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[Callahan]: Test 1-2, test 1-2.
[Hurtubise]: actually just right out of my garage right there. Did the kids let in? It was him. You knew him? Yeah.
[Lazzaro]: Okay.
[Callahan]: We're ready to go? All right. Welcome to the Public Works and Facilities Committee of January 21st, 2025, taking place at 7 p.m. in the City Council Chambers. Today, we will cover two items. One is paper number 24-492, Resolution to Receive an Update on Roads, and the other one is 24-493, Resolution to Establish a Volunteer Tree Planting Program. Before we go on, Mr. Clerk, would you call the roll?
[Hurtubise]: Councilor Lazzaro? Yes, sir. Councilor Leming? Present. Councilor Scarpelli? And then Chair Callahan.
[Callahan]: Present. Then we might as well move on to our first paper. So this is the resolution to receive an update on the roads, whereas it has been more than six months since the city council was last updated on our roads, and whereas during the election of November 5. The voters of Medford considered a budget override provision in Question 7 providing funds for, among other purposes, quote, fiscal year 2025 general operations of the Department of Public Works, $500,000, including but not limited to additional staff for road and sidewalk infrastructure repair, unquote. and that ballot question was successful. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Public Works and Facilities Committee invite engineer Owen Wartella and DPW Commissioner Tim McGibbon to attend an upcoming meeting that is today to talk about the state of the roads and the plan moving forward, given the outcome of the election. Thank you so much to Commissioner McGibbon and Engineer Wartella for being here. I would like to go ahead and pass the floor to you. And if you can give us an update on the roads, especially given the new budget, that would be great.
[McGivern]: All right. Thank you. Councilors, good evening. I'm Commissioner McGivern. So I primarily deal with the operations of the DPW, and Owen is obviously lead in engineering and capital projects. Capital projects always are engineering projects. So I will give you an update on the 500K first. As you may recall, The 500K has a breakdown that includes three new staff members that is posted right now. So we're gonna go through an internal process, but eventually we'll have three new people in the highway division. These positions include a mason working foreman, two maintenance craftsmen and laborers. Actually there's one other, there's a transfer coming from cemetery too, but basically those two maintenance craftsmen and working foreman will be added to the highway division, which will enable us to generate more crews more often. So that increases the efficiency and the production of the department. So the expected increase in efficiency is about 20%. So we're increasing the size of the highway division by approximately 20%. What this allows us to do is to increase things like large patching and preventative maintenance activities. If you recall, this was a strategy that I've had for a while. So we've also purchased equipment. So we have newer equipment and we have more people. So with that said, the budget breakdown includes things like parts and supplies for that equipment, gasoline, repair supplies, concrete, for example, or asphalt. And then we also included an amount for capital expenditures because When you add more people, you are going to need more trucks as time goes on. So that is the breakdown of the 500K. And I can go into numbers if you guys want to talk numbers. But that's basically the things that we get for it. So like I was saying that we will be able to do more preventative maintenance activities. So right now, basically, our preventative maintenance is doing potholes, spot repairs, also on sidewalks. We do spot repairs on sidewalks. That type of work is so large in the city that we also do contracts for that work. So that just tells me that our DBW is not right-sized. If we have to hire contractors to repair sidewalk panels, boy, that's a really inefficient way to spend a public dollar. So that type of spot repair work should be happening in-house, and that frees up that capital dollar to be spent on larger capital projects, which Owen will talk about. Um, so we kind of went twice, we will get more cost effective work done in house for spot repairs and box out patching and other preventative maintenance activities on our pavements or sidewalks and our asphalt. But we'll also be able to shift resources away from engineering to open those resources up to managing capital projects and actually spending the money on capital projects. And when I say capital projects, what I mean by that in the engineering world is you know, miles of water pipe, miles of roadway, many, many blocks of sidewalk. So production work where we get a good bang for our buck when we're paying a contractor out there, and we can't do that type of work in-house. So that's the biggest thing that's happened in the last six months on our, let's improve our pavement strategy. Let's see what else. mentioned the new equipment, compliments and equipment. So that's a, you know, an outline, I think, and I can answer any questions on that. And I didn't know if you wanted to have questions now, or if we wanted to move on to Owen to talk about capital projects and where that's headed.
[Callahan]: Let me see if there are any questions from the city council members. Sorry, I'm not sure. Can you help me with this? on the left. We're trying to click the green one and nothing's happening.
[Leming]: Thank you. Two minor questions. First, what do you think the timeline is going to be for hiring the three workers? Like how long do you think it'll be before we can see them working on potholes around the city? And two, can you give us a ballpark estimate of how much the city was spending on contracts per year to hire out outside crews to do spot repairs?
[McGivern]: Sure, good questions. So the process for how long it will take to get new bodies into the DPW, it's hard to say, but we have already started the internal process. So we post those three jobs and then folks have the opportunity to sign for them that are in the labor union. And if they do, then we will interview them. That could take a few weeks, three to four weeks. And then once that process is complete, we may or may not need to backfill that position that the person is promoted from. So if we promote someone, then we have to backfill that. That happens all the way until we get to the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak. I probably shouldn't say that. the bottom of the labor force, and then we would then get two entry-level, three entry-level folks into the highway division that way. That could take three or four months to fully complete that whole cycle. It may take a little bit longer, depending on how many folks move internal for the job, on the internal transfers I have. Um, so I know that's not a great answer, but it's the best answer I have for you. Uh, we'll do it as fast as we can. Uh, but right now, um, what, what this laws is to do is to plan for it and, uh, to, uh, you know, make it happen as fast as, as we can. So, Oh, sorry. The second question, how much money per year contract? So, um, I think We average about probably like 500 to a million dollars in sidewalk contract funds every, every year, approximately, I think there's a loan taken out for about 500,000 almost every year. And we also did a $250,000 worth of stomping sidewalk repairs this last season, I think we've done that twice in a row now. And we don't contract out potholes, but we do contract out crack sealing. And we also contracted out large patching. And Owen might have numbers on those for you.
[Wartella]: So Cassidy's was our contractor for Sidewalk. It was a three-year contract. It just ended. As Commissioner McIvern said, it was around $500,000 a year. We are going to start a new contract with around $650,000 from CDBG funds. So we have that covered for this year. And we have $2.4 million in unallocated or uncommitted Chapter 90 funds. So we plan to use that. We have six or seven roadways that we'd like to target this year. And those are the numbers that I guess you were asking about. I mean, I can go into the state of our roads if you'd like, unless you wanna stop for more questions.
[Callahan]: Yeah, I don't actually have one other question before we go to you.
[McGivern]: Can I just add on to that just a little bit. Just because, not that it's misleading or anything, but we could spend as much money as we wanted to in spot repairs. So I don't want you to walk away thinking that we're taking $500,000 away from contract work and putting it into the DPW operations, we're not. We need to do both. So we're going to do another sidewalk contract loan, but we're going to focus on more production work. So in other words, a block or two of sidewalks, as opposed to spot repairs of sidewalks. In previous years, we've done, you know, a hundred or so spot repairs or, you know, 70 or so spot repairs for, you know, a large chunk of money where we should have been able to do like many blocks worth because the most expensive part of paying a contractor to do spot repairs is moving them around the city. And that's just, it's not a good use of money at all. You want to have them stay in one spot and do as much sidewalk as possible in that one spot. And my point really is being is we're not moving, we're not taking 500 away from capital and putting it into operations. We're basically saying that this type of work should be done in-house, which will open up more funds to do more production style work in engineering. Hopefully that makes sense.
[Bears]: Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Kiley. You basically answered the question I was going to ask which, but just to kind of clarify and drive the point home. It's much we're using the capital funding much more efficiently this way than we are when we're doing spot repairs with contractors.
[McGivern]: Correct.
[Bears]: And this is both for sidewalks and for street repair. The crew is going to be doing spot repairs where we previously were hiring contractors to do spot repairs like patching and crack sealing and spot panels of sidewalk.
[McGivern]: We don't have crack sealing skills machines quite yet, but in the future that is something we can try to do. But it's also easy to hire that up. But really with asphalt, it comes down to spending more time boxing out and square patching, removing large sections of pavements that have potholed over and over again over the years and repairing that section of pavement. To do that spread out over the city and pay a contractor to do it, you run into the same problem. You're not paying a contractor to move from one spot to another as opposed to doing the actual work. So that's the type of stuff we want to have in-house. So we have a small paver now, we have an asphalt grinder now, and now we're gonna have a 20% increase in personnel. So all of these things, we're hoping to get into some production value, some production work ourselves. In other words, I would love it, and we'll be like this next year, hopefully. We send out a crew to break open sidewalks, and then we send out another crew to prep the holes, and then another crew goes out and does the concrete. Those all take different amounts of time, so you can stay with crews. It's a more efficient use of people. We can't do that right now, we just don't have enough people to do that. So we send the same crew back to do that work. So that's just to give you an idea of some of the efficiencies that we're talking about when we talk about the difference between sidewalk concrete work and asphalt work.
[Bears]: Yeah, so essentially on both of these fronts we're talking about moving from triaging emergency spot repairs with outside contractors to being able to do all of that work in-house plus maybe even a little bit of production worker, you know, maybe some people might call it, you know. a new project.
[McGivern]: We treat it like production work, so it's still spot repairs, but you can send a crew out to break out 12 of them all over the city. And then the next day, send out a crew to spend two days forming them up. So you treat it more like production work, but you're not getting the benefit of all of it's in one location. Like if you were to do two blocks of sidewalk, three blocks of sidewalk, for example. And then the equivalent on asphalt might be, well, we're sending pothole crews out, you know, three or four times a week, and we keep potholing the same places over and over again. Okay, we still need to pothole and we still need to be doing that, but wouldn't it be great if we could spin up a box of pool at the same time. that is removing those large areas of re-potholed, re-potholed, re-potholed, and giving them a nice flat clean patch. So we want to do that in-house instead of paying a contractor to do it.
[Bears]: Great. And then just on the front of the money going towards our roads and sidewalks, and you know, correct me if I'm getting my six-month-old back of the napkin calculations wrong, but We were talking about needing to move into the $5.5 to $6.5 million a year range of spending, and we were somewhere in the $3.5 to $4 million range. So this gets us another $500,000 closer to that $5.5 to $6.5 million range, essentially, because we're going to still be doing. And does the efficiency impact that at all as well? Because we're using the money more efficiently, does it give us an even further added benefit than just adding 500,000 towards that annual repair budget?
[McGivern]: That's a good question. So we're really at 3.5 to 9, I think, still, right? Yes. OK. So 3.5, if we were to spend $3.5 million within, I guess, spread over all of our bands of pavement and done in the right priority, We would need to spend three and a half million dollars to maintain our current condition. If we spend nine, then we're going to have a nice steep rise of improvement of our condition. So that five million dollars is kind of like that sweet spot. It would be great if we could target and hit five. That's across all bands. So the bands are everything from pothole day-to-day maintenance to rebuild that road and everything in between. So the weighting of that band changes year to year. Last year, we did a ton of preventative maintenance work. Did we do $3.5 million worth? No, but it's hard to measure the value of that work over a long period of time. We know that we needed to do it right away because the sooner you do it, the better, the longer the road will last. But can we quantify that? Boy, that's a tough question. But we can watch it and we can see what happens. Now, some of the work Owen was just talking about is a middle band, mills and overlays. That's the next sort of round that we have to target here. And that is just grinding off the surface layer of the road and putting a new surface layer down and doing the ramps. That's in the middle band, and we're going to try to spend $2 million plus on that this year. But that's going to give us a lot less square footage than if we were to, say, spend that same $2 plus million on large patches, for example. or if we were to spend that money on anything really that involves contract moving around more than we'd like to.
[Bears]: Great. And I guess just to follow up, you know, when we talk about that $2 million, when we talk about that money in general, we're talking about the money that we're actually spending on We're not necessarily talking about the money we're spending on the staff, per se, or I guess just Yeah, okay.
[McGivern]: No, it's, it's the full spectrum of the band so everything from preventative maintenance to day to day maintenance to you know, regular care and resurfacing, like mills and overlays, to that road is gone and we need to completely rebuild it. It's not worth spending money on an overlay.
[Bears]: But we're talking about like the capital costs of like the materials for the project?
[McGivern]: Everything, soup to nuts. So when we say three and a half million dollars, we're talking about soup to nuts, everything, the soft costs, the hard costs.
[Bears]: Labor, materials. Yes. Even does that even include like police details and stuff like that?
[McGivern]: Yeah, it doesn't get that granular. But yeah, it certainly would.
[McGivern]: And that is driven by us, depending on if we're going to do, hey, we're going to do crack sealing all year this year. Well, we're not going to, we could crack seal every road that needs to get crack sealed out there and not spend all that money. Yeah. Yet if we go to rebuild one road, it's going to cost all of that money.
[Bears]: Right. So it's across all bands, I understand that it's complicated to determine you know how much does one person's time equivalent spend if they're doing a million overlay versus a completely redoing the base of the road versus doing crack ceiling I get that it's a hard calculation but it's helpful for me to try to understand right you talked about. um combining cdbg and chapter 90 funds to go towards it sounds like a few seven streets of mills and mill and overlay is that yeah that's all we have targeted at the moment right there will be more right right right and that community development block grant money is set aside for sidewalks within the eligible areas right we're also going for you know other funding sources that aren't
[Wartella]: making sure that it's from the state or from feds, you know, those types of pools where we can effectively, you know, use that money in targeted areas.
[Bears]: And I guess the question I'm asking, and again, I understand the answer is probably just going to be it's complicated, is can I add up the highway department budget plus the CDBG money we're using this year plus the Chapter 90 money we're using this year plus some other grant money we're using this year and say, well, that all adds up to four and a half million. So that's good. We're above the three and a half million. And I think you're getting there.
[McGivern]: I think when the, and you know, you might be able to contribute to this. I think when the engineers are figuring out what those numbers are, they're looking at how much does it cost on the market to bid out the work per foot of roadway or quarter mile or whatever they're using for unit. So it's very zoomed out. It's very back of the envelope planning. Like, for example, this year, you should do this amount of road rebuilding, this amount of crack sealing, this amount of patching. And if you were to do all of that, it should roughly add up to roughly $5 million. So my point is, it's way more zoomed out than we were getting into. So it's just really a rough guide. And I think you're onto something. But would it tell us that we're on the right track? Not necessarily how much money we're spending is going to tell us if we're on the right track. It's every single year, I think every two years, I forget what our cadence was. Every two years, we're going to update the payment condition index. That will tell us how well we're doing. And if we go up a point or two, then we can say, well, how much did we spend above that point or two? And what did we do? And then look back on it and say, well, how are we going to plan for the future, now that we actually have data and information that is telling us how our asphalt assets are either degrading or improving. I have a feeling that it will be a couple of years before we actually start to see improvements. So if we stay the course and we're spending that amount of money and we're doing our evaluations, we're going to know how healthy we are more and more after each year goes by. We already had one round of that and we're not doing so hot, but We're also not doing terrible either. We haven't been improving. We're getting a little bit worse, but only a little bit worse.
[Wartella]: So what we have done is we've slowed the backlog. So backlog's not going crazy. We did preventive maintenance to kind of like slow that down. And our backlog for pavement right now is around 70 million. And that's from last year's numbers. Our sidewalk backlog is around 30 million. And so our index, whatever the sidewalk conditioning index for the city has gone up. So we're spending enough to kind of move it into the right direction. And we got really creative this year. I'm actually really excited to see what actually how the index changes in the next year or two, because I think we're getting a lot more bang for the buck in the pavement side. It's going to show. Either it's going to show in our backlog stagnating and kind of plateauing, which is what I need to do, or the index going up. And hopefully we do both. That's kind of our sweet spot.
[Bears]: Yeah. And I think that kind of, you know, the trend-based stuff and the reassessment, I appreciate that that's the direction we're moving in. I know that we're in the kind of the early days of that. You know, I think for me, or it would be helpful for me to understand maybe after the next iteration of it, or maybe it'll take two, I don't know. And maybe it's just gonna be different because of how resources are allocated, but like, what dollar amount of money that we put into preventative maintenance at the lower end of the scale, or into mill and overlay, or into where we just had to completely redo a street, like how much of an increase in the PCI and the SCI did that get us for that money? Because then we can take that and say, okay, if we put, let's say, let's call it three bands. I know it's really about five, but like, let's call it three. Like if we put a million into band one and 2 million into band two and 2 million into band three, we think we'll move up five points in the next two years. Then we can start to understand, I think that financial scope of things a little bit better. At least that's what I would, you know, like us to move towards.
[Wartella]: Cause then- Five points is a big- A lot.
[Bears]: Yeah, no.
[Wartella]: And for those numbers, the dollar amounts will be way higher. You'd be closer to the 9, 10, 12.
[McGivern]: We wanted to know the same information that you want to know and that you just eloquently described. We want to know that too. And we're looking forward to it. We haven't been able to do the balanced approach yet because we kind of have to put up the fires. And we're still going to do that, preventative maintenance fires. So, you know, once we kind of feel locked in on that, we have uh, roads to rebuild and we have, um, lots of surface treatments to be doing and that's what we're going to work on and focus on. And I think that should give, as Owen was saying, it should give a, uh, an increase in our condition index, just because of the nature of the work itself, mills and overlays. It provides a fresh new surface that then gets evaluated.
[Bears]: So, right. Yeah, no. And I totally, you know, wasn't trying to throw out unrealistic numbers for you guys to try to meet. It was just totally, you know, we ran.
[McGivern]: we want them too and we'll get them. If we keep doing the work that we're doing year over year, the picture will get clearer and clearer.
[Bears]: Yeah, and I think at some point also being able to know how much invested in each band, like what does that reduce the backlog by, and I get that that's a little bit of kind of a, right now we're just trying to feel that out.
[Wartella]: And we've also implemented a lot of like the way we track like permits, trenching in the city, when somebody goes into the roadway, we are now way more organized so that we can, we know who's going in there, how they're restoring it and kind of forcing them to make sure that they go back and restore it correctly. So we don't have potholes, we don't have a trench breaking up a road after like three years. So there's a lot more oversight the, you know, the city standpoint on that. So we're kind of like holding the utility people to what they are required to do.
[Bears]: Yeah. And I appreciate that. And I know last time, or maybe two times ago, we had this conversation, you were talking about how a piece of that dollar amount is the utilities and the work that they do. And obviously you can't quite know how much they're spending.
[McGivern]: You know, or take that into account, but the more the more that we think about this, though, it's kind of it's they cancel each other out because they're the ones also cutting into our roads that. to cause the damage. So what we're really doing is trying to minimize that damage. And that really comes with, as on some of the improvements we've been making, like Owen was saying in the permitting, a lot of that is moving into online, being able to track much better online instead of paper permitting, and knowing who is cutting into the road. We've also been improving standards in what our licensed contractors should be doing out there when it comes to restoring the road. It's really simple things like saw cutting and tacking and sealing your cuts so rainwater doesn't get in in a year. So, but to monitor and track that happening hundreds of times a week. can be difficult and improving that will not contribute to our condition index, it will contribute or growing, it will contribute to it degrading less quickly.
[Bears]: Yeah. So they're just evening out the damage that they're doing.
[McGivern]: No, they're- They're making it worse. They're making it worse.
[Bears]: Yeah.
[McGivern]: Just a little bit worse.
[Bears]: Just a little bit worse because we're trying to minimize how much worse they make it.
[McGivern]: Correct.
[Bears]: Yeah. Okay. Well, it's totally worth the a hundred million we're sending to the British owners, right? Totally worth it. Love that.
[Callahan]: Thank you. I just wanted to put in one last comment just because I think You know, a lot of this, we do this for the public. We do this not just for us to understand because we're obviously involved in budget considerations, but we do this for people who are listening to be able to really understand what is happening with our roads. And I just want to put this in a little bit of context that when we did our first roads assessment in, am I correct that it was 2019? 2021 was the first one? Yeah. Great. Then when we did the first roads assessment in 2021, At by that time, we are roads already were quite degraded in that 49% of our roads were in the, you know, category four and five of the five, one being the best and five being the worst. So we found ourselves, you guys are in a situation where you're trying to dig us out of a hole that has come from the past and from the fact that maybe they didn't have the information because there was no roads assessment, maybe utilities were not being kept track of and so they, No one was preventing the degrading that they were doing. And for who knows what other reason, not enough funding or whatever else, that we found ourselves at the first roads assessment in 2021 with roads that are quite degraded, and now trying to dig ourselves out when just to stay at the same level would cost $5 million a year. Would you say that's relatively accurate?
[McGivern]: Three and a half is the- Three and a half is staying level.
[Callahan]: Okay, great. Five would be just able to begin improvement.
[Hurtubise]: Yes.
[Callahan]: Right. Okay, great. So just for people to understand sort of the context of where we are in terms of this roads update. So, wonderful. Is there anything else? Oh, sorry. Let me go to Councilor Lazzaro.
[Lazzaro]: Thank you. I appreciate you both being here and telling us about this stuff. It can feel frustrating and dark, and I agree with Chair Callahan that actually this is helpful for the community. I think a lot of our conversations publicly or when people start talking about it online, it's like the streets are so bad, the sidewalks are so bad. We're battling nature, we're battling backlog, we're battling all of this stuff. all the time. The earth does not want us to have streets on it. And we are insisting on doing that. Anyway, so we are always going to be, you know, fighting this battle but it's it's necessary and it's important so that we can travel to and fro, and that people with mobility issues are always being prioritized and all of that stuff, and we're trying all the time, we're trying. And I just see the work that you're doing, and as difficult and insurmountable as it seems, it's good, important work, and we have to keep doing it, and we have to pay for it as a community. So we have to keep showing up and trying, and paying for it. So thank you.
[Callahan]: Thanks so much. I would just want to see if you have any last things. I know we do have another agenda item that I'm hoping to get to. Is there anything else you'd want to add about roads?
[McGivern]: Just be patient. It's going to take a while. This is a long road and we're starting to climb out of that hole. So patience, patience, patience. Lots, hundreds, hundreds.
[Callahan]: Starts with a single step. Great. Thank you so much. So if we can, I would love to move on to 24-493, which is the resolution to establish a volunteer tree planting program. Whereas Medford loses an estimated 500 or more trees each year and plants less than 250 trees each year. And whereas the cost of planting city trees is primarily in the labor to plant the trees rather than the cost of the sapling. and whereas Medford only has one full-time staff member dedicated to our trees, the tree warden, and whereas Medford currently contracts out for tree planting, which is more expensive than planting with an in-house crew, and whereas trees are a vital part of fighting climate change, help cool buildings and streets in summer, and add to the beauty of our city, and whereas Medford has many residents who want to volunteer to plant city trees, therefore, be it resolved that the Public Works and Facilities Committee invite DPW Commissioner Tim McGibbon to attend an upcoming meeting, that is today, to begin discussing the possibility of allowing Medford residents to volunteer to help plant city trees. This is a project near and dear to my heart that I talked about a lot as I was campaigning a year ago last summer. So I would love to just open the conversation. I really appreciate Commissioner McIvern that you are open to discussing this possibility. There are other cities in Massachusetts that do allow residents to help volunteer to help plant city trees. And I would love to hear your thoughts about whether this is a project that we could start looking into here in Medford. I know a lot of residents who are actually excited to help. So if you can give us a little bit of sort of your opening thoughts.
[McGivern]: Sure. Thank you. So the biggest challenge that I would have with that program is a volunteer coordinator, someone to coordinate the work, to document the work, to coordinate and interact with the tree warden for that work. I think there are a lot of people in the city that would be interested in doing this. So if you can imagine having just even a half a dozen folks doing this, the sort of the level of coordination that would be needed to make that happen in an effective manner. So that would just be my concern. It's probably a part-time type position. I don't have it, even if it is. So that's really the biggest challenge that I would have. Otherwise, I think it's a fantastic idea. And like I said, I think there's plenty of folks in this community who would want to take part.
[Callahan]: Thank you. Can you tell me a few, I have a few questions. What season is the best for tree planting?
[McGivern]: I am not an expert in trees. So I don't have an answer for you, but I do know that we plant in the fall quite a lot. And we also plant in the spring. So I guess it's the fall and the spring. I can get an answer for you.
[Callahan]: Wonderful. So a couple other questions. How comfortable would you feel with a volunteer, volunteer coordinator, or do we need to wait for a budget item to come and put a halftime person in the budget before you would feel comfortable with a position like this?
[McGivern]: That's correct, yeah. Just because I don't think if we were to do it right now, it would be very effective. I think we would get a lot of frustrations, a lot of issues with the tree warden. And I wouldn't want to necessarily deal with that. I'm on the fringes familiar with coordinating volunteers. I've been involved in different organizations over the years. And it's not as easy as it seems.
[Callahan]: Let me go ahead and go to councilors for any questions or comments. Councilor Lazzaro.
[Lazzaro]: Yes, I have two thoughts. The first is I just got an email from the planning department about Trees Medford and their program. So Trees Medford is a nonprofit. their program offering free trees to specific neighborhoods that are like hotter neighborhoods or neighborhoods in Medford in particular. I know they operate as a nonprofit and have their own infrastructure for tree planting. I don't know what it is. I'm not super familiar with them, but it would probably be worth having conversations with existing organizations. Maybe you already have. I don't want to presume, but yes, but the other thing I wanted to say is that because of work that I've done with the Malden warming center which is an almost entirely volunteer organization, and is a nonprofit on its own. We I'm the president of the board of directors this year, but the last two years I was the assistant director and the our work is volunteer based. We have a volunteer coordinator and all of our staff are volunteers. Nobody gets paid for those for the work that they do, but everybody has to have a quarry, everybody has to have training. The volunteer coordinator does put in a lot of time, but everybody kind of goes into it knowing what they're getting into. The time that they put in is extensive. Everybody puts in a lot of time. But it's kind of part of the mission of the organization that it's like, what if we could do it all volunteer-based? And pretty much everybody in the beginning, the executive director, when he started it, said, what if we did a volunteer-based? And everybody said, you won't be able to do it volunteer-based. And he was like, what if I just did it anyway? And that was kind of how it started. The model is really unusual. So it's uncommon, but it's possible. And it does take a lot of people doing a lot of work a lot of time for no money. So I think the more common thing, especially when you're doing it with a municipality as part of a department, would be to hire somebody to bring people in, especially if people in neighborhoods wanted to do things for their own neighborhood. I think that would be a more traditional pathway to put something into the budget for somebody to do the coordinating. Because frankly, the work that our volunteer coordinator does, and she's been doing it for a number of years, she has another full-time job. I don't know how she does this. She is like on the phone with people in the middle of the night, because we're open every night, all night long for four months. She's like always coordinating somebody to be there. It's crazy. It's just, That's an outlier example, but it does take a lot of coordinating. This would be a smaller scale. I guess what I'm saying is it can be done. It needs a lot of forethought. So I think it's great, and I think we should do it anyway. The end of my comment.
[Callahan]: Thank you. A couple other questions, if you've thought a little bit about it. Aside from a volunteer coordinator, do you see any kind of structure? Like, how would this fit in with the tree warden or with anything else in the DPW? Like, what would you imagine to be like a structurally, how would it work?
[McGivern]: Well, the volunteer coordinator would probably need to report in some fashion to the tree warden to get pre-planting assignments. Another thing that I'm thinking of here too is, you probably need more trees to plant. So we'd probably want more money to plant those trees, another consideration. And I think depending on how many volunteers they get, I suppose, They would have to receive direction from tree warden and then report back once it's complete. And we know the locations have been filled, the tree locations. That's about as much thought as I put into it.
[Callahan]: Great. Any other, I can think of a bunch of next steps that I will, by the way, I have talked to Chief Medford about it. And so I think I have some other next steps for me personally that I want to do. Do you see other next steps? You know, I'm thinking like a pilot, like we get something in the budget and then figure out like a place where we could do a pilot project where we can do one or two tree plantings in a particular neighborhood and you know work through the warden and the volunteer coordinator and really have a first project to happen. Just curious if you see sort of other sort of next steps that we would do in this process.
[McGivern]: Yeah, I think it depends on which way we go. I think Councilor Lazzaro brought up a pretty good point. What's the capacity within the community already? So we have Trees Medford. I don't know what their capacity is, but are there other organizations that have some capacity here? And could it be more of a permitting process to the DPW as opposed to an operational thing of the DPW? Um, and what I mean by that really, uh, is if some outside organization, some nonprofit NGO approached the city and said, we have 500 trees that we want to plant and here are the locations, then I'm just reviewing and approving at that point. Um, so I think there's, there's some opportunity there depending on the capacity of already existing in, you know, maybe uh, future organizations here in Medford based that are, you know, citizen based. So that's not off the table either. Uh, so, but if you wanted to do it more of an in-house approach and have like a volunteer coordinator, I think next steps, um, is probably getting it on the mayor's radar to see if the mayor would be interested in adding something like that to her budget.
[Callahan]: Great. Are there any other questions either from councillors? Well, from councillors first. Are there any questions from the public? I see one and I don't have. Amanda Bowe, we have asked you to unmute.
[Amanda Bowen]: Hello. I am. I just wanted to let you know that there is currently a Mr. grit address for the record. I apologize. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Amanda Bowen 57 Madison Street, I just, I just wanted to let you know that this is very, very opportune because With the Myra, Mystic River Watershed Association got a grant over multiple cities to have citizen tree planting happen. And somebody named Karina Ramos from Myra has been in touch with Aggie just recently. about this, they have money for something like 40 trees, but the whole point is for it to be a citizen planting process. So there's money for trees, there's probably some staffing conceivably available from them to help with it. And so that would be a perfect test project and the money I believe needs to be spent this year.
[Callahan]: That is so exciting. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you bringing that to our attention. You're going to make that happen. Anyone else? Wonderful. On that note, I believe we are at the end of this discussion. I so again, super appreciate that you're open to the idea, really looking forward to moving this forward either through the administration with a part time volunteer coordinator or with a nonprofit, but potentially working with you know, the Mr. Graber Water Association or some other nonprofit, and of course with Trees Medford. Thank you so much, Trees Medford, for the work that you have done in previous years on this project. And with that being said, is there a motion on the floor?
[Hurtubise]: Sorry. Motion to adjourn.
[Callahan]: with a motion to adjourn from Councilor Lazzaro. I'm so sorry. Seconded by Councilor Leming. Mr. Clerk, would you please call the roll? Oh, do we need to call the roll? We don't need to call the roll. All in favor? Aye. And all opposed? We have three in favor, one opposed. The motion passes. Thank you so much.
[McGivern]: I'm glad to see you guys having so much fun. Oh yeah, I watched.
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