[Nicole Morell]: 23-320 committee, the whole meeting Wednesday, May 31st, 2023 at 6pm is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. Council President we're all present six present one absent meeting is called to order there will be a meeting of the metric City Council committee of the whole on Wednesday, May 31 2023 at 6pm in the Medford City Council chamber on the second floor of the hall and via zoom. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss proposed FYI 24 budget for the city of Medford paper two three dash three to zero. The following proposed departmental budgets will be presented. Assessor, Elections Commission, Executive, Human Resources Law, Planning, Development, Sustainability, Police Department, Treasurer, Collector, and Veteran Services. The City Council has invited Chief of Staff Nina Nazarian, Finance Director Bob Dickinson, and the Department Heads for the departmental budgets listed above to attend this meeting. For further information, aids, and accommodations, contact the City Clerk at 781-393-2425. Sincerely yours, Nicole Morell. We do have a request to take I think HR and treasurer collector first because I know folks have and and elections first and then we'll get I'm gonna write this down then we'll go to police. So we will start with treasurer collector unless Councilors have any questions or statements they want to make before we get started. Seeing none. So let me just find the page for treasurer collector.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah, we're doing treasurer 112.
[Nicole Morell]: Um, so whatever you'd like, if you want to sit, yeah, we'll make sure that Mike is on. And what I'll do is I will just read the total for your department. And then if you can give us any summary, you want to share any highlights, and then we'll go to questions from the council. So for a treasure collector, the expenditure summary is $719,418 up $16,480, 2.34% from the previous year. And we have Judy Johnson here to give us an update. you want to give us any overview or summary of your department, and then we'll go to questions about the budget.
[Lisa Crowley]: Okay, um, that's okay.
[Nicole Morell]: An overview or anything you'd like to share what you're looking for in this budget or anything you want to highlight. We can also just go right to questions.
[Judy Johnston]: No, it's just the same as last year. Just, um, we moved a few things around. Um, we've changed a few things for professional financial. We dropped that down and increased data processing. Everything else is pretty much the same. Great. Thank you. Questions from the Council.
[Zac Bears]: Vice President Bears. Thank you. Thanks for being here, Judy. Just wondering on the tax title collections, what work are we doing prior to sending things out for collection to try to help people get back up to speed?
[Judy Johnston]: We send out four notices we send out the four bills we send out a demand notice that goes out in May, then we start sending out letters and we send out four letters. We space them out. Next year we're going to start, you know, moving them closer together so people will remember. And then after the four letters we do an advertisement and then we put them into tax title when they go into tax title we have. Brown legal working as our tax settle attorneys, and they reach out to the residents and they try to help them if it's over $25,000 that they owe, then they can start with land court and all the proceedings, you know to, but the people do get notified. They do try to work with them to help them we have had, I think three or four properties that we they were in the middle of foreclosing on, and they help the people you know to sell them so that they could get money from them and you know, get the city gets their money to
[Zac Bears]: Okay, and is there anything just before the step of sending it to Brown that we do beyond the letters, like inviting them in to have a conversation, or do we try to talk to them on the phone? What does the letter say? It just says, please pay now, I'm guessing.
[Judy Johnston]: The letter says you're delinquent, please pay. If you don't pay, we have to have the certain things listed in the letter that's going to be advertised. It's a notice to collect. We do add charges to the letter. We have a $10 demand fee, and when the letters go out, there's a $22 fee. add it on to that letter. And then we don't add any more if it's just interest after that until it hits the tax title.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, gotcha. Thank you.
[Judy Johnston]: You're welcome. Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thanks for being here, Mr. Johnson. Just a couple of questions. How was the department staffed? Is it staffed appropriately for what?
[Judy Johnston]: Yes, we're doing. We are full staff now.
[George Scarpelli]: Okay, so how many people is that?
[Judy Johnston]: We have four clerks, we have a payroll clerk, and we have the assistant treasurer collector and myself.
[George Scarpelli]: Okay, good. I just have one question off the budget, but I know that I've been getting a lot of phone calls because it falls people start to follow my age group, people that worked for recreation. I think we talked. I know what I told them is to wait. This is after the pandemic. During the pandemic, they were looking for hours, the years of service because they're going into retirement.
[Judy Johnston]: Yes, we are up to date with those any that we have we have the payroll clerk goes right down and researches them and we get the information right out to them we were behind prior but we're all caught up.
[George Scarpelli]: All right, so I appreciate it. So they don't have a phone call last week about that.
[Judy Johnston]: So I could just send it right over to to either I or to the payroll clerk, which is Lawrence, and we'll take care of that.
[George Scarpelli]: All right. Thank you.
[Judy Johnston]: You're welcome.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council? Seeing none. Thank you very much. All right, we will go to human resources. Do we have someone here? Great. Human resources is page 96. So human resources, the expenditure summary is $202,357 up $13,199, 6.98% from the previous year and we have Lisa Crowley, director of human resources. Good to meet you. If you want to give us any highlights. Also knowing you're new in the role, but anything you'd like to share about the budget looking forward, and then we'll go to questions.
[Lisa Crowley]: Sure. Thank you, Madam President. It's really nice to get to know you and meet you. Hopefully we can meet in other circumstances as well. But so I believe some of the highlights are that we have, I'm sorry, thank you. So we have hired I would say 13 new emergency responders. We've created a consistent and comprehensive hiring interview process now. We are working to coordinate with the diversity, equity and inclusion director to make sure that our two departments collaborate together on all new hires, how we write contracts, how we go through the CBAs to make sure that we're be coming up to date with the DEI sections of those contracts.
[Nicole Morell]: Great, thank you. We'll go to Councilor Caraviello.
[Lisa Crowley]: Thank you, nice to meet you as well.
[Richard Caraviello]: Prior to you coming on here, we had a lot of issues with the employees insurances. Are those all squared away now? Yes, so we have- Everybody's properly insured now?
[Lisa Crowley]: Everybody is properly insured, yes.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Any other questions from Councilors at this time? Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Ms. Scarpelli, for being here, and welcome to Medford. I know that we had some issues that Councilor Caraviello said, everybody's on board. I know that we were told that we had some municipal workers having their personal insurance while they were waiting for this. they were acquiring Cobra. And is that do you know if they've they've been compensated for that?
[Lisa Crowley]: So that I don't know, I can definitely find out for you to look into that. Yeah, I think that was before I got here.
[George Scarpelli]: Yeah, definitely.
[Lisa Crowley]: I'll have to look into that.
[George Scarpelli]: And how are we staffed in the HR department?
[Lisa Crowley]: So, um, HR has never staffed enough in the community across the municipality, but we have the right people in the right positions right now, so we're doing pretty well.
[George Scarpelli]: So you're okay with the staff that we have? Okay.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Yes.
[George Scarpelli]: Okay.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Back to council. We'll go to councilor Sang. Then we'll go to councilor Carbonell.
[Justin Tseng]: Thanks. And just a follow up to that last response. I was wondering what a properly staffed department might look like. What do you think are the most immediate hires that you would make if we had more resources as a city?
[Lisa Crowley]: So you mean, globally or just in the HR department?
[Justin Tseng]: Just in yours.
[Lisa Crowley]: So typically there's three to four staff for this size community. So we have three FTEs. I have two part-timers, so if you put them together, they're full-time. So I mean, we're typically a three to four, sometimes five, but because the diversity, equity, inclusion department is separate, that helps with us too. So I mean, we're properly staffed for right now. Again, I think I'm week three in. So you know, I'm still kind of figuring out what's what what needs to be where. So as we work through that next year, it might be something different. But right now, we're properly staffed.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thanks. And welcome to Medford.
[Lisa Crowley]: Thank you.
[Richard Caraviello]: I should have actually said before, a lot of companies are and doing a paying their employees stipends to go on to dispose this plan? Are we planning to do anything like that in the city to talk about an opt out plan?
[Lisa Crowley]: Yes, I think we're looking at all those avenues right now. Like I said, I'm trying to sit back take a 360 view of what's going on in the department, but we do have a PEC meeting coming up. I just sent out an email to confirm a July 21st meeting, so that's all kinds of stuff that we would discuss in that meeting. That's one of the topics.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any further questions for Crisis and Bears?
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Do you have an opinion on how many staff we need globally for the city, since you said the word?
[Lisa Crowley]: So right now we do have some postings coming up. We have done a lot of hires. I watched last night and I realized, you know, it would be nice to have an assistant city solicitor and assistant city solicitor. So we're gonna be working diligently on that as well. Again, my first municipal job was in 1996. So I've been doing this for a little while and we're never properly staffed, no department. And, you know, it's just hard to staff everybody. So we do with what we have, I think we're pretty good now. I think with the positions that we have open, that we're going to be trying to get people and qualified people in for the jobs. I think once we get through that process, we should be we should be good to go. Great.
[Zac Bears]: And my one other question. I asked the last night since you're watching, you probably heard me ask it.
[Lisa Crowley]: The compensation and classification study June 29 is my meeting with Colin center.
[Zac Bears]: Great, cool.
[Lisa Crowley]: I did look that up, cause I did hear that question. I paid attention.
[Zac Bears]: No, yeah. I'm like, this is great. Thank you.
[Lisa Crowley]: You're welcome. Thank you. Any other questions from the council? Seeing none. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It'll be nice meeting you on a different occasion.
[Nicole Morell]: We will go to elections commission. That is page 88. We have our elections manager Melissa Ripley here I also see Henry Miller and the expenditure summary is $340,196 up $15,655 4.82% versus the prior year. So over the last six months, obviously I'm the new election manager, and we're trying to streamline things and move things forward checking in the
[Elections Manager]: checking at what we've done in the past and what we can do differently based on conferences I've gone to. Some of the things we've done is we've purchased two secure election boxes. One will be outside so that people can drive by and drop off their census and ballots. The other one will be inside the building. And again, the idea is for people to feel secure about the election. We purchased two metal boxes that will be available and lockable during early voting just again to give people the sense that we are doing the right thing with their ballots. We're working really hard. We're soliciting for more election workers because we can never have enough election workers. So here's my plug. If you're watching and you want to be an election worker, please, please join us. And I think we've done a really good job. So thank you.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you, we'll go to Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: We see there's a cutback on staff from a full-time senior clerk to a part-time clerk.
[Elections Manager]: Ideally, we'd have a bazillion people working full-time for elections. We're looking at streamlining our process, making sure that we're utilizing the city funds to the best of our ability. We do have a part-time position that is in the play. If for some reason we need to have a full-time person, we can certainly do that. I think during the off times, we are slower, and so it doesn't make sense to have a full-time person in the office. But after the elections, we will, after the first election, we'll look at what we have, and if we need to have a full-time person, we can make that change.
[Richard Caraviello]: So when is the full-time going part-time?
[Elections Manager]: Well, we have to put the job posting out, so as soon as the job posting goes out for the part-time person, we'll then... So, is there someone working in that position right now? No.
[Richard Caraviello]: Nobody working there?
[Elections Manager]: Nobody working in the position now. We do have one person who's coming in for about eight hours a week to help us in the short term, but they're not a permanent employee, they're just a temporary.
[Richard Caraviello]: That is a union position, correct?
[Elections Manager]: That is correct.
[Richard Caraviello]: Is that a violation of the union protocol?
[Elections Manager]: HR is working on that. I am not privy to any of that, so I just let HR handle that because they're the experts.
[Richard Caraviello]: Okay. How are we on our staffing for the polls on election day?
[Elections Manager]: We are working on our staffing for our polls. We sent a letter out to all of our election workers, seeing if they're coming back. We do have some polls. We've sent a letter out to both of the city parties. We're waiting to hear back from them. They have until June 15th to respond. Six weeks out from the election, we have some flexibility. If we don't have any additional workers, we can go outside of the city as long as they're registered voters in the state of Massachusetts. So we're working on it. It's an ever-evolving process and we're trying to recruit enough people.
[Richard Caraviello]: I also see there was a 73% reduction in repair and maintenance of equipments. Does that include our voting machines also?
[Elections Manager]: So what we did was we moved that money to our contingency funds to hopefully sort of clean up the line items so we know what line items go where. We have the Audemars machines, which we have a contract to have clean. The state pays that contract for us. With LHS, we pay for the yearly maintenance on LHS machines, but the yearly maintenance isn't that great.
[Richard Caraviello]: So the contingency plan has $52,000 in it? Yep. That's 100% more than it had last year?
[Elections Manager]: Yes, because we moved things from other line items into that budget just so that we could make sure that all of the LHS items, which are the contingency items, are in one place so it's easier to track going forward, so we can see what we're paying where.
[Richard Caraviello]: And what is the status of our census now?
[Elections Manager]: Right now, we've received most of the census that we're gonna receive back. We sent out 15,000 postcards letting people know that they have been moved from active status to inactive status. What that means is if they go to the polls and they haven't reactivated themselves, they do have to show ID. We will never turn somebody away from the polls. Everybody will be able to vote. It's just gonna take a couple minutes more if they don't return those inactivation cards.
[Richard Caraviello]: And my last question, the clerks in your office still haven't gotten a raise either, correct?
[Elections Manager]: Say that again?
[Richard Caraviello]: The clerks in your office have not gotten a raise.
[Elections Manager]: That is correct, they're waiting for the union raise to happen. However, I will say that Joan Lamoni did get a promotion recently, so she is now the head clerk instead of the senior clerk.
[Richard Caraviello]: And that's it for me at the moment, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Madam President. Chris Ripley, thank you. Not to be critical, but I think that this is something that this council worked very hard to make sure that this department was staffed appropriately. We've had some issues in the past, and we worked diligently to make sure that your position was here to lead us the right way.
[Elections Manager]: And I appreciate that.
[George Scarpelli]: And I appreciate you, but what I don't appreciate is that the the lack of fight for more staff. I mean, to think that to mention that your staff, there's not enough to do when we're looking at three major elections that are coming up in the next couple of years, right? And the questions that arise in just that period, it's like a firefighter. They could sit in their fire station for 10 days without a fire, then all of a sudden have three major blazes and they earn their pay. And I think this council has shown our commitment to make sure that it's staffed correctly. As a municipal employee, I know one of the big things we talk about is when we meet with a city clerk, city solicitor, that we're very cautious of when we move a position from a full-time to a part-time position, making sure that it's not union, because there are huge liabilities and labor laws that affect that. So I will be honest with you, this will be one of the things that I look at when it comes to voting on the budget. because I think for this council that has put so much effort and really making sure that this office is fully staffed and fully funded, I'm not going to quit now. And I think that, you know, you have one of the strongest supporters behind you. And I'd love to get his input later on, and Mr. Miller in that, you know, he's walked the walk every day for the last thousand years here, making sure the elections are run the proper way. I can't see him not being a supporter, not being being a supporter of this. So this might be something that I look at that I'll ask the mayor to make this a full funded position because I, you know, I know you're part of the team. So I'm not I'm not putting in the spot because I'm on that other side. So I don't expect you to say George, Oh, this is we're all right. We're great. I know we're not. But I will let you know from my personal opinion, I think for a few reasons that this position has to be funded. So thank you.
[Elections Manager]: If I can explain something. The part time position is part time. You know, in theory, during the elections, the part-time position will increase. As long as we keep the steady number of hours throughout the year, we are able to have the person come in. So I created a spreadsheet that basically shows during slow times that the person would work 15 hours a week. But during busy times during the election, they're gonna have to work 35 hours a week in order to help us. So I understand your concern about not having a full-time person year-round, but I do think that... We're going to go into the first election, the preliminary election, if we have one, making sure that we understand what's going on. And after that election, we can then make a determination. But I understand your concerns.
[George Scarpelli]: It just doesn't sound too fair, does it? So let's bring in a lesser employee and have them work 10 hours or 15 hours a week, then all of a sudden, we're going to inundate them when we need them. as a person that's for labor, that doesn't pass the smell test for me. I just think that If we're going to, if we're going to, if someone's going to commit to us, we should commit to them. If we've, if we've committed and agreed upon this, this mayor as, as, as signed off and understood that they're now union employees, you have to follow those union rules. So I don't, you know, I understand you, like I said, I understand your, your, your position, but at the same time, I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies that we're going to bring someone in for $12 a week. And then when it comes to most important time, we're going to give them 35 hours. It just, I just don't think that's fair in many different ways. I don't think it's fair to you.
[Elections Manager]: Well, and I do understand that. One thing I will add is we do have an advanced team that comes in prior to the election. So for early voting, vote by mail, and sending out all the vote by mail applications, we have about five to six people who are there to assist us and make sure that everything goes out smoothly. Just to give you that information. But I understand your concerns and I appreciate those.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you. So Madam President, if I could to the clerk, Can we make sure we make that part of the minutes that we ask the, I can't say legal opinion because we don't have a solicitor, but the opinion of our HR director who just started a few weeks ago to make sure that this isn't going to bite us in the keister for another unfair labor lawsuit by hiring a part-time employee in a union position, full-time union position. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Madam Chief of staff, do you have clarity you can offer to that situation?
[Nina Nazarian]: Through you, Madam President, to Councilor Scarapelli. Councilor Scarapelli, the human resources director has contacted the union to discuss this matter. So I just want everyone to know that we're having those conversations. Thank you. Go to Vice President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Thanks, Melissa, for being here. I'm sorry I didn't get my questions to you sooner.
[Elections Manager]: That's okay.
[Zac Bears]: So my understanding, A, if I look at the budget, we were way over this year. We were at 380, 380 plus, and it's going down to 340, which makes me think that there was a lot of work that needed to be done this year. And also, my understanding of how this, of course, it's under the new election commission to move from the registrar of voters, but between this, the budget being so over for FY23, And in this upcoming fiscal year, we're gonna have three elections, not two, like we had in the previous fiscal year between the preliminary general, maybe three, preliminary general and the presidential primary. And that back in 2020, prior to this new arrangement, when we had the registrar and the clerk's office, we had four full-time, basically four FTE staff working on elections, plus the elections coordinator who would come in know, for full time for an extensive period of the year. So at least four and a half FT, if not a little bit more, this would bring you down to two and a half FT. So that's the piece where it's not not really fitting in my head is that we are going from almost five people to two and a half people. The budget was over last year, we're actually gonna have more elections this year. And that makes me really worried. So, you know, if you could explicate a little bit more how you think you're going to be able to do so much more with so much less, that would be helpful.
[Elections Manager]: Yes. So I do know that there were three full-time people in the office and I wasn't here. So I, I, this is just what I'm gathering. There were three full-time people in the office. Um, the fourth person actually was, here during the elections, part-time, full-time during the elections, and then was not here on off election times. So that would give you three and a half employees. And that's just my understanding.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Plus the clerk.
[Elections Manager]: Plus the clerk. Yeah. So, that being said, yes we are, we are down people but I think some of that is, it's an efficiency thing. I do think that the experience that I bring to the table will help us with efficiency, we're getting stuff ready in advance for the election. We purchased, part of the reason why the budget was so high over this year, was we purchased things that we needed in order to meet the Mass General Laws. So for instance, when we have vote by mail, applications, ballots, we have to keep all of those. So we bought secure boxes, ballot tote boxes in order to make sure that our election, the election integrity is intact. So those were some of the pre-purchases that we made in anticipation of the fall elections. I do think that, you know, moving Joan Lamoni into a higher position will help because she's very experienced in the elections in Medford. So she offers an experience that I don't have. But I do think that as we move the professionalism forward in the office and we're learning from other people's experiences, we're able to more efficiently respond to things. For instance, poll pads. So we have not used the full capacity of poll pads. In past elections, when we've had people who've had to show IDs for affirmations, if they're inactive, we've typed everything in. So you've typed in about 300 plus people Now that we're using the pullpads, we actually don't have to type all those names in because they're already in the system. Does that make sense?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I mean, no, that all is well and good, but most of the budget that you're over is not in your supplies and ordinary expenses. It's $70,000 of overtime. And so that's just what has me concerned is that, you know, it seems to me if I look at this, like you already don't have enough staff.
[Elections Manager]: So the line item is incorrect. So the way it's been done in the past, the overtime was for all the part-time election workers in the advanced team. And so that's why it looks like that. The overtime was probably $2,000 for both Joan Lamoni and Haley Brogan. And we work very hard to, or I work very hard to limit the amount of overtime that people are required to work because I don't think that I think we can get stuff done during the five day work week.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. So basically all this overtime money that's in this overtime line is really just should have been in the part time line always correct, correct.
[Elections Manager]: When I came in, that's where it was put. So we just continue to do that, but it will be fixed for this budget.
[Zac Bears]: So really, it's just reflecting the a halftime loss, the loss of a, have a, yeah. Okay. So kind of along those lines, you know, I've seen how, how you guys, at least in the past have operated generally there was, you know, I understand the volunteers and the, the even better volunteers, the advanced team who have had more experience in some more training. I've also seen that sometimes those folks can make mistakes. They're not here all the time. There've been issues in the past. I know we've had discussions about things that you're changing and working through, but I have seen that, at least in the past, early voting was always staffed, at least as far as I could tell. 90% of the time, a full-time staff member from the elections department was in the room. Are you still going to be able to do that for early voting?
[Elections Manager]: It's not a requirement for us to do that as long as it's similar to the polls. I can't be at all the polling locations on the day of the election. So when we're doing early voting, we have three people that are processing early voting. We have someone that's checking in, someone that's giving ballots, and someone that's collecting the ballots at the end. I do come up and check periodically, but it's not a requirement that the elections manager or someone from the elections office is there. if that is a concern, we can ask the commission to help us, and I'm sure that the commissioners would be available to do that.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, yeah, I mean, I hear that's not a requirement and totally respect that answer, but I think I would have concerns with part-time election staff who are not full-time election experts essentially running an election on their own. And I will say this, that the early voting space you know, you have all the precincts in one place. In some elections, you have different ballots going out to different people. That's where some issues have happened before. So that's why I think that supervision check is really important. So that's why I bring it up.
[Henry Miller]: Oh, thank you. Council, it's a good question. It's a good concern.
[Nicole Morell]: But one of the things- I wonder if you could just name and address for the record.
[Henry Miller]: One of the things, Henry Rowan, you did say it for me.
[Nicole Morell]: I did say it, yeah. I mean, I know everyone knows you, not everyone on TV and on Zoom, I know.
[Henry Miller]: Election commissioner. the We talked downstairs. Yeah, okay, and when you find out you I know you'll be amazed But then we having it's not like you have a full time on site there, but you have full time available Additionally, we conducted more training So every time there's an election cycle, we have training. We have training. So we're so sure.
[Zac Bears]: We'll keep you happy. And just while you're here, Henry, my one other question is, and you maybe can answer the other half of it, Melissa. On this staff reduction, is the commission okay with it? Do they support it?
[Henry Miller]: Right now, the commission is stand by that we work with whatever we have. Our job is to make sure we run fair and square election, yeah? No matter what. Whether we bring all the commissioners to spend the night with us here and not to exclude her, okay? We're gonna have to do it. Right now, the time that the either in the middle of, before we get to the general, we might have that person on site. We may have that person on site working up to the level, by the time we get to 2024 election, which start right after the general in this November, okay, we gonna be full staff. I think we're okay.
[Zac Bears]: And Melissa, the other half of the question to you, is the, does the A team, do your election volunteers, does your staff team in the office know that this is the proposal and how do they feel about it?
[Elections Manager]: I think that staff recognizes I think the staff stands behind the commission and behind the administration and myself in the belief that we can do this. And if for some reason we need to have a full-time person, we can make that happen. So I think that's where we're at right now. So the census went out in past years, the census took until May. We completed the census that came in, and we completed it in March. So we're really moving things forward, making sure that we cover all of our bases. So I think we can do this, and I think the staff, I think Joan believes that we can do this, and we're just gonna do it.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, one last clarifying, and sorry for taking so much time. When you say, if we need a full-time person, we can make that happen, how are we gonna make that happen?
[Henry Miller]: that the and a nomination paper, all of you will realize there's a change, something is changing. Okay, we're doing something totally different. What was missing is new now, so we're on a good, we got good people downstairs. A-team is no problem. Remember, I'm a former A-team myself. I know, and that's why I wanted to qualify my mention. So I'm loaded with knowledge to jump in. I'll go downstairs to Melissa and say, what do you want me to do? What do I do? And sometimes I'll tell her what to do. You know, say, if I were you, I would do it this way, I would do it that way. I don't know. Working well.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, yeah, and I super appreciate that, Henry. You volunteering is not a long-term strategy, so I just want to put that point out there. But I really respect your engagement and your effort, and your volunteers and work for the city.
[George Scarpelli]: That's a violation of union policy if you're having a volunteer doing union work.
[Elections Manager]: So I'm gonna defer to HR because HR is dealing with this and I am not an HR professional.
[George Scarpelli]: I'm just telling, I work in municipality. I appreciate the HR and I'd like to get that on the record too. And as much as I love Henry Miller and what he does for this community, it's not Henry Miller's job to do a job that a paid employee should be doing. No disrespect, Henry, but- No, no, no.
[Henry Miller]: I'm sorry, Councilor, I think you misunderstood what I said. Okay. There are work that volunteer does downstairs, there are work that full-time does downstairs. Okay. Depending on your level of security, your level of access, accessing the database on the state, there are things you can... There's a lot people downstairs won't do, won't let me do. Okay? But there's a lot I can do. I can, for instance, sit down and put the... election calendar together. I can, for instance, during election, I'm the ones walking and facing each side, but as personal worker for full time, you know, yeah, I can do that.
[George Scarpelli]: I completely understand that and respect you. But at the same time, in the conversation, the question that Council B has asked with the lack of a secretary, you came up and said that you can do it, you come and help. So I'm just clarifying that.
[Henry Miller]: And I do appreciate it. I do appreciate it. My apology, it came out the wrong way. I will never go out there and do it. You know me better than I know as a person. I know.
[Nicole Morell]: And I appreciate your willingness to answer, Henry, and address all the questions. We appreciate it. And same with Manager Ripley, I think at this point, we're waiting to get that official response. I assume vice president bears is done so we'll go to great. We'll go to Councilor Sagan and Councilor Knight.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. I was actually going to make the point that Councilor Scarpelli made as well. I appreciate your enthusiasm but I mean even if you're doing things that wouldn't necessarily step on what that full-time position would do, you know, I don't want it to be seen as we're undercutting our union staff and I think that's And, you know, even if you're doing if we're doing things, technically right by the book it's really important that we let our other staff or union staff know, make sure that they don't feel undercut right. Um, but what I was what I was going to say is, I think I concur with Councilors scar probably embarrassed about. you know, what they're saying about staffing for the department. I totally, I respect your candor. I think it's actually very helpful. And, you know, we run a tight budget. I think you're painfully aware of that. But there are places where our city can do more and places where the elections department can do more. And you guys have done amazing work, too. I wanted to acknowledge that, too.
[Unidentified]: But
[Justin Tseng]: As a council we've said that we, we want you guys to work with, maybe the DI department and us on creating a report about how to how to improve outreach to voters for voter registration, especially with younger groups or immigrant groups right and that stuff I know you guys have a limited bandwidth, and perhaps. Part of that, you know, 0.5 FT right that's where that person would come in and help you work with the rest of our departments and create that report and do a lot of the outreach. And I think that's all I wanted to. That's the point I really wanted to make was. We, I think this budget perhaps isn't enough to do what we need for the elections, but there's more than we can do more than what's just enough. And I guess my question for you is what are the voter outreach goals of the next year? How are we gonna reach them? And what, you know, is that sufficient? Can we do more? Are there other cities doing more that we can't do with this budget right now?
[Elections Manager]: I think with a limited budget, you can do voter outreach. One thing that we can do is in-house, we can create brochures for both high school and senior center and other citizens. We've already started the process of creating brochures that will let people know when our elections are, let people know the importance of voting, and let people know how to register to vote and what their options are for voting. So we're working on those things. We will be working with the mayor's office and the DEI director just to make sure that we've covered all of our bases with regards to the DEI requirements. I think one of the things that I want to convey is there's a whole clerk world out there that we can use so we don't have to read things. So the brochure that we're working from was created by another clerk in Massachusetts, and so we're we can make that Medford. Working with other clerks on how to make the election efficient with regards to early voting, vote by mail, how do we make those processes more efficient so that we are covering all of our bases? And I respect the dissatisfaction or the desire for us to have a full-time person and we will cover our bases and we'll do our best.
[Henry Miller]: actually, voter outreach is a yearly business. You never stop doing it. That was part of my, I don't, I don't need to get paid to do that, especially in the city of Medford. Last year, we will just like Melissa just stated here, after we saw your resolution, we love it. I'm an immigrant just like anybody else, but I'm no longer an immigrant because I'm a citizen just like anybody. So we took the time, and I think like an immigrant, we sit down, we review, we need to publish it, and we're gonna require everybody's help to help us distribute that. One of the key thing we're gonna take advantage of is reverse 911 to see if we can let them know. Okay, because you need to speak on every language. I'm part of the group who put a multi language during COVID. I speak more than one language. So when there's an issue, there was a polling station that at work, when immigrant comes down, they need help, we dare to help them. And this time we have it better because we have a group of people who speak different languages who will be able to do it. So I think we get this part covered and thank you for your resolution that push us to do more than we were doing.
[Justin Tseng]: I appreciate that response. I think to your point, maybe I'm just being idealistic. As you said, it's a year-round thing. And so what I was thinking was maybe half the year when the elections are happening, the clerk works on that. And the other half, they're able to work on something else. But I do respect what you have, what you've proposed to us. I think one other note is I'm we all know how difficult it has been to staff the city, just City Hall properly and perhaps in the election world, it's not a particular problem, but I do, I am worried that perhaps it'd be difficult to staff a position that's really not doing much through most of the year, maybe 10 hours through most of the year, and then when it comes to elections, it's 35. And I just wanted to put that on the record. I know you guys are gonna try your best to fill that slot, but all the departments are trying, and there are tons of vacancies in City Hall.
[Nicole Morell]: And that's great. Councilor Naik. Apologies, Councilor Tseng.
[Adam Knight]: I'm sorry, I was hoping to repeat the question.
[Nicole Morell]: So you need cancer, you need cancer psychotherapy as I was talking to bears.
[Justin Tseng]: Which question, the one before this one, the one, the one you just asked. Okay. So, the question is, do you anticipate any difficulty hiring for position where you're saying it's 10 hours. week through most of most of the year and then it's 35 or so for election time because it's that's quite a regular schedule and we're already facing staff shortages or we can't fill vacancies at different departments.
[Elections Manager]: Very good question. I'm gonna so I'm gonna throw out Andover and Andover they have a part-time person who works September through June and not there in the summers. And she'll work, this particular person would work 11 hours a week or she would work 50 hours a week. It depends on what the need is. So I think if we market the position the right way, we'll get the right person. The other thing is with, again, the clerk world, There's always people that are looking for clerk jobs, maybe, and when we get the word out there that we're looking for that.
[Nicole Morell]: I think, sir, I apologize Councilor information.
[Adam Knight]: I believe that there'd be a number of hours that are required in order for a person to qualify for basic health insurance benefits and that number would be closer to around 20 to 22 hours per week rather than 10. So I don't know who we think we're going to be attracting any position that's going to be paying them 10 hours a week with no benefit structure. I know that's more of an HR thing, but I think we're really missing the mark on this one. I appreciate the presentation, Melissa, but I just, I don't see this as a reality. You know, I see this as a, a reduction in the position that this council and previous councils have fought for and staffing levels in that office. And now we're seeing unilateral reduction. And our contingency plan is to use volunteers and to reduce the position to 10 hours a week and make it benefit ineligible. You know, that's something that I can't support, but I appreciate the presentation and thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor.
[Elections Manager]: Minister Ripley, if you wanna resume. So I think if we market the position the right way, we can find the right person who is looking for that you know, part-time work. We'll see. You know, I can't guarantee, but we'll do our best to do that. I wanted to go back to your question about voter outreach. We do a lot of voter outreach already. We go to some of the nursing homes to help the nursing home folks vote, make sure that they're registered. We will be at the senior center. And marketing-wise, we're going to get a banner that says, hey, here's when the election is, just so that people are aware of what's available to them and when it's available. The other thing that we did do is we updated the website that gives some more information and some more specific information in hopes that that would help residents.
[Justin Tseng]: Again, I do appreciate the work that you guys have been doing, and I have seen the updated website, and there's a lot more information on there, which is good, but there's always more we can do. I just wanted to make sure that that's the frame that we're leading with as well, and that I don't want us to end up in a place where we don't have a clerk, a senior clerk in the fall, because we can't manage to hire for that position.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Collins. Thank you, President Morell. Thank you so much for being here for all of your hard work year round, and Marie as well, all the commissioners. I just wanted to sort of add my voice to the choir and saying thank you so much for your hard work. And we know you're doing a lot with the resources that you do have. But you know, especially reviewing this budget in this election year. You know, we can't view this outside of the context of what we're hearing from other departments all year round, which is Josh it's really hard to hire and you know I think, especially with the elections department, you know, as much as any department in the city that really has to be resilient, especially when we're looking at three elections in one year it just goes without saying. You know I think probably this whole budget season, like the records will reflect us trying to pull out from this budget. examples of where we do lack that resiliency, long-term examples of where we're doing the best that we can with what we have right now, and we know that it's not what we should be shooting for, what we should be aspiring to, and what would promote the best resident experience, the best voter experience, the best volunteer and staff experience. And so, you know, I... My hope is that the theme of this budget season will be elucidating like where we should be aspiring to go and knowing that we're not going to hit the mark this election or sorry this this budget season. For the short term, I mean I have to admit I share my fellow Councilors concerns about having staffing be so lean that if we continue to have trouble hiring. then we're in a really tough spot and then we're asking of volunteers to step up and maybe that's above board and maybe there are questions about that and I think that it's just hard to look at any department in the city and be and say this seems like it's going well for now and of course I always appreciate a can-do attitude but also to have to recognize that things are going well because of because of conditional circumstances that are short term, or they're fortunate, or we have some like, you know, all star enthusiastic volunteers on our side, but that's not always going to be the case when we can't be banking on that. And, you know, as one Councilor, we have to look at the budget and see assurances baked in that we don't have to depend on those conditions, especially when we're talking about elections. So thank you so much. I hope that we can.
[Elections Manager]: Sure. So our advanced team is actually paid. So when they come in, they're not volunteers. So other than the commission, everybody is paid when they come in, unless they're on the senior abatement program, in which case they're paid, but in a different way.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Going back to Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: I kind of missed Councilor Tseng's question when he asked you about the outreach to people. I think the population that Council was mentioning, I don't think they're website savvy. And I think everybody, we have a lot of people in this building that think the world revolves around the internet. It doesn't. A lot of people that don't have access to the internet. They don't know what the internet is. I think that's where, I think we miss our mark there. I think we have to find another way to reach other voters other than our website.
[Henry Miller]: One of the things I've done personally, because if you look at it today, in this city, we're celebrating more than the people who were born in Medford. We're celebrating people from Asia, Haitian, Spanish, everybody. So, We try to reach out to those people. Personally, I took this concept. I started in Boston, all the way to Washington to make sure most of the people I, Henry Malone, represent have no access to the website. So therefore, you have to find another way, as you stated, to reach out to them, whether it's audio or you give them a language that they use as their primary, because we're looking at English as their second language. So we try to do that. And I think when Melissa talked, we didn't say we go to the high school. We go to senior center, gathering, public gathering. Soon we're going to have a flea market here. We're going to try to reach out people. We go to the housing and so forth. Are you going to cover all of them? I doubt it. You're going to miss some of them eventually. And we saw that during COVID. We saw that during COVID. As we were moving, we were coming up with new language, more language, more people. But that's something fair, because I always say my mother, my mother who died three years ago, didn't know how to read and write, but she voted. So therefore, every time I think of voting, I think of my mother.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. And I was one of the Councilors, I think we all fought for this office. And I don't want to take a step backwards on the office now. I think I think we're really, we've become on this one, I think we're really being penny foolish. I mean, for $26,000 to let a full time person go. with the hope that we might be able to find somebody. I mean, you talked that, well, we'll market the job, we'll find a 10, 11 hour person, and then we'll ask them to work 50 hours. I just don't think that, I just think we're really being penny foolish on this. And we're also asking people in the office to do more. with less. These are people that haven't gotten a raise in four and a half years. How much more do you want to push these people before they say, hey, I don't want to work here anymore? I think that's a big mistake for this small amount of money to cut back on staff when we don't know if we're going to be able to hire staff because, as you see, we've got plenty of positions that have gone unstaffed yet. So I'm not going to support anything that doesn't keep this person in the budget. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Vice President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Just wanted to touch on the outreach piece again, and sorry I was away from my desk at the time. I think great to hear about the outreach that we're doing. Just a couple thoughts, and if you're already doing them, I'd love to hear about how you're already doing them. I know you mentioned reaching out to immigrant communities, and it sounded like we're translating some of the outreach materials into other languages.
[Henry Miller]: Well, there's the VR here, which is voting right acts, okay, dictate what can be or cannot be translated based on a percentage. For the ballot. No, election material. Oh, really? Yes. But we could go beyond. Yeah, depending on a percentage. But the thing that we have is regardless of your primary language, we will reach out and work with you. Matter of fact, we are currently working on the presentation to present to you, okay, how we're conducting our outreach, the new pamphlet we just created, and how we're gonna try to see the percentage. We have to go with the percentage. I forget what I told you on that section D, right? It's 15% of the registered voters.
[Zac Bears]: But if it's lower than that percent, could we not voluntarily also translate it? No.
[Henry Miller]: That will be up to basically local audience to do that, because we're following MGL. We're following the Fed.
[Zac Bears]: It looked like Melissa had an answer to that, too.
[Elections Manager]: So all I was going to say is that the city is not required states that we're not required to translate the ballot if less than a population if the population is less than 15 percent we haven't met that threshold yet now we will look into translation for things but again we want to follow the rules of MGF mass general law because we don't want to make a mistake
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I guess I'm not so much saying the ballot, I'm more saying like pamphlet, here's how to register to vote, here's how to, here's the election office number, here's, you know, that kind of thing I think would be really valuable to translate. If we only have English, and we're only at the senior center, we're not hitting everybody, you know? And even if we're only having English and we're only at the senior center, we're still not hitting everybody, right? There's a huge Haitian Creole population as well, right? People who speak Haitian Creole. So, you know, that's one piece of it. The other piece we've been having, and I've seen them in the rotunda, successful kind of welcome to Medford events. Are we at all, is your office at all engaged? And I know you're involved in the committee. Do we have someone there who's saying, here's how you can register to vote in Medford. Here's the form, here's the link. Is that something that we're doing when new people are moving to the city?
[Nicole Morell]: If we could get that response from manager Ripley just from the office perspective. Okay, thank you.
[Elections Manager]: So we can. We have not up to this point. But what you have to remember is being at an event at night doesn't generate a lot of voters. People don't sign up at these events. So last year when they did the police night out, Yeah, nobody went to the registration table for voter registration. So we have to be really creative on how we do this, and we have to make sure that we're utilizing our time to the best of our abilities. I would love feedback on things that you think we could do and what you think would be beneficial, but the neighborhood night out isn't a good use of our time, unfortunately.
[Zac Bears]: That's less what I mean. I was really specifically about when people move to the city. We have these, you know, there's kind of receptions and I'm sure 98% of new people the city aren't going to the reception and the rotunda right. But are you also sending out mail to people who move to the city, right there's like a mailer that's going out.
[Henry Miller]: It's not, it's not a mailing the welcoming committee receive from real to. a list of new buyers yeah so it's up to us to find out it like for instance council zag bought a house it's a three-family house but council zag doesn't leave it doesn't leave here he doesn't live here so we gotta find out who lives in that address so which is one of the thing that pushes this year. When we send the census out, you saw what we put election material in there to tell people to vote, but that's not enough. That's still not enough. It will never be enough. So we have, it's a consistent thing. That's what, when I started to answer council saying, I said, voter outreach is a year around. It change. Sometimes you get, sometimes you don't have anything. For instance, last year, we went to the high school. We got 43 young people registered. So that was good. Then we went to the police night out, we get nothing. So we went to the West Medford Community Center, we get nothing because everybody down there already registered. So it's a consistent, but I like your idea to say the language, the language. That's one of the thing we should try to do here to put when a person comes and they... I had that issue with a department here. A lot of people that can read another... language doesn't want to be communicated in the language. They want to speak English to make themselves different. So there's a lot of issue, but just like the manager said, give us idea that you think it's feasible. We will explore them and make them become reality as much as possible.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Henry. Thank you, Melissa.
[Elections Manager]: To add to that, we are not required when we have a municipal election to send out the vote by mail applications. We did send those out in our census, and we've received about 5,000 vote-by-mail applications. They weren't translated, but that's part of our outreach. It's using creative ways to sort of make sure that we're reaching everybody.
[Unidentified]: Great.
[Elections Manager]: There was a brochure in there that was translated to different languages just from the city. It wasn't from any particular department as well. So we're really trying, and we will continue to do so.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Any other questions from the council at this time? Before we move on, yeah, I just want to echo my fellow Councilors where I really do feel that that position should be a full-time position, which is not a comment on anybody's work. It's a comment on the state of elections in this country today and how fraught they are and how they're only getting more complicating and challenging and challenged. So to that point, if you can't find someone at that part time, would then there be a request to make it a full-time position? What's the thought there? If that position is open as we're getting close to election season?
[Elections Manager]: I don't know the answer to that question. I just don't know. I mean, I think we would try. Madam Chief of Staff, are you able to address that?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Yes, I mean, look, if we try to find to begin to say it's important to find the right person to fit the position, right? And if, you know, traditionally the hiring process begins with the department head, especially for, you know, staff directly involved, the department head is involved in that hiring process in this case, and it was evidenced by the hiring process or the, what essentially ended up being the promotion of the senior clerk to the head clerk, department head is involved in that hiring process, and that has an opportunity to make a recommendation. If ultimately the department head doesn't make a recommendation to hire, we would evaluate alternative options. Of course, if the alternatives were we're just not finding the people we need to act reasonably quickly on this matter. So in theory, we would consider coming back to the city council. If we were in that position, we felt there was just no one to be hired. And I'm speaking for myself as what would be my recommendation to the mayor. It would be to come back to the city council, ask for a modified appropriation if that needed to be appropriated from elsewhere, because there was nothing left to raise and appropriate. We would identify an alternative source and attempt to make a modification with the approval of city council, of course. Great, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council? Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Have a nice evening as well. So we'll take the two smaller departments, then we'll go to police and PDS and round out the board. So we'll go to veterans and then we'll do assessor and then we'll go into the larger department. So go to veterans, which is page 211. So veteran service department's expenditure summary is $435,703 up $3,372.78 over the prior year and we have Director of Veteran Services Jeremy Johns with us. So any highlights or anything you'd like to share with us? And we'll go to questions.
[SPEAKER_18]: OK. Thank you so much for your time, Madam President. So when I took over last June 13, first started with the Massachusetts Department of Veterans Services, becoming certified with them for the Chapter 115, which is the primary reason for my role, Chapter 115 disbursements for those needy veterans and their dependents. approached the mayor about getting accreditation to be able to touch and deal with Veterans Affairs claims, both pension and disability claims. That is not a normal thing in the state of Massachusetts. The State Department of Veterans Services does not extend that accreditation down to the towns and the cities. Those that you'll see online through the different powers of attorney, like Vietnam Veterans of America or American AMBETS, American Legion, they are independent. So they had to do a 40-hour accreditation with the Department of Veterans Affairs so that they could do these claims. So I got approval to do that with the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers, and now I'm able to look into veterans' claims once they change power of attorney. and help them out with the disability and pension claims DIC claims or dependency indemnity compensation claims, things that they would be if they were on chapter 115, which is a state and city benefit, they might have to be switched then over to federal, which is a benefit so that we could help out others at the chapter 115 level.
[Nicole Morell]: Okay, thank you.
[Richard Caraviello]: Um, have you seen an increase in people coming into the office since you started? Yes, sir. Especially with the VA claims.
[SPEAKER_18]: I'm about to show you. That's my dad. Yes, I've seen an uptick, both with Chapter 115 and with the VA claims. I've always made sure that the Medford residents have priority when it comes down to the appointments that I can offer, but I have seen an uptick in activity.
[Richard Caraviello]: I think I've talked to you about this before. How are you working to bridge that gap? or that big space between the veterans group, from Vietnam, that 20-year share gap, or to the Afghan veterans, the Middle East veterans. Are you starting to see the Middle East guys starting to come in, or are they kind of doing it, you know, trying to go in on their own?
[SPEAKER_18]: I'm actually I've got an appointment tomorrow with a veteran that just left active duty a couple of months ago. I have dealt with a Vietnam veteran that just because I was able to look through his claim, see where the error was, went through a higher level review, now he's at 100%. Bridging the gap, I would like to say would be finding a good communication. We used to have a newspaper and I'm sure that that's where most people got their information for the city. We've got. several Facebook web pages for the city of Medford, and then people that create their own under the city of Medford guys so I try to follow some of those and see if we can use that as a, as a push for information, but like the the non service connected pension and then chapter one 15 benefits. Those are a lot of them are elderly, those that are disabled can't work. they don't have computers, they don't have internet. And so it's, I just discovered this, the new free, the free newspaper that is for Somerville and Bedford, potentially advertising in there. I go to the senior center with the first pamphlets that I have for the requirements for chapter 115. I can do a little, maybe more outreach at the emergency rooms at the hospital to kind of put that out, but there's a different, It's hard to say where the majority of Medford residents get their information. If I could find that out.
[Richard Caraviello]: Are you notified when a veteran moves into the community?
[SPEAKER_18]: I am through the state. Okay. I get a list. And then I send out a letter saying you could be qualified for the welcome back bonus. If the person is 100% service connected, they also get a annuity from the state twice a year. I wanna make sure that they stay informed on that. Yes, I also welcome them to Medford with a letter.
[Richard Caraviello]: Do we do mailings to the veterans that we know live in the city? Yes, we do. And their spouses also?
[SPEAKER_18]: If they're identified through the state, if they're new into the community, other than that, it typically is just the veteran. I don't know the veteran's marital status or who they've moved in with. It's just if a veteran has left active duty or has returned from basic AIT, basic training, if they're in the National Guard. That's how I get that information.
[Richard Caraviello]: It'd be nice when a new veteran moves into the community, if we could send them a welcome letter or some kind of welcome package. saying, you know, we're here to help.
[SPEAKER_18]: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We do that with the letter also try to make sure that they understand what services are offered at the office as well, and show some of the unique aspects that I can offer them. Yes, sir. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Thanks, Jeremy. Sorry for cracking up when you said Facebook groups, but the state of public discourse and the level of good information that is out there in the community is wanting. I only have one question for you. Other than that, unless you want to found a newspaper, that'd be much appreciated. Is there anything that you are looking for that you may be requested for this year that you weren't able to get or anything in the future that your office really needs in terms of resources or staffing to do more?
[SPEAKER_18]: Currently, I'm satisfied with what had been agreed upon. When it comes down to the cash aid that we have, which is $300,000, I'm not able to predict when a qualified veteran comes in and requests to file for Chapter 115 or I'm able to identify them as somebody that could receive that benefit. If the economy were to do a downturn, something like that, we would end up going currently right now to get up 22 recipients on Chapter 115. Looking through the history, we were up to almost 40 at one point in time with COVID. That way, the 300,000, as long as it covers that, then I wouldn't have to ask for funding in the midterm point, but I can't predict when the number would increase of need.
[Zac Bears]: Now, just for my clarification, it's a fixed benefit amount, so we would run out, or the amount is divided among the beneficiaries equally?
[SPEAKER_18]: somewhat like that. So depending on the person that's coming in, um, if they have out of pocket medical expenses, if they're not, if they're paying for their, their, uh, Medicare part B, we can reimburse that as long as they meet that the asset financial requirement, they of course have to be an honorably discharged veteran or an unmarried dependent spouse. Um, but I have a family that I've pay out, $1,600 a month right now. And then I have some that are maybe just getting, the one lady was getting $98. So it's a variable depending on their need.
[Zac Bears]: But we're covering it now, but in an economic downturn, there'd be more people who qualify and need it, and we wouldn't be able to get there.
[SPEAKER_18]: Correct. Now, the city does not get reimbursed 25% of every dollar that goes out. That does come from the city. 75% is reimbursed from the state of Massachusetts, and we see that. when we close the months out. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate your work. I was able to also, from last year's budget, I did need software as well as the accreditation for the VA claims and that's where there would have been an increase in expenditures. Great. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Mr. Johns. I know this is a very vital position here in the city, and we know how important you are, so we appreciate all your hard work. Staffing levels, do you find it adequate within your department? Depending on the day, yes. Do you have a full-time
[SPEAKER_18]: assistant secretary now and now Darlene is part time 20 hours a week. And we were pretty busy in the office.
[George Scarpelli]: So maybe that might be one of the reasons why we can't we can't go out and secure more vets that need that need the assistance potentially.
[SPEAKER_18]: Yeah, I tried to get out and I have met with several like social workers that have brought some people up to my attention. I let them know what is required, what kind of evidence I need, discharge paperwork, and I don't hear back from them and there's only so much that I can do.
[George Scarpelli]: Right, right. Do you work very closely with with the different departments here in the city that can assist you with that? I mean, I know that this with the social work, we have a very, very robust communication department in the mayor's office. Are we using their expertise and trying to find strategies to reach out to to method veterans and seeing if maybe they can come up with a plan? I think that's their profession. So have we thought of a plan to maybe, you know, work with them?
[SPEAKER_18]: Yes, we could do that. And we'll do that or have continued to do. I appreciate that.
[George Scarpelli]: So I like that, like I said, I think that you're so valuable. But when you look at veterans, either it's, you know, they're too proud to come to the office, or they're just not don't know how to get there, whether they're, you know, you know, an older veteran or a younger veteran, I think it's, you know, very similar situation. So, um, I mean, we're seeing it, we're talking to our friends at the different VFWs and the American Legions, and they're seeing a huge drop in participation. And that, that's alarming because it's more of a social aspect. So it's kind of frightening that, that veterans aren't finding relief with their brothers and sisters at a social situation. But, um, you know, if there's anything that this council can do, you know, to hold any events or look to see if we can promote things. I think we all need to find a way to really boost those numbers. And, you know, I personally think that you having a full time secretary, because I believe from what I remember in the past, the past Veterans Affairs directors that we've met with, their biggest concern is doing all that paperwork. And the most important person that's got to be out there you know, a lot of people, uh, showing their face and saying, Hey, we have this office here. It's stuck behind the desk in an office fellow paperwork that a trained, um, administrative assistant can do for you a secretary. So I'd really like to see, you know, it's not a lot of money if we're paying a part time, you know, adding a couple $1000 to get a full time position. I think we'll pay huge dividends in your office. So thank you so much. Thank you.
[Adam Knight]: Good Council, how are you doing? Great, thanks for coming tonight. How many veterans have you been able to identify here in the city?
[SPEAKER_18]: Roughly was 1700. The state sent out a roster of those that are receiving some sort of benefit from the from the Department of Veterans Affairs at the federal level, and that was around 700. So there's everything depends on somebody identifying themselves as a veteran and then me looking at their discharge and seeing if they're qualified for anything. So other than what I was able to find out just online was the population was estimated at 1,700.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council? Seeing none, thank you so much for being here.
[George Scarpelli]: Appreciate it. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: We will go to Assessor on page 117. We have Ted Costigan, Chief Assessor. We haven't met yet, so I'm assuming that's the right guess. Expenditures, $559,637 minus $12,650, or minus 2.21% versus the prior year. If you want to give us an overview, and welcome.
[Costigan]: Yeah, good evening, Council is privileged to be here. Our office is responsible for equitably valuing the roughly 17,000 real estate parcels in the city as well as the over 1000 personal property accounts. We're particularly keen on picking up new growth off of our hundreds of millions of dollars in building permits we review every year. as you know, new growth is revenue to the city that's new in the year we find it. The office, you know, is anticipating a levy of around $139.6 million this year, which, as you know, is the majority of our budget. We're doing a good job with our outreach to veterans and to the elderly, making sure we have fulfilled all the personal exemptions that Medford residents might have. Talking to my colleagues in other communities, the fact that we have 350 people who are low-income elderly veterans or blind individuals who are receiving personal exemptions is an exceptional number even for a city this size. We're continuing to give great customer service with our staff to Medford residents who come in for motor vehicle excise abatements or want to talk about their real estate property in the city. I'm seeing a strong industrial core in Medford, a strong apartment class, and a residential class is still doing very well from a valuation perspective going into fiscal year 24. Happy to take any of your questions.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. I want to thank you for being here and welcome to Medford. I've got a couple of questions for you. Can you give me some information on the abatements granted and the allowance for the abatement balance that we have for the last few years? You don't have to give it to me tonight, but if you could send it to the council. Absolutely. From 20 to 23, that would be really appreciated. I see there's a $500,000 allowance for abatements for the overlaid reserve. Is that figure too low? Do you feel that's enough money in there?
[Costigan]: If I don't miss the mark, it's not too low. I'm hoping to do a good job this year with the valuation that we're doing for fiscal year 24. I'm looking at all the income models. My hope is that that is a very reasonable number for abatements.
[Richard Caraviello]: In fiscal 23, we were under our levy limit, 131,972, versus the number should be 133,790. Do you have the correct tax rate for us? Could you repeat that? I'm sorry. I'm sorry? I didn't understand the question. Could you repeat that? He says, we seem to be under the levy limit. I know we tell people we tax to the max, but we really don't. The real levy limit is $133,790. Our levy limit is $131,972 for fiscal year 23. Right. Have you projected a new tax rate yet? No, I have to have the valuation done to do the tax rate for next year. OK. And pilot agreements we have. For 23, I see a projection of 2.5 million versus 22. There was 3.3 million. Where is the difference?
[Costigan]: I'm gonna have to review the pilot expectations. I've just talked to the housing director today. They're sending their fiscal year 23 pilot funding over in the next week. I additionally have an MVDC meeting. So we'll be getting the funding from them the week of June 19th. So those are the two largest ones. From a budgetary perspective, I'd have to ask our finance team as to why they lowered the expectation there.
[Richard Caraviello]: that we can make that part of the report that we can get. We can get those answers. Yep.
[Nicole Morell]: Yes. Thank you. Uh, uh, so probably vice president bears, but he's not there.
[George Scarpelli]: So well, well, thank you, Madam President. Welcome method. Appreciate you taking this, uh, this position. So I very simple question. I'll ask every department staffing wise. Um, where do you stand? And are you are you in need? Or do you find it very, but do you find it adequate what you have right now?
[Costigan]: Yeah, I have a great staff. We're four busy individuals every day. Additionally, we have a part-time sort of ARPA-funded position that's very helpful for our field work. That is a request I made, again, going into fiscal year 24. It's the last ARPA year we can have for revenue replacement. That's going to be crucial. And if that goes through, I think we're going to be in really good shape.
[George Scarpelli]: All right, so we're hoping in 2025, that might be a full time position ask because it looks like we need it. That would be one of a lot of changes in Medford. And I think this is one one department that makes us money when we work. So it's very important that we fund these positions. Yep. Thank you. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Councilor Collins, then we'll go to Councilor Bears.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you for tomorrow. Thanks for being here and nice to meet you. Just a super quick question probably. I just wanted to make sure I was clear on the reduction in ordinary expenses. I see in the highlights it says ordinary went down by 50% looking at the line item breakdown. I don't see anything so drastic so I was just wondering if one of those was off or if you did see any dramatic decreases in ordinary expenses.
[Costigan]: Yeah, I think that was a typo. The ordinary expense is down 2.2% year over year. So no drastic changes. I'm sorry, total expenses down 2%, ordinary 11%. So it's not a 50% reduction.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President. Welcome. Thank you. Good to meet you. I don't have huge questions about your budget. My main question about the budget is just, is there anything that you were looking for or will be looking for in the future that's not being funded?
[Costigan]: I think as we're going into the new economy, AI is a big part of this. It's in the news, buzzwords, but obviously from a valuation perspective, there's going to be tools that might come on, might be innovative that would really help us in that growth number. That's what I'm aiming towards. I'm at a $2.5 million figure, and that's with the review of 1,000 building permits. AI that can have me do that faster, whether it's detection technology or whatever else, that would be an area that I could see in future years.
[Zac Bears]: You just won an award for the first person to mention AI in my four budgets. My two questions. One, exemptions. We've had a lot of conversations with past folks in your office about residential exemption, about maxing out senior exemption, et cetera. Just kind of a general thought from you. If we were to consider it, how do you think that would affect the way that you operate in your office or the way that we raise the levy? Do you have concerns off the bat or do you think it's really more of a policy call that we might implement effectively?
[Costigan]: Yeah, I have a few thoughts. Prior to this, I was the assessor in Chelsea. They have a residential exemption, very familiar with it. The administrative burden it has on the office is quite high. In year one, we'd have to take about 8,000 applications in the city of Medford, and all of those have to be attached with that as their state income tax return so I can prove that they actually live in their Medford address and they're filing taxes from here. So it is a huge data security question with that. To process 8,000 applications, we would need another staff member or two. In addition, from a pure policy perspective, what it does is it shifts the burden within the residential class. So you have longtime Medford residents who own two and three families who would see an increase in their taxation. A lot of those are low-income elderly. We see them when they're filing for their personal exemptions. So it does benefit the condo owner generally, that it kind of shifts the burden from the three families and the two families or to the three families and the two families to the, you know, from the condo owner. So the condo owner is paying less in taxes.
[Zac Bears]: And the single families under the break even?
[Costigan]: Yeah. And then you have to have the effects on your larger residential class. So like your larger apartment buildings or even your moderately sized apartment buildings that would see a significant tax increase.
[Zac Bears]: But is it generally fair to say you're shifting the burden from Lower valuation residential properties to higher valuation residential properties.
[Costigan]: Absolutely.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Okay. Cool. I appreciate the quick analysis. We're not asking you to do it next week, obviously, but I think the reason I ask is it's been brought up as a potential. Way to mitigate the impacts of a potential 2 and a half override or a debt exclusion that looks like we're headed down at least 1 of those roads, maybe both in some way. So. It's not going to bring any more revenue in and see right now I'm saying to mitigate the impact to say, if you have a two and a half overriding a debt exclusion, could you hear that and institute a residential at the same time and then maybe you're low, you know, if you're in a residential unit below the break even point and you're a low income elderly. maybe you don't see this big increase from the debt exclusion, maybe you actually are evening out or at least reducing the increase that's coming from that. So kind of, I know our tools are limited, state law lets us do not much, but that's kind of the one thing that seems to be in our back pocket that could potentially be a way to do that. Obviously, it's not universal because there are You know, people who are house rich and income poor or above the break even point, for whatever reason, right because their residential property is such a high value, right. Yeah, so we don't hear, we don't have to get in the, in the weeds on I just kind of wanted to get your feel on it. Great. Second pieces. And I've asked this to Ellen in the past and she's given me a fair answer but I'm going to ask you, maybe you can get it even shorter. There are people in the city who say. Assessments are not fair. My house is not assessed at my full and fair cash value or some people are bearing the burden of higher assessments every year while other people are going like their assessments aren't going up. If a resident came to you and said, you know, that house is staying at 400,000 assessed and but my house keeps going up, you know, x, y, z, you know, my taxes are going up more than two and a half percent per year. And obviously, that's not how prop two and a half works, but it's how people think it works. What would you say to someone who says that the way that the city's assessing properties is unfair to certain people?
[Costigan]: Yeah, so first I would say, can we do a site visit? Because we want to make sure we have all the data correct on the property record card. So the valuation is just really from what the data we have on their property is. It's directly from that. So if we have the square footage wrong or the flooring wrong, or if they have a finished basement or not, that's going to all affect the value of their property. On a more macro level, yeah, that's on us to make sure we have fair and equitable valuation of property. People don't understand a lot of times that it trails. The lien dates from the last January 1st, so it trails up to 18 months. Our assessment to sales ratios are usually around 0.93. a lot of factors that go into why the valuation that we have might not be exactly what they think is an appraisal value.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And it's not even the appraisal value piece because that makes sense. It's My understanding of it is essentially you go around every five years, you re-evaluate every property, and then in the interim years, if I get it wrong, correct me immediately.
[Costigan]: It still runs 10 years. We do try to hold more often than that, but yeah, it's by state law every 10 years.
[Zac Bears]: And in the interim, it's basically based on the conditions that we have on your property card, where you're going to be using the sales prices of similar properties to adjust your value.
[Costigan]: Yeah, it's a it's a modified cost approach. So we are using those sales to inform our cost approach. Yep.
[Zac Bears]: Right.
[Costigan]: Exactly.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. And so if someone had concerns about that, hey, they could obviously call your office and you'd be able to talk them through it. But they could also reach out and say, please come take a look. I don't know that you have the right information. And yeah, absolutely. Okay, great. Because it's just something you hear that I guess, and if you can't answer this, I understand if you have to go back for information, or if you feel like it's maybe too broad a question, and you maybe haven't been here long enough to have the answer, would you say that there's any properties that are having their assessments assessed, you know, that their assessed values are low on purpose and they're being kept artificially low?
[Costigan]: Not that I've experienced. Okay. That would be unethical.
[Zac Bears]: Right, it would certainly be unethical and, you know, people basically, you see what people said we were just talking about Facebook, people online are saying, you know, some people have this kind of constant rap that the city is purposefully raising certain assessments and not raising others and from my experience with Ellen and everyone else the assessment assessing office that seems I think it would be completely untrue, but having a new pair of eyes come in and also be able to say exactly the same thing that we've been saying for a long time is helpful. So what? Thank you. Absolutely.
[Nicole Morell]: That's the same.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. Thank you so much. And welcome. Um is the first time you've been, uh, you're you're, uh, you're at the podium. Yes, absolutely. did make me curious about one of the line items under ordinary expenses for the professional services other. There seems to be a decently big cut of about 30-35%. I was just wondering if you could speak to maybe what that was this year and if there's anything being cut or if that was a one-time expense that we're not doing.
[Costigan]: There are two things in this year that we won't be funding this way next year. One of those, just a personal property audit that we were able to do this year and is ongoing right now. And the other one is just funding for field work through that ARPA revenue replacement fund that'll be helpful and defrayed some of the costs from that line item.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the Councilors at this time? And one specific question. So we had so senior the senior tax referral for you when a I think I emailed, we believe is the assistant assessor before you came on just the the information isn't accurate. We had voted on the council to tie that upper limit to the senior circuit breaker. amount, I'll just send you the email I sent him. It just needs to be updated. I mean, we shouldn't have any more updates to send you because if unless we change it to lower but that's been tied but that's just been an issue in the past of us kind of passing an update to that and then making sure the accurate information is actually reflected on the one sheet that's on the website. So I'll just send you that.
[Costigan]: on that point, just a policy point, you know, we are at 5% on that. So might be a point of consideration for the Council of Boston's at 1% other communities are lower. Do you have any recommendations? You know, I think that if the goal is to, you know, help individuals stay in their homes, I think one area that I think about them not doing it is probably the interest rate being, you know, right now, is it high? No, but two years ago, you know, would have been so.
[Nicole Morell]: are you able to forecast our give some examples of just kind of like that, the cost the city based on what percent interest rate?
[Costigan]: Yeah, I mean, obviously, we depend on the tax bill. But yeah, it would, you know, if it's a condo, if it's a three family, but yeah, I mean, we could definitely look at it.
[Nicole Morell]: Yeah. And no, we're not. But yeah, if it's something that we want to just consider future, I'm sure the information would be valuable. So I appreciate that. Yep. Thank you. Okay, I'll send you that email. I appreciate it. Thank you for being here.
[Adam Hurtubise]: All right, we will go to police. I think we've got the smaller. Do you want to do executive in law?
[Nicole Morell]: All right, all right, all right. He's already walking over, all right. He said he'd happily be here till one or something like that, so.
[Jack Buckley]: Be very quick this year. Everyone calls the police. All the paperwork I have to pull up.
[Nicole Morell]: All right, we will go to page 134. So we obviously have Chief Buckley here, find the expenditures page, the expenditure summary is $14,670,614 up $45,527 or point three 1% versus the prior year. I know we have a pretty extensive highlight in here. But if you want to share anything, and we'll go to questions.
[Jack Buckley]: Yes, I never passed the opportunity to make a comment on the police department, especially the budget. But I want to start by thanking you for allowing me to come speak to both the department speak on the budget. So fiscal 23 was a can another busy year for the Metro Police Department. We continue to increase our calls for service. I believe they were up to maybe 3% last year. About 9% of all our calls for service are 911 emergency calls, you know, hitting those buttons. And that's pretty significant for a city this size. Despite our efforts, the past year has seen an increase in crime. I think if you pay attention to the news and the way that society has been going, it won't be a surprise to you. I told you that a lot of those were both related to vandalism and assault based crime. All right, so domestic violence, unfortunately, we believe that this time has risen 5% in the last year. And of course, it's made the news, but we've had three homicides in the city. And when you report this stuff, I'm very confident to sit here before you and tell you that we have a very safe city, and in large part, because of the work of the women and men of our police department. The police department, A lot is asked of us. A lot of us is us every single year and there's a lot of changes that are produced or pushed upon the police department. And I'm happy to say that we continue to be productive and responsible parts of this community. And we service probably close to 40,000 calls last year. So while we continue to see these increasing calls, we do, of course, continue to see an increase in calls that are related to mental health crisis and behavioral crisis. I'm happy to report that we still maintain a behavioral support unit. We have three full-time clinicians, even though One of them is out on a medical leave right now. Three full-time clinicians signed and working to a police department in the city is, it's not comparable to anywhere around here, you know, outside of Boston when they developed their plan. So we are well ahead of the game when it comes to those things. One of the major changes in that unit is we're running the clinicians in a co-response program, which means that when the police officers are out there in the day, we have a clinician in the police car with them. So they'll be first on scene first to make some evaluations. And a lot of times we know we're walking into a behavioral crisis issue or a mental health crisis issue. And the first contact is with that clinician rather than a police officer a lot of those times. So we're having great success when it comes to that. And we're going to continue to kind of push in that direction. I never take, miss the opportunity to thank, as I started to say, the men and women of our police department. And that includes the uniformed personnel, public safety dispatchers, and the civilian teams. You know, each year more is asked of us and they respond in very impressive ways. I can easily stand here and say that our police department is among the very best in the state of Massachusetts. I'm confident in that statement. I know a lot of times I have to stand up here and represent them, but I think they represent us every single day in very, very positive ways, especially doing a tough job. The job of police officers and public safety dispatchers, it's critical to the security and the safety each of us feel in this community. No, they're positive contributors. They're not just employees. I don't look at them. They're positive contributors to our city and they help create that reputation that Medford has. That being said, we continue to evaluate. where we are going both as an organization and a community partnership. And to that end, I'm happy to report that last year it was already talked about. We had the national night out. It was one of the largest community events the police department has put on. I always want to sit here and tell you that it wasn't the administration of the police department that put that on. That was the police officers themselves, right? So I've tasked the police officers over the last couple of years to don't be driven by the chief of police saying, get involved with the community, get involved with the community yourselves, and I'll support those endeavors. And National Night Out last August was one of the best events that we have run in my career. And the success of that has led to the police department, those same community engagement officers applied for a grant with the Cummings grant. And we were just recently awarded $100,000 over three years to continue community engagement through the Cummings Foundation. I can't be any happier for my police officers. It was driven by them. And I can't be any more grateful for the Cummings group for supporting our endeavor of community engagement. You know, I said it before, it's not just police officers. I do want to thank all of my civilian employees. Public safety dispatchers continue to evolve and continue to do a great job under stressful conditions and increasing call amounts. I will always pass up the, never pass up the opportunity to thank my secretary, Alva, going on 64 years now working as an employee of the police department. Linda Collazo, who is always here and keeping me in line when it comes to, you know, my budget numbers. I mean, she follows me here just to make sure I don't say anything that gets me in trouble. And finally, to Diane Riley. Diane has worked in the records office, and today is her very last day, and she's retired, so I just want to thank her for all her years of service. She's very important to me and running this police department, and I thank her wholeheartedly for everything that she has done for us. So I hope you're watching, Diane, because we can meet up with her later on. You know, we have a lot of partners in the police department, we do not do this alone. So I clearly want to thank the mayor and her office for her support. It's not easy to run a police department and the support you receive from the team in the city of Medford is invaluable. We work closely with the fire department, they create partners for us, Armstrong Ambulance, even though private entity is very good for us. But I have traffic supervisors every day working hard to get out there And last but not least, the DPW, and especially Mike Wentzel's team, right? He keeps my cruises and my maintenance in line, and we're not for want of the ball when it comes to that sort of thing. What you two expect to see in this next fiscal year? By mid-June, we will finally be out with our body-worn cameras and public. We're very close with that final policy. I think my last meeting with the union will be this coming week. The policy will be we're going to be reviewing that policy with the mayor, and then I'll present to the council and go over that pursuit policy. And then there'll be some public outreach that goes with that, right? So we don't want to just start showing up, and I know it's new for us, and it's going to be new for the public, but it will be valuable and important for this community to take that next step see if I had anything else I wanted to add as far as the policy. So I think that's it for sort of highlights. I mean, it's been a busy year for us, but I'm open and willing to listen to any questions and answer.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Chief. Go to Councilor Scarpellilli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Madam President. Chief, again, Um, year after year, during the toughest times, you've always, uh, you and your officers have always stood above it all. So I appreciate your professionalism and your commitment to Medford, my friend. I think that we are very fortunate to have you as our chief, uh, and have the staff that you do have. appreciate, you know, the focus on mental health. That was one of my questions. But it's it's evident what you're doing. You listen to some concerns that I wish the rest of the nation listened to. And methods way ahead of the curve when you know your your offices are are prepared with a mental health professional. I think that's amazing. I think it's so important. I think that we went through a very difficult time back in December and before with a couple of very, very dangerous issues at Medford High School. And there's been a lot of talk both nationally and locally about the importance of student resource offices in the in the building. Whether it's with with the uniforms or street clothes, I think that when you talk to the kids, forget about what party you belong to, forget about the talk shows, forget about who's fighting for what, what kind of leverage one group wants the other. When you talk to the kids, and that's what I do, that's my life. When I talk to the kids, the kids feel safe when there's a police officer in the building. I think that there's a huge disconnect with communities that don't allow that partnership to occur. It's direct. You see direct negative issues in your community when that happens. And I think that neighbor communities are doing that, and I think it's sad. I think that we're very fortunate that you stand strong in what your beliefs are, and you share that with the council and the city and appreciate your team for doing that. I think it's important. And I think we need to continue that. you know, when, especially when you have newer people coming to the city, especially moving in for more urban communities, their outlook and their view of police officers are totally different, unfortunately. But when you see a Medford police officer, when you have officers initiating national night out, because in other communities, that's initiated by different groups that want to come in and, you know, share their story. But here in Medford, our police, like you said, our staff, our patrolman really stepped up. Our lieutenants, our captains, our sergeants said, let's do this. And you could see the impact if you just drive by the event, let alone walk around the event. And you just hear people You even hear, you even see the most negative police proponents that they're even looking at situations like this, and you have to applaud it. And I think that, for one, I appreciate the police department and what you do. It's not, you know, especially in a time when it could be very volatile, you personally and your staff, your team, have been very understanding of what the national trends are and the concerns that we hear, and you're in front of it. And that's what I really appreciate with your chief. But when it comes to the budget, I think there are some things that, you know, some of old Malden Everett, neighbor communities to a program and I do it with partnership with our PD, some recreation. I think it's an amazing program. And I want to volunteer and work with Kevin. and hopefully try to bring the Junior Police Academy here in Metro like we do in the neighborhood communities. I think it's such an amazing program where you could tap into principals and talk to them about middle schoolers at risk. and needing that support, especially with childcare, but using it with the people that might be on the gang spectrum and bringing them and and then you realize when that police officer takes off that that that uniform and they weren't shorts and a t shirt. They're just like them. And then when they put that jersey back on and they put that badge back on, they realize they're the same people. And that's the difference that we've seen in our community and in neighboring communities. When you have 50 kids for a two-week period, 50 different kids each week, you really see the effect and how it just trickles up. where it's one kid in a group or a gang that has a different outlook on what a police officer is, and how important they are to them as their benefit. I think it's invaluable. So that's something I'd like to talk to you later on. I know the summer's too short, but it's too late. But maybe even working on something, it's not a very big budget ask. All it is, is, you know, we do with some of the PDs, We have a list of officers that are comp sometime, and they'll donate half and they'll comp half, and the deputy chief there and the chief of police, they're all in, and I'm sure you would be too. So I'm gonna be bothering you with that down the line, because I think it is an important piece. My two biggest things that I see that's scary in the budget, and we've been here a while, but when you look at patrolmen and women that we're down to, It looks like 73, and that's not saying that we have 73 on the street, because I know we have, you know, different situations when it comes to injury or when it comes to, you know, paternity maternity leave so I know that's not a true number. How far under are we with our staffing?
[Jack Buckley]: So first off, thank you for the comments and the positive and we will continue to kind of work through that with that community outreach. I will tell you sneak preview there is a group already talking about, you know, whether it's a junior officer camp or a summer camp for that's very coordinate with all those things. and jump in there. Lastly, it's no surprise when it comes to that, but I am a proponent of school resource offices. I think they're invaluable. I think it's important for the students to interact with, and we have a great team. You do have a great team. We do. And so I thank them for their work, and we'll continue to kind of push and show that we can do the right things up there. And we know when to get involved, and we know when not to get involved in the development. As for staffing, you know, we're getting back up there. There'll be a new civil service police list really released in July, and I say that because it's important because. You know, we're really We don't get as many people signing up to the civil service process to take the list. And then when we go through it, the quality is not what we need. And at this point in time, and probably for the rest of my career, I really refuse to lower the standards because the job is just too tough. So last year, I think we tried a high of 16. We were able to get 9, 10. This year, we're looking at 6. I'm hoping we can keep that because it's very tight. You don't have a short window of time to get a lot of things done to hire qualified and competent police officers, but we have significant failure rates when it comes to things like physical fitness and everything. So we have to buy it. You get some really good candidates and next thing you know, they can't pass the entrance test to the academies and we're losing. So, you know, if we get these six to the academy, we're looking really strong up to a 102. I hope to push and get more right up to the July, but the fed We can't just lower our standards because then I don't disagree.
[George Scarpelli]: I see some communities that are doing that and it's not looking good. So the other piece that I have, Chief, thank you for answering that, but it's, you know, our cruisers, I know that people don't realize that, you know, not like your own personal automobile, our cruisers run 24-7. And so even if it says 2018, it's really double that or triple that because of what they use. So how do we stand with that fleet?
[Jack Buckley]: So it's looking really strong right now. We have, and the reason for that is the influx of cruises that are coming and there's been some delays, but we expect to have three hybrid police cruises end of June, and then Mike Wenzel is probably cringing right now because I'm putting an extra thing, and then three more hybrid cruises by the end of July. So that's a total of six. Plus, the casino grant has provided us with a pickup truck for a traffic unit that should be coming in somewhere around the same time. So it's an increase of seven vehicles to the fleet and you know, this summer, the next couple of months. And then, you know, we've been working closely with the administration on the capital improvement side of things to kind of ensure that the future is bright and we get some sort of regular production of vehicles to the fleet. And we are moving on a hybrid, sort of, and everybody is, and we've seen those vehicles, we've tested them, and we're very, you know, happy and confident that all that will work, all the way from the fuel gas models.
[George Scarpelli]: We've gone a long way from holes in the floor of most of our patrol cars and, you know, looking at two, two years. So this is a great, great news in my eyes. And again, I appreciate all you have. Thank you. I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
[Jack Buckley]: I'm glad you're next. Cause I feel like I'm always looking over here.
[Kit Collins]: Well, now's your chance. Well, thank you for being here. Always good to see you. Um, Just one question for you about grant funding sources not included in this budget. I heard you mention the casino grant for the pickup truck. I had heard over the weekend about the Cummings grant for community engagement, which is nice to hear. Are there any other major sources of grant funding that are augmenting your budget?
[Jack Buckley]: So there's a MRS grant that we work on, it's traffic safety. We were the recipient of that public safety grant. And that is, you know, every month this Commonwealth of Massachusetts comes out with like say a seatbelt campaign or an anti, you know, no texting campaign or speeding campaign. And they were able to provide extra resources for traffic to get out there and kind of a large part of that program is educational and getting out there and trying to probably not a surprise to many of you, but the roads are a little crazy these days, right? And I do think that is one thing I can positively tell you came from the pandemic, very few people on the road and people decided to kind of like, let's pick up the speed and let's try it. But unfortunately, traffic fatalities are up around the areas. We had one again this weekend. And so I think it's valuable to have those sort of educational traffic grants out there. And so the Commonwealth was happy enough to award us with that program. And of course, a lot of, you know, we get a state 9-1-1 grant that allows us to do a lot of things internally with 9-1-1 communications. And there's a lot of training that goes with that that we're able to supplement when it comes to that. So off the top of my head, I think that's, I don't think I'm missing one. I don't think I'm missing another grant. I was just trying to think if there was another one that I missed.
[Kit Collins]: Great, thank you. So I heard MRS state 9-1-1 grant. Is that what you said?
[Jack Buckley]: Yep, and then the Cummings grant is now available that will be kicking in for us. We're getting there, right? We're trying to work on more grants to kind of help fund the police department to supplement it, but not always easy to get.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I know that's true. Thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. Thank you, Madam President. Thanks, Chief. Appreciate the intentional approach around the body camera policy, body-worn camera policy, and generally intentional approaches on many things from you and your team. First question I have just is around data in general. You've been doing this annual data report. When can we expect to see that?
[Jack Buckley]: I wanted it for tonight. It's almost done. I knew someone was going to do it. Generally, I lead with that. It is almost done. We started early. Yeah, you started early. And I usually do produce it. But I'm confident we're probably going to see it next week. But if there's a glitch in some of the printing, it might be shortly thereafter. But that will be, yes.
[Zac Bears]: Great. pretty much all my questions are on the same lines. My fellow Councilors have talked about the budget and whatnot. In terms of the uptick in crime last year, it's still safe to say that crime is significantly down over the last 20, 30 years.
[Jack Buckley]: I can tell you that we are a safe community. And I say that based on that crime is down. There's a lot of reasons for that. And it is certainly a good thing. But we have a vigilance.
[Zac Bears]: No, for sure. We look at the one year, and we always see what's happening right now. It's important to think about, at least in this context, I think it's important to think about. We're much better off than we were 30 years ago today in terms of certain metrics, and that's one of them I think that we should be proud of.
[Jack Buckley]: Yes, I think, and that is a full partnership. I mean, we do a lot of outreach in this community. I mean, every department that you brought up, you talked about outreach, and a lot of that kind of impacts the community interest. So I do think it makes for a better community and you know it's not always just the police it's about how the community treats each other and looks at each other. I think that's a large part of it.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah exactly and you know that's really for me At least, you know, some cases, there's just horrible things that that happened that he can't do, but some things that's desperation or not getting the care and treatment you need or whatever else it might be. And I think that's where that community piece comes in is how can we, how can we make sure no one gets to that point, right? Where then it's something horrible is happening. And I think that's something with the behavioral work and some of the other
[Jack Buckley]: other programs that you're working on that's a that's a priority it seems and when we talk about that behavioral and the clinical support teams we have that sole intent of that that unit it comes from a massachusetts uh another grant i know it's about one but it comes from a massachusetts grant from the department of mental health okay we were funded several years ago and that is a jail diversion grant right and then that's the detectives right there are people who have uh substance use disorder or desperation and they commit crimes, it's not always jail or the courts that need to be to resolve those issues. And we always have that option, but we have other options now that we can kind of look at. It's about, you know, paying attention to, you know, recidivism rates and the needs and what would prevent those sort of crimes from happening. And so we work a lot closely with the district attorney's office on that. But you know, when you get agencies like the State Department of Mental Health reaching out and giving you grants to kind of work with that, you know, you're moving in some right direction.
[Zac Bears]: So great. Two more questions. Just you mentioned this 40,000 call number a year. What does that like work out to for each patrol officer every day? if that's in the data report that's not done yet.
[Jack Buckley]: I don't even know if it's in that report.
[Zac Bears]: I just want to bite size it, you know, 40,000 a year, but you know, what's a normal day?
[Jack Buckley]: So that was pretty good. So it's, it's, it's a lot. And, and, uh, you know, our reports are up significantly, right. You know, that, that kind of follow with us and a lot of followup support reports also. And, um, I mean, I guess maybe we could kind of look at that and see what those sort of rates, you divide 100 by 40,000, or it's not that easy of a math, because it's, you know, you have a certain group of patrol officers all the time, and not every one of my staff is out on active patrol, and they are the ones who are responding to those 40,000.
[Zac Bears]: Right, and that's why, you know, it may be easy for me to say, oh, we have this 40,000, we have this 73, but there's probably more nuance to it, and that's why I was wondering.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, and there's a nuance, and of course, you know, some calls are really easy, and some calls take a long time. you know, we get it done. 25 years ago when I came to this job, it was from day one, there was changes and moving, changes and moving, and you just had to kind of keep getting the work done and you do it. And that's why I really, you know, I know I wear the uniform and I know I'm kind of biased and partial towards police, but this police department, they do a lot of really hard work and they don't, you know, they just keep plugging away. Think about trying to go to work every night at midnight, nights and weekends, and you know, hey, It's hard, and I understand it. It gets some of the police officers down. I got to work overnight again, or I got to work this weekend, and I wanted to be off with my family. But it's a calling that we chose. It's a job that we chose because the communities need it. Christmas night, we've got to be out there, and we know that. And so that weight gets distributed, and that's why I hold all these guys. Even when they complain about it, I hold them because I get it. And I did it one time. It was tough. I'm telling you, when you are sitting there, and I'm probably going down a different direction, but when you're sitting there in a cruiser, and it's 3 o'clock in the morning on Christmas morning, and you're praying your two little girls stay asleep before Santa Claus comes, you've got to get your butt home, right? And that's tough, and those are the little things that people don't think about for police officers when they're out there, and it can be quiet. I go back, they chose this career and they chose it for a reason, right? So it's an altruistic type mentality that people who are chosen for this career go out and kind of, you know, they look to help all the time. Doesn't mean we're not gonna make mistakes, but we're there to help all the time. We're there to kind of partake in that. And that when calls for service go up, it's part of the job and they do it.
[Zac Bears]: Gotcha. Last question is, it's another data question. So if you want to defer to the report on any of it, I understand, but, just like day to day, you know, we've talked about and then I'm, you know, likely going to be asking this on on all the big departments, you're just coming first. So you haven't heard me ask you yet tonight, but Tim, Tim's probably going to get it to freeze is probably going to get it. So you're just you're just the first big, big team in line. What are like some key metrics that you use to you know, assess how effective or successful your department is, you know? And if you want to pick like one you look at, you know, on a daily basis, if I see X looks good today, I feel good today. And then maybe on that larger annual basis, if I see this number, I feel like we did a good job. Just wondering if you have some thoughts on that.
[Jack Buckley]: That is a good question. It's an interesting question. And it will be when I come back to you further, you know, because I don't, you know, off the top of the head. that the there's a sense I can get from reading the reports on like, okay, it's getting busy. It's around the holiday season, right? Or it's in, you know, we say after Thanksgiving, it's going to get really busy with certain amount of crimes. And when I see them, I expect to see them and sort of thing. And you're like, okay, this is normal. That's when you see things that you don't expect. And I know that's a vague type type of answer. But the other part of it is you know, the metrics I get are probably a little bit less when somebody responds to social media and says, Hey, listen, thanks for doing this. I get emails all the time. You know, I bumped, you know, officer, so-and-so helped me out and did this. And I get a lot of that and that gives you the metrics. And I do compare that with, you know, compliances and complaints. Um, being said, no matter what we do, I don't think we're ever going to rid ourselves of traffic complaints, right, because we sit in a very unique position. But I know that didn't answer fully, but I like that question, and I'm going to go think about it further. We're going to have that. We'll have another further conversation on that. but it's hard to tell. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of what you hear from the outside. It's what you see in the inside reading. It's the, it's the, uh, you know, it's how you're reading on the officer's faces and how you're doing and how things have over. And, you know, I got a good command staff and they update me on how things are going also, because I can't be there 24 seven as much as I feel like I am sometimes, but it's, there's a large part of that, but it's not easy. It's not really easy to say, okay, I'm seeing this so I know things are going well, right? It's all right.
[Zac Bears]: No, and you know, that's the reason I'm asking, especially on these big buckets for one of the things we're looking at is an ordinance to say, how can we actually assess what our needs are in each department? And I think one of those things that's going to have to eventually go and inform that is, you know, measuring success, if we have needs, what are we trying to fix with those needs or improve with those needs? And So I'm trying to get a handle and a feel on from the folks, and I'm sure you have thoughts, I'm sure people in your department have thoughts, and maybe in the future we could hear some of that and report back too, but it's up to you.
[Jack Buckley]: It's a valuable question and something we should be sort of look at that. I don't know that the answer will be that easy. As a police professional, I kind of really like the question. I'll be thinking about that one for a little while. It's not that we don't ask ourselves this command stuff every day, like, hey, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? But how do you put that in a metric that you can measure it?
[Zac Bears]: Exactly. And that's really the question I'm trying to get at is, you probably have a really good intuitive feel for it, having been doing something for a long time. What's a number that maybe reflects your intuition? That's not an easy question to answer. So, understood. Last question, just a little bit about the Traffic Commission. I know Councilor Collins asked about that. I don't know that I'm going to win any popularity points for what I'm about to say. that. Sometimes certainly not from Councilor Knight. Sometimes there are, you know. Traffic design interventions that the city wants to do that they feel will make situations on our streets significantly safer and to avoid injuries and fatalities. I'm really. Super disappointed to hear that there was a traffic fatality this weekend. I hadn't heard that people who, um, you know, are against those safety interventions for reasons of personal convenience or work, sometimes commercial convenience. Um, and sometimes the Traffic Commission adjusts plans that to prioritize convenience over the absolute best idea of safety, at least based on the design plans that are presented to the traffic commission. If you don't accept that characterization, I understand, but that's how I interpret it sometimes. And I understand this difficult job. I know you're balancing interests and I know pretty well what that looks like sometimes. And we've been in rooms doing it together sometimes. What can we do to make the traffic commission What can we do to try to prioritize leaning in that direction of safety more, or is there anything you know, I don't know exactly what I'm asking but I think you get where I'm going with it. most of the time we're leaning in that direction of making the streets and roads safer by design changes rather than necessarily prioritizing convenience of certain private individuals on the streets.
[Jack Buckley]: So I think I have a clear message of what you're trying to send and I will say that You know, the traffic commission is a regulatory body, right? And so we don't design streets, we don't design plants. That's, you know, as a police chief, I'm not a, you know, traffic engineer, and I know I don't have that expertise. And nor do the, you know, the other members who sit upon that traffic commission, we rely heavily on our traffic engineering, Director Blake does an outstanding job. And over the years, there are things that have demanded upon us of the Traffic Commission where Director Blake will say, no, this is a safety issue. We can't do X, Y, Z, or we can't do everything. And I think it's probably about a 99.9% time that we abide by what the engineer tells us because it is a matter of safety. The Traffic Commission is an offshoot of the police department. It is about public safety. One of the things that goes hand in hand, though, sometimes is when, you know, if you push for a public safety initiative, and it will take away like, I mean, the direct issue with the direct comments like vast amount of parking, right? It becomes a struggle for a regulatory body to sit there and say, by design, we want to take away 50 parking spots. doesn't mean you don't support the safety initiative, but how do you do that in one week? How do you just tell people you don't have any place to park? And that becomes, it's just such a tough, it's a conundrum that nobody really has a solution to, right? Because we have excessive amounts of vehicles registered to the city of Medford and not at a park. We continue to see development that comes into the city without requirements for them to provide parking for them. And digging yourself into a hole is a traffic commission, right? Because if you make a decision, We made decisions that we think are safe based on the engineers. It wasn't what everybody wanted, and I understand that. I think it was a valuable compromise because in the engineer side, they supported it too, and that's good enough for me. Can we have a clarification, Madam President? Can someone fill me in on what we're talking about here?
[Zac Bears]: I'm not talking about a specific proposal. I think you're referencing Winthrop Street.
[Jack Buckley]: Yep, because it's the perfect example of what came up. It's the Winthrop Street idea, right, and the traffic. But as soon as we take it away, there's this new phenomenon in the city of Medford where I don't have parking, the city has to provide it for me. I don't know that we can do that all the time. And so it's a problem. But I will say this, the Traffic Commission has, in my four and a half years, worked for a safer community. But we have never made everyone happy.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I know we're not gonna make everybody happy. And Winthrop Street was huge, came here, we talked about it. You guys had a big discussion on it. You know, I think even I use the phrase reasonable accommodation and the traffic commission meeting for that one. I think where I'm more targeting is sometimes you'll get something that comes down from traffic commission from traffic engineer Blake. Say, let's take Auburn and North Street we had a committee of the whole on that almost two years ago, and director Blake proposed some What I thought were reasonable changes to address people driving down streets one way streets the wrong way and shortening very very long crosswalks at a dangerous intersection and putting in a little bit more signage comes on the agenda, Director Blake thinks it's a good idea. one person who abuts the project says they don't like it and it's been on the table for two years. That's the kind of thing that I'm trying to avoid.
[Jack Buckley]: I'm not so sure it's still on the table, but I'll follow up with you, but I have a petition of like 100 plus people who came out against that and plans. for multitude of reasons, it just gets to be an issue of, at this point in time, the traffic commission has to send all those concerns back to engineer, like, yeah, I keep going back to this that we do not design the changes, right? I don't know. I mean, I got a great understanding of it all, because I'm a police officer, but We don't do it we don't do it every little thing has this national highway transportation that you have to kind of follow these leads and what you're going to write I know we put a good plan together. But there were community needs that people started objecting and said what about this and this I think they have to be addressed.
[Zac Bears]: And that's fair and that I respect that's the process we had 40 people at a committee the whole 38 of them love the idea that was proposed. And my concern is less so that we, you know, we can try to balance the interest there. but that it doesn't get lost for a year, two years down the road. That's the piece where I'm like, I understand there's people who aren't going to like changes and I understand trying to have a process where we try to understand those concerns and incorporate them. I just don't like the piece where sometimes it's like the concerns come up, it has to go back to engineering and then it just kind of falls off the radar.
[Jack Buckley]: And I'll add an additional thing that we've been thinking about, or as commissioner, I've been thinking about also. So you get a proposal like that, we'll just use it as somewhat of an example where, okay, we need to redesign this whole intersection and everything. Director Blake can say, ah, do this, this and this, draw it up, and the traffic commission can say, sure. And we just put like a set of lights, it's almost a million dollars. And you put like a one to $2 million burden on the city, and I don't know that that is necessarily what the traffic commission's, purposes for right to get regulatory body, it all gets decided, it all gets designed, we vote that you can enforce that crosswalk, you can enforce that trip, that set of lights. I think over time, people have looked at the traffic commission as being the end all is to say, you design it, you tell us what to do here, we want this, you approve it, it gets done. A lot goes into it, right? A lot of money to change. Yeah, sure.
[Zac Bears]: So it's, it's, this one was painting signs, so.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, I think science costs money, which we'll be talking about afterwards, right?
[Zac Bears]: Not a million bucks. But, you know, for me, my flip side of it is, if you think it's the safest interventions, I think that's helpful for us to know. Because maybe we can't afford it today, but maybe we need it. How can we make a plan to afford it in two years, five years down the road. And that's the piece of it like, and it's not a criticism of you, although you are the chair of the traffic commission, I know that you don't design the roads and you're not the only person who votes on it. you know, I think in Medford, we've gotten in this habit of things, we don't analyze what our actual end goal need is. And that means that we kind of never get there because we don't know where we're trying to get to. And that's my thing. I think that's happening with some of these ideas and projects and different places where, you know, I like what we're doing at Maine and South. I think that new intervention with the curbing is great, you know, But our goal three years ago was a full set of lights and reconfiguring the whole thing. And that's still coming, right?
[Jack Buckley]: And again, that's the state, the state decided. No, I guess it even sort of surprised me that they wanted to extend that island up.
[Zac Bears]: And I'm like, yeah, and I get that. And I know that that one's multi-jurisdictional, but I think there's just a few examples I could point to where there are places where we've all generally agreed that we could do better. We get a little caught up in the specifics and then the process there kind of falls through a gap and hole in the process. And we don't really get where we wanted to go.
[Jack Buckley]: So to a large extent, I believe I agree with what you stated on like that we need a better or at least a holistic approach to a lot of things we're doing as far as it's not just urban design, but traffic is a large part of all that and to go forward and we can all participate. It's, you know, the traffic commission is the hottest part time job I've had.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I can imagine. I've seen that. I'm glad it's not not this council another one for this council to have a knockdown drag out about.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah. It's interesting, but all good stuff that we constantly. I'm glad that we're consistently looking at the rules and the roles of the Traffic Commission. We meet regularly on this, and you'll see some changes coming up. The question is when those changes will come about, as fast as we can make them happen, but there's a lot of work that needs to go into it.
[Zac Bears]: And on the holistic piece and the process piece, if there's ways that this council can have any sort of roll-by ordinance that assists you, I think we are all willing and ready to do that. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. I'm good. Thanks, Madam President.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you.
[Richard Caraviello]: I want to thank you for the work you've done in a short period of time to bring us our police department up to a modern department that addresses all the needs of the community. So thank you for that. an open office. So as I look around the city, now I see, I think, I think we probably have the youngest police department in the area. I mean, it kind of makes me feel old. I think everybody, when everyone's like around 20 years old, it looks like, how many retirees here do you have coming up?
[Jack Buckley]: So that was just asked to me the other day. I don't think we have any scheduled. So 65 years old, we have to retire. So it's a mandatory retirement of police officers. And we look at those as a benchmark. And I don't think we have one coming up for related to that in the next two years. So we're good for a few years. Good for a few years. Do I anticipate we may lose three to retirement? I mean, anyone can leave at any time. I'm guessing a number could be.
[Richard Caraviello]: And I think, I think they asked about
[Jack Buckley]: officers in the academy? Yes again we're going through the process right now we're pushing it along we have uh we're we're slated to try to put six in the academy by July 17th I think today.
[Richard Caraviello]: So by next year we'll we'll uh have a we'll we'll be up to a better number than 73 patrolmen? Uh we we we we should be yes. Okay um The police station?
[Jack Buckley]: Yes.
[Richard Caraviello]: Are we funding it properly for management and maintenance? I know, I know that's been a weak point of the city for many, many years, you know, we don't, we don't take care of our property. Are we spending enough money?
[Jack Buckley]: We have a cleaning crew that's in there. It's working. I don't have any issues. You know, all VG who's it was the facilities maintenance guy is constantly over in our police department working. We've, you know, a new building, we had some growing pains, especially with a few different areas, they're all kind of working through and resolved itself. It takes a long time to get an HVAC system balanced in a new building, and we may have, you know.
[Richard Caraviello]: So we're spending enough money to keep the building up to its proper standards?
[Jack Buckley]: To the best that I can tell, because even some of those that don't fall into my, you know, under my budget, but I can't be happy with what's going on with the building right now.
[Richard Caraviello]: You can get HVAC outs in this building. Yeah, it's everywhere. Question I ask every year, and I know you don't want to answer it, and I know you struggle to fill details every day. Is there a plan to bring the retirees on? to lessen the burden on you?
[Jack Buckley]: There's always a plan. It really is about negotiations with both unions when it comes down to this. And we've done some considerable work on this.
[Richard Caraviello]: Many cities have them. They allow them to work for a few years after they retire. And I drive by and I see work projects unmanned with no detail on them.
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, it is a problem. I mean, what's happening is you know, I'm not gonna say we're down significantly in police officers, but we are down significantly in police officers who certainly have an interest in working some extra time, right, you know, but those, the kind of quandary we're having a little bit with police officers, retired police officers working is that they have to meet all, if you're gonna wear this uniform as a police officer, just do a road job as a retiree, you have to meet all the standards of post requirement and all the training, that's a burden on the police departments also. So we're trying to find ways around that and get some assistance to help with that.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. Two more questions. How many police union contracts are not settled yet? We have two police units and they're both open. They're not settled yet, they're open still? They're open, yes. And my last question, it seems like your budget is level funded. Were there any needs that weren't addressed in here that you would like to see? Nothing?
[Jack Buckley]: Some of the things I shifted around, you know, in response to expense things. No wish list? A wish list is different than budget needs. I get asked that question all the time. I got a huge wish list, but it's a totally different question. that the Is Alva going to be there longer than you for another chief? I have already told Alva she will have another chief.
[Richard Caraviello]: You're the third chief.
[Jack Buckley]: She's healthy as a horse. I don't want to talk about it. She'll leave tomorrow. God bless Alva. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council? Um, I know we had talked about this in person and you mentioned the education component of around traffic. Is there any different approach to traffic enforcement or, or hours just in consideration of increase in traffic deaths, pedestrian deaths nationwide at the state level?
[Jack Buckley]: Yeah, I mean, so the good thing is, is, you know, when we get these new offices, we can, you know, move some people around, we can increase our traffic, and we've maintained a traffic unit separate from patrol for many, many years. And sometimes that gets hit in the little open, it's doing really well. You know, we're going to kind of continue to do that, focus on that. One of our traffic sergeants does a lot of social media stuff like YouTube videos, and we put those out in the past to be successful, but we really have to start it. We have to kind of do our own internal public safety kind of support because it's, traffic's back, right? I mean, we had a lull in the pandemic, and I think people learned how to drive very poorly during the pandemic, but now they're all out there on the roads again. And while the increase in cars have gone, people's sentiments are still kind of spiked, right? And so it's showing up in some aggression and some speeds, but we'll continue. I can tell you, even my patrol units are out there very actively increasing on traffic enforcement and parking enforcement. It still can be overwhelming at some point of times, but it's educating the people and getting people to understand that doing the right thing makes for a safer community. Slow down with a 25 mile an hour speed limit. Amazing what you could do to make a safe city if everyone just did that. do you see people coming through here? They come in a lot of going to work, coming home from work. I haven't met a person yet who's, you know, casually going to work or casually going home from work, right? They're all in a rush. Doesn't help. And then add, you know, AI. That's on the second department head now said that, right? But the advent of things, we've talked about the spheres, but the advent of ways, right? And things like that, it's just telling people what to do right now. And it's taken away a lot of the human element of driving, because you're following just a machine telling you where to go and what to do to save 30 seconds. You know, we have all these rules, don't look at your phone, don't text and drive. But nobody's actually put out that says, stop listening to Waze telling you where to go. And it is a complete, people are disconnected from their obligations on the road, driving safely when they're listening to a phone telling them what to do. Because they think, if I miss this turn, I'm doomed. I'll be sitting in traffic for hours. But if they've ever used Waze and just look at alternate routes, yeah.
[Richard Caraviello]: on the road every single day, Waze does not work. If you don't follow Waze and you stay on the straight road, you'll see that it'll change and it'll get you there quicker. So don't always follow the Waze because it doesn't always get you there the fastest way.
[Jack Buckley]: I really just brought it up because I felt obligated to bring up AI now. And it fit the answer. Of course.
[Nicole Morell]: Yeah. And I appreciate it. And I appreciate the education part. I also appreciate you know, sitting at the left turn, turn onto Harvard Ave from High Street and watching those cars get pulled over. So things that, when you're not supposed to be turning. So I appreciate the education. I think enforcement also, you know, helps. It's a carrot and stick kind of thing. And five to seven, I believe, basically rush hour.
[Theresa Dupont]: There's a sign right there.
[Nicole Morell]: Um, yes. Great. Any other questions from Councilors? seeing none. Thank you so much, Chief.
[Jack Buckley]: Quick question. Are we doing I have traffic?
[Nicole Morell]: Oh, yes. Yeah. Yes.
[Jack Buckley]: Do we want to do that now?
[Nicole Morell]: Yes. Any objection to taking traffic? Okay. So yeah, if you want to anything you want to share?
[Jack Buckley]: No, I just I mean, look at the traffic commission is what it is. And we're really working to sort of redefine our roles and ourself going forwards. But I already spoken that. But as it comes to traffic supervisors, I will tell you that is a We were lucky in the city. We had some really dedicated and long term traffic supervisors, which we hire about 25 each year. And even with that, we had 10 in reserve every single time, and they moved up to the years. A lot of them have retired, a lot of them recently time and age, and we are struggling to fill the traffic supervisor roles and to fill those obligations. That's a burden on my police officers. When you see five traffic posts crossing children not filled in the morning, there's police officers who leave their shift and come off and we're using everything from lieutenants and captains and you know detectives to cover those roles and back and forth but it's it's not necessarily a knock on them they are valuable you know employees it's just that I don't have time replacing some of them they have to take some sort of time off you know here and there because everyone deserves their equal time off but it's getting to be a fine line. I say this all the time if you want to be a traffic supervisor sign up it's on the website you can be there It is a very rewarding job. Who gets to interact with kids every single morning, seeing them laughing and smiling, going to school and getting them across the school safe. So that's the only thing I say. I truly appreciate all the work they do. And if we could hire more, it'll be better.
[Nicole Morell]: I think, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think they're keeping us together in some of the traffic areas, for sure. They're keeping all of us safe. It's not just the kids.
[Jack Buckley]: They know the kids, they know their area, right? And as we hire new ones, they develop and they say, no, I like this location. I want to stay here and if it helps us. But it's a struggle. Everyone's struggled a lot, right? It's not a phenomenon that's local to Medford only. So maybe that'll change.
[Nicole Morell]: Do you believe we have, Councilor Tseng?
[Justin Tseng]: Um, yeah, I did realize this might be a better question for the traffic engineer based on the answer you gave, um, Councilor Bears earlier, but, um, hearing about Waze made me think, um, that I did learn that a city government can ask Waze for, um, all of its data to see, you know, where, like, to get numbers on traffic and making those decisions and safety and all of that. I you might be able to answer this, you might not be probably might be the better person to go to. But do you know, as if, as a city, we've asked ways.
[Jack Buckley]: So ways is sometimes responsive to us, like, you know, occasionally, we'll sit there and say, Hey, can you we're making some changes here in the city? Can you put this as a do not enter street or something along those lines? Sometimes they're responsive and sometimes they're not. They try to be responsive, but I just think they probably get those requests all over the place. We have not yet asked them for statistics, and I will look into that. I think we have, you know, our crime analyst, crime statistician, statistics person, I almost tried to say statistician, but I said it right there. He can get working on that right away and see what they will provide for us. It'll be interesting to see what they do.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I don't know if the data might be able to help you, but I mean, it'd be good for our city to get the data. I was at a meeting.
[Jack Buckley]: It might be good for the educational purpose, too, to say, hey, listen, I mean, I know where the traffic problems are, right?
[Justin Tseng]: It's instinctive.
[Jack Buckley]: You see it and we deal with it all the time. But maybe, you know, finding a way to publish that sort of stuff and to say, hey, listen, you're creating a burden on the city. can you find a new way to go to school? Can you stop using weights?
[Justin Tseng]: Can you? Yeah, 100%, yeah.
[Jack Buckley]: No one's gonna listen to that.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I was in a meeting and one of the people worked for, I believe worked for Waze, and they said that any city government could request the data for free. Those statistics from Waze for free.
[Jack Buckley]: That's good information, yeah. We'll try to take advantage of that source, see what they provide us.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Thank you for being here, Chief. I appreciate it.
[Jack Buckley]: Thank you all, appreciate it. Good night.
[Nicole Morell]: All right, we will go to planning development and sustainability, which is page 122. And. We have Director Alicia Hunt here and for expenditures we have $779,084 up $101,460, 14.97% from the prior year. Director Hunt I know you're very, very familiar with all of us. Any highlights you want to share that we might not know or you want to call out and then we'll go to questions.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I feel like I'm in front of you so often that you know a lot of the work that I'm doing and in lieu of the time, I'm happy to just take questions unless you would like me to highlight stuff.
[Nicole Morell]: sure we'll go yeah I mean yeah Adam's usually the one who would say no absolutely not don't talk empty. So, questions. I just have one.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, and I appreciate what your team is doing something like that. You look at local communities, where they have teams and teams of people on the development community development team. Even some cities have their own attorneys with that. I know it's a luxury. So, I understand it's a difficult position. I think that. What I just one question I've asked, I'll ask every department head is staffing from your administrative staff to your team. Do you think you're staffed adequately is there? I mean, other than and I take that. And I love you're the only one that really does this, but I love how you backfill with students and take advantage of that. I think that that's a great benefit. So but other than that, I'm talking, you know, You know, Victor was a great example. He came in and really elevated the department and it's sad to see him go, but at the same time, what do you think you would need to really have the ultimate team as a growing community? And, you know, like some people have talked about, to have the paintbrush to paint the development in this community is so exciting. So, you know, what do you think?
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, well, thank you. As you all know, we do a lot. You could give me a hundred people and I would say we could do more, right? Like that's true. We've been working pretty to bring in additional staff positions with CDBG, CPA funding, making that full-time. So we've added a few positions this year through that particularly. And I like this idea of growing the department in measurable amounts. So we are adding some positions that are off budget with the CDBG we're using to fund stuff. I got a grant from MAPC for a climate person. Really it's the climate backfilling that I'm really looking for. And Like I literally wouldn't want another position on top of what I have right now, because I want to fill these. I have two people who have started in the last two weeks. I'm looking at bringing on three more people in the next couple of weeks. That's a pace that we can manage. Then I want a year to work with them and actually like, let's get things going and get things settled. And then. That's not to say that next year I wouldn't be actually pushing for another position. Some of our positions have been ARPA funded and grant funded and bringing them into the general fund is something that we're working on doing. And how can we use CDBG. The city had not previously been funding many positions with CDBG and we realized we could be funding more of them. So that's where the housing planners coming from. Um, and that's where I see the economic development planner being funded after the ARPA funding runs out. So there is, you know, space there. Um, I can, I can always do more, but looking at it with that format, I understand that.
[George Scarpelli]: And I think that for us, I think the important piece is that, you know, the zoning the zoning piece that we're going to be working with and having your team. We have enough staff to run that team because I think when you know we were, we were involved with it next door. And, you know, even, even the recreation department was part of that, you know, weekly meeting at different, different neighborhoods. to talk about the impact from recreation from police to fire. And what do we want to see in that neighborhood? So we think we have enough. You have enough staff and we look at what we're trying to use that $50,000 for we'll be okay with that.
[Alicia Hunt]: Well it's interesting because Somerville did their zoning all in house and they took seven years to do it, and I don't think we want to take seven years, and I think we could really benefit with bringing in outside consultants to do the work. That's why I said that I think having that team, we do actually have some really so Danielle who's our new senior planner. She has extensive experience with zoning she was actually on the zoning board in Somerville for 15 years, and she staffed zoning boards and planning boards in three other communities. So we've been trying to bring some of this experience in to help supplement the work that we're doing.
[George Scarpelli]: She worked under George Proakis. She did work under him, yeah. Amazing, and I know Watertown loves him so. But this is great, so I appreciate that, and I think that that's what's important, that as we're going through the process, the zoning, and your team, I think this is the partnership that we need to really, to see where Method's gonna, where it wants to go. So not where we want it to go, but where Method wants it to go, so thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Absolutely. And we do think we really laid the groundwork for that with some of the comprehensive plan, doing community meetings, studies, and that was to start to get us ready to do the zoning.
[George Scarpelli]: I think I've said in the past, though, I think that you do a great job in getting the word out. But it's it's funny that it seems like not every group gets the word. And it's not because not because you're not your effort. I think I said this in the past that it seems to be the same group of people that are responding to those surveys and not and I never meant to mean that this is you know, you're doing something wrong. What I'm saying is trying to find that, you know, that's like this whole process with the zoning group that we're trying to bring together to get in. really getting more people involved for what we want to see in Medford, you know, what's the vision in Medford? So thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I will say that when people say to me, oh, I didn't hear about that, whatever that is, I always say to them, where would you have liked us to share that information so that you would have heard it? Because I need to know where people are looking. And if anybody does hear like, oh, they're reading this paper or this outreach, or this is a place you can put it, I need to know that and just shy of we can do some flyering but we're not we don't have the staff to flyer every door of every house you know we we need to do mailings and direct mailings are expensive but we do do we did do some I think a lot you saw a big difference with when police did their community outreach and they went to into the neighborhoods
[George Scarpelli]: Yeah, I think that that's probably an avenue that I would like to see as we go through this process, you know, going into the little pockets and say, we're having this meeting. And what do you envision your neighborhood to look like so I think that, and if they don't come out there. listen I you know I work in a department where we use 15 different avenues to spread the word and then we put it in 66 different languages and we put it on billboards and we put it on fences and we put we have the QR codes everywhere and then I always get the phone call says I knew nothing about this program so I I understand it's it's a tough it's a tough line but um I appreciate you listening so thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks, Madam President. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being one of the last ones. How many positions are one-time grant funded right now outside of the eight that are in the general fund budget?
[Alicia Hunt]: So the climate planner is a one-year grant from the MAPC. And right now the economic development planner is ARPA funded.
[Zac Bears]: That's different from Economic Development Director? Right. Okay.
[Alicia Hunt]: So you guys know Yvette? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yvette's in that position.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: That's ARPA funded, but we have identified that we could use that position, so the, Yvette's leaving us, and so we've posted it, but we've made sure that the language is appropriate, that we could fund it using CDBG funding. Okay. So that, and everything else that, so we have a few that are grant funded, but the rest are permanent grants. Okay. CDBG, CPA,
[Zac Bears]: So just the two or one time. Okay, great. Sorry, but you were saying that there was ARPA, people who are funded through ARPA right now.
[Alicia Hunt]: So it's the Economic Development Planner and then the Staff Planner and the Staff Planner that we brought on the budget in this one.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, okay.
[Alicia Hunt]: So you see the increase here, that is the staff- So next year- Right, so it's Amanda's position, Staff Planner, that's been ARPA funded, that's showing in the general fund this coming year.
[Zac Bears]: I just want to make sure. So next year for ARPA, you found sources for all the ARPA funded positions already.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Great.
[Alicia Hunt]: Cool. I couldn't, I couldn't handle the stress of losing them.
[Zac Bears]: I don't think our new growth number could either. Um, just in terms of grant management, you were saying kind of that you're, I mean, you, you manage a lot of grants and you're, you're staffing that or you adjusted how you staff that a little bit now.
[Alicia Hunt]: So that's what we're adjusting how we staff that. So the CDBG manager position turned over and we've posted that position as CDBG and grants manager with the idea that that will do some. And that to do some of the additional grants, the CPA manager, we said, we'd like to put that position also do so that positions have been part time. We made that a full time job, which we do think there's full time work there, but we said full time plus some additional grants management. And then we're also looking at the city's ARPA fund funds manager. to do some additional federal grants management for us. Okay, so we're sort of pulling those together. And then our, our head clerk really is a finance position, a lot of it. And that's actually why Teresa is with me tonight. She's been serving in that role. By the way, she's your new CPA manager, but I haven't backfilled her position. So she helps me with the budgets, the finances, the invoices and everything. So that position also does some amount of the financial tracking of grants.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. I noticed that this repairs and maintenance machinery and the ordinary expense line for energy and environment, it was at 25,000 spend this year, but only 10,000 budgeted.
[Alicia Hunt]: Do you remember what we spent? I know some of it's the turbine, but- Yes, I can speak to that.
[Theresa Dupont]: There was an error in a budget transfer. It's on my to-do list to get that corrected, hopefully by end of next week. Okay. So the actual spend is about, it will be a little bit over, but by only about two grand. Okay. So it's just an error.
[Zac Bears]: Was that just from a different account in your budget or a different account in somebody? Correct. Okay, got it.
[Alicia Hunt]: That's why we have a finance person.
[Richard Caraviello]: I'm all set, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President. I'm in your office enough. I think you know that. My only question is where are we in replacing Victor?
[Alicia Hunt]: So we did a round of interviews. We did a round of interviews. He's really hard to replace. You know, he just really, he was an amazing find. He is still working a few hours a week for us. So we did a round of interviews. We had a candidate, she ghosted us. We've done another round of interviews. We're making a decision now. I don't wanna actually say too much more than that, but I'm hopeful that that's gonna move forward this time. But it was really hard. I will tell you that almost every applicant was from outside of the state of Massachusetts. it's hard to find this position.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Between Councilor Verrilli and Councilor Caravelle, they've covered my two main questions. You were close. I guess asking more about the economic development part of the office, do you think that we will eventually need expanded capacity, especially if we do rezoning and we bring more business in? Do you think we'll need more capacity on that side of the office to reach out to businesses, to try to attract businesses?
[Alicia Hunt]: So when we're successful at what we're doing, We really needed somebody to get the ball rolling and to get the word out there that Medford was open for business and that Medford was open for new businesses and for development. And we've really done that and people are really hearing that. So now we're getting calls. We need to field those. We need to be doing some studies. We're working with this with the zoning too to make sure that the changes in zoning are appropriate. You know, some of it is telling the businesses that we're available and some of it is actually making places where the zoning is appropriate for the businesses they want to bring and we want them to bring here. So that's some of what we need to be working over on over the next six months, a year, 18 months. is getting that. Sorry if I'm a little shaky. It's cold in here next time. Please warn me so I can get my jacket.
[Nicole Morell]: We all have different interpretations of how it feels.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm sorry. We got it for you, right? I know, and it's working.
[Adam Hurtubise]: I sweat in the shower. Just warn me. Just when it's like 79 when we get here and then 72 when I turn it on.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, sorry. It'll be warm in about 10 minutes. So the other thing that we, so there's the development, the director tends to work with those big developers. And then we try to have the planner be doing work with small businesses. And I have a whole list of things now that we have outdoor dining sort of really rolling. And we've got a facade program that's working pretty well. And we really want to be doing the next one that we're going to take on is actually signs. So it was interesting I've had some of our new small businesses tell me that they had trouble getting a company willing to make put saw do signs for them in Medford. And so I made a note. I said, Yvette, you're leaving. As soon as I get your position replaced, that person is going to go figure out what's going on. Why don't they want to do science? What's hard in Medford? Let's understand that. Once we do that research, figure it out. Is it something in City Hall? Is it in our rules? I don't know. Um, but it was really interesting to sort of hear that. Um, so we want that sort of like the next thing that I want them to do, but a lot of what we'd love to get the word out is with the small businesses that we can help them. And we want to make sure that as soon as we hear that a small business is thinking about coming into Medford, we can step them through this process so that by the time they're coming in front of you for their common victualers permit, we've whispered to them, by the way, when you're in front of city council, That's a great time to promo your business. Tell them all about it. Tell them about your operating hours. Think of it as don't be scared. Be there to promo it. There's nobody giving them advice on the way through. Do they get their permits? Yes. But could they be doing just a better job in that outreach and stuff? You can see the difference between the businesses who actually are familiar with Medford's process and the ones who have no idea why they're in front of the city council. but to help them through that whole process to help them figure it out so it'll go more smoothly. That's what we'd really like to have the economic development planner doing. But we needed to get outdoor dining rolling, we needed to do these other things first. So that's where I think we're going to be going. Once we get really started with that, then we'll have a better feeling for how much work did I just tell somebody to do? One of the things I always say to my staff is, I'm going to give you work. I'm going to give you projects. And I don't know. I'm not telling you how to do your job. I'm telling you what to do. You tell me if I've just given you too much work to do. And you come let me know if it's more than you can handle. And by the way, if you're bored, you need to be coming in my office because I got more for you to do. So I hope that kind of answers your question.
[Justin Tseng]: That helps. I think you're selling your department a little short, because on the economic development aspect, in terms of reaching out to small businesses, I've talked to small business owners who really have, they've told me that your office has been super helpful. And I've talked with Yvette a ton. And I know that she's worked with all these businesses to get them, and Victor too, but to get them all these resources, advice, advising, helping them with data, just smart business strategy. And a lot of residents, they always ask, when is the economic development coming to Medford? But there's already a lot of work being done. And I think this is also a good time to showcase that. And of course, we're all excited for more development to come, but there's a lot of good foundational work that's being done right now that I think should be highlighted as well.
[Alicia Hunt]: We do have a small business guide and PDF on the website for businesses to get started. And there is a nonprofit that will help people with business plans and how to run a small business that we connected the library to. So it's on the library resources to connect to that. If you know somebody who needs help getting started with a small business.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council? Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you for being here. Thanks for being one of the last to present. You've covered most of what I would hope you would cover already. Obviously, I could go on and on about all the good that your department does in our city. Thank you so much. Obviously, not all value can be encapsulated in, you know, how much revenue and development and connections you're fostering in the city. But, you know, just looking at the long page of accomplishments that are supported by outside grants with the folks that you do have at your disposal, like it really is just staggering how much you're able to do with the resources you have. So I feel like that always should be said. I did just, I just wanted to circle back to the climate. planner position. I'm just curious if you can speak a little bit more to that, what you're hoping that person will be doing specifically over the next year. And then if you said it, I missed it. If you have a plan for if that position will continue after the MAPC grant runs out and how that'll be funded.
[Alicia Hunt]: So to answer the latter part first, that is the one position that I don't have a plan for how to fund other than to say to the mayor, I'd like to see it in the general fund next year. I will say that I think there is an argument for either economic development planner or climate planner. Either one could be funded with CDBG, but we don't have enough money that we're allowed to use for administration to do both of them and the housing planner and the CDBG manager. There's enough money there for three positions, not for four. Um, and we've sort of said the economic development planner. We clearly that has to stay. Um, also, so that's the one that I'm going to be asking for. Um, The grant was truly around policy and making change to zoning and regulations was what they were willing to offer the grant for. So that's what I wrote that it would do that. But I also said they would help with our greenhouse gas inventory that we do every year. They'd help with our annual climate reporting. they would set up our climate equity council that we outlined in the climate plan. So those are the main things that I said in the grant that we would do. We also, I do a bunch of clean energy projects, you know, solar and stuff. And so I would be hoping that they would be able to help with that. Some of the building efficiency projects I have been giving to our facilities manager. And so I partner with our facilities manager on like new HVAC, we're doing We got, we're doing some studies of like upgrading the HVAC in various buildings and stuff. And frankly, he's managing those and I'm just sort of like half an ear like, okay, I know who you hire. Okay. I saw the scope. Great. Um, so, so that's, does that help?
[Kit Collins]: Yeah, it does. Thank you. Thanks for outlining the scope of the work of that position over the next year. And it's great to have a heads up that that's one that will be most likely an ask for fiscal year 25. I'm glad that this council knows that in advance. You know, obviously, that's climate resiliency is integral to many of our city's plans. So I'm glad that we have a full year or two, hopefully partner with you and making sure that that has a place in next year's general.
[Alicia Hunt]: And there's plenty of climate work that somebody in that role could be doing. they're going to be focusing more on the regulatory aspects the first year, because that's what the funding was available for. And I said, well, that's a good start. Let's get them in the door. Then we'll keep going.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. Councilor say quick question while we have you. So one of the goals that's stated for this upcoming fiscal year is implementing the redevelopment of better square in alignment with our plans. And I was just wondering if you were able to give us a general, it doesn't have to be a concrete timeline, but a general timeline of what we might see before us or what your office's goals are.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right? So for the Medford square project, We've been working with Mass Development on the DIF, and part of working with that, the staff from Mass Development have realized that we would really benefit from having a consultant help us write an RFP. And so they are trying to help us get an out-of-cycle grant, or basically an expansion of that grant that we currently have to add on a consultant who would help with that. And the thought was that if we get it, it would be starting July 1st. And honestly, I need an economic development director to help with that project to help lead the project. So I've kind of we're working slowly on it with the hope that I could bring in some more staff by July 1, a consultant and all. to actually move that project forward. We have to write the RFP, we have to figure out what it says, then we have to put it out on the street. So my best case scenario here is that I get the help that I need, that we do the writing in July and August, and then September, we put it out on the street in mid-September. And then it's my understanding that that should actually be open for two to three months for people to be able to really develop a concrete proposal for that. So then that's putting us into mid November to get the results back on it. And then we'll see what it says. So. Great, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any additional questions from the council? Seeing none. Thank you so much, Dr. Hunt. Thank you, Teresa, for being here.
[Alicia Hunt]: Oh, so we had... Oh, yeah. Right, I have like five or six boards and commissions, and I will say that Teresa is actually more expert on them than I am. So I think her first name... Does anyone have any questions on boards or commissions?
[Theresa Dupont]: Say it to the microphone. Most of the boards and commissions, which include Historical Commission, Historic District, Conservation Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, and the Community Development Board and Bicycle Commission. Thank you. Sorry, Bicycle Commission, if you're watching. Most were level funded with the exception of the Zoning Board of Appeals, and that is due to two additional members being appointed to the board. So that is for their stipends. Otherwise, I believe Conservation Commission also added an additional person. So it's just a matter of adding three stipends to our lovely volunteers in the community helping us progress our projects. Any questions though? Seeing none, excellent.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you both so much.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you all so much.
[Nicole Morell]: All right, we will close it out. We have executive and law, which I think both would be you, Madam Chief of Staff. Maybe we'll take a beat as everyone is going in opposite directions. the any of the two Councilor, does anyone have a preference whether we start with a law or executive first? Okay. Councilor Knight, do you? Are you here? Are you with us? I don't know where he's somewhere. Okay. When we get back, we'll when people get back to their seats, we'll start with executive. Yes.
[Adam Hurtubise]: I mean, yeah.
[Nicole Morell]: I can see Councilor Scarpelli walking back towards us. I'm just going to give him a second to open. Thank you. All right, so we are going to executive office expenditure summary is 640,390 down 471,790 less 42.42% versus the prior year. And that is the... Okay, yeah. If you want to if you want to just like highlight that I know it says in the summary, but I just want to know because that's a huge number.
[Nina Nazarian]: So if you want to know why that is certainly thank you, President Morell. Thank you to the council for this opportunity to discuss the budgets as a point of levity. Hopefully this will create a little bit of an icebreaker. These are all hard acts to follow based on tonight, considering I'm here to talk about the executive budget and the law budget. I'm certainly no comedian, but those who work with me day to day know that I attempt to bring some smiles to the conversation whenever possible. So I'm attempting to do that here today. And I'm happy to answer any questions you have.
[Nicole Morell]: We're going to do executive, and then we'll do law.
[Nina Nazarian]: On the matter that you raised, President Morell, the budget for the executive budget is going down what ultimately is 42.4%. That is, I would call, an artificial decrease. And the reason that's an artificial decrease, and I would characterize it that way, is because historically, in the last couple years' budgets, we've budgeted some funds for contracted agreements, you know, so that there could be a transfer when a negotiation has settled for a contract. whereas we have a number of contracts that are currently in negotiations, and we're working towards settlement on obviously all of those. We have moved those funds out of the executive budget, and we have placed a much larger line inside the budget that is identified on the transmittal letter, which attempts to capture the what we don't know what the full scope will be ultimately, but the best scope we can determine and ultimately it takes. it puts more control in the hands of the city council is what it ultimately does because it's in a completely separate budget that the office doesn't have the opportunity to spend without a transfer. It's really not materially different, but in some ways there are some nuances as to the control that it provides the council. So just that's all it is. It's nothing big, it's nothing fancy, it's just what it is. Great, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other highlights or things you wanna call out before we go to questions? I'm sorry, any other highlights or things?
[Nina Nazarian]: Oh, I apologize. I was interpreting that a different way. Nothing else specifically. I mean, there are some changes as far as there, there's really virtually no changes in terms of the, in terms of the expense side of the budget. There are some changes to the personnel side of the budget as a result of the non-union COLAs. Happy to answer any questions. Okay, thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Voter Vice President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Madam President, thank you, Madam Chief of Staff. two questions are, well, I guess it may be three. My first one is, on the negotiated salaries, it's gone from that 500K to 3 million. Obviously, that's a huge increase. Is that reflective, is that a best estimate? Are we overestimating with the hopes that it will be, you know, It's a $3 million thing. We're not sure we're actually gonna spend. And as we've highlighted, I think there's priorities that council would like to see funded. That seems like the one area of the budget where it's not saying, we know this is exactly how much we're gonna have to spend on these positions and these expenses. Is that fungible at all? Or are you putting it there because it's really like a solid estimate of what the cost could be?
[Nina Nazarian]: So this is hard to really truly answer the question and really be fair to any scenario that might arise. There's a lot of different contracts that are open. It's not just a percentage potential increase to those contracts. There are other areas. There could be an increase that's agreed upon for call it longevity. an increase that's agreed upon. I'm not saying we would or wouldn't, I'm just saying that there's so many different categories for me to be able to truly answer the question. We did our best faith estimate on this. So yes, it could go up, it could go down. The reality is there's no like set number, but what we are attempting to do is present what we need to capture in the budget so that there is a placeholder, so we don't go back to our past historical challenges of a structural deficit.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, okay. Second piece is I know there's some staff positions that are partially funded through the one time ARPA federal grant funding. Is your plan to continue those positions in future budgets or is that really like you know, obviously, I would guess communications are going to keep that's been a position in the city for a long time. I'm really thinking about that other communication position that's only 20% in the general fund right now is the goal to keep it or or is it? Is it really in our purpose? You know, public health related communications?
[Nina Nazarian]: Um, so it has. It has kind of, um, it certainly was public health when when we first introduced that that position to the budget. It has really taken on quite a considerable amount of work throughout. At this point, it is certainly our intention to look to keep as many ARPA positions as possible. Without I'm not gonna stand here and say they're not all gonna be evaluated, but I also don't want to say that and put anyone in a position where they're worried about their job. The reality of the situation is, are we going to try to keep them? Yes. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: Yep. Last question is just, I know we've been funding, one of the first things that we advocated for, I think the first budget we were here was the translation services line, and we've been funding those services out of ARPA funds, and it's still zeroed. Is the plan ARPA funds this year and hopefully bringing it back next year?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, and if not next year, because ARPA would be halfway through, perhaps halfway through.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Certainly. Okay, great. Those are my questions.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello.
[Richard Caraviello]: Thank you, Madam President. Thank you for coming. Thank you for staying the same. So I think maybe I missed about the $500,000. Where did that move to? I see it's gone out of here. Where did we move it to?
[Nina Nazarian]: No problem through you, Madam President. So what we technically did was we moved that $500,000 to a line in and of itself, which is now it's essentially its own department, so to speak. So if you turn to the transmittal, it's on page six. Thank you. You look at the bottom of the list. Certainly take your time.
[Richard Caraviello]: Is it page six?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, and look at the bottom of the list. You've got city total going in the reverse order, education, bonds and interest, pension, insurance, workers comp, and then contractual agreements. That $3 million number that's up there, just halfway down a little bit. It's somewhere.
[Richard Caraviello]: Okay, so that's been moved into that?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yep, yep, and that accounts for the best estimate as it relates to open contractual agreements. And remember, we've got some contracts that have been open for some time.
[Richard Caraviello]: So we had a capital plan presented to us a few weeks ago. And Councilor Bears asked the question, which is my part of my question too is, Capital plan talked about projects going forward, but we never executed a capital plan to look at our current assets and see what needs to be fixed there. Is there a plan to do that? We have no inventory of our current assets the city owns right now.
[Nina Nazarian]: So as a part of the capital planning process, through you Madam Chair, to you Councilor Caraviello, our capital planning process took was essentially a year-long process. It was a lot of work that went into that, and thanks to the Collins Center for assisting the city with that work. What ultimately, from a timeline perspective, we also hired the facilities manager kind of on what I would call the tail end of that capital planning process. The facilities manager who comes to the city with an incredible amount of experience is gonna inform great a greater detail in the future capital planning as it relates to facilities assuming your, your major component may be facilities but certainly As it relates to other capital matters, specifically fleet or roads, obviously the department heads have their own assessment level of that information and have contributed information into the capital plan.
[Richard Caraviello]: I think what I'm driving at is, before we start looking at new projects, I'd like to see where we stand with the assets that we have now.
[Zac Bears]: Just a point of information, Madam President. Just since you said it was my question at the capital plan product, I'll just clarify the words that I used. Basically, what I was saying is we don't have a single number that is the cost to bring all of our assets up to a state of repair. That was my specific. So we don't know. We know, you know, the capital plan, there are items in it that are you know, going obviously towards existing assets and trying to repair them. But we may not know actually, for fire station five, what would it cost to bring that to full state of good repair? Right? So that was really the question, like, what is our, what is the total cost to bring all of our capital assets to a state of good repair? And what percentage of that are we meeting with the capital plan?
[Nina Nazarian]: I mean, if I may, and I don't expect to answer the question. I don't know that I can answer the question because my my thinking is that would be a static analysis and everything, you know, so I don't know. I've actually done such a static analysis on roads going back maybe 10 years ago. that's really not representative of the actual cost because it's static. But I don't know what best practices exist in other communities in this area that may inform how we could approach this in the future.
[Zac Bears]: Right. The idea was that it would be dynamic. It would be. get it once and then once we have it once reanalyzing it should take less time than it took to do it one time you know maybe every three or five years we do a reassessment because I think like right the payment management plan says, here's the backlog. Here's how much they recommend funding every year to get there. So basically just something similar for all of our capital assets. And then we know, yes, it's 120 something million that we're doing over six years, but we need to spend a billion to get to a state of good repair. Like what is that? What is that the denominator of the capital plan, basically?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yeah, I mean, I really do believe that our facilities manager and in this regard, I don't want to have a tall order for him over the course of the next year. And I don't know that we can accomplish this in one year either, because, you know, it's it is a tall order, but the city's facilities obviously need work where we're working on those things. And, you know, our facilities manager is going to be a huge component to that process and informing that process over time.
[Richard Caraviello]: and my last question is, which little, uh, obsessed me a little bit. Everyone in your office, but going by the chart received between the 710% race or most essential city workers still awaiting their modest races. That's a little. That's a little, uh, deciding to me.
[Nina Nazarian]: And I mean, all I can do is address that head on through you, President Morell to you, Councilor Caraviello. You know, it's not something that, you know, is any point of pride in any way, shape or form. You know, we obviously don't deserve it. I appreciate that. And I really I'm doing my best here to kind of create a line and, you know, break the ice a little bit here and create a line in the sand and try to approach things from a different approach. you know, we want to settle these contracts. That's, that's all I can truly say. There are some complications. Um, there's always complications. Things are not as easy as they appear on the surface. Um, you know, with, with non-union personnel, the non-union personnel have not had adjustments to their wages or really more, more importantly, to look at the actual positions and the calves so that when we have a vacancy, how that affects the recruitment process is probably where I think it's most important to look at these areas from, because it's not about the individuals and the roles getting the adjustments. Certainly it is, especially for the people who haven't received those adjustments and have not had those agreed upon contractual agreements. That's important. That's critically important. And I can't undersell that enough. It's just... It's one of those things that we had a number of different employees or groups of employees across the organization that haven't had adjustments for a number of years. A couple of specific bargaining units, as well as non-union folks. In my opinion, and I don't know that everyone on the council will agree with me on this, I don't know that it's, all or none or none or all, I think it's we try to solve all of them. And that's, that's the goal. And so, you know, I want to make sure in my best opinion, I think it was important to make the adjustment to non union personnel. I don't mean that to be, you know, and unethical statement, because obviously I recognize that that affects my position, and it was never my intention for that to be the root of my approach. But I think it's important because from a recruitment standpoint, for the city to get talented personnel, we need to remain competitive with those positions. And we've seen that, and I've tried not to step on hot button subjects, so I'll just leave it there.
[Richard Caraviello]: We always step on landmines.
[Nina Nazarian]: I know I will eventually, but I'm doing my best. Thank you, Councilor Collins.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, President Morell. Thank you so much for being here. My question was actually the translation line item, which you already answered, so thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any additional questions for executives? I had one, but it's gone now. I know what to ask if I think of it. Seeing none, we will move on to law, which is on page... 79, thank you Councilor Tseng. Law department expenditure summary is $552,403 up $8,875, 1.63% over the prior year. Do we wanna go right into questions or Councilor Caraviello? Thank you, I don't see a line item for KPR in there.
[Nina Nazarian]: President Morell through you to Councilor Caraviello, it would be under professional services legal.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay, so that's what the profession spends.
[Richard Caraviello]: You know, we pay KP law rather than the others. Any other accounts in the city of Medford?
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, we would pay them depending upon the nature of the work. If there was a zoning matter, it would come out of the planning, development, and sustainability department, for instance.
[Richard Caraviello]: So is there a line item budget in every department for KP law?
[Nina Nazarian]: I would say that largely there, I mean, so not every budget, but some of our larger budgets do have some compensation incorporated into their budgets. or it's hard to project what types of things may come up, right? Because as an example, I don't know off the top of my head what it is, but there's a case in a department that I recently had to send off a bill for that I hadn't seen in my time here, right? And so I can't necessarily always predict when we're gonna have a case come up for a department. There's a matter that needs to have support outside of the retainer.
[Richard Caraviello]: So if I can ask this, Madam President, the question, can we get an answer to how many departments are paying KP law and the amount that they're paying them on top of the money that's been allocated in the law department budget? And one last question. It says a legal intern. Do we have an intern there last year?
[Nina Nazarian]: We, through you, President Morell, to Councilor Caraviello, we have had an intern, yes. And based on what we've seen, the amount of work has reduced. I think that's, you know.
[Richard Caraviello]: I don't know, I didn't notice one there. I only see Janet sitting in the office by herself all the time.
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, it was a legal intern that was with the city a number of years ago. And I apologize to the legal intern, I haven't met this individual. Did we have one last year? I believe so. I am not certain about last year, but I can say, you know, this year, somebody came back and unfortunately I'm forgetting.
[Richard Caraviello]: I just didn't know.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you.
[Richard Caraviello]: Okay. Thank you. That's it for me.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Madam President. Thank you for being here tonight. I too want to make sure that motions don't get in conversations trying to stay as professional as possible, but is there an RFP open for legal services with KP law?
[Nina Nazarian]: To solicit, through you, President Morell, to solicit alternative legal services? Is that where your question? No, not at this time. I mean, legal services under, just as information, legal services under the law is exempt from, but certainly there's nothing stopping.
[George Scarpelli]: So I think that if you were sitting in this chair and you were listening to outside sources, because we're really not getting much information when it comes from the main office here, and you hear situations like KP Law doing an investigation at the public schools over a coaching incident, the city of Medford with development issues. K P law doing investigation. Um and another department K P law, uh, overseeing the union negotiations K P law doing the mediation and contracts K P law defending the city of you can understand where when we don't get the answers and we don't, we just get, we get these different discussions from different paths that when we ask questions like, what are we spending on KP long? We don't get the answer. I hope you can understand where the frustration comes in when we don't get it. I mean, and that's what's, that's what's been so frustrating here because the bone of contention is that we really worked hard to get that city solicitor's position in for this council because we've been directly hurt. And to be honest with you, without having legal representation, we kind of look like we're just an organization where it just bypassed. There really isn't much faith in us, trust in us, or understand that we have any sort of buy-in. So this has been These have been the issues that I felt personally that when we talk about communication, we said it last night with the mayor, anybody could say otherwise, but when talking to my fellow councils privately, the communication's been pretty lackluster at best when it comes to that. With that, I just wanted to share that just so you understand where I'm coming from without a motion. But I think the other piece, I won't be here next week, but while I have you, I think I'm gonna miss legislation. I don't see the $50,000 for the zoning piece that we were asked for and told we're getting next year. Is that something you could share today where in the budget that is or we're not getting it?
[Nina Nazarian]: So through you, Madam President, Councilor Scarapelli, my understanding of the mayor's position on this is she's communicated it to me and I've communicated it to councillors here and there as we've had the discussion is essentially that there's no material opposition on the matter, but we just wanna make sure that the city's I'm hopeful that. Legal services can move forward as well. I recognize all the things that you said before that point that question and you know, I'm certainly thinking through that. I'm hopeful. That well, maybe it's. Not immediately apparent on the surface. We have taken back some comments and we've attempted to increase communication over time. I'm I think that there's always room for improvement, and I'm happy to continue to think deeply about how we can do that. I know you know this, and I know members of the council know this. There are certain things we can't discuss, but that doesn't preclude us from discussing the things we can discuss. And I am certainly open to improving my communication and the information that's needed. I feel the city's in a much better position, especially with finance director, and especially our new human resources director. I think those things will add to, you know, considering the vacancy in finance director for as long as it was. I think that our current complement of department heads will help with our communication. And, you know, again, I do believe that things are based on not the words, and I don't mean to be in any way cliche, but I don't believe, I don't expect you to trust that my words are going to result in the communication, but I hope that you can reflect back to over the course of the last, I don't know, five, six months and just look at some of the things we've tried to share with the city council. So the city council was up to date on especially hirings There was a comment, I think it was yours, Councilor Scarapelli about hires. We've modified that since. So, again, action. So I'm about that. And I think that will tell, that would be the telltale, but thank you. Thank you. Oh, it's not an opposition. It's just, we just wanna make sure we're, we can work through this together.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions from the council?
[Kit Collins]: Councilor Collins. Thank you very much. Thanks again. Not a question, just, you know, to sort of reinforce the point. I really appreciate all the explanations that you've offered here tonight. I appreciate your approach. I have, you know, heard that about the $50,000 from the mayor as well. It's not news to me. You know, I feel like it's worth putting on the record since we're talking about the law department, talking about the context of that line item. I know that's something that, you know, will be in the budget that I feel comfortable approving. I know that's not news to anybody in this room, but I just wanted to state that clearly while we're on the topic. So thank you again.
[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Collins. And I just wanted to that 96,000. That's the retainer for KP law. Correct? Yes. And then so then there's some money in other budgets that will ideally get and then there's other money for settlements and anything else. And that's kind of what brings us up to that 450, which is what we got for the last year. Correct.
[Nina Nazarian]: Yeah, I mean, I would distinguish settlements because settlements are going to be in and of themselves. They're one-time costs that would need to, you know, potentially have further appropriation. But beyond that, I think everything else you said was correct. Okay, great. Thank you.
[Nicole Morell]: Any other questions? Seeing none. Thank you so much, Madam Chair and staff. I think that's the end of our departments for tonight. On the motion of Vice President Bears to adjourn, seconded by Councilor Tseng. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Motion passes, meeting adjourned.
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