City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, I'll call this meeting to order. This is a special meeting of the City Council. Today is Thursday, June 4th. My name is Lance Davis, presiding. I use he, him pronouns. Please note that audio and video of this meeting is being recorded and may be shown live on local access government channels and the City of Somerville website and will be available for future review. Would the clerk please call the roll?

Councillor Ewing Campin? Here. Councillor Link? Here. Councillor Scott?

Present.

Councillor Klingon?

Present.

Councillor Strezzo? Present. Councillor Saeed? Here. Councillor Wheeler?

Here.

Councillor Hart? Here. Councillor McLoughlin?

Here.

Councillor Umbau? Here. Councillor Davis?

Here.

With 10 members present, we have quorum.

I just got a text from Councillor Bossing. He's a few minutes away, so we'll look forward to him joining us. Pursuant to our Rule 32, let it be known that the City Council salutes the flag of the United States of America, and let us recall our oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth to the best of our abilities and understanding. Because this is a special meeting, we'll skip straight to the substantive items on the agenda, so that's going to take us to section 7, unless there's any objection. Anything else that we want to talk about? No? I always want to give a fair chance. As you know, this is the mayor's presentation of the budget. My intent is to read in item 7.1. We'll hear that presentation. That will be the bulk of the discussion tonight. At the end of the evening, we'll hear the remaining items. My expectation is that all of the items will then be sent to committee, but we typically wouldn't have discussion on the items in 7.2 and 7.7. Of course, those are before us, so if there is something pressing, that would be perfectly in order. And then there's the two communications from the city officers. So with that, Madam Clerk, could we take up item 7.1?

Yes, 7.1, item number 26-0950, requesting the appropriation of $376,778,493 to fund the fiscal year 2027 general fund operating budget. Mr. Mayor.

Thank you, President Davis. Through you, good evening. Welcome to the community members, staff, and everyone here and those watching from home. Thank you for showing up and tuning in to the Honorable City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to provide an overview of our proposed FY27 city budget to you tonight. Thank you as well to each of you on the council for the thoughtful and efforts and the work you've put in already to this process and for the deliberations to come. Next slide, please. Just so everyone's oriented, first, there's an overview of what we're gonna do for tonight. We're gonna go through the budget, then budget director Michael Mastroboni will offer a brief but closer look at the financial details, and then finally, I'll wrap it up. Next slide, please. The budget before you seeks to honor the work and deliberations of this council and the voices in our community. It's designed to deliver results, strengthen core services, and uphold the values of our community through direct action. These principles run through every decision, every proposal, every priority before you. This budget also represents months of careful deliberation and work. It was just one budget cycle ago. I was a counselor sitting where you are. In fact, it's only recently that I'm no longer expecting to hear my name called during roll calls. I know how seriously this body takes its duty to review the budget, and I know the many hours that you all put in pouring over data and analyzing details of it. And of course, your efforts began well before you saw this budget as you listened to the needs and requests of constituents day in and day out, year round, and then met earlier this year to deliberate as a council on your priorities for the upcoming budget. I knew it would be a wholly different challenge to move from my work as a counselor and finance chair to building a budget as mayor, so I just want to share a little about what it looks like from this side of the process. When facing tough decisions, it's been reassuring and helpful for me and my team to sit down with the unbelievably dedicated and talented department and division heads in the city, the people immersed in the work, to discuss with them how we can fund our priorities without going backward in key areas. It's been clarifying to dig in, and identify how to ensure we make the right decisions to keep Somerville moving forward even in a year when resources are tight to say the least. We've literally been at this since day one of our administration and even before that during the transition process. Every minute of that work, I centered the community voices I've been hearing for years. The input I got last year when knocking on nearly 10,000 doors and visiting local businesses, that was part of each conversation and each deliberation. I kept those perspectives front and center in our decision making. Somerville, I want you to know, as far as I'm concerned, you were in the room and at the table throughout this process. The community shared a lot with me last year, but two key things shone through, and those were strong core services and helping our most vulnerable. This budget delivers both. Local government should make your life better, and when it doesn't, we need to fix that. This budget makes sure we'll be picking up the trash, paving and plowing our streets, and trimming our trees, all while we also advance shared priorities including housing justice, street safety, educational excellence, social service delivery, and more. We are proposing the largest dollar investment increase in Somerville Public Schools in the history of this district and the fourth largest percentage increase on record. This is happening at a time when school budgets are being slashed across Massachusetts and across this country and at a time when teachers are being laid off and programs are being cut. Not here, not in Somerville. The school budget fully funds the district's proposal to deliver excellent core academic programs, athletics and arts offerings, wraparound services, special education, out of school time programs and more. In addition to the school budget, the city budget and our capital plans also build in support for a range of critical school building improvements because we cannot afford another closed school and we are getting out in front of this with proactive capital projects. In a bit, you're going to hear from Sonoma Public Schools Superintendent Ruben Carmona about the district's budget. I don't want to steal his thunder, but I do want to just briefly talk about some of the details in the school budget that I'm particularly proud of for our community. Amid tough times, we're adding five new special education teachers and a minimum of four and a half new instructional coaches and math interventionists, and investing an additional $600,000 in substitute staffing. because consistency matters and our kids deserve a teacher in the room every single day. We're also putting new money into our school's equity funding formula, the first substantial increase in years so that resources flow to where students and schools need them most. We're expanding working on womanhood program, which makes a real difference in young girls' lives. And we're preserving the expansion of free T-passes for every Somerville student in grades 7 through 12 year-round, including the summer. I said this recently already, and I'll say it again. These aren't just line items. These are commitments to our children and to the families and caregivers who trust us to get this right. Just saying that our youth are the future of our city and this nation isn't enough. We have to do our part to prepare our kids to succeed in a changing world. And let me be clear again, this budget fully funds the request put forward by the Somerville Public Schools leadership. That proposal covers not only the needs they identified for a level service budget, but also adds the new staffing and resources I just mentioned. That carefully compiled spending plan both supports our students and adheres to our commitment to budget responsibly. Recently, members of the school committee voted in subcommittee to further add six new interventionist positions that the district did not ask for. I understand the good intentions of my colleagues on the school committee, but in a year where we had to resort laying off city staff, we simply cannot sustain unrequested additions. The schools and our community deserve to be proud of and confident in the district's FY27 budget. It's the product of a months-long collaborative effort between my team, SPS leadership, and our school committee, and I want to thank everyone involved. I mentioned we did this amid tough times, and you all follow the news and know that's perhaps an understatement. Municipalities everywhere are facing economic headwinds, including inflation and ballooning healthcare costs, leading to painful layoffs and headline grabbing cuts. The unpredictability and funding threats in Washington add a whole new layer of challenges. Tariff impacts, supply chain issues, and a changing marketplace are putting downward pressure on the development and commercial real estate market that generates local tax revenue. The cushion of ARPA pandemic relief funds is gone. So in Somerville, we too found ourselves facing a challenging budget year. On the city side, that translated to a $5.4 million shortfall just to meet level service costs. I want you to know we worked relentlessly and thoughtfully to close that gap. How did we do that? First step we took was to look to increase revenue. That included updating fees carefully because we know people are hurting amid the rising costs of living. Along with other mayors, I went to Beacon Hill repeatedly and lobbied for the Governor's Municipal Empowerment Act. This would have provided an additional $1.8 million in additional revenue in FY27. Unfortunately, the legislature did not deliver that relief. We used more than $14 million in stabilization funds to buy down the annual cost of some debts and to pay for some of this coming year's planned capital investments, like road and building projects. That's the responsible and sustainable way to use reserves. Responsible because reserves are best used for lump sum and one-time costs rather than ongoing operating costs. And sustainable because when a city starts spending reserves to pay for ongoing costs, it's just kicking the can down the road and setting up a fiscal cliff, and it would also lower our bond rating, which only means higher costs for the city in the long term. We then took our level service department and division budgets the staff submitted back in February, and we worked with them to then make strategic 5% non-personnel cuts citywide. Finally, where appropriate, we moved some positions and expenses onto settlement and other separate funds and sought to take full advantage of grant funding. Combined, that did make some headway, but failed to fully close the gap. So, We took a hard look at vacant positions and eliminated 16 of them, some that had been vacant for extended periods of time. When that deficit persisted after that, as a last resort, we made the difficult, difficult decision to eliminate 13 filled positions. I want to stop here and be clear. We cut based on positions, not people. We carefully analyze potential impacts with the department heads closest to the work with the goal of staying as close to level service as possible. We have incredibly dedicated employees impacted by this layoff. I'm grateful for their work for the city. I understand how challenging it is for those directly impacted as well as for their colleagues. This step was taken because it was necessary to close the shortfall. The end result is a budget within our means that was built with sacrifice, careful planning, and hard decisions. To be clear, Operating below level service and losing a total of 29 positions will have impacts. Every team is looking right now at how to streamline their workloads and evaluating what can be pulled back strategically. This is, of course, a can-do organization and our dedicated employees give the city their best every day. We will certainly be looking at how we can achieve more through collaboration across divisions and our restructuring should support that. We'll also be looking for efficiencies, and we'll be seeking processes and systems to update that can help increase productivity. But we need the community and this council to also understand that to budget within our means, we also have to be realistic and plan within our staff's capacity. Having just gone deep on the challenges we're up against, I wanna talk about how we're moving the city forward. This budget holds strong on those all-important core services, from street safety to maintenance to road and control upgrades, and clear and accessible communications to the entire community, while moving forward fundamental priorities, including affordable housing, climate action, equity work, and more, all the things the community spoke up for. We found ways to create capacity for needed new initiatives, including dedicated space for teen programming at the TAB, offering out-of-school enrichment that I know this council cares deeply about, as well as a long overdue examination and overhaul of our permitting for both local businesses and residents, and our new safe spot harm reduction initiative to help prevent overdoses. We're investing in new library subscriptions, and we'll be delivering year-round use of Founders Rink that provides both warm weather recreation space and winter ice time, Mr. President. On the course service side, you'll see continued investment in intensive rodent control, including a new focus on using Burrow Rx to get at tough-to-reach infestations. and an initiative to fully implement humane rodent traps across city and school buildings. An improved city app to better put city services and information at your fingertips, part of an overall focus on enriched communications that I heard about on so many of those doors that I knocked on. Continued care and maintenance of our more than 15,000 public trees. continuing to deliver strong public safety services, including ensuring rapid response when you call 911 for help, traffic enforcement to keep us safe, safety management for all our amazing events, and with a commitment to moving forward at long last with police reforms that everyone in this room has been waiting to see for years. Fire response will get a boost with the launch of a truly impressive new technology that will remotely create green waves of streetlights along routes to fire and emergency calls, so help comes faster. With new water and sewer leadership, we're tackling longstanding meter and billing issues in-house. You'll see quick-build safety improvements on the Elm Beacon Connector and road paving and partial paving on roads badly in need of it. Multiple departments are collaborating on that project to do work in-house that would have been previously contracted out. A city staffer today used the word insourcing to describe this work, and I love that for us. DPW is insourcing too. which will improve quality, provide more skills and training to staff, and lower our costs. They're bringing formally contracted work in-house to maintain ADA ramps and large sidewalk repairs. They're also starting insourcing for replacement of hot water heaters and pumps with our own plumbers, and electrical upgrades will be performed by our own electricians, including ballast replacement, light fixtures, and LED upgrades. And of course, to deliver quality core services, you have to measure outcomes, review what's working and what isn't, and continually strive for efficient and effective delivery. That's where our summer stat team will be digging in all year. I ran on an urban mechanics agenda focused on strong core services, and this team will ensure that we deliver on that. Now, I said this budget upholds our values through action, and I meant it. With the resources in this budget, we will finally see tangible progress on longstanding community goals for police reform, including clinician emergency response, and civilian oversight of police. We recently launched our co-response pilot with the intention to expand that work because it's high time. Somerville has trained clinicians on the scene and on that 911 line to better support our community members in mental health crisis. And we've created a new role to finally launch civilian oversight of police for accountability and transparency. We're keeping a laser focus on affordable housing creation. Our housing team is advancing important projects in the pipeline, like Clarendon Hill Phase II, 299 Broadway, 24 Webster, and more, which will deliver hundreds more affordable and deeply affordable units. At a time when resources are seriously constrained, we're renewing our commitment to providing legal supports to tenants and immigrants. We're re-upping our resident legal services so that our most vulnerable residents can defend their rights and protect their homes. And we're re-upping our immigrant legal support funds to help our residents navigate an increasingly hostile immigration system. From existing staff, we're forming a new language and communications access office to strengthen our inclusive communications for both cognitive and language needs. Existing staff will also form a new engagement in neighborhood services division that will double down on our work to connect residents and small businesses to programs and services. We will build on the outstanding work already going on in SOYA, economic development, and comms. This is local government meeting people where they're at. Think Mobile City Hall, except since this is Somerville, maybe we show up on bikes instead of in a van. As you all know, on day one, we opened the mayor's office door, and it's staying that way. We will continue to break down barriers to local government, raise the bar on constituent service, and build stronger nonprofit and local supports and collaboration. arts, accessibility, food access, family and social services, veteran services, LGBTQ plus supports, community health, and more. All the areas where Somerville is delivering for its people will keep moving forward as we walk the walk on our community values. And this is so important. This budget sets up our racial and social justice division to focus their efforts on organization-wide training and systems under a new name, equity and belonging. Let's talk about equity and belonging, the evolution of our racial and social justice work. Diversity, equity, inclusion should not just live in one corner within one division, it belongs with all of us. And this team is going to weave that into all of our work at a level we've never achieved before. To date, the Racial and Social Justice Department played a major role on plans for police reform and public safety for all, as well as providing support to boards and commissions and hosting important observances and events. We are very deliberately updating their name and widening their focus because we need a unit that can drive forward citywide equity work both in name and through their active mission. We want everyone in our city to have a voice. We want everyone to access our services. We want to do the hard work of continuing to break down the impacts of systemic racism. We want a government that is serving and fighting for all. This team will maintain outward facing community work while also introducing intensive collaborative work across all departments to integrate equity and belonging into everything we do as a city. They'll work closely with the New Engagement and Neighborhood Services Division and SOIA to amplify their efforts. Former RSJA staff and functions are also now positioned in new locations where they can deliver the greatest impact. The ADA coordinator will move to the Human Resources Division, now called People Operations. The Public Safety for All project manager in my office will keep driving forward the work to deliver on the goals RSJA worked with the community to identify and, A new Police Accountability Program Director position will also sit in the Mayor's Office to make civilian oversight a reality at long last, and then run that program. This approach is designed to get us moving beyond discussions and toward delivering results, action, and impact we envisioned and were promised. Our housing and stability divisions will continue their work to address the regional housing crisis. They'll be delivering housing supports to fight displacement, aggressively working to advance affordable housing construction, including deeply affordable and family units, and they'll be coordinating with regional partners on forward-looking initiatives that help keep people in their homes and in our city. Planning will have the resources to streamline online permitting, update our zoning permit process, and finally deliver the Davis Square neighborhood plan. Stay tuned for an update on that very soon, Mr. President. Sustainability and Environment is honing in on climate action across the board, from green building updates to drive down the city's carbon footprint, to a new grant-funded youth climate leadership program, to pushing to expand the state's fossil fuel-free demonstration program. All told, the proposed city budget that funds the services we provide our community totals $394 million in operating expenses, investments, and obligations in FY27. That's a 3.3% increase over last year, which is a slightly less than level service budget. Like other cities and towns, We fund our budget through a range of sources, property taxes, state and federal funding, fees, local tax receipts, and more. In Somerville, our community has also doggedly sought out growth specifically to create housing, jobs, and to shore up our tax revenues to help the city fund services that we rely on. That growth is still building. Sorry, terrible pun. All you have to do is look at the planned move of Transmedics to Somerville, which will bring roughly 900 jobs and significant new commercial tax revenue to Somerville. I want to thank the City Council for partnership on that TIF to make that possible. That growth, however, is slowing due to greater forces impacting the commercial real estate market, lab space, and construction. If you look at this chart, you can see the trend very clearly. City assessors are currently projecting approximately $5 million in new growth for FY27. This is a major reduction compared to prior years, but still a critical source of revenue to fund city operations. It's my job to be straight with you and the community. The projections beyond the coming year remain well below what we've grown accustomed to in recent years. When I say we built this budget not only for the coming year, but with the long range needs in mind, this is one of the factors we're looking at along with rising fixed costs like healthcare, pension obligations. We reduced spending. to create greater stability going forward rather than finding ourselves in crisis mode year after year. Thanks to the excellent financial stewardship of the finance staff here in the city in collaboration with Mayor's past and this council over the years. Somerville's financial foundation remains stable. In fact, our AAA bond rating was just reaffirmed by Standard & Poor's on Monday, which will save us millions over time in lower interest rates. You all know the massive bargain we're about to do very soon on a new school. We applied that responsible and sustainable financial approach to every choice we made carefully this year. Speaking of finance, I'll now hand this over to budget director Mike Mastroboni.

Thank you.

Mayor Wilson already.

excuse me, Mayor Wilson already shared the challenges that we faced this year. My goal is to briefly walk through how we responded to those challenges. We entered this budget development process staring down that $5.4 million gap between projected revenues and the cost of maintaining services. Unfortunately, there's no magic button that we can press to close a gap like that. If there is, if it exists, maybe Mayor Mamdani stole it in New York, can't find it. Instead, we had to do a little bit of everything. That means reserve strategy, it means reviewing revenue, it means department by department, line by line budget analysis, as well as organizational restructuring and reductions. We deliberately used a variety of tools rather than relying too heavily on any one solution. That allowed us to close the gap while preserving core services and continuing to make progress in our key priorities. That kind of approach creates a budget that's both balanced today and more sustainable going forward. One of the most important tools in that effort was our reserve strategy. The question we get all the time is, if Somerville has such strong reserves, why not just use them? The answer this year is that we did. We just use them in a way that helps us not only in fiscal 27, but in future years too. We propose to use $9 million to avoid borrowing long-term this year, and another $5 million to pay for capital projects happening in our schools and city buildings. You'll see those appropriations in front of you. The benefit is that every year going forward, we'll be paying less debt service. By contrast, using reserves to fund salaries or funding ongoing operations would solve the problem for one year, but leave us facing the same challenge year after year. The strategy was possible because Somerville has spent decades building strong reserves and maintaining disciplined financial practices. You can see here on this chart Literally, 20 years of planning led to this moment when we've met our fund balance goal of 30% of revenues and we can leverage our strong position as a AAA community. It allows us to address current needs while preserving flexibility for the future. The next question, of course, is where resources went, because even in a level service budget, there are still investments. As you've heard, the largest increase in this upcoming budget is within Somerville Public Schools. The proposed district budget is an increase of $8.6 million, which as you know, doesn't even account for many resources like health insurance, maintenance for public works or capital investments. While on the city side, growth was limited to about 2% or $5.3 million total. Again, as you heard earlier, this sums up to a 3.3% overall increase. This is the smallest budget growth since I started working here more than a decade ago. It's important to emphasize, however, that maintaining services in any year requires investment. The choices reflected in this budget align with the priorities of the mayor's administration that were outlined earlier tonight, schools, core services, and continued progress on key community goals, which leads me to the final point I'd like to make. Municipal finance best practices encourage us to look beyond any single fiscal year. While this budget balances fiscal 27, it also peeks around the corner and prepares us for the challenges we know are ahead. New growth remains positive, but a two-thirds decline compared to just a few years ago is serious but solvable. Infrastructure needs continue to grow, and our healthcare, our employee wages, and our pension costs remain significant long-term pressures. The decisions reflected in the budget presented today were made not simply to solve a one-year problem, but position us to continue investing in a sustainable way. Ultimately, this budget reflects that long-term approach. where we make difficult choices today so that we can remain financially strong and flexible tomorrow. I look forward to working with you all over the coming weeks, and I'd like to hand it back to Mayor Wilson to close us out.

Thank you, Mike. And a big thank you to all our staff for working with us with the dedication that they had and the grace they showed amid organizational change and economic challenges. Again, we responded to the fiscal constraints of the current economy, and we built a budget that delivers strong services and keeps our community moving forward. Waste management, snow removal, accessibility, IT services that keep our systems running, fire response, policing, payment processing, Communications, permitting, inspections, building maintenance, the list of core services that improve the daily quality of life in our four square miles is long and often overlooked unless it's not working well, as we all know all too well. Many of us take for granted that the grass gets mowed, that information keeps flowing, that our buildings and food services are safe, that when you call 911, someone comes to your aid, and then when you call 311, you'll get a quick answer or the service you need. And in Somerville, we go well beyond demanding equity. Social progress, innovation, and leadership of ourselves Again, this budget keeps us moving forward. We are not going backward, not in the face of financial headwinds, and not amid instability out of Washington. I look forward to the passage of a budget designed to strengthen Corps services and deliver on our values. This budget was built with care, clear thinking, and community priorities centered so we can truly say we're from the government and we're here to help. Council, thank you for your careful attention. I look forward to your deliberations and further discussion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Director Mastroboni. Questions? I know you have questions. So to be clear, for all our thousands of viewers at home, the primary deliberation of the budget itself will happen, as it has happened for years, in committee meetings with departments grouped by various knights, thanks in large part to the mayor when he was sitting here on the council and chaired the committee of finance. That process is much more streamlined, and it will all be available for folks to watch on Zoom. If anyone wonders why we don't have hours of questions tonight, it's because that's when the real nitty-gritty details will come, and hopefully many, if not most, of those questions will already have been submitted through the new process where the councillors can submit items ahead of time. So if you haven't done that yet, I can't remember what the deadline was, but even if you've missed the deadline, it's still always better to get it ahead of time. It gives the administration a little time to provide a thoughtful response. If you think of something at the moment that's okay too, just don't expect a response necessarily right away. All right, good. I vamped long enough for somebody to think of a question tonight. Councillor Baugh, take it away.

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I guess I just have some very high-level question for you. First, I highlighted some of those. It's around first communication, because that's like you used that word a lot. And as Councillor Hart saw me today, you know, with that Boston bean cafe, like trying to count how many, you know, accounts we have, like the various communications, because almost like every department has a communication person, and yes, like some data that I pull out, you know, like the social media accounts maintained across the city is not of 94, you know, and also periodic newsletter distributed by departments, also some in multiple languages, you know, which is great. There's also like not a 50 of those. And then there are also numerous department specific outreach functions already occurring. Like we also have like a council newsletter and stuff. And then there are also 48 publicly available data sets, also useful data, like this is all phenomenal. It's like when they say 3-1-1 calls and all this, you know, 9-1-1 and all that. So at the same time, you know, when I looked at the budget, I saw that, you know, you significantly increase, you know, communications. I was like, okay, like this is like, You know, given the physical, you know, constraint, I was wondering why expanding communication is a higher priority rather than direct, you know, service delivery positions. Can you speak to that?

Through you, Mr. President, yeah, if you look at that, you'll see, and thank you for the question, of course, you'll see that expansion is in the new Engagement and Neighborhood Services Division. That is a key equity piece that is designed to, like I said, build on the work that Soya Economic Development and comms have done previously to make sure that we are getting out and communicating with the people who don't have the privilege to read those email newsletters and monitor those social media accounts, that we're going out where people are at and meeting them there. It's so important. I know this work firsthand from my work in the nonprofit world. You have to be real about how people can be communicated with whether it's in person over whatsapp the goal is to break down those barriers and make sure that we are being creative with how we engage with people because otherwise we're going to end up with in a situation where the most privileged people know what's going on in the city and and we're going to be excluding people who don't have that privilege and we're out to break that down

Thank you, and true, Mr. President, and also have you considered a way to consolidate or streamline rather than expand? Have you thought about that? I guess where I'm going now is the next thing I would like you to answer me is like I was thinking that because the school department is kind of like weird because I'm analyzing it feels like it's a performance based budget in the school department but our city is always kind of like my goal is like how do you look at it holistically and then kind of like it's result oriented and because the cities are all interconnected this department is connected to this one and they all have like how do you So when you answer that question, tell me why you did not move in the direction of performance-based budgeting and still continue with the same old line by line.

Mr. President, I appreciate that. Yeah, you mentioned the fact that there were so many embedded communications people in departments. That's a big change in this budget. We look to centralize those. And from our original plans, we ended up making three cuts within the comms department because of the budget realities. We had to scale back our plans in the face of budget realities, and so we had to go with a smaller launch than we'd hoped of that engagement in neighborhood services division, but we're still very, very excited to see what they can go do to build on that, like I said, that excellent work that SOYA, economic development, and comms have been doing in that space.

Thank you, Mr. President. Another highlight for me was about the debt service because there was nothing there. I was like, I'm curious to know why there's little change in the debt service despite the city's major future capital obligations, particularly school construction. When should residents expect school-related borrowing to begin affecting operating budget?

Thank you, Mr. President. So very astute observation, Councillor Urba, that the debt service for fiscal 27 is not increasing significantly. That's a consequence of us using reserves to avoid borrowing additional long-term debt this year. Again, we have these significant reserves. We want to leverage those to preserve capacity on the operating budget. So we saved by spending, I believe, $8.6 million that this council approved, I think, in the past month. we were able to save $900,000 a year in debt service going forward for 15 to 20 years. So again, that creates capacity. It's paying cash for projects that were already happening in the ground. To your question on, you know, when are we seeing additional investments, right? And we know that we have a school coming up that the Winter Hill School rebuild, right? That process is underway. We're planning for that. And this budget also proposes using reserves approximately $5 million to fund a couple of projects. One of those is the West Somerville Neighborhood School roof. That's right, the West Somerville Neighborhood School roof, the roof on the DPW building, but also the Argenziano boilers and Healy School Room 208. So those appropriations are in front of the council right now, again, leveraging those resources to avoid having to pay debt for that in the future. It's something that we're able to do because we've spent 20 years building up those reserves.

Okay, can I, one last? Thank you. No, again, I was just, these are just charts that I'm looking, I'm trying to make sense out of it, because at the end of the day, you know, we, people don't want to be surprised. Just like how, when I, it took me like a while to actually understand that the water and sewer is not part of the budget. So I say, oh, hey, where is, where are these conversations? So this is almost like, so sometimes residents can get confused when, They start being asked to pay more because they thought, okay, the budget came around and this is something that I saw, or for some reason it's good to bring it up. And then the last set of question I have, it's about, I think I submitted like a budget, policy orders around the staffing, the cuts and stuff, because when you eliminated positions connected to youth services, housing support and racial justice initiative, it took me off guard. So I was like, okay, this is like we've spoken personally. We've talked about your equity agenda. I know this is something that you care so much about. I would just still, I'm not clear like how does this position that you took out, how do they advance your stated equity priorities?

Through you, Mr. President, yeah, the cuts that were done, again, were done across study. There was no one group was targeted. No one level was targeted, actually. It was a range of levels of positions. If you look at the salary grades where those did come out, what we can say is we worked very, very closely with those department heads to identify where we could cut back and still come as close to possible as level service. So this was done hand in hand with department heads and I wanna thank them for what was a really challenging and just very difficult process to go through.

And do we have, one last one, do we have any current budgeted vacancies citywide?

Mr. President, yes, there are definitely still vacancies that we're looking to hire. There are interviews happening all the time. There are absolutely vacancies in this budget.

Okay. I think I'll pass. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

you mr president through you uh to the mayor uh so thank you for all this uh i guess i'll just preface all this by saying this is my first run at this i may ask some stupid questions but i'd rather look stupid once um than be stupid forever so here i go uh i guess first going off of uh what my good colleague uh just asked um i The equity and belonging, I think that there's some great missions there, and I really appreciate the redirection and reimagining of that. I guess my question is, after the layoffs, it seems like a pretty ambitious set of goals, and I'm just wondering if we, post-layoffs, really have the staff there to actually execute on those.

Mr. President, right now, no, because there are two key vacancies that we are looking to fill right now. We are looking to be very realistic about our goals. At the same time, I'm an ambitious person. If you know me, you know I have high expectations of myself and of others, and we're going to look to make sure that we can go successfully go achieve those goals. We wouldn't have set those if we thought they were unattainable.

Thank you. And then I guess in reverse order of kind of what Councillor Mott had been asking about, I want to ask a little bit about what we're doing with stabilization funds. So in the last finance meeting, we were talking about using some of the... using what I think is a very smart tactic of using stabilization funds to pay down the short-term bonds so they don't become long-term and more expensive. My memory is that we were spending some of those down pretty quickly. pretty low. My question, I guess, is how are we doing? The free cash doesn't become free until the end of the year, I believe, and that's what we were looking to use, hoping to replenish that. How are we doing? I know there's a lot of different stabilization funds. Maybe just an overarching, we can ask about that more in-depth department by department in the department meetings, but overarching, how are we doing? And then the second part of that question is, I guess just the, you know, we've been able to build up those those funds because we had a lot of development and now the picture is kind of looking a bit more bleak. So I'm just wondering if we're not setting ourselves up, and I'm sure that it's been thought of, so I just want to hear about it, that we're not setting ourselves up for having really low stabilization funds and then having to lean more on residents to try to replenish those with the lack of development. Thank you.

Mr. President, through you to Counsel Link, thank you for the question. It's an important one to understand. We have a very strong reserve— Mr. Bain, could you just introduce yourself for the record for our regular viewers? I'm sorry. I'm Ed Bain. I am the finance director and city auditor. Thank you. We have a very strong reserve posture in this city, and we've deliberately built up those stabilization funds because we have very substantial capital projects that need to be attacked. So the Standard & Poor's, the bond rating agencies, gave us the AAA bond rating a few years back, and this is one primary reason is we've exceeded the threshold. The threshold, our target is 30% reserves in the ratio of general fund revenues. So in 2024, we were just a little bit above that, 30.5%. But on the financial statements in fiscal year 2025, we were at 36%. So we have the luxury of drawing down those stabilization funds to get back to that 30% target. So this year, with the previous administration and the new administration, we've drawn down a record number of reserves throughout the fiscal year, $32 million roughly. And given our fiscal situation, the appropriate use of these stabilization funds are for one time only capital projects, expenses, not recurring expenses such as salaries. We don't use that for that or a limited circumstance. So the way I'm looking at it right now is we'll be coming to you on Thursday with our free cash appropriations. We're still trying to figure a few things out in terms of a few collective bargaining agreements. But we should be able to get back around, I would say, roughly about $12 million back in free cash into some of these various capital stabilization funds. So what you've seen here, and I appreciate your approval the last evening of the net down of the debt service. So we have in front of you, as of late, we debted down $8.7 million, which you've approved for a number of capital projects. So we don't have to borrow that money. We give it some capacity, as was stated earlier. And what's in front of you right now, and it was just stated, is about another 5.9 million dollars for the dpw roof the western world neighborhood school roof the healy school room 208 the healy school needs five five new classrooms and finally the replacement of the agenziano boilers these these as you said we need to be spending a lot more money on building improvements going forward so i think we're in a very good position right now we should be right around that 30 metric when we close out fiscal year 2026.

Mr. President, thank you very much. I'm glad to see that we are spending money before, especially on the schools, before it becomes a much bigger problem. It seems like in the past we've maybe been a bit penny wise, pound foolish, so that's great. Thank you very much.

Councillor Hart.

Thank you, Mr. President. Through you, to Mayor Wilson, thanks so much for this presentation and all of the work on the budget. Similar to my colleagues, I have a question about the reorganization of racial and social justice and equity and belonging. And I really... agree with the sentiment of integrating it across the board. So I appreciate that. I was just curious if you could tell us more thoughts and plans about how that work will happen, because I know oftentimes, you know, when departments, they have their priorities and bottom lines and, you know, just how is it gonna be, how is that integration and collaboration gonna happen and how will it be made sure, you know, how will the accountability for those goals?

Absolutely, through you, Mr. President. Yeah, that was such a central piece of what we're looking to accomplish. Think of it as moving that group from RSJ's kind of planning function to one that implements systemic change internally and externally. The point of putting that in the operations and systems department is that that department is led by the CAO, and that work, much as the same way IT or 311 hits everything, we wanna make sure that that is hitting absolutely everything in the city, to the point that when planning is being done, when policy decisions are being made, that we're centering equity in those decisions and in that work. And we also wanna make sure that folks are just trained to think you know the same way you think about the financial impact or the climate impact of something that we're also thinking about the impact on equity because uh you know i'll paraphrase something a labor leader said at a recent labor breakfast every policy every policy has an equity impact and if you don't think it does then you're probably missing an aspect of it everything has an equity piece to it. And so by taking this approach, by giving them that mission and stating that very, very clearly, we want to see meaningful work done on that front. And one of the really extreme challenges with the resurrection of the performance measurement piece and bringing that back in Somerstadt is thinking, how do we measure that progress? And I'm really excited to dig in. We've been a little preoccupied with the budget here for the last few months, but I'm really looking forward to the next phase of all of this, which is sitting down with Somerstadt and these departments and divisions and going over what are your KPIs, sorry, your key performance indicators, how are we measuring success, how are we measuring performance, and how are we making sure that the things we're doing are actually making an impact And that's something we're going to be taking a really close look at. To Councilman Baugh's question earlier about performance, that's going to be a big piece. We're here to make sure that the investments we're making are paying off and that we're getting the most bang for our buck. And that's where I'm really excited about Somerstadt.

Thank you.

Councilor Streisand?

All in favor? Thank you, Mr. President. Through you to Mayor Wilson or whomever wishes to answer this from the administration, Yes, I appreciate hearing more about where the direction of the Equity and Belonging Committee initiative is going to go and who is going to be, I would say, accountable for making sure we are making progress on that because equity is a shared value here in our city, and I'm proud of that. So from what I understand, that our CAO will be responsible, or I'm sorry, not responsible, but leading the drive of whom the dispersing of the different versions of where equity, I don't know, officers or where we're gonna go, it's going to be through the CAO.

Mr. President, equity and belonging is in the operations and systems department. The CEO is not the head of equity and belonging. There's a director, just to be clear.

Right, right, but through you, right, not that the director is now the CEO. That's not what I, yeah, right, I'm on the page of that, but that's who will be kind of driving the concept of looking at the metrics, like we're actually making progress, we're not, et cetera. Okay, and let's make sure we're all on the same page here, and this is not a gotcha question, and whomever you wish from your department to answer this, but so we are on the same page because we do have various levels of needs in our community. How do we define equity?

Mr. President, I'll take that one. We define equity as making sure that all means all. I know it's a very simplified answer, but that... when we say all, we're actually living that out, that people aren't being left behind, overlooked, not being taken into account, not being connected with, that we're serving the needs and desires of everyone in the community so that some people don't get more information, get more access. We're looking to make that, God, I keep wanting to say equitable, that's one of the problems, but it really is as simple as all means all.

Mr. President, through you, to Mayor Wilson, this is not a gotcha question. That is not the intention of this, but whom is being... All means all, and I'm totally with you. We want that too. But of course, sometimes it's... It's tricky to get, like, what exactly, so any, can you get a little more detailed? Mr. President, I'll go deeper. Okay, thank you.

I'm talking about underserved communities in our city. Maybe there's a language barrier. You know, maybe it's just, you know, it's socioeconomic factors lead to folks not being at the table, not knowing what's going on in the city. We're out to go attack that. and break that down and make a measurable difference with that. Whether it's who shows up at meetings, who gives public comment on things, who knows what's going on in the city. That was something I heard loud and clear when I was out last year talking to people is there's a divide in our city between who's connected and who's not and we're out to go make meaningful change to make that no longer the case.

I'll accept that answer, yeah.

Other questions? Councillor Willard.

Thank you, Mr. President. So I want to acknowledge all the questions we've been talking about. These are tough questions. The different things that the mayor and the executive team and the city's municipal leadership have been stepping up to take seriously, they're hard questions. I want to appreciate how I've been hearing about the human impact of these decisions being weighed seriously and the decisions being owned. And there's so much that I appreciate here, including the emphasis on bringing recurring work in-house. I caught that and really appreciate that rather than relying on consultants and outside contractors so much so that we're investing in the expertise of our own staff. I also want to name the importance of trust in this process among the council, the mayor, the city staff, and the public. So much depends on this trust. And just to give one small example that came up just in the last finance committee meeting, last year there were some asks for appropriations for school infrastructure. where the director of infrastructure and asset management appeared before the council and said, frankly, they weren't sure at that moment which projects specifically would need this money the most urgently. And the council, after asking plenty of questions, decided to go ahead and appropriate that money, and we just got a follow-up. learning, as was just mentioned, that it was spent on urgent heating, cooling, and building repair work in several of our schools. If there were low trust, then a process like that could grind to a halt with people not being sure what was going to be done with this money and not trusting it would be handled responsibly. With high trust, we can all operate more efficiently and serve the community better. And I say all this because we all know trust isn't automatic, right? It's earned. And so that's all to set a stage of when we're asking hard questions, whether it's asking hard questions of the mayor, when residents and the public are asking hard questions of us, I want to make sure that I am always taking those questions seriously as an investment in this trust and not as a nuisance. Same thing when the council or residents are reaching out to city staff, reaching out to the mayor with hard questions. We are going to have three nights of departments appearing before the council in the coming weeks, and the council asking questions, some of them hard questions, but it's worth it. Hard questions are a form of support, and surfacing questions, identifying decisions that we're making, and even second guessing decisions, that's an investment in this trust. With all that said, I have a few questions. So in your presentation, Mr. Mayor, through the chair, you mentioned this new role for police accountability program director. I'm excited to see that. In connection with that, is there a commitment to form a civilian oversight body and on what timetable?

Mr. President, yeah, we're absolutely looking to do that. So we have our public safety for all project manager that was funded, started last year. That's the job that's going to be looking to get this established. And we're looking to have this up and running. The goal is in January. Yeah, we're committed to making sure this happens. It's been... It's been a demand of the community for so many years now. And I hear all the time, where is this promised body that was supposed to exist? And we're here to work with the council to make that happen. I sense a lot of enthusiasm for this on the council and from the public. And there's a lot of enthusiasm here in our office as well, in our administration to make that happen.

Thank you. Another question. So in speaking with different people about the school budget, I've heard some different interpretations. An interpretation I've heard from some is that they see the school budget as essentially a level funding budget. And I've also certainly heard from the mayor and others that it's a significant expansion above level funding. As someone who is not involved with school finance, it's a little hard to know how to sort these out, and I'm curious if you can clarify.

absolutely uh three mr president appreciate that question uh i guess you could say to some people it might seem like a matter of perspective when i look at it when i see things expanding uh i think it's it goes beyond level service so i think there's a good story to tell there uh you know if you talk about the expansion of of working on womanhood if you talk about the addition of of some key positions uh i see i see service i guess i would call it level service plus where I think that we are moving forward. And look, I recognize, I sat in those meetings, Councilor Davis could vouch for me, I've got 100% attendance record on the school committee so far, even for daytime meetings, I take that responsibility very seriously. And I heard the comments from the community, from educators about, we have all these needs, there's so much desire to go do more, and I share that. we uh have this responsibility again to produce a responsible and sustainable budget and i feel like we were able to make some progress towards some of those things i heard about in that public comment while still leaving us in good financial shape here going forward we're not setting up a fiscal cliff for next year uh we're not kicking the can down the road. We're making those, again, responsible and sustainable decisions to set us up in good financial shape for the foreseeable future.

Thanks. And then my last question, regarding the layoffs, I know that in some cases in departmental structure there are multiple layers of management. And the impact of the layoffs I know fell primarily on frontline positions. What is your approach going forward to balancing management staffing with frontline positions?

Mr. President, I appreciate that question. I also appreciate an opportunity to, again, state this was spread out. This was not felt. If you look at the different salary grades, it is distributed. It's not at one particular grade. it would be foolhardy to go entirely after one side or the other. It truly was an effort to spread around the cuts to make sure that there was not one team, one sector that was being singled out for this. These were all carefully thought out again in collaboration with department heads to identify what could we cut and still come as close as possible to level service.

Thank you. Those are my only questions. And if I could be permitted a small indulgence, I just want to remind everyone that Wednesday, this coming Wednesday, June 10th, 6 p.m., will be the public budget hearing. Anyone who has questions or perspective in the public, please come and share it. It will be an online meeting. You can find the link if you Google Somerville budget.

Thank you.

Okay.

Well, thank you. Councilor Ewan Campin? Thank you, Mr. President. Through you, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, everyone here. I appreciate all the questions that my colleagues have asked. I could sit here and ask a million questions. That's what will happen over the next month. I have one department reorg question for tonight. Something that we always hear, and I know all of us have been prioritizing, including you, Mr. Mayor, is ISD. the making it easier for residents to get permits. When I look at the budget, there's no more ISD. It seems like there are people with ISD in their title, but the department has been split. And I'm trying to get my head around this big picture. Obviously, we're going to have a departmental hearing. Through you, Mr. President, can you give us a 10,000 foot? What does that reorg? How does it help people get their permits faster?

Three, Mr. President, yeah, I really appreciate that. Yeah, ISD, something that comes up a lot. We basically, in order to improve the focus, there's a health and safety group that is over under public health in HHS, and then there is inspectional services under the infrastructure department. We wanted to call that permitting and building code. It turns out inspectional services is a standard title and we would be overly complicating things if we gave them a more descriptive title that we felt better suited what they were doing. So they stayed as ISD there. And I'll tell you this, I got to be careful what I share. There's embargoed information about an opportunity for us to really go do some really fascinating work on permitting. I'm really, really excited. to go do that work that is going to involve a lot of collaboration across groups. Economic development does a ton of work on the permitting side. This is not something that just sits within one group. If we're going to solve permitting in this city, it's going to take everyone working on that, and that is a key priority for our administration here in FY27, is to get our permitting up to where the level where we feel like we're giving the people of Somerville the service that they deserve on permitting.

Mr. President, I look forward to getting beyond this embargo. Thank you.

Councillor Scott. Thank you, Mr. President. Where to begin? I will say that I look forward to the time that we have in finance committee and I'll keep my detailed questions mostly to there. But there's a few kind of big picture things that I want to make sure that we have clear and to make sure I understand it because it is tough as stuff slides around. When I look at the, one of the departments that has kind of broken up salaries was, for example, all of the core salaries have been moved out of the police department and moved into their own separate budget line. Is that an internal accounting change that's also happening, or is it just for the purposes of the book?

I'll tell you about me too. Mr. President, that is a very intentional change because I remember as a counselor the conversation we had around CORE of folks wanting to invest in that, but obviously if it's part of the same personal services line and OM lines as police, there was a lack of trust over how that might happen. This is to a step, we heard Counselor Wheeler talk about trust. This is to establish that trust, that if we make investments in that standalone CORE group, they're going to remain in that core group they'll be realized as impactful clinician initially co-response and one day soon hopefully solo clinician response resources so that we can give our community the emergency response that we know everybody wants to see here with the confidence there are no games being played this is nothing's being moved around this is about trust

I appreciate that. Has there been an actual change to the reporting structure of CORE?

Mr. President, through you, reporting structures, there's a whole separate reporting structure conversation. Overall, that is coming. For now, CORE remains with the same reporting structure. This is a budgetary trust move on our part that we can invest in this without anyone worrying those funds are going to get repurposed for something else.

Okay. I appreciate that. I think when you were talking about some of these new executives there's a public safety for all now there was a public safety for all program manager and i think you just mentioned that in one of your answers but then there's a a separate thing on this org chart that's labeled police accountability program director and i'm trying to find where that is in the uh i'm having a hard time here

Mr. President, that sits in the mayor's office and that is going to be grant funded through the RSJ fund. Or not granted, funded through the RSJ fund.

oh i understand i just i see in the grant fund of positions reporting directly to you mr mayor the arpa director the public safety for all coordinator and the police accountability program director when i look down at the listings uh is the so is the public safety for all program manager the actual position that's uh in the org chart labeled as police accountability program director I'm just trying to make the personnel listing match up to the org chart that's in there.

No, there's two separate positions. Public safety for all project manager. That's the position that's existed since last year that is in charge of implementing those recommendations that came out of that. And then the new position is the police accountability position that I think we have an October 1 start date for that.

Okay, so the police accountability manager is the one that's going to be tasked with setting up the civilian oversight. Yep. Through you, Mr. President. Yep. Well, through you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, can I clarify that? The public safety for all project manager is going to be doing a lot of work on getting that up and off the ground. The police accountability program manager will be the one who actually runs that new program.

Well, I am going to have some more questions about that when we get to our executive administration night. I guess I would just maybe start the observation with saying I am concerned that the person that's going to be tasked with operating the civilian oversight program is making 20% less than the most junior newly hired police officer in our city. And there are 130 of those.

Mr. President, I just want to make sure we're not talking about a prorated salary because of the later start date.

Okay, then just less. It would still be a third of what a police captain makes. So I guess I've got a few more questions. You know, when I look, I appreciate what you said about, you know, there's cuts to positions all the way across different classifications of positions. But I'm curious with this reorganization, was there any streamlining of upper management positions in the city?

Mr. President, through you, I just want to make sure upper management, what are we talking, which grades are we talking there for upper management?

Directors, deputy directors, people that have more than three people reporting to them on an org chart.

Mr. President, yes, and you will see if you look, there were multiple positions at that level that were cut.

yeah i did i did notice uh the only ones i saw there was a vacant director of finance admin in water and sewer it was a vacant position and the deputy director of racial and social justice is there anybody else at that level that i missed mr president i think that those were the two at that level as i recall yeah i just uh It does seem like the cuts came from a lot of direct service delivery positions. I understand hard choices have to be made. I also understand maybe they weren't the ones I would have made. But that's not my job. That is your job. So I defer to you on this. I also want to understand very clearly, when you look at the police budget, it shows a very slight decrease. But that's because all those core positions were removed from the police department, correct?

Mr. President, if you look at the overall public safety, which includes all of that, I think it ticked up by 167,000 for all of public safety. That's police, fire, everything. There are no games going on here. No, I understand.

I'm not accusing anybody of skullduggery. I'm just trying to back out the numbers so I can understand what happened with them. One of the things I look at is the core salaries, that's 228K. The co-director of core went off of salary and became a grant funded position. One of the core clinicians also got moved to grant funding, that's at 75K. That's basically 350K that was sitting in the police budget last year that no longer is. Although, Director Mastroboni, feel free to correct me.

Thank you, Mr. President. I'm not aware of any removed positions in police at this time. There's a natural sort of churn of new officers replacing more seasoned officers. I'm happy to get into the details with you as we discuss the police budget, but I'm not seeing any

uh particular reductions yeah positions that's so i'm just trying to understand what the what the net net on this is um because obviously no positions were eliminated there were salary increases there uh are the salary increases that we see in the police budget in this budget book reflective of the newly negotiated contract with sbsoa that hasn't been accepted yet mr president no that's not been approved by this council so that is not in this budget all right and likewise the presumably the Patrol officers Union as well, so Does that mean that this number will be have to be modified upwards in the event that those contracts are ratified I

Mr. President, so we reserve resources in salary contingency for any union collective bargaining agreements. If this council were to approve any union collective bargaining agreements before we're able to get to the final budget, I'd love to get those included if we can get that math done as fast as possible. More than likely, that would be something we'd have to come back for to this council for that appropriation after approval of the collective bargaining agreement.

Well, so if we did, Mr. President, move quickly and approve those, then that would be another, I have to recall my math, I think another quarter million dollars that would need to be added to the budget as opposed to coming out of a stabilization fund and then rolled into the budget in the next year. Do I have that procedure correct, Director Mastroboni? Through the President. Mr. President, that's right. Okay, so I'm just trying to understand as we move around, it looks like there's the standard $350,000 increase in the police budget when you net out core and then another shadow increase of another $250,000. That's like a $600,000 increase to the police budget year over year if those contracts get adopted. So I'm just, it's one of those things that is hard for me to, Hard for me to square with the $600,000 request from the school committee. So I look forward to talking about it in more detail, but it's just one of those things that I wanted to highlight tonight. Mr. President, I also wanted to have a procedural conversation because I know you and I, all of our colleagues, have received a great deal of communications from our constituents imploring the city council to act regarding the recommendation of the school committee, which is an item we have before us. It's a vote out of their subcommittee on finance. It can be very confusing when you look at Mass General Law. Because the first time I read the Mass General Law, and this is, I believe, Chapter 44, Section 32. It seems to indicate that any school committee could pass a recommendation to the city council and the city council could vote to approve that budget as opposed to the one the mayor has submitted. But it is my understanding that even though it's written in the plain language and that amendment to Mass General Law happened 1986, 40 years ago, that it is an optional section of Mass General Law that we have not accepted as a city. Is that your correct understanding? I see some nodding from the chair of finance.

We have members of the law department here. I'm not going to field that from my seat at the president's desk here, but I'll defer to the law department. Unless, can I see Councilor Wheeler's hand? Do you have direct knowledge of that?

Just on this, I spoke to the city attorney's office today about that precise question, and at least the understanding I came away with from that conversation was that what the councilor from Ward 2 has said is correct, and that even though that section in mass general law if you just read it on its own makes it sound like the city council could vote with a two-thirds majority to approve an additional uh suggested amount from the school committee that because somerville has not adopted that it is not in effect for somerville

Yeah, and that's one of those things that you wouldn't find just by reading Mass General Law. It's one of those things that you'd only find if you went to the PDF copy of the Acts of 1987, Chapter 329, which says that the provisions of the Act shall take effect in any city on the first day of the calendar month after its acceptance by a majority vote of the City Council. So even were the city council tonight in our meeting to move to adopt that, being that this is June, that authorization would not actually happen. We would not be able to do that until July, which is after when the budget has to be approved. So given that, And given that we cannot modify the budget except to make cuts, as the mayor has suggested it, procedurally, there is no way for the city council to accept the recommendation of the school committee, correct?

Councillor Scott, the city attorney is in chambers, but I wouldn't want to put her on the spot. I assume we could put a request through Dr. Najee Williams to the law department to address that question for us, please.

All right. Well, I just want to convey to the best of my understanding, as the chair of finance has spoken to the law office, and that's also my understanding. Well, I just want to set the expectations very clearly. Now, if we do get confirmation that, in fact, that is how this procedure works, then the only action the city council could take to force a change would be a vote to reject the entire budget, or perhaps a large enough vote to reduce the budget that it would cause the mayor and finance staff to go back and prepare a new one for submittal, as happened back in 2020. So I just wanna make it very clear that procedurally, that is what we are facing as a city council. I also, as a final matter, Mr. President, You know what? There's a lot of granular detail there. And I look forward to going through it in our finance committee meetings. I appreciate everybody's forbearance as I get into a little bit of the weeds here. But just to let both my colleagues and our constituents know that fundamentally the only way that we would be able to encourage the mayor to accept the school committee's recommendation would be by voting either to drastically cut this budget in the amount that they're looking for or voting to reject the budget entirely. Thank you, Mr. President. I'm all set.

Councillor Sate?

On that point, though,

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mayor Wilson and everyone who worked on this budget. We'll keep many of my questions for the next few weeks as we dig into the budget in detail. For now, I have one question. I will ask the same question to all the different departments that were affected by the layoffs. My question is, were there any positions that were consolidated as a result of the layoffs? And is it affecting staff's workload? Will it affect staff's workload?

three mr president uh yeah you can't lose 29 positions and not have an impact uh that's why we're trying to be realistic and that's why we want to make sure the public and the council and and honestly internally in the city are realistic you know especially as we as the adjustment period happens here uh there were transferred positions and there are positions uh where uh we're also gonna just be realistic about the work that can't happen. Expecting people to pick up one or two colleagues work is just not realistic and we would not expect that of people. So yeah, we've been working with managers on what that's gonna look like and we're encouraging staff who are impacted by the loss of a position on their team to be working with their managers to figure out what that's gonna look like here to make sure that we, again, we are coming as close to level service as possible to minimize that impact.

Through you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mayor Wilson. As one counselor, I would like to know in detail how it's affecting every department and staff in every department. Just to keep that in mind as a counselor, as I'm asking staff, not assume that they have the same responsibilities. So I think that's

that's like another reason why i would like personally to know that thank you anyone else who hasn't spoken yet before we go to the go to our second rounds all right so i have for second round i have counselor strezzo cancer link and counselor hold on counselor and then counselor hart i'm going to jump in have we not spoke yet and ask the vice president to uh Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for this presentation. I look forward to hearing the more detailed discussions of everything. But I wanted to, on the topic of restructuring and on some of the slides that are available on the agenda item this evening, I wanted to ask for a clarification. And you mentioned, and now I've forgotten, you just mentioned the nature of a department versus department or directors, right? And I have received some input or some questions from my colleagues on the city council regarding the department that includes one of the lines being city clerk. And I brought this to you as I just want to make sure no one's misreading this so could you clarify um just to to put an end to any any misunderstanding or concern um this this budget does not in any way change the nature of the city other than the the budget number itself um and and you know the downstream impacts of that but in terms of the um the reporting of the city clerk or any member of the city clerk staff um or the city council staff for that matter uh there's no change those folks will continue to report to the city clerk and and mine and i'll go one step further what you explained to me this morning was that um To a degree, some of that grouping was to ensure that the city clerk herself actually has a seat at the table. I'll stop talking. Can you please confirm that there's no changes to the reporting structure of the city clerk's office, the office itself, or the people within it?

three mr president to uh to counselor davis uh yeah i appreciate and anticipated that question uh you almost answered it yourself uh right there uh but yeah happy to report uh there's no change uh in reporting structure the city clerk reports to the city council uh we want to make sure that that is very clear uh to what counselor davis mentioned uh we want to make sure the city clerk has you know is incorporated that kick you know into the meeting structure that we have and that's where the city clerk is able to meet with that operations and systems cabinet and make sure that with all the collaboration going on that they are fully integrated from a meeting perspective into what we're looking to do as a city uh yeah nobody's trying to take away the city clerk from the city council I'll point out too on the subject of that, the law department is another good example where the law department also meets with the operations and systems department, but obviously the city attorney does not report to the CAO, the city attorney reports to the mayor. There are reporting structures and then there's organizational meeting structures and that's an important distinction. I'm really glad that you asked that question.

Through the president, thank you, Mr. Mayor. One clarification. You said that the city clerk remains reporting to the city council. The staff in the city clerk's office remain reporting to the city clerk, correct? And only the city clerk, correct?

Mr. President, through you to council, yes, an important distinction. The city clerk's office and the staff therein report to the city council. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm glad you brought that up, Mr. President. I was thinking about the same thing, too.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Second round, let's be as reasonably brief as we can. Councillor Strezzo and then Councillor Link and Hardin.

Well, Mr. President, if I had remembered this when I was talking the first time, I would have just asked that question the first round, but I'm back, and I'll ask it the second round then. Really quick, through you to Mr. Mayor, can you talk a bit about the affordable housing initiatives you mentioned put into this budget, building low-income and family housing, and what that looks like allocated in the budget going into FY 27.

Mr. President, through you, absolutely so glad you asked about that, Counsel. It's one of the things I spend a lot of time on is trying to drive that home. I met yesterday with the new Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities. We had a very good meeting, and I laid out what I want to see for our city, which is Going full speed ahead after affordable housing and those opportunities, we've seen some really good projects spring up. The ones we mentioned, including the one I always point to is 299 Broadway, where as a counselor with many of you, we voted enthusiastically for that UCTF. to go put our money as a city where our mouths are in affordable housing and subsidize that. The kind of projects I want to see are deeply affordable and a lot of family-sized units that will keep families in some role, because we know families are under immense displacement pressure just because of the dearth of family-sized units in our city. One thing I might be coming back to you all with soon admittedly slightly outside the budget front. You'll tell me if this is germane, but looking at whether we could satisfy the 20% inclusionary zoning requirement through FAR to allow more family sized units. So we're engaging staff. I'll tie it to the budget, through the budget to work on initiatives like that to where how we can get more of the kind of housing built in this city that I think we all wanna see, which are the developments that keep people in our city and don't lead to the displacement of our residents.

Thank you for that. So would that look in implementation more of community partnerships or are you speaking municipally built projects or municipally funded?

Mr. President, through you, Yes, and one of the things I talked about, and it's gonna take a lot of staff work on this, but it's something I'm really excited about is, it's a spoiler for Monday and the Gilman Square Neighborhood Council, but that home and site down there and figuring it out. what we can do to make the most of that site. That is an amazing site. We own that outright. The cost basis for that is minimal. It's going to take staff bandwidth on this, but I'm really excited to see what we can do with this. I talked to the Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities at length about this yesterday, that that's such an exciting opportunity to really go do something groundbreaking and really, really meaningful that really moves the needle on affordable housing. And if I get my way, on affordable early childhood education as well.

There we go. Let's see, so I have Councillor Link and then Councillor Hart.

Thank you, Mr. President. I just wanted to go back to actually something that I was asking about before because I realized I didn't quite finish. We're obviously looking right now also at a few different big cost items that we don't really know about yet. What debt service projections do we have for things like the Winter Hill School? We've got CSO looming over us, all that kind of stuff. I'm just, how close to the bone are we?

Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Excuse me. Not very close. that being said our our needs are extraordinary and immense just like every other community especially the inner core communities the process we go through to evaluate that again we stick to our financial metrics again 30 of of past year's revenue and stabilization funds um you know keeping below preferably you know eight or nine percent of our operating budget towards debt service maintaining 1.5% of our budget to go towards pay-as-you-go capital. These are things that we call measures of financial health. They're best practices. We stand on the shoulders of groups like the Government Finance Officers Association. The process by which we evaluate that is as soon as the budget is approved, me, my team, we start working on the next year's budget and thinking not just one year ahead, but five years ahead. even taking a peek at 10 if we can, in order to identify not only the capital projects we wanna undertake, but also the impact of that on the general fund budget. Again, making sure that we stay within our metrics, but also that we don't push it to the limit and limit our flexibility in the future, right? As I think folks know, debt service needs to be paid first legally. We don't wanna put ourselves in a position where that's putting pressure on the services that we need to provide for residents. Thank you.

Yeah, that's good. Okay, Councillor Hart.

Thank you, Mr. President. I have a couple of questions, but I think they'll all be fairly brief. One is through you, Mr. President, to you, Mr. Mayor. You mentioned in the budget the teen space, the new teen space. I would like you to say more about that. And also, I know a priority for many years is the community being able to use the high school after hours, and I wonder if that is in this budget as well.

Mr. President, through you, I really appreciate those questions. Yeah, the TAB, we pay Tufts to rent that. we just there's space there that was not being used at all and our thought was let's go stand up a teen center there uh the previous teen center at the edgely was hugely popular i know counselor strezzo saw that as well first hand like i did it left a real hole in the community when that had to go away when the winter hill school was displaced it then displaced the teen center we're very excited to bring a teen center back online my vision is to have teen centers east central and west maybe even north and south in this city we're going to start with with the tab and at the last school committee meeting actually i was really heartened to hear the superintendent bring up this this work that we want to collaborate on which is figuring out how to open up that high school There are logistical issues we have to work out. There are operational issues. There will be financial issues we'll have to work out, but I think it's really worth going down that path. I think that that would do so much for us as a community if we figure out how to open up that gem of a high school, 280-some million dollars for it. I'm here for that and we're gonna put in the work along with the schools to see what we can do there. I think that would just really lift our community.

Great, thank you. My next question is if you could speak to the, on the organizational chart and personnel of the page of the budget book, because HHS was reorganized, it looks like 40 positions were cut. So I'm wondering if you could explain how many of those you know, were actually cut versus how many were reorganized into other departments?

You want me to take this or you want to take it?

Thank you, Mr. President, through you, Councillor Hart. We have a page in the front of the book that shows personnel. I think that's what you're referring to. So my recommendation would be to take these, they're grouped in the cabinet, I'm sorry, in the department structure. So we've got notes of where folks went. I think one of the challenges in building this year's budget does the sort of significant change and the movement of positions, I think I'm feeling really good about the impact of that. From a budget perspective, it was difficult. So we have that guide for where those folks are coming from and going to. Again, this goes for all the councillors. If you have questions, please let us know. And if we can be more clear, we're happy to do that. But I would say go to that. It's in the budget overview section. I was just looking at it and I tried to log into my computer, but that's where to go to find that information.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. President. Through you, I apologize in advance to the finance team. It's just, you know, this is the first budget that I've ever been through where there's been cuts, and it's clearly a noticeable difference. Usually it's like bread and circus. Everybody's cheering after every applause line the mayor says. We're all, you know, and it's just a totally, you know, this definitely stinks to have these layoffs. And I just want to ask because, you know, Mr. Mastroboni just said that they forecast out a few years, and I'm just looking back at 2024 to 2025, went up 20 million, 2025, 26, went up 20 million, so 40 million over the last year. And we all knew that this was coming, so I'm just curious, was there a big ticket item that I'm not thinking of that got us into this hole?

Mr. President, the biggest ticket item is the new growth, right? The slope of the growth, the trajectory of our city has been the envy of all of our neighbors. If I be someone who could predict the economy, and there's the second half of that joke, I can't think of it. We'll buy some lottery tickets together, right? So I think the biggest change is the trajectory. We've had a nearly 75% decrease in our new growth over the past couple years. Just like every other community, we just don't have the resources to sustain the base budget. You've heard from Director Bean consistently about the importance of maintaining your base budget.

Thank you for that, through you, Mr. President. I'm not trying to money more than a quarterback. Obviously, you know, none of us want to be in this position. I'm just, I was just looking for maybe that there was some big-ticket item because, like, how do we know that we've done enough now that we're not going to be, you know, revenues are projected to still go down again? Is that correct?

Ms. President, we're projecting, at least right now, things change. We're projecting to continue this $5 million new growth for the foreseeable future. Again, we're subject to the same issues as every other city and town, unfortunately. The other thing I'll add is health insurance has been a real struggle over the past few years. That's the thing that jumps out to me immediately.

i'll leave it at that thank you you know i absolutely know that the gic has gone up multiple uh increases over the last few years that's really croaked a lot of cities and towns um i just want to highlight that because you know um you know i commend anybody who runs for mayor coming into dark times like they know that that this is what's ahead of them and um you know i i just want to say that i i really this is a really crappy position to be in But I do feel like a lot of thought and care was put into it. And I think things could have been a lot worse. And that's not to say that I've been laid off and I've been fired, you know, in my life. You know, so, you know, my heart is with all those who lost their positions. But I just want to say that, you know, thank you for doing the best you can with this team. Thank you all.

Councillor Scott.

Thank you, Mr. President. I'm not going to disclose how many decades it's been since I was fired from something, but I appreciate Councillor Klingon's solidarity there. And I also want to acknowledge that as somebody who has run a business for 17 years and had to let people go, I know it's hard. I know it's a lot to go through. And the buck stops there, as it were. I did want to just clarify one thing. I think on slide 18 of the presentation here, it mentioned that closing the gap that the layoffs reduced $2 million in budget space, right? Am I reading that right?

Mr. President, through you, by way of Director Mastroboni? Yes, approximately. Okay.

all right uh i guess i appreciate that you know those two vacant director level positions uh were removed you know two out of thirty i haven't done the math to see how many of the uh like 738 uh city general fund positions um that would be i i don't know what that percentage is um but hey two out of thirty maybe sounds right there i guess uh Mr. President, what continues to stick with me is we have a lot of vacant positions in the police department and we have a staffing study that was published in 2023 that talks about the elimination of eight sworn officer positions to be replaced by anywhere from one sworn officer and four civilian positions to as many as 15 civilian positions. but at the low end of their recommendations and this is from page 47 of that report it's an extra six hundred thousand dollars if we just followed the recommendations of the 2023 staffing study and i would just respectfully ask through you why this budget has completely passed over the police department why these reductions have completely passed over the police department

uh mr president through you uh there were reductions uh to the police department uh they were not there were there were lines that were cut um in terms of the recommendations in here the chief and i meet on a regular basis i found the chief to be a very good partner in this and one of the things we're gonna be looking to do is what what can we do going forward to carry out more of these recommendations in there

Well, thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Further questions on the item? All right, seeing none, thank you, Mr. Mayor, thank you, Director Mastamoni, Director Beane. We will refer this one to the Committee on Finance. There are, as I said at the outset, one, two, three, four, five, six other items in Section 7 that all are specific requests for appropriations. In the interest of transparency, Council will ask that we read these ones out. If you want to take these up together, Yes, please. I want to take these up. Unless there's no objection, we'll take up 7.2 through 7.7 together. Madam Clerk, if you don't mind, get your reading voice ready and read these through for us. All right, 7.2, item number 26-0953, requesting the appropriations of $794,782 to fund the fiscal year 2027 Kennedy School Pool Enterprise Fund budget.

7.3, item number 26-0954, requesting the appropriations of $237,500 to fund the fiscal year 2027 Dillboy Fields Enterprise Fund budget. Next, 7.4, item number 26-0970, requesting the appropriations of $238,791 from the Kennedy School Pool Enterprise Fund retained earnings to support the fiscal year 2027 Kennedy School Pool Enterprise Fund budget. 7.5, item number 26-0969, requesting the appropriations of $86,200 from the Dillboy Fields Enterprise Fund retained earnings account to subsidize the fiscal year 2027 Dillboy Fields Enterprise Fund budget. Next, 7.6 item number 26-0968, requesting the appropriation or reserve of $8,367,344 in estimated fiscal year 2027 Community Preservation Act revenue for CPA projects and expenses. 7.7 item number 26-0948, requesting the approval of the expenditure limitations for departmental revolving funds for fiscal year 2027.

Thank you, Mr. President. I move to refer these to the Finance Committee.

Those items are all referred to the Committee on Finance. Next item, Madam Clerk.

Yes. 8.1, item number 26-0974, Superintendent of Schools Conveying the School Department Budget for Fiscal Year 2027.

Thank you. So as has been my practice, because of a conflict of interest, I will recuse myself from discussions specific to the school committee budget and hand it over to the vice president.

And sorry, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I'm also recusing myself from this proceeding.

The record reflects that Councillor Klingon is also recused. So, Mr. Superintendent, you have the floor. Oh, okay. Maybe we can take a five minute recess and then we'll come back in. Mr. Mastroboni, I'm listening.

Thank you.

Well, my sense is that

I never know.

Thank you.

Thank you.

you

Madam Clerk, could you call the roll to establish a quorum, please?

Yes. Councillor Ewing-Campen. Here. Councillor Link. Here. Councillor... Oh, Barry.

Councillor Link. Here. All right.

Councillor Scott.

Present.

Councillor Klingon. Councillor Strezzo. Councillor Saeed. Here. Councillor Wheeler.

Here.

Councillor Hart. Here. Councillor McLaughlin. Here. Councillor Umbau.

Present.

And Councillor Davis. With eight present, you have quorum.

Good. What's the next item? Can you read the next two items together, Madam Clerk?

Yes. Next, we're on 8.1, item number 26-14. All right, thank you, Councillor Schrezzo. Item number 26-0974, Superintendent of Schools Conveying the School Department Budget of Fiscal Year 2027. And item number 26-0975, School Committee Chair Conveying the School Department Budget for Fiscal Year 2027, approved by the School Committee Finance and Facilities Subcommittee on May 20th, 2026.

Superintendent Cameron, welcome. You have the floor.

Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you to the members of the City Council. I wonder if I'm going to have access to the actual slides. You should.

Yes, I can get that up for you.

While we wait, I would like to see René Higuita. You know that. Is Colombia part of the World Cup? Well, we'll see.

Well, I can start talking, but I wanna make sure that there will be part of my talking points. So as we load them up, I'm gonna start. First of all, thank you. I think that in huge part, the outcomes that we have this year have been the investments that were facilitated through the school committee and obviously through the city council. So thank you for your support and your generosity. I always tell my kids and my team that a budget is more than just numbers, is more than revenues and expenses. And I feel that it's, It's similar to an x-ray. It reveals our intentions and our commitments to the values we uphold. It is also a window in how we build coherence across the system through one of our most significant and more powerful tools, which is finances and the budget. So our budget does exactly that. It shows how we are as a district and who we are as a district and what we truly prioritize for our kids. So in front of you is basically the roadmap of the conversation tonight. I'm going to highlight some of the successes and the impact of the investments that we have this year have in our community. We will also highlight the budget priorities. And I also will bring our CFO, Dr. Barreta, to talk about the cost drivers and as well as a comprehensive summary of the proposed budget, both on the personal and the non-personal side. So I want to start by, next slide please. Highlighting some of the members that actually have helped us in the process, our thought partners, if you will. I also want to thank all the departments that have joined us in revising and scrutinizing their budgets to support students. My central office, obviously members are here. Thank you. also principals and department heads, as well as key stakeholders, the PTAs, the SEU leadership, as well as the mayor's office. We meet with them during budget season around pretty much every week to talk about numbers and to scrutinize the impact that they have in our students. So, this is a true collective effort, and it starts always with a process of assessing what are our investments, mainly around staffing, curriculum, and all the other materials that on a regular basis we purchase. And the process allows us to ensure that the driving outcomes is centered on students. From there, we engage with our school leaders and our department heads, and then we bring all this information through the executive team to determine what these inputs will do for achievement for our kids. And that's how the process begins it begins with basically an assessment of the current inputs and then We go through a collaborative effort that yields often the focus around instruction and high quality instruction And the pros once the process concludes it begins again and again so I wanted to thank you and to thank the school committee for the work that they always do in being a thought partner in this process and So next slide. We always have to start with a why. Next slide. And our why is we are creating the conditions for learning where every student is seen, heard, acknowledged, challenged, and celebrated for their gifts. This is our most important priority. Our budget process is grounded in that vision. every investment is filtered through it and as we review current spending and consider new requests we ask a simple but critical question does this strengthen the conditions for learning and improve outcomes for students this ensures that our resources are aligned not just to the needs but to the experience we want every student to have in our district Next slide. I'm gonna highlight some of the impact that the investments that you have approved or that you approved last year are clear to you. And if you look at the first one basically is, this is the first time that we met our targets for our MLE students. We in K through eight since the pandemic, we haven't received, the Department of Ed gives us a rubric between one through four. So this time around, based on the preliminary data that we got, we got a four on the K through A grade span, and then a three in the high school. So it's a one through four scale. So some years we have not met that target, and some other years we have met a two, a three, but this is the year in which we actually have the highest performance across both grade spans. I also wanted to highlight that our reading baseline has increased for our students by five percentage points, and also there are some other tangibles that we can cite, which is the number of students in CTE who participate who are MLE, multilingual learners. It has gone from there was a significant increase from 83 to 154 students. Obviously the reason for that was because we put some structures in place, some resources, some paraprofessionals that allow that integration of students into a program as complex as CTE. And also we have had, based on the tools that we use for assessment, the DIBELS and the iReady have shown a steady increase in reading and math across the board. Next slide. Another point of celebration is the work that has happened through the budget process. We are creating a more transparent budget process, thanks to the work that has happened through our finance department. And also, if you look at the CT and the scale changes that we have had, in 2024, we actually have a strong partnership with the scale. So the scale is the adult learning that is housed at the top building. There is a strong partnership with the CTE program, so we offer a night program at the high school. In 2024, we started with an early ed and CNA program. Again, these programs are industry credentials, so every student who comes out of that program is employable, if you will. so in 2024 we have early ed and cna in 2025 we added hvac and facilities maintenance and for next year we're working on adding electrical and automotive through a grant that we're getting through the state so that still hasn't been finalized but um most likely that's something that will happen so i just wanted to highlight the fact that these are very tangible outcomes that have happened as a result of the investments that the district as well as this body has has made The other piece is that there are some significant increases on indicators of social emotional need. So the number of reductions that we have had on suspensions and the number of, and then the decrease of the number of students that are, the referrals to office referrals has decreased significantly. As well as attendance, our attendance is above the state average. And finally, I didn't know you were aware, but this year our robotics team has the strongest showing that we have had since robotics has been in place. So that was, again, part of the investment that has been done across the board. Next slide. And then there's another source of celebration. I think that when you go to, I don't know if any of you joined Class Day, I know that Councilor Stresso was there, but every time students are going through their ceremony of Class Day, most of them actually highlight what is the where are where do we end up at the end of the of the of their um high school uh trajectory and so most of them have a pathway that either is laid through the city or through a college access the one thing that i'm really impressed uh is that we don't have it in here but the number of students that are attending Bunker Hill Community College has increased significantly. So a 25% increase from last year. What I hear from the counselors is that the amount of work that happens to make sure that our students go through that process is quite an undertaking. not only from signing, but from walking the students to take the courses, identify taking the kids there to Bunker Hill, engaging with the families. So these are weeks and weeks of support. And that is, again, thanks to the result of the resources that have been laid out for that. When we talk about equity, to me this is a true equity in action celebration. And again, there is a sampling of all the colleges that our students attend, and that's in huge part the accomplishment of the work that happens at the high school. Next slide. I also want to connect the work that happens at a high level in terms of our strategic plan and the work that happens through our budget. So as you might be familiar with our strategic plan, there are four big pillars, academic excellence, equity and access, wellness and joy, and family and community engagement. And I want to highlight that our budget process is how we bring these commitments to life. Every investment we make is intentionally aligned to these priorities, ensuring that our resources are not just allocated but directed in ways that strengthen outcomes and experience for our students and our community. Next slide. I also want to make sure that I highlight the complexities of the fiscal landscape that we face. As you know, there is a significant uncertainty around the policies from this administration towards education. So even the fact that our Department of Ed was questionable as far as how the guidance that we get from the Department of Ed has changed. We know that many of our neighboring communities have faced layoffs, as well as difficult financial situations. And there is also, as you know, the financial uncertainty that we all experience, and it's also reflected in how we manage our finances at a district level. Despite all these challenges, I think it is clear that we remain committed to multiple things. One of those things is that we continue to be centering our students, our families, and our staff to make sure that that commitment is not diminished. We continue to maintain our staffing levels and our classrooms and our classrooms, our students, the teacher to student ratio continue to be the same. And we continue to advocate at the state and city level for support for public education. And what you will see in this budget is that there is also a strong push for building and increasing our coherence. The idea is not to go wider, but to go deeper. Next slide. And I am going to pass the baton to Dr. Bobby Barretta, who is gonna get deeper into the numbers. And so, Dr. Barretta, join me.

Thank you. Thank you, Superintendent Carmona. Dr. Barretta, will you please introduce yourself for the record? Yes, my name is Dr. Bobby Barretta. I am the Chief Financial Officer of Somerville Public Schools. Mr. President, through you, good evening, everyone, esteemed counselors. I'm very excited to be here and present this budget proposal to you all tonight. I believe it represents a balance of fiscal prudence and also strategic investments needed to make Somerville Public Schools the premier district that families deserve. Before we get into specific numbers behind the budget, I recognize that this is a more challenging budget year than in recent past. As a result, I want to spend some time explaining what's driving the increased costs behind the proposal that we are putting forward for FY27. The first is enrollment. As you can see, we've been very fortunate as a district that our enrollment has held steady over the last few years. We believe this highlights the success not only of our community, but also of our school system, especially as many other districts around the state see their enrollments decline. Next slide. In FY27, we are fortunately projecting enrollment to remain steady and even gain ever so slightly. And again, the steady enrollment is the key reason why our budget proposal this year was focused on continuity. We aimed to provide a level service budget so that we can continue serving the same number of students with the same proportion of resources as we did this year. Even so, a level service budget does require more dollars to maintain that continuity because costs for people, goods, and services all increase. And so I want to take some time in the next few slides to explain those increases. The first is, and the largest driver of our level service budget, is the people, the staff that we invest in to educate our students and keep them safe and supported. As this slide here shows, new contracts with over 75% of district staff are increasing salaries by an average of 8.19%. Even so, investing in staff is critically important. We want the best staff working with our students, and as a result, it's appropriately expensive. Next slide. We are also continuing to invest in special education in Somerville. We're adding five new special education teachers to help alleviate caseload pressures and provide more support to our students. We're also increasing our out-of-district tuition and transportation budgets significantly to reflect student need and increasing tuition rates. The net increase here is approximately $1.6 million overall. And I also want to emphasize the note at the bottom there that about $3.5 million will be charged to our Circuit Breaker. About $3.5 million of those out-of-district tuition costs will be charged to our Circuit Breaker. Circuit Breaker is a state reimbursement program that helps districts offset costs associated with special education and helps reduce the financial burden on this municipality and many others. I'm going to come back to this adjustment in later slides because I want to make sure that all of our stakeholders are clear about the investments we're making in special education, and we're making a few accounting shifts to reflect that. Regarding substitutes, as the mayor said, we do invest in substitutes because we believe it's really important that our students don't miss learning. We want them to have a great learning experience every day, even when their teachers need to take some time off. Unfortunately, as you can see, our budget over the last several years did not reflect the actual need for substitutes. So in FY26, we budgeted just $715,000 for substitutes, but we are already on track to invest about $1.35 million. And this gap tells us that the prior budgets were not actually aligned with the actual operating need. And in fact, as you can see here, we've had to adjust our substitute budget even as costs continue to increase. I'm sorry, we had not adjusted our substitute budget as costs had continued to increase. In FY27, our budget proposal attempts to be more responsible and realistic regarding substitutes. We do require them to cover parental leaves and daily absences that occur naturally throughout the course of the school year. And as I said, to ensure that students continue to get great instruction even when their classroom teachers need to take time off. Next slide. Our transportation costs are also going up, and we sometimes look at transportation purely as an operational cost, but I wanna make the argument that it really is an access cost. Our transportation budget allows several thousand students to access the free and amazing high quality public education that we provide here in Somerville. So those are the major cost drivers shaping the budget for FY27, and over the next few slides, I'm gonna dig into the specifics of our budget proposal for next year. I wanted to start with just a note about a line item budget because we did hear the call from multiple stakeholders when I assumed this role last year. Multiple stakeholders said we really don't have enough transparency with our budget. We heard this from parent groups, from concerned citizens, from the school committee, Even members of this council here said, hey, you're not telling us enough about where all our dollars are going. And so we're proud to offer documents that you'll find in the packet tonight. These are the building blocks of our soon to be published budget book that I believe offer a full accounting of every dollar that we're requesting from the council. I think you'll find also that this year's budget documents and presentation do provide a higher level of detail than maybe has been shared in previous years. And we're proud of that. And that's intentional. We need those dollars to support the work that we're doing with our students and staff. And we want to be held to appropriately high expectations for how we steward them. Next slide. So this slide shows the basic reality of our budget and many district budgets. The overwhelming majority of our investment is in the people, the educators, the specialists, the paraprofessionals, the administrators, and counselors, nurses, custodians, clerks, and support staff who make school happen every single day. And that is why salary growth has such a significant effect on the overall budget. Even so, these investments really reflect our commitment to maintaining our staff, honoring negotiated agreements, and preserving the services that students and families rely on. And because personnel is such a large portion of this budget, I do want to spend just a moment unpacking what is actually driving the personnel increase.

Next slide.

So our personnel budget increases from approximately $94.9 million in FY26 to about $104.2 million in FY27. That's an increase of about $9.4 million. And there's two really important things to understand about this number. First, a significant cost, as I mentioned earlier, or a significant portion of this overall increase is driven by negotiated salary increases. Second, the year-over-year increase also reflects a one-time shift of $2.5 million in salaries that were previously charged to our Circuit Breaker account that we are moving back into our personnel account. Circuit Breaker really shouldn't be used to fund salaries because it's mostly associated with out-of-district tuition and transportation costs, and so we made that accounting shift. so again that's a one-time shift that that is not really like a an overall add to our budget and again that point really matters because it does make the proposed personnel budget look higher but it is not a new programmatic expansion of the same size it is really just a shift in where the costs are being carried like i said it's an important one to make because those circuit breaker dollars really are associated with transportation and out of district tuition and we should be charging apples to apples in our accounting The overall FTE change is relatively modest. Sorry, we're still on that previous slide. Thank you. It's just an increase of 2.0 FTE overall. So, you know, this is not a budget that we are building around a broad staffing expansion. It is primarily about maintaining services, honoring contracts, and properly accounting for costs. Next slide. I do want to note here, as the mayor mentioned earlier, and as several counselors mentioned, that the school committee, in our May 20th finance subcommittee meeting of the whole, voted to add $645,000 to our personnel or salary line, as is their purview. You can see those new numbers reflected here. That would amount to about... an additional $10 million in our salary line and an additional six teachers, so eight additional year-over-year staff members. Sorry, not just teachers, eight additional staff members year-over-year. Our goal would have been to specifically use those dollars to fund two additional special education inclusion classrooms and four additional intervention teachers. And we wanted to share this even though we know that the mayor's budget proposal reflects the superintendent's originally proposed budget. Next slide. So this slide here gives a fuller picture of the personnel changes in the budget. You can also see in the packet tonight a detailed list of all of the position changes year over year. There are some additions and there are some reductions. And overall, as I mentioned, the net change is small, but it does reflect our effort to align staffing with student needs and strategic priorities. The additions are concentrated really in areas that Dr. Carmona and our team have prioritized, and they're mostly focused on supporting our highest needs students in special education and in English language acquisition programs. We understood this year's overall budget would be more challenging than in years past, and that's why we really put a lot of effort into making reductions where enrollment program structure or service delivery models allowed us to do so. That allowed us to reinvest in some of those areas of need without ballooning our overall budget. Those reductions include some changes in MLE staffing, library aids, building substitutes, and a few other roles. Personnel, though, is only one side of the budget. The other side is our non-personnel budget. And the FY27 comparison requires a bit of explanation because the headline number can be misleading. Next slide. So at first glance, you might think that the non-personnel budget proposal appears to decrease by about $659,000, but this is not a cut to services. The main reason is that some costs previously associated with the non-personnel budget are moving to other funds. Most notably, like I mentioned earlier, that $3.5 million of out of district tuition we previously budgeted for in our non-personnel budget, but we are just shifting that to our circuit breaker because that is a better way to expend that state reimbursement account. In addition, we're moving about $192,000 from our special education proposal from non-personnel to personnel because we were previously contracting with a physical therapist and a physical therapist assistant and we thought it would better serve students to actually just hire those folks internally and it will also save us some money as well so to be clear the the proposed non-personnel budget line low is lower but that does not mean we are spending less on supplies materials and services for our students in fact we are investing more to ensure that our district reflects the core values of the city

Next slide.

Just to continue here, for FY27, we also used a more disciplined and equitable and transparent approach to non-personnel budgeting. Most of our budgets did receive a small bump to account for inflationary pressures, and this was especially critical on the school side because many of these non-personnel budgets had been level funded for years, meaning that department heads and principals could purchase less paper, fewer books, and fund fewer field trips each year because their budgets had been held level. We also looked at historical spending patterns of all of our non-personnel budgets, and seven out of those 35 non-personnel budgets were reduced based on their investment history. And we just believe that that's part of responsible stewardship. We don't want to just roll forward dollars where spending patterns show that the need does not exist. We've also added three new budget organizations to our non-personnel budgets. The CTE department, the finance department, and the HR department will all get their own budget orgs. And again, that's just a move to help improve transparency so that this body and all of our stakeholders understand how our dollars are actually being utilized. Next slide. I want to take a second just to sort of highlight how our approach is pushing more dollars to schools. And so this slide here reflects a major improvement in our budgeting process. We really centered equity. In the past, our school's non-personnel budgets were mostly shaped by history. Whatever a school had received the year before, what had been added over time or what happened to be in the account is what they got in the coming year. Now, that kind of approach can also unintentionally preserve inequities and foster wasteful spending and really does not align with our core value of being good stewards of public dollars. So for FY27, we're using an equity-driven funding formula that incorporates student demographics and distributes resources much more intentionally according to need. Just to point out there on the slide, you can see that, you know, previously East Somerville was one of our lowest funded schools on a per pupil basis. And through the new funding formula, we're actually driving more dollars to that school to reflect the need there. And we're very proud of that. And again, this does not mean that every school receives the same amount. That's not what equity is. It means we're simply asking what resources are really needed to support students well in each of our schools' contexts. We're also proud that every school budget increases this year. That gives principals and staff more flexibility to support school climate, to support academics, family engagement, and student experiences. The appropriation that we seek from this body is really the foundation of our budget, and it's not only the funding, and it's not the only funding, I should say, that we use to steward our district. We also have many grants that support critical services and positions and help to lessen the financial burden on our local government, and I want to spend a second highlighting that. So this slide summarizes our major federal and state grants. They total approximately $8.8 million. These grants support really important services and staff and help to offset the dollars that we request from this body in our appropriation. So putting all of this together, personnel and non-personnel grants, some of the cost shifts that I mentioned earlier, we arrive at the full FY27 budget proposal summary. Next slide. So the proposed, the district's proposed FY27 budget is approximately $122.5 million. Excuse me, that represents an increase of about $8.6 million over FY26, or about 7.58%. This is slightly above our typical annual growth, as the mayor had mentioned earlier. And again, the reason is really that our cost drivers that we reviewed earlier, those negotiated salary increases, special education costs, substitute costs, transportation, and then shifting some of those costs related to special education back to the Circuit Breaker Fund. It's important to connect this sort of bottom line dollar amount back to the overall context of the district. And I want to say that I do believe we are making incredible strides in our outcomes in Somerville. I've been in the district for just about two years, and we have a really brilliant executive team. We have incredible principals. We have hardworking teachers and support staff. and we are asking this body to invest accordingly to help maintain and build on that progress and really create the student-centered learning community where students can thrive. We believe at our heart that Somerville is and always should be not just a great place to live because we have amazing restaurants and fantastic culture, but because we are a great place to learn and grow because of our schools. Thank you so much.

Thank you for the presentation. At this point, before I open up the question, you know, I see Councilor Strezel is, you know, teed up and I will, I mean, so we have Strezel, we have Councilor Yuenkampen, Councilor Link, Councilor Said, Okay, so I will wanna just add some clarifying question before I open up to my colleagues. So the equity slide, can you put on the equity slide? Yeah, I don't see anything at the top. Like is it just, are you missing some levels or is that how you intended the slide to be?

Oh, column headers, I apologize. Sorry, yes. That's because we don't have as sophisticated budgeting software as the city does. We're working on that. So all of our budgeting is done through Excel. So this is actually just a screenshot of the non-personnel budgets that we have on Excel. The first column is the budget org. The second column is the name of the school. I do apologize for this. The third column is the FY26 appropriation, then the FY27 appropriation. the year-over-year percent increase, the dollar amount increase, and then the per-pupil funding.

Thank you for bringing that up as well, because I was confused about this slide, too. It doesn't even really detail what the colors mean, so I was hoping that we could also... figure that out too, so I'm glad you brought that up. So what do the colors mean while we're on this slide?

Through you, Mr. President. Yeah, so the blue and white are just the shading that you naturally see in an Excel table. The green and yellow labels are just really just a gradient from the smallest year-over-year percent increase to the largest. Just some very rudimentary, you know, Excel color grading.

So green means go or yes, and yellow means a little or a little bit of investment, and the slighter light green means a little bit more but not as much as the darker green?

Through you, Mr. President, I think the colors probably are less important than the actual percentage. So, you know, you can see there that Next Wave Full Circle, for example, is getting a year-over-year increase of about 3%, whereas East Somerville is getting a year-over-year increase of about 52%. The color scale is just the grading that Excel naturally applies there. I should have cleaned that up. I apologize.

Thank you. Thank you. Again, the point was just to say that slide could be optimized for more. I'll get back to you. Can we go to this personnel changes slide? Yes. I was just curious, I'm looking at this slide, I'm wondering, I don't see any mental health specialists. There's no mental health specialists in the district? Is that correct?

Through you, Mr. President, when you say mental health specialists, we do have counselors. We have guidance counselors. We have adjustment counselors. We have social workers. So we do have folks that work exclusively on mental health. We just didn't make any changes in those positions year over year.

Thank you, Dr. Baratta. And also, like, I see special education teachers five. Is that in the district, special ed? What is that ratio to the demand for special ed? Is that five special ed in the entire district?

Through you, Mr. President, yes, that's five additional teachers over the course of the district that would be assigned based on caseloads. We always like to sort of survey the demographic data at the start of the school year and then assign those special ed students according to our collective bargaining agreements we have We have a weighted caseload model that we've agreed to with the SEU that basically says we assign a certain number of students to a teacher. And so we try to cultivate or create our staffing plan accordingly.

Okay. And just one last clarifying question is, would you consider your budget a performance-based budget or is it a level service budget?

That's a great question, Mr. President. I would agree with the mayor's assessment. This is a level service plus budget. We started off with level service, and then you can see there we added two additional positions year over year. So level service plus.

So the district, because when I look at the results, like when you started the initial slide, I said, okay, this is how we expect to see result, and then you're assessing the performance of the district, how they are doing, based on what kind of methodology you're using, and then that's when you can find the gaps and how to meet them. So that is not how the district operates.

Dr. Barnum?

Through the president, Mr. President. And I heard you describe the district budget as a performance-based budget. So we try to allocate improvement along the inputs that we put into the system. But it's not that easy to say this one input, one special ed teacher will result in a change of two, increase in performance in I-Ready or Devils. So that correlation is very difficult to establish. We do look carefully at the impact that we have across the board as a district. If you remember, every school comes up here to talk about improvement plans, and that improvement plan is an aggregate of many inputs and many efforts. But let me just give you an example. We have new coaches, is that right? We have added 3.5 coaches to the system. We believe one of our theory of actions is that when we have more better knowledge around our instructional practices and our high quality instructional materials, the instruction will improve. And so that's, That's how we establish some level of correlation. It's not really a one-to-one correlation. It's very difficult. But in the aggregate, we have seen how some schools have made some significant improvements, like the improvements we have seen with the MLE in the MLE department has been a constant investment around both better instruction as well as better participation and inclusion models with the special ed teacher, the MLE teacher, and the classroom teacher. So those are some of the ways in which those hypotheses about performance, we follow them. It's like what is the outcome that we have right now, what changes do we put in place, and then we determine the improvements.

Thank you. I think that's a better response. No disrespect to Dr. Baratta, but I think you guys all mirror the whole thing, but it's good to, I was very confused about, like, I was looking at the budget. I was saying, when I see the results and everything, I was like, okay, this is based on some input, you've seen the assessment, this is how the results came through and then so you're measuring that and then you can see like the shortfalls. But the fact that I'm looking at the special education, I think that's like a whole nother conversation in terms of like I've spoken to a lot of, I've never really known how those kids are individually assessed in each district because they're still parents, as a public school parent myself, like sometimes you see a child Somebody said, oh, my child is partially deaf or my child is partially blind. But the district is doing a great job when they know that there's a resource. But sometimes it's about how to discover, capture those needs, how you assess them. If the parents themselves have to come and volunteer the kids or the district can actually assess in each classroom that this is like, I've identified this child that needs this particular, has this particular need, and then now they can also co, because it's like co-parenting, that we are parents, the teachers are also co-parenting with us. So sometimes we can see, you know, some issues, sometimes the teachers can also see some issues. But thank you, it's been great. Councillor Strezzel, you have the floor.

Thank you. I appreciate through you, Mr. President, to Drs. Barretta and Dr. Carmona. Thank you very much for this presentation. We'll start there. I would love to just highlight some wins, and I appreciate you investing in East Somerville Community School after years and years of longing personally for that to happen. taking that very directly on. I appreciate the commitment to hiring staff in-house instead of relying on outside contractors for certain departments, such as special ed. I have some serious concerns, however, with the presentation of the numbers and where we're going with this. Let me break this down for you. requested that the that the school budget is presented similarly as the city council budget and city budget is presented this one is over 500 nope this one's 450 plus pages this is last year's my current one is being printed, it is over 500 pages, especially in the fact that we are facing a over $5 million shortfall in funding. This has never mattered more. And including in the fact, additionally considering the fact that we have Over what quite a large number of new counselors city counselors this year in their first budget cycle and It's a lot of abbreviations and coming at you even just our slide presentations I'm trying to google what? FTE means Because I don't know And if I don't know, I'm certain that there may be counselors on this board that don't either. So even just basic breakdowns are useful and helpful to all of us. But also, especially considering that we are $5.5 million short and who knows what, having a detailed budget is more crucial than ever. So colleagues, I am hoping that some of us who are typing right now really just listen and really help me out with this because I think we really have to assess what we have in front of us. We need detailed budget line items for a very intricate system such as a school system. And to echo what our colleague, Councillor Scott, said, we need to really know what's going into what we're facing right now, especially in this budget crisis before us. And I was really, really hoping tonight and crossing my fingers, as I have been since March, crossing my fingers and hoping that we can learn more about the thought process of what went into this presentation of 10 PowerPoint presentation slides. I know this took a lot of work, and I respect that and appreciate that. However, I'd love to know, with the CTE program, the difference of funding of supplies that are going into this year's budget. and a breakdown of that. How will that affect the culinary department? How will that affect carpentry? How will that affect the electricians? What will that look like? Will unions be helping us if there are certain items or will they need to donate and step up? They always step up. Unions help us if we have to, if we have a shortfall of items that we can gain from, so that our students can learn. And how will that affect the nurses' offices per school? Has there been a decrease in the supplies that are going into each school's nurses' department, or even just toilet paper? What does that look like? I don't know. And so respectfully, I would like to know. I and then addition to that I see in our pluses and minuses of new staff and Increased or decreased I see an increase of just two chiefs of staff Where is that in the central office or chief of staff of a special What where is that coming from there are so many questions that I don't have answers for and and so we're Almost six million dollars short and we have to have these answers and I don't know what they are So I have very serious concerns with what we're looking, that's what's in front of us. And again, I asked for this in May with enough lead time enough lead time to to kindly just get more data because past school presentations last year and the year before that and the year before that we haven't had this information and that was while everyone was still figuring out How I sure fits in and how the pandemic fits in and now the dust has cleared and settled on that So that can't really be an excuse of why we can't received a detailed budget so here we are now and We still don't have one so respectfully Dr. Beretta you mentioned that you had plans to present a budget book when with what's the deadline on that?

Thank you so much. Through you, Mr. President. Respectfully, Councillor, the line item budget that you requested is present in all of the materials that are included in tonight's packet. Our budget does not look similar to the city's budget because they use a different software. Their software has an automatic budget book that produces their budget. We provided dozens of pages that I think do detail line by line where all of our dollars are going, salaries, non-personnel. There is a non-personnel budget for a detail for all of our 35 departments. You can see how they've broken down all of their proposed allocations there. So we're publishing the actual, sorry to answer the question, we're publishing our actual PDF in mid to late June.

Thank you, Mr. President. Yes, so it would be published mid to late June before a decision was able to be made.

Through you, Mr. President. Actually, the publishing is really just the compilation of all the documents that you currently have before us, before you all. Again, it's a little bit more complicated on the school's side because we don't have budgeting software that produces a budget book automatically like ClearGov does. So we're, you know, forced to sort of do this all manually through Excel. And again, you know, we've made tremendous progress, I think, year over year based on what was presented in years past to this body. And we're very proud of that.

Mr. President, to Dr. Retto, agreed, and this is not a slam, okay? I do appreciate, yes, what we have before us is definitely more than we had last year and the year before that, so I do appreciate that, and yes, I do see line items by school and staff, and I do appreciate that. I see that. It is, respectfully, 12 different PDF files, kind of not talking to each other, data not really talking to each other. And I wasn't aware, Mr. President, through you to Dr. Rota, that this was run on an Excel database. Just out of curiosity, what would budget software cost?

Through you, Mr. President. Great question. So we've actually gone through a procurement process and looked at several different budgeting softwares. The one that we're moving forward with is one that's widely used in Massachusetts. It's called My Budget File. It's fortunately also the lowest cost of all the options that we explored. Cleargov was one of those as well. I think our first year implementation costs will be $15,000 with an annual subscription cost of $12,000 to maintain the software.

Ms. President, through you, thank you for indulging me. So $15,000 has been, is the lowest cost and then, so in addition is a start of a 15K and then each additional month cost, this subscription is 12K per month. So the one time 15K and then each additional month 12K. Mr. President, through you to Dr. Beretta.

Thank you, Mr. President. Yes, that's correct. So it's just one tiny clarification there. It's $15,000 to initially implement the software. That's a lot of loading of our general ledger and running scenarios, loading our staffing plan, bringing in all of our salary tables. It's fairly complex work. We're sort of budgeting four to six hours a week for about 12 to 15 weeks to kind of get that done. And then it is $12,000 annually, not monthly. 12,000.

Awesome cost savings. I know it's not, but Ms. President, through you, is that included in this year's budget for the FY 27?

Through you, Mr. President. Where can I find that? Apologies. In one of the PDF documents that we are going to eventually compile into our budget book, I believe it's called non-personnel detail. And you can see a sort of line by line breakdown of each individual department's appropriation. Under the finance department's appropriation, I think we have $40,000 budgeted for budgeting software. But through the procurement process, we were able to come in a little bit lower.

Thank you very much for that. Very helpful. But again, I want to know more, and that's really where I'm going with this, is the details of per school. How much are office supplies going to be changing from last year to this year's budget? Is it going to be affected? And these details are critical in this, where everything is, everybody's stressed out about what we have to cut, hopefully not as much, but how does this reflect on the service delivery of our children, of our families, of our teachers? That's what I'm looking at. That's the broader picture of what I'm trying to get to. And the only way I can determine that is happening is through looking at these line by line budgets deeper than really deeper in a book of a 400 page book or whatever, something a little more. Give me a little more. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the conversation and I look forward to ongoing. But at this point, I do not feel comfortable with what we have just yet. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Strezzel. The takeaway is that we're... Can I just ask a clarifying question? Is it on this item?

The school committee goes over the budget, correct? Through the chair to the director? Through the chair. Yes, that's correct, Councilor. Thank you. And we can't make any changes to the school budget even if we wanted to, correct?

recording in the chair that's my understanding based on the legal discussion that happened earlier thank you very much thank you thanks for you and company thank you mr president through you thank you superintendent everyone here all the staff uh school committee this is my first budget year with a student in the somerville public schools it's a special year for me uh we've had a wonderful pre-k year um So through you, Mr. President, my question is, I've been hearing from many constituents, I'm sure this won't be a surprise, who are really concerned about the proposal to change course on the decision the school committee made several years ago to stop having full-time police officer at the high school, a student resource officer, an SRO. I've heard a lot of concern that the decision is being reversed, and in particular, As I understand it, there was a recommendation at that time to go with a model called the Student Liaison Officer, an SLO, which would be specially trained officers who are the folks kind of dedicated, they know how to work with the schools, but they're located offsite instead of 100% of their time in the school building from what i understand the ballantyne administration didn't pursue this kind of did the first part of ending the sro program but then never took any steps towards creating an slo the off-site uh program um so my question through you is whether the district is actively considering following up with the student liaison officer model which was you know unanimously recommended by the school committee after this very extensive community process

Thank you for that question, Counselor Yuenkampen. You read everybody's mind around the horseshoe.

Mr. President, let the record show I did not read Counselor Schrezo's mind. Thank you for clarifying. Okay, okay.

Through the President, thank you for the question. So yes, there's a lot of It's interesting because there are a lot of rumors as to what is the intent of what we're trying to do. We even haven't had the benefit of the doubt as to what is it and where are we heading with this question. Part of my inquiry was there was a process that was started, was left halfway, there was no MOU out of that, and we still have some concerns around safety and security and how do we create the conditions for success in that relationship when it comes to supporting our kids, especially at the high school. So I am interested in asking the question of what would it take to get to that agreement or what is the agreement that is feasible that encompasses concerns around making sure that our students don't end up in a criminalized track and also how do we make sure that we support our building principles with the needs that have been identified. And granted, these are things often that require police expertise when it comes to, you know, if a student is coming in to steal a bike or there's something that happens outside of the school that comes into the school, things of that nature that are within the Model MOU criteria, the three items that have been outlined by the Model MOU that has been used as a reference as well. But the short answer to that is this, the SLO option, it is one of those, is we, again, we don't have a preconceived notion of like what's the outcome, we want to make sure that we are able to respond to the needs both of the highest schools as well as understand the context that we have in Somerville.

Mr. President, through you, thank you for that. I'm very glad to hear that the SLO model is still on the table. I think having served on the school committee for a couple of years, not when this discussion was really active, but in the aftermath, I just know how much work went into that and I'm I'm here tonight not as an expert on this topic. Obviously, I respect the work that the school committee does on this. But just to kind of amplify the concerns that I've heard from the community. So thank you for this. And I, you know, speaking as one counselor, I hope that we can move in that direction.

Thank you, Councilor Yuenkamp. And Councilor Strauss, if you don't mind, I can just do it like a sweep around the whole show.

Yes, absolutely. It was on the point that Councilor McLaughlin made. you want to put me back in the queue you put me back in the queue if you want yes uh through you too counselor mclaughlin yes thank you so much for recognizing and making sure that the public is aware um and uh hope that uh not explaining anything to any of the counselors here but yes that is uh should be recognized that yes it is a up or down vote that the city council makes an up or down vote on this, and with that, have a up or down vote that correct the school committee is the entity that makes the individualized opinions on this. However, again, in consideration of what Councillor Scott said earlier, and if we were all listening and actively listening to what the conversation on that was, and also in consideration of the fact, again, that there are staff cuts this year. And for many of us on the council, this is the first time that it's happened at this heavy of a level and also with such a loss of millions of dollars that we're facing, I think it is very critically important to not just make a quick up or down vote on a decision like that.

Thank you, Councillor Streza. Councillor Link.

thank you mr president through you um i have well i guess first of all thank you for this presentation um i thought it was great um i i i do appreciate the um especially knowing now that it's all done um in excel the monumental effort that this must have been to make this even possible. So I'm very happy to hear that you'll be able to use your time better once there's an actual budget book software and get us better looking budget stuff in the future. But still, which is not to do, I do not want to at all degrade the effort that had to go into this. So thank you. My question is, I guess around the, I noticed on the equity, I'm sorry, I've got like five different, I see that there's an 8% increase, but I know that that school is also going to be taking on the AIM. This is for the non-personnel budgets. I also know that that school is going to be taking on the AIM program, or at least part of it. Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this. uh so i i just want to make sure that that that's actually going to be um enough for for the school um and i saw that it was so there's going to be which on the personnel side um it looked like we've got uh for full-time employees like an increase of 11 for the special ed paras and then five for the um for the actual teachers uh which looked great, but then I was curious because then I looked at the Capilano School and it looked like it was gonna have 13 fewer special ed teachers. I wonder if those were related as well.

Dr. Baratta. Through the chair. Thank you so much for the question, counselor. So a couple of things there. First, the non-personnel budget. Again, this is the first year that we've used this sort of equity-driven formula to drive resources to the schools. To be transparent, I do think that we're gonna have to re-tinker the formula in future years, but I think in consultation with Principal Soto there and Special Ed Director Arellano, we feel very confident that even if that non-personnel budget isn't sufficient to support, let's say, some of the field trips that they're gonna do with the new students that are gonna be there, that we can supplement that from our special education budget or from another budget area. So very much hear the concern, and yes, that's something that we're working to address. In addition to just constantly looking at that formula, especially next year, and making sure that it's really driving resources according to student need. On the staffing side, I think the staffing adjustments that you noted there do reflect the shift in the program from Capuano to Argentiano, and I think there were some other shifts in there that I'm sure Director Arellano could speak to more specifically. Suffice to say, we do feel confident that we have the right amount of staff in that school to support the incoming students. Fantastic, thank you.

And then I guess the last thing I hope, you know, I'm looking at this and I see that we've drastically, you know, for the non-personnel budget, drastically increased at East, which I think is great, but I do still note that it's per student is actually still one on the low side. So I do hope that we can continue to add to that in future years.

Thank you, Mr. President, through you. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for providing more detail this year. Every year we'd like to have more, but actually, can you tell me, are you the only person who works on you know, like all these numbers, you know, because in the city we have, you know, a whole department. Just curious. That's my first question.

Through the chair. Yes, counselor. I am in conjunction with my deputy finance person. We work on the budget all by ourselves. We do not have a budget department in the school department. But we do feel very confident in our ability to do it. And it is very time consuming.

Yeah. So thank you. Thank you for your work through you, Mr. President. So as a former educator in some of the public schools, I wanna highlight some of the things that stood up to me during the presentation. I've seen increased investments in special education, in substitutes and transportation. These were things that we you know every year you know as a district you know we try to do more of so really glad to see this especially the substitutes you know part now that we have sick leave we have paid parental leave uh that stress when educator goes on a sick leave and you have to send materials, and if you go on parental leave, we're talking like 12 weeks. So really, really glad to see that we're investing in this, and the students are having consistency. And then another one also that Dr. Ocomoni mentioned is the 25% increase in student attending Bunker Hill. Really glad to see this as well as we've seen over the years that many students, they go to college, they don't really know what they wanna do. Now the money is spent, they have loans. So really glad staff are working with students every student who is interested in doing this and learning more about it. And it's cheaper. When I first moved to the US, I did take classes at Bunker Hill, and it really saved me a lot of money. And then another thing that you mentioned, Dr. Comone is the electric automotive for CTE. We'd love to learn more about that, but we can do that offline. And lastly, the transparency, like the plan to have more transparency for HR budget and CTE budget. So thank you for that. I did have a few questions about the personnel changes summary. The section, the staff additions section. Chief of Staff, this was mentioned by Councilor Strezio. Could you please just give us more detail? Chief of Staff, it says two.

Through the chair that may have been a typo it's actually a point to adjustment to the chief of staff, so we have a chief of staff this year. The chief of staff, you know, for I think personal professional reasons decided to step down to like a point eight so four day a week role. Our chief of staff current chief of staff is transitioning to a new professional venture and so. I think in consultation with the school committee and the superintendent, they just felt like that position has been such an important liaison between the city and the school department that we wanted to bring it back full time. So that is really just bumping up that position from what is currently budgeted as a 0.8 to a 1.0.

Thank you for the clarification through you, Mr. President. And the other one for staff additions is teacher 0.6. It says just teacher.

Dr. Baratta? Through the chair. Yes, I believe that is a, is that the 0.6 reduction or the 0.6?

This is addition. Okay. And then there's a staff reduction of teacher and it's just one. Since it just says teacher, no title, could you just clarify that?

Yes, I believe both of those positions are additions and reductions at the high school. It was just, I think, the current position was the person who held that position was retiring, and so I think the decision was made to just kind of close it out. And then they were adding back a 0.6 to have a full-time teacher to accompany what was previously budgeted as a 0.4.

Through you, Mr. President, so it's just a teacher at the high school, but we don't know what their position exactly, like what department, if you have that information.

Through the chair. I don't have the exact information off the top of my head, but I can consult and get back to you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Say. Councillor Hutt.

Thank you so much. Through you, Mr. President. Thank you both so much for the presentation. I really appreciate it. Just a quick question, again, on the personnel changes summary. One thing that caught my eye was on the staff reduction side, the five for the SEI-1 teachers. I'm wondering if you could explain more about that.

Through the Chair, Councillor, thank you for the question. Great question. A decision that I think was made to sort of close that SEI1 program with a lot of care and consideration. I think the biggest driver behind that decision was the low enrollment of that program. And again, knowing that it was a difficult budget year, I think internally, the superintendent in conjunction with MLE director Metropolis really took a hard look and said, actually, we can better utilize the dollars associated with those positions to support our MLE community in other ways. So that was why the difficult decision was made to sort of consolidate that program and reallocate those resources.

Through the chair, so we have two programs, SEI programs, one at the Healy and one at the Agenciano. Given the fact that we were actually having more students at the Healy and also the decline was significant because of the geopolitical you know, landscape we have, those numbers were very low. So we decided just to shift them to the Healy. So we do still have a program, but again, that is an enrollment-driven decision that unfortunately has an impact on the district, but it's the numbers were not there, and that also allow us to make other trade-offs in terms of positions that we put in place.

And if I could follow up just through you, Mr. President. Thank you. I'm just curious, so were those teachers laid off or like what happened, reassigned or?

I believe most of them were reassigned in the district. We always have high demand for educators, especially if you are an educator who has ESL strengths, especially with the diversity of needs that we have. So my understanding is that most of them were assimilated within the system.

Is that correct? Okay, yeah. Thank you, thank you.

Any other question from any members?

Chancellor Huila. Thank you, Mr. President. Thanks so much for this presentation. A lot of this school budgeting stuff is new to me, as my colleagues have discussed. School budgeting has not been our forte. First, just a logistical question to follow on on my colleague, Councillor Strezzo's, just questions about the files. I was initially confused too about the packet, the references of the packet. What packet? Figured out that you were referring to the files that are attached to this item in LEGISTAR. Just to make sure I understand, it seems to me like there's a lot of information in the different files, but that the two total budget files are the fiscal year 2027 master staffing plan file, and then the fiscal year 2027 non-personnel budgets file. Do those contain everything in this? Okay, just wanna make sure I'm clear on that. A question about the council's proposal for additional staffing. So my own children, back when I used to live in New York, attended a school with inclusionary classrooms. One third of the students in their classrooms had individualized education program plans, and there were two teachers in every classroom. Now I know there's been talk of a plan, and this was part of negotiations with the SEU union, for a pilot of inclusionary classrooms, and there's an intention to do that. Just to be clear, is that pilot able to move forward with the current proposed budget, or would that pilot happening in the next fiscal year, the next school year, require additional staffing?

Dr. Kamun?

Through the Chair, so the way the pilot was configured was basically one teacher at the East and one teacher at the Winterhill. And the idea was to have also a team to kind of identify best practices out of that process. And I think that that is being generated as part of that collaboration with the SEU, our special ed department, and also other members of the community. And so the findings of that work will inform the next phase of the work. So currently what the school committee recommended in their proposal was to make an addition of that continuation of the of the pilot process. So that's kind of where we are in terms of the staffing for that. I think part of the question for me that also has been shared with us through the findings of a study that we had in the district, which was what are some of the issues across the board that we have in terms of special education? And part of that is making sure that we have some continuity around both differentiation and creating lessons to support students with diverse needs. And so that in combination with the fact that we have new high quality instructional materials in pretty much every grade level, that creates a complexity that also adds up probably that makes the process of identifying what's the best way to establish a course of action with an inclusion model, it complicates that process. But the question as to can we have an inclusion model in Somerville? is a matter of finances. As you said, two teachers in a classroom is a cost that has to be mediated with the current needs.

Thank you. And through the Chair, just to be clear, it sounds like with the current proposed budget that beginning this pilot with those two classrooms

will not be possible this school year is that correct or so we we have the the teachers for the pilot but is the continuation of the next grade level uh inclusion model if the that model were to continue uh if you go up for the next grade level thanks i appreciate that that complexity yeah

Returning on a separate question to previous comments that Councillor Davis, or sorry, or maybe it was Councillor Mbah, it was you, Councillor Mbah, made about school psychologists. President Mbah. President, acting President Inva made about school psychologists or mental health professionals in general. I know there's different titles used for work that often has more overlap than the titles might suggest, but just looking through that staffing plan document, I saw six school psychologists all in district-wide positions. And my quick back of the envelope suggested about one school psychologist for every 800 students. From my quick Googling during this meeting, it does seem like that is better than most urban school districts, but not as good as the National Association of School Psychologists recommends. of one to 500, so I just wanted to flag that. I'm a big fan of school psychologists, and I think that kind of counseling support is among the many things that are worth funding. That's all my questions at the moment, thanks.

Thank you, Councilor Wheeler. Any other question, comment? I just wanna also, Dr. Barrett, I wanted to say something. Oh, okay. You can do that.

Through the chair, through president. Yes, counselor, great question, great point about the school psychologist. I was just confirming there with our special ed director, Ariano. Actually, our school psychologists do mostly evaluations. They don't really provide mental health supports. Mental health supports, I think, are mostly reflected in that staffing plan through social workers, through counselors, and a couple of other positions budgeted under our student services department. The district-wide sort of budget location can be a little misleading too. We often budget some of those positions district-wide because it gives us more flexibility in placing them during the school year when we can sort of better account for student need based on the most current enrollment data.

Thank you, Dr. Bretta. You're almost like an onion. You got me going again. As a point of privilege, when somebody invokes your name, that you actually started a conversation. You just want to jump in. I just want to say thank you so much. I'm so proud of the work you do. As a public school parent myself, sitting here, I see Karen. We have kids in the same class. I see Bobby. He doesn't say he was my classmate. He said we only took two classes. But I'm so proud of the work you do for the public schools. And I can say for myself, my kids are happy. They are really flourishing in West. And I cannot thank you guys enough for the work you do. I know that it's not easy. So thank you. With that, we'll place this item on fire. Thank you. Thank you. Next item, Madam Clerk.

Next item is new business.

New business, so what do we have for new business?

We have nothing.

We have nothing. Okay, so I think we are adjourned.

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