AI-generated transcript of Committee of the Whole Meeting via Zoom

[Kevin Harrington]: Microphone check one, two. Mic check. Check mic one, two.

[Zac Bears]: Medford City Council Committee of the whole May 21 2025 is called to order Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Council Kelly and Vice President Collins. I believe she's on her way. Councils are Council Leming is absent, Councilor Scarpelli.

[Zac Bears]: Councilor Tseng President Bears present five present two after the meeting is called to order, there'll be a meeting of the Medford City Council Committee the whole. May 1st, 2025 at 6 p.m. in the City Council Chamber, second floor, Medford City Hall, 85 George P. Hassett Drive, Medford, Massachusetts, and via Zoom. Our action discussion items today are 25-039 for the budget process, preliminary budget meeting, and 25085 submitted by the mayor in appropriation of free cash. And this is a discussion and it'll be, it could be referred to a regular meeting for final action. Just to get it out of the way, we're going to take 25085 first. This is an appropriation of free cash for parking kiosk replacement and soil remediation at 448 High Street. Dear President Bears and city councilors, I respectfully request and recommend that your honorable body approves the following free cash appropriation in the total amount of $150,859.89 for the following, or 98 cents for the following, 92,859.98 for replacement of the remaining Flowbird parking kiosks, IPS parking kiosks, and 58,000 for the continuation of solar remediation services at 448 High Street. The balance of free cash before this vote is $22,311,303.11. Parking Director Sarah McDermott and City Engineer Owen Wartella will be available to answer any questions on the respective requests. Thank you for your kind attention to these matters. Brianne Aligo-Kern, Mayor. I'm not seeing Owen, I do see Sarah. If you guys wanna come up and present a little bit more about these requests, and maybe we can start with the parking kiosks as we await the City Engineer. And you can feel free to move that down, if helpful. And I do want to note that Councilor Collins has arrived and Councilor Leming is absent due to military service so we'll go to parking director right now.

[Sarah McDermod]: So as of today, the city of Medford has 12 remaining Flowbird parking kiosks that were originally part of Park Medford's inventory of kiosks that the city of Medford took over seven years into the contract. We had full ownership of them. 12 of them remain. There are three on Clippership Drive and nine on Boston Ave from Harvard Street over up Boston Ave down College to Cousins Gym at Tufts. These meters are unreliable and are not able to be repaired according to my meter 4 person, Mike Viola. The positive thing is we have removed four IPS meters from a different part of Boston Avenue for a large project at Tufts, which we can use to replace some of these meters in the meantime to provide kiosks that actually work for our customers. And yeah, so that's, I mean, I don't know what questions you all might have, but I'm happy to try and answer any.

[Zac Bears]: Great, Councilor Lazzaro.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Um, as the parking department I know is revenue generating department. It seems clear to me that we it's in our interest to make sure things are working appropriately. Uh, the The parking kiosks. Is this different than a meter? Is this at a parking lot? Sure.

[Sarah McDermod]: So I refer to them as kiosks because the city does have single space meters. So the individual space by space meters I will generally refer to as meters and then these pay by space kiosks. and they cover multiple spaces. So I'm referring to 12 kiosks, not single space meters. So these kiosks would cover, I don't know, nine kiosks. I don't have the inventory of how many spaces it would cover, but it's a significant portion of Boston Avenue between Harvard and Cousin's Gym on College Ave. And the reason that it is important that those meters start to work functionally soon is that we've lost about 40 plus spaces at the 400 block of Boston Avenue due to the Tufts Dormitory Project. So those spaces are utilized most every day by people commuting on the Green Line. And so if we have reliable kiosks on a different part of Boston Avenue, we can easily transition all of the folks who are used to parking in one part of Boston Avenue to a similar distance away on a different part of Boston Avenue and not encounter functionality issues. Something I failed to mention is that these kiosks from Flowbird are still under a different vendor. So Flowbird charges us per meter per kiosk per month. It's $66 per kiosk per month for 12 months. They've been paid for the year 2025. So another benefit is if we replace any Flowbird kiosks and take them out of commission, I can likely get refunded the unused portion of 2025. In total, we've paid them $9,504 for the use of their kiosks for the year 2025, calendar year 2025. And if any that are taking it up commission, I can recoup that money as soon as they're deactivated, they'll stop the service and we should be able to request a refund.

[Emily Lazzaro]: So do you have an estimate for how long it would take to likely recoup the cost of the kiosks?

[Sarah McDermod]: That's hard for me to say. Simply, I could look up the amount that the flow bird meters have produced, but it wouldn't really truly reflect what the IPS kiosks could produce because they'd be more functional and with just the shift in the customer base for those kiosks, I could estimate, but I couldn't give you an accurate number of what I could expect to recoup and when. But

[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, I'll leave it at that. In general, I just would want to say that I think that when we have functioning parking equipment, it's much better for that department and for all of the all of the parking in the city to be super functional and available for people on a I think it's a good practice. I think it's a good baseline because then people are used to regularly paying for parking. They're doing it by habit, and it's, um, more consistent. I think it's a good practice. So thanks. I would be in favor of Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Do we have any other questions from members of the council? I

[Sarah McDermod]: I think hadn't considered putting in single space meters. I could absolutely get an estimate for that. But in that area, they have been kiosks for since 2014 when they were originally installed. So I believe to kind of harken on what Councilor Lazzaro said, it would stay consistent with what the folks in that area are already used to using, if for no other reason than that. But I could I could get an estimate as to what it would cost to acquire and install single space meters for the spaces along that drive if that's what the council would like to compare.

[Zac Bears]: Back of the napkin, would you guess would be more expensive?

[Sarah McDermod]: If I had to guess, I don't know that it would be any less expensive because it is a substantial amount of spaces. And that would be, it would be at least 30 or 40 single space parking meters. But like I said, I don't know off the top of my head what those are per meter, especially now I don't, I could look at what we paid for them in the past and it might be different. I'd have to request a quote from IPS to get a better determination.

[Zac Bears]: And would those require like electrical wiring to install and

[Sarah McDermod]: No, they're all charged by solar power. There's batteries inside that get charged continuously in the sunlight, but it would require, so there's three components. There's the pole, the post, and then of course, installation of each of those posts per space, the housing that holds the mechanism, and then inside the mechanism itself, which is probably the most expensive part where all the electronics and the magic happens. So that, it might be less equipment-wise, but it's a lot more installation, whereas the infrastructure to install these kiosks is already in the ground and actually will be. There's a section of that part of Boston Ave just, I guess, north of Harvard Street that we don't have kiosks in right now because they've been doing construction, but they're about to be reinstalled in the coming weeks.

[Zac Bears]: And that's between the college intersection and Harvard Street?

[Sarah McDermod]: It's on Boston Ave between Harbor Street and College Avenue. Yeah, yes.

[Zac Bears]: What's our compliance like in the area, especially around the T station. So are a lot of people using the kiosk like how often are we seeing people parking all day to take the T and how often are we ticketing them and. I'm just, yeah, it's just kind of a unique area of public parking and that's why I'm wondering what the best treatment might be.

[Sarah McDermod]: So compliance has gone up recently simply because that a lot of the T workers park there, which is a complaint I've heard, but also they're paying customers just like any other citizen. So what we did recently, I believe it was in March, we expanded the prepaid time so that people who come to park there to go to work early can prepay for their session starting at 4.30 AM. Previously, the prepay wasn't allowed until 7.30 AM, which is well after some of the employees and students park there to get a space. And so compliance has gone up since then. We do still have, I would say right now it's about average. We take 20 spaces that are occupying. I don't think it's any more or less abused than any other area, especially now that we've expanded the start time to 4.30 a.m. So we don't charge between 4.30 and 8.30, but they can pay for their session to start at 8.30 a.m. as early as 4.30 a.m. And then they can pay for the whole day until 6 p.m. when the meters are no longer active.

[Zac Bears]: And it's unlimited. They can stay the whole day.

[Sarah McDermod]: In that particular zone, they can, yes. Most of the zones are limited to three hours but that zone and I think a couple others are a place that road is another one that you can park all day it's designed for commuters.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. And, and enforcement is going up there on a daily basis.

[Sarah McDermod]: It's very frequent up there simply because it is a popular area and it's also near another municipal lot and it's en route to a lot of residential areas as well.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. So my last question is kind of on a two year time horizon with the dorm project. you know, some of the use in that area is going to change. We're going to have a lot more people, probably a lot more activity. I know that Tufts is talking about significant improvements to the street. How has the kiosk project been incorporated into that? I would hate to see us buy these and then take them out, you know, in two years because of the significant design changes on the street.

[Sarah McDermod]: It's my understanding that once the project is complete, we have already spoken to the contractor who requested that we remove the four kiosks from either side of Boston Avenue there. And part of our discussion was the reinstallation after the fact. So we have communication with them, letting them know we'll need to be there when the concrete's poured so we can put our bolts in to reinstall them and also signage. So it's my understanding that the kiosks that we're taking out will only be temporarily removed and will be put back. Should there be changes in the planned use of the curb between now and then, that might change. But as of right now, the plan is to reinstall these four kiosks after the project's complete.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. And on this other side of the street as well? Correct. Okay. And so if there are changes on the other side of the street, I know that they've talked about in the sidewalk over there as well. strange to say the least. Yeah. With that weird kind of lip. I know that's going to be changed. So would we install these now and then maybe have to uninstall them and then they redesign and then we reinstall them? Is that kind of?

[Sarah McDermod]: Well, I also have a request from a constituent which has been approved by the mayor to install or reinstall because it's been removed before my time here. A second kiosk in the West Medford municipal lot behind located closer to the rear of Pompeo Insurance. Because right now there's one kiosk in that lot, and I've heard several people request an additional one be put back where it used to be. So that's another one. We do have one spare, and we're planning on reinstalling that there as soon as we can get the concrete poured. But we do like to have at least one spare aside anyway. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, if they decide to change the entire curb at the tough storm that would leave for kiosks that were no longer necessary based on the use that we have now. One could be the spare that we. Um. Replace the spare from West Medford, and then the most would be left with is three. And to be honest, we could stand to have another one in the Lambert Street lot. So that's that would be a recommended uses for that. And then perhaps, um. Somewhere in the I don't I'm hesitant to say the clipper should drive a lot because I know We might end up with spares should the uses change on Boston. Okay.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I guess my only thought would be, let's make sure that if there's significant changes that the reinstallation removal and reinstallation if necessary is something that tops and their contractor is responsible for. Installing them and then having to pay whatever the installation fees are in a few years if they make significant changes to locations or or the lot of the street i'm thinking actually on the track side of Boston Avenue across from the dorm that's kind of where my concerns are.

[Sarah McDermod]: Yes, and we have two from that side and two from the top side.

[Zac Bears]: Those are off on that side too. Correct.

[Sarah McDermod]: There's two from one side, two from the other side that have currently been removed for that project. So if they change the railroad side of the street, then that would only impact two of the kiosks that we currently have out there.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, great. Thank you.

[Sarah McDermod]: You're welcome.

[Zac Bears]: Any further questions? Seeing none, we'll go to Engineer Wartella to talk about the Soil Remediation Services.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Hi.

[Zac Bears]: Hey, Owen, we can hear you.

[Owen Wartella]: What's happening at 448 High Street? Hi, thank you so much for taking this on. We need to extend the contract for the remediation for another two years. This contract is for having our consultant do that work. And we need some funding to continue the work so that we can continue to report it and monitor it.

[Zac Bears]: Which lot is this again?

[Owen Wartella]: This is the lot behind, it's on the corner of Canal and High Street. Okay. So behind the shops over there. Yeah, there's like a hair salon, a liquor store, a restaurant, a few restaurants.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. Do you have any questions, Councilor Callahan?

[Anna Callahan]: just super basic, why are we doing soil remediation there?

[Owen Wartella]: This is something that was started back with the previous administration and it's over like a decade old. We're trying to, we own the lot, there is contaminated soils, the remediation has been occurring for 10 years plus. So we're just continuing it. It should be the last little bit of it, we hope. Fingers crossed. But that's all there really is. It's just operation, maintenance, and testing, and reporting.

[Anna Callahan]: Thank you.

[Owen Wartella]: Thanks. And do we know the source of the contamination? It was the old, from what has been told to me, I wasn't around here either at that time. It was an old laundromat that was there. OK.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Great, thank you. Do we have any further questions for the City Engineer? Seeing none, is there a motion and it would be to refer out? A motion to refer to the regular meeting by Councilor Callahan, seconded by Councilor Tseng. All those in favor? Opposed? Motion passes. Thanks, Owen. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Already gotten back to work. All right. Next, we're going to take 25-039 Annual Budget Process Preliminary Budget Meeting. Tonight, we're talking Assessor, Building, Clerk, Legislative, Electrical, Fire, Insurance, Pensions, Bonds, and Interests, and Recreation slash Farmhouse Stadium. We're going to take Recreation first. So we're going to go to our Rec Director, Kevin Bailey, and we will hear about what's happening in the Recreation department. So first I'm just going to read off the budget, and then we'll do Hormel next but here we have department recreation fiscal 25 budget 607,787 fiscal 26 proposed 641,373 for an increase of $33,586. As our net increase, we have some fixed cost growth. We have some step increase, stipend increase, or a stipend that's eligible for, and additional training for part-time employees. And then we also have a new expense under part-time employees for an office manager position for the department. So with that, I have a general kind of three items that I asked everyone. So first, just share, you know, any other things you'd like to talk about with the change in the budget. And then let us know kind of what your accomplishments were this year. What are some goals for the upcoming year. And finally, what are items that aren't funded in this budget that you'd like to see funded in the future.

[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah. just to go from order my binder if it's okay we'll start with settings and goals from this year and future that have a flight 26 great so we actually had four goals this year that we were working on. The very first one I think we talked about it briefly last night is last, the end of last spring we received a bus. It's a 10 passenger bus with opera funding so one of our goals this year was to really utilize that bus. Originally, it was supposed to be shared between the Council of Aging and the Recreation Department. So our original plan wasn't to use it too often, but to do field trips and possibly snow tubing and different activities with that. The Council of Aging did find that without handrails and the way the seating is, it's a little tight. So recreation does have a little bit more availability to utilize that. This year, we did offer a couple of field trips. We were able to go to the Ecopterium over the summertime. We did indoor rock climbing. We went to boat aboard, I believe, and Sky Zone. So we did start some of the things that we kind of had on the list that we really wanted to start with field trips. So we were able to do that. Also in the summertime, our program manager, really wanted to do a program called adventure week where that whole entire week each day we were doing different field trips for the entire day. Understandably, getting the van late spring, by the time we got it out and we got the vendors and the program put together, it was already July. So we didn't have the ability to really get enough numbers to execute that program. But we would love to continue something like that as well towards the end of the season and something more for the older teens. The other thing that we're doing with the van this week, and it kind of ties into another goal, was to use the bus during our summer park program. We're at a strong advantage of having our own van where we can do field trips and not increase the cost of our summer park program. So we changed the way we're doing our summer park program, but we increased it. And we did groups of 10 so that every day, that bus is going to be used where a group of 10 is going to go on a field trip. We have different things planned out. So we're going to Nahon Beach, we're going to Beaverbrook reservations, we're doing hikes around Wrights Tower. So again, to try to keep costs down, we're trying to visit, you can tell a lot of our state parks and just different unique experiences around the area that we want to make sure that all the kids get to. We're doing other things like fishing up at Wrights Pond. One of the other nice things we just recently this is only two weeks ago we received a grant from the Tufts Community Fund for the summer park program so some of it is being allocated for financial aid by any remaining funds left over is going to be used for the summer park program. So we are looking at trying to use that money to do either kayaking or some other kind of paid field trips. The second goal that we're trying to do is intramural program for our middle school students. Very truthfully, it was a struggle to try to get this up and going. It is something that we continue to try to get going. But our program manager has been out for a very extended period of time. So this was one that was kind of a struggle, but we were able to get it going. You can see in the fall programming, we already have one intramural started. John Curley, who is our facilities coordinator is also the high school football coach. So we asked him to kind of help get that started. And the first one we're gonna do is flag football for middle school students this fall. And another goal that we had was to enhance our summer park program and our saga program saga is basically our school vacation week programs and when there is a professional development days. As I mentioned, we are using that van, which I think is gonna be great to enhance it. The other thing that we were able to partner with is with City Year. City Year is actually a group of volunteers that help us staff the saga program. So this year we've been able to increase our enrollment. Typically we only take 20 to 30 people into our saga program, particularly February vacation and sometimes April vacation, we don't have the college students back. But having this partnership does give us more people we've been able to increase it past 50 people. So we had actually no waitlist this year for our school vacation week so that was a really nice to see and be able to do that and grow that program. We also in the summer park program this year, one of our goals was to figure out indoor space and location, we actually decided this year, we're gonna do a little bit of work over at Lacanee Rain, cleaning out the hockey bed, and we're gonna have that as a rain location. So the summer park program, if we're as a plan that most of the day is gonna be rain, we're gonna actually relocate a camp over at Lacanee and we'll have basketball, we'll have pickleball nets, we'll have corn hole, we'll have a bunch of activities out there so that we can really use that like a gym space. The last thing I want to share is the year previously, if you remember, one of those goals was the Friends of Method Recreation to get established and then get running. And that has done wonders to our department as well with the fundraising efforts and trying to apply financial aid. One of the nice things with this. We have been able to apply a lot of financial aid to our typical programs we have children, jumping into wrestling into archery and all different programs but when you do look at specifically the saga and the summer park program. Already we've given out over $2,410 on financial assistance. So it just kind of shows that effect of the previous year goal, how that is helping us out and helping make sure that our programs are accessible to everyone. The very last one we talked about, and this is one of my own personal goals, and anyone who knows me knows that I have a real passion for aquatics. But we really want to try to get to offering free swim lessons over at Tufts Pool. We continue to work on this. We do have some grants that we found that is available. But I think as I said before, we need to make sure that we're running a nationally recognized program. And in the past, we've actually did our own in-house swim program. To keep it affordable to keep the cost down, but it does seem if we do go with a national program like the American Red Cross, while there is some upfront expenses of having our staff train as water safety instructors and to bring in an instructor. Unfortunately, I let my instructor elapse, but we'll have to bring in an outside person to teach it for right now. There is going to be a little bit upfront, but it does make us eligible for these grants, and one particularly is going to be a DCR grant, Department of Conservation and Recreation. So we do have that identified. I've already spoken to a water safety instructor trainer. Mary judge if anyone knows she is a method resident and the high school swim coach, but she is an instructor trainer so she is already scheduled to run a WSI class at house pool. Soon as we get it filled so the week of June 9 we will get started and get our staff WSI certified. So that was the goals for this year. Those are things that we've been able to accomplish. Obviously, we're still working on some of these goals, but a lot of it we have certainly helped enhance and continue to work on them. For FYI 26 is a three goals that we want to be working on the first one we talked about as a group is to enhance our team programs may you know we have team nights. And one of the things that I've heard before is that it's just open gym it's a place for kids to go, and we do have a group of kids that typically come visit and play basketball, which is great. So we kind of want to take that to the next level. Particularly now, we have a little bit more classroom space at the YMCA. We talked about we have like a TV in my office that we will allow when the kids are watching a movie, we can certainly get a video game controller in there, have a section where kids can play video games. But we also talked about looking at purchasing other things if we can do ping pong tables and and other things that we can store, that collapse, that can fold, we can have more activities down there just to kind of enhance that teen program as well. The other thing that our staff I think had a great idea is to try to offer a paint night during the teen night drop-in. So we are working with a couple of people that have done paint nights with us to see if they can try to bring that into the teen night program. The second one is to expand our therapeutic recreation programs. As you know, we did work with a collaboration between Method, Malden and Somerville Recreation to try to grow that therapeutic recreation offering. And really the goal by having the three is more children will enroll and participate in that program to make sure we have the numbers to run it. We did have one at Somerville. We had our teen drop-in program, which is great, We are now going into the summer session. We are running our adaptive swim lesson. That's one that we've been running for several years. It's been popular. Even right now, this program doesn't begin until after July 4th, and it's already at full enrollment. We're working with some of them in Malden to get some more instructors, and I am as well. So we're hoping to increase that. So the plan is to just continue to grow that program. Hopefully we have more people in that adaptive. We also have a sensory friendly open swim at Tufts pool, Saturday mornings from nine to 10 before we open up to the public. So it gives a little bit of a quieter time that people with families with special needs or have sensory has the ability to visit the pool at a dedicated time that might be a little bit easier for them. We also have Who's Without Limits that we are planning for the fall session as well. We have a preschool program, well, I shouldn't say preschool, it's more for youth program, and then we have another one for tweens that is already on the schedule for the fall. So our plan is to continue with that collaboration, continue offering that programs. That is what we have right now for the summer. And then in the fall, again, we do have that who's without limit, but we're also looking towards Malden to try to also run a program as well. So there's several offerings that people can choose from. The last and final goal for FY26 is to help with the hockey rink to get more rentals during outside peak season. If you go on the hockey rink schedule, you can see that a lot of times we have the public skating, which is by contract with DCR, but then there's usually this closure time. And we usually get a couple of hours, sometimes three o'clock or sometimes five o'clock, depending on the hockey season that we get things up and running. And we just look at that, Like a lot of these different recreation facilities that take a lot of energy, no matter what, there's a lot of fixed costs to run those compresses to keep ice. So we want to get people on that ice all the time so that there is revenue coming through. So that is our goal as well. We are working at different companies such as Catch Corner. to have an online app to try to market and to get more rentals in there. But we're also gonna be reaching out to Method Rock Hockey and with figure skating to just try to add more programs and close that gap so that we're continuously having programs in there from morning to night. Any questions on the goals or should I go on to the finances? Okay. As far as the finance section, One thing that I do have to mention is when we were creating the budget, the expectation is we did have a program manager on family medical leave. Unfortunately, she did come back last week and decided that is best to resign for her family and for her growing family. So this does kind of change a little bit when you are looking at the program manager moving to a step five Those are different things that obviously are going to change. We are going to be posting that position as soon as possible. I would love to say that's going to be out by next week, but we want to get someone in very quickly so that we do have our program manager started before the summertime. The other thing that you're going to see is a increase in our part-time employee budget. That is to add the 0.5 office manager position. This is a position I've been asking for a few years and one that we have, I know as a city council, I've talked about for a while, but our hope is by having a office manager. Truthfully, I was hoping for a full-time office manager, but to have someone in the office to help answer the phone, respond to our general emails, help pay invoices and help with some of the media of adding programs into the calendar, making sure that our schedule is correct and we have the staff. These are all different things that right now as a director I'm doing, as the assistant director is doing, but most importantly our program manager. And when we talked about wanting to have originally a certified therapeutic rec specialist, the idea is The program manager that unfortunately just recently designed was a therapeutic recreation specialist. She had her master's degree in therapeutic rec. We wanted to have an office manager to take some of that work off of her plate and off of our plate so that we can focus on the bigger picture things to allow her more time to be able to run more therapeutic programming. And that still stays the same. When we go out to a job opening, we are gonna look for someone that does have their CTRS or have that experience to work on the therapeutic program. It's in that job description. So we are really hoping that office manager is going to help take some of that work off of our plate so that it allows the program manager to focus truly on executing the programs, not the remedial, answering the phone, responding to general emails and questions. I think that's it. And another thing to just point out with the longevity pay, I know it shows that we haven't spent it. We actually did get paid out that longevity pay. I think it was accidentally put to the permanent employees. So we're just looking to transfer that money, but that was paid out. And I think that's everything covered.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Thanks, Kevin. I'm gonna go to councilor Scarpelli then council Lazzaro. Councilor Scarpelli.

[George Scarpelli]: Thank you. First, I'll start off by humbly letting you know a little story today. Today, we reviewed our survey that we sent out to our community. And number two on the list was, why don't we have as many programs as Medford? So I'm really mad at you, Kev. Thank you. You made me look. You have a lot to know we do, but I just wanted to let where we are and where you are as a, you know, a team of three is very different. And I think that I see you working first firsthand you and I work collaboratively. You've been very helpful when we have concerns, not just me, but other recreation departments across the state that need help with aquatics. I think your expertise is make sure that all of our programs are safe and under following all the guidelines. So I appreciate that. As of your goals, I appreciate what you're doing. I think that the discussions we had both in subcommittee and we've been talking with on a regular basis with parents, Increasing the, the programs for children with disabilities I think that's, we're seeing something that's going to be really celebrated I think in a year where we're looking at what you're doing with aquatics and taking over what we're doing for teen center and now you're taking your turn and some of all doing the adaptive recreation program in the summer. Maldon doing basketball, then us again, we're taking on the bicycle, I like the bike program. So you're seeing, we're taking an initiative as a partnership. And I think that that's a lot because of your leadership. So I appreciate that. I know that there are some limitations. I know that what we wanted is really another full-time recreation employee. And We also, we like, I settle on the fact that understanding that we have a part-time office manager, which I think will help with at least filling the gap with increasing your involvement and your team's involvement away from the duties behind a desk and in the field. So I appreciate that. I know that, as you see, the question that I had was really, I know we have 243. We've increased it to 280,000. And then for part-time, 273. For FY 26, I know a lot that you do is we need the part-time assistance. Is that still enough money in that account to maintain that? The program as we're growing with part time staffing Kevin that that's my biggest concern right now is making sure that I know that we're not top heavy but we're not very bottom heavy so.

[Kevin Bailey]: No it's a great question and, yes. I would like to see that higher. Obviously there are financial constraints and I will say that the mayor did increase putting that officer manager in there. So she certainly listened and put that in to help us out. One of the things that we can do with the part-time budget is we do have our recreation revolving account. So even if this is not exactly what I'm looking for, there is a revolving account that we can take some of the money from. Really what I'm trying to do with the part time employee budget is look at the pond and pool that's where most, I would say almost all of it, besides the. The office manager really subsidized so that our pond and pool passes are at a affordable rate. And ultimately by doing that, it's the lifeguards, it's the park rangers, it's the bathhouse attendants that are in that part-time employee budget. I think this year I'm gonna have to use a little bit of our recreation revolving account for some training with our lifeguards. originally hoping for was a little bit more money in that training budget so that we can add another training during mid-season. Right now, we do 16 hours before the season opens up. Every Father's Day weekend, I know, your daughter's one of them, right? Every Father's Day weekend, we do go to the pond and the pool. We practice, we train. At times, we've had the fire department here as well, which is great. is what we want to try to do is we do all this training, we talk about the rules, we talk about how the summer is going to go, how it's going to be laid out, we practice the drills. And what we're finding is we really need something in two or three weeks after the season opens up so we can reiterate because we see flaws, we see things that we need to go over again as a reminder. You know, we're noticing to the guard, you got to get off the chair you got to go talk to people you don't just have to blow the whistle and yell at them right like there's certain things that we see as observation but it's really hard to get that meeting and follow up what our observations are for the first couple of weeks so. That was our original hope a little bit more money to be able to do that, but we'll be okay.

[George Scarpelli]: But you'll be okay. And I'll just say before I go, Mr. President, if I can, I didn't disclose that my daughter did work part time with, with the recreation department, but we don't know if she's coming back. Just to make that known. I just, I will I will look, I will share that we, is there a way working with HR to bring in a, use a volunteer-based program? Because I know we have a lot of people that, former teachers, former educators, former coaches that are retired that might be a good way to even talk with the assessor. Maybe there's some sort of an abatement program, a work abatement program for recreation. No pressure. No.

[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, sorry, I'm losing my voice. We actually have had a senior abatement program that has been very helpful. Larry, you might see, he's actually now a park ranger for us. He's helped us out with even just cleaning the recreation facility, doing a nice deep clean a couple of days a week. So we have had that before and it's been helpful.

[George Scarpelli]: Okay, I'll leave you off with this. I've asked this both many moons ago. And you brought it up because it is important because probably the most expensive line that falls with the Parks and Recreation Department will be your electric bill from the rink. Yes. I would recommend through the chair that we make a motion that we ask our environmental director to look into looking into making Dillboy, excuse me, Hormel parking lot to a solar parking lot to fund the needs of the electric cost for the rink, which will then eliminate a big number toward our cost to the city. I think it's something that's prudent. It's very, you're seeing it across the Commonwealth now that you're seeing a lot of, it doesn't affect parking spots. It looks appealing and it, could be a very, very cost effective way to run the compressors. So if we can, that'd be something that I know I asked, but that was years ago and we haven't heard anything back, but I think it's time where it's so maybe 15 years ago, it wasn't 10 years ago, it wasn't so prevalent, but now you're looking at a lot of municipalities using solar parking lots as a way to fund some huge initiatives. So I will end by thanking you, Kevin, you do a great job. And I know I'll be talking to you probably tomorrow. So thank you. You're welcome.

[Zac Bears]: We have a motion from Councilor Scarpelli, seconded by Councilor Tseng. Just a quick follow up on that. Kevin, where do we pay the electric right now? Like is that in the building? Sorry, the facilities budget or?

[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, it's a it's a revolving account. So rental fees, I'll pay for it. But Mr. Scott probably is right that one of our largest expenses is any hockey rink, the largest expenses, the electricity and the compressor, especially when you look at like the month of October, I think sometimes we're getting somewhere around $20,000 just for that one month. So it is a big expense. All right. Thank you. Hockey is expensive. Yeah. Council is our

[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I just want to reiterate something that I think I said last year. I appreciate your dedication to aquatics. It's really important that our residents are learning to swim as young as possible. It's a public health issue. We have a lot of waterways in the city. So I really appreciate your dedication to that. And I wanted to ask this. It's not, you know, I happen to just have a conversation about this today, but it's not really the responsibility of the recreation department to provide child care to the city, but it's also kind of the responsibility of maybe a few different departments to do that. So I wanted to check about the summer park program. in the vacation week programs. What are the hours of those programs? And if you can sort of elaborate on also the length of time for the summer program. I think that there's maybe, and it might not be this one, there's also summer fun. Is that different from the summer park?

[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, I find it is with the school department.

[Emily Lazzaro]: The school department. So there are a few different city run summer programs that are available to Medford residents that are really pretty affordable. But I think there's usually like a gap week or maybe two weeks at the end of the school year before they start up. Is that true?

[Kevin Bailey]: It is true. One thing that we did do this year that's a little bit different. When you look at the summer fun program they are starting the first week of July 4. Don't tell my head what date that is. Second, I want to say or the first. Yeah, they're going to start that week a little bit earlier. We're both six weeks programs. Okay. But ours is going to start the week after July 4. So ours is July 7. So it'll be started. So we have an extra week in there. So I think that is a little bit helpful. And I think we can get away with it a little bit more we are at the Curtis tough school which has made a tremendous difference for us, having an indoor location, kids having a break and have an AC. But we do have a little bit of advantage of also being able to be outdoors in the park. Yeah, because you're right next to tough start. The other thing with that is we did also partner with SNL. SNL is also an outside company that also works with the after school programming. They are going to run a summer camp right up to the start of school. So the very last week Again, I don't have a calendar on me so I do apologize for that very last week of August, and the two days before school starts. We are planning on running a camp with them. And it's going to be at Tufts Park so it will be an outdoor camp. We're not going to be able to have the school buildings. But we can offer a program out in the park and use the Tufts pool bathhouse as the restroom.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Oh, nice.

[Kevin Bailey]: Try anything outside the box and kind of keep it going.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Totally. A lot of the time you have to do that kind of thing. What are the daytime hours? When do the camps start and when do they finish?

[Kevin Bailey]: 830 to 430. And then this year, again, partnership with SNL, we did an extended day option, I believe it was an extra 100 or $150 for that week. So it goes all the way till six if you wanted to do that. We didn't get too much enrollment, which I was really surprised as a parent. I know myself when I saw we can go all the way to six, this is great if nine to five, eight to four, you have that time. We didn't get too many people. We are going to hold a little bit longer, see if we get a few more enrollments. But we've already talked with SNL that if their minimum number doesn't reach, we're just going to uncover that, and we're going to have our own staff run that extended day program. So that option is also out there.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Well, that's great to know. It does tend to be, I mean, from my experience, an absolute nightmarish scramble trying to plan for the summer. And sometimes you have to do it. depending on when you're trying to get coverage, like you have, sometimes you have to plan in January or like right after Christmas, or there are some camps that are full in December and you are like, well, I don't know what I'm doing in August yet, but now I have to figure it out. And it's very panic inducing. And I'm glad to hear that the vacation week camps are going well. That sounds awesome. But yes, I think there are a lot of different departments that have to kind of work together to try to help us cobble together childcare options for our families, especially the families that are, you know, on like the more vulnerable end of the spectrum that are in need of childcare sort of for longer spans of time that are more affordable. that have meals and all that kind of stuff. So great to hear that there are inside options too for when, you don't have to like close the camp if it's raining and have the kids stay home because that's also like work doesn't cancel when it's raining. So thank you for that. I appreciate. I'm hearing about that and that the office manager will be starting and maybe in future years, we can get the coverage for a whole full time employee. Thank you. So thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Just a couple quick questions for myself, Kevin. You just, and you always do this, but could you just talk a little bit about how your department is funded in general? I know you get personnel money from the city but everything else comes from your program fees and outside funding can you just talk a little bit about that more. Yeah.

[Kevin Bailey]: So when you do look at our budget, the full-time employees, the part-time, well, let me start with the full-time employees. That is the four positions. It's myself as the director, the assistant director, program manager, and facilities coordinator. So that is the four full-time management and the general fund. Part time employees, what you see there is, as I mentioned, more for the operations of rights pawn and test pool so it gets subsidized. I actually did like a little. a little exercise just to see if we wanted to be in a revolving account, what we would have to charge the public. And when I first came up with those numbers, I was like, this is ridiculous. People are not, they can't afford this much to go to Tufts Pool or to buy a Rice Pond Pass. But I will say I've had other recreation departments and conversations at conferences they keep asking how Rights Pond and our pool fees are so much cheaper. How do we get away with it? And it is because our part-time employees are in there. So it's a subsidization of that. Other than that, everything else works off a revolving account. So if we have a part-time instructor to go teach, let's say, our sport sampler program on Saturday. We have to pay that instructor. So whatever the user fees is, that comes in and that is how we're able to fund those part-time employees. Anytime we have a part-time employee help teach a program or work the front desk, that's where it all comes from. And that really rolls back to even some of the minor things when you look at like our website or our operating system. At the end of the day, it's now costing us almost $10,000 when you look at all of the facilities. So that all comes in from the user fees, a certain percentage to help pay for that type of stuff. So yeah, so basically all works out of Revolving Account, whether it's equipment, supplies, part-time employees that teaches our programs. The Summer Park program is a perfect example. All of our Councilors, our CIT, those are all paid out of the Revolving Account, but it's the fees that are coming into the Summer Park program that helps support it.

[Zac Bears]: And how is the you said the friends has brought in some money, what about that element of it the non fee like the outside funding, what is that, how much is coming in and.

[Kevin Bailey]: Yeah, so this year is really the first year we've really been able to actively go out now that we have the 501c status. It is over $5,000 that we've already raised. I want to say year to date is closer to $10,000. And again, we haven't been established for too long. But we have been able to get some grants. Again, the other Tufts University grant. We've had the Community Fund Grant with Encore. We've had several in-kind donations. We have the Dave McGillivray Foundation also gave us a donation. So we've had a couple of good donations and several in-kind donations for it to help. And really right now, the friends have their main goal and focus is to just raise money so that we can apply that financial aid and really not turn anyone away from our programs.

[Zac Bears]: Great, thank you. Do we have any other questions for Kevin Bailey and our recreation department? Seeing none, do we have any questions or comments from members of the public about the recreation department budget? Seeing none in person or on Zoom, thank you. Kevin, can we quickly talk about Hormel? I'm seeing Hormel Stadium or Hormel Commission, 5400 Fiscal 25, 5400 Fiscal 26. So no change, but is there anything else you'd like to say about that?

[Kevin Bailey]: No, the only thing I would say is the projected right now for this year, we had started the year with only two commissioners. So I think we are gonna be under budget this year, even, but again, for the proposed, we do now have a full three panel commission. So that's why, even though we might be under budget this year, we need to put in the actual hire now that we have a full staff.

[Zac Bears]: Great, thank you. Any questions about Hormel Commission Seeing none, thank you, Kevin.

[Kevin Bailey]: Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: All right, we're gonna go to the assessing department. All right, we have here assessing... No, good at the end. We have the assessing department. Fiscal year 25 budget, $589,783. Fiscal 26 budget, $644,812. fixed cost growth, keeping a part time employee on through the revaluation process some inflationary increases to supplies and services and software. And then we have a new expensive 57,000 for the state required citywide revaluation. So with that we'll go to our chief assessor. And same questions, just give us some commentary on the budget any of the changes that I mentioned your accomplishments in fiscal 25 goals for fiscal 26 and anything that's not in this budget that you think needs to be funded in the future.

[Jared Yagjian]: Right. So, first for 25 we're just trying to continue on with what we were doing, which was. bring up all the properties, both residential and commercial, to their full and fair cash value as of the lien date. As you mentioned, we're in a reval year, so the state is going to certify us at the end of the year, working with our state rep to get that done. It's an intensive, time-consuming process, but working through that. And as you said, most of that budget increase, that $57,000, is for that state reval we utilize. vision as our software, and that was a $114,000 reval, which is pretty much in line with what the cities and towns paid on a five-year reval process. And then going forward for those next three or four years between the five-year time frame, it's significantly less. So that's kind of a one-time hit every five years. Beyond that, All the other minor increases were pretty much inflationary. And then, yes, we wanted to keep that part-time field inspector on. It's very important that we have someone out in the field rather than rely on vision. One, it's cheaper to actually have our own field inspector versus pay them to go out and have their guys do the field inspections bring it back and then they send us back the information we get it in house, we can talk to the people so we feel it's just it's much cleaner data that comes back when we fund our own field inspectors versus farm it out. And as I mentioned, run the numbers and it's not much cheaper but it's it's cheaper and we get better data so it's a win win as far as I see it too. continue to maintain having a field inspector out in the fields to keep looking at our properties, mainly for the cyclicals. So what happened in 25 and what was our main one of our main goals that we achieved was to catch up. So every five years, every 10 years, a property has to be looked at. So we have roughly 11,000 properties in the city. So to stay on track, we have to do about 1100 a year. and then sales reviews and building permits get bundled into that. So fell behind in the last two years, we had to do approximately, I think it was right around 5,000 and we have hundreds left. So we'll get there and we'll be on track with that. So going into 26, again, I'd like to keep going with that field inspector, which we have in the budget and he'd be doing again, the SICA bills, helping with the building permit reviews. and looking at some of the sales that take place. And the other increase was just the reval mailing. So as part of the reval process, at the end of the year, once we get the value set, we have to send out what's called, they call it, I think it's an impact notice if there's a certain percentage that the valuations are going to change, but basically we have to put out all the new values, either on the website or via mailings, or both, whatever the state tells us to do. And that usually happens in October, so that's going to be a budget increase there for the mailings. And beyond that, there really isn't much change from last budget to this budget. Everything else is pretty in line. Any questions on that?

[Zac Bears]: Great, do we have questions for the assessing department? Don't worry, I do. So I noticed there's a reduction in the field assessor roles. What's the impact of that gonna be?

[Jared Yagjian]: a reduction in the field assessor?

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, it looks like it's going down from... Yes.

[Jared Yagjian]: So we had two last year. One was funded through ARPA, just to catch up with that cyclical that we were well behind on. So that fell off this year. It would be nice to have two. I think we can get away with one.

[Zac Bears]: Okay.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: But there's going to be... We won't be able to catch up as much without them.

[Jared Yagjian]: It's always better to have more eyes, but it costs money. So to keep up with the cyclicals, we should be OK. If we stick with that $1,100, that's well within one person's budget and one person's ability on a part-time basis. The new growth stuff as we start to get more stuff built getting built into the city, we might need more eyes may want to revisit that later.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. And that's essential to maximizing our new growth is essential.

[Jared Yagjian]: That's, that's what I spend the majority of my time on. Okay.

[Zac Bears]: Yep. Can you explain a little bit of a difference between the annual re-evaluations and reassessments of properties and what the statewide re-evaluation is? Why are they different? What is the state mandate that's different from what we do every year?

[Jared Yagjian]: So every year, the goal is the same. It's to bring properties to their full and fair cash value as of the lien date. So for this year, it would be January 1 of 2021. 25. So we're looking at calendar year 24 sales for fiscal year 26. And then it's the same going forward. It'd be calendar year 25 sales for fiscal year 27. So all the state does is they come in and they look at, they take a, it's called a data quality review. And they said, are you being, are you assessing fairly across neighborhoods? Are you looking at the sales or the sales in line? Are you over sales? So they just basically do a scrub of our data and say, do you have clean data or is your data dirty? And does it need to be cleaned up? And that's what I'm working with our state rep on right now. So far, so good.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. And so that's what the state revaluation is. It's, it's the same, you're doing the same thing every year, but sometimes the state comes in to double check.

[Jared Yagjian]: Same process this year, right? Every five years, there's someone looking over your shoulder, so to speak, to make sure that it's being done right.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, great. That's super helpful, because I think might look like there's extra reevaluation or, you know, but it's the same thing and it's a double check and make sure you're following the rules and regulations that we have to follow every year and they observe you.

[Jared Yagjian]: Correct. Just additional reporting that year to the state.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Last question. You know, we talked about it pretty extensively as a council. It was one of our key requests in the budget process was that we really want to consider residential exemption. with this budget, with the staffing, if we came in December and we said we're voting a residential exemption, would you be able to handle that?

[Jared Yagjian]: Without an increase in the budget, no. We'd need a full-time person that was well-versed in that to start. We'd expect, I think based on the modeling last year and on the paperwork in front of me, we'd expect about 7,000 applications, I think was the modeling. you know, to have to be reviewed before July 1, so it would be a big ask of someone, and it would be a full-time job.

[Zac Bears]: Okay.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Yeah, we definitely want to be able to consider that, so I think it's something we're going to need to talk about more as we move through the budget. People have questions now, so I'm going to go to Councilor Callahan, then Councilor Scarpelli, then Vice President Collins. Councilor Callahan.

[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. This is, I'm quite sure you're correct, but just, you know, running the numbers in my head, 1,100 a year is more than three a day. And that's a part-time person that can assess more than three buildings a day. That's like, maybe I'm not, I'm just curious, like, with the part-time.

[Jared Yagjian]: Right, so he'll do roughly 80, he can do about 80 a week. Eight a week, you said? 80 a week, right? 80 a week.

[Anna Callahan]: That's amazing, okay.

[Jared Yagjian]: We bundle them, so it's not like I send him from one neighborhood all the way to the next. I'll try to keep him on the same street.

[Anna Callahan]: Awesome. And then thank you, President Perez, for mentioning the, what am I sitting on now? Thank you, the residential exemption. My understanding is that applications wouldn't begin until July, like we would open an application process in July and that you would need people starting some extra help starting in July, right? But the way you phrased it, it sounded like it would be submitted by July. Or can you just talk a little bit more about that process?

[Jared Yagjian]: So for the residential exemption, my understanding of it is that you need to own the property and occupy the property as of January 1st. to have the exemption apply for the upcoming fiscal year. So it's to start on the July billing. So my understanding, I believe, is that the applications need to be reviewed prior to July 1 for that fiscal year.

[Anna Callahan]: But I think if we vote in December, can we vote in December to have it apply to the next? I'm just trying to understand. It seems almost like it's become impossible for us to ever do it because we have to have already hired the people before. I thought that our deadline for making some sort of decision was really going to be around July.

[Zac Bears]: I think Jared's saying for the following July.

[Anna Callahan]: For the following July.

[Zac Bears]: So if we voted in December to implement a residential exemption, that would apply for the tax rate for the fiscal year starting the next July.

[Jared Yagjian]: Right. So say for this December, it would be fiscal 27. Right.

[Zac Bears]: Right.

[Jared Yagjian]: It would be July of calendar year 26.

[Anna Callahan]: And that's why you would need to have that extra on the budget, because those people would have to be hired. So you're not talking about this July.

[Zac Bears]: They would need to work from, well, probably even starting a little earlier than that, I'm guessing, to do the prep, but certainly from December through June. Absolutely.

[Anna Callahan]: Wonderful. Great. Thank you so much.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Councilor Scarpelli.

[George Scarpelli]: Thank you. First, Jared, I want to commend you. Because I know you came in at a very difficult time as the acting. when I know the city threw an override at you and assessments and reassessments and it must have been chaos. And I know I came by the office a few times and I've witnessed it myself. I also wanna thank you for a lot of the senior citizens that were in dire need of support for the fact that their taxes skyrocketed to the fact that they needed, they were making decisions, whether it was healthcare or they were going to have to pay their taxes. And I think that your team, the one-man team that you have, did an amazing job. So I want to make sure that I'm public. I know that your department, as I talked to the previous assessor, was not involved in the override process or the prep of the override process. So that had nothing to do with you. And I tell people that every day that are having issues because I'm still getting phone calls from people that are really struggling with their taxes. But I think that my questioning is that I know that we're looking at the homeowner exemption, and I think that as I talked to the state assessor, who's been a good friend of mine, an ally in understanding these processes as we go, and he said a lot of cities and towns are seeing the homeowner exemption being enacted he said but what he did say is making sure the infrastructure of the team is in place to make that happen. And the other piece that he mentioned was that also understanding that when you hear homeowner exemption anybody that thinks they own a home, whether it's worth 500,000 or hundred 1.2 million. They're like, oh, great, my taxes are gonna go down. And that's not true. And I just, I know that that has to be vetted. I think that people really have to understand that there is a consequence, because I have residents that are saying, George, my tax will go down, we'll finally get home more exemption. And I said, well, your home is praised probably around 1.1 to two family. They're like, yeah, it doesn't equate that way. And I think that if you could share a little bit about that just so we know and the other piece is the ramifications to our renters because when you look at big buildings like the building across from Wegmans, you're talking 600 renters and that assessment that homeowner that would affect their rates, which would then increase renters, correct? I mean, help me understand that if I can. I know that a lot of people are hoping that we are going to ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars to have in place so we can expect this and hire new people, but I know there are some limitations, so.

[Jared Yagjian]: That was a very good summary and pretty accurate. So with the residential exemption is what's called a break-even point. And everyone wants to know what that is. It's almost impossible to say what the breakeven point is without knowing how many applications we get. It's a function of applications because the levy never changes. So it's last year's levy times 1.025, 2.5%, and that's plus the new growth. And that just gets distributed. How it gets distributed is what the residential exemption does. So that breakeven point is what, say the breakeven point, I think last year we modeled it was right around 900, assuming the certain, I think 70% exemption, I believe. Don't hold me to that, but pretty sure it was right around there. Anyone over 900,000, their taxes would increase. And then to your point specifically, the bigger, those apartment buildings are considered residential class. So if you have a $70 million apartment building like 61 Locust, their taxes are going to significantly increase. And what that would do to how they pass that along to the renters in their buildings.

[George Scarpelli]: We have to be cognizant with that so I appreciate the understanding I think that I think even if there's a way to put it on our site, where it's. put forth so the average person can understand what the ramifications are, because all they hear is exemption, homeowner, and that's it. So I think that understanding the whole calculation might be helpful if there's a way to do that. So if there's a way to do that, that's also important. And I know that one of the biggest things I've said, especially over the override concerns is the lack of new growth. I know my fellow councilors have stated that we were top of the state and obviously they don't understand what I was saying. And as I go through the assessor's line and I've talked to the building department, some members of the building department, we're seeing that they're really, other than two jobs that are in process right now. But one of the biggest factors, we haven't had shovel in the ground and big jobs in many, many years. And that's hurting our base for an increase in what we're seeing for accruing fees for permitting, which is a lot of money that could help our tax base also increasing more of a tax base from housing. So I don't see anything here, but what did we do last year? Did we have many jobs or many, you know, the assessor's office see much of an increase or anything to support the community for big jobs with shovels in the ground that would help with that.

[Jared Yagjian]: No, we haven't had a significant, you know, new growth is new construction art, and it can be exempt to taxable. That's a different topic that we could get into if you'd like, but it'd be small additions to homes would be small new growth. A big new apartment building like the ones that are across from Wegmans, that would be considered big new with the projects that are coming online, the apartment buildings that are to be built, that's going to be significant. The other piece of that that also helps the residential side is when you get new growth in the commercial sector, or even in the residential with the big, it will drop the overall tax rate because of the denominator being bigger and how it divides into the levy. So that would be helpful for everyone who owns a home when new growth occurs.

[George Scarpelli]: So I know you don't have a crystal ball, with Fells Way and Mystic Valley Parkway, two big sites. Next year, hopefully we'll be talking and seeing something different that could assist us with that tax base.

[Jared Yagjian]: Absolutely, big projects are instrumental to having strong growth. We really need them.

[George Scarpelli]: We love election season, don't we? So I appreciate it, Jared. Thank you. And I know we've taken enough of your time, so thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thanks, I just wanted to talk a little bit more about two of the topics so can start with the new growth. You know, regardless of the type of new growth, you know, new growth has been significantly higher the past couple years than it was in the past, you know, could you go over the new growth numbers over the last few years.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yeah, so the new growth numbers for the last two years, myself and the previous chief assessor, we did a very deep dive and scrub on old building permits. We caught a lot of things that just, they were done already. So I would say we're pretty current with what we have. There's not much else to grab that hadn't been already grabbed. So that was kind of a lag effect where maybe that new growth should have happened in the prior years and it didn't. So this year we're struggling because there is no new shovels in the grounds to catch and going over past building permits was a project we took on in calendar year 24 and calendar year 23. We scrubbed through that and there's nothing else really in there significant to find.

[Zac Bears]: So those 2.2, 2.3 million a year numbers were mostly from your catch-up project?

[Jared Yagjian]: Yes, I would say that was a pull forward from previous years.

[Zac Bears]: Do you have any expectations on this year?

[Jared Yagjian]: For this year, there is not gonna be a significant project that we can grab. The Herb Chambers, I believe, is the biggest one, that old office building, or not old, but the office building that's being converted into a showroom, and then they're building a substantial auto bay next to it. That's our biggest project cranes in the sky right now. So we'll capture a piece of that through June 30th, which is the date we have to value new growth by. Beyond that, that is, there is no other big project that I'm aware of that will have shovels in the ground as of June 30th.

[Zac Bears]: What do you expect from like all this aggregation of the smaller things, the nine unit building on in West Bedford Square, stuff like that?

[Jared Yagjian]: In terms of new growth for this year? Yeah. It's tough to say. It depends on how far they were along as of June 30th. Right now, get this here. So estimate-wise, condo conversions, we typically have a strong number from that. Again, a lot of those come from two families that get renovated. Since we switched to June 30, capturing new growth, the previous chief assessor, Chapter 653, put that in play. So it now pulls forward the Again, the condo conversions where we are now capturing the two family renovations prior to the conversions. So we just get a piece of that. So the condos are now starting to come in lower than they would have been. We're getting about a half year versus a full year and getting more.

[Zac Bears]: And they come in the next year.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yeah. So again, with that 653, it just was a pull forward that you typically get because of the one-one date prior to that. But all that said, in short, we're looking at about 2.1, 2.2 roughly is my estimate. And that's assuming that we get another roughly 150,000 between now and the end of June. We'll go out in June and do a last final review of the, I think we have about 200 properties that are under construction from small additions to the back of the house all the way to the Herb Chambers with their $20 million permit.

[Zac Bears]: So we're gonna be in that 2 million range still or so is the estimate?

[Jared Yagjian]: That is my best estimate, between two and 2.2.

[Zac Bears]: Do we see that dropping in the next few years because of what you're talking about?

[Jared Yagjian]: I see it increasing with the big properties coming online.

[Zac Bears]: And that two million number is historically very high for Medford over the last 10 years.

[Jared Yagjian]: Over the last 10 years, I look back, it seems to be since I've been here and with the previous chief, we've done a pretty good job at getting that number up.

[Zac Bears]: On the, obviously, Mourning Growth is great, and I hope we get more. For the Davis Company's project on the Fells Way, I mean, that obviously they have, they've done demolition, there's construction going on. Mystic Valley hasn't started yet.

[Jared Yagjian]: The 4000 Mystic Valley?

[Zac Bears]: Yeah.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yep, the old Gold's Gym.

[Zac Bears]: And so do you expect, like, when would we get the full realization? Is that a year or two out?

[Jared Yagjian]: The, it will come in chunks so unless they do the full build out in a year which is unlikely, say, one you say it's a two year project. June 30 of next year, maybe we get 50% of the full value.

[Zac Bears]: The next June 30 would get the other 50%, and that's even if it's occupied or not it's just the construction.

[Jared Yagjian]: It's the construction, that's the cost model. And then we talk with the owners, there's the income model too. So it's a function of what they have in place and might give a one year discount for lease up, something like that. But yes, most of it's based on the cost model.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, great. And then on the residential exemption, basically my understanding of the way it works is you assume 7,000 homes are gonna apply for the exemption, let's say it's a 30% exemption. And what the city has to do is say, okay, we're gonna lose that much, you know, if we, which we won't, right? Like the levy doesn't come down, but that would reduce the levy by this much. So we have to have the rate be higher. And because there's a higher rate and because the exemption amount is fixed, it applies kind of a progressive curve to what is currently a flat residential rate. Is that essentially correct?

[Jared Yagjian]: That's correct.

[Zac Bears]: And so if you're under the breakeven, If you're very low, if you're in a $300,000 home, I don't know that there's many left with that valuation here in Medford, you would be receiving the most benefit. And then if you're in a very, very high value residential property, even if you're one of many tenants of multi-hundred million dollar valued property, that's where the higher rate is gonna impact the most in a dollar amount.

[Jared Yagjian]: want to say the owners of those big apartment buildings, they'll get hit the most. And then your $1.5 to $2 million single families, and the condos, the smaller condos. Yeah, I'd say I don't know if we have any at 350, 400 anymore, but they'd get the biggest break. So like you said, you're accurate with that curve.

[Zac Bears]: So it really benefits the small, small single families condos. Maybe if you have a three family that's of low value and you divided it across three units, something like that, but yeah, I don't, it's possible that three family would be under the break even, but be unlikely, very unlikely.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. Thank you. Those are my questions. Vice president Collins.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for being here. And for helming the assessing department, while you're around, we're very glad to have you on board. Your presentation was very thorough. Thank you as well for the added context around new growth. I don't have any specific questions on your presentation just while we have you, I wanted to add my voice. to the conversation around, um, taking this opportunity in this budget, um, to future proof for future assessing needs. We've had a lot of conversations, not just this term, but in previous terms before you were before you were here about wanting to gear up to at least have that conversation about a residential and exemption and, um, I remain of two minds on it for the reasons that were just discussed. I think that this is one of those municipal tools that sounds simple, but isn't. And as you just described very well, some residents will see an immediate benefit. A lot of others will not. And I think we have to have really, really good comprehension about that in the community before we try to make a determination about if this is something that the people of Medford want or not. I think there's a lot of really great reasons to consider it. I think that we also do have to pay attention to those homeowners who will not benefit and renters whose costs may go up. There's a lot of conflicting data about that out there. But this isn't a conversation tonight about should we do a residential exemption or not. It's about when should we bring on the capacity to be able to do one if we decide that we want to do one. and the resources to investigate what that would look like in our community so I really do think that, you know, I am. It's not a criticism but just looking at the spreadsheets I'm concerned to see even a small reduction in force in the assessing department, because I know the great work that we're able to do with more staff in the assessing department over the past couple of years. getting things up to speed, reviewing old records, cleaning up the data, as you said. I think that's a benefit to everybody and we also know that it's just easier for residents to get quick answers to their questions and to get help with exemptions when your department has, you know, the staffing that it really deserves. So I hope that that's something we can contend hope that's something that the administration is willing to take a second look at as we proceed through this budget process. Not just because I think it's a benefit to the community to have more people on hand in the assessing department in the short term but if our conversations over the rest of this year, lead us to wanting to. pursue a residential exemption we're going to need more people on that for starting in this fiscal year. And as other Councilors mentioned earlier, it's not to say we definitely want to do this I'm definitely gonna vote in favor but it would be foolish, I think, to not even have the option of pursuing it because we don't have the people to implement it in the assessing department so I just want to put that out there at this point. And I do think it's also relevant. I'm happy to hear the numbers about the new growth. It is actually gratifying to me to hear that our projected new growth number for this year is kind of in the ballpark of previous years, given that previous years weren't so much of a snapshot of new growth that happened exclusively within that calendar year, it sounds like, but cleaning up undocumented new growth from prior years. And as you're aware, we're in the midst of a very large scale rezoning effort. I think that in the coming few years, coming many years, we can expect to see a more consistent application of larger new growth eligible projects. And I know that you've been doing a lot with a small and scrappy team, but I think that as time goes forward, we really need to be thinking about how to right size this department so that we're capturing everything we need to be in real time. and not creating backlog just because you could use more people in the office. So all that to say, thank you for your presentation and for your work. It looks great, but I do hope that the administration is able to consider avoiding a reduction in the assessor's department this year. I think that current level of staffing is something that we should be maintaining. Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have any more questions for assessing? Anything else you want to add, Jerry? Nothing else. All right. We're good. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Go to the building department. We have the building commissioner with us, Scott Vandewall. Building Department Fiscal 25 Budget $1,031,543. Fiscal 26 Proposed $1,057,806 for an increase of $26,263. Most of this in the fixed cost growth, phone contracts, postage spending, clerical contracting, COLA increases, and the copier lease, and two new citizen-served licenses under new expenses. And my three questions for you are the same as everyone else just if there's anything else you'd like to add around the change to your budget. What were your accomplishments this year goals for next year, and what is something that you'd like to see funded in the future that wasn't funded in this budget. Thank you.

[Scott Vandewalle]: Good evening. Um, yeah, we've added to citizen service licenses one for the clerk's office and one for the engineer's office. starting to go online with permits for the clerk's office himself. Most everything else is, yeah, fixed costs. We're primarily a labor department. We don't do much in capital improvement, things like that. And yes, the postage machine is in there and postage costs are going up and the use of the postage machine has increased over the years. So those are probably the two biggest changes. It's been a busy year. I've been here now just slightly over a year, a year and three months. And we've gone through a lot of changes down there. Primarily in some of our permitting stuff developing our citizens are programmed to include more departments on it, health permits are now going online for permits are online, outdoor dining licenses and some of the processes around that, as well as an ongoing effort to sort of streamline the system. get data out of it that we need to use both for customers and for ourselves. We're having a great increase in public records requests. I think when I started at the beginning of the year, we'd have one every couple of weeks request to please close out on the old building permits, because I'm going to sell my house. And now we're getting one to two a day. So we've had to develop a process for going through that, including reports that we typically email back to them, saying what they wanted to say is closed, even though we never made, we don't have a strong record. And some of these permits are going back to 1999, they're in the systems. Nobody's here that remembers what was done so we try to close that out for people. Again, we get appraisers we get attorneys we get homeowners both after and before and sometimes they're calling from the closing gone I need this record because some attorneys asked for it so that's pushed some of the growth and process on us to deal with. We also continue, and it's been an ongoing thing, developing some of our overtime protocols with the fire department, and that is a series of conversations and documentation. That's sort of an ongoing process. We're trying to work to get a handle on to sort of control some of our overtime costs, and I think that's increasingly being successful. We've had some new energy code changes coming up this year. Some of them focused around the ADUs that are now out there. We have a new building code coming online fully in July 1st. We're sort of split between the old and the new, but as of July 1st, it'll be a brand new building code. That's been the first time since I think 2017. It's the 2021 code. So you get a sense of how fast the state really moves on these things. We have been using to help us get through all this, some senior work offs that have really been successful for us. I think it's the first time we've used them. They do more than answer the phones. They get deeply into a lot of the processing. One of them has been very helpful in going through all those public records requests we have. And I value her services very much in addition to, The administrative staff we have, one of them was out for probably six months on sick leave due to some issues. So we've been bouncing around a little bit with the staff and trying to stay on top of that issue. Just to let you know, we're probably going to be on target for somewhere between 4,000 and 4,500 permits through our system this year, which is about the same level we've been the last few years. We're kind of holding right in there. Probably the biggest change is we got several very large projects coming on. We've got 970 Felsway, which is a six-story 40B project full of apartments. I think you've seen the building coming down over there. As a matter of fact, the last wall came down, but they had to shut power off on the street because it was so close to the power lines. They didn't want to take it down until they coordinated with National Grid. We've got 4,000 Mystic Valley Parkway. We expect we've had early conversations about the permitting process. They've projected sometime in June to be applying for the permits. We certainly have Tufts dorm coming online. We've been exchanging some paperwork during the time in the closing of the financing part of the process and doing some initial work. We don't expect them to start doing much more than moving dirt and fences around for at least another couple of weeks. A waffling court is supposed to undergo a major development, tear it down and reconstruct. We have the homes at 541 Winthrop, which is known as Mary Kenny Way now. The first of those has started to get occupancy permits. And so they're starting to get, come on live. We started to do site clearing for the bridal path. project up at the top of the Hill of Franklin the old horse farm. So we've got a several things there, certainly her chambers is busy so from our perspective there's a lot going on all these large projects taken unusually large amount of inspections because the size of we do them in small chunks rather than one large size. So we expect to be very busy this year, doing a lot of inspections. I've also continued to work with the planning department on zoning changes. I'm not the lead on it but I pay attention I'm probably less more focused on language changes and definition changes and some of the things that know, the down in the weeds stuff that we deal with on a daily basis. And we're working through that and making recommendations. I sort of leave the big colored maps to the planning department and I focus more on what we deal with at that desk every day. Certainly one of the things that's been popping across our desk is ADUs with the new state law and protected ADUs. We only have a couple Only a couple applied for, but I would say hundreds of people probably asked about it, they all want to understand what is, I think, the most important thing to understand is that. The new ADU law is zoning protection. Unfortunately, the building code still applies to the fullest extent. We treat it as a single family home, essentially, that you're adding to your property. We don't necessarily recognize ADU as a term in the code. So that creates some challenges to work around, fire code, energy code, things like that. So we're working through all of that, working towards continuing to try to use technology and then do our inspections, you know, pushing the use of tablets in the field. big plans for us. And it's been a busy year, we're doing an awful lot of work. If I have one goal down the road, it would be to find a way to digitize the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of files we have in the basement, because we go down that basement, almost every day pulling an old dusty file out and provide in a record for somebody and ultimately my dream would be to have those digitized and available on some sort of digital base. We're always encouraging people who are looking for information to log on to the system, which is, you've seen some of the icons on the website, they can do public record searches on their own. but we're sort of limited to what we've had in the last five years. All the old little cards and files down there that gather dust or stuff, we go digging for the old fashioned way. So hopefully down the road, we'll be able to get those online, join more of the digital age as we come. And that's pretty much my report at this point. Is there any questions? Great, do we have any questions for our building commissioner?

[Zac Bears]: Board is not lighting up. I have a couple of questions for you. We have been working on this new, well, we have a request out to departments around the new fee schedule. Have you been able to take a look at your fees and fines and make recommendations?

[Scott Vandewalle]: Yeah, we did some time ago. We're probably in the mid range of most of them. There's a few communities substantially higher. But we're not down in the bottom range either, although we probably tend to trend towards that. We're certainly overdue to consider looking at that, but I did make a series of recommendations a time ago, and we look forward to seeing what comes out with that.

[Zac Bears]: Great. All right. We'll take those recommendations. We'll ask them, ask the chief of staff for them, and we'll see if we can work on updating some of those fee amounts to get us more into a reasonable range. Vice President Collins, do you have a follow up on that? Okay, well, I'll just go to you and then I'll come back to my questions.

[Kit Collins]: well, take a break from the specific questions, which I don't have. I just wanted to say thank you for the presentation, and we have a lot of undersung hard workers in City Hall. You're certainly among them. I know especially with, I've been working in concert on the zoning updates, and I see just a fraction of the many, many questions that you've been getting about just the protected ADUs updates alone. Your department is quite resourceful in handling a lot of incoming all the time, so. Try to stay busy. And we know that you do, so thank you for your service and for the presentation.

[Zac Bears]: Speaking of busy, permit and inspection times. How do we do on that? Are we, you know, how long does it take on average to get an inspector out to a site after they've, you know, how does our time put compared to other communities? Are we longer, shorter?

[Scott Vandewalle]: No, I think we do fine. You know, generally, if you call the day before, you can get an inspection. In rare occasions, we've addressed emergencies during the day. We're maintaining, you know, we're keeping up with the flow generally pretty well. I do know our plumbing electrical inspectors are very busy. They certainly have quite a big load. The building inspectors kind of have a different process and do a lot more drawing review and permit review on the side and are still able to maintain a pretty good consistent schedule.

[Zac Bears]: How long on average would you say from a filing of a permit to a determination you know how long does that take?

[Scott Vandewalle]: Well the magic answer is one to two weeks, depending. Understand that we've split the permits up into minor permits and major permits. Minor are sort of one-shot deals. They're roofing, they're doors, they're windows. They go through sort of a simple review schedule. The major permits additions and new buildings and stuff like that go through a more extensive review where they're forwarded to all departments. In any department that may have an issue, might pop their head up and say, hey, I need to put a hold on this and that can drag it out. We check for taxes and we check for open stuff from other departments. So generally not too bad a week or two if it's simple. If it's complex and you haven't done your homework ahead of time and gotten everything straightened around, it can drag on a little bit. Worst case scenario, we find you have to go to the zoning board and that easily can add two to three months to the project to go there and come back. but generally it's a good, decent time turnaround, reasonable time. We're required by building code to respond within 30 days. And we can generally meet that unless there's a concern floating out there that we uncover.

[Zac Bears]: And is that done electronically or on paper at this point?

[Scott Vandewalle]: Everything's pretty much electronically. We take everything by electronic, we submit it and pass it around. We're really trying to avoid paper. I would say most of, you know, not to pick on generations, the younger generations prefer that way, the older will come in and we'll help them how to do it online. Not to say we haven't got plenty of the older generation who, you know, they learn how to shop on Amazon pretty quickly and they can pick it up pretty quickly, but it's pretty much 100% online at this point in time.

[Justin Tseng]: Thanks. Um, I, in talking to you know some contractors in the city they're very, they do actually note that if their paperwork is in line, Medford's actually quite a good city to do business in. So props to your department, to your staff, to you for that. I think that leads, that connects really well to what you just said. I do have a question for you about, you noted that there's some applications where maybe they haven't really done their homework, they have to go to the ZBA first. which, you know, protracts the process. Do you notice any patterns in terms of what kinds of things, like mistakes are being made? What kinds of variances that people are seeking? Like, is there anything in that, you know,

[Scott Vandewalle]: Well, we go through a couple of different stages in it. Surely there's the initial administrator, we're looking at, did you pay your fee? We did change last year from paying the fee at the end of paying up front and it's gone fairly well. We have to look at insurance as the state DIA requires any permit to have workers comp insurance evidence submitted. That one gets mucked up quite handily. Most people just used to handling paper and don't really understand what they're doing. We've been training the staff to understand to look at some key points to make sure it's consistent there to protect the homeowner. That is very difficult for most folks to get quite right the first time licenses are. Less and less, the state doesn't give anybody little paper or plastic cards anymore. That is all online too. So we struggle to get guys to learn how to download that and upload it and some of that stuff. Those are some of the challenges. After that, it will be generally referred to a building inspector. And that's, you know, with the energy code, we looked at hers reports, which not everybody fully understands what it is. We increasingly need site plans because of a lot of zoning type issues and stuff like that. We get a lot of homeowners who want to do a very simple thing and don't realize there are some more complex things that need to be thrown in that didn't used to exist. So they get a lot of education on that. Again, most professional contractors have sort of done this enough times and we're not that different from anybody else that they can get through the process. We do have plenty of contractors though that are still learning the ropes and they have some challenges and we do have to go back and forth quite a bit. We document it and verify it all along the way. In terms of moving things on to the zoning board, we've tried to get away from the process of taking in a building permit and then sort of rejecting it and then sending them on to the zoning board and sort of encouraging them to go ahead. If they know what they're doing or come talk to us, it shortens the process down because it takes time to do a rejection and set them up for that. And just spending time for us, we don't need to duplicate. We're seeing a lot of stuff, people wanting to do like third floors where it's a two and a half floor limit they want to bump up the attic and put in addition living space that's been very popular lately. You know, you would think with the cost of things today and the interest rates, people are still putting additions on and still put nice ones on so that is still very much, you know, bread and butter of what we see a lot of in terms of the big projects. Don't see a lot of new homes, that's just the nature of Medford but people still want to improve them. in any way they can and contractors are all still staying busy and they're hard to find a good contractor. They may say, how many times people come in and go, can you give me a name? We don't do that. It's unethical on us, but they're having trouble finding contractors. And I don't think that's changed at all.

[Justin Tseng]: Thank you for such a comprehensive answer. I think it helps us, um, understand, um, I think a priority for me, at least, and I think for a lot of Councilors here is to make doing this stuff in Medford easier within reasonable limits, right? But to make sure that we're revisiting how we do things and make sure that the kind of steps that we're putting in make sense and that we can make things easier for people to come in and try to do business here in Medford. So that gives us a lot of fodder to work with. Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think the consistent clear and equitable experience that you know, any applicant receives is essential. And so, and speedy as best as we can do it. Last question, leaf blower ordinance. I know it's new. I know we're working on it. The ordinance does require large commercial operators to submit management plans and municipal operators as well. Yes.

[Scott Vandewalle]: Nobody submitted a plan last year.

[Zac Bears]: Okay.

[Scott Vandewalle]: Voluntarily.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And how do we get enforcement on that? Or what, what reason, you know, what does your office doing to, to get those plans submitted and to, and what does enforcement look like if someone calls and says that someone's violated?

[Scott Vandewalle]: We have not had any requests for enforcement to date.

[Zac Bears]: Okay.

[Scott Vandewalle]: It will be a challenge, primarily because these guys do come in and they get out by time we get out there to see it we don't, we're not sure what we're going to run into so we really haven't, but nobody's really made a natural complaint. We are working on ways to get the word out. Probably the biggest challenge is we just not fully sure who we get the word out to. We have certainly a bunch of names that we used to see. You almost have to drive around and write names down off of trucks. Some people have submitted some names, but we will certainly stumble across guys on a regular basis that nobody knew existed or was doing work. So it'll be a challenge. It's something the next, required to be submitted by September 1.

[Marie Izzo]: Yeah.

[Scott Vandewalle]: So we're not in that quite in that timeframe yet. I am creating a module within CitizenServe to sort of dump the information into and create it and give us a database to go back out next to remind people. But it's definitely going to be a bit of a challenge to to work through and, and catch and find the things we need to find.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Yeah. And I think just one, you know, I'm sure you're doing it. But If we could work with the communications team to get something up on the city website that just kind of explains what you're talking about. Is the citizen serve module just going to be internal? Or are you going to ask people to submit their plans through that module, we're going to treat it much like we do with the outdoor dining licenses.

[Scott Vandewalle]: Okay, no, here's what we're looking for. The owner says we need this, you need to give us some information and you need to submit it through that and becomes an annual license. Part of what we do with these licenses and permits and requesting. We're also capturing some key information. that we've added all the property owners emails and phone numbers and stuff that help to supplement other departments needs to reach out in an occasion or an incident or emergency so we're sort of using it to do a couple of different things but we'll treat it just like we do an outdoor dining license you apply on an annual basis you'll submit the documents we need and at least we know what we're going forth with and then we have somebody to reach out to if we need to.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Yeah. And I think something on the website that just is, you know, here's if you're an operator who needs to submit a plan, here's the link, here's some of that. If you're a resident who feels that the ordinance is being violated, this is the process noting maybe some of the limitations of the enforcement, you know, just so that there's kind of a clear landing page for people who have questions and concerns about this, both if they're an operator or a resident who wants a little peace and quiet during the time the ordinance says they should have some Awesome. Thank you on that. I appreciate the answer. Council is our Thanks.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Just this morning. I called the police, not emergency line about a leaf blower. So I can tell you they're still around, and I know that they're in my neighborhood around Hastings Park in West Medford almost every single day. It's really incredible. Um, it's, uh, I would I would love if there was a link, but I can also write down just the names of the landscaping companies. There's one big one, but I think we know who that is. But yes, and I think that there's also just like, if there's any kind of standard way of recording, I think that would be great, or like some really straightforward way to just record would be helpful.

[Scott Vandewalle]: Right now, see click fix. is certainly an available way to utilize. And it does come to us and to one of our code enforcement officers to follow through. The biggest challenge for me is just by the time we receive a complaint can get back out there. They usually moved on. So we don't have the magic answer to how we're going to be in as timely as we'd like to be, but we just have to work on it.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Yeah. And I think, you know, even just pointing people in that direction, making sure there's a, category and see click fix for the specific issue. Those kinds of kind of small nudge guidance for folks will help because I'm sure a lot of people are complaining generally, but maybe not. We're not hearing about it. They're just complaining in their kitchen or something. Thank you for that. Any further questions for the building department? Seeing none. Thank you. Commissioner. All right, we'll go now to clerk and legislative. We do have our assistant city clerk with us. We may go back and forth with our city clerk who's sitting beside me, but we will start with the city clerk's office and then we can do legislative. We have fiscal 25 budgeted 40, 406,364, fiscal 26 budgeted 408,686 and increase of 2,322. We have in here that this is all fixed cost growth. We have contract increases for the staff. We have a printer and copier contract increase, increase for book binding, inflationary costs in office supplies, increase for clerk conferences and training, and an increase for some of our subscriptions that we use for licenses and records. So with that, turn it over to our Assistant City Clerk and same three questions as for everybody else. Feel free to go into the budget more.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Can I start and hand it over?

[Zac Bears]: I'll turn it over to our City Clerk and then our Assistant City Clerk. But just talking generally, any additional comments you want to make on the change to the budget, then accomplishments this year, goals for next year, and what's an item that's not funded that you'd like to see funded in the future. So we'll start with the City Clerk. who will then go back to being the clerk of the council.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you. I just wanted to do a sort of a brief overview and get folks more acclimated to Rich as well. I know he's been here since October. He's been absolutely fantastic. In the last year we had, last June we had two retirements of longtime employees, including the assistant city clerk. And we promoted one employee internally and we hired two new employees in the office, we still have a vacancy, which was one of the new hires in the office, Cassandra Polito is one of the new hires in the office and Lisa young is the person we promoted the former assistant city clerk Sylvia de Placido, thankfully is also still working with us part time. She has a lot of the institutional memory the clerk's office. She does a lot of tasks, actually related to your work whenever we do Council papers, whenever I do Council papers she can she converts the records into the Council papers and delivers them to the mayor. We have really this year been been been doing more with it, you know, with a little, little bit of a staffing shortage. But we have also been, and this is this is mostly thanks thanks to Richard I'm going to hand it off to him in a second, but we have been working with the building department as the building commissioner said to get some of our processes online so that so that customers don't have to come to City Hall. We are working on the class two and class four auto licenses right now. I believe they're up on CitizenServe. Common Vic licenses will actually be up there later this year at some point. They're not up for renewal until the end of December. So there's a little bit of time there, but we're working on getting these processes online so that, you know, we love it when our customers come and visit, but if they can do this from their couch, it's even better. So we are really looking at those processes as both a short term and a long term goal. And I'm going to turn it over to Rich now. But the budget stays, our budget is staying roughly, roughly level.

[Marie Izzo]: Everyone. Yeah, like Adam said, I mean, my goal when I came in, was to try and streamline the office to make it efficient and functioning into the 20th century, so to speak. I'll settle for the 19th at this point. Yeah. I mean, everything was done in paper. Still, when I got here, it was done in paper. And we had this huge influx of paper. We have been working with Scott over in building to get the applications online. We have three applications right now online, which is our auto licenses, Auto 1, Auto 2, and Auto 4. Those three are online. Auto 4 is in the process right now of being renewed by businesses. The goal is to have every application online hopefully by the end of the fiscal, by the end of June of next year. I want to get the common VIX and a couple others online through the summer so we can have that influx come September, October, November, and December. As far as that goes, it's just been streamlining the office, cleaning it up, organizing it, updating it, which is what I've been going through, looking into fees, scheduling, and stuff like that to see how our fees are, and just been taking it one step at a time. Adam slowly has been putting responsibilities my way with other departments and stuff like that. So the department has to understand that there is an assistant in the office, and they can come to me for things that they need. But yeah, I mean, other than that, everything Adam said is what we've accomplished so far this year, and hopefully to continue that through the summer, where it's our little lull of a period, and we're not as, you know, hopped up on licenses and stuff like that, so. Any questions on the budgets?

[Zac Bears]: Do we have any questions for the clerk or the assistant city clerk? I actually don't have any myself on the clerk's budget. It's pretty self-explanatory.

[Marie Izzo]: There is one thing that I would like to add just to make you guys aware. I have been talking with Scott about subscriptions, especially for CitizenServe. He did recently get us one subscription, which is going to be under me. He did say that these subscriptions are costly and I would like to get the employees in our office their own subscription so we can track their workload as they get it. If not, they'll have to use my login and my name will be on every application, every process, every step of the application process. So we really can't see who is actually doing the workload. My goal is to separate the workload between the employees to make it easier for the office to function. Everybody will know what everybody is doing and how to do the job, but I want every individual to have their specific responsibilities. So there might be something coming up next year that I may have to, when we come to you guys for the budget, that you may see a little increase in subscriptions for the CitizenServe licenses. How much those are, Scott will have a better idea of what they are, each one, but I don't think it's a large amount, but it'll be a significant increase.

[Zac Bears]: Well, that makes sense. I think as you gear up and get everything on there this year, then you'll be running those. So it makes sense when everyone's using them that, and the reporting seemed to be a great benefit in general. Yeah. Thanks for adding that and we'll be on the lookout for that in the next budget. All right, legislative, we have a legislative fiscal 25 312 689 fiscal 26 307 359 for a reduction of 5,330 taking a taking a budget cut y'all. And it looks like the main change is the reduction from $51,000 to $35,000 for our professional technical services, which is what we've been using for our zoning consultants. So we are keeping a chunk of that because we will be continuing that into fiscal 26 at this point. And I did work with the clerk who worked with the administration on this. I do actually have a question for might be for Bob. Hi, Bob. It looks like we might be booking. Some of the services that we use for our meeting management and agenda in the wrong line item, just because I'm seeing no to date actuals in the legislative repair and maintenance line item. And I'm seeing that we're over on professional technical services. I was wondering if you might be able to take a look at that, or obviously Adam or Rich, if you have any thoughts on that. It's really, it's all coming out of the same ordinary expense pool, so it's not a big deal, but for our budget, but I just think we might be putting some stuff in the wrong line from how I'm reading it right now.

[Marie Izzo]: I haven't seen anything come through the office. Sylvia has been handling the billing end of it. Yeah. I can definitely talk with her to see if maybe we're coding it wrong. It's being put on the wrong code.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. I think it's the Civic Plus stuff.

[Marie Izzo]: OK.

[Zac Bears]: Looks like it might be getting entered into 5310, and it should be getting entered into 5240. OK.

[Marie Izzo]: Yeah, I mean, that's something we can look into in the office.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Yeah, it's not a big deal. And don't worry about it now. But Bob's here. You're here. You're both aware of it. Great. Thanks, Bob. Do we have any questions about the legislative budget for the clerks or I guess for me? Well, we're hoping that we'll be able to find someone to help us out with that soon, so. Great, thank you. Next we have our, and thank you both. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Adam. We have our electrical budget. We have a Superintendent of Wires Randazzo with us. Fiscal 25 budget, 678,805. Fiscal 26 proposed, 752,094. We have COLA increases, an adjustment to reflect overtime and historical actuals, a couple of contract increases, some inflationary cost increases for meter charges and office supplies. So these are all under fixed cost growth. And then we have a big increase adjusting for our streetlights and the lighting costs there. And off street for recreational as well, lights. So that's the summary here. I will go to Superintendent Weyers, same as everybody else. What, you know, any comment anymore on those changes that I just mentioned? Accomplishments last year, goals next year?

[Steve Randazzo]: My only accomplishments that I'm looking forward to next year is to pretty much keep everything maintained properly. It's kind of my department is to maintain the signal equipment and the streetlights. So as long as I can just keep everything maintained status quo, then I think I'll be in good shape. And hopefully there's nothing catastrophic that happens.

[Zac Bears]: No light poles falling down or anything like that.

[Steve Randazzo]: Hopefully we have had some issues with the light poles out here, which the bid just went out. So that'll be getting started soon. So we'll have some new lighting in the parking lot as well.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Do you have any questions for Mr. Randazzo on the electrical budget? I just have one. Could you just talk a little bit more about that increase for this, the, the 55,000 for the lights and what, what that's going towards.

[Steve Randazzo]: So basically the meter charges have gone up. They've gone up across the board. It was originally my streetlight account had more money in it. And then we had a couple of quiet years where we dropped it down. But now we're bringing it back up to where it should be to be compatible to up years prior.

[Zac Bears]: Right. All right, thank you for keeping the lights on for us all. We appreciate it. Seeing no further questions on electrical. Well, thanks for sitting through this. We'll take you to fire. Maybe we'll take Steve first next time. We have Medford Fire Department. We have our chief Todd Evans with us. We have fiscal 25 budget $15,126,017 fiscal 26 proposed $15,802,494 that's an increase of $676,477. And we're looking at. The vast majority of that fixed cost, it's all mostly in fixed cost growth, although quite a bit of some new expenses. We're seeing $526,000 in the increase for permanent employees. That's eight firefighters last year budgeted for half year and this is bringing those up to full year. We also have contract increases and step increases. We have some increase in part-time clerical staff to help with transitioning to a new office manager. We have some contract increases for the firefighters. Postage is going up a bit, janitorial going up a bit, clothing is up because there's 13 new hires being added, replacing radio batteries, and then we have some new expenses. We have legal costs going up under professional services, additional training within the fire department and individual classes, restoring a couple of the motor service repair items back to fiscal 24 levels. some new tracking software, prices are increasing for some of our firefighting and rescue supplies, and then conference dues going up, and then $8,200 for public education. So that's everything. We've got a long list of line items there on that second page. But with that, we'll turn it over to the Chief, and same as everyone else, if you could tell us, you know, anything more you'd like to say about those changes beyond, you know, I'm sure you have more context than what I have, just what's written here. Talk about some of your accomplishments this year, goals for next year, and something that's maybe not funded here that you'd like to see funded in future years.

[Todd Evans]: Sure. Good evening. Were you able to get that PowerPoint that I sent over for you? You want to try to share on zoom. Yep. All right, you touched on all those other things already there There's all those things that you ran down right there so Looking back over the past year here, we're looking at, we had several promotions here over the past year. We've had some new hires that we had that went to the Fire Academy back in October of 24. They're now assigned and they're out on the trucks now. But we also started the process of back in August, August, September of 24, starting the recruitment process of 12 more people to send off to the academy. So that took up until now to finally get them scheduled into an academy. For four, we were able to get into the Bridgewater Academy. And eight, we were able to schedule to the Stowe Academy. So four will go in July, and eight will go in August. So it's a long process to get them through and scheduled into an academy once we begin the hiring process of them and doing all the background checks and everything else and putting them through physicals and psychological testing and everything like that. So they'll be getting out around end of October and then we can start getting them out on the trucks finally. So we're looking forward to that. That'll right now we're at about 105 total basically an all time low number for manpower the department here. So you can see the overtime costs that have been going on here. It's it's been pretty significant along with basically the There's four working groups and there's a 23 person minimum manning for a group. And basically right now, each of those four groups, we only have enough manpower for basically 24 per group. So obviously anytime somebody's on vacation or out sick or death in family or something like that, it's costing all the time. So getting us up to 117. It'll help a little bit. It's going to help a little bit. And finally, it'll help. Firefighters are definitely working a lot of hours and also trying to do what you heard the commissioner talking about all the development and all the buildings and everything else going on that usually entails details and things like that. So there's been a lot of details going on also. So the firefighters are trying to keep up with doing details and the overtime work and It's a strain on them. So increasing the manning is definitely going to be helpful. And obviously, every year, I'm going to say that we obviously need more manning because these trucks are busy. Medford's busy. You've probably seen recent articles talking about Medford up and coming, growing, expanding. Engine one out of headquarters here, they're doing a lot of runs, as you'll see in the coming slides here. Engine four, Riverside Ave station, they're doing a ton of runs too. And there's not much wiggle room there that we can try to, you know, utilize other outside stations to come into the area of coverage to help lighten that load on. And obviously, talking about developing Medford Square more. Now we're talking about developing Salem Street more. It's gonna add more runs, and we're trying our best to think of ways to try to help these trucks reduce the numbers of runs, beating up the trucks. I mean, the costs are adding up on the trucks, and we've been trying to maintain the fleet, and it's difficult. The costs are going up on all the, all the parts on trucks delays and getting the parts and, and obviously the mechanics are very strapped in the city here, like cities down to like two mechanics now. So it's, it's, it's difficult. So now we're going to have to send truck trucks out for repairs outside because the mechanics, we don't have enough mechanics here to work on it internally. We're going to have to send them out and it's additional cost there. So it's tough. With the we had had an aging fleet we're waiting on to pumps that are supposed to arrive at the end of this year, sometime maybe December, January, maybe we're supposed to get to pumps that were ordered back in 23. that's part of the slide also coming up. How this a national. crisis really of backlogs of fire trucks and the cost going up skyrocketing. Senator Warren's looking into it, probing into these companies that are basically buying up the companies that made the fire trucks and it's creating a, you know, huge backlog and price spikes and everything else. So, uh, I included it, some articles in there for you. There's even a news newsreel about it that tells you all about it, what's going on there and how they're looking into it right now. Um, back in 2023, when we ordered those trucks, those, those fire engines were about, I believe 980,000 each maybe. And, uh, now, and I think they were talking about like maybe 800 days wait time from the signing of a, of a contract. Now they're talking about the trucks are over $1.2 million and you're looking at 1200 days wait time from the signing of the truck after you go and spec it out and everything else. It's tough to keep up with this stuff.

[Zac Bears]: And are you, some private equity firms are buying up these fire manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers and gouging us basically? All right, great.

[Todd Evans]: So yeah, that's one of the challenges that we're facing. So anticipating, going forward, trying to anticipate trucks being built four years, you know, it's harder to look at the capital improvement plan and try to space that out. And we're not even talking about ladder trucks yet. Ladder trucks are over $2 million now. So it's tough going forward along with the parts. Even ordering hose or something like that, you got to start thinking a year in advance to start getting hose, things like that. It's pretty tough to figure this out, the way that these prices are going and the backlog of supply chain stuff and everything else here. But it's not just us, it's across the country. Obviously, we had several retirements here. We had four people retire here. We had some, again, I mentioned the promotions. One of our firefighters actually just recently got promoted to Lieutenant Robert Brennan. His uncle, who retired after 42 years, was on the state hazmat team for a long time. He was one of the longest serving members on the state hazmat team. And Robbie Brennan went through all the hazmat training and applied and went through the process and interviews and everything else against other people that were trying to apply. And he ended up landing a spot on the state hazmat team and happened to replace the spot that his uncle was in, coincidentally. That's a pretty big thing there to have a continue having somebody on Metro Fire Department on the state hazmat team. I think that's a good thing to have here. So that's great for him. Last year, I had mentioned that we were going to try to look into that Cummings grant. for community engagement. We had nine people that are now a community engagement team here. Last year, we did not get the Cummings grant applied for due to some other circumstances behind the scenes here that were going on here. But this year, we're going to keep our eye out for the Cummings grant again. And I've established some dedicated folks that are part of the day personnel to start focusing on grants and looking for more grants to acquire things. So that's been working out well. They've been tracking down some good things here to apply for. And I think we have some things on the horizon to look forward to here. We have acquired, here you go, the grant section here. We were able to get some great training on electric vehicles and we were able to acquire several fire blankets that you can actually put over an electric vehicle if it's on if it was on fire and and try to help maintain keeping that once you get once you get it out trying to keep it from reigniting and transporting the vehicle to like a tow yard or something and getting that safely stored away there. We also got plugs that you can put into the electric vehicles to disable the power to the electric vehicles. So we have a supply of those electric plugs through that gaming commission money that we were able to get there. And then there was two department of fire service grants that we've got that we were able to those new recruits that we have going to the academy we were able to nine out of the 12 sets of gear we were able to acquire grant money for. So, that was, that was helpful right there. And also, another Department of Fire Services grant was we were able to acquire to buy more structural firefighting helmets and face pieces. So right now it's working out pretty well there so far with the focusing on the grants and having somebody dedicated to looking into that for us. Again, the procurement guys that are looking into the grants and also helping out with acquiring supplies for us and items that they've attended some conferences, which we haven't been able to do before. And that's pretty important, looking at outside other state, other fire departments and things like that. That's more like the norm around it. going out and learning about other things there and interacting with vendors and things like that isn't something that has been done in the past here. So Medford's catching up with the times here, kind of expanding their viewpoints and learning other new things out there. So it's a good thing here. The engine three, the ladder two station there on Salem Street, that was a year-long project, probably more than a year long, doing that floor over there. They were finally able to move back into that station. Engine four on Riverside Ave, there was an issue with one of their bathrooms there that Paul was able to fix. fix some issues in there with the hole in the floor and leakage, water leaking down to the lower level. And he was able to do a tiling renovation in that bathroom and repair that. And all the stations, obviously not headquarters, but the other stations had window projects done. So windows were replaced in those exterior stations. Again, Rich Lane from IT. He's been working on a fiber network project going on throughout the city. Also updating several computers at the department. And a new telephone system was installed. The headquarters working on the other station soon. And we were able to acquire a new fire engine actually through ABBA funding. just before the beginning of just before the beginning of the year there. That's just about to go into service finally. So that came about because of another city's department happened to they ordered a couple fire engines that actually didn't end up fitting in their stations. So we happen to hear about that, that those were became available. Lawrence grabbed one quickly. And then we heard about it and we quickly learned about that we could get get some upper funds and quickly grab a new truck, so that we wouldn't have to wait for years. So we quickly jumped on that one. So, and we're sure we're sure that's going to fit in our station. It's in. We went out and measured all the stations and made sure that it was going to get in it. It's working. So they're just doing driver training on that right now and just getting acclimated to the truck now. And it should be driving around very shortly. We're right there. And again, we had to plan ahead and try to get all the equipment for that truck. And now we're waiting on some of that stuff, supplies, to come in to get that into service. One of those facility improvements. This is here, we're talking about, we had to get a boat dock installed at the Riverside Yacht Club, where we keep our marine unit one, our fire boat in the water. Last season, when we pulled it out of the water, we found that there was significant damage to the bottom of the boat. We found out that, There had been barnacles attaching to the boat and eating holes in the hull of the boat. So we had to get that repaired and then get this dock installed so that we're able to lift it out of water. There's actually a video here that if you want to take a quick look at that just to see what that looks like. I'm not sure if you can hear that.

[Zac Bears]: Even Rich Lane didn't bring a video.

[Todd Evans]: So here it is landing back up on the dock.

[Unidentified]: Yeah.

[Todd Evans]: All right, so there's that. All right. So basically we had to do that to try to save the boat.

[Zac Bears]: Oh, that's great. All right. Less holes, that's always good.

[Todd Evans]: Yeah. So here, this is what I was talking about here, about how busy.

[Zac Bears]: The run figures? Yeah.

[Todd Evans]: So this is looking at the run numbers by station. You can see. engine four. So they're working hard. At this point, like the engine one numbers and engine four numbers, they're quite significant where at this point that the levels that these are getting to like NFPA standards would say that these are probably like a I won't say dangerous level, but it's pretty significant. And this was just talking about employee compliments. I mean, you want to review this stuff, this is just like numbers over the years of where we were at as far as employees go. And that was what I was talking about with the four groups, with having 24 or 23 people working in A, B, C, or D group. That's where I was talking about where basically anybody on vacation or out sick or something like that, it's generating overtime costs. So that was just to explain the overtime amounts in the budget there. Last year, that was cut by $100,000 last year. So that's where we're at on that. And this was the thing that I was telling you about the nationwide fire department struggles with the trucks. This is where they're telling you that now they're costing over $2 million for ladder trucks. And Senator Warren is looking into that. Telling you that there's a nationwide fire truck shortage. Quincy fight apartment, this article about Quincy. I mean, this is pretty similar. Reading the article, it's like very similar to Medford situations. So I encourage you to read that article. It's very interesting on how close it is compared to us. Spikes in labor shortages and everything else is adding to that. And there's that rev group that we were talking about that's buying up these companies. There's a two-minute video, a news story about it. If you're interested in seeing that, it's up to you.

[Zac Bears]: Maybe we can circle back to it. It's available here. We'll make it available to the public.

[Todd Evans]: There's the article about looking and probing into the firetruck manufacturing issues. We can skip along. Again, well, the goals going forward, we were talking about discussing some of the goals. Obviously we wanna look towards officer development and the mentorship program with new recruits coming on board. Also looking at increasing training and looking at more targeted training focused on low frequency and high risk incidents and really training up on that stuff. also getting more people certified in things such as safety officer and fire instructor and things like that that are important towards promotional exams. And again, with the officer development, peer support, firefighter wellness program, members of the department have already charged ahead with this and started doing this training with, they've been training in here support mental health, mental wellness training. So, and they've actually conducted classes now for for members of the department with it, telling them how to contact them and get in touch with them regarding if they've gone through a difficult call in some way and how to address like critical incident stress situations and things like that. So that's already, members have already taken the reins of that and run with it and they're doing a good job with that. So actually they're ahead of that already. And obviously we're looking forward to trying to update old SOPs that are that are dated. And another big thing is we really need to start catching up with the times of the software that we can actually track training and inventory tracking for all of our equipment that is obviously expensive stuff. We want to keep an eye on it and keep track of it and know where it's at and everything else. And these companies are all going to a subscription based model. Like you can't just buy software and own it anymore. So yeah, this is becoming a cost now. Some companies are charging outrageous money, but we've been looking hard at the different things out there and we've been trying to find something that can be suitable for us and do exactly what we need. And we believe that we found some good ones for training and inventory tracking. And we would like to start working with those and utilizing those to get the department up to date so that we can actually be ready for like insurance. We have an ISO rating. The last time that we got an ISO rating done here was in 2018. And at the time we were rated at a class two and departments all strive to get to the class one. And basically we were just missing out on some points where they look at like water systems and dispatch and your training records and training grounds and staffing and equipment and trucks and things like that. So we were probably within like about eight or nine points of getting to a class one at the time. So we were really close. We're trying to strive to get all the stuff in line for the next time that we get inspected by them to try to get to that class one. It'd be nice to get to that class one level. That'd be great. So we can work with the, you know, water department and make sure we can probably get some points on that end. I'm talking about basically checking water flows from hydrants and things like that. Checking on the water system that way could help us pick up some points and things like that. Other things with the training, and tracking the training, that's where the software would come into play, inventory tracking and all that stuff that plays into it. So that's something that we're striving to do with that software. And we've spoken before about obviously something that we hope to do one of these days is develop a dive rescue team. and a drone response team. Both of these would be huge to have here in the city. We've looked into it that we would probably need about three people per group of the four groups. So if we could get 12 people completely trained up, we could have a successful dive team here. That way we would have three people potentially working in each group to be able to respond immediately to some kind of water situation here. And this is about 10 people or so went out and started getting the training on their own years ago after they responded to a drowning incident at the Medford Boat Club. And it's tough for them when they go to a call like that and somebody is underwater, you can't find them. we don't have the equipment to get down there. You got to call another community that has a dive team and wait for them to get there. And so you get, you have firefighters standing like on the shoreline, they can't dive. There's nothing, there's nothing you can do except wait for a response. And that's something, that's, that's something tough to do if you don't have the stuff that, you know, that's, that's not in their nature to wait for something, you know? So, um, So a dive team would be great if we could actually get that eventually. And the same thing with a drone team as far as search and rescue capabilities, that would be Great to have the drone with the thermal imaging the night vision and be able to actually there's been several times that we've had to look for people in the in the woods, we have a lot of woods around method, we have a lot of waterways trying to find somebody in the water reported in the water it's hard to find them at night. I can think of several times where if we had a drone with that capability, we could have flown that along the shoreline, we could have found these people quick before the incident turned worse. And again, at like a fire scene, it can be huge to actually be able to pinpoint where fire is in like a roof or something like that, because I've seen it in action at some fire scenes where We have, they have a ladder truck flowing water onto the fire and there's smoke everywhere. And you can't really see through the smoke or where you gotta aim this stream of water and hit the right spot in a roof or something like that. And, but with the drone, they can actually see the thermal hotspots and like look on a tablet or something while they're directing the hose streams, the water streams and pinpoint. the exact location through the smoke and everything else and start hitting those targets exactly. And that would be something huge to have here. That'd be great if we could acquire that. It wouldn't be that one, that particular drone that I have listed there, because I looked at that one last year and it was about 13 grand. But now with the tariffs and everything else, that one went up to like 30,000. So that one's out, but there's another one that I found that's back around

[Zac Bears]: 10,000 spots. So these two chief, are we looking at, these are one-time costs or how much of this is ongoing? Yeah.

[Todd Evans]: The drone, the drone that I, the alternative drone that I found, that thing has the same thing, thermal imaging, night vision, that one's about 9,000, $10,000. And the only other costs associated with that, anybody that wants to be on the team, it's like a, It's like $175 to get your POT 107 certification, basically drone pilot license that you have to get. It's like 175 bucks to take that test. And then that's it, that's it. So you could get a handful of people that are pilot trained to operate that drone. And then you got a great search and rescue tool and great tool at a fire scene and hazard assessments.

[Zac Bears]: And for the dive team, are those one-time costs as well, mostly, or how much of that is ongoing?

[Todd Evans]: Yeah, well, for the most part, yeah, to acquire all the equipment and the dry suits and the tanks and the communications, that's going to be the big initial cost there in getting those certifications to get up to the full-scale dive rescue ability, rescue diver level certification training. just to get those 12 individuals done, that would be the initial cost. Yeah. So, and after that, it's going to, it's just going to be like, you know, uh, training throughout the year or whatever, any costs that might be associated with that, but that, that could just be some little over time involved in that just to keep on, keep up with your training once it's established. But for the most part, you're going to have those three people per shift working on on duty at the time so you're not you're not like calling somebody in you're gonna have those people they're available ready to go and and you could call like another community it's like a backup team to come in and help you out so and instead of calling a another community in to be your your one and only rescue situation here um yeah that's all we get for that um and then uh the only other thing that on the horizon right now is we have an issue with the truck radios that we have right now. Right now the truck radios that we have are basically end of life right now and we don't even have any interoperability with the police because the police switched over to a digital frequency and our truck radios are not capable of even getting the police frequency in the truck. So we can't communicate with them in the trucks or hear them. So we have to look into replacing those radios as fast as we can. But again, there's a cost to that. So we were looking at a quote of roughly $109,000 for that. So that's it. That's all I got. All right.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, chief. We'll go to questions. I have Councilor scarpelli.

[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Mr. President, I can I don't want to be rude but I know I have to get to work after I speak I try to hold on as long as I can, but chief I appreciate your thorough breakdown, and, but I do have some, some questions, and as we look at the budget breakdown. One thing's alarming to me, you mentioned that the staffing is a concern, but we see two positions that will not be filled this year. How is that gonna affect us?

[Todd Evans]: Well, as I mentioned before, the past year, we've been operating at an all time low, really. We haven't been up to that. That's gonna reduce us to the, basically to the potential of only hiring up to 118 people. Once we have these people out of the academy, that's gonna get us right to about 117 right there. So we can potentially add one more person and that's about it. Obviously it would be great if we could increase Manning after that and that would help increase the people working in those four different groups. And that would help. That would help obviously defray any overtime costs and things like that. And also, we could we could start looking for a potential, you know, If we could start looking at like a squad or something like that, that would probably be one of the best ways to start alleviating some of the issues with the engine one and engine for the amount of runs that they're doing to have like a, a squad would be like a smaller vehicle that you could send out to respond to like a medical call or something like that and try to take off the burden of engine one and engine four. Um, that would probably be the only way to help them out. But that's obviously something that we have to look forward to in the future.

[George Scarpelli]: All right. So I know that I appreciate that. I'm looking at the report that was sent up with the gentleman that the city hired the GIS report. So right now we're not meeting safe staff staffing numbers on our companies and trucks at the national regulations, right?

[Todd Evans]: You mean like NFPA standards? I mean, obviously, ideally, we would want you would want to have like four people on a truck, right? We have three and we run three people to a truck. Yeah, sure. I mean, obviously, at a fire scene and stuff like that, that's gonna help out tremendously with the situation.

[George Scarpelli]: And I know you mentioned you talked about grants, but I know that we we lucked out in the FEMA grant because of numbers and then because they won't, they won't fund the department that are not willing to invest in itself, right? Correct. I mean, that's what I know that the union president was here and I know Danielle did a great job applying for all these grants, but we had a great opportunity to save our community a lot of money with FEMA, I believe, taking the lead in paying for 10 firefighters for three years, I believe it was. And then as long as you get the commitment of staffing, and then we would take over the responsibility that we should and staffing a minimal by department, right?

[Todd Evans]: Yeah, that's safe. That was a safer called the safer grant. So that thing actually just reopened again, that just went live just a couple days ago. It's about to go live, but they just put out the information about it about to go live, I believe, like me.

[George Scarpelli]: Right. That's why I bring this up because we're gonna put down to not even level so that we won't even be able to apply for the FEMA. We won't even do it. So it's kind of a waste. So I see I see the cutting of the budget and staffing and severely hurts method chances, right, for winning these grants. I think that's definitely, it's important that we see this as a community and our leadership team here in Medford. I revert to, because I know that an article went out, an article went out from Tufts and they asked the mayor some questions. And the mayor's question was that, that the fire is resisting change and accountability. How is the morale? Because I know that there's a lot going on there with accusations of fraudulent sick time and possible investigators following your firefighters. I mean, how is the staff? How is the morale of your staff?

[Todd Evans]: As far as the morale of the staff, I've heard conflicting things. I mean, there are people that are trying to make the best of everything. And sure, there's been some grievance issues going on and things like that, sure. But again, with the low manpower, obviously it gets tough eventually trying to keep up with the amount of runs that Medford has here. how busy it is, people get tired, people get worn down. And of course, it's going to happen in that and that's going to reflect on morale in some way, of course.

[George Scarpelli]: So I mean, you make a good point, because I think that was a topic of discussion. And I actually asked to have you, the leadership team for your union, and the administration, come to a meeting and then go to executive session so we can actually ask some issues that we've heard so we can, this could be some corrective actions. And what I'm seeing is that, you know, you said it yourself, understaffing, people are tired, people are run down. So those are the same people that are taking days off. and then being accused of. So this is what this is. I think I'm more concerned with our budget with the lack of staffing and how it's trickling down effect and then being categorized as resisting. So as you keep, I just want to stay on the topic that, you know, Again, I've said it a few times in different departments, and I look at the legal costs that we're seeing at DPW, we're seeing with fire, we're seeing with different unions that we're seeing, paying representative legal representation for for grievances, then arbitrations, then losing arbitrations, then appealing arbitrations, and then losing again. And we're seeing in the biggest thing we're talking about is money. But these are the reasons, part of the reasons why it's I would love to see our administration try to find a way not to look at it as resistance, but try to work as a partnership to fix these issues so we can then save these these funds that are going out, you know, useless, just useless use of funding. So a piece that I'm nervous about, because I have family and, and elderly friends that where I grew up, and engine three, we can't even call it engine three, because we don't have an engine three. So that means we have no water, correct in the Salem Street area.

[Kevin Harrington]: Yep.

[George Scarpelli]: So you also brought up that engine four and engine one's taking all this heat. They're taking it because we don't have staffing for engine three. Right, engine three would lighten the load. And from what I gather, that was a necessity. I know that you don't want that, but I know it's a necessity for the fact that to take some of the pressure away from overtime, because it's a lot of money, that we have to shut down an engine and use that team to fill in gaps for overtime. Is that, that's what I've been told, is that?

[Todd Evans]: It's because the 23 minimum manning, but we only have like 23 or 24 people in the group. just because of the manning. So that's the, you would have to have at least 26 in the group to put engine three in service.

[George Scarpelli]: Yeah.

[Todd Evans]: And that's, but of course, like if there's vacation or sick again, sick time or anything like that, you, you, you rarely ever going to have right with these levels, you cannot get to the 26 people to put that truck in service.

[George Scarpelli]: So, um, so why aren't we, why aren't we, You're our leader, right? You came up and gave us a breakdown, but why aren't you telling us this is what we need, City Council? I know we can't give it to you, but I think the public has to understand that sure, there are faults in the school departments. Sure, there are some problems with DPW. Sure, this is public safety. And from what I'm hearing is that it's gonna get to a point where I'm nervous because We've done an amazing job with some pretty big fires and your team has done an amazing job. And I just, I don't want to get to a point to say, geez, we knew this, but we didn't do what needed to be done as a city. So I think that's important.

[Todd Evans]: The problem is the department has always done incredibly well with very limited things. Yeah. gauging fleets and gauging equipment and they make the best of it and they do a great job with it. So they all do a great job at any fire scene.

[George Scarpelli]: So these are the resistant union members. So again, then we, this, the community listened to your firefighters, the rank and file. I believe they listened to Chief Friedman when he came out and spoke. And I think when I talked to a lot of people, when it came to the debt exclusion for the fire station, I think the non-involvement and the final stage and the limitations of that new station really spoke volumes that the community voted it down. And I haven't heard anything. We're both with a new fire station and a training tower. Do you have any updates or anything with that?

[Todd Evans]: No, there's still water coming in through my windows in my office, leaking all over the floor and the fire prevention and everything else. We're in a building that's basically it's decrepit building, the roof is leaking. And they did a quick little patch on that to try to keep a room from leaking water in there with right now some important computer equipment and things like that is trying to make this building survive. I mean, the heating system was probably going to go on the fritz eventually soon. And then we're going to be in a world of trouble there. But when there's no new headquarters on the right now, I know you're the chief and it's a hot seat.

[George Scarpelli]: And I just you have to take the brunt of it. But you know, in your presentation, you didn't, you didn't say anything about the headquarters chief, but you had to wait for, I had to say something so we could talk about what's a huge issue.

[Todd Evans]: We know what happened with the vote. What am I going to say about it? We don't have a new headquarters.

[George Scarpelli]: Right. So what is the leadership team doing to move our city forward to make sure that we're going to a next step? Maybe it's looking at a debt exclusion in the future for what's truly needed, right?

[Todd Evans]: Obviously that's, The only way you're going to see something happen, but there's nothing on the horizon right now. Well, that got shot down.

[George Scarpelli]: Yeah, well. Deservedly so, but I look at and, you know, I know that you mentioned the peer support team because I've talked to some young firefighters. And again, that's spearheaded by a union, correct? I mean, I know the union takes their brothers and sisters, the new brothers and sisters say, hey, listen, they might not be here, this, that and the other thing, but we're going to take that peer peer leadership and we're going to take control of it to make sure that we're teaching our fellow brothers and sisters firefighters.

[Todd Evans]: This is what I've been asking people. I've been trying to encourage people to get engaged with it. And I've been telling them, we got to, you got to reduce that stigma out there across fire departments and other places that people are afraid to seek help. You can't be like that. People need to, if they have a tough call, they see some terrible things, awful things that stick with you forever. And they need to seek out help and it has to be welcome and encouraged to do so. That's what we want, and that's what we're working towards now, and it's going forward.

[George Scarpelli]: I, for one, City Councilor, I think this is one of the biggest pieces that I find very disturbing. It's not a secret that I haven't been supporting what's been happening with the firefighters, the union, and the fire headquarters, the tower. And I know we're just glossing over things, but there are some serious, serious concerns here. And it's something that as we meet with the mayor as we move forward, that there has to be something that has to be earmarked to our fire stations.

[Todd Evans]: If you can find a piece of land in the city or something like that, where we can try to look for a grant or something to get some kind of like, they have conics boxes type of things that you can build a training facility. Auburn has an incredible one.

[George Scarpelli]: I agree with that trickle down effect. I talked to members of the state board, fire board, and I get some numbers from them. and to get these wishes, if you're not showing that we're maintaining minimal safe levels of force, then we're not gonna get these grants. Because again, common sense says if your own city isn't gonna commit to it, why should an outside agency give you money to do it? And at least that's what my homework has shown me. And I'm frustrated because since the debt exclusion failure, We haven't heard much. We haven't heard much. And then today you have retirees contacting me that saw this Facebook post about the mayor's article in the Tufts Daily and, you know, making a point that say that the firefighters with this whole process, that again, that they're resistant. to change in accountability. I haven't seen that article. Yeah, I just I'll let you know, I'll forward it to you. But that's so that's what the question was about the unions. And she said, well, the union, the fire and teams is just don't want change in accountability. Well, how do you want change in accountability when you're struggling as hard as they are? I mean, you know, I don't even think residents know because my my neighbors didn't know that we don't have water on on Salem Street. You know, we call it engine three, we have no engine. Yeah, so I mean, these are things that if people hear what it is cheap as a leader, and they see these things, people are going to stand up and say, Okay, well, maybe we do need a debt exclusion. Maybe we do show us. And I think that since it failed, everybody's moving on. They're not talking about something we definitely need down the line, which is looking at a new high school, refurbished high school. I can never say you're looking at a new one. I don't think it's gonna happen, but at least try to stop moving things forward when we talk about our fire department, because I don't wanna be the one, God forbid, that says, I told you so, when one of our firefighters or one of our residents lost their lives because we didn't have enough staffing. So again, I appreciate you listening. I'm very passionate about this because I've gone, I've stood up for our firefighters for a long time now. And again, I hate to be rude. I know that I was supposed to be gone 45 minutes ago, but I just, if you have any response or anything that you want me to ask, I'll stick around for that. But I know Zach doesn't want to hear me anymore, so thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Just remember my first words, eight minutes after we knew that question six had failed, we're coming back for a fire station. So I'm one who will vote the debt exclusion Tuesday night if it's proposed. I also actually need to step out, so I'm being rude as well. But I do want to thank you for the presentation. I have a couple of minor questions, but I might just send them over email. Appreciate the work that you're doing. I know there's a lot that our department needs from a staffing, a capital, and other perspectives. So just really appreciate the challenge that you're facing and the work that you need to do. And thank you for being open and transparent and I really appreciate the presentation that you're focusing on, you know, really showing here a bunch of key goals here are some things that are not being funded and this is what they would cost. Some of those bigger questions that involve us and the mayor and everyone else, you know, maybe those are not able to be addressed, but I'm hoping that some of those one-time things around dive team and the drone team that really could improve your operational ability. And it seems mostly based on one-time costs that those are some things we might be able to move forward with much more quickly. So thank you. And I'm going to turn it over to Vice President Collins to take the chair, if that's all right with you. Thank you. And my apologies, Chief. Thank you to my colleagues.

[Kit Collins]: Seeing no additional hands raised from other councillors, I'll just briefly state, thank you for your presentation. Very thorough as befits the incredibly complicated charge of your leadership and your department. So thank you so much for the thorough overview. And yeah, no problem. I think to the conversation that we were just having, I really appreciate your candor. I think that your presentation and your communication throughout the year do a really good job of illuminating the work that your department is doing all the time and outlining those future needs in those areas where it's not that, not areas where you want to improve, but where areas where the community needs our fire department to improve. And for myself as one Councilor, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say to the leader of a department, you know, you must identify the path forward and also how to fund it. That is our job. So it's, community and other branches of government need to collaborate on how to meet the needs that our department heads identify. I think you've done a very good job of that. And I appreciate your continuing clarity in telling us what are the capital and operating needs that we really do need to fund. And again, it's not discretionary. It's not, we want this. It's things that we know that we need from the reports of fire department employees and things that we know we need to keep up with best practices for keeping people safe in Medford. So just for myself as one Councilor, this is not a, this is an operational budget hearing. We're not talking about overrides. We're not talking about debt exclusions, but we know that there are certain things that we continue to need that could have been funded. with mechanisms outside of the standard operating budget, and I continue to feel that we should do those to give your staff and the people of Medford the quality public service that they deserve. So thank you for continuing to tell us what those things are, and I hope that we are able to fund them very soon. That's what the community deserves.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Councilor Lazzaro, go ahead. I said I wasn't going to talk. I'm sorry. It's already nine o'clock. I apologize to my colleagues. I have really appreciated getting to know Chief Evans a little bit and talking to you about the ways that we can improve the fire department short of the debt exclusion which failed. The debt exclusion would have paid for a new our headquarters. Short of that, because it went to the voters and it failed, we talked about a dive team. It was not included in this budget, however, because many of those costs are potentially one-time costs that would eventually need to be updated over time. I do think that there is potential, and I've spoken to the mayor about it, that there is potential once this budget is passed for it to be paid for through other strategies, other mechanisms that the city has. So I don't think that that's totally off the table. I also didn't know about the drone thing. That sounds amazing. And it's even less expensive and seems like a really wonderful opportunity to take advantage of technology that we should be taking advantage of anyway. Public safety is especially important right now I think for people in localities to take advantage of we are partners in government, and we shouldn't be seeing each other in any way as adversaries we're all working together to take care of each other and protect each other and use each other as the people that work as a team to maintain the kind of community that we want to live in. And I think you've been such a great partner in that. And I just really appreciate all that you do and the thoroughness with which you approach this presentation and all of the things that you're willing to look into. And the way that you really appreciate your fire department, your team's willingness to see somebody that, it's just like what I was talking about with Kevin Bailey. He really cares about water safety. He really cares about making sure that kids are learning how to swim, that people in our community are learning how to swim, and you're coming at it from the other direction. It's like, protect people before something bad happens, and you're here to protect people if something bad does happen, and not having to wait for the bad thing to happen. And it's the same thing that we do when we look at our streets. We're keeping the streets safe, and we're also trying to make sure that enforcement is happening, and the roads are paved so that the cars are not bouncing around. Everything has to happen all at once, and we're all working in partnership with each other. And it's frustrating when we don't have an endless supply of money to do this with, but when we're all paying attention and in good faith, trying to do these things in partnership, that's how community is built successfully, and I do think that there are ways to do this as long as we stay focused and collaborative. I appreciate it. I don't think that everything that, and this applies to all of these, I don't think that everything that we didn't get that we were hoping for, hoping to see in these line items means that they're not happening. Maybe some of the things are one-time items that doesn't make sense to be in the budget right now. It makes sense to come after June. And then, you know, we can see it again. If it's training, it gets folded in in a different way. I appreciate all of the things that you said. Thank you very much for your presentation. I look forward to everything we'll talk about in June and July. Thank you.

[Bob Jones]: Thank you.

[Kit Collins]: Any additional comments from Councilors? Great. Any additional, actually, I'm sorry, as I took over the chair, I need to open the Zoom to see if there are comments on Zoom. Let me into the zoom place. Thanks. Thank you for bearing with me. All right, we'll go next to public participation on this item. All participants will have three minutes to speak. You can speak on Zoom or at the podium. Going first to Zoom. Name and address for the record, please. And you will have three minutes. Thank you, Danielle. Go ahead.

[Danielle Marcellino]: Hi, can you hear me?

[Kit Collins]: Yes, please go ahead. Thank you.

[Danielle Marcellino]: Sorry, Daniel Marcelino, Levin Spencer wrote on the fire union president. I just wanted to comment on the fact that the staffing level is being cut, that they're dropping our staffing level down by two firefighters. It's kind of incredibly disappointing to hear that it was just it was actually not even mentioned in the chief's presentation. And it's just kind of grazed over in the in like all the comments afterwards. Anytime staffing level is dropped that the in trying to get that back is almost impossible in the future If you go and look at the table that the chief had put on his presentation that shows the staffing levels going back to like 2012 Last year when we were setting up for the grant for the personnel we had noticed I looked at the overtime spendage like the overtime shifts when compared to the actual numbers of Firefighters on the floor when our numbers were up in the 125 range our overtime was incredibly low when compared to what we have right now so to see that we're going to be cutting personnel and never have the opportunity to get to that point, to me, makes no sense if overtime is such a big issue with the mayor and in the department budget. I mean, and, you know, to say that the morale is low because of the call, the number of calls that were going on, that our morale is low because our staffing is low. It's more work with less hands and then we're constantly at battle with the city and the administration and everything else like that. So, I mean, our morale is not the result of the runs and the calls that were going on with our community. So I would like to, I mean, if there was ever anything that I would ever ask anybody else to do or the Councilors to push for, I would say if we could push to keep maintain those two numbers, because otherwise, if we keep slipping year after year, we're never going to be able to staff the department in general. Like we're not going to be able to hit that minimum minimum manning of 23 on the floor sooner or later. I mean, as far as working towards headquarters, I'd love to hear about a new headquarters. We would love to collaborate on that. The former plan that we talked about in the fall was just severely lacking in so many different places. I mean, not just what we needed, but actual things that are like by law required. So, if going forward, I'd love to talk about it. I know we had It had been, you know, mentioned in meetings that I had with the mayor that she was still upset about it. I get that she's upset about it. I mean, we're upset about it. Everybody's upset about it, but we need to move forward. And if talking about headquarters is ever on the horizon, then we'd love to sit down and try to, you know, bring our committee together and put planning, you know, on paper and actually make come to fruition.

[Kit Collins]: Great. Thank you so much, Danielle. Is there any other members of the public who'd wish to speak on this item? Great. Name and address for the record, please. You have three minutes.

[Bob Jones]: Robert Jones, 5 St. Mary Street, Treasurer of the Union. Just real quick on the dive team that we talked about. The dive team would be a very good asset to the department. The drowning that Chief Evans spoke about earlier took place about 20 feet off the Tufts boat dock up at the Mystic Lakes. When the dive team did show up, they were able to recover them. the swimmer in minutes, we would have had the equipment and probably the outcome probably would have been drastically different. Tufts does have two boathouses in City of Medford. I think it's a perfectly reasonable request to have the funding for the dive team come from Tufts. I think they can afford it. They have multi-million dollar projects here. For that matter, we should probably bring someone also to cover those costs. Do we have an updated number on the dive team? So they do have that. Is it, what is it? 120,000. It's about what it was last time we looked into it. It's mainly the one-time cost, the certifications and the equipment. Like Chief said, some training. Upkeep would be on the overtime side. Again, it's a reasonable and grantable request from Tufts University. I'd be happy to facilitate that in any way possible. As far as the overtime and staffing is considered, We have to have X amount of firefighters on shift at all times, whether they're new firefighters, which we need desperately, or guys hired back on overtime. It's going to be about the same on costs. We need more firefighters and we need better equipment. And I would like to see a budget, obviously, at least be level funded. We have the lowest we've had in years. I think we currently have 104 firefighters on staff, chief. 104 105. That's very low. I've been on the job 24 years. I think it hasn't been this low at any point in my career. So we do need those firefighters and please consider that and consider the grants that we applied for to try to get the federal government to pay for these positions and invest in the city. Thank you.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you very much. Chief, I think that you spoke to this in brief earlier, but could you just quickly go over the context? I see the, on the topic of the reduction from 80 budgeted firefighters to 78, was that a strategic decision or is that due to making the numbers work because of the amount allocated from the administration?

[Todd Evans]: That was just what was given to me.

[Kit Collins]: Right, right. I mean, I think that this is, I think that in these discussions and these preliminary budget hearings, especially, we have to remain really clear on where the power lies. I'm sure that if your budget was up to you, we would have the plans for a new fire headquarters and more than two additional firefighters in this budget.

[Todd Evans]: I'd be at 135 people and I have four people on the trucks. Yeah, sure.

[Kit Collins]: That's right. Yeah. And I think that's always the context for how we go forward from the preliminary budget hearings to the negotiations to what the number that we finally arrive at and I just think that's something that's good to remind all participants and the public as we go through this process is the, the allocation is fundamentally decided by the mayor's office. Um, our department heads throughout the city, I think, are incredibly good at being resourceful, and I think we hear that over and over in these budget hearings. But a lot of the decisions come down to making the numbers work, because we are legally not required to be in a deficit as a city. On the topic of the dive team, because it seems that that is, I'm certain that there is consensus among all parties, councillors, members of the fire department, the fire union, this is something that everybody would very, very much like to see funded. I as one Councilor, I'm always most in favor of things that we value and want to fund coming from our own operating budget. I think that is safest, but I do think that this is an area that would be especially appropriate as a form of pilot payment from Tufts University to the city. This would be outside of our operating budget process, of course, but I would welcome a motion from a Councilor, now that I'm chairing, to urge the city administration to include seed funding for an FEDFIRED Appointment Dive Team as part of our pilot negotiations with Tufts University. Great. So that was a motion by Councilor Tseng. Is there a second? Seconded by Councilor Calderon. Thank you.

[Unidentified]: Thank you.

[Kit Collins]: Yeah.

[Adam Hurtubise]: We're taking the motions of the under Yeah, there's only two motions. So far, there's a

[Kit Collins]: Did you want to say something else, Chief? OK. Any other comments from council or city staff or members of the public on the Medford Fire Department budget? Thank you.

[Nina Nazarian]: I just want to highlight a number of very important things that are happening here in this budget with the fire department. And I want to make it clear. I know that there was a very thorough presentation by Chief Evans, but I feel like there's some watering down of what was the great work that's being done and the significant work that's been put forward for the last year plus at this point to move the department forward. The chief, the mayor, the human resources director have all collaborated. We're bringing on 12 new firefighters. That's probably one of the largest cohorts we've had. I don't know in how long. OT, overtime is better since Chief Evans joined the team and became the provisional chief. and now the permanent chief. In FY25, overtime actuals totaled just under $2.5 million. So there's a significant change to the way in which things are being managed and the way in which the work is being done to move some of the needles that need to be moved around to accommodate and make room for an improved fire department. That's not to say that The men and women of the fire department are not doing a fantastic job. There's a lot of really good work that's being done by our entire fire department. I just don't want there to be any ambiguity as to the significant progress that's been made over the course of the last year plus. We, as this council knows, as the public knows, who's had the opportunity to follow along these budget meetings, we had major financial constraints this fiscal year. But in the context of the discussion that's taken place today regarding the fire department, I think it's worth mentioning. We had approximately a million dollars in additional costs for the waste management contract. We had, approximately 2.5 million if my memory serves me correctly. I know it was a 10% increase, but I might be mistaken on the numbers in terms of the health insurance increases. We've had significant increases, and I'm sure there are ones that I'm not immediately remembering. But I will also say that, you know, we are, we have been working very diligently and hard to ensure that we give support and priority to all 25 departments of the city, but that means some resources go here some resources go there and we can only allocate so many resources, because there's a finite budget, and there's a finite pie, so to speak. The fire department's budget is going up over 4%. So I don't want that to be lost in the discussion that's taking place tonight. And I don't have any further comments, but I'm happy to answer any questions if the Council has any for me.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Chief of Staff. Any additional questions from Councilors? Seeing none, it's been a long night. I think we should let the Chief get out of here. Any final comments?

[Todd Evans]: I'll say thank you.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you for hanging with us till 9 24. Anytime. Great. Thank you so much. All right. I think we're on to our last topic for this hearing. Thank you again, Chief. Um, that would be insurance, pensions and bonds and interest. Welcome up. Welcome up. Finance director extraordinaire. Good evening.

[Bob Dickinson]: Probably the most boring part of the night.

[Kit Collins]: I'm going to ask you just at the beginning to boost that microphone because we want to hear every single word that you have to say. All righty.

[Bob Dickinson]: So what do we want to go first?

[Kit Collins]: Dealer's choice.

[Bob Dickinson]: Well, bonds and interest, we have to pay that. That's what it is. There's nothing new on either score, really. So that's what that is.

[Kit Collins]: Are you able to give us just a top line overview of the numbers that we're looking at? Are you able to walk us through just a top line overview of the numbers that we're looking at for bonds and interest?

[Bob Dickinson]: Sure. the easiest one here. Um, actually, currently, the city has $74 million in outstanding that as of June 30th 2024. And I don't know how much detail you want on this. Not much.

[Kit Collins]: I think it's just helpful for councillors maybe any members of the public who don't have the sheets in front of them just to have like a general bird's eye view. I see. a very moderate reduction in proposed budget for fiscal year 26 compared to our costs for budgeted costs for fiscal year 25 for both the general fund debt service and water and sewer fund debt service. So I think this is fairly static interest rates on a lot of longstanding debts. Is that roughly correct?

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah, no, the interest rate on longstanding that does not change. This year we retired some debt. Water, sewer, you know, water, sewer debt, actually, there isn't a lot of interest. It's 71,000 in interest and 1665 in principal. There's a little bit of funding for the general fund debt out of the revolving funds. 2026 interest for the general fund is 1.8 million. And principal is 3.24. So we'll be retiring some more debt next year. But nothing big is coming off, I don't think, until 2028 or so. But at that point in time, obviously, we'll be looking at the debt for the HVAC project at schools. 2028 is when that comes online?

[Kit Collins]: 2028 is when that comes online?

[Bob Dickinson]: we'll be looking at short-term interest costs in fiscal 2027, roughly a million dollars, and then in fiscal 2028, we'll be looking at about 1.56, depending on how the interest rates run. So, you know, we'll just put in the long-term forecast, and that's what we have to pay.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you. I'll go to Councilor Callahan.

[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. How many different pieces of debt do we have that end at different times?

[Bob Dickinson]: That depends on how you, we have, I mean, I can send it all to you if you'd like.

[Anna Callahan]: Three years at 100.

[Bob Dickinson]: We have, right now we have debt from fiscal, They're cut up in, for instance, the fiscal 2020 debt is public library construction, middle school roof for Andrews, Harris Park, and sidewalk. And there's, I don't know, there's probably about 60 or 70 lines worth of different debt. And in any given bond issuance, there can be different times depending on how longer legally allowed to borrow for for things. So it may be, you know, in a single issuance, you may have stuff that's 10 year debt, you may have stuff that's 30 year debt.

[Anna Callahan]: I would love to see if it's 60 things, and I don't know if you could, you know. I don't mean like asking me right now, but if we could just have it emailed, that would be really interesting and useful to understand sort of when it's gonna get retired, when different pieces of it are gonna get retired. That'd be useful. Thanks.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Councilor Callahan. Any other questions from councillors on the debt service overview? Seeing none, essentially what we're looking at is a forecast for fiscal year 26 that looks much the same as our budgeted totals for fiscal year 25. Thank you for the overview. Going next, unless I see no public participation on this budget, so I'll go next to the insurance budget. And just a question for you, Bob, does the insurance budget also cover budget for pensions, or is that separate? I didn't see a sheet for pension.

[Bob Dickinson]: Pensions is a separate budget. This is insurance costs for, this is mostly driven by the GIC healthcare costs. It also includes the dental and the life insurance, the contributions by the city for that, money for unemployment and Medicare and city Medicare school. Also insurance payments, it's pretty much spelled out on the, I'm not sure if you can see that on the on the attachment. Yeah. But the big the big one here, obviously, is the G I C is projected to go up. Which is group Insurance Commission, which is what pays for the health care. For the For statewide, that's actually not bad for the GIC. We've seen, I've heard from other communities where it's going up as much as 18% in the smaller communities, actually. There are a lot of communities that are actually now going for actual two and a half overrides just to pay for health insurance. So it's just, you know, that's what they're charging us. It is a bit of a jump. I've been looking at this for the last few years. It's gone up 5%, 6% in the last two years. Before that, it was much less than that. So we're just going to have to see what happens with the GIC.

[Kit Collins]: It's quite a frustrating situation. could say a lot about what a frustrating situation it is for communities just to have to follow the ever-changing rates. But so that GIC increase is the 10% fiscal 25 to fiscal 26% change on the health, dental, and lifeline item, which is a dollar change of $2.7 million. Yeah. So that's probably one of the single largest line item increases that we see in the entire operating budget this year. Yes, it is. And that is just for continuation of existing service for municipal and that's just for to continue insurance services for city employees.

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah, you know, we, there's actually a detailed breakdown of what every employee right now, which insurance they're on, whether they're individual and family. There's also provisions made for new hires, open positions that we expect to fill. It gets very weedy because the GIC, there's, I think, six different health plans. There's also the health plans for the retirees. So we look at all that data, and that's the closest we can come up with with the new rates.

[Kit Collins]: So an estimate of all those factors together. And the best estimate is that it's about a 10%. I'm sorry.

[Bob Dickinson]: I'm having real trouble hearing you. Maybe it's just my ears. That's OK.

[Kit Collins]: It's mutual. Going through all those weedsy factors, the best estimate is that we can expect to see about a 10% increase. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Tough.

[Bob Dickinson]: Zach is louder than you are, so.

[Kit Collins]: Oh, believe me. I know. I get told that a lot. I see other notable percentage increases. This is a large percentage increase, rather small dollar increase in relative terms, the increase to the unemployment light item. Could you just give us a quick explanation of the nature of that change?

[Bob Dickinson]: That's just looking at the past amounts that we've spent. So we just try to make sure that that is actually covered for the year. Great.

[Kit Collins]: So that's just trying to right size for the unemployment line item.

[Bob Dickinson]: And again, it's another $10,000. That is a big percentage increase, but cost-wise, it's not that much. Just right sizing the budget.

[Kit Collins]: Gotcha. Thank you. Any questions from my fellow councilors on the insurance budget? Seeing none. Any questions from the public on the insurance budget? Just one question. I noticed that on our cover sheet for this meeting, it indicated that we would be reviewing the pensions budget. You said that was separate. Do we expect to see an overview of the pensions budget in a future budget hearing?

[Bob Dickinson]: I don't think that ordinarily we actually present that. That's a number that's come up by the, that's, the actuary for the retirement, the actuary for the retirement board gives projections of how much the city has to contribute to the pension fund to be fully funded. Currently, legislation is in place that has to be fully funded by 2040. I'm trying to get this absolutely straight. Medford is currently scheduled, the PARAC, which runs the pension systems, would like everything to be funded by 2035. Medford is on schedule to fund everything by 2033. at which point the pension number is going to drop drastically. We have new projections because, obviously, the markets come down. So that means that the contribution has to go up to fully fund our retirement obligations. But that will be discussed at the next retirement board meeting, and that won't affect fiscal 2026. It'll affect fiscal 2027. I'm working with the mayor and the chief of staff to come up with a recommendation for the retirement board. In any case, we are not talking about pushing out the timeline at all. That's pretty much off the table. So we will have that fully funded by 2033. At which point we will probably start, if I'm still in this position, it's a few years off. But at that point, usually what cities and towns have been doing is using the extra funding to start funding other post-employee OPEB, other post-employee benefits. So that's the plan, basically, with that for looking eight years into the future.

[Kit Collins]: Okay, thank you. That's helpful. And yeah, if it's not normative for us to review a separate pensions budget in the budget hearing process, which it sounds like it isn't, then we're not missing anything. I just wanted to make sure. Great. Any additional questions from councillors on the insurance budget or any other departmental budget that we heard about tonight? No? Seeing no public participation. Nina, any last thoughts? Great, sorry, didn't mean to say it like that. Is there a motion to keep the paper in committee and adjourn? Oh, sorry, we need to, yes.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Motion to send the motions to regular meeting so we can vote with the full committee, because there's only four of us. And keep the paper in committee and adjourn. Send the motions to the regular meeting. Can we do that? That be possible, Adam?

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah, you can send the motions to a regular meeting if you want. We have a quorum right now.

[Kit Collins]: What are the motions again?

[Adam Hurtubise]: Councilor Scarpelli moved to ask the environmental director to look into making the Hormel parking lot into a solar parking lot to fund the electric cost for the rink. And then Councilor Tseng moved to ask the administration, which I misspelled, hang on, to include seed funding for a dive team as part of our pilot negotiations with Tufts University.

[Kit Collins]: Oh, okay. Do you still want to report? I would withdraw that and I would. Okay. Let's take a vote on those two motions. Then we'll vote on Councilor Latero's motion to keep the paper and committee and adjourn. So on the motion by Councilor Scarpelli to ask our Director of Planning, Development, and Sustainability to look into making the Hormel parking lot into a solar parking lot to fund the electric costs for the rink. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? The motion passes. and on the motion by Councilor Tseng to ask the administration to negotiate with Tufts University to include seat funding for a fire department dive team in their pilot payment. All in favor? All opposed? Motion passes. It was Councilor Zero. The second? What's the second?

[Adam Hurtubise]: On keeping the... Oh, sorry.

[Kit Collins]: I thought you were talking about the motion that we just voted on. No, I'm- What is your question?

[Adam Hurtubise]: I'm asking for the motion that I'm- That's Councilor Callahan.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you.

[Adam Hurtubise]: That's the one I'm looking for.

[Kit Collins]: Pick a Councilor, any Councilor. On the motion to keep the paper in committee and adjourn by Councilor Lazzaro. All those in favor? Aye. All opposed? Meeting is adjourned. Thank you, everybody.

Zac Bears total time: 28.02 minutes total words: 2670	Emily Lazzaro total time: 9.26 minutes total words: 447	Anna Callahan total time: 1.89 minutes total words: 192	George Scarpelli total time: 21.36 minutes total words: 1439
Kit Collins total time: 17.54 minutes total words: 1148	Justin Tseng total time: 1.34 minutes total words: 136