[Nicole Morell]: 23-320. May the whole meeting Wednesday, June 7th, 2023 at 6 p.m. is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Vice President Bears. Present. Councilor Caraviello. Present. Councilor Collins.
[Nicole Morell]: Present.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Knights. City residents.
[Nicole Morell]: Which buttons? Your button's not working? The speak via mic buttons aren't working, Kat? Oh, Rik's isn't working?
[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Scarpelli is absent. Councilor Tseng?
[Nicole Morell]: Present. Five present, two absent. The meeting is called to order. There will be a meeting of the Medford City Council Committee of the Whole on Wednesday, June 7th, 2023 at 6 p.m. in the Medford City Council Chamber on the second floor of Medford City Hall and via Zoom. He's gonna move. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss proposed FY24 budget for the city of Medford, paper 23-320, The following proposed departmental budgets will be presented, building and code enforcement, Department of Public Works, diversity, equity, and inclusion, facilities slash Chevalier Theater and GMAC gym, fire department, health department slash civil defense, parking and recreation. The city council has invited chief of staff, Nina Nazarian, finance director, Bob Dickinson, and the department heads of the departmental budgets listed above to attend this meeting. For further information, aids and accommodations, contact the city clerk at 781-393-8255. 2425. Sincerely yours, Nicole Morel, Council President. One adjustment to the schedule is we do have IT moved over from last night because they weren't able to join us last night so we can take IT first and then we'll just go through the order that's on the meeting notice. I just want to note that Councilor Scarpelli is unable to be here because his daughter is graduating tonight. And also folks if anyone wants to speak specifically on departmental budgets outside of the department heads if the public wants to speak you can just raise your hand on zoom, or come up to the podium. So we will start with it which is on page 100 in our budget books. And what I'll do is I'll just read the headline expenditures, the total budget for the department, then we'll take any highlights or overview from the department heads, and then we'll go to council questions and if any members of the public wish to speak. So for IT, we have expenditures of $377,751 up $11,646 or 3.18% over the prior year. And we have new IT director, Rich Lane with us tonight. It's me. Good to meet you. Yeah. Do you want to share any highlights or, you know, also welcome to the council?
[Rich Lane]: Yeah, thank you very much. So yeah, there's a bunch of things that were done, I guess, and ongoing things too. You know, obviously the big stuff that people are going to notice is going to be done on the capital budgets. We're not here to talk about that right now, but. I think most of the notably to think about it is there wasn't anybody position for a long time. We're relying on an outsourced vendor to do a lot of the work. We had a consultant come in, Jim Silver, obviously you all know him. He's done a great job, I think, stabilizing things and keeping the business running. And I've kind of taken over from there all day three. But yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the foundational stuff like inventories and knowing what we have, what we don't have are things under maintenance. We're ongoing with that and then putting in policy procedures around, you know, cybersecurity awareness training, you know, how do we handle data, you know, and archive data and data sensitivity and privacy and things like that. So we'll continue on with those sorts of things and we'll continue to see where the gaps are, what we need to upgrade and what we need to do. I think the budget itself has gone up a little bit. This is just what we'd call, you know, to run the business budget in the private sector, but it's just keeping the lights on essentially. I think the increase in expense is that there's a lot of software that needs some upgrades here and there, just sort of desktop things, you know, maintenance costs go up year over year, things like that. So, but I'll open up the questions to any of you have and poke holes in my theorems.
[Nicole Morell]: Questions from the council. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President, and welcome. I know you've only been here a couple of days, so it's going to be kind of hard to figure out where you're at, but I think one of the big questions that we've all asked is about how protected are we from what you've seen.
[Rich Lane]: Yeah, I think it's a great question, because I think it's a lot of concern. You know, I think what happened in the Lowell Law Ritz, they were locked down for a number of days. It's becoming more and more common. I come from a background of being an analyst and working in cybersecurity to some degree. So ransomware is the main attack point. They try to get people. One of the interesting things about it is that it's not necessarily they're getting into your system and stealing your stuff. It's social engineering. So it's calling someone up and saying, hey, I work directly for the mayor. You know, she's trying to get into an account. Can you reset her password for me? Let me know what it is, type of thing. So we need to be better, I think, about communicating and get that to people like this is how they're going to get your kind of thing. As far as the system itself, I think the level of So the security we have around the servers and the application of that is what you'd expect to see to some degree. As we upgrade things like the network going into next year, we can do a lot more things around that for sure. A lot more monitoring, see where things are, the traffic's going, things like that. Like nothing's 100% foolproof as my first day in IT, the security told me, you know, firewalls don't keep people out, they tell you when someone got in. But I think we're as good as we can be right now, but we can always try to do better and modernize at the time.
[Richard Caraviello]: Have you been able to take stock of some of the hardware that the different departments have that probably need? I mean, I see some of the old stuff. Yeah, sure. Have you had a chance to make some type of assessment yet?
[Rich Lane]: I mean, I've certainly taken mental notes as I've gone through. I haven't gone through a full inventory yet. I definitely want to get that done sooner rather than later. And then when we start figuring out the capital plans for next year, obviously we'll start at the bottom and work our way up, you know, as far as what's the oldest and most vulnerable type of thing. I think that's part of the problem. This building is a lot of equipment is really old. So you can you can see I'm, you know, I'm up on the third floor. And, you know, that's probably the worst part of the network and I actually feel that so I definitely want to make that a priority for sure. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Yeah.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. Welcome to Medford and welcome to the city council. Thank you. I was curious, since you're a relative outsider. What are your impressions of our needs in city in the city of Medford in City Hall. When it comes to it when it comes to the software and the hardware. I'm not thinking about, you know, dollar amounts that might be attached to anything but in terms of need.
[Rich Lane]: Sure, that's a good question. Um, so just to be clear I lived in Medford for 18 years, I only escaped across the line like a half a mile into summer school about five years ago and that was just because my rent went up. But, uh, and that was one of the reasons why you know when I was in Medford and living in Medford and interacting City Hall. I found it a little frustrating that I had to do everything manually. I get a piece of paper, fill it out, walk it down to City Hall and do whatever. And it was fine for me. I work in tech, so I can just tell my boss I'm gonna take off for a couple hours, do whatever. But for most people, they just can't do that. I'm like, why are we leveraging technology to make things easier? You think of customers, internal customers, the people that work here, and external constituents, how they interact with City Hall. I think there's a lot of things we can do to modernize, to make things easier. I see people doing their work, people doing a lot of repeated processes. I don't like that. I've never liked that as an IT person. I'd say, well, that should be automated. You have to do it over and over the same way again. Well, we have to do it this way because the system doesn't let us automate it. or what have you. So there's a lot of opportunities for things like that. Obviously, you can't boil the ocean, you know, everything costs money. So you kind of have to prioritize what's the best bang for your buck when spending money, what's the ROI, as we'd say. So yeah, but there are things for sure that we could certainly help people with. But again, it all comes back to what I was saying earlier about the foundational work, let's get the network bandwidth going the way it should be so people can be more effective without having delays and slowdowns. There's certain things that are going to have to happen first before other projects can move forward. So it's going to have to happen serially. But once we put together that list, I think we can move pretty quickly on a lot of things.
[Justin Tseng]: I don't know if you've gotten a chance to review the goals, the stated goals, since I assume you weren't here helping to develop them. But you mentioned that the budget that we have is basically keeping lights on. does the budget that we have in front of us allow you to accomplish at least some of these goals that are, that have been set?
[Rich Lane]: So there's two sections of the budget. We have what we call, you know, sort of the BAU business as usual. This is like, you know, someone's computer dies on a second floor and I have to swap it out or I want to upgrade some of the machines. I want to pay for licenses, maybe expand licensing because someone, you know, wants to use the same program or you have to do hires. The capital expenditures, That's a whole different barrel over there. That's the really big ticket items, but the ones that bring you up to where, you know, now we can start. For instance, finance department, they've been talking about like, you know, we really should get on a more modern financial package. Most of those things now are cloud-based, which are great for a lot of things, disaster recovery, reporting, the whole nine yards, but they require a lot more bandwidth to go out and in. And so he's gonna be dependent on me finishing my part before he can even think about doing his part kind of thing. So yeah, so the capital projects are definitely the more cool kind of technology stuff. This budget here is just the, you know, keyboards, mice, and, you know, desktop software, that kind of stuff. But it's still important stuff people have to work under the child to know. Thanks.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Yeah, thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Welcome. Good to have you here. Really getting in front of the gauntlet on day three. Just a couple questions. One on what you were talking about, kind of how a lot of our processes are still paper processes, and that also really limits the ability to share data kind of with the public about what's happening. what can we do to at least try to implement like more of an open data policy for the city and what resources would you need so that your department can make basic city statistics and information more accessible to the public? As far as what's an example? Like, you know, how many building permits were issued this year? Or, you know, I know we have that data in the building department, right? But I'm kind of thinking envisioning something like something I mean, I know we're not going to have the resources to do this right away but something kind of like summer stat in Somerville where you have a bunch of city statistics and information available in a single place. And I guess kind of a tangential part of that question is, is your role as an IT director also working on kind of public information the city website, that kind of thing.
[Rich Lane]: I think that's handled the communications department. Certainly, we haven't had any discussions about that. I'm open to what makes sense anywhere. But as far as data aggregation, data reporting, I'm all for it. The problem you get yourself into is years and years of legacy systems. and being able to aggregate that data. So you have two methods. You either find some way to bring it, unify it on one umbrella, which is a huge capital expense. You hire a bunch of people just to do, you know, actuarial work, you know, data aggregation and crunching data scientists type people. Or you have to look at the silos of data. What are the most important ones? What can't they report on now easily? I think a report should just be one button because the report was written and you can run it as many times as you want. Can we get them what we need in software-wise upgrade or to a new model package to get that data out? But I'm all about, you know, data doesn't lie, right? You know, you can make assumptions. People can say whatever they want, but if the data back up any assertion, then you win the argument. And it's also good just for people to see. Like you said, let's see how many permits are going. Our permitting office actually issues a high number of permits in a relatively short amount of time. They're a high-functioning group, that kind of stuff. I'm all for that. I think it's great. But when you're dealing with 20-, 30-year-old computer systems, it can be pretty tough to do that, unless you have staff that just are in report-writing roles, which nobody really has the appetite nowadays to really fund that anymore, unfortunately. But back in the old days, we used to have just report writers that did that sort of stuff.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Well, the interesting thing is, you know, I was talking to Jim Silva, who was, you know, working on this before you came on board. And he was talking about how we kind of have different IT universes for the city. You know, some people, you know, City Hall is in one section, the police stations in another, libraries in another. Schools are in a whole other world. Um, you know, each of those entities releases reports, right? But it's sometimes they live in one place or another. I guess my question is, um, what, you know, either do you have any plans or intentions to try to bring together these different IT environments under a single infrastructure? And if if yes, or how big of an investment would that take, or what can you do with your existing resources?
[Rich Lane]: The most effective model that we use, or used to use, out in the private sector is called the shared services model, where everybody, IT is just one department of services everywhere. And it's just the easiest way to do things. So you don't end up with five redundant different systems, because five different departments bought the same time and attendance system. I worked for a company that had 300 different time and attendance systems. We consolidated it down to one. We picked one and went with it. And it saves you money. And it makes, like you said, reporting a lot easier across the whole aggregate business, whether you're a corporation or government. I would like to see that eventually, but we have, I think we have a ways to go before we can get there just because we are in those different universes where the police department is in library are probably up here and a lot of the other apartments are somewhere down here. We have to bring everyone back up to that level before we can think about that. But I'm always there to assist or advise or what have you.
[Zac Bears]: Would you say that there's funding in your capital budget to make some progress on that?
[Rich Lane]: I haven't even gone through the capital budget in detail yet.
[Zac Bears]: Gotcha, nope, totally understood. If when you do, feel free to send me an email. Thanks. All good, thanks, Madam President.
[Nicole Morell]: Any questions from councilors on Zoom?
[Adam Knight]: No, ma'am.
[Nicole Morell]: Councilor Knight.
[Adam Knight]: No questions.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. I just have one. So prior to you, Maybe a little ways prior to that to the department, you said 2 people looking at a staffing level. I know we've been here for a week. I mean, is there for a city of our size and the age of our systems is there a preferred staffing level? I know you'll make do with what you have, but.
[Rich Lane]: Yes, staffing levels is an interesting subject. It's also religious war in some companies. There's no golden rule for it because everybody has a different set of systems. Some are more high maintenance than others. What I want to say is this. If you can outsource stuff, That's repetitive and low-hanging fruit, sort of lower-level work. You should always look to do that because it's going to save you a heck of a lot of money in the long run. If you look at some of the municipalities around here that are even smaller in effort, they have five or six people in the IT staff. They're just going around doing whatever, fixing people's print drivers and really mundane tasks. But when you look at the amount they're spending on staff, They could do it a heck of a lot cheaper by what we chose to do here. We have Toss that does the help desk stuff, and it works great, and they're a really good company. We save a lot of money by doing that. If we had to staff up three or four people, the problem you get is municipalities aren't going to pay as much as corporate America are going to. It's just a reality. Also, trying to find people in IT qualified to do IT work is next to impossible. I mean, even some of the bigger tech companies struggle to find qualified people to fill positions. So being able to have this third party that has 26 or 28 people that can at any moment, you know, handle an issue for a user or even for our servers, back end stuff. That's pretty invaluable and considering what we're paying for, we're getting great value out of it. I think it's a smart way to go. I think it's eventually you'll see other towns around here. I think it's a legacy thinking they have to have a big staff. I think they'll eventually start looking towards this model.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Any other questions? Seeing none. Thank you so much. Excellent. Thank you. All right, we will go to building and code enforcement. That is page 153. We have Building Commissioner Forti here for us at 153. So total expenditures for building and code enforcement is $1,885,531, an increase of $85,178, 8.51% over the prior year. If you want to tell us any highlights or anything about the budget.
[Bill Forte]: Thank you, Madam President, Councilors Thank you. So, we're really nothing outside of the norm here this year we're not asking for any capital items, you may have seen that we've kind of improved the conditions down in our department it's become. more cleaner and friendlier. You'll notice that there is a large flat screen at the front counter now that allows us to help people that were having some difficulty with the computer. I determined that that was one thing that we were lacking. We're able to get that taken care of. I've been in charge of the department a little over eight months now. So a lot of what I have been able to accomplish with my staff over the past eight months has mostly been housekeeping. I will tell you that my staff are very competent. They're versatile. They have been able to function without a department head, a direct department head for a few months there. And they did a fantastic job. I have really no predictions outside of what we're using here this year. I would say that the biggest thing is projected revenue. I believe that it's going to increase exponentially with a couple of things that have been initiated by me as the building commissioner. I find that, We were lacking in permit fees, due to underestimated building permit values, and these things aren't really a big deal when you're talking about small homeowner jobs and stuff like that but some of the commercial work that is occurring and what I'm projecting as what's coming up in the city. I now require by code that a final cost affidavit be submitted at the end of every job prior to the issuance of a certificate of occupancy, which is the authorization under the state building code. I've initiated that policy. I've given people plenty of warning. so that they know what's coming and I'm expecting that to generate a significant amount of additional revenue to the city. I found that our permit fees were lacking this year. I'm going to say that a good portion of that was due to the raising of the interest rates. I feel as though a lot of people may have hesitated in doing some of the projects. We are seeing pretty good permit counts, but there are a lot of small stuff. But what I see on the drawing board coming up in the next five years, I think that we're going to be in a very different place as far as revenue stream from the building department. We also have been able to. curb the overtime bill a little bit, make it a little bit more efficient. So when, when we're called out on a code enforcement call, um, it's fines are an automatic, um, fines are issued automatically to help pay for the overtime costs. Not in every case, obviously, because we have emergencies that we must respond to. But I find that my department is one of the most responsive departments here in the city. They do a very good job of getting back to people. I find that there are little to no complaints about how things are handled. I'm able to sit pretty much near the counter all day and I hear what's going on. I'm, I'm satisfied that my, my staff is doing a great job that we're, you know, I have a very versatile staff which allows a lot of flexibility in the schedule so that people have ample time off. Um, and, and I project over the next year that, um, revenues will increase, um, that, that some of the housekeeping issues that I put into place, um, will start to really take effect and we'll, we'll be able to, um, really advance this department forward to where I think it should be, which, you know, there's always room for improvement. We have, uh, we have goals to achieve with, uh, scanning our, um, you know, our plan, all of our stored plans. That's one of the big projects that needs to be tackled over the next couple of years. And I'm going to propose that in next year's budget. But I would just tell you that our expenses are pretty much level. And I don't expect to be needing anything because I'm no longer in charge of public buildings. We have a facilities director for that now. And so we've separated most of our budget from that. I do believe that there is, a line item here um in the budget for um let's see i thought repair the materials and supplies that's not it i'm sorry it looks like it was it looks like it was taken out okay yeah we did have a building maintenance budget in there but it's been moved to the facilities director so yeah it's on the first yeah yeah okay okay so i i really am i'm open for questions and anything i can help with
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you madam bill. Thank you for your good words. You're right. You have increased the modernize the office. It looks a lot more and more friendlier than it was before. One of the things I've asked for in every budget, I did get it one year and then disappeared for another code enforcement person. I know Dennis does the best he can, but he's just one man and you've got him going different directions. But that's really one of the things I'd like to see is code enforcement, because even if you use the guy, the person part-time, maybe two or three days a week, there's a lot of obvious, offenses around the city that can be, you know, which would help our curb appeal. If the code enforcement officer was out, maybe, you know, if he dedicated two days a week, something, you know, to going around and cleaning up some of the low hanging fruit, that would, I think that would help us to the, especially the look of a lot of things. That's really my only thing that I've ever asked for. I say, we did get it one year and then it disappeared.
[Bill Forte]: We actually have two inspectors that are dedicated to code enforcement. Again, because of their versatility, they do building inspections on occasion. They're mostly focused on code enforcement. They do a great job. Sometimes they have to team up together. We don't want them going into a property by themselves because it's a liability for the city. But both of those code enforcement officers are also building inspectors and if we have one specific problem in the property I know that we had talked about auto repair stations and so forth, you know, we have the ability to be able to go ahead and task, some of that and so, you know, certainly we can, you know, we can do that, you know, with, with the current staff we have.
[Richard Caraviello]: maybe a day or two we just go around and you know I'm not saying find people but yeah hey listen this is you're out of code on this I'll give you 60 days I suddenly want to come back please take care of it yep NSA especially a sign a signs are you know the windows and signs are They're all out of code and there's stuff everywhere, but I think if we can start cleaning up some of that stuff, that's always been my goal. Okay, noted. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Vice President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Hi, Commissioner. How are you? Good evening. Just a little bit off of what Councilor Caraviello's question was, is the code enforcement workload manageable for the staffing level that we have right now?
[Bill Forte]: Yes, I find that it is. I will say that both of my code enforcement officers are busy all day long. There is no blank time. They're either out in the field, cleaning up old cases, or they're in the field, you know, addressing new problems. I would say, currently we are adequately staffed to handle the amount of calls that we get. Now, to Councilor Caraviello's point, We don't really go around the city and police. And the reason why is because it's always kind of been traditional that, you know, you don't go looking for trouble because it'll find you. And I know that that sounds dismissive, but it's not because what we don't want to do is be accused of selective enforcement. And, you know, cities have gotten into trouble for that particular reason. And so because we're complaint driven, It keeps us a little bit more focused on the things that are important. It's not that a building inspector wouldn't stop if he doesn't see a building permit card in the window or he sees something unsafe or something unsightly. I'm sure that my staff does that, but I would say that, yes, they are busy up to 430 every day.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. That makes sense. I appreciate the point you just made. I would personally be interested in seeing A more proactive approach that we could maybe implement that would have with accusations of selective enforcement if. You know, split the city into four quadrants, one week a month, we're gonna be going into this area and just looking around. Signs are a great example. Yeah, signs are a great example. We have a lot of minor issues. I'm not saying fine everybody, you know, but say, can you get into compliance? Because I think, especially on our main drags and our commercial squares, you know, we could be looking a little less shabby. And I think code enforcement help with that. Now, I understand if the issue is, two people are responding to calls all the time, so we don't have the staff to implement the proactive approach. But I think it would be, that would be a goal I would like to see. Um, how does inspectional services coordination work, you know, with the health department and anyone else who's kind of going around doing, doing different services.
[Bill Forte]: So I've proposed what's called a code enforcement task force and I have permission from the mayor. I'm getting ready to implement that. I was just waiting for the right time. Uh, that will include, um, building department, health department, uh, probably one member from the police department, one member from the fire department, uh, probably, uh, one person, uh, from the health department. perhaps Health and Human Services. And what that task force will do, it will be a non-public task force so that the public wouldn't be invited, but it would talk about specific enforcement cases where we have problem properties, where there's always problems, whether it be with crowds or whether it be with different things. And that task force would get together and talk about what each department has for enforcement authority. And it worked very successfully in the city of Newton, where I was first employed. And I find that if you meet once a month and just go over some of the problem cases, they get resolved with better results, because it's more permanent. And when they're focused on those certain things, that will be implemented over the next couple of months.
[Zac Bears]: That's great to hear. I think that's really a relief.
[Bill Forte]: And that is coming.
[Zac Bears]: So I didn't just make that up. No, no, that's great. Even if you did, I'd hold it to it. It's quick. Last thing is on permit fees, so. Sounds like you're implementing something to make sure we're capturing the full value of permit fees for the new construction. Do you think we have space to potentially increase permit fees? Would you be willing to make a recommendation on that?
[Bill Forte]: Yes, I certainly will. Yes, thank you, council. So I was going to wait until after the election because I don't want it to be a political issue, but my recommendation to this council probably in December is going to be to raise the commercial building permit fees to $22 per thousand. I find that $15 per thousand is lacking. It's not consistent with other communities, other communities are getting $24 $26 per, you know, per thousand. And those revenue increases I think haven't really been looked at because you know Medford's always kind of been like a working class kind of blue collar. town, you know, it's like a big town, you know, people, you know, the economy hasn't been like booming here, you know, and it's a it's a growing city in progress. But I think that we're ready for this. I'm going to strongly recommend that we raise it to $22 per hour. But again, I figured after the election, so it wouldn't be a political issue. And I do believe that the city will significantly benefit. And again, you know, keep in mind that the permit fee is there to pay for the services that it takes to actually run the city. So when I take in a building permit fee, it's not just for my inspectors and my time and to keep the lights on. It's for all the other departments. The fire department doesn't get paid to go out and do inspections. The engineering department may collect fees, but they may be out there four or five times on a job, and especially a big commercial job, inspecting multiple times. All of those combined costs to the city aren't realized until you know until the permit fees are not only collected accurately, but again the upfront fee is definitely too low. My plan is to keep residential one or two family at $15 per thousand that will keep the, that will keep the one or two family and the homeowners here in the city, you know, more level with what you would expect, but the commercial fees should definitely go up to at least 22, if not $24 per hour. And these big companies that are coming in and building these labs and these 40 Bs and all this stuff can afford it. So, you know, it's a big significant impact to the city and the way to recover some of that is through building permit fees. So. Great. So I've got a plan.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Do you think we have similar space on potentially on linkage fees?
[Bill Forte]: Yeah, I think that I can't speak to the linkage fees that that would be Alicia hunts expertise.
[Zac Bears]: And could you share with us a quarterly report on the permit fees that you gather just going I have an actual an annual report.
[Bill Forte]: Oh, great. Okay. So we have only collected and I find this to be very light. It looks like a total of about two point 2.8 million for July 122 till today. I'm expecting that to be a little bit more, maybe 1.85, 2.85 rather. The permit revenues for this city should be anywhere from four to six million on an average year, and on a good year should be eight to nine million. And so one of the things that we weren't doing, which I have no explanation why, But some of the fees that are in the ordinance are not being collected and specifically the. the occupancy permit fees there's a cost per square foot and we weren't for some reason we weren't charging that or collecting that but it was something that I caught and we've we've you know rectified that and you know it may not be a lot of money on a small job but some of these jobs you know four or five six thousand dollars you know these are things that needed to be cleaned up so I refer to those things as housekeeping And one to $6 million a year worth of housekeeping. Yeah, well, I honestly I think that I do think that there is a good amount of probably hundreds of thousands that was kind of leaking out of the bottom and just not being watched correctly. So, in terms of if you follow the words of the ordinance and the ordinance fees. Yeah, you know, we have to make sure that we're we're a fiduciary, so we're responsible to collect.
[Zac Bears]: It was money we were never collecting that we couldn't.
[Bill Forte]: Yeah, exactly. For whatever reason. But again, here now, we have a good handle on what kind of revenue. We've got some work to do with our two inspections, which basically are multifamily inspections that are due every five years. We're not up to date on that. There's a lot of work to be done here, and I'm prepared to do it. I'm just initiating it. and so we can eventually get it up to speed. I think that there'll be a need for another inspector, but not in this fiscal year.
[Zac Bears]: All right, well, that's really encouraging. news because we have obviously significant revenue issues. And it sounds like even the fiscal year that hasn't ended yet, nevermind the future ones, we may be in a much better position.
[Bill Forte]: We're going to track it manually for the first year to see what the difference is. Yeah, you know what we actually collected in final cost affidavits. And I will I will have an annual report for this council probably by December.
[Zac Bears]: Great.
[Bill Forte]: Thank you. All right.
[Nicole Morell]: Any questions from Councilors online? You know, just open here.
[Adam Knight]: No.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor. You also just, you know, just raise your hand if you want to speak. You don't have to say no every time. Uh, but thank you. Um, commissioner. So, um, you said, and I believe it that your code enforcement people are, are, you know, they're busy all day. Anytime I've had to call for a resident, they're somehow there like within a matter of minutes, sometimes not hours. Um, how many calls a day would you say on average they go out for, for code enforcement violations?
[Bill Forte]: Um, so I have a case count. for one year and it's 432 cases, which is good for two people. I was doing in Newton by myself, I was doing 250 cases a year. That's a busy year for a code enforcement officer. And I would tell you that this year, 455. And I would say, judging by the resolve rate, I would say it's anywhere from 70 to 75% resolved. So sometimes cases don't get resolved because they're ongoing. Sometimes there's time involved with compliance, but for the most part, these inspectors are great with following up, closing the case and moving on to the next one. It's very methodical, if you will. They approach it the same way. They have the same level of, Diplomacy, the same level of enforcement, the same level of resolution, and they have this down really, really good. I'm very satisfied with the way that my staff handles every situation. I've been made informed when there's something that requires a higher decision, but for the most part, I don't get a lot of, they've handled just about everything.
[Nicole Morell]: Great, thank you. And you said the policy has changed, or the approach has changed, that they're finding, I don't want to butcher the words, like on-site or immediately, that's a change in how it used to be done. If you could just explain how it used to be done versus now.
[Bill Forte]: Yeah, sure. So when we're called out on overtime for a safety issue, that's about the only thing that we'll go out for now. If we have a nuisance, we don't go out on overtime, because it's not in the city's best interest financially. And unless there's a safety issue, it can wait till the next day. Um, when, when we are called out for an unsafe, um, an unsafe job condition or something like that, I'll work without permits. Then it's an automatic $500 fine to pay for the overtime. Okay.
[Nicole Morell]: Great. Thank you. Any other questions or questions from the public? Seeing none. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, madam president. Great. We will go to DPW. We have commissioner McGibbon here and we are on page one 68. So Department of Public Works. So the expenditure summary is $16,358,149, up $743,973, or 4.76% over the prior year. Commissioner McGibbon, if you want to give us highlights or anything you'd like to share. Sure. Thank you, President Morell, and hello of our fellow councilors. Thank you for having me. Tim McGibbon, Commissioner of Public Works.
[Tim McGivern]: Just to give you an overview, and I know it's in your books, the DBW is made up of seven divisions, plus our admin, our clerks in the office, cemetery, and city hall office. So the divisions are highway, engineering, water and sewer, parks, forestry, cemetery, and fleet. Today with me, I have a leader of highways, Steve Tanaglia, leader of engineering, city engineer, Owen Wartella, and our tree warden, Aggie Tudin. So if there are questions that kind of progress that we need answers from, they are here to help us. Typically, you would see Mary here with me, but she is attending graduation, so she's not here. So if there are questions that she may have the answer to, we may need to get them from her at a later date. So anyway. I just wanted to just quickly, but I'm sure you have plenty of questions to talk about our goals. And you may have noticed that our goals are really asset based and collaborative between division based, you know, since I've been the leader of the public works, I've seen a lot of opportunity for inter division collaboration, for example, highway and engineering. engineering and water, forestry and highway. So I'm really trying to, you know, cultivate that collaboration as much as I can to sort of continue to oil the machinery of DPW operations. You know, for example, We have asset management software, and our water division is moving in the direction of managing our water assets. But I'd also like to get highway, pavement, catch basins, that type of asset also managed. So we're working with engineering to figure out the best way to do that. So that's just an example. So that's where our goals are focused. And then I think, as you know, the DPW has two main funding sources, the General Fund as well as the Water and Sewer Enterprise Fund. So the Water and Sewer Enterprise Fund has a different strategy associated with that just due to the nature of it. So, you know, again, the focus is still on operations, but because of the asset management work we have done over the last couple of years, We're beginning to look at the operations and how much work needs to happen over the, say, the next 10 years and how we can plan for that. And also regulatory compliance is continuing to increase as time goes on. So those are really what we're basing our goals off of. And I also just want to highlight a couple of things that are happening in the cemetery that I think are pretty exciting. We're working with the architect to assess the existing buildings and see if we can put together some scope of work for the buildings that are there and get some renovation projects going. There's also some improvements that need to happen in that particular city asset, so we're looking to get those on the schedule as well. Some of that's CIP, but it's all sort of related. With that said, I mean, you know, you guys have the books and I'm happy to take questions and, you know, however you'd like to do it.
[Nicole Morell]: Great. Thank you. Do you want to talk about facilities as well, or is that kind of already?
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, I'm sorry. I do forget about facilities. We do have facilities. Paul Riggi is also here. Buildings is, yes, currently also a division of the DPW, but I apologize. I didn't include it in my list.
[Nicole Morell]: Great. Thank you. Questions for the council? Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President. Tim, I see in the street construction, what is that on page 175? What does that comprise of? We only have like $4,075 on this year, we have nothing. Page 175. Yeah, my page numbers. I think you're different.
[Richard Caraviello]: Um, what's the title of the line reconstruction? It's under ordinary ordinary expenses.
[Tim McGivern]: Oh, for end to end under engineering and houses zero. Yeah, yes. So that was archiving work that the engineering division did that that work is continuing but that was the initial archiving and Owen can give us details on exactly what that was but we have a lot of documents in engineering that are quite old some of them, you know, hundreds of years 100 years old, and we're working on archiving and indexing those so that's what that was. That's actually labeled wrong it should be contracts for some reason. That's wrong.
[Richard Caraviello]: Where are we with street paving?
[Tim McGivern]: As far as... Are we planning to pave any streets this year? Yeah, we're planning on paving streets. We have, you know, we have a schedule based off of the condition index of the streets. So where we continue to I don't have that number in front of me. I don't know if Owen you know how many streets.
[Owen Wartella]: a number of different sizes to but we're doing a project based basically right now so anytime we're have utilities being upgraded we're doing that we're also doing Riverside Avenue. In about four weeks it's going to start. That's going to go through. We have a few more in the queue that are down in procurement, so it's coming.
[Tim McGivern]: So we know there's three or four right now in procurement. And then, you know, we typically will get a couple more in the queue as we kind of get closer to the end of the construction season to try to- Are we going to spend all our money that was given to us for the street, baby? Yeah, we typically spend all of our money, our chapter 90 money. Yeah. It's about a million dollars. Yeah. We got a little bit more this year, wrap money. We use that for some larger patching out there as well as some ceiling. So the most important thing when it comes to asphalt and pavement is the maintenance piece of it, the maintenance ban. So last year, as you know, we focused and continues this year, focusing on crack sealing and focusing on larger patches to get longer lives out of existing pavement that we have now. And it's all from a status of our assets standpoint, it is no secret that we have deteriorating assets that we do continue to have to plan for both pavement, sidewalks, utilities, et cetera. So that's always out there. We always have to plan for that.
[Richard Caraviello]: So I'm sure we had a savings because of the mild winter that we had.
[Tim McGivern]: No, opposite. The winter actually, from a pavement standpoint, was not mild because there was a lot of freeze-thaw cycles.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah. Well, I mean, as far as snow and ice removal and things like that. I think we only had really one storm this year.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, we did use a lot of salt, though, as well. So I mean, we didn't spend as much on removals as other years, probably, yes. OK, that's it for the moment for me. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Vice Mayor Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. I'm gonna try to keep my questions in divisional buckets, but may not be successful. Sure. On highways, what's the total spend? Some of it's in the general fund, some of it is capital expenditures. So if you could give me an estimate, what is our total spending this year on street and sidewalk repair and maintenance?
[Tim McGivern]: I would have to compile that number because it comes from multiple different sources. Okay. We have our ordinary expenses. So, each year we have money that you know identified lines for things like asphalt, things like concrete. Yeah. So, for the work that we do in house the highway does a very good job of doing that work, but then, you know, we also, we have capital funding that, and we have state aid funding, and then we have loan funding. So it would have to be an exercise where I compile all of that. So I don't want to compile it.
[Zac Bears]: If you could, no rush on it. Sure. And then maybe we could do it on an annual basis when you present the budget. Cause I think that would be really helpful for me to say, Oh, you know, cause I saw a few hundred thousand in here in ordinary, I would say maybe 500,000, maybe 600. And then I know we did some bonding and I know chapter 90, hopefully will be going up this year. Um, if we had that total number, then I could say, could be able to compare that to that payment asset management reports and say, oh, so we are doing two and a half million. It said we need three for this. It says we need 10 to really start hitting the backlog. Just being able to assess how, how close, how much are we. increasing our spend on street and sidewalk repair every year?
[Tim McGivern]: Sure. Something more than, you know, I think typically we talk about bigger numbers, but you want something a little bit more detailed from an annual perspective. Yeah. I think, you know, we're doing that, we're tracking that in-house anyway, so I could just compile the numbers and see what we can do for providing that information. Great. But you wanted pavement and sidewalks?
[Zac Bears]: And you can do one you know you could do payment and sidewalks and then the total you know you can separate them out whatever is easier but you know, I think the payment report is talking about something in the $10 million range as one of the to really start bringing down the backlog so for spending 2 million. You know, I just want to be able to, if you could base it on what the payment report was saying and the sidewalk report was saying, that would probably be the best thing.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah. And in that report too, if I recall, there is some breakdown of what existing expenditures have been. Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of paints that picture in that report to give an idea of what sort of capital investments the city would need to see over the coming years.
[Zac Bears]: Exactly. And I think the piece of this is just, We have that data from when that report was released. Could we say, oh, so we're doing a million dollars better this year. Just if we could have that number, that would be great. Quickly on highway, in terms of curbing on these new projects, is it all granite curbing? Has that issue gone away where we can now get granite curbing again?
[Tim McGivern]: For the moment, it has gone away. OK. Yeah, we have been able to get granite curbing.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Can I go to trash next just feel free to just say yes or no on this seems to me that the increase in the trash contract this year is basically. at least two-thirds of the total increase in the DPW budget.
[Tim McGivern]: Because it's a large item, yes.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. It's bad in the water on the water side. Something I mentioned to you many times and will mention to Bob and Nina as well is, I think it'd be great if we could separate out the trash line from the highway budget because I think it makes the highway budget look a lot bigger than it is. The trash is 7.9 million of the 10 million this year, and that's all just the contract that we pay out. That's just what I think would be a really helpful way to display information in the budget. On snow and ice removal, I think last season was the first season with the new ordinance in place. How did it go? with the sidewalk snow removal ordinance?
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, with the updated snow and ice. If I gauge it based off of complaints and requests to clear sidewalks, I think I've been doing this for a year and a half or so, and two winter seasons. I think the understanding from the community is a little bit higher that second snow season about what they're responsible for. But to Constant Caraviello's point, we didn't have a lot of shoveling events. We had a lot of ice events. And a lot of people don't, those don't land on people's radar, but they land on my radar because we spend a lot of money on salt and they're actually a tough, ice storms are tougher. And Stevie could tell you about it. Sometimes there's a, ice storms are just as tough, if not tougher than, you know, snow. Sometimes I think snow, from what I hear, I don't plow, but snow is easier to deal with than snow plus melting, plus sleep, plus rain, et cetera.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. Just a couple more questions. On parks, something that we hear a lot is just requests for restroom facilities. I know that's a pretty significant expense, and I don't think any of our parks have restroom facilities. When you were discussing some of the new park construction projects with the grants that the Planning and Development Sustainability Office has been bringing in in partnership with you, has that idea ever come up to bring restroom facilities into our parks?
[Tim McGivern]: It is, I would talk to Alicia on a little bit more about this as well. You know I advise on these things, but I don't necessarily have, you know, have the planning hat on when these projects are being assembled and developed. The recent projects I've seen have areas, I believe, at least one of them anyway, with dedicated areas so program can bring in portable toilets. That's typically what happens is program brings in portable toilets. Now, bathroom buildings, that's obviously a significant capital expense to bring in a new building. It's not just the initial expense, it's the ongoing maintenance of that. The DPW has played a role in the caretaking of Wright's Pond, for example, the building up there, and that bathroom seems to see significant vandalism, for example, which obviously that's a cost that falls on the city. Would I like to see bathrooms at our parks? Probably not if the DPW is going to be the entity managing them. Because I don't think we're ready for that, that burden, so to speak, at the moment. Yeah, it also means sewerage and utility design and all that. So it's significant, complicated, and it would need its own initiative.
[Zac Bears]: That goes kind of right to my next question, which is and feel free to answer it, answer whichever version of this question is easier for you to answer, but do you feel like you have enough staff to do the work that the city needs DPW to do and or what would you do with additional staff that you don't have now?
[Tim McGivern]: That's a good question. I think to accomplish the goals that I have, I'm a practical person when it comes down to it. So to accomplish the goals that I have with the DPW and knowing what we have to work with, I'm confident that we can satisfy those goals. Now, the second part of your question, what would I do with more? I don't spend too much time thinking about that. But if there was more, I would figure out ways to spend more and have bigger, broader goals.
[Zac Bears]: I guess the other way to frame it is, what are we not doing that you would like to be doing?
[Tim McGivern]: What are we not doing that I'd like to be doing? I think we're touching upon everything. I think we're doing everything. The RDBW is big, and we do a lot of things. The things that I can think about are more capital expenditures. And we've touched upon here, our asset management. Since I've been with the city, we've done an analysis, some sort of evaluation on all of our largest assets. And as the time goes by here, we do have to think hard collectively as a city on what we do with our aging city. So I think that's the best way to answer your question. Those are the things that I think about.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, our infrastructure is getting to be, you know, the big boom in this city was 1900 to 1940, right? So our infrastructure is getting to be 80 to 120 years old.
[Tim McGivern]: You got it. And I think, you know, people see it. You know, there's no question about it. It's no secret. The city is old. It was built. A lot of it was built in the 20s and 30s. And that was quite some time ago. So when you do it that way, then of course, all that infrastructure comes to age at around the same time. And it's not like days, we're talking years, if not decades. But like a water pipe, when you put it in the ground, you can expect 100, 120 years out of it. So we're getting there. So anyway, I think that's a challenge that this city faces that's beyond the scope of an operating budget.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I really appreciate your focus on the asset management and the assessment of our needs for that, because I think streets, sidewalks, and buildings, that's going to be a lot on our end. Obviously, water, sewer, a lot of the enterprise fund, but big needs there as well. And we need to be I think you've said it before in prior meetings, you know, if we're just doing the bare minimum to keep an old system together. you increase the chance of catastrophic failure, right?
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, exactly. And that's just how the science works. And that's how we do those evaluations, criticality, probability, risk assessment, really. Just to give you a real easy example, is the water main feeding hospitals and schools, or is it feeding a four house subdivision? So obviously one's going to have a higher criticality than another one. just to give you an idea, and that's just one very simple scenario. But it works with every asset, because if you think of pedestrian sidewalks, for example, some of our pedestrian sidewalks see a lot more feet hitting them than others. So the public dollars, when we're assessing where they should go, we need to take that into consideration.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think it speaks to some of the work that we did with the previous commissioner on a sidewalk priority sidewalk clearing program that the city could run. So maybe that list of sidewalks is similar to the main focus needs of where we have a lot of foot traffic.
[Tim McGivern]: One of the things that I believe I shared with you, and if not me, Owen probably has, is the data from our asset management work on pavement and sidewalks and a heat map, which basically shows foot traffic densities. So the way I'm trying to slowly transition, and I've had support for this, slowly transition how operations and investment happens based off of data. Because these assets are so big, we need to be thinking about them strategically and with data supporting where we put those public funds. So I will continue to do that.
[Zac Bears]: Great. I have one more question for you. I'm asking it to police, fire, DPW and schools as the big, big four departments. So I don't know if Chief Buckley warned you already, he said he wasn't going to. It's not a big deal, but I think it's an important question that I'm finding a lot of value in, which is basically, are there any metrics, a metric or metrics that you use either on a daily or, you know, like kind of the daily and an annual basis to measure success? Like if, you know, what is something, a statistic or a metric that you see that says, this was a good day for DPW or something at the end of the year, a metric or a set of metrics that you see that you say, this was a good year, we made a lot of progress as a department?
[Tim McGivern]: I think each division of DPW has their own metrics when it comes to that. One of the things that I use on the day-to-day is how many tickets are coming in, how many complaints are coming in, how many issues are arising. For example, parks. So if we're getting a lot of complaints about ball fields, what's happening? Something's wrong. If we're not getting a lot of complaints about ball fields, you know, we're probably in good shape. I probably don't need to drive by and go look at it. So that's kind of like the day by day, year to year. You know, I've been at this for about a year and a half, so I want to take a rain check on that one. But one of the things that I am doing is trying to develop metrics that are easily quantifiable, almost monthly. You know, I gave some examples in the report, like tons of asphalt that we placed, for example. I think it was like 275 tons last year. Now, that number means more to some people than others. But, you know, if, for example, I keep in touch with all the division heads on a regular. But if I were to see a report, and I'm not to pick on highway, I know it's here, but if I got a report and the city said, oh, this month we didn't zero tons of asphalt, then that's obviously a red flag. But that doesn't happen. So I know that's a small example. But it is one of the things from an annual perspective and a monthly perspective month to month. I'm still working on as the commissioner trying to figure out what those best metrics are to tell to tell the story. Yeah. So great. More to come.
[Zac Bears]: Cool. No. And I appreciate the answer. I would have taken what the chief Buckley's answer was, which I'll have to think about and get back to you. So I appreciate the examples.
[Tim McGivern]: But well, I was thinking about it with you.
[Zac Bears]: That's all I have. I have some questions for facilities, but I'll stop there for Tim.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Councilor Sagan.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. The questions about streets have been covered by other Councilors. I think I wanted to ask about trees. I know we have people here for that as well. Do we have an idea of what the timeline is like to finish an urban forestry plan?
[Tim McGivern]: A timeline, it should be less than a year once we execute it, I would believe. Now, I'm not an expert, and you can stop me at any time if you can, but what I found out just in the last probably six months, four months, there are a number of opportunities out there, both partnering with folks like the Mystic River Watershed Association or Trees Medford, or just doing it on our own. Grant opportunities from the MVP program, for example, is where we just applied for one. I'm noticing that there are opportunities for trees. And one of the things that I identified, and I had some help identifying it, is that we don't have a forestry management plan currently. So we're piecing it together. We didn't win one grant that we applied for, but we're trying again through MVP. And we're also partnering with Mississippi River Watershed Association on a bigger federal grant, all in the interest of seeing if we can get an inventory of our trees completed, a full one. the workflow to support that inventory, because once you do it, it starts aging the moment you get it. So you get an inventory, trees start dying, we're planning new ones. So having a process in place through GIS, ideally, where we're updating that inventory. And then the next piece of that is having an urban forestry management plan, where we know what species, how we should focus on that, where we're lacking, where are the hot spots, all of these things. That's needed in the city. We don't have it. We're doing what we can with what we have, for sure. But with climate change and discussions about resiliency, it's becoming more important, I think. The folks that are issuing the grants know this too, which is why I think we're seeing some availability there. So hopefully we are successful and I can continue the pursuit.
[Justin Tseng]: And I know you guys put out on that tree strategy that we got a press release for maybe a little bit more than a month ago. On average, you guys, I think for the last two years have been planting about 200 new trees a year on average. Is this budget basically going to keep us at 200? Are there any cuts or increases to that plan for the upcoming year? I didn't see any cuts.
[j0mqfzXKqXM_SPEAKER_08]: Thanks Councilor. We do have other funding sources coming in through ARPA and some other CPA money. So we hope to increase it. The goal is to increase the number of trees planted this year, and we feel confident that we can do that.
[Justin Tseng]: Excellent. Do you, would you have an idea of how many trees were planting net, you know, considering the trees that are being cut down for old age, for different reasons? Do we have an idea as a city of how many, what that net number is?
[j0mqfzXKqXM_SPEAKER_08]: Do you mean number of trees removed versus number of trees planted? Yes. This year, I believe we have probably six or 700 trees removed, which is not offset by the 200.
[Justin Tseng]: I see. Okay. That's important to know. One last question about trees. Well, one last question about trees is, I see that there's an inventory of types of trees are you planting. What ages are the trees that we're planting? Are we planting slightly older trees? Are we planting saplings? Or is it a wide variety?
[j0mqfzXKqXM_SPEAKER_08]: Great question. By contract, the tree plantings need to be two and a half to three inch caliber, which is the diameter of a small trunk. And those are the best choices for planting new trees, because if you plant larger trees, they go through greater transplant shock, but they take much longer time to recover. So if you plant a young, healthy tree, they begin to grow right away, where a larger tree has to put all the energy into recovery. So it's the best practices to use that size tree.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. Yeah, um, I, you know, trees are something that we're starting to hear more and more from residents, especially as climate change is becoming a more ever present problem, and, um, I would personally love to see you know when the finances are more flexible, us investing more in how much we're planting and the great work that you're doing. I do want to commend you guys for for doing such a great job with paying attention to where we're planting trees. looking at the map and looking at where trees have been planted in recent years, there seems to be, even though we don't have that master plan in place, there seems to be much more, a lot of thought put into heat islands, into different neighborhoods, into environmental justice communities, and I think our residents should know that you guys are keeping all of that in mind.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Thank you, back to Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. Tim, I got a couple of questions on personnel. So I'm looking down here and I see for foreman on page number two, minus 63,000, did we lose a foreman? No, we haven't lost a foreman. On your personnel summary.
[j0mqfzXKqXM_SPEAKER_08]: Yes.
[Richard Caraviello]: I got page 187, I don't know.
[Tim McGivern]: I did notice, so the foremans are scattered throughout.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, I see like there's this 63,000, we're off, did we lose a foreman? No. Why is the change? It says four in the FY23 and then three in the FY24 proposed under foreman. No, we're not removing any foreman. I don't know why. Why is it off? I don't know.
[Adam Hurtubise]: I do not know.
[Richard Caraviello]: I do know that we're not losing any points.
[Tim McGivern]: Okay. No, we're not down tree climber.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, so I see, you know, and you got like a tree climber.
[Tim McGivern]: uh we're short did we lose did we lose one there no we changed a job we changed a job from tree climber to uh something else so we've actually increased the staffing of forestry by two over the last year if you recall um last budget hearing my strategy for forestry um i got creative with our budget and i was able to uh not not double but got another crew in forestry this year uh so definitely not reduction.
[Richard Caraviello]: Well, the foreman looks like maybe potentially a mistake. Okay. And what about the tree climber? Did we lose? I know you hired one, but did we lose one?
[Tim McGivern]: In the last year's budget, we had two tree climbers proposed and one of the job descriptions was changed from a tree climber to a maintenance craftsman, I believe, because we felt that we didn't need two, we needed one tree climber with basically a helper. And that's what that explains the reduction in treatment.
[Richard Caraviello]: And in the engineering department, there's a negative $60,000 there. What is, did we lose someone in that department? No. Why is there a negative 60,000 there? I do not know. So let me say, so the 60, 63, 54, and 60. Are those all supposed to be positives?
[Tim McGivern]: I get the explanation. So that was, we have one engineer, the position's not going away, but it was, funding from the general fund, but it was supposed to be funding from the casino fund. So I think that's a correction from last year's budget. I believe that's what that is. Okay.
[Richard Caraviello]: And is that in the engineering departments? Yeah, that's an engineering. Okay. And last question is, We've allocated money for sidewalks the last two years. Where are we on the sidewalks? Have we spent all that $2 million in the last two years?
[Tim McGivern]: Just about, I think we got about, I wanna say we have about 300,000 left to go on the million dollars we opened up, let's see. It's the first million and second million. Second million. And then, yeah, then we have another one for 1.5 that we recently got that's next in queue. But the one before that, I wanna say like 70% done or something like that. So we should be finished with the vast bulk of it by the end of the construction season.
[Richard Caraviello]: There may be a little bit left over that we would wrap into- And where does that put us in terms of staying on top of our sidewalks? I mean, do we make a dent in anything?
[Tim McGivern]: We definitely made a dent. The focus has been repair lists and driven by complaints and requests for sidewalk repairs. We are Moving towards looking at getting more efficient use of that money. So the next million dollars I think it's in with minus the equipment, it's probably going to be about $1.2 million out that particular bond that we're going to be looking very hard at our heat map that I was talking about. where we can have less mobilization, so more production style work, which we get a more efficient use of our dollar. So there's gonna be a little bit of a different strategy to make a bigger dent. So that's the goal. It may end up, and I'll just say it, I mean, it may end up being, if you live in a cul-de-sac and you have a heaped sidewalk panel, that may not receive as much priority as a block on a main drag, like high street or something like that, that sees thousands of feet, a week. So we're changing the strategy a little bit. But I hope it's going to be so we increase the debt.
[Richard Caraviello]: So are we still looking into putting on a side? sidewalk division or sidewalk group. Yes, still doing good and you said it was going to take some time but we have we made some progress from an equipment standpoint and a sort of a planning standpoint.
[Tim McGivern]: Yes.
[Richard Caraviello]: So, for example, next year we might have crew in place. Well,
[Tim McGivern]: I can ask Stevie to talk about how he breaks down his crews each day, but we do have crews going out doing sidewalk work, and we also have in-house, and we also have crews going out on contract work. So we're tackling it both ways, and that's the way it has to be done. you know, using the in-house crews to focus on spot repairs and things where it doesn't make sense to mobilize a contractor to do, for example. And one of the pieces of progress that I have made is getting more equipment to better do that in-house work. So for example, transitioning from hand placed asphalt and compaction to spreader placed asphalt and compaction. That's gonna end up with a better product. We'll be able to do more with the man hours that we have. Another example is a sidewalk planer machine. I talked a little bit about that. A lot of the sidewalk complaints that come in are because the sidewalk is heaved an inch, two inches. Typical practice now would be, well let's remove the panel and put a new one. If we have a sidewalk planer, we can plane off the trip hazard in an hour or whatever, and move on to the next one. So those are the kinds of improvements I can make now, and I'm working with Stevie our highway foreman to implement those changes. To have a dedicated crew to sidewalk is not a good use of our current crew staffing time. So it's more of, you know, Steve, you can probably speak to DT.
[Richard Caraviello]: I understand your short crew and to have a dedicated crew would be detrimental to the DPW. It's going to be incremental. Yeah. I mean, are we looking at having a dedicated sidewalk crew going forward? I'd like one. I mean, we could put that crew to use with contract work. I mean, they could do sidewalks all year, and then you use them in the winter for other stuff. One last question is, where were you on our stumps?
[Tim McGivern]: Well, we have, uh, we've been doing a lot of movables, obviously through contract work. And I think the, the, the last round that we currently have funding is in procurement right now. So that should start up soon and be done by the end of the construction season. So that would be another 50 or 60 stumps. Um, but we have, I don't know the exact number, but we still have a significant backlog of stumps, so it will take some time for sure. But, uh, the only other thing I can say in that, that regard is, um, From an operational standpoint, I'm trying to transition us to treating backlog like backlog and treating new work as new work. So in other words, not increasing our backlog by adding, if we take down a tree, adding that stump to the backlog. I'm trying to separate backlog. So we're taking down a tree and then queuing up the stump for removal and then contracting out the backlog so we can wipe it away. That's going to take a lot of time. year over year, you're going to probably hear me say things like, well, we did another bunch of contract work and we did a bunch of in-house crew, in-house crew work. But the backlog's so large, we just got to keep doing that every single year until we catch up with ourselves, basically. So. That's it for me. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Councilor Knight.
[Adam Knight]: Madam President, thank you very much. And Tim, thank you for being here. Can you explain any of the operational hardships that you may have faced over the past year?
[Tim McGivern]: Operational hardships. That's a good question. Some of the largest challenges that I have are with communications with so many different divisions and players. So, um, you know, leading seven different divisions plus admin, uh, for a while there too, I was kind of doing double duty with engineering his own as own was getting his feet wet. So, Just clear communication is my biggest operational challenge, making sure that folks know where they should be and what meetings they're coming to, and making sure that one division is clearly communicating to another division. Yeah, there's other challenges too. Another operational challenge, I would say, is prioritizing all the work that we have to do. So I work with every division to try to do that schedule and prioritize work. So those two challenges stand out to me.
[Nicole Morell]: Do you have any additional questions, Councilor Knight?
[Adam Knight]: Yes, so I think it's safe to say that over the past couple of years, you've done a great job with the staffing levels that you have right now and the personnel levels that you have. You know, have you, these personnel levels, you know, have allowed you to provide the consistency in public services, right? We haven't seen a degradation in what we've been able to deliver, have we?
[Tim McGivern]: No, I don't think so. I think from before I was commissioner to now, I personally think there's been some improvements in our operations. I'm hoping the division leaders think the same thing. I don't know, we'd have to ask them but you know I'm pretty confident that some of the changes that I've made are helping that. I touched upon some of them. I have a regular set of meetings now that happen like clockwork that folks know that they need to come to them. And that really helps with the communication piece I was talking about and the collaboration piece between divisions. So just that, just looking at that one thing, setting up regular meetings for operations and for procurement and other things. That one thing, I believe, has been a significant improvement to how things were done in the past.
[Adam Knight]: Excellent, thank you. I think you're doing a great job with what you have and with the boots that you have on the ground. So I appreciate you coming here and putting on, once again, another great presentation. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Knight. So I just, I have like two very specific questions. I did have one resident reach out about I want to make sure I just the intelligent speed assistance for fleet vehicles. I don't even know if that's something I know that speed cameras, you can't do Massachusetts. I don't even know if that falls under the umbrella, but it's just the intelligence be designed to keep fleet vehicles at the speed of which is posted in the area. And I'm not saying this based on seeing anything. I'm just saying a resident just asked about this. So I don't know if that's something on the radar.
[Tim McGivern]: Could you say it one more time?
[Nicole Morell]: It's intelligent speed assistance. So it's a it's intelligent. sure it's AI to help vehicles like fleet vehicles, they wouldn't have to maintain the speed or they would be able to go above the speed of the posted speed limit.
[Tim McGivern]: First I'm hearing of it. Okay. So I can send it to you. Yeah, I mean, I look at it, I'm pretty confident that we're not out there speeding around.
[Nicole Morell]: Yeah, and I've never seen an issue. It's just a resident asked about it.
[Tim McGivern]: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm more than willing to learn and take in information.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. And again, I haven't had the chance to look to see if it's something I know we can't do speed cameras in Massachusetts because the law is currently written. So I don't even know if this falls under that umbrella. So I just want to raise that. And then for the trees, I was just curious, and this may be more of a question for Aggie, with the tree inventory, How are you able to keep up with the trees? So I've seen a fair amount of stumps removed around me, which is great, but those are also, they're like that last reminder that there ever was a tree there. And I just worry that people that never saw the tree there, it's like you can't even conceptualize the idea of there used to be this big tree on the corner providing shade. And I worry that as we catch up down the line, we lose the idea or we lose these spaces where there were trees and no one's putting in a request and it might not be on the radar. Just curious how that works. And I'm talking about West Mead, which is a little bit leafier than I know, like the Heat Island areas and areas that are, I understand are priority and should be priority right now.
[Tim McGivern]: I will tell you one of the factors that was listed in our proposal for two grants now was having to do with the heat island effect and where there's shade and where there's not shade. And that becomes a variable in recommendations on where we should focus new plantings. So when we talk about an urban forest management plan, a key part of that plan is a set of recommendations that tells us where we should be focusing our public dollars for tree plantings. So I would think, and I'm not an expert, and Aggie, please chime in, but if you have a street where we had to remove trees because they died, then that would come up on that evaluation and say, hey, you've got to plant some more trees there. OK.
[j0mqfzXKqXM_SPEAKER_08]: Thank you.
[Tim McGivern]: Does that sound about right?
[j0mqfzXKqXM_SPEAKER_08]: Yes, it does. It does. Thank you, Jim. But if I may add. In the last few years, we have been focusing on environmental justice areas around the city, which are also the Heat Island areas. And that's been very successful. So it's the denser, more densely populated neighborhoods. So South Medford has some areas we've addressed, some in the Wellington area. So we've been progressing on that for, this is at least the third year of having that as a specific focus. And there is one thing I mentioned is, Often when a tree is lost in a tree pit and the tree pit is empty, the trees are not replaced at the same location, usually because it's an improper place to put a tree. So it might be too close to an intersection or there must be utility conflicts and that sort of thing. So we assess each location by site to plant right trees in the right place.
[Nicole Morell]: OK. And then how often is that heat assessment done to understand where the heat islands are?
[Tim McGivern]: You'd have to ask Alicia if her office has done something. But we haven't done that in the DPW. This would be a, as long as we get the grant that we want, then that would be a fresh evaluation. I'm sure we would use data that we already had. I know we had a climate resiliency plan. We have that. It's published. So if there's data associated with that, I'm sure it would get used in a urban forestry management plan.
[Nicole Morell]: Great. Thank you both. Any other questions from the council? Any members of the public wish to speak? Seeing none. Thank you so much. All right.
[Tim McGivern]: Thank you very much.
[Nicole Morell]: We were going to go to DEI, but Director Nagy had to step out to grab some food. So we are going to go through, we'll go to Chevalier, and after that, we will go to fire. Oh, sorry. You want to, yeah, sorry. You want to continue with facilities? I'll go back to President Bears for your questions. I'm sorry. Commissioner McGuire, I may have more.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, maybe the director. Oh, Tim, could you stick around for like five minutes? Sure. Thanks.
[Adam Hurtubise]: How are you?
[Nicole Morell]: Hello. Good. Welcome.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: What page?
[Paul Righi]: It's in DPW.
[Nicole Morell]: It is, yeah.
[Paul Righi]: What page in DPW? Yeah, under part DPW. Okay. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: And I understand Vice President Bears has questions, but if there's any highlights you'd like to share with us.
[Paul Righi]: Just one thing I'd want to point out, if you notice that the facilities budget has increased this year, it's due to the utility costs. Last year I was told the utility costs were lowered by $200,000. so we're correcting it back to where we think it should be, what we will be spending, unfortunately, on utilities. Luckily, we had a mild winter, so that also drives costs up.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Thanks for being here. I just had a few questions kind of along the lines of what I was talking about with Tim. In terms of asset management and assessment, Do we have, you know, does your division have a plan to assess all of our facilities and figure out what it would cost to bring them all up to a state of good repair?
[Paul Righi]: That is what I've been spending the six months that I've been here and probably will be spending the next six months on to develop a plan of action to bring Medford where I feel is in line with other cities and towns and any entity to keep the facilities. I have been working on looking at our PM program and increasing that, I was able to get the library HVAC system under a PM program, working on getting the police station under that. So I'm looking at all the programs that were developed and seeing where I can enhance them. I'm also looking at all our vendors to see if I can get a better value by increasing the services. So grouping those services together to see if I can get a better value for the city with contracts that we enter into.
[Zac Bears]: Great. That's good to hear. And I think something that would be really helpful, you know, and if the issue is that there's not enough staffing or resources in your division to do it I understand that is something similar to like what we have for streets and sidewalks now where we have this assessment and we know this is the dollar amount backlog. This is how much we are recommending we spend every year to take that backlog down versus this is how much we're actually spending right now. I know that's a lot of capital side stuff but I think, you know, just, you've been around all the buildings last six months you know how much need there is, you know, go to the second floor bathroom right here in City Hall and see how much need there is.
[Paul Righi]: As buildings age, just like people, unfortunately, we require more funding to keep ourselves going. It's to look at that and develop a plan so Medford is positioned that we can keep the assets because some of the older buildings are beautiful and we need to keep those as best as we can as we develop newer facilities. Yeah, no and you know, similar to the street sidewalks and water sewer we're coming up on 100 years on many of our already there on some of our structures, you know, develop a game plan of what I feel are the, the next necessities over a five year plan and give that to the mayor so we can work on those.
[Zac Bears]: Great. And you know that's the interesting when we're talking about the capital plan. I think it's good to have the necessities over the next five years. I think it's also good to know what's the total number, right? You know, the necessities over the next five years, maybe we can only fund 25% of what it would take to actually get everything where it needs to be. You know, I know right now, we'd have fire headquarters, new high school, you know, the stations for the fire department, some other facilities needing support. We never talked about this building, which needs a lot of support. So that that's really my, my thing is, I think it's helpful to have these five, six year capital plans where we know how much we're investing and there's a plan and we're trying to meet these urgent needs. That doesn't capture that there's almost no investments in City Hall in that capital plan over the next six fiscal years, and this building needs a lot of work and I think the people who are here a lot.
[Paul Righi]: City Hall has to be part of that. Yeah. And unfortunately, anytime you look at a facilities plan. you're always going back to your deferred maintenance as you're trying to keep ahead of the game. And it's, you know, just like Tim was saying, you keep going after that backlog, you keep going after that backlog. And hopefully, eventually, you get to a point where you can say, We've gotten to a good point here with our backlog, but there is a lot of backlog. And to make those priorities and come up with a plan of what we really should get to first, and then look at the future also. And if we are developing new facilities, look at those in a way that we could get better systems in those that would maybe last longer.
[Zac Bears]: No, and I think that's that's much appreciating something this council's really starting to hone in on is really assessing what our total needs are you know there's the making do with what we can attitude and there's the will do the do what we can with what we have attitude I think that's prevailed in Medford. For a very long time, and we're seeing the impacts now where departments don't have the staffing they need that maintenance for buildings hasn't been sufficient so we have a lot of deferred maintenance backlog facilities haven't been invested in. And we're kind of snowballing a little bit, and getting our getting our getting back on track there I think is, it's. The residents need to have clear information because they're going to be asked to make really big decisions.
[Paul Righi]: Well, and I think you'd have to pay for this. The first major step by creating this department. Yeah. So that shows your commitment to the facilities and buildings.
[Zac Bears]: Two specific, hopefully smaller questions. One is just around Chevalier. You staff the commission now? Yeah. Is there any way that we can increase how much revenue that Chevalier is bringing to the city?
[Paul Righi]: I'm that's the private management company with the agreement. And that, you know, I know there's an agreement with the mayor's office I've not really done on that. And I know that they're trying to bring as many events into that facility.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah.
[Paul Righi]: So, you know, they're trying and we're doing some work in there to help improve the quality of that building so they can maybe bring in bigger events and more events.
[Zac Bears]: Last question is just about this this space I know we've talked about this space already before. I don't think we're going to get that money in the state budget for for some of the stuff we were hoping to do. I didn't see it in there I hate to disappoint you on it. Just in general, could we take a little bit more of a look at this room, this room tends to end up getting used as a storage space when I really don't think it should and and also there's some, you know, that curtain over there, if we can't replace the curtains is there some minor work we can do just to make sure.
[Paul Righi]: My, my plan for as I have told the mayor is this is a people space. Yeah, I'm in it, we should try to make it look as presentable as possible. And I'm hoping, once the new budget, I can replace the shades, the shades in here that really need to be replaced, maybe replace the curtain and upgrade the lighting. So that's a start. Also, looking at room 207. Yeah, so some minor upgrades there so I am looking at those public spaces in this building. I think you may have seen the first one was when I had the always. hallways done and brought back to what they should look like. That's going to be a yearly project. We'll try to keep that up look and the look of the building as presentable as possible. But I've been looking at windows and saying, can we clean windows? Can we do a lot of things? Great. It's to squeeze that into a tight budget and try to get those things done.
[Zac Bears]: Understanding that may not have some things we were hoping to have. Maybe replacement isn't possible, but functionality and cleaning of existing stuff. Maybe the curtains don't have to go, but can they be... Yeah, if we can refinish something. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Thank you so much. Thank you. Those are my questions.
[Nicole Morell]: Would you were you.
[Paul Righi]: Okay, we will go to Chevalier you'll see the one budget item is that the part time maintenance person has been moved over to my oversight. So, I've been actually since I've been here. overseeing his work, getting things done. We are doing some projects there. We're putting in a chairlift with some funding that we got. As you know, we're redoing the facade of the building that needed to be done. That project hopefully should start again within the next month. The contractor got back to me. They're having a little problem with the stone, but once they secure the stone, then that'll start up. And I'm working on a $200,000 earmark for that building starting for next fiscal year. So hopefully we'll get that and we can do some more projects.
[Nicole Morell]: Great. Thank you. Questions for the council? Seeing none. Thank you so much for being here. All right. We will go to fire. Fire department, page 146. So for the fire department, we have Chief Friedman here and the expenditures summary. I'll give a beat. Take a brief pause as everyone gets collected. If everyone's walking away. I'm just going to give, since there's so few of us in here, I'm just going to give one more moment for viruses and bears to come back in and then we'll get started.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Just gets back to the seat.
[Nicole Morell]: All right, we'll go. Everyone will filter back in. So yes, so we're going on fire department. We have Chief Friedman here. The expenditure summary for the department is $14,399,581 less $21,640 or minus 0.15% versus the previous year. We'll go to you, Chief Friedman. Thank you for being here.
[John Freedman]: Okay, Medford Fire Department consists of four groups. We have in-fire suppression, we have a Fire Prevention Bureau, Training Division, and Fire Investigation Team. And obviously, I have one full-time office manager and one part-time office assistant. So since I took over 18 months ago, I've been striving to bring the department up to today's modern standards by modernizing and the method fire department continues to provide protection to the citizens of Medford. We respond to numerous calls, medicals, motor vehicle accidents, fires, and we've had numerous multiple on fires recently. And all this with less resources. Um, the inflation and the pandemic supply chain interruptions have had a huge effect on the department's operations, and we're constantly looking for ways to stretch the dollar, increase efficiency and do more with less. Um, we've had a lot of turnover in the department since I took over due to retirements, promotions. Um, we did hire 12 new firefighters and This turnover is happening at a rate that is almost impossible to keep up with the current delays that are in the academy and throughout. It's not just Metro, it's throughout Massachusetts. That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to recognize the firefighters under my command. In the 18 months since I took over, they have done an excellent job and continue to do so on a daily basis. During the pandemic, we were here. We responded to COVID positive calls and facilities. In the beginning, the CD guidance wasn't, it was constantly changing. We made do with the tools that we had on hand. And firefighters did not have the option of working remotely. And they showed up every day. Most of them, including myself, um, ended up getting COVID. Our families got COVID and yet the department kept functioning at a high level despite all this throughout the pandemic. And I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank all of the firefighters under my command, men and women for everything they did and continue to do to maintain public safety in the city. Um, We also receive support from many of the departments. Some of them we heard from today here in the city to help us accomplish our mission. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Medford Police Department, the DPW, all their staff, the water department, our mechanic, Brendan Saluda. I like, I have a special thanks go out to him. He keeps these trucks and the apparatus and all our other vehicles running on a daily basis. I hope I didn't miss anybody. I really don't want to have anybody feel like they were missed when I was thinking. So I'll just give you a brief summary on some of the things that are going on right now. We are in the process of, you know, working on the design and a feasibility study for a new headquarters. The feasibility study is at approximately 45% done. When it gets completed, we'll have a written document. So we'll be able to share that. We're very early stages of the design of the headquarters. We're trying to go through the program books and figure out the exact amount of square footage. And then once the feasibility comes in, and we figure out how big of a facility it's going to be, then obviously the next step will be to look at funding. So that's where we are with the headquarters. As far as like the outside stations, the satellite stations, since I've taken over, we've done numerous renovations. I listed them in my summary. you know, we continue to do that. And the facilities manager also has been a big help. So when I have something, um, I utilize his expertise to help me out with efficiency and how we should go about repairing some of this stuff. Um, we have two new fire pumpers that, uh, were funded and a contract signed with sea grade. So we are, um, my apparatus team is set to go out to the factory the end of June. to help design and finalize the drawings for the apparatus. And we also operate in the department, we have a utility vehicle that I activated that we use for numerous different things. If we need off-road, if we have an emergency up in the woods, we need to go off-road, we have that capability now. We have a boat that Right after I took over as chief, we activated Marine One and it's in the water in the summer. In the winter, we can't keep it in the water, so it comes out and it's stored at headquarters. We operate a brush truck. So, you know, While we wait for these new pumpers to come in, we have to continue to operate to the pot. And we recently lost one of our pumps, the frame prematurely failed. So that's the reason we're ordering these pumps. But during the wait, it's a long wait before those trucks come in. Um, I've made some changes in the budget and increased motor services so that we can actually begin to start to try and start some more parts. So we have the parts here when something breaks because what's happened with the supply chain interruption is we have a failure, for example, something needs breaks or needs an alternator, let's say, and then we call up and nothing is in stock. So then we end up, not only does it go down while we wait to repair it, we have to wait for the part to come in before we can repair it. So we're gonna make some changes and try to, at least the common parts that we use, that we know we're gonna use throughout the year, we're gonna try and stock some of those under this new budget. And with that, I'll take some questions.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Chief. Chief, I don't think anybody realizes police, fire, and DPW, those are our frontline services. They work 24 hours a day, and they're really the only ones that don't, you're right, never had the opportunity to work remote. And I don't think anyone ever realizes how important the fire department or the police department is until you call them to come to your house. And you're correct. I've had a chance to come to my house a couple of times. And that's when you realize how important you are. I'd say 2 o'clock in the morning when you call for a policeman or fireman, they're there within a minute. So I thank you for what you've done there. Chief, in the last month, you've had a bunch of fires involving the lithium batteries. are we lacking equipment? Is there a different kind of equipment that we should have to put those type of fires out? And you know, you know, I know you get the cars now being charged at the houses. I think we're seeing an uptick and fires everywhere.
[John Freedman]: Okay, we did have recently have a couple of I would call them e bikes or e scooters. Yeah. Uh, and they are lithium ion batteries. You're correct. And, um, part of what's happening with these fires we had in the homes were, um, when they do happen in the home, it's devastating because they burn so hot, they go into a thing called thermal runaway and it ends up, um, you know, causing significant damage. Um, and the, it happens very rapidly. So by the time we get there, even if it's two or three minutes, you've got this massive fire. So, um, you know, at that point when the fire gets that big, you know, you kind of go to defensive ops and that ends up being more devastating because, you know, you end up having more damage. So we did put out a press release through the Department of Fire Services. It went in the globe and, um, you know, to kind of put the word out about these lithium-ion batteries and the proper, to follow the manufacturer's recommendations on properly charging it, storing it, you know, they're all different. So to put something out like that, you have to stay generic. And then, you know, we're about to put out a second press release for the Southern Fire regarding lithium-ion. So yeah, we are seeing an uptick. You know those those those types of fires the ones are in the home we have to use water that's that's the media okay. We are my training divisions been kind of looking into some fire blankets that some of the other departments are using, but the you know when I looked into it right now it's kind of very early in the incipient phase with those. They're very expensive and there's a bunch of different ones out there. So I'm trying to like do a survey through the Metro chiefs to find out which ones are the best. Uh, but then obviously the end all, you know, answer, you have to make sure that you get the right one. The problem with them is too, is that they're only limited usage. So if you purchase one of those for say it's two to $3,000 per blanket, And you use it three times, it's done. Sometimes five times. It depends on the fire, how hot it is and what happens. So is that a new wave, could end up being the new wave, how we're going to fight these things, especially up on the highway where we have no water, or if you're in a parking garage and you just have very little access to water. So I'm definitely looking at it really hard. I'm in the middle of kind of waiting on the Metro Chiefs to see what everyone else is using to try and combat those.
[Richard Caraviello]: City is moving forward. We're looking to bring in bio and life science projects. Is the department have the equipment to do a bio hazard or something if there were to be an issue in one of those type of buildings?
[John Freedman]: I think those are going to be level ones and twos. You know, I don't, if I don't think there's, I'd have to look into that to get back to you on what, if there is any specialized equipment that we would need. Yeah.
[Richard Caraviello]: I mean, they're not coming tomorrow, but they will be here in a few years. And I want to make sure that the department is able to handle it.
[John Freedman]: I think that's one of the reasons we kept it to level one and two is it's less of an impact than threes or fours. You know, like you get up to those level labs and it's a completely different ballgame. So, um, I mean, there are some issues with the gases they use and how they're going to store them. And you know, that'll all be done through fire prevention, make sure we keep an eye on that. But, um, I'm not aware of right now of anything special that we need for those, but I will look into that.
[Richard Caraviello]: I know they're coming down the line and they're not here yet. Understood. So as I'm looking here in your personnel chart, I see a decrease in firefighters of $143,958. What do we attribute that to?
[John Freedman]: Okay, I did speak to the chief of staff about this, and that may be an error, I'm looking into that. it's possible that that's a mistake. But until I didn't communicate that to them until tonight, I thought that was what it was, but we're gonna get back to you and find out if it's a mistake or not.
[Richard Caraviello]: Well, Madam President, I mean, we seem to be getting a lot of mistakes in this year, and not just the department. We've picked up with a few others at different departments. I think, Maybe before we vote on this budget, all these mistakes should be rectified.
[Nicole Morell]: Absolutely.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. That's it for me, the chief at the moment. Okay.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from Councilors?
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, what was the mistake again?
[Nicole Morell]: It says they're less to fire.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, that was okay. We think that's yeah, that's also in the personnel chart. So we think that may not be true. It's not true.
[John Freedman]: Well, we're looking into it.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Nicole Morell]: Yeah, I do know. I think it was last. Does that I mean, I'm not trying to guess for this. I'll just ask this question different ways. So it's not connected to that. Do you have positions you're not able to fill because of the delay from the firefighter Academy?
[John Freedman]: Absolutely, yeah, I'd love to, what I did when I did this budget, prepared for the budget, I did sort of a little staffing analysis. And what's happened is it kind of, it's a dynamic thing. So when you, we had people retire that really weren't slated to retire and they just left. So, and then a side effect of making promotions, which is fiscally responsible by the way, cause you're sealing the overtime void. I ended up making a bunch of promotions, like seven of them. So if you add up those with a couple of people that left suddenly, we had one recently just at the end of May that just left. So there's three there. There's two that are gonna age out, one in August, one in November. So if you add the number up, it's 10. So I'd like to talk to the mayor. I haven't done that yet, but I'm gonna sit down with the mayor. And once I get the authorization to do that, that all takes time. It takes money. Um, I have to have that discussion with her. Um, but you know, what's happened is the academy, I called up there, there's three different academies, the quickest I could get them in. Once I prepare and go through all the background checks and medical screening site testing, all of that, once that takes usually three, three or four months that I can then petition. Once I have the mayor's decision and names and social security numbers, we can give them conditional letters of employment and we petition the academy. They're telling me right now that's nine months from there. So if you go three and nine, that's a year. And then if you take the 12 weeks it takes to train them, that's 15, 16 months before we're gonna see them on the fire ground. So the quicker we get them, know, certified and decision made, then if something else comes up in the next nine months, say Boston runs an academy or Brookline or some other department where we can try to get them in there, we could get them a little bit sooner. But Um, in the absence of that, you're talking before we're going to see them will be in fiscal 25. Okay. So, and that's what I know. There's always, uh, what I found out in the last 18 months, the unknown where all of a sudden somebody's, you know, I did a little, uh, another little analysis and there's seven firefighters that are over 32 years. Some of them got 40 years. Some of them have 36 years and one has 37 and another one 33. So they have the age, they have the time, but they're hanging around, right? So, but they could just in any moment make a decision, hey, I'm done. And you know, they're ready to go. So, but they're not, they're hanging around. So I can't count those when I do my analysis, cause they could stay. There is one in that group that's gonna age out in early fiscal 25. So there's at least one more that I know in, you know, because once we turn 65, we have to leave, that's the deal, right? So that's what I know as of right now. And what's happening is it's exceeding, the rate they're leaving at is exceeding my ability to replace them. Even if I call right now today, because it takes so long to do that process. So that's the best explanation I have for that.
[Nicole Morell]: So just confirming outside of this, whatever is going on with this too, that we don't know, you do have within this budget, to your understanding, money for those 10 positions?
[John Freedman]: Right now, I do. Even if this is correct and it's 78, I do have the money there to fill those positions in this budget. And there'll still be some left over That'll be what we call vacant positions. We talked about that last budget season that we have to maintain, because what's going to happen, the side effect of all this, if we don't get them quick enough, then the overtime goes up and then I exceed the overtime budget. So that money's there to kind of protect me when I go over.
[Nicole Morell]: Okay. And as I understand, police are having an issue getting qualified candidates. Is FIRE having the same issue, or it's just simply the delay of the academy?
[John Freedman]: It's more or less the delay in the academy. I mean, I have to have the conversation with the mayor, and she has to give me the authorization to begin. Once that happens, like I said, that time clock will start. I'll begin all, you know, usually we start with the background checks, then we go make a decision from there, how many make it through that. Cause that's the other issue that's happening is not, we've had sort of a, when we call for the list, sometimes we don't get as many on the list that we need to hire. So if you're going to hire say 10, for example, you might need to look at 30 because that's the civil service rules. So you might go through that list and you don't end up with 10, you can end up, with less. So that's the fear. And then, um, uh, you know, the list could run out. You know, I, I don't think this one will, but you know, they give the test every, every year. So, um, you know, there was some discussion and in the chief's association about maybe creating a reserve list so that like you have these people on the list and when those openings open up the academy, you can jump on. And then every time these people retire, you could say, okay, uh, we're going to hire, you know what I mean? If you have a certified list to pull from, but, um, Medford's never traditionally done that in the fire department. So that would be a change. Um, you know, my advice to the may is going to be start immediately, get the process started, get them all, um, you know, pull the list from civil service, get, get started on the background checks. The quicker we get that done, the faster I can petition the academy and get that clock started.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Vice is embarrassed.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, chief. Um, just a couple of quick clarifying questions. One on the facilities. Um, So you said the feasibility for the fire headquarters is about 45% done?
[John Freedman]: That's what I understand from the architectural studio that we hired.
[Zac Bears]: Given that, what would be the timeline for feasibility and design to finish? Is that about six months to a year?
[John Freedman]: whatever, it all depends on what that study says. It may say several things, but whatever that does end up saying, then a decision will be made. All right, which direction are we going in? And then once that's made, that whole design process will continue, right? And we've already been working towards what we think we need based on the requirements of the fire department. Okay. And we look at 50 years, you know, it's going to be a 50 year building. So you have to kind of think ahead and say, okay, do we have room for expansion here? If they decide to expand and run an ambulance, or if they're going to run a heavy rescue, or if we're going to add another company, you know, to the headquarters, do you have the space? Do you have the room, the dorm rooms? Do you have the, you know, the capacity? So, you know, we're trying to be forward thinking, but at the same time conservative. So we're not, spending too much of the city's money. We wanna get what we need and not go overly elaborate, right? But yet still have the room to expand if we need it. So once that is figured out by the architects, then we can, basically you're gonna tabulate that how many square feet and that will equate to a number. And then we're gonna have to go to the city and find the money, just like the high school. There has to be a process, how we're gonna fund it. And I think at that point, it'll be like, all right, take a breath. Let's figure this out. And then they fund it. And then we'll have a timeline. I think if we funded it, when I talked to the architects, they're saying probably from that point on, probably four years it'll be built for the ribbon cutting. That's the estimate, depending on how long it takes to fund it.
[Zac Bears]: And that's from when we have the funding decided?
[John Freedman]: From when we have the funding to when we actually ribbon cut. So that's rough. That's a very rough estimate. And it all depends on how long it takes to get, you know, if it has to go on the ballot or something like that and delay it, you know, so. You know, we just were working with them very closely to try and get that square footage down, and I'm trying to get them to kind of complete that feasibility study so we can share that with the city makes them this high level decisions.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And then we'll move on is the is the, and again I understand if you can't quite answer but you know, by this time next year do we think we'll have the study and done and the number or.
[John Freedman]: I think we'll have a study done pretty quick. I mean, they owe us that. I've been kind of pushing for that, you know? And then the number, once that study is done and the decisions are made, I think it'll be pretty quick. We'll have a number to come back to the council and say, hey, you know, we're gonna need X amount of dollars for this.
[Zac Bears]: So. Got it. Definitely understand that it's a process, but also, you know, I think we all feel the urgency around it too. And just to clarify this, we're looking at the site of the existing HQ plus the former police headquarters.
[John Freedman]: There's also within that, you know, square footage, you're also looking at how you're gonna heat it, cool it.
[Zac Bears]: Right.
[John Freedman]: And we're looking at efficiency. You know, the city has to make some decisions there. How efficient do you want, you know, cause obviously there's different levels of efficiency, you know, there's lead gold, I believe is the best, right. But that comes at a much greater cost. Cause you're putting in all electric, you know, solar, Maybe geothermal, you know, that one would have the highest cost and then there's sort of like a two and a three, you know, version of that. Yeah, so that those are again all decisions that the city has to make once we get there. And then the other problem we run into is the fire service is extremely, we use a lot of energy. So it's extremely hard to accomplish legal, although it has, I'm told now it has been done, but at what cost, right, like what's the maintenance cost going to be afterwards on all this high tech stuff because that's what we're doing we're talking about putting in solar geothermal high tech. radiant heating, you know, something that needs to have high level maintenance that you don't normally see in a regular fossil fuel or something that's less, maybe like heat pumps, things like that. So Those are decisions. Those are something that we look at the grants that are out there and we look at the cost and we say, okay, is it possible? How big is the building that determines how big, how many tons of cooling and heating we're gonna do? And then based on the, whatever incentives that are out there, the city can make that decision. And then we try to go for whatever that decision is. That's what we strive for.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. Last question is this question I asked to Tim earlier, you know, just, you know, what are some metrics that you think about on a daily basis or on an annual basis, you know, that allow you to say, you know, measure your success. So, you know, this was a good day, or we've made some real progress this year. those kind of things and respecting that I think obviously we know the first one is that no one's injured and everyone comes home.
[John Freedman]: That's the most important. That's how I measure success. We all go home at the end of the shift, right? Yeah. That's the goal. Safety, number one. Not only our safety but the residents. Exactly. And so I constantly, we obviously you know, um, document all of that. And we look at it all the time, right? We have this system we use called interest reporting, national fire incident reporting system, and all of our data is logged into that. And on top of that, um, you know, I constantly look at, um, you know, the amount of injury hours, right? Like, so every year, um, I've only been here 18 months, but every so often I look at, all right, per fiscal year, how many hours of injury did we pay out? Right. And I'd like to see that number going down. But the reality of the situation is, is that as the department ages, as we get older, injury rate goes up, right? And, you know, we try to get new firefighters so that, you know, the average age goes down, the injury goes down, but then it's also a function of the amount of calls. So we've seen an increase in calls in the last three years. So we went from, you know, say somewhere around 11,000 and we're almost at, I think last year we were at 12,289. This year we're on point to go over 13. when you see an increase in call volume and you're getting more fires and more calls, the incidence of injury should go up. And when I look at injury hours, it stayed steady from the last three times I looked at it. So in the last three years, it's been 8,000 hours every year. That's the amount of injury hours if you add everybody up that was hurt, okay? So it's, so it's kind of staying the same where the call volume went up. It's staying the same. So it, it, it doesn't look like it's, it seems like it's static, but with the amount of call volume, it's actually, I think when I look at that, I say, okay, you know, that's good. The other thing I have done since I took over is I prioritize training, training, training, training, right? So you do your training, you do your knowledge, skills, and abilities. You evaluate after you do this training. Okay. What could we have done better? And then, um, that the effect of that is supposed to be a decrease in injuries, decrease in accidents and mistakes in general. Right? So that's what I've done since I took over and we continue to do that. That's one of the budgets, the line items in there that I asked for an increase in because know, if you look at what happened when I took over, we lost, you know, Gilberto retired, he had 23 years experience, I come in, I'm at 18 months, I need training, I left my position, I wore five hats when I was a deputy. Okay, so I had to rebuild that underneath me, but they don't have the skill level of me. So I'm constantly training them. And then as you promote a captain and a lieutenant, You lose your driver. So the drivers that are driving the apparatus, once they get promoted, they can't drive anymore. So now you've got new guys driving the apparatus and they need apparatus driver training. So we brought in training for that and it just. The more retirements we see, I lost a high-level deputy that retired early, and he was my IT guy, right? So now I'm leaning on Jim, and hopefully this new guy, I can lean on him when he gets all set up. I'm embracing technology. I'm bringing in, I was talking to the water department about doing a flow model for all the hydrants, right? And then color coding the hydrants so that we pull up to a hydrant, the color on the hydrant means something. Currently they're all the same color. And, you know, so like they have a whole NFPA color standard, but that's going to take time and money to go and do the flow models. But what I've done with, Tim was, we sat down with the water department. We said, okay, as this model is made and as you guys get the data, share it with us. And then we'll have that data. It's on maps. We'll know what size water main is there. Currently right now, we have, you know, very little idea of what we're hooking up to. We just hook up to a height and hopefully it's okay, right? So once we hook up to it, we know, but by that time it's too late. So it'd be nice to be able to, as we're coming into the scene, okay, This is a six inch main. This is an eight inch. This one's a 16. I know where we're going to get the most water from now. And we're going to put that on the tablets and the trucks. That's another thing that will be good for the firefighters. They can actually look at the screen and see where the water mains are. But that all comes at a cost. You have to buy an app. And you have to basically buy the licenses for each computer so that you can load it on there. And I think eventually we'll get there. And then the goal is to have the water department increase, you guys were talking about what more staffing you could do in the DPW. I have an answer for that is increase the amount of water mean that you change on a yearly basis. So if you're changing a quarter of a mile a year right now, based on the modeling, once we get back, we should increase that amount. It should be maybe four miles a year. And I don't know what that cost would be. It might translate to doing it in-house and hiring more staff. And then you could replace more means when we find the problem. Right. So that's kind of where I'm at.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, that's helpful. That's I've had some conversations with Tim and Dan. about that issue with the water mains and we can see obviously how that really goes right into the work that you do.
[John Freedman]: I do also look at response time. Yeah. I get a daily report every day by email from Armstrong, exactly how long it takes them to get on scene when they get the call. If it's an ALS unit, a BLS unit, and then I get graphs and charts each day, like it shows me if something's in red, I know something went awry. For example, say there's three medicals come in all at the same time. It's very common, right? So A1 goes to the first cardiac one, and then they send a BLS and a BLS. And now the third one's coming from Arlington, or it's coming from wherever it's coming from, right? That may take longer to get there, right? So that's the beauty of having a fight department. The fight department gets there in under three, and we stabilize the patient, and then we wait for that. It affords that ambulance time to get there. So as long as we're meeting that standard with who's responding there and we're stabilizing, And sometimes what happens, what's been happening with with Armstrong is and all these ambulance companies for that matter, same thing we're having, the staff is leaving, moving quicker than they can replace. So they've done some things, they've hired some more staff. And I've also when we did the contract this year, I met with them and I asked for a third ambulance to be in the city. So currently we have two ambulances and during the hours from eight in the morning to eight at night, that's where I saw the peak volume. So you talk about efficiency, that's where we need a third one. So what we did was we brought another ambulance in and the two medics that are in the medic car now, if they need a transport, they can go back and get that ambulance and become a third transport unit in those cases where like we run into a situation where we're waiting a long time for an ambulance. And since I've done that, I've seen a lot less problems. We still have problems every now and then, like every now and then it's just weird. Like you'll get seven medicals will come in, you know, for example, in the town next door, like Malden, Everett, and then we'll have seven. There's no way the system can handle that. It just, it ends up, somebody's going to be waiting. So what we try to do is, and what I told Armstrong is they have fleet eyes. They know where all their trucks are. Okay. And you know, they have to kind of sort of triage the ambulances and say, okay, if this, because they also do our EMD, which is emergency medical dispatch. And they know something's cardiac or it's ALS, right? So prioritize that ambulance, move that one over first and go to the ALS call. The BLS call can be stabilized while we're waiting. And so it goes against the contract a little bit because they're regionalizing without doing it. But what it does is it increased the efficiency. And it's only during those times when the calls are at such a peak that it's overwhelmed everybody. And it's been working out better. They're working on getting more staff constantly. I mean, that's definitely helping a little bit. You know, those are the kinds of things I look at, you know, as chief, it's like, okay. And if there is a problem, if I detect a problem, sometimes my staff will come to me, hey, it took like too long to get to this call or something happened where the ambulance was late. And then I make a phone call, I talk to them and say, okay, what happened here? And then we look into it, right? There's a million things that could have happened that as the fire chief, I have that, on my shoulders to make sure that I investigate those so that we make sure that it won't happen again. So that's what I've been doing since I took over and I stay in touch with them whenever I need to investigate something. pull the tapes, whatever, I do that stuff.
[Zac Bears]: Very helpful. Um, really quick question. Do you think regionalizing EMS would be helpful given that it's already kind of happening?
[John Freedman]: I think if we have a contract with them, we'll go against the contract. If they did, it would violate it. So, uh, I think there, um, you know, I think they're doing it without regionalizing right now, because if they have an emergency, they need to get ALS there and with that with fleet eyes, and they have the capability to do it. They're the best ones to do it. You know what I mean? Like, because they know where the trucks are, they're looking at a map saying this trucks, you know, the closest trucks send that one to Medford, right? So it speeds, and it might not even be an Armstrong ambulance. It could be a Cambridge ambulance. It could be, you know, a Fallon. It could be all, it could be anyone. They know where everyone is. So.
[Zac Bears]: Interesting. Yeah.
[John Freedman]: So, I mean, I think if we were going to do that, you know, or they were going to do that, it would violate the contract and then there'd be a problem. Right. All right. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. Chief, just a couple of questions. You brought up the fact that you've got an abundance of medicals now. The community's getting older. I see other cities have medical trucks. I think we used to have one years ago. You mean on the fire department? Yes. Is there talk of maybe getting a medical truck to take the burden off you sending out the big truck? all the time.
[John Freedman]: So, you know, I did look, I've had looked at that. Other cities like Woburn, they run their own ambulance.
[Richard Caraviello]: Well, I'm not saying running an ambulance, but you know, I have a medical, just a medical truck, you know, versus sending out a, you know, a big bumper or, you know, like I say, and I see them on the highway, the medical truck will be following the ambulance.
[John Freedman]: Are you talking about a medic unit? Like an SUV? Yeah, yeah. We have that in the city now. We do have that now? So what we've done with them, what I did with Armstrong was those two medics, or whoever's in that medic unit, a lot of times it's quicker and easier to get the medic to that call. So they operate like that normally. In times where, between eight and eight, where things could get sort of dicey, we get a lot of call volume, They don't, they don't have the capability to transport. So now you're tying up. Now think about what you just said, right? We've got a medic in the back of the ambulance. Cause you want the, it's like bringing the doctor to you, right? He's in the back. Someone's driving his, his SUV. So you're tying up the medic and you, the ambulance has to go. So that's part of the problem too, that I didn't want to get into, but because we don't have a hospital anymore, right. Everyone's either going to Winchester, they're going to Mass General, they're going out of the city. And a lot of times it's mass transit. So, but even if they go to Winchester or Melrose or wherever they go, right? It takes time to turn that ambulance around. So we also sent letters to the hospitals too, because what was happening was they were using those medics like doctors. They were kind of like triaging the patient saying, okay, don't turn those over to us till we can get a doctor for it, right? So they were holding them at the hospital and it was tying up resources, making it almost impossible to get them back in a timely manner. It would take hours. So we wrote a letter to them and basically they had to hire some more staff within the hospital to be able to care for these patients and turn the ambulances around quicker because it was having the side effect of people not getting an ambulance for you know, six, eight, 10 minutes, and that's dangerous. So, um, since we, that was another thing we did. I just, you know, you just brought it back to my memory that, that by doing that, it's, it turned it around, turned them around quicker. But in the past, when we had the Lawrence, right, the ambulance were all here, even if they weren't, were at the hospital, they could clear them. They're in Medford. Now they're all either in Boston, Winchester, Melrose, wherever they are. So that time to go from A to B, It takes longer to get them back. So that, I think, is another side effect of losing the hospital.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, you're right. So last question. So the city is looking to grow and expand. And one of the areas they're looking at is Route 16, Riverside Avenue area. There's going to be some building there up in the Fellsway. Are we going to need in the next four or five years to maybe
[John Freedman]: uh increased staff and maybe another truck or two here or there as you know i think you hit a uh you hit on a subject that um the the city is growing in leaps and bounds right um i saw an article online it was a the 15th fastest growing city in the nation So that's so it was the fire department. The fire department. So to answer your question, I would love to expand. I'd love to have another station down at station landing somewhere. I'd love to have maybe put engine three in service or maybe take the two houses and combine them into a three bay station or something, you know, in the future. But all of that comes at a great cost, you'd have to increase minimum manning and that 14 million will go way up.
[Richard Caraviello]: And that's something that the city has to... But is that in your part of the capital plan, looking to grow the department as the city grows?
[John Freedman]: It isn't yet, but I can certainly look into it. And we can sort of as a wish list, put it in there and see if we can... You're going to get bigger buildings, newer buildings. more people would be coming in and obviously attacks I mean that I thought about that when we when we were looking at headquarters I when Gilberti was chief I sort of mentioned that to him about that might have been a way to sort of pay for a temporary headquarters, right? You take and build a new station, say down a station landing, right? And then what you do is you put all the headquarters people out in the, once you get that built, you have enough room for the whole department to be on the peripheral. And that gives you an empty building to rebuild. And then as we go through, like you were talking about replacing stations, I mean, I'm dreaming right now, but it would be as we replace them, right? Then they would come to headquarters and we replace this one. And like, if you wanted to add another station somewhere, that's the perfect, sort of scenario instead of you build a headquarters, right? And we're going to build a temporary building at what cost? I'm looking very hard at Cambridge right now. They have a, um, I believe it's a four bay station they bought. That's a temporary station for millions of dollars. It just comes down from Canada and they put it up on this site. They have a site plan for it. And it's, it's just a temporary building while they build the new building. Right? But the better, again, I don't know the exact numbers, but I was talking to the architects about it. I gave them the contacts so we could kind of look into that and see what they paid for that, see how much it costs, see what the plan, the long-term plan is for that. Like in some ways it might be better if you were gonna have that plan and say, okay, we're gonna expand out into say station land area, landing area, or like maybe in another part of Medford. to build that station, a permanent one. And then when you're ready to do your other renovations or replacements, you have a place to go. And you look at the expansion, I'm looking at the expansion now as chief. It's like, I see all these developments, right? Maybe you pull some linkage money in and say, okay, if you're gonna build this big of a project, you gotta add on a fire station or put it within the development. Thank you. You're welcome.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, any other questions from the council? Members of the public who wish to speak? Thank you, Chief. I think we'll open up to any, I know folks have been sitting here, Mr. Buckley's been sitting here, so.
[Eddie Buckley]: Happy to go ahead. Walter Buckley, 340 Salem Street, Medford, also a Medford firefighter. We just had a couple of concerns while looking at the budget, starting off with public safety supplies. If you look at last year's budget and this year's budget, it used to be $90,000 and it's going down to $55,000. I believe to this day, we've spent $92,000. This item pays for all fire operation related equipment. And obviously the firefighters feel that $55,000 is just not enough, as again, we've already spent $92,000 this year. We're pulling money from other line items to make up that cost. Also, usually in that item is turnout gear. Turnout gear, currently 29 members only have one set of gear. because of an expired set or they were never issued a second set. By the end of fiscal year 24, 47 more will expire. That's a total of 75 sets, which is equal to $400,000. Obviously going from $90,000 to $55,000, they're not taking into consideration that turnout care. I don't know if they put that in a different line item, but we can't find it anywhere. The next one is, you guys were talking about the manning. So in fiscal year 21, we had 125 members. Fiscal year 22, we had 123 members. And I don't know what they were talking about, the two members being cut, but the way we look at the budget today, fiscal year 24 gives us 120 members. That's another two members that we lost, that would equal to $148,000, that's two members. Yeah, so looking back, 1989 we had 170 members and we had 6,200 runs. 2022 we have 105 members, the 12,190 runs. So the calls are going up, they're almost doubling and we're going down, that takes, Firefighters, they have to work overtime. Physically, mentally, we're getting worn out. Firefighters are getting promoted to lieutenant, captain, and deputy, and it's not getting backfilled. As you talked about earlier, it takes about 18 months to get somebody here. That's if you did that today. There's no plan of hiring anybody today. So by next year, we're under 100 guys. It's not feasible, especially on us, on the members. It makes us, the morale's down in the city, and working more overtime, it's just putting stress on us, putting stress on our families. The last thing we wanted to talk about was the training line. It is getting a bump from 12,000 to 25,000. But with that, we're spending around $10,000 to have tiller training for new members. So that cuts that down to $15,000. Then we'll spend another $10,000 to do pump simulator training, which we do every couple of years. So now we're gonna have $20,000 already spent. The rest of the year, we have $5,000 for a training line. You can't train a member You can't train a department with 100 members, 110 members with $5,000. That's no training at all. We're hoping that someone knocks down a house and we get to go in there and cut holes in the roof and do stuff like that. But to actually train guys, we're not getting any classes coming in. Armstrong hasn't provided classes with us for a while. And I heard you talking about the We don't personally have a medical chaser car. That's Armstrong. We would love a rescue or an ambulance like that that would provide income to the city. And I believe Lieutenant Jones will be talking about that when I leave. But those are most of our biggest fears in this budget. The lack of public safety supplies money, the lack of staffing and the training. Any questions I can ask?
[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Caraviello.
[Eddie Buckley]: What number do you think the public safety should be? Well, again, if we already spent $92,000 this year, we're only getting $55,000 next year.
[Richard Caraviello]: So it should at least be at least level funded. Yeah. At least. At least. Now, I see underneath it there the public safety uniforms. Yep. Went from, it's going up to a little bit of a, there's a bump there. 110 now? Or 104,000? Are those like the irregular uniforms? It says public safety uniforms.
[Eddie Buckley]: That's the clothing, yeah, the regular uniforms. It has nothing to do with the bunker gear. The bunker gear is $5,000.
[Richard Caraviello]: That's not considered turnout gear. No. Okay. And I know, I remember we fought about turnout gear for a long time. Right, and we're afraid of that. It's not in there.
[Eddie Buckley]: So we're gonna have to come and fight for it again. There's no turnout gear at all here. And I believe the council and the administration talked about some kind of plan where they would rotate, they would know when these gears are expiring. We know they're expiring. They're expired right now. There's no plan to buy them. There's no money to buy them.
[Richard Caraviello]: So we need a plan for turnout, yeah.
[John Freedman]: So I can answer some of that. This $90,000 that he's looking at, we did go over because of turnout gear. We had 12 members that came on that we bought turnout gear through that line item, OK? Because obviously, they come on the job. We had to rent gear for them to go in the academy. And then we have to repair, clean it, send it back. And then we got to buy them new gear when they arrive, OK? We couldn't fund a second set through that because it would have been way too much money. So I had the discussion with the staff and it is in the CIP, there is a plan. And it just hasn't been funded yet. So I know what I need. I've communicated that to them. And I just haven't got around to getting the funds yet. Is that eligible for funding under the OPA money? I don't know the mechanism. That's the issue, is where is that money coming from? Most likely some of it will come from OPA, I would imagine. And well, we have a free cash of $25 million.
[Richard Caraviello]: We have a free cash of $25 million.
[John Freedman]: Like that big purchase, that $400,000 purchase, I was very well aware of that. I made the staff aware of it. It is in there. How they're going to ultimately fund it, that's a higher level decision that I don't have.
[Richard Caraviello]: Like I say, there's $25 million in free cash. And there's still OPA funds available that hopefully they're going to put a better use of it than going to.
[John Freedman]: They just haven't communicated the decision down to me yet where the money's coming from and pulled the trigger on. when to actually make the purchase. But some of the gear is correct. Some of the gear is expired. There are members that don't have second sets.
[Richard Caraviello]: And you get 10 guys. You're going to have 10 guys coming on and have no sets. We don't have 10 guys.
[John Freedman]: The plan is 10, but that won't be until the end. But it's a year away, year and a half away. So if you hire them today, they're going to hire them today.
[Richard Caraviello]: I don't know why we're not hiring people.
[Eddie Buckley]: Also, those new guys, we decided they have one set of gear. We've had four-line fighters, three-line fighters, they've all been to those fights. Now their gear has to go and get washed. What are they wearing? Someone else's gear that probably doesn't fit them. So it puts them in danger. It also puts the public in danger.
[Richard Caraviello]: And what's the cost of gear per man?
[Eddie Buckley]: About $5,000, head to toe.
[Richard Caraviello]: So you need 122, 123 sets, 122 turnout gears? That's you adding 10 guys that we're not hiring right now. No, okay.
[Eddie Buckley]: We only have 110 guys. Okay, yeah. So the issue with the gear is,
[John Freedman]: it is a finite amount of life. Under NFPA, it's 10 years and done. Once it hits 10, it's no longer deployable. So we know those dates. We know when they're going to expire. But like everything since the pandemic, there's a lead time to get it, too. So my concern is that we need to get it funded sooner rather than later, only because some of it has expired. And it takes months to get it made, get fitted, get it made, and get it delivered.
[Richard Caraviello]: Okay, and my last question is, this council received a letter a few days ago. Does anyone, would you like to discuss that letter and its contents? If you could. I don't have a letter in front of me. I think you know what it says. It says what it says. Nothing has changed from when we got the letter? No. Contract negotiations have gone nowhere? No. And there's still,
[Nicole Morell]: I think even though it feels like it was days ago, I think it was just yesterday we got it.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yesterday, okay. And there's still fire personnel that don't have insurance? They don't have insurance to this city, right?
[Eddie Buckley]: So they have VA insurance, so they can't go to their own doctor. They have to go to some guy at the VA that they don't know.
[Richard Caraviello]: I thought when we hired a new personnel person, the mayor got up here last week and said the insurance issues were all squared away. Contract negotiations were moving on. Again, they do not have insurance provided by this city. How many people don't have insurance? It's four. And how long have they been without insurance? Since they were hired. February of last year. Last year, so they still don't have insurance? Yep. I still don't have insurance. I don't either.
[Bob Jones]: They were told that they would have to wait until the open enrollment, which that period begins July 1st.
[Eddie Buckley]: They were also told that they might not possibly be eligible for it because they're not a new employee anymore, and they're not switching from any other insurance. So there's no life-changing event to jump on. So we don't know if they're getting it. We hope they're getting it.
[Richard Caraviello]: So I understand you need the life event to get on quicker. So these people were hired. And when you get hired in most jobs, there might be maybe a small waiting period to get the insurance. 60 days. 60 days. So these people have been on for more than 60 days, and they don't have insurance. Why is that? That's a question for the city. I can't help you. Madam Chief of Staff, could you answer that? So I think I have very little... No, Chief of Staff, maybe she can answer that.
[Nina Nazarian]: Good evening, President Morell, members of the council. President Morell, through you to Councilor Kariviello and to our fire union folks. This is the first I'm hearing of four members not having insurance. I sat in my office and I met with the president of the fire union, the vice president of the fire union, the secretary of the fire union. We discussed this issue in the middle of open enrollment. I asked if they had informed their members of open enrollment They said they had an opportunity at that time to enroll. I'm not aware of any communication that occurred that suggested that open enrollment would only allow them to do so in July. None of that occurred as far as I'm concerned, at least it didn't with me. I had very clear communication with the president. I really don't know what's being described here, but I certainly welcome further clarification and discussion on this topic because it was my understanding that everyone had the opportunity and was notified of open enrollment.
[Nicole Morell]: And I think we have heard.
[Eddie Buckley]: That's true. They have all applied for open enrollment, but Mr. Osborne talked to us before our conversation. And he said that they might not be eligible for it. Now our conversation, we did discuss that the members had insurance, but they don't have insurance through the city. That's what I'm talking about. I know they have insurance. They have VA insurance because they're veterans. But they're not on the city's plan. Correct. I'm not saying they don't have insurance. They have insurance through the VA. They do not have insurance through the city. They've never gotten insurance through the city. And we're hoping by July that happens.
[Richard Caraviello]: They all did apply for it. If they don't have a life event, how are they going to get on? I got nothing for it. I'm not an insurance guy.
[Nina Nazarian]: President Morales, through you, to be clear, if they've applied for open enrollment, they will get on to the city's plan. And that's just a fact, to be clear.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Then we would mislead them, Mr. Hoffman.
[Bob Jones]: All right, good evening city councils, Madam President. Bob Jones, 5 St. Mary Street. That's with us. Just would like to go over a few things on our budget and the state of affairs in the city. Our budget's being cut a little bit. I mean, Chief Friedman said that possibly it's a mistake of the 255s. I hope that's true. Our budget shouldn't be cut at all. Our budget should be increased. As we spoke earlier, Medford is one of the top 15 growing cities in the country. as the city grows, the infrastructure needs to grow along with it. I mean, we all agree with that police by DPW schools that needs to come along with the growth. Let's try to look at the capital plan. I saw that there was some projects in the fight about 25 million the school department for 60 million goes through fiscal year 2026. However, it didn't list the projects that were on there. Is there somebody that could direct me to that? detail on the capital improvement plan, who was the author of that report? To the chair.
[Nicole Morell]: Madam Chief Staff, were you able to speak to that? I believe in the, our presentation, there were not hypotheticals, but there were things that were still being worked out. Nothing is concrete. Yeah. Yeah.
[Bob Jones]: It says there was It doesn't have specific projects? Yeah, I didn't see any.
[Nicole Morell]: I believe it reflects the understood needs, but nothing specific. Correct me if I'm wrong, Madam Chief of Staff.
[Bob Jones]: There were a lot of initiatives, and there were some figures that were out there, which is done for some institute at UMass Boston, but there was no detail on the projects. I just was wondering about that.
[Nina Nazarian]: If you want to add anything, Madam Chief of Staff? Certainly happy to speak to it. And I apologize, through you, Madam Chair, the specific question on the capital improvements plan that Lieutenant Jones asked about if he could just repeat that.
[Nicole Morell]: It's just understanding what the specific projects are, because there's dollar amounts referenced in the capital plan, but what the specific projects are that they're referencing.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. Madam President, so I have a list of what appears to be and I'm happy to read them to the City Council and audience, of course. Replace purchased turnout gear already expired 95,000, fiscal 23. Firehouse alerting system, Zetron max system, and install a fiber optic network, 338,527,000, fiscal 23. Replace slash purchase turnout gear that will expire 340,460, dollars FY 23 and 100,000 FY 24. Engine three floor slab replacement, 450,000 FY 23. Add second natural gas boiler at fire headquarters, 100,000 FY 24. Half fire truck lease payment, FY 24, 25, and 26 at $143,218. Pumper apparatus replacement, FY 25, 26, and 27 at $1 million each. Feasibility study, one-year planning and design for fire headquarters stations and training facility. 150,000 FY 24, 85, 850,000 FY 25, and 200, I'm sorry, 20,000, thank goodness it's not 200,000. FY 20, what would I believe be? Seven, happy to make sure that the council has a copy of this and update anything else that needs to be updated.
[Zac Bears]: Could we make those available on the city website as well? Absolutely. Great, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, thank you.
[Bob Jones]: Appreciate it, thank you very much. So that answers the question about the turnout, yeah. The other things I'd like to just bring up is this is for many years I've been coming before this body, have been asking for a grant writer and some pilot program. We can't cut any of these budgets anymore. We need to explore new revenue streams. And I would love to get an answer on why we don't have those two items in place at this stage in the game.
[Nicole Morell]: Sorry, you said grant writer, and what was the other provision?
[Bob Jones]: Grant writer and pilot program, payment in lieu of taxes. We have a lot of nonprofits that are operating in the city that we need to support, that needs city services, that should pay their fair share. I believe they will if we had a program that was in place. Item, another funding item, CPA money, I believe should be available for station repair, redesign. How do we go about getting that? Do we have a plan in place to request that money and secure funding for the other projects that the chief of staff did not list? We did do a bunch of capital improvement type things. We got a lot of roofs. Most of the stuff is normal wear and tear. We spoke about additional resources. We have other cities around the commonwealth that are getting additional apparatus, additional stations. I think we would be in the running for one of those, an additional station, like we said, at station landing. The base of Commercial Street, in my opinion, would be a great place to put a new edge and a new ladder to service all the new growth that we're going to get. We have a lot of biotech labs coming in, which is another hazard. There's other hazards out there. COVID was one hazard that we dealt with, worked through, and persevered through and continue to work through. There will be others. We have biotech labs coming in with unknown things that will happen there and other types of after type training with we have a lot of active shooter type stuff that we're going to need to deal with be trained for and be prepared for if and when it does happen. It doesn't. The free cash we have $25 million of free cash that correctly believe we can get some of these needs addressed through that. I was asking, I was curious about the negotiated salaries account. We have some citywide accounts. So we have a pension contribution, group insurance, negotiate salaries account. The past three, four years, we haven't negotiated many salaries. So I was curious of where that money went. It should be an unspent budgetary item. One of that goes through the free cash or go someplace else. It should be money that's available for contracts. Let's see here. We talked a little bit about, somebody mentioned linkage. We get a lot of new growth coming in. We get a lot of companies, a lot of businesses that would like to build facilities, new development, new housing in the city. We can get them to pay for some of these things, stations, apparatus, through linkage. Now, I'm hoping that that is something that we're doing and looking forward to. A lot of new growth, which is gonna provide tax revenue. Property in Medford, there's a lot of million dollar houses in Medford. tax revenue should be up on that. We should have more money to collect on that going forward. We spoke a little bit about the Armstrong contract. We had just signed a new contract with a private ambulance, which is Armstrong, which we operate with every medical. We talked about the flight car. We talked about the ambulance. We talked about a chase car or a medical truck. In the past, we've had a rescue. That would work with EMS. Other cities and towns have had, Everett in particular, has had their own fire department ambulance. We could do a GIS study, which would go in and look at the need, look at our call volume, determine if it's feasible for us to run our own fire department ambulance. We just need the buy-in from the city and the willingness to do that. The other thing I wanted to talk about was some ARPA money. I'm wondering where that went, where that was spent. Do we have money to spend? Do we know how to spend it? I saw in the negotiations of debt ceiling that they were looking to claw back some ARPA money that's unspent. I hope we're not in that situation. The other thing was the state tax revenue. Last year, we had a supplemental budget with the state tax, state income taxes. had collected the state had collected more taxes than they could spend the money for. It was a supplemental budget that was released. I don't think we applied for any of those funds. And if we are in the situation again, I'd like to request that we would be in the game to request some of those funds on the supplemental budget. We need to in the city we don't we act when things are in dire straits. We need to, as far as fire department apparatus, stations, staffing, we need to have a systematic regular recurring mechanism to have those guys replaced, replenished, so we have the ability to provide service here. We have two retirements that I know of, two guys will age out this year. As far as I'm concerned, we should be having another class and those guys should be being replaced at this moment. Guys retire, guys leave, but it's slow for the city to backfill. I understand it's a long and tedious process, but we need to get ahead of it for stuff, vacancies that we know are going to happen. With the apparatus, with anything, with everything wears out, everything needs to be replenished at a regular recurring rate. So just, I appreciate the council's time. and I thank you for this forum. Any questions that anyone may have? Please let me know.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council at this time? Going to Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, President Morell. I just, I think that, you know, in light of the conversation about the fire department's budget and so many other budgets that we've heard details of tonight, to me, this illustrates the need for the FY23 budget. Sorry, you have 24 budget to be about more than just this individual budget, you know, talking about being proactive and not reactive talking about the city continuing to expand something that we knew was happening for several years. You know, to think that we can continue doing more with less is magical thinking and so I'm glad that the Council so far has made the budget season, a forum for talking about how to make the budget process more proactive in the future, how to be thinking in five and 10 year increments and not just one fiscal year at a time. And I think that for all of the reasons that our representatives of our fire department just spoke to and many other departments this evening, it's so important that as we work to pass this budget, we are also trying to bake into the process a more effective budget process for years to come so that we are not just trying to uh, reactively solve problems as they crop up because that's how problems just persist and roll over year to year. So I appreciate the comments from staff and representatives tonight.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Collins. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Just one last question. You talked about all the money we're going to need going forward. And I don't know if people realize this, but we'll squeak through this budget this year. But next year, is gonna be the year where you're gonna see hurting in the schools and this whole city is gonna be hurting because all the free money is going away this year. So we're gonna have to learn to live on, we're gonna have to find some new money going forward and find it quick because it's drying up and I don't know if we spent all our money prudently going forward. That's next year is gonna be the year.
[Bob Jones]: Again, additional revenue streams. If we were to hire a grant writer say for sake of argument, 100,000, they write $300,000 worth of grants. That's a $200,000 win. It's just basic fiscal responsible financial makes financial sense. I don't know why we haven't done. I know there were a lot of open positions at city hall. Hopefully they get filled, and we get the new IT guy, much needed. I hope he sticks around. Everybody's needed. Everybody's needed.
[Richard Caraviello]: We're not hiring anybody that's not needed, but just say, the party's over after this year. Party's over. Party's over. The free money's all gone. Next year's going to be the year. Schools are going to hurt. Everyone's going to hurt next year. on the next budget. We have a lot of new growth. We better find a lot real quick. Pilot grant writer might help us out. Thank you. If a project goes into ground today, we're not going to see it for four years. So the new tax growth doesn't come in for a while. The new growth, but the linkage in the permitting fees would. Well, we hope we get that stuff.
[Bob Jones]: Well, we never know until we ask, right? Permitting fees is automatic. They need to permit to do this building and the linkage. We just lost $3 million in the permit fee.
[Nicole Morell]: I want to try to bring us back to fire. I have someone who wants to speak. All right, sure. Thank you. Any other questions from the council specifically? All right, I'm going to go to Joanna on Zoom. Joanna, name and address for the record, please.
[7dpVBOZN8pE_SPEAKER_15]: Hi, Joanna Mejia, 44-33. I have a comment and a question. I'll go with the question first while the deputy is standing there, or lieutenant, sorry. Do we have paramedic firefighters, and if so, how many? Do we have what? Paramedic firefighters, and if so, how many?
[Bob Jones]: We do know we have paramedics that are in what we call P one the fly cars what we talked about earlier the chief mentioned that we have paramedic care through Armstrong. Currently nobody on the fire department is a paramedic trained. We have a lot of EMTs on the department, which helps out. But we do not have any paramedics on the fire department.
[7dpVBOZN8pE_SPEAKER_15]: Thank you. Thank you. And my comment. Briefly, is I just wanted to make a comment on what Council Caraviello said to the chair. We do appreciate police fire EMS. and DPW departments, especially during the pandemic. I know I do. I know my family does. I know my friends do. And a lot of my neighbors do just so you guys know. And I too worked through the pandemic and assisted living. We do appreciate you guys. And I'm sorry that the morale is low. I wish it weren't. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you.
[Bob Jones]: Thank you for those comments through the pandemic and through whatever else comes, we will be there and we will respond. Thank you.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you. All right.
[Nicole Morell]: And thank you, Chief. So much appreciated. We will go on to health department and civil defense. I'm just going to pass it off to vice president bears. So I can just going to sit down and eat some food for a second, but be right back.
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: Adam, Alicia is here.
[Zac Bears]: Just send a couple up here.
[Adam Hurtubise]: I have one for Nicole too.
[Zac Bears]: Hi, Director O'Connor, how are you? Good, yeah, I'll just introduce you and I'll read some stuff off. We have the Board of Health Health Department budget here. We're hearing from Director Marianne O'Connor. This year, the total personnel expenses were budgeted for $707,702, total ordinary expenses, excuse me, $37,250 for a total of $700,082. $784,702. This is why President Morell does it. So I'll turn it over to you, Director O'Connor.
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: Thank you. Thank you, President Morell and City Councilors. I put together a presentation. I promise it's brief, but I just wanted to kind of outline some of the highlights and the work that's been going on and how we're able to fund what the work is that we do. Because this year's budget was really focused on expanding core infrastructure, building capacity to address the critical issues that COVID really brought to light as far as social work, health equity, and community outreach. Next slide. So just a brief overview of what really what the budget foundation is. Because of the impacts of COVID, it really highlighted the health disparities and inequities among our communities, diverse and low resource population. missing infrastructure within the department to support community efforts for outreach. It really, extremely highlighted the need for social service capacity and community mental health and behavioral health needs support. It highlighted the value, the extreme value and need for community networks and partnerships with our community-based organizations and highlighted the need for improved coordination among city departments. Next slide, please. So a lot of the work that we do, I think most of you know, is grant-funded in the health department. And this is a list of some of the grant-funded initiatives that we're currently taking on. Most of it is within the Office of Prevention and Outreach. We have our MVP Preparedness Grant. I think you were given a presentation in December by Penny. as to resiliency hubs and the community-based organizations we're working with. We have the Mass Collaborative, that's called Mass Call, Part B and Part C, that's around youth substance misuse prevention, and we have a coordinator who's funded through that grant for that. And we're doing a work with Tufts as far as evaluation on best practices. Our RISE Foundation, we've just received another 25,000 for this year, and that's for our recovery supports and harm reduction initiatives. We have a Tufts, Melrose-Wakefield-Tufts grant for culturally competent connections to Kiev. It was $14,000 this year. This, I believe, is our last year of that grant. We have it. We did receive an earmark to really push our Food Justice Council forward, and that work is underway. And then we're looking forward now to opioid settlement money, which is about 1.5 million over 15 years. So we're looking at probably about $100,000 a year in funding there. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. And then we were able to obtain over $400,000 in APA funding to really help address all of those needs and infrastructure deficits that we saw because of COVID. We're also part of a lot of regional funding. Mass DPH is really pushing for health departments to work collaboratively and do regional partnerships. So we have, again, the Mass Call grant that we spoke about earlier. That's actually regional, even though we are the lead for that grant. And then we have our tobacco control. our emergency preparedness medical reserves call through Melrose. We also are part of the public health excellence grant program with our five Mystic Valley Public Health Coalition towns, cities and towns. And that has just been refunded another $300,000 for this upcoming year. So that's been a huge help as far as it pays for a lot of staff trainings, it pays for public health educational materials, pays for a lot of equipment, It's really focused a lot on inspectional services. But this year with that 300,000, we're actually going to be hiring a regional epidemiologist and some regional inspection support. So that's going to be very helpful. We are in a shared services contract tracing program grant with Somerville and Arlington. That was originally for contact tracing. Obviously, that need has diminished. DPH has decided to fund another $300,000 this year, again, for that collaboration, which we're going to be, again, we're still doing some contact tracing, but we're looking at part-time community health worker here for Medford. We're looking at additional trainings, and we're gonna be focusing on a viral hepatitis program this year for education, screening, testing, and vaccinations. And then our H, HMCC is emergency preparedness for all health and medical providers within the region that we're a part of. Next slide. So the opioid settlement funding is here. We have to go through a process, which is really seeking community input. And that process is underway coming in July. We have some listening sessions. We've already been doing some surveys out there. um, to really get input from the community as to how they think we need to spend the opioid settlement funding. Um, once that process occurs, we will be coming to the city council to present what the input we received is. And as well as we're really looking here, um, to expand, you'll see recovery coach is one of the folks, one of our personnel listed. That's really That's, that's not what that's going to be going forward. We're going to use the opioid funding to really expand that and modernize that job and be able to do really additional work as far as navigation and harm reduction. And that line item now that you see recovery coach that $25,000 in the personnel budget is actually going towards our community social worker. So Alicia, who's here. is funded through OPER, but this is one of the ways where we're trying to transition to getting that position on the general fund and away from OPER. And going forward, we're going to have a plan for hoping to do that for all of our positions. So once again, once we have that information, we will be coming back to the council And basically, it's setting up a revolving account for the settlement funds to be used going forward. Next slide, please.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah, thanks.
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: You lost two. You lost two. Yeah, I can go forward. So the next slide is the APA funded positions. I just wanted to give you a sense of the work that's being done through the APA funds. And again, that critical infrastructure and work that has to happen to the health department and is currently happening. So we have our, like I just mentioned, our city community social worker, that's a full-time position. We have a health equity coordinator, which is also a full-time position. and community liaison team of five, which point 40 before FTEs, that's 15 hours a week, basically up to. And then in my administration, we had added a junior clerk to add to help with the additional phone volume that we were having and now the paperwork that we're doing. We have a data analyst, a special projects coordinator who's been helping out with some new border health regulations around the biosciences, new border health regulations around tobacco fines, helping with the road and control ordinance and all the IPMs that we're supposed to be collecting and following up on with dumpsters, constructions, food establishments. And then a couple of APA contracts that we had, where we had a one-time food inspections, about $10,000 help us catch up with the food inspections that we needed to do. And what I neglected to put on here, which is probably all the questions I'm going to get, is we use Voting Control, $60,000 in offer funding for Voting Control as well. And that project is ongoing. I'm happy to talk more about that. The next slide is just really just to give you an idea of what kind of social services navigations and what the community liaisons are doing. A total of 144 requests for service navigation has come in this year, handled by both our community social worker, and also our community liaisons and recovery coach. The other duties of the city social worker is on the next slide, just to give you an idea. And again, we're moving towards putting this position on the general fund by using that $25,000 from the recovery coach job. And so Alicia provides wide scope and supportive services to residents. I think you all know that. She's working very hard with other city departments. She's helped with veterans, building departments, certainly the health department. She comes out on some of the more difficult cases that we went into with housing issues. She's really helped develop solutions for community issues. She works with the residents. She works with the agency. She does a lot of navigation work, trying to help people out with food, utilities, housing. We've had a couple of recent nice wins for people that we're very excited about. were able to alleviate a utility bill and get a woman's gas, $6,000 gas bill back, get her gas back on after a really long time. Housing, employment, other service navigation and case management for those with behavioral health needs, creating programming to ease access to local services. She leads a substance use recovery harm reduction program. she actually also just did a return to work job program for those in recovery as well and a lot of other community interventions the health equity team which again i think you are well aware of we have um The coordinator, who Sophie was here earlier, she's the one who's managing the liaisons. She is managing the city food and housing equity efforts. She's collaborating with the public health nurse now. We have a new public health nurse who just started this week, so we're very excited about that, to identify and implement strategies to address the chronic disease disparities and some health promotion ideas. She's also been securing some amazing programming, new programming around health equity. including establishing citizenship classes starting in September at the library. She has implemented a certification program for mass health application Councilors. So our social worker and our liaisons are all going to be available to help people with their mass health applications. That's currently in progress or under training now. She secured a DTA kiosk, which is going to be at the library as well. She is trained in youth mental health first aid instruction, and she'll be offering those programs throughout the summer with the support of the language access team so they'll be in different languages as needed. And she is managing the EMR and the Food Justice Council work going on in collaboration with the YMCA. Our five community liaisons have been doing amazing work. We have Arabic, Brazilian, Portuguese, BIPOC, which is English speaking, Haitian Creole, and Spanish speaking liaisons working with our city cultural events. We've had two really great cultural events recently, the Arabic and the Haitian Heritage Days. Again, we already have one of our Councilors, our liaisons certified in being able to help folks with mass health applications. So already 20 folks have been helped with that since March. Um, we have three or four of them certified as community health workers and two others working towards that. Uh, we've done a lot of outreach to culturally specific owned businesses. Um, and businesses have been reaching out to liaisons regarding issues around licensing or complaints or any other city related issues. We had a wonderful meeting last week with Congresswoman Clark's office. They were very interested in the work the liaisons are doing, particularly great discussion on immigration concerns and what the Congresswoman's office can do and what we can do to help them. At the end of the conversation, we did tell them that the liaisons' positions are all APA funded, and we know that that will be coming to an end on December of 24. And the response we got was send us a write up and we're going to see what we can do to help support them going forward. So a lot of great work is being recognized and I'm hopeful that we will be able to continue the work going forward. And then the last couple slides, the inspectional services side of the house is the next slide and the public health nursing. Again, we have a brand new public health nurse who's just started and So I think she's going to be wonderful. But this past year, with our previous public health nurse, we did administer over 1,700 vaccines. She did have weekly blood pressure screenings at both the Council on Aging and West Medford Community Center, and the Farmers Market, and several other places throughout the community that she would visit. Responsible for all the infectious disease follow-up and contact tracing, you know, TB, COVID this year among MPOCs. as well as others who've got illnesses. The department put out over a thousand permits, those are permanent permits. There's also another couple of hundred temporary permits that the department put out this year. 25 pool inspections in addition to all the other inspections, because the 520 complaints that you see we received, those pretty much all generate an inspection or two as well. And in addition, We do 537 routine food inspections are required. And that doesn't include having to go back for re-inspections and temporary food inspections and farmer's markets and other events. So that's to make sure that there is the inspectional side of life that's extremely important and happens every day. And the inspectors are incredibly busy. I have a new inspector starting on Monday. So we're very happy about that. So we'll have a full staff back up again. And then the goals, I'll let you read them. I don't have to read them to you, but yeah. That's it. Any other questions?
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. We'll go to Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you, President Morell. I'm glad to hear that the social workers, you're finding a way to continue that pastor, which has done an amazing job. So I wanted to convey that I'm very happy about that. I think your department in general has done a great job, especially through a few very difficult years, and especially as our city, I think we've reset our expectations and our goals with, how we approach public health and what lenses we use. And so I think I have to commend you guys for that work. A lot of folks are rightfully very proud of our community liaisons program. A lot of different municipalities look at Medford and that program as a startling example, as a shining model. And I think there's some concern that we might not have the money for that next year when we face a big fiscal cliff. Have you received any assurances or are there any ways that we're going to keep that funded?
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: Yeah, so actually the mayor has been Very committed to that. She does want to start actually doing that work this summer. We are to sit down and start looking at what the needs are in the budget. We're definitely, in the meantime, going to be not shy about reaching out to Congresswoman Clark's office or other funders because it is, I think, people are recognizing the value. I don't think finding additional funding is gonna be as difficult, but I do, the ultimate goal is to get it into the general fund, into the budget, operating budget, so that it's sustainable and going forward.
[Justin Tseng]: Great, yeah, I mean, that's something that I think is something that should be in the general fund. I know Councilor Collins and I have been calling for that for a while, but we also understand that the budget is complex and things aren't always very flexible. I think the next question I wanted to ask, I mean, I think everyone's asked, you're anticipating questions already, but about rats and rodents. What is, I asked you this question last year, but I think for the sake of residents, it's good to re-ask it. What is our city currently doing on rats, on rodents? What is our plan going forward? And I think a new question would be, what are some other cities doing that we're not doing? So for example, I know Somerville's doing a bunch of things and different neighboring municipalities are trying out a bunch of techniques. Is there anything that you think is working and that we should maybe look at investing in?
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: So we're trying to do a lot of education. Obviously, it was great that we passed the ordinance last year, the pest control ordinance. And we're following up on that. That is requiring food establishments, dumpsters, and haulers. People have to have an integrated pest management. And when we say that, some of these folks are like, they don't even know what it is. Some of the pest control companies themselves, they don't know what it is. what that is. So we've had to do a lot of education around that, but I think just making sure that they have those in place, um, is, is, is helping. I think we've, we've seen a difference. Um, we do have a contract with Yankee pest control. Um, we don't want to be, uh, just spreading rodenticide, uh, throughout the city. So what we are doing is again, besides by inspectors going out The pest control inspectors are going out as well, surveying the homes or the sites. and talking to folks about how they could better protect themselves from road infestations. But again, if they do see burrows on these properties, with our contract with Yankee, they will treat the burrows for free for the residents, depending on where the burrows are. Sometimes if they're too close to the home, because what they're doing is putting carbon monoxide dioxide. into the into the borough. So depending on how close they are foundations or whatever. But if they're under sheds, they're in their yards, under their fences, they will treat the boroughs twice, they'll go back a second time. And if it doesn't look like it worked the first time, we'll treat them again the second time again for free for the for the residents. So we're hoping to continue that. What what we've been looking at and what some of the other communities Yeah, mixed reviews on all of these things, right? But the shock boxes, Maldon, I've been talking with Maldon. They just implemented a shock box thing. It's a couple thousand dollars to $3,000, depending on the number of boxes you get. It's like $100 a box per month. They usually do 30, so it's like $3,000 a month that they're spending. They seem to be having some success. The thing with those boxes is they actually track. They have GIS on them, and they track when there's a hit. And they'll go out and empty the box and restock the box. But it's basically shocking the heart and stopping the heart of the rat. So we're looking at that as an option as well. But again, the rodenticide thing, especially like we had a lot of people calling about making sure that we weren't doing that, especially when we had a couple of deaths recently of the eagles. And so we want to be very, very conscious of that going forward. So it's just a lot of education, trying to get people to stop feeding the birds, and picking up their trash, and making sure that their barrels are maintained properly, and changing the barrels if they have holes in them, and really trying to get people to cooperate and take ownership as well. You want to be proactive, right, too. So that's really a lot of education. posted, I believe, that educational session we had with the owner of Yankee Pest Control a year or so ago. So that's back out there on the web, on our webpage. And we started an Instagram page this year too. So I didn't, my inspector did. But we do a lot of education through that as well, really trying to push the education.
[Justin Tseng]: seek additional grants or additional funding.
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: We have APA funding throughout the year to help us, would get us through with that. But we are really, see, I shouldn't say this. Complaints seem to have quieted down a little bit. So I think we're going in the right direction. Again, it's the time of the year that people are now going to be out later on their decks or whatever at night. So the complaints may go back up again.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Director O'Connor. I just have two questions. One, I know that animal control is always pretty tight every year. I'm not seeing any increases in this year's budget. Is there any plan in the next couple years to try to get some more resources down to help out with animal control?
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: Yeah. A couple of sides to that, yeah. So the animal... I mean, it's really hard because animal control, it's not 24-7, and it's difficult when complaints come in on weekends and evenings. So, yeah, we have been looking at that, and I've had discussions with the police because, you know, they oftentimes end up dealing with some of these situations. So, we're talking and we're trying to brainstorm solutions. Again, like, those regional grants that I've talked about, we've even had discussions within those, like, can we get a regional person who would just be, like, an on-call? You know, will the grant cover that? So, we're seeking options that way. The health canine contracted services, that's really, that's a little deceiving because $26,000 of that 35 immediately goes to mosquito control. And the rest is left for basically, you know, kennel boarding and that type of thing when that happens. We lost our facility and land shut down abruptly that we would be boarding our animals, our dogs at if Patrick found a lost dog or a dangerous dog. So we've been scrambling, honestly, to try, and everyone's scrambling, because these facilities have just had few in between and had to come by. And MSPCA will not take animals anymore from cities. So if the police went there, they would take it from a resident. But they really are putting it back on the cities to do that. I mean, I even had a quick discussion, I hope you remember this, with Chief Friedman around the new the new fire station and potentially like finding a spot where we could just have the area that would be a place where we could have the dogs stay overnight until the owner is found or until we found another home for them. So that's, you know, we're going to pursue that as well because that would be a huge lift off of Pat's shoulders too if we had that.
[Zac Bears]: Got it, and I know you already talked about it a little bit, but it looked to me like we had 5.8 FTs that were on ARPA that's expiring after the end of this fiscal year. Is that total cost, is that most of that 400,000, that's the ARPA money, is it mostly those positions or is?
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: Yeah, some of that, about $70,000 at least was one times, well actually one not, so this is 55,000 civil defense as well. So $120,000 was one-time contract to go to control some civil defense training. So the 5.8 FTs are like 330.
[Zac Bears]: OK. And we're Sounds like we have kind of a plan for the social work positions since there's some money that's in the general fund now that can be moved to maybe the opioid settlement and that navigator. The other 4.8 FTS, are we just kind of like, fingers crossed right now or, well like I said the mayor had discussions already with the mayor.
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: And she's committed to working on the solutions with us as well. So she does want us to start working this summer on looking at budget, looking at other funding sources.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, so hoping that a combination of grants, maybe some new general fund money, maybe federal money from Catherine Clark if Republicans will ever let it pass. Got it. Okay. Yeah, because that's huge. That's the biggest I've seen on the city side so far. That's just straight up ARPA. I mean, it makes sense a little bit because obviously you guys were responding to the pandemic and I was responding to the pandemic, but I think we found so much value out of this that goes far beyond pandemic response and, you know, definitely a priority of me to try to keep as many of these positions as we can. So, hopefully all of them. All right. Great, thank you. That's it. Thank you.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Director O'Connor for your presentation and kind of on that point, just made by Vice President Bears, you know, so many of the work that's directly come online because of our funding these positions programs. I don't think there's anybody in the community who would say. Wow, this work seems like it's becoming less relevant. I feel like we're becoming over served. I say that, you know, in a lot of cases, it feels like we're being adequately served or approaching adequately served for the first time. It's really important to me that as many of these programs and positions as possible enter into the general fund. That's that's the ideal. Not just so because we can reliably depend on them and. not have to wonder about other sources coming through, or deals coming through, or grants coming through, but just because, you know, this is stuff that we should be investing in. I'm a strong believer in the things that are the best for the community, the community should invest in, we should prioritize these things in the general fund. And obviously, as we all know, that is not easy. That's why we're all here. But, you know, again, to be a broken record, hopefully, you know, aspiring to be a concise one, this is why it's incredibly important that, you know, we can't just try and do this dance every year to figure out how many of these vitally important things that make the community more resilient, can we shoehorn into, you know, persistently austere budgets, we need to make sure that, you know, you can spend your time as the director of the health department, not, you know, filling the role of congressional liaison and grant writer and all of the other billion things that you do just to make sure that the things that we already need that are not over and beyond but are just sufficient can still happen. So thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Any other questions from the council? I see Darlene Raymond on Zoom. Darlene, I'm just going to unmute you. Sorry. You should see, I know your hands have been raised for a little bit, so.
[SPEAKER_12]: It was a mistake. I'm sorry, it was a mistake. But I know that Marianne is doing a great work, I might as well say it. I raised my hand by mistake, but it was not really a mistake because I know the Department of Public, the Board of Health have been doing a lot of great work, including all the community liaisons and also getting the other voices that have never been heard to be able to be heard in Medford right now is really something very important. And it's growing and it's gonna have a greater impact as we continue to allow other communities to have voice and bring their input and share their ideas, their initiatives for the growth of the community. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Darlene, and thank you for your work. Any further discussion? Thank you so much, Director O'Connor. Thank you for bearing with us. Everyone else is also still here. Thank you as we continue on. Thanks, have a good evening. All right, we are going to go to parking, and that is page 159, and Director Morrison is with us on Zoom. We did also send around, the clerk sent around a narrative, a very helpful narrative I found from Director Morrison, just highlighting some of the work since she's joined. And then I will go to the expenditure summary for the department is $1,006,916, up $74,365, or 7.97% over the prior year. So Director Morrison, apologies, I will ask you to unmute. And if there's anything You would like to discuss or highlight, and then we'll go to questions from the council.
[Faye Morrison]: Well, I just wanted to point out that the reason why we're over on the budget, there was some processing fees that should have been assessed to my department that weren't for some reason. So I'm just finding out about them. So we had to adjust the budget for that so that we can pay them next year properly. Other than that, you have our narrative about what we've done in the last year. I want to thank my staff for all of their hard work. We certainly could have never worked with a full staff. Right now, we are too short on staff. Considering our resources, I think we've done a good job the first year here. And I will take your questions.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Dr. Morrison. Vice President Paris.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Director Morrison. I know that we in the document you sent over to us, you mentioned that the department had already brought in 1.9 million for at the end of December of 2022. Mm hmm. Do you happen to know, and I understand if the data may just not be there yet. Do you happen to know what we're looking at from July 1, 2022 to present? So, for fiscal 23?
[Faye Morrison]: No, I do not have those figures in front of me. No.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, I still think you know that 1.9 million number is very, very significant and obviously, much more than we are spending on the department. And I know you noted that there were two positions for enforcement to staff.
[Faye Morrison]: No one, one position for enforcement that's been vacant since October. And then we just lost a clerk the beginning of June. So the clerk's position hasn't been vacant that long. I'm still waiting for that one to be posted. The PCO position, now that the new HR director has started, she has us on a platform for people to apply. Those applications have been coming in and someone in HR is going through them and getting them to me. so that we can start the process of interviewing for that position.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. And then there were, you had requested two additional positions for this upcoming budget?
[Faye Morrison]: I had actually requested three additional positions for this upcoming budget, yes.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, and none of them were funded?
[Faye Morrison]: No.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. What is the impact gonna be of not funding those positions on your ability to enforce effectively?
[Faye Morrison]: This coverage, we won't be able to cover the full six days without those additional people.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Faye Morrison]: Also with the one I'm down, if the other person that's on shift with them calls in sick, I have nobody in the field during that time. I don't have any backup. I don't have anyone else that I can call and say, can you come in and cover this shift?
[Zac Bears]: So it sounds to me like it'd be fair to say given that the three positions additional positions weren't funded and we're down, that there's going to be enforcement that can't happen, and likely going to be some revenue left on the table because of that as well.
[Bob Jones]: Absolutely.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. I think given given the data we have so far it's pretty clear to me that the marketing department is bringing in significant revenue more than it's spending and I think it would be given all the all we've heard so many concerns about enforcement in the. in this chamber all the time, but especially over the past few weeks, it seems to me that it would make sense to try to make sure that the department has the staffing that it needs to do its job effectively. That's all the questions I have. Thank you, Director.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Thank you. Madam Chief of Staff, did you have something you wanted to?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes. Thank you, President Morell. I'm hearing At some point, not long ago, I had done a review of revenue for the parking department. At the time, it was my understanding that the number was about shy of a million dollars. So I'm not sure where the information is coming from that suggests that we're collecting over a million dollars. And in speaking with the finance director a short while ago and reviewing this matter, it seems his numbers are more in line with the numbers that I have.
[Zac Bears]: So- For what period, if I may ask?
[Nina Nazarian]: Mine was over one fiscal year, one specific, I don't know, I believe if my recollection is correct, my review was for a period of February to February, so it was not a specific fiscal year.
[Zac Bears]: February 22 to 23.
[Nina Nazarian]: I believe that's accurate, yes.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Nina Nazarian]: But I would defer to the finance director if he has any specific information. I think his numbers are for fiscal 23. Okay. To date.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. And if I could ask on that question too, does that end up in our local receipts figure for the revenue?
[Nina Nazarian]: I would defer to the finance director for that one.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you.
[Bob Dickinson]: It does follow local receipts. So far, the three lines for parking revenue totals, I believe, $730,000 since July 1st of 2022. Okay. So I'm going to do a mark. I'm already emailing the our treasurer to make sure that we're getting that all the parking revenue is actually being properly booked and there's not a lot that I'm overlooking, but that's what I'm seeing right now.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay.
[Faye Morrison]: I'm happy to share the information that our clerk keeps track of, that takes in the checks and does the checklist warrant. I'm happy to share that information with the council if they wish.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, thank you. Yeah, I just appreciate the answers. And, um, I know, absolutely.
[Faye Morrison]: Oh, my love's doing, um, graphs and charts. He'll be thrilled to put something together for you.
[Bob Dickinson]: Great.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you.
[Bob Dickinson]: I'm happy to work with Omar and the treasurer to make sure that we're getting these numbers right.
[Zac Bears]: Great. And, and just, uh, Bob, one question for you really quick, or just to mention, I know it was just in the report last night. Um, is it possible you maybe have a breakdown of the local receipts number that you could share with us? Like what's coming from meals and rooms, what's coming from excise, what's coming from fees, what's coming from parking?
[Bob Dickinson]: Well, I mean, the 22 stuff is on the 2022 actual, so we're all on the recap.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, I mean what we're budgeting for 24. Like when we have that in the recap, it says we're shooting for I think 19 million, and maybe I'm off a little bit there. Could you tell us at some point, not tonight, but just if you have it available, what the composition?
[Bob Dickinson]: I can do that, yes. Great. I update those revenue forecasts at this time of year, every couple of weeks, just to make sure I'm in the right place.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you.
[Bob Dickinson]: All good.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from Council? Thank you so much director Morrison. Appreciate it.
[Faye Morrison]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: I'm actually going to go back to civil defense. I apologize. We skipped over civil defense. So I'm going to, I know. I'm sorry. Hopefully this shouldn't be too long.
[Zac Bears]: I forgot just when I thought I was out. So that's page one 94.
[Nicole Morell]: So we just have director O'Connor back for that. That was my error. And the expenditure summary is $9,390 less $25 or 0.27% over the prior year.
[MaryAnn O'Connor]: There's actually nothing really changed on this budget. The only thing I wanted to add is that if you see the the FYI, 24 goals, we need to update the city's comprehensive emergency management plan the same. And we need to update the multi-hazard mitigation plan. And we're doing a whole program as far as our emergency planning goes. So that's with $55,000 worth of ARPA funding as well. That's helping to do all of this work. Once this is done, the hazard mitigation plan will be good for five years. And the sample would be much easier to update on an annual basis.
[Nicole Morell]: So essentially, the ARPA funding is really It's not one time, but it will cover us for enough that you're not, it's not going to be money we're going to do next year. Correct. So it's a contract one time. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Questions from Councilors on civil defense. Seeing none. Thank you so much. Thanks for hanging around. All right, we will go to diversity, equity and inclusion and director and Roger and next year we will have to ask your preferred food so you don't have to leave and lose your place in line and we'll make sure we can get to you. I think I also need to keep track of what order people go in this year so that next year we can make sure I'm like, I hope I don't keep the same people waiting for like hours every year. I have no recollection of. I know, yeah. It doesn't help to be the most agreeable because we'll, make you wait. Okay, so going to page 92 for diversity, equity and inclusion, we have Director Nwaje here, and the extended term summary is $107,996 up $11,215 from the previous year. I'll go to Director Nwaje for any highlights, and then we'll go to questions.
[Frances Nwajei]: Yes, so good evening, distinguished councillors. Good to see you all. As you know, it is almost a year ago to date that I stood up here three months in for the budget hearing of this current fiscal year. In the length of time that has passed, I can say that the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has truly established itself as a fully functional office in all the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The office has worked extremely diligently with internal city government, that means other department heads, but also externally important areas such as the school, the fire department, the police department, and the community members. The work of the DEI office, I think many are beginning to realize, is not what was imagined. The DEI office has put into effect processes in order to ensure our federal compliance when it comes to the EDA. So that means that I've had to step out a little bit more and work even more closely with Director Riggi, our facilities director, and also forming new relationships with the building commissioner, who I rely on both when I have to review site plans, which is using a different lens when it comes to the ADA. Additionally, things such as the reasonable accommodation processes, keeping up with all the different trends in the law, the changes to the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act, those things are essential, those things are critical, and those are things that I have done and continue to do in my time so that I can actually inform in a manner that is beneficial to the city. Also streamlined processes for hiring. We do have a new HR coordinator, so ensuring that we are both on the same page in terms of expectations. And additionally, ensuring that we are utilizing best approaches and modern day recruitment strategies to not only hire the best people for the best roles for the city of Medford, but to ensure that we can create a pathway growth and retention. So I open it up because this department of one has worked with Board of Health as a Municipal Hearing Officer. I get to listen to those as well, as well as the Building Commission, Prevention and Outreach, School Department. So I open it up for questions that you may have to clarify.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you.
[Justin Tseng]: Um, I really just wanted to thank you for for all the work that you've done in the year that you've been here. I think you've really broken the department into I mean you you've described all the all the work that you guys, you've been doing, but um, I think we have a DI department that really, um, is a fully-fledged department. You wouldn't even know it's a department of one. But I think getting to that point, right? I mean, I think oftentimes in other cities, DI departments have more than one person working in the office. And I understand we are under some difficulties as a city, some constraints in that regard. I was curious as to your own bit personal bandwidth when it comes to writing the grants that might give you more money if, if you have found the time for that if you're on it and you could just be too busy for that and maybe mean I think that's that would be room for our city to find some support for you.
[Frances Nwajei]: At this time, I will have to say that I do have some funds that are set aside, and those are the funds are for an intern. But given the city's fiscal nature and fiscal health, it's gonna be essential that I make the correct decision on the type of intern that is coming in. Because there are many, many things that the department, the DEI department needs to do in order to be a full partner and a full support. because that's the role of the DEI department. It's not about moving with the administration, it is about tilting. So whichever way the city goes, DEI has to come and get the city back upright. So I can't say like, oh, I'm gonna use that and have somebody that's gonna look at data. I have to make sure that when that decision is made, it is gonna be something that's gonna bring about the best bank for the city. As far as writing grants, it is in an interesting way, right? DEI is about equity, right? And the thought of having to go in search for funding to do your job, it doesn't sit right. But what is the comeback, right? Remember, I could utilize the time to write the grants, but I would have to manage them. But that same time, I can meet community members' needs. I can build an ASL interpreter group for the city of Medford that would long live past. So it's really about weighing what the priorities are.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that. I think it's certainly, I think, honestly, probably just so many things to do at once that you can't do them all.
[Frances Nwajei]: That's why I forgot to eat.
[Justin Tseng]: I think that underscores the need for us to have more think a clearer process when it comes to grant writing, grant management, I understand that there are a few positions in the city government that are kind of, that split that responsibility. But I do think that this is a realm where you know, we should be investing it to help you and to help other directors as well, to get more funds for your departments and hopefully more, you know, hopefully to get grants that might be able to get more people at your office as well.
[Frances Nwajei]: That would be wonderful. Thank you so much.
[Nicole Morell]: Councilor Caraviello?
[Richard Caraviello]: Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Francis, I want to thank you for bringing some stability to an office that had been vacant for a couple of years, and you and I have got a chance to work together on some things, and I just think, I'm just happy for the work you've done. You brought a new attitude also to the office that hasn't been there either. So I just want to thank you for your service, and keep up the good work.
[Frances Nwajei]: Thank you so much.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Seeing no other questions, Thank you so much, thank you for bearing with us for so long. That's all right, thank you.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Appreciate it.
[Nicole Morell]: All right, we will go to recreation. It's the award for politely waiting the longest. You can have whatever you want of these older ports in this drawer as your prize. We're waiting, we've got some stuff from 2004. Whenever you want. Okay, so we are on recreation on page 207. We have Director Kevin Bailey with us and the expenditure summary is $608,535 up to $49,613 over the previous year or 8.88%. I'd like to share.
[Kevin Bailey]: Thank you again for having me tonight. Again, I'm Kevin Bailey, I'm the recreation director. Our department itself, we're moving into our sixth year as a full-time recreation department. Our department itself has four people as a full-time staff. Myself, we have an assistant director, we have a program manager and a facilities coordinator. We do also rely a lot on our part-time staff. We have three really amazing part-time staff that helps us out at the front desk. Most of the people who are probably watching this has met them at some point. Danielle, Brenna, and Autzen do a fabulous job really being the front line of our department. Not to mention all the different program instructors that help us out at our camp and everything. The department itself we had department goals last year, I just kind of highlight a little bit of some of the things that we've done. Some of the goals for last year was to expand our field trips. One of the things that we started the year prior was a ski trip, and we got a lot of good feedback. We really wanted to expand that again and have more opportunities, so we did expand from two to two. to four field trips. We'r on it this year. Other di to take it outside of ski to try other things like and some of the other act We also look to expand our co-ed activities, particularly John Curley, who comes from another recreation department, has a little bit more background experience running adult leagues. We can take his wealth of knowledge to kind of help expand that as well. And we were able to do that. We did offer an adult dodgeball league. John continued from previous years to have an adult basketball league. And we're also working with men's softball on a transition to move it towards the recreation department. We also found that because we use a lot of time doing the adult basketball league, we did reduce some of our drop-in programs where it came to near the end of the winter season. We kind of changed the schedule of how we're using the recreation center. And we have a lot of programs out there at night. I'm really proud and really excited to see the recreation center getting used as much as it is now. Um, we are open seven days a week, but we really are turning into a facility that is open typically from nine o'clock in the morning till 10 11 o'clock at night. Um, so we do try to use that as much as possible and it is being used now. Um, we have for over several years, we've had to roll this over to create a 501 C friends of method recreation. Um, It's been a long process, but I'm kind of happy to say that we are moving forward with it. We are continuing with it. We do have a board of members assembled. We've had several meetings now. We've already written the articles. We are working with a lawyer to be able to process that with the IRS. And we are now working on the bylaws. So we have an amazing group of five people who have work not only just at the meetings, but in and outside of the meetings, getting that into fruition. So very excited to see that the 501c is moving forward. We also talked about expanding different programs at Laconie rink. Many of you guys probably have seen that the rink was open this summer. We did work on having a hockey clinic, and we've also worked on adding other programs, such as the stick and puck programs, more drop in during the school half day for the middle school. We've had it open as well, so kids can walk down and skate. So that was kind of our goals, some of our achievements. And I'll just open it up for any questions.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. That's trivial.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President. At La Conte Rink, are we going to be opening again this summer?
[Kevin Bailey]: Not right now. So there's actually a new thing that, so one of the things that we have been asking from DCR right from the beginning was to replace a cooling tower. The cooling tower definitely needs to be replaced, and we've been asking them for many years now. I was told that the cooling tower is going to be replaced in August, I don't have a fully confirmed through DCR, or from the vendor that is contracted out with DCR, and with the city of method, so that they are planning on putting in a cooling tower. it doesn't make sense making ice near August and then have to melt it to put the cooling tower back in.
[Richard Caraviello]: So did we, do we at least break even on last summer opening the ring for those months or did we lose money? I've been involved with that ring for years now. Oh yeah, yeah. And that building is not made to be opened during the summer for ice. It was never designed for that.
[Kevin Bailey]: So during the summertime for July and August, so not using admins, but I keep track, of course, of all of our revenue and expenses. I can say for both July and August, both months was about 7,000. July was 7,152 at a deficit, and August was 7,441 at a deficit. So we lost money on the rink over the summer? We did lose some money, yes.
[Richard Caraviello]: So why are we going to open it again this summer? Well, we're not opening. We're not going to open this summer.
[Kevin Bailey]: No.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah.
[Kevin Bailey]: We're going to be, so it's closed right now. We're planning on opening on Labor Day, like we usually have. The cooling tower, especially, it just doesn't make sense. One of the biggest expenses this year was working with American Refrigeration, the company that services the compressors. As we said, that cooling tower needed to be replaced. With the cooling tower not working properly, the compressors are shutting off, and that costs near the end of April, sorry, the beginning of April, we had American refrigeration coming in almost every single day. And that's, again, one of the biggest push of why we were asking DCR for that replacement. And there is an announcement that for the state, they are giving us another $100,000 in the state budget to be dedicated for Lacanee Rink.
[Richard Caraviello]: Is it worth it to keep the rink open that extra month? Or is it better to shut it down at the end of March?
[Kevin Bailey]: So looking at the numbers, what we're looking at is at the end of April, I'd like to keep it open during April school vacation week. And so then I also talked with the contractor trying to keep it open at least for that school year. Once April vacation ends is when we would like to close it. As you know, with hockey, May, it's a dead season. There's not a lot of people. So overall, did the rink turn a profit? No, because of all the repairs that we had to spend on it.
[Richard Caraviello]: Um, so it was a stupid question.
[Kevin Bailey]: But can I also add, I do think, though, even if there is a loss in July and August, or if we even open up for August a little bit earlier, I do think once these repairs are done, we have the ability to make up that loss in the winter months.
[Richard Caraviello]: make sure that ring should be making money there because ice time is valuable throughout the state. There's hockey leagues everywhere. I think we should be a little more proactive and looking for more people to come in there and rent those hours all the time. Like I say, I was involved with that ring for many years and it should be working a lot more than it's working now. I know it's a, You know, you might think it's a crazy question. I'm sure I'm getting bombarded with all the time. What are we doing with the pickleball craze that's sweeping the city?
[Kevin Bailey]: I mean, everybody's, everybody's wants- And it's not just an issue in MedFed. I know it's an issue everywhere. They want to take over the world now. It's one of the fastest growing sports. I know you've had Tom and Peter up here saying that as well. It really is. So, every city in town is trying to match up with that. What I will say with method though, you know, talking with other recreation departments we do belong to Massachusetts Recreation Parks Association. This is a hot topic in the industry and it's something that we discuss all the time. Method does offer a lot of pickleball, a lot. And if you look at the comparison to the other cities and towns, we have people coming outside of other cities and towns coming to Method because- And that's an issue, I'm glad we started charging money now for these people. Yes, yeah. So we do have Duggar Park, which is the main attraction, of course, that's where we get a lot of people coming in. We have five wide pickleball courts. We also have Hickey Park that is under construction right now, but once that's done, There's gonna be another two line pickleball courts. You have the recreation center that has two lined pickleball courts as well. There is not a lot of indoor gyms that have line pickleball courts and we have that as well. But we also what is exciting is car park. When car park goes under renovations, there's gonna be four dedicated pickleball courts. So there is a large demand. I think the city recognizes that there's a large demand. That's why you see the projects. Every time we're doing a tennis court over, we're adding the pickleball lines at it. why the next time we are doing a park renovation, we're trying to add those pickleball courts.
[Richard Caraviello]: Is there any consideration to bringing it into maybe at the high school? And that gym that went as, I know they have courts that roll out, so you don't even have to mark them, but I've seen them, they kind of roll out and you roll them back up. Is there any consideration of using, because I know other cities do it in their gymnasiums. They have a certain day where they charge by the hour, they rent them out to these groups.
[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, we've seen that before too. You can even rent a car for like $20 an hour, things like that. And that's something I think we're looking at the Recreation Center right now because we do have it already Tuesday and Thursday morning. We have it Saturday mornings. We just started adding Wednesday night this summer. I'm actually when I was in the audience, I'm working with some of the staff right now working on schedule, but we're planning and also have a night activities down at the Rec Center for pickleball. So there is an opportunity. I didn't necessarily look at Method High School, but down at the Retz Center.
[Richard Caraviello]: Right now, I think we should strike now. I mean, that's a moneymaker for the department, right, at this particular moment. So I hope we strike. all that great crazy spot.
[Kevin Bailey]: Absolutely. And I've heard that from reading and some of the other departments. Yeah, that's actually one of the revenue.
[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, exactly. But I played it a few other cities and they just, you know, they rented out privately, like two hour blocks. Right?
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions?
[Justin Tseng]: Oh, thank you so much. There's so much programming that you guys do, so hats off to you guys. I wanted to ask, there's some stuff in here about afterschool recreation programs. I know Councilor Scarpelli has been a big proponent of finding a way to reach out to city departments and see how we can work together to solve the lack of afterschool spots, especially for elementary and middle schoolers. I like, I think we all know that there isn't, there isn't the capacity right now to create a huge program or to create a program. But, um, I was curious as to your kind of like take on how, what would you need to set up a program?
[Kevin Bailey]: No, it's a great question. And it's something that has been discussed with myself and with the administration and with the school department about the after school program. And we've talked to residents as well. One of the biggest challenges, as we've said before, it's actually two challenges. One is to find the space, as most many people probably know the rec center. When we first moved into that location. I want to say it was five years ago was the first year. Um, you know, we weren't at the capacity to run an after school program. So the Y. M. C. A. Has that. Um, so it doesn't make sense for us as a rec department to push out the Y. M. C. A. Just to replace it with the rec department. The Y. Does a great job with it, and it would just be moving one place for the other. So location is going to be the number one issue. And as you probably know, the administration has released that they are working on the Hagner Center. I know that it's not something that's going to happen overnight. You know, we're looking at the future. But certainly that place can be used for after school program. And that's something that because we've had these discussions is our plan to have that space. We are also looking at the school department to see if there is any other alternatives. But certainly if we do have a space, as I was saying with the school department as well, we want to be cognizant that before we start a program, we want to be set up for success. And that really goes into making sure that we have adequate space. I'm sure that we can find a classroom, but if you imagine if you have a child that's been in school all day to just be moved over to another classroom, that that's going to get very difficult for our staff to be able to keep the kids engaged. So I do want to make sure that we have the adequate space. Um, and then we have the storage that we have a place that we can actually keep equipment and we can keep fun equipment. You know, if it's something that we have to transport every single day, you know, that bring comes a challenge as well, too. So we are looking at that as well for the school department to see if we can get something in for the Hager center actually comes into fruition. And the second one is staffing, you know, like anywhere else the school department certainly has a challenge trying to find staff to be able to run the actual program. I don't think the rec department is going to be any different we're going to be in that same looking for the same amount of people. I do have some kind of plans in place. I did share that with the administration about how we can try to get a full time, how we can work on that with a revolving account like we do right now with the rest of our programs. But certainly the first step is we're trying to find, is there a good location? And then the second part will be, how do we implement of getting the staff to be able to do that?
[Justin Tseng]: But yeah, I think in the next, in the following few years, it's something that we'll have to really sit down and really hash out all the options.
[Kevin Bailey]: And it's certainly a need, and it's something that we would want to be a part of to help with that. One of our FY 24 goals, I don't know if you have a copy of it, but one of the things that we did say, at least for this year, is trying to do more after-school programming. Even if we do it right now, every single day from 3.15 to 4 o'clock, like we were saying, this is a really good test to see how many part-time staff we can get right after school to work for us. So we think even if we implement that this year, it's gonna give us a better idea on what those staffing challenges will be.
[Justin Tseng]: With that program, I'm just curious. So the 315, what would we know what kids are doing between 2.30 and 3.15?
[Kevin Bailey]: I think we're looking at that, seeing when kids get out of school. So if we have a high school student going from high school down to help run the program. But it doesn't necessarily have to be 3.15. It could be earlier. But we're just throwing that number, that timeline. thinking that we were trying to get some high school kids to help out with that.
[Justin Tseng]: Great. Yeah, no, it's good to hear that we're trying new options and experimenting and seeing if we can get any, you know, any fish to bite. So thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions for Weston Bears?
[Zac Bears]: Kevin, just one question. The travel allowance seems pretty down. This year is that going to be a problem?
[Kevin Bailey]: I think it was. It's just been transferred to a different line. I think when we were first talking about it.
[Adam Hurtubise]: That was added because it was the French benefits.
[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, for going down, you said?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, it looks like it's $37,000 this year and $8,000 next year. It's a 78% decline.
[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, because of stipends. You see a large increase on the stipends.
[Unidentified]: OK.
[Kevin Bailey]: I think in the past, because last year was the first year we were actually in the contract with the Teamsters, I think the way it was placed originally just didn't make sense, so the travel should be what the travel amount is.
[Zac Bears]: It was just something that was in a line that shouldn't have been there.
[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, and then keeping the stipend separated.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. Great. Thank you. You're welcome.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions or discussion for recreation? Seeing none. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for bearing with us for four hours. Thank you. We're going to take, if we can handle it, we're going to take workers comp. Workers comp insurance, pensions, and debt service. Or we can save debt. Do you want to just do workers comp, insurance, and pensions? We can do that.
[Adam Hurtubise]: OK.
[Nicole Morell]: That starts on page 239. Workers' comp, insurance, and pensions. And we'll save debt service for our next meeting. So, workers' comp, expenditure summary is $600,000, down $46,000, or 7.12% from the previous year. Insurance is $25,500,000 down $2,438,312 or 8.73% from the previous year. And pensions is $15,487,640, increase of $1,149,908 or 8.02% over the previous year. And then we have finance director Dickinson who has been here the whole time, just to give you credit for that, as has Madam Chief of Staff, to speak to this, address any questions.
[Bob Dickinson]: Sorry.
[Nicole Morell]: Yeah, the specific ones start on 239, but I don't know if there's something in the front of the book you prefer.
[Bob Dickinson]: Way up there, yeah. A lot of pages. 239, yeah.
[Nicole Morell]: Sorry, 239, and then. I got it.
[Bob Dickinson]: Yes. These are simply our estimates based on the prior several years. The big one, obviously, is the health insurance. Pension liability is a set number. That comes from the Medford Retirement Board. That's what we have to pay for this year. The Medford Housing Authority is included in the total number that they give us, but that's our net for retirement. It simply is what it is. health care costs we were projecting based on priors for the fiscal 2023 budget we were expecting a significant increase in health care costs it proved not to be a case this is a conservative number there is not a generous, but there is room in this based on our estimates to, should we be wrong, basically. But from the fiscal 2022 budget and fiscal 2023 budget, what I'm projecting is there's significant turnbacks in healthcare costs. So it seems foolish to budget for something that doesn't seem to be appearing. Workers comp, That's based on our estimates of what we've been spending this year, plus working with HR and our work with FutureCom to figure out what kind of liabilities we might be facing going forward. So there are existing claims that haven't been processed yet. So that's where that number comes from. It's all relatively straightforward based on our best estimates. And you know, that's what the math tells us. I hope it's right.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President. So we were over budget the last two years. Why do we anticipate the drop this year?
[Bob Dickinson]: Because we were over budget the last two years. Right. If we have a significant back in health care costs. No, I'm looking at the worker's comp.
[Richard Caraviello]: The worker's comp, 22 and 23 were over budget. Why are we projecting we're going to be less this year going forward?
[Bob Dickinson]: Well, that's what, I mean, that's what we've, we talked to future comp, that's what we're expecting. So.
[Richard Caraviello]: So we have more people and we're going to, okay. Where's the money gonna come from if we go over budget?
[Bob Dickinson]: Oh, we'll have to put a paper before the council and say we messed up.
[Richard Caraviello]: We messed up? Yes. No, that's not, we don't operate by, we don't come back and say we messed up.
[Bob Dickinson]: Please don't say that. I could put it in different words, but we try to make our best estimates about what these budgets are gonna be. We're trying to cut the budget to the bone. That's what we've been doing this whole time. I mean, I would ask the council's forbearance on this simply because I don't have a crystal ball, sir. We make the best estimates based on the information that we have. And you are correct, we've been over budget for the last two years. So perhaps this one is one that we should actually take out and review.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council on these three accounts? President Bears?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, just two questions, Bob. How much were we expecting to turn back on health insurance this year? It's in the millions. In the millions? Yes. Are we expecting that that'll be added to free cash, or is it going to be transferred to other accounts to cover overages?
[Bob Dickinson]: I'm working on year-end transfers right now. There are a couple of things that I wouldn't expect that we would need to use any of that money to cover those. I think most of the stuff that we would need to cover, hopefully, is in departmental budgets, simply moving from salaries to operations or something like that. But I don't anticipate it's going to be a long list of stuff that we need to reappropriate.
[Zac Bears]: At the end of the year. Okay, so those turn backs are probably going to be ended up in reserves. Yes. It's just, you know, we've had this escalating cost. Obviously, if there were turnbacks this year at the millions, then the budget for last year was too high for it. Are we getting a better deal from GIC rates? I'm just wondering how this is happening, because the health insurance is always going up.
[Bob Dickinson]: That's what our actuals have been. They've been relatively flat, so we wouldn't be anticipating a big jump in health care costs. As I say, based on our reasoning on this, There's a good excess in this, should we be wrong.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, so this even is $25,500, you think is probably more than we're going to end up spending?
[Bob Dickinson]: That's what I believe, yes.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. And then just on the pensions, the past few years, this number has been going up like a million dollars a year. Is that what we're expecting, basically, going forward? Yes. OK.
[Bob Dickinson]: We have the pension system. We'll do another actuarial evaluation as of January 1st, 2024. So we will have a new schedule based on that. evaluation. That's the actuarial computation. We are scheduled to be fully funded, at which point this will drop like a stone in, what is it, 2032. We have to be fully funded, I believe, by 2037. Yeah, so it goes up every year. I could I thought we actually had that.
[Zac Bears]: There's a chart in here somewhere about it. I was just asking just for estimates.
[Bob Dickinson]: And the chart that is in here includes the Medicare Housing Authority. I'm going to get the actual numbers from the retirement board to put it there. But that's roughly $800,000 to $900,000 a year that they contribute to this. OK.
[Zac Bears]: And so 2032 is when we'll be fully funded. And then we're going to be, OK, so it's going up a lot. All right, I see. There's a chart, and there's an actual.
[Bob Dickinson]: And obviously, when the actuarial report comes out, a lot of it depends on market conditions. So if the market's really good, then it's good for us, because the retirement system makes more money.
[Zac Bears]: Right. So in 10 years, we're going to go from a $26 million annual obligation to $4. That'd be nice. That's quite a bit of money, but long ways away. I don't know if this is part of pension, but something that was on the ACFR that was like freaking me out was this OPEB liability. Is this real? This $370 million? What is that?
[Bob Dickinson]: Other post-employee benefits. Which are? unfunded health care costs, mostly.
[Zac Bears]: Meaning? I'm just not getting it. It's health care we're paying for people after they've left the organization?
[Bob Dickinson]: Yes. And the other thing is pension requirements. People live a very long time. It's an actuarial number. It's one of those things that I'd like to address possibly in the next year, trying to start funding some of that OPEB liability. It's just one of those things going forward.
[Zac Bears]: I guess my question is just like, is this an accounting thing? Like when they said the post office suddenly is $14 billion in debt because they- It is largely an accounting thing. Yeah.
[Bob Dickinson]: Yes. Nevertheless, it's a real estimate of exactly how long it's going to take to get to that point. This is looking out 100 years from now. Okay, got it.
[Zac Bears]: $369 million liability and an $82,000 trust fund.
[Bob Dickinson]: Right, and now we've set up the trust fund. We should be funding the trust fund.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Bob Dickinson]: That would be wise, but you know, most communities aren't close to fully funding their OPEB.
[Zac Bears]: And what do we pay out every year in this right now? And where does it come from?
[Bob Dickinson]: We pay through the retirement system, and we pay through the health care costs. OK. So this was always set up as a pay-as-you-go type of thing. OK. But then the requirements of, I think, I forget what gap it is, that you have to actually, before the audit, you actually have to show this on our books And ordinarily, it would simply be funded year by year. This is what we owe. This is what we have to pay. Right. But now we have to take a look and then see what that actual liability going out in many years actually is.
[Zac Bears]: And so this liability, we're actually paying for it every, we're paying for the actual costs every year, the liability.
[Bob Dickinson]: Throughout the budget.
[Zac Bears]: Right.
[Bob Dickinson]: OK. Yeah. I actually have been talking to the person who manages our $82,000 and hope to have some meetings this summer with her to make sure to figure out exactly what we're funding, what would be the best course and come up with recommendations for that.
[Zac Bears]: And I guess my question is just like, if we're on track and it looks like we're very much on track to fully fund the actual pension liability, does that mean that we're also basically covering this and because it's PAYGO or I'm just down.
[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah.
[Bob Dickinson]: Oh, yes. Okay. All right. Looking forward to actually funding all of this.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, it just when I was looking at the balance sheet, I was like, this makes everything look nuts. But it shouldn't be right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
[Nicole Morell]: Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. I'm going back to the insurance thing. So what is $25,500,000? How are we saving $2.5 million of our insurance? We've been looking at the prior fiscal years and saying we're over. It's gone up, it's gone up every year. And I don't know, I don't get health insurance for the city and my rates keep going up. I mean, I'm curious, I was saving two and a half million dollars, but we're bringing on more employees. People are retiring, they're getting the insurance and we're projecting money that looks like the same as we did in 2021. I'm a little puzzled about that.
[Bob Dickinson]: That's what I'm saying. One of the things that was asked of me is why free cash went to $25 million. If you've over-budgeted your health insurance by millions of dollars, that's going to fall to free cash. That's a turn back. when we're looking at our budget.
[Richard Caraviello]: So what you're saying is?
[Bob Dickinson]: Rationally looking at the last few years, that should be what we're expected to pay out.
[Richard Caraviello]: OK. If we can go back to the pension thing again. What year did you say the pension was going to be funded by? I believe it's 2032.
[Zac Bears]: There's a chart on page 44 that shows how much.
[Richard Caraviello]: I've been sitting on this council for the last 12 years, and that year keeps changing every year, every year. It probably changes every two years.
[Bob Dickinson]: It's an actuarial computation done every two years. So the next one will be done in January 1st, 2024.
[Richard Caraviello]: Is that taking the downturn in the market this year? That will include the downturn in the market. But is the downturn in the market included in these numbers? Not yet, no. So when will we see that?
[Bob Dickinson]: January 1st, 2024. That's when the next report comes out, and then that will determine what we're doing. There are various different scenarios based on how much we fund now, how much we fund later. There's also room in there if we want to. There's four more people retiring every day. Yes, there are. But there are different ways to actually, for instance, you could spread the, because we have till 2037 to fund this fully, we could spread it over more years, lessening the impact to the city. We could pay it quicker if we wanted to. The report will come out with what the actuary thinks are the best, his best estimates. And usually there's, there will be three or four different scenarios how to fund it. And then we will discuss that with the mayor and make a determination about what we think is best for the city to fund this.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions for the council?
[Zac Bears]: Just if you could tell the retirement board to invest in Nvidia stock like three weeks ago.
[Bob Dickinson]: Well, yes. or, you know, go back 10 years and get some Bitcoin. That would be great.
[Zac Bears]: Yes. I was thinking like minimal time travel on the budget that we have, you know, 10 years we can't afford, maybe three weeks.
[Bob Dickinson]: Maybe three weeks. All right, well, I'll work on that. Thanks, Bob.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions? Seeing none, I'll bring you Director Dickinson.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Motion to adjourn.
[Nicole Morell]: On the motion of Vice Mayor to adjourn, seconded by Councilor Tseng. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. Yes, five in the affirmative, negative two absent, meeting is adjourned. See everyone next.
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