Community Preservation Committee 04/14/26

AI-generated summary. Written by gemini-3.8-flash from the transcript below, which is the record. It may be incomplete or wrong; it does not report votes. Every item links to the moment it began.

The Community Preservation Committee approved a small grant application for the Tufts Park Community Garden, re-elected its chair and vice chair, and recommended the FY27 CPA budget.

0:27 Tufts Park Community Garden Expansion — Approved a $4,000 small grant application for fence realignment and ten additional beds at Tufts Park, conditioned on the Garden Commission obtaining layout and expansion approval from the Parks Commission.
19:30 Officer Elections — Elected Roberta Cameron as chair and Joan Cyr as vice chair for the upcoming year.
22:08 Draft Annual Plan Review — The committee discussed the format of the draft annual plan and the possibility of creating an executive summary.
31:44 FY27 CPA Budget — Recommended an estimated FY27 CPA budget of approximately $2.38 million, maintaining minimum 10 percent allocations for historic preservation and open space, 25 percent for community housing, and 5 percent for administration.
58:55 Approval of Minutes — Approved the meeting minutes of March 10, 2026.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I will call the meeting to order. The meeting of Medford's Community Preservation Committee on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 at 6.30 p.m. We are meeting hybridly with some of us being located in Medford City Hall, room 201, and some of us meeting, joining online. And that is... are opening the meeting business. Yes. So the first item that we have on the agenda is a small grant application for Tufts Park Community Garden Expansion. And Teresa, I believe you were going to explain this application to us.

[Theresa Dupont]: I am. Unfortunately, the the garden commission folks were unable to make it, but. And Jerry. They're amazing. Yeah. And Aisha. Fantastic. Hi, everybody. So yes, the garden commission folks had a conflict, so they were unable to make it tonight, but I've been side by side with them on all of their various projects across the city. So hopefully I can do a decent job presenting their request here. I'm going to share my screen and make sure everybody can see the application materials here. And make sure that we can also see people over here. Thank you, everybody, for patience as I talk through my tech. All right. So the Garden Commission, as you may remember from past applications, they have been really tasked with, by administration, to expand our community gardens across the city. They have a wait list of over 300 people, and it's about three years deep right now. So to that end, they have done some really great job with expanding.

Having the Barry Parker coming online as well as the clipper, the Photoshop pop up park here in Medford square. They're also re, evaluating existing gardens to see if there's any opportunity to shoehorn a couple more more beds. And so we're looking at tough spark. It's an existing, I think it's the 2nd, oldest, maybe 3rd, oldest garden. in the city. It's existing. So again, it's existing with, I want to say 30 or 20, 28 beds or so. They re-evaluated the layout of the garden and by just shifting a little bit to 20, are you saying 12?

Yes. 22 beds. 21 beds. 21 beds. Thanks, Fred. So they're looking at the layout of Tufts Park and they realized that they can just by adjusting a fence line, they can accommodate 10 additional beds. So that is what the request is for tonight. It would cover the 10 metal gardening beds, excuse me, which is approximately $2,000 from a vendor, and then $1,000 request to do the fencing realignment. So altogether right now, the cost for this project is $3,000.

That price is set to escalate due to steel costs right now, so it could potentially go up to $3,600, which is why they're asking us for $4,000 tonight. So that is project estimates with some healthy contingency. And a reminder to all that any money that is not expended on a project we keep, so it just goes back into the coffers. So I'll go ahead and pause for a moment and switch what I'm sharing to see if there's any initial questions.

I'm pulling up a layout so everybody can kind of see what we're visualizing for the park. But I'm struggling. Okay. So hopefully everybody can now see the layout of the garden. So again, the black line that you're seeing is the existing perimeter of the Tufts garden. And then down in the bottom left, we see a red line. This is the, truly the existing perimeter. So where you see the little tick marks going across the bottom and the green dash, that's the new fence line. So it kind of takes this a little wonky shape and makes it a little bit more polygon.

And then the green beds, these little green rectangles you're seeing, those are new beds. So it'll be adding these 10 beds without really changing the footprint too drastically of what they're taking up. So I'll pause. I have lots of questions. Okay, and Jeremy just came back in, so hopefully he didn't miss too much, but yes.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So the bottom left corner of that diagram, the black line on the left-hand side, is that an existing fence? No.

[Theresa Dupont]: No. It kind of jogs like the, hopefully people can see my cursor is making it to the screen share.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So where it says new fence, should that also be in the new fence shaded?

[Theresa Dupont]: Yes. So it's, it's this, you know, 22 foot span here. Okay. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. Roberta is looking at an image that Reg has on his phone.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: It looks like the basketball court is enclosed by a fence.

[Reggie Graham]: No, because the basketball court doesn't, it doesn't share the fence. There's like a little path between the two of them.

[SPEAKER_04]: Would it be helpful to do it that way? I see what Roberta is saying, though.

[Jeremy Martin]: I mean, it looks like the fence for playing north from there is at the same alignment as the basketball court fence.

[Reggie Graham]: Well, this one, the way it is now, it looks like a cutout, like a rectangular cutout.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Okay, so there's a walkway to get into the basketball court there. Yeah.

[Reggie Graham]: There's two separate fences. Yeah. The basketball court has a chrome fence.

[Jeremy Martin]: Yes. That's what you're saying is there now, correct? Yes. Right.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So would the new garden bed be going all the way up to the basketball fence?

[Reggie Graham]: No. No. So what it does is it's Right where the house is, that little house in the corner there.

[Reggie Graham]: So this house here, right? The shed, OK. The shed, all right. Yeah. That's a little cut out there. So there's a little, it's like gravel there now, OK? So they're going to take the gravel and put enough more beds in there. That's what they're going to do, essentially.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So would this just be nothing if there's no garden beds there?

[Theresa Dupont]: OK, but it's not going to be like the fence of the basketball court and then a garden bed two inches away from that fence. Yeah, there's still a buffer zone there.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, I mean, that's that was what was shown in the diagram is that I'm talking about the garden fence, not the garden bed. So the garden, the basketball, the existing basketball fence becomes the new garden fence, basketball court on one side and a garden on the other side.

[Theresa Dupont]: The hand-drawn diagram, which I will pull back up here. It does look like it does bump right up against it, but there is a buffer there.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Okay. Okay. That was one of my questions. Any other committee members have questions before I go on?

[Reggie Graham]: One of the things that we discussed on another project DPW was involved and DPW was asking that the park commission put conditions whereas they wanted to make sure that the community gardens were maintained properly. So I don't know whether that condition should come from this committee or whether or not we should do it in the park commission, but he was very adamant about that.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: um because he's very proud of his uh outkeep if you will yeah so that leads to my next question which is going to be the jurisdiction of the park commission and the garden commission and how What does that relationship look like and how is it determined that the garden can expand in the park? Who has the jurisdiction to make that determination? We do. The Park Commission does. And has the Park Commission corresponded with the Garden Commission on this expansion? No. So I understand the timeliness of this request, but I have a little bit of concern whether we ought to ask them to follow an order of operations for the expansion.

So it could be that we approve the funding with the condition that in order to add those four beds, they have to get permission from the garden commission first. And then I think you would be the ones to make the rules related to maintenance. So we could make a condition stating that the garden commission has to seek to coordinate with the park commission to get permission from the park commission. And then the park commission can make the whatever conditions the park commission needs to make to give them permission to occupy that space.

[Theresa Dupont]: Which I will say that is very similar condition that this body put on the funding for Barrie Park, because at that point they hadn't finalized the location. So there was a condition on that funding that it would be subject to final location approval from the parks commission. Just want to highlight that.

[Reggie Graham]: So just a continuation of what we've already been doing, essentially. I mean, I think that's fair. Because if they've already gotten permission to get the money, they tend to be a little bit, how do you say, aggressive.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So I think the important precedent that we want to be careful of is what is our role? Our role is not to tell everybody what they can and can't do, even though we're very tempted a lot of times to do that. Our role is to give them money. So we can fulfill that with the condition that they go through whatever other channels are necessary to do the work that they want to do. And that's also has precedent in some of our decisions in the past too.

[Theresa Dupont]: And I can promise on the record that going forward, if this committee would so choose, I can direct them to say, before you apply for CPA funding, go and get the approvals needed first. I did not do that in this instance, but I can certainly do it going forward.

[Reggie Graham]: So where does that leave us? Does that leave us to table it for the next month?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: No, I think we can make a decision tonight. that with the condition that they come to you next, that they can't spend the money. And that gives them some time, because it has to go through city council as well. So there's a little bit of time.

[Reggie Graham]: All right, because we meet next week. So if they would- They can be on parallel tracks. Yeah. So if they can come next week, that would be fine. And we put it on our agenda. and hear them and see what they have to say. I don't think we're inclined to decline it or anything of that nature. I'm just saying we should follow protocol.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, that's exactly right. And one other question I had is, in the application they said, 150 people on their waiting list, this is 10 beds. But then in your presentation, you also said they're working on expanding in other parks. So I wonder what the total expansion this year is.

[Theresa Dupont]: I think this will be it for this year with ferry coming online. That's a big enough project for these volunteers to be working on. So they just made it a quick realization with Tufts that by shifting 20 feet of fence, they can increase Tufts by 40%. So I would not anticipate that they even have the bandwidth any further for 2026, but that is something that I think that they will be aggressively looking at for next year.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I wonder if that's 150 people on the waiting list before Barry comes online or after Barry comes online.

[Theresa Dupont]: I believe that they have not assigned beds for Barry quite yet. So those 30 beds for Barry will be absorbed off of the wait list. So in theory, we don't add anybody additional to the wait list. That wait list will decrease by the amount for Barry and these beds here, which is good because we're working through it. But there's still a lot to do.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: I was just curious, how many beds do we have total in the city already in use?

[Theresa Dupont]: Winthrop has, I believe, 40. They have actually divided their beds. 40 structural, no, sorry, 38 structural beds, but they have divided them in half. So it's actually twice the amount of gardeners at Winthrop. So that's 40, 21, eight. River Bend has 26 or 28.

[Reggie Graham]: Let's see, I can't help you with those because they're not under our purview.

[Theresa Dupont]: Yeah. I believe we have about a hundred beds in the city currently, counting the pop-up part. That's correct. Huh? That's correct. The pop-up part?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah. It's right behind that little tiny office building. I know.

[Reggie Graham]: Well, I saw some tools out there and some, you know, like a hose and, you know, the hose.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: All right, the condition being maybe we should wordsmith this, that they should seek the approval of the Parks Commission for the proposed layout of the new beds. Yes. And expansion.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I have to write everybody's names down or I'll say leave people off.

[Theresa Dupont]: And again, the condition was that the Garden Commission shall seek approval from the Parks Commission on the expansion and addition of 10 beds at Tufts Park. Yes. Very good. All right. Thank you all, appreciate that. That was a second from Jeremy, very good. Okay. On behalf of the Garden Commission, thank you very much for your continued support. All right, what do we have next? Next is officer elections. I'll briefly speak on this. We had put out a call to anybody who wanted to raise their hand to step into the chair or vice chair role. I did not receive, any interest from anybody. So at this point, I would think that we may elect to keep our chairperson and our vice chair. You have both a voice that you'd be willing to continue those roles. I'm so moved. Didn't even give me a chance to unmute.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I just wanted, before I call the roll, I just wanted to note that I would also be happy to just talk with anybody anytime about what we're doing, you know, like to encourage anyone to take on more.

[Theresa Dupont]: So we have to take a vote per person for each role, correct? For a slate? We could do a slate too. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I've never done this one before, so. It's been a while. I don't always remember that we have to do this. Yeah. But we're supposed to do this every year. So I will, the motion is to elect the slate of myself as The chair and Jonas vice chair and seconded by I, it was French.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Oh, Jeremy seconded. Okay. Reg seconded it. And that's not a word. Who first did it? All right. I understood. Yeah. I'm tired. All right. So I will call the roll my Asia. Yes. Kaylene? Yes.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Joan? Do I say yes or do I have to recuse myself on the vice chair vote? I think you can say yes.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, I'm reviewing a draft annual plan. Thank you for your efforts. Teresa. We can talk about it in full next time. But I wanted to take a moment to just see if you had any questions or comments about it to share now before we move on.

[Theresa Dupont]: Well. I was thinking about it and in the middle of updating it so that the annual plan just basically has a backwards look of what we did financially as well as a lot of the survey results. So a bit of narrative celebrating some projects that we've done as well as continuing to identify our priorities going forward. I was curious, and it's a several page document. It's very comprehensive. I'm trying to find a delicate way of saying, is there a more of an executive summary perhaps that might make this a little bit more appealing for members of the public to actually read it and digest it? Because I don't know how many folks are sitting down and cracking it open and really taking it all in. It's work I'm happy to do, and it's good work that should be out there in the public. But I'm just wondering if if there is like, again, an executive summary, a more condensed version that perhaps we could in tandem with, or in replacement of, that might make it more appealing and digestible to the public. Joan?

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: I have this new buddy at work. His name is Claude. He's great, you know, huge documents, and you put them into a, an assistant and you say, please generate an executive summary and speak to, you know, a common person, not a, you know, executive of the city, et cetera, et cetera, whatever you want to say, make it fun. You can say, and it's pretty spot on about, you know, creating.

[Theresa Dupont]: I'm speaking from a personal. Stance, I am vehemently against digital assistance. That's just my personal stance. If I could go back to a rotary phone and everything being analog, I miss 1996 really bad. But I hear what you're saying. As a city, I will say that we don't have an official policy on AI tools being used in any capacity, either for just my day-to-day work or what is public facing. So it'd be kind of something that we would explore. I'd be happy to look into that because that is a great solution, and I will acknowledge that it does wonders.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Like everything else, Teresa, it can be used for evil or it can be used for good. And it can be used at really rote tasks, like take this thing and summarize it for me. I'm not making decisions. There's not going to be any PII or any kind of non-public information in there. So I think it's a good opportunity to take this and take it for a spin. I'm happy to do it for you. outside of the city. I appreciate that. Well, why don't you and I get together and we'll chat about how you want to approach it.

[Theresa Dupont]: That sounds great. If I could just jump in real, real quick, what I could do just to put a little bow on that idea. I'm nearly done with completing the plan. So I recognize that it takes 30 seconds for AI to do stuff. So I'm going to probably continue to update the plan just as a And Roberta's very energetically nodding her head to that.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: What I love about it is you can say, oh, we've made a change. Here's the new plan. Incorporate this. And it will do so. Doug is laughing at me. And I'm kidding.

[Doug Carr]: I'm laughing because I've seen how it can do that. And I've done it. And I think it's going to be hard for me to imagine an evil executive summary of this.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: You can tell it, don't hallucinate, right? Because sometimes it takes things and it makes things up. So there's ways to get it. But this is so inane, you know what I'm saying?

[Reggie Graham]: Sure. So at the end of the day, we're going to review it first.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Absolutely. You're going to spit something out and you're going to look at it and say, this is wrong, this is right, I like this, I don't like this.

[Reggie Graham]: And so at the end of the day, we're going to look at both I mean, you're going to complete yours because I know you, because I know you, you know, so you're going to complete yours and then you can throw it into the jumbotron or whatever. Right. And we'll have Claude. That's what they call him. All right, so we'll have something to compare it to.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I would just like go back a step and think about who we want to read this and why. So the full report that we're preparing has the information that we might need to refer to now and then. You know, I'm just thinking about how I use my plan in Somerville and Um, I'm frequently sharing it with people because of the financial information that's in there. I refer to it to see what did we decide was the budget. And like there is some unique data that's on in certain sections. And then, um, the update about what are, what are accomplishments that we've made over the past year? Um, That's for the committee to know what those accomplishments are, as well as anybody else. It helps us to reflect. And I'm not sure that the public is ever going to read anything, no matter how long or short it is.

The outreach material that we've developed, we may be able to improve on it. But the executive summary, it's an experiment and not a very time-consuming experiment to see how it helps us. But I'm not sure that the lack of an executive summary is the reason nobody's reading.

[Theresa Dupont]: And like I said, as I'm in the weeds, I was even talking with Danielle, who used to be in my role. And she just had the suggestion, too, of really thinking about the audience And how can we connect the audience to what we're doing here? And it doesn't have to be the annual plan. Like you just said, we can look at our other outreach materials. And this can just be our annual legal plan that is a reference document.

So yeah. So back to your original question about that was the only thought I had was, yes, I understand we still need to do this. Is there a way we can take this good work that's being compiled and then make it, you know, I don't think we can make it a one pager, but user friendly. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how that works. And we'll go from there.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Yeah. I'm with you, Teresa, on a certain level. I have my reservations that, you know, this technology is great, but its impact hasn't been well thought through, and how to deal with the impact hasn't been well thought through. That doesn't mean it's not here, and it's not here to stay. I'm hoping that those issues get solved along the way as we're using them. But I tread gently on it. I don't use it for a lot of sensitive stuff. I just use it for the things that you know, please listen to my meeting and give me my notes on my.

[Theresa Dupont]: Yeah. And again, if the city were to evaluate some sort of a policy, um, on it, that might help me look a little bit more direction. Um, sure. Cause I don't know what I can do and what I shouldn't do. So, um, but yeah, Joe Neil and I are hanging out. It sounds great with our friend and rich.

[Reggie Graham]: Well, you know, the thing is, is that even, even if the city doesn't have a policy, being first has its merits sometimes. You can always steer the narrative.

[Theresa Dupont]: I can. I'll add that to my growing list of things, but that's a very valid point. All right. So we will have a draft plan and perhaps Claude's executive summary to review it next month. And I appreciate everybody's patience with that one. I hate whenever I put something on the agenda and I can't deliver on it. Sometimes I put it on the agenda to hold myself accountable, and I'm like, it's on the agenda. I must get it done. So I appreciate everybody's patience.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: We're getting there. So next is establish the FY27 CPA budget, which is going to help you to write that plan.

[Theresa Dupont]: It will. And this is something that I apologize if there's The very active day out there, all I've been hearing are sirens all day. Um, uh, this is something that we normally evaluate in May. So I think we're essentially just swap swapping the, the budget discussion and the annual plan. Um, but in the packet, uh, there was a budget worksheet for those in the room. There's a printout. Um, this is one that I just use. This is the vehicle in which I share our budget information with others inside of city hall. So I'm sharing it all with you so you can see the past years. Actually, why don't I pull it up? Duh. Apologies, folks.

Listen to more sirens. Goodbye. As soon as the weather gets nice, people go a little stir-crazy, it sounds like.

[Theresa Dupont]: I'm just gonna go ahead and scroll over to like the last few years here. So this is based on our earlier commitment of committing 25% of our budget to housing, which is why community housing here is at 603. These other buckets just represent the 10% minimum, which we are required to encumber against each category every year. So 10% for open space and historic preservation, that's 25% for housing, which leaves the remainder for our general reserve. And I did have it on the second tab, what that kind of just looks like, you know, if you want to verify my numbers there.

[Theresa Dupont]: There we go. An estimated surcharge on next fiscal year's revenue. Again, this is the 1.5% a surcharge on top of property taxes for both commercial and residential. So we're estimating that that amount will be just shy of $2.1 million. You'll see that this is a considerable increase year over year, which is attributed to overrides as well as new growth out of the assessor's office. So our tax base grew based off of overrides and the growth. This column here represents our match funds from the state, which we were directed to do 15.5% as an estimate. So I'm just showing you all the math of how I got to. Our budget for next year should land at about $2.4 million.

[Theresa Dupont]: That's included, yeah. If I were to change that. Thus far, we have received $3.2 million in state match funds. Which again, for anybody who is listening, watching, or just wants a refresher on the team, state match funds come from a percentage of transactions done at the registry of deeds across the commonwealth. So that's why we have such fluctuating numbers here. I think everybody was buying houses in COVID. That's why we had that banner year in 2023. But then it's kind of dropped off. So it's starting to creep back up again.

So again, that's how we came to the 2.4, and that's extracted here on the left, sorry.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: A couple of questions. The surcharge, how did we prepare the surcharge estimate?

[Theresa Dupont]: Did you do that, or was that given to you by the assessor? It was given to me by the assessor. And that, again, is calculated based off of they're projected revenue gain. I was just curious what your source was. Of course. And I wouldn't trust my numbers.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah. State match funds walk through. So that is 15.5% of the 2089-2093. I think it should be as a prior year. they're going to match last year's. So over the entire course of 27, we're going to bring in 2,000,089,000 revenue. That's from July 1 to June 30, 2027. But in November of 2026, they're going to look at what our revenue was for the entire of FY26 and match it by 15.5%. You are correct. Is it possible for you to run that calculator?

[Theresa Dupont]: It's my favorite thing, folks, doing math in front of everybody while I'm screen sharing. I'm so good at it. But I'm an Excel for the web and it won't be nice to me. Talk amongst yourselves for a whole minute.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Can you just in the next cell do it equals the one times the next times the other?

[Theresa Dupont]: 94. Okay. And luckily I did put the logic in there, so it automatically adjusted these amounts. I might have to manually change it. Yeah, I'll have to manually change it there, but get out of here. So thank you for catching that. We can use this table for that. Yeah, we can use this table. So instead of the 24 and change, we're looking at 23.83. So just try a 2.4. So we lost about 60,000 there. We didn't lose it, we're just accurately capturing it for our budgeting purposes.

So again, what we're trying to do tonight here is do we like these numbers? Do we agree on the percentage dedication to each category?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So I just wanna review why we're dedicating these percentages to these categories. Our enabling legislation requires a minimum of 10% to each of the three program areas. So that's why we have the 10% minimum to historic and open space. And we bumped it up to 25% for housing because there's a state program that gives increased funding to communities that meet several criteria supporting affordable housing. And one of the criteria that they are looking for is that we spend at least 25% of our CPA funds on affordable housing. So that's why we started last year bumping up our minimum to 25% for housing. In fact, last year, we gave that 25% to the Affordable Housing Trust and then funded a little bit of affordable housing on top of that.

[Theresa Dupont]: And honestly, for those who were here last year, which I think is everybody, we had established a budget and then we realized crunching the numbers, it would be nice if we dedicated a little bit more so we adjusted it the next month so that the city would qualify for that housing choice designation.

[Theresa Dupont]: Which again, gives us opportunity for more funding and at the state level. Reg has a question. Yes.

[Reggie Graham]: I was just wondering, I mean, this is the first year that we've actually allowed 25% for housing and so on and so forth, and we've advocated it to the housing trust. Do they report back to us?

[Theresa Dupont]: They will. Administratively, there's quarterly reports that I sit down with, and they will actually be coming to our June meeting to do a report out and presentation. Okay. I didn't, you know, I didn't remember hearing about it.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So we're still establishing that how those procedures are going to work. So, first of all, when we say 25% minimum in our budget right now, that is not the same as a commitment to send it to the affordable housing trust. We'll have that choice later in the year, whether we want to use it that way. And then secondly, when we do exercise that choice, we can put conditions and expectations on the affordable housing trust for what kind of reporting we want from them. So please keep that in mind. Jared.

[Jeremy Martin]: Thanks. I don't, I support the budget as we've divvied it up here. I'd be curious to know where we, have a refresher on where we landed last year, last cycle. I guess I was a little surprised when we got to the process of reviewing the applications. We didn't seem to follow a strict guide of these percentages, which makes sense. I guess I'm just trying to reconcile this exercise with how we actually apply the funds. And I guess, and maybe that's specific to what we're being requested each year, but anyway.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So maybe I stopped short of telling the whole story here with this budget. The 5% to admin is the state maximum allowance. And that 5% admin helps to pay for Teresa's salary as well as some other expenses that we have. And then the general reserve is everything that's left over. And that's flexible funding. It can only be spent on CPA program areas, but it can be spent on any of the three CPA program areas. So that's where when our actual spending It doesn't line up exactly with this budget. It's because we've given ourselves flexibility by keeping half of the funds in the general reserve that allow us more discretion to make choices when we see the applications that come in.

[Jeremy Martin]: Yeah, thanks, Roberta. That makes sense. And I very much like the flexibility. I guess just I. And it doesn't have to be tonight, but I would be curious to see where our percentage breakdown landed last year, just to understand the context of, did we end up giving 30% to housing and 30% and 30% to open space and historic, or were we heavier on open space or another? I think it's just an information point that I would find helpful.

[Theresa Dupont]: I can pull that up for you, Jeremy, and I would just need a minute because I need to pull it up from report, but I can get that in this meeting tonight, I can get that.

[Jeremy Martin]: It definitely does not need to be tonight, Teresa. I'm not asking you to do more math or calculating live with us.

[Theresa Dupont]: I have a lovely slide deck where the numbers are already punched in for me. Thank you for thinking of my forebrain. Continue talking, I can pull that up.

[Jeremy Martin]: I think I've said all I needed to say. I appreciate that, Teresa.

[Theresa Dupont]: Of course. I keep sharing just the application, so I'm sorry that if you're getting whiplash from me constantly, stopping sharing than starting sharing. So let me, got a nice little pie chart here coming right up. So what we have, I mean, this won't include the latest funding for the Tusk Park, but you know, here we are. 26.4% went to open space in our awards this year for this fiscal year, 47.7% I get that dollar sign that's there, went to historic preservation, and our affordable housing was 25.8%. And I think I might even have a program to date.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, historic, because it's interesting how much it fluctuates from year to year. I actually don't. I lie. OK.

[Theresa Dupont]: Well, we'll see it in the report. It will be in the report. But at least I can tell you about 20% 25% to open space, 25% to affordable housing, and then the remainder went to historic preservation.

[Jeremy Martin]: That's really helpful to say thanks. And then the $2.4 million of the budget here, if I recall, had last year's budget in it, and then also some additional funds that carried over from the previous year that we used to give out grants. Correct.

[Theresa Dupont]: And I anticipate that we'll have a little bit of not as much of a windfall as we had last year, but I think we'll have a little bit of slush money or clawback money that I just, I won't be able to calculate that probably for a couple of months, but I will have those numbers as we're like certainly looking at our fiscal 27 applications last year. Yeah. Well, everybody actually just got a little bit better about estimating the costs. If we recall, there was one large project that we funded last fiscal year that came in at 50% of what their original estimate was. So we got a couple of like 250, almost 300,000 clawed back just right there. So let me go ahead and share this again just so we're all looking at the budgets because I want to make sure that all questions are answered.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Any other questions on the budget? Is there a motion to recommend the budget as presented?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So let's look at that one. That's the one we're recommending. Yeah.

[Theresa Dupont]: Not to belabor the point, but I would also like to point out and maybe plan to see for all members to consider with this natural booing of our budget from overrides, you'll see that our admin budget is also increasing by about $12,000. And admin money is, again, things that don't have to be approved through an application process. It still has to pertain to CPA projects, but that is money that we could pivot towards a master plan, pivot towards bringing in a consultant to focus on one particular focus that you might want. If somebody's really adamant about playground safety and wants to do an inspection report or what have you. I just wanted to plant the seed that we'll have a little extra of our administrative money that we can devote towards something. And I would, um, I would, um, I would qualify that, that the admin money should be used to help us, the committee.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So, 1 of the things that can help the committee is for the applications to be supported by, like, for the city to do some kind of prioritization so that they apply for the projects that best meet the community needs or for the. For to help make an application more complete, if they're an applicant needs to do some due diligence or something that would enable. the application to give us the information that we need to know whether it's what we should be funding. So like just thinking about justifying the use of administrative funds in terms of how does it help us to make better decisions. And also any administrative funds that are not spent roll back into the program area funds that are available the next year. That is correct.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: So Teresa gets paid out of our administrative site section. Is Teresa also part of the city's annual merit review and increase or does that strictly come from us?

[Theresa Dupont]: Um, any increase to my salary would come out of the CPA budget. Um, I believe it is a, I, I get like a 1% increase every year. So it is a minimal, but that is something to consider about this miss Cameron.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Well, the, if I recall, this is something that we dealt with way back in like year two of the CPA program. We, the CPC, established the staff position in the first place. But then after that, it became part of the city's general HR policies. So we don't have a lot. We can't treat Teresa differently from how other city staff are treated. The policies are, yeah, the policies are

[Theresa Dupont]: uniform right it's just that her pay gets comes out of this as opposed to the general budget or the yeah yeah got it okay yeah i will say benefits those do come out of the city's budget so it's just my salary um and we we pay the coalition a consultant fee annually that's that's not nothing um But yeah, like I said, I just wanted the plan to see, because it was something I noticed that, oh, there's a little extra money here.

Could we do something meaningful with that? Do we just keep it and put it in with our general reserve at the end of the year? But there's something that could be done there. Jeremy?

[Jeremy Martin]: Do we have any examples of doing that? Have we done that in the past of using that administrative fund to support your work or our work?

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Really? We did at the beginning. Remember, Roberta, we hired that person to come in and did she help us write the first plan or something like that?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, she helped us with community engagement for the first plan. We wanted to outsource some of the community engagement just so that it had an air of objectivity that might not be if we did it ourselves. But we did use administrative funds to hire a consultant, I think, to help prepare a draft preservation restriction, which we've never completed. And now I have second thoughts about whether we should complete it. But that was a exercise. Yeah, that was a way that we tapped our admin funds.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Now actually- Preservation restriction or what about the thing from Malden? Would that, would there be any cost related to holding the reservation preservation restriction over there at the- So there might be.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: The first thing, if we were to acquire land for open space, we would have to identify an organization to hold a preservation restriction. You know, one option could be that one community, because this is land that's straddling two communities, say Malden purchases the whole thing and Medford holds the preservation restriction, could be something like that. I don't know if, so it may be a hurdle finding an organization that would be willing to hold the preservation restriction. Somerville and Medford have in the past explored like mutual aid holding each other's preservation restrictions and that never went anywhere. I think nobody besides the CPA managers in their respective communities ever saw any reason why that would be a good idea and dropped it very, very quickly. So I don't know if they would consider that for an open space acquisition, but that would be a requirement. But the, mention of preservation restriction for a historic property reminds me that in Somerville we're changing our monitoring requirements for CPA grants in general so that I'm probably going to be contracting with a historic preservation architect to review projects to help me ensure that they meet Secretary of Interior standards instead of relying on the Historic Preservation Commission for that role going forward. So there is another example of a way that it could be used if it seemed appropriate here.

[Reggie Graham]: I'm just thinking about the one that we kind of pushed off historic trust this year with the garage? Yes. You know, I mean, I always had questions about that, you know, do you qualify? You know, so that's an excellent use of funding, to be honest with you.

[Theresa Dupont]: And I think our historical commission, while they are always very robust and tried to be supportive. Um, I think it would just be asking them this, the committee, uh, the commission a lot to really help out with our monitoring. So I like, I like that as an, as an option, you know, just something to think about.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, certainly. And when I have a little bit, when I've been through it a couple of times, I can let you know what the budget looks like for a. Like there could be monitoring occurs at the time that they are undertaking the project to make sure it meets Secretary of Interior standards. And then there's post project monitoring, which is making sure that they don't undo the work that we just paid for in the next 15 years. And that is probably something that the CPA manager can handle because you just have to look at it and say, did it change or not? And so.

[Theresa Dupont]: I will say if somebody has the wherewithal, creating an organization that professionally just holds preservation restrictions seems like a very lucrative position right now. So not planting any seeds for anybody and thinking about getting a new gig, but every now and then I'm like, wow, there's no organizations out there. If somebody was a historian or a retired person, you know, this seems like it would be a,

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: It's no brainer, but it's not as hard to find someone to hold a conservation restriction.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Preservation. And it might be because they are really more onerous than we even imagine. Yeah. So that's why I'm having second thoughts about the right of roach hiding. So that was a lot of explanation. And we passed our budget. Right. So we voted on it.

[Theresa Dupont]: Just to explain, administration kind of asked if we would expedite this one just so they can get budgeting underway, kneel down some things. So I appreciate everybody's flexibility with that one. All right.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Next on the agenda is meeting minutes for March 10. Does anyone have any comments on the meeting minutes?

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: I think we just make a motion to accept the meeting minutes.

[MCM00001830_SPEAKER_05]: Yeah. I'll second that. Actually, wait, I didn't attend. Can I second?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: So there's an interpretation. I've seen people go back and forth. There is an interpretation that we have applied in the past saying that if you have received the meeting minutes, you can vote. You don't have to have been there to verify their accuracy. Um, but, um, I mean, that's fine. I'll be the second. All right. Then I will call the roll. Maisha? Yes. Hayley? Yes. Doug?

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Thank you for helping us to keep it efficient. If I had that draft plan, we would still be going fast. One question, though. Sure. An update from the Housing Authority.

[Theresa Dupont]: Will we get them to talk to us soon? I believe I did reach out there in the midst of doing some walking court Phase 2 re-evaluating right now. So they're a little, I don't want to say distracted, but they have to prioritize that right now. But I believe that they will also come for our June meeting. So our June meeting will be housing-themed with the housing authority coming and speaking about where they're at with Wadlingport. as well as a presentation from our housing trust, just to kind of do a quick report out of where they're at.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I actually think that's a really great idea, having them both at the same meeting, because I'd like the housing trust to get to know the housing authority.

[Theresa Dupont]: And I think that, I know you're a member of the trust, but the other members of the trust that I talked to, they also would love to have a better relationship, working relationship with the housing authority. Not to slight anybody, it's just they haven't really had time to do some connections, so I think we can match me, you know?

[MCM00001830_SPEAKER_05]: Haley? I was going to say, do you want me to give an update on what I have? Sure. We had a board meeting this afternoon, so. So they went out to bid for a contractor for Wakling Court. This is for phase one, so this is for the 189 units in the back, like the two tower look. That's phase one nearest the track. And Consigli, because they're in negotiations with Consigli to do the contract for that. And they're looking to close on all financing for phase one within the month. So it's good to go. They got tax credits through I believe it's mess housing. Yeah. And it looks great. You know, they they went through two rounds of tax credits and did not get them. That's kind of what the process is. It's like on a calendar basis.

Okay, sorry. Um, so it's it's definitely moving along. It's exciting. And at the board meeting today, I did ask about phase 2, and it'll have to go through a similar process, but they're getting the ball rolling on construction shovels in the ground, hopefully within the next 2 months, phase 1, and then they'll be moving on to phase 2. So the money from the CPC definitely was put to good use. I know it's hard to give all that money for like pie in the sky ideas and you never know what's going to actually happen, but it's happening. So it's really exciting.

[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you. I realized after I said, please go ahead and tell us that it's not on the agenda. So we technically shouldn't be talking. But that's okay. My mistake.

[MCM00001830_SPEAKER_05]: I mean, that was from my public meeting this afternoon. So I'm just sort of like sharing public information.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: Thank you. So I think unless we have any other announcements to make, I think we've reached the end of our agenda. I made a motion to adjourn. I heard Joan make a motion to adjourn. Oh, I see Reg is seconding it. Yeah, thank you. So I will call the roll, Myesha.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Wait a minute, who is Kaylee's vote person? I want to know who that is.

[MCM00001830_SPEAKER_05]: I'm an extremely annoying cat. Someone told us, like, oh, get a cat. You never see them. They're really independent. And this is the meatiest cat in America.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: Not the orange ones, not the orange ones. Sorry, I interrupted the vote to continue.

[Chair Roberta Cameron]: I think I heard Myeshia try to say yes. I did try to say yes, yes. Kayleen.

[Vice Chair Joan Cyr]: I know on May 12th I'll be traveling. Good for you. Yeah, thanks.