total time: 20.71 minutes
total words: 1191
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks so much for joining me today. If you don't mind just starting by introducing yourself, so saying your name and pronouns and a bit about who you are.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Hi, I am Emily Lazzaro, she, her, and I am a Medford City Councilor.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks, Emily. So we're going to start out just with our same question that we ask everybody at the beginning of the show, which is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Emily Lazzaro]: My favorite place to eat in Medford has not changed since the last time we talked. It's still Goldilocks. Actually, I like a lot of places, but I think Goldilocks is still my go-to. They were just on, I think they were on, uh, Jim and Marjorie on GBH maybe yesterday. And they were talking about bagels and flour and everything. It was very fun. Um, but my favorite thing is the rosemary salt bagel. They're amazing. Um, it was, uh, really fun to listen to them on the radio.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, that's definitely a favorite of a lot of people. Yeah. Um, great. So the last time you were here, or the last time we talked to you, you were running for city council and now you have been elected to the city council. So congratulations. And I'm wondering if you want to give us any updates or like reflections on how the first couple of months have been.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Sure, yeah, it's been a real whirlwind. It's been largely awesome. I've had a lot of good experiences. It's also been really challenging in some ways I didn't expect. We've had a lot of really long meetings with a lot of public participation that's gotten pretty contentious because there have been a lot of changes proposed in the city that are, I think, reflecting some growing pains that are happening. I think it's, it's been really reflective of the challenges that we're facing but also really reflective of people's willingness and interest and engaging in the democratic process and. It's been a really interesting working experience. So we've been working through a lot of new proposals and a lot of changes to the way that we are doing business in city council. Our city council president, Zach Baer, has changed the way that we are presenting our agendas, changed the way that we released a governing agenda in the beginning of our term. with a plan for what we're gonna present over the course of the whole two years, like everything that we're intending to do, and a rough timeline. Everything's subject to change, but everything that we're hoping to accomplish. And some of it seemed a little bit maybe scary to some people, so they kind of like came out and said, hey, we're concerned about a lot of this, and we got a lot of pushback. I don't necessarily think it's reflective of everybody in town, but a lot of people were Worried about it so came out and spoke against it, but it also resulted in us having a lot of meetings that lasted past one in the morning. like personal kind of pushback. So we just our last meeting made a change to the rules about public participation. We cut down from five minutes per participant to three minutes and 90 minutes as a general limit on each section of public participation. Like per agenda item, but we actually amended that to be 90 minutes and then one minute per person after the 90 minutes if there's a large group of people. This is just for the regular meetings, not for committee meetings, those being the things where we take one item and sort of delve into it more deeply. But it's all been a lot of changes really quickly, which I think is sort of reflecting in the community that people are kind of trying to adjust. So we're all going through a period of adjustment, and we're figuring it out together. We're hoping to have a lot more opportunities to engage with the community through listening sessions, through meetings with uh, Councilors and community members at the senior center, at the library. I'm, I'm also on the committee for resident services and, um, community engagement, which, uh, we're hoping to put out monthly newsletters and, uh, updating people on what we're doing and how we're hoping to engage people. And engagement is always good. So it's, it's something we hope continues.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you, yeah. And you mentioned this two-year plan. Where can people find that?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a PDF.
[Danielle Balocca]: I don't know, I have to look. It should be on our website. Maybe we can link to it in the show notes.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, definitely.
[Danielle Balocca]: We can definitely link to it in the show notes. Thank you. So, I know it seems like a lot of excitement in the first couple months. Some meetings that maybe didn't go as, or maybe it's as expected, but, you know, sort of seeing kind of the shift, you know, I think we saw a shift in sort of the composition of city council. And so maybe the pushback is kind of anticipated, but, um, seems like it could be difficult at times to manage, but, um, so I'm wondering with all that kind of, you know, you'd shared your priorities before being elected. And I wonder if you could share kind of some of your current priorities.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, absolutely. Well, affordable housing is always a priority of mine. I especially am interested in making sure housing is available for people who are kind of at the bottom of the economic ladder. People who have fallen through the cracks or or faced a couple of economic challenges that have made it impossible for them to secure housing because of various situations. Sometimes it's very easy to miss a payment of rent or a mortgage for some reason and face eviction very quickly sometimes. If you're like a gig worker or maybe a service sector worker, I have a friend who's a nanny and has like a legal issue and as a result has a pending legal thing come up on a background check which means she cannot get a nanny job which means she can't pay her rent, which means she's facing an eviction and she has an elementary school aged child and is now suddenly, you know, like talking to people at like, she lives in a town with an office of housing stability. So there, she has like services for that sort of thing, but we don't have that kind of thing in Medford. So these sorts of things are very pertinent to like my concerns, my priorities. So, Affordable housing making sure that we're we're trying to take care of people that are just on the cusp of that sort of issue and Homeless services that kind of thing we have a very small Very effective and powerful group of people that works on that in City Hall, but we could always use more and a lot of our a lot of the things that we've been working on are to bolster our affordable housing trust that we established, but hasn't had a lot of funding put into it yet. So we can use that once we fund it, we can use it to pay for things like complexes, to fund complexes like Wapling Court, which is something that's being, going through the approval process now. It's a, it's a rebuilding of a, uh, housing project that's in behind the Whole Foods in Medford. And, um, uh, we could like partially fund something like that as a city, uh, instead of, uh, using, you know, grant, grant funding and other funding resources. Um, if we had an affordable housing trust that we had been paying into for longer. So, um, that kind of thing. I'm also really interested in looking into our city's infrastructure. Um, specifically water and sewer is something that we're going to be talking about soon. We have something on the agenda this week to discuss it that was brought forward by Councilor Scarpelli. And I'm really interested in talking about that. We have a lot of deferred maintenance in the city that's really coming to a head soon. And I'm very eager to look into ways that we can update our city's infrastructure in the most effective and efficient way possible. Without, you know, you can't, there's so much to do and you can't do everything all at once. So as soon as you can figure out a way to balance everyone's priorities and do things in the best way possible. now that we're ready to actually take action, I think it's gonna be really good for the city.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I think that those are two things that I hear people talk about a lot is like affordable housing, the cost to live in Medford, and then also the state of our kind of like streets. And I hear like, there's a lot going on all at once. And I wonder kind of what is supporting that? And then what is what are what you see as sort of like barriers to accomplishing those things?
[Emily Lazzaro]: I think the reason that it's all, it feels like it's happening all at once is because it wasn't happening for so long. There was, we had one mayor for 28 years and it was during that time, it was easy for us to say everything was fine and kind of chug along. And also during that time and maybe after that time, a lot of the demographics of the city shifted. As people got priced out of different parts of this region, more younger families moved in. People from different backgrounds moved in. And now the makeup of Medford is different than it used to be. And the people that live here want Medford to grow and to change with the people who live here. we're hoping to catch up now. And we're doing a lot of catching up all at once. So we have a lot of catching up to do. And as we try to do that, we have to do it piece by piece. But trying to balance everybody's priorities is going to be the challenge, like making sure that we're paying attention to updating the schools, updating the roads, updating the water and sewer infrastructure, paying attention to climate mitigation, paying attention to other things that are falling into disrepair at the same time. As you do one project, it takes a long time, and then you're deferring the next project. And then before you know it, you do three projects, and the first one needs to be redone again. So everything kind of falls into place on a timeline like that. But I think as long as we're not approaching all of this from a place of, fear and resistance and thinking that when things change, it means that somebody's being left behind. I think if we can avoid that way of thinking, then everybody is coming along and everybody's being, everybody gets to be part of it and everybody gets to benefit from it. Then we're all in it together. Then I think that we can all see it as a net positive.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I think and I watched the meeting where you all talked about the real estate transfer fee. And we talked to Kit and Matt a couple of weeks ago. And I think there was this there was, you know, a large crowd there that and they all seem to be in agreement with each other about, you know, the what they were sort of interpreting as like an unfair burden on people who own homes. And I think that's like a trend that I seen sometimes is like it's not like sometimes it's like this change means you're taking something away from me, or like I'm going to lose something or. And so, which like, and, and I also talked to like a lot of people in the city who really do want. a place that's nice to live and to take care of their neighbors. And so I wonder how you make sense of that or how that comes up for you.
[Emily Lazzaro]: I think the biggest problem with that meeting, the real estate transfer fee meeting, was the intentional misinformation that was swirling around about that. Because by the end of the meeting, we had some people that came up a couple times and had genuine questions that we answered for them. about the real estate transfer fee and how, frankly, for developers who would be the target of that fee, that it would be borderline insignificant to their bottom line, and that that is what we needed people to grasp, that it's not about punishing people who are struggling. It is about utilizing the people who are making a significant profit from the real estate market in Medford and suggesting that they have the opportunity to give back to Medford, the city that made it possible for them to make a large profit. and have the rest of the city benefit from it. Because this city is what gave them the opportunity to make that profit. The services in the city, the things that are happening in the city, the schools and the parks and everything about the city that exists here, even the proximity to Boston, whatever, the jobs that are here, that's what made that property value increase to that degree. So I think it's logical that there would then be a small percentage of it that goes back to the city that allows the city to continue to prosper. So I think that's the way you have to think about it. And that it's not, it doesn't take away from the profits that are made by developers because their profits are so much.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that,
[Emily Lazzaro]: We would be thinking of it strategically with carve outs so that we're protecting people who need protection. People on fixed incomes. So the other thing is, real estate transfer fee was not my proposal. And I'm not even on the committee that's going to be hashing out the details of this. But I do plan, once they do discuss it in committee, I plan to attend it and pay attention to what they're talking about. Though that committee is focused a lot on zoning reform right now. So it may not be, it may be a while before they discuss it. But once they do, I'll be in attendance. I just don't, I'm not a voting member. So I wouldn't vote until it's back in regular committee or committee of the whole. But once it is, I mean, I haven't made up my mind because it hasn't been hammered out yet. But another thing I would want to say is that committee meetings are open to the public. Committee meetings are open meetings. They're advertised the same way as regular meetings. So if people are interested in learning more about these things, they should definitely plan to attend committee meetings. They tend to be shorter. They still have public comment. You can talk for longer because there's usually less people. You can engage. You can go back and forth if you need to. It's a great opportunity to see Councilors talking to each other for longer periods of time because you're really talking about the details of a proposal and discussing things at length. Regular meetings, we don't have time to do that because we're talking about a lot of things. But the committee meetings, we're talking about one thing for like an hour. And it's real nitty gritty stuff. So anyway, real estate transfer fee, the only reason we were talking about it is because the governor wants it. So it's more likely to happen. And that's exciting because it could help us fund our affordable trust fund. Great. Yeah, that actually clarifies a lot of the questions that I had.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Yeah, and I know you just, I know before we started recording, you were chatting, we were chatting a little bit about your work at the Malden Warming Center. So I wanted to see like, you know, if you had, if that's kind of brought up any connections to Medford.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Oh, yeah, for sure. So people who are dealing with homelessness aren't tied down to a municipality. So we have at the Malden Warming Center, we have people that come from other cities, of course, so you just go if you're unhoused, you go wherever you can access services. So we frequently would have guests that are from Medford. But they're There aren't seasonal overnight shelters in Medford. We don't have any shelters in Medford for men. We have a family shelter. I think it only has seven beds, seven rooms. We tend to refer people to other towns. so my I have a goal to establish a warming center in Medford, but the There are a lot of models There's a model in particular that we could follow that Somerville and Revere have been doing the past couple of years Somerville. I think just started it this year these there the armory space on Highland Ave and Revere used their City Hall. But they contract housing families, which is a non-profit. But both of them followed kind of the playbook of the Malden Warming Center, which has been operational for six years now. So most of the same basic rules. But I've been having conversations with a few parties about opening a center in Medford. So I'm trying to figure out a space. I'm hoping that we can make that happen for this coming winter. That's on our governing agenda for me to try to move that forward. Just because as a region, I think it's really important that we all kind of work with other municipalities and make sure that we're trying to close all the gaps and do our part as a community as well to bolster the services that are being offered so that we can assist other cities that are, some are taking on more responsibility than others. And it doesn't, I don't think it means that those cities have more homeless people. I think it means that those cities offer more services. So that's where people will go to access the services. They're not being turned away. So, and we don't, you know, at the Malden Warming Center, that's a nonprofit, but it does have a lot of city support. So the, We don't check papers at the Malden Warming Center. We don't have ID checks. We don't ask for verification that you have some kind of Malden connection there. And it would be the same in Medford. It would just be like, as a community, we're trying to offer services to help people when they need help. So I think that's the way of thinking about it. people who need help can come here. We will try to catch you before you fall through the last rung of the ladder.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Wow. And so it's like bringing up for me like some comments that I heard at that meeting about the transfer fee, which were like somebody saying, well, sort of accusing the city council of running like a social service agency, which seems like actually a nice thing to be. Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, like many cities offer social services.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yes, that is like one of the things that cities do. And we have, yeah, and like I plug her all the time, but our city social worker is like awesome. And she's one person, right?
[Emily Lazzaro]: We only have one, I know.
[Danielle Balocca]: And like the... You know, I think that, yeah, just like the sort of unseen needs that definitely exist here. It's just, yeah, I think that that is like a sad thing to try to accuse.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, God forbid somebody needs social services.
[Emily Lazzaro]: God forbid you do sometime. Exactly. You know, and yeah, like, like, that's what I think that's what people sometimes don't understand is that, like, I'm not particularly religious, but for the grace of God, go I. We're all on the cusp of, at any point, some horrible thing could befall any of us. And I think that the responsibility of local government is to have these things available for people if they need them. And everybody who comes to meetings and says things to me that are maybe sometimes not nice, I want them to know that I still, I want to help them. I want to be available to help them if they need help. And even if they don't like the way that I talk or move my face or body, I still want to help them if they need help. So that's why I ran for this position. I have these conversations with the guests that we help with the Malden Warming Center sometimes where it's like, maybe they are annoyed at me. Maybe they are resistant to the things that we're offering. Maybe they don't like the meal that night. Maybe they don't like the blanket that we're giving out. We actually had a lot of problems with blankets this year. Our laundry service was not good. Sometimes we didn't have blankets. And I had to apologize to everybody and get up front and be like, listen guys, we don't have blankets tonight. and I'm really sorry, we can turn the heat up, you can get an extra sweatshirt from the donation closet, but like, I'm really sorry we don't have blankets. You can complain to me about it, and I will hear you out, but I'm sorry. And it's like, as much as you want to complain to me, and as much as you want to say, why do you make me wait outside when it's cold, and I have to wait until seven o'clock, why are you doing this to me? It's like, I know, it stinks, and I also hate it. But it's because I just can't get here until 630, and then we have to clean the chairs, and then you guys can come in. Just, like, complain to me. It's OK. Like, it's OK.
[Danielle Balocca]: I still want to help you, even though you're yelling at me. Yeah. It does kind of, like, remind me of the pace of city government, right? When people are saying, like, nothing's happened. Or, like, whatever. You know, I think you haven't done anything in two years, or whatever that accusation is. And they're like, you know, you have to wash the chairs, whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: I mean, that feels like a great place to kind of wrap up. But I'm wondering if there's anything else that you want to plug or any ways you want to share, people can be in touch with you if they want to be.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, one of the things that we want as part of our public participation, the rules change that we that we put in, and we went from five minutes to three minutes, we changed the amount of time per agenda item, but we also are implementing listening sessions, which we're going to hammer out the details of that soon. And I'm really excited about it. And we'll put that on the website, we'll try to share that on social media as much as we can, but we're also going to have an online form that people can fill out if they want, like if they can't make it to a meeting or they can't be on Zoom, if they want something read into the record, They can do an online form, or they can fill out a form in person in the clerk's office, and then we will read it into the record. It will be part of the meeting, and it'll be in the minutes. It'll be part of the record. So that's a great way to have your voice heard. Everybody in the room hears it, and it's officially part of the record, which is cool. But you can also always email us. Our emails are right on the website. We read everything. If we don't have time to respond, we definitely read it. Often we respond. I mean, you send it to everybody, at least a handful of people will respond. We can't all respond to each other because it's open meeting law violation. But I think the listening sessions are going to be really fun and interesting and a great way for us to, in smaller groups, kind of interact with people. So I'm looking forward to seeing how that goes. And I really like people. I mean, I think it's none of us are introverts. So we kind of thrive in environments where there are a lot of people around. Um, so I'm looking forward to, uh, meeting more people one-on-one. Well, thanks. Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Giedonis. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites. Never Bites. Good job.
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total time: 20.71 minutes total words: 1191 |
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