total time: 41.86 minutes
total words: 950
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and changemaker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. Thanks so much for meeting with me today. If you don't mind just by introducing yourself with your name, pronouns, and who you are.
[Jenny Graham]: Sure. I'm Jenny Graham, she, her pronouns. I am the vice chair of the school committee. This is my third term on the school committee. And I am also the chair of our Medford Comprehensive High School Building Committee that will manage our end of the process to, you know, ultimately navigate our way toward rebuilding or revising or renovating, depending on which R word you want to use, our high school campus. And so that I've been the chair of that committee since it formed earlier this year.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. And yeah, I hope to get into more depth about some of those things in today's conversation. But before I do that, I just want to ask you the question that we ask everyone and which you've answered before, but maybe you have some updates. But what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Jenny Graham]: You know, I, like most of Medford, was super excited when AltaCuba opened its doors and it does not disappoint. I've been like excited to go in there each and every time. Like I love chips. So clearly like any chip oriented items are like definitely a fan favorite and I, I haven't been in, you know, maybe like a month or so. And I drove by the other day and I was like, oh, they have outdoor seating, which is like one of my favorite things that has come out of the pandemic is more outdoor seating. Because I think like summer here is so short. It's just nice when the weather is nice. It hasn't been lately, but when it is to be able to like sit outside and enjoy like whatever you're doing outside. And I just, as I was driving by, I was like, oh, their little patio that they've created is super cute. it's on our list to swing in and check out the patio soon. And I haven't been for brunch yet, but that's also on my list.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, we're planning to go on in a couple of days. Maybe we'll eat outside. That'll be nice. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, so I think we're meeting in the summer. It's like we're mid-summer right now, which I think most people don't want to think about school in the summer, but that is your job. So I think maybe I'm hoping we can spend a little time today reflecting on budget season. You know, we've heard like I've heard some information, but I'm hoping to hear kind of from you any reflection. So kind of what went well, what you're happy about, things that you want to like take away for next year.
[Jenny Graham]: Sure. You know, since I've been on the school committee, like I've been on a sort of a quest to make sure that we are describing like what we need in an optimal scenario to fund our schools. And five years ago, when I started on the committee, that was a really like foreign question to many of the people who we who we asked it of, like, what would you do how much money would it cost to improve out student outcomes? Right? Like that's, it's sort of a simple question, but it's just not how the budget was ever created before. So over the course of the last five budget cycles, we've taken like a couple of different tacts at that question. And, um, you know from like asking everybody to tell us their sort of wish list and it sort of became known as a wish list which implies that like the stuff isn't needed but we're talking about like literacy coaches and that's needed right so it felt like the wrong thing to say that that was a wish list so over time we sort of have shifted that process in a in a whole variety of ways but one of the things that has stuck around is that we really endeavor to produce two budgets. The first budget is what answers the question, what do we think we need to responsibly operate the district and improve student outcomes? And that's a number. And ideally, that would be used as input into ultimately what the mayor does on her side and what the council has to approve in terms of what the allocation to us is. And then once that allocation is finalized, then we would come back and do budget number two, which is, okay, like, this is the reality, this is how much money we have to spend, and this is how we're going to spend it, right? So ideally, there's really two budgets that get talked about. One is like, what do we, what do, what are we asking for? And then the other is like, how are we going to spend the money that we have? And since I've been here, there's always a gap between those two numbers. Now, if there wasn't a gap, that would make it super simple, right? But there often is, because as you know, the expense and the cost of operating the district is accelerating at a pace that's greater than how our tax revenue is increasing. And in Medford, our school budget is largely comprised of tax revenue from our local city and not as much from like this from state, right? So not every community sits like that, but we do. So, And in thinking about all of that, it's like, okay, like there is this like continual mismatch that we're always trying to manage. And it's reasonable to do that in lots of cases, right? Like there's lots of ways you can do that. Like you don't always have to buy a new math curriculum. So sometimes you have those big expenses and then sometimes you don't and you can like shift that money. But when you talk about big things like pay equity for some of our lowest paid staff, That is not something you do by like squeezing a couple of pennies out of a math curriculum somewhere else right like those are big big numbers and they add up like 85% of our budget is staff. So when you think about like increasing staff wages. that is exponentially different than like buying a math curriculum and it lasts for like those changes last forever you buy a math curriculum and presumably at some point you're done paying for it right so that is always sort of a challenge but this process that we've gone through to say like there's two budgets one is like what we need and the other is how we're going to spend the money that we have I think really has started to work like it has taken some time but it is working. And one thing that we did this year in the budget process that didn't get a lot of airtime but I think was really important is we, we went further. to codify our process. And we passed a policy that said, here is how we will do our budget. And it backs everything way up. Our budget was done earlier this year than really it ever has been. But that still is not early. There are many, many, many communities who are done with their school budgets in January. And we're not even starting. So we did pass a policy that lays out exactly how to do our budget and when different things are happening. So that passed, that's a really big deal. It was like one of those things that probably didn't mean much to most people who might have been watching, but it's really important because it provides that roadmap going forward for like how are we going to do this in the future and how are we going to do it in a way that does not like obliterate the finance office for three months, all at once right. And the other thing that we did in a very related way is we passed a similar policy about capital planning, and how we will like view and review our capital projects, like a school that needs a new roof or a new water heater, those kinds of things. And those two processes now are codified into policy, which I think is important because it lays out that roadmap, but they also work together hand in hand. So there's some sanity to this process that's very complicated. And the goal of all of it is to be ahead of it, right? Like to not be at a place where we are at sort of the 11th hour in making decisions about like, pink slipping teachers by the statutory deadline because we are uncertain what the budget will be. We never wanna be in a position where we have to tell teachers we don't intend to see go, like we're giving you a pink slip because the deadline is here and we don't have enough answers to know that we can fund you. And that's happened a lot over the years and all of this work that we've done process wise, hopefully we'll fix that and at least sort of back the process up so there's some clarity and we're not in those like 11th hour positions. And we're not trying to jam a meeting into the end of June to pass a budget, right? That all of that can happen in a little bit more of a proactive way. And ideally on the front of that process, when we're saying this is what we need, that it actually can arrive at the mayor's office in time to be actual input to the work she's going to do. This past year that didn't go great because she and her team knew that it was not going to be a great budget and so what ends up happening because our process is so late is the city starts to get some feedback about like where it sits. And then the two things get kind of get mushed together and it gets real murky. And so the early presentations that we got, they were not that purist point of view of what do we need? It was like, how are we going to survive this? So we were We were sort of answering a different question this year than we might want to and hopefully we can return to answering that like what do we need to operate a district and improve student outcomes question in a little bit more of a consistent way going forward so that definitely was. Not ideal. Also, we were not alone because every district is rolling off of significant support from ESSER that wraps up this summer. And our ESSER funding is spent and complete. The city still has some ARPA money, I believe, and theirs lasts a little bit longer than ours. So just like as everybody prepares to not have this infusion of cash, To do pandemic recovery. It, it had forced sort of everybody through what really was, you know, like a pretty ugly process. Maybe created like some anxiety along the way is like the administration and under the finance director Gerry McCue felt strongly that if we're going to put something in a budget document that says like we're going to eliminate a position. And there's a person in that position that they deserve to know that that's about to be in the public purview before it happens. And I'm not sure we've ever been so crisp about that in the past. So it did happen this time. Jerry did proactively talk to our union partners and to the individuals who would be like directly impacted. I think that made for like a really uncomfortable time for them because they knew like that their job was potentially being eliminated. And I, I feel like really terrible that people had to sort of live through that because that uncertainty is not, you know, it's not, that's not easy to navigate while you're still having to do your job and you're having to think about like, what do I do for next year? But I think the alternative of like being surprised Because we didn't have the courtesy to tell you in advance would feel a lot worse for me. So I think it's like one of those double-edged swords. Like I think what Jerry and his team tried to do was the right thing to do. I'm not saying it was like fun or easy because it definitely wasn't. In the end, I think we were able to get enough of an increase to the budget to like stave off many, many slash most of the things that were being actively discussed as being cut. And we were able to avoid the conversation about where does the other $2.7 million in cuts come from, right? So there was always this other pile of money that We didn't have an answer for like where would it come from, but if that original estimate had been held like we would have had to come up with those cuts to and we already like we're cutting pretty deep so I'm really glad that we didn't have to do that because that is what like kept me up at night through the budget season was like not. what you what you knew was bad enough, but like how to cancel the part that you could describe yet was the thing that was like worrying me is like I don't know how you do that without sort of drastic changes to our staffing and that just felt like that would have been much, much, much worse. I'm hopeful that with these new budget processes that line up with the city's budget ordinance, we can get to a place where this is much more like a process that happens and people know what to expect and when to expect it. And that we will not continue to be in a situation of having conversations about what to cut. You know, and obviously the override questions that and debt exclusion questions that will be on the ballot in November will be a big part of that, of whether things get better or not, for sure. even just the, you know, having some more systems and structures in place to navigate this process, I think is really important. Like our financial software is really archaic, just like across the board. And, you know, the schools are no exception. So all of this stuff that comes out and looks great, like is a Herculean effort. for the staff that do it. And then the last thing that I think went really well is that the budget actually is a readable document this year without having to really be on the inside of what's going on to know what's happening. And it's the first time that's the case. It's like a third of the size it usually is. But there's an actual narrative there that describes what the process was and what happened in various meetings and, you know, really sort of looked at everything from beginning to end. So all that was like great news, actually.
[Danielle Balocca]: Wow. Yeah, that's, that's interesting to hear. It is surprising that like There wasn't like a process that lined up with the city's process for the budget to but that's it sounds good. How did you recover like how did they bridge that gap between the, what do you say $2.7 million. Yeah.
[Jenny Graham]: So, the, the mayor's team provided an estimate to the schools. Back in March, I want to say, which is when the ordinance says that she has to tell us something about like where this initial like number is going to be. And she did that. And then like through. know, what happens when you build a budget of this size, right? You have to start somewhere. As they combed and groomed and did all the things to the budget on the city side, they were able to increase our allocation substantially. And then they also in the end committed to using some one-time funds to get us to a number that actually allowed us to not have to talk about that 2.7 that I was referring to, but also allowed us to add back some of the things that were on the chopping block, like some of the department heads, like the assistant athletic director, for example, and the head of world language, there were four or five positions that we were able to reinstate. We also were able to instate one or two literacy coaches, which was never a part of the conversation about like the budget, they didn't exist and they weren't initially being proposed to be added, but we were able to add two back as part of all of this. So that was important as well. And, you know, all of that is, you know, is good and important. And we were, you know, we were able to sort of recover because I'm just looking for the actual numbers here. So the city's original allocation, I believe was 73.5. And the year prior, so in FY24, we were at 71.2 million. And so then the initial allocation was 73.5. But we knew that we had an excess of things that had to be added to the budget for a variety of reasons. And then in the end, we were able to say, okay, how do we like some things we were able to sort of find revenue sources for like we were able to tap a couple of revolving funds for some of our vocational staff and that helped sort of shift things around and that's part of like what's so muddy about the budget is it's not a single budget it's a single budget and then there's all of these sources that happen around the budget, including grants, including revolving funds. So there's just like a lot of things happening, you know, sort of all over the place, which makes it really complicated to sort of dive in and understand. And then we had, we were able to add back some of the things that were originally proposed to be eliminated. and also to sort of right size some of the things in the budget where we always under budgeted but had to spend anyway like maintenance. So for years we would budget something very small for maintenance and then we would have to actually do the maintenance and so we would always look like we overspent the budget even though we always knew that the budget number was smaller. So we've sort of corrected for some of that in a handful of places as well. So that's a big important part of the process too. So this budget was like a lot of cleaning things up and scrubbing into it, like kind of putting things in a better place, which is, you know, will make it easier going forward.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, well, and it sounds like some of the issue was that we had like the like pandemic funding has run out. And so there's like, you know, non renewable sources of income there. And that maybe our cities, our city didn't necessarily make up for that income. I know you talked about the override, but another and that's something like, you know, I think is a little bit down the road, hopefully. But one of the things that I the terms that I kept hearing was free cash. And I wonder if you could just describe like what that is and when it can be used and like how that comes into the planning and negotiating.
[Jenny Graham]: Sure. Okay, so free cash is a city side concept. And it basically says like, at the end of a fiscal year, right, you have to close the books. So we just finished the June fiscal year, and you close the books. And you have to like do all the reconciliation and the audit and all the things that happen. And of course, like all along the way, you've got a budget and you're spending and you're ideally spending to the budget. And if you're not, you have some reason, you have a reason to believe that there's someplace else that money can come from, right? And all that happens. Where free cash comes from is when what's, left at the end of the year is more than what you spent, right? So it's like, is it a surplus? Not exactly. I like to think of it as like, there's revenue coming in all the time. And so when you make a budget, you're making an estimate about what kind of revenue is gonna come in. And you can't predict to the penny what that revenue would be. Okay, so that's how free cash is created is like there's money at the end of the year that is available. That money goes into this like free cash pot and cities cannot access it until their books are closed and they're audited and that number is certified by the state. So that free cash reserve is there And, you know, not available for us just to like reach into any old time that we want, because the books have to be closed, the audit has to be done, the state has to agree with our number, they have to certify, and then it's available, right? But essentially, free cash is like our rainy day fund for the city. the amount of money in free cash, like can fluctuate a lot over time, but it should, there are some like markers of what it should be. And it should be, I think for us somewhere in the neighborhood of like $15 million. And that means like that money should just always be in free cash because it's the rainy day fund. So when it starts raining, there has to be like something available, right? Like if you look around like the, the school in Somerville where like the roof fell in right like in order to address something like that or like you have like a giant flood or like a tornado whips by and like it's a hole in a roof right like you you have to be able to like tap some reserve for those like real rainy day issues right But the other thing that happens in cities is that like that free cash pot gets used for capital projects. And so over time, right, the number is going to, how much you have in free cash is going to fluctuate year to year. Some of that is because how much you put in the pot every year is going to fluctuate. And the other part of that is what you take out of it every year is also going to fluctuate. So in a year where you have a big capital expenditure, right? That is tagged for free cash. You're going to allocate that out of free cash. You're going to put it somewhere else, like we actually just did with MSBA. And then you're going to spend from that other pot. So there's, there's, I think there's a lot of misinformation about free cash. Like it wasn't a surprise that there was the amount of free cash that went into the that went into free cash when it's certified in June. It's not like we just found the money, like none of that is true. Like this is just part of the process and it's not available to us until it gets through the audit process and gets certified and all that good stuff. Now, one of the things that we are talking about in the lead up to the override conversations is to make clear to people what the plan is for that free cash, because there are plans for much of that money, except for that money that actually should stay there as rainy day, right? And a couple of examples, what the council did at the end of last year, at the end of June, they did three things. They moved $3 million into a special fund that authorizes us to do a feasibility study with MSBA. So that money has to be allocated by the city and made available for when we get to that part in the process. So $3 million from free cash was moved out of free cash before it got locked back up with the fiscal year. and it is in a separate segregated account for the feasibility study. So when we're ready to start to pay people for the feasibility study, that money is set aside. So that's 3 million. They also created two stabilization accounts, one for like 6 million and one for 5 million. And one is like a general stabilization account, and the other one is a capital stabilization account. both of those pots are essentially now available to us all year round. The money that stays in free cash is not available to us all year round. It is there and going to wait until free cash certifies again, and then it becomes accessible again. So the big thing about those stabilization accounts is it moves money into position so that if something has to happen that is not on cycle with how free cash certifies, that it's available to us. you know, a tornado whips by and puts a hole in the roof, right? Like now we have a place where we can go. In order to access those funds, the mayor has to send a request to the council and the council has to approve. So the check and balance of like using the money in the stabilization account is no different than using money out of free cash or putting money in the budget. It's all that very same process. Mayor requests, council says yes or no. One of the things we still have to do is articulate like some of the many uses for that money that was moved into the stabilization accounts. And I'm actually meeting with the mayor later this week and we'll be talking about that because I know that we have like a $20 million project going on at the Andrews and McGlynn complexes to remediate and fix and replace their HVAC systems. So both schools have, failing HVAC systems. And in many places, they have actually failed, right? So if you go to the gym at the Andrews, like it's sweltering hot. I think the gym at McGlynn is the same. But in the end, both of those complexes need new HVAC systems. So the process soup to nuts, it's a $20 million process. So that money comes from somewhere. I believe some of it will come from free cash, maybe not all of it, but some of it. If you want to buy a new fire truck, I believe that is also one of the things that's like on the list, like that would come out of the stabilization account. So it essentially is like a place to like aggregate the money for our special projects. Like that's what I think of free cash as like, you cannot use it again and again and again for things that recur. Like you cannot use it for operating budget expenses because you will deplete your free cash and then you will have none. And so that's why you don't use it that way. Like you use in your budget what you can justify is like going to come in for the year and be sustainable right so that's the hard part is like to me I think of it as like the you know the special projects bucket and those special projects could be any number of things but if you start to put recurring expenses in your special projects bucket you're going to get to do a whole lot less special projects and if you look around Medford or if you look at the capital plan like there's plenty of special projects to do here in Medford not just for the schools but for citywide so free cash is like a misnomer. It makes it sound like it's actually free. It's not, it's not actually free. That money comes from revenue that the city brings in. Some of it, you know, it's probably very negligibly tax revenue because that tax revenue is predictable and can be like attributed to recurring costs. But if you think about like permitting fees or meals and hotel tax like you at the as you build a budget you do your best to estimate what you think that's going to look like and then you know poof the great american beer hall opens and it is a smashing success and it brings in three times the amount of tax revenue as we thought it would and that's you know that's where some of those surpluses come from so um it isn't free in a whole variety of ways. It also is not necessarily like taxpayer, like real estate tax dollars. It can come from any number of sources. And it also is generally like not available to us many, many months out of the year because our finance team does take their time to certify free cash and close the books every year. So, If we had more people in finance, maybe they would be able to move faster. I don't know, but it is anything but free.
[Danielle Balocca]: You know what, it helps too, because I think like, you know, some of the stuff that I had been reading and like hearing was about, you know, this idea that like free cash was always there. And then why did we have to haggle about the, or like be less transparent is the word I heard a lot about the budget if you had this money. And so that helps, right? It sounds like that's not what was happening, but also that like, you can't plan a budget around free cash, that it's kind of how I, maybe how I use my checking account versus my savings account, right? Like you have extra and you can work on the sort of things you need.
[Jenny Graham]: you do it when you can but well the other thing that's been like sort of a an unusual phenomenon in the last like four years is that we've had ARPA money and the city got like 50 or 60 million dollars in ARPA money and that money had rules about broad uses and ARPA has been used to do a whole lot of things in the last four years that free cash would have had to be used to do were it not for ARPA. Were this five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, there is no ARPA and free cash is the only place you go for those kinds of projects. some of the funding that went into the McGlynn playground, for example. And so then you start to have to ask yourself these questions about like, well, could we, would we even have been willing to do it without this like additional funding source in ARPA? And I think there's lots of examples where like, no, we probably never would have done those things if we didn't feel like we had a source for them, right? So I do think the other thing that's been happening over the last handful of years is that we're not doing more or fewer projects than we did five or 10 years ago, but we did have another revenue source. And consequently that allowed more money to be returned to free cash than would have five or 10 years ago when this other funding stream didn't exist. So I think it, makes it, I think ARPA sort of made it look like we were just like bulking up all of this like free cash when that's not really what was happening and it's over. I think that's the other thing is like okay like yes maybe that has happened for the last couple of years but that's over now and we have to get back to like spending only what we can generate right whether that's like whether that's real estate taxes or commercial development or whatever so there's plenty of revenue sources to talk about like meals and excise taxes and all the things but um Yeah, it's just a little bit of a different day as we like move out of this ARPA phase that we have to be careful about too.
[Danielle Balocca]: And maybe in some ways that also delayed the conversation of how do we like change or increase revenue or how do we like kind of think about the big picture, which leads me to the other topic that I was hoping to discuss about the new high school and sort of what, if there's any updates on the process or kind of where we stand there.
[Jenny Graham]: Yeah, so in December, we were invited to the eligibility phase with the Mass School Building Authority. So when you build with MSBA, there's a very prescriptive process that you must go through. You can't skip steps, you can't go faster than they're ready for you to go, like you need approvals at each gate to go to the next step. But in the end, they will reimburse a portion of the project. That portion is always sort of the million dollar, many million dollar question actually, because how big that portion is depends on what kind of community you are. Like we're gonna have a higher reimbursement rate than say, Wellesley. And we're gonna have a lower reimbursement rate than Lawrence. And so they look at a community's ability to pay. And a lot of that is driven by like property wealth. among many other things. But at any rate, if you follow the process, they will pay for part of the building. So that's great news, right? Because that's money that we don't have to pay for. So they invited us to the eligibility period, which is the first step in like, there's like seven steps. And Our eligibility phase started on May 1st, so it required that we do a whole series of things. We had to form a building committee, which we did before May 1st. We had to put together a document called the educational profile, which is basically a description of what goes on in the building. both right now and what we want it to be in this new building, whatever this new building looks like. We also, because we have an active vocational program, we had to fill out a separate form around our chapter 74 programs and identify if we wanted to expand any of the programs and justify any such expansion, as well as identify if there were other programs we were wanting to start, but we can't because we're space constrained that we would want to be studying. So we put both of those documents together. The other big things that happen in this phase, one is that we have to talk about and justify our maintenance and capital planning practices. So we had a huge survey we had to submit around our maintenance and capital planning practices, both past, current, and future, I guess I'll say. And we also have to have a conversation with them about what we think the enrollment of the building should be. And that requires us to collect a lot of information about past enrollment, about planned building projects, what kind of building projects they are, what the real estate market looks like. We had to do all of this development work on the development side of the house to say, This is what is going to drive our enrollment in the future. All of that has been submitted so it took us like just a little bit over two months out of the six months of the phase that we have to submit that so the team moved lightning fast, the administration did a lot of work. to get us to where we needed to be as quickly as possible. And we have been pushing, pushing, pushing so that we can get out of this eligibility phase and get invited to the next phase, which is where we get to hire the owner's project manager and the architect who will ultimately do what they call a feasibility study. So the next phase is like to bring on board those professionals who are going to do the heavy lifting for us. I'm excited about that because all of the lifting up until this point has been on the building committee and on the district and on the people who have been involved in this process. And now as we get into this next phase, we will have people whose full-time job it is to do these things. So the owner's project manager will come on, will get to know us, and then will help us put out a bid for the architect. And then once that happens and we get approved to go to the next phase, we actually do the feasibility study and that architect will come in, they will learn all about our building and they will learn all about like what we said we were trying to do in the building, how big it's supposed to be, that's all the work we're doing right now. And then they will look at the space and they will give us options and they will tell us like, gee, you could renovate this part of the high school and still meet your goals and it would take this long. Or option B is you're going to build this building somewhere completely new so that you're not disrupting the education that's going on right now. And so they will give us a series of options essentially to think about in terms of like, how do we want to go forward? And they will help us answer this question, which I hear a lot in the community, like, isn't it just better to renovate what we have? I don't think that's going to be the answer, but it might be. And we will actually let professionals tell us that instead of sort of letting speculation rule the day. So whatever that answer is, is absolutely fine by me. I think I want to do this project so that we get an amazing building out of it and we do so in the most cost-effective way for the residents. But that in the end, the kids who go to school there are like, wow, this is amazing, right? That's what you want your kids to feel like when they go into school every single day. And that's to me the opportunity that we have. So we're pushing as fast as we can to get through so we can put a shovel in the ground, but it is going to be some time. And we still are a bit away from that, but We're well positioned. We've got our feasibility study money put aside. MSBA will reimburse a portion of that if we go through all of the rest of the steps successfully, so that $3 million will be reduced. But we do have to pay up front. And yeah, we have a lot of planned outreach with the community as we get into that feasibility study. The OPM and the architect will really be helping us with all of that community engagement. And I don't think you'll see much of that this year, but probably into next year, you'll start to see like, you know, tables and concept drawings and working sessions and focus groups and all of that stuff to really hear from all of the stakeholders in this building, like what they wish for in a new building.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I think there's been some good models around the city of getting community input with the parks and the playgrounds and things like that. So it sounds like there's a good model to go from there in terms of what people want to need. Is there a rough timeline for when maybe they'd have an idea of how they're going to move forward in terms of do we renovate or do we make a new building? Any idea of when we'll have that decision?
[Jenny Graham]: I don't have a great sense of that just yet. But what MSBA typically says is that a project, if you build with them, the project usually takes five to seven years. That's like the average. And that means like from the start to like kids inhabiting the new building. So we're in like, you know, month three right now. So we are legitimately at the beginning. But hopefully, we can move quickly through some of these phases so we can get to that place a little bit faster than planned.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, it's exciting to have a path forward. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you for answering those questions. I'm wondering if there's anything else you want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up.
[Jenny Graham]: I think, you know, the only other thing that I will say is like we sort of have touched on the overrides a couple of times in this conversation. And that is all sort of coming right voters in Medford will have an opportunity to weigh in on that on three separate questions in July. Sorry, in, in November, so it is July, but in November, and on election day, it'll be on your ballot and you'll have three choices to make. One is a debt exclusion for the fire station. And then the other two. are largely school related. One is like a stabilization number that would help stabilize the school budget and improve the services that the DPW is able to offer around like roads and sidewalks. And then the third number is like sort of looking into the future kind of number for the schools. And we have some work to do to like really describe what all went into those numbers. But when we talk about things like pay equity for our paraprofessionals and for our cafeteria staff and our security monitors, we've been pushing for my whole time here to bring those wages up to something that resembles a living wage. And we've made a lot of progress, but we can't We can't keep making progress without some ability to move the needle more than 2.5% a year, right? So without this override, we're sort of stuck at that no more than 2.5% increase. each year and it's not where we are in terms of the need. So there'll be a lot of activity as we go forward. But if there are people who want to know more, I'm very happy for people to reach out to me and I'm happy to chat with anybody who wants to get a little bit more information about what's coming. But there'll be lots more information out in public soon enough.
[Danielle Balocca]: I mean, just that information that you provided is really helpful that I think it addresses some of the bigger issues that we hear about, like the fire station, the roads and sidewalks, and then just not having to worry about teachers losing jobs or how to fund our schools. And then that third one sounds even more compelling to me as well. But thank you. That's really helpful. And I do look forward to learning more soon as well. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you, Jenny. Thanks, as always, for making the time for us. Yeah, absolutely. Anytime.
[Jenny Graham]: Um, I know it's a busy time of year. It's sort of everyone checks out of schools at this time of year, but I know the administration like this is their this is their busiest time of year. So I know they're like working hard to like, put their plans in place. And, you know, we've got, we've settled some contracts over the last couple of weeks. with some of our bargaining partners, and there's just a ton of activity going on, so it doesn't really slow down so much inside of schools, but we've got our work to do, and then the school year will be here before you know it. So, yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thank you, and thanks for working hard through the summer. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Idanese. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.
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