total time: 31.78 minutes
total words: 1197
[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelly. Shelly is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and change maker. 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. All right, thanks so much for being with me today. If you don't mind just introducing yourself with your name and pronouns and who you are.
[Matt Leming]: Hello, my name's Matt Leming, he, him. I am a city councilor here in Medford. I've been serving for about a little over a year now, and I'm pleased to be here.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks, Matt, and thanks for coming back. You've been on the podcast before and we're happy to have you. If we could just start with our question that we ask everybody, which you've answered before, but maybe it's changed, is what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Matt Leming]: Well, I've eaten twice today at my usual place that I've mentioned twice before, which is Oasis Cafe just had chocolate chip pancakes for lunch, but I've been eating a little more lately at a Tom Young Koon Thai place in Medford Square. So that's a, it's just a nice place to sit down and get some Pad Thai.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, great. Yeah. So keeping it, keeping it like your normal place and then a little branching out a little bit with the Thai food. It sounds good.
[Matt Leming]: You got to have some place to eat before city council meetings. So that's pretty nearby.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, that's great. So, you know, I invited you back because I think we haven't gotten like a ton of updates. There's a lot that's been happening with city council. We voted on an override recently. You know, I think you all have been very busy. So I wanted to just kind of hear what's been going on and any updates that you have.
[Matt Leming]: Sure, so yeah my personal time on city council at least pre November. The majority of that was spent on the override which was successful we've actually had a lot of other communities that have. not had successful overrides, reach out to our team and just ask how we did it and what the best way to execute an override campaign was. But we ended up succeeding by about 5248 margins on questions seven and eight which would put question seven is going to put three million dollars to the medford public school system and five hundred thousand dollars to the department of public works and question eight put an additional four million dollars to the medford public school system for investment in uh different programs there. The school committee actually recently had a meeting earlier this week where they actually allocated the override funds. And it was one of the probably the only school committee meeting in recent memory that had anything to do with the budget that wasn't completely depressing. So people actually got what they wanted out of that. But I understand that Jenny, school committee vice chair Jenny Graham is going to appear on a future episode of this and go into more detail breakdown of that. The DPW commissioner also provided a breakdown of the $500,000 that is going to his department. We're going to hire three permanent road repair crew members in order to get to work on patching up the roads and sidewalks within the city. So yeah, no, I'm very, I'm very proud of that. I'm really proud of the campaign that we ran. Obviously question six failed. Pretty narrow, pretty narrow margin. So, but, you know, you can't have everything. So ever since then, we've been getting to work on a couple of other projects so this first council meeting was pretty exciting for me. because we got to see the passing of a couple of things that I'd really been working on for a while. One of them was a veteran housing program for veteran renters, where the city gives cash incentives to landlords who rent to qualified veterans, which can address some of the challenges that I've had with constituents who served our country's military who have trouble finding housing. We also passed a welcoming city ordinance, and this was something that we actually had to pass fairly quickly with the incoming Trump administration. It essentially codifies into the city's ordinance the pre-existing policy of the Medford Police Department, which says that the MPD isn't obliged to cooperate with ICE or other federal authorities who want to round up undocumented immigrants for non-criminal matters, and so that's just meant to be a protection to some of the residents of the city.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I actually was at the meeting where you all passed that and was very pleased to see that it was happening, and this episode will be coming out on Inauguration Day, so it seems like a really helpful thing for our city as a way to protect our residents. And I was really happy to it was really moving to hear people's like speeches in support of being a welcoming city And I was really uh, it was nice to see there was I don't think any opposition to it.
[Matt Leming]: So A little bit I would say the vast majority the vast majority were supportive and that is that's something to be proud of so the one that sticks out in my mind is actually there's a there's a resident who had recently moved here from Texas and she was a physics teacher over in Texas. And she would say that during the Trump administration, she had this experience where sometimes her friends would just go from their house to the store and then they would disappear on the way there. And that was something that happened apparently pretty routinely in some states during the first Trump administration. So really just trying to do what we can to prevent a similar thing from happening. that we're going to be doing.
[Danielle Balocca]: Next term. Thanks for doing this.
[Matt Leming]: But, uh, but, yeah, Yeah. So so this I mean, this past year in City Council has been. Probably one of the most. Productive that we've had in recent memory. Um. Just a like, you know, I've had kind of a combination of some of my you know there's always demands for greater transparency from your local government so city council started publishing just a very straightforward bullet point newsletter which residents can sign up for if they want to know exactly what city council has done over the past month. We passed a resolution to update the city's linkage fees to the state house which would hopefully get more money to the city for capital projects. I've started, you know, I got some YouTube account passwords and we started live streaming all the meetings to YouTube. So just really trying to get the city's finances in order and let residents know exactly what's going on. Probably the most important work that City Council is doing right now, a project that's been quite a while in the making is our comprehensive zoning reform, which a lot of work really belongs to my colleagues for doing that because they spent previous terms allocating the funding in order to prepare for that. But essentially what councils, well essentially Medford's zoning hasn't been comprehensively updated for decades and the trouble with that is that you know the economy changes and zoning that we had from like the 60s isn't necessarily as applicable today as it is as it is today. So just for a little bit of a backing up, so zoning is basically when the city tells private property owners what they can or can't do or build with the property that they have. So in other words, if Somebody purchased a plot of land in Medford, and they owned that land, and they couldn't just end up building a 60-story skyscraper right on that plot of land because that would be against the city's zoning. So they're not allowed to do that. It does other things like it dictates what kinds of businesses can be opened by right, or what you have to get a special permit to do. So one very high profile instance that has kind of gone around social media was the opening of a Chase bank where Salvatore's used to be, which, you know, the people that own that storefront did that because they wanted to get out of the restaurant business is a little bit more risky. And they opened up a a Chase Bank there, which wasn't very popular with the residents, but they were able to do that because the city zoning said that they could open a bank by right there.
[Danielle Balocca]: I know that when we first started talking about the override, There was a lot of like, um, you know, people's ideas about like, instead of an override, why don't we look at all these other ways to increase revenue? And I'm wondering, and it sounds like zoning is potentially part of that. Um, so yeah, I wonder how that's going to be addressed in some of the zoning. Yep.
[Matt Leming]: So the, so for, About two years, Medford city government worked on something called the Medford Comprehensive Plan and people are always saying we want some kind of a vision for the future like what are we going to do with Medford in the long term and so They spent two years collecting feedback from residents and business owners and other stakeholders to figure out what are our priorities for growing Medford? What do we want to do with it? And the three consistent pieces of feedback that sort of came out of the comprehensive plan were, one, we want Medford to be more business friendly. So the business community in Medford kind of was stagnant for a while. I've heard people, countless people, who've tried to open a business in the city in previous years say that it's a very insular system. It's hard to come in as an outsider and understand all the workings of City Hall. Another thing that came out of the comprehensive plan was affordable housing. Part of getting affordable housing is just building more housing in general, which is beneficial because it increases the city's tax base. So we're able to get more money if you have more residents. obviously, and also because for a lot of jobs like service workers, construction, you know, people who keep the city running in the day to day, they need somewhere to live. So you need to build more housing for them. So that was the second point. And the third point that also came out of there was just really more pedestrian friendly areas in the city, like People wanted Medford Square to be more walkable, the same thing with West Medford Square, Haines, South Medford. So Medford published a comprehensive plan, and the next step is really executing that plan, so implementing it. And the foundation for any sort of implementation is zoning so a big part of zoning is clarifying the city's permitting processes and really, and so if you have a new person, they have some money, they want to open up a restaurant, they can look at the city zoning, figure out where they can actually open up the restaurant and understand very straightforwardly what permits they need to acquire in order to actually open that up. And so it kind of does away with this system where you have to know somebody or be friends with somebody in order to open up a business here and just really professionalizes and streamlines the process and so that's that's important. The other is creating incentives for developers who want to build. So Medford is a very expensive community to live in. Part of addressing that is creating affordable housing, and part of that is building affordable housing units. build in order to incentivize developers to build affordable housing units you do need to make it profitable for them to do that and so there are a number of incentive structures that can be written into the zoning in order to help developers help incentivize developers to you know, create maybe 20 to 30% affordable housing units and any new complexes they create while giving them either like cash incentives or height incentives in the new zoning. So let's say that by right, a developer is able to build a three-story complex in some area, but you can also change the zoning to say that, okay, well, if you put in 20% affordable housing units will let you build up one or two stories more. And that's just one example of one of these incentive structures. So we have different incentive structures that we're building into there. One of them is a green score which basically says that the more environmentally friendly you make your building like if you include solar panels or rooftop gardens on it then we'll let you build higher and another that I'm really pushing for is a transportation demand management incentive structure saying that okay if you make your you know, if you do things to your building that can help decrease the reliance on, like decrease the amount of traffic that the building will bring in, then we'll let you do, then we'll let you build more stories there. So, so yeah, it's, it's a very, it's a very technically complex process. We're working with, we're working with some, Consultants who've been great to go over this usually the planning and permitting committee meetings happen once every two weeks or so where residents can attend those. I would say Part of the issue with zoning is that it does end up getting extremely complicated. So we are also working on ways to message it and clarify to residents exactly what's going on and how all of these changes will concretely affect them. So at the last planning and permitting committee meeting, we passed a motion to work more closely with the mayor's office in making it so that uh we would we essentially put more effort into uh community outreach and you know letting people know exactly how these changes wind up affecting them.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great no thank you that really actually does help me at least understand how kind of comprehensive zoning is and what it how many different things it affects so it's like it sounds like it's going to hopefully make it easier for people to open businesses or bring their businesses to Medford
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It'll it will help. It'll help out small businesses, it'll help really clarify, it'll help, you know, organize where people can open up what it's really the basis for any kind of positive. Let's say infrastructural change that you have in the city. So you can't really change a whole lot until you get the zoning right. We hear from residents all the time, you know, we're not satisfied with Medford Square, we're not satisfied with Salem Street, we want these to change, and that really starts out with zoning. Another thing about zoning that I feel like I need to clarify is it doesn't change any current buildings. So we could change all of the zoning on Mystic Avenue. And in fact, that is the first sort of localized area of the city where we ended up passing zoning changes on it. But it doesn't affect any buildings that are actually there. But it does influence what developers can create in the future. So for instance, if we were to suddenly change the zoning in Medford Square to not allow any banks, then that wouldn't affect any banks that are actually there. So that's just not how it works. So I feel like that's one part that needs to be clarified.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, so it's not going to eliminate anything. It hopefully will just help to add businesses that we might
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, it helps future growth.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, great better way for it. And it also sounds like it'll be help it to make be easier to create or incentivize the creation of affordable housing, which is certainly important.
[Matt Leming]: Yes. And that is, yeah, the creation of affordable housing is an extremely difficult thing to get right. The Boston Globe Spotlight team did a really good series of articles in 2023 on just how it's basically not profitable for anybody to build any housing that's not like some luxury condominium just because labor has gotten more expensive. There's often local resistance to building, so it often takes time to get approvals for these new projects through. Materials are more expensive these days, so for instance, we can't just mandate that okay, developers, our zoning says you need to build, you need to make all of your units affordable. Like, you need to make it so that it only requires a certain percentage of income from people who make immediate income in the area. You can't just say that because then they wouldn't build anything because it would be literally impossible for them to make a profit off of it. So it's really a balancing act to do that, and yeah, it's, It's tricky to get right, but no, I have faith in our team that we'll be able to get something. We'll be able to get something good.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, and it sounds like, you know, you mentioned that this isn't something that's been addressed for decades. And it sounds like there's a lot of things in Medford that are like that, including charter, the charter, which hopefully we can talk a little bit about, but yeah. Yeah. And it sounds like, like that other cities and the other communities around us have probably made these updates in the past or made these updates more recently. Um, so hopefully it helps us too.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah. This, This city cap part of the reason the city council so productive is because. What Medford was stagnant for a while, so it really gives us a lot of work to put on our desk I mean just just going back to the override. We if you look at. The 351 cities in Massachusetts, and I pulled out a spreadsheet and calculated this myself, 94% of them have had an override or a debt exclusion at some point in the past since the passing of Proposition 2.5 in 1980. That's because it's A, it's mathematics. Prop 2 and 1 half doesn't allow city budgets to increase at a rate commensurate with inflation. So Medford never did that. So our budget got behind. And this is one step in the right direction to help address our systemic budget issues. And you can see that pattern across a lot of the work that city council's done. We instituted general and capital stabilization funds. We were one of, I'd have to look it up, I think like something like between five and 10 cities that didn't have any sort of stabilization funds instituted. And this literally just lets us spend money more easily on capital projects. You know, when some like Somerville, they had an elementary school collapse. Believe last year, and the emergency repairs funds for that came from one of their stabilization funds. Again, Medford only had that as of last year. So there's there's just really a lot of work that city council's doing and catching us up and creating some of the. very basic instruments of municipal governments that other cities have previously taken for granted.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great. And just as a segue, I think the first time that I met you was through the Charter Review Committee, and then you had to step down because you were deciding to run for city council, which gives you an idea of how long ago that all happened, because now you've been on the city council. You ran your campaign, you got elected, you've been on for over a year.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, it really was a long time ago. So I Well, I was involved in the Medford Charter Review Coalition for a while too. So I was one of those nerds who was trying to mail out signature sheets to people to get them to get their name for society so that we can get some form of charter review on the ballot, which that particular avenue never succeeded, but it did incentivize the mayor to create the Charter Study Committee, which you served on, I believe, for the whole time, and I served on for the first few months, of course, before I had to step down to start a city council campaign. So, backing up a little bit, I believe you have had Milva on the show to go over this, but The city charter of Medford is kind of it's kind of like the Constitution of the city. So it's, it's interesting because City council can change the ordinances of the city, but the charter of the city actually has to be, can only be changed at the state level because it, uh, it dictates things like, do we have, you know, a strong or weak mayor system of government? How many city Councilors do we have? What is the composition of our school committee? Uh, and stuff like that. And the city charter previously was, very old document, it wasn't incredibly well written. And so there was a demand to have some form of charter review in 2022, which failed at the state house, and then the Charter Study Committee was created by the mayor. And so y'all have been at work for I believe it was like one or two years. Yeah, just creating a new draft of a city charter. So those only, those got passed the city council in December, this past December, I believe. So they were submitted to the mayor, the mayor submitted to city council. And what's gonna happen with that now is City Council is going to review it. It's in the Governance Committee at the moment, where City Council is going to make our own changes to it. Then City Council will then pass that to the State House in the form of a Home Rule petition. I actually spoke with the chair of the governance committee just to clarify exactly what the process was, because it is a bit confusing. But essentially, it goes to the state house. The state house will decide to approve it or not approve it, depending on whatever the decision is. And supposing they do approve it, it will then go on the ballot This coming November, although that really depends on sort of the different timelines that we see, but it'll go on the ballot at some point. People of Medford will vote on whether or not to change the charter, and then it goes to the State House again, I believe, for official ratification. So yeah, so the proposed, I'd say like the most significant proposed changes to the charter are term limits for the mayor as well as increasing the mayor's term from two years to four years. So that's one that the study committee recommended. The other was a ward representation for city council. So right now all city councilors in Medford are at large. Most do a hybrid system of some at large in which all people in Medford vote on them and some ward based. And also changing of the composition of the school committee to be that hybrid system as well. So those are, I believe, going to begin to be discussed in more detail in the governance committee next week. So yeah, it's all pretty exciting. I mean, I've I've spoken with residents of Medford who've come up to me and said, like, we've been, you know, we've lived here all our lives and we've just been waiting for so long to see any sort of substance of change happen in this city. And so a lot of it is happening. A lot of it is happening all at once now.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, it seems like you guys must be very busy. Do you have a sense on the council how different, or just how just generally the council's feeling about the changes to the charter?
[Matt Leming]: Not as much as you'd think. So open meeting law prevents us from discussing it amongst ourselves. in too much detail. So the communication there is like, I will have conversations one-on-one with Councilors on certain topics of different things we're discussing. That's usually necessary, for instance, if you want to get a co-sponsor. You have to have it in depth with one, sometimes two of your colleagues. or if we are like meeting outside of an open meeting, then we just do not discuss council business or stuff that might appear on the council agenda. So I don't know. how other councillors are feeling. I believe one of my colleagues actually just a few hours before this call did release some of his proposed changes to the current draft of the charter, and those will be discussed at a this Tuesday's governance committee meeting, but we'd have to actually wait to the meeting to see what everybody thinks of those.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, well, that's exciting. Yeah. Yeah, well, big, it's a big start to the year for you guys. Are there any other things that you're kind of like excited about that are coming up or anything else you want to let us know about?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, well, yeah, one, I mean, one project that I that I've really enjoyed working on personally is And I believe this will come up in Jenny's podcast episode as well. I've been working with a group of parents who are the parents of youth with disabilities, and they are basically just looking to have more support for their kids in the city. I think the lack of after-school programs has always been a hot topic in Medford, often, which the school committee has had to address that. But this group in particular has had a particular lack of support for the kids. They've often had to go drive outside of town just to find any programs that would support children who are on the spectrum or children with Down syndrome, so on and so forth. And so at this most recent council meeting, we basically gave them a platform to talk about their experiences with this, their previous frustrations in lobbying local elected officials to do anything about it. And I spent a lot of time sort of talking to different staff around City Hall, the library, DEI office to figure out, OK, well, what can we specifically do to help support the programs? And we did end up endorsing a motion to encourage the city to hire a therapeutic recreation specialist and an office manager in Medford Recreation, which We will, we'll see how that will see how that goes during the budget season that actually can't come out of override funds and come out of this because it is outside the school system technically. But once, but you know. if and when we do get funding for that during the budget season, which I am hoping we can get an allocation for that. And then I look forward to supporting the development of those programs and hopefully partnering with outside cities to make sure they're well attended. So yeah, I am pleased with that. And also just really excited about getting Continuing with the rezoning process, so we have, the way we're doing it is kind of neighborhood by neighborhood. So we've proposed some zoning changes for Mystic Avenue, which people have been demanding for a very long time, and Salem Street as well. And we have a schedule where we're going to get to rezoning the neighborhoods and West Medford, South Medford, Medford Square, and so on. So yeah, that's probably some of the most important work that we're doing. Yeah, no, I'm really proud of what this council has done. I mean, it is, just objectively speaking, the most productive city council that this city has seen in, well, any recent memory.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it. And yeah, it's been really exciting to get to see what you all are doing. And thanks for doing it.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, no, and thank you. Thank you for for having me on and just, you know, giving me the platform to let let folks know, let folks know what's happening.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Also, it sounds like people can sign up for you to get your newsletter and then also the city council newsletter, too, if they want more.
[Matt Leming]: Yes. So in response to the demands for transparency, which, you know, we do we do here, we do hear about quite a bit, we've probably ended up putting out A little too much media out there so every so we have the city council newsletter, which is more of a, which is something that the city council or the resident services and public engagement committee votes to publish. And that's just a very factual breakdown of the things that we're doing over the past month as well as links to YouTube videos and there's links to sign up for that list in. every copy of the city council newsletter it can be found on the city council web page so just google medford ma city council and look under the newsletter section most elected officials have their own websites and their own some have their own blogs as well so i've been I've been pretty consistent about sending out bi-weekly updates to residents, as well as a blog post, which you can find on my website, mattLeming.com, if you're interested. And I just like to publish, you know, just different blog posts on just different topics that City Council is working on. So the most recent one was just a breakdown of what's happening with the welcoming city ordinance, but I also will routinely release either just uh some breakdown of some whichever bills that i'm uh talking about at the moment or if there's not much going on that month then just some more general thoughts about happenings in the city hey we'll look out for those and um i can put some of those links in the show notes for folks but yeah but good luck with everything um and yeah i guess keep up the good work yeah thank you thank you very much uh danielle and have a have a wonderful weekend
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks, you too. 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 Irenys. 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 interview the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites. Never Bites. Good job.
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