[SPEAKER_05]: Medford City Council Committee of the Whole. May 15th, 2024. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. 7 present, 0 absent. Meeting is called to order. There will be a meeting of the Medford City Council Committee of the Whole at 6 p.m. in the City Council Chamber, 2nd Floor, Medford City Hall, 85 George B. Hassett Drive, Medford MA and via Zoom. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the Fiscal 2025 Budget as part of our annual budget process. This is Preliminary Budget Meeting No. 6. And we have the following departments present. Bonds and Interest, Debt Service, Elections, Electrical, Facilities, Fire, Information Technology, Law, Parking, and Public Works. At the request of Councilors, we will be taking the Fire Department first, and then the Parking Department, and then the DPW, and then we will go in alphabetical order. So I apologize to the Law Department. With that, we'll start with the fire department. We have Fire Chief Evans with us. Basically how we've been doing this is I'm going to read the budget and the difference between the prior year. I'm going to go through the change sheet on the second page. If there's anything that I missed or that you want to state, feel free to do so. And then we'd love to hear your narrative about what the department has been doing in fiscal 24 and what the plans are for fiscal 25. And after that, we'll go to questions from Councilors and then questions from the public or comments from the public if there are any. So does that sound good? Good. I know it's your first rodeo up here, so welcome. We're happy to have you. Medford Fire Department fiscal 24 budget was $14,536,023. Fiscal 25 proposed budget $15,126,017.29. Fiscal 24 budget was for 123 positions. Fiscal 24 budget was for 123 positions. Fiscal 25 budget is also for 123 positions. The increase is about 4%. And all of the change is in fixed cost growth, where we have, or the increase, I should say, new fire contract increases, step increases in promotions, and increase in the hazard duty pay. And it looks like there are some decreases in a number of line items as well, offsetting So, but the increase is mainly made up of fixed costs, as we have heard for every single department so far. So far, we have only heard two non-fixed cost increases, totaling about $60,000 in a $200 million budget. With that, I'll turn it over to you. If I missed anything, and we'd love to hear what your department's been up to and your plans for the next fiscal year.
[SPEAKER_19]: Right there? There you go. All right, sure. Yeah, we get the increases due to the contracts settled. Of course, we're aware of the financial constraints on the city to tighten up our belts on other items here, so we have reduced some other items there. But as far as last year goes, just want to hear what was going on in the fire department for the last year. Well, of course, we've been very busy. We've had several large incident fires. There's all obviously been some changes in the fire department here. We've had five people retire in the past year. Right now we have five New High is scheduled to go to the Academy in July. So eventually they'll kind of make up for those people that retired in the past year. But basically that's gonna be our primary concern going forward here is that right now there's 106, including myself right now, actually, here working in the stations. There are three people that are actually out on injury right now, so that reduces that more. So really, we wanna aim for trying to get more bodies in the stations working on the trucks because right now, the overtime has been significant just because We've had every time there's anybody out sick or on vacation, our minimum manning right now, we have 23 person minimum manning to be working on a shift. And we have four groups right now where there's roughly 24 people per group, A, B, C, D group. So with 23 minimum manning, Summertime is coming up. Typically, there are five vacation slots in the summertime weeks going on. So every time somebody is on vacation now, just because of the low amount of manpower that we have there in the groups, that does lead to overtime costs. And right now, there has been a a large increase in projects going on around the city at like Tufts at 121 Riverside with like welding details and things like that. There have been a significant there's been a significant increase in detail work also. So that's kind of factoring into also, you know, grabbing away time that people are spending at either doing details for that covering those things or overtime shifts at the station. So really our ultimate goal wishlist is to get more people hired, which is turns into a long process. The five that we have going to the academy was probably Probably like an 11 month process just to get them there. So hopefully we can work on getting that process started soon to start replacing more people that we do have one person that's going to have to mandatory retire in January. I'm sorry, February, but there are also five people that will have, there are five people that will have the time and age that they could just retire whenever they want. They could just tomorrow show up in my office and say, yeah, I think I'm gonna be going now. So there's five more right there that could potentially go away. So that's why I'm hoping that we can just start the hiring process soon to start getting more people into the stations here. to work on covering these overtime cost stoppings, slowing that down, and giving firefighters some time to catch up and come up for air because they've been putting in a lot of time in the stations, extra time. There are also grants that we're hoping to go for. We'd like to come up with some more grants this year. Lieutenant Danielle Masolino, she's been working very hard on looking for any grants that we can get. There's actually a grant for hiring firefighters. It's called the SAFER grant, which she did attempt to apply for. And we won't hear from that, the results of that probably until either July, August, September, around there maybe. She did attempt to put in for 11 firefighters, which is over $3 million worth of covering over three years. if you actually want to learn any more about that SAFER grant, she could speak on that. She's actually here that she could tell you more about that SAFER grant and actually like what we would... Kind of like the numbers that are in accordance with NFPA, the codes and things that tell you how many people you should be having respond to a house fire, the amount of people that should be showing up to a house fire, or the number of trucks that should be showing up on a response to an incident. in the levels of people staffed by your department, the SAFER grant kind of factors that into it. Like if it's seeing if your city is striving to try to hit those NFPA standards, they'll kind of like, it kind of works in your favor that they're looking for the departments that are trying to make that commitment. So I'm hoping that going forward in the future sometime soon, maybe. We can try to increase budgeted positions to work towards that, improve our standing to receive grants like that. Actually, Lieutenant Masolino actually did in the past year, get us a couple of nice grants. She did get us She got us a brand new cascade bottle system for refilling our breathing tanks, the tanks that we wear going into fires there. She got a grant to cover the expense of that. She also got a grant for us to receive 10 thermal imaging cameras that will be going on the trucks and replacing older thermal images that we used to have. So she's been working hard on finding money out there for us, and she's gonna continue doing that. Hopefully, I'm hoping that she's able to, she's gonna attempt to work on grabbing a possible grant that could help more community interaction. That's called, that's a Cummings grant that they give out to, municipalities only that have Cummings commercial properties in it. So Medford's eligible for that. I believe that's like a $100,000 grant, I believe, over three years. So she's working out on that stuff. It's quite an asset. And again, the other thing is, obviously, all of our work requires the right equipment to do it. And we do have an aging fleet of trucks right now. That is the other concern of us going forward. We ordered two, two new engines in 23. But The wait time on getting those trucks is at the time that we ordered those, the wait time was probably supposed to be 800 something days. I believe each truck was around 970 something thousand dollars at the time. They're telling us now that we probably won't see those trucks probably until 26. So, right now we have a couple trucks that are like 24 years old that we're just kind of, we're working hard actually. DPW has been great, Brendan and Mike Wentzel. They've been working very hard on maintaining the fleet for us, trying to keep it going. We've had to get creative with some repairs and seek out some companies that can help us out with those repairs. We're managing to hold it together, try to get us through to 26 to get those replaced, but hopefully going forward, we can come up with a plan of replacing new pumpers in a timely fashion, not letting us get to the point of having 24 year old trucks that are hard to maintain and keep together. But again, personnel is what we want to focus on going forward and try to increase that hopefully. Any questions?
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Thank you so much. I'm going to go. First, I want to say thank you for your presentation. And we did have Lieutenant Marcellino present a lot about the SAFER grant, about time has gone from even four to six weeks ago. So we did hear about that and really impressed by that work. And the trucks as well, you know, Chief Friedman was here talking about the 800 day timeline. And that's why we did approve the free cash allocation, even though it hasn't been spent yet, just to get in the queue. So I'm really glad.
[SPEAKER_19]: Would you like to hear any more about that safer grant from Lieutenant Marcelino?
[SPEAKER_05]: We heard more, but if she if she's welcome to share, I just want to go to the Councilors with their questions for you first. But go to Councilor Leming, Councilor Collins, Councilor Lazzaro. Anyone over here? No, not yet. Okay. And I think Councilor Scott probably has some questions too. Councilor Leming.
[SPEAKER_11]: This is just related to the free cash and getting the fire trucks. Just questions on the logistics of that. You said we're probably not going to get those trucks till 2026. When would they exactly be paid for? Do we give them the money now and then we get the trucks in 2026 or how would that exchange work?
[SPEAKER_19]: So, uh, I, I could, I could get you like the contract and all that stuff. And if you want, if you want me to get all that information to you, I can show you all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_11]: Um, I didn't bring the entire contract with me, but, uh, the, just to the question that I'm getting at is if we don't get the fire truck, uh, within the fist, the fiscal year that it's ordered, would that, could we just end up paying for that in a later fiscal year at a free cash or,
[SPEAKER_05]: It's already been budgeted for. There's a free cash appropriation approved by the prior council, so it's not in this budget.
[SPEAKER_11]: I'm just wondering when that money would actually go to the company.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not 100% sure on that, do you? I would have to check the specifics of the contract. I know we had to approve, they required for the order us to have approved that the money would be spent. I'm pretty sure it's an invoicing issue, like we'd get an invoice and pay it. That's my understanding, but I'm not sure at what point in the process they send that. I don't know if they send that after we get it delivered, because I also believe there's some provisions. We get it, and then you guys have to test it out and make sure it's working.
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: but I don't know, maybe the finance department could, procurement could let us know. Okay, thank you. We throw that in the committee report just to request procurement, let us know the timing of the free cash payment for the two fire engines. Any other thing, any questions, Councilor Leming? No, that was it, thank you. Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_17]: this is your first budget hearing as chief. So thank you so much for your service. Thank you for stepping up. Thank you for being here. We appreciate the overview. Just a couple quick questions for you on my end. The 123 positions budgeted for in this proposal, does that include the five firefighters that are heading to the academy in July?
[SPEAKER_19]: Yes. So the 123 is that's also in one of those positions is actually including our office manager and there's another one factored in there for the part-time office professional bid. So those aren't firefighters. Sure.
[SPEAKER_17]: Great. Thank you for that clarification. So hearing you talk about what's currently in the works and what, you know, the future forecasting for how to make the department stronger over time. I feel like you're talking really a lot about pipeline, like what's our pipeline for making sure that we can work more firefighters into the operating budget going forward? What's our pipeline for working more of those infrastructure and fire truck costs into the operating budget going forward with parallel tracks?
[SPEAKER_19]: So again, we should come up with a plan for going forward, a timeline for that. So, we can examine which trucks are going to have to be up next for replacement, come up with a plan for that. Again, get the personnel, we're going to need the personnel and get them get the training done and keep on getting everybody else extra training. They'll be training on the new trucks and That's going to take up some time also. Once you receive the trucks in 26, you're putting them on the road and getting people qualified on them, going over them, learning the ins and outs of the new trucks, and that'll take a little time too. So it's not immediate. It's not quite immediate that you get them and boom, they're off and running. Yeah, certainly that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's important to know. Everything takes a little time. Sure.
[SPEAKER_17]: Right. There's like a lag time to all of this. There's a lag time between appropriating for increasing hires and increasing recruitment and that actually coming to fruition. There's a lag time between finally, you know, 800 days later receiving that truck and then being able to put it into use. Obviously, in the future, you know, I think this council shares the priority of wanting to be able to move more additional positions into the operating budget over time when our fiscal picture isn't quite so austere. On the truck side, that seems to me like something that really straddles operating budget and capital plan. Has that been a conversation so far of kind of ramping up, you know, kind of this being an ongoing investment, working that into the city's capital improvement plans that we can be purchasing and repairing trucks
[SPEAKER_19]: we're still going to have to work on the conversation about that. Because right now we just have the two that are in the pipeline right now that we've talked about so far. So going forward, we'll come up with a plan for that.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Just a quick follow up on that. After the two 24-year-old vehicles, what's the next oldest?
[SPEAKER_13]: 19 years okay, and then 16 years okay
[SPEAKER_19]: And we have a couple trucks that are 10 years old and a couple trucks that are six years old.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what generally would be the recommendation of how old the truck should be? When would we start calling it an old truck?
[SPEAKER_19]: Probably 10 years. The amount of runs that Medford is doing and kind of beating them up. So yeah, that's kind of like the time that we should be starting to think about turning it over. Got it. Councilor Lazzaro.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is similar to the question that Councilor or Council Vice President Collins asked, but there's an asterisk on the bottom. Sorry, I didn't say thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. To reiterate, there's an asterisk on the bottom under the personnel services summary that says eight firefighters are anticipated to start in January. How is that? There's no change between the 2024 budgeted firefighters and the 2025 budget firefighters. Are eight people retiring and eight people are starting? How does that move around?
[SPEAKER_19]: No, I believe that asterisk is regarding hopefully the Starting a process on getting them hired. So we so that will be then factored into So there may be so that's probably anticipating like the long process of starting Doing background checks and then all the other things that come along. It'll take a little time process of like how I said they started the process back in August 23 to start hiring the new guys. And it was a long process of getting them all squared away before they can actually get their seat in the academy.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, before they even start the academy.
[SPEAKER_19]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: How long are they in the academy?
[SPEAKER_05]: The current batch of five, it was five started in August 23, and they're going to the academy this July.
[SPEAKER_19]: So they didn't, that was just the starting the process of ask calling for the civil service list. selecting the name, taking like, I think they took 20 names off the civil service list, asked them to show up for, you know, say to just come show up and see who's interested. I think 18 actually appeared. And then they began the process of how they hired a company to do background investigations on them. And then eventually, once they got down to the five, finally, after interviews and things like that, psych exams, physical ability tests, and things like that. It ends up being a long process, and then you gotta hope that the academy is gonna have spots for them. So that's the other end of it. Once you get them through that, the process on our end, you gotta call the academy and see if they have seats available to take them. So, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I have one more question, if that's okay. What, in your view, would be a fully staffed fire department for Medford?
[SPEAKER_19]: Over the years, 106 is certainly the lowest that we've been at. This is the lowest that I've ever seen it. But, I mean, probably 2013, we were at 124. And that's like the highest that we've been in the last decade or so. So it's just kind of like you get retirements and you can't keep up with the pace of hiring more people to replace the retirements. The department's obviously been aging out over the years and we just haven't kept up with replacing.
[SPEAKER_04]: But this is like a goal, this is a goal amount of staff. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Any further questions for the Fire Department? Councilor Scarpelli?
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm good for now, Council President. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, good. Great. All right. Seeing none, I just had one quick question. The 23 per group minimum manning, is that Is that coming from the NFPA? Is that a contractual requirement? Is it based on an NFPA suggestion?
[SPEAKER_19]: That's just what they've had in the contract for I'm not sure how many years now. Five, maybe five years or so.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. All right. That was my question. Any further questions from members of the council?
[SPEAKER_06]: Councilor Sanders. Not necessarily a question. I think there may be more questions when the final budget comes out, but I wanted to thank you for your service. I know it's not been easy. I know it's not been an easy time to be our fire chief. We really appreciate it. All we hear is praise for you from everyone. And I think that speaks a lot to your leadership. I don't know who's saying such things. I'm sure we'll hear more from our firefighters. We want to make sure that we are getting those grants, that we are spending the money we need to get that extra benefit. That's not only healthy for the fire department, it's healthy for our city financially as well. That's going to be top of mind for me going into this budget season. I appreciate your presentation. Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Are there any comments by members of the public?
[SPEAKER_19]: just want to say I would just want to thank again the DPW IT Rich Lane he's been great and facilities, Paul's been fantastic. I mean, over the years, there's one of the issues with buildings in Medford is clearly that we build buildings and we've let them kind of fall apart. And Paul has been on it like, Paul's been on it great, but if there's a problem, Paul jumps on it and gets it fixed. We used to have, You might've seen them. We had the windows in fire prevention. I mean, since 2018, they used to, every time it rained, there was like a waterfall coming in through the windows all over the rugs. And Paul found out about it and he got somebody right in there recently and got it all fixed up for, so again, Paul's been doing a great job. So we appreciate that very much.
[SPEAKER_05]: We love DPW and facilities as well. IT's okay.
[SPEAKER_19]: All right, thank you so much. Oh, and building department. I can't forget building department. They show up whenever we have a late night emergency or something like that. And we absolutely need that. We need to keep the scene safe and they show up and take care of those issues for us. So thank them also. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. And of course, my fantastic firefighters. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, firefighters.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a laundry list of these podiums. You got it. Mr. Buckley, name and address, record, please.
[SPEAKER_12]: Walter Buckley, 340 Salem Street, Method. I just want to have a few comments. The first one is our staffing right now, you guys were talking about, we're budgeted for 123. One of them's the clerk, so it's 122. One of them's the chief, so it's 121. But we only have 106 members. So as we're talking about the summer that comes around where minimum manning is 23, five guys are on vacation. That means 19 people are coming in. That's a guaranteed four overtimes during the day and four overtimes during the night. pretty much all throughout the summer. So I saw that the overtime budget was being cut. That might be an issue going forward. Also on the trucks, we have an aging fleet. We have two trucks that are supposed to be coming in 2026. No plans right now for any more trucks. And I saw on the budget that some of the maintenance was also being cut. I don't think it's a good idea to cut truck maintenance when you have an aging fleet and nothing coming. in the new year on this budget anyway. I think that's all I have. Lieutenant Marcelino is going to talk about the SAFER grant and she'll tell you more about staffing for trucks. According to NFPA standards, we're below that right now. I believe the NFPA standards for us is five per truck. We have three per truck. So that's also an issue with staffing. Our main goal for the union is we need more members because more members work. And we don't have to do details every day. Overtime is every day. You know, some guys are working five or six days a week and you're working 24 hour shifts in the overtime and the details, you know, we're getting worn out. And I don't think it's sustainable to do it with 105 members, to be honest.
[SPEAKER_03]: Danielle Masolino, 11 Spencer Road. I come with all of the nerdy information that some of you are asking. So, Councilor Lazzaro, you asked about being fully staffed. There really isn't like a whole number that you would say would be fully staffed. But just to give a perspective of the history of the fire department, back in 1989, we were at our we say heaviest, there was 170 firefighters back in 1989, and we did 6,200 runs that year. We're currently staffed at 107, and we did 12,450 runs last year, approximately. So we're doing an infinitely larger number of runs versus how few firefighters we have. If you go into the NFPA standards, which is what governs our you know, safety guidelines. They like President Buckley said about 55 people on each engine and whatnot. They recommend based on low, medium, and high hazards. And with our city being the construction that it is and the number of high rises that we have, they actually consider us a moderate hazard instead of the low hazard that we wrote the grant to. So what they would consider appropriate staffing would be five on each engine and six on each ladder, which would actually be a staffing of 37 every day versus the 23 that we staff right now. We, with the grant, we were hoping to shoot for at least four on each piece of apparatus, and we ended up having to cut it down to the 11, which gets under that. So we'd probably have, I think, if we got the grant, and every single person came to work that day, we would be able to staff up to, I think, four on each engine company, or four on four engine companies, and then three on the other additional pieces. So it's better. But when we're talking about safety and Chief Evans spoke about, you know, where we're going in the future, we would like to see those numbers go up so that we have, you know, the more we have working on the fire ground, obviously, the safer it is overall. And the closer we get to those numbers, the more, the closer we're gonna get to being able to get rated. We go into ISO rating, or I'm sorry, our staffing level gets classified. And once we're classed, if we're a class one department, that actually reduces the ISO rating for the city, which would in turn reduce the taxes on that. on the citizens and things like that. So it's like kind of all works together. That's, you know, it's not just because we like to hang out with more people at work. It's that, you know, the whole thing actually plays into the city. I don't think what else I had. The grant, I know I spoke about it a lot the last time I was here. So I mean, that was like $3.9 million, if we get it. So that goes, the grant season is, the award season is between September 1st, or August 1st and September 31st. So hopefully, we'll be able to get something. And should we get awarded that, those 11 would go towards our staffing numbers, and that would actually bring us up to the 122. So with the additional five that we have going to the Academy, we would be fully staffed with that grant. And then the 11 would be paid for by the federal government, which is a better sell. But anything beyond that, I don't know if anybody else has any questions.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just have one. On the NFPA standards, do they also have like a formula for like the size of a city, number of high rises, like how many engines and ladders you should have?
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I don't think they have it for, I can look into that, but I don't think there's a set formula for that. But what they do recommend is number of personnel showing up to a call and the low hazard for a first alarm house fire that are kind of like ours, it would be 17 on the first alarm. We just barely get there.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, because there's only 23 people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, no, and it goes into the people that are actually staffed for that group. There's other little details with it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is that 17 firefighters?
[SPEAKER_03]: 17 firefighters on the first alarm. And then that only speaks to two-story wood construction on slab. um slab foundation so no basement so no basement and no attic um we go further because we have the attic the basement the blue frame there's all the other details with us so we would be a little bit higher than that yeah um but i can find out exactly what they what they have to say about that if you want thank you
[SPEAKER_12]: We've actually gone to the IFF, which is our parent union, and they are conducting a study on the City of Method. And I don't know how long it's gonna, probably gonna take a couple months anyway, but they're gonna give us all that information that we'll obviously send out forward to you guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: It comes with, like, a really nice formatted presentation that's, like, really easy to work with, and you'd be able to go through it and click and go to the standards and look at that kind of, you know, look at all the details of it on your own. We'd obviously try to present it to all of you if we had time, if you had time. But, yeah, it's going to speak to all of that as far as, like, how many piece apparatus, how many members we should have working. you know, the age of our fleet, it talks about everything, which is great. So we're really looking forward to having that all done.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any further comment from anyone on the fire department budget in person or on Zoom? Did I miss a question? Councilor Leming, sorry.
[SPEAKER_11]: I just had a question because Chief Buckley mentioned that the maintenance services are being cut and I'm seeing the line item here for motor services going from 75 to 65 and motor repair supplies going from 120 to 100, but it looks like the actuals for the motor services is about 5,000. Sorry, it was about 5000 this year. And the actuals for the motor repair supplies is about 36,000. So is that is that it's kind of like typical utilization of that line item? Year to year? Is this just uniquely? Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Fellow President, I'm very disappointed that you would demote President Buckley. Sorry.
[SPEAKER_12]: I believe the real chief didn't speak on that.
[SPEAKER_11]: My apologies. My apologies. It was a slip.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay. We had some solidarity there.
[SPEAKER_11]: And that was recorded too. So, okay. Oh, man. It's going to be a long night. Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: Councilor Leming, you were asking about the actual usage for the vehicle maintenance and repair. Yes.
[SPEAKER_11]: I was focusing on the motor services expenses. It says that the actuals so far this year were about $5,000 out of a $75,000 allocation. That is as of December 31. Well, even so, the actuals are typically a little bit over 50%, but that just seems very low given the amount. So I don't know if this is just a unique year where we haven't had a whole lot of repair problems. Would you say that that's typical?
[SPEAKER_19]: Again, with the aging fleet, the aging fleet, that could go up, that could change. So I think that's just a hopeful number.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is there any expense that is being paid out of the DPW budget for the repairs of your vehicles? No. Other than the staffing? No. The fleet maintenance?
[SPEAKER_19]: No. We have to still buy lots of tires for trucks and things like that. There's a whole bunch of things that we constantly replace for certain parts of the trucks that get worn out. consistently.
[SPEAKER_11]: I guess the nature of the question is do you typically go under your allocated repair budget? Are there some years where it's higher, some years where it's really low? What does that usually look like?
[SPEAKER_19]: It could go higher, sure. Especially right now, we're trying to kind of band-aid some things here and there. So just to save his eye, his vision because he's
[SPEAKER_03]: My printing is very, very small. In 23, they budgeted $50,000 for vehicle maintenance and repair. And we actually went over, we were at $81,463. And then vehicle supplies was budgeted at $85,000. And we went over to, it was $95,343. And years past, it looked pretty much the same. Is that fiscal 23? This was this was last year's budget. So the fiscal year 24. But that was the 23 actual. Okay. And then 22. Same thing. 22 budgeted was 50,000.
[SPEAKER_13]: And the actual was 76,259.
[SPEAKER_03]: For maintenance and the vehicle supplies was budgeted at $80,000 and we went over at $85,000. The past years were pretty much the same. The only time it was a little bit less was when I think the other mechanic was more dedicated. I think he was kind of dedicated to our department, so it was a little bit less in the maintenance realm, but the supplies was just as high. So, and then our fleet's getting older, so it's just going to get worse from here. Okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. The chief of staff.
[SPEAKER_14]: I may have some slightly different information. I'm not sure, but for purposes of providing the council the information that was asked. I have motor services, FY23 actual $34,000, 20 actual $54,000, 21 actual $26,000, 22 actual $51,000, 23 actual, I did hear $82,000. There's another line that is motor repair supplies. I have $66,000 out of what is a $120,000 budget. $50,000, $50,000, $85,000, $104,000. Today's actuals, presently, are $43,000, roughly, call it $44,000, and $67,000, respectively. And also, just on the question of whether any other budgets like TPW cover, I agree, not the materials, but obviously the labor and the overtime is covered by TPW.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Just for our edification and edification of the public in the future, is it possible to include the prior actuals in the ClearGov presentation?
[SPEAKER_14]: That's a good question. I can certainly ask our folks to look into that. I know ClearGov, you know, has, I know we have the prior year actuals in ClearGov. I'm not sure how much it can load. It's a good question though.
[SPEAKER_11]: Cool, thank you.
[SPEAKER_14]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_11]: Just generally speaking, it would be useful, although I realize it could be a lot more effort for first-year Councilors to kind of see how these budgets have progressed over the years, just for context.
[SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, absolutely. I just actually asked our assistive finance director to send me the information.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_14]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great, thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I actually have a question for the chief of staff. These are all the budgets that were printed off of the city's website, off of ClearGov.
[SPEAKER_05]: ClearGov had inaccurate information. Inaccurate? Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, so these are not the budgets that we used?
[SPEAKER_05]: The actuals data in ClearGov, we discussed this in the last budget, was not all uploaded correctly. So the budget data, like what was the budget for fiscal 24, the budget amounts were correct. But my understanding is that actuals data was not all accurate that was uploaded. Because if you look at it, there's like a fiscal 21 in there where it says the city spent like $50 million. That's obviously not true.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I didn't go back. I mean, some of them I did. I went back, I think, until 2020, but the ClearGov ones I would have assumed because we went to that nice new software.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, there was definitely some issues with the information that was uploaded, and we did talk about it last year, and we've already talked about it this budget cycle about making sure that whatever is put up there is accurate. Very good.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And hopefully that there's a lot of it for many prior years.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. All right, seeing no hands raised and no one at the podium for the Fire Department, we're going to move to the Parking Department. We have Director Morrison with us. Director Morrison, I'm going to quickly read the budget figures and then you can correct any mistakes that I make. Oh, you won't make any mistakes. We would love to hear any kind of highlights for this year, things you're planning for next year. And then one thing, which I forgot to ask Chief Evans, but he did give it to me anyway. Anything that you're planning for in the future that wasn't included in this budget? No, and he already got me. You know, you want to come back up? He got he filled it in its staffing it's the engine so we got there but I didn't ask it formally so if there's stuff that's not in here, but that your department needs and is planning for in future budgets we'd love to hear about that too.
[SPEAKER_16]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I will just quickly say we have the parking department fiscal 24 budgeted 1,015,559, fiscal 25 budget 951,563.80. That is a reduction of 63,995.20 and about a 6% reduction. There's also a reduction in the headcount from 13 to 12. It looks like the loss of one clerk position. And then there were some fixed cost increases for the, looks like for non-union 2% contract and minor ordinary increases, but also a significant reduction in professional services of 70,000 related to having the new parking meters. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Director Morrison.
[SPEAKER_15]: Okay, well the first thing I want to correct is we didn't really lose a position. When we started, because we didn't have enough technology in the transition, we had more staff in the office because we were doing everything with paper and by hand. Now that we are operating totally within our new system, as two part-time clerks left, I re-evaluated what we needed, and so we changed that to one part-time clerk with more hours that served what we needed, and it's working out very well.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for the correction.
[SPEAKER_15]: Okay, I just want to make it sound like they cut a position because that's not what I actually did that because I want the office to reflect what we need. And we didn't just didn't need that extra staff.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Thank you. Okay, floor is yours highlights of the year and plans for next year.
[SPEAKER_15]: Okay, so the highlights of the year, obviously, is we've now transitioned a lot of the old stuff out of the system and we're almost totally just our new operating system. We have a couple more things left. For example, when I took over, there were $2 million in tickets, unpaid tickets. We have whittled that down to about $8,000 now. and collected a lot of that money. And the last bit of it is straggling. And now as people are trying to get their registry holds released. So that's been exciting to start moving that out and be operating in our own system.
[SPEAKER_05]: You said $2 million down to $8,000.
[SPEAKER_15]: It was like $1,999,000, but basically $2 million. Pretty good, worse. So that's reflected in what you see in our income and how it's high at this time because we are collecting that old money. At some point, I think we'll settle into a little over a million dollars a year. We're obviously covering our budget, which was a request when I was interviewed to make sure that we were paying for ourselves, for lack of a better term, and we are doing that. And I was able to cut the budget as much as I was because technology and using that technology has allowed us to save in other costs. So you'll see like GTechness costs went up significantly, but that's only because we're buying more technology from them. But it looks like it went down in that professional services because as we put in the new equipment, and the old equipment comes out, we're not paying that vendor anymore for the processing. So that money starts to disappear, and we'll start to see just the three legs of our own system at some point, and those figures will start to settle as well. But this year, GTechNA, along with GTechNA, We are developing a couple of new things. One of them is the GL zone that I'm sure you've all heard about. So that is my staff has been involved in getting that permit developed and getting all that information into the system and, and have it ready to go and which we are, and we're ready to start that on July 1. We are proposing, and I'm sure when we come before this body because we've been asked for it, some temporary passes. So for folks who are moving into the city and need something for a moving truck for the day, or someone who has a workman in for more than the two days that the visitors pass. covers that comes with the permit. These two and three day temporary passes will allow those people to park on the street and operate. Landlords who can't get permits because they don't live in the city and can't get visitors passes because they don't live in the city can access those temporary passes. So that's Something that most of your surrounding communities offer, and it's been there's been a lot of asking for it and so we've developed that and we were hoping that that's something that the city will adopt Jim Silva who has been just and a measurable resource has been very successful in this year and bringing together parking stakeholders that didn't think they were so like engineering and myself and planning, and the chief we meet on a regular basis. to start developing communication streams. So like, I know when someone's going to be digging up the road, because they're not calling engineering when someone digs up their road. They're calling parking. And then we have to tell them, we don't know what you're talking about. So we're trying to develop those communications. It is going very well, so that everybody knows what's going on and can answer those questions when they come across our desk. We also have started this year assisting engineering in distributing the no parking signs for different projects, trenching projects and that type of thing. Because we're now charging them for those signs, we weren't before, but we should have been. And so because we're close to Treasury, we've volunteered to take that part on and people can come down with their permit and purchase the signs from parking. The other thing that we have also instituted this year is charging for the paid spaces when a vendor, when someone comes in and wants to do work in that area, sometimes they're there for 90 days. And so that the city doesn't lose that income, they rent those spaces from us and then purchase the parking signs as well in order to do the work. So we're just trying to have a more organized, So we know what's going on in our city. And if someone calls and says, you know, someone's digging up my street and it's not on that list, then we know we can call inspectional services and they go over and shut it down because they shouldn't be doing that. And I'm just surprised at how often it happens. So I'm happy to see that we're moving towards having more organization around that and for parking to be part of it. The other thing, which is a big thing for my office, we found out in January that we are being honored by the International Mobility Parking Institute for technology and innovation. And so we'll get that award in Columbus, Ohio on June 11th. where I will also be making a presentation about this department, because it's unheard of to have a parking department go from zero to 100 in four months. It just doesn't happen. It's an 18-month project. And so people out there are very interested in how we did it. It was a lot of collaborative work. not only with people here at City Hall, but with the vendors that we also brought on board, and also being able to utilize nontraditional ways of bringing those people on board. RFPs, people tend to use for those, but there are all kinds of lists, SourceWell, MAPC, Omni, things of that nature, where the state has done all the vetting of these folks, and so you can bring them on without having to do the RFP process, which we had to use to move so quickly. So that's exciting, and I'm looking forward to that. So that's a lot of the highlights. Just being up operational, we could be better staffed. If we had five more staff people in the parking control enforcement end, I think we could get more work done. That still continues to be a struggle, and we get a lot of calls from residents. You know, wanting to know why we can't do more. We just do what we can do with the resources that we have. So that is some of the highlights. Some of the things that we're looking forward to, the jail zone starting in July, obviously. The new passes that I talked about. We're also looking to restore some of the technology that was in the cars that would allow us to do LPR. like they did before, like Reef was doing before. And that would be helpful for us for two reasons. We're short-staffed, and that technology helps us with staffing. But also, it helps with the folks who are working alone in the overnight shift, and it provides them a little bit more security, since they wouldn't have to get out of the car. And that's important to me, because it should be at least a minimum of a two-man overnight crew, which we just don't have at the moment. We have someone working 4 to 12 and then we have someone 3 to 11. I would like to increase that staffing at night, you know, so that they have support.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, congratulations to your department and the incredible work that you've done. Thank you. And I'm glad to see that it's being honored as it should be.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any questions from members of the council? Councilor Lazzaro, Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_04]: I wasn't expecting the parking department to be so inspiring, but thank you. Very happy to hear this information. And what an exciting thing that you've really turned things around and paying for your whole own department functionally. That's great. And if there is any kind of concrete way that we can help support the hiring of more enforcement officers in the future, I can say that I can see evidence of the need for that in the community. So I do understand that being something that is a critical need, but congratulations on all of your hard work. It's very evident.
[SPEAKER_15]: I have a very hard working crew. I remind people that although I put it together, it is my staff that makes it happen. I'm not writing one ticket, so. I do appreciate them, because what we've done has even surprised me, because this is not what I promised at first. I said, you know, a couple of years, maybe, we'll be able to support ourselves. So I'm very happy that we're doing it, but a lot of that is collecting that old money, which was very, I know when I first started, there was all these rumors about how it was $10 million and $5 million. It was actually a little under $2 million, and we've just about collected it all.
[SPEAKER_04]: Great work. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_15]: You're welcome.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you. Thank you for being here and I want to also offer my congratulations.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_17]: It's the product of a lot of hard work and I think it really shouldn't go unsaid. It is pretty remarkable to go from having this like very, very normal municipal service be completely out of house completely contracted to bring that in house. That's something I was always excited about. And it's really quite amazing to see that become self-sufficient so quickly. So thank you for your leadership. I know it. I know like any major transition, it's been a rocky road at times. Yeah, it is. Just really one quick question. I know you spoke already to transitioning from some software and technological vendors to others. I noticed the biggest line item change was the decrease of 70,000 under professional services, financial. Is that what you're talking about?
[SPEAKER_15]: That's what I'm talking about. So basically, I try not to throw the names out there because, you know, I try to be fair to them. But basically, as we are replacing the flow birds, which are very old and have been very expensive to maintain, and we're putting in the new equipment, that's allowed us to have that drop. We're not paying them the processing fees for that. When I started, we were paying them about $67,000 a year. And this year we will pay them $8,000 because we've started to work their machines out of the system. There is a program called Meters for Trees that we're looking at to take the last 12 out of the system because of where they are over on Boston Ave, kind of a long walk. We would put signs up for just pay by phone there. And then the for every meter we take out the pay by phone corporation would donate a tree to the city to be planted somewhere. So we're looking that's one of the things we're looking at for the next fiscal year. I think it's a great idea. I'm sorry that the tree warden is probably hearing about this now I haven't had a chance to meet with her. But it is my plan to reach out to the tree warden and bring her into this, because obviously she would play the role in deciding where all of that went if we go with that program. And I think it would be the best way to remove the last vinyl of the old infrastructure out of the system. Because if not, if we have to wait to replace it, you're talking about $60,000, $70,000 to replace it. And I think it's where it is and where it is. We've had some issues with vandalism. I don't know how much you've heard. But it would cut down on that too, because it's just not an area that at night that's very populated. So it just lends itself to that kind of mischief. But if the machines aren't there, and the parking is still there, because the signs will be there, you just have to use pay by phone. So you wouldn't have the cash option and those options. But I think that we're talking about 12 machines, not the whole city. And I think it would work in that area. And so I'm hoping that we all get a chance to move that forward.
[SPEAKER_17]: Well, I think that's a really exciting idea. And I think the parking department, you know, how expensive it was to use an outside contractor, you know, that we're keeping that in house now that the city is, you know, these are city employees now and kind of, in a lot of ways, it's talking about return on investment. And wow, when you talk about getting like 12 trees donated, I think one of the many shocking things you learn behind the rail, how expensive it is to plant a single tree is one of them. So I really, I'm really excited by that creative idea. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_15]: I am also with pay by phone. We are looking at, the businesses have been looking at some parking that they could pay for, like some of the doctor's offices that are here in Medford Square, limited parking. I've had a lot of feedback from them. Pay by phone has a system where they could pay for their patient's parking before they even show up. And all they would have to do is find a space somewhere in the zone. and go in for their appointment. And so just streamline the process, whether they charge them for the parking or not is up to them, but we can make that service available for them.
[SPEAKER_17]: That's a great idea. And one more thing, I just didn't quite catch, you were talking about We've only got a new type of permit for vendors that are parking temporarily while they're doing work. Is that like for contractors?
[SPEAKER_15]: Well, I don't call those permits because they're not permanent. They would be passes. So we're talking about a one day moving van pass for people who are moving in and out of the city, and a two and three day parking pass for either someone who's coming in and doing repair work, or a landlord that's coming in and working on their building. We've had a lot of landlords that are just in this position where if there's no one actually renting their place at the moment, they don't have access to a visitor's pass. And due to our requirements for residency, they are not eligible for one. So this would allow them to come in and temporarily do that. And it's not something long term, which is not. We're trying to make sure that the residents have room to park. And that's what the G Zone is all about as well, giving people options off just their street to park, because no streets are even here. Some streets are smaller, some streets are longer. So we're hoping that that experiment will bear good fruit and we can collect good data from it and allow us to maybe spread it around.
[SPEAKER_17]: Great. Thank you. And that makes sense. I appreciate that explanation. And last thing I will say as a longtime resident of the GLX zone and a person who lives on a very short street, really excited for July.
[SPEAKER_15]: Well, we're trying. And like I said, I can't take all the credit for that. But I'm happy to assist Jim in these projects and moving them forward. And like I said, having someone who isn't the director of any of those departments when we get together, be that head person, makes it easier because nobody is in charge. He is. And so I think it's allowed us to move things a little bit smoother and quicker, having that kind of voice here to bring kind of rope us all in.
[SPEAKER_17]: No, it's been in the works for a long time.
[SPEAKER_15]: So I'm happy to see it happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Vice President Collins. Speaking for the tree enthusiasts, all I can say is no Bradford pears.
[SPEAKER_15]: I'm going to leave that to you. I'm not a tree expert. I would never even try.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's about all I got. We have Councilor Scarpelli.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you very much for all your hard work. You can see the impact because of, I think that, oh boy, when you first started, we were calling the office on a daily basis and now we don't have many calls and that says a lot about department that, you know, unfortunately, people look at like, it's evil. So but we know, we get it.
[SPEAKER_15]: We're never gonna be loved. We get it. We're just trying to do the best we can for the residents because we are invested in and doing our part to make things better for the city.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, I appreciate it. So I think that the only question I had is I remember that we had talked in the past that for your comfort, I know that your office was a little. How can I say it was underwhelming? Have we done any anything to support you? And in your comfort level in your department? Is that have we done anything to help with that?
[SPEAKER_15]: Oh, I know there was there were a lot of people looking at it, but I think that the determination was that it wasn't cost effective to do anything. At least that's my understanding. Maybe the chief of staff or Paul Reggie can give you a better answer.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay, well, I think whatever, whatever we're doing, there's got to be there's got to be a solution where we can find you know, hopefully find a more suitable location for you, especially as we're growing and as you're taking on pretty important pieces. I mean, I know that it doesn't sound like a lot, but just doing the passes for projects or for moving, that's going to be a very busy office. And, you know, and if you look at neighboring communities, Boy, they're standalone buildings. And from what I recall, yours is possibly a cubicle. So I would hope that we a little bit more proactive and finding you a better location or another space in the building where you have that space that you and your staff deserve. So I just wanted to share.
[SPEAKER_15]: The upside of our space, sir, is that when people come in and pay, at least the treasury office is close. It's right across the hall. And so they don't have to wander far when they're coming in to pay. So six of one, half dozen of the other. Okay, thank you. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. I have some questions. I don't know if the chief of staff or facilities director want to talk about the office space at all in the parking department and we've been able to make.
[SPEAKER_14]: Hi, thank you. Never easy to say. It's challenging to take on something that I agree is needed. In this case, there was, I don't want to speak to the technical matter of it. I defer to our facilities director, Paul Riggi, but it's one that, you know, has some load bearing walls. It has issues with, you know, the ceiling spaced above. And when we went out for quotes or bids, my recollection is it was a $50,000 cost. So I didn't, never wanted to say to our parking director that we couldn't do that, but that is kind of, it became cost prohibitive. So that's what I can offer. If there are any questions that I can answer, I'm happy to, or I can certainly point in the direction of our facilities director.
[SPEAKER_05]: Understood. I hope in the future we can find a way to, to make some changes. And you know, you say 50,000.
[SPEAKER_14]: Did I say 50,000? Yes.
[SPEAKER_14]: That's my recollection. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah. Yes. Facetiously, maybe we should maybe make an office move from city solicitor's office and the traffic and parking. Maybe that might work.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm glad we're in such a lighthearted mood this evening, but that landed the way that it did. Thank you, Madam Chief of Staff for the answer. I just had a couple questions you've answered most of them without me having to ask them, which I always appreciate. Just to confirm the suggestion of additional staffing the department was sometime in the future it would be beneficial to have as many as five additional parking and five additional parking folks would allow us to have at least be minimally staffed.
[SPEAKER_15]: And I think it would also allow us to respond to requests. It's very frustrating when people call us and say, you know, someone's parked on my street or someone's blocking. We have to refer them to traffic because some days at that time I might just have one person there and there's only so much one person can do. And so it'd be nice to be able to give a better answer than that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. And the LPR, the license plate readers, I just didn't catch it. Are those going in on the parking department vehicles or the police?
[SPEAKER_15]: We have two vehicles that we inherited that have it on there, but it was so broken when we got it that when I had our vendor look at it, he said it's just too cost prohibitive to fix it. So I waited until I could budget for it to reintroduce it into the system, and they'll be here in early June to fit two of the vehicles that we have with that technology.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. And one other thing, and it's come up a little bit, but I just wanted to speak to it directly. You know, ever since we've made this transition, one of the concerns has been the safety of the staff in your department, both folks out in the street and quite frankly, folks at the window. Has that situation improved at all?
[SPEAKER_15]: Oh my goodness, yes. It really has. You know, we're never gonna make 100% of the city happy, but I gotta say that probably 95% of the people are very gracious at that window. You're always gonna have. that one or two people who just don't want to pay their ticket or feel like they were ticketed unfairly. We do have an appeals process and we encourage people to appeal their ticket if they feel like that's happened. But we also have a very good system and I'm not saying that we don't make mistakes, everyone does, but we make very few because there's no pressure from me for a quota of tickets. I want the ones they write to be good ones and correct and stand up to an appeal. They take a lot of supporting pictures to assist in that. And the parker can see the pictures that we've taken. So that's unusual. Most departments keep those pictures for the appeals process. But when I started here, I realized that we were doing such a culture change that I wanted people to see transparently what the process was. So once we usually go in and show them the pictures, that usually tamps down their anger because we're just showing them. what we did. And so that's made it much easier. But LPR will be helpful, especially with the new zone, but nothing replaces having eyes on the ground, boots on the ground. You really need that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. Thank you so much. Councilor Scarpelli.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you. I apologize. I should have brought this up. And director reminded me that on the on the appeals process, I know that is it? I haven't really had a chance to look through it. And someone just mentioned it this afternoon, and wanted me to ask a question. Is it? Is it just people that the talk the talk around Medford again with the appeal process being something to the tune of $250?
[SPEAKER_15]: No, we don't charge for an appeals process, but someone has the right. If they appeal the ticket and they don't like the decision, anyone in Massachusetts that gets a ticket can go to their county courthouse and have a hearing. And they charge the $250. Okay, thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_15]: There's just one other thing I wanted to mention if it's okay. It's not on my budget because I took it out and put it on capital, but we still need a pickup truck for the meter crew. We had an older truck that we got from DPW that they were getting rid of, but I expended my repair budget taking care of it, so I respectfully gave it back. The police stepped up and gave us a Bronco, which is low mileage, it is great, but when you're taking, you see those kiosks, you need an open back truck to work with those. So that's just something that we still need to get back into the system.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. Great. Thank you so much. Any further questions from members of the council? Seeing none, any comments from members of the public in person or on Zoom? In person, come to the podium. On Zoom, please raise your hand. Seeing none, thank you very much. Director Morrison.
[SPEAKER_15]: Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Congratulations again for your hard work.
[SPEAKER_15]: OK, thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: DPW, you are next. So we will welcome Commissioner McGivern, Engineer Wartella, and any other of the DPW crew if they're wanting to join us.
[SPEAKER_18]: It's just me and Owen tonight. Mary's on vacation. No. So if you do have very specific questions.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, how are you gonna answer your questions?
[SPEAKER_18]: We're going to do our best. But I have the budget book here, so we can dig if we need to.
[SPEAKER_05]: Mr. Clerk, let's put a motion and email Mary.
[SPEAKER_18]: I don't want to bother her.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, on Monday or whenever she's back. Okay, so we're going to go in alphabetical order through your department starting with cemetery. I think we'll just do quick. I'll read it through pause and have questions on each department rather than try to have everybody remember all. or six of them, because I will forget. So starting with the Cemetery Division of the Department of Public Works, we have fiscal 24 budget, $1,059,320. Fiscal 25 budget, $1,118,050.11 for a net increase of $58,730.11. The headcount is remaining at nine, nine fiscal 24, nine fiscal 25. And the growth in that is almost entirely salaries. It's all fixed cost growth, no new programs, no new staff, as well as inflation cost increases for supplies. And with that, what's going on with the cemetery division?
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure, so you are correct. And what I will say, what we have going on at the cemetery is capital-based. I'll just kind of give you a rundown of what we're doing. So, you know, when I started and, you know, I assessed each division, what's going on, cemeteries needs are capital-based, they're expensive. So just to tell you the things I got spun up here, let's see here. We have an architect currently doing some design development for both cemetery buildings, the maintenance garage, as well as the caretakers' quarters. Both of those buildings are historic, so we're working with the historic commission to see if we can find some funding for the actual projects. Those buildings have seen a bunch of deferred maintenance. So I think the estimate was total work to bring them back to full preservation condition is about $8 million for both buildings. So we're not going to do all that at one time, but we do have to plan for that because they're historic. We're also working on some cemetery expansion projects, two of them. One of them we call the seven acre project, and another one is just moving an operational pile of soil. So we open up a lawn. So we've got those going on. And what else? Yeah, that's it. So those are substantial projects that we're working on at the cemetery. So I'm happy to answer the questions on the operating budget as well, but it's pretty typical the raises are due to the CBA update.
[SPEAKER_05]: access drive for the Brooks Estate? Correct. Okay, so it's on the north side of the drive, almost entirely, okay. And the remediation on the soil, how's, I mean, I've read the trustees' reports, how's that going?
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure, I wouldn't call it remediation necessarily, there was one small amount that needed to be- Removal, removal. Sure, that's a better word. So it's going well, so we've been trying to do this in an effective, cost-effective manner for a couple of years now, and we've, We're working with a new environmental engineering company. They're actually right in Medford Square Vineyard Engineering. And they're helping us get rid of some of the more contaminated soil. There's a little bit of contamination. Who knows where it's from? That site has seen many uses over the years. So that's been removed. That's only a very small percentage of the overall pile. The rest of it is, quote unquote, clean. So we'll be disposing of that either on site at an engineering project or just to a quarry.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. And I know I'm on the MMA public works committee and a lot of public works folks from around the state talking about how the cost of removing dirt is going up and up, so I'm glad to hear it's mostly not contaminated.
[SPEAKER_18]: Yeah, we're getting creative with how to, you know, get rid of it. So, we have some ideas in engineering, we have some ideas at some of our other sites at the cemetery, but... Should we put out an open call?
[SPEAKER_05]: What's that? Should we ask the residents if they want any dirt?
[SPEAKER_18]: No, no, no. Soil moving is very regulated here in Massachusetts. So I could go into details, but there's no need to. No.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know. Sorry, Tim. I just couldn't resist. That's OK.
[SPEAKER_18]: I won't go into the difference between dirt and soil. I'll save you guys.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, that's not up to me. If anyone asks, that's what I can do. All right, well, that sounds good on cemetery. Any questions from members of the council on the cemetery division, soil removal, et cetera? Seeing none, any questions from members of the public regarding the cemetery division? Great, engineering. We have our City Engineer. Just very quickly, Fiscal 24, the Engineering Division, $495,830.05. Fiscal 25, $543,661.93. Headcount staying the same at a four headcount for Fiscal 24 and Fiscal 25. net increase $47,831.93, and it looks like all of that is fixed cost growth, step increase, clerical unit increase, and the 2% non-union COLA increase. And if you want to share anything additional about engineering, anything you've been up to this past year, and any plans for next year.
[SPEAKER_10]: We've been up to a lot. We have a lot of plans. We're going to stick with the CIP and I'm just going to kind of keep it short on time since we've kind of gone over this in the past few meetings and just be mindful of everyone else here. So if you've any stuff that you want to to talk about. I'm happy to. But basically our CIP is going to be focused on water replacement and paving roads and sidewalks and any type of infrastructure projects going on. I know that we want to do a lot of flood mitigation work in and around the city. We've reached out for a lot of grants to do this work so we can fund it. And we're moving ahead. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. My only question, or to council's questions. Councilor Leming.
[SPEAKER_11]: This is just more of a general engineering staffing question, but I figured while I have you all here, I might as well ask it. We're doing the zoning overhaul, and I think I've talked to Owen about this, but just something I'd like to get a bit more understanding on. Part of it, which I've been having a lot of meetings on, is implementing transportation, demand management, zoning, ordinance, and I've been kind of shopping around different departments, begging people to fund and put somebody on a TDM study in the future, which would be required at the staff level. Just from my understanding, how much staff time does it usually take to coordinate that, even once you've found a firm that's able to get something like that off the ground?
[SPEAKER_10]: I wouldn't have the information for that. Our staff is at its capacity right now, and that would have to be out of one of the on-calls.
[SPEAKER_11]: Sorry, one of the on-calls?
[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, the on-call consultant engineering. Could you speak more? It would be one of the on-call consultants that we have to reach out to do that for.
[SPEAKER_11]: Does that make sense? Okay, so you would reach out to an on-call consultant who would then find the firm to actually do this?
[SPEAKER_10]: No, we have firms that are on-call that are on a three-year contract with us, just about to renew in July, and we would ask them to do what you're describing and what we've talked about before.
[SPEAKER_11]: Okay, so it wouldn't actually take any staff time for the people that are being budgeted here? You just kind of ask for them to do that?
[SPEAKER_10]: Not necessarily. We do manage a lot of these projects in-house, so while consultants do the work, there is some time that our staff manages to make sure it checks in, make sure that they're spending the money appropriately.
[SPEAKER_11]: And about, I understand that your staff are a capacity, but about how much time does that usually take to check in?
[SPEAKER_10]: I don't have that number right now. We're pretty stretched thin at the moment, so. Okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. Thank you. My only question, what maybe in future budgets, not in this budget, would the engineering department be looking for in terms of additional staffing or additional ordinary expenses?
[SPEAKER_10]: It would basically be based on capital improvement plans and projects. So the more we upgrade and ramp up more infrastructure projects, we will need more staff to go along with that. If we don't do that, we're gonna be hiring resident engineers at a higher cost. So we try to plan accordingly.
[SPEAKER_05]: do you expect that level of investment, like given the capital plan that we have now? It's a tough question, but is there a certain threshold, like is there a time in this capital plan where you expect the work is going to be so great that you'll need someone new or would it require a bigger capital budget before we get there?
[SPEAKER_18]: Yeah, the answer is yes. And it's because of some of the things that we've talked about. So the utilities coming to age, for example, right. So we know we I had a meeting on that today, for example, with one of the on call consulting engineers owners are to talking about, you know, something we'll talk about when water comes along. But to get a grasp of the amount of both water works, sewer works, drainage works, and roadway works. We know that some portion of that has to be contracted at engineering soft costs with either on-call engineers or in-house engineers. on-call engineers are more expensive than in-house engineers. So, we know that we have tens of millions of dollars worth of work to do just in water alone over the next, I don't know, you know, 10 years, let's say, just kind of making up numbers that we can order of magnitude so we can understand this. So, you know, when Owen talks about the CIP, we have it pretty well built out for a couple of years. But, you know, three, four, five years, it starts to get a little fuzzy. That's understandable. And it's fuzzy to the point that And today, where we're really relying on that rate study that we're doing with the CIP study to really understand, do we need one more engineer, two more engineers? How are we going to split it with contract work? What loans are available? What are the forgiveness rates with the infrastructure plan? All of these questions come into play almost as soon as the information starts rolling in from that study, which it actually did today.
[SPEAKER_05]: So just to start. Just a little bit. The first check-in meeting was today, basically. Great. Well, that's great to hear. And I know how hard you guys are working and how much progress we've made already. And it's been really helpful. If folks want to reference our late April public works and facilities meeting where you guys give us the update on the street and sidewalk assessments, I think that's a great, great thing to reference so that we don't have to talk about it now. And really excited that we'll have something similar coming through around our water and sewer infrastructure as well. So thank you so much for your hard work. It's much appreciated. Any further questions for the engineering division, for members of the council? Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you. Not a question, just thank you for the presentation. And as you are both as well aware as anybody, you're carrying the load for the stuff in the community that constituents notice and complain about and look forward to improvements on, as much as anybody in the city. Same goes for your staff, everybody who's working on improving water, sewer, roads, sidewalks. I know that alongside the year-to-year operational budget planning, there's also the long-term forecasting like you were just speaking about, Commissioner. So thank you for your hard work, and we really appreciate it. And I think here we get just a glimmer of the magnitudes of planning that have to go into what actually results in improvements that we get to see around the city. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Any questions from members of the public around engineering? Seeing none, in person or on Zoom, we'll go to Forestry Division. Forestry Division, budget fiscal 24, $616,473. Budget fiscal 25, $623,106.94. Five-person headcount in fiscal 24, five-person headcount in fiscal 25. All of the increases, fixed cost growth and salaries based on the DPW contract. Turn it over to you, Commissioner McGiver.
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure, not a lot to say on forestry. You'll notice it's more of a modest growth, just that 1% number. We had, you know, there was some opportunities based on actuals there to trim it up a little bit. As some of you may recall, a couple of years ago, my first budget, I spent a considerable amount of effort to get forestry where, you know, a step in the right direction. We had two staff before, now we have four. So I would call this budget settled at the moment. It certainly can be revisited in a couple of years.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great, any questions? Excuse me, on the forestry budget, Councilor Callahan.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just have a general question. I know that we're having a tree inventory done, and I've come to understand that we probably lose more trees than we plant each year. Do you have a dream for the forestry department that would allow us to plant as many trees as we lose each year?
[SPEAKER_18]: That's a great question. So another project we're working on besides the inventory is a vulnerability analysis. And that really is going to lead us towards both of those things. It's going to lead us towards having enough information for basically an urban forestry plant. We don't have that right now. So we have no basis of saying that we need to plant x number of trees more every year to sustain. And we need to plant them over here. And we need to plant this species with that one. We don't have that information right now. So my dream is what the word you use. I think I call it a vision, but the vision would be that I have that document in my hand. I can share it with my tree warden and we can we can understand the order of magnitude of the work that we need to do over. a period of time, just like everything else. So that's where we're headed. I don't know what those documents look like yet, but I do know that the data is looking good that I've seen, and some of the graphics and information that I've seen in the vulnerability work is also pretty impressive at this point. So looking forward to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just to follow up, do you know when we'll get the geometry and the vulnerability assessment?
[SPEAKER_18]: I think we're due, tree inventory I believe is wrapping up. I think we added on to a little bit. I would imagine that should be done soon, summer. And then the vulnerability project that is MVP funded has a deadline wrap up at the end of June. And then we are going for another grant to extend that to a year from now, June. to continue the efforts to get to that master plan. But June deadline was when one round ends, so we'll have a document, a deliverable, yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any further questions from members of the council regarding the forestry division? Seeing none, any questions or comments from members of the public on the forestry division at the podium or on Zoom? Seeing none, we will move to Highway Division. Fiscal 24, budget $11,624,596. Fiscal 25, budget $12,475,611.23, increase $851,015.23, Headcount 24, headcount remaining at 24 for fiscal 25. And the entirety of this is also, again, all fixed cost growth. We have about 120,000 related to COLA increases and the contract changes for the 24 staff members. And then we have, excuse me, a big increase here in our newly negotiated budget. waste management contract. So we are going from seven. I'm assuming everything in 5293 is the waste contract. Is there anything else in there? You're going from 7938 to 8727? Yes. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_18]: Correct. It's three contracts instead of one now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right. Because the new three.
[SPEAKER_18]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just so we can clarify that. I want to just point out that that's about a 10% increase, which is more than 2.5%. I'm just going to leave it at that.
[SPEAKER_18]: Well, just to provide a little clarity on that number, it's a conservative number. Let's put it that way. It's a new contract. There are some unknowns, more so in year one than in year 10 on a contract like this. I don't think we're going to end up spending $8.7 million, put it that way. There is a buffer in there because of the unknowns, the recycling costs, processing, for example. We don't know what that's going to do. So, you know, we could spend it all. I hope we don't. It's a bad sign if we do.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yep. All right. And just on that note, when we move to year three of the contract or year four, whenever the biweekly trash kicks in, is that going to drop our rate? Are we expecting like a reduction at all?
[SPEAKER_18]: There is, but the reduction is actually spread out over the life of the contract. Yeah. And that was to make it affordable year to year. So we actually have a credit at the beginning. That we, you know, resolves itself, I think, in like year 5 or 6 or something. Okay, great.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. In terms of the highway division, anything you want to talk about that you've done over fiscal 24 and any big plans for fiscal 25? And again, I just want to note that the trash budget in here is like 66% of the highway division. So when we talk about $12 million for the highway division, most of that is trash removal.
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure, highways are our biggest budget and actually, sorry, water is our biggest budget, but our biggest budget in the general fund world. And it's also the catch-all budget. So, you know, we pay fleet out of there and we take care of all the fleet, the city, police and fire. So that's important to know. Also clerical administration, me, new deputy are all out of the highway budget. So anyway, it's kind of deceiving when you look at it to just, you know, some of your new Councilors, so I just want you to understand that. So it's a little bit hard to understand if you don't know who the people are, for example. With that said, I'll take this opportunity just to go over, you know, sort of the DPW's budget, and I know probably Bob has talked to you about this as well, but You know, the water enterprise fund is about 63% of our budget. We buy about $22 million worth of water. So that's also something that sort of makes our budget look bigger than it actually is. So I don't really have a 40 plus million dollar budget. It's more like a $20 million budget. Then about 36% is general fund. And we also have some perpetual care and sales lots in there as well. So that's kind of the, the overall pie chart of it. Water and sewers are biggest, highways second, cemetery, parks, forestry, engineering coming in after that. And some of the highlights from this year, deputy is the biggest one. So we just hired a deputy, he started this week. So it's fantastic. I've been spread very thin. So this is gonna give me an opportunity to focus on some of the bigger picture items and have this gentleman, Scott Brink, focus on operations. That's exciting. We have, as you know, from alone, we now have some in-house paving equipment that we've been trained on. That's very exciting. We talked a little bit about that in our subcommittee meeting. Let's see, we have three new waste contracts. That's also a very big thing. So as we just talked about a little bit, we're moving to a system that collects compost, trash, recycling, and yard waste, the compost is what's different. Compost makes up a lot of your trash weight, and it's typically the element of trash that attracts things like rodents. So the idea would be, and trash disposal costs are going up and up and up, so the idea is to separate the compostables, make soil from that, and then to reduce the amount of trash, cunnage we have. So folks may have received something in the mail alerting them to signing up for compost. We're collecting a waiting list now. And that service begins in July, but it's limited first year. So first come, first serve. So that's important. And then there's some other things I just want to mention that you may know about, but you may not. It's not all highway related, but it's just because highway is sort of the catch-all budget. We're doing a lot of water quality regulatory work that's in preparation for new rules that the EPA is you know, making that go into effect in October. So there's a lot of work there to prepare for that. We bought a camera van, so that allows us to camera our own pipes before we were doing that via contract work, but the technology is affordable, so we can do that in-house now, which is going to save us about $200,000 per year, something like that. So we kind of did that in the budget, I think, last year. that we did that this year, trained up on it. And we got a couple of guys that are really excited about it and using it. It's turning out really great. We have a new water quality controller. We have a couple of field improvements that we did. We helped the school system and their varsity team do some refurbishment on play set field. We redid the courts at Hickey Park. And we're trying to line up two more for this year. Let's see what else? Owen didn't talk about this, but a lot of people have been asking questions about the work we did up at the dam. So we did do some maintenance work up there that was significant.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is the dam at Wrights Pond?
[SPEAKER_18]: Correct, yeah. We only operate one dam. It's the Wrights Pond dam. So, you know, some people may see some changes up there, but it's all normal and it's what we're supposed to be doing. Lots of personnel movements within DPW this year due to folks leaving positions, getting filled within the union, which kind of causes a domino effect up the totem pole, so to speak. So that's been a pretty exciting thing. New faces in new positions, learning new skills. So it's good to see. Another thing Owen didn't really talk about, but I'll talk about, his office has made some significant improvements to the permitting process around here. And he's, I think, doing a fantastic job holding utility companies accountable, taking on some of the work that I had hoped to have more time working on when I was city engineer. And he picked it up, and he's been doing a great job with that. And that's really helping us with our pavement work and making sure we fix those fix those gas sinkholes that seem to pop up all over the city because of their trench work. Other exciting things is some things that we got going last year, flushing program. We talked about the rate study for water, CIP with the rate study, and then doing a hydraulic model. Those are all very exciting things. And then we talked about the tree inventory. So just wanted to give that sort of overview of some of the things that are happening. As far as next year goes, what I'd really like to continue doing is making significant improvements to operations. Now that I have a deputy, I'm going to be able to do that. So that's really what I'm looking forward to. And that has all kinds of benefits. If you understand operations, you know what I'm talking about. If not, that's OK. I can answer questions. And then I'm also excited about the new pavement equipment and seeing if I can get more use out of that to save resources when it comes to potholing. I think a lot of people see the same places being potholed over and over again. So the idea would be is we now have the equipment to replace that as a box out, as well as being able to do our own longer sidewalk repairs. So there's more to come there. And we've talked about some of the future ideas I have for that. So I hold those visions close and I'm trying to pick away at them as much as I can.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Thank you, Commissioner for the Highway Division. Any questions from members of the Council on the Highway Division? Councilor Callahan.
[SPEAKER_02]: The compost, you say you're building a list, and currently we have a relationship with Is It Garbage to Garden? Correct. And is that how the list is built, is through them, or is there also a separate list?
[SPEAKER_18]: I do them. So there's, uh, there should be, you know, garbage to garden has, uh, all kinds of resources that they've already put out there. I know we have links on the website to sign up and you've heard compost.com. Yeah. Medford compost.com. That's it. Uh, thank you. And, um, so you just, you sign up there and, uh, like I said, I think you would see the 6,000, 8,000. So I don't remember.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is it four, eight, 12, right? Say again, four in the first year, eight in the second year, 12 in the third year.
[SPEAKER_18]: No, I think it's six in first year.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think you may have negotiated that after we last talked.
[SPEAKER_18]: Maybe, maybe. Anyway, don't please don't hold me to a number. It's a number. It's in the thousands. It's in the single digit thousands that we're capping off for year one. Then it opens up year two more, and then year three. We're hopeful to get everybody on board in year three.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so just so that I understand, that is through Garbage to Garden that we're doing our long-term compost project. It's not going to end up being in the city.
[SPEAKER_18]: No, we have a contract with Garbage to Garden. Perfect.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's the three contracts. It's waste management, trash, waste management, recycling, garbage to garden, compost?
[SPEAKER_18]: Nope. Waste management, trash, and recycling, garbage to garden, compost, and then save that stuff yard waste.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_18]: Great.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any other questions on the highway division? I have one, Tim. Yes. The reduction in the sidewalk repairs budget from $90,000 to $50,000. Are we making that up somewhere else? How is that going to impact what we can do there?
[SPEAKER_18]: It's not going to impact what we do, at least for this year. That's the line that we use to buy concrete. We haven't bought a lot of concrete, so the actuals are lower. I'm focusing more on asphalt work, actually, to tell you the truth. We do have some concrete work to do, but As we've discussed before, it's not like I have a sidewalk crew that can pour concrete every day. So it's much more efficient for things like sidewalk repairs to do them in asphalt at first, usually, and then come back and do them in concrete. That's what you're seeing is, if you look at the asphalt line, that one's bent down. So I think that as that's based on actuals, As we move forward year to year, I want that to go up. I want to be spending more on concrete in-house and I'm trying to line up as much as we can do this year as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know we've talked about it. I just want to bring home a couple of questions and a couple of nuances that have come before me even since we last talked about it. Sure. What's generally the timeline between a temporary asphalt patch and a concrete filling with concrete? How long is that usually lasting right now?
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure, it's going to depend on who does it. So if it's, let's say, for example, a water repair that is scheduled with our water division, then that gets on a list. And I'd say within usually a couple of months, that goes from asphalt back to concrete. But then there are There are other issues where it doesn't always make sense to put back concrete. We find that a lot around trees. So we're not going to put the concrete back a lot of the times. Once I have a little bit more time and Owen has some breathing room, we're going to spend some more time investigating alternative materials around trees. Right now, neither material is good that we use, asphalt or concrete. So there are materials out there. They're expensive, they're finicky, they require different types of maintenance. There are success stories and there are failure stories. So it's about, you know, spending some time to figure out what the right one is and then working to fund it and figure out how to do it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And my other question, you kind of got there, where we have, you know, older trees planted in sidewalks that are basically shortening and narrowing the sidewalk or the roots are uprooting and it's an asphalt patch. How is the department making decisions between forestry and highway and your team around prioritizing saving healthy trees versus allowing for accessibility for people in wheelchairs and other forms of mobility devices. How are we working through that conundrum? Because I understand it's a difficult one.
[SPEAKER_18]: I didn't mean to do that, sorry. It's a little bit of a difficult situation. However, the good thing is that Mass General Law has pretty clear guidance on this. Trees are protected, and ADA accessibility is also the rule of the land. you do have these conflicting issues. So really the obligation of the city is to try to figure out a way to honor both. That's almost impossible. However, I just recently went to Charleston, South Carolina, and I was impressed by the way that they do it because their old oak trees are protected. And they have been growing in the street for a very long time. And they will literally build the street around the tree. So some of the trees are just in the middle of the road. And so they've redesigned the road basically around the tree. So I'm not saying that we're going to do that here this year.
[SPEAKER_05]: But certainly not for every single one.
[SPEAKER_18]: Of course, right. There are trees that are out there that are 100 plus years old that there's no way that our tree warden is going to say, let's cut down that tree. And she has that authority, especially if it's a healthy tree. But then, of course, you have a situation where someone with a stroller or a wheelchair can't get by. So there's got to be a design solution that saves the tree to do that. We can't, there's thousands of these locations all over the city, so we just gotta pick away at them one at a time, unless we have... you know, some big project that is gonna solve a good chunk of them or the worst ones. So now there is some synergy between that and the sidewalk assessment and the work that we're trying to do on the sidewalks. You know, I don't know if it's been shared with this body in particular, but the sidewalk heat map that we have that shows where the high foot traffic is compared to the sidewalk repair that needs to happen. A lot of those sidewalk repairs are around trees. So that automatically goes into the queue for Owen and his team to assess, are we doing this block of sidewalk or that one? And then when we do that, the trees are taken into consideration. So that's the opportunity. Do we need to ramp up the grade? Do we need to do anything drastic like take somebody's land? Maybe we need a foot of property on someone's property, or maybe we need to change the width of the road and move some curbing around. So those are the ways you solve those types of problems.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. Thank you. When you were in Charleston, did you make it to City Hall?
[SPEAKER_18]: I drove in a tour horse carriage. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was cool.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_18]: It was cool, yeah. The ADPW cleans up the horses.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_18]: So anyway, cleans up the horses.
[SPEAKER_05]: So should we work on that, or? Oh, we have enough horses. Yeah. I just wanted to know that the clerk was there, he might have something to say, but their council chambers gorgeous. So, if you want to.
[SPEAKER_16]: I was walking down the street and we walked past city hall and I said to my wife, let's go see the city clerk and she was kind enough to give us a tour of City Hall and took us to their council chamber and. It was amazing. And it was I was also impressed by Charleston. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: What do they have, a multimillion dollar Washington portrait in their council chamber?
[SPEAKER_16]: They had she told me they have like 40 million dollars worth of art on the walls. I mean, there's one that's like it's like there's a portrait of George Washington that they're having trouble insuring because it's because it costs because it's it's so valuable. Wow.
[SPEAKER_05]: Paging director Ricky. He said, yes. All right. We're in. Thank you, Tim. Any questions from members of the Council, again, on the Highway Division? Any comments from members of the public, either in person or on Zoom? Seeing none, we'll go to Parks, Parks Division. in fiscal 24, maintaining it eight in fiscal 25. $951,016 in fiscal 24 up to $957,577.56 in fiscal 25 for an increase of $6,561.56, about 1%, and all of that is in DPW contract increases for the salary, so it's all fixed cost growth, and it does look like some of that was obviously offset by some reductions. Commissioner McGovern.
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure. Thank you very much. So I went over some of the things that we've been working on in parks, the field refurbishments. Parks is pretty simple, like forestry. Right now I feel like we have full staff and we have new leadership. Things are going great. There's a lot to be said for the hard work that the Parks Department puts in this time of year right now, making sure that the 15 fields we have operating right now are playable every day. So props to them. And again, a modest increase here. The fixed costs are really the thing that's happening there, and then some trims based on actuals.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great, any questions from members of the council regarding the parks division? Seeing none, any questions from members of the public regarding the parks division? Seeing none, that concludes the general fund DPW. So all the departments we just discussed were coming out of the general fund, which the biggest funder is the property tax levy. We're now going into water sewer enterprise fund, which is funded by the water and sewer rate payers. And we have in water sewer enterprise fiscal 24 budget 25,956,537 fiscal 25 budget 26,879,692 dollars and 12 cents. increase $923,155.12, going from a headcount of 21 to a headcount of 20, and that's about a 4% increase in the budget. Most of that is in fixed costs of about $1.1 million, the vast majority of that being the contract increase with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which is going up $784,517. There are also a number of other contracts going up significantly for $150,000 and $88,000 increase based on the new DPW contract for staff and staff raises. and some increased costs for field work around water mains and stormwater. There's also some new expenses. This is only the third time we've seen that all budget, and it's for two printers, safety equipment, and parts to replace fire hydrants. So with that, again, 1.1 million in fixed costs, 800,000 of that is MWRA. Only 42,000 is a new expense, and it seems for some pretty basic stuff. I'll turn it over to you, Commissioner McGimmer.
[SPEAKER_18]: Sure, so we did a lot of work on the water budget last year. So I haven't done much this year as far as changing things around. So the headcount you had, I think is wrong. I think there's a mistake there. So we have the deputy, which is new, but that position was in the budget, but it's a new person. Water quality controller, also a new position, new person. I'm sorry, existing person, but a new position.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's going from 2 to 3.
[SPEAKER_18]: We added a couple of positions in water last year. So those are those are them. So there's. There were some increases there having to do with technology, the way that we test water, the way that we protect ourselves. We bought some trench gear. And then we have a flushing contract that we're trying to really get some headway on. So we're trying to start that actually this summer. So we added that to the budget last year. And I think we increased it a little bit this year for field work. And then, yeah, a lot of the other increases were contractual things that we typically do that just, you know, get more expensive. And we pay stormwater things out of here too, like catch basin cleaning and things like that, so.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it, just so we can make sure we have the right stuff. In front of us, I had it in here as plus one deputy commissioner, plus two ME03, minus one assistant water network admin, minus two maintenance crafts, minus one equipment repair, as that sounds like that's not accurate.
[SPEAKER_18]: I think we need to, I think I need to look at that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, can you submit to us an updated headcount? Yep. Thank you. My only that was my only question was just, uh. That was I just had a question about that. Um, is the deputy commissioner being paid from the water sewer budget or.
[SPEAKER_18]: Yes, I believe it is. Okay. Yeah, part of the rate study that we're doing will be indirect costs as well. So we do calculate indirect costs in the finance department and they figure out what that's going to be. However, one of the things that we should really take a close look at is based off of you know, especially the CIP, maybe some future growth in water and how we're gonna tackle that. That'll, the indirect cost will change as well. So we're gonna take a look at that as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. Okay, any questions from members of the Council on the Water Sewer Enterprise Fund? Councilor Callahan.
[SPEAKER_02]: So is this the fund out of which we have to repair all of our 120-year-old pipes?
[SPEAKER_18]: Yeah, or that or grants.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I apologize for this newbie question, but where in here am I looking for an increase because we got to start repairing these pipes? Which budget item?
[SPEAKER_18]: Not in operating. Yeah, so eventually I'd like to have things in operating. So we're taking steps. Last year we take steps. We needed another water quality coordinator, so we have that now. Now we have two. That was an important step. This is all in preparation for the regulatory changes. And new equipment for testing lead, for example, is another thing. Where you're going to see the planning for replacing pipes and those costs are in capital improvements. So the CIPs, where you're going to see those. That is a little bit fuzzy a few years out because we don't necessarily know where we should be focusing our attention. And that's what we're having worked on as part of the rate study. Because you can't just look at rates, you have to look at what you're going to be spending that money on and why. So we're starting from a place of how old are our pipes? How fast do we need to repair them or replace them? And then what do those costs look like over time? How do we fund them with debt service? How do we fund them with grants if they're available? How do we fund it from just retained earnings? So those are our sources and putting the pieces together on how to fund it is gonna be, not something that comes out of the operating budget, unless we're doing in-house relays, which I would eventually like to get there, because contract work is expensive, and if we have the skills in-house, then we can save some money there. So in other words, having a few people in-house that are dedicated every day to just relaying water pipe. Now, of course, that's a vision, right? But where we are today is trying to understand the magnitude of the problem. And then how do we get there over time? And what does that, you know, what does that framework look like?
[SPEAKER_02]: And if I hope you don't mind if I just follow up a little bit. So we're trying to wrap our heads around an issue. And You're saying if we had sort of in-house people, which I imagine is because you say it's part of a plan for the future, like that is really how a city would normally be run is you're using this budget to make sure that you maintain all of the lines.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So is there. I mean, should I be looking in this budget for like us at least beginning to do some of that work this year, this fiscal year? Yes.
[SPEAKER_18]: So the maintaining part is a lot of what this budget is doing. So things like the flushing program, which is in here. Things like the new water quality controller, even the deputy because of how that works. There's a supervisor position I'm also trying to fill that we have open right now. So all of those contribute to the strategy to get to a solution for the big problem, so to speak. So that's what you can be looking at in the operating. And then, of course, people, staff can also do relay work, but we don't have the capacity to have a crew every day doing relay. We actually tried it on, what's the name, was it? Was it Union? Yeah, Union. We tried it on Union Street, that's right. And it worked out great. We do have the skill sets, we can do it. So I'm trying to model, you know, the vision based off of that. A lot of times the cities don't have the skill set to do that. I think we do. It's not necessarily hard work and it can be, it can be trained. But with that said, that's not going to solve the problem. It's going to be a combination of in-house and contract work over quite a long span of time. Just to give you some numbers that we're talking about today, we're talking about like a 35-year plan. Those are the numbers that we're talking about here. A couple of miles, two to three miles of pipe replacements every year, some of that is contract work, some of that is in-house work. So hopefully that answers your question.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then my final question, I think, is about retained earnings. Retained earnings, by that, do you mean what enters the enterprise fund from the rates that is not spent in that fiscal year, that that should be something that we are, you know, sort of filling that bucket year by year. And is that something I can see here? Or is this really just a budget? So we're not seeing sort of what is being retained?
[SPEAKER_18]: You can bring that question up with a finance director. I'm not sure. So when the retained earnings are certified, then we know what that balance is. So I think the last time was $8 million or something like that. It's going to go up. One of the reasons why it is what it is and it's kind of going up is because We don't necessarily know what the healthy number should be. And that's actually also going to be a part of the rate study. So we should be keeping retained earnings at a specific balance or hovering around a specific balance all the time. But right now, we don't actually have enough information to know what that number should be. And what it should be next year and the year after and the year after the year after. So that's going to be part of the study. I'm sure I don't I can't speak for Bob but I would imagine that the certified funds, you know, are available at some point in the process of the budget process. And we use retained earnings for, you know, we can use it for debt service for like, for example, that three and a half million dollar loan that we took out for the Willis Avenue water main replacement. So, you know, that debt service is paid out of the retained earnings, I believe. I don't wanna speak for Bob again, but like, you know, it's worked into the enterprise fund or retained earnings or something like that. And then, you know, we're planning on buying some vehicles, for example, out of the retained earnings. which is, you know, when you're talking about eight or nine or $10 million account, you know, half a million dollars worth of vehicles is, is, is significant, but not not not a drop in the bucket, but, you know, significant thing. But it's not we can't just dip into retained earnings to go replace all of our pipes out there, because we need to have that healthy number in there. What is it? Is it 5 million? Is it 6 million? We'll find out. And then we'll maintain that and we'll know what it should be every single year. And, you know, we'll work with Bob's office to, we're all consultant, we'll give us information and we'll work with Bob's office to figure out, you know, how to do that over time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thanks. Commissioner, are we, and Director Dickinson may have the answer as well. We're not budgeting for a surplus of retained earnings in the enterprise account, correct? So we're not expecting more revenue than we are planning for in expenses? I know we're not in the general fund.
[SPEAKER_18]: I think there's typically a surplus.
[SPEAKER_05]: But that's usually because expenses were not made, right? Like we're not saying we're budgeting 27, point for 27 million in revenue, but we're only going to spend 26.5, right? Oh, I see what you're saying.
[SPEAKER_18]: I don't do that.
[SPEAKER_08]: No, retained earnings would come from turnbacks, basically, expense accounts, or additional revenue coming in.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right. But the budget, it's a balanced budget for the enterprise.
[SPEAKER_08]: But usually people don't spend to the end of their actual available budget. Obviously, and if they did, we'd have to do budget transfers when they went over. In terms of revenue, people use more water, we get more revenue. That's how it works. Whatever's left over at the end adds to what we had at the end of last year, and that's That's where your retained earnings come from.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right. And I just wanted to put that out there just to note that both additional money going to free cash reserves in the general fund or additional money going to retained earnings. It's not that we're budgeting to raise more money than we spend. It's that we're either spending less or raising more than we expect. Thank you both. Any further questions on the water sewer enterprise fund from members of the council? Any questions or comments from members of the public, either in person or on Zoom? Seeing none, I just wanted to note that if there are significant changes to any of the divisions, we may have you back after the budget proposal goes out. Not that we're expecting them, but who knows? So just because it's a new process and you're here earlier than normal, we appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_18]: Not a problem. You know where I work.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thanks, Tim. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Owen. Next we have right on topic debt service bonds and interest Yes, so this is one of the places we have two numbers we have our general fund debt service and our water and sewer fund debt service and General Fund Debt Service budgeted fiscal 24 $5,090,533.77. Fiscal 25 proposed $5,391,318.49 for about an increase of $300,000. Water and sewer fund debt service fiscal 24 budgeted $1,273,968 and fiscal 25 proposed $1,743,643.75 for an increase of about $500,000. The total debt service increasing about $800,000. Again, $500,000 from water sewer fund and $300,000 from our general fund. And it also looks like most of that is increased principal payments. And I will turn it over to Director Dickinson.
[SPEAKER_08]: It's debt service. We borrowed the money. We have to pay them back. The only additional thing there is Most of it's long-term debt service. There's $60,000 in there for the $1.5 million that we barge for term for the fire station planning. But beyond that, it's all out there. It's all in the statement of indebtedness. That's what we owe. That's what we have to pay. So it's relatively boring.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is this keeping the debt service amounts about at the percent target for the budget that you guys set? Was it 3% or 5%? I can't quite remember.
[SPEAKER_08]: Actually, I don't know where we are with that. The city right now doesn't have a great deal of debt in general. I'd say that $5.3 million out of $100 million, it's very low compared to the total budget for the city.
[SPEAKER_05]: I remember the Collins Center presentation on the capital improvement plan that the goal was to get us to a certain target percentage to increase bond capacity at some point. If you could just let us know kind of where this puts us on that track, on that target. I think that was all the way up through fiscal 29, if I remember correctly. Sure.
[SPEAKER_08]: Well, I mean, obviously But obviously, debt's coming off in the next few years, which is great. And the less the general fund has to borrow, obviously, there's going to be some other major expenditures in the next few years that will be debt funded. The fire station, we're planning for the fire station, but you're going to have to pay for it. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: understood. And then if we were to do a debt exclusion for major capital project, that means that it wouldn't come out of the general fund debt service, correct?
[SPEAKER_08]: No, it would come out of the General Fund Debt Service, but it would be financed by a Prop 2.5 exclusion. Okay. So that would just, on the tax recap, it's Form DE-1. You just put in how much that is, and that gets raised additionally to what you raised in appropriate, because it's beyond the balance of Prop 2.5 until you've paid off that debt.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, OK. But that would potentially allow us to plan for other uses for the capital that may have gone to the fire station. Yes. Any other questions from members of the council on the debt service bonds and interest budget? Seeing none, any questions from members of the public on the debt service bonds and interest budget? Seeing none, thank you, Director Dickinson. Electrical department. I saw Mr. Randazzo earlier. I'm guessing he went to do better things. Oh, sorry. Nope, elections, give me one second. I think I may have just, I put elections in the wrong place. My bad.
[SPEAKER_11]: The words are pretty similar to be fair.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, no, no, no, no. I saw him here diligently waiting and he is, always at the beck and call I think of all of us. And he's back. Is that all right? Come on, Steve. We'll take you, Steve. I saw you running, so you get to go. Anyone who runs into this room.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was expected to be a couple more on the list. I apologize.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, it's my fault, actually. I had it out of order, so that's on me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good evening, council. Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Good evening, Mr. Superintendent. It's great to have you here. Thank you so much for all the work that you do. We know how important it is. So I'm just going to quickly go through the budget for the electrical department. We have fiscal 24, 644,100. Fiscal 25, the new budget at 678,804.84. That's an increase of $34,704.84. The salaries raises coming from the contract and 2% non-union, some fixed cost increases and increases to vacation time and sick time. Some increases in electrical costs that we're paying more for our streetlights and some increase in some meter charges as well, but it's all fixed costs going up. So with that, we'd love to hear from you about what you've been doing this year, your plans for next year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, I had some medical issues this year and I was unfortunately not around for a lot of it, but I did the best while I was around. We're continuing to try to make upgrades to some of our pedestrian crossings, make them more ADA compliant, help the hearing impaired and so forth. So we're working on that. Pretty much it's not an exciting department to really speak of. It's generally things break, traffic signals, street lights. I do the best I can to get those repairs taken care of. Unfortunately, sometimes it's not as easy as others, but I do try wherever I can.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, we think you're electrified.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any big plans for the upcoming year?
[SPEAKER_00]: Continue the same. Try to make any upgrades as possible as funds allow. Continue to take an opportunity to upgrade lighting to LED, which is kind of a no-brainer in this day and age. Saves on maintenance, saves on power. It's a win-win for everyone. Yeah, just pretty much keep the same. keep trucking along and hopefully keep the residents happy.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wonderful. On the switch to LED, how many of our lights would you say are LED at this point?
[SPEAKER_00]: Street lights are roughly around 5,600 street lights that they've all been upgraded to LED. That's not including probably 130 of the decorative style that are throughout our squares. The school department on their properties, I know that Freedom Way is being addressed. That's obviously a concern, and I understand. But I mainly maintain the streets and stuff like that, and just try to assist any department, you know, such as the schools, if they're interested. And a lot of input also is given from Alicia Hunt, who does a great job with, you know, solidifying funds and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. And then on the on the traffic signals, do we have any that are really old that need to be replaced?
[SPEAKER_00]: We do have some that are inundated, like, for instance, Boston Ave and Winthrop Street. That's one of our oldest. We have also Arlington and Boston have that intersection as well. Those are a couple of our oldest. Central Avenue in Spring is one that has a lot of deficiencies, but that is kind of beyond my scope. Todd from the traffic engineer has been assisting with that, and I kind of lean to him for his guidance because that's kind of his expertise. I'm more of when a vehicle knocks down something, you know, we go and make sure it gets put back up and stuff like that. Great.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right. Any other questions for Superintendent Randazzo? Vice President Collins?
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you. Not a question. Appreciate this very straightforward budget, but just thanks for the work that you do year round, obviously. lighting is really important to residents when they're walking around driving. So we see the fruits of your hard work every day. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_17]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any other questions? We are very lucky to have you and grateful for your work. So with that, I'm just going to see if there's anyone from the public who would like to ask a question. Seeing none. Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right. I appreciate it. Have a good evening. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, elections, sorry for that, it's my bad. And early in your tenure, I apologize for that as well. We have our new elections manager and the chief of staff here. Are we in week two?
[SPEAKER_13]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, so I'm sure you got it all handled, you know every detail. I just want to thank you for being here. We have had, you know, we, this council voted a couple years ago to shift to this model of an independent elections department under an elections commission, and we've been working with the administration around that. We've had some great points of agreement, some points of disagreement, but we are, you know, we are really grateful. You know, we had some conversations earlier to be like, let's call it elections department. That's a great thing to make it clear that the commission is just overseeing and you guys are the elections department. So, but yeah, I just wanted to give some of that context. I'm sure, you know, it's a pretty new department independent, although served many years with this clerk and others as the registrar voters. I'm going to read through quickly basically the budget summary, then we'd love to hear so far from, and also wanna thank Chief of Staff Nazarian, who has been running elections for a little bit now. Just go through the budget, hear from both of you about what's been happening in fiscal 24, your plans for fiscal 25, anything you think this department needs that wasn't able to get into this budget, but maybe need in the future, and then we'll go to questions from members of the council. So fiscal 24 budget, $340,196. Fiscal 25 budget, $328,629.20. This is a decrease of about 3%, $11,566.80. Decrease is caused by having one fewer election in 2025, fiscal 25 than fiscal 24. So the salary line for seasonal and overtime seems to be reduced. excuse me, reduced, and also this decreases offset by increases from the contract and ordinary expenses due to inflation around fixed costs. The headcount is remaining three, I believe that's two full-time, one part-time, and that's staying the same over the two fiscal years. So with that, I'll turn it over to both of you.
[SPEAKER_14]: I'll begin, and it's my distinct pleasure to introduce Danielle Petrantonio. Normally I get her last name wrong, so I'm delighted that I got it right this time. Danielle has been working in the field of elections for the past eight years. Danielle was most recently the director of elections in the city of Everett. In fact, in addition to that, Danielle actually supported the city of Medford through the March 5th presidential primary, along with her counterpart, the city clerk and chair of the Elections Commission, Sergio Cornelio. So we were very, very fortunate that we were able to make this connection through attorney Lauren Goldberg from KP Law, who found us some help and they found Danielle and they found Sergio and they assisted us. I think we probably called them at least once a day throughout that election once we finally made that contact and So Danielle had actually worked for us as a consultant, and that was incredibly helpful. If it wasn't for Danielle, Sergio, and I've said this before in front of this council, but there were a lot of critical team members that allowed us to be successful in that election. I was just there to make sure that we paved the path to make sure that the other team members were successful, but the people who did all the work were Joan Lamone, as you may know her as Babe, Then Jan Joyce, she was our former head clerk in the office who came back and supported us throughout. There were a number of other individuals that are called the A-Team, Advanced Team, as they've been named by our election commission chair in the past. Which brings me to our election commission and the chair of our election commission, Henry Malorin, who obviously did a lot of heavy lifting throughout that election to make sure that, you know, I knew what was next. He put only as much as I needed in front of me to be able to handle what was next, and he was really methodical about that. I'm, you know, forever appreciative of the extra care and attention that he and especially Joan Lamone, put towards this past election. Without them and without the help of the City of Everett staff, who we now have somehow convinced to come here, because, you know, I think Danielle will tell you she enjoyed the work environment, she enjoyed the staff, the A-team, and I'll let her speak to that. So I'm really happy that Danielle's joined our team, and that's the long and short of how we got to where we are and how Danielle's joined our team.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, I'm certainly interested to hear what you think is a more contentious electoral environment.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll see after the first election here. That's the right answer.
[SPEAKER_14]: So I'll just, the way we've structured this, considering the fact that Danielle is on her second week, you know, I'm going to go through the budget. I'm going to go through the goals and, you know, obviously welcome Danielle to make any additional comments or additional points that she'd like to add. And, you know, either one of us may be answering your questions if you have any as we get through this budget.
[SPEAKER_13]: Great.
[SPEAKER_14]: So as was already stated, this is a decrease over last year's budget. It's in terms of the bottom line, and that is because the number of elections we have. And in general, we do recognize that the complexity of this coming election is greater. So we've taken that into account to the budget. Otherwise, it might have been a larger decrease than you're seeing, because we do recognize that there's a federal election, and it's going to bring out a lot more voters than we have on a year-to-year basis. Federal elections inherently bring out the most voters, obviously. So just going through our budget narrative, essentially, the department continued to work in the basement storage area, isolating elections matters into their own dedicated and secured room. And before that, the election space was co-shared with the city clerk's office. I do want to send my specific thanks to our city clerk who turned around on the drop of a dime as I was taking on the role and responsibility and allowed us to separate his that we were able to bring. City clerk items into the vault. So city clerk and elections items or were completely segregated at one point because we just had such a sheer volume of ballots coming in at that point, and we wanted to the place to put people and organize. Really, we were in a situation where we knew we didn't have an elections manager. The office didn't have the other part-time position filled, and we're still working through that. And we were really wanting to make sure we had, for lack of better terms, and no pun intended, really, the path cleared so we could spread out, do what we needed to do in an organized manner, and have as few irregularities as possible. So really appreciate that, Adam. Mr. Clerk, I really, really appreciate that. We provided election worker training and manuals in March of 2024. It was really interesting because I think it was probably my, after one week of, post the resignation of our former elections manager, after one week of searching far and wide to try to find a temporary elections manager to serve the city of Medford and finding wheat There were no individuals out there who were either willing or had the necessary experience that was needed because there were so many changes in the Votes Act of 2020. It made the work dramatically complex. As I've said to other folks before, I don't consider myself any type of expert in elections. I will say I probably know 25% of elections, so Danielle will correct me if I get anything wrong here. But from what I understand, it's dramatically changed things. We also had another consultant who helped me with a lot of office work. That consultant was the former town clerk of Westminster. But she didn't have any experience with vote by mail or early voting. So we had to continue to kind of supplement. Getting back to my prior point, after a week of searching far and wide, we emailed listserv after we put feelers out, after feeler out, after feeler out. And I kind of got to a point where I realized we weren't going to get there. Then I kind of accepted that this is something I'm going to have to do. And working with Commissioner Malorin, One of the first things we had was, I remember distinctly, someone telling me, well, we have a training in a couple of days for our inspectors. We can't do a training in a couple of days for our inspectors. That's not going to work. We're not prepared. I don't know who's going to do the training. It's certainly not me. These inspectors are going to know more than me. So we did cancel the first training. And right around that time, we found Danielle and Sergio. And they actually came in, and they did our training, which was a subsequent week later. We rescheduled that training, and everything went. you know, and everything went very well. And so Danielle and Sergio, her counterpart, actually updated a lot of our information, and I'm sure, you know, Danielle will take it from where she left it off the last time she worked on it, candidly. As the Council knows, the Elections Commission and Department instituted a model of transparency. This was based on, frankly, comments that were made by the city council as to issues and concerns that came up in past elections. And we felt it was important. The mayor was obviously supportive. The commission was supportive. We felt it important to write up when there were major irregularities in the process. The council received two reports. that we're going to be looking at. Those two reports. I believe if not one or both might be in the council's packets. So you know, you've done your your portion of that transparency, and we appreciate that. I've of course, handed those reports to Danielle, so she has that information as well. And you know, Danielle has asked. What is that section of the budget narrative mean? And I've explained that that's the expectation moving forward. So she continue to share anytime there's something reportable. As far as goals for fiscal 25, these are, you know, the ones largely that I was able to jot down. I didn't apply a lot of pressure to Danielle to try to give us others, so maybe more to come. But for now, we are going to continue to work to recruit and train additional election workers to ensure that we have enough people to backfill for elections. We are also presently reviewing whether these workers need to be W-2 workers and on the city's payroll, so that's an evaluation that's going to be going on. And we're gonna continue to review all processes for elections to ensure efficiency. Candidly, Danielle and I were just talking about one major element of this budget process, which is the elections, city elections or town elections now have the ability to get reimbursed from the state for costs associated with early voting and vote by mail. And in summary, now that I've gone through a process, Danielle's obviously done it in her prior community as well. Now that I've gone through a process to actually submit for that reimbursement, I understand the system well, and I understand, you know, the parameters of the system. And I think we can plan to maximize our reimbursement. You know, we can pre-plan for the election to maximize our reimbursement. We were actually just chatting about that. So that's one avenue when I say continue to look for opportunities for efficiency, but it's efficiency and cost effectiveness ultimately. Obviously, we want the department to continue to attend professional development trainings, review all polling locations for accessibility and backups. We did get an email from, I'm not sure of the organization, but they mentioned an issue with potential accessible parking at one of our voting locations. I've transmitted that information over to Danielle, and I've asked her to take a look at it. So we're going to continue to pursue those reviews as well. And then one thing I think Danielle could probably talk to is some of the work in particular that she could speak to is some of the work that she's done in other communities as to expanding voter outreach. So I will pause there. That's a good segue for Danielle.
[SPEAKER_01]: things I was most passionate about was getting the youth involved. So we actually worked with one of the government teachers at Everett High School. We would hold voter drives a couple times a year. We would go into the government class, kind of teach them about the process of voting. We implemented a student poll worker program that kind of grew over the years. I think last year we had about 50 students who worked. So they could do everything that an adult poll worker could do. They kind of buddied up with a veteran poll worker. And Everyone loved it. The students were a big hit. The students loved the older poll workers. The older poll workers loved the students. They formed great relationships. We also held voting drives at a lot of the city events. So we would go there, have a little booth for voter outreach. We reached out to some of the local colleges, sent voter registrations to them, sent out saying that we needed poll workers to those schools to try to recruit them that way. local nursing homes to get as many as the residents registered and able to vote on election day, whether that was us actually going there and helping them vote or sending the ballots and picking them up. So just trying to get as many people all ages and all backgrounds registered and able to vote. There's a lot of different ways you can vote now by mail, early, in person. So it's accessible to a lot of people. I think it's just getting that information out there so that people know that it's available and how they can vote in the most convenient way for them.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Thank you so much. Any questions to Vice President Collins?
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you so much for being here. It's great to meet you. Thank you so much for joining the team and I know you've heard a lot from staff I'm sure and your colleagues the city hall. How happy we are to have you on board. full-time job, probably more like one and a half at least most of the time, but we're really happy to have you and to have you bring so much experience and enthusiasm to this role. So we're excited to work with you and support you however we can this election year and going forward. I have just one clarifying question on the budget before us, which I think is probably more for Nina. I think you spoke to this, but if you could just run me through, I see the the decrease in salaries part-time, I see the increase in salaries seasonal. If there's a short way to just explain how that all shakes out.
[SPEAKER_14]: I think so. I am not the most brief person as you've probably noticed. Me neither.
[SPEAKER_13]: But I will try.
[SPEAKER_14]: In summary, there's this reimbursement for the early voting costs. So a lot of those costs have shifted over to that area. And we've right-sized this to take into account that reimbursement area where we'd ultimately apply a lot of those costs for early voting and vote by mail. And I apologize, say that again?
[SPEAKER_17]: Would that be for the seasonals, for the part-time?
[SPEAKER_14]: It would be essentially for seasonals, yes. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. Essentially, you know, When crafting this budget, through you, Mr. President, when crafting this budget, I found that there wasn't enough lines, and I just expanded those lines. And it was actually one of the first things Danielle said, and I said, well, I went to the City of Everett website, and I stole the budget lines that you guys had, and I used that. So this is kind of, it's just kind of being drawn out a little bit more.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_11]: Just like to say, we're very grateful to have you here. Welcome to the city of Medford. And I'm sure that everybody here is an elected official can tell you our own stories about how chaotic the November elections were and how. personally stressful it was I would just encourage you if you see anything in the elections office that you think could be fixed in terms of making things more efficient or you know just anything you see then please feel free to bring it to council's attention or to fix it fix it yourself. So I went to the, you know, I chatted with some of the elections workers a couple of weeks ago and just kind of saw how they were doing manual data entry on what looked like very outdated software, just spending a lot of time entering the voter registration cards prior to the March elections. I'm not an expert on things like that, but it did seem like there was some room for improvement, either in terms of whatever software they're using, um, or just. I'm not I'm not really sure if you would have any ideas on that, but if there is a way that council can help support that in the future and make the elections department more. Scalable or efficient or less prone to having these kind of mistakes that we've seen in previous years, we're all ears.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, the system is a state run system. So there's no, we have to use that one. They are in the process of upgrading it. It was supposed to go into effect before the September election. Now it got pushed back to next year. But it is a 19, a system that was started in 1996. So it is a little outdated and slow, but that's the whole state has no option but to use that. So we're just trying to work around it the best we can.
[SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, it was a lot of the clerks there just taking in these handwritten cards and just typing in names, and it seemed like it was taking them five minutes.
[SPEAKER_13]: To register people?
[SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, and I was just kind of looking at it like, okay, I hope that this can be done better, but obviously it's a state-run system then.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the good news is most people now kind of register online, whether it's at the RMV. So we don't get as many of those handwritten cards as we used to. But those that we do, we still have to type it ourselves.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Thank you. I just had one question. Oh, sorry, Justin. Go ahead.
[SPEAKER_06]: might be similar, but I wanted to ask about when we were doing last year's election budget, something that came up was the drop in the number of FTEs. And there was a big conversation about whether that was the right choice. And I think a lot of different perspectives on it. I think I can understand different perspectives on it. I don't expect any change to this budget. For the position that we're in right now, this is reasonable. In our last governance committee meeting, we talked about letting you come on and then evaluate the situation and maybe come back to us to talk about this in half a year or so. But I did want to raise that to your attention. that this is a point of conversation on the council and with the administration about the resources needed for this department. And so, again, just wanted to put that nugget out there. And I don't know if the president had questions about that, because I know this is something that we had talked about before, too.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, no. I mean, I think it remains to be seen to me. Obviously, things are getting done, and I appreciate the update and transparency. I just think it remains to be seen. We'll see how these upcoming elections go, given that this is the budget we're looking at citywide. It makes it a little tougher to say, let's add two positions in the elections department. That'd be the most of any department in the whole city. But I certainly still have some outstanding questions of if the staffing level is sufficient for the level of work, or if there needs to be additional budgeting around the part-time and the seasonal. that. I respect that it's a moving target. Um and respect that, uh, your leadership and you know, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. And I trust that there will be an honesty that if there is more needed that you'll come to us with the need and then I respect that. So, um, my question was actually around more Councilor Leming's question just around the voter list. Um you know, it does seem to be getting up there. You know, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe not, but do you think that the updates to the state registration system or any work that you guys are planning to do maybe after these two elections might weed out some of the folks who have moved away but might still be listed and maybe they moved out of state so they didn't re-register in Massachusetts so the state system isn't pulling them out of Medford and putting them somewhere else, those kind of things?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so we just actually got a list in the mail from Florida and Maine, I think, that had sent us some lists. But unfortunately, you can't remove voters without a signature unless they haven't voted or filled out a census for four consecutive years. So once you didn't vote in two consecutive federal elections, after that four years, when we run the inactive report to send out the confirmation cards, it will delete. those voters, confirmation cards have to be sent out. So right now there's no one eligible to be deleted in that sense. But I think in the next couple of years, you know, that that will catch up with that after this federal election, maybe in the next years.
[SPEAKER_13]: But yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fortunately, even when you know they moved out, you have to wait that four years if you can't get a signature. So a lot of the times on the census, they'll send back moves, but they won't give us an address to send the delete voter form.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, there was an error in 2021, where people were moved, marked inactive inaccurately, and then all marked active. And I don't know how the backend of the system works, but could that maybe have restarted a bunch of four consecutive year clocks at that point?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think, I don't know how in the past if confirmation cards were sent out every year, but that has to be like logged in the system, like you have to for it, the clock to start has to be every year. So I think that's where like there was, there might've been like one year where it either didn't get sent out or it didn't get put in the system. So now we're starting from scratch again.
[SPEAKER_05]: Got it. Okay. Thank you. Any further questions on the elections department? Seeing none, any questions from the public on the Elections Department? Seeing none, thank you so much and welcome to Medford.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Facilities Department, Director Riggi, thank you for sitting it out.
[SPEAKER_13]: No problem.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the rivalry between the Council and IT grows. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I saw we forced Rich to eat some food. He's so bored and hungry, he went for the food. Welcome, Mr. Iggy. Facilities department. We'll go. I'll just go through it. You've watched everyone else. You know what's up. Fiscal 24 $1,000,619,513 fiscal 25 $1,000,865,594 one head count. Fiscal 24, that's you. One headcount Fiscal 25, that's you. Looks like about a 15% increase, all of that being essentially fixed cost growth. A little bit of an increase because of the non-union salary. Utility costs, electric and gas prices going up, that's a budget of 100 increase of $140,000. And then the cleaning contract increased $100,000. And that's really it. So if you want to share about what you've been doing fiscal 24 plans for fiscal 25, and then anything that isn't in this budget that you think may be needed for your department in the future, either new staff or other expenses.
[SPEAKER_09]: Sure. I was able to get 3 of our buildings under HVAC. maintenance contracts, which was a big thing. I've been consolidating services to save money so we have only one pest control company, one alarm company, so we're saving money that way. You'll see It's also the Chevalier is part of the budget. That's just one staff person right now. Most of the money for the Chevalier comes out of casino funding or paybacks from our client that uses the facility. One of the big accomplishments was finally finishing the facade project at Chevalier. Engine 3 is getting ready hopefully to reopen. I'm hoping that July 1st, we can get that company back to Engine 3 on Salem Street.
[SPEAKER_05]: And was that about concrete or weather?
[SPEAKER_09]: That's the slab project. The slab was failing, so we needed to get that done. And as we opened it up, we found additional problems. I've also done some waterproofing and other items there at that station so they can be dry and we can protect that slab. So that'll be opening. This year, I'm working on Fire headquarters redesign, starting that project, and anything else that may come my way. Council Chambers windows will hopefully be replaced totally. I did some glass replacements and we found some structural issues with the windows. So, another big accomplishment is the city now has a house doctor. the city of Met for three years. We have three firms on call on their architectural firms, so any department in the city and also the school department can call these. Architectural firms. They've guaranteed pricing for the city of Met for three years, and they can provide architectural support for any major projects that we may encounter. That was something that. The city has been trying to In the future, I think what I'm really going to be looking at is the facilities department and actually creating a department. Last year, I was only here for a couple of months when I did my budget, so I'm still trying to figure out what was up and what was going on. There are some maintenance workers that have a different reporting structure. I think we need to bring them into the facilities and maybe increase the staff. So I'm not just one person for 18 different buildings in the city.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yep. Is that 18 including the schools?
[SPEAKER_09]: No. And I've also, I'm technically not supposed to work at the schools, but I've been helping as much as I can in the schools for support and helping them with different projects at the schools.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. I think there's personally, I think there's great opportunities for synergy there, but. We will leave the law for another day. I have a question. Any other questions? Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate the straightforward, very legible budget. questions that I had on the utilities and the contractor services you already explained.
[SPEAKER_09]: Utilities, the city was very lucky about almost four years ago, signed an electric contract which electric rates were very low, so we were guaranteed for three-year pricing. Unfortunately, that contract came up last November. Electric prices went through the roof. We have another three-year contract, but we're still paying substantially lower than if we went through National Grid to get our electric. So that's it. Contracted services, I found that the DPW building does not have any outside cleaning. So we're adding that starting in July. And also, the library is open six days a week, but we only provide cleaning for five days. So we're adding the six-day Saturday, so we can make sure the library is clean for the residents.
[SPEAKER_17]: Great. Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Thank you. My only question... Oh, sorry.
[SPEAKER_17]: Sorry, I just missed part of what you're saying about the house doctor. Is that essentially like an on-call?
[SPEAKER_09]: It's an on-call architect. It's a state model where they have that for any state agency and cities and towns can put out an RFP to request architecture firms to provide pricing. We reviewed it, and then we selected three firms to be on-call for the city of Bedford.
[SPEAKER_17]: Great. Thank you so much for all of your proactive work.
[SPEAKER_05]: My only question, do the new windows come with drapes?
[SPEAKER_09]: That we have to talk about. I received some ARPA funding from the mayor to do some things, so hopefully I can stretch the ARPA funding to figure out once we do the windows, what we can do with the shades and the drapes. We don't need four-piece drapes. We'll be talking about that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, aesthetically we should do some, I agree with that. I thought we should keep the ripped one, though. I've been focused. I'll bring that to the... Everyone else has been talking. Chevalier, $32,000 staying flat. Is this all funded through casino money or half funded?
[SPEAKER_09]: No, that's our portion of that. The rest of the funding comes from the same budget.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any other questions for facilities in Chevalier? Any questions? Oh, sorry, go ahead.
[SPEAKER_17]: Oh, I'm sorry. You said half is funded casino mitigation. That's $32,000?
[SPEAKER_09]: $32,000 is the maintenance work, and then any other funding we need at the Chevalier comes from our casino mitigation fund and our payments from our Blumenreich.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great. Any further questions? Any questions from members of the public? Rich, do you have any questions for Paul? None that you can say publicly. All right, I think that's all we have. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the work that your department does, that you do. Information technology. I like the coat. It's good. It's looking good.
[SPEAKER_20]: I was supposed to be at dinner, but because the schedule got rearranged by one of you, I got put last. It's not dinner.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm sorry. Dinner for rich. Is that really true?
[SPEAKER_20]: As far as you know.
[SPEAKER_05]: In cases where you do have urgent plans, always feel free. We will accommodate. I give 24-7 for City. I don't have a life other than servicing its needs. Just don't tell HR.
[SPEAKER_20]: I am salary exempt, so... Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_05]: Aren't we all? Adam, if you could be... Oh, you have a presentation?
[SPEAKER_20]: That's what professionals do, my friend. Oh, jeez. I'm glad no one else is here. We all know what we stand for. make one big happy face.
[SPEAKER_11]: This is my favorite presentation so far.
[SPEAKER_05]: This Rattler is getting two beaded. I love it.
[SPEAKER_16]: Not only will I make it to the end, I will code it.
[SPEAKER_13]: All righty. Let me share.
[SPEAKER_17]: Go on up here.
[SPEAKER_13]: Just you and me, right?
[SPEAKER_20]: Will you wait for me?
[SPEAKER_17]: No, no, no.
[SPEAKER_20]: Do you have, um... Usually people wait until I start talking to walk out, so I don't know.
[SPEAKER_17]: Have you already been made a co-host? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Oh, yeah. Cancel. Oh, you are a co-host, I see. I am, yeah. So I'll shoot you a video. I'll share it.
[SPEAKER_13]: Don't let me share.
[SPEAKER_17]: Share screen. Solid start to an IT presentation.
[SPEAKER_13]: It's really a little embarrassing.
[SPEAKER_12]: Here we go.
[SPEAKER_20]: Share.
[SPEAKER_13]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_20]: There you go. That's all I had. I just wanted to share a picture of my dog and my cat. Now they're internet famous.
[SPEAKER_11]: What are their names?
[SPEAKER_20]: The dog is Linus and the cat is Larry. All right, so last year when I was here, I was on day three of the job, and half of you weren't even here yet. So I figure, I don't know that there's ever been a comprehensive review of technology or technology usage here in the city. So I thought I'd structure my presentation a little different than other people have been doing them. Plus, I was an analyst in another life. That's what we do is presentations. Just a quick agenda, what I'll be covering, nothing major here. I'll get through this as quick as possible so we can all go home. Basically, when I came on board, there was nobody in the position for almost a year and a half. So they had a help desk. We have a third party called TOS, a company that does, you know, you can call them, what have you. get your password reset, get some helpful things. But that relationship needs to be managed to get them moving in the right direction. They did the best they could. There was nobody here. They didn't have a person. It's tough to find the right skill set for this job, I think. So they took their time and did the best they could. So when I got here, I said, I need to assess everything suit to nuts. I used to live in Medford, just so you know, so I was well aware of where the city was from a technology standpoint. I don't feel that in the past 20-25 years much has been done in investment and technology here in the city. We lag pretty far behind our contemporaries in the area. Uh, so I kind of took a look at what was there and found a, what I expect to find. Uh, this is just a very short list of the things that weren't done properly or hadn't been done at all. Um, there's a very, very long list that accompanies this. I can share with anyone that wants to see it. Um, but just an idea that even the basics weren't done to the degree that should have been done. hear from what I what I saw. So setting about that, I said, you know, we're really in a firefighting mode right now. Everybody has problems all the time. People just literally just learn to live with the problems they had. And I find that unacceptable in this kind of position. So I spent a good amount of time in the beginning, trying to stabilize things. You know, I worked with the help desk that we have to get them working in the way I wanted them to work, in the way, giving customer service the way I felt they should be giving it. And then did some other things where I was able to deploy new assets to people that, you know, people have computers over six, seven years old. They were just frustrated with them, but, you know, they learned to suffer in silence around here. So did as much as I could to try to get in the first, three months, four months stability. And it works. When I first came on board the TOS, our help desk was averaging about 165 tickets a month calls from end users. Right now we average about 50 to 55. So it's a reduction of about 63%. What that means is people are able to continue to be productive throughout the day, not facing constant interruptions. And it also frankly frees up my time to work on what I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about here, capital projects and improvements and things like that, that are really going to move the city forward. I was, you know, we had helpdesk, I wasn't brought in to do helpdesk, I was brought in to do digital transformation, and that's what I'm starting to do. So planning, these are the capital projects we're looking to kick off or have kicked off. We basically have Most communities around here build municipal fiber optic networks. They did the most of that work between 2007 and 2012. Medford never did it. So that was high on my list to get started. One of the original thinking was they were going to put in fiber to the fire stations. And then I kind of took over that project and said, you know, why don't we do a bunch of the other municipal buildings? So the first part of it will be all the fire stations will be connected City Hall, Council on Aging, Library, DPW. And then we will work in another phase, and I'll talk about that a little bit later, of tying up the rest of the buildings in there. I'll go into a little more detail on another slide just because I think it helps to understand. People look at the costs and they say, why are we spending that much when it seems to be fine now? I can speak to that a little bit. City Hall, where we are now, there's at least four different generations going back about 30 years of cabling the network. We had to replace all that. It just doesn't make sense anymore to struggle with it. We have problems with it all the time. I always say the network here is a couple of cans and a piece of string. Then, you know, one of the other important products too is, so the fourth one down, the Zetron replacement. So the Zetron is the system that public safety uses in the 911 center to alert the fire stations, you know, they have a A robust system that can tell them all kinds of different things, where it is, what have you, alerts them, wakes them up on a sound sleep by turning the lights on and playing this crazy space invader's noise. It freaks you out the first time you're in a station and it goes off. Doesn't even bother the firefighters, it's hilarious. But that is really the sort of nexus of that is in the actual 911 call center where the operator is taking the calls. Right now it's about 22 or 23 year old system. The new system has a whole bunch of automations in it where it can really reduce the workload of someone when they're on a call with somebody that's in a crisis situation. They can focus on the person calling and less on keystrokes and things like that. So we're pretty excited about that and the fire department is. And then just here in general in the city, and I'll talk about the phone system a little bit too. We're replacing all the phones because they're an end of life for forever and a day and the phone system is, yeah, if you've ever used it, it's a mess. And it saves us a whole host of money by doing this. And then we're hopefully, we're in the valuation phase right now. If you look at the way our HR department, their workflow, it's all paper and moving papers around and what have you. really just difficult on them. There's only two HR folks, you know, it's Lisa obviously, but two generals in their benefits and in our recruitment. So, they have to spend a vast majority of their time just doing everything manually. And if you go down and say, can I get a list of all the employees of the DPW, you know, sort of thing and start qualifying things, It's just a manual process. It could take them days to get through to find the data. So we've looked at HRS systems. I know what they can do. We were evaluating some of the vendors out there that I think will fit an organization of our size. And hopefully this year, mid-year, fall-ish, we can start bringing that in and piloting it. So I just want to go on a little more detail on the fiber because people look at the cost and say, well, why are we spending that? It's an infrastructure project, and it's kind of the basis of everything we're going to do going forward. But just as when I have a methodology of going through asking for money for projects, it has to return a certain amount of money or self-fund itself over time. So when you add up all the money we spend now by having distributors you know, systems and what have you, you know, every location building has its own internet connection. So yeah, it's a you're paying $200 a month doesn't seem like a big deal. We'll multiply that up by 17. That's what we have in terms of tens of thousands of dollars. We do this project, we have one internet connection for the city. So, it's things like that, and then I don't have to buy duplicates of hardware, because I have to put hardware at every end point. I can get rid of all that infrastructure and not have to pay those maintenance contracts. So, it kind of snowballs. It makes administration easier. Those costs go down. So, it just kind of even just the first year, you know, we turn it live, you're looking at $110,000. I won't have to spend an additional money somewhere else. So, do you have a question? Yeah, I didn't want to take him at the end or whatever. You guys do you. Oh, okay, whatever. I'll sell you for the hand up, so. And then the same thing with the phone system. Right now, we get way overcharged by our phone vendor. Hopefully, they're not watching this, because I need them to keep going for a little while longer. But the call series, we were actually able to roll the fire department in. We'll be able to cancel their contract. And then the only people that will be outside of the phone system after we're done would be police and schools. And those are two organizations that I don't currently support. So they would be on their own, but everybody else you think, rec department, chevalier, DPW yard, council on aging, fire department finally will all be wrapped to the new phone systems and then you save 38 grand a year. So let's talk about the budget. We can take a look at that. There's a little, I don't know if you've got a chance to really go through it. I moved a bunch of things around just because to make it easier from an administrative standpoint, I combined some accounts that were legacy accounts. I don't even know what the original intent of them was. So when we go through this, it looks like they stole a bunch of money from me, but it's not really accurate. We were paying the support for what's called admins, our financial software package, out of my budget. It didn't really make any sense to do that anymore, so I just transferred that back to finance. It's literally just fill out a piece of paper every year, so there's no point in me having to worry about that. And then, More importantly, we see an addition of about 51,000 or so in the consulting, I think it's consulting. professional services. So last night, my esteemed colleagues in the library went and talked about technology and what they use and what have you. So they had been under their own sort of support contract for their technology. The past few, it predates me being here. It's not very efficient. You have to have economies of scale and put everything in one. You can negotiate, you've got a negotiating power. So we thought about it and said, why don't we move that over into my budget? And then I'll manage this. They use the same company for support that we do. It would just make sense. And then I would go back and negotiate with them. Both contracts are up July 1st and say, you know, what can we do to combine these things? Where are there efficiencies we can, you know, make it a little better for everyone. So I'm still in the negotiation phases. It's going pretty well. I don't think we're that far apart. But yeah, that money was added over there to account for that. So it's before anybody gets the, you know, we're underfunding the library and the IT director is taking books out of children's hands. That's not really the story. We're just moving the money from one spot to the other. And the day it gets spent, they get the same quality service they've been used to. Nothing changes in that regard. So that's just want to make that clear. So Zach, if you have any questions on the budget numbers or anything, just let me know because I'm going to move on real quick. And then there's this, I don't know, I don't even know if I finished this slide, but it was more cost savings. It was just low hanging fruit, you know, Fire departments always left them their own to their own devices for technology. Why, I have no idea, but I'm happy that I'm able to support them now. But then in going over contracts and whatever, I found just a few things that it was easy to roll into either my budget or just cancel out right as we had redundant systems. So that's really all that that's trying to show there. So I think that's it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Director Lane, thank you very much for your thorough presentation.
[SPEAKER_20]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: A model for all of us. Any questions for members of the Council? Councilor Leming, then Councilor Collins.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you. It's clear that you've been busy since you started here, and we're very grateful to have you. Is it two questions? First, is it logistically possible either technically or administratively to connect to get the school system as well onto the same Internet connection, potentially for more savings? You mentioned their Medford City Hall, library and some other place that wasn't the public schools.
[SPEAKER_20]: I currently don't support the school system. The school systems generally are networked slightly different. The reason for that is this. When you have a Comcast or Verizon coming to your town, generally shake them down. I mean, you negotiate with them to do certain things for the municipality. And that generally involves bringing fiber optic technology out to all the schools. All the schools are connected. These things are recorded. So all the schools currently are connected. We were actually strangely connected from here, that room right in there, up to the high school. Now the connection's broken, doesn't work right now, but it's Comcast originally put it in. Of course, Comcast doesn't run fiber anymore, so there's not much we can do about that. But we are this year, I believe, renegotiating with Verizon and Comcast again for the city. So we'll certainly have some latitude on what we can do. I would love Well, I'm not going to say what I was going to say. But yeah, I would have some latitude to get some things upgraded or updated where we need to be. But to answer your question, not that I'm avoiding it, right now schools aren't in scope. They have their own IT person up there. It just wouldn't be feasible the way things are architected to do that.
[SPEAKER_11]: Okay. Second question. What was the $131 spent on a part-time employee?
[SPEAKER_20]: I have no idea how that got in there or why that's been in there. There's also for, there was something in there for a dollar for conferences. I'm like, who's going to a dollar conference? But the 131 doesn't show up in my budget as a line item. I will say one thing about the salaries down the bottom. I just want to make it clear that I did not get an 8% raise. That is simply from, some of the department heads, predates me, were in a sort of union. We decided not to go forward with that in December. So that triggered the administration giving us the 2% for 3 fiscal years retro back there. And then I believe this is accounting for a 1.3% increase for fiscal year 2025. So it's just that. It's not that I got a raise or anything. So you'll see that a lot of the poverty heads, probably about 9 or 10, they didn't really get bumped up.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's just retro.
[SPEAKER_20]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Great, any other questions for Councilor Iya, Councilor Collins?
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you for being so forthcoming about that. I did notice on some other budgets, so thank you for speaking to it. Thank you as well for the most visual presentation of the night.
[SPEAKER_20]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_17]: And no specific question for you, just it's great to hear some of the details about, in addition to the whole scope of what you're doing, a lot of the consolidation of systems. This is great to hear. Happy that we're doing that. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just want to personally thank you for all the assistance you've given to us here. Emergency assistance, not emergency assistance. There's a much better digital setup up here now for chairs of the council, council committees, school committee to you know, be working on Zoom, managing it, there's a physical hard connection in case the Wi-Fi goes out. So making this kind of a foolproof setup up here as best as possible, even though I'm sure we try to file it up as much as we can. And that's just been really great. So really thankful for that. Also for working with Kevin Harrington and myself on some of the consulting us on the audio visual upgrade and work in the clerk's office as well. So I just wanted to really thank you for that. And next time, especially if you're bringing slides next year, I may not remember this, but I hope you remember it. You can go first. So if you're on big, long night, seriously, and you've reminded me that I said it, if I'm still the president, fingers crossed, that's a commitment I'm happy to make.
[SPEAKER_12]: No problem.
[SPEAKER_05]: put it in your calendar, mostly because I want everyone to come with a PowerPoint. I think that's a great thing. I'm surprised nobody does. Thank you so much. Are there any questions for members of the public? Seeing no members of the public present in the chamber or on Zoom, you are free to go. Excellent.
[SPEAKER_13]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if we did make you miss dinner, I do apologize. Last department of the night, law department. Chief of staff Nesarian representing the administration. Law department budget, fiscal 24, $552,403. Fiscal 25, $530,035.80. Head count going down from three to two, minus 4% growth. The decrease is due to the reduction and removal of the assistant city clerk and some minor reductions in ordinary expenses. There is an increase in the City solicitor salary increase in the budget for outside legal counsel. Chief of staff Nazarian. That's why I said assistant city solicitor, right? Oh, sorry. Assistant city solicitor. My apologies. What a night. But yeah, so the removal of the assistant city solicitor position, taking the full-time head count down from three to two. And so with that, we'll go to the chief of staff for, further presentation.
[SPEAKER_14]: Hello again. Um, you know, I know that the council's, you know, very well aware of the challenges that we're facing and the school department budget and you know the where the mayor myself and the finance team have been working hard to try to to find the millions more that the school department needs. Candidly, the mayor asked that I say that if it were up to her, obviously we work collaboratively with the council, that she would propose removing both the city solicitor and the assistant city solicitor from the budget and using those dollars to go to the school department and then using that the KP law resource to continue the work that we believe is allowed the city to move forward very. the city solicitor position. Um. More quickly, especially on a number of different areas. But again, as the mayor asked that I say, um, you know, she views this as a compromise to allow the assistant city solicitor funds to go to, uh, the school department, essentially, so those funds can be used by schools. And you know, maintain the city solicitor position. I do think that there's I think it's a challenging scenario, but I have said before, I've said probably year after year in front of this council, the number of disciplines, and I will read the list of disciplines that we really do draw upon with KP law can't be matched by a two-person city solicitor team. It just can't. So from that perspective, I don't... I don't believe the council's under any impressions that that would be the case, but the reality is that we would always need an outside vendor. And I think it's important that we have an outside vendor that can provide the level of support that our organization needs. There are so many disciplines specific, and I'll just touch on those really quick. labor and employment contracts, our procurement offices often reaching out to KP law reviewing contracts. There's a there's a lot that happens there. I just happened to start my time in the city of Medford on it in a temporary basis. in the procurement office, essentially. And I know firsthand as to how much work that office uses under the retainer, fortunately. Real estate, land use, environmental, governmental information. and access, construction, litigation. We didn't discuss this earlier, I'm surprised. I meant to mention it, but obviously the recount, I'm surprised it didn't come up, but the recount that we had in December of 2023, obviously we got what is believed and across the state to be the expert in that area, Attorney Lauren Goldberg. I think many of the council members interacted with her, Attorney Goldberg, at that recount, and I'm sure you found her to be just as professional as We have experience. She's the managing partner of the law firm, fortunately. So we're very lucky to not only have her insight, expertise, and the ability to reach out to her and ask her any questions. As I said before, we were lucky enough to have her connect us with the city of Everett. So there's tangible and intangible benefits that I think that the city is receiving from the partnership that we've had for the last few years. So that just at a high level addresses the change in terms of staffing. And I'm happy to go through more information on the narrative and the goals for next year. It's all very broad, but I'm happy to go through it if the council thinks it would be beneficial.
[SPEAKER_05]: Any requests for the narrative or objections to the narrative? Does anyone want to hear it? seeing those very broad, very broad.
[SPEAKER_14]: I don't think it's going to provide you that much. So just save yourselves the time.
[SPEAKER_05]: I do want to say that that is certainly no comment on the wonderful work of Jada Spencer, our office manager and confidential secretary. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_14]: We wouldn't, this wouldn't, this truly wouldn't be the city solicitor. Um. This this set up that we presently have in the absence of the city solicitor, and we've been trying. Um. I didn't comment on the adjustment to the city solicitor salary that's proposed here, but we did receive the council's request, and we did do our best to be as equitable as possible across the organization by taking our in a direction that would skew things significantly across the organization because we have a lot of highly skilled professionals who have licensure that, you know, I'd love to see a class, the class and comp study to really help us with these things is the reality of the situation. So the only other thing I was going to say back to Janice, Miss Janice Spencer, I really don't know how to thank her for all the work she's done. She's the one who helps us keep the glue together with that department, but she's also taken on the responsibility of records access officer in the absence of a city solicitor, which is a monumental task. Occasionally, she'll tell me the challenges she faces, you know, people will ask for a record, she'll get back to them, they'll be asked to pay an amount, and then they'll, you know, have frustrations that they haven't received the documentation, but it does take a long time. We do have many, many departments that she has to reach out to compiled documents, and it's not always 10 days, because under the law, we have 10 days to respond and provide an estimate of how much time it might take, because there are circumstances where the pile, I mean, I've had the building commissioner send me a photo of a pile about this high of public records that needed to be copied for, you know, one public records request, and that's just one, and we receive, I'd guess, hundreds a month hundreds, and that's not including police, for instance, because they have their own records access officer, and I believe fire as well, but I'd have to double check that. Obviously, police gets a lot more public records requests, too, so.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Got it. Okay, questions from the council. Councilor Collins, Councilor Leming.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you so much for the presentation. Appreciate it. I don't have any specific questions for you. I just want to go on the record and state some impressions given in good faith. Obviously, it's no secret to anybody that the Council has for a couple of terms been advocating for increased capacity within our in-house legal department, and I do hear you on the breadth of experience and expertise that KP Law brings to the table. In many occasions, we benefited from having them as available resource. I also think it's still true that they serve a different function than what we're hoping to expand in the in-house law department. Obviously, keeping and maintaining the role of city solicitor and assistant city solicitor over the long term is something that's really important to me. We know that this budget season, or I would say, speaking for myself, I'm also aware that this budget season is an extenuating circumstance. You know, I think I'm still, as with the rest of the budget, you know, most of the budgets that we've received, the departmental budgets we've received, don't have any big changes, like there isn't a great change in headcount. This is one where there is, and I think it's gonna take me more than a day and a half to kind of absorb that and, you know, see how I feel about it. I think that that's going to come down to, you know, the context of the overall budget proposal that we receive. Because of course, you know, these changes this year are all about context and making sure that we're putting resources where they're really needed. Of course, I'm talking about, you know, the schools and making sure that we are maintaining our baseline, you know, across the city and schools as an organization this year. But at the same time, you know, this feels like a big change. You know, I know this earlier this spring, the council advocated for actually increasing the salary allocated to both city solicitor and city solicitor. So I do understand that if the premise is, why don't we nix both? This is a compromise from that starting position, but from the starting position of we want to be competitive with other cities to fill both positions, this is a pretty big change. Just wanted to put that out there for the record. You know, that's how I'm absorbing this proposed change. and I also, you know, like I said, just to reiterate, I think that as with anything this year, it's gonna come down to the context of the overall budget that we're passing this year and our plans for how we're going to fill gaps citywide. Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thanks, Vice President Collins. Councilor Leming.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you. So hypothetically, if we did have a city solicitor, how much do you think it would decrease the line some of the line items here as well? So how much would so. KB law, it sounds like from what you're saying would be necessary, even in the case that we did have a city solicitor for more specialized services, how much of the services that. They're providing now, and an approximate dollar amount, do you think could be done by by in house legal?
[SPEAKER_14]: That would be an incredibly difficult question to answer. It really depends on the specialty experience or otherwise of the incoming city solicitor, for instance. You know, if that city solicitor has decades of experience, that would be a different equation. If that city solicitor is relatively new to municipal sector or, you know, Frankly, we've met candidates who have worked on the private side only, right? They would need to get acquainted with the open meeting law, with the public records law, with the... There's another law that somehow I'm not recalling right now as far as document. Our city clerk, I'm sure would have it at the top of his mind. document retention, thank you, document retention law, those are, that's like the bread and butter. That's the standard stuff, right? The public records and the open meeting law and retention, those things, you know, we had made an offer to a candidate not long ago, that was a New Hampshire solicitor, that person would get need to get acquainted with the city, the state of Massachusetts laws, there's some similarities, but not all. So it would take some time potentially again.
[SPEAKER_11]: Something that rewards institutional knowledge, which would be acquired over a period of time. So I would guess initially they'd be relying on KP law a good amount.
[SPEAKER_14]: That's the best summary to state, yes.
[SPEAKER_11]: But it also sounds like from what you're saying, FOIA requests and whatnot, you're personally handling a lot of the tasks that would otherwise fall on in-house legal counsel.
[SPEAKER_14]: I am not. Janice Spencer, the office manager in the law department, is handling those.
[SPEAKER_11]: I'm sorry, I misheard that.
[SPEAKER_14]: No worries. Thankfully, I cannot. I feel for Janice. She does a great job.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Councilor Zargarpur. We've been here for a while. I may be missing it. The payments that we make to KP Law, what budget does that come out of? Is that included here?
[SPEAKER_14]: That is included here. Basically, the retainer comes out of this budget. As you can see on the second line, under ordinary expenses, 010-151-5302 professional service is legal. The budgeted amount last year was $96,000. The proposed budgeted amount for this year is $138,000. This coming year is $138,000. There was an increase to the cost.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I guess what I'm asking is, if the thinking here is to save an amount of money in the legal department so that it can be used in the school department to balance the budget, how much is being saved?
[SPEAKER_14]: The proposed savings would be about $78,000, just $79,000, roughly, in the assistant city solicitor. Otherwise, this budget would be that much larger.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is something that is happening in various departments in order to balance the school budget in the meantime, because it's legally required that we have a balanced school budget to present to the state. But $78,000 is not a very large amount of money for a city's budget. From my perspective, I'm just saying that.
[SPEAKER_14]: And to that, if I don't mean to interrupt, but to that, I will say it's not just $78,000. We have combed through a lot of budgets. These dollars are adding up. Yes. It's still a very fluid issue. We learned about that major, that number, the gap last week. We've been working. I mean, I can't say around the clock, because I do sleep, but we have been working diligently on that issue. And these are ways that we can get pieces put together to make a larger pie to be able to address the school department issue. It's still a work in progress. Understood. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're going back to Councilor Leming. Councilor Tseng?
[SPEAKER_06]: I think obviously this is a difficult issue to broach with the Council, because you and the Mayor very much know where most of the Council stands on this. I think when I think back to our first budget, Councilor Collins and my first budget, the conversations were that council wanted the solicitor and assistant city solicitor to cut the funding for KP Law. I think it was a reasonable compromise at that time to put in the two positions and to keep funding for KP Law given what you said about the areas of expertise that KP Law does offer the city, that a lot of city staff have expressed interest and support for, but I also do very much believe that the solicitor roles are fundamentally just different roles than having legal advisors, legal consultants there. The interests are different. The ways that we can use them as a council, access them as a council are different as well. But I also don't want to re-litigate. right now, any of those past discussions. I would agree with Vice President Collins that a lot of this is about context. And so I understand the change being made. I can't, you know, have a very firm stance on it unless I know what's being made up from it, where, you know, what does the rest of the budget look like. But I would want to say that, you know, If the change makes sense, even if the change makes sense, and even if it's something that I could bring myself to support, I would really like to see a path back of adding this position back into the budget come next, the next budget for fiscal 26. I think that's a direction that we'll have to chart. And hopefully in the next month, we'll have a better picture as to how, you know, what's the big picture long-term plan to add the assistant solicitor position back into the general fund.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. I don't wanna get into... I'm gonna work hard on what I'm about to say. I think there are other ways to address the school funding issue that do not include this cut. I think we are still discussing that, and I'll leave it at that for that element of it. I definitely don't support this model. I certainly wouldn't support a fully outsourced model. I will say that in conversations with council who work for the firm that we are outsourcing to, there have been mentions that the model we are using is unorthodox. I would think that they would benefit from us moving to that model and for some of those councils to say that they would see an in-house model at least partially being more of a I don't want to say recommendation, but I've heard from members of the legal team that we work with that that element is important. They think that there's a lot of value there. So, you know, that's really where I'm at on it. I think we had a budget agreement two years ago that was predicated on having two full-time staff members in the law department. I do not think that that, I do not think the circumstances of this budget abrogate that agreement. And I certainly don't think that I think there are other ways to find the solution that we're seeking to find by removing this position. I also don't think that 78,000 is enough at this point to hire a qualified assistant city solicitor, so that's another discussion. But, you know, I just think that there's a lot of work that I think this council has been put in a position of not having in-house council that has put us in difficult positions in the past. I think we work our best with council. I think we're very judicious with trying not to reach out to council because we understand that there could be added costs to all of that. I think basically the way that all of that works has put this council in difficult positions at certain times and having in-house council, a city solicitor, And I'll just add that there have been a variety of processes and procedures that have been drawn out in terms of codification and of ordinances. And again, it's not a comment so much on any failing of a person as much as it is that there's no lawyer in this building that you can walk up to their office and say, hey, do you have five minutes? And know that that's gonna be the position and opinion of the city. And I think that that's an incredibly important thing to have. So I'm glad to see the increased salary here. I hope that that attracts a qualified candidate. I think losing the other full-time staff person in the department may detract a qualified candidate from wanting to come here, knowing that they won't have an assistant. So those are really my main concerns here. I, my preference would be not even a path in the future, but to just have a level staff funded budget here. If it gets, uh, if it's a, if it's a take back at the end of the year, like it has been the last three fiscal years is a take back at the end of the year. Right. Um, so, or maybe I'm not using the right term, but, uh, um, yeah, I just think that this is, I don't think that using this department's budget, to address the problems that are being stated is the most judicious course. And I'll leave it at that. I'm hopeful that we can continue to work collaboratively through the process and understanding of the deep underfunding of the schools and find an alternative to changes in the law department structure. Instead, find an alternative to that as we look to close the gap on the school funding. in the absence of being able to do that, I think some commitment in future budgets that this would be a key priority and that we would look to bring back the second full-time person potentially at a more competitive rate would also be potentially a path that we could take. Although that's sort of speaking for myself. So that's where I'm at on this. It has been certainly a top priority of the council, a major issue and a major question that we've been hearing. So There are a lot of places that I would be more than happy and willing to look to address the financial issue. I think this is one where it's really tough to do that. So that's all I'll say from my perspective. Any further comments by members of the council on the law department budget? Vice President Collins.
[SPEAKER_17]: Thank you. And again, not to belabor any points, but just I think this is obviously an ongoing conversation. conversations about any changes to any departmental budget, don't open and close and leave preliminary budget hearing. I think that's one advantage of this new structure. We have many more opportunities to talk about this, to discuss and negotiate. But I think one, I think something that's come up for me even just in this one meeting, which I think has been useful and clear in the way that many department heads are thinking about their budgets and the way that we're thinking about the organizational budget overall is What are we investing in and what's the return that we get from those investments? And I know in a year where there's a really emergent need, that conversation gets a lot harder. And we're trying to fill a multi-million gap for the schools and contemplate all possible solutions for doing that. And I think that we have to be talking about all of them. But I wouldn't want, you know, what a well-resourced city council is able to do for the city in the short and long term to fall out of that discussion. Even just thinking about the plans that we have for this year and where I think we're fairly well supported right now on one of our three major, one of our major projects being the zoning overhaul because of the zoning consultant that we do have the resources for for the rest of this fiscal year and the next one. But we also are going to be working on a city charter especially we're talking about the context of a major budget shortfall. One of the few things that this council has direct influence over is making the zoning decisions that affect business development. That could be one of the pieces of solving our budget deficit for the longer term so we don't keep coming back and having budget discussions like these when we're trying to fill gaps and trying to cut things that really shouldn't be cut. And so I hope that, I think this is one of the first, apart from the schools, this is one of the first really major consequential, in my opinion, cuts that has been proposed this budget season. But I don't think that we should, I think that as we contemplate it, we need to consider what we're leaving on the table by not continuing to try to empower the city council with this piece of the puzzle when it comes to our legal representation. And again, I feel that me and my fellow Councilors who have been on for more than one term have a different perspective on this than folks who have been here for less time. But I understand that there's a difference, and this doesn't take it all away from what KP Law provides, because everything that you said I think is totally true. And I think it's also true that having legal representation that is really for the council is different. and is responsible to the council in a way that is different, that is accountable to the council's goals, in a way that is distinct from the type of service that KP law provides, and not to say that that in any way diminishes what they do, but just to flesh out the points that I was making previously, because I know sometimes I can be a little abstract, and I just, you know, since this is the first time where Councilman Singh, this proposed change in public, I just wanted to put that out there for the record of some of what's on my mind as we consider this cut as part of the package that we try to make to cut our way to resolving that deficit. And what gives me hope is knowing that there are a lot of other solutions that we can, and I know that people are contemplating for how to arrive at a solution that at least all of the critical functions that the city provides, continuing to provide great service for residents and students and teachers. So I look forward to continuing that work. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Vice President Collins. I just have one more question. Will there be a cap change presented to the council to reflect the salary change proposed? And would that come with the budget and with an effective date of July 1, something like that?
[SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, I mean, we iron those things out, but essentially there would have there would need to be another paper.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, great. Yeah, I think just thinking through in my head, that's probably the best way to do it, then we avoid any sort of chapter 40, whatever 43 issues. When I give you the floor back, I know we all just said a bunch of stuff.
[SPEAKER_14]: So thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And I I recognize and I think Councilor Tseng said it, um, you know, this isn't necessarily an easy conversation. I recognize that the council. and the administration have had a number of discussions on this topic. I think in practicality, you know, I think the way I see it is I don't think that this proposed change really changes anything for the council. Frankly, you know, and we may end up disagreeing on that, but this is a discussion. This is something that we will continue to discuss throughout. And as we try to figure out where, you know, how to finalize a budget this year, right? So, you know, I don't take what I'm saying to be necessarily, I wanna preface the following comments that these are really mine and these are my reflections as chief of staff and not necessarily of the mayors. Probably hard to split the two, but I'll try to make that distinction just to tell you that, you know, when I look at this model, as far as the city solicitor is concerned, I think, you know, We could hire a city solicitor, and we can hire an assistant city solicitor, and they're both going to be bombarded. And the assistant city solicitor is going to be accountable to the city solicitor. And the city solicitor is going to be accountable to the administration. And I say that to be just completely upfront and honest. I mean, these staff positions are our staff positions of the city, and they are under the direction of the mayor. And I don't say that to say anything other than we are going to continue to work together and collaborate and provide resources and figure out ways to solve. And I think there's been an incredibly positive, very large steps towards developing better working relationships, to be completely candid. I don't think any one of us thinks probably any differently. I don't think we see it any differently. I think there's, I think the public can probably see it. I think that's very good. So it's not to say anything other than to say There's, I don't see a different, I don't see a different resource. I don't see a different approach to the model because I don't think we've, the council can draw on KP Law, or if it was another firm or another firm, those resources will still be finite, whether we have an assistant city solicitor or not, they will still be finite, no matter how you deal with it. We have 26 plus department heads in this organization. We have seven city councilors. We have, obviously, the mayor and myself, and many others who would need to draw upon. We have departments that have staff within them that are contacting legal for advice and resources, whether it's our CPA manager or some other position in the CDBG manager in the organization. It is not just 26 plus 7 plus 2, it's much more than that. Anyone, whether having one full-time city solicitor and or a full-time assistant city solicitor, their time is going to become very narrow. So I just say that to put into perspective, you know, kind of my angle, and I know the angle that I'm looking at something may not be the angle you're all looking at something, but I want to put in your heads, just like you're putting in my heads, the angles that I see this and how this might play out. That city solicitor and that city solicitor they're not going to be able to attend to everything. And it's not going to materially change, in my mind, how the distribution of resources becomes. And I do believe, and I think maybe I've mistaken. I'm not sure. I wasn't here. I can't speak to it. But it's my understanding that this council has done such a good job over the past several years that there are more ordinances that are getting pushed through. And yes, it does take time. It all takes time. But I think that's That's how government works. And government has to work sometimes, right? It does take time to go through a process. Sometimes there are scenarios where something gets generated at the city council level. And, you know, it's an idea and it gets a draft ordinance gets written and it gets passed to legal to be reviewed. Legal pulls in our department heads because sometimes that has to happen. Other times the council members are working with the department head and the department heads already or the necessary department heads are already looped in. I think there is a good model because we've seen the council be very successful with ordinances and changes and review. But that's just Nina Nazarian, chief of staff, telling you my perspective and my angle. And it's not meant to take away from anything you all have said, just to tell you that I don't know that much changes. But again, we're looking at this probably from a different angle.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Madam Chief. And I appreciate that. I think what you said highlights, though, the difference. Especially for us. The CPA manager can go ask KP Law for something, but a Councilor has to ask me to ask you to ask them. Right? So it's a different... We don't even have... the same access to legal counsel. I mean, you haven't denied access and I'm not implying that, but I'm saying that the process for us is like two more steps than it might be for a non-department head staff person.
[SPEAKER_14]: I will tell you that the CPA manager reaches out to the department head before accessing.
[SPEAKER_05]: One step more.
[SPEAKER_14]: There is also, you know, there is also an inherent, you know, I had this conversation with Councilor Leming and I, again, this is Nina Nazarian speaking, but, you know, there is, the City Council is a body. The city council acts as a body. And those are unique things to consider, right? If every city councilor were to take a specific action without the city council, without the body's involvement, that would be contrary to how it functions. And so I say that with all due respect and not meaning to be in any way, shape, or form minimizing the point you're trying to make, but the council is a body. And again, that's Nina Nazarian speaking and I'm not meant to be anything but kind of talk this out.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's kind of the point I'm making though. You know, I don't think that Because we are members of a legislative body, it limits our rights to reach out to city staff members or to independent resources for research. But I don't think we need to debate our theories about that tonight. More my point is that we make the law. And right now, we are making laws often without a lawyer in the room who is there to serve us. We can ask for it. We work around the schedules of KP Law. They are often very flexible. Again, I'm not trying to point fingers at individuals There's a difference between having someone who represents and works, is paid by just the city of Medford, who works in an office at Medford City Hall, who can build a relationship and grab a snack with a department head or a staff member or sit around a table with the city council in the committee room or here. versus people that we see on Zoom every so often. I know Janelle Austin pretty well now, but I know her now about as well as I knew Mark Rumley or Kim Scanlon. And I've worked with Janelle for four years. I worked with Mark Rumley for zero days. And I worked with Kim Scanlon for a year and a half. And some of that is, hey Kim, in the hall. And some of that is walking into the clerk's office and having a conversation you didn't expect to have that generates a different result. I think, to be honest, Same reason that there's a policy where remote work is not the standard operating procedure of the city, right? It's because having the people in the place doing the thing is generally perceived, especially in this work, to be of government, of serving people and engaging with people, to be the better model. So that's my position as an individual Councilor. I strongly and firmly believe that while KP Law, I would be fine with KP Law at $138,000 if it also meant a city solicitor at $160,000 and an assistant city solicitor at a competitive salary. I got no problem with that. I respect KP Law's specialty and expertise. I just think that there's a fundamental difference between an outsourced legal counsel and an in-house person dedicated to the city of Medford all the time. And I think that it would, make our job as a council as a body easier to know that we're going to have to build that relationship. Every time we're writing an ordinance, we talk to a different person. We have different conversations. We have an hour long disagreement because we don't understand each other's communication style. I mean, it's just, it comes down to like these very personal and, and, but also very tangible realities. Oh, sorry about that. I don't know why my phone is ringing at me. I'm probably telling me I need to go to bed. But in any case, it's just, it, it, It is serving this purpose well enough for us to get work done, but it is not making it easy for us to excel. And I think that has been my experience now in my third term. And I really, I certainly don't think that the more Drastic course suggested is something that we should move towards to say remove this city solicitor position because that'll save another 100,000 for the schools. I think we need to find real sustainable long term solutions and on that question. But I also just think in principle that this is just not the. Certainly not the approach that the council would want, even though I can respect what you're saying that under the current charter, the solicitor reports to the mayor. But I just think that that role in my experience and my conversations with Councilors for many terms of my conversations with people who held the position of solicitor in the past. And in my conversations, as I said, with members of the legal team that we hired to do the solicitor's job right now, there's a lot of value to having that position filled and building that in-house knowledge and interpersonal relationship. So I don't think we're solving it tonight. It's a preliminary meeting. I think that point is incredibly well taken. haven't seen the budget yet, so maybe we'll get somewhere different than this. And I'm glad that we had this conversation now versus having this be a conversation in the middle of June where motions are made that none of us want to make or like. So I'll leave that for another day. Any further discussion on this item, and I will allow you to respond.
[SPEAKER_14]: I don't have much else to say. I think the only other thing that I would say, and it was a point you made earlier, President Bears, as to the unorthodox, I think you called it unorthodox. I don't know. You know, I can't speak to perspectives, but, you know, and I can, what I can tell you is I've worked for a number of communities, form of governments were different, but, you know, outside legal counsel is not necessarily unorthodox across the Commonwealth. You know, I don't know what the comparative is, but I just, I don't feel that there's, I wouldn't, by no means am I suggesting that there was anything stated tonight that I think has been uh unfair or otherwise but I think historically there have been comments by you know maybe former city councillors as to the intent or otherwise the the nature of or the the um just just bad information misinformation has been stated in the past about this this topic and I'm not saying any councillors uh on this council have said any of those things, but I'm really not saying that, but I think former councillors have made points that have confused the situation. And I just wanna say that I don't think it's an unorthodox style, but I haven't studied the matter across the Commonwealth. I can just tell you that there's a number of communities that do utilize the support of outside council.
[SPEAKER_05]: Absolutely, and I agree with that. I believe that as you just said, most of them are towns. I'm not aware of a city that does it, I think that was the point that the person I was, and I'm not quoting them and saying unorthodox, that's my description of their words.
[SPEAKER_14]: And again, this model presents a city solicitor. So I just point that out. And I know you acknowledge that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it does. No, and that's very true. And I don't, you know, it sounded like taking it was an option.
[SPEAKER_14]: I just, I was asked to state to the council what the mayor, how the mayor would do this, given what we've seen in terms of demand and product.
[SPEAKER_05]: I appreciate that, thank you. All right, well, you know, I don't think we're solving it tonight, but I think all of our opinions have been stated clearly. Does anyone else have any comments? There's literally no one else in the Zoom and no one else in the room, so I won't even ask for the public comment. Motion to adjourn.
[SPEAKER_14]: Where did they all go?
[SPEAKER_05]: on the motion to report the questions from the committee tonight to the administration and to adjourn by Councilor Leming, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro. All those in favour?