[Bears]: City Council committee of the whole May 14 2024 Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Hurtubise]: Councilor Callahan?
[Callahan]: Present.
[Hurtubise]: Vice President Collins?
[Collins]: Present
[Hurtubise]: Councilor Lazzaro?
[Lazzaro]: Present
[Hurtubise]: Councilor Leming?
[Leming]: Present
[Hurtubise]: Councilor Scarpelli?
[Scarpelli]: Present
[Hurtubise]: Councilor Tseng?
[Tseng]: Present
[Hurtubise]: President Bears?
[Bears]: Present. 7 present, none absent, this meeting is called to order. There will be a meeting of the Medford City Council Committee of the Whole today at 6 p.m. in the Medford City Council Chamber, second floor, Medford City Hall, 85 George P. Hassett Drive, Medford MA and via Zoom. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the annual budget process. This is preliminary budget meeting number five. The mayor has communicated that the following departments will be present, the library and the police. So without further ado, we'll go in alphabetical order. We'll take the library, we have Director Kerr, and this is a little bit different from previous years. We are meeting with you before. the budget is fully presented. This is, as I said, our fifth meeting, and we're excited to have you. We do have copies of your budgets in front of us, and I've basically been asking four questions of the department. One, what was your budget request? Two, are there any programs or other additions that you didn't request this year that you would be looking at in the future? and then asking you to share kind of the narrative of your budget for your department. And at the end of the presentation, I will just note that if we see a big change from today to when the budget is presented to us, we may invite you back in June for another round. So very quickly, I will just read off here the library budget. For fiscal 24, the budget was $2,012,177. The budget this year is proposed at $2,245,111.90. And the main changes there are in our fixed cost growth category with 104,000 involved in staff increases and moving the office manager from 30 hours to 35 hours. 44,000 also in the staff to ensure that there's a pay increase for the hourly part time and a $90,000 increase in data processing because the cost of tech in our new library is much bigger. than our old library. And with that, I'll turn it over to you.
[Kerr]: So I have a fun infographic, if you wanna, I could pass that. That's a mixture of calendar year 2023 statistics. I have therefore 23 statistics, but there's a lot going on. So we went into the budget with three things in mind, the increase for the hourly part-time rate, the increase in the tech line, and also we wanted to add a programming librarian. The hourly rate is great. Everybody will be excited. And the tech, that isn't the original. We asked for more than that, but we made an agreement that we'd put this much in this year, and then the rest of it could go in next year. We've been covering the cost of the tech stuff out of the funding left from the construction project. So the last couple of years, we just that was our main goal was to like get our expenses into the actual budget. So we're almost there this year. That was the 90,000. I think that was it. Yeah, the programming library and we were not funded for but we are up for a Cummings grant. And we'll find out next week whether we have it or not. And that would cover the maker space piece of our programming. So that will that will take a lot of the weight away from people so we can wait till next year for the programming piece.
[Bears]: Great, and feel free, if you wanna walk through this infographic or share your budget narrative, we'd love to hear what you've been doing this past year and what you're going to be up to next year.
[Kerr]: Well, I handed them all out, so I don't know what's on it.
[Bears]: I have some extras here too.
[Kerr]: I did that with the directions to the after party of my brother's wedding too, that was disastrous. We're very busy and this year things are going up. We were pretty holding steady at 17,000 people a month last year and now we're up to 18 pretty much. The meeting spaces, we have five study rooms plus the maker space, the tech lab and the large program room and a children's program room and several children's study rooms. There've been 7,000 in 2023, there were 7,000 bookings of those rooms and the study rooms in particular are book solid every day, which is terrific, because we're still a very open plan building, but if you want a quiet space, you can book a quiet space. Also, the local history room, except people have been eating in there, so we're not sure about that anymore. We've had, I think we had 860 programs last year. There are programs practically every day. Children's does, from Baby Lapse It to What are they sixth grade and then the teens have their whole scope of programming and we are where the teens go in the afternoon now which most times is good sometimes is terrifying. But it's really great that they are there. And we have a we have a team advisory board who helps Nicole do a lot of plan the programming, they plan their own programs, and they get a lot of other kids in. So that's been very gratifying to have a space for them to be in finally, and that's been great. And children's is crazy. In the morning after the story times or the lap sits, the nannies all hang out in the cafe area and have coffee, and that's been a great. socializing thing. And this year we've actually started offering ESOL classes and citizenship classes, which is something I've been wanting to do for years, but we didn't have a room. So that started, we're doing two 12-week ESOL classes and they're full and there's a waiting list. So we're gonna continue with that next year. That's not exactly the budget, but we're very busy and we're, We do have a great space, so we're trying to maximize the use of all the different rooms and the potential that it has.
[Bears]: Great. Thank you, Director Kerr. Any questions from members of the Council? Councilor Callahan.
[Callahan]: Could you just talk a little bit more about the data processing, what it covers, what the systems are?
[Kerr]: And why we don't change the name from the 1980s terminology? For us, data processing is tech, but not just physical tech. So it covers our network membership, the Minuteman Library network membership, plus there's a cost for telecommunications and digital content. There's a shared ebook platform. It also covers things, it also covers our TOS, which is the company that does tech support for the library, covers that. Those are the two big things. And then we have, but there's a, what is it? There's a lot of fees for this. There's a laptop dispenser. There is a printing system. There's a traffic counting system in the ceiling. It's the platform for our newsletters, the platform for our summer reading program. and a bunch of databases, because we have Ancestry.com and Consumer Reports Morningstar. It's an amalgam of, oh, and we have two streaming platforms and a film streaming platform. So it's those guys and then little things that get stuck in. Because we're only two years old, we have not done a lot of purchasing of equipment, because it's holding up pretty well. But it's aging, they tell me. Did that make sense?
[Bears]: Any further questions for our library director, Director Kerr? Council Vice President Collins.
[Collins]: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you other board members and trustees for being here as well. Appreciate this presentation. I also know me and several other Councilors were able to take you up on the invitation to attend. a public trustees meeting several weeks ago, maybe last month. Really appreciate the dialogue about where the library is at and the budgeting process. I say this about a lot of departments, but I really like these hearings for being able to just shine an extra spotlight on the work that the library is doing, that the work that the department is doing year round. I know during budget time, conversation is often like, what do we have to take to get what is on offer to the community? And the library is such an excellent example of what the community is getting out of the work that we're investing in, especially when you're talking about the programming that isn't even inside of the operating budget, but offers so much to, in many cases, the people in Medford who really need the most. Something like ESL classes, I know that was such a need to be within Medford City boundaries for such a long time. So it's just very special to hear of this and other programming going on in the building now that we do have the new building. And I know that moving into the new building has been kind of one of the central pieces of the library narrative over the past few years, going from that sort of artificially smaller budget during the interim space to now try to, you know, funding for the big, beautiful, modern, contemporary building that the library is now in. I know that was certainly a conversation last year and something that we'll be continuing to work through over the next few years to make sure that the library is supported to really be operating. at full capacity and bring that full capacity into the operating budget. So that's just a note of acknowledgement and thanks to you and all the work that's going on behind the scenes all year round to make this such a useful space for the community.
[Kerr]: We really are being used. It's nice. I have a very good crew, too. I will say that. And actually, the funding that you were able to get for us the last two years were much more stable than we had been for a long time. So it was good.
[Collins]: Well, that's great to hear. Thank you. I know it's been put to really good use. I have just one small question. I know we've talked about this in the past. I know that there was some of the part-time workers at the library, there was kind of a talk of a raise. There hadn't been a raise in several years. The under-fixed costs, the increase that was mentioned, the part-time pay increase for hourly part-time, does that cover the proposed raise, or is that
[Kerr]: Nope, that covers the raise. This is actually more than I had originally asked for, because they calculated the increase, so that's good. Because we had people who were getting less than minimum wage, so now they're not, so that's good. And then everybody else is going up a dollar, so that's good.
[Collins]: That's great.
[Kerr]: Because they haven't gone up since 2019.
[Collins]: Yeah, I'm so glad that we're bringing up that baseline this year. Do you know off the top of your head, what is the amount of the raise per hour?
[Kerr]: It's a dollar an hour.
[Collins]: Great. Thank you for everybody. Thank you so much.
[Bears]: Great, thank you. Any other questions by members of the council for the library director? Seeing none, I have a few. One, I just want to confirm, there's no headcount increase in the budget as far as I could tell. The only real major change is the 30 to 35 hours for the business manager?
[Kerr]: Yeah. No new positions.
[Bears]: Got it. A follow-up on the part-time hourly salaries. You said that the last time that had gone up was 2019. Okay. And I just want to put it out there. The reason that they were making less than the minimum wage is that technically cities and towns are exempt from the minimum wage law in the Commonwealth. So it was not illegally. Sadly, the laws of the Commonwealth allow that. So I'm glad to see that that's changing. My last question is kind of a three-parter. You mentioned around new staff and programs that you'd be looking for in the future, the program librarian. Could you talk a little bit more about that, what that job does? Has that job existed in the past? And also, are there any other programs or staff that you would like to see maybe in future budgets? I know this is a tough year.
[Kerr]: That's the main one. That's the piece of our operation that is kind of new because in the old building, we had one room. So we didn't have a lot that needed to be coordinated. Plus we didn't have enough staff anyway. So everybody did a piece of the programming and that's what we're doing right now. My assistant director does the majority of the adult programming, but there are several other people who pop in and then children and teens do their own. It's a lot of it's a it's much expanded because we've got all these spaces now and there's a lot of demand and there's a lot of there's a lot of demand it when you only have one room. You can only have four or five things a week, and now we can have things in multiple rooms and some nights there's five things so. What we've been trying to get away from the last few years is having everybody who works there do five jobs, because really they were hired to do one job. And at this point, it's pretty good, actually. This is the first time for me since 1993 that I'm only doing one job, which is, that's progress. So, but this is the piece. it really would be better if there was one person focusing on all of the programming. They would be more focusing on the adult stuff, but coordinating everything, doing multi-year planning, which is not something that we do right now. We do our programming sort of quarterly and we're still in that model because the people who are doing it are doing other things too, it's not the priority. It is a new position and it is a new focus, but I think it would be very valuable because we're doing so much programming and there's so much demand. And Sam, who is my assistant director, she does a lot of the maker space stuff, but she's really limited because she's assistant director and there's so much demand for more stuff. And so that would be good if we do that. I think if we do get the Cummings grant, the makerspace piece will be able to maximize that and plan for several years. But the other stuff is still a little bit of a catch all, depending on who has time to do a program or sit down and schedule something.
[Bears]: And my last question, you mentioned that some of this is bringing onto the budget items that have been funded temporarily by the Metro Public Library Foundation, part of the new building. Is there anything else that needs to be brought over from that? And also, is there anything that was being funded at the library by ARPA that is being brought onto the general fund?
[Kerr]: We didn't have any ARPA.
[Bears]: No ARPA, okay.
[Kerr]: It depends. I think I was talking to Nina, wherever Nina is. We may be combining the tech support. So if we do that, there may not be anything else that needs to be brought over, but we'll find out about that. There might be a little bit, there are still, there's still some money in that account and it was intended for building stuff, for furniture fixtures and equipment. So we may use that. like I'd like to add a few more cameras in places, but things like that, or I've got a little bit of furniture on order now, but it'll depend. We might need to bring over a bit more depending on how this year goes, but we may not, so.
[Bears]: Great, that's great to hear.
[Kerr]: And there were some large expenditures the last few years, just because we were moving in and like we had to, the way we had the tech lab set up was silly. So we had to reorganize that and get some more computers and things this year, but that's a one-time expense. So I don't see anything really major coming.
[Bears]: Great. Any further questions by members of the council? Seeing none, is there anyone in the public who would like to comment on the library budget? Any members of the boards of trustees?
[Kerr]: No, apparently not.
[Bears]: Feeling good. All right. Well, thank you then. Thank you very much. We will certainly invite you back if anything changes.
[Kerr]: Thank you.
[Bears]: All right. Next, we will go to Medford Police Department. We have Chief Buckley and I will say once again, kind of the framing here. I'll quickly read the budget request. If there's anything I missed, feel free to add on to that. Then we'd love to hear about anything that wasn't requested this year that you'll be requesting in the future. Feel free to add that and share your narrative, and then we'll go to questions from the council. So very quickly, I will go here. We have the Manford Police Department budget. We had for fiscal 24, $14,566,880 budgeted. For fiscal 25, the proposed budget is $14,785,259. And we had FY 24 budgeted total headcount 122, FY 25 total headcount 128. And then the change sheet indicates that the fixed cost growth is $317,217 in full-time salaries, and then about $150,000, maybe $140,000 in a number of other items, court time, education incentive, academy tuition, professional services, and laundry. And then in terms of new expenses, there's some new expenses for data processing and for telephone. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Chief Buckley.
[Buckley]: Thank you. And I appreciate the opportunity. This is my sixth budget presentation. It's amazing to me how fast time goes on. I'd like to introduce Lieutenant Joe Gagliardi. He is basically charged with administration of finance and the department. He's my numbers guy. So if we get into the depths of where money's being spent and what's in what account, he's my kind of assistant to come up in there. So, you know, to some degree, I consider this a level funded budget, but we did have to tighten our belt in some areas, right? We understand the fiscal situation the city's in. And so where we tightened our belt, we feel comfortable that we can get through that process. And I will always say, anytime I come to the city council, the one thing that we're going to be looking for now and are in the future is police officers, right? I mean, we feel that there's a certain number of police officers that are required to maintain public safety in the city. 112 has generally been the number over the last few years. We've been cut down this year. We're trying to make strides to get back a little bit closer to that number. And I think that's, you can see that reflected in the budget. But other than that, I don't, there's no other further asks that I think some of the increased costs will be related to, you know, we're in year, for going into year three or four of the new police station. So a lot of warranties are up or software needs to be renegotiated and that sort of items. So you'll see increases in those areas as opposed to cuts in other areas. And we get it, it's tough fiscal year and that's where we are now. So if there's anything specific I can address or... What's the next part of this that you would want me to talk about?
[Bears]: If you want to share a little bit about what you've done, Fiscal 24, any plans or new things you'd like to do in Fiscal 25?
[Buckley]: Yep. So, you know, we've maintained sort of an increase in calls for services over the last year. So we did north of 36,000 calls for service. And I was told today as estimated that 50% of those even surprising me are 911 emergency type calls. So those types of things are increasing and keeping us busy. I am proud to say that the proactive calls for service, that means just that the police officers who are out there and and being visible in the community are up to about 28% of all of our calls for service. That has kind of continues to increase, and it continues to be sort of a sign that the police department is vested in the community and is active and is out there kind of helping with those regular and ordinary issues, whether it's traffic or just presence issues. We have pursued our community engagement unit, and we increase the support. We've been to a number of different events throughout the year. We probably received the 2023 annual report from the police department. Hopefully you guys have gone through that pretty extensively and to give you an idea of all the things that we've been involved in throughout the year. Our behavioral support unit remains to be active and a vital part of what we do as an operation. And if you remember, I've talked about this over the past couple of years in behavioral support, we have three full-time clinicians. And they were one of the very few communities in all of Massachusetts where they actually respond to calls for mental health services with our police officers. We don't call them afterwards, they'll actually respond on scene. And it has, we do see an increase both in the number of calls, but both in the effectiveness of the police response when we have a clinician with us responding to those sorts of calls. So that continues to grow as a part of our operations. We know that body-worn cameras now have been in play, we continue to see some positives with that and we continue to monitor that as we grow and no major issues with that. As for fiscal 25, I've outlined three sort of short-term goals. One of them will be to continue to pursue the hiring and recruitment of qualified in a diverse workforce. every police department, probably across the country, but I can say specifically in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is concentrating on hiring and recruitment and maintaining police officers. And we don't want to fall behind in that. And I think we have a great police department for a great city. And we want to attract and keep police officers as we've trained. The second short term goal for 25 will be to kind of concentrate those employees and, you know, Our officers take pride and satisfaction in the work that they do, and we in turn need to take some pride and satisfaction in them. And we concentrate a lot over this past year, and we'll do so in the future, on their physical health, their mental health. These are sort of epidemic problems in policing across the country. But also with some job career enhancements and development. We do a lot of training in the Medford Police Department. We increase that and go, But finally, and one of the things I'm going to be more proud of in fiscal 25 is that we are now moving forward to being an accredited police department. It's the hope that in fiscal 25 that we can become an accredited police department through the State Police Accreditation Commission. Essentially, this is our police department coming in line with the standards and best practices for all police agencies. So every state has standards and policies that are derived from a national level of police standards across the country. And it's good for liability purposes, it's good for professionalism, and it's going to establish more directives and more procedures for personnel to follow, but in the end, that is a good thing for policing, right? So we know what we're required to do, we know how to do it and we know why we're doing it. And so that is an extensive process and it essentially requires us to really dig deep into how we operate and do that. So we're gonna overcome that goal in fiscal 25 and push towards accreditation. That should be a gold star for the police department for the city of Medford. Thank you. Long term goals, while they slightly change over the years, they're always produced in our budget. I can read them here. It's some of the things you're going to be used to hearing decreased crime rates with effective crime prevention strategies and proactive policing. Maintain law standard objective to making our community safe and desirable place to live, work and visit. We want to partner with the community to solve problems and improve public safety. We will maintain community policing as our guiding philosophy. We intend to recruit and retain diverse, highly skilled, and motivated police officers. We have, over the last few years, taken up the long-term goal to maintain public contact through social media, and we see the increased importance of being able to connect our community through social media and so that remains one of our long-term goals is to to be out there visibly and publicly contacting, keeping the public abreast of what we're doing. We're going to maintain a long-term commitment to the safety and well-being of our police officers as I've just addressed previously. We're and provide quality services for the mental health crisis is to our behavioral support unit. If we can grow that 1 of the things we are trying to do in this coming fiscal year, which I forgot to mention is bring on a. bring into our police department a recovery coach, right? So it used to be done through the Office of Prevention and Outreach. We think it's a perfect fit to bring that into our behavioral support unit in the police department. So there's some negotiations with Elliot Services and DMH and some other avenues to make that happen and increase that unit. And then, I mean, in general, those are our long-term, short-term goals. And we think we've, had a pretty productive year. We continue to grow as a police department. I will take this opportunity to tell you right now that I'm very proud of the women and men of the Method Police Department. I appreciate everything that they do every single day out there. It's not easy. I recognize that it is not easy job, but they do an outstanding job and they're committed to what they do and they're committed to this community. So I probably thank them when I have this opportunity.
[Bears]: Thank you, Chief Buckley. Any questions from members of the council? Councilor Lazzaro.
[Lazzaro]: Thank you for being here. I appreciate this really clearly very level funded budget here. I mean, things are going up, things are going down. It's looking almost the same as last time. As a new councilor, I have a couple clarifying questions. Sure. I've never really looked at the budget at this scale before, but just to help me understand, So the way that overtime is calculated here, it's gone down. Overtime for officers has gone down by $50,000 from last year's budget, but it's separate from holiday pay. Can you help me understand how that's negotiated? Is that part of the contract for officers or is it based on something else? How is that and is it how is overtime calculated?
[Buckley]: Okay, so yes, it's contractual. And, but overtime for patrol officers would be any rank of police officer with the exception of the chief, but that has to perform work above and beyond their, let's say 40 hours of work service. So that could be shift coverage for vacation time shift coverage for sick time when we meet, we have to maintain a minimum standard of police officers. And, but it could be other could be training we send certain people to training over times and there's a separate line item for the cover on those. We feel that it's a, you know, like we're tightening the belt there on the on the 1.15 million, but I will tell you this in the 6. The overtime budget prior to this, prior to me becoming chief was probably, I think it was estimated at $1.8 to $2 million a year. So we continue to work hard on our overtime budget to bring that down. And so it's another stretch. overtime budget relates to extra work performed by police officers, not say pay detail work. Holiday pay, as you mentioned, is simply that we don't get holidays off, right? So when Christmas comes, we come to work and the officers get a payment for that day instead of the day off. And so that's why there's a line item for that. And then there's increased payments per contract is if you come to work and you actually work the shift, then you get it off. If you don't come to work, well, you didn't get a holiday, so you get paid for that holiday. That's contractual, and it's a number that we have to abide by. It paid for the 13 holidays that is contractually committed to by the city of Medford.
[Lazzaro]: Keep going. But there is a possibility to kind of schedule creatively to sort of try to tighten up overtime, which sounds like you've been attempting to do, and it looks like you're trying to do with this budget in the same way.
[Buckley]: Correct. We continue to always look. We look at it weekly, if not daily. We do work on that often, too often.
[Lazzaro]: And I just very quickly did like, just divided that it would be about, it's budgeted around $10,700 per officer. But is that is is does that usually work out evenly? Or is it it depends on who's on staff that day? Or just it?
[Buckley]: It depends because per contract. So it depends. It doesn't always doesn't ever work out evenly across the board. Some ranks will get paid higher, of course, but the patrol officers generally have more overtime work assigned to them. But we still maintain our overtime. Most of the overtime majority is voluntary. So, if there's an overtime opportunity, we look to establish a list. If you've signed up and willing to work overtime, you'll get that overtime opportunity. And if you don't sign up to work the overtime, you won't get offered it. Sometimes we don't have anybody and we have to force officers or we assign in advance for emergency type situations. But it's not across the board because it's a voluntary situation.
[Lazzaro]: I appreciate that there's a lot of moving parts to this and everything has scales and everybody's trying to fit the puzzle pieces together. So I appreciate you coming out.
[Buckley]: No, it's a good opportunity to talk about how it works.
[Lazzaro]: I'm trying to understand it all, so thank you very much.
[Buckley]: It is complicated, but it's a chance to tell and explain some of these questions. We will take advantage of it.
[Bears]: Great. I'll go to Councilor Tseng, Councilor Callaghan. Councilor Tseng.
[Tseng]: Thank you. You talked a bit about accreditation. I think that's a really exciting prospect. Is that something that is done mostly more through policies, or does the budget have a big impact on that? And does this proposed budget move you towards accreditation?
[Buckley]: It's mostly policy. So it's policy procedures, how we carry out our daily operations. Right. And but of course, there could be financial impacts on that. Right. And. accreditation will look at every aspect of not just say is your use of force up to standards of Commonwealth of Massachusetts or what other police departments, but we'll say is it will look at your like HVAC system, it'll look at your security of your police station and look at all these other things. And if you fall below that, you have to kind of maintain it. We're lucky in that this is the first time we've could have started this a couple of years ago, but our prior police station wasn't capable of passing any accreditation. So now we have a modern police station, and we're able to kind of carry that through. And with the exception of regular maintenance to a lot of the equipment that we have, we don't see any increased costs that's related to it. So we feel it's the perfect time to kind of seek and push for accreditation. But let's say in the future, some standard, physical standard of your facility doesn't meet standards, then we would not be re-accredited, and we'd have to find funds for that. But there's not necessarily an increased cost in personnel of assigned a lieutenant and an officer to kind of work through this whole process. They're already sort of on payroll. It's just sort of a reassignment of a special project to get us through this. There's a lot of work that goes into it, but I don't expect or see additional costs related to this budget that's not already covered for in here under general salaries and other facility type costs.
[Tseng]: Yeah, that's super helpful for us as Councilors to learn about and to hear. It's mostly a lot of paperwork. I trust you. I was also curious about, you know, are there any positions that are on grants or funds that aren't being carried over to this budget or are being carried over but require a certain amount of spending? to be kept up?
[Buckley]: No, sorry, we have no positions that are funded through a grant per se, with the exception of our clinicians, right? So they're funded full-time through a DMH grant for the department and they're civilian type. Everyone else is, all of our other employees are on here. Now that doesn't say that we don't receive grant money, right? So we have 9-1-1 grant monies, we receive grant monies from other different states, agencies are funded agencies and they go into kind of supplementing some of the things. So the state, say 9-1-1, will require that everyone who answers the phone for 9-1-1, which is generally most of our police officers, undergo 16 hours plus hours of training and additional related to this. They will pay the costs of doing that. So they go forward and they do that and they pay those costs. They'll pay costs for replacement of equipment that's in the 9-1-1 center should they break. Now, it's not unlimited, right? it'll go to even a chair if you needed a new chair, but you only have a certain amount of money every single year under a state 9-1-1 grant to sort of fund that. And then occasionally we see, we have a common trend, so we use that, a lot of that to support our community engagement unit, right? And so we, it's not fund, we don't have no ARPA employees, we don't have any other grant employees that we're gonna lose, they're all budgeted employees, and we continue to kind of supplement what we do through grants.
[Tseng]: And for those grants that you brought up, does the city also have to pay in a certain amount for,
[Buckley]: match a certain amount or... In those, no. Occasionally, we'll see something like, you know, emergency management type grant where it'll be 50-50 and if we need something that we can afford to fund it that way, we'll do that. That's not a regular type basis, but I can't think of anything else where we're paying into the grants that we get are just fully... We spend the money, they reimburse us in the same fiscal year. Great. That's essentially how they run. Thank you. The ones we're using.
[Tseng]: Thank you so much for your answers. Thank you for your service, both of you. And we really appreciate your work. Thank you. Thanks, Councilor Callahan.
[Callahan]: Thank you.
[Buckley]: Lieutenant Caglioti.
[Callahan]: Yes, wonderful. Thank you both so much for being here and for all the work that you do all the time. I'm just curious, again, one of the newer city councilors. about how the estimates for court time work looks like from 40 to 60K and just curious about how you budget for that.
[Buckley]: He'll probably be able to get deeper into the numbers, but I'm going to explain this in real sort of like easy terms. Our officers are obviously required to go to court for many things that we do, right? So it's not just arrest, it could be criminal compliance, it could be witnesses to different things. Pre-COVID, so pre-2020, our court time budget, I think was $70,000, $75,000 a year. We sort of stretched it. Police officers were always going to court. But we carried that same budget, say, into 2020, 2021, 2022. And the courts have never really got themselves back. And actually we do a lot of whether it was zoom type court hearings and or just handling things and we didn't have a need to spend that much money. Now it's changed. Now it's starting to up the uptick is to go back. So we're, we're going to go over our line item this year on budget, we'll be able to cover it for this year. But based on that overage, we know that we have to increase for next year, because there will be more officers going to court. I don't know if you have anything you want to add, Lieutenant, but it's pretty ever since those changes.
[Gagliardi]: We just basically, let's have, if you could just speak into the microphone, sorry. Ever since those changes were implemented, we just basically took an average court times paid once a month on the second Wednesday, and we're just taking what the costs have been recently, once a month times 12, and that's all, that's basically it.
[Buckley]: And thanks for asking that question, because I got him to work now. At least he got to answer something. keep them up. But yeah, I mean, there's there's there's a few items like that, that because of, you know, 2020 and 2021, the post COVID or it's just we're coming back to normal now. And costs go up.
[Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Callahan. Thank you guys. Any further questions from members of the Council? Council Vice President Collins.
[Collins]: I don't have any questions. Very straightforward. Really appreciate it. But thank you so much for coming here every year and walking us through it.
[Buckley]: Thank you. Thank you for well, they might be more questions, but I do always appreciate the opportunity to talk about the police department. So it's, it's just appreciate it.
[Bears]: I have a few. So just a couple quickly is the accreditation through the post commission. Is that or is it a private accreditation?
[Buckley]: No, but it's an interesting question. It's a it's a private accreditation. It's a mass state accreditation. But yeah, your brain is working in the right direction. There is a lot of I have a lot of conversations with both the post commission and now the accreditation commission. And there's some thought that to help police departments become post certified in the future that they should be mass police accredited. If you are accredited, you're already meeting certain standards and will help the post commission. So it is my guess that that is going to happen. Okay, but it's not a requirement right now.
[Bears]: Kind of along the same lines, the education incentives a pretty big chunk of your budget. Is that mostly related to officer certification and like on duty related education? Or is it kind of wide open?
[Buckley]: That is related to college degrees. So there are certain collegiate degrees, criminal justice, and we've expanded over the years. So if you have that degree, you get paid X percentage amount. It used to be the old Quinn Bill that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts suddenly stopped funding. We do really feel like a lot of things. We do feel that having educated police officers, right? There's been numerous studies that educated police officers lead to better police public encounters, right? And I think it's been proven over and over again through study after study. This educational incentive simply goes towards that, right? And there's, throughout the years, the language on the contract has been adjusted. So, you know, for the first couple of years, you could get a percentage of that, but then after three to five years, three years, you get 50% of it, 100% after five years, based on degrees. We have so many educated officers that that number is higher, of course. But the other part is like, there's no way to really tell which police officer you currently have on your job that is seeking to obtain a degree or to increase their degree from say a bachelor's degree to a master's degree. So we always have to kind of budget to be able to cover any of those increased costs. And we always encourage them to go to school.
[Bears]: And just to clarify, so it's if they have the degree, there's an incentive pay, not that we're paying, or is it that we're paying for them to get the degree?
[Buckley]: We're not paying for them to get the degree. It's the after. It's the after. Once you have a degree, you get the incentive.
[Bears]: Great. Thank you. The recovery coach for fiscal 25, is that staying with the health department? Or I know that was kind of a grant funded and maybe in a tough spot.
[Buckley]: It's going to be grant funded and it's an open question, but we think for fiscal 25, it'll be within the police department.
[Bears]: Okay.
[Buckley]: Subject to change. Okay. So it is a lot of, there's still a lot going into that, including how much it's going to cost us, right? So.
[Bears]: I've got two more quick questions and I have a question on the head counts. The professional services, legal fees increase. Is that, is that going, I'm just wondering why it's outside of the law department budget.
[Buckley]: Well, there's a lot of other things that go into that account, right? So a lot of our professional fees that we have to pay for a police department. But since Bruin, which is like a lot of things have changed and you're getting challenged now on every single one of my decisions that are related to your license and with firearm, and there are legal fees, I get sued every single time.
[Bears]: Okay, so you're getting sued over firearms licenses, basically. Like weekly. Yeah, all right. Maybe not that much, but yeah. And then what is SonicWall?
[Gagliardi]: That's just our defense and our service systems.
[Bears]: Cool, yeah, I just didn't, it's got a fun name. All right, my last question is on the headcount. It's kind of a multi-parter. I think Councilor is saying, you answered the question, there's nothing that's ARPA funded that's coming onto the general fund in this budget. We're going from 102 to 107 on patrol and then one dispatcher. And I guess I'm wondering kind of two things. It's described as fixed cost growth, but to me it's new positions from fiscal 24. And I'm wondering if you could just go a little bit more into why that's being considered a not a new position, but a fixed cost change.
[Buckley]: We have maintained, we maintained and we have since I've become chief that, I was gonna say acceptable, but that's probably not the right word, but a workable number of police officers for this city is 112. Now, I will tell you that, and like everybody else, we'll talk about this one. In 98, when I became a police officer, we were at like 138, 130 something. And throughout the years, we've lost numbers That's the entire position, from chief down. And so today as we sit, we're at 97 looking to fill positions. Things have changed and we've adjusted. So sometime right before I became chief of police, the number was 112. That's an effective number to kind of carry that.
[Bears]: That's the patrol.
[Buckley]: That's for the entire department, chief down, 112. So we try to maintain that in our budget. And last year, and I think two years prior to that, I'd have to go back and look, when there was some budget matters that had to be resolved, we were cut 10 bodies each year. So we went from 112 to 102.
[Bears]: And so I misread. It's 102 to 107 across the board, not patrol. My apologies.
[Buckley]: Yeah. And then, but last year it was, it was 112 to 102 and then the year prior. So that's, it's sort of, they're not really new positions. So we're just looking to fund them back to try to get back to the one to provide effective public safety. Yes.
[Bears]: And the main reason I ask it is it is a difficult year. Um, and it sounds like we're just trying to get half of halfway back to where we wanted, where we were a few fiscal years ago. Um, I just want to raise that point because I think it's important for people to understand what's going on. And in the light of proposals in other departments, I mean, we're talking about net 20, maybe net 40 loss in the school department. We just need to have all the information out there to explain why things are happening the way that they're happening.
[Buckley]: I think it's a fair question. And I think I think I think you at least understand why we're pushing for doing this. I think if you review the budget, you can see that we've made cuts in other areas to try to kind of stay. I don't like the term level funded, but I think we all know what we're talking about to try to compensate for this because we do need people. Ultimately our job is a people's job.
[Bears]: I see the effort completely in the money. Some people are going to point to the headcount, you know, and I just think it's important to have a holistic conversation. My last two questions, you said you're at, so we're budgeted for 102 and we're at 97 right now? Yes. And so you're hoping to fill 10 vacancies hopefully if this budget goes through as is?
[Buckley]: Well, we're hoping to fill 10 bodies. We're in the process of trying to fill five right now. We're just early in the stages trying to get through that process.
[Bears]: Got it. And then, I think that's it. Do you expect any more retirements or vacancies this year?
[Buckley]: This fiscal year, we expect two to be, our term is aged out somewhere after January.
[Bears]: And are you having difficulties with the applications getting enough folks in to civil service and to training?
[Buckley]: So it's increased over the last few years. We expect to see it's We were told somewhere around 56 people took the civil service exam for police officer and that list will be able to view June 1st. So I don't really have an exact answer, but that number has increased from the last few years when that number was substantially lower than that. Of course, it's drastic from the 800 when I came on the job, but that's the nature of the game. I can't probably answer that question. I do know that we've gone through this current list, but come June 1st, there's going to be a brand new list. And we believe there's some 60, I'm sorry, 54, 56 individuals who have taken that test. And that's a positive for us when it comes to that. So we'll be able to look at it there and see where it goes. Civil service now has that test every year, as opposed to every two years. Okay.
[Bears]: Good. All right. Thank you. I know that was a bunch of questions. It's a big crowd out there.
[Buckley]: Yeah. What's going on?
[Bears]: It's orchestra. The orchestra is coming to perform their statewide winning award winning performance. So want to get them in here as soon as we can. Is there anything else you want to say before I open it up to the public very quickly?
[Buckley]: No, but I just, I will repeat myself. I owe the success of this police department to the police officers who are out there every day. And yeah, I can always highlight the detectives. I can always highlight my administrative staff. We do a bang up jobs. But it's the police officers that go out there every single day in the cruises and work overnights and holidays and weekends that really are the, you know, the depth of this police department. And I thank them for everything they do. And I'll leave it at that.
[Bears]: Awesome.
[Buckley]: Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Yeah, just looking to see if he had something else he wanted to say. Oh, can I also just one last thing? So I think Ronnie Tarantino is so Ronnie's the chief clerk and Ronnie's this is when I said this is my sixth budget in time flies. This is probably his 50th budget. He worked a long time with Chief Sacco and I appreciate him. He does everything with a pencil but he gets his numbers right and they're accurate. So I just want to point him out. Thank you for maintaining the pencil budget as long as we get it back there. But he's still maintains a big strong support for us, so I want to thank him. Thank you, appreciate it.
[Bears]: Thank you, Chief.
[Buckley]: Oh, yeah, we do have traffic supervisors.
[Bears]: I can go very quickly through that. Traffic supervisors, we're going from 357, 650 to 361, 525. My understanding is that's fixed costs under the union contract, 2%? Correct, yes. All right, any questions on traffic supervisors? Seeing none, on the Traffic Commission, we're going from 27,800 to 30,500. It looks like that's a 2,700 increase in materials. Do you want to speak to that?
[Buckley]: In the very simplest terms, the Traffic Commission has been extremely busy this past year, and we expect that we're going to maintain our busy. But every time we go to the Traffic Commission, somebody says, hey, can you put up a stop sign here? The bike was the post or any of those things that cost money and funds. And so we're looking for a very small amount of increase and kind of overcome some of that burden but that's what that funds are for the changes that the traffic commission as money for the Plex post coming from this but not all of it. I'm using that as an example. I'll be honest, man. I don't know exactly where, but all of the decisions we make as a traffic commission, when we ask for it, like as a handicap sign, those things cost money. And it's a struggle. We've been flat budgeted in line for that for years. And the costs of everything are going up. And I mean, it's hard to sit in the traffic commission and say, I don't want to get to a point where I say, no, we can't put that sign up because we don't have funds. The DPW does help us out. We do go beyond this and it does help us out with it. So there's always somewhere in there, but that's what the increase for that is for.
[Bears]: Okay, great. Any questions on the Traffic Commission, Vice President Collins?
[Collins]: Just wanted to say between things like the Post Commission and now FlexPost, you truly are working in an evolving field. So thank you again for your service.
[Bears]: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. Wonderful. With that, I'll open up to members of the public. Is there anyone here who would like to speak on the Police Budget or Traffic Commission or Traffic Supervisors either in person or on Zoom? You can come to the podium or raise your hand on Zoom. Seeing none, thank you, Chief. Thank you, Lieutenant. Is there a motion on the floor?
[Buckley]: Thank you very much.
[Bears]: Motion to adjourn by Vice President Collins, seconded by Councilor Callahan. Before we call, we won't call the roll, we'll just do a voice vote. We're gonna have an orchestra performance. We have some certificates to hand out. So stick around, we're gonna move to a different Zoom meeting, but we may not get to some of our business for a little while until we get that done. So I think it's a nice day, a good meeting. And with that, on the motion of Vice President Collins, seconded by Councilor Callahan. All those in favor? Opposed? Motion passes and the meeting is adjourned. See you soon in regular meeting.
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