The committee reviewed and refined a draft Request for Proposals (RFP) for a new zoning consultant to lead the next phase of the city’s zoning updates project. The council discussed selection oversight, the volume of public meetings, and amended the scope regarding design standards before authorizing the Planning Director to proceed with the procurement.
[Zac Bears]: Medford City Council Committee of the Whole. September 30th, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Councilor Leming? Absent. Councilor Mullane? Present. Councilor Scott Peli? Absent. Councilor Tseng? Absent. No, he's present on Zoom. He is? Oh, there he is. Let me. There we go. Councilor Tseng. Present. Sorry, couldn't unmute. Yeah, my fault. Vice President Lazzaro. Present.
[Zac Bears]: And President Bears. Present, present to absent. The meeting is called to order. We have a meeting today of the Medford City Council, Committee of the Whole, action discussions items 24-033. This is our zoning updates project. We're nearing the end of year three of the project and We have before us a new proposed RFP, so request for proposals. And this is for the next round of the city's zoning updates project to bring on a zoning consultant. There was also an RFP over the past several months for a communications consultant that came from the mayor's office. Those would be the two groups the city would be working with on our zoning project going forward. And we're here today to look at the draft RFP. We have the Director of Planning and Development and Sustainability here, Alicia Hunt, who's going to present on it. And I can just give a short summary of where this has been. This is an update of the RFP that went out in 2023 for the first round of this project. Director Hunt will correct me. This has been reviewed by people in the Office of Planning and Development Sustainability, the Procurement Office, as well as some folks on the Zoning Project Working Group, including Councilor Leming, Chair of the Planning and Permitting Committee, and I believe the Mayor's taking a look at this as well. So, and then the Community Development Board had a meeting on it as well, where they reviewed it and provided some feedback. So now we are providing some of our feedback. And I think there's a goal to try to get this out quickly, but also we can figure out a way if we want to take more time with it. And Director Hunt has a lot more thoughts on that than I do. So I will turn it over to her.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great, thank you. Alicia Hunt, Director of Planning, Development and Sustainability for the city. Thank you guys for meeting on this this evening. President Bears has covered a lot of the early stuff. So we have in front of you, it was attached to the meeting notice for this meeting as well as last night's council meeting, this draft RFP. For your awareness, we did start with the original RFP. There's been significant edits to that. But I think I should take just a quick step back and make sure that everybody understands how this kind of a procurement will work. So, most people think of government procurement as being the lowest cost bid, that you have your scope, you know exactly what it is, you put it out to bid, and whoever bids the lowest amount of money gets the award. That is true in a lot of situations, but actually when hiring a consultant, there's another way that this can be done and is usually more appropriate for a consulting project. And that is qualifications. So when we do a qualifications project, what we do is we put together the scope that we're looking for, and then we ask the bidders to provide a document back to us, a technical document saying how they intend to perform this work. and why they are qualified to do this project. And then you have that as their technical proposal, and you ask them to separately provide a sealed price proposal that also goes to the procurement office, but the rest of us don't see right away. You can then also check references, and you can choose to do interviews if you want to do that. So what happens is, as part of that scope of work, you also say, we're going to score your proposals. And so you put in your scope the criteria by which you are going to score these. So you get your technical proposal back, you look at the criteria that you made public in your RFP, and the committee that's deciding scores each proposal based on that criteria. And then you look at a compiled score, and then you'll have a meeting, and you'll have a discussion about it. Sometimes it's really obvious there's a best one, and sometimes it's sort of like different people feel strongly about different pieces of it, so you might have a conversation among the committee and come up with what is the one that you're most interested in and you would rank them. This is our first choice, second, third. You can then at that point open your price proposals. And take that into account, because then maybe you find out that your first choice is twice as expensive as your second choice. So maybe that your second now becomes your first choice. Or maybe the pricing is similar enough that actually you just want to go with your first choice. You would then at that time, you may, you will probably want to check references, and usually the procurement office would do that for us. And if you're still struggling over like we're really not sure the right fit here, like they have different styles that we can read coming through in these proposals, we're not sure who's going to be the best to work with us, you can do interviews. And then you can decide that your decision on who to hire is based on your technical proposal, your pricing, your references, and your interviews. So that's the process. In order to do that process, we need the scope. And so this is what's in front of you tonight. This particular scope has come through a number of conversations that involved the chair and vice chair of the CD board, the President of the City Council and Councilor Leming. I believe Councilor Scarpelli was at a few of those meetings. The Mayor's been involved in those meetings, as has myself and our Communications Director, and Daniel Evans, our Senior Planner. So we've had a number of meetings sort of about this. We talked about what should be in here. We've refined the scope a number of times. And we also, at one of our more recent meetings, added in a more robust scoring system. The last time we did this, we actually only had two items. And it's useful to have at least five-ish things that you're scoring on so that you can have some differentiation. between your proposals. So I'm happy to share this. I'm happy to go through it. The other piece that's sort of useful to talk about is the timeline. For a proposal of this scale, you really kind of want to make it available for on the order of two months to give people the opportunity to see it's out there, think about it, consider whether they want to bid on it, and then put together a thoughtful package. We'll find that for something like this, consultants might actually go out and read our comprehensive plan. They might look at our housing production plan. They might review some of the past zoning that we've done to see if it's a good fit for them and to make sure that they're proposing to us something that we'd like to do. So you want it to be out there for on the order of two months to get them time to do it. I'm starting to feel some time pressure now because I have heard over the years from consultants that they don't like having things do right after the Christmas and New Year's holidays because that makes them feel like they have to work on it during that period of time. So you would either want it to be due two or three weeks after the holidays or before the holidays, even if we're not actually going to read them. Maybe we will, maybe we won't over the holidays. You want it due beforehand so that there's a better feeling on this and it wasn't like thrown together over the break. At this timeline, that's October, November, in order to put something out for procurement, it has to get noticed, there has to be a public notification window, so you can't just release it tomorrow. You have to actually put a thing out through the procurement office saying that it's coming a week before it's actually available. So the earliest we could make it available at this time would be a week from Monday, as opposed to this Monday. And then I expect, and what we kind of have in here for some numbers, is that in January, we would all read it, we would figure out who we, you know, score these, hopefully bring consultants in for consultants in January, and for interviews in January, if we want to do interviews, with the goal of getting somebody. And then it usually takes two to three weeks to get contracting done. Unfortunately, getting the contract drafted, if there are any terms in it. So we're looking at, Early to mid-February is a realistic start date for something, even though right now, tomorrow is October 1st, because a process like this really does take a while, and so it's useful for people to understand that. The other piece that's useful to fold in is about the communications consultant. During the conversations, and I'm trying to make sure I get this all right, between the council and the mayor last winter, one of the conversations was we want to have a communication. Sorry, my nose is itchy. I keep rubbing it. Allergies. We want to have a communications consultant working with us to help get the word out on this. So, last spring, we did put out an RFP for a communications consultant. We got, I'll tell you, five responsive responses. We got one that was one page long, and for a technical response, that's not responsive. So we got five, and the committee, frankly, has not yet met to make a decision on it, but the committee's read them, and we've asked everybody to score it, and that would be Council President Bears, Councilor Leming, City Board Chair Doug Carr, Steve Smerdy, our Communications Director, and myself, and I actually also asked one of my interns to read it. The mayor indicated that maybe she or, Chief of Staff Nazarian would review it, but they have not had time, and so they've said to move on without them looking at it. And I'll tell you what's really interesting about these is that the communications consultant would really be focused on helping to take all the technical stuff and make it simple for people to understand, make graphics, set up web pages, update social media regularly, do the outreach and then what we've asked for is to help facilitate meetings in the community, help facilitate these meetings, help facilitate public meetings, but really some of the community meetings and really engage with them. Most of the communications consultants included in their scope tabling at events. to help be there and really connect with the neighborhoods and the people to understand what was going on. So that was part of what we were really looking for, is somebody who could help make this really connect with the people and help them understand it. So most of the proposals there are from communications consultants rather than planning consultants. Although we did have one or two planning consultants who have strong communications backgrounds. bid on that. So part of this does say you would work with and coordinate with the communications consultant on the public outreach. So I will say that this RFP talks about a lot of public meetings but does not lean into them organizing the public meetings, running them. It doesn't really talk a lot about making language simple and like maintaining a website because we actually have this agreement to also pay this other consultant to work with the team to do that. So I feel like I've talked a lot. I have the RFP here, and I'm logged into the Zoom. I can share it if that's helpful. What do we want next? I do notice that VP Lazzaro has her hand raised.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I'll go to Vice President Lazzaro in just a moment. So I appreciate the introduction. I think just to kind of sketch out what might be useful, I think first we should talk about the decision-making. So who's reviewing and deciding on the on that we get their proposals back, who's deciding who we hire. I think once we figure that out, I think it's easier to talk about the scope, the evaluation criteria, and then the timeline. And it sounds like the questions would be. Is there anything in the scope that we think should be there that's not? Are there evaluation criteria that, you know, do we feel comfortable with this set of evaluation criteria or are there other criteria that we should be using? And then on the timeline, do we want to try to move this forward ASAP and have it due before December 18th or do we want to wait until the end of January? So that seems to me to be kind of what's on the table, and I will go to Vice President Lazzaro and then any of the other Councilors.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I really appreciate the summary from Director Hunt. I thought that was really useful, especially the timeline, just so we know we have a handle on it. Anybody attending can have a handle on how long these things take It's always a process. I did want to highlight one thing that the communications consultant came out of what really ended up being a lot of people in the city. Last time we attempted some of our zoning conversations resulted in people being a little bit upset, feeling like they hadn't They hadn't heard enough about what the communication or what the what the zoning plans were though we were meeting with great frequency talking publicly about what the plans were. It is very jargony out of necessity and having somebody as Director Hunt mentioned who's able to translate that into language that people can understand is really important but but that it was because we had attempted this before and we didn't as a city council have a communications team to communicate out what we were attempting to do. It's really exciting and important that that communications team can now be able to do this. This is a great thing. One thing I wanted to mention is if we are going to move forward with the scope of work, there's one, There's one detail in it that I thought was maybe beyond what would really be required in the scope of work which is the in so the scope of services section. I want to say it's on page 8 or 9. In the primary work product number 5 it says design standards. The current zoning calls for design standards to be adopted by the are we talking about like the details in this at this point or am I too early am I jumping the gun. Is it okay if I.
[Zac Bears]: I just really quickly want to go through the decision making. So who would be deciding on their proposals? Because I think that might impact which timeline we want or how involved we want to be. I can come back to my thing. That's fine. Great. Yeah, because I think where you're going is exactly the next question, which is the scope. OK. All right. Director Hunt, can we talk quickly? I see it says in here, review committee composed of city council and community development board members and city staff. And I was just wondering if there were some more thought on that.
[Alicia Hunt]: I feel like I had been making the assumption that it would be the same team that was working on the communications consultant, that it would be yourself, Councilor Leming, Doug Carr from the city board, myself and or Danielle, if the mayor wanted Chief of Staff Nazarian on there or Steve Smerti, the Communications Director on there. So we had, and honestly I was gonna ask one of our interns to staff it, right? So that's what actually I've had one of our graduate interns have also read the communications consultants ones, scored them, and she's compiling the scores as well. So I was gonna ask her to staff it. So I was kind of assuming that it would be the same group, but it doesn't have to be.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I bring it up in us because the original RFP, the council voted on the final selection. And you know, I have, I, I have had a different opinion from others about the communications consultant process. And I don't think the RFP, like we didn't have this meeting for that. And that seemed to be more an initiative coming from the mayor and her communications team and in partnership with you guys. So that was just really more why I wanted to bring it up. I was wondering if we were gonna do it the way that we did it in 2023, basically the first iteration of this RFP. or more likely communications consultant, I wanted to see what Councilors would think. There's also a couple Councilors absent, because I think those are kind of the two options, right? Is there some sort of appointed committee, or do we go to the body for the final vote, which is what we did the first time around.
[Alicia Hunt]: And so it is my impression that the goal is to be more collaborative with the community development board and the mayor's office, as opposed to just a project of the city council. And I think in order to do that, we've already heard very loudly from the community development board that they want to be more involved and they want to be more involved from the beginning. And so they've asked to be on the selection committee to be very involved in the development of the zoning. that they feel they would then be asking for many fewer changes after it's released to the public. And I think that part of our difficulty was that we needed more public communications, and so having the communications director involves all the time helps make sure we get more communications ongoing. Although I do think the hiring of the communications consultant is going to solve that. It is my understanding that part of that role will be to work with the communications director, but to also work directly with this consultant in this project.
[Zac Bears]: OK. Yeah, I think that's helpful. I think it might be worth going back. I don't know if the Community Development Board had an opinion on it. Personally, I think there should be something in between, you know, just the council decides and nobody sees a proposal until it's selected, right? Right. So that's just kind of, that's just my personal opinion. I don't know exactly where that would land, but I don't know if it's the group has two finalists in January and does a presentation to the CD board and the City Council or presents the recommendation and there can be questions. I just want to make sure everyone is included from the City Council side because That's how we did it last time, was everybody on the council had a kind of a bite of the apple.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And I will say the CD board, my impression is they're comfortable delegating it either to the chair or the chair and the vice. Wait, sorry. I keep assuming Sean Began is not actually the vice chair, but he is the member who is very interested. He's a lawyer who works in the field, so he's very helpful in some of the details of some of the zoning. but to have the two of them on the committee that they don't feel they need to see everything and vote on everything. I will say they have seen this RFP and there are comments and changes that are in here from things that they've reflected. Under state law, zoning can be developed. Zoning is approved by the council, but it can be developed and is often developed by planning boards and then submitted to councils for And so they, this CD board is very interested in being very involved in it and not just rubber stamping whatever comes out of a consultant. So in terms of the zoning, they've been working, they've been going through it line by line. They read through the whole RFP in their meeting. Like they want to have that level of scrutiny on the details to make sure we're not missing anything.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, yeah, I think we should, personally, I think there should be something between the return of proposals and the selection of a final proposal that incorporates feedback from more than just some members of either of the two bodies. I'm open to just further discussions about how we wanna handle that, but I think it's helpful for us to understand. There'll be some sort of committee with some CD board members, some members of the administration in your office, and some members of the council that will score and review whatever responses we get back. And we'll select finalists or make a recommendation as to a single finalist. And then I think it would be good if we heard, both bodies heard from that group. Even if it's, here's our recommendation, it's this one proposal, this is why we liked it. And then I think the only other thing that might be helpful for transparency's sake is, and again, I don't know how you guys want to handle this or what procurement would say. you know, who sees all the proposals, right? Not necessarily who reviews and scores them, but who sees them, because that was another thing that happened last time, is I do think all of the proposals went to the members of the council. Obviously, we were scoring and then selecting, and this was the group that was doing it at the time. But just, those are kind of just my two comments on the decision-making. And I do see Councilor Mullane, unless you have anything you want to add first to that. Councilor Mullane.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. Thank you, Director Hunt, for walking through. I obviously wasn't a part of some of this earlier process, so I appreciate kind of getting that background of it. I do agree with President Bears that I think while I get having a smaller committee to kind of go through and be able to figure out or whittle down to, you know, maybe one or two finalists. I do think it's beneficial to have those finalists come and speak in front of the council and CD board because it does provide a level of transparency. We're able to see it, be part of the conversation a little bit more. I think it's harder when While I appreciate all the hard work that I know goes behind a lot of this stuff, it's helpful to kind of hear as well the process that people are making in that selection. I can't agree more with getting a communications consultant as part of this process, and I hope that they go hand in hand and that there's no part in this where we would separate that or move forward without it, because to what Vice President Lazzaro said as well, I think there was a lot of information that could be shared and presented to the city and to everyone that had questions that just wasn't as readily available, especially with the website, pieces like that, for people to feel a bit more comfortable about what's happening, and I think I'm 100 percent on board with however we're able to do that to make sure that happens. But in terms of that whole selection process, I do think having a mixture of people in a smaller group going through and kind of culling through that, but I think whenever that presentation comes down to the finalist, explaining a little bit background of the process so that everyone's on board, how many proposals came through, what were some of the highlights. pieces that were most important as we were getting down to these finalists and then having it be out in the open and have everyone hear the same messaging before a finalist is actually selected. That would be my opinion on it, too.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Mullane. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you I was debating saying this because I don't want it to come off in the wrong way but I just when Director Hunt mentioned that a lot of other communities will have their planning boards be be writing and and making you know high level like important decisions critical decisions in these zoning conversations I do think that Oftentimes other communities planning boards might have specific professional and I'm not saying that our planning board isn't like dedicated and really committed to this project. I can tell I know that they are. We've had a lot of joint meetings where our CD board is really, really committed and dedicated to going line by line. I know they've been very long meetings. Like, we've been talking about this line by line, yes. And it's, I know that they're taking it very seriously, but I also know that somebody in our community in Medford applied to be on the Community Development Board who directly has experience doing city planning and doing zoning, and this person was rejected by the mayor. So this Community Development Board has been appointed by the mayor, and this city council has been elected by a majority of the people who voted for city councilors and I just want to like reiterate that and I know we've talked about this before and I personally want to be making these decisions because I was very outspoken about zoning. Some people got angry about it but I was very clear about where I stand and I got re-elected. So that's what I want to do. And I want to make sure that that happens. So like, I believe in affordable housing, I believe in building more housing, I believe in density. I've never not said that. And that's what I want to carry forward. And I think like everybody knows where we all stand, and they reelected us. So I want us, the people that were elected to be on making all of these decisions. every time. I just want to say that now. So, like, if I'm hurting somebody's feelings, I really am sorry. That's not my intention. And I don't want to have to, like, dance around this issue because I just think it's too important.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Vice President Lazzaro. All right. Seeing no further comments from members of the Council, I'll go back to you, Director Hunt, if there's anything you want to add.
[Alicia Hunt]: I think that that makes sense and one of the things that I sort of, I heard both things and I just wanted to be sort of clear. So there's the having the committee come back and present to the council saying here's what we heard, this is what we think, here's our recommendations versus having the interviews be in front of the council. It's not hiring. There are times when I've seen hiring in front of the council and that's really hard on people to have a public interview. It is hiring a consulting firm, having a public interview. It can be a little nerve-wracking and difficult, and I think it also depends on how many proposals do we get, right? And what are we narrowing down, and are we narrowing down from ten, from five? Last time, actually, we had two proposals. And so, I don't remember if we did interviews. I was just trying to check my notes to see if I could come up with it, and I was trying to see who was on the committee last time. I didn't pull that information in advance, sorry. But, you know, if it's two firms, it may not be necessary. So I don't want to lock us. There's some things we have to lock in now. Right now we have to lock in what is the criteria we're going to judge them on and what's the scope. We don't have to lock in who's on the committee and whether or not we interview and stuff simply because Does it make sense in the end to do that? It might, might not, and it might just be that we say, should we hold a subcommittee meeting and then members of the council who want to attend can, but we're not requiring everybody to, that we invite the CD board members that they could attend if they want to, or You know, do we look at the proposals and decide that we want to go a different way? We've certainly been in situations when we've been hiring consultants where we can't decide. We have several good consultants in front of us, and we have been in situations where, really, there's one strong contender, and you don't really want to waste everybody's time by interviewing when you know the others are just not strong contenders. I don't know where we'll be in January or February.
[Zac Bears]: All right. I will go to Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Sorry, could you just repeat one more time, what is it that you want us to decide tonight? So it's the scope of what we're requesting that they submit to us and
[Alicia Hunt]: So tonight we have to finalize, well preferably, the RFP. The RFP includes the firm, the only thing that's super firm in here is when is this due and are we doing any kind of, usually there's some kind of walkthrough meeting in the middle. Are we going to have that meeting? I realized Fiona mentioned that to me this afternoon and it's actually not in here. So it's not us interviewing them, it's us before they submit saying here's what we what we're looking for verbally, and then we can answer some questions verbally, but then they have to submit their questions all in writing. So those dates have to get locked in. We put in anticipated dates, it's actually in this RFP listed as the anticipated project timeline, which then says like, here's when we think we might do interviews, here's the window of time when we might when we expect to have decisions made and when this contract goes through. So we have to have the scope that we want them to do, and we have to have, which is also, which is in here, and we have to have the criteria that we're gonna judge their proposals on, which is also in this document. Those are the things that we must have in order to put it out to bid.
[Anna Callahan]: And then I was just going to follow up with like suggesting that we pick one of those, the dates, the scope, the criteria, focus on one first. And I would really appreciate if you wouldn't mind whichever of those we pick. Talking about what is in that piece and what you think are the parts of it that we might want to, you know, rejigger, that maybe other communities do a little differently. how it's different maybe from the last time we did this. That's kind of how I would approach it, so that we're not here until, you know, forever o'clock. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Yes. I think we should do dates last, and I just want to jump back quickly, because I think those are the three other things to the decision making. And it sounds like there's some clear, you know, we heard from Vice President Lazzaro some concern about Authority and who who is the decision-maker, and how are we developing these things and? You know I just think that was that was a clear thing and think councilor malign said Not necessarily we do these interviews in public, but if there is a review committee that it make a recommendation, and at least us and the CD board have a chance to review the process before a selection is finalized. So I just wanna go kind of summarize that, just if that's feedback that we wanna take back to others. And Vice President Lazzaro's hand is up again, and then I'm hoping we can go through maybe quickly we can redo the dates and then go through the scope and the criteria. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. Sorry. I do really like the idea of us like a committee meeting that has the potential for it to be, you know, a broader like anybody can attend. Maybe it's another joint meeting where everybody is invited. So it's not like there's it's necessarily like we are all it's incumbent on everybody to attend. But if you wanted to and then But I agree with Director Hunt that it being an interview in a public forum is not always the most productive or comfortable for anybody. But yeah, something that's giving us an opportunity. I would feel more comfortable if it's something that gave the city council an opportunity to review the proposals before decisions are made. Okay, and I'll stop talking about it.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Vice President Zara. I think the simplest thing to say is, I think what I'm hearing is we don't want it to go off tonight, and the next time that we see it in a public meeting is in six months when a decision has already been made. So something in between, some sort of public process in between that, whatever it may be. But it also sounds like we don't want to sit through multiple public interviews of two bodies, an appointed body and an elected body. So not that. All right. I hope that's helpful, Director Hunt. The place we wanted to go next was the dates. It sounded like there were two decisions, Director Hunt. It was if we can finish this tonight, then the responses can be due before the holidays. And if we don't finish this tonight, then the responses need to be due third week or fourth week of January. Is that about correct?
[Alicia Hunt]: I think that's roughly correct. So Fiona and I, our goal is that we would need a completely finished document by next week in order to hit this faster timeline. What she said to me had to be finished 100% in order to put it out is the legal advertisement, which is actually the first page. which includes the very brief description of it. It's almost all boilerplate, and it includes the dates that we have not updated at all that says when is this available and when is it due. And it states whether or not there's a public meeting during it. And so I didn't touch on that on the beginning, and I actually realize that it's not mentioned in this document at all, and I do think we should consider it. And that is where you have a meeting for the bidders to come. It can be optional or required. You can do it in person or on Zoom. And it's to discuss, to make sure they understand what our scope really is. And so, for example, for the communications consultant, what we basically wanted to make very clear was that there was also going to be a zoning consultant and that they would be partnering with them, but know that that had not been selected and that we wanted this communications to help us with all those things I said earlier for you, right? We wanted to say that verbally and make sure they had an understanding. But again, it was an optional meeting. It's a little different when you're doing a renovation of a park or a building. You really want people to come out and see it so they know what they're talking about. In this, it just gives people an opportunity to make sure there's not any massive misunderstandings about what's being put out there and what's being requested.
[Zac Bears]: OK. Is there any objection to PDS hosting a mid-bid meeting? I think that's fine.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we should have one, and I think I want to say we should make it optional. If it's required and somebody finds out about your RFP after that meeting, then they literally are not allowed to bid.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Alicia Hunt]: So.
[Zac Bears]: It doesn't seem like there's a strong viewpoint on that, so. Best judgment is fine with me. It seems fine with all of us.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I'll need to look at the calendar with Fiona. We usually make them a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I don't know why. Mondays and Fridays seem to be hard for people. And then we usually make them in the middle of the day. The communications one we did in person There are pros and cons, but if you do it on Zoom, then there can't be any out of band conversations, right? Like they either say it on the Zoom or it's not said. But it's nice to kind of meet people and see the space.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, that sounds good. It sounds like maybe we should talk about the scope and the criteria. It sounds like Councilor Callahan would like us to say, how is this different from the scope for the first RFP? And then it also sounded like Vice President Lazzaro had a question about scope. And that will probably inform our discussion of the criteria. And then once we've reviewed those two, I think we'll be in a decent place to say, Do we think we can advance this tonight or do we need more time? So let's go into the scope All right.
[Alicia Hunt]: Um, i'll share my screen.
[Emily Lazzaro]: I see Yeah Yeah, so The I think that everything looks great. Um with the exception of uh, if you go to page eight I think Um Number five Where it says design standards says the current zoning calls for design standards to be adopted by the community development board and it is anticipated that future zoning will utilize this as well. The consultant will work with the community development board to develop appropriate design standards. I think it's too broad. I think it's outside the realm of how the community development board will probably work with the consultant. I don't really know what it's referring to and I don't think you'll be able to I mean I don't think the CDB would be able to like implement design standards for most of the projects they would be looking at in practice once you know once the zoning is in place. Director Hunt I'd be happy to hear anything if you disagree with this but I I I would suggest that we scrap that section because I don't, I think it's, as it is, I think it's, I think it's saying, I think it's giving license to the community development board to be like articulating that like this kind of building is okay and that kind of building is not okay. And I just think that that's not really what we're doing here.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I'll tell you that I actually frankly, honestly disagree very strongly with you. I think that design standards are very important. It's sort of like if you look at the city of, the one that jumps out to me the most is when we look at our residential buildings and you look at, we have a lot of very generally historic standard buildings and all of a sudden there's a box. We actually have being proposed in front of the building department right now, not even proposed, they have building permits. A couple buildings that are two-family buildings that look like apartment buildings that are going to go on streets in West Medford because we have no design standards that say you can't build something And I don't mean a three-family, that it looks like a three-family. I mean, it looks like an eight-unit apartment building, and it's a two-family building. You're like, why are you doing this with the flat roofs and the very modern architecture, and that people care about how their neighborhoods look. So that's kind of what design standards are about and how do things fit in the scale of the community. It's incredibly common to have design standards in Massachusetts to look at How do things fit into the character of your community? It's something that I believe that the Community Development Board feels strongly about, and they have the authority to adopt them as regulations that it is better when, so they can do advisory design guidelines in their regulations, but they'd rather see them as design standards in the zoning.
[Emily Lazzaro]: So do they, out of, so do they, okay, I have a few questions. Design standards, are they proposed by the Community Development Board or are they hoping that the consultant will come in with like something that they can suggest so that there's something like a jumping off point since we don't, if we don't have anything, that the consultants would come in and say, this is a good baseline for us.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right and I think that's what they're asking for is proposals. Some things that are design standards are like when we were talking about allowing drive-through pharmacy in a neighborhood that the design standards would be that the A drive-through aisle would be completely located on the lot, that the window would be to the side and not facing the street, how things would address the neighborhood and how they would impact the neighborhood. They'll talk about front-facing entries. That's an example from Somerville, that the entry to the building must be on the main street. how things look, how much of the ground floor should be transparent or not transparent, like how much glass should be on it, how much massing breaks. So like whether a building is a straight across building or it's broken up with like courtyards and stuff, those are all things that are design standards. that can be built into things. So these are the kinds of things that they would be looking for consultants to make recommendations as to what would be good in the city of Medford. Our Wellington transformation study is actually the final version is gonna come out very shortly. And it has some recommendations in that as well. Like if you're gonna develop a new neighborhood, where you're going to have, in theory, what your goal would be, ground floor commercial with residential above it and more streets and stuff in there. How should they face the wetland versus the big road? Should they have similar kinds of signage? Should the buildings be brick or metal or glass or it doesn't matter at all? Whatever whichever developer comes in wants to do. Those are some things that you might get through design standards.
[Emily Lazzaro]: OK, this is helpful. I think that my reading of this is based on when I was growing up, there were sections of the town where I lived in Connecticut that would have HOAs that would dictate what kind of color you could paint your house, what kind of Christmas decorations you could put up or not. And that's the sort of thing that I think I was really, I am more concerned with us telling, Us having too heavy a hand with telling people what they can do with their property to a point where people do not want to bring their development into the city. It's too prohibitive. There's like, you know, something like that. Also, because, you know, the cost of building supplies is. very expensive. I know that. And as time passes, and who knows what's going to happen in 10 years or 15 years, what building materials will be available. So I don't know. If these things are all changeable, and it's all for practicality's sake, and it's not about always exclusively aesthetics or people's like weird feelings about whatever kind of material or like restriction for restriction's sake or keeping things historical but to the point where it's so it's so it becomes so expensive that nobody can build anything and that you are functionally restricting zoning by saying, oh, but yeah, oh yeah, you can build, you can build five stories on this plot technically, but it's gonna cost you a million more dollars than you would have wanted it to because you have to use these specific building materials because it has to be really pretty because it's in a really pretty neighborhood. Like that's the kind of thing that I would be really, really hesitant to require. Is there, can you explain to me why it's not that?
[Alicia Hunt]: So in theory, design standards could be incredibly strict, but I don't think anybody's looking for that in Medford. I think that's much too overbearing. I think they're looking for some more general, like Medford would like to be more dense, but to still look like Medford. I think that's kind of, what's interesting is that we're really talking about the big areas, big buildings, mixed-use areas right now. I'm personally have been more concerned about it in the neighborhood areas where you will be looking down a street and all of a sudden you'll be like that that house does not fit in this neighborhood. Everything else looks different from like everything else has a New England feel to it and that looks like it belongs in South Carolina on the beach. And you're like, it's lovely and I would love to vacation in that home, but does it fit in in Medford and do we want it to just naturally convert to that look and feel. That's the kind of thing that we've been hearing. It's not like what color so that we do have historic districts. that have very strict control over what can happen on the outside of your house. We have three in Medford. And when we're talking about really strict, we want this to remain its historic look and feel, then we're talking about a historic district. So I think that may actually get to what you are concerned about, right? I'm not talking about those, it's a whole different process.
[Zac Bears]: I do just want to add that I think this question of what does, and I got you next, what does Medford look like is like a highly subjective, highly political question.
[Emily Lazzaro]: And the different neighborhoods are different too.
[Zac Bears]: Right, and I also think it I think there's many people who interpret that to mean scale, and scope, and density. And I think that that, if we're answering the question what You know, if this is just, we think we'd like you to use some of these materials or we'd like you to not have X, Y, Z box, like that's one thing. I think it's, if it's, this is what this neighborhood should look like, that a group is making that decision. Yeah, I just think that that is, that's, there's like different scales of this. So I'll stop there. I'll go to Councilor Callahan and I do have kind of a proposal, but I wanna hear from everybody else first. And just that phrasing really stuck out to me.
[Anna Callahan]: Oh, thanks. I was just gonna say, even the conversation we're having right now, which is about this one, you know, single, two sentences and 0.5, I would really like to hear from you about how this differs from the last proposal and any places where you think it differs from like a standard proposal from other cities, just to have some context. So if you don't mind, if we could have that overview, that would be really helpful for me.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I think this is honestly much longer than the original one. It was very very brief. The and just sort of more going off the top of my head. The original version was pretty short and said we've done a comprehensive plan and We had a lot of meetings and conversations and now we would like a zoning consultant to come in and help us implement that and to help us do zoning throughout the city that reflects the fact that Medford zoning does not reflect what people want in Medford today and in many cases does not reflect what currently exists in Medford. It did not really talk about outreach. It said we'll have some public hearings and public meetings. It didn't talk about what visualizations the consultant would use to help explain things. It never talked about shadow studies or 3D models. It did reference that we had a GIS map and that they would use the GIS map. But it did not talk about this zoning in this much detail at all. It didn't talk about the previous plans and studies. It listed them. We have these previous plans. Comprehensive plan. housing production plan, the climate action plan, and you should work with those. Like literally, that was it. So in this case, we've actually flushed out a little bit more. We also have additional plans now, the Wellington study, the West Medford SWOT analysis, and we actually have gotten a grant to do a residential zoning climate impact study. So we're basically saying we want you to take all of these things into it. We didn't talk a lot about being responsible for all the conflicting language, for typos, for making sure that things are, everything comes in a final product. We didn't talk about that very much. The design standards is a new thing. The public process was much, much shorter. I'm not sure we mentioned it at all. I actually feel like I should pull up We did have a redlined version of it, of this, but it hit the point where even things that we kept, we had moved, so we ended up with a document where everything was redlined. But I'm just gonna pop that open briefly. It's a couple of iterations, just see if, Something's not right, that's not, there are no red lines in that. And then the other thing that was significantly different was that the, We only had two things we were judging them on, that we said we were judging them on their technical proposal and their experience. And even if, right, you're like, well, right, that's what we're judging them on, you actually want to break it up into more things, because if you have just two things, then your scores, everybody might have the same score, right, by accident even. So we created several more things to be creating, to judging them. The entire scope was, generate necessary background information, have working meetings with the city council. There would be at least two workshops or public meetings with the community. You would present the final version to the city council.
[Anna Callahan]: I am actually quite interested in the public process that was in the past one. Could you say that one? It's just a little mumbly.
[Alicia Hunt]: The original public process listed generate necessary background information, basically do do your tabletop work, have 10 meetings with the city council, at least 10, which would be open to the council, open to the public and department heads, as well as to engage the community. Have at least two workshops or meetings with the community. And then at the conclusion of the workshops and the meeting, the consultant will present the work generated to date to the city council or a steering committee that reflects it. And then there was a presentation of first drafts and then a presentation of second drafts. And there was an assumption that that was it. So there was some worldview going on. And I don't remember, but I was part of writing this and all, but it was many years ago that We would have like two versions. We would have a first draft, and we would have a second draft, and then we would adopt it. And I think that was pretty simplistic. And once we, it's one of these, your first engagement with the enemy, you realize that this actually is not, you know, the first battle. And you're like, oh, oh, this is not right. This is not how this should work at all. So the original version was incredibly simple. And I think that's part of how we ended up where we are. If you'll see that the new version talks about the fact that there are discrete areas and that each of those will be a separate process and that the residential is likely to be broken up into multiple discrete processes as well. But it leaves it kind of vague because honestly we've all discussed doing those other areas first so by the time we get there we may have learned and iterated again at that point. So that's kind of this really is much more robust in a discussion of public outreach, having iterative processes, working with the public more, working with the boards more, and not trying to do it all at once, but working on discrete areas. So it's dramatically different. I'll close it.
[Anna Callahan]: And just one last follow-up question. I'm curious about the public process section of it and if that is standard, if this is what other communities do. I'm curious about whether this process is standard.
[Alicia Hunt]: It's hard to say what other communities do because everybody is kind of unique. So when Somerville redid their zoning, they spent seven years doing it, and they never hired a consultant. They did it all in-house. They have, as you all know, dramatically more staff that worked on it. They had staff with their full-time job for many years with just redoing their zoning, right? And then you have smaller communities who will have one staff planner and that's it. And they hire a consultant that really does the lion's share of the work. We're sort of in that in-between space where we have professional planners, but not professional planners who can devote a huge portion of their time to this process. Some of what we did find is that The zoning that worked really well, that was better, were ones where Danielle and I were able to spend a lot more time focusing on it. And the ones where we were busy on other projects and we just kind of went along with how it was going, those were the ones that kind of people didn't feel as good about. But we don't have the time, so we need to make sure that a consultant firm is going to be robust in some of that, like providing the professional support and all these details.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. Thank you.
[Liz Mullane]: Just a couple of quick questions, Director Hunt. From what you went from when you said that the first version of this was very simplistic and made all these edits, did this come from you and Planner Evans? Who did the bulk load of adding all of these different pieces to it?
[Alicia Hunt]: I would say that this was a team effort, that we actually circulated it to the group that we've met, the sort of, for lack, the working group, and people put little bits in. The mayor read it and added some comments in here and there, and then we sort of honestly At one of our meetings, I said, here are a bunch of bullet item things that I think we need to be thinking about and have in here around visualizations, around breaking this out more, some of these details, and I bulleted them. And I didn't have time to get back to it, and Councilor Leming reached out to me over the summer, and he's like, would you like me to flush these bullets out into actual words and paragraphs in this document? And I said, if you've got time, that would be lovely. So he actually wrote a lot of the new text that you see here. But it was based on sort of these ideas that came out in one of our meetings. And then there are some refinements that were made in the CD board meeting. A couple of the requests, you know, the fact that they want to be more involved, that they would like to have their own meetings with the zoning consultant to go line by line through things. Frankly, the City Council doesn't feel they have to sit through a line-by-line reading of the document if they don't want to. They asked for the assistance working on the design standards. They didn't have a ton of edits. Those, I would say, are the two really significant things that they asked that we add in here.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. And then in terms of kind of going off of what Councilor Callaghan asked as well, it sounded like you said originally there was 10 meetings with the City Council and there was two with the community open meetings.
[Alicia Hunt]: That was what was in the RFP. That's never what actually happened in the end.
[Zac Bears]: We also, I think, said we only have X dollars. And we got responses back that were responsive to we wanted a much bigger project than we had the funding. We took on an effort without the resources. And so what we asked for and what we got back was responsive to this is how much money we can spend. So this is what you've got. This is what you're getting. So I think that's important context, too, for the first round.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, no, that is helpful. And I guess in terms of this public process, then it's about the same number of meetings or so than in the original. I mean, I see it now what you're saying, they broke down between community development boards, city council, then joint hearings, then public hearings, but in the end, It's around the same.
[Alicia Hunt]: It feels like it's 10 per section, if I was going to say, right? If you had some public meeting to come up with what does the public want in this area. And then you have a couple. In some of these cases, the planning and permitting committee maybe met three or four times with the consultant before there was a draft zoning that went for the public hearing process, right? And then we had CD board public hearings, which always were at least two meetings. And then we had city council public hearings, which were usually one meeting, sometimes two. So by that point, that's almost 10, and that's one neighborhood, one Salem Street. I mean, we could go back and count them. I think somebody, I think actually Councilor Leming did count the Boston Ave ones, and the number was over 10 meetings for just Boston Ave. And we had thought in our naivete that we would do that for the whole project.
[Liz Mullane]: Got it, okay, thank you, I appreciate the clarification.
[Zac Bears]: All right, do we have any other specific comments about things that are in the scope that are missing or we don't wanna see in the scope and then I'll bring us back around to this design standards question. All right, I'm not seeing any. I just want to bring us back around to this design standards question. It sounds like there's a concern about developing design standards without the input of the city council specifically as it relates to how onerous those design standards are and what the impact of those design standards would be on the feasibility of projects. So I don't know, Director Hunt, if There's a way for us to adjust that section.
[Alicia Hunt]: If the design standards are standards, then they're in the zoning and the City Council has to adopt them also. If they are design guidelines, then they are regulations by the CD board. that do not need to be adopted by the city council. So by the sheer saying that they're standards means the city council ends up voting for them. And I think what the board was thinking about is that they wanted to sort of sit and talk through and mull this over and what would they like and let's look at examples from other communities and work this through and then come up with some kind of proposal that we think would be useful. It could be, we could take out the language about, so and I think that there was some confusion, because I think maybe they were thinking guidelines, but then we wrote standards, right? Because if it was guidelines, then it would be adopted by the CD board without the city council. And I was just sort of clarifying to make sure I was using my terminology correctly, but that standards would be in the zoning.
[Zac Bears]: I think we might want to make this a section 4E and just make it design guidelines slash standards and say something about, I think both bodies are going to need to have an understanding of it. And then we're going to need, you know, it sounds like there's this question around how does design impact feasibility? And I think this is coming up because there's a lot of, literature about how certain elements of design review, which I know this isn't saying design review or a separate design review board, impacts the number of steps that any project, like how many steps does a project need to go through before from like being just an idea to getting all of its permits and being under construction. So I think that's how, I don't know if Vice President Lazzaro, if that's how you'd wanna see this edited. Something around where it's not a separate bullet, but it's part of the final zoning that it's both of the bodies are gonna have a discussion about, do we want guidelines? Do we want standards? And how are we gonna, make sure that any discussion around that includes questions around how this affects the feasibility of projects actually getting done. And I'll go to Vice President Lazzaro and then Councilor Callahan.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thanks. Yeah, I do. I do think that probably standards are a better, a better notion for the City Council if it's something that we would build into the zoning and have approval over. But Um, I, but I hesitate to put something into build something into the zoning that, you know, as times change and materials change, that might not, we might not want that to be the standard anymore. And if it's benefits guidelines, then it's totally at the mercy of whoever is on the CDB in the future and. you know, has a different preference. I just think like a lot of these are so subjective that I, I, I, but yes, for the purpose of the RFP, I think it's good to have this be under number four and something that we can collectively talk about with the consultants. and I think how Alicia's doing this draft right now is kind of close to what I'm imagining.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. It sounds like we want to change this to something like design standards slash guidelines. The consultant will work with both boards, the city council and the community development board to determine a best approach to design standards or guidelines and any implementation of a design standard or guideline will factor in the impact of that policy on the feasibility and approval of development projects, something like that.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yes, I like the idea of building and like consideration for the feasibility of projects in the future.
[Zac Bears]: Think you got that, Alicia?
[Alicia Hunt]: Does that look like it makes, does that reflect what you were saying?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, best approach for design standards or guidelines and any policy decisions must consider the effects on the feasibility. Yeah, so design standards or guidelines, Yeah, just in that last sentence, after standards, just type or guidelines. And then, and any policy must consider the effects on the feasibility, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Oh, I see what you're saying.
[Zac Bears]: I would say consider the effects of feasibility on future projects just like make it very clear like how well design guidelines and standards affect project feasibility. That's an E effect.
[Alicia Hunt]: Thank you. I'm like, there's just so much I have.
[Zac Bears]: I saw Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. So as you can nowadays, he's full disclosure, he's Chad GPT. I quickly did a review of other cities RFPs in Massachusetts and nearby. It looked at Lowell, Lynn, Gardner, Yarmouth, Watertown, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. examples, obviously not every city does an RFP for a zoning consultant, so I think, you know, that's at least some here in Massachusetts. And just so people understand, and this is great for me to know as well, that the most common process in terms of public process, as it is written in here, is actually that a working group guides the project with the consultant, planning staff, the planning board, community development board, council, and other relevant officials. Not all of every single body, but people from each of those would be on a special working group that would work closely with the consultant. The consultant does substantial direct public engagement. Drafts would come back to that working group often from the consultant, and that's where most of the workshopping is done. The council gets periodic substantive checkpoints. But the entirety of the city council is not directly engaged during the process except for being informed. And then the planning board or the CDB formally reviews once the process is completed. They make recommendations and then the city council does its formal legislative process of having the open hearing, and decides what to adopt and not to adopt of the recommendations that have come out of this joint group planning working group. and then to the, in our case CDB, each of those are making recommendations and the city council is then making final decisions. So just so that people understand that like neither of the things we had either last time or this time, neither meet only with city council nor meet half and half with city council and CDB, like neither of those is the norm. It is more normal to have a separate group that has people from each of those but also others, including staff, that does most of that. I just thought that was interesting and I wanted to bring it up in case that was helpful for folks. Thanks.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And so, I don't know, Councilor Bears, you wanted to speak to that at all?
[Zac Bears]: Director Hunt, no, go ahead.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay. So we did, for this process, have an internal working group that met at some point weekly with the consultants and met throughout the process on it. And early on, that was Councilor Bears and Councilor, well, actually, I'm sorry, Councilor Collins and Councilor Bears took me a minute there and myself and Planner Evans met weekly with our consultants to go through things and how things were going. And then over time, that group grew as the electives changed. This past year, Councilor Leming has been on it. Councilor Scarpelli has been attending those. As his time permits, and then we actually added there were points where the mayor met with us, but then now she does come much more regularly. We're meeting. We were meeting last fall, last spring, every other week, and we added, uh, the, from the CD board, Chair Doug Carr and Sean Began, and we were meeting every other week with the consultants as a working group, in addition to all of the public meetings that we were having in order to work through a lot of the details, work stuff out, occasionally Danielle Evans and I would meet with the consultants to go through some like, especially if we felt like after a meeting, they gave us a work product and we said, we don't think that's what we heard at that meeting, then we would have separate meetings with them to refine it and so we'll go like, that's what we think we heard at that meeting to move things forward as well. So honestly, meeting weekly was kind of necessary in order to keep up the pace, but it's a lot of time for a lot of people. to do this. And meeting monthly was with sort of some of the boards was very slow, really slows things down. The CD board did start to have extra meetings in order to fit this in among their required stuff.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. Just a little follow-up. It sounds like that is actually a formally written out part of their RFPs in these other cities. Part of why I was asking about this because it does seem like It's like two public city council meetings, two CDB meetings, and two joint meetings for every single one of these, which maybe if it happens over 10 years or five years or something, might seem reasonable. But we as a city council, we're meeting every two weeks for two or three hours. Looking at these others, I'm curious if there might be, it seems like six of these public meetings for each one. I don't know if that's, well, maybe that is what it should be. Maybe that's the right thing.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, I don't know if you're gonna say too much or not enough.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, I mean- Too much is what it sounds like.
[Anna Callahan]: Oh, no, I'm, yeah, what, no, what I'm wondering, I'll tell you what, I'm sorry about that. That was unclear. What I'm wondering is in these other RFPs, it sounds like they lay out what that actual working body is. And so it's public and everyone knows that like someone from the CDB is there, someone from the city council is there, someone from the planning, someone from the building department, someone from, you know, X, Y, and Z, and that those meetings are happening regularly.
[Alicia Hunt]: We do have, I put that up on the screen. We had the section internal process.
[Anna Callahan]: Yeah, I apologize if I missed that one.
[Alicia Hunt]: Which is separate from the public meetings. We were mildly vague, but we did specifically say a non quorum of elected officials, decision makers, and city staff. So I think this language is actually taken from something else because earlier, so there's actually an earlier version. Earlier in the RFP where we the very beginning where we say Working so under scope of services the first paragraph on page. Oh my gosh This is page for a working group comprised of members of the City Council The Community Development Board and city staff will direct to the project.
[Anna Callahan]: Sorry. Where are you?
[Alicia Hunt]: I just want it's um, oh Where is it the fourth? It's page four and
[Anna Callahan]: Page four, thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Scope of services is the very top of that page, assuming that your printout looks it like mine. For those who are following along online, I'll just highlight it on the screen.
[Anna Callahan]: There's two page fours, right? Because there's the internal numbers and the external numbers.
[Alicia Hunt]: Oh, sorry. It's page three of the numbered pages. Six of the... Okay, the little three, big six. Sorry. I guess it depends how it gets printed, too.
[Anna Callahan]: Great.
[Alicia Hunt]: So scope of services. That lays it out. And we left it mildly vague because we did feel that it was really helpful to have the building commissioner as we don't have a full time building commissioner right now. Like we need to have a full time building commissioner and one who is prepared to participate before we actually lay that out. I feel like so our interim he misses being involved in our zoning by the way. Thank you. Our interim building commissioner is our former building commissioner from like two commissioners ago. And so he was excited to hear we're still working on this. Nice. And then down under public process, we actually listed it as internal process to make it really clear the difference between meetings that are open to the public and what are meetings where we're just working, just doing work and trying to get stuff ready to show. And so there's also communication with staff, which basically says they can communicate and meet with the staff in addition to work things out.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I don't know that we got this right. But also it sounded to me like it's not necessarily final. We've given some sort of framework, which is, that there's work with both the City Council and the Community Development Board, some work with us collectively, some amount of public meetings outside of the, you know, actual decision-making or like vote-taking meetings and some sort of presentation of ideas to the City Council. So, yeah, I mean, I don't just with the communications from the City Board of late, I don't know I don't know that these meetings in this order and this number is where we'll land. I agree with that. But it sounds like you're saying we don't need to have that finalized before we put this out.
[Alicia Hunt]: So part of what we try to put in an RFP is to give people an idea of the volume of work and the number of hours and the number of hours per month that they're going to be expected to meet. And public meetings are sort of a different level of effort than a private meeting, right? A public meeting, you've prepared presentations. You've done them in advance. You've submitted stuff in advance. Private working group meetings, you show up with questions and you talk things through. You don't give presentations. So giving the consultants an idea of the number of meetings that we're anticipating is really important to them pricing what they're going to need from us. Because in the end, their costs tend to be a per person hour cost. And what level, right? Is this their principal who is showing up at the public meetings? Is this staff who's working through GIS details with people? Like, what level of staff and what do they bill at? And so we're trying to give them enough information so they can figure that out. What I really, it doesn't quite say this in what I, but I guess what I'm expecting is that somebody might give like a price per month or a price for a year or a price for this many sections of the zoning. We don't say to them we want you to price it one way or another. We kind of leave it open to them. At one point, Innes Associates had priced it like per bunch of zoning. This is how much it'll cost us to do Boston Ave for you. And so they didn't bill us the end of it until we finished final version of Boston Ave, right? Whereas they were thinking about how many meetings do we think this is going to take? And at one point we were doing some portion of this earlier portion of the zoning and we'd kind of come to the where they had billed really everything they thought they had expected and we knew we were going to need like four or five more public meetings and were we going to still have them under contract for that. So I asked them to just give us like what is your cost for to do four more public meetings on this so that you're not like going into debt over the fact that we've just taken dramatically longer than you expected. So that is something they can price. That's kind of what we're getting at here. If that helps at all.
[Zac Bears]: It looks like what we're saying is there may be as many as 50 public meetings over 36 months if I just do the math here.
[Alicia Hunt]: Well.
[Zac Bears]: So I'm not saying, I'm just saying neither good or bad.
[Alicia Hunt]: Our goal is that not everybody has to go to all of them.
[Zac Bears]: Certainly, I think it's more robust than the first time. I don't know if it's, it's, you know, Frankly, I think we'd want to hire someone who then can tell us what their best practice is, because I think we ran into this the first time. I think we ran into this the second time, which is overloading the public, overloading the Community Development Board, overloading the Council, and not providing clear guideposts and clear process, and having too many drafts of a single amendment out too many times with too many revisions. You know, Medford Square went pretty well, but then Boston Ave, we had too long of a gap between June and September. And both the council and the community development board voted on things after June. And there is now disagreement about who is allowed to vote on things and who's not. So I think that's where, I don't know if there's a way to put in here, like, we would really like to hear from you in consultation with the communications consultant what you think is a reasonable and effective amount of public process. in order to engage the public the most effectively without being too little or too much.
[Alicia Hunt]: Well, we do say that we are going to rate on the following things. And the first one is project approach. Describe the proposed approach to the project in a statement of project understanding, including an overview of the methodology and an acknowledgment and detailed plan encompassing the scope of services detailed above. And then B is approach to working with the communications consultant. The city has put out an RFP for a communications consultant, provide your approach for working with the consultant. We were kind of trying, and then we actually asked them for a project schedule, including proposed dates for project milestones. So we asked them to describe these things to us, which gives them space to propose what they think they should be doing.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. I just think if there's something in here about, And maybe under the timeline section that says kind of what Liz just said, not under the evaluation, but back under scope, something like, because I don't have any problem with the evaluation criteria. That looks fine. And it seems like nobody really has comments on it. But somewhere in this process and timeline, I don't know if it's as simple as saying this reflects a maximalist view. Liz, go ahead.
[Alicia Hunt]: We could add that the city has attempted to include what they think would be an appropriate number of meetings, but the consultant should use their experience to propose what they think would be appropriate?
[Liz Mullane]: having all lived through it in this past iteration of it, it is a lot of meetings for everybody, not just us, but the public and everything. This sounds like it would be, I would hope, the maximum number, and to President Bears's point, I would be open to hearing from consultants that come through to say, while, yes, we appreciate how thorough you are in terms of the numbers and of meetings that would happen for each different piece of this, we've also seen XYZ be effective and to ensure that there's more public and, you know, there's more ability to, for all of us to absorb the information because this just, I can't imagine there would be more meetings than this. This just seems like a lot to me as is, and I'm, you know, if we're talking about especially price as well in terms of what this looks like, I don't know. I just, I feel if we can leave something in there that also allows for the consultant to come back and say, you know, yes, but also we have seen this be successful in previous iterations that we've worked at, and it was in this, kind of allocation of time and committee meetings for both deciding boards and the public as well. This just seems like a lot and I'm not positive if this is the most effective way for everyone involved to take in and process this type of information.
[Zac Bears]: And I would just change in that second session what they feel to what they believe would be appropriate process based on their experience It just says in the second sentence would like to hear what they you know I would change this I like believe would be appropriate and then at the end of the sentence maybe like based on previous project at the end city and that, yeah, consultants previous experience, you know, studies or other evidence from, you know, some sort of fact-based approach. Cause honestly, I think we didn't get it right the first time we thought we could do this with too little process. you know, we had a bunch of analyses after the first round, which was there weren't enough meetings. The CD board and the council weren't aligned enough. Um, you know, the, the public was confused about what version of what we, you know, we had all this kind of review and I think like the, our solution was let's just flip the switch, which is let's just have more meetings. Let's have those meetings be together. Let's maybe not put out as many drafts of things. And I don't think that really worked either. I think actually like, um, And maybe there's another sentence right where your cursor is now, right after a similar scope of, the consultant may also propose a process for working with the city's communications consultant to make a proposal on process and timeline. Because I think at this point, we've tried to define a process internally and tell the consultants to follow it, and both times it hasn't worked the way we wanted it to. maybe the consultant should come back and say, here's our proposal. And then if the community development board and the council and the administration and staff can agree to that, and then say to the public, this is how each of these is going to go. Here's when you should be engaged. Here are your opportunities for engagement. I think that might serve us all better.
[Alicia Hunt]: Some of the communications consultants' materials talk about educating the public about zoning and doing small group workshops to educate people who want to know more about how zoning works and how it's developed. Some of them talk about some of that more real direct engagement. And there's a thing called a charrette, where people come and they work around tables and they move around the room and they use sticky boards and sometimes little cubes in buildings and sort of say, how would you want things to look and what works and what, you know, and it's very much more hands-on. And that was not part of our process this time. It was a little bit in the Wellington Transformation Study. So if you came to any of our offices open houses, The team that did that study had a small-scale charrette going on in each of those open houses where they had like blocks and hands-on stuff that you could work with. That's often a technique that people find very helpful. I think we mentioned the word charrette in here. A little bit of that sort of feels like it's part of the communications consultant scope. So, right, the balance between you just teaching people what is zoning versus are you talking about what do we want to see in Medford?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And I think, you know, and maybe this isn't for the RFP and maybe we can, it seems like just to, is there anything else on the scope? Not seeing anything.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm just going to flag for you something that we added in here that Danielle added that we kind of flushed out was a request for cover letters that each draft should come with a cover letter that includes what information was changed. What else did they think about. And we're in the attached language to find that information. So that would be sort of a summary that a layman, a Councilor, a member of the board could review and say, oh, I want to go look at that language. Or, oh, that's why it says this, because they thought about this other thing. And we think that might actually help really keep people on the same page, understanding what's going on. And then those would be public documents available for people to go back and look at again in the future.
[Zac Bears]: I think one-page summaries with each new draft is incredibly helpful. And just to adding in, again, I don't think these are necessarily things we need to decide right now. How many drafts of each thing, you know, the more drafts you have, the more I think opportunity there is for confusion. I think version control was an issue. I think cover letters will help. I think we just had too many hands at too many different times asking for too many different things. And it was not clear to anybody, you know. And then that resulted in not having enough time in advance of a meeting for people to really review materials. And I think, again, this was largely because we asked a very, very talented team to take on way too much. Too fast. Too fast. Well, too much.
[Alicia Hunt]: It's an interesting thing when we said, can you make this for the next meeting? But it turns out that that only gives them like five working days, because then they have to have it a version that's available for public in five working days. And that doesn't actually leave time for the staff to review it. It was because we were trying to meet like two weeks later. And well, really, you need a month for this. But then when you actually do the math and the reality, well, we have a meeting on a Wednesday night, Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday. You need the draft in hand by the end of day Wednesday. Right? That's not a lot of time.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Or early Thursday. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. So I just wanted to say all that. And I think the other piece of this is, I think we get to the micro-engagement around charrettes and stuff, and that's valuable. I think we don't want to be reduplicating everything that's gone into engagement on all of the plans that are informing the zoning. I think we need to be careful of that. And then I think the piece that has been getting missed, and I think this is a concern that a lot of people have raised, is around mass engagement, right? how are we trying to engage lots of people in the city, maybe at just a relatively high level, just to get their perspective versus engaging a small number of people over and over and over and over again? Because I think, you know, there are not that many mechanisms in city government that reach thousands of people. The main one is the election that we have every two years and like the elections produced kind of a different perspective on this than, you know, the high frequency touch points where people were coming a lot. I just think we need to figure out. I don't know that we need to include that in here today, and I think that's really something for the communications consultant and the person that we select at the end of the day. But how are we reaching the people who are not as engaged daily, regularly, weekly with government, who do have a stake in this, who do have opinions? How are we getting their perspective? Not just the people who've already been to three years worth of meetings on this and are now locked in for another three years of meetings. Um, Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: I hate to interrupt this delightful discussion. Um, I, I have some kind of, uh, I, I think they might be typos, but they kind of end up being substantive and I just wanted to go through quickly to make sure that they weren't. that they weren't meant to be written a certain way. There's some inconsistencies in the document about how long this contract lasts. The first page says it lasts roughly two years with an optional one-year extension. And then the last page just says that the term is three years. Do we know which one it is?
[Alicia Hunt]: I will say that I take responsibility for that. It was the original one, said two years with a one-year extension, and at some point over the course of looking at all these different sections and how long it's, you know, if you take four months or five months and you take a break for the summer, for a section and you do them one at a time, there's no way to do this in less than three years. And I realized that and I put that in the end and didn't realize it was in the beginning. But I will say that I did that unilaterally. So if people would rather it be two years with a one-year extension, I just don't see how we can do all of this in less than three years. So let's just be clear from the beginning.
[Justin Tseng]: No worries, Alicia. I'm sure this took a long time to put together, so I just wanted to straighten that out. Well, why don't I kind of go through the list 1st, and then we can talk about it. That might be more efficient for time because I know. Yes, let's go through the list. Yes. Also on page 1, it says that the top proposer singular will be invited to an interview, but then later in the. I think towards the end where you have the presentation interview section, it says top proposers. I think maybe top 2 or 3 finalists. I think that's that might be the wording top finalists. So, just wanted to make sure if it's 1 or 2 or 3 that we're inviting.
[Zac Bears]: I hate to do this, Councilor Tseng, but do you think that any of these suggestions require any of the rest of us? Or do you think we agree with you and that you could talk to Alicia about them maybe right after this meeting ends?
[Justin Tseng]: I can, I think there are just aspects of it that might, so on the proposer thing, I think it might be helpful to signal, I mean, I just don't know if we're looking at the comparative criteria or if we're looking at that and the price proposals as a way to get to the finalists, like, or to rank the finalists.
[Zac Bears]: I think the ranking's only on the, it's not on the price proposals, it's only on the,
[Alicia Hunt]: So you rank it, the numbers are on the technical proposals, and you can look at the prices before you decide who to interview. So you can take it into account as part of the decision on who to interview. And I will say, as we've had this discussion, I have thought about whether we want to give them more structure for what we want in a price proposal. We could just say we'd like a price per year. We'd like a price per section. We'd like a price per month. Like, although, right, if we take summers off, like, what does that mean? We do say we want them to include hourly pricing in there as well. And so usually what that means is give us a price for this project, but also give us a rate sheet. What do you charge us when you use different staff out of your office? It could be more clear if we want to be more clear here.
[Justin Tseng]: Okay, I appreciate that. I think substantively, these are just kind of more ideas rather than technical edits. Alicia, I'll send you the technical edits when I get a small chance, when I get a chance. Are we requiring conflict disclosure? Because I know we're doing the Tufts institutional zoning and there might be another developers active in Medford and folks might be using lawyers from certain teams and. Similarly, like using zoning specialists from. Different firms are is there a. Are we going to do a conflict check?
[Alicia Hunt]: So we, the list of required documents are what's provided to me by the procurement office. It does not include a conflict of interest document. If we want to include something like that, we can. If you think that's
[Justin Tseng]: I can't see the chambers, so it was just an idea to put out there.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, everybody's kind of wondering. I've never included something like that before, but I can also ask procurement about it.
[Justin Tseng]: Yeah, sure. I think it's something that we could live without because I trust you guys and I, to kind of get a good sense of that, but it might be might be something to pay attention to. And then just the last substantive thing is that it's great that we have requirement for things like GIS, massing, shadows, et cetera. Would you know if we as a city will ultimately own the editable source files and GIS layers and model files, graphics, stuff like that?
[Alicia Hunt]: We do ask that was something that Danielle had been discussing. We did include.
[Justin Tseng]: Because I think right now the wording is that like throughout the process we'll have access to them, shared access. But the ultimate ownership, I don't know if we have something about that.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I think that it hasn't been completely clear to us. So ArcGIS is where most of this work is done. And it's very proprietary. And we have our own accounts. But there is some interesting and complicated stuff about sharing between different entities and whether it is, in fact, something they can transfer to us. There is a certain amount of it becomes public record once they show us stuff. I don't know.
[Justin Tseng]: Okay, I appreciate that. And I'll just email over the rest of the kind of small things I noticed.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. All right, how are we all feeling about moving forward? Director Hunt, do you feel like you've incorporated all the feedback we had on design standards, scope, the timing of the process, and especially some sort of public check-in once proposals are received so that there's some sort of public meeting with the council before a finalist is selected and contracts are executed? Yes.
[Alicia Hunt]: There is one thing that we do, this is almost funny, but the question is how many hard copies do we want? We had traditional, I don't know where the number seven came from that we asked for seven copies. I think it's really who are the people who are going to be reviewing these and whether or not they want hard copies to be looking at. We don't want to take on the cost of duplicating them because they can be pricey.
[Zac Bears]: If you think it's discouraging bidders.
[Alicia Hunt]: No, it doesn't discourage bidders. As the environmentalist in me doesn't want seven copies when only two people are ever going to look at the hard copies. I will tell you we require one for the procurement office. We require, that's, and I personally would prefer to work from a hard copy.
[Zac Bears]: Maybe three and we can have one in the clerk's office if any Councilors want it.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay.
[Zac Bears]: Great.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great, thank you. I couldn't make that decision.
[Zac Bears]: All right. All right, it seems like we're comfortable moving forward. Yes, all right. So we're going to just kind of move to, is there a motion to, you know, authorize the the Planning Director to move forward with the rest of the RFP process, incorporating all of our feedback and the motion of Councilor Callahan, seconded by Councilor Mullane. Is there any further discussion by members of the Council? Seeing none, Director Hunt, I'm gonna stop your screen share. All right, I saw a hand for a second. So if there is any members of the public, yes, all right. Give me one moment. All right, Jeremy and Judy, if you could give your name and neighborhood for the record and you'll have three minutes.
[Jeremy Martin]: Thank you. And I'll be brief. Really appreciate the thoughtful discussion tonight. And I just wanted to make a comment on a couple of things. On the discussion about design guidelines versus design standards, this is something that we encounter in the architecture and engineering world quite a bit, and it is an important distinction. Very simply, design standards are often quite prescriptive. The thing must be blue, whereas design guidelines set a framework for a designer or developer or even a reviewer to propose something, the thing must fit within the character of its adjacencies, as an example. And that is maybe sounds a little like semantics, but it's important. And guidelines give designers and architects more latitude to propose things and give set less restrictions on design or proposals. And so I appreciate Councilor Lazzaro's interest in both making sure that those things are not overly subjective. But I think in the context of what moves proposals forward faster, design guidelines are often better because there's not such a rigid set of rules to follow. So that's something to consider. And then on the topic of number of meetings approach to the process, I just wanted to speak in support of leaving some of that a little more malleable by the proposers, because it will allow different firms with different approaches to put their recommendation out there. And so please avoid being overly prescriptive with number of meetings or who meets with who exactly when, and I think that we'll get more robust responses if we take that approach. But overall, very excited to hear the discussion and eager for this process to kick off again once you've selected a consultant. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. All right. We'll go to Judith Weinstock. Judy, name and address for the record, and you'll have three minutes. Here's your neighborhood. You don't need to give your address.
[Judith Weinstock]: Okay. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for letting some comments through. Sort of what Jeremy said around design, whether you want to, I mean, it sounded to me as though guidelines was the term that the CDB would be more prescriptive, but whatever it is between standards and guidelines, I agree with Jeremy. I mean, I think you have to be able to Have some design elements that are flexible. And so there has to be flexibility for the builder. So it doesn't become prescriptive in a way that adds too much cost. On the other hand, we can give the Tufts aquatic center as an example. even though it was a Tufts building where the south-facing wall in the original design, you know, it wasn't something they couldn't do, but the request from the CDB was that they take that south-facing wall and actually make it a little bit more approachable. And in fact, the architects went back very, very quickly and redesigned something that was way more palatable. It didn't take long, they knew exactly what they needed to do, and I think they actually were waiting for somebody to comment on it, and they weren't going to do it if no one mentioned it. On the meetings, I agree with Jeremy. I think the danger is if you need to be prescriptive in terms of the number of meetings so that you can get a cost from the consultant, that's one thing. But if not, I agree that there needs to be some flexibility. I would caution impatience around this process as it comes up. And I know everybody felt a little burned over the last couple of years being shortchanged in terms of resources, but I would ask that the Community Development Board and the City Council not be impatient with the process that is ahead of you. It will be formidable because that's exactly what it is. I will also say that I found the joint meetings between the Community Development Board and the City Council crucial. Nothing was more frustrating from a public standpoint than having to go to two different meetings where several different issues came up that were not consistent. It was very, very difficult to follow progress when so many different issues were coming up independent of the other body. So I would encourage more joint meetings in the future. From the public's perspective, I think it's very helpful to have them. And then in terms of educating the public, I absolutely feel like if you can get a communications director in to do that work, it is crucial. As you all know, Jeremy, me, and a number of other people have been really, really engaged over the last couple of years. And I can't tell you how much I still don't know. And it would be really helpful to know more. So as much as we can get done with educating the public, that would be great. That's all. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right, seeing no further comments on the motion, Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan?
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Levin? I'm absent. Councilor Mullane?
[Emily Lazzaro]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Scarpelli? I'm absent. Councilor Tseng? Yes. Vice President Lazzaro?
[Zac Bears]: Absent.
[Rich Eliseo]: Absent. And President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes. For the affirmative three absent, the motion passes. Is there a motion to adjourn? Motion of Councilor Mullane to adjourn. Seconded by Councilor Callahan. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan. Councilor Leming is absent. Councilor Mullane. Councilor Tseng. Yes. Vice President Zara absent, President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, four in the affirmative, three absent. The motion passes and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.
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