[Bears]: City Council Committee the whole March 6 2024. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[SPEAKER_07]: Vice President Collins, present. Councilor Lazzaro, present. Councilor Leming, present. Councilor Scarpelli, present. Councilor Tseng, present. President Bears.
[Bears]: Presidents and presidents, your absent the meeting is called to order. This meeting will take place at 6pm in the City Council Chamber, second floor, Medford City Hall, 85 George B. Essa Drive, Medford MA and via Zoom. To submit written comments, please email ahertabse at medford-ma.gov. So this is a meeting on 24-045, which is the resolution regarding the schedule of the annual budget process. As we discussed at our last regular meeting, by March 1st, city councilors submit individual budget recommendations for consideration. we're going to submit a collective budget recommendation to the mayor. We're then going to hold meetings with department heads and staff from April 15th to May 15th before the mayor submits her budget proposal on May 31st. And then we'll have another opportunity to talk to any department that we want to talk to after May 31st. You know, if. We don't want to invite someone back if we've had all our questions answered and their budget hasn't substantively changed since our preliminary meeting in April to May. No reason to have them down again. But if there are departments that we want to invite back and have further questions or we want to understand the impact of what the mayor's budget proposal is on those departments, then we'll be able to do that. The mayor also can, if she wants a department to come back, she can. also send them to us to give another presentation. So that's the basic process. I want to thank Councilors for submitting budget recommendations. We have a bunch of them in here. I just want to go through, give everybody a chance to kind of talk about their budget recommendations. And I have them in order, so I'll share a screen in a minute. But starting with Councilor Lazzaro, main ones were to protect cuts or prevent cuts at the Board of Health, anything that serves vulnerable residents, schools, and affordable housing, and protecting residents dealing with housing insecurity and housing issues. So I'll go to Councilor Lazzaro.
[Lazzaro]: Thank you. I think my priorities are fairly self-explanatory. It's important to me that we make sure that baseline we're not losing any of our departments that serve the basic needs of our residents that are especially vulnerable to the rising cost of housing and the rising cost of living in Medford, but also in Massachusetts and in the United States, there are rising levels of homelessness across the country. And I would love to see, in fact, increases to the budget and in our services that we offer to people dealing with housing insecurity, any kind of eviction protections, protections for people with low incomes. and protections for people dealing with mental health and addiction issues, but short of increasing the budget, it's my highest priority that we not see any cuts to those departments, anything that would relate to that. In addition, The school departments, I think I mentioned schools. I don't have it in front of me. I didn't bring my computer with me today. But the school budget needs to see an increase and at least needs to not decrease. I think that we're all most, I think most of us are in agreement about that, that the underfunding of Medford public schools is a pertinent issue and is something that is also one of my priorities. Thank you.
[Bears]: I'm going to go to Councilor Collins. Councilor Collins submitted primary priority in Medford's first post ARPA and ESSER operating budget, ARPA and ESSER being the federal funding that the city has received for the pandemic and pandemic recovery. We must maintain capacity within city departments, maintain capacity for key city functions and priorities, including long-term multi-year projects like road and sidewalk improvements, housing Climate resiliency capital product planning and maintaining constituent service and schools for all residents. So, the 6 primary priorities are 1 prioritize meeting the school departments, budget requests to prioritize the library departments, budget requests and maintaining level service an hour of operations. hours of operation, three maintain grant funded personnel in the health department, access to outreach and prevention and office of planning and development and sustainability, increased budgeted amount for city solicitor salary to maintain competitiveness with neighboring municipalities, increased budgeted amount for assistance city solicitor salary to maintain competitiveness with neighboring municipalities and Councilor Collins does have numbers on those. plus $49,871 for the city solicitor and plus $37,178 for the assistant. And also escalate elections manager position to elections director and increase budgeted amount for salary by $28,000 to attract competitive qualified candidates. There are also secondary priorities, one of which was implementing the Massachusetts Paid Family Medical Leave program for all city employees, which would increase city competitiveness with private employers and with other cities. and along with the compensation and classification study, help attract and retain competitive candidates in city positions to achieve fuller staffing and increase capacity across departments. And then there's also a study or consultant review of finance department software upgrade options and development implementation scenarios. Apart from expanding the personnel budget, what software and financial tools would increase capacity and effectiveness of the finance department budgetary and what would the budgetary impact of those upgrades be? And I think that's it. So I will go to Vice President Collins to talk a little bit more about her recommendations.
[Collins]: Thank you, President Bears. Essentially, what I put in my memo speaks to my recommendations. My priority is for this budget cycle. This is not going to be a budget year where I think that we are having the bandwidth to pilot a lot of new programs or start a lot of new positions. My focus is on maintaining level service for constituents and for students and workers in school systems. That's why my number one and number two priorities are meeting the school department budget request and meeting the library department budget request, making sure that we maintain level service and hours of operation at the library in particular, because that has been something that has been called into question in some past budget cycles. I wanted to call out specifically grant-funded personnel in the Health Department, Office of Outreach and Prevention, and the Planning Department because there are a lot of grant-funded positions in those departments specifically, but we know that all those positions are critical. In our community, they serve really important functions and the needs for those roles are not going away just because pandemic-era funding and grant funding is going away, so we need to make sure that we are maintaining level service by rolling those positions either onto other sources of grant funding or ideally making sure that those positions can be maintained within our operations, our operating budget this year and in future years. The next few key priorities for this year are ones that we've talked about around this time of year in the past. Trying to get a city solicitor and an assistant city solicitor online as quickly as we can. It's my belief that we need to raise the amount budgeted for salary for those positions so that we can be attracting competitive candidates. I do believe that this is a at this moment in time a tough position to hire for in this area in, in general, and I think that these positions are so important that we should prioritize escalating the amount of salary budgeted for these positions, so that we are competitive with some of our neighboring municipalities. I put some recommended dollar figures on here. Those are based off of my research into what our neighboring communities of Malden and Somerville primarily are paying for these positions. For example, in Malden, the budgeted salary for their city solicitor is around, it's a little over 117,000. In Somerville, it's 189. I believe that the figure I suggested to increase the city solicitor salary by less than $50,000 was based on the discrepancy with Malden. Is that true? Oh, sorry. That was based off the discrepancy with the city of Somerville. I know this is a big jump for one position, but I think we've all felt for the past few years how significant it is to not have a city solicitor in-house, and I think that that would be a I think that we can be pound wise by investing more money into these unfilled city positions. It's the same for the assistant city solicitor and in escalating the elections manager to a direct deliver position again I think that these are things that you know we see what happens when we don't invest in making sure that these positions are first and foremost filled. And second, you know, we really owe the people of Medford, the best possible person in all of these roles. And then I put the secondary priorities under areas of study slash secondary priorities. I know that these are things we're not going to be able to bring online early in fiscal 25. But I think that charting a course towards implementing a paid family and medical leave program for all city employees, apart from being the right thing to do and what all of our city employees deserve will help us fill key staffing roles. And I believe that a review of what needs to happen to bring our finance department software into the 2020s is something that we would see the benefit from. Once we achieve that, we need to figure out if that's something that can happen in three, five, or 10 years. And I think that every department would feel the positive effects of that. So I'm hoping that while not being things that I think are realistic to prioritize for fiscal 25, these are things that I hope that the administration is saving some capacity for studying this year. Thank you.
[Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Allen. I was going to go to Councilor Leming, then Councilor Scarpelli. Councilor Leming, I have here from you money for linkage, nexus and transportation demand studies, increased salary for library pages for the non-union part-time staff. more staffing in the elections office and permanent salary for community social worker Councilor let me.
[Leming]: Yes, thank you. I submitted a brief list of budget recommendations. I wanted to make it a little bit more of a focused a couple of focused items because I. You know, I didn't want it to be too redundant to some of the issues and very important issues that my colleagues brought up concerning the staff concerning the budget for the schools, for instance, but these, but I just like to make sure with these relatively modest requests that we have money set aside for three studies that I believe will be. for the long term financial health of the city, a linkage study, which should be coming into, which should be brought up at the council meeting next week in order to update the linkage fees in the city, a nexus study, which will determine how much to charge the developers to put into affordable housing and a transportation demand management study, which would also be carried out by the planning office in order to implement at the staff level the transportation demand management program, which is currently in the planning and permitting committee. The rest is just really repeating what was said before about the need for more and permanent election staff. which I think the last, the previous election and the fact that we've had a lot of loss in that department has really shown the importance of. A permanent salary for one community social worker who has been on a sort of a revolving set of funds for a while now, it's a very important position. And I had a conversation about having increased salary for the part-time library workers. That is a position that I haven't seen a whole lot of advocacy for or mention of just previously in other city conversations. So I thought it would be useful to represent them in some of these budgetary priorities.
[Bears]: So thank you. Thank you, Councilor Leming. From Councilor Scarpelli, I have City Solicitor, Assistant City Solicitor, DPW Cement and Hot Top Crew and Equipment, Administrative Assistant for the Recreation Department, full-time or part-time to start, might be a good option to share with elections, Program Coordinator, Recreation Department, focused on afterschool care, and staffing and education for elections. Councilor Scarpelli.
[Scarpelli]: really tried to focus on for our many years and going through this process is understanding. First things first is looking at what I would request and what it really meant to our budget. and I think that there's a tone to it. City Solicitor, Assistant City Solicitor, I was going to talk about, I'm glad Councilor Collins brought up the fact, Vice President Collins brought up the fact that the reason that we're not filling that position is, you know, the dialogue out there is when you're offering a position that important, it should be given that respect when it comes to pay. And, when you keep it at that price, and like I've told you in the past, everybody here, that I've talked to city solicitors that I've worked with in the past, and this is, you know, their observation is that you only can apply for a job and be a city solicitor if the mayor truly wants a city solicitor. I think she's very comfortable, KP Law, I think she controls the dialogue, and as KP Law says, they don't work for us. A city solicitor now works for us. And the reason why I think that's so important, I'll say it over and over again. We did a huge disservice for the residents of the BJ's neighborhood because we answered questions without having legal representation. And it cost us by putting in a gas station that we could say now they're doing it that we don't need there. It's for a huge company that has a lot of money that has done nothing to prosper relationship with the neighborhood. we've done. Even even after they've come in and talk to us. It's still a mess. They still have not fulfilled what they've wanted. They should have done so. Having the funded positions to what it deserves to be, and I'm glad Council Collins shared those numbers because I had the similar numbers from, um. That city And you could see that, and I think that that's a huge cost savings, both with not bringing KP law for hourly rate and something that they really don't assist us with, and the fact that having someone that heads off huge issues, like I mentioned earlier. The DPW cement and hot top crew. This is something, I think it's now, it's sort of, comedic now when I bring it up because I've been doing this since we started I when I first when it was my first year as a Councilor was gung ho about this and I got a report and I did a I did a study and I came to I brought I brought the paperwork into the to the administration and it was a crew of three with their salaries and their benefits and their one time cost for the truck. And it came out to maybe like $250,000. And it was voted down, it wasn't even obtained. But since then, every year, we are asked to pull a bond for cement sidewalks for 2.5 million to 500,000 per million dollars. And I can guarantee you we're going to get that again this year, the mayor will come to us and ask us for a bond for sidewalk repaving. And where you can have your own crew come in and do that. And when times are slow, which they wouldn't be because we have so many issues, you can also use that crew to backfill, whether it's a spring to help the fields crew get that facility ready, whether it's highway, if we need something with highway. It's probably one of the most underfunded, under positioned departments in our city, both DPW, and as you all know, with the fire department being down 25 firefighters, you're looking at under funding and undermining our most vital positions, and that's hurting us. So that's why I bring that up. I think the other, the administration for recreation department, so I would get a few phone calls, because I don't know, some of you might know, I chaired and spearheaded the full time recreation department here in Medford a few years back. And Mayor Burke gave me the opportunity to chair it and really be the voice and share my professional opinion and we really watch it grow. And I think Kevin Bailey and his team, they do an amazing job. But now we're at the point where there's growth, we have to keep moving forward now. I think we're starting to get stagnant and we're starting to waste money. And I'll give you an example. When you have a director that's making, you know, maybe 90s, and he's spending 15 hours, 20 hours a week, answering phones, making phone calls, replying to emails, because they don't have a even a part time administrative assistant. These are the things that you see that are hurting us, and they're cost effective, and no by no means. So, you look at the situation where we when we talk about elections they say well funding the elections department is difficult because it's only really during election season we really need those people so. I want the administration if they can is to be a little creative and looking at a position where you have someone that's working in the recreation office, maybe 20 hours a week, or maybe 30 hours and 10 hours in the slow times in elections. And then that flips during election time, they work 30 hours in elections and work 10 hours at recreation. And I think that that would be more cost effective when you're talking about your director or your assistant director answering phone calls that that you really should have someone that's, you know, there all the time. The other pieces of people saying that we don't have someone that's answering the phone. So parents would call even during the program. You know, as a recreation department, you want somebody at that phone. You might have an issue with, a parent might've forgot that, they forgot to tell us their child is allergic to bananas. And when you don't have a person you can talk to, and you can't get ahold of that person that's in the field, it's a scary time. And I know it's dramatic, but these are the things that we think of when we work with children. So that's why I look at that position, seeing how important that is. The other position is looking at increasing program, another program coordinator that focuses on after school care. And I can tell you as, as my profession, we see the benefits financially and for our community, when you can offer a robust program through your recreation department, where parents aren't afraid to spend money to make sure their kids are in a highly developed program like the recreation respected program like recreation. And that also supports the issues we're having in the school department, that you've all heard it, you've all gotten phone calls that there's no after school care. one school's full, so there's a waiting list, they'll never get in, and then as they try to get on the next season, they can't do it, so it's just a revolving issue that, for the most part, who it really affects is the most needy in our community. It's not the more affluent members of our community that understand on April 1st, registration's gonna open, they're gonna be there right on their computer, boom, boom, boom, they're gonna sign up with their credit cards, and what happens, You have families that don't have that access, maybe not to a computer, not to even have a credit card. So it makes it difficult to make sure there's equity there. So I think that having that position would really help when it comes to the overflow and looking at what we're doing. And I know that we work closely with the YMCA with their afterschool care, and they take a lot of the voucher kids in our city. but there's still a huge need. And you love the fact that our parents that have a voice are being heard and the Brooks and the Roberts and the McGlynn and they're being heard and they're figuring out ways like being creative and starting bringing in Mr. Karate and paying Mr. Karate $150 for an after school program. That sounds great for the parent that has the means. But when we talk about kids that don't that when they're locked out of the YMCA program, because the numbers, these are things that I feel that are important in our budget. Next is staffing and education for the elections. I'm hearing some pretty disturbing things in the streets. Not only from this, you know, last election, still things are lingering. And a lot has to do with probably the greatest people in our community. And those are the people that are working the polls. And when you're talking about, I know most of them, and they're the sweetest people in the world, but unfortunately, I don't think we spend enough money and time in making sure they're trained properly. And then that does what? Because perception is reality, that then puts them in a bad position because they weren't taught the right way. And a resident that is educated when it comes to this, they blow things totally through the roof and who gets affected and then who walks away. are those people that come in and do that work for us. So I know a little winded, but I wanted to make sure that there was a dialogue and there was a reasoning for my choices. So we're also, you know, I know that Councilor Villes, we all want the schools at least level funded. From what I heard today that the teachers, union representatives reached out to me today and they were told that The school system is at a spending freeze right now, and they're still trying to make up. I know that Councilor Bears heard something different, which is better news, but from what I heard last time, it was still $2.5 million that the mayor actually replied and said that's true. So this is scary because a lot of it's coming down to the sustainability. When we purchased or we put any money from ARPA or ESSER into any of our programs, The reasoning in other communities having that person that oversaw the ARPA money, the first thing that when we met with them as a professional, when you meet with that director, they say, okay, what is the sustainability after that money is done? That was the key. If we couldn't show sustainability, we couldn't move forward. Medford just used it as a stopgap. Now we're gonna be in dire straits. And I think that's why having this meeting is great, but we all should realize I'm trying to, educate everybody I talk to, you know, and you, my fellow colleagues are just starting off, you're going to see, you're going to get phone calls, emails, people going to stop you in the street, and they're going to blame you. and people don't understand the budget process. We can ask what we're doing right now, but when it comes down to the budget, all we can do is cut, we can't add. And I'm just trying to educate people with that, just so they know, because it is going to be, I hope I'm wrong, I pray to God I'm wrong, but it doesn't look good. But thank you very much, Mr. President. And I owe you 66 minutes for talking, so. No, you're good.
[Bears]: You're all good. I'm gonna go to Councilor Tseng, and I have boiled down his letter. If I miss anything, you let me know. But we had the discussion of the Youth and Gender Equity Commissions and looking at 20,000 for the Youth Commission, 9,000 for the Gender Equity Commission. Maintaining investments in our public schools and community liaisons program, translation services, and the economic development planner, health equity and outreach coordinator positions, ensuring that the salary is competitive for hiring a new prevention outreach manager, increasing line item spending for road signage and markings, increasing staffing in our elections office. the city's financial software and increasing financial assessing staff. Ensuring HR has the capacity to keep their work and complete their work in a more timely manner, improving child care access and raising the salaries of vacant positions to meet regional standards. Councilor Tseng.
[Tseng]: Thank you. And a special thank you to all my colleagues for bearing with me. I was in memo writing mode last week, writing legal memos, so I figured it would be easier for me just to continue with the memo writing. Essentially, thank you. I appreciate it. I'm glad my teacher gave me a name. So essentially my idea is well down to three big categories. One is small dollar increases, investments to help our city improve its public services. The second category is preserving spending, important spending projects that we have right now, which I think many of my colleagues have already alluded to. The last bucket is long-term plans. So essentially spending items I think for me personally as a Councilor, I don't need to see in this budget because I know the constraints on this budget are real, but I really would like the administration to commit to putting plans forward, at least the next few months to show us how we might get to a place where we can fund those important priorities. So going one by one. The first bucket, I really is much shorter so I've sat down with some of our city staff and the prevention outreach department, recreation department as well. We've basically been working on the youth. commission ordinance that I know Councilor Scarpelli is also big into. I think we've made a lot of progress, but we've also identified that we will need a real budget if we want the project to succeed. And so sitting down, doing the calculations, thinking about the number of members that we need to be paying for that commission and also the event costs, the cost for a secretary or lead organizer for the commission, it boils down to about $20,000. I think the number is somewhat adjustable, but that's about the number we need. And this includes $800 stipends for members. Now, the stipend, because it includes youth, it should be $800 or less, because when you go over $800, there are special reports that folks under 18 have to file. I think a similar logic is behind the Gender Equity Commission, which I think because there will likely be less programming and less secretarial kind of work needed, clerical work needed, $9,000 is an appropriate amount for that. I've also talked to member city staff in the planning and DW department, something that we talked about earlier this year when we were working through the governing agenda when I was sitting with them and going through the governing agenda was to help our city meet our priorities when it comes to safe streets and bicycle lanes, repaving streets. We have a series of policies that dictate what types of signage and markings we need before we can repave a street. That's oftentimes a constraint to us actually getting the repaving done. And so they've mentioned that increasing the line item spending for road signages slash road markings can be really helpful in getting us to repave streets faster and in a safer manner. Very similarly in kind of the raising spending category, increasing staffing for our elections department I think is something that's already been said a few times. We have noted I think it's really noteworthy the the change in the elections department going from more FDs to fewer FDs and how that really constrains what our city government can do and the quality of the service that we can give our residents. And given that this year we have a very contentious presidential election, given the political atmosphere, both municipally and nationally, increasing the capacity of our elections office I think is very paramount. In the second bucket, essentially, we have the items where I think we need to fight hard on preserving spending. I think Councilor Scarpelli really made a very important point in saying that the victims of government, cutting government spending are oftentimes and usually the less advantaged in our city. It's not necessarily going to affect every single resident, but it will affect a large number of residents who can't afford to replace those services with their own budget. And so that's why maintaining our spending in our public schools, in our library, maintaining the community liaisons program, which is grant funded, maintaining our health equity and outreach positions are really important priorities for us, for me at least, and from what I hear for the rest of the council as well. And these are essentially essentially roles that we need to make sure don't get lost and don't become victim to cuts in government spending. Now, there's also the economic development plan I've also put in this bucket. This is a really, really, really important position that's been helping Medford open up a lot of new businesses that folks in the community have been really excited for. We've just hired a new one, and I think it's very much a priority of mine to make sure that we can keep developing our local economy, and hopefully that will help us improve our revenues over a longer term as well. to be able to do that. Now the last bucket about long term plans. I think, um, for me, the real focus is one of the types of investments our city can make early on that will reap us rewards and benefits and especially more revenue in the future. And so updating our city's assist us in the reforms that we want to make is really important to me, and I think it's something that the City Council should be pushing for more. Ensuring that our HR department has the capacity they need to complete their work, I think is something that will make working in Medford more of a draw. for city staff as well. And well, some of the dissatisfaction that we hear from improving childcare access is something that tons of residents write me about throughout the term, no matter what time of the year it is. And in Councilor Collins' vein, raising the salaries of vacant positions to meet regional pay standards is, I think, really important. And it sounds like there's appetite for us to push hard for this cycle, which I would be happy in joining as well. We've heard a lot about how difficult it is to fill some of our positions because there's a shortage in the labor force. Now, because of market demands, we just have to be willing to pay for what we want. and I agree that a city solicitor is really, really important to helping our city council get as much work done as possible, and to help the city save costs from outsourcing. And I would be very happy to support any action to bring those salaries up to where our neighboring municipalities are at to draw candidates. Thank you.
[Bears]: I'm going to go to Councilor Cahan, and then if you have any, and then I can read mine, and then we can talk about it.
[Callahan]: Thanks so much. I apologize to my fellow Councilors for not submitting mine in a timely manner, but I want to, first of all, just state my agreements with points that other folks have brought up. One is level funding for Medford public schools, including those positions that have been paid for with funds that may be ending or may have ended. I agree with Councilor Scarpelli's request for a DPW hardtop group. I want to make sure that we maintain our funding for community liaisons. The elections department needs to be fully funded as it was in the past with an elections director. I definitely agree with everyone that the city solicitor and assistant city solicitor salaries need to be increased. We need to find those people and fill those positions. And then two that I think have not been mentioned. One is our tree planting budget should equal an amount that can fund the amount needed to plant the number of trees that Medford loses per year, whatever best estimate that is we have for like a five year average. I would like to see a, this is not exactly a budget request but it's like information that I think needs to come along with the budget. I know that We have requested from the administration an explanation of what our five-year plan is for fixing our roads and sidewalks and how that matches with the pavement report, pavement management study, and the sidewalk study that were done. I believe that we need to see a five-year plan so that we can understand how the upcoming budget fits into this plan. At a minimum, If that plan is not ready in time, the budget for roads and sidewalks should come with an explanation of what is going to be accomplished with the funds just for this year as compared to the plans from the pavement management study and the sidewalk study. So those are mine. Thank you.
[Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Callahan.
[Callahan]: I'm sorry, I do have one question.
[Bears]: Go ahead.
[Callahan]: Is there, for example, if there were creative ideas that came from the community about how we can support our local small businesses, is there some sort of a fund where small amounts of money like $2,000, $4,000, those kinds of things can come out of?
[Bears]: I'm not aware of one. I think there have been some. There may have been one through ARPA. There were some micro grants and micro projects that went out, but I don't think there's anything in the general fund budget to my knowledge.
[Callahan]: I would request there be a small slush fund for, you know, creative events and other ideas that can help our local small businesses. We're talking like 10k maybe for an entire year, just very small. You know, we're talking small, but you could do some interesting events and things with 10K. Yeah.
[Bears]: All right, so mine, I had just five bullet points. One was level service funding for our public schools. The second was to do our best to retain all ARPA-funded staff positions on the city side. I'm with Matt. The part-time non-union staff at the library haven't seen a raise in six, seven, or eight years, and so we're really losing. Those positions are really hard to fill, and I think that's one that slipped through the cracks because they don't qualify under when we do the non-union raises for full-time, which we did last year, and they're not under the union contract for the library, so they managed to get outside of both of those processes where everyone else has been brought up, so I think that group should be brought up, and I think that's a To me, that's more of a technical error than it is anything else. So I really hope that we can address that in the budget. With Councilor Caraviello not here, I will sound the horn to increase funding for code enforcement in the building department. That is what he would bring every year to these meetings. We need more folks over there for a number of reasons, but the job's getting even bigger. Short-term rentals, Maybe a rental registry, maybe, you know, the leaf blower, but we know that we need more code enforcement. And that's a quality of life issue for people across the city. I mean, we have so many civil code violations. And very few resources devoted to actually enforcing the civil code and making sure that the city is. just staying clean and safe and relatively as beautiful as it can. So that is really important to everyone's daily quality of life. And I know that a lot of the complaints that we hear from folks outside of the big ticket items of fixing the roads and building a new school and building a fire station and funding staff positions really come down to Why is there trash on the curb and on the sidewalks? And why are private landowners able to leave their front lawns just looking at a situation which is against our city ordinances and things like that? So really just want to sound that alarm. And then the last one, it aligns with what everyone else has said, but around the city financial software, at least putting the seed money in Um, you know, you could talk about it's been talked a couple ways in here. Councilor Tseng, uh, his recommendation around update our city's financial software, increased financial assessing staff. We had ensuring human resources have capacity to complete their work. Um. To be honest, and I think this kind of has gone on. Unspoken. and maybe this isn't the space to speak it, but I'm going to say it anyway, this entire thing around the fire department has started from a place of our financial systems being in not a good place, right? And retro pay taking way too long to get out the door after we, you know, we had a contract approved, we rushed through, we skipped the three readings unanimously on a contract, and then it hits the it's the financial system that can't calculate the payroll. And here we are in a really bad spot. I think all of us agree, regardless of what maybe our individual positions are on individual specific issues, that if we just had better financial software, we may not be in at all. So I really think that that is, you know, having had conversations with different departments and seeing how payroll works in the clerk's office and seeing how it works in other parts of the city, I think, you know, maybe it's a $2 or $3 million investment to really bring up our financial stuff to where it needs to be or get the staff in there or make sure that the training's there, whatever the issues are. between the staff time and the paperwork and all of that that's going into it, we're spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars anyway. If you're taking, in the police department, there's two and a half FT working on finance and paperwork outside of our finance department, right? So that's a lot of money. And that multiplies across all of our departments. When you have department heads spending hours a week on paperwork, that really could be automated. I think that we would find, and I haven't even gotten into the fact of all the reporting that we've been looking for for two years or wanting to know the financial situation of different, you know, I could go on and on and on about all of the things that spring from this central problem of not having the financial software in a place that we get timely reporting and that staff doesn't have to do onerous amounts of work. to just do basic financial functions. So to me, it may be the most boring of everything we've talked about, but I think it's actually at the center of a lot of the problems that we see in the city, or at the very least, understanding what those problems are and beginning to find solutions to them. So I hope we move in that direction. So those are my recommendations as well. I'm going to open it up to general discussion, and then I have been trying to lump these into different categories, but I need another minute to do that, so I'll go to Vice President Collins.
[Collins]: Thank you, President Bears, and I thank all of my fellow councillors for coming into the meeting with their recommendations. I think it's really exciting that we're starting this conversation in March for the first time in the first time that I've been on the council, which is not that long, but I think that this conversation, this process is beginning earlier than it usually does. And I appreciate the administration's cooperation so far with trying to make the overall budgeting process more communicative and less rushed. And I think that this is a great start. I'm happy to hear that there's cohesion among a lot of us on a lot of the shared priorities, and I think that's not surprising because we hear all the same issues. And I think that when I think back over the past couple years of budget discussions and what the common threads that emerge are, you know, we're the funnel into which sort of the main problems and aspirations and grievances of the city comes into. And I think the conversation that we've been having about the law department for a couple of years is an example of this. We're seeing our capacity reduced within these chambers because we lack in-house legal support. We see it taking a lot of time on ordinances. We see legal issues coming up, like the BJ's lawsuit, as Councilor Scarpelli mentioned. And I think the work of this council, very productive in the past, has been to say, what's the common denominator here? What's the investment that we're not making that we need to make that could be the fulcrum for all this other change? If we had a staffed in-house legal department, I think we would be seeing the difference in our workflow, in the quality of our workflow, and how quickly we're able to get things done, and then there would be all the things that we are not seeing. All of the decisions that It's hard to make, or we have to put off, or we have to request from an outside legal perspective, and they're not super accountable to their timelines, to our timelines, because they don't work for us. It's all the negatives that we don't see because of a targeted investment, in addition to all the positives that we do start to see. I think that's still that common denominator that we're still looking for that targeted investment there. And I think the other one that this conversation, um, I would say over the past six months is also revealing is needed investments to the finance department. I think president bears put it very well. There's all these positives that we would start to see if we brought our financial software and staffing up to year 2024. And then there's all these negatives that once we stop having these problems and inefficiencies and, you know, deleted results that come from a severe shortage of staffing and outdated software. We won't know it when those problems start to go away, but we're certainly seeing them now. And it's exciting to me to see multiple voices in this room, noticing the same problems. And I think that we're identifying another area, like the legal department, that we really need the administration to target some investment into. I know that it's hard to contemplate in this financial environment, making a multi-million dollar investment. But as President Beer said, We're already spending a lot, not just in money, but in staff time on trying to use inefficient processes to do this work that we have to do anyway, and dealing with the problems that arise from doing it less efficiently than we have to. So I hope that that can be a topic that we really elevate this budget season. Again, this is a year when I think we have to be realistic, but I think that this is so foundational to so many departments that we can't afford to not prioritize the issue and at least try to get some, you know, in my recommendations, I put it forward as an area of study. Can we at least invest in a consultant to look at our software and say, here's a plan for how to get there? Can we at least start there? If not looking at what would it look to really divert some funding into an investment in this fiscal year and know that that's something that might feel short-term uncomfortable, but we have to think about the long-term downstream positive effects of that kind of investment. Thank you.
[Scarpelli]: Thank you. Councilor Scrivilli. Thank you. So, I appreciate Council Bears and our new Council at least starting this process, but, you know, for my newer colleagues, it's nice that there was a time when we used to get We used to get updates on a pretty regular basis, making sure that we were all caught up and understood what was going on in the day-to-day budgets here in the city. So even the actuals that we're getting from our Chief of Staff, it's kind of sparse. I mean, we were receiving them until last one we received was August. and they're redacted, so you really can't see much, but at least we got something from the administration. The fact that I think that I might disagree with Council Vice President Collins, the software that former financial director Aleesha Nunley had is the same software that we have today. she would give us a robust breakdown of our finances and preparing us for the upcoming budget, especially for the last few years. This has been horrific. And I think that we're celebrating starting in March because the truth of the matter is, I believe two years ago, we didn't even actually get a actual budget book, we didn't even receive one. And neighboring communities this process, working in municipality, I see things a little differently, because I'm part of that process. We started, we started six weeks ago with our process in our department. And we're already starting the pre budget meetings. And we're actually getting updates from our finance office that gives us our budgets updated on a monthly basis. So we know where we are. And It's pretty impressive. What we don't see here is there is a lack of transparency. The mayor ran on transparency, but we're seeing a drastic opposite of that. There is really no transparency. The software is there at least to keep us apprised of what's going on, but it's sparse at best. Like I told you, this is something we've asked for for years. I mean, we're two years behind and we started getting redacted actuals in June, July, then August, and we haven't seen anything since, unless my colleagues can say otherwise. The last one I got was August. What is it? The Warren articles, the redacted Warren articles. So we haven't seen anything. So I think that, you know, Councilor Bears brings up a great point that, you know, not having, funds really paying a huge impact and the issues we're seeing today. What are we talking about? What has been the biggest news lately? The biggest news lately is what's going on with the firefighters. And it's funny, so what I did is I didn't just go to our fire department, I went to neighboring fire departments in the greater Boston area and I talked to they talked to the fire. I talked to deputy chief in Boston, and he broke down their process. I talked to a deputy chief from Cambridge and in Somerville. And I've asked them, the biggest thing I see right here that's glaring, and you know, the overtime issue or the absentee issue wouldn't be an issue. If our fire department is funded with 125 people that's supposed to, because they built in for absences. And I asked questions that looked into some opportunities that hopefully we'll know soon that we'll see that our firefighters don't take sick days fraudulently. They earn those days and they take those days. I don't think we'll see one firefighter in the red. I don't think other departments in the city or other neighboring fire departments will have the same news. But we're seeing the impact of our budget causing some serious divide in our community. I mean, you've all seen it, that everybody's pointing fingers at us and everybody's pointing fingers at this person, everybody's pointing fingers at that person. But if it's funded properly, we wouldn't be in this mess. if we had a team in the finance department that can bring all the information forward that's needed, like neighboring communities, because I'll give you, I can only speak for myself, but I'm in a municipality where we were in the rez for three years in our contracts, and we finally settled up. It took two weeks to get the retro updated and then paid out to all the employees, and that was hundreds of employees. We have the same software here, but for some reason, it's causing a huge, huge issue why the fire department hasn't gone near retro because I personally think either we don't have the money or we don't have the staffing that can do the job that's needed. So this is why it's important to understand the processes as we're moving forward. And we're gonna be, I'll say it a thousand times, I think the lack of growth and the lack of new money in the last four years, we're reaping the negative ramifications today. There hasn't been a shovel in the ground. We have major areas in our community that could be redeveloped into mixed use smart growth and development processes that will bring in millions and millions just in permit fees. know, we talked about one of the projects that was that walked away from the city on Boston Ave, that just the permit fees alone was $6 million. That would help any deficit. Um, You know, so there is so much that I see that wasted, wasted funds, wasted money. And, you know, I pray like Councilor Callahan says that we realized how important those ARPA positions were, both on the school side and the city side. And we're seeing what's happening because, you know, I we love Penelope, and she's changed that department. One person she came in, she was a one person army here, when method was going through a huge drug issue, suicide issue. And she did amazing things. And I don't think we celebrate that enough. And if you talk to recovering addicts that live in our community, young people that I know, and I taught, they tell me that that office saved their lives and actually gave them a purpose. Then our advocates for that. And because that's what I was told, that's an ARPA position. And I think the fear of losing her job now that she's a young mom and have a family, she, she needs that sustainability and, and now she's gone. And, um, so I think that we're in a position right now that, um, looking at creative way of funds funding is something that's needed. So I appreciate everybody sharing their their goals and I think that someone that's the senior member now, is that the first time I said that Kit? I'm the senior member now and I've sat through a lot of these both on the 16 years now on the school side of the school committee member now a city council I've never seen anything like we've seen in the last couple of years. Last year was a very contentious budget. you know, we were angry with our colleagues and it kind of divided us in a sense because of the process. I'm happy that Councilor Biaz has gone early with our vice president and talked with the mayor and started this process openly so it's not something that's being done on the 12th hour. You know, just so we can get something through so we can move on with our lives here in the city of Medford. So thank you.
[Bears]: and I just wanted to, for my part, clarify on the software piece. I was talking about the payroll system software, not the financial, so I should have noted that. No, no, no, in my, but I just wanted to, my understanding is the issue is that the payroll software is an old, outdated system, and people are, you know, I'm watching people write payroll down every week on a piece of paper. It's kind of nuts.
[SPEAKER_06]: carbon paper we just moved off the typewriter for something I think two weeks ago that's not a joke
[Bears]: I think there was a serious question of what happens if the typewriter breaks? We can't fix it. And then we want people to do the thing. So, you know, when we talk about that issue. Yeah, we're gonna need to borrow.
[SPEAKER_07]: We'll call Tom Hanks.
[Bears]: Yeah, exactly. Councilor Leming.
[Leming]: Yes, I just like to thank the, I just like to riff off what my colleagues were saying. The problem that we're facing is not misallocations of funds. It's the fact that Medford doesn't have enough funding to begin with. We have one of the lowest operating budgets for any major city of our size in the state of Massachusetts. And so we are not going to get everything that we discussed and wanted to tonight. One point that I would like to make is that there are a few There are a few items that were discussed that I think would substantially help with growth and getting more revenues in the future. And I think that it would be. Good to prioritize those those particular items. So, for instance, I'm going to. I think this will be more of a discussion point next week, but I'm going to strongly insist on having the money for these studies, the linkage fee study, for instance, that we could update those because that's something that in particular will help us get more revenues into the future and hopefully get us out of this. get us out of this problem. And a lot of the financial software that was discussed, I think falls into the same category. So when it comes to priorities, we should be looking at things that long-term will help with more revenue and more growth in the future.
[Bears]: Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Leming. So I have been able to sort these into some categories, which I can share here.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just a moment.
[Bears]: Make sure folks can see this. I tried to pull these out, and we had multiple people with a similar item. I tried to put everyone's name next to it, but we have kind of the categories of preventing cuts and then recommendations around staffing increases as well as, and that includes like if we were recommending a change in compensation. and then non-staffing increases, and then a few one-time expenses. I left a further study here, Councilor Collins, around the paid family medical leave, but if you think, I couldn't quite figure out, it probably should go into staffing increases, but. Yeah, okay, so I'll figure that out. But in general, I think we could write this up in a slightly clearer way, and then submit this to the mayor by March 22nd. I like what we did last year. Last year, we had kind of a set of combined priorities. We kind of picked a top five. and then also submitted everything that everyone had sent as an addendum. So I don't know what folks want to do at this point. I could, you know, we're at 7.15. I could share around a copy of this and we could schedule another meeting. You know, folks could kind of say, here's my top five, and we could try to hone in on what the top five recommendations should be. Or we could try to do that now. Or I could try to do it based on things that got submitted multiple times. I think we could go through any kind of process that the body requests. I'll go to Councilor Lazzaro, Vice President Collins.
[Lazzaro]: From my own perspective, it's a little hard for me to process numbers in this. in this situation with the screens this way? Would it be okay if we could do it over email? Or is that a violation of OML?
[Bears]: Yeah, I mean, the best way that we could do that would be I could send out a document, and then people could, or I could have the clerk send out a document, then people could reply to the clerk with their top five based on that document, and then we could have another meeting to vote on it.
[Lazzaro]: That seems like too much time.
[Bears]: we could probably make it work, but- It's not a meeting. Yeah. Okay. Vice President Collins and then Councilor Tseng.
[Collins]: Thank you, President Barras. My preference in terms of where we go from here, I think that we built in a couple of weeks to move from individual council recommendations to full council recommendations. I think this meeting put us in a pretty good, I think that there's a very clear. Ben diagram. There's a lot of stuff in the middle. Personally I would be comfortable with the process where either this kind of informal document is shared out by the clerk to all Councilors and Councilors get back to the clerk with perhaps a ranking of their. Top five, which as council leadership, you or I could assimilate into a document for us to vote on in a future committee of the whole, um, I think that it would be a pretty similar process if, um. you know, I think that we could, um. Yourself for myself. Um just took a stab at, you know, tallying up what was submitted the most times make a version of that document, and then we could similarly look at it as a group at a future committee of the whole and then make some final decisions. Um that evening and still have plenty of time to submit it before the 22nd. I just think that that will be, um, give Councilors time to digest, um, without some time to order our rankings.
[Bears]: Thank you, Vice President Collins.
[Tseng]: Councilor Tseng, then Councilor Callahan. I concur with Vice President Collins. I think that, in my opinion, to do it right now without letting it sit with us for a little bit might be a little too rushed. I know there are great ideas that my colleagues had that I didn't necessarily jot down, and I think it would be great to give, and I think a lot of us are in that same position, so it would be great for us to sit down and have that time to think about the proposals that have been laid out on the table. I also have noticed just scanning through what you presented, I think we have a lot of ideas that are basically the same idea, but just worded in slightly different ways. I think there's work to be done on combining those ideas as well. I think a little bit of time would be nice. I think the council leadership has built in time for us to discuss. to discuss and compile. And so I would be happy. I would say I would concur with Vice President Collins and her recommendation to the Council.
[Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Councilor Callahan.
[Callahan]: Thank you. So I hear this sort of coming up with five. I'm curious, what do our boil down recommendations look like? Are we supposed to come up with five? It doesn't say anything about that in the resolution. What are we expecting this to look like? How many is too many? What do we want?
[Bears]: I'm happy to just give my opinion on that, which is just, I think, deciding what we think is the most. I mean, there's overlap, so I don't want to overestimate it, but we probably have 25, maybe 30 recommendations. And, you know, a lot of the ones in the prevent cuts are pretty much the same. I think we could almost boil that down into one, right? Like don't, you know, or one or two, you know, meet these budget requests, do not cut these positions, et cetera. But I think it's, I think it's kind of a signal noise type, just like thought process of like, if we send 30 things over to the mayor, who's already thinking about 300 things, will it get lost versus, you know, and even for my set of recommendations, like, increase funding for code enforcement in the building department. I want it, but we've been it's been a request for 10 years. It hasn't happened. Right. So I'm not voting that a top 5, but, you know, level service funding for the schools are retaining the positions. Those are really important right now. This year. I think that's really more, it's more just saying, here are our top priorities. And then also here's what every Councilor thinks. And then it's really on the mayor and the finance staff to incorporate what they think they can incorporate. But I think it's also drawing and beginning to draw lines for budget negotiations. So in a sense, kind of, I think we have had for the last two budget cycles, lines in the sand of this is what, if you want the budget to pass, here's what we think needs to be in it. And we've been successful in making sure, for example, that the zoning study funding was included. We did keep the solicitor's positions in the budget, even though there hasn't been hiring for them. So I think now we're maybe going back to the plate on that one and saying, well, OK, you've kept it in the budget. You promised it for three years, but no one's in the position. What's your plan to increase the funding so that we can get someone hired in those roles? So that's kind of, I think, the shape of the discussion. And I'll leave it at that, and I'll go to Vice President Collins.
[Collins]: Thank you. I think that's an important question, especially for the folks for whom this is the first budget season. And I appreciate President Bears' overview of what I think is a reasonable way to approach this. In terms of what I would propose we, you know, what we literally send to the administration. I believe that what we did last year, probably the year before that as well, we go through this process of Councilors submitting individual recommendations. We talk about our shared priorities. We come to some form of consensus about, we all come in with our individual rankings, individual priorities, and we find what is the middle of that Venn diagram. What are the things that we're going to say? There's 30 things we want. We're going to ask for five and hopefully get one or two. And trying to hone in on those shared areas of most importance. So that's, I think, the first page of the packet. And then I think what we did last year was we also included every Councilor's individual memos. And I would propose that we also, of course, include the minutes of these meetings so that the administration has you know, that thorough overview of our discussion, has the record of everything that we put on the table, everything that we thought was important to raise. In addition to, out of all of that, here's that shorter list of things that we really have to say. And so, in terms of next steps from here, I think that I believe that we have some space in the schedule to have a follow up committee of the whole to revisit this before the 22nd. If fellow Councilors were amenable to it I'd be happy to make a motion for council leadership to circulate this aggregated document among fellow Councilors. By the end of the week, work to schedule a follow-up committee of the whole where we can digest it together, come up with a shared shortlist of priorities so that we can stick to that timeline of submitting it to the administration by the 22nd along with Councilors individual memos and the records of this meeting.
[Bears]: Second. Thank you, Vice President Collins. Councilor Galliard.
[Callahan]: I wanted to ask, should I email mine, or is it okay? Do you have reasonable notes from what I said?
[SPEAKER_07]: I could tell you what I have.
[Bears]: I think it would be helpful to email them to me and the clerk, because I want to make sure that they get included in the packet, even if they are not. Yeah, I just want to make sure they get included in that.
[SPEAKER_08]: I will do that right now. Thanks.
[Bears]: So on the motion of Council Vice President Collins, did you catch that? Yeah.
[Collins]: to circulate the document for council leadership to schedule a follow-up committee of the whole where we will prioritize those ideas, and then to submit that list of priorities to the administration by the 22nd after the meeting, along with councilors' individual memos and the records of our meetings on the topic.
[Bears]: Great. Could we change that to by Monday?
[Collins]: Yeah.
[Bears]: Thanks. It's looking like we would have that meeting at six o'clock on Tuesday the 19th. I love it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I like it. I say we should do that. Give ourselves a raise $89,000.
[Bears]: You heard that? George Scarpelli says we should meet twice a week.
[SPEAKER_08]: This is still an active session.
[Bears]: Are we going to take a vote on Councilor Scarpelli's motion? There are five people on Zoom. I wish.
[SPEAKER_06]: No.
[Bears]: My mom's watching later. On the motion of Councilor Collins, seconded by Councilor Leming. All those in favor? All those opposed, motion passes. We like to call this Schrodinger's meeting. It's like, do we meet too much or do we not meet enough? I can't tell.
[Leming]: Um, I don't know. Anyone have anything else they want to chat about? You did make the motion to raise our salaries to $89,000. So it was seconded.
[SPEAKER_08]: Seconded by... It was not a motion. Councilor Scrapp probably has withdrawn. Um, motion to adjourn?
[Bears]: second on the motion of council calls adjourned seconded by councilor levels in favor opposed motion passes meeting adjourned.
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