AI-generated transcript of City Council Committee of the Whole 05-12-26

[Zac Bears]: Medford City Council Committee of the Whole meeting May 12, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Callahan. Councilor Callahan is absent. Councilor Leming. Present. Councilor Malayne. Present. Councilor Scarpelli.

[Bob Dickinson]: Present.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Tseng.

[Zac Bears]: Present.

[Marie Izzo]: Vice President Lazzaro. Present. And President Bears.

[Zac Bears]: present, six present, one absent. The meeting is called to order. Action and discussion items 26-061, annual budget process for fiscal 27 preliminary budget meeting number 4. This will be the fourth preliminary budget meeting of the fiscal 27 budget process. The mayor has communicated the following departments will be present, assessors, bonds and interest, pensions, facilities and insurance workers comp and we will be taking them in that order. Well, maybe we'll take assessors in the facilities and sorry Bob, we'll have you do the other two at the end. And we will be having a meeting next Tuesday as well on the budget. So that will be our next preliminary budget meeting. We're going after the May 15th deadline in the budget ordinance this year. So we'll start with our assessor. We have the chief assessor with us. We basically have... Four initial questions, and then we'll go to questions from the council on your budget. But the four questions are, what's changing between last year and this year? What has your department been doing this past year? What are your plans for next year? And what is something that wasn't able to be funded in this budget that you are hoping will be funded in future years?

[Jared Yagjian]: So this year, it's very much the same in terms of what we strive to do each year. We're this year trying to get more word out to the public about the exemptions for the veterans and seniors. So that's going to be a goal of ours to just get more word and work with the veterans department on that. In terms of budget, not much has changed. We tried to level fund most everything. Inflation costs for software were up slightly. The revalve from last year, which was the five year DOR re-cert, that is not happening for another five years. So that's where there's money coming out that was in last year. So that helps at least for the next four years, and then that will be in for the fifth year. So that would be fiscal, what would be that, 31, it would happen again. And beyond that, it's not much change in the budget from last year to this year, 26 to 27. Great.

[Zac Bears]: What are some of the things you've been working on this year, some of the plans for next year?

[Jared Yagjian]: So working on this year, again, a lot of what we do is the same thing over and over again. So this year, again, working on new growth currently right now. We just finalized the exemptions for 26, the personal exemptions. I reported that to the state. Right now INE's income and expense for commercial industrial sector we're going over. That helps us inform our income tables or standards for commercial industrial valuations. So in the process of doing that right now. We'll have a standards meeting usually in July to set the new standards for fiscal 27. The assistant assessor is going through the sales file, so we study all the residential sales. That informs our residential model for most of the single family, condo, twos, threes, and then the commercial sector, the rents for the 111 and 112s. That's in our standards meeting in July, and that helps us inform those because a lot of that's driven off cap rates and income. So that's a lot of the valuation work and it's set in a minute but it takes months to do so we focus a lot of time on that. And then towards the end of the year we get into the reporting. So we start to give our data to the state, meet with the state rep and go for certification towards the end of the year. We then, you know, work with Bob and get the numbers certified and come back up to here and we'll have the tax rate hearing and hopefully set the tax rate soon and get ready for the December billing.

[Zac Bears]: Great. And is there anything that wasn't able to be funded in this year's budget that you're hoping will be funded in future years?

[Jared Yagjian]: There's some software that I think might be helpful in terms of just streamlining process. It wasn't in this year's budget. We'll see if I can, well, I'm hoping to be able to see if we can make some room for it next year. There's a lot of new software that's just much more efficient. We have 11,000 parcels, so it's nearly impossible with the staff to go and review those. There's a software that allows us to fly over the city, if you will, and do detection change. So it would say this was here last year or this wasn't here last year, this is here now. It helps with new growth. I personally think it would pay for itself just in additional new growth. So that's the big one that I've seen come out. A lot of assessing departments are talking about that and hoping that next year might be able to fit that into the budget.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Great. I will go to questions from members of the council, Vice President Lazzaro.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. Do you ever miss new growth that you're aware of?

[Jared Yagjian]: That's certainly not the goal. Going back to what I just said, it happens and that's just because what we try to do is follow the building permits. So that's the best way to find new growth is who's building and we go out there and look at it. Now there's people that unfortunately don't put building permits and they put additions on and renovations that are impossible to catch without physically going out. So that detection change, that wouldn't see inside the house, but it certainly would see outside. It would help with unpermitted work. It could be shared with other departments, building departments specifically. So short answer, no, we don't do it on purpose, but does new growth get missed? I'm sure it does.

[Emily Lazzaro]: I have another question, if I may, President Bears.

[Jared Yagjian]: Yes.

[Emily Lazzaro]: How many employees do you have? How many permanent employees? How many part-time employees?

[Jared Yagjian]: Four permanent and we have like a point four, eight hours a week. a field assessor helping to go out and look at these permits or unpermitted work and do a cyclical inspection. So every 10 years, by DOR mandate, we're supposed to look at every single parcel in the city. So if we do, you know, roughly 1,000 a year, we'll be on that mark. But if a property doesn't sell and there's no permits looked at, it could go 10 years and not be looked at without this digital flyover where we'll be able to do a lot more in a year.

[Emily Lazzaro]: What's the cost of the digital of the software that you're talking about?

[Jared Yagjian]: It would be about an additional that that layer that detection layer is an additional 10 to 12,000 depending on the parcels. That's what I was quoted.

[Emily Lazzaro]: But that's like a one time fee.

[Jared Yagjian]: It's annual. Oh, it's annual? It's an annual subscription, yeah. They fly the city three times a year. So we get a snapshot, a real-time snapshot about every four months of what's going on in the city.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Okay, thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Do you have any other questions from the Council for the Assessing Department? All right. I have two. I noticed the field assessor's dropping. It looks like it's going from .75 to .25. Is that right?

[Jared Yagjian]: Right. So he's going from 10 to 8 hours.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. All right. And is that partially because it's not a revaluation or just like a haircut or?

[Jared Yagjian]: Well, trying to help with, you know, the overall budget for the city, but I believe we'll be able to keep up with the cyclicals and not fall behind with those 8 hours. Okay.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And then, can you forward those spreadsheets on the residential exemption when you get a chance?

[Jared Yagjian]: Yes, I was just waiting. I thought when we spoke our email-wise, we were just waiting for the minutes to come from the meeting.

[Zac Bears]: Oh, we sent those over certainly to the mayor a while ago, so. Oh, all right.

[Jared Yagjian]: Well, I was just waiting for those. I have it ready, so.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. We will figure out how to forward that to you. But yeah, that definitely went over to the administration a couple months ago. So, that was committee of the whole. March, March something? Was early March? Do you remember the date on that?

[Jared Yagjian]: Yeah, it was late. Yeah, something in March. I don't know exactly.

[Zac Bears]: Well, we'll forward that directly, but yeah, we definitely approved those a while ago. Yep.

[Jared Yagjian]: I have it ready for you. I can get it to you tomorrow.

[Zac Bears]: Great. And the acting clerk will email you the file.

[Jared Yagjian]: Great.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Seeing no further questions on the assessing department, we'll move to facilities. And we have our new facilities director here with us. If you want to introduce yourself and share a bit about what brought you here to Medford, and then we'll go through the process. But we like to hear from you when it's your first time.

[SPEAKER_06]: Of course. My name's David McIntyre. I'm the director of facilities. I started back in January. I come from, you know, over 10 years of facilities experience, and I'm a Medford resident who is looking at getting more involved in my city and found this opportunity and threw my name in the hat to try to join this group we have at City Hall. Great.

[Zac Bears]: Awesome. Well, thank you for being here, and we'll go through that same kind of list of questions. What's the difference between last year's budget, the current fiscal year and the upcoming fiscal year, 26 and 27? What has your department been working on this year? What are your plans for next year? And what was something that wasn't able to be funded in the upcoming budget that you'd like to see funded in the future?

[SPEAKER_06]: Great. So I've worked since January to best understand the financial situation of my department. Basically, the difference between last year and this year, there is a decent amount of increases. Utilities continue to go up. Those rates, I don't believe, are formally set until December. So this is based off of an 8% increase between heating fuel and utilities for those increases. Repairs and maintenance material costs, again, continue to rise. So we show an increase there as well. In regards to What we've been doing since I've arrived has been a lot of kind of triage work to best understand what's going on with the different buildings, quite a few buildings that I'm responsible for. I have been putting that all together, responding to those individual occurrences and getting the best idea of how to transition over to preventative maintenance, which will be one of my goals going forward into the next year and into the next however many years. The more things we can transition to preventative maintenance, the more we can control facilities costs. by getting things set on schedules to be taken care of and not waiting until equipment and what sort kind of falls apart.

[Zac Bears]: So in. Oh, sorry, I just shut off your microphone by accident. It's back on. What I was going to say is if there's any way you can make the air quieter in this room. But keep going, sorry.

[SPEAKER_06]: I can look into that tomorrow morning for you. But yes, so essentially my main goal would be to transition as many things possible to a preventative maintenance schedule. You know, HVAC systems are a great example of that. If they get tended to on an annual or even semi-monthly basis, then we will catch things instead of waiting until stuff happens. What are the other prompts? Could you just repeat that for me, please?

[Zac Bears]: Sure. So just, you know, What was work you've been up to this year? What is kind of the plan for the upcoming year? And then what are some items that weren't able to be funded that you hope in the future will get funded?

[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you. So one of the other things I plan to do is see whatever kind of costs I can get moved over outside of operating, be it capital or any kind of grant funding. I've already started exploring opportunities with our planning and sustainability group to see how some of the funding and grants that they have access to could help benefit the facilities department just so we can try to keep operating as even as possible as time goes on. In regards to not funded, I would love to see the department grow in the future from a staffing perspective, whether that be on the administrative side to help with scheduling and, you know, invoicing and all that, or also on the maintenance side, be it maintenance workers or, you know, someone to help me if there's two crises going on at once in different buildings, you know, having someone I can say, hey, can you respond to that and I'll take care of this one. Are there any questions?

[Zac Bears]: Do we have any questions? Councilor Mullane.

[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. Nice to meet you. Welcome. Just had a couple of quick questions around the budget here. So I'm assuming I see under like janitorial supplies it's only 16 as of right now that have been spent on the 65. Is it just because it's going to be late in terms of when it actually hits your budget line to catch up to that 65?

[SPEAKER_06]: I think some of that has been the disconnect between my predecessor and me. There was a time where things maybe were not getting ordered as heavily.

[Liz Mullane]: So you anticipate that 65 to be the same moving forward?

[SPEAKER_06]: I do think that will be pretty accurate, yes.

[Liz Mullane]: Okay. And the other question I had, I guess, around the building repair. I know it had it at 700, and we were at 751, and you're at 725. Do you already anticipate that you're going to see hitting that number, the 725?

[SPEAKER_06]: I do it for this year?

[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, for the fiscal year 27.

[SPEAKER_06]: I do anticipating that number, yes.

[Liz Mullane]: Okay, because you don't, you're the 751 to 725, so.

[SPEAKER_06]: I do think there are a number of things that, you know, in trying to comb through all the expenses that have made thus far on facilities, there may be some opportunities to migrate things to capital or through other funding means that I think can help offset some of the stuff that's hit facilities repair so far. And I think once I have a full year of booking all the stuff myself as the issues come in, I'll be able to better align the expenses with accounts that I think would fit best. Great. Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilman Lane. Vice President Lazzaro.

[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. support what you mentioned about the preventative maintenance. I think that's really important and I think that will do a great deal to allay some of the large expenses we often see because of deferred maintenance over time. So I think that's a great plan. I'd love to see any kind of, you know, if you wanted to give a presentation down the road when you do have that ironed out, what the plan may be for the future about how you would like to, how you would intend to make, you know, a roadmap for how to do preventive maintenance so that we can avoid large HVAC and, you know, large expenses that we would have to, you know, put forward all at once, like something that's happening with a bunch of our schools right now. We have to do a lot of like big roof work, lots of HVAC stuff all at once because it just hadn't been done over the course of time. So I think that's a great idea. I'd love to see more of that. So thank you.

[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Vice President Lazzaro. I have a question for you, David, and thanks for being here and appreciate everything you do in the first few months on the job. There's the contracted services line and then there's the building repair line, and I'm wondering what contracts fall into each of those lines.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, so I actually am working to better align the GL codes and the descriptions with what services are falling under them. Right now, I think building repair is a little more emergent issues where contracted services leans a little more towards things that we do have some PM set up, things of that nature. I do think it could be a little cleaner. So I have had some discussions with Bob and his team about going forward, maybe better identifying what these are and being a lot more intentional on what's going into each. So if when you ask that question in the future, I could give you a very direct answer into, you know, these 15 things fall here and the rest of them go here.

[Zac Bears]: Great. I think in general. What is the scope of the services we're looking at? Is this ongoing custodial? Is this only repair? What are the contracts that your department's managing?

[SPEAKER_06]: I would have to double check where exactly the custodial contract falls. I don't recall offhand. That's definitely one of them though. There are a few other contracts, the inspections for sprinklers and fire safety equipment. That's a contract that the city has. Again, I would have to double check each of the GLs and see what falls where. But that's another one I know off the top of my head that we have as well.

[Zac Bears]: All right, great. Yeah, because one of the things we're looking at, You know, we contract out mainly custodial services in this, you know, for municipal buildings outside of the custodians that are in your budget and working in your department. And school department also, my public schools also has some custodial contracts and we've been talking about for about, six months now, an ordinance to make sure that when we procure those services, there's a wage and benefits floor when, you know, communicating with the administration about it. So I'm just kind of wondering, you know, what's the cost? What's the annual cost of our custodial contract? Is it in this 70, you know, 136 range or is it in that bigger budget? Like, what's the annual cost?

[SPEAKER_06]: That I would have to, I don't know off the top of my head, unfortunately. That's okay.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And just, just kind of coming back to it, you know, we want to make sure We understand that these are contracted out, but we also want to make sure that when we're using municipal funds and taxpayer dollars that we have kind of a labor floor standards for who we're working with and ideally, you know, folks who are making a decent wage and have hopefully access to labor unions, which are pretty prevalent in the custodial world. So that's an ordinance that we're hoping to pass relatively soon, might impact the next procurement for you and your team. So it's helpful to understand. We've been kind of, there's been some feedback from the administration, well this will be impacting us budgetarily, so we want to understand, you know, we think that that's a cost that we need to pay, you know, that's important to us, but we just want to understand a bit more. How much are we paying for these services every year right now, and how much more does it cost to make sure that the people that we're contracting out to are being treated fairly?

[SPEAKER_06]: I understand.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, not directly you, but it's in your budget, and something you're gonna be managing, at least, that contract.

[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: All right, do we have any other questions for facilities? I guess one last thing, you know, obviously we have a pretty significant, many significant projects happening at Medford Public Schools. Are you in, you know, do you communicate with them around facilities, work, and I guess just what does that look like for you?

[SPEAKER_06]: I do meet with Ken Lord just on best practices, just to understand, hey, is there a contractor you've used that you were particularly happy with, just to get a sense of, oh, this could be someone good to call, or what kind of experience did you have in so-and-so. I have no part in advising on any kind of work that's happening over there or anything like that. It's just kind of to share notes of, hey, I hired this person and I felt like we got this kind of response from them, just a heads up, because I know we use a lot of the same vendors. So it's been helpful to chat with him and understand, as I learn the different vendors that the city's involved in, kind of what their strengths are and how they can help us move forward with things.

[Zac Bears]: Great. And I know, you know, we've done some assessments over the last few years of our city facilities. Are there any, you know, when we do a major project on the city side, you know, there's a potential for a new fire station. potential maybe for something to happen with the Curtis Tufts building if the Medford High School project moves ahead that is currently structured. Are there any kind of big projects on the horizon outside of preventive maintenance keeping what we have in place right now that you're working on?

[SPEAKER_06]: Not that I'm actively working on. I'm aware of all those things that you mentioned. My goal would be to, I know the schools had a whole building, well, not all the schools, but multiple schools had this building assessment and conditions. I would love to do something like that for some of the other city buildings. I think it's very valuable in understanding the current situation so we can make the best decisions when it comes to larger projects going forward. I have been working on getting sets of plans together that most accurately describe the buildings that we have so that when we do go out to bid for larger projects, we can say these are the materials we have to limit, hey, this was a surprise. We didn't know this was like this. And I have had some success on gathering those materials. So I'm slowly working in that direction.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Last two things, you know, we had initially with Kevin Harrington from Medford Community Media and the former facilities director, we have to redesign the space. It's in the capital plan, I believe. Just wondering if there's any, you know, did Director Riggi bring you up to speed on the plans for redesigning the city council chambers given that we're adding four new councilors and what's the progress on that? And kind of as an aside, there's a space above us. I don't, have you been in it?

[SPEAKER_06]: I have.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Are we doing anything with that?

[SPEAKER_06]: There's nothing I am aware of with this space above us. In regards to this space, yes, I have been brought up to speed. And I have also connected with the architects who were first it was mentioned to. And I think it's something we're going to start moving more on once we hit the new fiscal year.

[Zac Bears]: Great. I think it would be great for us to have a meeting in the new fiscal year to kind of, you know, With us, I think we have a lot of probably design thoughts. Of course. The folks who use the space for these meetings about, and certainly Kevin on the AV side of things, how we can make this room a lot more functional. And how we can try to fit 11 people back here in a reasonable way.

[SPEAKER_06]: I think it would be great to, you know, kind of hear the thoughts of the people who use the space for moving forward with anything concrete.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And we would love to, you know, yeah, we can set up a meeting in July or August, a committee meeting with us and. Hopefully, we can get to a design that works and that we all think will serve the council going forward. So we're looking forward to that. Great. And when you say no plans for upstairs, you mean it's not ADA accessible, right? Because it's not connected over here.

[SPEAKER_06]: It's not accessible at all, unfortunately. Anything that would happen up there would be very limited. Yeah. Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: OK. It might be worth a cleaning, at least.

[SPEAKER_06]: I can't disagree with you there.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. All right. Great. Well, thank you, David. We appreciate your time and your work as our Facilities Director. Thank you.

[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you very much.

[Zac Bears]: All right. We've got our last two for the day. Bonds and Interest and Pensions, Insurance and Workers' Compensation. We have our CFO Bob Dickinson here with us. And is there any order that you'd like to take these for in, Bob?

[Bob Dickinson]: I don't care. They're fairly straightforward, so.

[Zac Bears]: No preference? All right. Then we'll start with our debt service bonds and interest. So you can tell us the difference between this year and last year, or this year and next year. Yeah. We'll start there and then we'll see if any of the other questions apply on these ones.

[Bob Dickinson]: OK. Well debt service bonds and interests. The big one this year is you'll notice interest on temporary notes. That's a school HVAC project. That's going on right now. We borrowed $225.7 million short term. So that's $1 million interest that's due in August. And at that point, we'll make a decision whether or not to roll that for another year or to actually bond the whole thing. And that's pretty much it. Medford doesn't have a lot of debt. So quite frankly, yet. But that means that not much of it is rolling off. There isn't a lot of, in future years, there's not a lot of debt that's going to be leaving. So that takes up roughly a similar amount of money for the next few years.

[Zac Bears]: And as a percentage of our total budget, how much is our debt service? Less than?

[Bob Dickinson]: Oh, I didn't do that. General fund, 5%, something like that.

[Zac Bears]: Is that pretty standard?

[Bob Dickinson]: I would have to look that up. In some places, my old hometown has a ton of debt, but it's got a sewage treatment plant. It's just going to have a ton of debt.

[Zac Bears]: And most of the debt in the general fund debt service, that's the police station, the library, and now these new, the HVAC projects for the schools.

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah, the HVAC, yeah, what's, yeah, the library, the $25 million for the police station, those are the more recent ones. On water sewer, it's just MWRA funding for pipe replacements and lead abatements. And those are all, you know, they're nice because there's zero interest, but there's still, you know, $6 million. You have to pay it off in 10 years. So that's what makes up most of the water sewer debt.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Do we have any questions for CFO Dickinson on the debt service for the city? All right, next we will go to the pension budget. Pension budget.

[Bob Dickinson]: Pension is very, very straightforward. This is what we have to pay based on what the actuaries say to finally fully fund our pension obligations. These costs is, well, we actually put in a bunch of years so that you could see that these costs are increasing around 3.6% every year. So it's eating into our pie a little bit. But they do increase every year. It's a significant chunk of money. And it'll keep doing that for many years, so.

[Zac Bears]: We're on track for fiscal 2033.

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah, we're on track to have the old pension obligations fully funded by 2033. Obviously, this depends on the pension fund has done awfully well in the stock market, as many people who own stocks have. If there's a big turnaround in stock prices, that would obviously change. But right now, the state is mandating it has to be paid off by 2040. The pension board wants it paid off by 2035. We're on track to pay it off by 2033, and we wanna stick to that one, definitely.

[Zac Bears]: Right, and once that happens, this number goes down somewhat?

[Bob Dickinson]: You know, $5 or $6. It goes down from, $21,387,000 in 2033 to $3,117,000 in 2034. All right, so it's very significant. So there's a significant drop. One thing to remember, of course, and what a lot of cities and towns have been doing, we also have OPEB liability, which is not funded at all at this point in time. And that's retiree health insurance, stuff like that. And it's the big chunk of it is retiree health insurance. That liability is in a couple hundred million dollars right there. So when I'm looking at this stuff, I'm like, OK, we should take a significant portion of that money and start trying to really put in that into an OPEB trust to pay off those obligations.

[Zac Bears]: How do we pay for that right now?

[Bob Dickinson]: It's in the insurance budget.

[Zac Bears]: So it's in the health insurance?

[Bob Dickinson]: It's in the health insurance line, yep.

[Zac Bears]: Yep, all right. And is that the main other post-employment benefit is health, retiree health insurance? Yeah. And what does that consist of? Is it like a Medicare supplement or?

[Bob Dickinson]: It depends on the retiree. Yeah. And obviously spouses too. You know, if you retire and you're 65, you will be, you know, you are going to be on Medicare Part A, but the supplemental insurance, the city pays, you know, 82.5% or 85% of that for the retiree. And then if, you know, if your spouse is, you know, below Medicare age, then the city will pay for their health insurance until they are of retirement age. So that's a considerable chunk of money. Because it's, of course, it's the city and it's the school and it all comes out of, that's all what GIC charges us.

[Zac Bears]: And this may be a question for the next budget, the insurance budget, but how much of the annual insurance to GIC, how much of that is current employees versus the retiree?

[Bob Dickinson]: I'd just have to look that up. You'd have to look at that? Yeah. I mean, I've got it. It's on a spreadsheet. I'd have to, I'd actually have to add it up.

[Zac Bears]: Right. That would be helpful to understand. And does the state have a calendar or an actuarial deadline for us to fund the OPEB liability?

[Bob Dickinson]: Not yet. I heard it's been bandied about, but right now there isn't a firm date. But it's just one of those things that cities and towns are starting to fund because it's just a recognition that is a liability that cities and towns have incurred.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah.

[Bob Dickinson]: OK.

[Zac Bears]: All right, do we have any questions around the pensions budget? All right. Next, we'll get workers comp out of the way. This looks like it's going up pretty significantly from $928,000 to $1,213,000. So, you know, over almost $300,000. like 20 percent, so if we could talk a little bit more about why we're seeing such a significant increase in workers' comp, that would be helpful.

[Bob Dickinson]: These are all just calculated based on last few years. Workers' comp, of course, the big problem with workers' comp that we always bring up is that frequently there will be a settlement and those settlements in the past have not been budgeted. You know, you're paying out workman's comp for a while and then somebody gets a settlement and it's $60,000 or something like that. And then we've been covering those with year-end transfers. So this is just a way of bumping up the yearly appropriation to sort of take that into account and have a little bit more of a buffer there for that type of activity.

[Zac Bears]: I see the fringe benefits medical school is going up significantly. That looks like the biggest driver here. Is that just part of this in general, what you just said, or is there something specific there?

[Bob Dickinson]: Oh, yeah. No, that line frequently, it's kind of mislabeled. The medical costs are the costs of evaluating workers' comp claims. So if I fall down the stairs and hurt my knee, the city has to send me to doctors so that they can check out what's happening with my knee so we can decide whether or not I should be on comp or not. Medical costs, as I'm sure you realize, have gone up significantly. So we put that one in there.

[Zac Bears]: And that's reflecting the fact that we budgeted $100,000 and have spent almost $300,000 so far this year?

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah, a little bit more than that. Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: Yes.

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah. So, yeah, this is looking at, you know, this is looking at the cost over several years and, you know, trying to get appropriate budgets for it. I mean, we're cutting back where we can, but yes.

[Zac Bears]: Are we seeing an increase in claims or like the absolute number of claims or is it just that the cost for each claim is increasing and actually I see the HR director So I will I'll recognize her.

[Bob Dickinson]: That'd be good.

[Zac Bears]: Director Crowley.

[Lisa Crowley]: Yep, I'm trying to get can you hear me?

[Zac Bears]: We can hear you.

[Lisa Crowley]: Okay. My computer was spinning. I'm not sure what it was doing. Um, yeah, Bob's pretty much hit everything, um, on the head here, but we are seeing, um, an increase in the medical costs. So when we have the claims, we do have some, um, claims that are, um, life claims. So there are people that who are hurt and found permanently injured. So they stay on our, um, workers comp for life, unfortunately. And so some of their medicals are going up. We have some of the other medical costs for our more recent claimants going up. So it's just a lot of increasing costs. We typically see, unfortunately, on the school and city side, more claims coming through the summer season. And that's just typical. It's typical throughout the Commonwealth. as well. But, um, so we have seen an uptake just a little, but we are leveling off and, um, trying to get our folks back to work as soon as possible. So we, um, also sometimes have to have some case managers on call so that they can help us, um, determine what the medical records are looking like. And sometimes there's a slight cost to that as well. But typically we go through, um, what we've done over the past several years and try to calculate out the best we can. So that's why you're seeing that, that increase it's because some of the medical costs, the PT costs are going up and, um, PT is sometimes, um, asking for more PT so that they can actually get back to work instead of staying on workers comp for extended periods of time.

[Zac Bears]: Are we seeing this? Is this like something that's happening in other cities and towns as well? Similar trends.

[Lisa Crowley]: Yeah, well, like I said, they've been similar trends for the communities I've worked with as well. But I do think if you did some kind of study, you would see there was an uptake during the spring and summer months for most communities.

[Zac Bears]: I think it'd be helpful also to understand a little bit more about the settlements. Are we seeing a higher number of settlements or more claims being filed? Could we take a look at that data over the last You know, five to ten years could we just see how many claims have been filed each year, how many settlements have been reached each year, maybe a note of what might be outliers versus, you know, if there's occasionally something that's an outlier versus something that's more of a trend. I think that would be helpful to better understand the increases that we're seeing because it's going up pretty significantly and it's just useful be able to explain why.

[Lisa Crowley]: Okay. And I, and I, I think you've already requested that information too, for the administration. So I think that's part of that whole request for the information. So whatever we have when we're responding can get to you.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. That would be very helpful. Yeah. We definitely want to understand that piece of things a little bit more. Okay. Do we have other questions for, HR director. All right. Anything for Director Dickinson on workers' comp? No? All right. Councilor Mullane would really like to see the breakdown on the settlements around workers' comp. Okay. Then we will move to the next item, which is the insurance budget for 2027. All right, looks like we're going from $31,220,000 to $34,083,000, 9% increase. And I will turn it over to Director Dickinson to talk about what we're seeing here.

[Bob Dickinson]: You're seeing that insurance costs a lot. Obviously, the big driver for the last two years on the insurance budget has been health care costs. The GIC has been going up. We're actually right in the middle of which the increases with them. There have been some communities I've heard of that have seen increases on the order of 14 to 17 percent. So we're around nine for this year. It was a little more last year. Obviously this number, it can vary in the details per year by which plans everybody is on, what the percentage the city covers on them. But that's the big driver is health and dental. You can see that that's gone up by quite a bit. And to a certain extent, this is completely out of our control. What the GIC charges for health insurance is what they charge for health insurance. We are about as, even though it's a lot, we're not that big a player in the grand scheme of things with them. So there's that one. Medicare school, that's, you can see that's gone a lot, that's basically making that budget more commensurate with what the costs actually are. That line and the line above it are the, what the city pays for FECA. So, you know, for Medicare, the city has to cough up seven and a half, it's, what is it, 15.6 or something like that for Medicare, and the city has to come up with half of that. So obviously with the school, we didn't catch this last year, but with the school increases and the increased work week, the paychecks are bigger. If the paychecks are bigger, the Medicare expense is bigger. So it's just math. But as part of this budget, it's not part of the school budget. All right.

[Zac Bears]: Do we have any questions on insurance? I have a few, but I'll go to the other councillors first. All right. Seeing none. First is on the JIC. Do you know why or do you have any insight into why we see less, why we're seeing a lower increase than other communities and higher than others? Is that a formula question or a number of beneficiaries?

[Bob Dickinson]: I really don't know.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. Does the GIC provide any sort of explanation to the city about the rate change every year, or they just send us a number?

[Bob Dickinson]: They just send us a number, basically. Well, they don't even... Remember, the GIC consists of eight, nine different plans depending on what it is. And some of those plans went up by more than 9%. Some of them went up by less than 9%. And I would think that that drives a lot of how that works. It's whatever agreements cities and towns have with their employees and who takes which plan. So there's two different Harvard Pilgrim plans. There's Unicare. There's the retiree plans. So if you want the gory details when I'm trying to calculate what the cost is going to be, I know what the increases are for each plan. I know who's on each plan right now. So I calculate that budget for the next year and then I add, you know, 10% for new employees, people switching plans, et cetera. Roughly, that's roughly how it's calculated. It's another big, big spreadsheet. So try to get it as close as I can.

[Zac Bears]: All right, we'll go to HR Director Crowley.

[Lisa Crowley]: Thank you, President Bezos. I think you may have asked why our increase is less than other communities in the Commonwealth. Was that a question you asked or did I hear that wrong?

[Zac Bears]: Yes, yeah, just trying to understand if we're in the middle of the pack, is there a reason that we're in the middle of the pack?

[Lisa Crowley]: Yeah, so because GIC has such a large volume of participants, they're able to give a better rate than say like a blue car, blue cross blue shield or a private habit pilgrim. So that's why you see we're kind of in the middle because those private insurances don't have such a large pool like the GIC. So they're able to, to give us a better rate through the GIC than if we went out outsourced through like a direct blue cross blue shield type of situation.

[Zac Bears]: Sure. Sorry. I think I met, um, within the GIC, Were you saying, Bob, that there's other cities that are going up 20% because they're not in the GIC?

[Bob Dickinson]: That's just what I've heard from others. Yes. Basically, every city and town in Massachusetts and probably nationwide is experiencing large health insurance premium raises. So this is just gossip around. Got it. So I don't know if they're specifically in the GIC. I don't know what their makeup in the GIC is. What, you know, who's getting which plan or whether or not they're on Blue Cross Blue Shield or private Harvard Pilgrim. I just know that other cities and towns have experienced larger increases than we are experiencing this year. All right.

[Zac Bears]: Two other things. I noticed the unemployment budget's going down pretty significantly. Is that, what's that a factor of?

[Bob Dickinson]: That's just based on numbers that I've seen recently. It does seem to have gone down. We might have cut a large check for something. I don't know why our actuals are up that much, but it's not a large part of the budget, really. So I'd have to look at that. I think we had in 26, we had to make up We're working on that. We had to make up some underpayment from many years before. So we've made that up. So that's, you know, that's what I came up with when I was looking at the year over year budgets for this expenditures. I might have been wrong. Maybe I should have asked for another 25K.

[Zac Bears]: And then the last thing is on our insurance premiums, police liability, and the ordinary expenses. What are those insurance premiums? Does that include general liability insurance for the city from lawsuits?

[Bob Dickinson]: That's exactly what that is.

[Zac Bears]: Okay.

[Bob Dickinson]: And that's determined, that's what I was told by the Jay Ruddy corporate representative who does our insurance and that's for. You know, building, cars, police, police vehicles, all of that fun stuff.

[Zac Bears]: All right. Is that also covering us from personnel, lawsuits, settlement? You know, the city's been in a pretty significant number of settlements and issues in arbitration with unions and employees. Is that, at what point does our insurance kick in? Is that one policy there for?

[Bob Dickinson]: personnel issues would not be covered by this. This is like if, you know, you walk into City Hall and trip over a wet floor. Those, you know, other settlements or, you know, if there are labor disputes or something like that, that would not be covered by these policies, to my knowledge.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, so these policies don't cover like MCAD complaints, or labor disputes, or arbitrations with unions. This is just about if there's a vehicle accident, or someone falls on a sidewalk, or does this cover, for example, like a sewer backup?

[Bob Dickinson]: This is your homeowner's insurance, and your auto liability, and all that sort of stuff.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, so this is just covering like personal injuries, or if a vehicle or private property is damaged due to the city.

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. And is that just a monthly premium and this is the total?

[Bob Dickinson]: Yeah, it's a monthly premium. These are based on, he said it was going to go up between four and a half to five percent. So that's what I put into the budget.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. All right. It would be helpful to understand, you know, are there, what is the city's liability insurance in these other matters? And does that come out of this budget? Is that in the law department budget? Because we're just trying to understand where. When the city's being sued and settling, who's paying for that? What accounts is it coming out of? What insurance policies are covering and addressing that? And what's the end cost to the residents for those lawsuits and those decisions? So I guess my question is, is there any other insurance outside of this budget? like in the case of a lawsuit?

[Bob Dickinson]: No.

[Zac Bears]: No. Okay.

[Bob Dickinson]: Not that I am aware of, no.

[Zac Bears]: All right. All right, do we have any other questions for the CFO on the insurance budget? All right, seeing none, this is our budget meeting. We'll have another budget meeting next Tuesday. Hoping to have some more of our departments that we haven't seen yet at that meeting. And we are, this is our committee of the whole. We're moving into our regular meeting in a few minutes. If you're on Zoom, stick with us on Zoom. If you're watching on YouTube, you might have to switch to a new live stream. But we will be back in about five minutes once there's a motion. Is there a motion to keep the paper in committee and adjourn? On the motion of Council, I'm going to keep the paper in committee and adjourn, seconded by. Seconded by Councilor Mullane. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Callan? Yes. Councilor Leming? Yes. Councilor Mullane? Yes. Councilor Scapelli?

[Bob Dickinson]: Yes.

[Marie Izzo]: Councilor Tseng? Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. And President Pierce?

[Zac Bears]: Yes. Seven in the affirmative, none in the negative. Motion passes. Committee of the Whole is adjourned. We'll start the regular meeting in about five minutes. Thank you. You're on Zoom. You can just stay in the Zoom room. Thank you, Bob.