AI-generated transcript of City Council Planning and Permitting Committee 01-28-26

[Scott Vandewalle]: I'm just going to test out the presentation real quick.

[Unidentified]: Hey, Scott. Hello.

[Marie Izzo]: Scott, can you hear me?

[Scott Vandewalle]: I can.

[Marie Izzo]: I can't hear you.

[Scott Vandewalle]: The mic is on. I can hear him. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah, my mic and video are both on according to my screen here.

[Marie Izzo]: Sorry, let's try that again. Testing. Okay, I can hear you.

[Matt Leming]: Justin said he's going to be five minutes late. To be clear, he's not on the committee, but he did a significant amount of work behind this. So he's going to be giving like half the presentation. Zach's not going to be here. Emily, Anna, and Liz all should. arrive momentarily.

[Marie Izzo]: So Justin sent me an email, a memo, a corrected policy memo. Does he want me to send that out tonight?

[SPEAKER_05]: Or is that the Tuesday's meeting?

[Matt Leming]: Yeah, send it out. You can just send it out immediately.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I'll send that out to everybody that

[Matt Leming]: Just the Councilors on the planning and permitting committee. So Emily, Liz, Zach, and Anna.

[Marie Izzo]: Thank you. Well said.

[Matt Leming]: Cool. Rich, how full is City Hall from the community meeting in there if you've seen it?

[SPEAKER_05]: I have not seen it, but a busload of, and I say a school busload of people have dropped off.

[Matt Leming]: All right, so we do have quorum now, but I want to wait for Liz and Justin still. No, they're commuting. They're commuting home. Text me about it. Apparently the snow is really slowing people down.

[Marie Izzo]: There's Liz.

[Matt Leming]: Liz, did you drop Justin off?

[SPEAKER_11]: Yes, I just did. The traffic's pretty bad with the snow and everything. Gotcha.

[Marie Izzo]: And there's Justin.

[Matt Leming]: All right, looks like we have everyone here. This is a meeting of the Medford City Council Planning and Permitting Committee. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, will you please call the roll?

[Marie Izzo]: Vice Chair Bears. Vice Chair Bears. Councilor Callahan.

[Anna Callahan]: Present.

[Marie Izzo]: Vice President Lazzaro.

[Anna Callahan]: Present.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Malauulu.

[SPEAKER_11]: Present.

[Matt Leming]: Chair Lynn. Present for present one absent meeting is called to order. We're talking during this meeting about a proposal for an update to our vacant properties ordinance. The way that this will go is I'll be giving about half this presentation, then I'll hand it off to Justin. We'll take questions from councillors as well as staff members, then open it up to the general public. To get started with the presentation, vacant or abandoned properties create and pose pretty significant and costly problems for Medford. They're often a drain on our budget, and they detract from the quality of life of neighborhoods and the city as a whole. When people see vacant properties, they're often unsightly, structurally unsound. Sometimes they can even be dangerous to public health. And what this proposal does is it will create a registration process that is intended to prevent or mitigate dangers to health, safety and welfare, promote responsible management of these properties. provide a safe neighborhood for residents, safeguard property values, expedite building repairs, and provide for prompt contact with owners or managers by police, fire, code enforcement, potential tenants when issues arise. So Medford has had a couple of vacant buildings for a long time. This is a frequent subject that Councilors will hear about during my own campaign. I talked a lot about a potential commercial vacancy tax. Even if there's only a handful of properties that people talk about, they tend to be noticed. And if they're around for a couple of years, people will bring them up. They create harm to economic vitality. They reduce foot traffic and just generally contribute to a sense of blight. the so what we've done for this proposed ordinance is that we've had we've had a couple meetings about this in the past there was one that took place last year where we had a version of an ordinance the admin at the admin at the time said that they wanted to go another route with it, and we acceded to that. Councilor Tseng, who is not on this committee, but he's, of course, a member of the council, and he's attending, and he did a lot of work on this, drafted the current version of the vacant building ordinance that we're discussing tonight with a team of his at Harvard Law School. To update this ordinance, the council sought and incorporated feedback from the building commissioner, PDS, other interested parties, and sought feedback from other municipal leaders and other communities in Massachusetts that also attempted to tackle the issue. We sought feedback in earnest from a lot of different stakeholders when developing this. Um, what we've generally found, uh, is that landlords that are sitting on these vacant properties tend to hold out for, uh, higher paying tenants and to do so they're willing to keep caught. They're willing to sort of pay a property taxes, uh, for a long period of time, uh, eviction costs and, uh, are very high. They often have an inability to pay to bring their own buildings with the code and the value of waiting and keeping the option of getting a good tenant in the future often exceeds the lost rent that they have over the years of keeping those buildings vacant. We have had limited success with existing measures. State tax credits do require very long vacancies, so there tends to be a list of requirements. The grants that we have are small and highly restricted. I will acknowledge that we've gotten a larger grant this year, but grants also don't create long-term stability for new business owners. And the current ordinances do give us very limited ability to engage with property owners directly. It's often been when the previous economic development director was in, he often said that he would sometimes say that he would have trouble actually getting in contact with some of the owners of these properties. I've heard the same anecdotally from potential tenants as well. It's a little bit tricky to figure out how to figure out who to contact. I'll also mention here that I fully support continuing on with grant programs, other carrots, so to speak, to get these storefront owners to fill their vacant properties, but it can work in conjunction with a vacancy ordinance that has a little bit more teeth to it. These are some of the emails that I received from residents over the years. I took excerpts from them just to sort of reflect the idea that residents do complain about these things a lot, rightfully so, to us. Generally speaking, when I was talking about the idea for a commercial vacancy tax, it saw popular support from just members of the general public, people tended to like the idea of it. And I think people are generally frustrated with the state of some of the vacant properties around Medford. I'll also say that the photos in the previous couple slides that we've seen are not, those aren't photos I took myself, those are photos that were sent to me by residents over the years. I'll also point out that when I say the word tax here, I said that during the campaign. That was the terminology I was using at the time. We don't actually have the ability to levy a tax as a city, but that was what I was The, the, the idea at the time was to submit a home rule petition to the state, but that's right now that's a, it's a fee that we're talking about. So, but this is just an idea to sort of give the sort of give the offer an idea of the history of this. Okay. Other municipalities, which Justin's team interviewed, have had success with similar vacant building policies. The biggest one is East Hampton, which imposed a $500 vacant storefront registration fee that escalates for each year of vacancy, waiving and waives those fees for properties that have public art displays. The mayor of East Hampton in the interviews thought the policy was the reason for the reduction of vacant storefronts filling all but two of them. Lowell imposes a thousand dollar vacant storefront registration fee, which escalates an additional thousand dollars each year vacancy Arlington. has a similar fee as well that they thought was a useful tool for improving building upkeep. New Bedford implemented a similar fee, and they also tended to like the results. They saw improved maintenance, a robust database of information on vacant properties that it funded, and tended to improve communication with property owners. Outside of Massachusetts, San Francisco also had their own vacancy tax, which they implemented relatively recently. So early evidence of this indicates that it contributed to a 50% reduction in vacancy rates across the city. So these have led. Having similar fees are generally very supported in other cities, are generally pretty supported by the business community. They lead to sharp reductions in vacancy rates, and they've tended to be good for the economic development of those cities. So for the next part of the presentation, what we're what we're gonna do is talk about what is actually in the proposed ordinance. And after that, we tacked on a frequently asked question section just to kind of like discuss some of the talking points that usually come up in response to this. For this part, I'm going to pass it off to my colleague, Councilor Tseng. Justin, just say next slide when you want me to switch.

[Justin Tseng]: Cool, thank you. First of all, I want to thank everyone for taking the time out of your work days to be with us tonight. I know everyone's really busy, especially with the snowstorm. It's been a really busy week for all of us. I guess just to give a little bit more background about the work that my group and I did, we did it under the direction of a professor at Harvard Law. Essentially, the project was to identify a problem in the community, interview stakeholders, look at different municipalities and in Massachusetts, especially, and across the country, talk to the people from their offices, see what they did about the problem, what they've been experiencing, any drawbacks, shortfalls they've seen in their approaches, and My goal for tonight is to start the conversation and get more feedback on it. And I think it's also important for me to note my personal journey on this issue, where I wasn't necessarily, if you go back into the minutes of on this paper, I wasn't always the most supportive of a vacancy fee. But in doing the research, something that the different towns and cities across Massachusetts, their economic planning staff and their elected officials have kind of reported is that when they've tried grant-only approaches or inspection-based approaches, they still face difficulties of being able to contact absentee landlords. And to encourage business growth in the city, and it was only when they kind of joined all these pieces together with the vacancy fee that they've seen pretty much full compliance and. you know with that being said that there are um you know there are challenges which I've kind of built uh kind of been able to walk through with them in depth and kind of uh present what I've presented what I'm going to present tonight to them and kind of worked through it with them to pick their minds about it. And in particular, I have to thank the mayor of East Hampton, who wrote his city's vacant building ordinance. He chaired the committee on it when he was on the city council. He has also been in charge of implementing it. And we walked through line by line the ordinance and kind of got his feedback and takes on it as well. The draft text that you have before you guys and that I'm going to summarize in these slides pretty much take from Arlington, East Hampton, Melrose, communities surrounding us. I understand that it's ambitious and, you know, I think that's why it's helpful to have us all here tonight to talk through what we like and, you know, ways to make this fit our city even better. So, Matt, if you want to go to the next slide. So, essentially, what we're proposing is in all other in a lot of other Massachusetts municipalities, the vacant properties ordinances are actually not. Contained in the zoning code, and they're actually contained within the building department section of the of the code of ordinances that allows them more flexibility to make edits and adjustments to kind of correct course. Um, if any issues arise. This essentially is a modernization effort. And so modernization efforts start with the very beginning of the ordinance, the purposes. And this just builds on top of what we already have in our vacant properties ordinance, which is pretty much only about kind of bare bones when it comes to guidance for the city. And so, Importantly, the purpose of the ordinance is to establish, develop and maintain an online registry of vacant properties in the city to conduct inspections provided for in this section and kind of do that reform process. provide an appeal system for those who feel that they've been aggrieved by the requirements of the section, and to mitigate negative effects of vacant or closing properties, those same things that Matt started this presentation on. Yeah, Matt, if you wanted to go to the next slide. So one of the big proposals in the text before you guys is to create a database. Matt's absolutely correct that we as a city can't create new taxes. There's a complex set of laws with regards to what taxes a city can levy on its residents and its property owners. But we can create fees, but the fees must be proportional to a service being used and the numbers that are in the ordinance right now I'm really happy to, you know, get feedback on and hear if that does seem proportional. The the memo that you guys might have seen slash should have gotten kind of walks through how we got to the numbers that we are proposing in the ordinance. But again, this is something that is it's a sort of a conversation, essentially. In most cities, what you have is a database. Most cities that have a vacant property fee have a database online that helps publicize vacant properties and on this database, and some of this is already required in our current ordinance. This is just kind of like updating it for the internet age. You know, the basics, owner's name, address, telephone number, you know, the street number, property type, square footage, contact information for property managers, if that's applicable. And then we've added in some things that other cities don't have that Medford already has. And then something that other economic development planning staff from other cities have mentioned is really helpful are things like clear photographs of interior rooms and street-facing exteriors and storefront status and the use that is allowed under zoning for that property. Matt, if you could go to the next slide. So I kind of explained earlier on the proposed numbers. In talking to staff from different cities, they found the escalating structure, where it's like, for example, $1,000 in the first year of vacancy, $2,000 in the second, and then $3,000 each year, to be really effective as a deterrent for bad behavior. And we've also built in a lot of waivers and the waivers are, you know, they're quite inherent to a lot of these ordinances, substantial financial hardship, public kind of public art especially is really common. improvement for future use, special cases like condemnation, that's pretty standard. We have added some innovations that other cities were kind of interested in, that they said that they would add in if they could rewrite the ordinance, like community events and planning for upcoming changes to the zoning code. There was a resident who wrote to us before this meeting who suggested, he's a lawyer, he suggested that we put in a waiver for properties whose titles are in dispute. So I have some draft language with regards to that to propose after the presentation. Yeah, just quickly before higher maintenance standards, something that a lot of kind of folks from other municipalities have told me is that For the most part, they haven't even gotten to the fee part. For example, in East Hampton, I think they had 10 or 12 properties that were vacant, and they've only had to charge one or two properties with the fee. And so they've really seen a huge drop off since, since the ordinance, their ordinance has been passed. Same thing in Arlington where there's actually really low. kind of events where the fee is charged. And they've in both municipalities, they've done quite also quite a long phase and period. And both, you know, pretty much everyone I talk to who works in a city with this fee has said that it's really the passage of the ordinance that is a big deterrent and gets people in touch with their economic planning offices. So when it comes to like inspectional standards, that's a huge other huge component that is quite, at the very least, standard, even in cities without the fee structure. They have a much more robust inspection, inspectional regime for vacant properties than we do in our current ordinance. I wanna thank Building Commissioner Van der Waal for sending me comments that I've tried my best to integrate. The only things that I haven't integrated are kind of unresolved legal questions for KP law. And things that should probably be left up to discretion and not baked into law in the ordinance itself that we can kind of, we should develop after the passage of the ordinance. basically monthly vacant property inspections, 24-hour contact numbers of a local individual or property management company in charge of the property, rodent mitigation measures, repairs to broken windows and doors, This is, you know, there's a public health and public safety element to the inspections component as well that isn't necessarily built out in our current ordinance. And this is something that in talking to one of the members of the Chamber of Commerce was really important to them was that we really kind of build out the inspections process and use that as a another kind of deterrent in to deal with the problems we're seeing. If you could go to the next slide, please. This just builds on top of it. Just, you know, authorizing different people in our city to inspect properties or to send their designees to inspect properties, authorizing them to issue fines and citations for violations and so on. if you could go forward to. Of course, with any ordinance, we have to consider the enforcement regime as well. Usually with the, because this is a building kind of falls under the building code, not building code, building department section of most code of ordinances, usually it's the building department that enforces it. And there's, of course, with the health components of it, the board of health as well, or their designees. We've explained in the memo the fine structure as well, but essentially for each step of, for each way that you could break the ordinance, for example, just kind of elucidating that those fines are applicable to those sections. It's something that's required by state law that we list out specifically in the ordinance. We've built in some time to remedy issues prior to the issuance of fines. And kind of built in enforcement discretion as well, in case, you know, the city knows that someone, you know, is going to fix the problem in good faith, but isn't able to do it within a seven day time span. And building in an appeals regime. If we take it out of the zoning code, then the appeals would not go to ZBA and instead usually they go to the building department. Something to talk about, of course, but this is kind of more standard. Matt, if you could. Thank you. Essentially, when we were doing the legal research about the case law and with regards to statutes, we really only have two mechanisms to enforce. There's condemnation, which is really not preferable. It creates liability and responsibility for ourselves as a city. And so it's something that Commissioner VanderWaal noted in his comments, something that we really tried to avoid. And so fines are the only really other means available to us for enforcement. And so in summary, This is really about giving us more leverage than before to deal with negligent landlords and to have both carrots and sticks on the table to deal with the problem of vacant storefronts. Some of this is repetitive of what we said before, but essentially it's really about investing in the neighborhood vitality and aesthetics, especially in our local commercial squares, adding a practical and legally sound tool to our toolkit, while also building into the ordinance itself much more discretion for when we choose to enforce the ordinance or just, you know, basically it's about bringing the other party to the table. And, you know, as noted, in Massachusetts and across the country, this type of ordinance or this type of update to the vacant properties ordinance has seen reductions in vacancies. It's seen improved communications with property owners and improved upkeep and kind of authorizations for inspections if we need that. Again, I want to kind of underline that a lot of this is just authorizing the city to do stuff. It's not necessarily making it mandatory to do everything. It's just basically giving us the discretion to use this tool if we need it. And then on the next slide, I've prepared kind of a chart. This is also in the policy memo itself of how it would work, because I know it's a lot of information. So, we've prepared kind of a flowchart of how it would work. It wouldn't apply to residential properties, but it would apply to properties that have commercial or industrial uses contained within them. And yeah, registration, permit fee, increase in fee, waivers, inspectional requirements, and fines. That's all contained in this chart. I believe, Matt, you've prepared a few slides afterwards. So I'll hand it back over to you.

[Matt Leming]: Yep. Thank you. Yeah. And feel free to jump in for these. This could just be kind of a bit more of a discussion point. But in talking over some of these proposals with with stakeholders, we do tend to run into a couple of points that we've heard come up a lot. I think when people hear vacant building ordinance, they think, oh, you're just going to charge everybody an arm and a leg. whenever they can't find a new tenant for their storefront. And that's really, there's a lot more nuance to it, but there also is like, there also does tend to be some concerns from folks. And so I just added three, we just added three FAQ slides in response to some of these questions that come up at the end, just to kind of talk through them. The first, Is the first thing that we've heard is will this proposal attract undesirable businesses. The idea being that if we tell business owners that they're going to that we're going to charge them if they keep their stores vacant, are they just kind of, you know, Are they just going to get a pawn shop in there or put another bank in Medford Square or whoever is the first person to occupy the territory? A couple of points to that. First, the vacant building registry, it acts as an advertisement for these spaces and it makes it a lot easier for potential tenants to get in contact with businesses. So, having something like this up and running and kind of giving landlords a bit of a stick to come to the table, or at least specify a property management company will help this communication and art between the economic development director between city staff and between. potential tenants. It also gives the building commissioner pretty significant discretion to distinguish between absentee landlords who are just kind of sitting on their properties and not doing anything with them and landlords who may earnestly be trying to find a good tenant but are experiencing some form of financial hardship or just have a situation. So it's not like an automatic set of rules there is there is a lot of discretion that is built in in the waiver system and whatnot to kind of make sure that this doesn't happen. And the last point is really that zoning changes which the city is currently doing right now, City Council with in collaboration with PDS really should be where we're thinking where we're our minds are sort of going when we're thinking about what kind of businesses do we want in Medford. So my mind keeps going back to this, but people keep complaining about banks in Medford Square. And if there happens to be a vacancy coming up in Medford Square, will they just open up another bank? Well, that's an issue that really needs to be solved with our zoning codes, and that's something that we're actively trying to solve in other areas. So that's the first question. And again, Councilor Tseng, if you have anything you want to add, just feel free to go.

[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I mean I just wanted to say anecdotally like this was this was the question that I had really like struggled with before I, you know, jumped into interviews with people across the across the state and including with the from the state government. And through the conversations, basically, they've emphasized like this discretion, like if you can build more discretion into the ordinance, that's something that would give us a lot more kind of ability to like deal with this problem, like potential problem if it arises. At the same time, you know, I explored building in like exceptions for just like, for us to not charge a fee if it looks like a quote-unquote undesirable business is going in. Um, I think it's really hard to do that right without, um, conforming to the zoning. And so zoning is the real kind of the most solid answer there. Um, but at the same time, the timeline for this is quite long. Um, and we can always, you know, revisit that timeline too. If, if, if needed, be it during this round of editing or, um, in the future, if we kind of. see that that arises as a problem. We could change the timelines.

[Matt Leming]: The next question that I kind of see come up a lot can be summarized by this, which is, can't the city just charge more for inspection and fractions? And where this comes from is, I've heard people say, like, oh, I don't want to, again, it's like, I don't want to charge landlords An arm and a leg aren't there other, but I do want to see the city have more teeth over over enforcing these, these. vacant building or disincentivizing vacant buildings. So can't you just do something else? Like, can't you make it so that your inspections have more teeth? And the answer is really no. So I think, again, the only two mechanisms that the city really has to enforce anything it says is fines and condemnation. And when it comes, and if you wanted, if you had the idea, and I think Justin can talk more to this about charging more for infractions of inspection specifically, as opposed to vacancies or things related to that. There are limitations in state law to how much cities can actually charge for that class of infraction, so we can't really legislate that. Vacant building ordinances, like the ones that have been proposed here, is really the method that cities are going to disincentivize this sort of thing. Justin, do you have any?

[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I mean, I think there's more about it in the legal analysis part of the memo that I sent out. I don't have the the statutes in front of me. It's also something that I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Commissioner VanderWaal might have flagged it and said that we were going to, we were talking to KP law about kind of just figuring out all these like the limits on the fines and penalties, because some might actually be for criminal offenses and not civil offenses. And that's something that we would have to revisit across the whole code of ordinances, like across everything we've passed. But yeah, there are certain limitations. Yeah.

[Matt Leming]: And the last one is, will this encourage or discourage development? This was a slide that I prepared in the last hour. It's up for discussion. But I think the fear that this question reflects is, OK, Will a vacant building owner just try to sell off or try to find a new tenant immediately? Or will, if they do sell off the building to a developer, is there going to be like, and the developer is, you know, redoing or rebuilding an old building, building something new there, will there be this period of vacancy lasting several years potentially that would be charging? And the answer is no. Again, there are Um, exemptions within the vacant building ordinance for new construction. Um, if anything, this would sort of prevent building, um, current building owners from kind of waiting. Uh, for, uh, that. That whale to come along that they're really looking for, just like, sitting on their property. So I think so this would. encourage development and there are mechanisms written in there to kind of distinguish between these long term vacancies that we want to discourage and the vacancies that occur naturally as a result of any new construction. Justin, do you have any.

[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, yeah I mean I just really want to underscore that like something that we have that is actually quite innovative that other cities don't necessarily have in their ordinances and I don't think most cities with this type of ordinance have this exception built in is just for new newly constructed buildings. you know, we don't want to disincentivize people from building in Medford. We want that to happen here. And so I think, I believe it's a one year long kind of exemptions where this whole ordinance just, or the, at the very least the registry and fee part would not apply to a building that's newly constructed. Again, we can revisit timelines, very open to feedback on that. But I think that's a very important part of this ordinance is making sure that we are not disincentivizing people from building in Medford. At the same time, what research across the country has shown is helpful about vacant property fee and registry is that it also encourages landowners who are sitting on these properties um, that they really don't have the money to fix up, to sell those properties to people who do have the money to fix it up. Um, I think what we're dealing with writ large here is a real, is, is a bit of a market failure, um, where even the kind of logical math doesn't add up. Um, and I think that, you know, explains why, you know, logically it would actually make sense if you're sitting on that property that you can't fix and you can't rent out to sell it onto someone else. But in talking to, again, talking to people in Medford and outside of Medford, there's actually, there just seems to be an instinct not to do that. At the same time, there's a market failure when it comes to just, you know, even if you have a perfectly good building, and not renting it out and holding out for people who are willing to pay higher rents for that storefront. Logically, it would make sense for them to rent it out and then raise the rent after, or at least they're making money in the meantime. There seems to be a kind of attitude that holding out and getting tax credit in the meantime or holding out for higher rents is somehow worth it. And even though if you use a calculator, it's not, it's something that is happening that we've heard from landowners here in Medford and from property owners outside of Medford in different, in pretty much every city that I reached out to as well. And the fee essentially is a market correction or an attempt at market correction at kind of getting people to realize that there's actually a bigger cost here. There's a cost to the city and there's a cost to themselves that maybe they haven't really done the right calculations on.

[Matt Leming]: All right. Thank you very much, Councilor Tseng for both the presentation and your work on this ordinance. With that, I'm going to first open up to members of council and then members of city staff if they have any questions. And then after that, members of the public too. If any members of council have any questions, feel free to raise your hand. Councilor Lazzaro. Council Vice President Lazzaro.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I just wanted to voice my support for this. I appreciate the work you've all put in so far. The previous version of this ordinance was not this comprehensive, and we have been floating something to this effect for a while, but I do think that it's important that we try to cover all of the responses that we've gotten from city staff, from residents, from different stakeholders. And I think you've all done a really good job addressing, attempting to address all of the different responses that we've received. But something that I find to be an overwhelming and reoccurring response is that our residents continue to be frustrated by the ongoing vacancies and what they're perceiving as the lack of a plan from our end. And people continue to ask us during the campaign and not during campaigns, campaign season or not, like, what are you doing to encourage commercial property owners to not just rent out their spaces, but to accept offers from people who would like to rent their spaces. The way that we, I mean, when people are trying to rent their spaces and are not able to because of the impossibility because of the cost or because of various reasons that it just, it shouldn't be easier to not rent out a commercial space than to rent it out. So whatever it is that we have to do to correct for that, I think we should go ahead and do. I really appreciate the effort that's been put in, and I'd love to move this forward, but I appreciate that we're holding this committee meeting. I think we should continue to get feedback from City Hall and from other residents to just hear where people are and what they want us to pay attention to and make sure that we're not bypassing any ongoing issues that may arise. The other thing is that the Chamber of Commerce has been, oh God, the Zoom is zooming in, it's being very weird, sorry. I don't know why it's doing that, please stop. The Chamber of Commerce was hesitant to have this be primarily an ordinance that would result in business owners being penalized. Not the people that would rent the space, but the real estate owners being penalized for not renting their space. Because what if somebody, what if there's an economic downturn and people feel like they cannot rent their space out? That shouldn't be something that somebody is penalized for. And I think that this version of the ordinance is correcting for that. Or my hope is that this version of the ordinance would not have that be, well, that's certainly not our intention, but that we're taking pains to be cautious around that. But again, that like, this is not a code enforcement issue, and that we've already, I think the city has already been very, very effectively going through every avenue they have at their disposal to condemn buildings that are condemnable and do the necessary work that they can, but yet these spaces remain empty. And if you condemn a building and then the businesses that were in that space, like what happened in the building close to City Hall in Medford Square, I mean, the space remains blighted. I mean, and it can get worse. It doesn't mean that what happens is the owners of those spaces suddenly fix it up. I mean, what happens is then it's empty for longer and that does not solve the problem that we're trying to solve. So I appreciate this. I like what I'm seeing. I do hear from residents that they really wanna see these spaces filled and if we can beautify them in the meantime, let's try to do that. So great work, really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

[Matt Leming]: Thank you very much. I saw Councilor Callahan's hand up first, so we'll go to you.

[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. I so appreciate the amount of time that has gone into this, as well as the community input that you've received so far. And I look forward to getting more community input. I firmly believe that having vacant storefronts is just bad for our community. So many people, as I knocked on doors the past two elections, talked about our squares, not just Medford Square, but all of our squares. being boring, uninviting, unsafe at night, not vibrant. It's a complaint that I hear over and over and over again. And I think it's very important that we take action where we can. and do what's good for our community. Now, I think it's deeply unfortunate that financial incentives encourage people who own buildings, sometimes, not always, but sometimes encourage people who own buildings to leave them vacant because they can make more money if it's vacant and they wait that period out because of the, you know, the way that our, the way that ownership of land works and ownership of property works. So it's unfortunate that that's true. I think what this ordinance is trying to do is to tackle that reality in the best way that we can. So again, I really appreciate it. I appreciate all the work. I look forward to getting more community feedback. I do believe that this is an issue that we need to tackle. I think it's really important for our community that we do tackle it. My one question about this ordinance is related to the idea of a static and unchanging fee versus one that is based on square footage or frontage, you know, linear frontage footage, or any other metric. And I'm curious whether there has been any research into just the difference between the largest storefronts and the smallest storefronts. And maybe more interesting would be into the currently vacant storefronts. Because if all of the currently vacant storefronts or typically vacant storefronts fall into a similar category, then maybe that doesn't really matter. But we should always look to the future and ask ourselves, what could it look like if there were a gigantic storefront? Would it matter to them $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 versus a very small storefront where that might have more impact? So I'm really curious about that aspect and whether that was looked into, what kind of research and data you can provide for us about that piece.

[Matt Leming]: What I can say anecdotally about that is that this is a, uh, this is a fee and not a tax so that it would have to be, you can only charge about as, about as much as, um, would be able to fund the database itself. And I feel like if you start to charge by square footage, that's where it starts being like a, you know, more similar to an additional property tax. And it would be unlikely to hold a court Councilor Tseng, I don't know if you have any additional,

[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, so it's essentially the answer is just legal. We did explore that option. And basically, there's a there's a three part test that the state Supreme Judicial Court sets out for what kinds of fees the city is, what makes a fee a fee and not a tax. And essentially, The first part of the test is about particularized benefit. And the benefit in this case is putting the stuff on a registry so that people can rent out the properties and getting the inspections through it. And that kind of stuff is the benefit. I mean, it's really the registry part is the benefit. And that's the first prong of the test. The second prong is voluntariness. In recent years, the Supreme Judicial Court has kind of leaned away and said it's just not really a prong of the test anymore. And then the third part of the test is just the reasonable calculation, congruency, like just making sure that this is proportional to the benefit that they see.

[Anna Callahan]: That is very helpful. Thanks so much.

[Matt Leming]: Councilor Mullane, did you have any Any question or you put your hand down?

[Liz Mullane]: Well, first of all, thank you again for putting this together. It was really helpful to kind of get a better sense of the direction for an issue that, again, I heard so many times when I was talking with residents in various parts of Medford about wanting to see these vacant properties something being done with them. And I kind of asked my first question around the fee structure, especially when it comes to size of building, so I appreciate that. The other piece of it, Justin, you kind of talked a little bit about the timeline that you had drafted within this in terms of how long people have to kind of respond and be able to, you know, be in contact with the city and what some of those next steps are. And I was just curious, as you were talking, and it looks like your team did a lot of great research and talked to various different areas. How did you come up with this being kind of that structure? And where might you see some flexibility when it comes to or push back one way or the other as you're doing this in terms of the timelines?

[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, so the timelines that we adopted for the most part come from pretty much what other cities do. And actually the fee calculations too are based on what other cities do. I think for the most part, for each kind of the number of days that you see in the ordinance, other ordinances have the exact same number of days. The one thing that we actually extended the timeline on Or the two things. The first thing I mentioned already was the new builds, like new construction buildings. That's something that's special to this version of the ordinance and not to other cities' ordinances, municipalities' ordinances. The second thing that we've extended is just the kind of date it goes into effect. I believe in most cities they give them six months. before the ordinance kicks in. In this proposal, the ordinance would only kick in a year after to give property owners the time to learn about the ordinance and how we're gonna enforce it, but also to give city staff more time to develop what the enforcement regime looks like, what the inspections look like, capacity and stuff like that. And this actually brings me to a point that I wanted to talk about a little bit is just a central kind of question for us when we were working on this was how do you create an ordinance that is both future proofed. but also kind of realistic to the capacity of our city government right now. And that's another reason why we've kind of really leaned heavily on the notion of discretion. And so for the most part, we've tried our best to not make too much of this obligatory on the part of city government, at least where it makes sense for us to give that discretion. At the same time, kind of building in capacity, like authorizing things that we would, we might be able to do as a cities. If in five or 10 years, we do see tremendous new growth in the city and we do, hopefully. you know, be able to hire more people in the building department, more people across different city departments. That's a real consideration for us in how we kind of arrived at this notion of discretion in this current ordinance draft. And one other thing, I guess, to answer your question, Councilor Callaghan's question about the legality, the kind of why we set the fee as this and contingent on making it static, is because the Supreme Judicial Court actually has already reviewed similar ordinances, and so we wanted to keep the basic structure of the ordinance similar to what the Supreme Judicial Court signed off on. We didn't want to create an ordinance that could be challenged again in court. We wanted to really rely on something that's, you know, already been kind of done and dusted and settled and completed. Do you have any more questions, Councilor Mullen?

[Liz Mullane]: No, no, I appreciate that. It's helpful. And, you know, I think as other people have mentioned too, I'll be interested to hear what other feedback is from the public. And, and again, thanks to you and Matt and to your team putting this all together and really trying to take us to the next level when it comes to figuring out how to combat this issue. So thank you.

[Justin Tseng]: Thanks. Chair Lemme, I just, I have a kind of three, three more points to short points that I wanted to say.

[Matt Leming]: Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Justin Tseng]: I was lucky enough last week to be able to speak to the members of the Chamber of Commerce. And it was really interesting hearing the feedback from them about this idea. There really was. I think split is a strong word, but there are a lot of businesses who are actively asking for something like this to be done. I think their evaluation is that vacant properties kind of drive down foot traffic in the squares. that they're in, that it's harder to do business when you have vacant properties around you. And actually, the way that it came up in the conversation was they, the businesses brought up if we had looked at this as an idea. Now, at the same time, I have to acknowledge, you know, there are, there were some, there were also businesses. you know, I think one or two people in the room who weren't as gung-ho about the idea, but they, there was wide agreement on at least in, at the very least inspections and kind of fines and penalty part. They're just, you know, a little bit less, a little bit more skeptical of the fee itself. So there's, you know, there are different views on the issue. And so part of leaning into the inspections part is to signal that, you know, we are listening and that we are kind of at the very least trying to make progress on where we have consensus on the issue in the community. Um, I do, um, would also recommend to the committee that we send a draft, um, you know, it might be a draft with with further edits, but we send a draft to KP law for review as well. Um, even though we've had, you know. We've had a well-known professor look at this and review it himself, like that's not the city's legal counsel. So I do think it's important for KP Law to review a draft too. And I just wanted to kind of conclude at least this portion of the meeting by just, again, thanking our city staff for being here for the hard work that they are already doing on this issue. I don't want that to, go unseen. There has been a lot of work at City Hall, especially from PDS, to try to improve this issue in the city. And we've seen some fruit from that, which is really nice. And it's a tough issue to tackle. And I think that really, again, underscores the point that it's always helpful to have more tools in the toolbox. Um, and that, uh, in developing this ordinance would love, I really would love to hear, um, any, you know, suggestions, um, edits, any kind of feedback from city staff as well, because I, you know, this is, this is a Frankenstein product of, um, you know, individual research, individual ideas, and a lot of what other municipalities around us are doing. But of course, you know, we need to also just listen to City Hall, um, and understand, uh, at the very least, you know, we're gonna move forward with this project. What can we do to make it, um, work better in Manfred?

[Matt Leming]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Uh, gonna move on to taking, questions and comments from city staff. I recognize the Director of the Board of Health, Mary Ann O'Connor, Building Commissioner, Scott VanderWaal, Economic Development Planner, Kayla Myros, Lead Economic Development Director, Sal DeStefano was here for a while, but I'm not seeing him on the Zoom. If y'all have any questions, comments, feedback, input, feel free to raise your hand, or if you don't, that's fine as well. Mary Ann, Director Board of Health Director O'Connor.

[MaryAnn O'Connor]: Hello, good evening, and thank you, Councilor Leming and Councilor Tseng for this. I really do think it's, like you said, more tools than a toolbox, and it's going to assist us greatly, I think, in doing our work. You know, and I do appreciate your comments about discretion as well, certainly. But I think the big piece is it's going to give us a lot of assistance with contacting property owners to do the right thing. We do have a hard time quite often, actually, contacting property owners. So this will be a huge help in that respect. I also really appreciate the idea of using some of these vacant properties for community events. I think that's a wonderful idea, because we certainly need more community spaces. And the only, and the other thing that I really appreciate is the fees and fines being potentials for municipal charges, liens. That's, again, another great tool for us to help us get the work done. My only edits I would, would be to define, when you say a local individual or property manager, to really define what local is. I think in some other ordinance I've seen, you know, it's been like 20, within 20 mile radius or something, you know, so really defining because local to us may be One thing and local to someone else, maybe within the state, you know, so I think defining what that local is would be helpful. And then, of course, I have to get involved with the rats on the on the. Request for a license pest control person to go in and do, I think you have 6 months in there. I would really appreciate monthly pest control reports. only because some of these vacant properties are also attached to other properties that may or may not have issues as well. So that six month could be moved to monthly. That would be really helpful. But other than that, thank you.

[Matt Leming]: Thank you very much, Director O'Connor. As I've noted the two suggested edits, we'll go over that in between meetings. Is there anybody else who has any input, feedback, or comments? And happy to take it here, happy to take it offline as well if you would like to discuss these things individually. Okay. Seeing none, are there any members of the public who'd like to chime in? I think, yeah, we kind of got overscheduled by the community meeting that's happening in City Hall right now. But yeah, so, okay, so. In terms of moving this forward, I'm just going to talk about a couple of procedural a couple of procedural items as as Councilor Tseng said. Um, we really need the legal memo from KP law and their analysis for this, uh, that will. Help this. Apparently the mayor of East Hampton said that that really helps this to hold this up in court. I believe that can be done from from committee. So we could just we could request that tonight in terms of. In terms of procedure, there's a bit of a weird thing in this ordinance where currently our vacant building ordinance, which this is replacing, is within zoning. And what this is going to do is it's going to take it out of zoning and put it into building codes. Now, zoning changes would need the approval of the Community Development Board first. So essentially, to move this forward, we would basically need to have the full council request a deletion to the entire vacant building ordinance, have them go over that and just have them say, sure, you can delete that or cope with that recommendation. I don't believe that they would be able to comment on the ordinance itself, since that would be outside the zoning, but that replacement, you kind of need to do that. that thing under state law. So there are going to be extra steps to passing this regardless. I believe what I was hearing from multiple members of council was that they'd like to see more community feedback, more community input. And so the option, I kind of see that basically the options for that are move this forward to another meeting and then receive and then, you know, try to receive more public feedback there. Or we can refer this to a full council meeting, get the CDB process started and have all members of city council be present for that. And that would also give us a bit more of a forum to try to advertise and get public comment, public comment. And then obviously in between referrals, we could we could implement the changes requested by Director O'Connor as well as some of the things that we've heard from residents since the draft was released. But I would love to hear from other members of the Council whether they think that referring this to the full Council or referring it to another Planning and Permitting Committee meeting in the future is the best next step for this. We'll entertain any motions. Council Vice President Lazzaro.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Motion to keep the paper in committee.

[Matt Leming]: Do we also have a motion to ask KP Law for a legal analysis and get that started?

[Unidentified]: Yes. Okay.

[Matt Leming]: Do we have a second on that motion?

[Liz Mullane]: Second.

[Justin Tseng]: Could I, I know I'm not a member of the committee, but could we also just, just to cover all our bases, add in to that motion, just letting me continue to edit this, this ordinance draft?

[Emily Lazzaro]: And to keep the paper in committee, have Councilor Tseng continue to edit and request legal review from KP Law.

[Matt Leming]: I don't know if we need, do we need an explicit motion to allow them to continue to edit while it's still in committee? I didn't think so.

[Justin Tseng]: Um, we've done it before. We've, I just think it's just to cover the bases.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Okay.

[Justin Tseng]: I don't think we do, but we've done it before. So. Okay. Okay. Great.

[Anna Callahan]: Um, the point of keeping it in committee is like you're working on it. Right. I mean, I would hope so.

[Matt Leming]: Okay. All right, great. So on the motion by Council Vice President Lazzaro, seconded by Councilor Callahan, Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Callahan.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Yes.

[Marie Izzo]: Vice President Lazzaro.

[SPEAKER_11]: Yes.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Malate.

[SPEAKER_11]: Yes. Yes. Yes.

[Matt Leming]: Chair Lemon. Yes or yeses. One absent the we will, uh, let Councilor Tseng keep working on edits to this the motion. Uh forward a draft of this to K P law for their edits. Do we have any other motions on the floor motion to adjourn? Do we have a second?

[Anna Callahan]: Yeah.

[Matt Leming]: On the motion to adjourn by Councilor Callahan, seconded by Council Vice President Lazar. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the

[Marie Izzo]: Councilman Leigh?

[Liz Mullane]: Yes.

[Matt Leming]: And Chair Linden? Yes. Thank you all very much. Everybody, meeting is adjourned. Later. Thank you all.