[Zac Bears]: Medford City Council Committee of the Whole, May 27, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Present. Councilor Leming? Present. Councilor Malatey? Present. Councilor Scarpelli?
[George Scarpelli]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Tseng? Present. Vice President Lazzaro? Present. And President Pierce?
[Zac Bears]: Present. The meeting is called to order. There'll be a meeting in the Medford City Council Committee of the Whole at 6.15 p.m. in the City Council Chamber, second floor, Medford City Hall 85, George P. Hassett Drive, Medford MA and via Zoom. Action and discussion items 26-061 offered by President Bears, Annual Budget Process for Fiscal Year 2027, Preliminary Budget Meeting 6. This will be the sixth preliminary budget meeting of the fiscal 27 budget process. The mayor has communicated that the following departments will be present, elections, fire, legislative, library. We'll be going in the order of elections, legislative, fire, library. So we will start with the Department of Elections with Elections Director Blatchford. And Jim, welcome. Good to see you. Thanks for everything you do for our city. We have kind of a general format for the meetings. We want to hear what has changed between last year's budget and this year. what you've done over the past year, what your plans are for the upcoming year, and anything that wasn't able to be funded in this budget that you'd like to see funded in future budgets. And I can go through that, if helpful, or you got it all.
[James Blatchford]: All right.
[Zac Bears]: You watched. So if you want to start there, let's go.
[James Blatchford]: So James Flashford, elections manager. The difference between last year's budget and this year's, as you can see, there are a couple big ups and downs. The major increase being overtime for elections. That is actually the line where the detail for officers comes out of. That number was not budgeted for in 26 as you can see. So that's why it's so large. Additionally it was. Anticipating that there will be three elections in the next fiscal year. So September of this year, November of this year, and then potentially a May election I heard might be on the horizon. So we're trying to budget for three within the fiscal year. So that's additionally why that line is no longer 50-ish, which is what I expected two elections to come out as for details and other overtime. So that's why we budgeted for 75. Everything else is kind of minor or moving. certain things to other places. A good example would be the data processing line drops by 8,000, but the prep voting machines increases by 14. That number is partially because we don't have to print all of our budgets this year, budgets, ballots this year. because we only have one local election within the fiscal year. We have two state elections. The state provides printing for that. We would have to print our own ballots for the May election. So that is the reduction. The 14 increase for the prep for voting machines is we have to prep for one more election and print our own ballots. So that's kind of a move there. Otherwise, The only other major change in my opinion would be the additional 10,000 for city census. I believe that line had been underfunded previously. We're going to be over that line this year. We do have to do. mandated one mailing in January-ish time for the city census, and then we have to do a confirmation mailing, which, if I may PSA a little bit for everyone watching at home, if you do get a card in the mail in the next two or three weeks, it's because we have not received your city census for this year, so you have been inactivated, you are not ineligible to vote, you are just inactivated, so if you do not fill out the card that's sent to you in the next couple weeks and get it back to our office, you will have to present identification when you go to the polls in September and November. That's just a little PSA for everybody. I think that's it for differences. What we're working on this year, we successfully prepped for and executed two elections this last fiscal year for 2025. January we've been processing our census and vote-by-mail that's come in. We've had about 5,000 or so vote-by-mail applications that have already come in prior to the state sending out theirs, which they will do in July. So if anyone has not already signed up for vote-by-mail, you will get another bite of that apple when the state sends that out. We're actually able to do a second mailing for the census for anyone who was active but did not have a current census year. It's a smaller list, but it saved us some money because when you do the confirmation mailing, we have to pay for postage when it gets returned as opposed to a second census. that we sent out earlier, which we were able to save some money on the back end of having to prepay for postage. Thankfully, this council was kind enough to approve funding for the new pole pads that we're receiving prior to the September and November elections. That's about half of our stock that's going to get replaced with newer pole pads. We had nine that were actually going to be going out of service so that we needed to replace those regardless, but we're trying to do kind of a rolling replacement. So we'll always have at least 20 active and new working pole pads, which allows us to kind of have a continuity of operations in case there is ever a problem. update to the programming and we lose half that's not currently brand new as it were. We received, not received, purchased, address machine which prints the address labels on the ballots. Previously we would have to bring in advanced team staff to come and label every single envelope. There's three that go out with every single ballot. The ballot that goes to the home, the ballot that gets returned to the home, and then the internal envelope that you need to sign. Now I can do that by myself. And all that we need to bring in staff for is putting the envelopes together and then adding the ballots. So it's actually a very efficient saving us time and money because we're getting fully reimbursed by the state as well. We have two new commission members that were approved recently, and they are getting their sea legs underneath them, ready for the 2026 elections. And then we are transitioning currently all of our election workers over to payroll, which has been a long time coming. It was, I think, true, they tried to start it when So, it's been a long time trying to get election workers over there to payroll, as opposed to treating them as vendors. Plans for next year. Best way I can describe it would be automation and efficiencies. There are technologies that we're looking at to try to bring us to maybe the 20th century, maybe not 21st century in the election office, things like allowing for a census to be answered online. I'm looking at quotes and talking to vendors about how we currently send out mail, and the only way to get it back is for residents to physically bring it in. And so we want to be able to Utilize the technologies that are out there where you can just like the federal census go online Type in your individual code that you receive and if there are no changes we can't do anything with changes because there's laws around how Changes can be made. We need signatures things like that wet signatures particularly and This would allow, if you have no changes, you can digitally sign and say, yes, this is my census, and it will cut down on costs to residents, but also efficiencies in our office to allow us to just print off a list and scan them into the computer, as opposed to filing each individual piece of paper as we currently do. Additionally, we'll be working on emergency planning. Currently, there is a plan and it's in my head, as opposed to having it written down. Backup locations, if the worst happens at a location, a sprinkler goes off and ruins the floor and we can't use said location, or if there is a power outage, do we have, communication with emergency services to be able to get Generated there things like that. So this will be written plans Accessible for anyone to see but particularly staff if Myself or any other member of the staff is incapacitated at the time What was something that wasn't able to be funded in the upcoming budget that you'd like to be funded for the future I am in the unenviable location of if an election is happening, we have to do it. So it's, if we have a special election and an elected official moves on into a new position or resigns or anything else, we have to hold that election. So I'm not, at this point, having anything that's not funded. We are lucky we've kind of hit a nice groove in our office in what we need to do and how we need to do it. So I feel comfortable with our current budget. The question would be better for next fiscal budget. We will have three elections immediately following. So in 27, we will have a May election potentially a September election and a November election. turning around to 2028, we will have a presidential election in primary in March, then we'll have another election in September, and again, November. So in a year and a half, we will have six elections. So next fiscal year, I may be coming with some different higher level funding asks, particularly around advanced staff and stuff like that for advanced teams. But otherwise, potentially funding those technologies that I mentioned previously to help with efficiencies in the office would probably be looking at next year, next fiscal year rather.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Thank you, Jim. Do we have any questions from members of the council? I'll go to Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thanks for being here, Jim. Appreciate the update. I was not aware that we could, that there was legality to doing a census, any kind of census updates online. I would love to hear more about that if possible. For a little bit of background, from my perspective, I volunteered, I didn't volunteer, they paid me, to be an elections worker in 2020 and 2021. I observed a ton of people who came in to vote, and because they hadn't completed the census, because there had been no changes, and they didn't understand that you still have to send in your census every year, they were removed from the voter rolls, which I've heard a lot of national news about these draconian laws, about purging voter rolls and things like that, but it really, like, it's actively still part of Massachusetts law. From my perspective, I think it's too, I don't think it's a good law, but it's state law, is that correct? Correct. Right. So, but municipalities, you're saying, can often to do a perhaps more expensive but easier method for many people to do the signature to say, yes, everything is still the same, and stay on the voter rolls?
[James Blatchford]: Yeah. So the only reason a person would be removed from the voter rolls, and I want to be clear about this because there's a difference between being removed from the voter rolls and becoming inactive. OK. Inactivity means- Provisional ballot.
[Emily Lazzaro]: No. Another thing.
[James Blatchford]: So I guess this is more of a public education in the sense of, and I want to emphasize, thank you for asking the question, because there is this question always, every single election. I was removed from the voter rolls is a common phrase that is said to me. The only time a voter is ever removed from the voter rolls is if we have an indication that they have passed away, So if we get back a census that says, my mother has passed away, we try to find an obituary. We try to speak to the local funeral homes to verify that that person with that birth date has passed away. Sometimes people sign their own saying that I have passed away. That happened last year. So we try to be as cautious about removal as we can, especially if somebody is saying, please remove me. The secondary measure of that would be inactivity. and I don't mean inactivation, inactivity, meaning they did not vote, they did not sign a nomination paper, they did not update their driver's license. That has to happen for four years, two major cycles, major cycles being even numbered years, so governor's election or presidential election. So anyone who has not voted, updated their census, updated their voter registration, signed a nomination paper, really you have to do nothing for four years, so anyone previous to 2024 at this point will be deleted if they continue to have no activity after the 2026 election. So you have to really, really not do something to be removed from the voter rolls in that case. Inactivity is different. That happens every single year. And that's when people show up and they have to show their license, they have to sign a piece of paper. That is more of a, That's the product of the law in the sense of when people think they've been removed or there has been a delay in why they're currently going to vote right at that moment. The simplest answer I can give is please return your census. Please return those cards that we're going to be sending out this week, next week, or the week after that you'll be getting at your homes. Because it streamlines the process for us in the sense of You don't have to now go out of line, when voting, to go talk to the warden, to sign paper, and things like that. But additionally, it saves us from having to track you down and update that information later. It's a time thing. That's the part of state law that people don't get, is because it's a yearly thing. And for a long time, I think, everyone considers the federal census to be that census. That is a totally separate thing. That is completely separate from what we do. That is a more county population for monies kind of thing. Ours is more voter centric in that sense. And so it really comes down to if you are on the voter rolls, Even if you are inactive, you still vote that day. And your vote still goes through the same machine that everyone else's votes go through. So the difference is you only have to produce identification of some kind, meaning your name and printed address on something, a prescription bottle, car registration, bill of some kind on your phone, your ID, your state ID. Passports don't count because they don't have a printed address on them. Additionally, if anyone is ever concerned about being, whether they are active or inactive, you can go on the Secretary of State's website, pull up your registration prior to going to the polls, and find out if you are inactive. And if you are inactive, you can go to the polls with identification, or if it's maybe a week prior to the election, come into the office, fill out a census, which we can print very easily, and activate yourself and your family, which is the big thing, because head of household can activate, but also any other adult that is a registered voter in that home can activate the entire family, which is helpful. Provisional balloting is a whole separate thing. That's if you're not on the rolls at all, and you're not in Medford at all. So if somebody shows up and they're still registered to vote in Salem, Massachusetts, it's 7 o'clock. They're potentially not going to get to Salem in time to vote. we can do a provisional ballot. A lot of those people say, I went to the R&V, I changed my registration. Sometimes the R&V is not great about getting us those registrations. We have a system that afterwards we can go look into that system and say, hey, did this person actually renew their license or change their address? And they say sometimes, a lot of time, oh, yeah, they did. Their name was spelt wrong by one letter and we didn't send it to you. So we then register that person as if they were registered in time, and we count that provisional ballot. A lot of provisional ballots tend to be that, of I changed my address and we never got it. There are the few cases where they didn't register in time, or they registered the day after. And unfortunately, I can only be so flexible. But that's... All of that in a nutshell as much as I can be concise on it.
[Emily Lazzaro]: But as far as the online program.
[James Blatchford]: So with that, and I, there are not many vendors who have this technology because it is a newer concept in the election clerk world. It really comes down to making sure that the system is effective and it is easy to use. So if I feel comfortable being able to use it and I will make sure my staff understands how to use it, if we are all okay with it and it works, It would provide efficiencies within the city. We would make sure we have a big rollout in coordination with communications in the city to make people say it, maybe get people excited about the census for once, saying if you can actually do this online, it's easy. That would be great, because then potentially in the future, if it becomes so efficient, we can maybe pay for return postage on the initial mailing because so many people already do it online that maybe it'll incentivize a couple other people who don't use online to send theirs back and things like that. So I think it pays for itself. in huge dividends in the long run, but we have to make sure the technology is there to be effective and efficient. Very few towns currently do it, so my plan is to kind of go see it in action in January and see how good it is, because if the technology is good, then I absolutely want to employ it.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you.
[James Blatchford]: You're welcome.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. Councilor Tseng. Thank you. I just had two questions. The first one being about the new charter. The new charter provides for citizen positions, initiatives, et cetera. And we, President Bears and I have been involved in a number of conversations with KP Law and with the mayor's office about implementing the new charter. One of the kind of results of that conversation was to kind of, the administration said that they'd get to you and organize kind of, I guess, a transition. plan to identify how many signatures are needed for each each thing and so that when residents come to you with questions that you're prepared. Has that happened yet. We just haven't had an update.
[James Blatchford]: Very preliminary. Let's put it that way. I understand the process because I've I've worked in the city of Haverhill before. I've lived in the city of Lawrence. I understand the process and I'm not concerned about my understanding of that. It's kind of just drilling down to the details to make sure that we're all on the same page, that this is kind of the rules of the road, as it were. I have not had those in large amounts, let's say, only because my office has been busy kind of catching up on things that need to be caught up on. So we're kind of getting to that point where I have some time to be able to concentrate on other things, so that's my plan.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. And the other question is about kind of engagement with low turnout voters or folks who could be registered to vote but haven't. Something that years ago we talked about on this council was trying to get I think one of your predecessors, maybe a few generations removed now, to kind of cooperate more with schools and with their community liaison network, et cetera, libraries. Has that effort been ongoing? I know you guys are busy, but has that been ongoing? Is there a plan to pick that up?
[James Blatchford]: literally on my to-do list. And I didn't bring this up on purpose. It just happened to be clumped in with my other pad. It's one of those things that everyone always wants to do. It's just doing it is the hard part. We have a new election commission. That's a big... lift for them in the sense of it is one of their initiatives that they can do independently of me, particularly making sure that they understand what they need to do and filling out the paperwork so everything's great when it comes back to me. But really, I would love to be able to do things like that. I think one of the things that we talked about in going back to the new charter implementation One of the things that my office and the Election Commission really want to do as a service to the city is kind of explaining the new process. So we have eight wards. That language is not really talked about much in the past with the at-large Councilors, with the at-large school committee members, with the mayor, because it was never ward-based things. And so kind of explaining the process on how to get on the ballot and what this looks like moving forward for this city is kind of up my sleeve, as it were, in the sense of like something I really want to be able to do. Because it is such a drastic change. It is something I've been lucky enough to kind of live with my whole life. I've always had board Councilors for all I've known in my hometown. So I feel I can speak with confidence about a subject like that, be able to answer questions about it. But it's kind of a we need to get the elections office out there mantra that I think we need to start doing in general. So voter registration drives at high school events, community events, recruitment of poll election workers. Because as you all know, this is a nationwide thing. Most elections are run by people who are that's the largest amount of election workers that we have. But that's a nationwide thing. And so making sure that we have a diverse population of election workers, going around to the library, doing demonstrations, going to the senior center, I know it's kind of, but you have people who have time on their hands who can be able to like sit and listen to some explanations of things that I do and that we do in the city. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. have difficulty voting, particularly physical issues with not being able to hold a pen or having shaky writing. It's one of those things that everyone should know what this is. And so everyone should be comfortable using it because we've had it for years. This is old technology at this point, but nobody uses it because no one's explained what it is. So going to the senior center, going to the library, recording it so it can go on public media, is one of those kind of getting the election office out there that is on my list of to-dos. And I'm aiming for probably beginning of next year in the sense of that's kind of a good time for everyone to see what's going on in the city, gives us some downtime in December to prep and prepare for that. So that's kind of One of those three things that I want to make sure we get out there doing, voter registrations, kind of a PowerPoint explanation of, hey, this is the new form of government that's going to be implemented after the November election, or structure, rather. And then this is how you can vote, and these are options for you to be able to vote. Because we did testing. We had people from the... Council on Aging and Disability Commission come and actually test our machines with us. It's the first time it's ever been done. And they were surprised at how easy and efficient their process would be to come and vote. And I think that's great. a detriment that we've kind of, elections in general have not been more public about how things can happen. It's a very public process. It's a very open process, as you all know, but not everyone does. And so that's kind of, we want to make sure we bring that to the forefront, especially in the current climate.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. I really appreciate that focus on accessibility for everyone. I mean, elections are supposed to be the most democratic aspect of government, and any hurdle that stands in the way makes that more difficult. So I'm really appreciative of that focus, from physical accessibility to, you mentioned diversity, language access, et cetera. I think that's really important. I guess one last quick question. It's possible that our city might see a debt exclusion on the ballot in the spring. Is that accounted for in this budget? It is.
[James Blatchford]: Great. Yeah. So it doesn't clearly state it right off the bat because there are some weird negatives and positives. But the best example I can give is the 75, thousand increase for overtime for elections. That includes police details and any overtime in my office. But there's a negative of $18,000 in the seasonal salaries, which doesn't make any sense. If we're going to have another election, how are we going to have more election workers? It's because we are getting reimbursed from the state for our last local election. And that is coming in time for me to be able to use that money because it goes into a separate account as opposed to the general fund that I can actually access those funds for May if and when that $42,000 runs out earlier. So it doesn't look like it does, but I promise you, yes.
[Justin Tseng]: Great. Thanks for walking through that for us. I think just looking at the chart itself, it's harder to spot, but that makes sense. I just want to take a quick moment and thank you for your leadership in the office. It's really noticeable how much smoother elections have become in Medford. And I just wanted to you to know that I think there's a lot of appreciation for that. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have any further questions for our elections director? Seeing none. Thank you, Jim.
[James Blatchford]: Thank you. All right.
[Zac Bears]: At the request of councillors, we're going to do the legislative budget next. I'm happy to share it. It is pretty significantly different from the legislative budget that I submitted alongside the clerk as the department head. And we might need the administration to provide an explanation for that. I will share my screen and show what we submitted and then what we received back from the administration. So this is what we received back from the administration for legislative. There's largely no change in the personnel item. There is a 50 percent cut in the ordinary expenses totaling an overall 12 percent cut in the budget. The main cuts are from our legislative technologies and professional technical services items, $20,000 each cut from those two items. In the budget that I worked with the clerk to submit, we had proposed funding the legislative aid city messenger position. Councilor Mullane has been working on that job description for several months with HR. It was a revenue neutral proposal. That position is, of course, in the charter and is an essential job that we need filled. The position has been vacant since we sadly lost Larry Lepore, who had served in that role for decades. And we were able to move money around and have a minor increase in our budget solely for office supplies, dues for an association, and advertising since we're doing more joint meetings and joint public hearings. So we would have had the ability to have a part-time council assistant city messenger position at a reasonable rate of pay. And that was a revenue neutral item. Instead, we were presented a budget that cut nearly half of our ordinary expenses and does not fund the city messenger council assistant position. So, that's what we got back. I don't know if the administration wants to share why we received that budget. I didn't receive any communications indicating that our proposal was going to be changed.
[Nina Nazarian]: Good evening, thank you President Bears. So for the position that's proposed, we are still evaluating that one. It doesn't cut the city messenger position, that stays as was previously budgeted here. As you all know, it is not a small task to add positions, even part time positions. We are trying to allocate as much funding as possible to gaps where we have in the budget. So that's the first piece. And then the second piece where there are changes to numbers, those are based on actuals. The historical actuals as of 5-20 just simply did not appear to indicate the need for those numbers. We have made adjustments to actuals on all budgets that we receive. This is no different than that.
[Zac Bears]: I'll go to Councilors in a minute, but the historical actuals for those combined line items are actually pretty close, 54,000 in fiscal 25, 49,000 in fiscal 24. I never received updated actuals. The only actuals I had when we presented this were from December. And I'm not sure what payments have been made to Innes Associates. That was some of the stuff that was coming out of the budget. I do think that there were payments made to our civic clerk service since then. And we had indicated in our budget proposal a revenue neutral proposal to fund the right size city messenger position. Larry was doing that job for 30 years at $6,000 a year. It's not a reasonable. salary for anything. We've had six months worth of discussions I'm sure Councilor Mullane can speak to. So and then we never I never even had a meeting with the budget director so nor did I receive as far as I'm aware communication from the administration indicating that our proposal was being changed. So, you know, I have, I understand it's a difficult budget year. We really need the support, especially with the staffing reduction in the clerk's office that we saw this year. It was listed in our council priorities. Councilor Mullane's been working on it for months and it really is an essential role that is Named in the charter, the new charter provides additional, obviously subject to appropriation. We can't appropriate, but I had not received an indication from the administration that our proposal was. being changed, and we felt, certainly the clerk and I and Vice President Lazzaro, felt that we were able to fund this through a revenue neutral reallocation of funds, and we're willing to explore some reduction in those lines as needed, but we don't think a $40,000, 50% cut to our ordinary expenses without addressing the personnel needs is the approach that we should take going forward. That's just where I'm coming from on that. Happy if you want to share a little bit more, and then I know a number of Councilors have concerns.
[Nina Nazarian]: One main question. I know that we in the last couple of years set up our, these are actuals as of 5-2026, but I know this is more logistical. I know in the last couple of years we set up automated updates to go to departments for their budgets for year-to-date actuals. So I'm assuming the city clerk receives one for the city clerk. What I don't know for the city clerk's budget, what I don't know is if You know, yourself, a president bears, or the city clerk receives one for legislative, because if that's not happening, we can certainly add that. I know for myself, I get one on a regular basis for executive, for instance, and license commission, and so on and so forth. So that's just more administrative in terms of the numbers and the actuals on a regular basis. If that's not happening, we can make that adjustment.
[Zac Bears]: I'll go to questions. I'll go to Councilor Callahan and then Councilor Malay and then Vice President Lazzaro.
[Anna Callahan]: Yeah, I think my question is like I don't think the messenger slash legislative aid position is a surprise. It's in the charter. We've been talking about it for months. We've been working with the HR director. And what I'm curious about is what that position what the city thinks that position would be posted to pay, given that we're directly talking to HR, like what, how much does HR think that position would pay, how much does the city think that position would pay, and where is that money in this budget, or is it in some other budget?
[Zac Bears]: It's not in this budget.
[Anna Callahan]: That's my question for the city, through you, the president.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. This is what we sent over. What's on the screen now is what we sent over.
[Anna Callahan]: That's my question.
[Zac Bears]: We received.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, there's nothing.
[Nina Nazarian]: If there's no increase being proposed in the budget for clarification, President Bears, through you, so it's more of a This is just simply, if there's an increase shown.
[Anna Callahan]: I would eventually like my question answered.
[Nina Nazarian]: So President Bears, through you, Councilor Callaghan, you had asked, Where is the money that for the messenger proposed? Is that correct?
[Anna Callahan]: Like what is that job? Like we don't need to know an exact number, but like how much would that, like where is the amount of money? Councilor Maloney I think had a. How much money would that be and where is that in this budget or some other budget?
[Liz Mullane]: I think that's what we were, sorry. So when I had sent this over to Director Crowley, I guess, back early April, my understanding was that there was some budgets, monies allocated for this position because it was a previous position that we had. There wouldn't be any reason why there wouldn't be any kind of funding there. And I think what President Bears is demonstrating is in order to get it to an appropriate amount for a part time, being able to take away from some of our other previous areas within the budget to allocate it for this position. So I'm just as surprised to see that it's not even listed on here as a position that was even looked to be funded previously or even moving forward, especially as it was in the charter. And so we're just trying to follow, you know, what everyone had also voted on as well.
[Nina Nazarian]: President Bears, through you, to the Councilors.
[Zac Bears]: Madam Chief of Staff.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. So we need to really kind of break this down into two buckets to discuss this further so that we're all on the same page. Whether we're in agreement or disagreement, that's a little bit of a different story. But just to start in terms of what's here and what was previously existing in the budget. What previously existed in the budget was a line for $6,600. for the late Larry Lepore's position. That's here. That hasn't been removed from the budget. What has been proposed by the council is a modified position. That modified position isn't here. It's still being evaluated. It's a budgetary, you know, I realize that the council proposed cuts to the budget. But when we're in a situation where we have a two plus million dollar gap, 2.24 if you're just taking schools and MFN alone, when we have that kind of gap, we are literally actively cutting department budgets, even as of today. going through to try to find additional funding where we can in hopes to try to close some of that gap. We're not going to be able to close all of it by any means. We're not even close. But that's, I mean, when a department recognizes that another line item isn't needed, I don't know what else to say but to recognize that that item was identified as not needed. We need to continue having, I have no problem continuing to have the conversations and I don't think the mayor has a problem because I know that the position is still under evaluation. I don't have the numbers, Councilor Callahan in front of me in terms of that position, but I can say that that's still, I mean, I don't know how else to praise it other than it's still under evaluation. It's an increase to full-time equivalents, and those types of increases undergo a significant level of scrutiny. You can ask any one of our department heads who have gone through the request process to get positions. Multiple department heads, probably the vast majority of them through our organization have found themselves in situations where they've asked multiple years in a row for positions, and then the city tries to move towards, we try to move towards funding them whenever possible.
[Liz Mullane]: So I completely I understand that and you know how the budgets work. I just think in my mind when the conversation was being had and we were putting together this job description at no point in time did anyone say there's absolutely no money in here. You have to come up with a completely different way of funding. what we're looking at $25,000 to $30,000 for this part-time position. That was never communicated. And again, I'm new, so perhaps I missed something somewhere in here, but it wasn't communicated to me that that would ever be that much of an issue since the position had already, in some form or other, had existed here. I just find that surprising to have it be completely eliminated, having sent the job description over, having sent it over to the director over a month and a half ago, and just was believing that this was moving through the rest of the process, that it would just be completely eliminated, and finding out just like this is just a little off-putting.
[Zac Bears]: Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. It's not a full-time equivalency. It's part-time. It's not a stipend like Larry got. Larry was a wonderful soul, but he'd been doing this job for a very long time for not enough money. And he came to every meeting and stayed the whole time. He drove paperwork to our houses. He worked many hours, and he deserved much more than $6,600 a year. adult human in their right mind would do what he did for $6,600 a year, we would never be able to hire that position. And God bless Larry, an amazing man who is no longer with us. It is a farce to put that stipend in this budget and act like we are going to now go hire somebody to do that job. Who is evaluating the position? through the chair.
[Nina Nazarian]: HR, you know, essentially.
[Emily Lazzaro]: So didn't Lisa Crowley work with, didn't HR work with Liz on the project?
[Zac Bears]: The final thing, Liz, I think Liz and I were on the same email, was HR said, we'll post it when it's in the budget.
[Emily Lazzaro]: We'll post it when it's in the budget? Okay, so.
[Zac Bears]: That was the last email we got.
[Emily Lazzaro]: All the other, we're looking at.
[Zac Bears]: And I submitted a budget that funded the position.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Okay, we're looking at all the budgets. It's not a secret. We've seen all the budgets. We cannot hear that we're cutting every budget. Every budget had a small increase because of increases to salaries, step increases, and cost of living increases, so we're seeing all the budgets. It's not a secret. We are the only budget that has a cut and no explanation, and it's just a cut that we did not see beforehand that was presented to us in a public meeting, which is incredible. Truly. And, like, I mean, it's pretty nice. So I'm very interested in hearing, I guess we should request that HR can come and explain what the evaluation is that we're waiting on. Because it was level funded, the budget was presented with no increase. So I do not understand what the problem is. And I would love to hear an explanation. Thanks.
[Nina Nazarian]: Just a couple of clarifications. What I was going to say through you, President Bears, to Council Malone is I've never encountered a situation where our HR director has been asked a question with regard to a matter that would ultimately have a budgetary impact and her not refer that. So it sounds more consistent with my understanding of how she handles every matter that comes before her that has a budgetary impact, which is to refer it to the budget process. We had, as an example, numerous circumstances across the organization where departments were requesting, you know, additional licenses. And in some cases, this is kind of off of the specificity of what we're describing, but it's an example of how we refer things to the budget process. So we had departments all throughout FY26 identifying, the clerk's office was one of them, identified, if I'm not mistaken, a total of three licenses needed for citizen serve. We prioritized one and, you know, made it happen, but the other two licenses got incorporated into the FY27 budget and are going to be funded and are going to be licensed once we have that budget. As you all know, when we originally went through the initial budget stages for the FY27 budget, It was, you know, as we've seen in other years, we have way more requests than we have actual funding. So there's still a finite pot of funding, and that's what we're dealing with. Now, as far as FTEs, I want to clarify what that means. FTEs, it stands for full-time equivalents. The terminology is used to describe when A full-time equivalent, let's say, in City Hall would be a 35-hour employee. If we have an employee that works 17.5 hours, the FTE, the full-time equivalent, would be 17.5. That's why I'm using that terminology, because it's terminology that's used in the context of budgeting and in the context of positions. And then finally, I will also note that I understand what you're saying, Councilor. Lazzaro, and there is an administrative oversight in terms of the second sheet here, and we had this with other departments. They have, under fixed cost growth, the increases for COLAs. There is an increase to this budget, so there should be a line that says $5,515 for the council's increases, which is the 2.5% COLA that's been placed before the council. So it is not necessarily vastly inconsistent because if you look back to other city budgets that we've submitted, there are others that simply have that one line, for instance. I wouldn't be able to name them off the top of my head, but visually I believe that's the case.
[Emily Lazzaro]: The decrease in this budget is the amount of the position It's a decrease in the amount of the position. But that position has never existed. So that position that was created did not cost anything in the budget because the proposal was level funded. We borrowed from a line of the budget. I just want everybody to understand. What was proposed was borrowing from other lines of the budget that were not being spent to create a position that would be very valuable to the council, that would alleviate some of the pressure on individual Councilors to do legislative work while we're all working full-time jobs in addition to this part-time job. And it was done in a way that did not require the city to pay more money to this department. Instead, that was seen as an opportunity to remove money from our budget. I don't understand the justification for that. I don't understand the justification for making our budget lower because we created an opportunity to move money around so that it was more efficient.
[Nina Nazarian]: I don't hear a specific question, but I will answer.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Can you explain the justification for cutting $34,485 from the legislative budget? Can you please explain the justification for that?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. I appreciate that. President Bears, so when a department or any budget identifies a decrease in another line, it suggests that that amount was not needed. So we take a close look at that information and we make determinations from there. In this case, it's identified that the amounts were not needed. Now, we have other department budgets that are decreasing for FY27 as well. So this budget isn't in necessarily a different position than some of our other department budgets across the organization. Again, wouldn't be able to name them specifically right now, but I can tell you I've seen Bottom line decreases. Another piece that I'd like to mention is that when completing the second side in preparation for the city council meetings, if there is an increase to a line, we show it on the second side. If there is a, and again, there's an error that does not include the one increase that is shown on the other side of the sheet. But when there are decreases, we do not, you won't, I don't believe you'll find any decreases shown on any of the sheets. So that's, Just want to point that out, that if there's a net decrease, it is not surprising that there is not a lot here on this sheet.
[Justin Tseng]: Councilor Tseng. Thank you, President Bears. I think it's really important to look at, and President Bears, feel free to interrupt and correct me if I'm wrong, which I know you will. But I think it's really important to look at the recommendations that were made right, the recommended cut of the reallocation of the 20,000 to the messenger and upgrading that to a constituent service aid role as a holistic kind of vision for the department, right? I mean, I think it's an acknowledgment that with this new position, we might not need to spend as much on XYZ items, and so in total, this is the new vision for the department that makes sense. And then, But that vision falls apart when you don't have the extra person, the constituent service aid that we're looking for to do that role. And so we're left with a cut to something that we need to do our jobs while not getting the benefit for that restructuring, right? We don't get that extra person to fill in what we're losing. And so, in total, I think we're kind of chopping up a re-envisioning of this department in a very cynical way. And I don't love the reasoning, to be honest, of whenever a department offers a potential line item cut, we jump at it, or we kind of like take that as a sign that the department doesn't need that. I think that's a bit short-sighted, to be honest, and it doesn't let department heads present a holistic re-envisioning of their departments. Because I think oftentimes, and at this point, this is less about the legislative department and more about any department, you know, if I were a department head, and I had a vision for restructuring the department or restructuring certain services, I might make, in order to not just ask for more money, but to be constructive with administration, with HR, with finance, acknowledging that budgets can be difficult, I might suggest certain cuts to certain lines in order to fund other lines that, in the end, help us do more. But the kind of line-by-line breakdown might look different. It's about that kind of picture looking forward about how you want the department to work, how you envision that department working more efficiently, more collaboratively, better, in a more modernized way. And so I think the approach of treating any suggested line item cut as, oh, this is a cut that can be made, doesn't acknowledge that re-envisioning. And that's kind of at best. I think at worst, it actually incentivizes department heads not to make cuts when they want to re-envision the department, or when something is inefficient, because they're afraid that you only get half of the equation. You don't get the thing that makes the parts greater than the whole, you only get the parts that, you know, that you recommended to be chopped off, chopped off. And so, I guess I have less of a question here. I, I actually do have a question for President Bears. But I, I just bring this up as a recommendation for city administration, those in the finance department going forward, that we really rethink fundamentally how we do our budget. Because I don't wanna be disincentivizing the leaders in City Hall from making bold choices to re-envision their departments, to make our city more modernized and more efficient. Because of a fear that they're not gonna get the other part of the equation that they need to balance things out, they're only gonna get the cut. So with that being said, the question I have for you, President Bears, With this, I think, kind of huge cut, the $40,000 to the ordinary expenses, could you kind of illuminate for us what that looks like for us, how that kind of affects the job of us as city councilors, as a legislative department, and how that affects our ability to serve our residents?
[Zac Bears]: Sure, Councilor Tseng. And, you know, I have a bunch of things I want to say because, What I'm realizing at this point is the disastrous failure of our efforts to try to get the implementation of this charter done. Number one, and I didn't realize this until right now because I was so focused on something else, when I proposed our legislative budget, there was no change to the legislative salary because changing the legislative salary or the mayor's salary is illegal. under the charter. Under the new charter, there's no COLA, there's no two and a half percent. That doesn't happen anymore. So I didn't even notice that what I had done correctly per the charter and on my budget proposal has been undone here and we should probably revisit that for the executive budget as well because we shouldn't be getting a raise and the mayor shouldn't be getting a raise because the charter says that raises can't go into effect until after the next election. So that's wrong. The charter talks about the city messenger position and the council's ability to have an assistant subject to appropriation, to have staff subject to appropriation. There are going to be three new Councilors in 18 months in this chamber and part of the efforts we're doing here is to have enough people to support that. And we are six months in to our efforts to try to get this charter implemented and it's not getting implemented. We still haven't gotten a response back from our latest meeting. Apparently, the discussions with elections are very preliminary. But more fundamentally, like, this budget just doesn't reflect the realities of the legislative branch of the city. And I don't know why it happened this way, but I don't, you know, and we can try to correct this. I do not get actuals. They're not sent to me. You know, and I sent a budget that got the charter right. and was a level fund, essentially a level fund budget. And this is before we got any indication from the administration of a deficit or anything. No one bothered to email me or contact me or try to have a meeting with me to get our budget right. The clerk just informed me that the actuals don't include a $12,000 PO for Civic Plus. Like with this cut, we're not going to be able to post agendas anymore. So we need to get this right. I'm not going to be able to vote for the budget at all if we don't get this right. And I think that implementing a $25,000 adjustment to get a reasonable salary so that we can have a council assistant to support the legislative branch of our city, that is .0125% of the city budget. is not an unreasonable thing to do. We have a new charter in place. Like, we need to get it right, and we're not. So I found $6,000 right there. We're not supposed to get a raise. Maybe there's another five or six from the mayor. She's not supposed to get a raise. And, you know, we can go from there. There's half of it right there. And to be honest, I found all of it, and nobody bothered to reply to my email saying, here's the budget proposal. Let's have a meeting about it. Let's get it right. The actuals we have aren't right. Like, I just don't. We're the legislative branch of this government and I think the more that we are left out or ignored or not included or whatever else is going on on the other side of the hall, we're just gonna have the fundamental collapse of any basic functioning of government because there's literally zero trust left. I just won't vote for the budget if this is the budget. I don't know how other people feel. You know, we've had that discussion before. Nobody knows what happens if no budget is approved. But like I sent this in March 3rd and nobody emailed me to get it right. So I don't think that answered your question, Justin. I'm sorry. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: You already kind of said this, but what happens if we don't approve a budget?
[Zac Bears]: We don't know because it doesn't happen because cities work.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Let's find out.
[Nina Nazarian]: President Bears, you've brought up a number of different things that obviously need to be reviewed. I don't believe you ever requested a meeting, but I will take responsibility for not setting up a meeting.
[Zac Bears]: I set a budget and nobody responded to my email saying we're changing it.
[Nina Nazarian]: You said, President Bears, with all due respect, that you requested a meeting. I don't believe that's happening.
[Zac Bears]: No, I never said I requested a meeting. I never said that.
[Nina Nazarian]: Perhaps I misunderstood, because that's what I heard.
[Zac Bears]: I said nobody asked me to have a meeting. Every person who runs a department, never mind literally the legislative branches, my understanding is that the budget director meets with everybody except me. Is that true? Do they have to request a meeting to have their budgets done?
[Nina Nazarian]: The budget director hasn't had the opportunity to know. We've been very busy. The budget director doesn't meet with the budget director.
[Zac Bears]: So most departments don't meet with the budget director?
[Nina Nazarian]: Correct.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, so how do their budgets get done?
[Nina Nazarian]: I'm sorry, I didn't hear that.
[Zac Bears]: Like, let's say a director submits a budget. What happens, do they get a reply to their email that it got changed?
[Nina Nazarian]: There's usually a final budget that's submitted to the department head and they're asked to review it. No different than would be the case where we're submitting the budgets to the city council.
[Zac Bears]: Do they usually get to review it before it's placed on a public agenda or?
[Nina Nazarian]: They do some, this year has been very limited in terms of time to be candid, unfortunately.
[Zac Bears]: Well, here's my review, it's not good.
[Nina Nazarian]: I'm sorry, for some reason I'm having a difficult time hearing you.
[Zac Bears]: I just said here's my review. It's not very good. It doesn't accurately even reflect the things, the basic functions that we need to do, never mind the priorities that the voters, 70% of the voters voted for for the charter. And it doesn't reflect like it's in the legal budget because it gives the mayor and the council raises that we're not allowed to accept.
[Nina Nazarian]: Obviously that needs to be reviewed.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And we've been saying, Justin and I and the school committee have been trying to have meetings for six months to get the charter implementation done because there was no plan to implement the charter. And here we are again.
[Nina Nazarian]: Yeah. I won't go down that one road, but.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Like these are the things that I was worried about. And we're here now. And I'm glad that we noticed it.
[Nina Nazarian]: I guess I will go down that road, President Bears. I mean, we have been working alongside with you all in terms of the charter. I recognize that it's a process and it takes time. Government does take time. Unfortunately, we have a limited amount of resources and we're pulled in multiple different directions just like you all are. There's a lot going on right now. So yes, charter's coming back to the forefront come after the budget season passes. That's just part of the reality.
[Zac Bears]: There needs to be a council assistant to support 11 Councilors, to support the work of the council, to support the fact that the clerk's office had a position cut and that the charter says that it needs to happen. So we got to get it right. I sent a level funded budget on March 3rd and nobody ever replied to me that it was going to be changed. So I don't know. It doesn't feel like a good process to me.
[Nina Nazarian]: I also, if I may add, that in the process, in this process, I know we exchanged communications. Perhaps it wasn't with you directly, President Bears, but I know it was with, I believe it was with our acting city clerk in terms of cuts. So I'm assuming our acting city clerk communicated with you, President Bears, on cuts. I think it's also important to highlight that $40,000 here isn't necessarily $40,000 directly. I understand Councilor Tseng's point, and I don't, I think, I think it's important to separate the issues a little bit, but I won't go down that road too deeply other than to say, you know, when there is an opportunity, to solve budget problems that we're having at the magnitude in which we are having them, in the magnitude in which we have had to address the FY27 budget. This is how we have no choice. I don't find, myself, the mayor, our budget team, we don't find any pleasure in making changes. I recognize that you all submitted a budget, or President Bears, you submitted a budget that had What would ultimately be, I'm not even sure that I have your direct submitted budget because there may have been a COLA placed on top of that from there, but you had proposed adjusting President Bair's $25,000 out of the two lines in which have a $40,000 reduction here right now. So $15,000 of that is a pure further reduction to what was proposed. You had also proposed, and I think this has already been stated here tonight, that a position be created to address the messenger and the council assistant piece, which we've been discussing, $25,000 to $30,000 specifically. All I can say is all of those pieces get taken into consideration. You know, the total final budget that was proposed for that line is $31,600. As I said before, that is still being evaluated. That's as far as I can go right now because I don't have any concrete, I can't stand here before you and tell you the position is not going to be funded. I can't stand here before you and tell you the position is going to be funded. What I can tell you is the position is still being reviewed. We have a budget gap. We're working through.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I think we're willing to play our role in addressing the budget gap. You know, maybe we can shave 5 or 10 off, you know. Maybe we can do that. That would be probably in line with what some other departments are experiencing. I don't think we can shave 40 and I don't think that shifting the 25 is really an option, just getting rid of it. I think shifting it so that we have this position which, again, to implement the charter effectively and to support this council, we need to do. There's a reason that we propose the budget and I'm happy to meet with you and the budget director at any time, or if you have a written review of what I submitted, why it changed to this. But I don't think the actuals are right either. And, like, again, there's a PO, like, one of these lines, if it gets cut by 20,000, and we've had this issue persistently with these two lines where for two years everything was going into one line and none was going into another, but we were spending the combined allocation. It looks like things have been split back up now. You know, we need that money to pay for the service that we use to post the agendas and, you know, that we've offered that everyone in the city could use but haven't had the staffing capacity to do that. I mean, I'm literally creating and posting every city council agenda. That's not my job. And it's because we have, you know, I don't bring that up lightly, it's not what I, You know, I'm probably doing union work. I think we really need to just put that on the table, and I've been doing that for a while, because we haven't been able to fill the city clerk position, we're cut down a person, we haven't had a city messenger, like, we're running on fumes here, and we need to do something different, because I missed one, like, once, and we couldn't have a whole meeting because of it, and it's really just, it's not my job.
[Nina Nazarian]: With all due respect, President Bears, I believe, I can tell you unequivocally, it is not union work. And I can tell you also that I believe you've been doing that work even when we were fully staffed with the non-union staff, long before, with all due respect. Hats off to you, President Bears, because you do a lot of work. I'm sure all the other Councilors do. I see a lot of your work especially. So hats off to you on that. I don't envy the position you're in, but that's been a long-standing issue that I think the office has to address.
[Zac Bears]: Well, I trained someone to do it, then they quit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to stop myself.
[Nina Nazarian]: There's a long, windy road we can go down, but I'm not going to go down that road.
[Zac Bears]: It's not sustainable.
[George Scarpelli]: Sure.
[Rich Eliseo]: Mr. President, to the Chief of Staff, I just want to address for the record, I was never informed of budget cuts to the legislature, especially a $40,000 cut. I would have immediately brought that to the council's attention. So the statement you made that said the clerk was alerted to the budget cuts, I was alerted to my budget cuts, not to the legislative budget. So I want to clarify that for the record.
[Nina Nazarian]: I don't disagree with you, if I may, President Bears. I don't disagree with you, Clerk Alicio. It was never my intention to say that. What I was indicating was that we asked departments to make cuts and that I must not have finished my thought because we asked departments to make cuts. So there was, all I was trying to indicate was President Bears had made a comment with regard to no communication since March, since the submission of the budget. And I said what I was attempting to say, and I must have gone down a different road at that time, but what I wanted to articulate was that in fact there was communication to all departments with regard to requesting all departments make budget cuts. I was under no circumstances implying that you received any direct communication about the legislative budget.
[Rich Eliseo]: I appreciate that. It's just the way it came across. And I just want to state for the record that no one told me about that budget cut. And I don't believe President Bears or anybody in the council was in that email to department heads in regards to budget cuts, from what I understand.
[Zac Bears]: We don't receive those.
[Nina Nazarian]: I'm happy to reach out tomorrow. I will reach out tomorrow. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Do we have any more questions?
[Emily Lazzaro]: Just real quick and this is just before we talk about the fire budget and I'm very supportive of the fire department budget. The increase to their budget is almost the full amount that we are, that our budget is allocated for. But there's a bunch of stuff in their actuals that is a big gap between what's budgeted but it looks like they still have the same amount budgeted for next year. So, just wanted to point that out that maybe we could borrow some from them.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I mean, our actuals just are not to say that that's based on our actuals, the actuals that we have for this year do not reflect our expenditures. They don't reflect the actuals. reasons the money was budgeted, I mean the $30,000 at least I think 25,000 of that is for the zoning project. If we're not planning to fund that out of our budget next year, if we're not planning to continue it at all, you know, we've not been made aware of that. I thought we were doing something reasonable here. And Councilor Leming, sorry Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, thank you. Just to chime in here, I've been pretty silent on this. Yeah, I mean, the executive budget and the proposed executive budget here was raised $40,000. The proposed legislative budget was, as we can see, it's decreased by an approximately equivalent amount. We're not funded. being a position that has been specified by the charter, I think we've heard from one of my colleagues that the that the HR director already approves of it, I under I understand the answers of like you know it's it's. It's under review. We're still considering it. And that's because the chief of staff is not able to give a definitive answer to all this. I would appreciate having the mayor actually show up to some of these budget meetings. I understand that everybody's busy, but the budget's, I mean, the budget's a pretty important part of running the city. So I would like to actually have her come to a few of these things so that we could have these conversations a little bit more directly. uh collaboration has always been a bit of a a bit of a uh weak point here like when we were when we're talking about like a pretty minor portion of the charter which we ultimately did come to an agreement on just like the that was the that was the issue of voting for members of appointees to multi member bodies like that. That took like, that took like a very unnecessary public spat to do, whereas, you know, just answering emails and being a little bit more open, I feel like would avoid these things. in in the future. Obviously, you know, I'm not, I'm not I'm not supporting a budget that prioritizes other positions in the city, and just completely ignores the implementation, like like a position that's called for in the charter again. I also am having less and less sympathy just for the reasoning of we're also overworked that we don't have time to answer emails or do any of this. I mean, we're overworked because of turnover. We're overworked because we're not not appropriately funding positions. Council would be less overworked if we had this position for ourselves to actually help us do some of the busy work. I mean, the point of hiring people and maintaining adequate staffing is so that elected officials have time to do more of the policy work and less of the day-to-day work. Yeah, the legislative aid City Messenger, not only are we legally supposed to have it, it's a good idea, which is why folks voted on it. So yeah, I can't vote for any position that any budget that doesn't fund it. I don't see the logic in sending us back a budget that doesn't include that. yeah yeah that and and i'm you know i i i'm not really satisfied anymore with the answer of it is under review because you know you you could you could say that about literally anything so thank you that's that's that's all i got thank you councilman and then councillor callahan
[Liz Mullane]: I just wanted to circle back that when I was in communication with Director Crowley about it, the last piece that we kind of left it on was that She stated, I'm glad to hear this position is in line with the budget allocation set out by President Bears, which was referenced earlier in an email. Also, I'd be very happy to continue this conversation once the position moves forward through the budget approval process. So I was under the impression at that point that we were moving this through. I'm not saying, I'm not blaming anybody, I'm just saying that was the last communication that I had. I was under the impression that we were all moving in the same right direction and she had the job description. So I just wanted to clarify that was the last communication we had about it.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. Do you have the, this is really not super relevant. I'm just trying to figure out if that communication may have come in before we knew the massive gap that we had in the school department budget, right? Because that would be relevant if it was. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but it sounds in the ballpark. And it's possible that there's communications going from, you know, my side to, or the mayor and myself to the HR director on the next step. And then we learn about something else and, you know, something's already in queue to get sent out. So I also, kind of as Acting Clerk Alicio made, I just want to clarify, I don't believe that there have been emails that have gone unresponded to, right? We acknowledge when email budgets are submitted. I recognize that, you know, I'll take responsibility for not reaching out in advance, but this season, so I'm going to take responsibility and say I apologize for that. This budget season has been particularly It's challenging in terms of the massive gap. At some point, we believed we had a $7 million gap on the school side. Now, it's a $2 million gap, and we still have MFN at $240,000 or $250,000. So, you know, we're really just trying to solve those problems. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't even be having this conversation.
[Anna Callahan]: Just two quick things. The idea that the city is still evaluating the position and that the city cannot even tell us the status of that evaluation, whether, when it will be evaluated, whether we will get that position, that unfortunately cannot apply to a position that is in the charter that the voters voted for. That position is in the charter. That position needs to be funded. There's no evaluating whether that position will be funded or not. And my second comment is that I'm quite surprised and dismayed that the process for budgeting in this city is that department heads send their budgets, their requested budgets in, and then there's no discussion, and then they receive a budget back that may be totally different. That seems unprofessional at best.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Mr. President. And again, I publicly want to announce that due to the fact that the person at the podium has publicly attacked me and accused me of pretty intense accusations of redirecting everything to you, Council Bears, but I keep hearing over and over again, the budget team, if we can, if Council President can get us the, the list of who was on that budget team would be interesting to know. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Chief of Staff Nazarian.
[Nina Nazarian]: President Bears, I cannot ignore a comment like that any longer. Councilor Scarpelli, through you President Bears, has been hollering at me for the last five plus years. It is unacceptable. Councilor Scarpelli treats me in a way that is hostile. I will not accept that treatment any longer, and I will not accept that I have publicly attacked Councilor Scarpelli because I have just come here and I have tried to answer questions, but I have been subjected to a hostile work environment. That is all I have to say about that for now.
[Zac Bears]: Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: I just wanted to bring this back to this budget. reiterate just how much I agree with Councilor Callaghan that... Who's on the budget team?
[Zac Bears]: Councilor Scarpelli. I'll call you after Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Councilor Scarpelli, that wasn't about you. But I just wanted to kind of bring it back to what Councilor Callaghan said. You know, I think earlier in this kind of, on this topic, I mentioned just how structurally I think we could improve the budget process. I think another way we could improve the budget process is to have more comprehensive meetings with all the department heads to kind of get an idea of what they're actually trying to do with the budget. And instead of treating every person or every program or service or kind of computer program as a line item. It really is a cohesive network that builds a department and builds a city. And I think the idea that department heads can be kind of jump scared by having a budget they haven't had time to really evaluate, understand, and learn to defend is really tough for me to kind of accept as a Councilor.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. You know, I think it's a little, I think the implied, the implication that you made earlier has really been sticking with me. And if I went on strike, right, from doing council agendas, there'd be no meetings, there'd be no appropriations, there'd be no budget. And I understand. I've been yelled at a lot in this room. And I understand that it's not fun. and it can hurt, and I apologize to anyone who feels that way, standing at that podium, sitting behind this rail. I understand that. But you threatened to go down a road there that I think was really not cool. And what I'm saying to you is that there's a reason that this budget was presented the way that it was presented. We all do a lot of work behind the scenes, a lot of work that goes unseen, unvalued. I know I feel that way. I'm sure you feel that way. I think everyone in this room feels that way. The voters voted to make some really significant changes to our government. The implementation has not been what it needs to be. I understand that the explanation for that is that we're too busy. But we put forward this budget. We moved through the motions on it. It's, to be frank, a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of the city budget. If we think that the $15,000 or $25,000 or $40,000, whichever number you want to pick out of the changes that were made from the proposal we sent in to what we got back, are going to rescue the city budget, it's not true. And what are we sacrificing by leaving it out? It seems to me that I may well have been the only person who runs a branch of the government or a department of the city who never got called in to have a meeting about the budget. And that's fine if that's the way we want to operate. I'll keep extending the deadlines and holding things out and, you know, letting you get stuff in late so we can get the agenda out on time. I really, you know, don't have a problem trying to help. I really don't, but there were some, it's just not easy and I don't appreciate that you didn't really even try to talk about it with us. I just would have appreciated a meeting. Thank you. Is there any other questions about the legislative budget? All right, we'll do the fire budget. Oh, you're doing the presentation? All right. All right.
[Rich Eliseo]: Do you have to give me some rights?
[George Scarpelli]: I am sharing.
[Zac Bears]: Oh, are you co-host? I don't. You should be able to share. OK. I will try to go. We have you on as Chief Evans. OK. And actually, before we start, Councilor Scarpelli, I'm sorry, I missed your hand.
[George Scarpelli]: Yeah, I'm sorry, Council President. When we get a minute, if we can get that answer, though, that who's on the budget team, I'd like to know who's working on that. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Yeah, we'll work on that.
[SPEAKER_10]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_09]: You got two buttons.
[Zac Bears]: All right. I know you have a presentation, but Chief Evans, the discussion is about the fiscal 27 budget proposal. If you could share with us what's changed from fiscal 26 to fiscal 27. of summary of some of the work you guys have been doing over the last year, some of the plans for the upcoming year and items that aren't funded in this budget that you'd like to see funded in the future and you can do all that after your presentation.
[Todd Evans]: Okay. Good evening. So we have some changes to the budget as far as looking at the permanent employee expenses there as well Some overtime increases. Last year overtime was reduced and the overtime in this budget is being increased back to that because as far as the year has gone, it's been a tough year as far as injuries go. There have been several injuries over the past year which has created more overtime as well as FMLA usage. And also stipends, there are stipend increases just due to we have added some new firefighters to the roster. So some of these stipends are increases because of those additions. And same thing with holiday pay and longevity. and sick incentive, those are all increases due to the addition of some of those firefighters there. There are increases to professional services, this is, part of that is if we're able to do any hirings this year. Some of that money comes from doing background checks. Some of that also includes using vendors for testing of our ladders and our aerials and our pumps. Also, legal expenses as well. And the building supplies. I'm sorry, janitorial supplies that just increased just due to cost increases that have come up, as well as communication, sorry, computer software. I'm reading the small print here. Computer software equipment, that's some record management systems that we were, and reporting systems that we were required to switch over to. Nationally they transitioned from a, how we were doing our fire reporting to the state, it became a transition to a national system. So we were required to move away from our previous way of reporting to this national thing so that we had to use a vendor for that. That's part of some of the cost increases of the computer software as well as other record management and training software as well. So that's kind of a quick overview of just some of those increases and changes for that.
[Zac Bears]: Before you get into the presentation, Chief, I've got two questions. Why is the professional services going up so much?
[Todd Evans]: So again, that's part of some of those are like unknown possibilities here with what we're getting into the discussions of the rezoning and things like that. Obviously, some of that is going to incur some questions that we might also have to reach out to legal on about.
[Zac Bears]: But why were the actuals $159,000 and the budget was $35,000? What are we paying for there?
[Todd Evans]: For the professional services? Yeah. Again, that was part of also the doing the background checks if needed for the new hires and also the testing on vehicles and apparatus and ladders and pumps, using vendors to do that stuff. any possible pending litigation and things like that. We do have some outstanding arbitrations coming up.
[Zac Bears]: Is it possible to get a breakdown of specifically what the expenses were in that line this year?
[Todd Evans]: I can try to find those numbers for you. I don't have those numbers with me.
[Zac Bears]: If we could get like a printout from the finance department.
[Todd Evans]: Yeah, if you want to give me a request of exactly what you want to see.
[Zac Bears]: We'll request that. We'll request the FY26 actuals line for the professional services line item.
[Justin Tseng]: I was just going to ask for the same thing. I'd be curious to see what the breakdown is and how much we're spending on litigation and pending litigation. I know you're in a difficult position, but I think there's a lot of concern in the community about that and how we're spending that money. So I would make that motion to request a breakdown of the professional services line item in the FY27 budget, including information about litigation costs.
[Zac Bears]: So all expenses for FY26 and a breakdown of what the expectations are for that for FY27. Councilor Scarpelli, then Vice President Lazzaro.
[George Scarpelli]: Well, thank you, Mr. President. While we're talking about this now, I think that also with that, I know that we just recently had, I believe, two arbitrations that were handled, one over $160,000 and another one roughly around $60,000, so over $200,000 in settlement. So I think that we need to get an understanding of where that money is coming from. Is that part of that line? And moving forward, I know that there are a few other arbitrations that will be heard soon, I believe, and what that would cost us. So thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Adding arbitrations there. Vice President Lazzaro. And I have that as a motion by Councilor Tseng, seconded by Councilor Scarpelli.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I actually, I want you to be able to get to your presentation. So I could also hold this until maybe we should do the presentation first and then I can ask line item questions. Would that be better or should I ask you now?
[Zac Bears]: I think let's, we're in it. Let's go for it.
[Emily Lazzaro]: We're here. Okay. I was wondering if you could explain about the overtime line where it's budgeted in 26 to be 1,800,000, which seems like kind of a lot. to start, and then the proposed budget for FY27 is $1,900,000, but the actuals as of 5-20 are $2,148,241.58, which is already way over. It's already way over what's budgeted for next year. So, could you explain why it's so high, and then why the proposed budget for next year is lower than that, and it's not even the end of the fiscal year?
[Todd Evans]: Those were unexpected, the injuries that have been there all year long. We've had about eight people probably out all year long. Some of those people had to get surgeries. And so it's like a long-term wait for them to return to work. So we've had to cover a lot of overtime with that. Just the levels that we're at, we work four different shifts. Each shift is a 23 minimum person on a shift contractually.
[Emily Lazzaro]: 23 firefighters need to be in that.
[Todd Evans]: Working, yes.
[Emily Lazzaro]: In each building per shift.
[Todd Evans]: Among the six stations, yeah. Among the six stations, got it. 23 people working, manning that shift. And then right now we're really at about we're able to have about 25 people assigned to each of the shifts with us, with the staffing. So injuries or sick. Injuries, vacations, or sick, it's generating over time.
[Emily Lazzaro]: This has been an issue for a while for this department, right?
[Todd Evans]: It is. So, I mean, sorry, I was just looking back previous years, back in 2002. where we were, I was hired in 2001, and I was looking at the complement then, it was 132 at the time for staffing. And right now today, we're sitting at about 112 right now, staffing, with some vacancies that we're hoping that we can fill those with hirings coming up. If we're able to.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Are they budgeted for?
[Todd Evans]: Yeah, so right now.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Are you seeing people coming out of the academy?
[Todd Evans]: We just got our last person out of the academy. We did a hiring of 10 over the last year. Well, we originally had 13 going through the process over the last year, and only 10 people were able to complete the process.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Does that keep up with retirement?
[Todd Evans]: We do have upcoming potential retirements, which is an issue. There are several people that could basically just call it a day at any time. They have the time and the age to retire. So they're trying to factor that in as you don't know if they might decide to retire or not. So then again, you know, the hiring process can take about a year to go through the process of getting them. background checked and vetted and then going through the academy and graduating.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Is there a solution? That's a question.
[Todd Evans]: Obviously, I'm always hopeful that looking forward and the city will be able to be able to hire more staffing in the future.
[Emily Lazzaro]: How about more money?
[Todd Evans]: Well, sure.
[Emily Lazzaro]: For salaries?
[Todd Evans]: Yeah.
[Emily Lazzaro]: And not overtime? Yes. Because you do pay for it, right? You do pay for it ultimately in the overtime.
[Todd Evans]: Sure.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Because we're just budgeting for it now in overtime instead of in salaries, which doesn't really make a ton of sense. What if you took the overtime and just put it in salaries?
[Todd Evans]: Well, we would have to, if we could increase the, Counting staffing, I mean.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Right. You can't really do it backwards.
[Todd Evans]: Obviously, we would prefer to.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Maybe that would be more fiscally responsible in the future.
[Todd Evans]: Then you get all the benefits and things that you have to add on to that.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, but time and a half is kind of a lot.
[Todd Evans]: Yeah, it is. And it might be contributing to the injuries overall. Because you're tired? Just because they are doing a lot more work and working more shifts.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Right. And it wouldn't be aside from the fiscal responsibility that we have as a city to take care of the people that are keeping our residents safe from fires. Seems like pretty high priority. But I also just want to say I mean it seems obvious but I feel that I should say it out loud. We don't want the people that work for Medford to be getting grievous injuries that require them to have surgeries and be out of work for long periods of time. I just feel like I had to say that. But that's an important thing to do. So maybe we could look at, maybe we could do a little looking at how much money we're spending on overtime and what if we redirected some of that money to salaries instead. But I wouldn't want anybody to be too efficient with their budgets and then lose money as a result. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Just a quick follow-up on that. Is workers' comp or is there any, like the cost of the injuries, is any of that included in here?
[Todd Evans]: So the medical line item.
[Zac Bears]: Medical?
[Todd Evans]: Where we have the, we use future comp as the, company to deal with the injuries to negotiate better rates for their surgeries and things like that and try to get some savings on that. But it's just been such a bad year. Those prices have obviously been adding up for us also. Typically, you have that medical line item there and you don't usually hit that number. But this year it's been so bad, I think we're projecting to be even over that a little bit too. So, which is like, it's very rare.
[Zac Bears]: It's just been a tough year. So that's a service that you use to try to help reduce the cost of the, like negotiate with healthcare providers? Exactly. Okay. All right. Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Thanks. Councilors are really, I think, gone the line of questions I had because when you look at this whole situation, right, you've got these overtime costs that line item that is, I think, in part, it's a staffing cost disguised as, you know, a separate line item except it's less Fiscally responsible, right? It's like less fiscally effective for us to do that. But that's not all of it. It puts more pressure on our firefighters. And it's forcing them to, you know, wear out their bodies and burn out even more, which is I think what I'm hearing from a lot of folks in your department. And I know you're aware of it, too. I know we've talked about it. And so it really does seem to me that it's more fiscally responsible and just humane to our workers to invest in staffing as a way to kind of rebalance that need there. Do you know what the picture looks like in other municipalities?
[Todd Evans]: We actually have some of the numbers in the presentation.
[Justin Tseng]: I won't make you jump the gun. Maybe we'll do the presentation. Yeah, let's do the presentation, because my next question was a lead into the rest of it, which was the 98,000 that's cut, or that's lower. Yeah.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Do you, just very quickly, do you know, is there, are the families of the injured folks, are there, is there, like, any kind of, like, fundraising or anything? Do they need help? Is there, like, something that we could help publicize or whatever for people who are recovering from injuries?
[Todd Evans]: Members of the department have actually done a good job of formulating a health and wellness committee. So they have gone out and gotten training for themselves to do peer support. And they've gone through the entire department. They've done classes with everybody in the department. A group of them have done a great job with that, basically informing everybody how to reach out to them. for any needs as well as how to reach out to other communities around us that are involved in other peer support teams. If they didn't want to like personally speak to other members in the department, how they can reach out to other organizations that can kind of help them deal with anything else also. I think they've done a great job of that. So they do have a system set up to try to deal with that.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Any help that they can. Yeah. And if there's anything like, if there's like a collection or anything that you would want us to, or an event or anything that you would want us to help publicize, please let us know.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. All right. One quick last question, then we'll do the presentation. When we're talking about the 23% minimum manning, is that that doesn't include you, obviously. Right. It doesn't include the deputy chiefs? It does. It does include those deputy chiefs, captains, lieutenants, and firefighters, all in that? Yes. And that's, there's four shifts? Yes. All right. And basically what you're saying right now is that there's maybe eight to 10 unfilled positions right now that are moving through the academy?
[Todd Evans]: Right now there are probably six vacancies right now. Six vacancies. Getting staffed. And then how many injuries? Right now a couple people actually just came back so I believe we are at six injuries still.
[Zac Bears]: Six vacancies, six injuries. So that brings us down to 108. Yeah. Really 107 because you got to take the office manager out.
[Todd Evans]: And also like like day personnel, fire prevention, administration.
[Todd Evans]: So training, the individuals like say three people in training, three people in fire prevention. So that's 103, 100.
[Zac Bears]: That brings down to 100. And administrative deputy and administrative captain. All right. Yeah. So we're at 99 or about 99. Yeah. All right. So 24, maybe 25 if you're lucky, scheduled. And that's if nobody's sick, nobody has an emergency, nobody's on vacation.
[Todd Evans]: Personal days, death in family, FMLA.
[Zac Bears]: And so even if you had all six of those positions filled and no retirements and everyone was off injury, let's say just the six positions filled, you leave six on injury, you may be 26.
[Todd Evans]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. And then I think it sounded like you said there were some statistics in your presentation, so I'll turn it over to you.
[Todd Evans]: Okay. So here's an actual picture of Engine 4 that we got recently. So again, we've discussed that we have a couple pumpers coming September and October. was purchased with ARPA funds, so that is in service at Riverside Ave already. Again, we've talked about the long wait times of ordering vehicles, which could potentially be like a five-year wait time, and the prices of those vehicles are obviously increasing drastically. That's just the, under there. These were just a few of the people, some of the graduates that went through the academy this past year. Also, promotions. We've had some promotions in the department. Some temporary promotions. One permanent promotion was made during the fiscal year and five temporaries. Again, we did 10 new hires over the past year and we had one member retire after 43 years of service. Actually, some of the members of the department are here, but they were having a retirement party down the street for this person, so they're missing the retirement party. We've had the administrative captain that has been working on trying to get us grants here. We were able to secure a few grants, firefighter safety equipment grant for radios and student education. And we also mentioned before that the Leary Fund was going to be getting us bailout kits. And then there are some other potential grants out there that we're waiting to hear back on now. So the administrative captain has been actively seeking out as many grants as possible to try to get us additional funding for all this equipment that is increasing in price on us. And we're just trying to keep up with replacing things as needed. We had one of our lieutenants, he completed his state hazmat training and was appointed to the state hazmat team. And then we were doing community outreach throughout the year with the smokehouse that you've seen at events and things like that and going to city events. So I do have the administrative captain here tonight. So some of these numbers here that we would, we've been analyzing some of the run totals for some of these. We talked about the staffing and, but the run numbers for instance, engine one, engine one just by itself is out of headquarters central in the city. They're doing almost 4,000 runs a year by themselves, which is, that's a lot of runs. That's comparatively to some other cities. We've, here's some totals here.
[SPEAKER_11]: In my research, looking at like grants and whatnot, you do a lot of like department analytics. And in particular, we found that towns like Lexington, Stoneham, Redding, populations are between like 25,000, 35,000. They do an annual run totals of around 4,800 to 4,200 runs. They cover that with two engines and one ladder. Redding also has an ambulance. So that's, yeah, two engines, one ladder. So Medford headquarters only. That's just engine one, ladder one. We are averaging, actually last year, no, fiscal year 25, we did 6,693 runs out of headquarters only. That's with one engine and one ladder. So engine one did more runs in 25 than the Winchester Fire Department. So we're seeing extreme wear and tear and between 11 and 13 runs a day for the engine. So a completely unsustainable number actually.
[Todd Evans]: So some of the research that they've been doing regarding these elevated runs, they've gone to other departments and looked at how those departments are adding or have squads or rescue units, in which case, if you can see this picture, it's a vehicle that's a smaller size vehicle. You could potentially put like two people running out of that vehicle with specialized equipment. You could create, begin creating a tech rescue team starting out on a small scale and ramp it up in years to come. Start picking away at the tech rescue training and actually having these people staffing this vehicle, you could potentially put like a vehicle like that at headquarters to help reduce some of those runs for engine one. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: I'm sorry to interrupt you. Could you go back for a second? Yeah. A few slides back to the run totals.
[Todd Evans]: These ones?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. So what you're saying here is just headquarters is doing more runs than the entire town of Lexington, town of Stoneham, town of Reading.
[SPEAKER_10]: Substantially more.
[Zac Bears]: By a lot.
[SPEAKER_10]: Over 2,000 more.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. OK. And if you could maybe go two slides further down. So engine one and engine four. are going out so much that there's a lot of wear and tear on the vehicles, the firefighters are out all the time, and we're not meeting certain ratings and standards that fire departments are supposed to meet.
[SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, essentially, we pretty much use like NFPA 1710 as a metric for response capability, which is your total complement to respond to residential structure fire as being the bare minimum metric. Due to the total call volume of Engine 1 and Engine 4, there is a rating called the UHU rating, which is essentially time under utilization of the apparatus. Both of the apparatus are rated nearing .5%, meaning almost, or at Engine 1's case, basically at half of the 24-hour shift, it is out of service on a call, unable to respond to another emergency. So they're basically not factored into NFPA 1710 because they're not available.
[Zac Bears]: They're out too much to respond to an emergency. Correct.
[Todd Evans]: All right. Again, these are some of the, we mentioned some of the high hazard properties in the city and things like that. And again, this is gonna come up again later on with the talking about the rezoning and things like that. And as we're trying to add buildings and certain facilities and stuff like that to the city, which you're gonna have to take specialized training into consideration. For instance, the cranes that are on Boston Ave right now at a project there. That would require high angle rescue training and a tech rescue team for an incident that could happen with those cranes if a crane operator was in jeopardy up there, say, and in which case we would require like Somerville or Cambridge to assist in a rescue for that. The aerial, the ladders on the trucks, they can't even reach that. So they would require specialized rescue training for that. So again, that's something that we've been looking into. reaching out to those departments that are trained in this and a lot of them are very helpful and they're willing to, you know, assist and point us in the right direction of finding the best training to do that and start, and we can start using that training budget to start chipping away at getting people. trained in those specialized things.
[SPEAKER_11]: Just to meld these two topics together if I could, we did some more department comparisons to more like-sized departments on the whole. So Somerville, Waltham, and Newton. all doing run totals. Some will do run totals around 15,000, 15,500. Waltham around 12,900 and Newton at about 12,100. Medford is at 12,296 for fiscal year 25. All of their respective departments, the busiest apparatus is between 2,500 and 2,800 because The common theme is they have two to three more apparatus than we have dispersed amongst their city, and all three of the comparative departments, one of those apparatus is a specialty vehicle tech rescue. They also have staffing. Some of those are 160 to 170, WALFAM's at 165, and Newton at 194. Very similar run totals to what we have.
[Zac Bears]: And we're at 120. 112. Because we're budgeted for 120, but we have vacancies. Yeah, we have some vacancies right now. Yeah.
[Todd Evans]: Again, there's a mention here, obviously, the Fall River incident there. They're talking about the staffing there. And that goes back to 1710 as well. Yeah, exactly. And then there's been a lot of discussion about PFAS in the firefighting equipment, in the gear. And next year, we're actually, we're going to have to start considering updating many sets of firefighting gear where the governor passed the, There's going to be a law in effect starting in 2027 that vendors cannot sell the gear with any PFAS in it. So we're going to have to start getting that lined up for replacing everybody's set of gear that's set to expire after 10 years of having the gear. So we're coming up on that date where many people got their sets of gear 10 years ago coming up on it.
[Zac Bears]: I'm going to recognize Vice President Lazar. Chief, could you go back to a couple of slides? Could you go back to the staffing? There was a slide that had historic staffing levels.
[SPEAKER_11]: Oh, yeah, sure. 2002 I think was the first one.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, this one.
[Todd Evans]: So it's kind of been like a up and down thing here. We're pretty low historically here.
[Zac Bears]: This is the lowest it's ever, well, it was this low in July 2024 as well. Yeah.
[Todd Evans]: And then we got to do that 10-person hiring, well, the 13-person hiring, but we were only successful with 10. And then, of course, we're anticipating possible retirements happening again. So we can start dipping down into those levels again if people suddenly start retiring soon.
[Zac Bears]: All right. And you had some data on that. How many are we gaining this year if everybody gets hired, if everybody who's in the pipeline right now comes on? Are we going up to 110?
[Todd Evans]: Yeah, you're going to be basically adding one more person to each group, basically.
[Zac Bears]: And then you had just on the next couple slides basically one thought that it seems like the department has is around the squad approach to reduce the number of calls on the apparatus at engine one and engine four. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
[Todd Evans]: Because there have been discussions of trying to get engine three back in service as well on Salem Street. Again, that would require staffing that with three people versus the squad type vehicle that you could staff with two people. So if we could kind of, if in the future we were able to get to a certain level of staffing, you might be able to implement the two squads or something to help reduce some of those runs for engine one and engine four. if you were able to split up two squads.
[Zac Bears]: So at 23, at minimum manning, engine three's out. It needs to be at 26 to shift to have engine three. And it'd need to be 25 to have one squad, 27 to have two squads, 30 to have two squads and engine three. Exactly.
[Todd Evans]: But then if you have vacations or sick, then you're not able to staff those. Right.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Other Councilors have questions, I'm going to come back to mine. Councilor, this is our Councilor Tseng.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. Can you please possibly send this presentation to the clerk for him to distribute to Councilors? Would that be OK? Sure. Is that OK? This is just valuable information for us to have, I think. Something that makes me really insane as a city Councilor is when things that are objectively for the health, well-being, safety of our residents are not taken seriously by our government or are things that maybe don't make our like the general public kind of like rend their garments in the streets because I think it's really important that we make sure that we can not have people die in fires or have firefighters get grievously injured because of understaffing, historic understaffing, chronic understaffing, people not being able to do their jobs. And that also includes equipment. The debt exclusion failure was a big problem, and the fact that we couldn't rebuild the fire headquarters was a big problem, and I wish it hadn't happened that way, but that was a public vote, and we can still move forward working with what we have access to and trying to find a solution. But it requires vision and leadership and direction. And short of that, what we can do is try at the very least to not have our firefighters be in danger all the time and not put our residents in danger all the time by ignoring factual information about best practices and just physical reality. So I really appreciate this presentation. I know you've had to basically repeat this information year over year because nothing changes, but I do think it's really important for the public to understand. I know that nobody's, I don't know, not a lot of people are watching this meeting really, but I think it's important for it to be publicized so that we say a few times that it's very important that we have happy, healthy and safe firefighters so that the people of Medford can be safe in their homes and not in danger of the sort of emergencies that your team can prevent or make not be deadly. So I just, there are solutions to what is happening here and incremental change needs to start happening or we're going to continue to put ourselves and our families and our friends and our neighbors in danger. And it's not acceptable. It's just very frustrating. And one of the effects of this continued behavior is that firefighters are suing the city and the city is repeatedly losing the lawsuits. And that is also expensive. And you're paying for it one way or another. If you're not paying for it in salaries, you're paying for it in overtime. If you're not paying for it by staffing the firehouses and by having enough equipment, then you're paying for it in the litigation and in the lawsuits that you lose. So I'm just thinking that maybe we could have some fiscal responsibility by investing in our city beforehand, not after the fact, with injuries and lost lawsuits. It's illogical, and it angers me. It's unsafe, and it's irresponsible. I appreciate the presentation. I wish that I had greater capacity to increase budget line items than I do. But for now, thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Councilor Tseng, then Councilor Scarpelli, then Councilor Malauulu.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah. One of the key, I think, flaws in being a city councilor is learning so much about what needs money, what needs help, and then not being able to make a motion to increase those line items ourselves. I think that's a very fundamental frustration with this job. Thank you so much for a really in-depth, detailed presentation about where we stand, where we stand compared to others, where we need work, and kind of what next steps I think are helpful. I think, I'm speaking for myself, but I'm sure there are people behind the rail who agree, I think a worry of ours is we keep identifying the problems, and then There doesn't seem to be a long kind of long-term vision. And this isn't about your department really. I think it's about a grander vision for the city, a long-term vision about how we get to that destination, about how we fund the apparatus, the equipment that we need, the infrastructure improvements. maybe two years ago, we went on a tour of the firehouses across the city, and you got to see how just dilapidated and falling apart a lot of them are. And I think it says a lot about our firefighters, that they're still serving our city, despite those being the working conditions that they're facing. So, I mean, you don't have to respond to this, but any kind of any indication of how this budget might address some of that, what falls short in this budget when it comes to addressing those kind of like the capital needs to support our firefighters I think would be helpful. In addition to that, one thing that the council has brought up time and time again, especially since the last budget, but I know I've talked to folks about this too, is the need for a dive team in Medford and how I think over a year ago, it may have been, I'm not sure on the timeline anymore, but, you know, we sadly had a resident drown in the lakes and if we had a dive team back then, then we could have saved one life in this city. I know it's, it is a budget impact, but I think, I've heard ideas from different folks about how to fund that. I'm curious if we've made the request in this budget, if there was a conversation with the city administration about that, what that was like. So that's my second question. The first one being infrastructure and capital needs. Second one being dive team. And then the third question I have is about grants. I think it's excellent that folks in the department have the kind of gumption to be writing and applying for these grants. It seems like a heavy lift. Seems like it takes time away from either work or relaxing at home. I'm curious about would it be helpful to have someone either on your team or centralized in City Hall help with that process, help you guys identify and apply the grants. I'm curious about the time that people, like what kind of time are people taking to apply for it? Is it personal time? Is it work time? Is that time taking away from serving our residents?
[Todd Evans]: So, well, I just want to say that I do appreciate all the equipment and capital funding that the city has given us as far as trucks go that we were in dire need of replacing these trucks. And again, the timelines has been difficult and the prices of these vehicles has been difficult to deal with. So I appreciate all that the city has provided to us. And all these firefighters here are doing an excellent job. dealing with all multiple alarm fires throughout the year. It's been a busy year as far as that goes with multiple alarm fires. And they do a great job with all the equipment that we do have provided to us and the training that we do have. And they are ready, willing, and able to take on these additional trainings. And they want to move forward and learn new skills and increase our capability going forward with the growth of the city. So as the city expands, the department wants to expand and take on these abilities to deal with technical rescue. So again, we've discussed with other departments that are involved in that and they have told us there's like a correlation between the dive team and the rescue teams that the tech rescue teams kind dive teams kind of evolve maybe as like an offshoot of that tech rescue team or something like that, you know. So again, that's like something that we could, we'll have to start chipping away at these things as far as, you know, with the budget that we have provided to us and the amount of money that we can put towards training. And again, over time that factors into it as well, trying to get training. So the overtime isn't just to cover the injuries and sick time and things like that. It's for multiple alarm fires, calling in additional help for multiple alarm fires, fire investigations, investigating the fires, there's costs involved with that. We've had some bad winter storms. We've increased some people for some of those storms. That factors into all the overtime as well. But again, they're all doing a great job with what we have. So, and they're pushing through and trying to overcome the injuries and keeping up with the demand of, as we showed you, the high volume of runs that some of these trucks are doing. So the people working on those especially busy pieces, you know, They're trying to keep up with the demand as well. I forget what the other question was.
[SPEAKER_11]: As part of one of the main components of my job title is to look into and procure grants on straight time in an administrative role. There are some offshoot stuff that I do, department analytics and whatnot, but the majority of it is looking into grants, applying for grants, following up with grants, doing year-end reports, and all that. So that's, I would say, more than 50% of my total job title for my day shift. Right now, we are waiting for We're waiting for word on two separate grants. We are in the process of doing the student education grant through through Mima, so we're going to be going to the elementary schools and providing fire safety education for the first and third graders in the next two weeks. That was off of grant applied grant money. We got just over 8000 for that. We are. We're waiting on grant money through Firehouse Subs potentially for some extremely important life safety tools, thermal imaging cameras for each individual firefighter. And we are in the process of looking into applying for FEMA grants. Those are sort of like the big ticket grants that we're going for for this year. AFG, which is assistance in firefighter grant, and then also SAFER grant, which is manpower. So essentially you apply. and you get three years of partial coverage of total salary, and then it's up to the city to cover those new department members on the fourth year. So that's what we're looking at right now.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you so much. Thanks for all the detail. I mean, even this slide alone, I think it really highlights how, even though on the budget sheet it might say a certain figure, when you account for the vacancies and the injuries, that it's not the lived reality of what firefighters are facing on the ground and the capacity in the department. So I think this is truly, really helpful. I understand, you know, it's really difficult to be presenting a budget that maybe isn't your ideal budget. And I appreciate, I think, your honesty in dealing with it and being able to take tough questions. I really see that. I think Chief Evans especially, you've honestly reached out and kind of raised a lot of attention for me when it comes to the issues that Firefighters are facing on the ground and are feeling on the ground as well. A lot of the pressure that you're seeing in your department that is creating greater fiscal pressure on the city as well. And fiscal is just one of the ways it's creating pressure. So I really appreciate, you know, you standing here and giving us this presentation and answering our questions. And I just appreciate the whole department for their work. I think I just want to close on what Councilor Lazzaro said is Public safety is one of those things. It's a basic of city government. We should never play with it. But even beyond that level, ultimately, it's just not fiscally responsible to not invest, because it ends up biting us in the butt anyways. So thanks. I'll end my spiel there.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. Councilor Malauulu.
[Liz Mullane]: Oh, I think George.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, Councilor Scarpelli and Councilor Malayne, my apologies.
[George Scarpelli]: Sorry, Council President, I might have to jump out in a minute. So I just wanna make sure I get my, cause I tell you, I'm a little dismayed and a little disheartened because I'm hearing all these things and this isn't new. We talk about squad, we have an engine that doesn't have staff. That's the most basic, principle of protection in that neighborhood. We don't have, we don't have water. And the fact that we're just talking about it, this isn't new. This is, that's why it's so infuriating to me. We talk about grants. You know, what we just heard was that we had the FEMA grant. We had it. And all the mayor had to do was fund the fire department at minimal level. And then we would have been up to 128 firefighters for three years paid for by FEMA. So I get so frustrated when I hear this dog and pony show that goes around in circles. We talk about the injuries. The injuries are because we have firefighters working harder than they should. We have politics being played left and right with public safety officials. When we hear different situations, like firefighters being followed by detectives and private investigators and being called out and being fired, and then all of a sudden losing in court, and then trying to recover from that. Because I want to know how we're going to recover from the last two settlements. Because we're in the hole right now. Where are we going to find $150,000 plus to pay back a firefighter who was accused of something, lost in court, and then again. Then we have questions about overtime. Who's leading us? Why do we have to keep defending this? These are basic issues that we're dealing with that are costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then we want to say why we're not funded? And it's not even close. We're talking about a squad. And that's so important because everybody has them. That's a basic right we should have as our firefighters, as a community. And we don't. Water safety, we don't. We don't even have an engine with water. Because we had to use that force to cover overtime, if I recall. When is enough enough? Because I tell you, I, you know, chief, you're in a bad spot and I can appreciate you having to come up here and take the heat, but I'm not holding back with the fact that when it was chief, when, when chief Gilberti was there, no matter who the mayor was, he demanded what he needed. We understood what he needed. This isn't a secret. We talk about being in financial constraints. Sure we are. But we still have to mandate and cover the most basic safety function needs of our community. Education, fire, police, DPW. Those are our basic necessities. We can't sit on our hands anymore. I'm sorry. Your firefighters are not safe. Whether you want to say it or not, we're underfunded. We have firefighters that are working way too hard, and we're in trouble. I know you showed the presentation with what happened in New Bedford, and that's scary. And I don't want that to be us. I don't want us to be standing at a podium and saying, this is why we need it. Because what I've yet to hear is a clear, clear message from Chief Evans, tell us, how many firefighters do we need? How much money do we need? Let us know, because all it seems like we're doing is walking in circles. And we could talk about fundraising, we could talk about grants, but the truth of the matter is, it doesn't help if we don't have the support of the administration. to do the dirty work, meaning sometimes you have to make a tough decision and say, you know what? I can't cut this department any longer. It's bad enough that the firefighters stood up and said, we do not want an inadequate main fire station headquarters. And the city should applaud the firefighters who stood up for that. But that disappeared now, and that's what I was more worried about than anything. So I, again, Please, this isn't attacking. This isn't me trying to demoralize anybody. This is frustration. And this is, unfortunately, this is how I present my frustration. Because when we go to the podium and just go up there, because I understand how difficult it is, because I work in a municipality also, and I answer to a mayor as well. But when is enough enough? because we need to know as a city council, Mr. President, we need to know the number that we deserve and the amount of money that we need to fund this, at least get to that point. It's like, we're not even saying it. So again, remember back everybody, when Danielle Marcelino came to us and presented the grant through FEMA, And, you know, I know Mr. Minow said the same thing, that he's working on that. But I would rather him put his energy somewhere else if this city is not going to be committed to what the firefighters need in the city. Because the mayor wouldn't support that. And no one talked about that, because we'd be at 128 firefighters right now. And for three years, we'd be paid through FEMA for those firefighters. And all we had to do was make sure we were minimal and make sure that we covered them after that. So when we talk about injuries, when we talk about staffing, it's because we don't have enough and people are overworked. And when you see the line item of overtime, there's a reason for that. because we're understaffed. So again, I apologize for my negative demeanor, but it's so frustrating that, you know, you look at, the fees in that we're paying off. We're asking the mayor for these, these are the reasons why we're asking the mayor, how much are we paying legal fees? How much do we have to pay the opposing attorneys for settlements? You know, how much did we pay KP law? How's KP law working out for us? I'd like to get it. I'd like to get that information as the chief of our fire through the, through the, through the chair, Mr. President. Are we confident in the legal representation of KP law? Or are we dropping the ball somewhere administratively through the city that we keep bringing these lawsuits forward and then we lose? So if I talked out of line and I made anybody feel uncomfortable, please forgive me. That's not my true intent. This is frustration. And I'm not showing up at the fire station. I'm not showing up. I'm not going to a fire. I'm not putting my life on the line. So I can only imagine what the rank and file feel like. Thank you, Mr. President.
[Zac Bears]: Seeing Councilor Scarpellilli. Councilor Malauulu.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. There's not too much more. I mean, I think a lot of the Councilors have already said a lot of things that I've also been thinking and feeling. I also want to say thank you for all of the incredible work that you're doing within the constraints that you have. Certainly, I look forward to seeing more of that presentation and really digging into it because it's obviously clear that you've kept the data and you've been looking at it and evaluating where to place, where to put emphasis on different pieces of the budget. Two quick things, and I think Councilor Tseng started talking about this, and I apologize if I missed it. But in the personnel piece of it, what do you have for the firefighters, 78, but it looks like it's about $100,000 less than what you paid the same amount last year. I know that we're talking about overtime and payments, and I'm just curious what that is, why that's less there.
[Todd Evans]: One of the positions right now is funded for $1 at the moment, one of the vacant positions. right now. So again, we kind of had to shuffle around. It looks like, you know, the overtime is over budget this year and we don't know what to anticipate as far as future spending goes on that one coming up. I don't know how much longer there are the people that are out on surgical injury leave right now. They're still out for a while here. So you start coming into summer months and vacation time and things like that. And that adds up on overtime quickly.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, just to be clear, this is really 119 positions because one of them is funded at a dollar?
[Todd Evans]: Yeah. So basically, we're at the.
[Liz Mullane]: OK. And I guess the other question I had in all of this too I think certainly public safety or firefighter safety. This is top priority in your presentation as you're going through. You mentioned there are several things that are coming to the end of life. So obviously there are some bigger costs that are going to be coming down. It would be helpful, obviously, I know everyone's super busy right now in the budget season, but as we look at some of these capital requests or pieces that come through, some of them are a bit, at least for me, new, only a couple months in, sometimes seems a little ad hoc and I'm not quite sure what's top priority. And obviously some of these things in terms of clothing and, you know, your high hazards list of needs that you have as we're making some, you know, changes throughout the city. Those types of things would be, I think, speaking for myself, would be very helpful to have a sense of and listening of what your priorities are in terms of needs and where you see most catastrophic in some of these areas where the end of life is coming up very quickly. It would be helpful in terms of just forecasting. It, you know, stresses me out not to see three years out of like what that forecasting could be. But obviously you've already identified some immediate things that are coming up very shortly. And it would be, I think, helpful for us to know what those are and priority wise as we look to different types of funding moving forward. So just kind of a general statement. Again, thank you so much for what you're doing and how you're doing with the limited resources that you have. So, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: So, can you tell me where the directive to save face came from on that one position? Like, why are we doing a $1 position to say that we have 120 positions?
[Todd Evans]: Well, I'm hopeful that we don't entirely lose this position to hopeful that next year that we can refund that position and staff more.
[Zac Bears]: And I understand that, like, there's, you know, the pipeline, there may be positions that go unfilled. Yeah. Are we, you know, are you doing within your budget, like this year, a transfer to fund the overtime overage? Is that?
[Todd Evans]: So the overtime, just again, we weren't able to factor in how much that was going to go up over the year. And so, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: I just, I guess I don't really get what the difference is between funding 119 positions at their cost and 120 positions at the cost of 119 positions plus a dollar. Right? We want the position back next year. It just, I don't get it. The chief of staff has walked up, so I don't know if there's an explanation there. You know. We're effectively losing the position either way because the money's not there.
[Nina Nazarian]: Yeah, I mean, President Bears, thank you for the opportunity. So this is a situation where we are back to some of the things we've already discussed. We have a $2.25 million budget gap. We are recognizing that we would like the department to be fully funded at 120.5 personnel across the board, including uniformed and, you know, administrative personnel. But recognizing that we can't fully fund all of that with all of the needs of the organization, we have one finite pot. I recognize that, you know, I think I told the chief yesterday when we were speaking several years ago when I was in a temporary position with the city. I remember looking around the organization and thinking to myself, oh, we definitely need more support over there. We definitely need more support over there. Because as you may know, I came to this position with a background in town management. So it was very easy for me to pick up on where we need the support. Then when I went through my, when I had the opportunity to take an acting position as the chief of staff and I went through my first budget season, I was humbled, very, very humbled by what we were able to actually put into the budget in terms of positions each year. The mayor had said to me at some point, you know, one or so positions a year. And candidly, I'm the type of person who needs to see it for myself, touch it, feel it, understand it, really, truly get into the deep depths of it to agree with it, disagree with it, and I quickly learned that she was right. So I know that it's not popular, it's not popular for me to say this to you all, and I'm trying to take a different approach at the moment, but the fact of the matter is there is one pot of funding. There is only a finite amount. We can't adjust every budget we want to adjust the way we want to adjust them. I wish we could. I wouldn't have to be here. This wouldn't be as controversial. This would be a lot more fun for every one of us. But the fact of the matter remains, there's a budget gap. In order to address that budget gap, we have to fund positions in the fire department, one, and positions in the police department, still working through, at $1.
[Zac Bears]: But I, I, we don't have to fund it at $1. We should just be honest.
[Nina Nazarian]: Why do we need to lie? Because we recognize that we would like the department staffed at that level.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. We should recognize that we want the department staff to be 140 people.
[Nina Nazarian]: Sure.
[Zac Bears]: Right. So why lie in the document?
[Nina Nazarian]: There's nothing that here is a lie. I'm not sure what you're saying here that's a lie.
[Zac Bears]: We're funding a position at a dollar because we can't afford it just to say that we have 120 positions when we have 119. Why?
[Nina Nazarian]: It is to acknowledge that in future budgets, we want to restore the funding for that position.
[Zac Bears]: But we want to restore it to 132, so why don't we have 10 positions at a dollar?
[Nina Nazarian]: Because it's the current staffing level and going into the next fiscal year is what it is.
[Zac Bears]: But this is my point, right? Like, this is where it all breaks down. Everyone here, everyone in the room understands that there's only so much money to go around. And as you just noted, right, we also understand that there are myriad challenges that the city faces and needs to fund. We are, we have one of the most overworked apparatus in the city. We have grossly underpaid part-time employees at the library. We have a new city charter and we can't even have a council assistant, so I do all the agendas for two years. We, you know, and that's like the three things that are here tonight. Jim Blatchford's like, hopefully we don't have an unexpected election. We get that part of it. My part of it is, what's the plan? If we're underfunded, and this is, I've been harping this for seven years, it's why I ran for office. If we know that we need 15 firefighters and three new apparatus to actually not have a massive morale crisis and going over time and deep understaffing to not have the turnover that we're experiencing, like, and right, we have an example of this, right? I just, I don't understand what the plan is. If the plan is the mayor says we can have one new position a year and we just accept that, then everything's just gonna keep deteriorating. So I don't understand why we feel the need. If we, I agree with you, right? Like we want 120 positions, we can't afford it. Why not just say it? We know we need 128 or 130 positions in the fire department. We can't afford it. Why not just say it? Why not have the mayor come out and say, we need significant new zoning, and I'm talking to developers to bring in major new growth. And I understand that density is really tough, but it's the only way we're going to not have a fire department that's not in collapse. or we need $2 million a year for the fire department, I'm gonna put that on the ballot and ask the voters, and if the voters say we're not gonna pay for it, then we can say the people voted on it. I don't understand why the choice is to say we're gonna put the number 120 when it's really 119, because it feels better. That's the part of this that I don't understand what the plan is. We're not gonna ask the voters for more money, we're not gonna do new zoning and bring in new growth to raise more money, and We're just gonna say it's okay, we're just gonna slowly, slowly, slowly cut, cut, cut until, even though we know we can't. That's the part I don't get anymore. I just don't get it. So that's what I'm really frustrated by. I don't think we should be saying it's 120, but really it's 119 plus one dollar to say that it's 120. You know, the MMA, we get it, cities and towns are in a rough spot. But it just seems to me like there's no plan. Like, we're not being honest with the residents that we don't have enough money to support our firefighters, to support our library, to support all the city departments. And the mayor's not willing to say, here's how much it would cost to do this, even to do pieces of it. You know, here's how much it would cost to fund engine three and put it on the ballot. The mayor's tanked the zoning. Like, we don't have that avenue anymore. We're not working, you know, we spent years fighting a bunch of projects that hopefully will bring some new growth, but it seems like the new growth's not here for this budget. And our cost drivers are crazy. I just don't get what the plan is. So I'm ranting at this point. I'm going to stop. But I really don't think this budget should say that there's 120 jobs when it's 119 and we're just saying it's 120 because we're funding a position at a dollar. We have been really clear. Part of the reason we did the budget ordinance and there were pieces that were said we're not going to do it. Let's tell the people of Medford what it would cost to actually adequately fund our departments. let's explain to the people of Medford that that gap is millions of dollars, and then let's say, are you willing to support zoning and projects that can bring in new growth? Are you willing to have something, an override on the ballot to fund those things? And if the answer to both of those is no, then we'll make the cut. But I don't really think that the dog and pony show of like, saying it's 120 when it's 119 or coming before here and just saying it's really hard, we're going to do one position a year is honest and reflective of our need and what the people of Medford want to hear. And I think it puts this council in a really difficult position of looking like bad guys.
[Nina Nazarian]: President Bears, may I?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, go ahead. And then I'm going to go to Vice President Lazzaro.
[Nina Nazarian]: So we, as you know, as the council knows, as the public knows, there was a seven, in totality, $7.5 million override presented in 2024, which the voters passed. The mayor was very clear then and all throughout her tenure as a mayor that she wanted to balance the availability of funding for people here in the city. And that is a fine balance. And everyone's going to have a different perspective on what that balance is. But she has been very clear from day one that she does not want to compromise the high school. And she has said that in, I believe, Every one of her probably addresses to the city, every one of her budget messages, there's been no ambiguity as to the mayor's position and the importance that she places on ensuring that we don't overtax the residents of Medford and subject ourselves to a situation for a failed high school vote. That has been abundantly clear throughout all of her messages. So while you as a city councilor and as the president of the council may have a different perspective or a different approach fundamentally, I think that those are just You know, I can't speak to that. I think you two have differences of opinion on that matter. And the fact of the matter is the mayor, while saying also we can't fund more than one to two positions, has been one of the most creative people I have met in municipal government trying to find alternative sources. It was referenced earlier, and the chief can speak to it. Maybe I'm wrong. I believe we did apply for a grant pertaining to firefighters. It was a scenario where we applied thanks to the support of the fire department, and then if we were awarded, then we would be on the hook three years later. We did not get the grant. I will also say that the mayor is strongly focused on making sure that the fire headquarters is in the capital plan to ensure that it gets taken back up within, you know, the capital plan that we have. We obviously have a major debt exclusion coming up with the high school. These are significant, absolutely monumental costs overall when you think about it all in totality of what is before the city. A dollar here, it was said earlier that, you know, it's just a little bit of funding, but they all add up. Those additions are the things that allow us to balance a budget. President Bears, you mentioned earlier, and it is obvious across the Commonwealth, cities and towns are facing significant impacts to their budgets, no different than what Medford is dealing with. Every scenario is a little different, but if we look across the Commonwealth, we will find many, many cities and towns who, I like to, unfortunately, I don't want to say I like to, I'll take that back. I stand corrected. Unfortunately, the city of Medford is very lucky at this point in time, in my opinion. It was able to solve a $7 million financial gap in its school department. There are some communities that have not been so lucky. So it shouldn't be considered something that's easy. And if we do pass another override, hypothetically, this is just me speaking hypothetically, these are not the mayor's opinions or words from this point especially, What if we jeopardize the high school debt exclusion vote? Those are the things that have to be balanced. Those are the challenges that are before us. I know you all know this, but the fact of the matter is it's not just another override to put on the taxpayers' shoulders. That's not what this is. It's not that simple. It's never that simple. None of this is that simple. I'll stop my rant.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I don't think anyone said it was simple, and I'd appreciate it if the mayor were here so that she could share her words at some point.
[Nina Nazarian]: June 2nd, with all due respect.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Again, right, like we were close on a fire station and we wouldn't be having to have the conversation you're talking about about the fire headquarters and trying to squeeze it into an already squeezed capital plan if we had had the discussions that needed to be had to get the firefighters to support the fire headquarters. Didn't happen. And now we're not going, now this is the first I've actually heard that the plan is we're not going to go back out to the voters on it. And.
[Nina Nazarian]: I didn't indicate that one way or another, to be clear.
[Zac Bears]: So we might go back out for a debt exclusion.
[Nina Nazarian]: At this point in time, I'm just indicating that the mayor's working to get it on the capital plan. Anything can be put on the capital plan, right? It doesn't necessarily mean that if it's on the capital plan, it's not excluded or it's excluded. Things that are excluded and not excluded are on the capital plan.
[Zac Bears]: Right, but like, again, here's, like, it's back to the fundamental question, which is what's the plan? We don't know. Two years out from the failed debt exclusion vote, and we don't know if we're going back.
[Nina Nazarian]: We are putting some final touches on the capital plan right now, and it's gonna be released very soon as a part of the budget book.
[Zac Bears]: Great. And, you know, I'm sure that we'll see it for the first time when, in the budget book, so that'll be great. I just think, you know, I don't think anyone, I don't appreciate the characterization that it's just another override or we're going to jeopardize the high school. We're not being honest with the people about the needs of the city and we're not giving them the opportunity to make the decision about whether they want to pay for it or not. That's it. If the mayor thinks that not having firefighters getting hurt on the job and not having part-time librarians getting paid $10 an hour less than our neighboring communities, that to address those issues we have to overtax people, then okay, I don't think that, right? That's the difference of opinion. I think we shouldn't be grossly understaffed in our fire department compared to peer communities, and we shouldn't have an engine that's basically operating 25% more often than it should be. And I don't think those are good long-term decisions. I think Vice President Lazzaro's point that we're making decisions that seem to be penny-wise and pound-foolish just seems to be accumulating. And I don't, again, I don't have confidence in an understanding of what the plan is here. You know, if I agree that the answer shouldn't be overrides, I agree with that. But then the answer needs to be new growth. And I don't understand what the city's strategic approach is to bringing development into the community. I don't understand why we're prioritizing, you know, single-story retail projects on Mystic Ave instead of figuring out how to get people to come in here who want to build projects that will bring in significant new revenue. I don't understand why we sued 4DB developers for years in a losing case to, get less affordable housing and less revenue for the city. I just don't understand why we're making those decisions. I don't understand, if it's about balance, I don't understand what the balance is, because it seems like we're balancing the backs, like balancing the budget on the backs of doing the basic functions of government. You know, now this is just a difference of opinion, but I just have a really hard time at this point, even the override, right? It almost didn't happen because we were arguing about should it be 7 million or 7,500,000, and if we hadn't gotten the agenda out at 12, 25 p.m., maybe there's no override vote. When we knew two years before that that 7 million or 7.5 million was enough to kind of stop the bleeding, but not enough to address the problem in its totality, and here we are. two years out and, you know, if we had done $10 million, which certainly would have been a higher cost to the resident, no doubt about it, $10 million or $12 million would have been a higher cost to the resident, but would have been substantial in a way where we wouldn't be having this conversation right now and we wouldn't have been in the budget situation that we're in because we stopped the bleeding but we didn't raise enough funds to actually address the scope of our needs and our challenges. I just don't think we're being I don't think we're planning for the long term. I don't think we're being ambitious enough in our beliefs about what facts the people of Medford can understand about our budget situation. And I just have major concerns from whether it's for about $25,000 or millions of dollars in our fire budget. And I really don't think that we should be saying that this is 120.5 full-time equivalents when it's not, when it's 119.5 because we're funding at a position at a dollar because we want to save face. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Just a couple of things. This $1 position, I'm just wondering if that was reviewed by HR or not before it was put in the budget. If that's a standard practice for all of the positions that are put in the budget, like what was done for the legislative aid position. or if we're just tossing stuff in. And secondly, I think that we are getting off topic on the fire department and getting a little too macro. And who among us doesn't get a little bit macro sometimes? I know that I am guilty of that. I think we've made our points. I think we understand what we're talking about. I really appreciate the fire department folks being here and letting us know what's going on. I hope that there's a path forward. I think it's going to take creative leadership and thoughtfulness about how to do stuff. I think we need to be thinking when we talk about new growth also about what that means, how important it is to have a fully functioning fire department with sufficient staffing when you're building big new buildings and that Councilor Leming's linkage fee updates are going to have an impact on that. And maybe we'll have some more revenue on that end. for the fire department, that could be helpful. You know, there is a future where it doesn't have to be dire, it doesn't have to be hopeless, and we can move forward collaborating and hopefully building a Medford that can work for the most people possible. And decisions get made sometimes where you put a one story business on Mystic Ave or you prioritize that or you talk about avoiding high rises for affordable housing because of the same reason. And it's the same reason that you are trying to stonewall zoning. And it's the same reason that you don't focus on new growth. And it's to keep things the same. It's to maintain the status quo. And that has a lot to do with not funding your departments and not asking your residents to vote even at all, to even have an opportunity to vote at all, to pay more money for your city. The fact that we never had an override on the ballot at all until that past term where we finally did and it passed, you know, or at least two parts of it passed. And we can make choices where we decide to invest in the city or we can make choices to decide to keep the city the same way it is. And I got macro again, and I was just talking about how I didn't want to do that. So I think that we should wrap up our fire department discussion if possible and move on to the library, because I also would like to talk about the library. And I really appreciate this discussion. I think a lot of these conversations about departments end up being about the whole state of the whole city. It's just what happens, but I do really appreciate your presentation.
[Zac Bears]: Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Council, yes. To no shock to all of my colleagues, I don't like overrides. But I will tell you, just to this point, I believe that the major flaw has to be the lack of leadership when it comes to new growth. We all saw that. We had multiple units of permitted fees that were coming in and possible new tax growth that really would have supported this community, but we haven't seen that. But back to the point, to Chief Evans, I know as I'm looking back on my old records, I only go, I have from 2019 to 2024. And I want to make sure that we're clear with this. So we want to fund 119 firefighters today and we have 112. Is that true? Is that what we have right now?
[Todd Evans]: Yeah, we're at 112 right now.
[George Scarpelli]: Okay, so, as we look back to the years, I don't know. I don't know if anybody has last year's budget. The numbers in front of them, but in the past, it seems like it's a trend. We. We fund back in 2019, 125, 20, 125, 21, 115, 22, 123. 23, 122, 2024, 122. And then we come up drastically below that when it comes to the actual boots on the ground. And I need some assurances that we're going to fund the 119 firefighters and we're going to put 119 firefighters minimal that we approve through this budget or else. I'm just going to make the recommendation that we've done with the city solicitor and and with KP law. So, um, you know, we, we have to know what, what direction you're bringing us to. So we know what we have to fight for and make sure we hold people administration accountable because we're seeing a trend here and it has to be called out. So if you can answer that, that'd be greatly appreciated.
[Todd Evans]: Well, I will be asking to see about getting a new hiring group going on. Recently, the civil service exam list was updated in April, so we do have a new list that came out. So it's just going to be the next step of how many cards we send out for hiring.
[George Scarpelli]: Just so we're clear, what do we know for expected? I know unexpected we don't know. What are the expected retirements? Because again, I want to know everything now. We want to make sure that if we're putting 10 firefighters through an academy to get to the 119, but then we lose eight to retirement, then we're back at the same place. And I don't want to do this because we keep going backwards. So if we know that there are active retirements that are coming down the pike, then we should be preparing for 15 firefighters to the academy. Does that make sense?
[Todd Evans]: I understand what you're saying. Yeah, we have like one mandatory retirement coming up in 27, but that is the only one that we can definitely.
[George Scarpelli]: Okay, I understand. I understand. Yeah, I understand. We can't, we can't, we can't look into a crystal ball to see who's going to retire, but I think it's important for this council to start looking at this process and make sure that as the year progresses that we're hitting our minimal, at least what we voted for. Um, to make sure we're supporting our firefighters and we're supporting you to make sure we get to that number. So we're down to 112 right now, we're at 19, so we're expecting at least seven hires within this budget?
[Todd Evans]: That would be what we were hoping for.
[George Scarpelli]: Okay, so that's that's and that's the administration agrees with us as you come bringing this forward that we're all shooting for seven new hires. So this is good. All right, just at least that gives us the understanding of what we're looking for, because a lot of times what we do is we get to this meeting, we talk about this stuff, and then all of a sudden Kent gets kicked down the road, and it's two to three months away, six months away, and we've had retirements, but we haven't filled positions, or we didn't prepare for people not to complete the academy and have people ready to go, to jump right into those shoes, or there's possibility that we can do that. So, um, I appreciate the, the, uh, the, uh, your answers and, um, I, and my dissertation, Mr. President, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Uh, thank you. Um, yeah, so I, I, I agree. We. I think we need to move on to the library at this point. A couple of quick points. I mean, obviously the point of the $1 position is so that you can say in conversation that you didn't cut any firefighter positions without technically being a liar. But there's no point doing it. It's not a good way of going about things. So I agree that if you're going to cut it down, just remove the position. A point that my colleague brought up about cutting the city solicitor and KP law. completely understand where he's coming from. I don't think cutting any legal defense away from the city is necessarily a good move. I would personally advocate for cutting KP law's budget in half, which I think would help encourage the city to actually seriously look for a city solicitor, but that's a conversation for another time. And I also think that, you know, generally speaking, moving forward, we should, like, I don't know if the mayor actually watches these meetings. So we should kind of save a lot of the macro, like a lot of the macro talk for when she does show up and we can actually have that conversation in public. Like, you know, it just, you know, we. We talk a lot of these meetings, I just don't think a lot of it really, really gets back. But, but yeah, we've, we've been being a dead horse for a while here I just, I would strongly advocate that we just move on to the library.
[Justin Tseng]: I agree with moving the meeting on but we have, I think we have the fire union here who wants to make a comment so we should hear them out. I just wanted to chime in and say I think the macro discussion is helpful because I think without the macro discussion we're not going to be able to address the micro matters. And these micro matters aren't micro, they're public safety. And then the last thing I wanted to say is, I think a number of councillors, I can think of Councilor Lazzaro, myself, Councilor Scarpelli said tonight that public safety shouldn't be up to political games. And I really can't find another explanation for why it says 120 and then one position is funded at $1, besides that being a political game. It seems like spin to me, it just isn't honest. And it's just better if the budget sheet looks honest. It's the budget.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. We can go to our representatives from the fire union if you'd like to share your comments on the budget. And thank you for being here and missing the.
[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you, President Bears, for having us. To speak to the point of public safety and not playing around with it, we can go through numbers and talk about that stuff all day long, but I know the Chief had it in his presentation. If you just look at the incident that happened in Fall River, they had an incident in a nursing home, people passed away, it was totally preventable. We have guys that need help at work. We have 23 guys contractually supposed to be at work every single day. Look at the overtime numbers. It's through the roof. The solution is hire those people. We need to hire more people. We need more people at work every day. And we can get creative with the squad, but like we've already spoke about, we have Engine 3 on Salem Street. It's there. We have trucks. Put those guys in that truck. Get water on Salem Street. It's not a hard solution. And I am just tired of hearing about getting creative and fundraising and doing these things. We have to figure it out. We can't just keep talking about it. And I know Brian can speak to some of the overtime to staffing costs and how that can be figured out.
[SPEAKER_09]: So my name's Brian Honeycutt, Secretary for the Union. So just through the chair to Councilor Lazzaro, how you were talking about a $2.2 million overtime budget. Just doing some basic math off the top of my head, say an average employee with health care and all that type of stuff may cost the city $150,000 maybe. I mean, you're talking 12 positions right there. So, you know, we're here to, you know, advocate for more members because I work on Engine 1. You know, I'm on my eighth year. I've been at Engine 4 and Engine 1 only. So, you know, you guys saw those numbers. It can be, you know, that's what I signed up for. But, you know, it can be, you know, a lot. And there are, you know, creative ideas that if we had the staffing, we could do to alleviate some of those call volumes. You know, I have friends who work in those other cities that we mentioned, and, you know, their run disparity compared to what we're doing is nothing. You know, nothing compared to what we're doing. And, you know, you're talking about these members, what is it, 119. So what I would think with that is, you know, if we went up to the 119 and then, you know, got rid of the overtime, you know, I mean, hire the 12 people that would take care of that right there, right? So that's all I really have on that.
[SPEAKER_08]: And just to speak to the health and wellness committee as well, that was created by members of Local 1032. I'm actually a member of it. We went, got trained on our own time. We've raised a bunch of money to give support to our members. You talk about sick time and injuries. Our members respond to every single call in the city, whether it's A sick person, whether it's a car accident, whether it's a water rescue, a house fire, you name it, we respond. And those members, it takes a mental toll on you. Talk about guys on engine one, myself and Brian. You go to 4,000 calls a year. It adds up. It takes a toll on you. So we went out of our way to make sure we're protecting our own members.
[SPEAKER_09]: funded on our own.
[SPEAKER_08]: And we fund it on our own. And we're just looking for support back from the city. You know, we can only get creative for so long. We don't want to be on the news saying this could have been preventable. And especially not for one of our own members. God forbid something happened. So we want to take action before it's too late.
[SPEAKER_09]: It was one thing that through the chair, Councilor Tseng said earlier about that boat rescue. We've been talking about the boat. I've been on for almost eight years. We've been talking about a dive team since I got hired. I feel like we had already gone over that with the budget and we had sent it up to the mayor and all that stuff. I was on that call that you were talking about where we had to call Stoneham's dive team. I mean, they're a city a third of the size of us. It's embarrassing for me to be standing there without the, the tools to do my job as I'm watching a 16-year-old, you know, in clear stress, you know, which unfortunately turned out terrible. So, you know, it's very disheartening, you know, to be in that position. So.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. I just had a couple of questions. In general, how would you say the morale of members is when it relates to staffing and overtime. Are people doing overtime because they want to or because they're being forced to?
[SPEAKER_08]: It depends. Overtime, you get called for, so it is optional. In some cases, you are forced if no one accepts the call. I would say it's early in the year right now, so it's okay. But if you ask me that question in September, I would say everyone is over it by that point.
[SPEAKER_09]: Summer gets very, very difficult. people will be forced because of the staffing. 23 minimum manning and if you only have 20, currently I believe only two groups have 24 and the other two have 23. So you're talking any vacation and it's creating an overtime.
[Zac Bears]: Between the overtime and the high number of runs, is that impacting health and wellness and injuries?
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I mean, I can speak to the health and wellness. Since we've created the program, we've, I'll say responded to incidents, but we've responded to members for debriefs or whatever it may be over 20 times already. There's a major need for that program as well, but the union decided to do it. I mean, it's a lot and it takes a toll on our members.
[Zac Bears]: And, you know, again, if you guys can't comment on this or, you know, whatever discretion you need, how much of the litigation that's ongoing between firefighters and the city is related to their injuries?
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, it was a major, major case that was just settled that I believe Councilor Scarpelli talked about with 100, you know, potential $150,000 settlement. outside of that will, oh actually that wasn't even injury related, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_08]: We have two upcoming litigations that are directly related to a finite duty injury.
[Zac Bears]: And if, you know, if you can't get into the details of it, but basically what's happening is folks are working too much, they're getting hurt on the job, and then they're being, their rights aren't being respected based on their at work injuries.
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, and to put it simply, yes. And just to speak to some of the legal costs, I'm not sure what it is on the city side. I can only speak to the fire union. we've spent this year alone around $20,000 a month in legal fees.
[SPEAKER_09]: There was a question, I believe, Councilman Mullane asked that about, or maybe Councilman Zara, about the line item, which I'm not sure exactly what it was called in the budget, but somebody was asking about like, it was a, professional services. Yeah, so how much of that came out of litigation. So just from a union's perspective, we can tell you what we've spent, and it is an exorbitant amount of money. Like President O'Brien just said, we're looking at just about $20,000 a month. You know, we get bills for upwards of $25,000 for some months, and it's all fighting for members who are winning, winning these cases, you know, being terminated or punished illegally.
[Zac Bears]: And how does that impact morale at the stations?
[SPEAKER_08]: Negatively, I would say when you add everything together, the morale is low. But I will say as a lifelong resident of Medford and a Medford fireman, we love working here. We love our city. We love the residents. Every single day I go to work on engine one, whether we're doing 25 runs in a day or we end up doing 10, it's the best job in the world. And we'll continue to do it, but we cannot continue to put this stuff on the back burner. It's gone too far. It has a negative impact on our members, and it has a negative impact on the city as a whole.
[SPEAKER_09]: In my opinion, you could only be reactive, you know, for so long. You know, you have to eventually be, which all the council have mentioned, you know, we have to be proactive at some point, whether it's, you know, ordering new trucks, you know, getting guys in the pipeline, because I know for a fact that by the year 2030, we have 12 members who have to go. So if somebody were to get their card, which I know right now there is none out there, you know, you're talking about a year span until that member gets on a truck, you know, properly trained. So in that meantime, you know, how many, So you're talking a year backlog. So if you continuously do that and then, you know, we're already down seven, then you're down 12, you know, in the next additional three years, how many people can we get on in that, you know, that period of time? Or if it's a truck or a station, you know, these are things that we have to work on. And, you know, we understand that it's not going to be, you know, everything done overnight and, you know, but just chip away at little things, you know, different trainings or different, you know, different little tools we could buy or things like that, so.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you guys, I appreciate it, and I know it's not easy, and I know you guys spent a lot of your night along with some of our library colleagues. I swear to God we'll start in a minute. I appreciate you being here, and also I know that a firefighter died in Boston this week, so I want to send my condolences to all you guys, and Chief, and you guys as well. To end everything, Chief and Captain.
[SPEAKER_09]: We appreciate your time, and you guys. Thank you guys a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you.
[Justin Tseng]: I just had a quick question. I know you guys filed the public records request. On the council, we filed a public records request about litigation, It's been a struggle hearing back. Have you guys heard back?
[SPEAKER_08]: No, we have yet to receive a response about our public records request. What month is that from? We filed that about a month ago now. We were told it would take approximately 10 hours of work, but we've yet to receive a response.
[Justin Tseng]: That's unfortunate. If you guys can update us if you hear anything. We're trying our best to get the information as well.
[SPEAKER_08]: Absolutely.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, no, I completely agree with you that it's really frustrating to hear, let's just get more creative, let's get more creative about this, because at some point you're pushed to the brink and you're out of ideas. And I mean, the challenge is structural, right? I mean, that's why I said I was okay with people talking about the macro, because it's like, we need to talk about the macro to get to the structural challenges. And sometimes the questions and answers are tough, but we need to have that conversation. It's just not happening. across the hall, to be honest.
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I just know that if something happened in my home and my mother was home, God forbid, I wouldn't want the answer of, well, we tried to get creative and we couldn't. Yeah. That's not an answer. That's a great- We're talking about public safety.
[Justin Tseng]: That's a great way to put it.
[SPEAKER_08]: It's not a great answer.
[Justin Tseng]: You can't, that's just not acceptable for any resident of our city.
[SPEAKER_09]: Right. Both of us are residents. Yeah. It relates directly to us.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah. And I mean, I think to what Councilor Scarpelli was saying and Councilor Mulaney was saying is, you know, We really need to be able to have that sheet of paper, right? To look, you know, this is the two-year plan, the three-year plan, four years, five years. Plan for the backlogs. Plan for the retirements. Know exactly, you know, what we're supposed to see in a few years. And without that, we can't even chip away at the problem, like you said. So, yeah.
[Bob Jones]: Thank you. Mr. Jones. Yes, just a quick update on the regarding the litigations that you spoke about. Over the past five years, we've probably been to about 100 arbitrations. I think we've lost one, and we shouldn't have lost that. We go to arbitrations, we win these cases because we have good facts and we have good representation. The city, in my opinion, just wants to make us go through this exercise for an unknown reason, probably just to spend money. on our legal fees and also the city's legal fees, which doesn't make much sense. Thank you for your time. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Seeing no further questions, I will go to the library, or do you want to say more?
[Nina Nazarian]: If I could, please, Mr. President. Sure. I'm sorry. I know everyone wants to move on. Just several things. We talked a little bit about economic development earlier, and I didn't have an opportunity to respond to that. The mayor has always been taking a strong position on measured growth, the opportunities for the community to review things, be prepared for them, ensure that they have the opportunity for feedback. So, I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. a tremendous cross section of our department heads, have done an absolutely amazing job working through creative solutions. So going back to the one to two positions, it is one to two positions on the general fund, but it has been, I don't even know how many positions overall across the city because of the creativity, the significant efforts of the department heads and the leadership of the department heads and the support of the mayor in those areas. I remember early on, When I was working on fire stations, kind of in a temporary capacity, the mayor laid out a plethora of ideas and we utilized funding sources left and right. CPA, the two stations were placed on the local historic register at the time, which were never placed on the register before, which made CPA funds available to the city to be used on fire buildings. There have been millions and millions, over $2 million on a spreadsheet, and I stopped tracking a while ago since we had very involved facilities directors that have been invested in the fire stations. You know, I will, I don't want to go down any windy road with, The issues with regard to personnel, I will say the vast majority of the fire department is doing a phenomenal job and working very hard. But I think if you ask the fire chief if he has a situation where he's got a member of the team who's coming in unshaven, which is against policy, and that person continues to do it, it's a safety hazard, he has to address those types of things. I think the council, I'm certain that the council indicated that it wanted to cut the law department budget or certain members of the council, perhaps not the, there was no, there was no vote of any sort. But there was at least three people, I believe, who wanted to cut the law department budget before we were even having this discussion tonight. So that's not new to, to this evening by any means. These things are not exercises. They are holding people responsible because accountability makes a better department. That's important. I don't want to be here saying any of this because I can't really go into the depth that would need to go into for the very small portion of the department that makes the steps necessary, very, very small portion, because everyone's doing such good work. And I truly appreciate the work of the fire department and our public safety departments in general. The request on the public records request, the request that was filed by the fire union, I may as well comment on that as well. It's being worked on. I know it's being worked on. It's a fairly small request when compared to other public records requests, and it shouldn't be any type of issue. We haven't petitioned the Secretary of State's office. We still have time. I believe I'd have to check exactly when it's due, but I'm sure we will provide a response before the due date. I don't know. I guess the last thing I'll say is I don't, I don't agree with some of the characterizations that have been made here today, but I don't think any of you want to go one at a time through each of those items. There are many different scenarios where The chief and the HR team are put in challenging circumstances where they have to take steps to, to ensure accountability. The policies of the department are going on old in the, as, as old as the 60s. Those are things that the chief has, has wanted to take on and is, is actively working on, are things that are captured in the budget for FY 27. There's a lot of good things happening behind the scenes if we want to see those also. But as the council would say if you want to put a political spin on it, then That's the political spin you'll want to put on it. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Chief, just one question. Would you say that the main personnel issue facing the department is facial hair?
[Todd Evans]: The topic has come up.
[Zac Bears]: Is that the subject of most of the lawsuits or grievances? It's one of the grievances going on. One of how many? What's that? One of how many?
[Todd Evans]: Off the top of my head right now, there's probably, I believe there's two, two outstanding, two or three outstanding? Two or three outstanding. I believe. Okay. And I believe we're waiting on a couple decisions.
[Zac Bears]: Right. You know, is there, there's like one of them's about shaving a beard, is that?
[Todd Evans]: One of them, yeah, one of them is.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, great. Just want to check in, see if that was like an epidemic or? some sort of beard pandemic going on at our fire stations. Thank you. Yeah, we should take the motion. Councilor Tseng, seconded by Councilor Scarpelli, a motion to request the, can't think of the name of it at this point, but the list of expenses for the fiscal 26 actuals for the professional services line ending in 5302, so we'd like to see actually every expense in that line item for fiscal 26. And also a breakdown of the expectations for fiscal 27 for that professional services line item to understand kind of what you expect that to be spent on. And also as it relates how much of that in fiscal 26 and fiscal 27 do we expect to be spent on litigation and arbitrations. All right, great. That's a motion by Councilor Tseng, seconded by Councilor Scarpelli. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll and please send that to the administration after this meeting.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kelly? Yes. Councilor Leming? Yes. Councilor Maloney? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli? Yes. Councilor Tseng? Yes. Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. And President Bears?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, 70 from the negative, the motion passes. Thank you, Chief Evans. Thank you. All right. And then we have some of our library trustees here with us and our new director, Sam Sednick. And Sam, I bet you're regretting three hours ago saying that you'd be happy to go after fire.
[Sednick]: They have a very important retirement to go to, I am sure. I'll be calling them about.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry Sam, one second. I hate to be this guy, if you could go in the hall. We just can't hear. Take it in the hall. They've waited long enough. Justin, can't believe him. It's that hair, he just thinks he can do whatever he wants. Director Sednick, welcome. Congratulations on your new position. You have big shoes to fill and you have as much time as you want.
[Sednick]: The people sitting behind me are not for that. So I am going to do my level best to talk fast, but it has been a day for me, for this budget. And so I feel like I have to kind of backtrack a little just to let you know where we are on this. To be clear, I started this job on May 1st. So it's a fun time to just jump into being a director and jumping into the middle of a budget negotiation. Fortunately, we knew that Barbara was retiring. It was not a surprise, right? And so I got to work with her on our original budget proposals as we went through. So I would like to call our first budget proposal our hopes and dreams proposal. So we submitted that to the city at the end of February, right? Where we submitted what we actually needed, where we were looking at inflation, the cost of things, how literally every single one of our subscription costs have gone up this year, right? Including our network membership, our database costs, everything goes up. Copy machine, like it's fun. So we covered all of that in our hopes and dreams request. But the biggest issue that we asked for in our request was for our part-time budget to be increased. Now this is a weird budget line. You will see that it is the line that ends with 1104 is part-time employees. And it's a hard line to parse out because I have four employees that are part-time that are union employees because they work 30 hours, they're in the union, so their cost of living increases are part of a union contract which very gratefully got settled this year, right? So our percentage increase that you see to our permanent employees and to our part-time employees are because of our union contract agreement that got settled, right? And so their COLAs are situated. What is also kind of tucked into there is our part-time employees that work 19 hours or less. There are three categories of those employees. We have our pages who get paid minimum wage. I'm not seeking an increase for our pages. It's a minimum wage job. That's what it is, right? We have our circulation staff who we have a number of folks that are working on in that position. There are five part-time circulation staff members. They are currently being paid $17 an hour. Market rate for that is a lot higher, but if we were going off of our own salaries, like our unions level one, hired fresh off the street salary, right? You would be looking at $28 an hour for that staff position, right? We have five folks that are sitting there. So they're $11 an hour under what the same person at the same desk doing the same job is being paid. So that's cool for morale. We have seven librarian positions. Those folks are being paid $20 an hour. Now, to be fair, they could go to Trader Joe's and stock the shelves for $5 an hour more. Their market rate is 36, like Winchester pays 36 for this position, but like our union salary staff, level one, hired fresh off the street, full-time salary would be $33 an hour, right? So they're $13 an hour, same job. So we, in our hopes and dreams budget request, asked for an $8 an hour increase to those two positions, the circulation folks and to the librarian positions, so that they could not get up to pay equity, but to just be like close, to be maybe moderately paid for what they're getting. What we got back from the city in March was a request to level font. And if the city knows this, but during my interviews for this position, I told them that I was the queen of the spreadsheets. And I really do have every variation of this request, right? Like in a spreadsheet, I tried to figure out a way to get them the pay raise that they not deserve, but like kind of need, right? Like as the person who signs our payroll every week, Most of my part-time staff, I'm not sure how they pay for groceries weekly with that amount of money, right? It's not a big check coming from the city. So when they asked us to level fund, we did a real hard level fund. You can look at our budget. And ordinary expenses, right, we are 0% funded, 0% funded, 0% funded. Our one big ask increase is our advertising budget. And it is because we pay $2,100 quarterly to publish a newsletter. So the city, we asked to fund $7,500 of that, which is less than we're spending. because we will find an outside source. We will be super creative and we will find someone else to pay for the rest, right? And that's really, functionally, for all of our ordinary expenses, that's what we do. We get creative, we find other ways. I have great news, Tufts University is giving us $5,000. The youth services department can now buy audio books, which is good, because their ordinary expense line for audiobooks got cut this year, right? So Tufts has very kindly jumped in and given us a little bit of money so that we don't have to just not buy audiobooks for the Youth Services Department, right? So we are seeking outside sources of funding for all of our ordinary expenses. We are working very hard to do that. And you can look down at the line at the bottom, which is that weird budget line water cooler. It's the water in the back room and in the staff room. And so, again, trying to be creative, trying to cut where we can cut. We had our custodians install water filters on taps, and we are canceling that contract and saving the city $1,000. Yay. But the city came back to that response and told us that they couldn't give them even a $4 an hour raise, that they could only give them a $2 an hour raise. Again, with union contracts just settled, we're not even keeping close to their counterparts. We have been asking for these raises for years, right? And every year it's the same. Every year it's a tight budget year, and every year, You know, we're going to get to it next year. We'll do better next year, right? But next year comes and they say, actually, we don't even want to see that request on your budget request, right? We don't want to see that ask. What we want is what is required by law, so you have to put in your union-contracted raises. Like, when I first came downstairs, I was really excited because the non-union staff, which at the library, there's three of us, it's the director, assistant director, and our custodian, got a cost of living increase, and it was a 2.5%, and I was like, this is great. All of our part-timers are gonna get 2.5% increase. But that's not how that works. They don't get the COLA cost. They don't get that raise. The only time they get a raise is if we get it through this budget. and we aren't getting it through this budget again and again and again. I will be creative with our budget. I will do my level best to find interesting ways to make sure that we're getting the books that we need and that we're subscribed to the database that helps you get a job because it practices your interview skills and your resume building skills and your other things. But ultimately it comes down to our people. Our library got 20,000 visitors in April. We searched 3,000, or I'm sorry, 33,000 books and other materials, right? But if you ask someone why they come to the library, They say I come to the library because I love coming to story time with Val. I come to the library because Rebecca is doing peg doll book reviews with me and I got to make a peg doll book review and put it up online and it's really cute and really adorable. I come to the library because Karen greets me with a smile at the front desk when I come in the door. Our staff make that library, the building that it is, it makes the library the heart of this community and we're not paying them enough. So I got really excited, unlike most folks, when I got this budget from the city because my original ask from the city was $2,481,000. And what the city budgeted and what you guys got was $2,521,000. And I was like, we're going to do it. We're going to pay my staff what they deserve. That right there is more than giving them that $8 an hour raise. What they did, though, is that extra money is in our full timeline. And it is because I was budgeted for twice, right? Like, I'm new to my position. I totally get this, like, they added a second assistant director in there, right? So that money isn't there to pay for my staff. But we need to find a way to pay for this staff. Now the other thing that I noticed, the difference in their budget, and my original ask, was that my salary, right, already has that COLA increase in it, right? A projected 2.5% increase to my salary. Now, again, I just got hired in this position, right? So I'm starting out at step one salary. but I can't take a 2.5 increase when my staff can't buy groceries with their weekly check. So if we have to make cuts, you can cut my cola, but I need to get them to at least a $4 an hour raise, because the rate at which they're getting paid is, not sustainable, when we're talking about costing the city money, the constant run of hiring, or the inability to hire staff because you aren't getting applicants that work out, right? There has to be a better way to do this, right? The first step is having a reasonable salary and making sure that everyone on this staff is getting paid what they deserve to get paid, what they have a master's degree to do, right? And so what I, I mean, I know that you guys don't have the ability to like up, down the vote. It doesn't do that, but it's really, really important for us to fund our staff. And I know the city's in a tight budget year, but they were in a tight budget year last year, and they were in a tight budget year the year before. And I can't have this section of the staff cut again, right? They need to be paid for the job that they're doing. And waiting for a better year or better zoning or better what have you doesn't matter to these individuals, right? Because you're asking them, to not get paid for another year. So I am up here knowing that the city is going to make the correction to the budget that they submitted to you, right, that they're going to take that number and drop it back down and the city will gain $100,000 back into their pot that everyone is going for right now. And I get that. But to get my part-time staff a $4 an hour raise, we are talking about $20,000. That's it. You can have my $3,000 off my cola. So now we only need $17, right? Take my cola out of it. But get me to that $4 an hour raise.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks, Sam. A number of Councilors have questions. Is there anything else you want to share about the budget? What's changing? What the priorities are before we go to questions from Councilors?
[Sednick]: I mean, the really nice thing for the city about this budget is we have more than one retirement, right? When you take someone who's at their top step out of the budget, you save money, right? So you will see some big changes in our budget because Barbara retired. We have another retirement in June. Judy's retiring. We're going to have some vacancies that are going to sit there and also save the city a little bit of money here and there around the edges. It takes time to fill positions. Budget for our employees is pretty low this year relative to what it could be, right? With a full and much more seasoned staff than we have, right? So that's the big cost that you're seeing changed. Other than that, what you can see is a level funded budget.
[Zac Bears]: I am seeing two things in here, so. Yeah. This is saying that professional assistance is going from 15 to 17, is that the error? The full-time staff under the personal services summary.
[Sednick]: The professional budget, wait, sorry.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, on the table at the bottom, it says that professional assistance is going from 15 positions to 17 positions. And then it says that part-time hourly is going from 15 positions to 17 positions. Basically, I guess I'm wondering how wrong, how many mistakes are there in this document if we know that there's already a pretty big one?
[Sednick]: I have seven librarian positions. I have five circulation positions and five page positions. So in total, I have 17 part-time positions, but those are all paid at different rates. So there's a cool subtable with all of this in it. There's also four permanent part-time staff working at 30 hours. Those are the union contracted ones. Their wages are locked in contract.
[Zac Bears]: So what this is saying is that there were 19 part-time positions last year and there's 21 this year.
[Sednick]: No.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, so that's wrong. And this is saying that there were 17 full-time positions last year and there's going to be 19 this year.
[Sednick]: I mean, I think that's where we went wrong, right?
[Zac Bears]: So one of those is that you got double counted?
[Sednick]: I'm in there twice, and I don't need to be.
[Zac Bears]: But you're not gaining new positions.
[Sednick]: I'm not gaining any new positions. And what isn't reflected on there, to be quite honest, is that we actually, again, we ask for positions. You don't get them ever, right? So I have an entire full-time position sitting on my state aid account, right? The state is funding one of my full-timers, which is Not great in the long run, but we're working on it, right? I have my maker space position is funded out of the Cummings grant, which is fine for this budget year. But again, you guys will see us coming down in a year or two being like, I need this position. And you like that? you know, the Makerspace grant fund is a grant. It goes away at a certain point. So it's either you fund that position in a couple of years or we lose that position, right?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. I think like... I guess what I'm asking and then I'll go to the other Councilors is, it seems like the document that we received is really inaccurate. Because it has your budget going up by $220,000, 13%. It says that four new people are being hired and none of that seems to be true.
[Sednick]: I mean, yeah. I don't know where that is. But I can give you the full range of my staff. I don't have any new positions this year other than people that are vacating positions. Well, I mean, 17 is correct, right? There's a total of 17. I don't know why we only had five last year for the part-time assistance. Oh, the 21, I guess. Yeah, so what they're doing, so this part-time assistant is the union contracted ones. So that actually makes sense. Again, the part-time line is really muddy because there's those union contracted folks that are 30-hour positions, right? That's the four part-time assistants. And then you have the other ones that are sitting at 17. So that's the discrepancy there. That's actually accurate. Those four aren't, I mean, they're part of that budget line, but they're not part of this, like, ask for an increase, right?
[Zac Bears]: Right.
[Sednick]: Yeah, because they're in the union.
[Zac Bears]: Right. No, yeah, that's not even really what I'm saying. It just seems like the numbers in the sheet that we got are wrong in some form. Like, it would be, I think it might be helpful, and I know you guys have been here a long time tonight, I think it might be helpful to maybe get the city to update this and then we could have a conversation based on that. Like I'm right there with you. You've been asking for years on the part time. When I got this budget I had the same reaction as you which is like well libraries getting a really good increase this year probably means we're finally solving some problems and it seems like that's not true. So I want to understand that. I understand what your priority is. I'm going to stop talking. Other Councilors may have questions.
[Sednick]: What I would guess, and again, I'm brand new to this job, guys. Yeah. So I don't know what spaces some of these positions were in last year. Are we gaining staff? Absolutely not. Was Barbara paying some of these staff out of the state aid budget last year? Maybe. Like, I don't know what that is. Like, I don't have the answer to that, and I can look at that a little deeper. Your change in staff is not something that I see on my spreadsheets.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, on the budget that we got, it says that it's going from 36 positions to 40 positions. And one of them is Sam getting double counted, right?
[Sednick]: Yeah, I mean, that's an extra position. That's the problem there.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, so I think it would be helpful to understand. Yeah. I'm going to go to Councilor Tseng and then Councilor Lazzaro, then Councilor Callahan.
[Justin Tseng]: You can make the motion. But I just wanted to thank you for a very, I think, powerful presentation about how far we're falling short in terms of serving the people who've dedicated so much time to our community. Look, for me growing up, my safe places in the city were the park, the schools, and the library. And this was the library before it got updated, right?
[Sednick]: A cool library.
[Justin Tseng]: And it's astonishing to see how far from where we should be, we are with the wage situation, right? You said, I think $11 would give us, increase would be kind of reasonable $8 would get us close but short. $4 is what you're really asking for right now and $2 is what you're getting. These numbers just keep going down and down and down, right? And I think with each fall from 11 to 8 to 4 to 2 is an additional failure to address the living situations of people who are putting a lot of time and effort into this city. You mentioned, you know, that's grocery money. That's rent money. That's gas money. And it's really difficult to hear that. And it's really, really sad. I mean, for a city that claims that the library is the new center of community, it's the new hub, that we're a city of workers and the working class built the city, I think It's difficult to hear us say that and then see how far we are from that on the sheet. I know it's not completely accurate. I think to give the public another story about what's happened, and I think I might have mentioned this to you, but I have a friend who just graduated from getting a master's in library science, and she was looking for jobs. And a community like Medford, that was like the ideal of what she was looking for. And when she was looking through the posting, she saw the Medford posting, and she immediately screenshotted it and sent it to me. It was like, I've just paid so much money in tuition for a master's degree. And it's really heartbreaking because this is the job I want, but I can't even bring myself to apply for it because I would be taking a pay cut. And the benefits don't line up, the wage, the salary's not there. It's just impossible to say that this is reasonable. And of course, I'm sure, that's her perspective, right? She didn't apply, ultimately. But I could only imagine how many other people are saying that, or having that same reaction, that they've worked really hard to get all that training, in a field that they're passionate about. A field that I think we need more of in this world, to be honest, because I think a lot of the problems we see in today's society is linked to kind of not, you know, being in touch with our literary side and the lessons that that can teach us. It's, I tell that story to say, you know, there are a lot of people out there who want to come to Medford, who want to work at Medford Public Library, who are finding it impossible to even send in the application. And then I think about the other side. For the people who are at the library, what's morale like? Surely it's not great if this is what pay looks like. The amounts that we're talking about aren't ridiculous. But they do make a huge difference to people's lives. So I would, you know, I would certainly, maybe we can add this to Councilor Lazzaro's motion, but I would want a motion for us to request an increase of that hourly rate in the updated version of the budget.
[Sednick]: Thank you. And I can take a look at where the numbers are in terms of the staffing. And again, the nice thing about the library budget is it's not fully on the city, right? We get state aid from the state. But what we get in state aid from the state is largely because we have enough staff with degrees so that we maintain accreditation, so that we can apply for that state aid, right? And I, as someone who currently has a staff member being paid out of state aid, don't want to lose my state aid, because that means I lose a staff member, right? There's a lot of, again, we've been creative. We've been creative with how we are staffing this building. We've been creative with how we are funding the things that we're funding. And it is an amazing building, and we serve an amazing community. And I mean, I think that is why people keep showing up to work, to be quite honest, is because this community is amazing and we get to do lovely things. But you have to eat. You have to be able to pay rent. And the thing with our part-time staff, again, they're working less than 19 hours. They're definitely working other jobs. So here's the thing. I have a staffing gap, right? I can't keep the library open as many hours as we're open with just my full-time staff. We require these part-timers in order to keep the library open, right? They are covering. all my gap hours, right? But if this part-time person is working three other jobs, right? And I'm like, oh, no, someone called out sick. I need someone to sub in tomorrow night. are you going to take the Medford job, or are you gonna go to any of those other libraries that are paying $16 an hour more? Like, genuinely, like, we are never gonna get the yes on that. It makes it much harder for us to meet our minimum staffing requirements. It makes it harder for us to sub in when someone is out sick, right? Again, like, there's all of these other costs that start to impact the city, the service of the library, when we're not paying our staff They should be paid.
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you for illustrating that. I understand it's, I think it's really difficult for a, you know, head of a department or I guess director of the library to come up here and to talk about, to advocate so openly for your staff. And I think, I hope you're, someone's watching this or showing them the footage because I think it's really admirable. And I, on a lighter note, I want to, just shout out your shirt. The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorite books as a kid. Still is probably one of my favorite books. Excellent choice.
[Sednick]: Yeah. And you can check it out at Medford Public Library. Children's Department.
[Zac Bears]: Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Turn on my mic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being honest and straightforward. We get a lot of people from the departments coming and saying yes it would be nice to increase our what we're able to offer but the concrete. The clarity with which you have presented these numbers is very useful. $17 or $20 with a master's degree. I paid an eighth grader $20 an hour to babysit my kids, during which at one point my daughter cut her hand open and had to go to the hospital once. She's fine, but she got stitches. They're great. The babysitter's great. I still would trust them. It's really not their issue. The point is, The point is it's $10 to $15 under market, those positions. $17 is an insane amount to pay a professional to do a job at a building that is often allotted as that crown jewel of Medford. It's this beautiful building we outsourced Funding to build it. We asked Michael Bloomberg to help us pay for it. So it's not even the Medford Public Library, but that's not the issue. Everything we budget for is a testament to our values. And when we decide not to increase how much we pay the lowest paid people at the library, it's saying that we do not value our lowest paid employees, even though it would have a minimal impact on the bottom line of the budget. We just, it's not that important. That's what we're, that's the statement that's being made. A budget is a statement of values. So, my values are to make sure that the lowest paid people in this city can afford to live, And especially if they are working to maintain a service for our residents that is highly valued, that brings people to Medford from other cities, that is a critical piece of the way the city operates, the way people interact with each other. And there's absolutely no downside to this library, and it's an obvious, obvious thing. And I don't understand why you would fight against it It used to be that the library would say, well, yeah, we have a big gap in how much we offer our part-time employees who are nonunion, and we're asking for $2 an hour to increase it. what would be offered was $1 an hour increase. And then the next year it would be like, well, we really need a lot more, but we'll ask for $2 and we'll get $1. And on and on forever. And this time Sam was bold and said we need $8 an hour even though we really need $15 an hour. And that's closer, but then if next year we ask for $8 an hour again, like, we'll be there. But instead of getting $8 an hour, she was told to cut. So she said, OK, $4 an hour. And then that was cut to $2 an hour. That's insane. How much are you saving? Sam, how much are you saving?
[Sednick]: to get them to $4 an hour, the cost is $20,000. Right, exactly.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Right, exactly. It's $20,000. It's nothing. It's nothing. In a budget of $217 million, it's nothing. That's stupid. This is the theme of the evening. I can't say it enough times. You're not saving anything. It's not fiscally responsible. It's a statement of values. You don't care about the people that are not being paid, the people that do not make money in the city. You don't care about them. That's the statement that's being made. Prove me wrong. If you care about the people that work in the library, prove me wrong. You're available to do it. I can't do it. I would if I could but I can't. One person can do it. Prove me wrong. Prove to me that you care about the people that are the least paid in the library in the city. Prove it.
[Zac Bears]: You might get in trouble. Councilor Cowns and then Councilor Scarpelli.
[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. I have kind of a clarifying question about the part-time. So you have, am I correct, do you have 12 part-time, five in one sort of pay structure and seven in another?
[Sednick]: I have too many papers. We have five pages. So our pages are the folks that return books to the shelf. They're the minimum wage job. We are not seeking an increase to their salary. I have five circulation folks that total 75 hours a week. And then I have seven librarians who work 124 hours a week, right? So not all of them are even working 19 hours, right? And some of them are working 11 hours, some of them are working 15. Again, we get whatever is left of what they are working with their other jobs because we're paying the least, right?
[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. My question is really about whether the library hires 12, not the minimum wage, but the 12 sort of less than 20-hour part-time people who are not the pages, whether the library hires those people as part-time because they must be part-time for some sort of logistical reason, or is hiring them part-time a way to avoid having full-time people that you have to pay union wages? Could, and that puts a little intent in there, let's not put intent in, let's just say, could the library instead hire one more full-time librarian and five part-times, or two more full-times and three part-times? Would that be a possibility if the funding was there?
[Sednick]: I mean, this is a hypothetical, which I do have a spreadsheet on. Yes, the answer is yes. We could hire, you know, a handful more full-time employees and have significantly less part-time employees. The reality of the situation, though, because of our union contract and because of vacation times, sick times, whatever, FMLA requests. You always need some level of part-time individuals, right? Frankly, I would really love it for them to be on call so that you're not contracted to a 19-hour schedule. If I don't need you for those 19 hours and I could just have you on call and have you sub in when I do need you, that would be cool. But we don't pay enough to do that, right? No one is going to do an on-call job for the city of Bedford because we do not pay market rate, right? Like, I can't get that position. So, I mean, yes, there is a different staffing model that is possible in a scenario that is not this budget year, right? And I would be delighted to talk to the city about any level of, like, what that looks like. And again, just like within the library itself, I am looking at different ways to position staff so that we need fewer staff at the start and close of our day, so that we don't have these like staffing crunches that we have. And so that's the thing that I, again, like, We are a Medford City Department. We are good at flexing. We figure it out. Like, that's how the city rolls, right? We will figure it out. But you've got to pay for the people that you have, right? You have to pay for the people that you have.
[Anna Callahan]: Sure. I really was just kind of getting at this question of, like, are we avoiding paying union wages? Like, is this a thing that we could maybe get around?
[Sednick]: I mean, it's really hard. And you guys know this. You guys listen to your budget thing, too, right? It's really hard to get a new position onto the thing. Like, again, the position that's being paid out of my state aid budget right now is our programming librarian position. We've asked for that since the library opened, right? We could never get it into the budget, so now it's sitting in my state aid budget.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. And I just want to make a couple of comments. I mean, thank you so much. It's great to have you. Welcome to the new job, all these things, in case I forget to, you know, say all those important things. Are we paying you market rate?
[Sednick]: What?
[Zac Bears]: Are we paying you market rate?
[Sednick]: I can afford my groceries. This is not about my salary. And again, I am very, very serious. If you need $3,000, don't give me a cola this year. I am the highest paid individual on this staff. And I shouldn't see increases until my part-timers have pay equity.
[Zac Bears]: And I appreciate that leadership style. More I was just saying, and your board shook their heads no. I was trying to slightly make light of a bad budget season by saying... Yeah.
[Anna Callahan]: Did you come up to the microphone and say that?
[Zac Bears]: Can you come say that in the microphone?
[Anna Callahan]: Can you come say that at the microphone? We're not kidding, actually.
[Zac Bears]: Could you say it in the microphone so people can hear that?
[Anna Callahan]: Because the public can't hear you from back there.
[Zac Bears]: And just tell us who you are when you say it.
[Sednick]: This is our new assistant director, guys.
[Zac Bears]: Hi.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi. Nice to see you all.
[Zac Bears]: What's your name?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jenna Berry. I'm the new assistant director. Congratulations. Thank you. Very happy to be here. So I've been working at the library now for almost four years, and I did do an analysis for Sam and Barbara several years ago, looking at government, the salary.gov, and looking at postings to try to understand really the lay of the land. and understand what pay equity look like. I also did it in part to find out and to confirm that all the libraries around us indeed pay their part-timers the hourly rate of their full-time librarians. So we're the only ones, we're the only library among Winchester, Arlington, Lexington, lots of other, Watertown, that don't pay their part-timers what their full-timers are making if you broke it down to an hourly rate. But the thing that I was asked in the back was if Sam has pay equity. And based on this spreadsheet I put together, she's about 20 to $25,000 under what other directors are making in surrounding towns. Thank you. Go sit down now.
[Sednick]: Which again is really cool, because keep it. Give me $20,000 to get to a $4 increase for my part-timers, right? That's all I'm asking is that that pay increase is what I would like to see on this budget this year.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Sorry I cut you off there.
[Anna Callahan]: Not at all. That was very productive. So I just want a couple of points. First I'm very disappointed to hear that your budget discussions were similar to what was described tonight. Sounds like that's the way we do the budget. People department heads send their budgets in months in advance and then there is no discussion between anyone and then they suddenly see a totally different budget with no explanations of any kind. So that seems not great.
[Sednick]: I will say that Nina did in fact sit with me on Friday and we did line by line it. Right. Like she's already heard this discussion. She knows I was going to come up here and talk about this. I told her so she did go line by line on Friday with me with this budget. But thank you.
[Anna Callahan]: And then I just wanted to say a little something about how I, these budget meetings are why I often talk to people about how I am really often stunned by how well the city is run on a skeleton crew. That every budget meeting is another department that is absolutely starved for funds that has fewer people than any surrounding towns, doing the work of far more people than they have, and people doing it because they love their city and because they love the work. There's so many reasons except for pay because we're not paying people very well. Our departments are wildly understaffed. And this is also why we have such, you know, turnover of department heads and of, you know, people who work here. It's a real problem. Like, we have a genuine budgeting problem. And it ends up, unfortunately, becoming a morale problem. Like, that is just the reality. hate to hear of the very specific and Medford-specific morale problem, which is you have union staff getting paid a dozen dollars per hour more than non-unionized staff. I mean, that is really not a recipe for for good relations and good morale inside of any department. And I just want to close by saying that, you know, it is truly mind boggling to me that in the state of Massachusetts, city councils can remove and lower line items, but we cannot increase line items. And I just, I've got to say that, like, there is a term called double entry bookkeeping. And this is throughout all of accounting and bookkeeping, everywhere, everyone understands that you can never break this law. And the law is, if you add it in one place, you have to subtract it from another place. And if you subtract it from one place, you have to add it to another place because you have to end up with the same number at the end. And so this idea that city councils are forbidden from publicly making statements about the budget that make any logical sense because they add up to a budget in the end, it is unbelievably frustrating to me. Because if we were allowed to strike and reduce line items, And then we should be forced, in fact. No city council should ever be allowed to remove line items, strike line items, or reduce line items without then adding them to some other place, because that's double entry bookkeeping. That is like the absolute basic 101 of any sort of budgeting or accounting. And so I am incredibly frustrated that we have no power to increase $20,000 or frankly $40,000 or whatever it would take to be a little bit more reasonable to the library's budget while we are able to remove line items from other places in the budget. And that is simply inexplicable to me. I cannot understand the absolute illogic of that in the state of Massachusetts. I'm deeply frustrated and I wish that we could take the action that would remedy this particular budget. So thank you for being here.
[George Scarpelli]: Sam Weaver, City of Boulder, Boulder City Councilor Scarpelli. Thank you, Council President. they turtle up when it comes to speaking up for what they need in their department. And I give you a lot of credit and your staff is lucky to have you. You're a sign of a true leader. So thank you. Might have a simple question. I know that there's rumors going around and maybe you can enlighten us. Did the coffee cart close in the library?
[Sednick]: Yeah, so the answer is yes. But I hate doing this on a public meeting because I don't know that their staff does yet. But the reality of that is that it is expensive to run that coffee cart because you have to staff it twice, right? like UD Day, a supervisor and the trainees that work there. I am having some meetings about that in the near future. Again, it would be really lovely for the city to have a a permanent job training mechanism for individuals with learning disabilities, like the coffee cart, but in order to have that, you have to fund that position, right? Like, it isn't a money-making enterprise, because Most of us drink several pots of coffee before 9 a.m. And so by the time we open, a lot of our coffee drinkers maybe they'll flirt with the coffee, right? But, like, so, I mean, it is an interesting dilemma, and I'm sure that you will hear more about that in the future.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. And Councilor Molayne.
[Liz Mullane]: Sam, I also want to thank you for coming here and really outlining this for us. I know I've said this earlier tonight. I'm new in this role, so I have not sat through all of these types of budget conversations. And I think the public would probably be horrified to know that we're talking about just a $20,000 increase to be able to create such support for the library. As someone who spends a lot of time on Saturdays in the library, I see it as a bustling hub. And I think, as everyone has said numerous times, the crown jewel of Medford and to think the little bit that you are asking for right now in order to keep it open. I mean, to be able to pay people in appropriate ways, especially with morale and the discrepancy between payments like that. I can't even imagine what that, I deal with some of that as well, and I can only imagine when it's as prevalent as this is in the discussions that we're having. I also want to commend you for having this conversation and sharing with us. And I do hope, I know that there seems to be some edits perhaps that we can look through and talk through. I don't know what that. means exactly, but I think the more that we can highlight and talk about this funding discrepancy for the part-time staff, and that all that you're looking for is a very small amount of money to be able to at least do that piece of it. I think as much as we can continue talking about that, we should, because I feel like more people who utilize as often as they do, as I see in so many different ways. And of knocking on doors across Medford, all of the different activities that you have hosted there, following what you do online and seeing it. I mean, it's incredible what opportunities that you make available for the city. And I apologize that we're in the situation that you're in the situation, like a month in. two months in of having this conversation, but I applaud you for doing it and sharing this. And I'm hopeful, you know, that this will help raise even more awareness of what we need to do and fund.
[Sednick]: Liz, do you mind if I ask you a question? Yeah. All right. On the, on the budget that the city prepared for you, what's the bottom line for the, for the library?
[Liz Mullane]: For the department totals for fiscal year 27 proposed?
[Sednick]: Yeah.
[Sednick]: So it's 2.5, oh it's 2,521, right? Honestly, if you went with our full ask of Keeping everything else the same, you went with our full ask. The cost to the city would be $2,481,000. You're still seeing a savings of $40,000 because of the budget mistake that happened on the top line.
[Liz Mullane]: So should we just approve this right now?
[Sednick]: Should we get that money?
[Liz Mullane]: Is that how that works? I don't know. I'm new.
[Unidentified]: I'm new. I don't know how long I can say that.
[Liz Mullane]: I don't know how long I can say that for, but that sounds... We got it, guys. I mean, you just got out 40K more, right? So yeah, no, I hear you.
[Sednick]: Anyway, I'm like, again, we can give you $40,000 back into your magical playland and still get our top-level ask. We can do that. It sounds like a wild ask, but it's so small. It's so small.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Would any of the folks from the library want to speak at this time about the library budget proposal? No. Okay. Do we have any further questions from members of the council? All right. We do have a motion to request an updated library budget with accurate information and also further request that that updated budget include the additional $2, so not $2 but $4 an hour. Is that what we're asking for or are we asking for something else?
[Sednick]: Yeah, so it'd be a $4 an hour. $4 an hour instead of a $2 an hour. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: That's from Councilor Tseng, seconded by Vice President Lazzaro. And we're probably going to want to keep this one for the next meeting so that we can talk about.
[Sednick]: Am I coming back?
[Zac Bears]: Well, we don't know what your budget is.
[Sednick]: Bonus points, guys.
[Zac Bears]: Someone can motion to, I mean, you know.
[Sednick]: So this is June 2nd?
[Zac Bears]: I don't know. I mean, yes, I think we'll have, I don't, there's some.
[Sednick]: Some other time.
[Zac Bears]: Slew of budgets that need to come through to us, I think for June 2nd. Cool. Maybe we can take you first.
[Sednick]: That would be awesome.
[Zac Bears]: Someone will have to make that motion, so blame them. No, I mean to take Sam first next time. Yeah, you have to wait till the meeting. On this motion by Councilor Tseng, seconded by Vice President Lazzaro, to request an updated budget and requested to include the $4 an hour raise for part-time, not $2. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kelly? Councilor Leming? Yes. Councilor Mullain? Councilor Scarpelli? Yes. Councilor Tseng? Yes. Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. And President Pierce?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I have any problems on the negative, the motion passes. Is there a motion? On the motion to adjourn by Vice President Lazzaro, seconded by? Seconded by Councilor Tseng. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Yes. Councilor Leming? No. Councilor Malate? Councilor Scarpelli?
[George Scarpelli]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Tseng? Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. And President Pierce?
[Zac Bears]: No. 5 in the affirmative, 2 in the negative. The motion passes. The meeting is adjourned.
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