[Zac Bears]: Medford City Council Committee of the Whole, June 2nd, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Present. Councilor Leming? Present. Councilor Mullane? Councilor Scarpelli? Present. Councilor Tseng? Present. Vice President Lazzaro is absent at the moment. And President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Present. Six present, one absent. The meeting is called to order. Vice President Lazzaro will be joining us a little late. Action discussion items paper 26-061 offered by President Bears's annual budget process for fiscal year 27 preliminary budget meeting number seven. This will be the seventh preliminary budget meeting of the fiscal 27 budget process. The mayor is planning to attend the meeting and she is present and will give a presentation. The mayor has also communicated that the following departments will be present, parking, police, including traffic supervisors and traffic commission, Medford public schools, department of public works, general fund, cemetery, engineering, forestry, highway and parks, and the Department of Public Works Enterprise Fund Water and Sewer. Is there anything from members of the council before we turn it over to the mayor for her presentation? Seeing none, Madam Mayor, welcome.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you. Thank you President Bears and councillors for allowing me some time to speak to you about the fiscal year 27 budget. First off, the general fund operating expenses are a total of $218,238,427.50, and our water and sewer enterprise operating expenses are $30,030,904.68. Before I begin, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to completing this budget. Thank you for allowing us a slight extension for delivering the budget books as well. Compiling this comprehensive breakdown of the city's financial outlook took countless of hours of preparation, debate, and insight from our department heads and our budget team, led by Finance Director Bob Dickinson. Our former assistant finance director and budget director, Filiana Lima, and my team in the mayor's office, led by Chief of Staff Nina Nazarian, who has been at your meetings. I also need to credit our communications director, Steve Smerdi, and communications specialist, Emma Tumbley, for putting in so many hours of work on the granular aspects of the budget book that often go unnoticed. The work of this team is invaluable and will hopefully lead us to a fourth Distinguished Budget Award from the Government Finance Officers Association, after having received back-to-back awards recently, a recognition we all are extremely proud of. The city's on a cusp of a generational transformation, both in terms of its development and infrastructure strategy, as well as its broader educational future with the plans for a new state-of-the-art high school building, partially funded by the Massachusetts School Building Authority. Being in a position to navigate such impressive changes, along with the council's help, has required not only sound fiscal management, also a willingness to make difficult fiscal decisions that may not be universally popular, yet, in my opinion, necessary to sustain a collaborative success. This reflects a pragmatic approach to equitable budgeting and an understanding that overleveraging taxpayers, especially those on a fixed income or those struggling to pay rent, is not a long-term solution. This fiscal year brings a number of fiscal challenges, rising fixed costs, particularly in health insurance, pensions, school transportation, special ed services, and debt payments continue to place pressure on our operating budget. This year we are facing a significant increase in health insurance costs, once again, for the third year in a row, alongside the full implementation of recently settled collective bargaining agreements. The great news is, however, that no current CBAs are out of contract. At the same time, we remain cognizant of the financial impact on taxpayers and are committed to maintaining a sustainable financial path without an over-reliance on one-time revenue sources or short-term solutions. The Medford High School building project is currently in the feasibility study phase of the MSBA process. And over the past year and a half, we've hired a OPM and the architect for the project. Alongside our school building committee, school committee, and school administration, the project team has worked hard on developing the educational vision for the new building that will guide our educational priorities for years to come. There is still much due diligence, discussion, and compromise on the horizon for this project. but we will get it done. We need to continue to work collaboratively with the MSBA, our internal team, and external stakeholders to ensure that the space identified in the project is conducive to our educational goals without inflating the price. Publicist support is critical for this project to ultimately get built, so we cannot have an associated price tag that our community can't afford. I want to highlight some of the accomplishments of the city, city council included in these goals, priorities, and initiatives, I'm sure. We, voters approved the new charter. We also restarted the process to update the city zoning on a more deliberate schedule with more community and staff input. We added two assistant city engineers along with key project management administrative staff to the engineering division. and 50 linear feet of roadway reconstruction and 11,000 linear feet of sidewalk reconstruction. We replaced 7,700 feet of water main and 4,600 feet of sewer main were rehabilitated. We identified and addressed 857 unknown and lead service lines through the lead service line program. We completed the Medford economic assessment study which examines the city's current economic landscape Started work on over 2.4 million in park renovations projects this construction season, including but not limited to Logan Park, Riverside Plaza, and wrapping up car park phase two. executed a contract with development company Transom Real Estate for the project to transform three underdeveloped city-owned lots in Medford Square, with the focal point being public art, a community grocery store, and so much more. When completed, the Transom project will realize a significant increase in the city's estimated net growth figures, which increases the commercial tax base and hopefully easing reliance on residential taxes. This is an overall transformative economic development for the square and the community as a whole, and I want to thank the council for helping rezone those parcels. Planted 163 new trees, removed 85 tree stumps, and performed 148 prunings. Completed a wayfinding master plan which will improve navigation across the city, highlight local attractions, and bolster economic development opportunities. Another example of strategic economic development in the community includes parcels reclaimed from the Mystic Valley Development Corporation, which produced over $1 million in funding generated from new growth, allowing the city to pay for part of the transition to a new financial software. This accomplishment was not an easy one, took quite a bit of time, but was achieved through considerable pressure and negotiations from myself with much credit given to the assessor's office for their data support that aided in that successful process. We selected members to the Keep Medford Beautiful steering committee and hosted a record setting over 400 volunteers at the citywide cleanup this past May. nearing completion of substantial HVAC work at the Andrews and McGlynn Middle School. We continue to grow the curbside composting program, which now has almost 9,000 households enrolled. We released its first ever urban forest master plan to further our work to protect the tree canopy. Continued our Medford Connect social and climate resiliency work to connect residents to city services and programs that most recent round of Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Grant funding was $750,000. Through deliberate and targeted efforts, we secured nearly $90,000 in municipal ADA improvement grants to create a new self-evaluation and transition plan. We launched the Neighborhood Ambassadors Task Force aimed at improving communications between city and residents. secured a firefighter safety equipment grant of almost $35,000, received our first distinguished budget presentation award, oh, sorry, third, from the Government Finance Office Association for fiscal year 26. Also received a certificate of achievement for excellence in financial reporting for our annual comprehensive financial report for fiscal year 24, and have applied for the recently completed report for fiscal year 25. And we broke ground on the city's first mini forest at Tufts Park, led by Trees Medford, to expand and enhance Medford's tree canopy and biodiversity. This spring, the city released its first ever urban master plan, like I just mentioned. We are lucky to have secured multiple MVP grants over the years, which have helped communities build resilience to climate impacts. especially in underserved neighborhoods. The plan studied Medford's current tree inventory, distribution, age, and condition, and threats from pests, diseases, and invasives, and will guide the Department of Public Works in growing, caring for, and protecting our trees in the years to come. Another MVP grant for $750,000 is currently funding Our Med4Connects program, led by the Office of Prevention and Outreach, which I also know is very important to the council. This program connects vulnerable residents to essential city resources and funds a wide variety of programs and events throughout the city, including our amazing multilingual and multicultural community engagement team. This team is an important link to the communities that have historically faced barriers to accessing government resources. They host a wide variety of programming all year round. including the winter preparedness event, Haitian Flag Day, Brazilian Independence Day, Arab American Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, free financial literacy courses, ESOL courses, and much, much more. The Office of Prevention Outreach also handles most of the city's translation needs, funneling requests through the community engagement team. We're happy to share that we are allocating more funding towards translations in the fiscal year 27 budget to ensure the city resources are accessible to all residents. Along the same lines of improving accessibility, the DEI office secured nearly $90,000 in a municipal ADA improvement grant from the Massachusetts Office of Disability. Work for this grant will continue into fiscal year 27 and will allow the city to create a new self-evaluation and transition plan to support improvement projects related to the Americans with Disabilities Act. We also have an application pending through our Office of Prevention and Outreach for Disability Connector. which will be a connection for the community and one who connects the work being done by many of our departments in this area. With that in mind, the City is in the process of renovating two first floor staff bathrooms at City Hall into fully ADA compliant facilities. Construction began this spring and the project is expected to be completed by mid-June. In addition to improving accessibility for visitors and employees, this project represents an important step towards modernizing City Hall and ensuring public facilities are welcoming and usable for all residents. As part of the fiscal year 27 budget, the city continues to prioritize investments in public health, mental health, and recovery services for residents as well. This includes the launch of the new Veterans and First Responders Recovery Group, a partnership between the Veterans Service Office, led by Veronica Shaw, and public health departments that provides dedicated supports for veterans and first responders dealing with substance use and recovery. The weekly support group will be led by the city's recovery coach, Chris Suma. The program reflects Medford's commitment to expanding accessible community-based behavioral health resources and ensuring that those who have served our community and country have access to the support they need. The city, city council, community development board are also in the midst of the restarted zoning project, which began in December 2025 and is taking the process at a more manageable pace for both staff and residents and includes more community engagement opportunities for everyone to make their voices heard. This thoughtful collaboration has yielded significant results with the city recently amending the zoning for the three underutilized lots and rezoning Medford Square, paving the way for a transformative vision for the area. The team is now prioritizing Boston Ave corridor this spring and the Tufts Institutional Zone on the horizon in the fall. The zoning update project will continue into fiscal year 27 to ensure the process is equitable and reasonable. The fiscal year 27 budget reflects the city's strategic focus on capital infrastructure investments, with the engineering division playing a key role in delivering projects that address a multitude of areas, including deferred maintenance, regulatory requirements, and long-term system reliability. Due to sound fiscal management and targeted investments in key staffing areas, the engineering division has added two assistant city engineers, along with key project management and administrative staff. This investment has improved project delivery timelines, reduced reliance on external consultants, which are very costly, and strengthened oversight of capital construction and utility coordination. We will really see the full impact of this staffing increase during the 2027 construction season. From a capital standpoint, fiscal year 26 investments were directed towards roadway, sidewalk, and underground utility improvements. Water and sewer infrastructure remained a significant priority as well. Approximately 7,700 feet of water main were replaced and 4,600 feet of sewer main were rehabilitated to address inflow and infiltration, reducing long-term system costs and regulatory exposure. In parallel, the lead service line program identified and addressed the 857 unknowns. In fiscal year 27, the city is advancing a targeted capital program aligned with available funding and debt capacity. Planned roadway construction includes Arlington Street, Bowen Ave, Golden Ave, and Willis Ave, totaling that 7,700 feet, with associated sidewalk reconstruction of approximately 14,600 linear feet. Water main replacement is scheduled on Brewster Road, Capen Street, Governor's Ave, and Sherwood Road, totaling approximately 6,800 linear feet. The city is also working to address more than 581 million in identified capital needs alongside hundreds of millions more in long-term infrastructure needs. These needs span critical areas including roadway and sidewalk reconstruction and safety improvements. HVAC upgrades in our school, water and sewer infrastructure repairs, ADA upgrades at City Hall, and essential equipment replacement. Many of these investments have been deferred over decades and now require substantial funding to maintain safe, functional, and compliant systems. By prioritizing our infrastructure enhancements, we're promoting the city's commitment to economic development, by reducing our overall long-term costs, increased productivity, attracting investment, creating jobs, and improving the overall quality and resilience of our community. In addition to these existing obligations, the city must also plan for upcoming projects that will further impact our debt capacity. Chief among them is the new proposed Medford High School, which is expected to require a sizable debt exclusion. At the same time, the city understands the need to bond for a fire headquarters, another essential public safety investment that can't be delayed indefinitely. And has included that in the capital improvement six or seven year plan. Taken together, these needs present a clear financial challenge. While borrowing is a necessary tool to fund large scale capital projects, it also increases the city's long term debt obligation as it has a direct impact on our taxpayers. It's therefore critical that we carefully balance the urgency of these investments while remaining aware of the cost burdens they present for our residents. Not every project can be undertaken at once and decisions must be guided by public safety permitting requirements and the understanding to not over leverage the city's revenue sources. The city is actively pursuing state and federal funding opportunities to offset local costs. Ultimately, Medford is committed to making the investments necessary to support a growing and evolving community, but we need to be careful not to place a burden on our residents. By taking a measured strategic approach, capital planning, The City aims to responsibly manage its debt while continuing to deliver the infrastructure and services that residents rely on every day. The City has selected Transom Real Estate as our partner in transforming the three underutilized lots. This project will create a true village square atmosphere and ensure ample parking for our seniors. and patrons for Chevalier Theatre. Transom's proposal reflects the values we share as a city. It includes both market rate and affordable housing, anchored by a 13,500 square foot grocery store across from the senior center, and designed with pedestrian access and safety at the center. It is a vision that aligns with our comprehensive plan and advances the goals laid out in your requests and the request for proposals. A Medford Square that is walkable, welcoming, and filled with opportunity. To best support investments, the city completed the Medford Economic Assessment Study, which examines the city's current economic landscape and provides recommendation for future programs. Staff will use the findings to inform policy decisions, prioritize initiatives, and collaborate with community partners regarding opportunities to support local businesses and strengthen the growth of the innovation economy. Also, the city is undertaking over the 2.4 million in park renovation projects that I mentioned, with several slated for completion this construction season that extends into fiscal year 27. Projects include Logan Park, Riverside Avenue, Shade Improvement Project, Clippership Pop-Up Park, Playstead Road Safety Improvements, Tufts Park Upgrades, and phase two of the car park renovation. Park and public space improvements that are in queue next include work at Wright's Pond and Condon Shell, a mini forest at Tufts Park, creating a COVID-19 Memorial Grove, and implementing pieces of the Mystic Shoreline Revitalization Plan, which was developed by the Mystic River Watershed Association. To encourage both residents and visitors to visit and patronize Medford's business districts, the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability has completed a wayfinding master plan conducted by design firm OverUnder and in partnership with MassDevelopment. The study funded by a Massachusetts Gaming Commission Community Grant aims to improve navigation challenges across all modes of transportation and highlights points of interest in the city through signage and citywide public spaces. Almost done. The public art and historical preservation also remains priorities. With the Council's support, the City unveiled the new Sarah Bradley Fulton Statute outside City Hall, recognizing Medford's Revolutionary War history and creating a new civic landmark in the heart of Medford Square. Throughout the fiscal year, the City continued to expand in the arts and strengthen neighborhood identity through a series of cultural programs and celebrations. Major events supported by the City include the Disability Fair, community concerts, Medford Pride, Winter Extravaganza, as well as numerous multicultural and neighborhood-based events that brought residents together across the community, like the annual Citywide Cleanup, Run Medford, and this Saturday will be our annual Porch Fest. Our new Keep Medford Beautiful chapter is a community effort to organize local volunteers interested in cleaning up and beautifying Medford's public spaces. Members were officially named to the steering committee in March, and the team will continue to work alongside the Department of Public Works and our office into the next fiscal year. For the first time, we've included a rodent prevention line. believe that was also one of your priorities in your memo in the budget as another way to keep our city clean and beautiful. Rodent populations are a concern for all of us and every municipality. We want to ensure that our public health and animal control staff have the resources they need to control and mitigate the situation. In its anticipated funding source, this lapse in fiscal year 27 was the city's American Rescue Plan dollars. The city has been funding a number of contracts and staff positions through this federal relief program for the past five years. We've had to rearrange multiple department budgets to account for items like better teams, used by human resources, and salaries such as our federal funds manager, a disability specialist, and associated salary costs for our communications team. This work wouldn't be possible without the support of the strong leadership team we have built here in Medford and without the City Council's support. Over the past year, we've hired a new elections manager and facilities director, as well as promoted a new library director. We're proud of our financial strategy, which has yielded us a double A plus bond rating and strong admiration from our peers in the form of two consecutive government finance officer association budget awards for the last two years. The finance team was also recognized for the exemplary work compiling the city's annual comprehensive financial report. According to the GFOA, the award represents a significant achievement by a municipality that reflects the commitment of the governing body and staff to meet the highest principles of governmental budgeting. We look forward to putting forth a new budget for fiscal year 27 that meets, if not succeeds, these expectations. As this work highlighted exemplifies the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our incredible staff who worked tirelessly to deliver not only exceptional public service to our community but meaningful improvements that strengthen our city's connections to its residents. Thank you for the time. I know I'm long-winded. But I appreciate having the ability to read most of the what will be in the budget book, although I did cut some out because I feel bad it's so long. And thank you. Welcome, Councilor Lazzaro. And I'm here to answer any questions you may have. I know we have several budgets before you and Chief of Staff Nazarian is also in attendance.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have questions for the mayor? I see Council Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Hi, I wanted to apologize for my late arrival. I was under the impression that we would be finished with the Committee of the Whole presentations by June 2nd, so I had a conflicting obligation tonight. Also, I want to be really upfront that these meetings have been going on for a long time and we've been reviewing the budgets for, couple months already. And I have a babysitter tonight because my kids are at home and my ex-husband is on a business trip, so I will be leaving at 10 p.m. So these are three massive departments that are all in the last Committee of the Whole jammed in at the end. This happened last year as well. The school budget is over $90 million and we don't, there's not time to discuss it in one evening. But I'm going to leave at 10 because I can't afford to pay a babysitter to stay until 2 in the morning. And we're going to talk about it again on June 9th, I guess, or we're going to vote for it. And it's, you know, 630, and we haven't talked about anything yet. So I'm starting off frustrated. I wish that we could. follow the regulations of the ordinance as written. There are a lot of ordinances that I wish we could follow as written, including the Citizen Control over Public Surveillance Ordinance, known as CCOPS. It's so great to have the police department here tonight. We did not have the police department here on the night that we talked about the CCOPS ordinance, which is supposed to happen as written in the ordinance. That was on May 20th, and nobody was in attendance for that. When ordinances are written in Medford, the intention is that they be enforced. So I've, I'm starting this meeting from a place of frustration and I just want to be upfront about that. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have further questions? Councilor Mlayne.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you Mayor for going through that listing of different items to discuss today. One of the areas I was trying to figure out and I apologize as I'm first time going through the budget process but I have been getting a lot of questions about the Medford Family Network and I was wondering where within the different budgets it might lie or rest or kind of where we might stand in that as I know we're kind of coming up to kind of finalizing the budget and looking at the final budget this year.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: A few things on the Medford Family Network. Myself and Chief of Staff Nina Nazarian have been doing the tough work, which may be why we are saved the larger departments, because they obviously have room where we were trying to squeeze some money to provide more money to our schools, which is about a $2 million gap at this point. and the MedFamily network that needs the $240,000. So we have been doing that hard work. We do not have $2.24 million, but I did have a financial task force meeting with President Bears, Consul Lazzaro, member Master Boney and member Graham from the school committee. And we discussed one way to handle it. So I really do have hope that we'll be able to at least bridge the gap and then hopefully try to get them funding for additional years through grants and different means. But I also have a call with Tufts University tomorrow. I did reach out to Tufts and ask them to provide more. I know they gave them a $5,000 grant through their grant round recently, but I did tell them the situation and explained what they were going through and the loss of the funding that they had over the last 10 years. And I believe one of the school committee members also reached out to Tufts. So that call is in the morning. What we're hoping to do, just a general overview is in why one of the reasons I came tonight is because I've been really digesting that eight to ten page memo from your meeting in March with all the council's priorities. It was very lengthy. Everybody had great requests and wants and needs. I was really trying to evaluate them all. Over the last maybe four to six weeks, you've probably got five to ten emails from me where I've asked department heads to highlight things that I know are continuing. You're very interested in the connectors and the liaisons, so I asked our Board of Health to just write up how that is going to be sustained and how we're going to enhance that. You've asked about home sharing and how we're going to implement the tree work we've done and we want to volunteer day. So I've really been trying to answer your questions throughout. Then we're working with Nina Nazarian, chief of staff, as she goes through budget hearings on additional things that we may be hearing. We're going to do the same thing tonight and her and I are meeting tomorrow to discuss what adjustments we can make for the council, what additional adjustments we can make for council priorities, have those laid out to you in an email tomorrow with my availability for anybody to call me or set up a meeting. And then also what chunk of money we'll be able to give to the schools and to the Medford Family Network, which I'm hopeful that Tess will come through for us and that we'll all agree on how to handle the remainder that Medford Family Networks needs to move forward. So I just hope for a collaboration over the next week by phone call or two if you vote on the budget on the 9th or if you table it and vote on the 23rd. a hopeful collaboration and I'm trying to take all the council's requests and be thoughtful and, and do as much as I, as we, as we can.
[Liz Mullane]: Sure. No, and I appreciate it. I know there's a, there's a gap we're trying to fill. So I guess between this next week, we'll have a better understanding of where we might be at least to close the gap for this year. Is that what I'm hearing within this next week or so before? Yes.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Okay. I think, I think I'll probably try to get an email to you by end of business tomorrow that will outline what adjustments we'll make, what we can give to the schools and the family network. And then we can talk, or you can say that this all sounds good, or this sounds bad, but we'll do what we can. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have any other councilors saying?
[Justin Tseng]: Thank you, Mayor, for coming today. I think your speech made me excited about the things that we've done in the past. It makes me even more ambitious to dream bigger about what we can do with city government, what we can do for our workers and for our residents as well. I think the council understands that it's never easy to run a municipal budget, especially with the pressures from Prop 2.5 from rising inflation that affects the public sector much more than the private sector as well. Of course, there are pressures everywhere. I think at the same time, there's a concern with residents and with members of the council that oftentimes the budgets that we receive are kind of bandaging over the difficulties of a year and then just trying to get us to the next year. And the way out of that is thinking about long term revenue and that plan for what do we do when we know that grants are falling off, what do we know when certain big non-profits in the city are losing money. How do we plan that out over a few years? And how do we make sure that the new growth strategy keeps on pace? I think transom is a real great addition to the city. It's something that we can be really optimistic about. But we'd love to see more transoms, more projects like that. And at the same time, I think it's difficult for the council You know, I think with the rezoning project, the residents were right that there needed to be better communication, there needed to be more kind of opportunities for feedback. They're definitely right on that. At the same time, I think oftentimes we conflate that with the question about pace. And given the kind of concerns that we have about, you know, fiscal pressures facing the city and also the pace of kind of new growth, housing, commercial development to generate revenue over a long term. Can we, can you describe kind of over the next five years what pressures we'll be expecting as a city and how we're gonna get to that revenue plan to generate the revenue for that over the next five years?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, I think we're going to experience pressures as you see the federal governments giving states, including Massachusetts, far less funding. And in turn, the funding that we get from the state pretty much stays stagnant. And so the percentage of what we get from the state continues to decrease. So we have to be creative from a city perspective. We're not in a different boat than any other community that I've been watching, I've been watching the override votes and the debt exclusion votes pass and fail in communities across the Commonwealth. And my colleagues, mayors and town managers are really struggling out there, especially if they have votes that fail. But I think the work that this council along with the planning office and my office are doing to rezone in the right way is going to be definitely pave the way for new development. We also have, I think, seven developments that are just like transom, although not all have a commercial component, but there is the Mystic Valley Parkway development that's close to 300 units. That was a 40B. We have the Davis. company's development that's another almost 300 units. That's on the Fellsway. The KISS 108 station right next to the Wellington Tee is another large-scale development that we've been working on, as well as where Cappy's location is. That's going to be, I think they added 50 more units, so I think that's closer to 350 plus. And there are a few more that are not on the top of my head, but we have been actively working on it. In addition to the zoning review, we're also working on the Wellington Transformation Study. We have a company in helping us create, of course, mixed use, but commercial and industrial to make sure we maintain our commercial tax base and increase what we have. Unfortunately, I think we had eight companies or projects in queue that were small to very large scale life science developments that didn't pan out due to financing and saturation in the market. I think that's because the city didn't start looking at life science or trying to actively obtain life science until 2020 and it was just too late. So there's between the transformation study and what we're doing in West Medford, we have a West Medford study, the rezoning, me negotiating with the Mystic Valley Development Commission and obtaining that $1.3 million, getting those two parcels out of the pilot and onto Medford tax rolls so we could obtain the new growth. I am trying to be as creative and hardworking as I can to try to sustain the budget that we have and increase it as much as we can due to the fact that the federal government and the state government are not providing us as much as we really, really need.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah. No, I mean, I think, yeah, I think that's fair to say they're not doing what communities like ours need. But I guess I have two follow-ups on top of that. The first thing is, as you noted, I think we were a little bit behind the curve when it came to life sciences. What lessons are we taking from that in terms of looking at new industrial and commercial development in the city? And the other question is more concrete. Do you have projections of how much new growth revenue those projects that you've noted would bring in? And it'd be useful to see those relative to maybe what we expect insurance and pensions to go up by in future years, too. And if you do have those numbers.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I don't have them in my head, but I think we could provide them to you if you are CFO. Absolutely. Yep. We'll take note of that.
[Justin Tseng]: Great. And then the first question about just commercial and the lessons that we've learned.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes, I came in in 2020. And right from me taking office was when I started really trying to bring in the life science, because it was just really starting to expand. And you were seeing life science buildings opening in more than just Cambridge. But by the time we had those probably eight or so developments in queue, You just saw over 2022, 2023, each one lose funding due to saturation of the market. I think you'll get a presentation very soon on the Wellington Transformation Study, and that is our main focus is commercial industrial as it relates to making sure that Wellington remains strong with our commercial growth. and adds, you know, additional growth to that location. So that's one of the biggest studies we're doing right now. But we every day are trying to, I think I just signed a letter supporting the vacant storefront grant. So we are actively trying to bring in commercial business.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I mean, I think that's helpful to know. The, I just wanted to note, you know, as we talked about Wellington, you know, it's a place I'm very passionate about, a place I call home. And I just want to make sure that we're making this next round of growth before it, before it's too late. Right. And, you know, sometimes I'm worried that drawing things out too long makes us miss that boat. I'd also, I had a few questions about the budget process itself. I think at the last meeting we heard that some department heads, maybe many department heads, received the proposed budget around the same time as the council or right before, and that there wasn't necessarily the back and forth that we would expect happen to happen in the budget process between folks putting together the budget and the individual departments that were making the recommendations? Is that? accurate. And I think on top of that, we had a very specific concern that we found out during the, when we were evaluating the city messenger position, which we want to convert to a constituent services aid modernized position to be more useful for the 21st century. I think the council president might have just made some recommendations about where we could find the funding for it within the department. And essentially the idea was re-envisioning, restructuring the legislative department so that we could have that extra person, we could finance that extra person and also kind of modernize in total the vision of how we do things. And then I think the budget that we received had all the cuts but none of the readjustments. And essentially, I think this is the second part of the budget process question is, it seemed like there wasn't communication to understand the kind of, the reason behind why recommendations for certain cuts were made. And I think what we said on the council last week was that we were worried that if this is the approach, we're worried that department heads aren't actually incentivized to make bolder kind of plans for the department because they might be worried that they could make certain line item cuts or cut recommendations to restructure the department but they wouldn't get the kind of the plus at the end of it. to fund that restructuring. And I guess, I'm curious what your approach to the budget process is.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Sure, yeah. I'll start with your first question. I think in late February, March, into April, within six weeks of that time frame, we meet with every department head for one to two hours. Myself and my chief of staff, we give them a two hour slot. So I think we did maybe say four or five a week. And we didn't, we, at that point we don't know what the schools are coming in at. We don't ask them to make any cuts at that time. We ask them for what their proposed budget is and requested and required expenses. We take it all in. We ask questions. We do our due diligence and review what we need to review. And then once the school budget comes in, we figure out what the gap is. This year, there was only a presented budget, which was a $6 million gap. At that point, we knew that that was because it was based on what the school committee wants to know, what the schools would need if we had all the, you know, all the money in the world. So that was a $6 million gap. But I didn't, we didn't know, myself and, and my chief of staff did not know what the actual gap was. So there was nothing we could do as far as touching budgets to try to reduce city side budgets until we knew what that gap was. And that came probably, It came later than we would like, but obviously everybody's doing hard work behind the scenes. Once we had that, we did not go and review every single budget. We just don't have the time. I'm in four, five, six, seven meetings a day. As Nina and I were able to schedule two to three hours a week in our calendar where we go over early in the week, we would go over the budgets that we were going to be presenting the week after. We would kind of finalize where we were at once we knew what the gap was, the 2.24 million, which was pretty recent. And then we would finalize that on a Wednesday and give it to the department head on a Thursday. And so yes, the department heads had maybe almost a week, a little less than a week to review their budgets, ask questions, push back, see if they could change things. And we were pretty amenable. Knowing we have to tell our department heads that we have almost a $2.5 million gap, this is not like a plentiful year. It's, you know, I feel, we feel terrible for our department heads that, you know, we have to either reduce this line item and tell them they need to, you know, use free cash in the future or. So that's, we just took a few budgets a week as we were presenting, giving them to the council. That's kind of my answer. It's a very tedious process.
[Justin Tseng]: You mentioned the gap and I'm just curious what, do you guys have an estimate of what the free cash after the budget, after the proposed budget and after the proposed transfers is going to look like? Do you have an estimate of the amount?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. That's such a hard thing to answer at this point in time. I know finance officials across the state try very hard not to commit to those types of questions, and I'm not going to want to put our finance director in the position to I'm not going to commit him to answering those types of questions at this point, but I can tell you we're still looking at transfers that will need to happen and that we'll have that information at the June 23rd meeting. So that will probably be the earliest. We'd probably be able to take a look at that type of thing. In all reality, revenues affect the process just as much as turnbacks do, and there are other major factors as well. So that's a very challenging thing to answer. I don't know as though we've ever tried to answer that in the middle of the fiscal year, never mind even when the fiscal year has been closed. That's my understanding, Councilor Tseng. You're asking how much we would close fiscal 26 in terms of cash.
[Justin Tseng]: Right, right, yeah. Okay, I'm also curious about, well I think this is more of a question of the whole council, but I know councillors have brought up the idea of just the concern that we're spending a lot on legal costs, a lot on litigation, settlements. I think a lot of us personally in Our personal interactions with KP Law have not been the most impressed by the work product, even when it comes to just reviews of ordinances. And I think at the last meeting it was pointed out to us that a lot of the cost for that isn't in the kind of legal department, the law department's budget, but is in kind of professional services for different departments. for fire when they handle their cases. We, I think, we requested from Chief of Staff Nazarian if we could see before the budget what that breakdown looked like for, I think we specified the fire department, but I was wondering if we could get that information from you guys before the budget.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes, I think we have that request. We do have that request. I know that we have broken it down in the past and just want to reiterate where we're at. We, I think, evaluated in 24 or 25 and it was about $400,000 total that we spent on legal costs. We evaluated about 16 communities at that time. We were either the lowest or the second lowest in legal costs. When we compared specifically to Malden, Malden, which is very similar to the city of Medford, is spending $1.2 million on their legal budget. I did learn today that cities like Lowell have 10 people in their law department. They're spending close to two plus million on legal budgets. We did have a couple of cases that we spent a little bit more money in fiscal year 25, 26, but we had to defend those cases. We had to. I know that KP Law has reviewed, and I apologize if you're not happy with the services, but they've reviewed over 20 ordinances as of recent. for the city council, and I know they helped you with the BJ's litigation and much more, but I feel like we're getting good service. 30 plus municipal attorneys that specialize in every different area. I have department heads that have come to me nervous about their legal budgets getting cut. One came to me just yesterday when I saw him on the stairs saying, I call the legal department, our legal counsel, multiple times a week. What am I going to do? Let us handle it. I really hope that I can explain to the council that those services, we don't overuse, but we use them for zoning. We use KP Law. If we didn't have Chirin from KP Law, we would never have got a signed agreement with Transom to redevelop our underutilized lots. On the personnel level, and I know that's where we get You may get pushback from certain departments because we are in the business of holding people accountable. So I know that's uncomfortable. It's something the city wasn't used to before I came in. There was no human resources. And we do. We need to. In order to keep our residents safe, believe me, I can give you some examples. I can send you some personnel examples tomorrow that will blow your mind. I actually have some pictures of things we have to deal with. Our DEI office is calling the legal department probably every other day. It's every single department that uses, it's probably me the least if I have to be honest, but I don't know what we would do without legal services if those were taken out of the budget. We try to negotiate the rates. We try to negotiate the monthly retain. the monthly retainer. We try to be cognizant of what we're spending on legal. We have the chief of police is in and out of court when he doesn't give a gun license and is getting sued left and right. And Janelle from KP Law is a specialist in that area. But I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
[Justin Tseng]: It'd be helpful to see what information you have for us. I know we have the FOIA request that we all voted on, and it'd be helpful to get that as soon as possible. I'm also curious about what the plan is to staff the city solicitor position. I noticed that in the budget proposals, the salary's been cut, even though I think one of the kind of main reasons given for why we couldn't hire one was because of our just pay not being competitive. What went wrong with the stability of the department? Because I know we had one for a little bit. And what's the plan to make it stable?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, if the council wants us to repost, I think that probably will be in the email tomorrow. You know, if we can allow our department heads to call an attorney that they're used to calling at Coleman and Page for fiscal year 27, we will commit to posting the job. And if that's what the council wants as far as pushing that up to step five in the budget, I think we're amenable to doing that. That's going to be a discussion for tomorrow.
[Justin Tseng]: Great. We heard from the library at the last meeting. And their main priority, it seemed, and I think it's a very fair priority. I know people have looked at librarian positions throughout the state and Medford is just, they wanted to work here and it's just not acceptable to them how much. lower our pay was. We heard that we're $11 per hour under regional standards. $8 per hour got us kind of reasonably close enough to be competitive. I believe the board of trustees might have asked for $4 an hour more. And the kind of proposal that we got was $2 per hour more. And the difference between $2 per hour and $4 per hour is $20,000. I'm just curious why we went with $2 and what would get us, what would it take to get us to the $4?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: That's on our list for tomorrow too. I think going through each budget, what's on my mind, you know, of course the MedFamily Network, but the majority of what's on my mind as I chair the school committee and understand how expensive it is to fund our school department. I think every time I look at a budget, I try to be reasonable and fair on something like increase in salaries. That's a conversation that we also have with our human resource director to make sure we're evaluating it throughout everybody that's non-union, works part-time. We try to make sure we're being fair and equitable. But yes, ultimately, trying to give the schools as much as possible was, is always, is on my mind when you hear of a $2 million gap. But that is something we're going to evaluate tomorrow. Because we know it's a council priority.
[Justin Tseng]: I'm glad to hear that, that you're reevaluating it. I'm, I guess, I am curious what metrics, like when you're evaluating these pay increases. I think there are just certain groups of workers in the city that have historically been I mean, massively underpaid. I think there's an argument for all workers, of course, but, you know, paraprofessionals, library staff. I'm curious about the metrics that are being used to evaluate what constitutes a fair increase. What questions are you guys asking?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, I mean our HR director leads those discussions, but she will evaluate other people that are working part time for that specific one other people in the city that are working part time. So if you're given some part timers. 12% raise which is what I think close to what the $2 an hour is, what are you giving every other part-time employee in the city and how is that fair? Then we have to evaluate it to our union personnel and what percentage if they're getting the 2.5%, you know, How are they going to respond when they hear somebody else is making 11%? But we also take a look at our comp and class study, when the positions are on our table to be reviewed. We take into account a whole host of things, mostly led by our HR director and trying to just be reasonable, fair, based on our comp and class study and what we currently offer and provide and pay our entire staff, work staff.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I understand looking at the percentage increases, but of course, many workers in the city are starting at a very low baseline compared to what our neighbors in the region are paying to. I'm just saying that's something I would look at too, and I would recommend looking at when we do make those valuations.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Other than Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston, which is really hard to compete with, because Somerville, I think the share probably will be about $170 million with their budget, more than what Medford has, our classic co-op study did not include those three cities and towns, and we were in the middle ground or above for most of our salaries.
[Justin Tseng]: Were there any that were particularly or were low or very high?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: We found that the three that we already proposed to you were the most out of whack and that's what we were trying to fix this year. That's why you have the proposal for you. And then over the summer and the fall we're going to be evaluating potentially adopting a new plan. get away from the CAF system and go to a new system and, and potentially, especially if the budget allows, create another step or two for employees. But that's gonna be our fiscal year 27 project. But we did, we did find that those, those three were the most out of whack, which is why we we've had probably eight, eight meetings on them to try to be as fair as possible to all of our staff.
[Justin Tseng]: Great. Something that I think everyone kind of agrees with in this room is the need to execute the urban forest management plan. I think the memo that we got said that 200 trees per year isn't enough to stop canopy decline in this city. The plan recommends reaching 400 per year by 2030. We have been getting more plantings per year through grant funding, but the plan also recommends adding one urban forester and two laborers, which aren't in this budget. We know the tree warden is retiring. I think that was...
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I got the tree warden retired, and I believe Tim is presenting tonight, so maybe he would be the best to answer some of these questions, but I believe we have some really good candidates, and I'm very hopeful that the new candidate will also be an arborist, which is a new requirement we added to the job description, and I think it's going to be very beneficial.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I think that's adding the arborist requirement is a good step forward. I think what a lot of us are kind of curious about is what the plan is to over the next three to five years reach the goals set within the plan. It doesn't seem like there's a lot being done in this budget necessarily towards that. Of course, we can cite tons of financial pressures. But what's the plan for the next few years to get there?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, I mean, this year, I think we need to just right-size the department as it relates to getting a new manager and actually really managing the department we have now and getting on a good track. I think you're going to see, moving forward, a lot of improvements and work productivity enhancements. Start there and then we can evaluate next season. Each year we have a list of anywhere between five and 15 new positions being requested from department heads. So we do our best. Last year was the rec and maybe one other. This year we're adding the three or four salaries that have percentages that were covered by ARPA plus all our contracts. So we're trying to squeeze in a whole lot into one pot of money.
[Justin Tseng]: I'm also curious, shifting to the inclusion specialists that we've recommended in our budget recommendations. I also noticed that in the, the school's budget for tonight, and we can get to the school's part with the schools. That there was, there's vacancies are just not. positions not funded that we would like to see, that I think the community would like to see with regards to inclusion. Of course, when we talk about inclusion specialists, a lot of that's very different from what DEI does. And I think that's why we want to see investment into that as well to make sure that kids are participating in society and schools, that residents are participating in society and schools. What's the plan to get us to staff those needs?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I've been conversating through email with Councilor Leming a bit over the last few days and there's opportunity, I think, to potentially add a bit to the rec department to take care of one of his concerns. add more inclusive programming. So we're going to take a look at that tomorrow because we know it's a priority of the council. I don't, Kevin has now two additional staff members that he's managing as well. So I think a gradual approach to that is the way we're going to be able to handle it. Adding 100,000 new position, I just, I can't, it's hard when you know that there's a deficit in the school department's budget.
[Justin Tseng]: I've asked a lot of questions. I guess my last one will hopefully put us on topic for later tonight. We've been talking about the gap for the schools. I think it's all over 2 million. 2.18 is the number I have. But if the city doesn't close that gap, that the public schools has indicated that it's going to need to revisit high school staffing and special education para positions. What is, if we don't fund it, that gap, what's the alternative? How do we prevent these layoffs and how do we stay true to what voters voted for in 2024?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, we don't have $2 million to close the gap, so I'm open to suggestions now that you, after tonight, you would have reviewed all the city budgets, I believe. So I'd look for suggestions from the council on where you might wanna reallocate money. We've done, I mean, I'm getting heat for some of the things that I've cut and I'm trying to be thoughtful and considerate and fair across the board. It's not easy and it's not comfortable, but we're doing the work and we're, you know, doing our best to try to explain it to all of our department heads. explain the rationale, but cities and towns are struggling, and increases in costs and expenses, like I mentioned before, we're doing the absolute best we can.
[Justin Tseng]: I'll let other Councilors speak. I know I've monopolized a lot of time. Of course, the questions are on the list, but we can always chat offline too.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes, absolutely. I'll email you tomorrow and we can set up a time.
[Zac Bears]: Do we have questions from any other Councilors? I have a few. Less than you. I'll take it. I'm going to try to keep it narrow to three and a half points. Okay.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Sounds good.
[Zac Bears]: So, you know, I think going back to, and this kind of goes into the question around the law department, right? In the budget ordinance, something that we talked about was quarterly financial meetings and seeing the warrants regularly. We haven't been able to keep that up. We only did that I think for Q1 this year. I'd have to go back and look at my email. Maybe we got something for Q2. I'm not 100% sure. So.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: And we can talk to our CFO about that.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I get there's capacity issues across the city and city government, but I think. I think the reason why we are where we are now asking the questions that we were asking about the law department budget is those costs are spread out. It seems those costs are spread out across different departments. When we talked to the chief, he said the actuals in his professional services line reflected some legal costs. When we've heard, you know, from you tonight, other departments are using legal costs. So, you know, the law department budget, when it was, when most of the things were happening in that budget, that budget reflected the cost of our legal services. It seems now that those costs are kind of all over the city budget, across different departments. It's hard to pull that information together to understand it, and that's just before we even get to, you know, potential settlements. We don't have the information you have about, in many cases, about certain decisions, right? But it does seem when we hear hear from folks that arbitrations were lost, settlements were happening, and we don't understand where that's coming from in the budget because we're not seeing the warrants on a quarterly basis. We're not having those update meetings. It's spread across the ledger. I think we end up in the place where we are now where we have kind of a trust deficit. And, you know, I think even when we looked I remember sitting, I think, here in 2024 and saying, well, we're not doing end of year transfers, so the law budget is a law budget. I was saying that to George, right? And since then, it seems that I think I was maybe wrong about that, about exactly what our legal costs are, what the exposure is. And I think a lot of that comes to, you know, a breakdown in the process and the information sharing and in some cases the way that information is compiled, which is I think why we put such an admittedly robust request upon you guys for legal information was to say let's get it all together and then we can have a full understanding of what the picture is there. And I really think it goes back to some process issues around just we don't have the information that we would want to see. So I understand a lot of departments use legal services. There's I think seven different opinions on this council about our different individual interactions with different individuals like KP on different projects and depending on, you know, a lot of different factors on how that's gone. I've certainly had some good work done with some folks at KP. I also have had a bunch of issues with some of the projects that we've worked on, right? I don't want to see us in a situation where we're going a month to month on a law department budget. I don't think that's work that any of us want to be doing. But I think what Councilor Tseng was kind of trying to get out there and what I think many of the councilors have said is with the information breakdown, we don't have the information we need. to actually understand really what we're approving, right? So I just wanted to say that was one and a half points. And now I have more of a point and the other two are more questions. But I just wanted to kind of provide some more context on that and maybe we can get somewhere. And I'll pause if you want to.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, no, I appreciate your comments. Thank you, President Bears. We don't have anything to hide. We do run any settlement by the council that's over $2,500 and we get approval from you. I don't even think it's the law, but we do it. We want to be transparent and open. We've been able to negotiate some large, large claims down to what I consider almost pennies compared to what the claims were demanding initially through good legal representation. We have been asking department heads for many years to pay for what they're using from either KP or Jonathan Silverstein for the zoning or any other attorney a department may use. Other than the retainer and maybe some other funding that we may have in the law department budget, we have been doing that for several years. It's the reason why when we evaluated it in 2023 and 2024, 2023, 2024, We did compile that number. One of those years, it was that 400,000. That was compiled not just from the law budget, but from every department that spent money on legal fees. We're not trying to not be transparent. I think that every city and town is spending money on legal fees. Every city and town is getting sued, and we're left defending these claims. But it would be detrimental to us if we We're not able to continue doing that into the new fiscal year. So we have the public record request, I think. Nina has the amount of documents that it's producing and how long it's going to take some of us to do, mainly our administrative assistant in the law department. We will provide those to you on as much as we can do either each week or biweekly. We just are not going to be able to get that done by, I mean, it's going to take months. If you pull every claim, and yeah, it's going to take months.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And I think, you know, it'll take months for you to pull it and then probably weeks and months for us to then take it all and reassess it and put it into the informational format that we want to understand the information. And I think I said this to Chief of Staff Nazarian, like, there's an alternative here based on the original resolution, which is putting together a report so that we can see all the information in the way that we need to see it. And I think, you know, something that has changed for me, I won't speak for anyone else on the council, is just, I think, a number of announcements, certainly by people making claims against the city that, you know, the city has lost a very significant arbitration or claim, right? maybe the city's appealing, you know, what is that gonna cost? And if there's elements of this that need to be discussed in executive session or elements of this that you don't think can be discussed with us, I think we need to find a way that we can be communicated about because we see sticker shock in a lot of the announcements about the cost of legal services to the city. And without, I think coming up with some sort of regular and clear process to kind of create the report that we were asking for back in January or February, we could maybe alleviate some of the questions around the public records. Obviously, the clock is ticking on that, right? So. Yeah.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yeah, we have to focus on that by law so where we just kind of put our energy what we have left of energy after doing the budget and zoning and Medford Square, all that with the public records request because then we had to ask for an extension and it's been a lot of work trying to figure out how long that's going to take. All I'll add is that when we win a case or I settle a case, we had a case that The demand was about $1.5 million, and then I settled. It took a year, but I settled it for $28,000. I don't go on film and boast about it. We might tell you in executive session, but I'm not going to say, look what we did. Look how much we saved the city in claim money. But yeah, you do have at least one union representation that does. They make videos. So no, we do not win every case, but we are working tirelessly to try to keep costs down and negotiate settlements real hard. I might, you know, I get depoed and instead of settling sometimes, I would rather go through a one, two, or three-day depo of myself because I know that it's going to lead to what is best for the community. So yes, no, I'm not boasting about good negotiations. I'm not boasting about anything we win. But yes, once in a while you will see representation from one union that boasts about it. And like I said, we don't win them all. I don't claim to. We're a municipality and we get sued for whatever reason. And we're doing our best to defend and settle when we know we need to settle, take legal advice from different counsel, KP doesn't handle most of our certain types of claims, but we're doing the best we can. I'm happy to discuss different settlements with any of you. I'm happy to discuss personnel matters that we're dealing with that we need labor counsel for anytime.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And I appreciate your perspective on it. I think What I've heard from my colleagues and I think in the resolutions that we forwarded over on this matter is like, and I feel like we've articulated it and if there's ways that we can try to clarify the articulation of the information, you know, and you just kind of brought up one of the other points, right? Who are the vendors we work with? you know, where are their costs, where are we seeing their costs in the different lines of the budget? When we see a loss, where are we seeing that? I don't want you to boast about winning necessarily, but I think, you know, there probably would be some data value to be able to indicate your point, like here were the Like here was the claims that we could have been faced with versus here is what we ended up for, right? And maybe it's a settlement, but it explains it, right? We don't have that information. The context isn't there. And to your point, whether it's one of our, you know, employee unions or employees or residents online, like people are, you know, people are spreading information and framing that information the way they want to frame it and to us, I think it's been pretty clear to me that the seven of us don't feel like the city has given even us the information to be able to adequately explain this issue. So, you know, and obviously my hopes would always be that it is not an issue that maybe we think it is but we don't have the information to answer that and I think that's why some Councilors made the proposals that they made previous meeting about the legal budget.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Got it. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right. My two other things are relatively quick. I think just kind of trying to boil down the whole budget into its two most important parts, which is the deficit and forecasting. If we want to start with the deficit, I guess my two questions would be, and if you don't have the figures in front of you, you know, what were, what was the total deficit based on the submitted budgets, right? So, and like on the city and school side, I think we have that on the school side. I have a bunch of presentation numbers here, but, you know, right now it looks like after all of their paring down of several million dollars pared down, it's still 2.1 million on their side. And So it probably started somewhere in the $6 million range, I think, from the presentations. So that's pretty significant work. And then I guess, not necessarily on what came to us, but based on the budgets, the initial budgets, right, I understand your perspective of I don't think what the school committee presented originally was if we had all the money in the world. I think it was still mostly fixed costs with maybe a million of that increase being trying to do new things that are important. That's, I think, something that we put into the budget ordinance and something that we constantly talk about here. And I think that preliminary budget meetings help with this. understanding what our department heads are asking for, you know. So when we started at the top of the list, you know, back before you knew the school budget before, you know, March or April, early March, February, you know, what was the deficit back then on the city side? I think that would be a helpful piece of information to have. And then what's the deficit as of today on the city side?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I think we look at it differently. Overall it was a $2 million deficit based on what we gave the schools, based on what department heads asked for. So we didn't have a deficit. Now we've spent time reducing budgets to try to eliminate the school deficit. I don't have a figure as far as what like requested items that aren't required tally up to but overall we wait for the school department deficit to then eliminate from our requests.
[Zac Bears]: And I think that's kind of maybe where I'm getting to the kind of the point that I'm trying to make, right. It seems to me from what you said the department had at some point submitted budgets that were higher than the budgets that are in our packets. Correct. And that's probably similar what the school budget school budget process looks like where they start with here's everything we think is possibly a fixed cost and then here's some things we'd like to try. And I kind of you know we have that breakdown I think because of the budget ordinance on our sheets right the fixed cost growth versus the And obviously, we've seen in this budget, most of the changes here on the city side are fixed cost. I think there was one or two new expenses in a couple of the departmental budgets.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes, yes. We're running tight to be able to provide the schools with as much as possible.
[Zac Bears]: Right. So just so I understand it, because I think the claim that you just said was if the schools were taking The figure you had earlier, I think it's the 87,750. And I'm not sure if that includes the stabilization fund or not.
[Unidentified]: Then- No, no it doesn't.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, so if that was in there, then all of the requests that all the department has made would have been able to be funded. And we would have had no deficit.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes, I believe so. Yes. The way you're asking it, yes. We've cut from the city side as much as we can to provide to the schools. We'll have that definite number tomorrow, but it's not $2 million. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: So on the city side, the answer was zero and now it's a negative number.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Correct.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Yes.
[Nina Nazarian]: I agree with the kind of discussion
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Anything over the zero would be requested amounts that we're never in. It was just like, hey, it would be nice if I had a fourth person in my office. We don't have that. We don't have what the requested number is, no. I guess for us, it's been year after year, like really trying to grind and budget accordingly based on increase in health insurance, this year debt capacity, fixed costs, transportation, special ed. So I'm a realist and I know very well that we weren't going to be able to just say put everything you want in that budget. And then, yes, there might be a $2 million deficit on the city side too. We don't operate like that.
[Zac Bears]: Right. Well, so they're not comparable figures. This is kind of what I was trying to get at because it goes into the next piece of things. which is, you know, DLS recommends and but we don't really see it. I don't know if you have it and we don't see it or we don't have meetings about it or we just aren't able to do it. DLS highly recommends financial forecasting like 5 to 10 years on both revenue and expense sides. We don't talk about that in public meetings. I don't think we receive the documentation on it. I was watching the, you know, Medford High School meeting last night and, you know, I saw some figures looking at maybe some projections on parts of questions around this like new growth. But like the new growth numbers that I was looking at, I don't think that they, would reflect like the four projects that you mentioned. Like, you know, if one or two of those projects comes online, that's going to bump us up from our pretty standard 2 million in a year when we don't really see a big project come online. And those are the kinds of things I think we would see in financial forecasting, right? So what is our plan over the next five years? Like what's our revenue forecast over the next five years that's not just, what it seemed to me to be a new growth that was like base plus two and a half per, you know, base base plus a couple percent every year. Cause we know that there's four or five projects that are happening that are gonna increase that. And then similarly on the other side, like what's our expense forecast. And that's where I think things like what the Metro Public Schools are doing, you know, really can be helpful. And if we do have department heads who are coming to you and saying, here are the things that we think we need. Yeah, it's a tight year, it's a tight year every year. And this is where I kind of get a little, I have a little tough time, right? No matter what, we're never gonna be able to fund every single thing we wanna fund in a given year, unless we have a really, really great revenue plan and we execute on it really, really well, which I think should be our goal. But it just feels hard to me to hear on the city side, We're not going to present what the department heads are saying may be needed or would be good to fund. But then we are doing things like in the police budget and the fire budget where we're funding positions at a dollar because we hope, we know that it's important that we fund them in the future. So I just don't think we can do both of those things at the same time. And I do think that the kind of the operating theory of how you're describing it means that we actually can't compare what's happening on the Medford Public Schools budget to the city process. So, you know, from what I see, the school cut, you know, cut their deficit down really significantly to 4 million probably by making a lot of really hard choices. But what I hear on the city side is, you know, I don't know how to quantify what we've, what the city side budgets have been able to do in that way. So that was kind of long winded and it sounds like you have a response but I really think, this forecasting thing, the fact that we're not doing the, or that we're not at least seeing as a council the DLS recommended financial forecasts and understanding the five and 10 year picture for the budget puts us in the situation where not only are we having tight budgets every year and not really being able to effectively explain the gap or explain like what our plan is to address the gap over, you know, a few fiscal years and a situation where you know, the figures that were presented last night around Medford High School saying we don't have fiscal capacity for this but like it didn't reflect like a revenue forecast that includes major projects that are going to bring new revenue to the city. I just don't think it puts us in a really good position to have. I don't think we have accurate information to make the best decision possible whether that's us or the voters.
[Nina Nazarian]: So, a couple of things. We, as you all know, there is an annual budgetary process and to your point, President Bears, there is a revenue forecast. I recall discussion on that when we had a joint meeting with the school committee. If you haven't received that presentation, My recollection tells me it was contained in that. I also know that a lot of the things that were coming up during the budget process and the budget hearings were on my plate to get back to you all on. So if I am a little bit behind on that, I was, for instance, intending on sending you all a copy of the library budget the corrected version today, but I, I unfortunately didn't get to it. Hopefully I can send it to you tomorrow with some good news in it, you know, cuz the version today doesn't have, doesn't have anything but a $2 amount. I did contact our finance director today cuz I was recalling your question, President Bears. At one point, and I was going over my notes and looking at the request to get hits to free cash, President Bears, so I had inquired with him to follow up with the council on that. As far as the revenue forecast, we can certainly provide it. Our finance director prepares it, and I know that he's been working on it. I know he works on it every year. It's an iteration that happens on a regular basis. Realistically, I'm sorry, I'll just say realistically, revenue forecasts are just forecasts. They're almost inevitably never... metrics that can be used to rely on, right, because they're forecasts, and then the realities come in. Our capital planning process is where we do the vast majority of the long-term financial planning in terms of the major expenses we have. So we've done an extensive effort in that regard, and that is what really played into the MSBA information and the high school work that was presented. And then the last thing I'll say is as far as revenues that could come in, you know, It's imperative that cities and towns are careful with their forecasting. We have an obligation to be conservative, and we, on a year-after-year basis, are pushing our own limits in that regard, because if we get too far in our own pushing of our own revenue expectations, then we could find ourselves in a deficit. And we can't really, that's not going to work very well for the city. So when we have a situation where we're not sure when revenues will come in for a specific development, we do our best to forecast for that. But sometimes we have to err on the side of being a little bit Thank you. Cautious in that regard. Those are the high-level thoughts and comments that I have on that. I don't know if you have anything else to add in there.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: No. Bob is probably the correct person to answer this. He was very involved in the slides from last night, so was Bond Counsel. He does projections. Hopefully, he'll be here on the 9th. to present to you and answer any questions that you have on that. He also, I think this current budget, the fiscal year 27 budget accounts for four of those developments, breaking ground and the associated building permit fees which again is a little less conservative than we like but we know we are hoping these six projects move forward over the next several years.
[Zac Bears]: Right. I guess more what I'm saying is, Yeah, I mean, obviously it'd be great to see that and like have that presented and, you know, if we're having an iterative model that's being updated regularly to be looking at that in these quarterly presentations that aren't happening. So in quarter one or in quarter two to say, okay, the revenue forecast in June was this, in January we're estimating this, like, you know, here's our expense forecasting. And I appreciate that forecasts are forecasts, right? But, you know, again, I think we're, I think there's a hypocrisy to saying, well, they're not real until they're real, but then presenting them to the community in a way that says, we can't do this. And I think also the way that we're doing that, right, it doesn't let us set a goal. Like we have a very hard time goal setting to say, well, what's the gap we need to bridge and how are we going to bridge it, right? There's only two big major tools to bridge these kinds of gaps. They're both, complicated in their different ways. One is overrides and debt exclusions, which certainly can be impactful to folks. They are incredibly democratic tools where the people themselves get to decide whether or not they want to spend those funds. And I think we were very clear in 2024 We have a plan for if, you know, the overrides don't succeed and it's, we'll have to make major cuts but we were able to tell the community that and the community was able to decide. whether or not they wanted that. And the other one obviously goes through important municipal processes too and that's growth. And those forecasts would help us say, OK, if we want to do the things that we need to do as a community, right? There was a slew of things that were presented as liabilities to the city in the presentation but some of them were not capital liabilities like OPEB and pensions were in there alongside some of our roads and buildings. And, you know, pensions, the pension liability, we're planning for that, right? That's in this budget right now. It's in the budget every year. There's certain liabilities that were included in the presentation that we actively plan for that are, you know, we're working through state aid or not, essentially not debt service funding to support those liabilities. So, that being said, I just don't, I don't think the information that's being presented to the public on these matters is done in a way that's clear enough for people to make informed decisions. And I include myself in that. And, you know, at the very least, being able to see the five-year revenue forecast, you know, just looking at the DLS website, and I'm sure, you know, I know Bob has a lot of experience, I don't know I don't know if he's using this, but the DLS Financial Management Resource Bureau offers a two-day in-person workshop that teaches municipal finance officials how to build a forecast using a five-year forecast template. You know, are we using the DLS template? Is that something that we can cross-compare with? you know, other communities that maybe are using similar templates. Do we have the data on like forecast to actuals over the past five years so we can understand to your point how real are the forecasts? Are we doing a good job forecasting? Are we not? Because those are the kind of things that's let us set a goal, you know. One of my main takeaways from last night's presentation is that the most stripped down limited Medford High School project is like $300 less a year than the full project to the average single family taxpayer. And I'm not saying $300 a year is nothing, but I do ask, you know, what do we lose for that? It's going to be an incredibly expensive cost to the community if we say it's all on the debt exclusion, the municipal debt service has no capacity to handle any of it. And we don't have a plan to try to utilize some of the growth that we're seeing to help support the project or potentially other creative options. I know that I've at least floated a few, not that I'm on the building committee or particularly involved in the process. I'm watching along with everybody else. But I really think those questions around forecasting and really understanding how can we compare The numbers for the city departments and the schools around the deficit are really important for us to be making our decisions and especially when it comes to the high school project, financial forecasting and revenue planning in a way that feels more robust and more accurate than what I saw last night, I think it's going to help voters understand their choices. So, it's my perspective. I think our perspectives differ. But I don't think we have I think there's information that it sounds like maybe even exists that's not being, that needs to be shared and could be shared in a way that really helps us make more informed decisions.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Got it. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do you have any further questions from Councilors for the mayor? Let me just double check on the line. All right. Seeing none, we can move to our departments. Let me, one second.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I was just going to thank you for your time. President Bears and City Council will be in touch hopefully by the end of day tomorrow and good luck with tonight. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right. How did you hear that? Is that the ice cream truck or? Someone projecting calming music into the chambers. We'll start with parking. We have our parking director, Sarah McDermott, with us. Thank you for being here on our last preliminary budget meeting. have kind of a series of questions. I know you've been here before. I think you've probably watched some of the, maybe watched some of our budget hearings that are captivating.
[SPEAKER_18]: I watched a little bit of last week's.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_18]: Get a little prepared, hopefully.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Basically, the questions that we'd like to go through are, What are the differences between last year's budget and this year's budget, or fiscal 26 and fiscal 27? What are some of the highlights from this year fiscal 26? What are some of your plans for next year fiscal 27? And what are some items that you believe your department needs that weren't able to be funded in this upcoming proposed budget?
[Sarah McDermod]: Okay, so to begin, we have some we have a net increase to well it's not a net increase to the whole thing um but we have the we have some employees most of my employees have been with the city for several years so we have the their raises their So that's all accounted for. One item that went up is our professional services, which I know seems to be a common theme. So my professional services line item pays for our parking management system, GTECNA. It pays IPS, who manages our meters, our multi-space meters and our single-space meters. and it also pays our merchant processing fees, which are fees associated with credit card transactions. The contracts we have in place with G-TechNet and with IPS, the more productive my staff are with producing citations and selling permits, the higher our costs are. Our contract with GTechna right now, we pay a dollar. Every time one of my staff writes a citation or the police department writes a citation, that costs us a dollar, and that's invoiced monthly. Every time GTechna sends a letter because a citation is late, that gets invoiced monthly. There's a cost to it. Every time we sell a permit online or in the office, it costs us $2. So those items are somewhat unpredictable. The more that we sell, the more tickets we issue. And I'm sorry, let me just backtrack. IPS has a standard rate we pay each month for each of our multispace meter kiosks. And in addition to that, we pay a small fee for every transaction. So all of these costs are based on the activity that we see. So what I usually do, what I did last year and what I also did this year was get the average of the past year and find the average per month and budget for that. But this year we've, my staff has been quite more, quite a bit more productive at least in issuing citations. So the costs have gone up and also there, there are, A couple of costs. The $1 per ticket and the $2 per permit are contracted. Those rates won't go up while we're under contract. But there are other costs for mailing letters and for their online permitting system have gone up slightly so that I looked at the average number of transactions for the last year and budgeted for an increase based on the price, the new prices they gave me, and that amounted to about $4,400, just the price increase. And regretfully, last year I did not account for the merchant processing fees properly. I misjudged what they would cost, and I did not budget for them properly last year, but that I have figured out and accounted for better this year than I did last year. A little bit about those merchant processing fees. We used to use a company called Heartland, and for every transaction they would charge a small fee, every credit card transaction to be specific. And I've subsequently switched our IPS transactions to another company called AMG, and that saved the city literally thousands of dollars since I switched because it was before Heartland would take about 25% of every transaction, every credit card transaction, as a merchant processing fee, which is outrageous. And so I switched to AMG, and currently it's about 10%. So about 10% of the revenue that is credit card-based, not cash. Now goes to merchant processing as opposed to 25%. So these numbers I budgeted for are based on the averages and those averages including the cost of heartland. So they should be lower than what I've. predicted, given that we don't have a huge uptick in people parking at the meters. I'm working with G-Techno to switch them from Heartland to AMG as well for more cost savings there with our credit card processing fees. In addition to that, switching to AMG allowed our the people who use our meters and kiosks to pay with American Express, which they weren't able to do before. So that was substantially, that made a big difference because that was something that the people wanted. So that's probably the biggest increase is the professional services, was at 4,400 from the price increase from GTECNA and then my own budgeting, the merchant processing fees, where I did not do that properly last year. So that accounted for, I believe, 25,740 in the professional services line. I made cuts from some of the other items in our ordinary expenses because this past year I took over cell phone payments for all of our handheld devices and our city issued cell phones that were previously being paid for by the Medford Police Department. We estimated last year that it would be about $5,800 per year. The actual costs were substantially less than that, so now we can go with about $4,000, so that saved about $1,800. Supplies, clothing budget was higher than we've needed the last couple of years. A couple of the other line items were higher than we really used, so we made some small cuts there. I say small, but it was actually pretty substantial. It looks like 12. It looks like around 15 or 16,000 from the other line items. Which doesn't completely offset the cost of professional services, but it will help balance that out a little bit, I think. Another thing I'm looking to do, so I currently am creating an RFP because our contract with GTechNA expires in December of 2026. And overall, I know that from what I've heard from the Medford Police Department, they're not quite satisfied with that company. And I'm also, I've heard from residents who order their permits online that they do not like GTechNA's system. And I've had a few, I've had a few issues with them myself where they have tried to invoice me for things that specifically they tried to invoice me to switch to AMG. And when I gave them some pushback, they were like, okay, fine, just you won't have to take. So, so I have a feeling that they, they, I just get the impression that they want to charge us for things they shouldn't be charging us for, and it causes me a little bit of distrust with them, so I'm seeking a better company. I know that a neighboring city just switched from a company that was owned by the parent company of GTechNA to a more local company and they're incredibly happy with the price and with the service they've gotten so far. So I know there's, there's opportunities out there for us to improve not only the price of the service, but the service to the residents who do get frustrated every year come renewal time that they can't easily just reorder a permit and call it a day. It turns into a much larger process sometimes. So that's, that's a goal for this year, is to find somebody to take over. And if, if I'm proven wrong and GTechNet is still the best service provider at the best price, then we'll stick with them and re-sign, probably not for five years like we did originally. But it's still, that still remains to be seen, but that's something that's, that's a big thing on the horizon for us. what I would like to see. I mean, what I would have liked to see. What I'd like to see is more people on the streets writing tickets, because I get a lot of complaints from residents that there are not enough people out there. But I also have to admit that I think the staff we have already still has potential for improvement. So I believe that's one reason, and it's just my belief, that's one reason why I've had an open position we have yet to fill, because there's still potential to see what output the current staff can do with a little bit more training, a little bit more encouragement to, and a little, I say a little bit more encouragement, but what I really mean is a little more training. I think that there's room for improvement there. So, but that being said, from between, and, In the 2024 calendar year, the total number of citations issued between my department and the police department was 19,448. And in 2025, the total number of citations issued between our two departments were 27,348. So that's a 40% increase in citations. 40% increase in every time, you know, how much I have to pay a dollar every month. So the costs, as we get more productive under this current contract, do go up. So I've budgeted for averages, but if my staff continues to improve and be more productive, the costs may go up higher. Is that a good place to stop and ask for questions?
[Zac Bears]: Yes.
[Sarah McDermod]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you for the presentation. My only other question is if you could share, at some point, kind of the revenue for the fiscal year for the department, you know.
[Unidentified]: Sure.
[Zac Bears]: And then I'll go to my fellow Councilors.
[SPEAKER_18]: I have it.
[Sarah McDermod]: So as of the end of April, because I don't have the deposits for May just yet, but as of the end of April, the total deposits are $1,704,570.07. And that's still with May and June revenue yet to be accounted for. All right, and that's permits, fines, that's everything? That's with, yes, that is citations, citation revenue, permit revenue, and the revenue from the parking meters and the pay by phone app. Compared to the entire year, fiscal year 2025, the total deposits for that fiscal year were $1,687,363.53. We've already exceeded that by $1,687,363.53. quite a bit and we still have, well, we've exceeded it by about 20,000. We still have two months to go, so.
[Zac Bears]: So fair to say you're generating more revenue than you're expending.
[Sarah McDermod]: Thankfully, yes.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yes, we are.
[Zac Bears]: Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate hearing about the revenue. Where is the revenue held? Through the chair. Where's the revenue? Just through the chair, I'm asking a question. Yeah, yeah.
[Sarah McDermod]: I believe it goes to the general fund, all three sources is my understanding.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Okay. just the G-Techno, first of all, it sounds like an evil company in an 80s movie, just weird name. No offense, I shouldn't have said that. I'm sure they're a fine company, but it's doing the Comcast thing where you try to... When everybody had cable and you would try to cancel and then they would give you a better deal. Anyway, it sounds like a good, probably a good move, and I'm glad that there's an opportunity to network with other parking directors in the area and figure out which companies are better service providers. So that's encouraging if there is another option. But it just seems like you're, I mean, this presentation is giving me the impression that you're looking to use best practices when you know, running your department, which is encouraging and great and, you know, moving forward and improving. So I'm just happy to see this presentation. I appreciate the work you did to present it to us. And I guess I wish that we could have a clear sort of, I wish we could have something very clear and visual to help us understand the revenue and the expenditures for the whole city, because this department being something that brings money in. I also think this would be useful when we do talk about the school budget, which doesn't have anything to do with you, but when we get there, community schools, after school, there are some things in the school budget that do generate revenue, and I just think it's useful to see what those are, where that money goes, and you know, how much of it ends up in certain places, then there's like the water sewer enterprise fund, which only stays in one place, like doesn't go back to any, cannot be spent on anything else. To President Bair's point, when talking about, you know, certain areas where we as a city are going to owe money, but it doesn't matter if we ever do anything different, we will always owe money in that particular area, that showing it as part of our debt obligation overall to the city doesn't make sense. So that's all. I just wish we could lay it out and put it in a visual format that made sense. This going to the general fund is very straightforward, but thank you for presenting this. I appreciate it. That's all.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Councilor Malay.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, thank you so much for your presentation and kind of demonstrating, especially where you're digging in to kind of find areas to address where services might be charged more than other places do. It was something that you said about, you know, utilizing your staff members. Obviously, as a revenue driving demonstrated increase over the past two years. You mentioned, was there one position you said that you haven't filled yet, but you haven't, you're kind of waiting to see if there was more coming out of some of the other
[Sarah McDermod]: Well, yeah, I said that, but that's not, those are my, that's partially my assumption.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay.
[Sarah McDermod]: So I've had an open position. I had a full-time parking control specialist transferred to a different position within the city in April of 2025, and his position has not been filled subsequent to him leaving. As I mentioned with the numbers, you could see a massive increase in the productivity of the remaining members because that so that parking control specialist was on staff in 2024 and was part of the numbers from 2024. So we did get a new parking control specialist in September of 2024, a few months before I started as director and he So between that, I wouldn't say that the staffing levels were significantly different between 2024 and 2025. But the numbers of citations that have been produced are substantially different. And just the police increased the number of tickets they issued as well. I wanna give them credit where that's due as well. Because it's not just my department that increased productivity. I do think there's a little bit more potential there for them to improve even more. But I know that there will be a cap eventually on how much they can actually produce realistically. But me saying that that had something to do with the position being held open, that's my assumption as to part of the reason why. I don't know the full explanation why it's still under evaluation, whether we should fill that position or not.
[Liz Mullane]: No, that makes sense. I guess what I was trying to allude to and oftentimes with the teams that I work with too is kind of addressing where would you, if you could put extra staff, where would you see more of the uptake on the revenue side as you're seeing in, you know, some of the increases. So I was just curious if there was kind of that pressure point that you might be able to push on if there was other staff or other staff members within your team where you could see even more increase in terms of revenue.
[Sarah McDermod]: Well, so the other members of my staff, there's three full-time people who work on the parking meters and maintain them, keep them clean, keep them up to date, do upgrades, check on them when there's complaints. They do not, other than maintaining the machines so that they're usable, they don't really produce revenue the same way that the parking control specialists would. And my parking clerks, I have two full-time clerks and one part-time clerk, and they are there to sell the permits and interact with the customer, answer questions, guide them to where they're meant to be, where they can go. They don't really decide. Who gets a permit? I can hear them maybe upselling them here and there. They have a senior getting a senior residential permit. They'll try and upsell them on, hey, we have this permit. You can park at the meters all over Medford. It's $25 for the year. So there's only so much they can do. They do, I do hear them upsell though, or offer additional things. Oh, you're getting a permit. Would you like visitor permits? You know, just to try and, well, A, save the person on the trip because if they can get it all in one trip, great. And then be, you know, those things produce revenue. And not only that, but they keep, it's a balance though, because the more permits that are out there, maybe the fewer citations we write. But then the more people are in compliance, which, I mean, in the end is really my goal. Revenue is great. being fiscally conservative is great. But in the end, my philosophy behind running this department is to maintain parking and allow everybody who needs parking to have a space to go. And it's a balancing act between residents, visitors, businesses, and the like. So that's, yeah.
[Liz Mullane]: And then I just had a quick question on the night differential. It seems you have it budgeted for 26 and 27 but nothing in the actuals. Is it just because it comes in towards the end or?
[Sarah McDermod]: I don't know. I don't know why it's not in the actuals, because I have been paying those same night differentials throughout this year. I don't know if it's just ended up in a different line or not, but I have been paying those same. I have an employee who works 4 p.m. to midnight and one who works 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. So those two gentlemen get shift differential every week. I can't explain why it's not in the actual.
[Liz Mullane]: I saw that myself and yeah. For the both budgeted so I was curious. That was it. Thank you very much. Sure.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have any further questions for Director of the Parking Department? Seeing none, thank you.
[SPEAKER_18]: Better wrap it up while I can. Get out of here. Thank you all so much. It's nice to meet you, Councilwoman.
[Zac Bears]: All right. We'll go next to Medford Police. We have our Traffic Supervisors and Traffic Commission as well under Medford Police. And it looks like we have Captain Covino with us. You want to vamp for a minute? You got any? You want to vamp for a minute? Riff? I see him coming back. He's coming back to save you. Lieutenant Gagliardi to the rescue. Thanks for being here and send our best to the chief. I know he's, yeah, thank you. All right, so we have the Medford Police Department budget here, big budget, pretty big increase this year. Same questions for you guys as we do for all the other departments. If you could share the major changes in your budget from fiscal 26 to fiscal 27. Tell us about some of the accomplishments of the department in fiscal year 2026. Some of the plans for fiscal 27 and items that weren't able to be funded in fiscal 27 that you would hope to see funded in a future year. Those are kind of the four big questions and we'll turn it over to you.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Okay. Good evening. How's everybody doing tonight?
[Zac Bears]: Good evening.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: The police salary budget went up. 17.24%. That was mainly related to contract negotiations raises that the police officers got and the dispatchers. Both contracts were settled. On the expense side, we decreased by 7.24% this year. We're funding 105 positions. We have seven token positions that we're funding for six patrol officers and one deputy chief. I believe this is a pretty conservative budget. We have 97 police officers currently with the hope If we can get to the 105, maybe we can get additional funding at a later time. I really don't know what that encompasses as far as bylaws, charter provisions, or appropriation rules, but if we get to that point, it would be good to get additional funding for those positions. And I'm really open to any questions you have. It's pretty, this is a pretty conservative budget and if there are any questions regarding raises or those percentages as they relate to this budget, I can answer those questions. Whatever you have.
[Zac Bears]: Great. We do often receive, I think, an annual report from the department. Sometimes the chief in the past has gone through some of that. He's not here tonight. You don't have to do that tonight. Could you just come over to this side so the folks online can hear you? Thank you.
[Paul Covino]: That annual report has been completed. It just hasn't been put together yet. So when we get it together, we'll certainly get it over to you.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you. All right. I will go to, I actually do have one question before I go to members of the council. So in the past, so this reflects, a change after several years of a, like the salary line, both of those contracts were expired for an extended period or.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: July 1st of 2022.
[Zac Bears]: So this reflects essentially a change.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Four years worth of changes. Yes.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: All right. It's actually. Yeah, so for example, on the police side, that would be like a 19% increase. And the dispatchers would be a 13.97% increase. So that's 17% encompasses basically those raises.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And that's over five fiscal years. We haven't seen really an increase.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Well, we haven't seen 2028, but 2027 is represented in these numbers.
[Zac Bears]: Right. So that's four fiscal years of change. I just want to kind of provide some context to the public so they don't think.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yeah. So that's why I'm pretty much saying it's pretty conservative because I mean, we're at those numbers.
[Zac Bears]: And this may be for the Chief of Staff, Madam Chief of Staff. I know in the past that the administration has budgeted kind of a contractual agreements line within the, I think within the executive budget or maybe within the HR budget. Is that being shifted over in this budget to kind of reflect for some of the agreements that have been settled since the previous fiscal year budget?
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you. Yes, there would be a change, a significant change, because I think historically the number's been over $1 million. There's going to be a significant change since we've settled contracts. We don't have any open contracts as of right now. We are working through negotiations for a contract that will effectively open 7-1, which, you know, another way to say it is that it ends 6-30. So yes, there's going to be a significant change in those numbers. That's still being finalized too, but yes.
[Zac Bears]: Sure. Yeah, I'm just trying to provide some context because obviously if, and you see in a big budget, difficult budget year and then you come to look at this budget and you see, you know, 17% increase in the salary line, you know, that was actually being budgeted for through this contractual agreement section in the past. All right.
[Nina Nazarian]: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. All right. I will go to Councilor Boehling and then Vice President Lazzaro.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you very much. I just had a question. On the weapons apparatus stipend, it looks like it was budgeted for 58 and it's again for 58 but there's no actuals in there. Is that?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: We'll say that again?
[Liz Mullane]: For the weapons apparatus stipend that it looks like it was budgeted for 58 and again for 58, 600, I know it's a slight increase, but there's no actuals. Does that come in towards the end of the fiscal year?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yes. That is in June.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: And it's a flat stipend depending on whether it's a superior officer or a patrol officer. The amounts are different.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay. Great. And then I think the other question I had was around the contracts, but I think you all explained that already, so thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I just want to draw attention to the fact that I believe that there was a $2.4 million deficit. Madam Chief of Staff, would you mind clarifying for me what the deficit is that We keep talking about how much is the deficit for this budget this year?
[Nina Nazarian]: That is correct.
[Emily Lazzaro]: That's just like kind of uncanny. It's the exact amount that is that the police budget has gone up. So it's interesting that we there was no so like you knew that you guys knew this was coming because the contract was negotiated. And then there what we have to cut is the schools and the library and the city council budget and every other department. And to pay for the police budget that was contractually negotiated knowingly. I mean, can you explain why that happened that way?
[Nina Nazarian]: The contractual process is such that the city had been in negotiations. I don't know the timelines, to be honest with you. These gentlemen would probably know the timelines better than I would. The city was going through a contractual negotiation with both the patrol union and the superiors union. As a part of that process, the unions have the option to file with the joint labor management committee. The joint management labor committee is a mandated essentially mediation and an arbitration process that is, you know, established and codified in mass general law. And both police and fire can file with the Joint Labor Management Committee. And it's a mandated process. We can't elect to not negotiate or we can't elect to get to an impasse. We must follow the process. I can't, I don't recall exactly all the stages, but just before some of the final, we were actually in the final process towards getting a decision awarded by the JLMC before the union was able to settle and the city was able to settle with the union.
[Emily Lazzaro]: So you were like at an impasse?
[Nina Nazarian]: Sorry?
[Emily Lazzaro]: You were at an impasse and there was somebody was deciding
[Nina Nazarian]: Well, it's such that cities and towns can't get to an impasse, basically. The process kind of takes over and it requires cities and towns to... So somebody decided on this contract for you? No. So through the process, we were doing extensive amounts of research and work. I actually have a binder somewhere that we put together for the process, for the negotiations to ensure that We had gone through our due diligence and looked around the Commonwealth, looked at other cities and towns to understand what numbers they were settling at. It's important for us to make sure that we tell the city's story in terms of the city's available dollars and budget in that process. We essentially present at that arbitration hearing and we present information to. Okay. We don't have.
[Emily Lazzaro]: That's okay. That's okay. I'm sorry. We can't keep doing this all night. We, what's your lowest paid police officer paid?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Lowest paid, like entry level. Yeah. Entry level. First step police officer. Yeah. A year. Yeah.
[Emily Lazzaro]: So if we were to divide that up by hour, how many hours do police officers work per week? 40 hours a week. So I just want to do a quick math, 66. Sorry. 42 divided by 40 is, so that's like $31 an hour. $31.70 an hour. And that's like a starting level.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yeah, because that's a five year step process.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah. And librarians who work in Medford part time, not in the union. with a master's degree make $20 an hour. So the library is asking for $20,000 to pay them slightly more. They still will not be at market rate, but I just want to compare that. Were you asked by the chief of staff or the mayor to cut your budget at all? After this budget was presented to the mayor's office, were you asked to cut it?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: There were a few cuts made.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Can you tell me where?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Overtime. In which?
[Emily Lazzaro]: There are a lot of overtimes. Do you remember which one?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Overtime for officers, clerical, and training.
[Emily Lazzaro]: All of them? Okay.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: And those increases were more based on Actuals. You know, the actuals and salary increases, so.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: It's something that also takes part as, you know, how many police officers we're going to have graduating. Yeah. How many we hire, and it works hand in hand with the overtime, so.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Another thing I want to ask about is the full-time police officers, the number of positions. It looks like you will be planning to hire more patrol officers next year?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yes, we currently have 97 right now. 105 would give us the opportunity to hire another eight right now immediately.
[Emily Lazzaro]: So eight more patrol officers immediately. That's great. The fire department. Does anybody remember what the fire department was allotted for hiring more firefighters? I can't remember. I don't think it was.
[Zac Bears]: It was around 6 or 8. I'm not 100% sure.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Understand how contractual obligations work. I know that it took a long time to get there. An argument was just made by the mayor tonight that if the lowest paid librarians got an increase in their pay, it would be too much of a jump all at once and it wouldn't be fair to other departments. I think this is a great example of what happens when somebody in one department is being right-sized to a contract that might be something that is overdue and necessary, perhaps. But I don't think you can make the argument that one department in the city should have people that get paid a living wage, and another department in the city should have people that just do it for the love of it when everybody needs to eat and prevent for their families. And I'm not saying you guys don't. I'm just saying that this is a great example of disparity within the same employment unit. So I feel frustrated about, I know it's a very big department. The police department's very big. I understand that. But knowing how many times we've heard about the size of the deficit for this year and seeing that it's exactly this increase and that All the other departments have just small, small, small asks and that it would make a huge difference for a couple of people. I feel frustrated again. I do appreciate your responses to that stuff. I mean, everything is, it's not unreasonable. It's just all very stark.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: And just to clarify the years of the contract, I mean the 2027 fiscal raise for police is 2.5%. Yeah, totally.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Of course. It's just that it's been building. Yes, of course. And I understand. I understand that. And that is the same thing in the library, too, is that they've been underpaid for so long. when the ask was small because the hope was to get maybe if we ask for just a little bit we'll get that and then you got half of that, you know, over and over again for years. And I think we just need to think more along the lines of ask for what we deserve now and maybe get a little bit less than like, you know, ask for nothing and get less than that. And also that like maybe we have a responsibility as a city to give the people that work here what they deserve all the time, not just every four years and not every 10 years. But thank you. And I'm sorry. Thank you. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. My main questions are just about overtime. And also overtime, same as the increase to salaries, overtime also comes to about $2 million. And my question about overtime is really, and we asked the fire department about this, and it was a really interesting answer to sort of understand exactly how fire departments are required to have 24, 23 people per shift by law. And that means that if they're understaffed, They literally have to do overtime and people don't want to do it. So it was a very interesting conversation. And I would love to understand more about overtime generally in the police department. And then if you can, also talk about overtime for things like the crossing guards, like when a crossing guard is missing and then a policeman does that. just to understand how much overtime, what is overtime for? Why is overtime necessary? Why does the police force use overtime? I'd love to have a general understanding.
[Paul Covino]: going to start with the traffic supervisors. We don't pay police officers to fill their spots on overtime. It's someone comes off the shift. It's an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon. So we work with less people at that time is what happens.
[Anna Callahan]: So it's not overtime.
[Paul Covino]: So that is not overtime. Thank you. That's good to know. We have a certain amount of people we staff daily, per shift, and we will allow that to go down to a certain number before we have overtime. We are often forcing people to stay for overtime. It is a large number because the number we have, 97 people, is very, very low. I was here, I've been here for 40 years, and I remember when we had 132 offices. We probably ran an average of 120 to 25 for a very long time. And in the last 10 years, the numbers just kept going down and down and down. So the money is one issue. There's also an issue with hiring people who people just don't want to do this job. And it's become very difficult. They're under a lot of stress. And therefore, the overtime goes up. So instead of having, we're trying to get to 105. We're still nowhere near where we should be to service this city, especially a city of this size. But if we can get to that, it helps reduce the overtime part a little bit.
[Anna Callahan]: Do you mind if I just ask a little bit more detail? Sure. My understanding from the fire department is that there's a legal requirement per fire truck or per station.
[Paul Covino]: There are standards, industry standards to maintain.
[Anna Callahan]: So I would love to, like, how does the police department determine if overtime, if overtime is guesstimated? We have numbers. Like, how are those numbers determined?
[Paul Covino]: We have four sectors in the city. Each sector has two officers. That's an average of eight officers per sector. There'll be two sergeants in the street. One is the east side, one is the west side. So you're talking 10 there. Sergeant staffing is a little different. But we'll go down as low as six. We won't go lower than six unless we just can't get personnel to fill. But six is low. That's a low number to be running around there, whether it's a daytime or evening or midnights. But we do it. And one catastrophic event can just put us behind. We're fortunate that we have several cities and towns that step up and help. They're all in the same boat. So mutual aid is a big thing in our business right now. So that's the number. A full staff would be the eight sector cars, two to four motorcycles, depending on the shift, a K-9 officer, which we do have another K-9 officer, who's often bumped into the sector cars. So he's not out doing his regular K-9 routine. He has to answer calls. And then when we need a K-9 specifically, we'll take him out of that sector. We have detectives, we're down to, it's a bare minimum detectives unit following up on cases. We often get complaints from people that feel we should be following up on their case. When I was a detective lieutenant, I had explained to them that based on the situation that they're in and the lack of solvability factors, their case got put aside and other cases are assigned to people because we just don't have enough people to take on every case that they want. our citizens want us to follow up on. When you become a victim, in some circumstance, you know, we feel for you. We don't want you to be stuck out there. But there are some cases that just don't, they don't have the solvability factors and the level of the crime really isn't I hate to say isn't high, but it isn't. And so we have to put that on the back burner. When the detectives are, you know, when things might slow down a little bit, they'll pick at those cases and try to resolve them. But I've seen our numbers, like I said, go from 132 down to 97 right now. I've seen them go as low as 90. And we usually would be bouncing back up within a couple of years. We're not seeing that bounce back up now. It's been five years now, so it's at least more than five years that our numbers have been dropping. It's difficult to get people to do this job now. Also, it's a six-month training academy. We talk about a master's degree. It's certainly not a master's degree, but the amount of credits that would be built into it would give you an associate's degree. You may be making the same amount of money when you come out as the person who's hired to say work for the DPW that's sweeping the ground, but you are now You have specialized in mass criminal laws, mass traffic laws, motor vehicle laws, working with people in domestic violence, working with people in mental health issues, as well as all the defensive tactics and firearms things that we go through. So there's a lot of work that goes to it, and their pay is not good when they're in there. So some people will leave a career because they want to be a police officer, and they'll sacrifice that. pay to commit. And then after they get out of the academy, they'll get up to that step one pay that we just talked about. So we're all suffering to get somewhere. And unfortunately, and I understand your comparison, your goal is to get everybody a pay raise. The unfortunate thing is I know that the Librarian may have a master's degree, but so do most police officers right now. I have one. I know he does. And those guys over there do. So many of them officers do have bachelor's degrees, too. So there might be a couple that don't have a college degree, but most people are working towards it. So there is that educational aspect that we carry on on our own. And there's also that you go to work as in the library, odds are you're going home that night. In this job, you never know how you're going to end up. We had an event this morning that an officer was almost killed. And so that risk is also a deciding factor on not just your educational background, but what are the things you're willing to do to help the public. So thank you. Thanks.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: As far as overtime is concerned, I'd like to elaborate on one more thing. Back to your question, too, is when I say 97, I should have probably said We have 91, like, because six, 91 are actually sworn. We have six in the academy right now. We have two graduating very soon. And that's part of that 97 number I probably should have elaborated on earlier.
[Anna Callahan]: That's helpful.
[Paul Covino]: Thanks. Did I answer your question as far as your questions? Yeah.
[Unidentified]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Do we have any more questions for? Technicolino, Lieutenant Gagliardi. Councilor Cunliffe.
[Anna Callahan]: I apologize, just because this writing is so tiny, it's very hard to read it here. I should have brought them with me from home. I didn't do that. So I'm in trouble here. But I did notice that it is split up into like officers, clerical, and training. Is there anything that would be interesting for us to know about what is training overtime? Why is there overtime for training and clerical? How are those different from each other?
[Paul Covino]: Oftentimes we send people to training on their days off, because our schedule's not a regular Monday through Friday schedule. So we have to pay them overtime, it's a contractual thing. Or if we send them in lieu of their shift, we often have to fill that spot with an overtime shift. So that's what that's for. Great, thanks. And to your statement, which is true about building up the money over the years. I can remember when I came on, the pay was $20,000 a year. So it's a building process. And I don't think 66 is probably the equivalent of $20,000 a year.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: And police officer training is worth, is more than $150,000. I mean, we get it from a lot of different funding sources. So that's, we get it from multiple funding sources. So that's just from our budget side of it. There's more training than $150,000.
[Paul Covino]: Just to clarify that. Over the years, we've established our own training program. The industry has established training programs whether we participate or not is the department's thing. But as the state grew, as we grew, the state came up with mandates and laws. Now, we have the post commission which has increased our normal training by more and they're mandated. So, that cost is still going. It goes up even more.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Oh, sorry, Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: I just wanted to clarify quickly, I didn't intend for my comment to be that it's a comparison of education or that. having or not having a certain degree means that you deserve more or less money. I just mean that if you require somebody to have a degree and then offer them $20 an hour to perform a job, it's often having higher degrees means you may have personal debt, you may have a family to provide for, and that was the reason. And usually it implies, like, you would have higher pay, hopefully. But that's all I meant. It wasn't that, like, I just wanted to compare, like, an entry level position with something that would be maybe a step beyond entry level, because they would have had more training and education. Not to say it's apples to apples, because it's not. It's just that when we're looking at different departments' budgets, and we're talking about, how much money is really at stake. And it's really hard to compare across departments, because the police department is so big, and then when we're going to talk about the school budget, and it's also huge. And it's just, it's really hard to do this, and that's why it's useful to have these conversations, but I do appreciate the perspective you share as well. And I think that everybody should be able to come into a position, in an entry level position, it used to be true in a lot more, careers that you can come in with a salary that you can live on. I think that should be kind of baseline for most places, and it's really not. That's why people live with their parents for longer. That's why, like, you know, they rely on each other. They have roommates, that kind of thing. But anyway, I appreciate this moment. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. I just have a couple quick questions. So, I mean, I brought this up around the fire as well. And I appreciate that it's kind of more specifically outlined here. There's six positions funded. Is it six or seven positions funded at a dollar in this budget?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Seven.
[Zac Bears]: Seven. So it's this.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: One deputy chief and six police officers, yes.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Okay. Six patrol deputy chief.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Funded at a dollar. effective staffing is 105. What's that? The effective staffing is 105 uniformed officers.
[Paul Covino]: We're funded, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Paul Covino]: All right. That's the whole department, 105, not just uniformed officers.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. It says in this sheet.
[Paul Covino]: That's from the chief down 105.
[Zac Bears]: Right. I didn't mean just patrol. So it says in here 105 uniformed officers, so just FYI. But yeah, understanding that's chief, captain, lieutenant, sergeants, and patrol, right. You know, this isn't really on you guys. If you have any kind of context or explanation for including the 112 number with the $1 items, is that, you know, something that the department wanted to maintain in here to show that, In the future, we want that?
[Paul Covino]: We want to get our numbers back up. We want to be able to do more for the public. There is a lot more that we can do out there. Traffic is one of our biggest problems in this city. Our traffic division opens and closes every job. It's closed right now. We have no one in it. We don't have enough people to staff it. That's a division that should have at least six patrol officers and two sergeants in it, and it could work. day and evening, and there's so much more we could do with that. We bring back motorcycles within that, and we should have a lot of departments. They used to have what's called CAT teams. They're called community action teams. Years ago, we had community police officers in different areas. because our numbers over the years were dropping, this was a good way to make a team of community officers. So a CAT team is a community action team where you have officers who will work in various areas of the city where needed, get out there, get them to know the public, and also get them to act on specific problems that arise in those areas. But those are all goals right now.
[Zac Bears]: For sure. And the reason I ask is, you know, I personally, I personally don't think we should have books that say there's 112 people when we know seven of them are funded for a dollar and it's really 105. Because I think, to your point, right, and we hear it from every department, heard it from FIRE, heard it from you tonight. Certainly we hear it from some of the smaller departments in the city. The austerity and the budget cuts that have come to municipal government impact all of our departments. really the main issue that we're facing right now, whether it's our operating needs and our personnel or our capital needs, is that there is a huge gap between the money we need to spend and the money that we bring in. We need to have significantly higher expenditures if we want the things that you just said, right? And to me, and it's a difference of opinion that I've raised earlier in our conversation with the mayor and and in previous budget meetings, I don't think that we are effectively communicating to the public when we say, oh, no, no, it's 112. But then you read the asterisk and it's 105 because it's a real issue. We're facing really significant, you know, we have, you know, we can talk about the budget deficit, the funds deficit. We have a needs deficit. There are a bunch of things that we need that are in deficit and we do not have the money to pay for them because, The cost of providing those services is going up faster than the revenue that the city brings in. That's basically the whole budget problem in four sentences. And there's two ways to bring money in. You can ask the residents if they want to pay more. And if we say, let's say we put something forward that said we think we need six patrol officers and two sergeants to fully staff a traffic division so we can address the dangerous drivers on our streets. Because we know the dangerous drivers on our streets are an incredibly big problem. We get tons of communications about it. That's having the honest conversation. We have a need. This is how much it costs the voters. Can you do that? And they can say no, and then we can say that's where we're at. The other side of it is trying to bring in more of the new growth because the only way that we can raise revenue without increasing the tax burden on the existing taxpayer is to bring in new development. So those are our options. You don't make that decision, but I think you illustrated the point well, and I personally I understand the intent behind saying we'd like to, that's where we want to be. That's where we think we can do more with 112 than with 105. But I just have some issues on my own of putting that in a dollar. It's aspirational for sure. I just think there's maybe a different way to show that aspiration. So, thank you. That's it.
[Paul Covino]: Thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you very much. We do have very quickly.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Traffic supervisors and- One more thing I'd like to add, the training was 400, I misspoke, I said 150. This is very small. I was looking going 150. I'm sitting here going.
[Zac Bears]: Just very quickly, traffic supervisors and traffic commission, if we could go through that. I'm noticing a relatively small increase for traffic supervisors, is that a step increase or a contract negotiation?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Two percent raise.
[Zac Bears]: Two percent raise.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: They got a two percent raise. Right now we have 23 permanent, six reservists. Some of those will be permanent in the off season and we usually fund 25 and then we have extra monies for reservists. Okay. To fill in and this year there's a little extra money left in that but there were a lot of police officers covering traffic supervisor shifts out there. So that's why it was a little, the spending wasn't as high as it probably could have been. It probably, we were short.
[Zac Bears]: Was that a lot of people out sick or?
[Joseph Gagliardi]: We had a bunch of reservists recently. Okay. So we were short and out of those 23 permanent that we have, one is out on an injury unrelated to this job. Yeah. So there were a lot of police officer coverage.
[Zac Bears]: And just so folks know, this is the morning and afternoon supervisors at our schools.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Traffic commission, no change.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yeah, we usually level fund.
[Zac Bears]: Great.
[Joseph Gagliardi]: Yep.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Do we have any more questions? Seeing none, I do see Mr. Gilbrey here. I recognize you.
[Paul Covino]: Can Lieutenant McGilvery say something?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I'm recognizing him, yes.
[McGilvey]: I'm not here as Lieutenant McGilvery, I'm here as the representative for the Supervisors Union. I was on the bargaining team. So I understand the sticker shock that you may have when you see the wages increase 17.5%, but for the last three years, Our salary line item was based on 2022 wages. That 17.5% represents a three-year pay increase, which was exactly the same as everyone else in the city got. We went right down the line with the same raise on percentages as everybody else. There was a little something extra for post and getting the chief's job out of civil service and creating a deputy chief's job. But our wages are right in line with everyone else in the city. We didn't get any more than anyone else. It's that simple.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. And, you know, I think one other thing I was going to say back to Vice President Lazzaro's point, the part-time union, part-time librarians, They make about $31 an hour, so similar to.
[Paul Covino]: So it's really an issue with the- Are they actually required to have a master's degree?
[Zac Bears]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: And that's the pay? That's state certification requirements for a librarian. And it's not easy to get a library sciences master's. Councilor Malone.
[Liz Mullane]: This might be just a question to the chair but when did we, and again apologies if this came up earlier, when did we know that the contracted services like this were going to hit the budget at this level? Did we know this like last fiscal year or like, I'm just curious about the timeline of that.
[McGilvey]: We came before the council last November with a negotiated settlement. She wasn't here.
[Liz Mullane]: I wasn't here. We came in front of the council last November with a negotiated settlement. We went to the JLMC and
[McGilvey]: because we reached an impasse. The JLMC is there because police and firefighters cannot go on strike. So we need an outside entity to settle our contract disputes. We reached an impasse. We went to mediation. We were heading to arbitration. We never stopped negotiating. We were able to sit down with the mayor and we were able to negotiate a settlement. It came before this council. This council voted unanimously to fund it. So I get the fact that when you see that line item, 17.5%, that it looks like, whoa, and we're in a budget, deficit and all that good stuff. But I also want to remind everybody that we did a $7.5 million override to fund salaries on the school side, so.
[Liz Mullane]: And all I just wanted to say, nothing against that. It was more to the point of, I think, at the beginning when we were having the conversation with the mayor about planning and how we're looking at revenue and expenses and looking at it more like a one, three, five year type of time span. That's where I was just curious about when we may have had that. So as it's obviously, we knew it was coming.
[McGilvey]: And it should have been in a negotiated salaries account.
[Zac Bears]: Well, so this I want to, I just want to, if we could just keep it, I'd like to keep it from the back and forth. And I'd ask everyone to let me recognize them before they speak. Yes, and I think that's part of the issue where we talk about the budgets before we have the budget book in some cases or, you know, I think there are some schedules and charts that would be incredibly useful to provide additional information to us, right? I, right at the beginning, I think you might have been here, but I asked Chief of Staff Nazarian about that, right? What was in the negotiated salaries line last year? And is that mostly shifting here now into the police salaries line because we have this negotiation that's, I think it was four fiscal years if I'm right.
[McGilvey]: It was three and a half, we were out three and a half years when we started.
[Zac Bears]: Three and a half, yeah.
[McGilvey]: So. Just one other point.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[McGilvey]: 2002, we had 106 patrol offices. We're down to 78 now. When Stephanie Burke was mayor, she came up with the number 85. That was going to be the lowest we were going to go. We haven't hit that number 85 in probably 15 years. So our overtime is there because we don't have people to staff shifts. You need us out there staffing shifts. Sorry.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you.
[McGilvey]: It's unnecessary. If you hire more officers, your overtime is going to get cut. But then you've got to pay the benefits package. And we've been playing that game for a long time where the city would pay overtime instead of paying benefits. So, but right now it's just a struggle to get to, you know, a decent staffing level.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. You good?
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: I'm sorry to keep doing this. I do just want to clarify that. My main point in referencing this is that the increase here was a known amount and it is the number that keeps being referenced as the reason why we can't do anything else in the whole rest of the city. We can't have anything else in the whole rest of the city because of this known contractual increase. that happens to be the exact dollar amount of the deficit. We could have done an override. I mean, we could have done an override, maybe, if we had talked about it. There could have been any number of opportunities for us to raise revenue. Is there a plan to raise revenue? I mean, we don't make the budgets on city council, but we have been working very hard to figure out ways to raise revenue. We've been working on zoning. We've been talking about opportunities to bring in business to the city. I personally, like I'm thinking of lots of ways to try to raise revenue for the city and new growth is a way to bring in more money to the city. That's all. That's the reason. And I do appreciate the perspective. I just want, I want, I'm just repeating myself now, so I'm going to stop. But I appreciate Mr. Gilbrey's comments.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do you have any further questions for, yes, Chief of Staff Nazari.
[Nina Nazarian]: Thank you, President Bears. Through you to Councilor Lazzaro, just for clarification, the personnel, the permanent employees line for fiscal 20, I feel like this point wasn't, I wasn't able to make this point earlier. So I want to, for informational purposes, share that pointing out the permanent employees line, which is going up by 1.616 million for the police department, If we look at the fiscal 26 budget, the city had allocated 1.575 million in contractual agreements. So this was anticipated, the city was forecasting it, the city was budgeting for it. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Any further questions? Seeing none. Thank you. We'll go next to Medford Public Schools.
[Paul Covino]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, everybody. All right. Hi, Madam Superintendent. Thank you for being here. Do you need us to do the presentation sharing?
[Suzanne Galusi]: Please, we would appreciate that. While you're doing that, I'm just going to do a little framing, if that's OK. Great. So thank you very much. Good evening, esteemed members of city council and the Medford community. This evening, we are going to present to you our fiscal year 27 operating budget that was approved by school committee on May 12. As stated during that meeting, this presentation is a responsible, thoughtful, and authentic representation of the work that we have undertaken to support the growth and development of every student in Medford Public Schools. This budget cycle follows a year of significant progress. Much of it was made possible by the passage of the override last year. We continue to successfully operationalize our instructional vision through new consolidated schedules at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, which added 15 minutes of instructional time across the district. These changes, alongside our commitment to our collective bargaining agreements with teachers and paraprofessionals, are not only direct reflections of the override implementation, but also they are deeply rooted in our core values of belonging. I do think it's very important to note that all of the work associated within the override was not one-time spending, but rather reoccurring costs. However, we must also address the realities of the current economic landscape. And like many districts across the Commonwealth, and like many of the comments here this evening, we are navigating unavoidable costs, such as rising costs to special education, transportation, and our operational costs. To meet these challenges, we as the leadership team have continued to work alongside our school and department leaders. to ensure that there is alignment with our evolving needs for our students, our staff, and our community. All budget work is iterative, and it's really important to just make sure we mention that because it is still evolving. But it is a testament to our values of consistency and coherence that we are working really hard to establish in Medford Public Schools. Tonight, this proposal is a result of months of discussion, public feedback, and collaborative problem solving from the entire administrative team. I want to thank our budget analyst, Mr. Gerry McCue, our Finance Director, Mr. Noel Velez. They are going to be presenting the budget presentation this evening and for all of their hard work and dedication through all of this. Tonight's presentation is an overview of this process and the work that we have done, but we are here to answer any detailed questions that may follow from the overview. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you. And just a little bit more framing, tonight really we're talking about the city allocation to the Medford Public Schools. We're not going to talk about any of the line items. That's the school committee's job, so we can keep it simple on our end. And I know you'll present it but just to put it out there, May 12th budget hearing school committee requested general fund appropriation of 89,933,398 and a 750,000 dollar transfer from the stabilization fund to the fiscal 27 general fund appropriation for Medford Public Schools as well as about 530,000 in free cash for capital and technology needs. That's, you know, those are the things that we would vote on, right? As a council, we'd vote on the budget appropriation, the stabilization fund appropriation and the free cash transfer. That would be on June 9th when the budget is presented and if the mayor provides us an appropriation for the free cash and the stabilization fund.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Yes, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Great. And I will share. I think the correct presentation and you'll tell me if I'm wrong. How's that look? It looks good. Good. What? That's what I got. Give me a minute here. If you can make it look nicer on your computer. You're welcome. You have a computer, you're welcome to share. No, no, see?
[Noel Velez]: No, no, no.
[Zac Bears]: Correct. All right, it's gonna take my computer a minute to load Adobe Acrobat, so. Yeah, sorry. All right, let's see if this works.
[Unidentified]: All right.
[Zac Bears]: All right. How does this look now? Perfect. All right. Great. Get rid of this. I can't get rid of this. OK. Go ahead.
[Noel Velez]: Thank you all again for this opportunity. We met all last year for the first time. So just to introduce myself. My name is Noel Velez, the director of finance for Medford Public Schools. And as the superintendent was talking about earlier, this was great, tremendous work by principals, directors, and our admin assistants who scheduled over 60 meetings. between October to March to try to get what we felt was not just an accurate number, but making sure that everyone felt that the students were put first. And I believe that this budget represents that, where we put students first. And second, we made sure that every taxpayer dollar went to providing what we feel is an excellent public school district and continuing to grow that public school district. And with that, I'm going to turn over to Jerry to start off a few of our slides.
[Gerry McCue]: Thank you, Noel. So, one of the first things we do in our budget development cycle is to look at enrollment. October 1 is a benchmark enrollment number for us and that's also used by the Department of Education to create the foundation budget. So, it's an important number and you could see that we're trending down a little bit and not precipitously but we have about 100 fewer students projected for next school year versus October of 2024. We do have larger than, slightly larger than average class sizes moving through the middle schools right now and eventually they'll be at the high school but overall slightly trending down right now. The next slide will provide an analysis of the foundation budget. and this is pretty hard to see but essentially the based on the Senate budget that was passed and it happens to be identical to the House budget so it will very likely survive the joint conference committee on the budget, but it provides us $717,000 increase in state aid to Medford, which will help. with the overall finances of this school budget. This, on the next slide, just describe, you know, some of the issues we were dealing with for this budget. We've had two Committee of the Whole meetings with school committee in addition to a public hearing. We had significant increases in our special needs programming for a variety of reasons. But a good amount of that increase had to do with families that are moving into Medford that have children that have existing IEPs from other districts and we're bound to provide the services that are in that IEP. We did have some other operational cost increases, for instance, put our cleaning contract out to bid, so we have contracted cleaning for McGlynn and the high school. We budgeted a 5% increase. It was actually a 20% increase in the first year, and that is a over $200,000 hit to our 27 budget. We had the project with Motorola to improve door access and overall security in the schools and when that lease was finalized after we, concluded our budget last year, that was $60,000 more. We're expecting our utility costs to go up by $200,000. So those were larger than expected increases. We did provide in the first budget session with school committee a budget that, you know, if enacted would result in a 9% increase. And then we did a lot of hard work to reduce that through, through a number of ways. We, we postponed certain budget requests until FY 28. We, you know, provided them a, we, We relied more on our circuit breaker funding for some of the special education cost increases and we were able to We trimmed back some new proposals that were requested by principals and directors and got the budget down to a 4.7 percent increase.
[Noel Velez]: On our next slide here, we just have a nice overview regarding As we were trimming down, we wanted to make sure that, as we said, the main goal and the main dart is always minimizing direct impact on our students who attend Medford Public Schools. And we laid out some areas that we made sure. So we made sure to fully fund all collective bargaining agreements, aligning with available funding, ground decision makings with our core team, our core value team, using best efforts to avoid layoffs, As Jerry mentioned earlier, complying with all students who moved in and current students who have IEPs related to special education and English learners that we have the right staffing and the spending requirements as required by law. Keeping our class sizes that we felt under the CBA requirements, but also keeping things where families felt that their students' needs could be met in a good classroom size. ensuring working with our COO that he was able to use his strategic skills regarding what capital needs were immediate and some that we felt, as Jerry was saying, we don't want to say the word postponing pretty much the next fiscal year, but understanding what immediate needs we had that we needed to address now, what immediate needs that we're going to talk about later in our free cash request, and also what we can plan for fiscal year 28. but also wanting to work with our teachers and our paraprofessionals and increasing and improving professional development experiences and providing more professional development to these departments, providing funding for transition, for more rigorous instructional materials. As we said, we've added more minutes to the classroom. More minutes to the classrooms mean more teaching time. More teaching time means we have to make sure we're providing proper curriculum that can meet the needs that these students require. On our next slide here, just to give everyone a quick reminder of the question eight. Okay, thank you for that. As I remember, we're very grateful for all the voters who voted yes for question A funding from the override. So just here's a quick breakdown of just how these funds are being used by Metro Public Schools. The override was for $4 million. Last fiscal year, we used $1.8 million regarding the new teacher contract and the minutes added. We were able to create a 2.1 stabilization fund in which this fiscal year we used just over a million dollars to support our staff and our paras. Next year we'll be using $750,000. And then in fiscal year 28, the last year that we have funding, we'll be adding $350,000 on top of our budget. So here we have, as we were talking about earlier, what I'm hoping is a complete but basic line detail breakdown of what our base budget increases are. So as we said, we wanted to make sure that we were fully funding all of our CBAs. By doing so, it increased the budget by $2,784,300. As Gerald touched upon earlier, again, our special education related required, whether it was a one-on-one para, transportation required with the students or if the students attend a collaboration or a non-public private school. came out to just over $1.9 million. School-based new increased spending, while we did decrease it from our previous request in our first budget presentation, we still felt that some of this is needed to continue Medford Public Schools going in the right direction, and that came out to $360,236. Continuing to work with our COO and his team to increase some technology and facilities increase. We want to increase that budget by $109,255. Coming out to a total of $5,163,140. Based on some more scrubbing and meeting with more principals and meeting more directors and really Kudos to my central, to the whole leadership team. We were able to identify a few more. What we would consider savings are $490,991 and additional reductions including some of the newer requests that we had mentioned earlier. We lowered $575,000 in some of our new requests. So with a total savings of just over a million dollars, leading us with a overall proposed base budget increase of $4,096,649. So in here, just to give a quick summary. We're talking about collective bargaining agreements funded, special education being funded, operational costs increase, new investment in our music band and curriculum. Specifically, we know that we have such an amazing music and band program. We wanted to provide for them more funding for specifically them attending events, which as we know, requires them taking a bus. As Jerry talked about earlier, our transportation costs have gone up.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Can I say one quick thing though?
[Noel Velez]: Of course.
[Suzanne Galusi]: I do wanna just call out on this line item. With the new high school schedule, so just in case we, you don't under, know, this has been the first year through our collective bargaining process that we actually have one consolidated, complete schedule that merges the CTE schedule, which is our vocational side of, of, the building with our academic side. So that was where we probably used the most and we're appreciating the most for the override money. Because in order to get that schedule where everything was streamlined for students, we added a period to the day, which included that 15 minutes. So the 15 minutes was needed so that we could add that period in the day. That period allowed the students that are in CTEs to still have their co-ops and their shop time, but it also allowed an additional period where we can open opportunity for them, that they don't have to go without because they're in the CTE pathway. We still have work to do, but that additional period allowed students to have services, allowed students to take extracurriculars, allowed students to take AP courses. And as a result of the schedule, we saw enrollment in art and music courses increase by 300%. in just one year. And I think that's just an important piece of data for you to know about the work that was done based on the override. One little piece.
[Noel Velez]: Sorry about that. Just a giggle. It's good. It's good stuff. As we talked about with our enrollment going down a little bit, we did do a net reduction of one classroom. And as we'll talk about later, we have on our last slide, certain operational costs we'd like to shift over to a free cash request. Speaking of our enrollment size, so this is what it's going to, this is what the average number is going to look like at the Brooks Elementary, the McGlynn Elementary, the Missituk, and the Roberts. As you can see here, the numbers are still very healthy. They still look really good. And I think these are class sizes that we can be very happy and proud of. On our next slide, so just to briefly touch on our free cash request, we have here a total request of $530,500. One of those is for replacing all our defibrillators, AEDs. They are either, most of the ones that we have currently at the school are outdated and expired. interactive panels in the classroom. As we continue to invest in our curriculum, as we continue to invest in our classrooms, we want to have high-quality technology that can meet the needs of our students. We also have maturity maintenance fundings to address some facilities conditions assessments, estimated approximately at $75,000. Then last, we have our Roberts water tank heat replacement, but I believe that number, Jerry, Did we want to talk about that number real quick? We believe it could change as we're looking to see as technology is getting better, hopefully, we're looking to see what efficiencies we may use that we didn't think about before or as we continue to look forward. So that number is subject to change, but we're still waiting on all our assessments.
[Gerry McCue]: So yeah, this is one of the ways we were able to reduce our budget. The mayor and the city council have been generously providing us with periodically with free cash supplements to our maintenance budget. So we thought that we would identify the things that we were carrying in the original budget that might be a good fit for free cash and that helped us reduce the general fund appropriation. The hot water tank is really based on, this is a document that the school department approved, I mean the school committee approved and the hot water tank was based on the cost of a similar project that we had at the Brooks. a couple of years ago, but subsequent to developing this proposal, we may not have to do the same amount of work at the Roberts as we did at the Brooks. And we could certainly use that difference in the second line We did have about a year ago a facilities conditions assessment done on all our schools except for the high school which we are looking forward to the MSBA to provide us a new school and the Curtis Tufts we did not do an assessment on. But that identified a significant number of projects and we're addressing those projects as best we can with the staff we have and the maintenance budgets that we have. The next slide is kind of a summary of where we were at this current year, the $4,096,000 increase that we have described and what that means to bottom line budget for FY27. It is, as we talked about, you know, we do have, we did get a preliminary budget target from the city back in February and it resulted in, you know, right now we have a 2, almost a 2.2 million dollar gap. In the public hearing, there was a typo in the variance that, 1 was a 0 but the difference if you do the math it was 2.183. And so the next slide will describe kind of how what we are looking at to close that gap. So we are looking forward to the mayor's budget that it sounds like, you know, their staff are doing what they can to help us with that gap closure. But we are looking at a couple of things we weren't able to finalize by the time we submitted our preliminary budget and one was, taking a look at the high school schedule and identifying similarly how we do it in the elementary schools with class size students per section, so. We're finding not a lot but some instances where we have completed student assignments to different sections and we don't need as many teachers as are currently in the budget. I will say that for all these contemplated reductions, it's a very small amount, but we've identified either through retirements, resignations, or non-renewals positions that people can move to if we're proposing to cut a position here. Likewise, with special education, we're looking at, we want to make sure we're in compliance with state requirements for staffing. We also sometimes, you know, there's programmatic decisions by the special ed department based on the needs of the students, which might require us to have more staff than we're legally required to have. But you can also have position creep, so to speak, if you're not. constantly evaluating what you need versus the staff you have. So that's what we're looking at now. You know, each school year presents a different set of needs for this particular student population. And getting back to the high school schedule, another factor that we're looking at is that we have a, we've had a, a decline in our EL population, which would be no news here. I'm sure it's discussed a lot, the reasons for that. But at one time, we were able to budget three general ed teachers for subject matter areas, science, math, and English language arts that would provide content instruction to students along with their language acquisition instruction. And because of the loss of enrollment in this program, we find that those content area teachers can be returned to their program. And so this is like adding more teachers to the mix. that and still have, you know, sufficient coverage for content instruction for that EL population. So, you know, as we have non-renewals and retirements we just, we may not need as many teachers at the high school as we currently have. And then of course we'll continue to look at our, new proposals and other areas in the budget that we may be able to exercise some more cuts. But we've pretty much reached our limit with what we've done to date. I'm certainly happy to answer any questions you might have on specific cuts. I know you've got a copy of our public hearing slide deck and that provides a lot of information, more detailed than what we provided tonight.
[Zac Bears]: All right, do we have questions for the superintendent or Noel or Jerry? So I just want to get into a little bit this base question. So it seems to me, and this was the kind of the opinion I shared as well, and it seems like it's what you're presenting that, you know, you considered the general fund plus the stabilization fund from last year to be the base. And if we took that, you know, if we took that and, did a 3% increase on top of that, then the gap we're talking about is, you know, about $700,000, right? That includes the 750 this year, right? So it's still, there's still a gap. But if we assume that the fiscal 26 base was both the general fund and the stabilization fund funding, because we were talking about that ramp. But it seems that the mayor's, kind of budget assumption in that March 1st figure was that the stabilization fund didn't count. And so that leaves us with more like this two point something million dollar gap. Is that basically what happened here.
[Gerry McCue]: Yeah, I mean I, the, however the city arrives at that number, I mean that's within their purview and then we just have to deal with the results of that. But I think it's more correct to consider the stabilization fund amount as part of our base. There are salaries attached to that stabilization fund. There's, you know, expenses. It's all kind of one part of money and I think part of the issue might have been that we originally got at, we originally had added to our budget in the supplemental the full $4 million in FY25. But as part of FY 26, which we had a slide tonight and people might remember from that budget hearing is that we came up with a plan and it was really because the teacher's contract was first, it was settled late. So the way the questionnaire was written was that it was gonna take effect in FY 25. but it was for specific purposes. The longer school day that, you know, before we even talk about raises for teachers, we had to pay for that extra 15 minutes for teachers and paraprofessionals. Those expenses weren't going to happen until FY 26. So we came up with a plan to turn back $2.1 million from our FY 25 budget. put that back into the general fund in order for that to be transferred into the stabilization fund and then be spent out over the next three years. So, that might, that might have caused a little bit of confusion and but, but our position is that however much of a percentage that you wanna increase the school budget by, it should include that base budget that includes the 1.085 in stabilization funds. Right.
[Zac Bears]: And so this problem is compounding, right? Because it'll be like the new base.
[Gerry McCue]: Yeah. So what happens is, you know, in a perfect world we would have been able to spend the whole $4 million and it just would have been, it would have rolled in as part of our base in FY26. But out of necessity, we had to come up with this plan to keep the promise that the vote is made with us on how to spend that Question 8 money. But in doing so, it creates a structural deficit because now you have one-time money funding the budget for a budget that has ongoing expenses. So it's very important to kind of unwind from that as soon as possible. And so in effect, there's a difference between, there's a difference of $335,000 between the stabilization used in 26 versus 27 and that shifts into the general fund in order to maintain the base budget. And it was designed that way so that that shift would be more manageable than using the whole 2.1 million dollars in 26 and then having to come before the board kind of replacing that $2 million before we even start talking about collective bargaining and special ed, things like that.
[Suzanne Galusi]: And there were several positions at that time that we had cut previously that were also reinstated as part of the override language. So those positions were put back into the budget.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Thank you. Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Oh, thanks. I just had a little question. Again, this is about the override funds, but on the question eight slides, you showed that some of it is being used, you know, in the last year budget and then some is being allocated for next year and the year after. And I thought that the 4 million, you know, along with the other 3 million, those were per year. So I don't quite understand how like that gets allocated to a future year.
[Zac Bears]: That was the first year. So in the first year, because of the override passed mid-year, about half of the money was not expended. So that was put into a stabilization fund. that would then be ramped out over the following three fiscal years, fiscal 25, 26 and 27. I think if that is the simplest answer. So it was actually half of the money from the first year. Great.
[Gerry McCue]: Yeah. Does that answer your question? Okay, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right, do we have any further questions?
[Justin Tseng]: Councilor's saying. Thanks. I know you guys had alluded to potential areas in which you're looking at to close the gap. It sounds like it's very difficult and that you're hitting a bit of a wall. I'm curious as to what you guys see as the impact to students and to families if the gap isn't plucked. what's on the docket.
[Suzanne Galusi]: Can I answer, can I start? Sure. Yeah. I also wanted to say that, as you know, we've been, Medford Public Schools is going through some changes in leadership. And we've brought on, in a new superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and well, academics and instruction, our chief operations officer, and so with. shifts like that. A lot of the work, too, that has happened this year is a review. It's a review of how we've done things. It's a review of what we want for our students. And even some of that conversation and that visioning work is also part of the work we're doing that goes into the MSBA for the high school project. So Jerry and Noel can speak a little bit to some of the things that we've been talking about. In that first presentation, it, we have always been asked for transparency from school committee. So a lot of the work that we were doing initially was, how do we want, how do we envision Medford Public Schools to be running? And a lot of that was increases in professional development for teachers. Jerry mentioned at school committee about what the percentage is, it's 1%. I believe of a district's budget should be or that's maybe it's average calculation to be applied and we are like woefully under that 1%. So that's just one area where we've really had to look at maybe grant funding or supplemental funding or just creativity within house and kind of look to see what are the priorities for professional development this year, what can we be creative with, what can we use for grant funding or things like that. There may there are also conversations around just structure and what we're giving to our school leaders and our department leaders. The number one. thing that we are guided by all the time is making sure, and Noel spoke to this at the beginning, it's students first. So it's what can we do to have decisions be farthest away from students? And so that is staffing. So what are the other things that we can look at? that is not going to impact students' experience in Medford Public Schools. But I would say that that might not necessarily be wholly fair to our staff experiences. And a lot of the work in which we want to do to, to get to the Medford Public Schools that we feel the community deserves. And then I'll, I'll let Noel and, and Jerry kind of.
[Noel Velez]: Thank you for that question. As the superintendent alluded to, the last thing we ever want to impact is our students in our classroom. Some areas, as we talked about, you know, just to talk about new proposal spendings, we'd always start there. So new proposal spendings are when we meet with directors, when we meet with principals, They come to us with what their base budget was last year, and then they say, here are some increases I would like to make, and here's why, and they identify areas. One area the superintendent alluded to that we really want to fund, not that it's professional development, really trying to invest in getting really good professional development. For our teachers, purchasing and looking at new curriculum if we're hoping to not have to postpone that. Also, as Jerry alluded to, we had a great assessment last year on all of our schools for facilities. There are some projects that I know Ken Lord would love to get off the ground that I know we would love to fund. And we would not just have to go to free cash, but also just put it in our operating budget so that we can consistently invest in our buildings and grounds, consistently invest in our building repairs for the HVAC systems, for our elevators. So those are areas that sadly we would have to look at and see. If you think of it as like a code, you've got your code red, which is our most important things, and you've got your code orange, your code yellow, and then your code green. And we would, for facilities purposes, without speaking for our COO, we would look at our code reds and our code oranges, and then have to look at our code yellows and say, hey, I know some of those code yellows you really wanted to get done. We might have to either come back to the city council later in the next fiscal year for some free cash, or we might look to postpone that to fiscal year 28. Similar with some of the curriculum, I know that, Dr. Talbot is doing a fantastic job in reviewing how we are running the district as a whole and reviewing our curriculum. So I know she's identifying some areas she would love to see more instructional, more hands-on instructional supplies. to go with the curriculum. Again, not that we want to postpone that, but that might be something where we wanted to say we wanted to invest $75,000 in our science department. We might be only able to invest $50,000 where every department may have to take a small hit. Again, I'm just throwing up numbers based on preliminary conversations we have. These are never easy conversations to have. These are conversations we as a district don't want to have, but we are well aware, you know, we're also not going to disrespect any number. As we told the mayor beforehand, whatever number we are given, we're going to fit into that number, because at the end of the day, we understand we're a city. It's not just the school department, there's the police department, there's DPW department. So we don't want to take resources away from every department. We also want to make sure that we're doing the best with the funding we have. And again, any decisions in which we have to back off of, I don't want to say it's on the chopping block, it might just be hey, maybe not now, we might have to look at fiscal year 28. But again, every decision we make will always, I can assure you, will always be the furthest from impacting our students in the classroom. And as the superintendent alluded to, sometimes that means affecting other staff in other areas that are not in the classroom. You know, and so it's a tough, it's still a tough conversation to have, but we do have, we always have a plan B and a plan C ready. So those are some of the areas I hope that answered you, your question of like, you know, where we're looking to trim back on and maybe come back in fiscal year 2018. You might see that again on the same doc. I'll be honest with you, you're gonna see it again on next year's presentation. Certain things we didn't get, you're gonna see it right back on there because We're gonna continue to advocate for it, and we're gonna continue to fight for it, to continue to provide the best public school, I believe, in the state of Massachusetts when it's all said and done.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, no, thank you. That very much answers my question. I think it's helpful for us to get, I think, a really tangible view of what's at stake and how that impacts our kids, our parents, our teachers. their work experience in the schools as well. And I think, you know, I think we all have the same goal here, right? Of making Medford Public Schools the best school in the state. And to minimize the effect of any of this on the kids. And I think it's really apparent that that's the goal here. I think it's also apparent that no matter what we do, it's gonna have an impact. And I think that's why our council has, I think, always found it really important to push for the full ask. And hopefully this year we can push for that again.
[Gerry McCue]: I'd also like to take a moment to thank our legislative delegation who was able to secure funding in the state budget supplemental for van for the vocational program and for robotics curriculum at the middle school along with, equipment to go along with that curriculum. So that was a little piece in helping us to close our budget gap.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you. Do we have any more questions for our team from Medford Public Schools? Chief of Staff seems to want to speak.
[Nina Nazarian]: I get the unpopular job most of the time. I want to start off by saying that I have a lot of respect for my peers here today and I know that my peers are doing everything that they can for the schools and the children and it's incredibly hard to come up here and present a different perspective with regard to the base budget. My peers know the position of the school, of the city on this matter, and so none of this is gonna come to them as a surprise. The higher figure that's being, I think it's important to start off on, before I dive deep into base budget details, to say that this is fairly complicated. not something I would expect. I personally, if I was seated in your positions, to be candid with you, my learning system would not allow me to digest this this evening. But I'm going to go through this and I'm going to state what I feel needs to be stated. And I'm happy to answer any questions. I'm also happy to provide this written down if that's helpful. I hope, I hope maybe part of it doesn't even matter because I think we're all just headed towards the same direction. But I, it's important to outline the differences in perspective in terms of the base budget here because These types of things are going to then, if, if unaddressed by myself, for instance, they are gonna go down the road and be assumed that, for instance, the, the city's finance team on, on the municipal side and the city administration agree that this is a part of the base budget when we don't believe that that's accurate. The, the higher figure that's being discussed is effectively incorporating the FY 26 general fund appropriation of $85,400,000. $90,000 and then adding funds that were carried into Fiscal 26 from 25 through the Stabilization Fund, effectively treating those funds as part of the ongoing base. From our perspective, that approach doesn't align with the original intent or budgeting logic, in my opinion. As we understand it, the progression is as follows. The fiscal 25 budget was $76 million. Question seven was $3 million approved by the voters, this council, of course. Question eight, $4 million approved by this council and the voters. The total fiscal 25 appropriation was $83 million. For fiscal 26, the $83 million total was increased by 3%, inclusive of the $7 million override, resulting in a general fund appropriation of $85,490,000. Separately, as has been discussed tonight, the $2.185 million from question eight was placed into a stabilization fund with the following planned use schedule. Fiscal 26, $1.85 million. Fiscal 27, $750,000. Fiscal 28, $350,000. For fiscal 27, applying a 2.76 increase to the fiscal 26 base of $85,490,000 yields $87,850, 887 million, I don't know what I've been saying to be honest with you, I think I'm losing it here. $87,850,000 consistent with the city's finance director's communication back in February of 2026 to the school department. Again, we're referring now to Fiscal 27. The agreed upon use of the Stabilization Fund in Fiscal 27 was $750,000. Reframing these amounts, and this is probably the key to focus on because that was just a lot of numbers. Reframing these amounts in a way that incorporates Stabilization Fund into the base effectively suggests that the school would receive not only the $7 million in the override, but also another $2.185 million. added permanently to the base by Fiscal 28. That $2.185 million was already part of the original Question No. 8 funding in Fiscal 25 and was intended to only be phased forward to avoid absorption into free cash, not to permanently increase the baseline budget. Treating those same dollars as both a temporary bridge across fiscal years and a permanent addition to the base budget results in counting the same funds twice in different ways. The outcome materially changes the agreed upon financial framework and produces a higher ongoing obligation than was originally contemplated. Another way to frame the concern is to say that the voters did not approve a $9.185 million override. Another, yet another way to say it is by looking at the overall trajectory, the FY24 school general fund budget was $71 million roughly. It was just over $71 million. And the current interpretation points towards a FY27 requirement on the order of $90 million. That scale increase over a short period further underscores the extent to which this approach departs from the original financial plan. Again, I understand that we're all vying for the same dollars and the schools is just doing that for the best interest of the community and I support that. I think the mayor supports that. Everyone supports that. I know you all support that. But I just can't not indicate that there is a very real and concerning point with regard to treating the $2.185 million as part of the base budget because it's not. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Is there anything you guys wanna say about that?
[Gerry McCue]: Yeah, I think on this point we agree to disagree. You know, our position is that initially we did receive a 4 million dollars from question 8 in our FY25 budget and we reduced that amount by 2.1. So we technically we did not get $4 million added to our budget at the end of the day. And we did indicate in the FY 26 budget if we go back to those slides and we were having a very similar discussion about a budget gap, we indicated that we would use a million eighty-five to close the gap. adding that money to our budget in order to help close the gap. The other thing was if you remember the $3 million in question 7, a large amount of that was given to us in our appropriation kind of pre-funded, you know, without knowing how that, override would pass, so the city did have a plan to fund that, you know, in the event the override didn't pass. But when the override did pass, the city was retained, I want to say it was about $1.7 million. 1.75 to kind of make them whole for the money they had already given us. The additional 1.2 or so was added to our budget in the supplemental. So, you know, I think at the end of the day, we, it's still a $2 million budget gap no matter how you slice or dice it. We do not believe we're spending 9.8, 9 million, 9.1 million dollars from override amount of 7 million. That's not something we can agree to but we are using $2.1 million that we turned back in FY25 in order to spend it over the next three years and that part of the reason of doing that was to manage the impact of kind of unwinding from that stabilization fund. But the other aspect of it was it follows the three-year contract that we have with the teacher's union and that's, you know, what the money was voted on in order to meet the requirements of the schedule and improve the salaries of teachers and paraprofessionals, so.
[Suzanne Galusi]: And just if we want the numbers, it did bring back, we cut 14 full-time positions at that time. And when the override was successful, we were able to reinstate those 14 positions.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Yeah, I mean, I kind of, not to add a third perspective to the whole situation, But, you know, my understanding was that these funds were essentially serving as a ramp for the city to have general fund increases greater than 2.75% per year. Understanding that the schools would need that and these funds were a ramp so that the city budget could sustain that. And that's why I was considering a part of the base and just reading from the letter where we established the, I mean, I could see it being interpreted differently than I'm interpreting it, but this is June 18th, 2025 from the mayor. Establish and transfer funds to Medford Public Schools special purpose override stabilization funds. It concludes, by taking this action, we will have a source of funding available to supplement the Medford Public Schools annual operating budget in the upcoming fiscal year or future fiscal year. It specifically says annual operating budget which means recurring expenditures not one time expenses and therefore needs to be planned for to be maintained going forward. So that's like what we voted on the letter to establish the stabilization fund from the mayor. So I agree with the chief of staff it's not that the overrides 9.1 million but I also agree with you guys that it's to supplement the annual operating budget in the upcoming fiscal year and in future fiscal years which is what the mayor wrote to us when we approved the fund. So thank you. Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: I was just going to say that this is one reason why it's not advised for cities and towns to use free cash or stabilization funds for operating expenses because here we are and nobody knows, right? Wow, gosh, we used millions of dollars of essentially savings for operating expenses and now we don't know. We don't know what the voters wanted. So hopefully we will not be doing that again.
[Gerry McCue]: Well, as Chief of Staff said, it was designed to prevent that money from going to free cash and preserve it for what the voters intended with that money.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And I think if it seemed to me from the letter from the mayor from last year that we were all in agreement that we know that the schools need more than 2.75 percent per year above the even with the override figure included, and that this was a way to mitigate that ramp up. You know, the city would have to do a little bit less in fiscal 26, you know, than they otherwise would have a little bit more in 27, a little bit more in 28. And then in 29, it would be addressed. But it seems like where we were in agreement in the letter being submitted to us last year, we're not in agreement anymore. Do we have any further questions for the school leadership team? All right, thank you.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. All right.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you all very much. DPW, we have Tim McGivern. We'll do general fund, then we'll do enterprise fund. And I'll take it in, I think the order that it's in the packet, Tim. So we can start with highway.
[Tim McGivern]: Sure, good evening President Bears and council members. I had a late cup of coffee, so I'm good. But I have just a small presentation to make, just reading off some of the facts from last year. And then we can dive into questions.
[Zac Bears]: Great.
[Tim McGivern]: So as many of you know, DPW is comprised of seven divisions. And those are engineering, fleet, water and sewer, highway, forestry, parks, and cemetery. We operate with general fund money as well as water and sewer enterprise and perpetual care funds. Our budget this year is about $48 million. A lot of that is water, buying water for the city. So lots of great stuff happened over the past year or so. As a lot of you know, and we talked a little bit about earlier, we have an urban forest management plan now that was paid for by the state through an MVP grant. That included a tree inventory, which is really exciting because we didn't have that before. So now we have a GIS-based tree inventory, which is wonderful. And another big thing that we've been working on, that I think most of you know about as well, is transitioning our waste contracts into a more modern waste system. So that's just some big sort of administrative accomplishments. The engineering division has been up to a lot. There's five new staff members in engineering. Hopefully, you've seen lots of improvements going on. A big one was the traffic signal improvements at Spring Street and Central, for example. We basically completed resurfacing of six streets, about 5,650 feet, about 11,000 feet of sidewalk reconstruction. We did 7,700 feet of water main, 4,600 feet of sewer main, and we are rapidly removing the lead from the service lines, feeding the homes and businesses here in Medford. We resolved 857 of those, which is a large amount. Fleet maintenance, we take care of 240 city vehicles, including 27 fire apparatus, 51 police vehicles, and 20 pieces of heavy equipment. In the water and sewer division, we take care of 15,083 water services, and those come off of 144 miles of distribution pipe. And one of the big things that we accomplished in water this year is finished a citywide meter swap. We only have a few left, so that was a very large accomplishment. And we fixed 66 water service leaks and 67 water main breaks. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Highway, so we maintain 95 miles of public roads and about 29 miles of private roadways. Private roadways have limited service. We placed about 780 tons of asphalt this past year, repaired 110 structures. We painted 375,000 feet of traffic lines. And we have, it's not new anymore, but we've had paving equipment for the last couple of years. And last season, we did 11 paving spots, which is much larger than a patch. We paved a stretch of road, basically. And that was about 590 tons of asphalt. The forestry division is something that I looked at over the course of the last year with the urban forest management plan. It helps me as the manager of the DPW to know what we're up against and what we need to do to service those assets. So that was really important for the DPW. The parks division, we have a lot of parks in Medford. We have 16 major parks, 7 passive parks, and 14 playgrounds, 9 baseball fields, 7 softball fields, 4 soccer fields, 13 basketball courts, 9 tennis courts, and a pickleball court. And this year we are refinishing or refurbishing, however you'd like to call it, Playstead Park tennis courts, which is a very, very popular set of tennis courts here in the city. Goals for next year, they kind of build off of goals from last year. We want to improve our asphalt operations. We want to have two to three highway division trainings for asphalt knowledge and skills. We plan on upgrading our milling equipment. And we are shooting for weekly deployment of our paving equipment this season, which goes through November. Another goal is to improve our concrete operations, have two to three highway division trainings for concrete knowledge and skills, and weekly deployment of concrete spot repair crew. Another goal is to establish protocols for tree inventory updates. We're already working on that. It's a collaboration between the GIS and engineering division and the forestry division. The goal is to have an effective GIS-based tree database that can be used effectively for asset management. Another goal is to have 100% of the lead services removed out of the ground by 2032. That goal is going to remain until then. Then we have a lot of capital projects going on at the cemetery, so we have a goal to make some progress on those projects. We have an expansion design going on. We have a soil removal project that is almost done. I'm hoping this is the last year of doing that, and then we'll have just regular operational removals after that.
[Zac Bears]: Piles looking good, Tim.
[Tim McGivern]: The piles looking good?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, it's getting down there.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, the weeds growing on top, though, look kind of big. They almost look like trees, so. Anyway, you know, and the roads up there are horrible, so we have a project there that we're trying to make some progress on, and buildings as well. We have two buildings that are in rough shape. We have estimates for preserving those buildings that are quite high, and then I'm actually working on doing a comparison of what a new building might look like in cost. to compare, so I'd like to make some progress on those. And then we are continuing to work on asset management transition to field devices, so the goals right now, we have water set up, but really to move on to highway engineering and forestry, especially for the trees as we talked about. Just to get ahead a couple of questions, you know, some of the concerns that I have with this particular budget is material costs. Those go up every year. So, you know, really our DPW budget, even if we do a level budget, it is cut. Even if it's level across the boards because material costs go up, contract costs go up as well. Fuel costs is a concern I have this year in particular because it's so variable. We don't know what's going to happen with fuel right now. So we kind of did our best and did some shock analysis to see what our budget could handle. And it should be able to handle reasonable increases in fuel. And then things that are challenging and are coming is more regulation and more enforcement of those regulations. We're seeing more ADA activity. more requests for GIS services, you know, we're seeing a lot of activity from the state and local, the state and federal level for water regulations, keeping our water clean, things like that. And then also deteriorating assets, which I talk about a lot with this group. You know, we have an old water system, we have old roads, and they all happen to be failing now. They're long failures, so, you know, over the next, for water, probably over the next 20 years, 15 to 20 years, we really should have everything replaced by then. And then roads as well, we're maintaining a steady condition index, but we're talking with the mayor on what the capital plan should look like to start to tick up on our index, which is great. And then I'm always trying to right size the department and I've worked on kind of each division, one division per year, and we just got finished looking at forestry. You talked a little bit about what a right size of forestry might look like, so we know that information, so we have something to work towards over time, and then I see Retaining and hiring mechanics is a significant issue coming, too. The private industry pays mechanics a lot better than here on the public side. So we've been trying to hire mechanics for going on a year. And unfortunately, it's not one of those jobs where if we increase the salary, we're going to attract more people, because we just won't be able to compete with $50, $60 an hour out there. you know, private fleets are giving out. And then just a little bit about the override and what we're doing there. So we have three new employees, and I would say now we're at a normal sort of opening level. We do have a handful of openings, but we've filled the highway rolls. We bought a new hotbox, so we have two pothole crews now. Actually, that second hotbox is going to be deployed next week. And then we're planning on upgrading our milling machine. And as I talked about, we're deploying our paver more and more. So we're going to continue to do that to keep our condition index high, or as high as we can. And then you notice some adds in the budget, some decreases, too, to right-size things. But we need more software, CitizenServe, other things. Our fleet, the fleet is getting older. We're replacing vehicles, but we seem to have a little bit more in fleet costs each year. So you'll see some of that. Tree warden is another tick up. We're paying that position more now. So I think you saw that the other night. And solid waste has an uptick as well. And then water main breaks as well as wholesale water increases. So those are kind of the big increases that we saw this year. Thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you for the presentation. Could you just help me understand in the parks budget it says food for the inmates and I don't see who pays. So who. Can you explain.
[Tim McGivern]: Yes. So we have a partnership with the state correctional facility, and we basically have inmates that will do work on our islands. Governor's Avenue is a good example. They trim all the weeds up against the wall a couple times a year. So the deal is that we provide them lunch. We feed them. That's the deal. And they come in and do some work.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Do you know how much they get paid?
[Tim McGivern]: They don't get paid. that we feed them.
[Emily Lazzaro]: I hate that. I know it's not anything I can do. I hate that so much.
[Tim McGivern]: It is part of their rehabilitation and their community service. OK.
[Emily Lazzaro]: It's community service?
[Tim McGivern]: I think it counts as community service for them, I believe. They want to be good standing as prisoners. We have great success with them. No, I'm sure they're wonderful.
[Emily Lazzaro]: The thing that I hate is that they're not being paid money, but if it's for community service, but it says inmates, so I'm confused. I'm confused. Also the actuals in the parks budget in general seem really low in a few places. Is it where they just know it's 527. It doesn't really matter. It seems like the actuals are all over the place in a lot of these budgets. And I did notice that in the highway budget the I think that was just because this year we had an insane amount of snow but it was private contractors was really high. Is that why.
[Tim McGivern]: If it was the snow and ice contract line, then yeah.
[Emily Lazzaro]: It just said private contractors. Hold on. There's a lot of papers for your department.
[Tim McGivern]: Yes.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, it was in highway, and it's highlighted, and it says private contractors. 46,000 is budgeted, $238,212 is in actuals. And then $46,000 is proposed budget for next year. Any idea why it would be like that?
[Justin Tseng]: There are two lines.
[Emily Lazzaro]: One says private contractors, the other says snow and ice materials, which is also astronomically high. That whole highlighted section on highway is kind of all over the place. Does it even out if you add it all up?
[Tim McGivern]: It might be snow and ice.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Well, they're probably both snow and ice.
[Zac Bears]: It's line items 423-5241 to 423-5530. Oh, I see it. Yeah.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah. That's snow and ice contractors. So we have actuals from those two large storms.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah. And then... It's materials and it's contractors.
[Tim McGivern]: Sometimes, last year I think we had, we zeroed out all the snow and ice lines. This year it doesn't look like we are. There's some, you know, nominal amount in there.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Sorry, wait. How do you mean you zeroed it all out?
[Tim McGivern]: So last year when we did the budget, it's been different each year. The last few years, our proposed budget just would have zero in those lines. Why? Because snow and ice can go into deficit, and it's an unforecasted or non-forecasted expense.
[Emily Lazzaro]: That's why it's highlighted.
[Tim McGivern]: It's highlighted because I think it was changed, I think.
[Emily Lazzaro]: So now it's not going to be zeroed out?
[Tim McGivern]: It's highlighted because it's snow and ice, I think. The whole section is highlighted as snow and ice.
[Zac Bears]: All of those highlighted items are the snow and ice line items.
[Emily Lazzaro]: OK. I guess my question here is those actuals don't seem to match the budget for either year.
[Tim McGivern]: No, and they won't. We would expect them not to.
[Emily Lazzaro]: And they won't ever? So what's the point of having a budget?
[Tim McGivern]: It's lines that we track, lines that we use for expenses in the accounting software and NPOs.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yeah, so those are the lines we use. Just silly little games, OK.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, and there's no money in those lines until we spend the money. And I don't know the mechanics behind how that happens.
[Emily Lazzaro]: OK, there's no money in the lines until you spend it. So it gets put in as needed.
[Tim McGivern]: Well, it's an emergency response. Got it. So, um, and you know, it looks like maybe she has more to say.
[Nina Nazarian]: Just to say, thank you for the opportunity, just to say that it's common with cities and towns to kind of keep a level budget with snow and ice because of the unprecedented changes that happen year after year. It is one of the only budgets that we can spend into deficit under state statutes with the understanding that You know, we can't predict snow and ice each year. We can't possibly anticipate that amount. Also, and I need to check my facts on this, but my recollection is that if we do increase it, we can't decrease it in subsequent years. So it's a tricky one that cities and towns manage very similar to how we're managing. And I can look up more information and maybe I'll be able to find it before this evening's meeting is concluded.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. That's okay, that's not necessary.
[Justin Tseng]: Oh. The equipment that folks were talking about, us potentially being able to, like helping us in future years if there are big storms?
[Tim McGivern]: As far as, does it come out of snow and ice?
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, does it come out of snow and ice or is it another line item?
[Tim McGivern]: I mean, do you know if, like if we buy snow plows, I don't think that comes out of snow and ice, does it? No, yeah, those are just capital expenses. Those are capital expenses. When we, there are small expenses, like if we need a snow blower or something. Oh, okay. We'll buy that out of snow and ice. Repairs, we have repairs out of snow and ice, so we usually don't close snow and ice until, you know, like a month. ago, like May, because we're repairing vehicles and repairing things out on the road that are a result of snow and ice work. So.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks.
[Tim McGivern]: Yep.
[Zac Bears]: Vice President Lazar, are you good? Yeah. Sounds similar.
[Liz Mullane]: I had a question, I guess, starting on the highway budget. I was just curious with the highway streets contracted, the budget at 534, actual is 185, and it comes in at 500. What is kind of the difference in that? Like, what does that mean, the streets contracted?
[Tim McGivern]: I just have a different spreadsheet with some notes to kind of guide me through some of these things here. Streets contracted, right? Yes, please. So that's 5250. Okay, so that includes line painting, line painting contractor, sweeper rentals. We have a paving contract. It's relatively small if we need to use. Miscellaneous emergencies and then catch basin cleaning.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay. Do you just anticipate that more will be coming in towards the end of the next month? It's just 185 to 500 is kind of a big. jump between actuals and budget.
[Tim McGivern]: Sure, sure. This is a line that we don't always spend down. It really depends on the line painting, really, to tell you the truth. That's the biggest one, and the catch basin cleaning is the second biggest one. There's two line painting contractors out there, so we do it during good weather, and we try to do it at night. So you'll see that be spent down over, we probably have more spent now than when this budget sheet was submitted, and we'll continue to do that, but we never always spend enough because we can't get the contractor in as much as we want. That is one of the lines that we did adjust, and we continue to adjust and look at it. But if you actually take our contract values and you add them up, that line really should be more like $720,000. But we don't actually end up spending that amount. But again, in an ideal world line painting, we'd want to spend that amount. So it's just a matter of, can we? And then each year we basically try to adjust that contract value based off of actuals from the year before. So that's what we're looking at.
[Liz Mullane]: And then I just had a question at the two highway contracts, other services. I think one's at 10.5 and the other one's 95,000. I'm just curious. What's the difference between the two? Like how do you differentiate and kind of that growth from the 9.4, 7.5 actuals to now the 10.5?
[Tim McGivern]: Sure. Yep. So that line is the solid waste set of contracts. So that includes our waste management contract, our compost contract with Garbage to Garden, our leaf pickup contract with Casella. Those are the three main ones.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah.
[Liz Mullane]: And different from the other highway contracts, other services for 95?
[Tim McGivern]: That other line, do you see the number on the account?
[Liz Mullane]: Sorry. It's okay. Yeah. It ends in 5295. All right.
[Zac Bears]: Oh, down the bottom. Okay. Yeah. 9295.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, I got the line. I'm just looking for the notes on what's included in there. Where are you? That is disposal of yard waste. So we have containers in the back of the yard for asphalt, concrete, breakouts, soil that is no good, things like that that we have to have it disposed of. So that's what that is.
[Liz Mullane]: OK, great. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Thanks. I was wondering about the highway budget, just staffing numbers. It seems that we're going down from 19 labourers to 17. Is that part of right-sizing the department or is that?
[Tim McGivern]: No, I don't think that's accurate. Okay. Is that from last year to this year?
[Justin Tseng]: Yes.
[Tim McGivern]: Something's wrong there. I'd have to take a close look to figure out why. We went up three, sorry, two laborers and one foreman.
[Justin Tseng]: Okay. Yeah, that's what I thought I knew, and yeah, this seems weird to me.
[Tim McGivern]: But also to remember that the highway budget includes other positions besides highway fleet, for example, and as well as administrative staff. So the totals are a little bit wonky. It doesn't represent the highway division. To give you guys an idea of how many are out there, we have 15 members of the highway division actively working out in the streets, basically.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, this says there are 30 people fiscal 26, 28 people fiscal 27, and the 19 to 17 from the laborer. So, just FYI, that's what the budget we got presented says.
[Tim McGivern]: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I'll take a look at that to see if there's an error.
[Justin Tseng]: Okay. I was curious too about the waistline with the, I know the city announced last year the transition to the biweekly trash pickup this year. Do you know if that's still happening? I don't think we've heard much of it in the last six months. Sure.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah. It's not happening for FY27. So what the mayor wants to do is, you know, Well, I should back up one step. We heard all of the feedback. We've received a lot of feedback. And we're working with our consultant now to study, basically, quite a number of things to see, you know, what the what adjustments, what additions, what subtractions to the program we should make at this time. I don't know exactly when you would see a change like that at this time because it was put off. So right now we're in that academic stage where we're trying to understand all the different options and all the feedback that we received. So that's really where we're at. Got it. Thanks for the update.
[Justin Tseng]: And I just wanted to make sure that this increase, this line item was enough to cover what we need for this next year. So that's helpful. Sorry, it's getting late at night. I think my last question was just about, I think you might have alluded to it, and please forgive me if I missed it. Forgiven. Truly. I was curious what the progress is when it comes to implementing the bike safety plan, Vision Zero, those kinds of things.
[Tim McGivern]: I think we're constantly looking at how to make roads safer for all users. We still have an active complete streets program and policy. So everything that comes across engineering's desk for improvements, we're looking at can we fit a bike lane? Do we need to add additional protections here or there? Does this area need a crosswalk? Does it need a protected crosswalk? So those are constant conversations happening all the time. Tom Blake, who's the director of transportation and traffic, he's got great maps on his wall in his office that shows where all the improvements have been made in the last five or six years, and it's full of dots, little markers where the improvements are. So I'd say it's something we're constantly looking at. We're not at a place where I'm not in favor of this, which is why we're not really going in this direction. Removing travel lanes for things like bicycle lanes, we're seeing Boston kind of retract some of those things now. And the idea is to keep the travel lanes open, but what can we do with the width of the roadway? Whether it's bump outs in a parking lane or Heck, we have enough room for a bike lane, or there should be a crosswalk there, or there isn't, when there isn't. Things like that.
[Justin Tseng]: I don't want to take us off topic. I was actually curious. I noticed that Boston has been moving in that direction. I was wondering if there's been a new update in the public works world about why.
[Tim McGivern]: No, really. I think they took the bold step of removing travel lanes for vehicles for bicycle infrastructure. And at the time when they did it, I think the public world was like, hmm. Because unintended consequences, really. You know what I mean? It's hard to know what those are. Anyway, Medford's not at that place yet. Maybe we will be, I don't know.
[Justin Tseng]: It's just purely the policy geek part of my mind that's curious. Sure. Do you think that this, what kind of progress does this budget help us make when it comes to bike safety and pedestrian safety?
[Tim McGivern]: Well, my response is less budget related, but more office related, I suppose. We have a full engineering office now. For the last two years, we've always had multiple openings. And we've had trouble keeping up with infrastructure, capital infrastructure improvements that need to happen in this city. It's really directly related to how many engineers are managing those types of projects. An engineer can manage somewhere between $1 and $2 million worth of projects per year. So just do the math to figure out how many engineers you need. Now we have those engineers. So I didn't read the whole list, but in the summary of accomplishments, we got a ton done last year. And we are planning on doing a ton this upcoming year as well. So anyway, good news. That's great news. Mm-hm. Including the traffic safety things as well. Awesome.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you.
[Tim McGivern]: Mm-hm.
[Zac Bears]: Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. I just want to say, of all of the budgets that I've seen this year, I feel the most optimistic and hopeful seeing this budget. You know, I honestly, when I first started running two years ago, two plus, almost three years ago now, I made lead lines one of my top topics, and then people weren't that interested, so I stopped talking about it, but like I never thought I would see the day. when we would get rid of all the lead lines. So that's incredibly exciting work. The fact that we have an urban tree management plan, that we're, we've got a tree inventory and we are really looking to properly fund the forestry department is like incredibly exciting to me. Even our, I know this is not, did not happen in the last two years, but the fact that we have a composting, you know, citywide is amazing that facilities do that. I love the fact that, And I know the in-house repaving crew was partly funded by the override but. The idea, like having more engineers on board and the idea that we also have this in-house repaving crew, when you mentioned like even maintaining our condition index is great because that's not the trajectory we were on before. And so if we can get that condition index up, I'm always in favor of a little bit more funding. And my only question, and I apologize if you mentioned this in your opening statement is, You know, there's one line item here that is, like, wildly larger than everything else. The, you know, $9 million budgeted, $7.5 million spent, $10.5 million for next year. And I just want to double check that that is what I think it is. This is, like, the contractors we pay to repave our roads and to improve our roads and sidewalks. Is that accurate?
[Tim McGivern]: Not that one. That's the trash contract. Yeah, our biggest line and highway is the trash contracts, solid waste contracts.
[Anna Callahan]: I'm a little sadder that that's the line item that's going on, but I know we can't do anything about it.
[Tim McGivern]: Any line that says materials, so there's materials lines in the highway budget that include asphalt and concrete. Those went up last year, they didn't go up this year. They went up last year because of the override and the expectation that we'll have 20% more asphalt being placed. Which, as the numbers I stated, they're getting up there and we're trying to shoot for more, so.
[Anna Callahan]: Great. Well, I'm still excited. I'm glad that we are going to be able to keep that road condition index where it is and maybe bump it up.
[Tim McGivern]: I hope so. Fingers crossed.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Yep. Tim, just a couple quick questions. Is that line item, the 433-5293, is that just the waste contract?
[Tim McGivern]: Let me just double check. I believe it is. It's the waste contracts plus waste expenses. So we pay housing, we pay schools, sorry, not schools, we pay municipal buildings and housing authority.
[Zac Bears]: We pay the housing authority's trash bill?
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah. Previously, they were just included in the general services pickup. But we changed that because we want to be able to quantify just Medford Housing Authority and see if we can make their collection system more efficient. If you were to go to one of their properties today, during a trash pickup day, it's just bins everywhere. And we're trying to have, well, we haven't started the conversations yet, but we will have conversations with them to see if we can have a more efficient pickup, dumpsters, for example. So that's what that is. So we changed it to be a separate bill so we can analyze it separately. So it's the contracts plus the housing, and same with municipal buildings. This building, for example, has 12 bins out there. Is there a better way to do it? Probably.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Have you guys considered I probably ask you this every year taking the trash contracts and the administration that are in the highway department and just making a separate sub budget in DPW for that.
[Tim McGivern]: I don't think you've asked that before. But I know you do bring up the fact that it kind of muddles the rest of the- It's opaque.
[Zac Bears]: It's very opaque, yeah.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, it kind of muddles all the rest of the budget. I agree. It's something we can think about, I mean, for next year if I remember, and maybe we'll talk about it again and I'll be reminded. I didn't do it this year, but previous years I had broken it out and almost given a separate highway budget just to see what the number is really for highway, you know, because- Just for example the highways line is just over 15 million dollars, but ten and a half of that is is waste Yeah. For example. So it does model it. Same with water. You know, water is almost a $30 million budget, but $23 million of that is buying water from the MWRA. Right. Yeah. So similar kind of situation.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. My only other question in all of the budgets is the, there's also a reduction of one MEO3 in the water and sewer enterprise budget. Is that also inaccurate?
[Tim McGivern]: That may have been a correction that we made. I think there, if I remember, I'm gonna have to double check this, but if I recall, there was an extra position in water from last year, and that's a correction. Okay. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: It is, okay, that might make sense, actually, given the figures here. Yeah. Okay. appreciate the update on the waste contract. I think that that's something a lot of residents are reaching out about and wanting to understand. I think I haven't heard much since the forums in the winter. So I think people will be, who knows how people will feel. I won't assume their feelings. I'm sure people will be interested to know that there is a consideration of changes given the feedback.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, well, that was one of the points of receiving all that feedback, was to really understand it and digest it. And that's what we're doing, so. Great. Yep, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: I have no further questions from members of the council. If you want to add anything, Madam Chief of Staff?
[Nina Nazarian]: I know that this was more of a question by Councilor Lazzaro, but I just wanted to tie this back. I can appreciate the complexity of municipal finance law and municipal budgets and trying to follow it, so I share this in hopes to provide that backdrop. I found the statute I was looking for. It's Mass General Law Chapter 44, Section 31D. It talks about snow and ice removal and emergency expenditures and the reporting requirements under that statute. It specifically says that the appropriation for such purposes in any said fiscal year must effectively equal or exceed the appropriation for said purposes in the prior fiscal year. So cities and towns intentionally do not increase this line. for the purpose of not finding themselves in a situation where they have a surplus. Thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. Tim, I might have one more question for you, sorry. No, I guess I don't. Well, sorry, I'm just looking at an old budget here. I guess it looks like sometimes we're coming in over budget on the actuals for the waste removal contract. Is that mostly the expensive side of things ending up being higher than we thought it would be?
[Tim McGivern]: There's variables in our waste management contract. So disposal costs aren't known. We can just project those. We forecast those. Fuel is another one. And then the recycling market is another one. So we add a 2% factor of safety onto the waste management contract number because of those things?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Okay. I have my own spreadsheet running and I just want to make sure. get it right. One of the things that I'm breaking out trash just to have a better understanding of that cost driver.
[Tim McGivern]: Sure. Yeah. And if you want to follow up we have a whole spreadsheet just for that line and just for the waste management contract on how we basically forecast the budget costs. Great.
[Zac Bears]: That would be great. Yeah. We have that. So if you could share that with the council we'd love to see that.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Some of us would love to see it.
[Tim McGivern]: I'm joking. I'm joking. Yeah, absolutely. It does break down. That's a big number, so it does break down that number a little bit. It's a huge expense. All right.
[Zac Bears]: Do we have any more questions? Public works. Oh one last thing Tim just want to confirm. Yeah the crew from the sidewalk the crew from the override the paving pothole patching sidewalk crew. Yeah that exists. It is hired and it is on the street.
[Tim McGivern]: That's right.
[Zac Bears]: And it is allowing you to have people out on doing that work five days a week when the weather allows.
[Tim McGivern]: That's yeah that's right. Whether it's pothole work concrete work or roadway asphalt work. Yeah. Not all at the same time and they all don't get out five days a week. But yes.
[Zac Bears]: And that's up from three days a week before the over.
[Tim McGivern]: It's less days a week and more number of crews. For example, next week when we do potholes, we'll probably do potholes for three or four days next week, depending on the weather. And instead of sending out one hotbox and one crew, we'll send out two hotboxes and two crews.
[Zac Bears]: For the whole four days.
[Tim McGivern]: Right, exactly.
[Zac Bears]: So it's doubling.
[Tim McGivern]: I can't commit, I can't say it.
[Zac Bears]: Sure, sure, sure.
[Tim McGivern]: I'm not saying, yeah. But maybe we'll do, depending on availability of staff and what priorities exist, maybe we'll do a day where we have two pothole crews out there, and then another day, one pothole crew and a sidewalk repair crew, which we didn't do that before. So now we're doing that. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: So basically, it's, in theory, if capacity is there, doubled your capacity every day.
[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, yeah. At the end, you know, we're really looking at somewhere in the range of 20 to 25% increase in production, really. Sure. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. I think that's it for the night. Do we have a motion? Keep the paper in committee and adjourn. Motion to keep the paper in committee and adjourn. And, Tim, we're just going to trust you to send us that spreadsheet. So we won't make a motion. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll on the motion and keep the paper in committee and adjourn.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kelly? Yes. Councilor Leming? Councilor Leming is absent. Councilor Mullane? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli?
[Zac Bears]: He communicated to me he's having a technical issue. He is still on, but he can't unmute to vote. Okay. So, absent? You can just mark him as present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Okay.
[Zac Bears]: I mean, he texted me that he votes to adjourn, but I don't know if that counts.
[Rich Eliseo]: Technically, I don't think it does. Councilor Tseng. Vice President Lazzaro is absent.
[Zac Bears]: And President Bears? Yes. Four in the affirmative, one present, two absent. The motion passes and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.
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