[SPEAKER_02]: May 21 2024 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[SPEAKER_08]: Present. Present.
[SPEAKER_02]: Present.
[SPEAKER_04]: Present.
[SPEAKER_02]: Present. Present. None absent this meeting is called to order. There'll be a meeting in the Medford City Council Committee the whole at 7pm in the city council chamber second floor Medford City Hall 85 George B has to drive Medford, Massachusetts and by zoom. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss paper 24-045, the annual budget process for fiscal 25. This is preliminary budget meeting seven. This is the seventh preliminary budget meeting. The mayor has communicated the following departments will be present. The health department, Medford public schools, and the department of planning development and sustainability. We will be hearing first from the health department, and then we will go to the schools and planning and development sustainability, unless planning development sustainability makes it in time. So we will go first to you. Director O'Connor, welcome back. You feel free to sit if you'd like. And what I'm going to do, if you haven't been watching the Barnburner budget meetings we've been having, is I'm going to read the fiscal 24 budget, the fiscal 25 budget, any headcount changes, and then I'll go through the change sheet on the back, and then I'll turn it over to you to fill in anything that I missed, to share your narrative. And also, one thing we'd love to hear is if there's stuff that your department would like to be doing, that you didn't request in this budget that you are hoping to get in future budgets. That is definitely a priority of the council. We know it's a tough budget year, but we also know there's a lot of needs in the city that need to be met. So we'd love to hear that. But with that, I will start us off. We have Department 510, 519, that is our Board of Health and Animal Control. Fiscal 24 budget $776,510. Fiscal 25 proposed budget $806,185.93. The fiscal 24 headcount was 11. The proposed fiscal 25 headcount is 10. I believe that's a reduction of one part-time nurse. And the entire increase from fiscal 24 to fiscal 25 is a fixed cost growth increase. No new programs are being planned. This is an increase due to 2% non-union pay increases, step increases, and two employees who are fully funded through ARPA who are now going to be funded 50% through ARPA and 50% through the general fund. And those are offset again by a decrease in the part-time employees and some very minor changes in the ordinary expenses. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Director O'Connor. Welcome.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thank you. Yes, we've had some vacant positions for a while now, but that's starting to work out and we're We're going to be hiring an additional inspector starting on June 3rd, as well as our manager of prevention and outreach will be starting on June 3rd.
[SPEAKER_02]: One second. The microphone may not be on. Are you seeing the light? It's green. It is on? Okay, good. Yeah. Sorry about that, thank you.
[SPEAKER_13]: Is that better? So yes, so we've had some vacant positions for a little bit now as far as the inspectors go, but that's looking better. We're gonna be hiring another inspector coming on on June 3rd. Also our new prevention and outreach manager will be starting on June 3rd as well. So that's a really big help. But I'm very grateful that we've added a couple of positions. Our community social worker, and some additional administrative support who were funded by opera but now we'll be going on to the general fund so I'm very grateful that we're getting to where we need to be and I believe that that's what this budget shows a lot of the work we're able to do though through our prevention and outreach workers is funded through grant work we were lucky enough to get a $500,000 foundation grant This year in addition to MVP grid, which supports our community and climate resilience work. So we're very grateful about that. We also will be now tapping into our opioid funds going forward to help with our recovery coach, and also our recovery support programming. And then we also are a part of a what's called a regional public health excellence grant with four other communities, which again allows us to supplement a lot of the work that we do. And we're going to be getting that for the next five years so we've been lucky to use that to help with additional food inspections. We're going to be bringing on an epidemiologist for the region. and also a communications person for the region. So that's all gonna be handled by that grant. So that's all work that I was looking forward to doing, especially the epidemiologists, it's very exciting. But of course, we're still dealing with our inspectional side of life and trying to address all of the complaints. And again, that new inspector coming on June 3rd will certainly be helpful in that regards. So I think that's it, if there's any questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Any questions? Councilor Tsengh. Thank you. Would you be able to speak to the community liaison program if we're going to be able to keep that on?
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes, so the community liaison program again is going to be funded through, still through APRA, but also now supplemented by that Ba Foundation grant I talked about. So we'll be able to keep on the community liaisons. Our MVP with our community connectors, that grant ends at the end of June, but we have submitted a new grant. Unfortunately, we won't probably hear from that until September. So again, we're hoping to use these BAH Foundation funds to tide us over with the connectors for the summer months until we are awarded and I'm being very positive that we will be awarded that next round of funding in September.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm glad to hear that. I think that was one of the priorities of the council, as well as hiring, making sure we were able to hire a prevention outreach coordinator. I'm very happy to hear that we've made a lot of progress on that, that we'll have someone starting. I'm excited to welcome them to Medford. I think that's all I have for now. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Tseng.
[SPEAKER_02]: Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you so much for being here as always, and for walking us through the budget. It's always great to hear about how certain positions and capacity in the city are being funded by grant funding I know that your office always does a really great job of leveraging that. Just a quick clarification on some of the personnel. You walked us through the community social worker and the administrative support that's being funded through some of the grants that you just mentioned. I saw that one of the part-time nurses looks like it's coming offline, or maybe that was just reallocated. Could you speak to that?
[SPEAKER_13]: So the part-time nurse monies was reallocated to assist with the community social worker position, I believe. But we have, again, a revolving account. That's our vaccine account, dispensing account, and We in need of a part-time nurse, mostly through those flu seasons when we're doing those clinics and such to help Jillian with those clinics. So we were able to look at that fund that we have and decided we could use that money to assist with any part-time nursing staff that she might need.
[SPEAKER_11]: Great, thank you. And just to clarify, so is that monies that are available for a seasonal nurse or is that it's it's more appropriate to use that funding for the community social worker at this time? I'm sorry. Just to make sure I understood you correctly, is it that the being for are being put towards a seasonal nurse like during the like the flu season or is it that it's being reallocated to the social worker?
[SPEAKER_13]: So the monies for the seasonal nurse during the flu seasons will be coming from the vaccine account. Okay. And the money that was in the budget for the part time nurse was reallocated to the community social worker. So it makes it.
[SPEAKER_11]: Yes, it does. Thank you. I'm sorry. I think the AC makes it even harder to hear the normal. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: President Piazza, my question might not be for you, Mr. O'Connor, but I'm looking for. I know that I might have missed it, but I know that we lost a valuable member of our team here to a new position, but our outreach manager for prevention and outreach, Do you know if we're filling that position or if it's been filled? Oh, that's great, okay.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, it's been filled, should be beginning on June 3rd. Oh, great.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, will it be under your department? Oh, perfect. Okay, great. Obviously, big shoes to fill. He was amazing, so. Yes, yes. Okay, that's all I had. Thank you, Mr. President.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you. Councilor Callahan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just one question. As a newbie councilor, there are a number of canine services, canine workers maintenance. I'm just curious about this.
[SPEAKER_13]: So animal control falls under the health department. So canine services, that's kind of funny, canine services, dog kennel, I guess I should say, is that what it says, dog kennel canine services? Yeah, that also includes Eastern Middlesex mosquito control contract, which it's kind of funny that it's under, canine services but but that's about $27,000 a year. Yeah, so that actually went up, it goes up every year so this year it's a little over 27,000. But we do also have to pay for dog kennel services. If we pick up a stray dog if we pick up a dangerous dog if you know so we do have to pay for for boarding for dogs that we pick up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very quickly, because we've already had meetings on this topic, but I know some residents are curious. On the topic of rodent prevention, we're working on ordinances on our front to help with that. Your office has been doing a lot. Does this budget allow you to keep doing the work that you need to do to work on education and mitigation when it comes to rodents?
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes, in our budget we have some money spread aside for another service and professional services for the education and the outreach, but we are going to be looking to and I'm working with Mike Roberts to come up with a contract and possibly go out to pitch, so that we can come up with a contract that would address professional services through I believe 2026.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for saying any further questions by members of the council. So you know, I have two. Number one, could you say like, and it doesn't have to be exact, but approximately how much of the programming of the health department is grant funded?
[SPEAKER_13]: I would say probably equal match. Yeah, so this budget really goes to the environmental side of life and the animal control. And then the grant funding really funds all of our prevention and outreach work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And is that grant funding stable and reliable? And I guess we love the prevention outreach work. We want to fund it. So how reliable and stable is the grant funding? And how much, you know, if you're thinking about if the grants were all gone tomorrow, how much of that would you want to bring on to the general fund so that we could keep doing it?
[SPEAKER_13]: Well, grants are pretty hefty right now but one of them is a regional grant which is $250,000 a year but again that's a regional grant for five communities to address use substance use the $500,000 is over the next three years to help with the climate change work and resiliency work. You know, that won't be sustainable if we don't get the next round of MVP which is would be after this but the state has really touted our program as kind of one of the model programs. So I'd find it highly unlikely that we wouldn't get funding to continue, but again that's $200,000 a year. So, you know, and then the opioid funding, the opioid funding will be coming for the next been over a decade or so. And that if we budgeted out, right, we're looking probably to about 100 to $150,000 a year.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the opioid's pretty stable. The state funding for resiliency is, we have it for about three years, but we would need to have that renewed, otherwise that would go away. And then some of the grants are even shorter term than that. And this is probably a leading question, but I'm guessing you'd want to keep doing all of that. Yes, of course, yes.
[SPEAKER_13]: That's a very important part of public health, yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you. I appreciate just understanding that and understanding typically half of the work of our health department that we see isn't coming out of the general fund right now, which I think is a testament. I think finding those grants is great, but we're not talking about doing something a one-off. We're talking about things we want to keep doing. And sometimes grant funding doesn't always, isn't always there. So any further questions from members of the council for our director of the health department? Seeing none, are there any questions or comments by members of the public on the health department budget? Seeing no one in the room and no hands raised on Zoom. I think we're all set, Director O'Connor. Civil defense. We do have to do civil defense. Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli. The one thing I want to say also, if we do see a significant difference between what we talked about tonight and what we get in the budget proposal, not that we expect that, but if we do, we may invite you back here in June. This is a new budget process, and we've been really working hard with the administration to do things a bit earlier. That's why you're here in May, before we've seen the budget. You know, if the administration wants to have you back, or if you want to come back, or if we want you to come back, we could see you again in June. Sure. Civil defense, we have fiscal 24 budget, $9,390. Fiscal 25 budget, $9,840. And this looks like it is just an increase in the public safety supplies and the dues, conferences, and travel. And if there's anything else you want to share on that.
[SPEAKER_13]: No, the dues, conferences, and travel, we are also part of, even though we're beginning to establish our local emergency planning committee, we've already this year able to start our internal team. The dues, conferences, and travel goes to the regional emergency planning committee, the Mystic Valley Regional Emergency Planning Committee, so there are membership dues to belong to that.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, any questions, Councilor Scarpelli? Thank you. So, Connor, thanks. Just one question. I know I mentioned it to the chief of staff on Saturday, we did the tour of the fire station. Have we connected with the auxiliary group and told them that we're moving on?
[SPEAKER_13]: Joe and I, yes, we have had discussions, but we are meeting with the mayor on May 28th in the afternoon, next Tuesday, I believe.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so still might proceed.
[SPEAKER_13]: We're looking at and they seem to be very interested in pursuing the Medical Reserve Corps route.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they wouldn't need the trucks and all the apparatus. I know that I know the chief was also reaching out to let them know that they're trying to find there was some equipment that they said that. Okay. All right. That's all. Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli. Any further questions? Seeing none, any questions from members of the public on civil defense? Seeing none, I will just say up at the station in the Heights, there's some great civil defense stuff from about 1953. So if you want some old blood transfusion kits or 60 year old biscuits. Yeah, that was pretty wild to see. That was just, yeah. So, you know, didn't know about it. Hi, member of the public, do you want to comment on the health department?
[SPEAKER_14]: I want to ask a question regarding the health department.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure, you can make a comment to me and it's up to the director. Yes. If you could let, yes, you can sit down and give your name and address for the record and happy to hear your comment. You can direct your comments to me and then we'll go back to the director.
[SPEAKER_14]: No, I'm a nice person.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, no, no, it's just, it's a formality. It's totally just technically all comments have to go through the chair.
[SPEAKER_14]: All right, my name is Dana Ralberto. I'm 596 High Street, Medford. And the reason why I wanted to ask regarding the health department, does that have to do with the rat situation?
[SPEAKER_02]: It does.
[SPEAKER_14]: Because I have a bad problem in my home. I practically fist fight them. I've had the exterminator come out twice. I've called Amelia at City Hall here that works in the department. She had someone come out, but they weren't that helpful. They just came and left, looked around and said, oh, everything looks great. I set traps left and right. I catch them. It's getting to be like, they're like part of my house. They're like residents. I'm gonna have to start naming them now. It's terrible, I know I live in an old home, it's in the 1800s, I go around, I block holes, they just seem to find a way in. But they are everywhere, it's not just in my house, I'll go walk my dog, they're at Duggar Park, they're everywhere. So I was wondering, I didn't know what to do or whatever, 596 High Street.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I can share a couple things and then the director, however you would like to share, You know, we have been working, the director shared a little bit earlier about road and control. Some things we've done is we've passed an ordinance a couple of years ago now. We require any new construction to have a pest management plan. We've been trying to build in more and more as much as we can on the road and control with the guidance and advice of the health department. Beyond that, that's really our role in it. Definitely director O'Connor is the person to talk to or the health office. It may behoove us if you have a minute to talk after the testimony, if that's all right with you.
[SPEAKER_14]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right. Great. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Awesome. All right. Any further comments on the health department or civil defense? Seeing none, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Go Celtics. Celtics won. I would. Wouldn't it be nice right here in the big screen? All right. Give me one moment. I want to see if we have Director Hunt. I think, sadly, we're not going to make it. PDS will go after the public schools. So next we'll hear from Metro Public Schools, our superintendent, Dr. Maurice Edouard-Vincent, and our director of finance are here with us. We have some school committee members in the chamber and on Zoom as well. So excited to be here. It's a little different here. So for every department that we've heard up until this point, the city council, looks at line item budgets. For the school, Medford Public Schools, there's a different process, obviously, because there is a school committee. So what happened so far, the school committee has done its process of developing a budget along with the school administration. Last night, the school committee made a formal request to the city of Medford for an amount that is budgeted. The mayor will then allocate an amount for the Medford Public Schools and the City Council only has the authority to approve that amount or to cut that amount. We cannot increase it. We cannot approve the budget that the school committee requested last night. All we can do is approve or cut the mayor's request. So that's how the process works. I appreciate some of the outreach that we've gotten today asking us to approve the school committee's request that was proposed last night, but that's not how general law process works. So I just wanted to make that clear before we started. Um, that certainly doesn't mean that I think many of the people behind this rail certainly support the request of the school committee and support funding our public schools. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Dr. Edouard-Vincent. I just wanna very quickly, um, I could pull it up. Just note that the school committee requests the municipal government for fiscal 25 was $79,399,774. That's an increase from the fiscal 24 general fund request of $71,200,000. And with that, Madam Superintendent.
[SPEAKER_12]: Good evening, Council President Bears and distinguished members of the City Council. I am pleased to be here this evening to present our annual budget. I am the proud superintendent of Medford Public Schools, and my name is Dr. Marie Sedgwick-Vinson, and this evening I am here with Mr. Gerald McHugh, affectionately known as Jerry. He is our finance director, and so he will be going through a slide deck. to present the school committee's recommended number of $79,399,774 to you this evening. And at the end of this presentation, we are prepared to answer questions. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Superintendent. Thank you, Mr. McHugh.
[SPEAKER_16]: Yeah, we we we We had a number of issues we're trying to deal with in the budget this year. We had our collective bargaining agreements, of course, that are legal obligation of the school department. We have all these positions that are integral to the operations of the school department on ESSA funding, which has expired. We identified a number of accounts for a variety, I guess for whatever reason, were kind of chronically underfunded. The budgets were not aligned to the historic spending in these accounts. And then we have a new spending request to shore up the budget. The increase is significant, but I think it's based on a level service budget to keep the school department going in FY25. So just a couple of data points that we look at as we try to develop the budget. The first one is enrollment. The school system is showing some growth at the lower grades. We had some high kindergarten this year that were addressed, and our projections will continue to show some growth in the elementary grades, although next year's grade two is somewhat of an outlier. I would, my thinking on that is that those students were just going into kindergarten as school systems were kind of coming out of remote learning and back into classrooms, and that might have affected those kindergartens in that year. But kindergarten is something that we continue to monitor. We note that the registration activity at the Brooks School is high for this time of year, so we're looking at that. The other three elementary schools, the kindergartens are more or less on track for what we're predicting in 2025. And we continue to see slight declines in the middle school and high school enrollment. The other thing, and so these are totals for each grade group. You can see that we're expecting, on a total basis, a very slight increase, but you can see in the grades one through five, the growth that I talked about, and then the declines in the upper grades. The next slide is on foundation budget. So we anxiously await the recommendation of the governor in January. Unfortunately, it wasn't great news for MedFed in terms of Chapter 78 and FY 24. the city, I believe the chapter 78, went up about three and a half million dollars, and I was hoping that we'd see a similar bump, but we could see that the foundation enrollment declined from FY24 to FY25, so that caused MedFed to be in kind of a minimum student aid category, where your Chapter 78 is hold harmless, even though it should theoretically go down, because enrollment went down, the state always has a hold harmless clause for Chapter 78, so you'll at least get the amount you got the prior year. And then typically there's a $30 per student minimum aid, that school systems qualify for if they're not eligible for Chapter 78. And typically what happens is the state calculates a foundation budget, which they use standard per pupil rates for all kinds of spending that school departments engage in. and they multiply that out across the enrollment and there's different rates for different things in high schools and elementary grades and pre-K. That all rolls up to a foundation budget and then the state determines through formulas how much of that foundation budget will the city of Medford be required to contribute to. And then the difference between the foundation budget and the required contribution is what the foundation aid is. There was some good news, though. The House budget, when passed, provided an increase in minimum student aid from $30 to $104 per student, and this resulted in an increase of $470,000 in Chapter 70 funding. The Senate Ways and Means Committee released its budget, I think, towards the end of last week, and they're debating it now. And the House Ways and Means budget also includes the $104 per student. So we're not gonna know for certain how much we'll get in Chapter 70 until the budget passes and the Governor signs the budget, but this means that it's very likely that that will be the Chapter 70 funding for MedFed. And this is just a snapshot of our current staff. Most of the staff, as you would imagine, is within the teaching, nursing, and council ranks. And we have a complement of paraprofessionals that assist in the instruction of our students. So when we developed the budget, as I said, we looked at four categories. And the first one was, what are our obligations to our staff in terms of collective bargaining agreements? We have a number of our agreements in force right now through FY25 and beyond. And those agreements we project in FY25 will increase our salary budgets by a little over $3.3 million. And then we are creating a salary reserve for three contracts that are up at the end of FY24. So the total salary increase is just slightly over $4 million. The next area is these accounts that were historically underfunded. For instance, homeless transportation, which is hard to predict, and I don't know if the council is aware, but there's a requirement, and I'm in complete support of this, is there's a requirement that if a family becomes homeless, the students in the school system can remain in that school system and you're obligated to transport those students from wherever they wind up back to their home school district. And those charges are split between the sending district and the district that was formerly the home of that family. We have been running, spending in this account has been running $500,000, $600,000 a year, but yet the budget is $130,000. There was an argument to be made that you don't know really if you're gonna have the same level of transportation need for homeless as you do from one year to the next, but when you start to establish a trend, you have to address that in the budget. And similar with these other accounts, substitute coverage, these are accounts that typically run over their budgeted amounts. So it's really imperative that we try to get these accounts properly funded, because it just starts, you start the school year with a deficit, in the event that all things being equal, you kind of spend your money the way you budgeted. The next area that we looked at was ESSA. And You know, as I stated, we had a number of positions that are integral to the operations of the program. Of course, a lot of ESSA funding was spent to support students during COVID and support the re-entry into the school system. I mean, it seems it's not that long ago, but there was so many protocols that had to be implemented to ensure that students were safe in school and that we could mitigate any contagious students and properly care for them as well. So we have a number of positions, several of our new newcomer program positions were funded on ESSA. We have adjustment Councilors. All our school-based substitute teachers were funded in this account. Grants manager was funded in this account. We are providing funding for those positions in the general fund this year, as well as some paraprofessional positions that are funded in a revolving fund. We're seeking to move those positions again over to general fund because the current funding is not sustainable. And then there's a variety of new spending, our special education outplacements are going up. There's the state approved tuition increase of 4.7% for our outplacement programs. And then we have some modest growth within those outplacement ranks. So that's almost $460,000. We have a network equipment budget for a school district that's entire student body and staff have devices now and the budget is $30,000 to maintain the network. So we're seeking to increase that. And also we have a need to refresh our Chromebook inventory and our MacBooks that are allocated to staff. Also, buildings and grounds would benefit from new spending so we can provide for project management. We really need to do a space use study in our schools to avoid overcrowding that we're experiencing, particularly in the Roberts. and just kind of get some baseline data so we can start to think about some facilities master planning in the future, possibly redistricting. But we should make sure that we're using all the classroom space that was built with the intention of being a classroom as a classroom. And then we're also asking for two additional school buses, there was a lot of concern at the beginning of the school year about overcrowding on buses. We think that can be solved with the addition of two school bus yellow buses. and some school supply increases and other, also there's a request to add a payroll supervisor and a HR assistant to build capacity in those areas and to provide some management to manage the, to plan out the work of those departments. So that results in an increase of almost $8.7 million. We identified some opportunities with fund balances in our revolving accounts to charge, at least for this school year, two teachers. That constitutes about $200,000 of that 469 number. And then we will implement a plan to recover some administrative and facilities expenses that we that are being used by programs that charge fees so that we can kind of recover some of those costs through those fee programs. And that when those additional resources are deducted, you come up with a budget of $79.4 million.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Jerry. So just before we go to questions from Councilors, I'm going to summarize once again the process here and some of the key numbers. There's a lot of great information. Really appreciate your presentation. So, the request by the school committee as of last night is 79.4 million let's let's round up by a couple hundred bucks. Now pursuant to the council's, the new city budget ordinance, I believe that the mayor provided an initial estimated allocation to the school system about in March. And that was 73.5 million. That was the initial estimate of what they believe the city could provide at that time. So that's a pretty big difference. It's almost $6 million between what was requested by the school committee and the initial estimate. I want to add just a couple more pieces of context. I believe the district, as you indicated in your letter, had proposed a $76.7 million budget, which changed the school committee recommended this full budget. That $76.7 million included the variety of potential cuts that you had determined and were discussed at the school committee earlier this month. Maybe it was end of April, but a few weeks ago. And I also know that the administration has been working to try to increase that 73.5 million through finding other essentially changes on other city departments. So, I just wanted to put that context in play, but really. What has been going around the community a lot has been a discussion of the initial kind of batch of proposed cuts, which got to that 76.7 million number, the school committee has requested the 79.4 million which would, I don't want to get into specific line items because we don't control that. to avoid many of those cuts if that $79.4 million was received. But the estimate was all the way down at $73.5 million. So we have essentially a $6 million need to avoid the cuts that have already been discussed, a $3-something million need to pass a budget that includes those cuts that were discussed. And then if it's below that $76.7, we're talking about finding even more cuts beyond what was discussed at the meeting earlier a few weeks ago. So I just wanted to put that context out there. And then again, procedurally, the school committee has made a request. We are hearing from you a description of that request we will receive in the official budget proposal by the mayor and allocation. And at that point, we can just approve or cut that total allocation to the school. So that really is the council's role in the process. And the mayor is the one who will propose the allocation. And it will be somewhere between the $73.5 million, which would require even more cuts that have been already discussed, and the $79.4 million, which would fully fund this request and wouldn't include the cuts you described. So if you have anything you want to add to what I just said, I'd appreciate the context. But I just wanted to kind of summarize where we're at.
[SPEAKER_16]: I know that that's accurate. The, we decided that we had to, we had an obligation to see what kind of savings we could generate, knowing that we're not gonna be business as usual, you know, with cuts, given the gap. that we had between the initial allocation that we got from the city and what the actual need for a level services budget is. So we did go through an exercise of trying to use criteria to make some strategic cuts. There was, you know, significant feedback from the community during our two budget meetings. Of course, no one and people are advocating, you know, as they should for different programs. We did present a package of $2.2 million worth of cuts that was almost exclusively staffing. We didn't want to get into a whole host of cuts around programs and curriculum and instructional needs beyond what we did. So we did identify another $2.7 million that we had a gap between if you went with the $2.3 million increase plus $2.1 million in cuts, so those... That's the $73.5 million. Right, and another round of cuts will be significant, but we also recognize that Council has a lot of has the whole city and its residents to be thinking about when you put a budget together so we're hoping you can do the best you can with that budget but we will have a balanced budget. You know, with the appropriation that we're provided.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you. Last thing I'm going to say before I turn it over to Councilors is just one added piece of context for the discussion. This Council, and I believe the administration, but the Council has persistently identified over multiple fiscal years a need for additional funding for all departments and our public school system. We have discussed the structural underfunding of the city of Medford, including Medford Public Schools. And last year, myself and former Council President Morell were able to negotiate an agreement that was publicly presented to the Council. to create a financial task force to work on creating the budget ordinance which we have passed along with a couple of other items and that financial task force has been meeting for several months. There was a public press release from the office of the mayor March 31st I believe talking about us our discussions to create a framework for a debt exclusion for the fire station and an override to address school funding as well as some street and sidewalk funding Those conversations are ongoing. The discussions around this budget have laid bare the need, and I am confident that with the additional discussions between myself and Vice President Collins, Mayor Lungo-Koehn, Chief of Staff Nazarian, and Vice Chair of the School Committee, Jenny Graham, that we can create a proposal and bring it to the voters to address the structural issue. One of our goals with that, as we're still doing research given this discussion, is to see how much of that can address the issues in this year's budget and how that would work. So I personally have been deeply engaged in those discussions. I have, since the first day I ran for office and before, been a strong supporter of the need for additional revenue to provide sufficient funding for not just our schools, but the city as a whole. So I just wanted to add that context to the table. We are still working on that. I wish we had an answer sooner than we have them, but that's where we're at. And my hope is that the outcome of those negotiations would be we're going to be putting something before the voters that would help address significant portion, if not most of this gap, so it will be up to the voters of the city of Medford, but I personally am confident in the voters that they want to fund our schools, too. So with that, I will go to Vice President Collins, Councilor Scarpelli, Councilor Lazzaro. Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for the presentation. I always appreciate the very thorough walkthrough that you give us into the school committee's recommendation. Of course, as has been stated, you know, the City Council has no jurisdiction when it comes to line items, when it comes to how the Schools Department chooses to spend whatever appropriation that's given each year. That is beyond our scope, but still I find it really helpful context for understanding the number that comes before us, so thank you so much for that. Um, speaking of individual line items, you know, for myself as an individual Councilor, like anybody else in the city, I hold individual opinions about particular positions or programs that to me seem really vital and important, that seem like they must be protected. But as a Councilor in this role, it is deeply important to me that we advance a budget, advance a budget plan that gives our school's administration the latitude to do right by students, families, educators, all school staff. And it's my understanding that that's the number that was just explained to us. This year, I am optimistically expected to cast a yes vote for a budget that includes this school's appropriation for the 79 million that puts students and families' minds at ease, that's fair to teachers and school workers, and that gives our public schools the ability to start doing more rather than less. And that isn't a reflection whatsoever on the district, I don't think. We're coming off of a pandemic. We know we're in a really difficult fiscal situation. But based on what I hear, from the community. I think that there's this widespread consensus that we have to start improving, and we have to be really serious about what that takes. Personally, I think that education is one of the most important services that a city provides, and our budget should reflect that by meeting the school committee request. President Bears spoke a little bit about the need for additional revenues to make that manifest and about the work that the financial task force has been doing around that question for months. That's still being worked out. We've been having some really you know, some tough conversations, some good, some productive conversations, but I believe that this community is ready to do what it takes to say, you know, this is the fiscal year and we're going to pivot towards making public education better in Medford and better for everybody who interacts with that system and competitive with the other options that are out there. You know, when it comes to talking about, you know, the prop two and a half override that is probably, well not, I don't think it's probably likely, I think it's definitely needed to maintain level service in the city and start making strides towards not just level service but improved service. This is something that I have been, you know, publicly advocating for, for, you know, the last two budget cycles, because we need to start preventing exactly the type of cuts that are being talked about that are in the realm of possibility if we don't change course. And I think that many people in the community are at the point of saying this chronic underfunding can't go on any longer. I don't want to turn this into a conversation about increased revenues, but with the number that's before us and knowing that the, you know, it's not an invisible asterisk. I think it's a very obvious asterisk next to that number is what will it take to get there? I know that the conversation about that should be comprehensive. It should take as long as it needs to. I know that something that will come up in that question is what will it cost? to do that, to fulfill this request and all that it will mean for students and teachers and families? What will it cost people to do that? And what I think about when I think about that question, what I think about with the various versions of the school department budget that have been put before the community is, what does it cost the community when we don't do that? What does it cost in tutoring fees? What does it cost in private school tuition? And the people who simply can't afford to augment the public school experience, it costs them most of all. So I thank you very much for this presentation. As one Councilor, you know, President Bears has, I was planning to start my spiel with, again, hammering home what role we do have in this process and what role we don't have at this point. I think that's already been well taken care of. But as myself as one Councilor tonight, I'm very supportive of this version of the school's department budget. I'm looking forward to continuing to work with the mayor's office with my fellow colleagues, both behind the rail and as a member of the financial task force to come up with a plan to pass a budget that meets this request and maintains level service across all of our critical areas in the city. Thank you again.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Mr. President. First let me disclose that I do have a family member that is a teacher. I've contacted the Ethics Commission and the protocol is that I can be present because we're not discussing any votes, so I will not hide in a side chair or anything like that. I'll stand in front, and you can ask any questions if you, you know, and I'll respond. The way the process goes, I was told to inform the public, because it was a little confusing yesterday, that the night of the budget meeting, that when we go to vote, I will ask when we get to the school department budget that we sever elementary education piece to be voted separately. I'll exclude myself, the council will vote on that part, and then I can come back in to be part of the procedure. So I think that there was some confusion of what the process is when you have a family member that's in the system. So again, I appreciate, your presence. I know that Councilor Bears made a presentation about where we are right now. I will share the conversation on June 20th of last year. I felt like Nostradamus, Mr. McHugh, because I sat in front of this body and I explained how tragic and how devastating, if we funded the budget the way that we were going last year, where would we be today? And it's happening. It's happening, and there's nothing we can do. My fellow councilors, like Councilor Behr said, did meet behind closed doors with the mayor and came up with a plan with another member of the council to set up this financial group. This financial group, I guess, has been meeting since April. Are you part of that financial group?
[SPEAKER_02]: I am not. No. We've been meeting since September.
[SPEAKER_05]: So is Mr. Dickinson part of that group? Our city financial director?
[SPEAKER_02]: We have requested information from city finance department staff as needed.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so on a day to day basis during these meetings, I don't I don't I don't see any minutes. I wouldn't know what's going on those meetings. What I do know is that they've been meeting. And we've come to a conclusion over after knowing for a year over a year now, because it was publicly stated, we're gonna be in drastic, drastic financial need. But we've known in a year, and I'm gonna ask some questions about that later, but we've known for years that we are in a devastating situation. We knew we were gonna be here. And what we've heard back was the mayor announced that we're gonna look at debt exclusion and overrides. which is very, very irresponsible for the fact that when other communities present overrides or debt exclusions, it's part of a transparent process. where it's discussed, it's presented so the community and as a whole understands what this process looks like. What happened that evening when the mayor pronounced after you said, I believe that you were talking that we were gonna have a $5.5 million shortfall and the man jumped back and said, it's the first time I heard of that. I only thought it was $500,000. Really, they've had a working groups in September and that's the first time they've heard that. So as we move forward with this process, We're seeing the mayor present that evening that we're now going to focus on this working group that is going to look into an override and debt exclusions to get us to where we need to be. Irresponsible. I've been saying this for over a year now, more than a year. The lack of transparency and the mismanagement of finances in this community is pitiful. It's the reason why we're here today. We can look at zero new growth. We can look at confusing payments to law firms that when I did my numbers from the actuals, over $470,000 paid to KP Law. You're seeing lawsuits. You're hearing all these different issues and why we are where we are. And I'm going to be honest with you, I don't disagree with my fellow colleagues. My number one priority is to fund the school system where it needs to be so we can do the best we can for the most important people in our community, that's our children. I support it a thousand percent, but it's how we get there. And that's what's frightening to me. Because right now, I don't see a transparent process. You have a few Councilors and a school kid member working together with the mayor and the chief of staff without any financial professional with them on a day-to-day basis, and the mayor comes out and says, after these cuts, I'm gonna look for a debt exclusion, and I'm gonna look for looking at an override to balance our budget. Oh, absolutely not. There's a way to do it, and I'll get to that when I speak, when she comes to this body. But what I understand, so I can understand this transparent process, if you can allow me to expand on this, is that Where are these questions coming from? I bring up the point that I have some bullets that parents, teachers, administrators, myself come up with. The process that why do we not have faith? Well, there was a Monday we got an email saying that there was a shortfall in the FY 24 budget of 2.5 million. And then on Friday, hey, we found 2.2 million or so, right? Where did that come from? So we still, I asked for a report much back in understanding that. So if you can allude to that, that'd be great for the first question.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I could just very quickly, in terms of the scope and scale of the involvement of the council leadership and the discussions with the city administration, as I noted, we've been meeting Since September of 2023, I wouldn't say anything otherwise that there have been disagreements in that group about the scope and scale of our medias and what an overrider debt exclusion should look like. Through those meetings, we have narrowed that gap significantly. We have worked through the mechanisms available to us and our understanding of the immediate future. And that's how we arrived where we are today. One of the things we didn't know was what is new growth and what a local receipt is going to be. We didn't have that until the spring, right? So when it comes about the specifics, yeah, we've been working through that. I'm hopeful that we're going to get somewhere. Would I have liked to have gotten somewhere earlier? Would I have liked information to have been earlier, sure. But again, the council leadership met with the mayor last June. We publicly presented everything that was discussed. We made that agreement and the council voted to approve a budget based on those discussions. I understand you voted against it and I respect that. But we all agree, we agreed last year, we knew we were going to be in a very tough place. with one time funding, ARPA and ESSER included. So, you know, I appreciate the Councilor's perspective. I understand that there's always room to do more, to be earlier, to have more information out there. But I do want to say that Council leadership has been working diligently on that issue. the administration and as I said earlier, I'm confident that we will find an answer that this community can rally around and support to make sure that our schools get the funding that they deserve.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if it can't to that point of information, Mr. President, I think we agree that I think that we've talked not getting the information that you need, but what that evening on June 20th of last year, I think the biggest problem was the lack of information given to the the complete council. And to be honest with you, even with this financial group, you keep saying the leadership, we talked about this last year, the leadership. Well, did you think maybe that getting us just monthly reports on what that leadership was working on? Because we didn't. And these are the things that I'm saying when I say, well, lack of transparency, that brings me to the first question that we talked about. So if you can speak to I appreciate I can give a quick recap on that.
[SPEAKER_16]: I arrived here in the middle of August and. It took me a while to kind of get my bearings and meet all the staff and get familiar with the accounting systems. In November, I believe, I started to put together a projection model to try to figure out where we were gonna land on June 30th. in terms of the budget and I was alarmed that we did have a shortfall and I felt without any kind of further investigation that I had an obligation to let senior management know about this possibility and we continue to work on it and I have to thank the city's finance director who agreed to kind of review all my my spreadsheets on this, he discovered an error in the formula that I was using, we corrected it, that accounted for about a million dollars. In the meantime, we were able to identify other resources that we could employ if in fact we did finish up the year with a $1.5 million deficit. So for instance, we believe we'll have a balance of about $200,000 in the ESSA fund that we can charge eligible expenses to. There's a state reimbursement for homeless transportation that's in, sitting in an account in the general fund that we could use for this purpose. So we were, I was satisfied that even if we finished the year in a deficit, that there were a number of resources that we could employ to balance the budget.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so with that being said, You have to understand, I'm not blaming you, I think just understanding it, I think understanding you coming in in August wasn't the best, it's not the best fit, so I understand that. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, you don't work five days a week, right? You're a consultant that works.
[SPEAKER_16]: I am on the payroll. I have other responsibilities. My preference was to just work on the budget for this year, but there was a need, both the CFO and the assistant, by the time I got there, had both left, so there was, you know, a staffing issue. So I agreed to work three days, which is the most I could commit to at that time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Again, I just think that this is working three days with this type of budget and what you had to recover from, it's not fair to you. It wasn't fair to you at all.
[SPEAKER_16]: Well, I knew what I was getting into. I do have a lot of experience in government and I've only worked in the public sector all my life and I worked for 26 years for Chelsea Public Schools. So I knew what I was getting into. And those three days get stretched out during the last three months too, you know, given the budget. But I think my role was to just come in and kind of do the budget analysis that was necessary to, as you say, to be transparent about what the true cost of operating metropolitan schools are. I leave it up to the school committee and the council to see how they can fund that. And then my hope is that the school department will soon hire a permanent finance director and I can transition out.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you were well aware, Mr. McHugh, that we were in financial disaster ahead of us, correct?
[SPEAKER_16]: I mean, well, was I aware before I got here?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, I'm saying when you got here, I'm only saying this because I We have a school department that knew and a city mayor that knew last year that we were going to get to this point. And I can speak firsthand being on the school committee when we had some huge cuts and you had to stand up and be a big boy and big girl and stand in front of everybody and tell them what they don't want to hear. Okay. But we're looking at a situation where What we did this year, Madam Superintendent, I think we did a terrible job in making sure that we tightened that belt and made sure that we did everything possible. When we get to this point, we wouldn't be this bad. you know, to that point, you know, usually we get a budget. I was accustomed to always get the school committee budget, even as a city councilor. So I love the point, but I'd love an actual budget if you can get that to me, because I like to look into the pieces that you don't hear about. How much money do we spend on consultants? How much money do we spend on people that we could have moved over to other positions and people could have picked up other spots? I work with, Superintendent Belson, I realize he's probably the cream of the crop, but when we had drastic cuts in 08, the first group he went after was his leadership team. And he said, well, I'm gonna feel the pain first. And I'm glad to see that we're gonna move forward with getting to this budget of 79 million, which by the way, does that bring everybody back on? Everybody that's cut, all the directors, would that $79 million bring all those people back to their positions?
[SPEAKER_16]: I think that's going to be a decision that the school committee will make ultimately, but I would say that it certainly reduces the devastating impact, but I'm not going to commit that we're going to put every single position back because we have But by the time we get to that point, there could be other needs that come up as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's what the misleading point of last evening and tonight is. So what I got when I got the phone call this morning from parents and people saying, this is great. So Hannah's coming back to the bench, you know, right back to her position. That's a big one, right? Yeah, our head of physical education is going to come back, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: state mandated position, right? You're talking about secretaries, where I worked at the McGlynn School, knowing how two secretaries are important, vital to that process. So what I'm getting back is saying, this is great. Everybody's coming back. So that's not true.
[SPEAKER_16]: No, I didn't say that. I said that I'm not in a position to make that decision. That's very possible that those positions do come back, but that's going to be when we get a final number, then the budget recommendation will be reprogrammed with that new number and it would go before the school committee.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so in full transparency, the reason why I say this, and I don't want to put you on the spot, I wish the superintendent can help with me, but as we talk about these positions, we have to make sure that the community understands this doesn't make everybody whole again. Okay, so this is what we may have to make sure that, because people left last evening thinking, oh, this is great, we're going to get everything back. Okay, so we gotta make sure that's not true. We still, that's still left up until to the school committee and the administration.
[SPEAKER_02]: It might not be true. How the process works, once an allocation is made by the mayor and once a budget is approved by the council, the school committee then has to reconcile the difference between the budget they requested and whatever the allocation is. So if the budget they requested is not met, then there would still be a need for
[SPEAKER_05]: I completely, completely understand. But what the school committee said last night is go level funded a $79 million, not for what the mayor's presenting, not as of last night, people left that meeting saying we're whole again. We just don't want to be careful, Mr. President, because I don't want to come back to the city council that the city council didn't want wasn't transparent because the questions they asked me and is that We don't know. That's not true. So even though we get $79 million, hey, I support it. Like I said, I want to make sure that we're whole with the school department. But I just want to make sure that when this happens, and let's say the mayor comes back and says, hey, we're going to go for an override. And that override is going to be passed. And you're going to get that $79 million. but understand to the community that this city council made sure that everybody's aware that doesn't mean everybody's whole again. I just wanted to make sure that piece was clear.
[SPEAKER_03]: Point of information, I have a question about this. I kind of think we're talking past each other and asking different questions and answering different questions. I think the question is, if the mayor allocated $79 million, could we use that money to bring everyone back on the payroll?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the answer to that, I don't think we're talking about each other. The answer is the school committee has to vote on what the final budget is.
[SPEAKER_03]: And say, let's say, I think. I don't think we're gonna make commitments. No, no, no, we're not gonna make commitments. I do think Councilor Scarpelli's question is being lost and the response is not helping.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, yeah. I mean, I think that if you, did you like to try to answer it a different way, Madam Superintendent?
[SPEAKER_12]: I will try to answer it the best way possible so that if in fact we are granted the 79.4 million, I'm sure that there would be certain positions that would definitely be returned. However, that would be something that we would have to bring back to the committee to figure out which positions would come back. And of the positions coming back, if we were granted that number, we would definitely look at the other areas as well that the district continues to show need or areas of recommendations or suggestions to improve programming and other buildings. We would also take that into consideration. So I don't want people to think that if we get the exact number that everything that was listed as a potential cut is going to automatically come back. So I don't know if I'm answering your question, Councilor Scarpelli, but I want to be clear that if we're granted that amount of money, we would definitely use it to advance and further improve programming for students in the Medford Public Schools.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Madam Secretary. Thank you. And that's exactly what I was asking, because I think that understanding and make sure we're transparent enough to say what you just said was perfect. Hopefully, the community is listening. So when they come back and say, we're confused, so that that's a huge piece that I wanted to clarify. And I appreciate you. you pointing that out for us, okay. So thank you. So I appreciate the budget book, if you can get that for us. I know that we talked about last year and some things that were talked about were, you know, where were we losing money? Have we looked at what are these shortfalls? How do we really capture, bring those numbers back? One being, you know, we're seeing that we're losing a lot of kids to charter school, or our kids are leaving to private school, and why? Especially at the middle school, high school level, mostly the high school level. So I think that, you know, people realize that we do lose a lot of money when we, and then the reimbursement. Can you enlighten us on what we paid the charter schools in reimbursement this year?
[SPEAKER_16]: I didn't really gather a lot of data on that because the city handles that account exclusively, but I wanna say that in the Senate budget or the House budget, the reimbursement was about 1.5 million and tuition might be around 8 million, something like that.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, so we'll ask the mayor. I think that's important. I think that the reason why I bring this up is Back in 2008, we looked at how do we find a way to even try to figure out, because pennies start turning into quarters, quarters into dollars, dollars into hundreds, right? So we looked at something like the summer programming. And we did, I'm proud to say that I was one of the people that brought the summer program to the MISA Tech and brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure we did that. And what we didn't see is one of the biggest, biggest needs was after-school care, before-school care. And we've done the best we can without the space. But these are things that I'm looking for to say, how do we bring more revenue back into the city? And at the same time, providing a need for our students. I think that's going to be important as we move forward. I think that's just a comment. I know, like again, I think that some of the biggest questions are rumors. I wanted to make sure we spelled a few rumors. So if you can just enlighten me. Because I didn't hear this, so that's why I'm trying to just figure this out, to answer this for a constituent. Are we cutting foreign language at the high school? Or is that a process, is that something that's on the table?
[SPEAKER_12]: No, world language. Okay. The world language administrator position was one of the slated positions that was going to be cut. However, we are not cutting any of the foreign languages world language, we're still going to continue to offer world language. What we have done this year is we have looked at what students have selected class size. You know, there was a theater class at the high school level, just as an example, 11 students out of 1200 high school students signed up for it in three sections. that is not sustainable to maintain a 1.0 FTE for 11 students in three sections. So, like one section only had three students sign up for that. So, if it's something where there's significantly low enrollment, then that particular course would not be offered.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, and I think specifically just so you, just to be, just to, be up front is I think that the commitment with CASIC and bringing Italian to the elementary schools, and the rumor is that maybe Italian might be the language that's being dismissed. So that was one of the questions.
[SPEAKER_12]: One of the pieces of data we do have, and I can say that in full transparency, is that at this point in time, fewer students are signing up for Italian, more students are signing up for Spanish. So that's just, I think, a trend that they're starting to see that students are selecting other languages. So we are monitoring that, but it's not a decision based on saying we don't want one language or another. It's actually just based on student selection of courses. And then we go from there.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that's important because I think that, I don't know if the funds have now dried up, that Miss Petrangelo, former Italian teacher, left the school district. I believe she left a million dollars at the time to make sure that foreign language, but mostly Italian, was something that she would leave her legacy. I think that's what's important. That's one of the questions, one of my former teachers, so I think that, I'd like to, if we can, maybe not tonight, but just get some information on that, Madam Superintendent, because I think it's important to see if we still have that in the budget, which you donated. I know that.
[SPEAKER_16]: Yes, Council, we will do that. There was a world language position at the high school that became vacant at the beginning of the school year, and it remained vacant for the, through scheduling, they were able to kind of work around it, so that, position was in fact cut.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that was at the high school?
[SPEAKER_16]: But no, the language program at the middle schools are fully funded.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I appreciate that. Listen, I understand- Jerry, when you say cut, you mean it's in that batch of proposed cuts? Yes. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. So like I said, I think that it's important that, you know, as I'm, the questions that I'm reading up, not just from me, they're from former teachers. And when they hear these things, they want to make sure that the legacy of one of their former colleagues is still carried on. And I think that, you know, I, you know, I see so many students, my children included, that the Italian language part of their culture is very deep here in Medford, and I know that I think maybe Italian families really don't feel So they feel a little bit slighted. And that's something that just for transparency purposes, just to bring forward.
[SPEAKER_12]: And I definitely want to just restate and double down that it's not, there is no intention or anything that out of the ordinary that the district is doing. It's the students that select the languages that they want to take and I'm looking at it and I'm seeing, you know, 44 students in one section of French to honors. And, you know, if I look at Spanish to CP 35 students, so the students are selecting the language, and the families are involved in that. And so as long as there is interest, and the students continue to select the classes, we will offer it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so I just want, just so you know, just with Miss Petrangelo's funding, with what she donated, just to make sure that plays a big factor, because I think that as we move forward with this, when you have a teacher leaving a vote load of money, which is a million dollars, a lot of money, and that was some years ago, so I don't know if there's anything left in that line, but understanding that with her legacy, her former colleagues that I've talked to, making sure her legacy is carried on, that we give her the respect, whether there's only 12 kids for Italian, we find a way to fund that class with what she left. That's my point. So I appreciate that. I completely understand that there's a need base and we can all agree with that. I promised Councilor President Baez that I wouldn't go line by line. I think that I've taken enough time tonight. I think the biggest question that will be during the budget presentation with the mayor, and I think that I'll be more vocal when it comes to how I think this budget should be funded, because I think that What we're seeing right now is something the mayor ran on in transparency. This community has yet to see in five years. And we've lost a lot of revenue because of, for what she has decided what's important to this community. We've lost millions of dollars. We wouldn't be in this bar right now if the mayor was more transparent in the process. Just no different than this process we're in right now. We found out I was watching the meeting, the five o'clock meeting, and the mayor was stunned when you expressed the number, and she came back right away and said, this working group has been working on a override, Proposition 2 1⁄2. And I only bring this up because Councilor Villes and I talked. A lot of people I've talked to that you would think that don't want an override have blatantly told me, if we can see the financial picture, and is it true? Does the data prove that? If we had new revenue, if we went with one 40B project, and if that 40B project brought in $3 million in permits, right? And then the new revenue, that's another $3 million. out of that project. This $606 million in new growth, that's one project that we fought, which by the way, would be hundreds, hundreds of affordable housing units. This is the narrow minded thinking and the mismanagement of finances that we're seeing today in this community that is hurting the bottom line. The bottom line is scary to say it's going to be our children and our seniors. So again, Mr. McHugh, listen, I appreciate all your hard work. You have the toughest job in this whole city. You were given a pile of junk, and they said, OK, go to work.
[SPEAKER_16]: Well, I do have a lot of support from the staff in the central office and directors as well. I just wanted to make one small comment about the budget book. We will publish a budget book and I'm happy to deliver you a copy when it's ready. But the gap, there's such a difference. You see the turmoil that was caused, the anxiety with $2.2 million worth of cuts. And that was what I would consider just kind of around the edges to go up to five million. to have to disclose huge cuts in staff and programs that wouldn't have been helpful at all. So it's kind of difficult to put a budget book together under those circumstances, but we do want to document what we did to get to the bottom line. And so I will get that to you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And to that point, do you see what I'm saying? To that point, Mr. McHugh, We're a community that's looking at a $79 million budget line, and we truly don't understand it yet. That's what's frightening to me. We left here a year ago at this time knowing we were going to be here. You know, another comment people ask, is the school committee still going to accept their raises? Well, sure. I would recommend still that we cut our pay to support that so we don't hurt the budget in any way possible. But that's my opinion. But when you as the director of finance or the acting finance guru here see how drastic and how difficult this process is, Imagine what we're thinking. Imagine what the residents are thinking. Imagine the homeowner that's a senior citizen sitting back and someone's whispering in the area saying that if an override goes through and debt exclusions go through and transfer tax goes through, that homeowner is possibly looking at thousands of dollars that are going to change their lives. So that's the fear right now. And so, and I appreciate that, I hate to put you on the hot seat because you don't deserve it, but this is exactly how everybody's failing. And this is when I say mismanagement of finances in our community, it's not your fault, but it is, we can see it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli. I'll go to Councilor Lazzaro.
[SPEAKER_08]: just a couple things point of information. First off, our city finance director did talk about the charter reimbursements that's covered in the city budget, one of their line items, but
[SPEAKER_02]: we uh there it's like a graduated uh reimbursement rate so it starts out higher and it gets gradually lower it's 180 60 zero yeah four years and jerry was basically dead on uh it was 8.6 million sending last year and 1.6 million reimbursed so yes seven million of chapters is here tonight so
[SPEAKER_08]: Councilor Scarpelli, I think if you wanted to ask him about that, you could probably show it to him.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, no, I think the biggest piece, I think, Councilor, is that the understanding of is in trying to recover funding in any way we can is finding a reason why we're losing.
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I asked him about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would like to request my fellow Councilors please not engage in cross-talk. And also I'd like to add to the meeting record if we could request an update on the Petrangelo fund balance from the Finance Director.
[SPEAKER_08]: Councilor Lazzaro. Another thought I had is that I think it's possible that we may be losing students on the higher grades to private and charter because of the historic underfunding of our public schools. That being said, I do have a question that is pertinent to the work that our city council can do, which is about the homeless transport in the schools and the fact that it costs so much. I was wondering if you knew, and you may not, do you know if that is so much higher than it's been budgeted for in the past. Is it higher this year than it has been in previous years? Or is it always higher and we just overspend?
[SPEAKER_16]: Yeah, it's been around this level for a couple of years.
[SPEAKER_08]: So it's just something that's overspent from that and maybe pulled from another line.
[SPEAKER_16]: And it's unfortunate, there's just more need. And the lack of housing, so the available housing for these families are further and further out. So it's just more costly. But we are hoping, through a rigorous bid process, that we could, take the opportunity to kind of reduce some of those costs.
[SPEAKER_08]: Could you explain to me what you mean by rigorous bid process?
[SPEAKER_16]: Well, we have to pay for homeless transportation in two ways. One is for the transportation that MedFed is required to provide. Right now we're getting quotes from small providers on an as needed basis.
[SPEAKER_08]: Taxi services.
[SPEAKER_16]: Well, bands and companies have got into this business. It's door-to-door. And then we're also required to participate in the transportation that other school districts provide when they are the receiving district and we're the home district of that family. So that's just a check we have to cut when we get it. We are working with the city purchasing director right now, and we're preparing a bid for all our transportation. We're hoping that could reduce the cost, but the underlying cost of transportation is also going up. The drivers are getting more money, the cost of gas, the cost of maintaining. maybe the best we do is level funded, what savings we might achieve might be offset by higher costs.
[SPEAKER_08]: I am curious about the degree to which greater services for homeless families in Medford would allay some of the costs of transporting. And if you're finding that when families do deal with the effects of becoming homeless, if they have to find shelter further away, does it only happen when they are actively living in shelters or does it continue, does the transport continue when they have permanent housing or do they then relocate to a new district?
[SPEAKER_16]: The state has a very broad definition of what constitutes homelessness. So you could be homeless in the family car, you know. You could be homeless if, you know, you live in Medford, but you have to move back with your cousin, you know, because you're being evicted, or your rent's just gone up three or $400 a month because the landlord wants to get you out of the house. So, you know, it's not based on whether you're in a shelter or whether you're not, but you, you know, that's something that the, registration office handles and those are, you know, private conversations with parents, but the benefit of the program, I think, even though there's a significant cost with it, is that it does provide a very limited amount of stability for the students involved when everything else is completely unstable.
[SPEAKER_08]: It's called McKinney-Vento? Yes. Yes, okay. It's very important for stability for students, and it's something that's important to support. It's unfortunate it's expensive, but I do think it's important. It's just like, how do you kind of find a way to balance it so that it doesn't necessarily have to be so expensive? But thank you for that explanation. I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_16]: Yeah, the state does provide a limited amount of reimbursement for it as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you so much, President Pierce. Thank you again for being here and for patiently answering all of our questions. I think I speak for all my fellow Councilors when I say we really appreciate it. And we recognize how hard, how hard this job is on everybody. And I'm not a number crunching person so to me it seems even harder. Thank you. I think it's very true that we went into this fiscal year knowing that it would be really, really difficult. And that's because we knew that one-time funding was coming offline. Everybody knew that. We talked about that. That was out in the open. We knew that we were coming into a year. We would have to transition from a lot of really important, often critical positions being funded by this one-time funding, which is now going away because of how this national act, national grant funding worked. And now we're doing the work of figuring out how to transition away from that. And I feel really confident that every player in this dynamic shares the same goal of coming out of this budget season with a budget that includes a school department appropriation that gives the school department the latitude, the ability to put that money where it is going to best support students and teachers and all school staff and families. And I really do think that that is a value that everybody behind this realm, school committee, mayor's office, your team, administration, I think that is really shared. What I get out of that for me is saying, great, I support this $79.4 million recommendation. And that sounds to me like a number that will help us achieve our shared goal of doing right by Medford Public Schools. Budget seasons are hard work. This is what that hard work looks like. Making recommendations and reconciling them with what's possible. We don't get there by fighting with each other. We get there by working together. And I am, I think like everybody in the community, knowing for not just one year, but for several years, that there is going to be an Esser cliff. There being a lot of transparency around that. Knowing that, coming into this budget season, feeling really anxious, feeling really worried, because this is too important. But I think if we continue to collaborate and say, what can we all do so that we get as close to that number as possible, so that we don't have to cut things that we don't want to cut, that's how this should work. I for myself, I don't have any further questions, and I also want to reiterate, I want to leave the discussion of the line item positions and programs to the forum where those questions can be most thoroughly answered. And I think that's what the school committee. So for myself, I don't have any further discussion points. I don't have any further questions. We have a couple other departments to hear from tonight. And I'll defer to my other Councilors, but I'll prefer that we we move on to our next departments at this point, after this very thorough, very appreciated presentation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Vice President Collins. Councilor Leming.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you. Just like everybody watching this, to understand just a couple of basic things about the city's financial situation. So first off, this is a very long time coming, and it would be easy to sit here and talk about this or that decision, complain about everything under the sun about why we're here right now. But at the end of the day, the problem is systemic. So Proposition 2.5 prevents the city from increasing its total tax levy, the total amount of money we take in from property taxes, by 2.5% every year. The average inflation from 1980 till today 1980 was when Prop 2.5 was passed. That average rate has been 3.08%. So that means that the value of the budget in 1980 adding up would be about three quarters as The modern budget would be about three quarters as valuable as it was back then. This is somewhat offset by growth. Cities that have had a lot of development in the past 44 years, Cambridge over with Kendall Square, Somerville with Assembly Row have not had to pass an override. But Medford hasn't seen that development just in the longer term. There are a variety of reasons for that. Um, so I think that this is not a panel of judges criticizing others decisions. It is our job to come up with solutions. I'm not going to sit here and either be administrators or the school committee. five loaves of bread and two fishes and tell you that you need to feed 5,000 people. That's just not how this works. I think that we need to get real about the budgetary situation and say that we do need an override of some sort just because the system that we're in inherently leaves us with a broken budget. The problem is that passing it to if we were to pass it to if we were to pass an override that money would not be available from now till the next fiscal year so there's the matter of bridging that gap it is not in the city council's authority to set to raise any of these line items it is not in the authority of the City Council to say, hey, we need to take, you know, $6 million or $2.7 million from free cash and use that to fund the school systems in the interim. That is up to the mayor. The City Council is working on a lot of other things, a lot of other initiatives which will address this fiscal shortfall in the long term. Not all of our solutions are perfect. We just got done with a committee meeting where I was proposing a commercial vacancy tax to help to address the vacant storefront problems in Medford. It's not a perfect solution, no solution is, but I'm trying to bring solutions forward to help address our problems instead of just complaining about the decisions that are made by other people and acting like I have no power in this situation. So that is, so that being said, That is what I personally think should be done about this situation. I understand that there are arguments against taking free cash out of reserves. We're looking to fund a new high school. Having an amount of free cash is important in order to get a good interest rate for the loan for that new high school. So in that way, spending that money now could end up just affecting the city's bottom line 10 years from now. the mayor's proposal. But I do think that in this situation it is more necessary. It is necessary to make that that decision. I look forward to seeing, um, what the mayor's proposal is. Um if she doesn't if she doesn't want to do that, or if she finds cuts in other areas. Obviously, I wish that other decisions have been made beforehand. I think that an override should have been passed a lot earlier so that we wouldn't be dealing with this right at the edge of that fiscal cliff, but it is what it is. People aren't looking for people sitting behind, sitting in these chairs to come up with complaints about a budget situation that obviously nobody likes. People are coming here to find proposed solutions to these problems, even if these are not ideal. I thank you for going through a budget that is just not enough money to go around at the end of the day and coming to us with what you can. and that's all I have to say about that. This council really can't make a whole lot of decisions about this realistically until we get another number from the mayor around what her proposal is, but we'll be able to come up with more definite answers after that, so thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. As one Councilor, I'd just like to reiterate, Councilor Collins and I proposed an override of $12 million in 2022 because we knew the structural underfunding of our city. That was tabled by a rule that then pushed it past the deadline and made it moved by another Councilor at the time. and fiscal 23 and 2023 for fiscal 24. We proposed, uh, to three charter amendments, which would have we felt better address the budget process. Um, those were passed by 6 to 1 margin, but we're not submitted to the state House. Mayor did not want to move those forward. And again, I think Many of the elected officials in this community were elected because they clearly messaged the reality of structural underfunding of our schools and our city departments. We know there is not enough money to do the job. The reason there is not enough money, piece of it, is that we've never done an override in 44 years. Piece of it is we don't have as much development as fast as scale as we want, right? I'm not saying that those answers can't both be true at the same time. But we are where we are. And 1 of those things takes 5 to 10 years. 1 of those things takes much less time. Um, and we believe can actually affect this fiscal year. Um, in the future, I mean, again, we've been, we've spent what meeting are we on Councilor Collins meeting? No, no, maybe 7 for the budget. But what meeting are we on the zoning? five of this term and we did a whole zoning recodification last term and we've approved multiple plan development district projects that have come before this council because this council has been focused last term with a very different membership this term with a different membership on the idea that this community should grow and that growth needs to be an essential piece of our revenue strategy. So we're there. We have been pushing very hard as a council to have more resources in our finance to budget department so that we have more transparent and open budget planning so that our schools and our city finance departments are not so strapped that they're so worried about the next two weeks that we can't think about the next two and 20 years. So that's work that we have been doing, and it's essential work. We are now at the point I was worried we would be when I saw the fiscal 21 budget in the first six months of COVID, which is a fiscal cliff. That means if we do not find revenue now, jobs lost. Now, without that new revenue, we can have a debate, and the council has a role, not on the school side about this, about who we want to fire. I don't think any of us want to have that discussion. We could find $5 million in the budget, but it's 50 people in the schools or 50 people somewhere else, basically. That's the position we're in now. And looking back at the past is not going to change that, although I do think we should look to the past so that we don't repeat the mistakes in the future. So I hope that we can all at least agree on the fact that we don't want to fire people. Any further discussion by members of the council on the mentor public schools budget Councilors.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll be really quick. Um, I think I do agree with everything that's been that the President just said, um, I am very grateful to Superintendent Edward prison and director queue for the hard work that you've been putting into this budget season. I'm also very grateful to the school community. I know we have a few members in the audience tonight for the work that they've been doing for the last two budget meetings. And I've had a lot of constituents write in today saying that the work that you all did to explain the budget last night was very, very helpful. And I want to make sure that that effort doesn't go unmentioned. I'm supportive. I support the $79.4 million that the school committee recommended for the school's budget. I know that The proposed cuts are painful, and I've been a student in many of the programs mentioned, and that's something that I'll fight for. I've made it the cornerstone of my campaign to run for city council, and I think I can speak for every city councillor behind the rail that we will do our best to fight for as much money for the schools as we can get. I think that's, you know, we're on record doing it in the last few years. We've added millions of dollars to the school budget. We're going to keep fighting, and I believe in our council to do our best to try to reconcile everything. Thank you, any further questions by members of the council? Mr. President, if I can. Councilor Scarpelli.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just to reiterate, I think that maybe some things are getting confused, some councils in translation, but the understanding, I appreciate you bringing this point up, that understanding to sit here and blame anybody right now doesn't get us anywhere, but to understand the process to make sure the, the bleeding stops when the same thing's being done over and over again. We have to identify that and being the fact that this council is in charge of making sure that financially, we're doing the best for every citizen. It's important to ask us the most important questions. So when I bring up the fact of five years of stagnant growth, of course, that's a huge factor where we are today. Of course it is. I identified one development that would have brought our community millions of dollars, and that's one. So the key factor and the key process that I'm bringing up right now, and especially that everybody understands this, is not only with the mayor, and I brought up the council respectively, the council president from June 20th, and then even with this financial process that we're talking about with this working group. When you're doing it in a bubble and we don't know what's going on, it's alarming. We're in big trouble. And now sure, could we have looked at a debt exclusion or overrides in the past? Sure. This council, by the way, unlike anyone here, presented the debt exclusion for a new fire station years ago. And maybe one person was here that voted no on that that evening, but it didn't go anywhere. But what I did was, I met with the financial director, who by the way, as award winning financial director, and Aleesha Nunley, and she presented a breakdown of that debt exclusion to educate everybody to understand where it fell, where it fell. And at the time it was $17 per household a month. with excluding senior citizens and veterans. So I understand completely what this council is looking to do, but it's how are we doing it? And understanding that maybe pointing the finger has to be done. Maybe people understanding because you know what? To get this passed, if we really need it, we need everybody involved. We need everybody to see the light. Because all this is doing right now is further dividing this community, this process. Not that we don't need it, because I've already addressed that. I think that if it's done properly and the data proves it, and we can say, well, let's say we have four developments ready to go in the next year and a half. And we're ready to pull the trigger instead of fighting and going to court and denying and denying. Well, maybe that's revenue that we wouldn't be sitting here right now. So to my colleagues, we have to identify that. And we do have to look at pointing because that's our job. We have to figure out where the mistakes have happened. So they don't happen again, like Councilman said. So this isn't sour grapes. I grew up in this community. I taught in this community. I coach in this community. I own a home in this community. I raised two kids in this community. I was in the school committee for eight years. I've been the council now for many years. I've seen the ups and downs. I understand that things are underfunded. But if we do it correctly, everybody can get involved in this, and everybody can support it. But when it's coming the way it's coming out right now, and it's irresponsible, the process was irresponsible to date. And Council Bears and I have talked about this. He doesn't disagree in the sense that he wished things came out differently, too. We've talked about this. So that's the process that constituents Maybe not some people's, but constituents that reach out to me, make sure I express that. So we look at every avenue possible. Maybe talking to mayor and saying, okay, let's look at this. Let's look at this right now. What we can do today to fund our schools, to get them level funded, so they're not hurting. But at the same time, pause, get the information that we need, the proper information that we need, the data that we need, that everybody can marry and understand. Well, you know what? We do need a debt exclusion for this. We do need an override for this amount of money. I'm not saying not to do it. I would firmly believe if the data shows and everybody's part of the process, because I said this at the beginning, the difference that you're seeing in communities that have passed overrides, Communities were informed, they were part of the process. I'm good friends with a former mayor that is probably someone that I put on the top of the mountain when it comes to mayors. And when I explained this to him, he says, well, explain the breakdown. How was it presented? And when I said, well, it wasn't presented, it was just mentioned. How irresponsible? So fellow consulate might not take what I'm saying as that they take respect toward it or they feel that it's not needed. Oh, it is needed. Because that's what people put us in for. So I would never tell anybody here not to express your thoughts. But these are the thoughts that we can bring everybody together and find a way to get where we need to go. And like I said, if it's a debt exclusions, if it's overrides, I think there's a way to get there. Thank you, Mr. President.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for our Jerry. I appreciate you. Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli. With all due respect, I believe that we will have something for this council and the people of the city of Medford to consider that will include all the data that you're talking about. The presentations that you're talking about, that is the intent. Certainly, I was here two years ago, right? I think we should have been having that conversation two years ago. Councilor Collins and I put something forward to have that conversation. We are now in dire straits and we are having that conversation, but I believe that what we will present is fully scoped and has that information and everyone can get behind it because that's what we're talking about here. I've actually seen in the past two and a half weeks incredible unity among people who often disagree about the fact that the impact of the budget allocation versus the need of the schools would be devastating among people who don't often agree. I've had conversations, phone calls, emails, social media, all of that. So I believe we will get there. And again, I think the facts support both of the cases that have been made here. When you look at the new growth numbers, they go on DLS back to 2003. We're not talking about five years of lack of growth, we're talking about 40 years of lack of growth. But the last three years since we started our zoning conversation are the three highest in the history of the city. So we're making that work. We're talking about also on the override side, never done it in 45 years. So I agree with you, we need to do differently. This council, as I believe, including all of us, has been trying to change the tone on development and growth by updating the zoning recodification and implementing our zoning project, change the tone on budget by passing the city's first ever budget ordinance. And just speaking from the perspective of the financial task force, sometimes I feel caught in a catch-22 of, do we not say anything until we have everything fully baked so we can answer every question that you just asked, Councilor Scarpelli? Or do we say everything before we have any answers so that everyone sees every question we've had to ask? And I think it's, in many cases, an impossible choice. and also a choice that is not just the choice of myself and Councilor Collins, but of the group. So we're working on it. What you described is my goal, and I hope that I will be able to present to this Council exactly what you described soon, because I believe that is my responsibility and the faith entrusted in me by the members of the Council and elected me President and by the voters of the City of Bedford by electing me as a Councilor. So that is my goal. And with that, I'll go to Vice President Collins, and then we can hopefully go to members of the public. Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you. I just wanted to say, I think that as representatives, we hear some of what people in the community are feeling. I would never purport to hear what everybody is feeling or to know what everybody is feeling, but we all receive different trends and patterns in that. And I think that we can, as representatives, convey what we're hearing from members of the community, i.e. about an override, without going so far as to say that we know how everybody is feeling. I know who I've heard from. I know that based on who I've heard from, there's strong will to do what's necessary to fully fund the schools and maintain level service. What we're talking about is level service, not level funding. And I know that other people have concerns and other Councilors have heard those as well, and both things can be true at the same time. And I also do just want to note, because I know that some of these concepts are new to many residents, because it's true that we haven't done an override in 45 years, that if we do an override and or a debt exclusion for both to what degree, these are questions that will go before The residents, everybody will be included in this process. This will go on the ballot. We will have five months for everybody to be included in this process to learn about an override or debt exclusion if one is proposed and for everybody to form their own opinion about if they're going to vote for it or against it. And I just wanted to make that really clear that this is something that will be decided by popular vote. That's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Vice President Collins. Any further questions or comments by members of the Council? Seeing none, we'll go to members of the public. Thank you very much Madam Superintendent, Mr. Finance Director, much appreciated.
[SPEAKER_10]: You're welcome.
[SPEAKER_02]: Name and address for the record please, feel free to sit and use the microphone. And if you're on Zoom and would like to make a comment, please raise your hand.
[SPEAKER_15]: I'm just going to stand. That's right. Again, 45 M Hill Avenue in Levenster, Massachusetts, and I am the president of the med fatigue Association. I just wanted to speak tonight to once again as I did last night. give my full support to this proposed budget, the $79 million budget put forward by the school committee last night. And I just want to reiterate, again, what I said, this isn't, I don't consider this a radical budget. I don't consider this a terribly progressive budget. What this budget does is it keeps us level. It keeps us where we are this year. And I just want to One against a few things that I can see on the horizon. If this budget isn't passed to get my comments public. Last year, my one of the first things I dealt with as the new president of the teachers Association was a sudden influx of kindergartners who joyful, obviously to get more students into the metropolitan schools but all of a sudden there was a great scramble because we didn't have enough teachers. To cover it, there are teachers moving, there are teachers who had to find empty rooms and had to suddenly fill them. So the proposed cuts, especially at the elementary level, pose a risk because we don't know what the class is. And as it was mentioned today, that Brooks is seeing an influx of students next year and it's, you know, the end of May. The last flux came at the end of August, so we don't know who's coming, but I have no reason to think it's a lower population than it was this year. The idea of when we lose students to charter schools and to private academies, we've got some hope here because we also have a waiting list for our vocational programs. That vocation, those vocational programs are producing award winning machinists. We have students coming out of there who, you know, the last two times I saw men with public schools in the news now was a pair of young women who are getting into Harvard to two twin sisters who are going to Harvard, I had the pleasure of teaching and award winning robotics team. And I think that's what's gonna bring people into the medical schools. That's what's going to show that there's a very clear path in Medford to get into high institutions to show your abilities now. And like I said, we did that with the staff we have this year and this proposed budget simply seeks to keep those positions. So that's all I have to say. Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Mr. Ian. Any further comments by members of the public on the Metro Public Schools budget. Madam Chief of Staff.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you, Mr. President and members of the City Council. Good evening. I think there was a lot that was said here tonight, and I can appreciate the various views that have been stated in the various history and historical perspectives. And I think it's important for me to represent and state. some elements that come from, you know, essentially the mayor's office as chief of staff. I've been involved in the city budget since 2022, or at least the development of the FY 2022 fiscal budget. I can tell you, and I think we can all kind of, let me start by saying that The mayor's office, as has been stated by President Bears, has been working very hard to try to find a way to carve funds out of the city side to provide additional funds to the schools. We are dedicated to doing that. We are working very hard. Our department heads have been very supportive in that process. The mayor, myself, our finance director, and our budget manager have met at least weekly for throughout the budget process, but have been meeting and discussing in particular, additionally, since we heard the level of concern and numbers on the school side. Obviously, we anticipated a level of a budget cliff, and I'll get into that in a bit. We knew that there was obviously ESSER funds that were coming off. But I do need to take this council, if I could please, back a while back. And sometimes this isn't a popular subject to discuss or remind. remind the community of or otherwise because they were difficult budgetary times. But I do feel it's important to take us back to when the pandemic began and some of the levels of uncertainty that existed back then and how that unfolded in our operational realities of the budget process. I'm sure no one will forget the difficulties and the uncertainty that existed in March of 2022. That was the time in which the city was formulating the 2021 budget. Um, in March of 2022, we believed things were going to shut down and things did shut down, right? We remember when 2020. Sorry, did I say 2022? Thank you. March of 2020. We remember things shut down. We remember that hotels were closed. We remember restaurants were closed. Everything was closed for a period of time. We remember those impacts. And at the time, across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, communities were making very, very conservative estimates in their revenue projections. And we did no different. Our former finance director, Aleesha Nunley Benjamin, made some very, very conservative financial projections, which has been very consistent with how our current finance director does that very same thing. Conservative at that time as the unpredictability of the pandemic had loomed. A year later, and that year, because of that uncertainty and a number of different factors that came in, the city had to use one-time funds. And those one-time funds ultimately became ARPA funds. The city used over, if I have my numbers correct, over $13 million in ARPA funds to balance the revenue side of the city budget.
[SPEAKER_02]: We used free cash the year before, too. The year before, too? Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: Okay. And as I recall it, looking through financial reports, that number was $5 million, but it was a much lower magnitude. And so then you fast forward to the following fiscal year, and we're still we're still very much in the middle of the pandemic, there hasn't been significant relief. Now, you know, people are starting to travel, people are starting to go out, people are starting to spend money, people are starting to feel a little bit safer, but by and large, people are not feeling very safe. And so we had a situation where we were expecting conservatively budgeting, as always, we were expecting revenue shortfalls to continue. We utilized on the order of magnitude of $7 million to balance the revenue side of the budget. Um, and since that time all throughout, we have been working very hard on the city side to in the mayor's office and working with all departments from city hall departments to other facilities to school department. We've been working very, very hard to try to tighten that belt to get to a place where we are, you know, obviously not utilizing one time funds. And for the first time in fiscal 24, we did not utilize one-time funds for the stabilization of the budget. We did use one-time funds to deal with a lot of backlogged capital work. We've used a lot of ARPA funds to do a lot of work that had been backlogged for decades, probably. We also used some small order of magnitude, obviously, for staffing positions when compared to those capital costs. So I really think it's important to tell the historical picture of how we got here. And at the time in which the mayor was at the last budget hearing of the school committee meeting, yes, at the time, all she had known was a $500,000 budget gap in the FY24 budget. And so, yes, she was surprised. But this isn't... This isn't something that's just happening to Medford. This is happening all across the Commonwealth. And I think if you ask your school, the city school administration team, you'll hear that same information. But I have data points to provide some of that information for you today. GBH published an article in May of this year, identifying that with the header being school districts across Massachusetts, way teacher staff cuts and staff cuts. They covered communities ranging from Boston to Pittsfield in that article. They talked about Andover. They talked about Braintree. And I also looked on the state's website for the Division of Local Services, that the Division of Local Services, as obviously the council knows, but members of the public may not know, is an entity that actually helps, essentially regulates the work of cities and towns as it relates to revenue and budgets. They have a sheet that shows that there are communities across the Commonwealth that are going through budget overrides, and I'll just touch on a few. This can be searched on their page, DLSgateway.com. Arlington, fiscal 2025, override, general operating. Athol. public safety overrides. These are proposed, not necessarily the wins or losses. Belmont, general government override with a note that says supplement cap budget and town school operating budgets. Oxford, two overrides for schools. Brewster, two overrides for schools in FY24. Brookline, 24, two-way question operating override. I don't know what that stands for, but we know Brookline a little bit from some of the work we've been looking at. There are many other communities. As you can see, I'm naming them in alphabetical order.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was how many through the Bs, five?
[SPEAKER_09]: I apologize?
[SPEAKER_02]: We got through the Bs and that was five?
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Braintree's another one. We didn't even get through the Bs.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you. So, and you know, I... I don't even know that this needs to be said, but I just can't help but dispute information that is just clearly and evidently wrong as to transparency. The council had asked for the mayor to provide certain information as it related to KP law bills. We've been back over this numerous times. Through you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, to Councilor Scarapelli, the you made statements relative to KP law bills and not having information and how you're adding it up to be $300,000. But 476, Mr. Chairman, I, I don't believe anyone else was interrupted.
[SPEAKER_06]: If we could just thank you.
[SPEAKER_09]: Um, So those things, we transparently provided the information. We provided a warrant from 2020 to April of 2023, identifying all KP law payments. We also provided information relative to a survey that we did of 16 of 16 communities and Medford ranked third lowest in terms of per capita spending for legal service costs. And we disclosed at that time that our estimated per year was $450,000. So there is no surprises here that is contained in, through you, Mr. President, to Councilor Scarapelli's email inbox. And lastly, I think it's important to touch on development. You know, frankly, this is an area of the organization I don't work very closely in because the mayor works very closely in. The mayor hired the city's first ever economic development director. We are working with our, with Sal, and of course I'm forgetting Sal's last name right now. Thank you. Obviously he was with the council this evening. He was talking with the council this evening. It's my understanding that he was going to announce grant application that was submitted on vacant storefronts. Wonderful. that's been going on. There was a press release that was issued by the mayor as to development and over 500 units that had been done, and there were issues as to prior 40 B projects again. I can't necessarily speak to those things, but I know that our planning, development and sustainability director Alicia Hunt is here this evening for her budget presentation and may be able to touch on some of those things if there are questions. But I think I just felt the need that I had to address a number of issues that were stated here tonight as to the perspectives from the mayor's office. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Madam Chief of Staff. Councilor Scarpelli, I was going to recognize you already as you had a point directed through me. Councilor Scarpelli.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Mr. President. I'm glad to see that our Chief of Staff has like commender. She's coming here as she usually does and stands up and defends the mayor because that seems like that's been common practice with our chief of staff. I will tell you the numbers that I shared a numbers that were given to us by her office and I believe there was a comment a few weeks ago that the law line item was $50,000. That wasn't true. When you do the actuals and you count it up at the time for that one year that we did have, which we expressed is a question because we're seeing the mismanagement of financial process here in the city. You can blame COVID again, but that's getting old because as Medford's fighting about COVID, I could talk about communities too. And I won't talk about, I won't give you numbers from Athol, Massachusetts. I'm gonna talk about our neighboring communities. Malden, flourishing. Everett, flourishing. Somerville, flourishing. New growth everywhere. We're touting a beer hall on Mystic Ave. So when we talk about transparency, there has been huge lack of transparency from that office. Even the fact that what I heard the other night, looking back at the meeting, that a city solicitor is not important. It's a disgrace. The city solicitor works for the community. He's that check and balance, that person's that checks and balance for the city, for this body. So there's a lot to be said in what's going on, because when it's time, everything will come out when the mayor is here, because I think that that's one thing people are missing, is that when things are tough, I believe she said that to Councilor Caraviello when he ran against her for mayor, saying that Mr. Caraviello doesn't want to make tough decisions, he wants to say yes. Well, guess what? It's been tough for the last five years. And we haven't seen much happening. So you can blame the pandemic, you can blame whatever you want to say, you can look at whatever numbers you want to look at. But the truth is in what we live in every single day. You might not understand that because you don't live in metric. So, but no, no, no, no, no. That's a valid point. You're touting something that and not understanding what the community has expressed to us. So don't be a little bad, to me at least. So, you know, the understanding that when the mayor gets here at budget evening, we'll go over it, we'll discuss it, we'll debate it. Because we're here for, we're here, like we said, in a more mutual understanding process, is that we understand that there's a process that we might need a form of overrides or debt exclusions. But I don't think it's done in a transparent manner, I've mentioned it, I'll say it over again, and I'll stand by that. I sat with this mayor. and what she worked with sitting next to me for years isn't the person that's trying to run the city right now. Thank you, Mr. President.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli. I'm going to take the spirit of compromise and just say a little bit about what I disagree with both of you about. And first thing I want to say here is I appreciate, but there are many staff in the city who do not live here the chief of staff was with us for four hours at fire stations on Saturday, came here. I don't question her devotion to serving the city, even though I may disagree sometimes. We have disagreements. We all have disagreements. I'll go first with just some additional context on the budget. I appreciate you adding that. Madam Chief of Staff, I just want to also add when you mentioned the $7 million FY23 gap of the one-time funds we used that year, that was a major driver of Councilor Collins's and my proposal for the override at that time. I do respect that we were able to not use one-time funds in future years, but also there were things cut between the initial FY23 proposal and then the final budget. That was presented to us because of that use of one time fund so that means that there were things that the city was doing and probably the schools, maybe as well, depending on the process a little different that we weren't able to do, because we were trying to reduce that reduction on one time fund so that's really where I think many of us are coming from on the structural underfunding. And then the other piece is I really appreciated you starting to list the overrides that all these communities are doing across the state because we do have a common financial fiscal issue across the Commonwealth and across the country with the ARPA expiration. We did use some one-time funds for FY 24 on the school side with ESSER. I know we are all aware of that, but that, you know, it wasn't a structural gap in the general fund, but it was a structural gap in a sense that we, you know, I remember June 21st, Councilor Scarpelli was talking about the 20th. On the 21st, I had an event and I said, we need to work together to keep as many of the ARPA and ESSER positions as we can on the budget. Mayor was present there as well. And work has been done. I mean, I am impressed, especially on the ARPA side, how much we're able to keep on. So I do want to acknowledge that. But I think the other piece of it, and it's not really a disagreement with anyone here, I think the other piece of this part of the fiscal issue that we are all seeing in commonality is cost growth. We are seeing huge over the last two years, a huge increase in costs that is devaluing the amount of revenue we have. When Councilor Leming talks about However, the last 45 years, because two and a half hasn't kept up with inflation, we have less money. That has accelerated over the last two years significantly. Councilman was using a CPI price deflator. That doesn't actually reflect government purchasing their price deflators for government because government purchases very specific things. not the things that a person, you know, we're not buying a lot of bread every day, necessarily, as a percentage of our budget or food. We're buying concrete, we're buying health care, we're buying, you know, pensions, and we're paying salaries, right? And those things have been going up really significantly. So that's just the other piece of context that I really think is important to add And when we talk about the fiscal picture of all these communities, and especially the reason why the override and the need for additional immediate revenue is so much more dire today than it was even two years ago, is that the costs are just out of control. And when costs are going up like that, government, we can't keep doing more with less. That's what we're seeing. If we want to, quote unquote, keep it tight in the belt more, Now we're not talking about, I believe Sherry said, working around the edges. We're talking about core programs of the city and schools. That's where we're at. Now where I just want to point to Councilor Scarpelli, we bring up Malden a lot. Malden gets $65 million a year in net revenue from the Commonwealth. Their Chapter 70 allocation is tens of million dollars more than us. They get $65 million, we get $20. Their new growth the last four fiscal years has been almost a million dollars less than the city of Medford. So it's not a comparable community. Malden is treated very differently by the state and isn't growing as much as we are on the new growth numbers. So, you know, I just wanna bring those facts to the table, that context to the table. And again, say that I really understand the frustration everyone has with the uncertainty, understand the frustration of the public, of our educators, of fellow members of this council, of members of the school committee who are not part of the financial task force, where we have not said this is our plan yet. And we have not presented a plan and had that debate yet. It is coming very soon. We are at the zero hour. We are at the decision point. And I believe that we will present something that we can all see the details of, have those details discussed and debated, and then bring this community together to vote for in the fall to say that we're gonna address these serious financial challenges that we face. So I appreciate the perspectives of everyone. I think we've had a healthy discussion generally. And with that, Mr. President, I just have one new piece of information.
[SPEAKER_09]: The only one piece of information that I meant to include in my statements is just it kind of dovetails from some of the things you you just said, and some of the things Councilor Leming stated in terms of costs outpacing. When we have a 10% increase in health insurance, which is $3 million, that is 1.5% of our budget increased right there off the top. That dramatically affects our position as it comes within the constraints of Proposition 2.5. And there's just no two ways about that. And then the only other thing I should probably say and address is that we've been working very diligently, the mayor, the finance team, have been working very diligently to come off these funds because we are trying to We need to, and the mayor is against the use of one-time funds. I need to say that transparently to this body. If you haven't heard it, the mayor is against the use of one-time funds. The analogy she uses to express that is if your, let's say 16, 17-year-old teenager came to you tomorrow and they said that they got $500 worth of gifts for their birthday and that they wanted to lease a car, would you let them lease a car from that? So I'll leave you all with that. I do appreciate the discussion. I appreciate the time that was afforded to me to speak.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Any further questions or comments from members of the public? Seeing none in the chamber, I do see one hand on Zoom, Jess H. Jess, name and address for the record, please. You have three minutes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Jessica Healy, Four Lock Road. I just have a question. Because I keep I always hear from the chief of staff. I believe she is but not the mayor and not to you know downheart all but We did not vote in the chief of staff. We voted in the mayor Is there going to be a time that? We're able to ask her questions regarding everything that's going on There will be a time when if
[SPEAKER_02]: No, you will not be able to ask her questions directly. You can make comments. Generally, the mayor presents the budget at the budget meeting when the comprehensive budget proposal is submitted.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay. And now what happens if everyone's talking about the override? What happens if it doesn't go through? Have we thought of that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, there would be drastic cuts that would be devastating to our community.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm understanding but have we figured out if it does not go through?
[SPEAKER_02]: We would not have the funds to fund our schools.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay, so we used to have the funds, but we don't anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've discussed extensively how Proposition 2.5 and cost growth has reduced what those funds can buy.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay, so the 2.5 override will go directly to our schools?
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, there's the mayor and the financial task force have announced a proposal to do so. Yes, and we plan to put out the details as soon as possible.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you. Any further comments from members of the public in the chamber? Seeing none, I will go to Charlene Douglas. Name and address for the record, please.
[SPEAKER_10]: Charlene Douglas, 414 High Street, Medford, Mass. So I just want to state something that occurred at last night's school committee meeting. The student reps on the school council wrote a proposal about the use of the free cash money to alleviate the deficit to the school budget. And I ask you to look at that and support that as a council. That being said, I also understand and hear both sides to this argument about overrides and what should we do as a city of Bethlehem. And as a resident of this city and, you know, a taxpayer, I truly understand about the taxes and everything. However, I must say this, if we do not do this properly, there is no way that this will pass. So if we need to truly have an override, we need to make sure that there is a proper information out to the public and that must be done and that is extremely important. And the last thing I wanna say in relationship to the opera funds, when we use those funds to support the schools such as newcomers, teachers and things like that, things we knew, the union stated, we knew that we would need there was no way we can have a newcomer teacher and some of the other programs that were funded by opera funds. So that to me was poor judgment and poor use of opera funds. So I just want to state that, because I think that's very important. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Ms. Douglas. I just want to say that it is my highest priority as council president that any proposal for an override or a debt exclusion has all the information needed and that there is the, obviously there is the public process to propose one, there is the public vote, but that is the work that we are doing and I intend to continue doing. And I'll leave it at that. Any further discussion on the Medford Public Schools budget by members of the council or members of the public? Seeing none, Planning Development Sustainability, Director Alicia Hunt. I don't know if you've been watching our previous six meetings, and thank you, Madam Superintendent, Mr. McHugh, once again, and all the residents watching, we are working on this. We have basically our processes that I'm going to read the top lines for the overall budgeted amount and the headcount, and then read through the change sheet, and then we would love for you to share, fill in any gaps, share your budget narrative, and also we would love to hear about Items you did not request are not included in this year's budget request that you plan or would like to see in the future. We understand it's a difficult budget year, but we do want to hear about what we are not doing right now that we would like to be doing. So with that, I will go through quickly. Planning and Development Sustainability Fiscal 24 Budget $779,084. Fiscal 25, $812,897.91 for an increase of $33,813.91. There's a change in head count from eight to 11. That is two part-time interns and that part of the full-time climate planner is moving from a grant to the general fund. And basically all of that is fixed cost increase with the COLA for non-union positions, moving over that climate planner position and some increase for maintenance and dues and subscriptions. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, Director Hunt, for the Planning Development and Sustainability Budget.
[SPEAKER_01]: Good evening. It is late. I did not really prepare remarks for this evening because I have been working extensively with the council on a lot of different initiatives, and I did realize that it was going to be late at this point. I think that it's most useful for me to just briefly address headcount. And then some of the changes a little bit. So you're very much correct. The number of positions of full time increases by one. It's the climate planner, which is frankly what I said at this meeting last year I was coming back for. But we got the grant that has been funding it this year. And we actually have obtained a grant that will fund her position for two more years for 40% of her position. So what we are looking at doing this coming year is actually just, and I'll be very specific, putting 31% of her salary on the general fund. Some of the funding will be from ARPA for the first half of the year. And the other percentage, I'm not doing math at this hour, I apologize. The other percentage is coming from a mass clean energy center grant that will pay her to do outreach among the Medford community, run the Electrify Medford program, which we have just started running, which is to help Medford residents electrify their homes, offer coaching and advice through us training and paying some coaches as well as volunteer coaches around solar, heat pumps, electric vehicles, And there's some funding in there for some consultants to back up all of our consultants or all of our coaches. And so this will pay for Brenda to manage that program. And then the money that's in the general fund in ARPA is for her to do all the other energy things. A lot of this is backfilling work that I have been doing myself since I became the director of planning, but has been traditionally done energy efficiency work, solar, those types of working on our climate plan. The other reason the number looks a little big is that we had been carrying the number two for interns, which is just seems to me to be arbitrary. We've been for the last several years running with four interns in our office at any given time. And we do fund it through various ways. The increase in salary for part time employees is in fact going from 20 to $30,000 is to reflect the intern budgets and to help pay for them. I'm also hoping to pay for them off of other places. Sometimes we get grants to fund them, some CDBG, etc. The actuals for this year in part time is pretty high, and that, I just wanted to be clear, is not what we've been paying interns. But you're aware that our economic development director and our economic development planner both left early in the year. But they both actually agreed to stay on part-time and help and work with our office to support us while we searched to fill those positions. They were extremely hard to fill. We're thrilled with Sal DiStefano, who's our new economic development director. We also have a new planner. But we did pay Vic and Yvette part-time during the year, and their money was basically moved into that line. That's why our permanent employees was so low and part-time was so high. It's artificially high, but we were also using money from vacant positions to pay for interns. I felt very confident. We're going into this calendar year with a full slate of staff, there are no vacancies. I said I really would like to see some money in the part-time intern budget because I can't dip into my full-time salary budget just to cover those interns this year. The other changes are mostly structural around shifting things around so that we're paying for them where they should actually be paid out of. And my goal is actually when we all see the actuals for this year, we'll see that some of my line items were overspent and others were underspent, and that is because we needed to pay them out of the right places. Repairs and maintenance machinery, my office has been actually paying for and managing solar panels. We've been doing wind turbine annual maintenance for 14 years now, and this year we have started with solar. We have three solar race to that are owned by the city, and we're hoping our plan is to install another one this coming year. So we have added a solar panel maintenance contract as well. And so that is to reflect the costs of the wind There was, I think. That was the main shift from last year, right? Like I shifted some money into dues and subscriptions to more accurately reflect things like we belong to the Mystic River Watershed Association Stormwater Outreach, and that's a dues that the city pays for outreach. We belong to power options. And then there are various membership organizations around economic development and community development and planning that we as a city belong to, and we pay for out of that line. move the money there to more accurately reflect. And because we have actually been paying for many of those just out of professional technical services, we lowered the professional technical services to reflect that we were shifting the money to where it was actually being spent out of, rather than me saying, oh, I need new money for this. And then because the budget cuts were so difficult this year, that is the line that made the most sense for us to cut a little.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you shifted 10 and cut 20?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we shifted 10 and cut 20 from professional technical. And so in the big picture way, that is the bucket that we pay for consultants out of and we pay for grant matches. For example, we have applied to a municipal vulnerability preparedness grant. This year I'm doing it jointly with DPW and it is a forestry vulnerability assessment but it is also to update the city's municipal vulnerability assessment because our vulnerability assessment was last done in 2019 with 2017 data. And so this would update that with current 2024 data and give us actually an interactive website on our climate vulnerabilities. If we were to get that grant, I believe I should have written it down, but I think the match is like $30,000. So rather than going to the mayor or this body for that, we would just have that money in my budget. And so we have some funds there for Brownfield Consulting or Climate Consulting or grants that we would get where the matches are of a reasonably small number, that it's just easier to pay for it out of our budget. I think that generally covers it. If you wanted me to go into more detail, we can.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anything new you'd like to do that's not in here in future fiscal years?
[SPEAKER_01]: When I want to do new things, they're really big and really expensive and wouldn't be covered in a budget like this. It would be large capital expenditures. I'm working on the electrification, the partial electrification of the McGlynn and Andrews school. that's gonna be a multi-million dollar project. Our parks projects are very large multi-million dollar projects that we have to go out and get grants for and other funds for. They're not gonna be in this. What I do like to use this money for is sort of the starter. You have to have a certain level of design. We actually had just applied to a green communities grant that we may not get because we don't have it advanced far enough in design in order for them to feel comfortable funding it, they may actually want us to pay for a $30,000 to $50,000 design step before they'll award us the $500,000 grant. So that's another example of something that if we get turned down for that grant, it's probably going to be in our best interest for us to just touch my budget. go get that design work done, and then apply again to green communities.
[SPEAKER_02]: So seed money for grant funded projects would be a key priority additional.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you had more, you could get more grants.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely. And honestly, a lot of it is, I feel like we have just become fully staffed in January. And I want to run with this staff for the next several months to see how are we doing? What's the workload sometimes? So a couple of years ago, when I came at this meeting, I said, I didn't want any more staff to the finance office had more staff because they were our bottleneck. Now things are moving through finance because they did get the extra position a year or two ago. So I'd like to run with the staff, see how much work we can get done. And if the bottlenecks at that point are our staff or somewhere else in the operations.
[SPEAKER_02]: Great. Bob has left. I'm just gonna make my one comment, then I'll go to, does anyone want to have a question? Okay, then I'll just make my comment anyway. Bob's not here, but this is really a message for Bob. Maybe we can include it in the report. I just love how few line items are in your budget. I think we're at like 12 or 13. I love that. It just makes it easier. It's everything has a name that I can kind of at least understand and I don't have to ask for an extra explanation. I understand some of that is gap and some of that is state determined and whatever, but. I just think it's a really clean budget where I understand what everything means and that doesn't mean that the information isn't there for every other department, but to me it is a model of naming conventions for ordinary expense line items. So as an extreme nerd, I will close there. Any further questions on the planning development sustainability budget for the director? All right, we'll go through the boards. Rapid lightning speed.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have the boards.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got Board of Appeals. And it's looking like that's going up 1350.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's because of the positions increases, the number of positions on the board. The number of positions for those stipends.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's going from 11,150 last year to 12,500 this year because we increased the size of the board of appeals to avoid any quorum issues, I believe was the main reason. Yes. Community development board, no change. On board of appeals or community development board?
[SPEAKER_01]: There are all of the boards and commissions that my office is currently staffing. I'm just slowly making sure that I'm not missing anything. All the positions are residents. I've had The Energy and Environment Committee, one of our members moved out of Medford and asked if they could continue to participate with the board. They get no stipend. They don't make decisions on anything. They're mostly a volunteer, like organizing. So we haven't actually asked her to step down. But all of these that are funded boards are 100%. Decision-making boards are all Medford residents.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'll do respect to that. I appreciate the hard work people are doing, and I understand keeping them on right now, but I think as we move forward, I think it's important that we give the opportunities for Medford residents to take those positions, so I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Energy and environment is an unlimited number of people, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Energy and environment and the bike commission both have an open number of membership. There's no rules. So we generally will add people in a group as we feel like we've lost a critical mass.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're advisory committees. Yes. Take it all back then. I apologize. I think that's great.
[SPEAKER_02]: We will take someone else's free labor for our... If you have an expertise and you want to work, let's do it. Yep. Great. All right. So if those questions are answered, I saw no change for Community Development Board. Looks like a small stipend reduction on the conservation commission.
[SPEAKER_01]: So my notes are that we can't figure out why the number was what it was last year we think that at some point there was a miscalculation and what either the rate was or the number of members. And so we went through this several times because it's, this is accurate.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's going from 8200 to 7500. Yeah, got it. Historic District Commission, it looks like A stipend is proposed and there's been a shift from special projects to the stipend and to professional fees?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so all the boards that are staffed by city staff, some of them get stipends. And this is one where the Historic District Commission said to me, we would really like to be asking more of the staff person who's helping us. Prior to the pandemic, they and the Historic Commission and the bike commission actually had no city staff support at all. We manage their budgets now and we manage their zooms and we post their agendas. The historic district commission said they would like more robust support on more of the things that they're doing. And we said, and they said, could we get a stipend to justify that? And they were willing to shift the money from within their other things they spend money on too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Who in your office is going to take that on?
[SPEAKER_01]: So we had asked Jessica Martinez, the new economic development planner, if she would work with that. And I will just say for transparency that not all the boards and commissions have stipends with them. So there are several that people are staffing with no stipend. But in some the affordable housing trust comes to mind, it is part of the role of the housing planner to support that. And we have said since that job was created, that that part of that job is supporting that commission. Yeah, at the point that they have a lot of money, and it takes a lot of time, we may want to reconsider that. But as a startup, But I just thought it was fair to say, for example, the historic commission, there's no stipend associated with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's significant. Yeah. Something that this council has discussed prior sessions, prior years, try to get some uniformity, some equity across all the boards and commissions. Look at all of them because it seems like it's just we make one and we set this. And then 20 years later, we make this and we set this. So I think when we're not triaging the budget, that is something this council is interested in if we have the time to get there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and the stipends across the board for the different boards and commissions, there doesn't seem to be, I don't understand where those numbers come from, and they are not, you know, they're on the city's webpage, you can see them all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep. Historical commission, we have, it was FY 24, $38,050, FY 25, $35,000, it looks like just a reduction in professional fees and a reduction in the unclassified line item, which I believe was a grant match of some kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: So right, so their money is to pay a consultant to do the historic, the studies of different buildings that come in front of them to say whether or not they're actually historic. It should be preferably preserved. And then they get to grants and their grant matches. When the mayor was asking people to please cut budgets to help with the budget, they said that they would figure this out and they would be okay with a $3,000 cut in the spirit of helping the city with its budget struggles.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you. And Bicycle Commission, $1,500 last year, $1,500 this year, no change. And that's for supplies and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right. Any further questions on the Planning Development Sustainability Department or the boards and commissions which it helps to coordinate? Seeing none, thank you, Director Hunt. Any further questions or motions in this committee of the whole meeting, which is our final budget preliminary meeting number seven. I should have led with that last one. Budget seven on the motion to adjourn. We do not, we have, we believe that on this timeline, the 31st was the deadline. We believe we've met that by getting us with this being the last meeting. I'm seeing a nod, yes. So that should be our goal, which is great. And the last thing I'll say is Celtics 92, Pacers 88. On the motion to adjourn of Councilor Lazzaro, seconded by Councilor Callahan. Yeah, they got back pretty fast. All those in favor? Opposed? Motion passes.