[Laurel Siegel]: Good evening. My name is Laurel Siegel and I am the CDBG manager for the city of Medford. And this is our annual hearing to discuss our CAPER report for HUD for the prior program year for CDBG. The purpose of this hearing is to discuss the consolidated annual performance evaluation report or CAPER for the previous program year, which runs along the city's fiscal year of July 1, 2024 to June 30th of 2025. The paper outlines the city's accomplishments and current uses of community development block grant funds. And as part of the paper, we seek input from our community, including our low and moderate income residents, our social service agencies and the public at large on our use of CDBG funds, which includes on housing and community development needs and development of proposed activities for use of our CDBG funds. A little bit about what CDBG is. It's an annual grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This program has been in effect for, we're now going into the 51st year of CDBG, and the intent is to address the causes and consequences of poverty in our community. The grant specifically benefits our low and moderate income persons, or LMI, which is defined as persons with income at or below 80% of the area median income for MedVerse. All of the projects and activities that are funded through CDBG must benefit at least 51% low and moderate income persons. That can be through direct service to individuals who have been identified as being eligible or through service to sections of our communities that have a proportion of population that are within the 80% area median income. Uses of the funds include for public facilities, such as we've used this for our fire stations, parks, public services, which is a variety of services we'll discuss later, as well as housing and economic development purposes. This table here shows our current low to moderate income limits in the city. And the center point shows for a family of four, they would need to have an income at or below $132,300. So the timeline for CDBG, we have a number of different stages throughout the year that we need to meet our deadlines. Our program year, again, runs through the fiscal year of July 1st to June 30th each year. We solicit proposals for public services, which we can allocate up to 15% of our grant funds towards. The solicitation for those grant proposals opens up in late January or early February of each year. We then draft an annual action plan, which includes all of our proposed usage and activities for CDBG for the coming year. That goes before the city council for review and also is available for public comment and review for 30 days, beginning in April. Once that has been finalized, we go before the city council and we seek their approval, authorizing the mayor to submit a plan. The action plan has to be submitted to HUD by May 15th of every year. And then we also have this CAPA report, which is due for the prior year by September 30th. We also have what's called a consolidated plan. Every five years, the city must create a plan which outlines our overarching goals for the use of CDBG funding over the next five years. We are currently in the first year of our most recent consolidated plan, which would cover federal fiscal years 2025, the current year through 2029. We held a public hearing on that plan back in April of 2025, and we are awaiting final approval of that plan by HUD. So for the prior program year, We had a total available funds of just over 1.6 million that included our annual grant of 1.384 million program income. And what that is, is we had some old outstanding, we had some old outstanding rehab home loans from 10 to 15 years ago. that were due to the city. These were loans that were used to assist people in improving their homes. And so we received a couple of payoffs on that. That's the 20,580. And we also sometimes have some funds that did not get used in a prior year. This prior year, we had about 213,000 available. So that's the total of the 1.6 that was available. We actually spent 1.1 million, which includes, we allocate 15% of our budget, the cap that we're allowed to, towards public services. We also allocate the 20%, which is the limit that's allowed towards planning and administration. And what that includes is staffing, my own position, as well as our housing planner and our economic development planner, as well as investment in other administrative resources, such as we did a social services needs assessment in the past year. And last but certainly not least are the projects that includes all of the infrastructure projects, economic development projects and housing projects that we invest in during the year. So we did spend a total of 1.1 million last year. We've also committed funds for projects that are now in process is crossed over from one year to the next, including the sidewalk improvements in West Medford and South Medford, as well as some improvements at Tusk Park to install some bleachers and a sunshade there. So going to what we actually accomplished and the different types of projects that we did during the year for public facilities improvements. We did roadways, sidewalk and utility reconstruction at Gowerly Road and Dwyer Circle. We also committed some additional funds to McGlynn School Playground, which did open up last year, but there was some additional work that needed to be completed to bring that to completion. And again, we're in the process of installing the new bleachers and sunshade at Tufts Park, which we're hoping will be completed by the end of September. For affordable housing in the year, we launched the first phase of our housing rehab loan program. So we're reinstituting this loan program, which provides low interest loans to Medford homeowners to make essential key improvements to their homes, such as replacing furnaces or roofs, or making things more accessible to them, such as adding ramps or railings. So we will be actually launching a new phase of this program in the coming months this fall. Also, we fund the affordable housing planner and through that, or the housing planner, and through that, the affordable housing trust has worked on developing their action plan for assistance. We've also helped invest in the work of Innes Associates on the proposed zoning amendments that have been considered in the city. And also our housing staff have been working to create additional affordable units through private partnerships with developers interested in developing in the community. And then our public services, we fund a number of programs with outside nonprofit agencies. And this list reflects the 10 that we funded this prior year, including ABCDs, Emergency Rental and Utility Assistance, Community Families Alzheimer's Day Program, Housing Families, Homelessness Prevention and Legal Services, Medford Council on Aging provides a number of different services to senior citizens, Medford Public Schools funds afterschool programs, scholarships, The YMCA, we help fund their mystic community market to provide food for our residents in need. SEM Community Transportation provides medical and shopping transportation for our elder residents, our residents with disabilities. The Welcome Project has been providing English as a second language classes to parents of Medford students. And last, West Medford Community Center also provides a number of different services to our elder residents. In the economic development front, we launched our vacant storefront grant program, which is an incentive for businesses to occupy our vacant commercial spaces. That way we utilize our vacant spaces and also it gives a leg up to a new retail or other business looking to establish itself in our city. We also held the first round of our project pop-up, which supports new retail small businesses by providing them with a space, a retail space, as well as a number of different consulting supports and educational materials to really help them launch their business in Medford. And our economic development staff has also been working to streamline permitting and building processes to make it easier to open a business in Medford. In addition to our regular CDBG funding back during the pandemic, we received a CDBG CV grant or coronavirus funding. We still had a small piece of that remaining. And so we did utilize some of those funds this year. Those funds were used to fund the salary of the city's housing planner and also housing families homelessness prevention and legal services program. as well as some additional transportation services for our seniors through Madan transport. In the coming year, the current program year, some of our projects will include some further ADA redesign for curbs and crossings in low and moderate income neighborhoods throughout Medford. That will include some work that we're doing over at Arlington and Street Arlington and Boston over in West Medford as well as some of the intersections along Main Street in South Medford. We will also be soliciting a second round of applications for the housing rehab loan program. We're about to launch a second round of the retail pop-up that we hope to have opening by early November. And we're creating a new program that will provide small business technical assistance to our small businesses on business plans, accounting, finances, legal assistance. And also we will be continuing to operate our vacant storefront grant program. So we invite any comments on the paper. The paper is available on our website at medfordma.org slash CDBG, or you can also request a copy at City Hall room 308 in the planning department. The comments will, the document will be available for public comment until 5pm on September 26. And we welcome any comments on the plan as well as any comments on what needs there are for low and moderate income residents in Medford, where the city should focus its CDBG resources and also what our priorities should be among the eligible expenditures, which includes parks, public facilities, infrastructure, housing, economic development and public services. And any of those comments or questions can be directed to me, the city CDBG manager. You can reach me at lsegal at medford-ma.gov, or you can call me at 781-393-2480. And now if there are any public comments or questions, I welcome them at this time. Seeing none, I will go ahead and close this hearing and thank you for listening.