where this number comes from, essentially. It's just historical data with a little bit more added in, but it's not as much as it was last year because, again, you've settled some stuff.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, thank you. That answers my only question. Any questions from the Council? Any questions from the public or comments from the public? Seeing none, we'll move to pensions. Pensions. We don't have any further budget meetings scheduled. We can table any questions till discussion at our next regular meeting when we consider the budget.
[Richard Caraviello]: is that I will I was going to ask table in the table, the debt service and bonds and interest too. And so we had until we had the rest of the members here. Because I think those are pretty important departments that, you know, unfortunately, you know, we have some members missing tonight. Something that we could just discuss before the before for the council meeting, maybe on Tuesday. if the president would like to schedule that.
[Zac Bears]: Are there any other items that you'd like to say?
[Richard Caraviello]: I think the debt service and the bonds and interest of the pensions, we're looking at many millions of dollars. I think that needs a little more. I think the other council should have the opportunity to ask questions on. So if it'd be the pleasure of the president the whole, maybe a brief committee of the whole meeting on Tuesday before the council for those couple of things, I think that would be helpful.
[Zac Bears]: Do you think 6.15 PM would be sufficient?
[Richard Caraviello]: 6.15 should be enough for those two.
[Zac Bears]: I will coordinate with President Morell to see if we can schedule that. On the motion of Councilor, Councilor Caraviello to the table, pensions seconded by.
[Richard Caraviello]: Pensions and debt service and bonds and interest.
[Zac Bears]: Seconded by Councilor Tseng. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. That leaves us with Information Technology, which was previously tabled, Legislative, which was previously tabled, and the Executive, which was before us tonight. Do we want to take Information Technology first? Information technology is previously tabled. We did receive a redacted report, and I believe there may be a request from the council to meet in some form of executive session to discuss unredacted information regarding a cybersecurity analysis that was done in the past year. Just with that information, I wanted to let people know why it was tabled, and I'm happy to turn it over to Chief of Staff Nazarian for a presentation.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. So the Information Technology Department budget is by and large pretty much the same as last year. We are posting the position actually. We're actively working to finalize that with a number of different support folks. We have someone in the community that's helping who has specific knowledge in this area. It's important in particular to evaluate that job because historically the information technology department appears to have kind of evolved in a way that has not been centralized. We have, for instance, phone systems that don't necessarily fall under the IT department, but you have to go to one department to get the phone and another department to actually get, you know, the extension or some of these other details which, which it's important to centralize these things so it's It's critical for us to evaluate that job description to make sure it accurately reflects the goals and the mission of the department. And I hope that the Councilors and the public will look at the description that's provided in the budget book, because I think it really provides a good understanding of where we're trying to take the information technology department in general. A number of different things that we're working on over the course of the next, probably several years, because it's gonna take time. is developing a list of assets, both software and hardware, developing a process, specific policies and procedures for information technology and streamlining. We've presently developed a ticketing system that we're utilizing a third party vendor to provide us support on that. And actually that third party vendor is presently providing a service support as well and managed services type of environment. By and large, I think that concludes my presentation, but I'm happy to answer any questions that the city council may have.
[Zac Bears]: Chief or staff, any questions on information technology? Councilor Collins, is that? No. I have one question. Given the cybersecurity assessment and report, was there any, basically, was there any thought that this budget should be amended relative to the concerns outlined in that report, or was the thought that the amendments shouldn't be made until a director is hired?
[Nina Nazarian]: Vice President Bears, thank you for the question. In general, I mean, I would say that this department, like many of our other departments, could use more resources. Um, but it's important to the mayor and myself that we are making sure that we are obviously producing a budget that is sustainable. And so in that process, we have considered all different options and it is important that a director be hired to consider and evaluate the next steps. But we do have a very solid process for cybersecurity at this point in time, as it is managed by a third party.
[Zac Bears]: Is that toss?
[Nina Nazarian]: It is, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Any further questions on information technology? Any comments from the public on information technology? Seeing none, we'll move to the legislative budget. I guess I'm the acting chair of the legislature. So I will just go through and say that largely there is little change to the budget. There's a reduction of $900 to the part-time employees line item, but other than that, there was no change. This council did have some requests and recommendations regarding the legislative budget. Of course, the appropriation $50,000 for phase two zoning consultant for us to continue our zoning work. and in alignment with any of the other plans that are coming out that was not included in this budget. And also, I'll bring this up in a moment, but I'll defer to my fellow councilors first, if they have any questions about the legislative budget. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Mr. President, the only question is, I think the clerk said, we're currently not using that software in the other two rooms that we're paying for. Is that needed in the budget still?
[Zac Bears]: I will allow Chief Staff Nazarian to speak in a minute. I would say this, personally, there's a lot of communities that have a much more up-to-date digitized system for things like council papers, council records, things of that nature. Rather than not have it in the budget, I would like to see us maybe explore a new contract, repurpose it for something like that. But I will also go to Chief of Staff Nazarian.
[Richard Caraviello]: And I agree with you, the addition of the money for the zoning consultant, I think is key. I mean, you saw, you've got two projects already, hopefully in the pipeline, more than paid for the small investment that we made in that. So I support putting the money in. Again, I don't know what number it's going to be. Maybe 50 is not enough, maybe it's too much I don't know but I think that's something we should, but there should be some type of expenditure in there to keep that project going.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello. Do you have any comment regarding the technical services such as, I mean, I think we're basically talking about the camera system that's in room 207. I think we've now, that's basically a deprecated system. We've moved on. We're in a new era of these hybrid meetings. Medford Community Media has set up different technologies. Do you know if it would be possible for us to potentially leave that contract and potentially explore some different uses for technical services with those funds?
[Nina Nazarian]: Vice President Bears, thank you for the question. I am not entirely sure I have the background on this one at this point, but Is the reference to room 207 and room 201 at this point?
[Zac Bears]: I think it's, so it's room 207 and this actually predates my time on the council as well. Maybe there's room 201 as well. Yes, I think the cameras, the streaming technology that was installed in those rooms at least four or five years ago.
[Nina Nazarian]: I see, okay, thank you. And I know that there has been discussion, I'm not sure where it stemmed from. I know that there has been discussion and an effort, and you may have referenced this, Vice President Bears, that Medford Community Media assist with getting some new technology into at least room 207, but I know that that discussion has further expanded into room 201. We have, as a part of the information technology process, We have developed an ad hoc group of department heads and that includes our current Medford community manager Kevin Harrington. And also, this is just kind of in line with comments made by planning. Development and Sustainability Director, Alicia Hunt, at her budget hearing for that department. Teresa DuPont is a part of those discussions, as well as, of course, Director Hunt. And they've been collaborating, in particular, Teresa DuPont with Kevin Harrington, our MCM manager. And there's a manager title right there. And also to discuss, of course, the opportunities and ways that we can modify those rooms and their technologies.
[Richard Caraviello]: Well, look at the baby, you know, repurpose that money to other technological means that this Council can use.
[Zac Bears]: The City Clerk, I believe, had something maybe to say. Mr. Clerk, I saw you unmuted yourself.
[Adam Hurtubise]: That was an anticipatory unmuting. There is not a whole lot that I can add other than I know that when that software was put into place, there were a lot of kinks that had to get worked out. My recollection is that it wasn't operative. It was installed sometime in 2018. was not actually operative, we're using a meeting sometime, I believe early 2019, I'm talking about calendar years, not fiscal years. And then very soon into the pandemic, because of the pandemic, the council stopped meeting in that room. So I don't believe that technology has been used in room 207 since very early in the pandemic.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Mr. Clerk. I think Madam Chief of Staff, I think to maybe tie all of these different threads together, where we are is, we had Mr. Harrington before us discussing the new technologies, more Zoom-based, the Joppa speakers, things like that. The camera technologies that we're in, Room 201 and 207 that were previously installed by the clerk's estimation sometime in 2018. Those came with a specific software package that I believe had a subscription cost. Mr. Harrington said that those cameras, the way that they're connected to everything, as well as the software itself is basically useless for the city. So I think that basically what this council is saying is we would love to initiate the process to no longer have that subscription as the cameras and technology are not useful. and then perhaps this council will approach the administration or procurement or however we need to do it to repurpose that subscription cost towards something more like a modern digital system for tracking papers before the council, something like that. So I'm not exactly sure the procedure here, quite frankly, but I think that's just something to let you know of. I don't know if maybe you could, notify whoever is paying the subscription that we can leave that service as it's no longer used. And then this council could have discussions along with the city clerk about a new system that we may appropriate these technical services funds for, or request an appropriation, or again, it's appropriated, so I'm not exactly sure how it would work, but could work collaboratively with the administration to let you know what we were thinking and make sure that it would be a functional approach.
[Nina Nazarian]: Great, I appreciate that summarization, Vice President Bears, that's very helpful. And yes, I can definitely look into further where that subscription is paid out of and evaluation of whether we should continue to your point.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Mr. President, and I'm going to cover yellow, if we could put some type of stipend in there for the zoning consultant going forward. This way we know it is going to happen in the future. Some dollar amount to get it started. I think would be helpful with rather than have nothing in the budget at all for that. I think it's a key tool. You've seen what we did with it in the past, and I think it's something we should continue on as phase two, as we see people are starting to look. And again, the longer we wait to do that, the more difficult it's going to get. So if the administration could find some funding to at least put it in the budget as a starting point, it would be appreciated.
[Zac Bears]: Madam Chief of Staff, do you have a comment on that?
[Nina Nazarian]: I don't have a specific comment on that but do we know how much the, the software amount is that's being that was discussed a moment ago.
[Richard Caraviello]: But 25,000 26,000 I think it's, I see you.
[Zac Bears]: I don't know if there may be multiple. Yeah, I don't know. So I don't want to say that this software, software alone that we may, I'm not sure where the city's muni code is paid out of, for example. So is your point that maybe that could be at least for one- It's just an option, thank you.
[Nina Nazarian]: It's just an option that I was thinking of. I mean, it's certainly the mayor's budget, but just given the dialogue a moment ago, it's something that we could potentially look at.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, thank you. Councilor Caraviello, was that a motion or just- Yes. Okay, so on the motion of Councilor Caraviello to request that the administration provide some funding for zoning consultant in the fiscal 23 budget seconded by Councilor Collins. Mr. Clerk, do you have the motion.
[Justin Tseng]: Any discussion Councilor Tseng, I was just going to say you know this council is very excited to work with the mayor's administration on the comprehensive plan on the new projects that we have coming out of the pipeline OPS. You know, these are, you know, if we are excited to move forward in these terms and we're excited to work on increasing housing increasing commercial development in the city, but you know if we want to make sure that we do zone for it, we need the zoning consultant to make sure that you know, these plans are coming to fruition and aren't just, you know, stuck in the pipeline.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. Just to add my voice to the chorus there I think that Councilor Caraviello said it very well when he said, you know, these, the, the types of projects that we've been able to pave the way for through the first phase of zoning recertification have paid for themselves or will pay for themselves so just to shore up that point for me. The chance for this Council to work with the zoning consultant to get on phase two is is really and I think I've probably made this clear before it's really a bright line for me in this budget, and I've said that before but I just want to be really transparent about that. desperately wanted to see that funded for fiscal year 23, just because there's so many urgent and exciting plans that have been advanced by this administration that I, like Councilor Sander said, really just dying to work with the administration to accelerate, to work on. Short of that, I think that putting a line item into this budget for the zoning consultant is a good plan B to make sure that that space is being held. But I just wanted to really take the opportunity to reemphasize that. if we want to catch up on development, if we want to catch up on housing, if we want to, you know, compete to be a leader in climate, all these things that we really can't afford to wait on, this is something that we need to do that. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Collins. On the motion of Councilor Graviello, seconded by Councilor Collins, Mr. Clerk, are you having the motion, Mr. Clerk?
[Adam Hurtubise]: I have the motion. Councilor Caraviello moved to request that the administration provide some money for a zoning consultant in the FY 2023 budget. And I have a second from Councilor Collins.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I will. I will change the word some money to the word funding, if you don't mind.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Provide some funding. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: And I would take out the word some if you don't mind. Funding. Yes. All those in favor?
[Justin Tseng]: Aye.
[Zac Bears]: Opposed? Motion passes. Any further discussion on the legislative budget? I have one item if my fellow councilors don't have any. Madam Chief of Staff, I know we budgeted, the budget is $9,600 for our videographer. And I understand that there's some questions around compensation and things like that. I just want to note that whereas Mr. Colbert, our videographer is a contracted employee, he's a contractor. He's not a W-2 employee of the city. What would be the process for us to request that he be paid at a rate of $500 per month instead of $350 per month? That would still bring us in significantly below the $9,600 budget.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. This budget does include, because it had the space, a adjustment to the videographer to $400 a month. It's important, again, to evaluate the positions and evaluate the costs and increases and make them reasonably consistent across the organization. The city has not settled on collective bargaining agreements as of yet. I realize that this is a smaller stipend position, so to speak, or is a smaller contracted position, so to speak, but it's one that we look at carefully. And as well as a messenger report, a messenger report is proposed under this budget to go up to $550 per month. Based on the city council's requests, we did attempt to make changes to those two.
[Zac Bears]: Um, just, um, so I'm seeing under purchase of service videographer that we're budgeted at 9,600 for the year. Uh, $400 per month would only be 4,800. Um, so is it possible for us to move up beyond that given the space in the budget?
[Nina Nazarian]: Vice President Bearss, I'd have to look to see if there were any other costs that were applied to that line. It doesn't jump out at me at the moment, but I'd have to take a look to see that. But again, it comes back to ensuring fairness across the organization where other employees are not being provided at this point in time adjustments because contracts haven't been settled. And largely negotiations are just starting.
[Zac Bears]: I hear you, but these are certainly, Mr. Colbert, contracted non-union position that's a monthly stipend. You know, we don't provide him benefits. We don't take taxes out. You know, it's all on him. I personally, I understand the work that you do on personnel. I just personally don't see how this impacts, you know, a negotiation on a multimillion dollar contract. You know, we're talking about a difference of, you know, like the change in longevity or the change in sick leave buyback or for another department. So I appreciate the increase to 400. I think that of course, Mr. Colbert will appreciate that, but I would respectfully request and if councilor could make a motion that a motion of councilor Caraviello to request that.
[Richard Caraviello]: People forget, he's been here about three nights this week. So, you know, he works more than his fair share. So I think that's, I think he, I think it's well-deserved. Would you like to comment on this?
[Zac Bears]: No, okay. On the motion of Councilor Caraviello, seconded by Councilor Tseng to request an increase to $500 a week in stipend, $500 a month in stipend. Jeez, I can't, it doesn't even sound right. $500 a month in stipend for our videographer, Mr. Colbert, all those in favor? Opposed? Motion passes. Any further discussion on the legislative? All right, any discussion from the public on the legislative? Seeing none, we'll move to the executive, our final budget of the night. Madam Chief of Staff, I'm happy to turn it over to you for a presentation.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you very much, Vice President Bears. So by and large, there really aren't material changes to this budget with one exception, the negotiated salaries line has increased over last year's number. And that is because there are two contracts in particular that have been expired for a period of time. That's the clerical contract and the fire union contract in particular. At this point, those are just estimated numbers so that we can attempt to meet the obligations of prior years during negotiation processes. And the personnel line item is going down because we did have a transition in our director of communications position where the former director of communications stepped into a more part-time role and the COVID-19 public information officer became the director of communications. And there's a modification in that wage. There's a difference in experience there. Other than that, by and large, The majority of the impact, as I mentioned under personnel, is negotiated salaries. Under ordinary expenses, it's basically flat, consistent with what we've been presenting or attempting to present with many other, if not all, budgets. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam Chair and staff. Questions from the council? I have a question if my fellow, oh, Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Vice President Bears, I note that the line item for translation services has been reduced to zero and the proposed fiscal year for 23 budget I'm wondering if the chief of staff of mine speaking to that.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. Yes, Vice President Bears, through you to Councilor Collins, I think that's a great question, and I'm glad you picked up on that. It is one that we were planning to hopefully transfer to the diversity, equity, and inclusion budget. However, given the tightness of the budget and understanding that ARPA could be used for these types of costs, are going to be placing the majority of those costs in that same ballpark under ARPA. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Any other questions? Councilor Caraviello. What are the contingency fees?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. Through you to Councilor Caraviello. Contingency is a budgetary line item that allows, you know, for frankly any matter that comes before. By and large, we're using that line item for events and planning things like Patriots Day or other events that have recently occurred. Pride, potentially. But I think we paid some of those pride flag raising costs out of different budgets. A number of departments helped in that process, because obviously that contingency line doesn't go very far.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello. Any further questions from the Council? I have a couple, but I'll defer. Okay. First question actually may be for Director Dickinson, just around the contingency this is not specific to the executive budget, but I've seen some contingency line items around the budget. Um, is that a best practice to have, you know, it's, it's a line item of course, but it's not really for a specific purpose. Is that, is that a standard practice to have in a budget, like in a city budget?
[Bob Dickinson]: Where I came from certainly had line items simply for expect expenses, they usually weren't large. It's not an investment.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, thank you. It's the only one where I can at least try to figure out what it means. So I appreciate that. Madam Chief of Staff, I have two questions and one of them actually may be relevant to Director Dickinson as well. On the negotiated salaries, I have no question about the purpose or the amount. I just wonder about the location within the budget. It's in the executive branch. We now have a Department of Human Resources. Would it potentially make sense that that line item should live there instead of within the executive budget?
[Nina Nazarian]: Vice President Bears, through you to the council and to answer your question, By and large, I don't know that it specifically matters where it is located, although I would defer to finance director Dickinson on that subject. But in the end, obviously that approval needs to occur between the mayor and the city council to be utilized. So those are my only comments at this point on that.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Bob Dickinson]: Any further comments, Director Dickinson? Where I came from, the similar line was There was a separate line that was contractual obligations. And that could be voted to be moved against whatever negotiated salaries were.
[Zac Bears]: What department did the line item live in, if you don't mind me asking? It was totally separate. just its own line item entirely separate from everything else.
[Bob Dickinson]: Totally separate its own line item.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I don't ask this for a procedural reason or really any reason other than a perception reason that, you know, there's $500,000 in the executive budget. Someone with lay knowledge may come in and see, oh my goodness, there's 500,000 in extra salaries in the mayor's budget. What is she using these extras? You know, and I know that that's not that, you know that that's not that, but if it were to exist, maybe somewhere where it's more, employee focused, it's really totally just a subjective thought of mine. So I appreciate you answering the question, both of you. And the only other question that I have, where is it? see quick fix. Is this, um, 52 50 inclusive of these at the entire cost for this entire city of the secret fix program?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. I believe so, but I would prefer to check that before saying it is a fact.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, that's fine. If you could just get back to me by email. And then finally, my last question. You mentioned that the Director of Communications, there's been a transition there and the former director is working in part-time capacity. Where is that reflected in the budget?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you for that question and answer actually seems like it's missing from the sheet. I believe it is in the budget book, but because it is moved, the position's almost essentially swapped because it's largely gonna be funded by ARPA. It is not necessarily represented here because of the fact that it is gonna be, you know, 80% ARPA and 20%. operational funds, but it is, it is represented under the, it's not shown in the personnel services summary table, but it is calculated into the part-time employees line. And, and, you know, it should, it should have be represented in the personnel summary services summary table, which fortunately the budget book, I believe has that information in it.
[Zac Bears]: I do see that there's a assistant communication specialist with a $10,000 operating in the budget online. I would also just note for you, and I think I may have found a couple others, but I just don't have it in front of me. You know, the departmental total here, at least on the sheet in front of us is 112,180, 1,112,180. On the budget book, it's 991,550. And I actually think I had a third number of 1138984 that was actually in the budget that was put on the council agenda. So I just wanted to flag that there are at least three numbers out there for the request for the executive budget for fiscal 23.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. I believe the 113 number was an outdated number and was corrected in the revised city paper that was submitted to the City Council, but I will look into the other two discrepancies. I believe the accurate number is 1121. Thank you for that.
[Zac Bears]: when plugging things into the budget, but I actually, for some ridiculous reason, I think I recognize this 991 550 number maybe from last fiscal year. So it may just be an oversight in the updating on the clear gov website. Any further questions on the executive budget? Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. And if you'll indulge just one more comment, not quite a question, probably my last one for the night. But I just wanted to circle back to the translation services line item. I cut short my question before just because I was honestly surprised to see it reduced to zero. And if this sounds like a direct response to Chief of Staff Nazarian, I really don't intend it that way. I just wanted to kind of share a little context about my feelings about it for any residents that are Watching this hearing. I think that part of the reason I that number jumped out to me so much is because I know that there's getting a translation services line item in the budget at all was the product of years of advocacy by by constituents just to get that in there at all was really a victory to have that be. an unfunded line item and then to have it funded was another real victory for equity, making sure that the city does what the city's supposed to do, which is service all constituents equitably. So then to know that the intention was to shift it into the DEI department, which makes a ton of sense to me, no objection there, but then unfortunately there was not the space for it. within the DEI department and then has to be moved to time limited funds. I'm not upset that we have ARPA funds. I'm certainly not upset that we're using them. I understand the constraints that we're under, but to me, I just want to reinforce that this is an example of why I really dearly hope that we can follow up this budget season with a very sincere and thorough conversation about how to move our values and priorities into the operating budget because it's good to know that we will have that $10,000 for translation services in fiscal year 23, but we need a guarantee that when ARPA goes away, those will be folded back into the operating budget. So again, I just wanted to make that point for why I cut off my comments abruptly earlier. Thank you for letting me give that context.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you, Councilor Collins. Councilor Tseng. I think Councilor Collins put that very well. You know, this, the translation services, this is something that many, many, many thousands, thousands of residents in the city depend on, something that my parents would have liked when I was growing up here in Medford. I totally understand the budget constraints and that, you know, this is something that can be funded with ARPA. I just, you know, wanna, add my voice to the discussion say you know this is something that we really want to be living our values we really want to see our values in the budget, and I'm. You know, the discussion really should be, you know, hopefully in the future year when we solve this revenue crisis, the conversation should be about expanding services, because I already I know you know families who come into City Hall for for services and, you know, it's it's an intern in office translating for for the, you know, for the family. And, you know, it's the same goes for the city website, you know, it's often, often actually falls on children of immigrants, you know, to translate, to translate that because the city translations just don't suffice. So I hope in future years, that's where we are. I guess my question to Chief of Staff Nazarian would be, could we get a Could we get a guarantee that, you know, when ARPA funding expires, that this will, you know, if, you know, like this position will be that, you know, this line item will still remain there. Madam Chief of Staff.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, vice president bears to Councilor Tseng, I mean, I at this point don't it's the mayor's budget. So I, it would be difficult for me to guarantee something that would be, you know, her discretion that said, and I don't think that this really gets to the heart of the point that yourself and Councilor Collins are making on this matter, because it's not the, $10,000 amount that we're referring to, but I am looking at the diversity budget, and unfortunately, I don't see it specifically called out there, but I recall us leaving a nominal amount there so that we maintained a line. Again, I'm not seeing the terminology, so I'd like to check in on that, but I do think that there's a commitment on this. Again, I can't state that I make a commitment because it's not my budget, but I do believe that there's a commitment on that on the part of the mayor.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chief of Staff. Just one final question. When the, at our next regular meeting on Tuesday, will there be a budget presentation by the administration? And could you let me know? Or if you know now, could you let us know who will be making the presentation? Or if not, could you let Councilor Morell, President Morell and I know who will be making the presentation?
[Nina Nazarian]: Sure, absolutely, we can get back to you, both.
[Zac Bears]: But the plan is to make a presentation on Tuesday?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, I anticipate so, yes.
[Zac Bears]: All right, thank you. Anything else? Motion adjourned, Councilor Carpiello. Seconded by Councilor Tseng. All those in favor? All those opposed? Motion passes, meeting is adjourned. Thank you, everyone.
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