[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Good evening, Council.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Mike Mastroboni, 73 Fulton Spring Road.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I'll be brief.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think either proposal moving to ward or district-based representation is a positive move.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think for a couple of reasons, one, lowering the barrier to entry for people trying to campaign in terms of cost, in terms of effort.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think secondly, having a representative

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: That you can go to on a local basis, I think, for me pushes me towards the.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: eight individual board Councilors approach.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I respect the immense amount of work that the Charter Review Committee did over a number of years, the level of effort they did in reaching out to as many residents as possible.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: And the last thing I'll say, this isn't really my area of expertise, but I think looking retrospectively at turnout numbers and voting numbers,

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think it's a bit of a red herring, you know, when people are able to when people running for office are able to focus on individual wards, you know, different wards have different ways of outreach.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: and people be able to meet people where they are in a way that makes sense, whether it's tough students or folks in apartments.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: We're gonna be having a lot more big apartment buildings coming in the city, hopefully.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: That's a challenge that everybody will have to face.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: So I think for that reason, I support word-based city councilors, and I look forward to hearing the rest of the conversation.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I appreciate the work everyone's done on this.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Thank you.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Melvin, Laurel, there's a bunch of, there's like an iPhone user, a cell phone user.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Let me know what you want me to just submit everyone.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Here's John, I just let him in.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: So it looks like then everybody else is.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Okay, go ahead.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Thank you, uh, no, but thank you, Anthony, Michael, and Marilyn for your time.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Um, we really appreciate it.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think I speak for everyone.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I say that, um, I'm the, uh, by day I'm the budget director in Somerville.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: So this is a process, um, uh, about which I am a little bit familiar.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I've been involved in the charter review, especially with respect to the, the CIP and the sort of the role of finance and things like that.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Um,

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I'm relatively, you know, compared to the rest of the group, probably I'm very new to Medford.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: So what's important to me as a newer resident here, at least in this process, specifically kind of like, you know, what extent do we want to hear from the mayor, from the council?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Can we hear from the mayor and the council?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: or are we simply negotiating with ourselves to find out sort of what can or cannot pass?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think I come at this from obviously like an administrative good governance bias, right?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Just because of my day job.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: And I wanna find out what relevant comparisons in terms of size, scope of government there are between like Medford and the surrounding communities I'm not interested in.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: In reinventing the wheel here, there's best practices.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: We're not the first ones to do this.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: So trying to figure out what's worked in other places and what have been pain points.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: And then really trying to strike the middle ground between flexibility and creating strong guardrails.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I think at the end of the day, well, I'll leave it there.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Yeah, just just really briefly, I'm wondering what our ongoing engagement with the call center looks like?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Is there we are we going to have presentations on specific topics from them on our regular meetings?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Or are they going to be advising us answering questions that we have?

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Like, what does that look like?