Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. I'm Ben Wheeler. I use he, him pronouns. I'm a counselor at large and the Finance Committee Chair. It is 6.02 p.m. and I'd like to call to order the Monday, June 15th, 2026 meeting of the Finance Committee of the Somerville City Council. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting of a City Council committee will be conducted via remote participation. We'll post an audio-video recording and a comprehensive record of these proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the City of Somerville website and local cable access government channels. We are joined by Clerk Delaney Fisher-Cassiol. Clerk, could you please call the roll to establish quorum?

That I can. Counselor Link.

Present.

Counselor Strezzo. I believe I saw you come off mute, but I did not actually hear you, Councilor Strezzo.

Present.

Got it. Thank you. Councilor Hart.

Here.

Councilor Scott. Present. And Chair Wheeler.

Here.

All right. With that, we do have quorum. Everyone is here.

Okay. Welcome, everyone, to the second night in our series of departmental budget hearings on the proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. First, as a general note, if I pronounce your name wrong or get your title wrong or use the wrong pronouns for you, please don't hesitate to interrupt me. I want to get it right. Thank you to the department heads who are appearing tonight and division heads and everyone else in a managerial capacity who will be here. Thanks to all the staff members who've been preparing for budget season and thanks to all the counselors here tonight and who submitted questions in advance. Here's how tonight's meeting is going to work. For each department and division, if there was a departmental memo with responses to councilor questions, then the clerk will display it. We'll invite the department or division heads to give a brief high-level overview of their department. Sorry, let me be a little more specific. We'll invite the department heads to give a high-level overview of their department's role within the administration and its role in the cabinet, something like three or four minutes. We'll invite each division within the department to also give a short overview of its work when its turn comes, including any plans it wants to highlight for fiscal year 2027 and any major changes. I'm imagining here something like one to two minutes. I'll briefly recap any questions that counselors submitted and attempt to paraphrase the answers that are in the memos and invite the division heads to elaborate if they wish. Council members, committee members, can then ask any follow-up questions or further questions that they might have. And after we finish discussing any department or division, any counselor is welcome to make a motion for a cut or to make a motion for a resolution suggesting additional funding. These could also be made at the cut night or budget night. So any such motions will then be tabled until cut night, which is Tuesday, June 23rd. And I also encourage anyone making such motions to speak with the council's finance analyst, Mohamed Oudin, ahead of the 23rd. Now first, before we actually begin the department hearings, we have an item that was referred to the Finance Committee that I'd like us to take up first. That is item 2, 26-0979, an order introduced by Councilor McLaughlin requesting that the Director of Health and Human Services update the Council on recent changes for requests for proposals for youth programming grants, particularly grants that impact teen empowerment directly. And I believe we have Director of Health and Human Services, Karen Carroll, who can speak on this. And I believe we also have a speaker from the community whom a member of the committee wishes to sponsor to speak. So on that, I wanna make clear to everyone that we're not gonna be sponsoring outside speakers in the departmental budget hearing portion of these meetings, but this is specific to this order by Councilor McLaughlin. Okay, with that, Councilor Link, would you like to sponsor your speaker?

Yes, I would like to sponsor Alia from Teen Empowerment.

Do we have Alia Ewing in the attendees? I see her there. Yep, talking has been permitted. Please proceed, Ms. Ewing. Oh, and also, just before you begin, we ask that you keep your comments to two minutes.

I will talk fast. Thank you. Thank you.

Please proceed.

Councillor Link, thank you for sponsoring my remarks this evening. As previously mentioned, I am joining you today to urge your support for maintained funding of Teen Empowerment Somerville Youth Program. Our work is centered around preventing issues among adolescents. And so by the very nature of the mission that we have in this city, even if crime and violence and suicide and substance abuse among teens are trending downward, our work at Teen Empowerment is still needed to continue to keep those statistics trending downward. In previous years, funding from HHS seemed to understand our work as a necessity to the social fabric of this community of youth. In FY23 through FY25, funding remained steady at $422,000. However, the city's investment has drastically decreased over the last two years. FY26 went down to $409,340, while FY27 is at that $100,000 mark. which again is not a guaranteed amount as it is through a public RFP process. Simultaneously, as funding has been severely cut, the city's youth minimum wage for the contract has gone up from $15 an hour four years ago to $18.85 now, along with staff salaries and insurance and food prices and et cetera. And in addition, last year we were also removed from the city's phone and internet system and began paying for that on our own as well. So historically, we've had a very positive working relationship with HHS, and we appreciate that we were given a general heads up about impending changes. In early March, we were made aware that we'd receive potentially less funding due to overall cuts in the city and that there would be the shift to RFP process. However, there was no indication that the cuts would be catastrophic to our program and would amount to less than 25% of what we currently receive. Furthermore, the RFP itself was rather complicated for a very fast two-week turnaround, one of those days being Memorial Day holiday. And we found that teen empowerment only qualified for one of the two RFPs because our space at 165 Broadway is not ADA compliant, and the second RFP required open teen center programming. So we've scrambled within that two-week period to identify viable partnerships with venue space that could allow us to qualify with their help. So those RFPs were extended a few days past those initial two weeks, but it was after we turned in our proposal. And for whatever it's worth, during the submission for questions, the person responsible for answering those questions before the deadline had an auto email response saying that he was on vacation. So we had to reach out to general procurement for email assistance on that. I'd also like to note that other budget cuts made beyond teen empowerment also have disproportionately affected teens in Somerville. For example, basically the entire racial and social justice department staff was laid off last month, along with additional layoffs of at least one youth services social worker that I'm aware of. And much of that work engaged teens and supported the work that HHS has agreed is vital to our youth. So we can't afford to nor are we able to raise enough to supplement the level of programming that is required to meet the needs of young people living in Somerville. We're not in a position to stay in Somerville long term without city investment, and we would likely be forced to pursue other opportunities with more sustainable funding options and We'd prefer not to do that because our work within this city is so meaningful for us and so impactful for the youth. And so I really would just like to have a broader conversation about how funding can be maintained for us. Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us and sharing those remarks. Do we have Health and Human Services Director Karen Carroll or Finance Manager Anup Malik here to comment on this item?

Yes, to the chair. Director Carroll is here.

Thank you. Welcome. I suppose I just stated your name and you did too, so maybe you don't need to state your name, but please proceed.

Thank you for the question and the comments. We understand there's been a considerable amount of concern on this. So I just want to clarify, there's been no reduction to the overall budget this year for the youth services programs. So that 409 is still there in its entirety in our operating budget. So there has been no reduction to the overall youth programming. What we are doing is going out to bid following mass procurement process that after three years, a contract needs to go up to bid. And we use the opportunity, as the folks from Teen Empowerment mentioned, to align the RFPs and the scope of services that we're requesting better to the needs of youth. And those needs were assessed by two ways. We did a needs assessment that was conducted two years ago or a year and a half ago. And there's several very clear recommendations that have come out of that. And the second thing is our youth risk behavior survey that we conduct in our schools. So we compiled the data, had a look at those things, and then adjusted the scopes for these youth programmings. They are now split into several two RFPs that are out now with a third to go out soon in the summer when we finish working out the kinks of that. And so the two that are out, there's $300,000 currently out in a procurement process with scopes. And I can't elaborate anymore. We're in the middle of a procurement process. So certainly folks were invited to apply and we reached out to bidders in this field to encourage them to apply.

Thank you, Director Carroll. Any comments or questions from members of the committee? I'm seeing Councillor Hart.

Thank you so much. And through you to Director Carroll, thank you. I just wondered if you could elaborate a little bit on the results. You said you kind of adjusted the scope based on the results of the survey. Could you say more about that, about what the research showed and how the priorities shifted?

Yes, through the chair. Thank you for the question. There were three broad buckets of recommendations and there is a lengthy report I'll be happy to share after this meeting with the committee that outlined the needs as determined in the needs assessment. So there were three broad areas. One was youth advocacy. One was communication and coordination of resources available to youth, how we learn about things generally. and working together to expand the amount of programming and spaces available to youth. And the third was career and professional development, sort of a range of skills and topics within that field. So those are the three broad buckets that came out of the needs assessment. And then those were broken down into several recommendations, which again, I will share. Our needs assessment largely reflect the needs that were identified by the youth. I wanted through the chair to just add one more point about specific eligibility questions. If bidders have specific eligibility questions, they can reach out to our procurement team or to the HHS contact to discuss those.

Thank you. Councilor Hart, are you all set with your question?

For now, yes. Thank you.

Thanks. Councilor Link.

Thank you, Chair, through you. I guess the one thing that I do worry about hearing this, and I say this without having the opportunity to actually see the data, so I could be misplacing my concern, but a needs assessment make is like contemporaneous right like so for example if teen empowerment is is fulfilling a need and then is no longer able to fulfill a need it occurs to me that perhaps um next time there's a needs assessment it might be that the thing that they the services that they provide for our teens isn't there um and i don't know how easy it would be to get something a program like this back up and running um if possible at all uh so i just um Yeah, I've got some some strong concerns. I don't know if you can speak to that at all. I understand. Please understand, I don't have the data. So maybe I'm, I'm totally off base here. But I yeah, that's what I wonder about.

You're the chair. Thank you for the question. There is an RFP that is specifically dedicated to the youth advocacy and empowerment scope of services and those types of skills and programs for youth, which is largely an area in which teen empowerment has worked in the past.

Councilman, do you have any follow-up to that?

Yeah, sorry, yes, sorry, I was just thinking. I apologize. Sure, yeah, I guess I'd love to hear more about that and just understand, I guess, if this is just a case where, and I know you said there's also a third grant coming in, but I just, yeah, I want to make sure that this program, this program isn't getting chased out. I don't know. It's not the intention. But without the funding, it might be the result. So I just really want to be careful there. So I guess I look forward to maybe talking more about this. I think we could maybe talk about it outside of it here. I can just, if it's possible at all, to sit down and just understand the landscape better. It would be great.

Councilor Hart, oh, sorry, before I give you a second crack, why don't we go to Councilor Scott and then I'll come to you. Councilor Scott.

Sure, thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, through you to Director Carroll, so of the $400,000 or $409,000, the two grants have been put out so far are, those RFP for grants are in what amounts?

Through the chair. One is for $100,000 and that's for the advocacy and empowerment RFP. And the other one is, could be in multiple, it could be in various amounts. So bidders have the option to say they were bidding for 50,000 or a program for up to 200,000. Okay.

And that's the teen space.

Exactly. All right. So.

Maybe I'm just old, but I can remember much advocacy from teen empowerment in the past just begging the city for help because currently they're in a city-owned building. They've been complaining about the lack of accessibility in their space for some time. It's been a point of advocacy both from the community and the council. So it seems a little on the nose to be offering a piece of the funding that had traditionally gone to them to something that they are structurally unable, through no fault of their own, to comply with. I'm not ascribing any motive to it, but I can certainly understand how somebody on the receiving end of that treatment would feel somewhat targeted by that. I also understand that of the grants that normally just go out the door like clockwork to support that program of $400,000 and change, this year, they're not. The city hasn't even made the last tranche available. Um, which, you know, I can understand wanting to reassess, uh, priorities and reassess, uh, what's being funded, but I'm not sure anybody in the city looks at it and says, you know, the thing we spend too much money on is those damn kids. Uh, so it, it just strikes me as particularly, um, trying to think of less colorful words to use here. Uh, It strikes me as particularly harsh to take a program that has been funded and have that funding stream interrupted and to actually cut back on how much money we're putting out the door on July 1st. I would totally understand if the mayor said, hey, you know, we're going to use some of these opioid settlement funds to establish an extra $200,000 in programming and ensure that the structures that we already have in place for the teens in Somerville continues to function. I do not believe necessarily the best way to build an airplane is while you're flying. So this just seems to me to be, if perhaps well-intentioned, certainly, let's say mismanaged in its financial application. Fortunately, I don't believe it's too late to fix that. I believe it's pretty straightforward. to restore the funding for this contract, at the very least for this year, so that longer-term conversations about maybe program restructuring or space availability could be undertaken in the course of that year. And, in fact, you know, we had something like $18 million in free cash appropriations before this council on Thursday night. It is not too much of a stretch to say that some of that might be, well – well used to, for example, find some of these upcoming grant opportunities that you spoke of wanting to pursue in the next year. Because I think pursuing new opportunities is a great thing. So Mr. Chair, that's just my thoughts on the matter.

And Counselor Scott, if I could just add on to some of your saying just I know you know this, but in case anybody else is listening, those free cash appropriations that were before us on Thursday night, those are still before us. We those have not been decided on. And for the most part, those will be taken up on cut night just as a as a scheduling heads up to everybody. Please continue.

Yes, sir. I wasn't speaking to your handling of them procedurally. I was just pointing out the millions of dollars floating around here while we argue about cutting back a program that's been serving our youth here in the city for a couple decades. That's all. Yeah, I appreciate it. This seems like a, this is a choice, Mr. Chair. And if that's the choice the city wants to make, I, as a city councilor, can look at that choice in the aggregate. Right. I can say in this particular case, this is something I disagree with. And certainly I do. And I have expressed it as much, uh, and I can implore the mayor because functionally it is the mayor's choice to, to reverse this. Um, however. when taken in a totality with some of the other places where the city is making a very clear choice, for example, not to fund this or not to fund the special education request of the school committee or not to fund other significant programs, that's when, as a city councilor, I believe it becomes relevant to my vote on the budget in the aggregate. So I just... I appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation, and I hope that the administration reconsiders and rectifies this mistake before we get to voting on the budget. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. Councillor Hurt.

Thank you, Chair. I share a lot of Councillor Scott's concerns with this funding, but I want to take a step back a little bit. And through you, Chair, to Director Carroll, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what is the city's vision for youth development overall?

Through the chair, there are lots of components to the city's vision, some of which sit in HHS, some of which you'll hear more about tonight when the team comes in to talk about youth programming, other youth services, some new youth spaces that have been made available. So I'm not sure if you want me to specifically, but with this funding, I can just clarify that there has not been a reduction in overall funding for youth programming. The $400,000 will go out to bid and will be renewed to serve youth. And those are in those categories that I mentioned that are based on our needs assessment that was conducted previously. So there won't be a reduction in HHS's line of our P&T line that contains these contractual programs overall. I'd be happy to after you hear from the rest of the team tonight and some of the work they're doing in the youth space, prevention space, we can certainly come back. We work with our friends in Parks and Rec, libraries, you're also hearing from tonight, who do a lot of the work with youth in the city and the schools. So we can certainly, questions are not answered, we could come back to this committee or the Public Health and Public Safety Committee and share more specifically about work plans to do with youth services. That would be fine as well.

Okay, I appreciate that. And, you know, maybe we can get into those questions later, like you suggested. Through you, Chair, I would like to just ask another, dig in a little bit more to understand more about these particular grants. How many, can you tell us how many applications you received for each of the grants that have gone out?

Through the chair, it is still in a procurement process. The bids have closed. There was an extension to the bid deadline that closed, but we have not begun the process of reviewing bids. So I cannot answer that question at this point.

Okay. Thank you. And the apologies, I forgot what I was, which the question I was about to ask.

I can always come back to you.

Thank you. Thank you. I do have other questions. So one of them, just this is similar to the concern that Counselor Link raised about, I mean, I do appreciate the, you know, a lot of effort going into following the procurement, you know, laws. So of course that's important. I am a little concerned about, And, of course, I support things being driven by data and equity, but I think that sometimes there may not be a There's so much lost. You know, when you're answering a survey, answering a form, you're trying to put, you know, really such experiential aspects of one's life or programming into a quantitative, you know, format and brief surveys. And I just worry that there's something being lost in that kind of mismatch. You know, I really... think that it's hard to match up the value of a program like Teen Empowerment to a simple survey. So that is a source of concern for me. In addition to the situation that Counselor Scott raised about the physical constraints on being in a specific location that is a city building. So it's not a question exactly, but just wanted to raise that concern as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Hart. Councillor Scott.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I just wanted to come back and be crystal clear through you about something that was said and then repeated. Nobody is saying that the mayor has reduced funding for teen programs. Director Carroll, I appreciate the words that you have used to say that the total funding for teen programs has not been reduced. The fact remains that we have a program in place, Teen Empowerment, and we are not funding it this year. and we are instead going to be directing that funding to some other program that we have not identified. In one case, we haven't even created an RFP stating what kind of program we need. So that defunding of that program is a choice. So maybe I just have to ask directly, does the city think Teen Empowerment's been doing a bad job with that money?

Through the chair, no, we do not. We are following the procurement laws. This is due to go out to bid. So we are following that and we are basing the scope of services, the refined RFPs on data that was collected and it was not a brief survey. Again, we can share the detailed data with you after this meeting, the needs assessment. It was conducted over a year period. with many youths conducted by an outside consultant, as well as the Massachusetts State YRBS study that is done every year for middle and high school students. So there is a lot of data that we are looking at and compiling and that all helped us form the RFPs that went out this spring and the final one will go out this summer.

Yeah, I appreciate that, Ms. Carroll, because I wouldn't want anybody to think that the city was thinking that Teen Empowerment was doing a bad job there. I do. I have seen enough RFP written to know that they can be very, very carefully tailored. And it sounds like what you're saying here is that due to your survey and everything, the scope of services that you would like to obtain are beyond what Teen empowerment currently has the capability to offer. So I understand that. I want to go back to, I don't agree with it. I mean, I think, again, this is a good job, a good point for expansion of programming. But I just want to be very clear about what's going to happen to the organization. It's going from $400,000 funding down to $100,000 of funding. so i did also want to follow up on council hart's question about bids did you say that you don't know how many bids you received or that you would not tell us how many bids were received i do not know for sure the number of bids have been received i have not spoken to procurement and asked for the next step in the packets oh okay so you just haven't gotten the packets yet nobody from uh procurement has okay well uh geez is procurement on our list for later tonight mr chair no they were they were the first night yeah they were the first night yeah maybe somebody can reach out to them because uh bids are public records you know we it shouldn't be that hard to be able to figure out how many of those uh there are perhaps somebody in our governmental affairs could put in a call while we're in this meeting i think we're going to be here for a few hours uh so Is there anybody in the room there from the mayor's staff that could look into that answer for us?

And just to check, I want to make sure, you know, If, like Counselor Scott is saying, if this information is simply a matter of public record and it's just about finding it out, then I think by all means, let's go ahead. If there's some aspect of the procurement process where that information is sort of not supposed to be shared yet, then, you know, please let us know, Director Carroll.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm familiar with procurement law enough to know where I'm asking here. So fortunately, we have Health and Human Services before us at the end of this meeting, which could be four hours from now. So I'm going to ask again through you, Mr. Chair, because I did not get any answer from anybody on the mayor's staff. Who can get us the answer to how many bids have been received for those two RFPs?

And Councilor Scott, I'm currently texting the Director of Intergovernmental Affairs to see if... She's right there. Oh, well, no need to text. Hello, Director of IGA Amanda Najim-Williams.

Good evening, Mr. Chair. Through you, we will follow up with that information. I do want to recognize that it is after business hours, so procurement team is probably not in office right now, but we will follow up with... the information that we can provide.

Thank you.

I wouldn't want anybody to work late, Mr. Chair. I think I'm all set. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. Councillor Link, and I just want to issue a blanket. This is a very important issue. We have a lot of very important issues before us. And I just want to make sure that we're keeping in mind that We can come back to this topic as it is relevant in the HHS department section. One question for you, Director Carroll. Which of the divisions within Health and Human Services does this pertain to most? Is this something that's sort of under the overall administration? Is it part of community wellness?

Yeah, thank you. Through the chair, it will sit in the community wellness division under the youth services team as of July 1.

Thank you. With that said, Councillor Link.

Thank you, Chair. This is just one really quick question. So my understanding is, as you said, the overall funding hasn't decreased, but we know that everything is kind of, the way it's broken up has. So I'm just curious, what is the maximum that team empowerment could get potentially with this new arrangement?

Through the chair, the maximum amount of money that's out for bid at the moment is the $300,000. $100,000 and up to $200,000 in the second RFP.

So it's possible for them to get $300,000 from this? I thought one of them could be split apart by other. So probably less than $300,000. Okay. All right. I think that's good for me for now. Thank you.

Thanks to my colleagues. Thanks, Director Carroll and Director Najem Williams. Any other comments or questions at this time from the committee with the proviso that we can keep talking about this as part of community wellness? Okay, thank you. We're going to move on with appreciation, and we will see you soon, Director Carroll. And also thank you to Alia Ewing and anyone else here from Teen Empowerment for joining us. Okay. Moving on to our first department of the evening, culture and community.

Sorry, real quick. What would we like to do with this item?

I'm sorry. Thank you so much, clerk. Let's mark this item as work completed. Since we have the opportunity to discuss it more and possibly bring motions as part of the departmental review and cut night process.

Got it. Thank you. And just to clarify for the departmental, I guess, presentations, you want each person to have a timer for two minutes for the introduction?

In my mind, we don't need to be as strict as having a timer. I was thinking for the overall department overviews, something in the ballpark of three or four minutes. And then for the division introductions, something briefer, two minutes or so. But I think I'll play it by ear. I appreciate your help. Okay, so the Culture and Community Department. So for the first of the divisions within culture and community that we'll be speaking to, arts and culture, I believe that we have Interim Arts Council Director, Rachel Stratt. Is that the case? Okay, wonderful. Staff, please introduce yourselves and proceed.

Erica Satin Hernandez, Hello i'll jump in very quickly I, my name is Erica satin Hernandez i've connected with you before, as the arbor director, but i'm also currently supporting the new culture and Community department. Erica Satin Hernandez, i'm helping bridge the communication between the mayor of the cabinet and our wonderful division heads. Erica Satin Hernandez, The culture and Community department is a new department comprised of arts and culture, previously arts Council recreation previously parks and recreation and are some of the public libraries. This new cabinet department grouping supports and enhances the work of divisions that make Somerville a lively, livable, and lovable city. The commonalities each of these divisions include not just their public-facing events and programmatic offerings that engage residents, but their development of the systems and scaffolds that ensure that community priorities and their areas of impact are advanced and aligned with the city's long-term vision. In that way, I like to think of their work as an iceberg. The public-facing events are the things that we often see the most, but under the surface, these divisions are doing deep development of cultural infrastructure, supportive systems, community cohesion, placemaking, and more. So thank you for your engagement with our department via your pre-submitted questions, and surely the questions that you'll have to come, the comprising departments will now present their budgets and answer your questions, starting with arts and culture.

Hi, good evening. My name is Rachel Strutt and I am the interim director of what is now Somerville Arts and Culture. And I wanna start by saying it's been a year of transition for us and I wanna, show my appreciation for our staff who's just done an amazing job and we're making great progress. Also to note, there is a staff opening that is the director, but we did post that job two weeks ago. Now to tell you a little bit about who we are, we're probably best known for our events, whether it's Porch Fest, Art Beat, Carnival, which happened just yesterday. These events bring tens of thousands of residents and visitors each year They strengthen our neighborhoods, they support local businesses, and they contribute to our identity as a cultural destination. And also to note, we couldn't pull off these events without the support of other departments, whether it's police, fire, communications, it's a real team effort. Yet, all of us at the Arts Council are eager to convey that we're more than just our events. Through our LCC grant program, we work closely with our volunteer board and we redistribute funds from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2026, we awarded 165,000 in grants. This goes out to individual artists, it goes out to organizations, and it goes out to schools. Increasingly, a major focus of our work is on our cultural infrastructure. and on space needs. Artists need affordable places to create, perform, exhibit, and teach. Without these spaces, creative people struggle to remain in Somerville, and cultural assets that make our city distinctive are at risk. To help address this challenge we're working closely with a number of different organization and the mayor's office to create a cultural trust that could preserve and expand long term cultural space, this would function in a way quite similar to our existing somerville Community land trust. we're unusual as an arts Council it's a municipal arts agency, because we directly operate spaces. We, through our some art spaces, we provide affordable opportunities for dancers and artists of other genres to rehearse and present work. And through Nibble Kitchen, we operate a restaurant and business incubator that supports immigrant chefs while bringing new multicultural experiences to the public. And maybe we should invite you all down to take a cooking class, for example. These spaces are central to our growing workforce development efforts. Nibble provides entrepreneurship training in a low risk environment. And we have a proven track record. Just at Bow Market, for example, there are three restaurants that have been started up from graduates from the Nibble program. We hope to adopt this model to support creative entrepreneurs and other artistic disciplines going forward. Because if artists can afford to make a living in Somerville, the hope is they can afford to stay in Somerville. Wrapping up, our work reflects a strong commitment to serving all of Somerville's diverse communities through inclusive curating and through programs like our Intercombio Language and Culture Exchange. We're also committed to engaging youth through programs like the Mystic River Mural Project and our Summer Theater Camp. Finally, we remain committed to public art through ongoing mural projects and new initiatives such as the planned pop-up gallery in the vacant Starbucks building in Davis Square. We believe in art for art's sake. Hear, hear for that. But we also want to convey that our programming and initiatives also propel economic development. They protect art spaces. They preserve community identity. And they ensure that creativity remains a vital civic asset for the city and all of its residents. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Director Strutt. To try to briefly summarize the questions and answers. So, you know, I'm speaking to you, but I'm also speaking to everybody else. I don't expect anybody and I'm not going to read the entire verbatim questions and answers in these memos. Some of them are pretty long, which is much appreciated in the depth people went to. But just to touch on these questions briefly and give a chance to shed some light if there's any more to shed. So one question from the counselors was, What does the Arts Council need to better support arts engagement? And just to summarize, the answer included staff capacity, public awareness, advocacy, partnerships, external funding, and cross department collaboration. Anything else to add?

No, I think that sums it up well.

Thank you. Another question was, is Arts and Culture still involved in the Brick Bottom Art Park slash Art Farm project, which I'm very excited about? That answer was yes. Arts and Culture is working with Public Space and Urban Forestry on stage and audio visual design and early programming strategy. Is that right? And I'd love to hear just even a quick update of what stage that project's in and what comes next.

Murgel, or Thank you, Mr chair we're still very much engaged in the art farm project we've been engaged in that project for the past 15 years, but, however, right now it's in the parks planning stage so it's moved primarily at least for now with public space and urban forestry. But we are involved in planning the design of the space. For example, will there be plinths or stages for creative performers? Might there be a small gallery space? And then I think starting, you know, 2027 and definitely 2028, it's going to be all about the programming. I think we'll have to go after grant money. to ensure that the space is well programmed. Because it's one thing to create the space, it's another thing to make sure that there's cultural activity happening there.

Thank you. Another question was about, two questions actually, about the armory. One is asking, where is management of the armory centered? And the answer was saying it's, It involves multiple different departments, Department of Public Works, infrastructure, strategy and development, culture and community, and arts and culture, and that the Arts Council as well focuses on the arts mission and vision. Anything else to add to that?

Through the chair, I would add that this also has been a project years in the making. And I think it's incredibly exciting that the city took this building by eminent domain. And I think we're now all committed to ensure this remains a vibrant art set that it is and will become even more so a vibrant art center for all of our residents. And we're excited to work with other departments and also with our new hire a buildings and tenants manager to ensure that arts remains the focus of this building and this project.

Thank you. You sort of connected there to the next question, which was, what's the Arts Council's hope for the Armory this year? And I know that included moving tenants in, building community, setting operation policies, and keeping the Armory artist-centered. Anything to add to that?

I would like to turn to Erica to ask you if you have anything to add as you're more involved in the Armory project than I am now.

Sure. I think those are the key items. We are also assessing and planning any infrastructure and capital needs. But I think these are the overviews for the coming year.

Thank you so much. Those are the existing questions and answers. Members of the committee, do you have any further questions about this? Councilor Scott?

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't mean to be dense, but I've run a business and run space and event space for a lot of years. I don't think I've ever done it by committee. So I guess I'm just curious what the answer to the question is about where it's centered. Where does the buck stop? If somebody fundamentally has a question about operations there, where does the buck stop? Who's in charge?

At this stage of the chair, the funding account where all of the transactions occur is sitting in OSPCD or strategy and development as its new name. And so that is kind of the, I guess, core of where all transactions and items will be sitting. So I think that could be one good place to look at it. But I do think that it's incredibly important that Arts Council is really the holder of the vision that there's these two kind of elements have to work in tandem of how do we have a functional, well-managed and clean, upgraded, et cetera, building while also making sure that we're filling with tenants who can meet this vision. We are setting a long-term vision, not just for one year, but for five, 10 and more. And I see kind of our strategy and development team managing the side as with the partners listed, the side of the... Erica Kaurudar, Operations and the physical nature of the building and the arts Council really managing the envisioning the and I guess the. Erica Kaurudar, In that way, the artistic operations of the building, and I know that still breaks into two, but I hope that gives a little more detail, thank you so much Erica and through the Chair, I would add there's also a five person.

Erica Kaurudar, board in who will be helping oversee how that building is used and they are. five very arts-friendly, arts-forward people. So I think they will help us ensure that the vision is kept. And Director Galigani has told me that the city property and tenant relations manager will start in OSPCD, but we'll see how that goes. And they could potentially move somewhere else. That's my understanding. And the Arts Council is very keen to work closely with them to ensure the focus stays on the arts.

Okay, appreciate that. Now I got two new questions. That sounds like a new multi-member body. Who's on that board? Has it been advertised for solicitations for positions? Has it already been built? Is it a structure that exists as a public committee or is it an ad hoc set of directors? What on earth is this? I'm curious.

Caroline Miller, The Chair, I can start that question, and I will also have to get a little bit more information on kind of the origins of that, but this is a. Caroline Miller, It was the positions were advertised, there is it's five Community members who will be supporting. as Director Stratt mentioned, the vision of the building. I do not believe that this is a formal entity in the same way as some of our other boards and commissions. They serve at the pleasure of the mayor, but I can find the exact language on the logistics of how that's set up.

Yeah, I think that's a matter of pretty great public interest. So I appreciate that. The other question I had

uh is there was a uh facilities manager i'm sorry i missed the exact language that you used there uh director strut what what was the new city property and tenants relations manager and they'll be overseeing the armory as well as a few other buildings okay and they're we've interviewed for them but we don't we don't know exactly who it'll be yet i don't see that position in the budget That's because it doesn't go into the arts and culture budget. Right now, it's going to sit with OSPCD.

Is that correct?

Yes. I don't see it in OSPCD either.

I will look to the budget team for support, but I believe that comes out of a non-general fund source funded by Armory Revenues, such that it is secondary to our general fund budget. TAB, For a little bit more information as well, but it does come out of the armory revolving account and. TAB, Which I will get more details on for you, but it's not part of the general fund budget, this is a it will eventually be funded by armory rent revenues, etc, but it will be one of many costs expended in the armory account as set.

Okay. Well, Mr. Chair, again, just expressing confusion, the OSPCD administration has, I believe, just nine positions of which I believe seven are at least partially grant funded, but they're listed in the budget book. So this phantom position is kind of a mystery to me.

And just on that matter, Counselor Scott, just looking in the supplementary section of the budget where there's a non-departmental budgets and other funds section and a revolving funds subsection, I do not see mention of the armory in that page.

That's another good catch, sir. I was going to get to that one next.

Mr. Chair, if I may?

Please.

Thank you for your recognition. Mike Mastroboni, Budget Director. The council approved on, looks like November 25th, sometime around November, the creation of the Armory Revolving Fund. I think that's what my colleague is talking about. I'm happy to share more information about that. This isn't something I have open on my computer, but the Armory Revolving Fund is used to maintain the building. There's a staffer on there. I'm sorry, can we close the door, please? Thank you. Sorry, there's another meeting going on. The Army Revolving Fund is used to maintain the building. It's also used, and the rent from the tenants go into that. So the council approved that Revolving Fund. Again, I'll look for additional details and share those with the committee, but I expect that that's the case. And that's what my colleague is talking about.

Thank you, Director Mastromoni. And I'll just point out, I would expect to then see that listed on the revolving funds page of the budget.

Mr. Chair, the revolving fund section of the budget is Chapter 53, sorry, Section 53 revolving funds. Those are ones that require an annual appropriation or an annual expenditure cap. This is a different situation. So there's two different types of revolving funds. Again, happy to follow up with more information. I just don't have that. open on my computer right now. You can follow up with that before the end of the budget process.

Okay, thanks. I would love to know about any other funds that the city uses that are not in the budget book.

Mr. Chair, there's a number of them. Remember, this is the general fund operating budget that we're talking about here. It's the annual appropriation to maintain services for this current fiscal year. There's some things we need to reappropriate annually. They come separately, but the digital budget book specifically is really focused on the general fund operating budget. So, you know, we have a number of stabilization funds. We have a number of other funding sources. That's the job of the digital budget book is to talk about the general fund operating budget. But again, I'll share that information on the Armory Revolving Fund as soon as I can put that together. Thank you.

Thank you, Budget Director Mastromoni. Councilman Scott, you still have the floor.

Yeah, thank you. As much as it may be clear that the annual budget book online here is about the general fund, it is the job of the city council to provide a certain degree of fiscal oversight as part of this process. So given that we're talking about city property and city funds and that all of this seems very relevant to me, and it seems like more transparency. So I have some outstanding questions here, but it seems as if those answers might take a while to get. So let's just, at least from my end of it, put a pin in it. I think that answers most of the questions that I had about this budget this evening. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. Councillor Link.

Thank you, Chair, through you. I guess I'll just start by unexpectedly having to echo my concern about while understanding why it would not be included in this budget book, wanting to know more. I'm a little bit confused as to like this process of this person who is maybe working under OSPCD, but is being paid for by the Somerville Arts Council property with a revolving fund for the armory. So all that is to say, I don't think it bears, I don't think it requires any further response at the moment, but I do want to know more. I do want a response during this budget process. My First question is, we talked a little bit about the, sorry, I got into the revolving funds on my screen here instead of the, oh, now I'm totally lost. Anyway, the director position. So my understanding at this point, obviously we don't have one, oh, we have one, sorry. We don't have a regular. So the, I know, People in the community were very concerned about this. Where are we at in this process and how are we making sure it's transparent?

Sure. through the chair, this has been a very democratic process. The community was very concerned about this position and the staff has been involved in helping write the job description. The Somerville Arts Council Board has been very involved in writing the job description. We've been working closely with Sarah with my colleague Erica here. So it took a long time to get a job to really think it through and make sure we were writing a solid job description so we can get a person on board who will serve us for many years to come. It was just posted two weeks ago. The committee to interview this person will be Director Anders, myself, a a member of our board, our board chair, Emily Beatty, and a member of Human Resources. So we feel good about the process. And right now we want to really work to promote that this position is open.

Wonderful. That's great to hear. And I think that, yeah, I hope that people who have been concerned about this here, that they feel some sense of reassurance. But everything is as good as we could hope it would be at this stage. The next question I had was about the cultural trust. So what kinds of things, assuming we can either get a cultural trust through a home rule petition or through the legislation that's currently at the state level, what would we be hoping to do with a cultural trust?

I'm sorry, can you repeat the question? What would be the what?

So assuming we were able to get a cultural trust, what would those funds be used for?

That is up for the community to decide, but hopefully to protect existing art spaces and potentially to create new art spaces In terms of how it would be funded, it would be mostly partly or mostly funded through a buyout provision. So when you're probably familiar with our zoning, a certain percentage and densely populated area has to go towards arts or creative usage, but it's not always viable for the arts and creative use to go in the space of that development. They could put it into a buyout fund and that's how it would add funds to the coffers. But it could potentially also go towards supporting arts organizations that are having a hard time staying in their space. We really want to open that up to the community. And over the next couple months, we will be advertising public meetings so that we can get community input because we want this to be a community-driven project.

Wonderful. So for example, like the Central Street Studios, which was up for sale and then was able to, the city was able to help and maintain that as a permanently affordable art space. Would that be like a good example?

That would be a great example.

Yeah. Which I think actually has a ribbon cutting in two days?

Thursday, I think.

Yeah. Cool. All right. I think that's it for me for right now. Thank you. Sure.

Thank you, Councilor Link. Councilor Scott, do you mind if I ask a few questions before you go? Thanks. to hold on to, I think, is the idea that this could be a place where people come and teach and learn and participate in arts, not only a place where they go to sort of consume and sort of, you know, witness other people's art and and go away and i know there's been questions about uh as the vision and the cost has shifted some uh from away from having the sort of original idea of a large indoor space uh i do know that there's an opportunity to use some space for example there's a sort of picnic table area and i'm just curious if there is work being done now to envision a place for teaching and learning. For example, using tables that could be used for eating, that could also be used for students working on art.

Through the chair, thank you for the question. I love the way you're thinking, and I will relay to the people who are working on this that it is a concern. I think the goal is to make all our public art spaces as interactive and as inclusive as possible. And I can ask some questions and get back to you in terms of how the design might support arts learning within the space. And I think it comes back to what I said earlier about ensuring that we have funds to create and run programming in the space.

Thank you so much. I had another question going back to the armory. One of the concerns I often have for city processes and the armory and arts and culture are by all means not the only ones that run into this, is that when we have approaches that use a request for proposals, an RFP, often that RFP document, and I've looked at the ones for the armory, You know, the original full documentation was well over 100 pages. And there's reasons for everything that every page that's in there and every paragraph that's in there. Nothing is there foolishly. But I do worry that in our push for a transparent and open process, which it is formally. There are so many people who are not going to be able to work through this legalese and parse it all and figure out what it means that they have to do, who might thrive in an art space like the Armory. And I'm just curious how we're making sure that in our extensive transparent processes, we're not also filtering out people in a way that makes these facilities inaccessible.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's another... Great question. And I do think through our research and especially through the research of my colleague, Callie Chapman, who runs the Sum Art Spaces, that it can be prohibitive. And there are a lot of people who would rather lease space rather than like use space, you know, several hours a week rather than have the responsibility of taking on the space themselves. So we are exploring this. And I think that will come after we have reviewed all the proposals that have come in for the spaces. There's discussion about could we reserve space for artist residencies, people who would use the space temporarily. We are like the Arts Council or the Arts and Culture staff is very much interested in these issues as well, because I think it's a way to serve the broader arts community.

Thank you. The only thing I may add is just that, you know, HAB-Masyn Moyer- agreed and understood, as we put together this document very lengthy and that, unfortunately, we cannot lease property city owned property to non. HAB-Masyn Moyer- municipal government entities, without going through an rfp process and plug for later eventually coming back to you for approvals. HAB-Masyn Moyer- And so I think as as Rachel was mentioning when we look at the ways in which that we populate this building and we did want to start with. leasing direct to artists and artists serving entities. There are many ways to look at programming and to consider how this building can be a hub for artistic uses such that we do have opportunities to consider more holistic options, but did start with the first leasing of individual spaces that as mentioned, we could not avoid an RFP for leases that way.

Thank you. I think a model that I'm often drawn to is using a trusted intermediary that themselves might lease or might respond to an RFP And which could then, you know, essentially sublease in a more nimble way than government can. And, you know, that's one of the ways that, say, the Somerville Community Land Trust, I think, is able to make decisions with, you know, their own extensive and transparent processes, but more nimbly than government can. And I think that that's also something appealing about a cultural trust. They might be able to make those decisions. So, you know, I do know we have the Arts at the Armory organization that's already, you know, done quite a lot of investment in this space in these kind of shared ways that, you know, blur a lot of of the boundaries. A lot of that investment essentially is in this city owned space. building and space you know even if that organization were gone and um you know that's in my mind an example of a slightly different direction we might go we might still try at some point in the future with that organization or another one rather than being the sort of direct landlord to every single room through the chair thank you for that feedback thank you appreciate that counselor scott uh

Thank you, Mr. President. I very much appreciate your point there. I'll leave it at that. I had a couple more questions. I heard that the funding of this was going to be in at least some part from buyouts or in lieu payments for ACE space creation. So who that's those spaces required by some of those zoning who's authorizing the buyouts or in lieu payments?

Through the chair, I think that's in development, but we can get you more information on that if we don't have one.

Okay, so that's a that's an idea. It's not some it's certainly not part of the zoning code. It's a it's an idea. All right. Uh, all right. Then my next question, it sounds like this director, I just want to make sure I understand this director will be a city hired position that will report to the executive director of OSP CD, but is paid from and in control of an off book revolving fund. Do I have that? Correct.

Through the chair. I think we might be mixing two different. items, which is one, the director of the arts council, which will be a standard general fund director, the arts council, and then the position specific to the armory. And may I add, um, a couple of other buildings, um, within the city will be the property and tenant relations manager will be fully paid out of the armory revolving account, which lives in a strategy and development.

Okay. Okay. But that's, so there's two different director level positions. Got it. I'm sorry. The property manager.

And it's not a director level position, but I apologize for jumping in through the chair.

No, I appreciate your clarification.

Yeah, no, I appreciate the clarification. Not for nothing. How much does that position pay?

I will have to take a second look through the chair.

I believe it's about 90 or 95 that area.

80 to $90,000 per year.

Yeah. Okay. That's more of a manager than a director. So now that tracks. All right. But that When I asked the question about where the buck stops, it sounded like it was that property manager person, not the director of the arts council when it comes to the building, the armory building.

Through the chair, I would suggest the way that we're envisioning the property and tenant relations manager is that person on the ground in the building almost every day of the week, making sure that tenants have what they need to succeed. They're helping funnel information HAB-Juliette Boone, 311 requests they're making sure that capital improvements are being tracked on the ground they're kind of like the. HAB-Juliette Boone, The eyes on the ground and they are working directly with our tenants when it comes to that they would then report up to the director levels to say you know hey this is what we're hearing going on this is how things are going. HAB-Juliette Boone, And the dirt, you know the director levels can also be then advising back down to the property and tenant relations. so i would consider them more of a hands-on um staffer uh and the directors being at the visioning level the property and tenant relations manager is carrying out those visions that sounds like a really great position to have i know the city's uh had its failings as a landlord in the past um

But I guess that then gets to my other part of the question, which is, given that there's an executive director of OSPCD and there's a director of arts council that are both in the vision or policy setting piece of this, who exactly controls and authorizes expenditures from this off book revolving fund?

Through the chair, I suppose, ultimately, when it comes to formal authorization, that Since the account is in OSP CD that may also lie with OSP CD, but I, I do believe that a shared working relationship is possible and that this can be meeting kind of those two bottom lines of artistic and cultural development, as well as I guess a capital and physical function that those decisions can be shared, but in the most technical sense, the account living in I'll try to keep using the new name strategy and development that, you know, financially that is, I guess where authorizations will end up, but also, you know, pointing to, well, yeah, I guess I'll stop there before I start.

It sounds like an actually a really interesting philosophical conversation we may get into. I just want to be clear, Mr. Chair, I'm asking these questions just to have a greater transparency and understanding of where all this money sits, where the flows go through and who's going to be in control of them and ultimately who's going to be setting policy and interacting with tenants in these buildings. So I really appreciate this discussion. I think it's given a lot of visibility to this that I know I personally before. You know, I might have my own opinion about that as a management choice, but I am but a humble city councilor. I am not the executive of the city. So that's the executive's purpose. I guess I just have one more question, which is if there are any other phantom director-level positions that we don't know about, for example, ARPA director Satin Hernandez, you have a position which is only funded through December of 2026, and you've been a heck of an asset. Are you anticipating being here past that point? Is there a role already created for you in the city?

HAB-Masyn Moyer- In the chair, thank you that's very kind of you i've really enjoyed my time here but you're correct that our grants do our expenses are do 1231 26 and. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Just just as our expenditures, as am I so i'm looking forward to closing out with our fun keeping keeping a prize book goes on in the city, but at this point, my end date is indeed in December.

HAB-Michael Leccese He- Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you for everything you've done. And it looks like you're still very much sitting in the driver's seat with your hand on the wheel up until that day from what I've seen tonight. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm all set.

Thank you, Counselor Scott. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Well, with much appreciation, thank you for your appearance tonight. And we will move on. Have a good one. We will move on to libraries and I am hoping we'll get a chance to hear from library director Kathy Piantagini. Hello, Director Piantagini, how are you?

How are you?

I'm fine. Please take it away.

Well, I'm Kathy Pantagini, director of our public libraries. And based on the questions I received, I feel like you all know the libraries, which is great. So happy to see that you use our online resources and that there are so many thoughtful questions. So I guess just a quick overview is we have three great libraries staffed by an amazing team of full and part-time librarians. We are very fortunate to have a board of library trustees that is so dedicated and supportive to our public libraries. We are also fortunate to have two other stakeholders, one being the Friends of the Somerville Public Library. Maybe you went to the book sale they had this weekend at the main library. Then we also have the Somerville Public Library Foundation. So I'm very grateful that we have these great groups that work so well together to support each other. And aside from that, I would like to take a minute just to thank Erica, actually, as I've been listening so far. We have been very grateful for her serving as our interim cabinet lead. So just want to take a moment there to acknowledge that. And then if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Thank you so much. Well, I'll start by summarizing these questions and answers, and please feel free to add anything else that I might be leaving out. There was a question about how the library's role is changing. The response talked about the continuing need to connect people to information and ideas, an increasing role for digital access, a lot of programming, changing and evolving programming. the importance of intellectual freedom and economic support for the libraries during this time of economic stress. Anything that you'd add to that?

I think so.

Thank you. A question asked, does roughly $300,000 in overtime mean that the library is understaffed? And the answer said, not exactly. Overtime funds weekend and evening hours, staff absences, vacancies, community events, and other programming. Anything to add to that?

I think that covered it.

Thanks. A question asked, when will the new strategic plan be available? And the answer said that the Board of Trustees is expected to vote on the five-year plan in July, and that will guide yearly action plans through fiscal year 2031. Anything on that?

You are correct.

Okay. A question asked, is the online subscription line, because that was something that jumped up and stood out, is that line for Hoopla and similar services? And the answer said, yes, it covers services like Hoopla, Canopy, and Libby. Costs are rising because digital use keeps growing, which is great. Feel free to jump in and I'll keep going.

A question.

Thank you. Well, this is all you and your staff having answered these already. Will the new library app improve and does Somerville pay for it? The answer is yes. The app's part of the Minuteman Library Network's shared system and we pay as one of the member libraries. And there are ongoing improvements. So anything else to highlight on that?

No. No.

And then the last question was, how's the library social worker used and how secure is the funding for that role? And the answer described that the social worker provides referrals, application help, de-escalation support, staff training, community partnerships, and support for unhoused residents. And that the role is funded through Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners and BLC state aid, which depends on meeting state library requirements. Anything else I just was hearing earlier today, someone expressed appreciation for this role.

It's a great role. Yeah, I can't speak enough about it. You don't have enough time. There's too many people about me, so.

Well, thank you. Let me turn to the members of the committee. Does anyone have questions or comments for Director Piantagini? I'm not seeing any more hands. We got some great, great answers here. I am now seeing one. Councilor Scott.

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to say that, as always, the libraries are doing more with less in the city, always have, in terms of being direct frontline engagement with our community in a way that is hard to understand. Hard to capture, hard to summarize. So just appreciative for all that they do and a commitment that I'll continue to follow up on trying to make sure that they get taken care of and their facilities get taken care of as well as they deserve to be. Thank you, Mr. Peer. I'm all set.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. Councillor Link.

Thank you, Chair, through you. So with appreciation for the fact that, well, so first of all, with appreciation for the fact that there's a library. I love libraries. My kids love the library. I would go there too much. The question I have is, so, you know, we got the West library and I'm assuming that this is pricing that will be on the, this the, the strategic plan, but I'm just curious, we've got, you know, the central library and the East library and that both are a little long in the tooth. How, What do we think in terms of where a city, known for deferred maintenance, how much longer, can we defer, how are these libraries doing in terms of actual the bricks.

Through chair Wheeler I thank you so much for that question I I always appreciate when it gets raised and i'm. you're right we definitely could stand to have two more amazing awesome libraries like our west branch library and um i'm only a little bit kidding when i tell you my dream is to have another renovated library before i retire if i'm lucky enough to keep having this job for them um so let's do it let's let's get some libraries yeah i mean we're i know that um Mayor Wilson is very aware of our hopes and dreams for new facilities. And as always, I'm very mindful of the fact that we have so many buildings, our libraries included, that need to also have a lot of attention paid to them. So I am truly optimistic that we'll see some good changes like that in the next couple of years.

Well, I, for one, do hope that we get at least one new library before you retire, which I hope is not for a while. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, Chip.

Thank you, Counselor Lenk. And just to follow up on that, Director Piantagini, we had the chance to speak a while ago. I also had a chance to speak to Grants Director Hartke about the Mass Board of Library Commissioners, MBLC, grant funding opportunity for building expansion. Am I right in understanding that The sort of next cycle of these grants for building expansion or renovation is expected to come around roughly 2028. And that there is a 40% local match on those funds, meaning that ultimately we would pay about 30% of any total building cost.

Those are approximate, but fairly accurate from what I remember during the last cycle. So upwards of 40%. What I remember at the time, it was probably like high 37% or something like that. But yes, that is accurate. And the timeline, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

No, no, no, please.

It's also approximate. I think... The state, they were trying to shorten that window because they've learned over the years that if they didn't change their processes, it can take that grant cycle very long to be able to award it to municipalities. So their goal the last time they structured this was to do turnover, I think, in that three to five year window.

Thank you. I know that Somerville has no shortage of infrastructure needs, the total dollar cost of which can be a bit frightening, but I have heard from so many residents how important the libraries are to their lives. I think everyone who sees how many people are served in how many different ways by the much renovated Cambridge Public Library, I think it's not hard to envision how much the libraries could do with an expanded building. And as someone in your board said, libraries are one of the only institutions that everybody comes in and out of on a daily basis and is open to just everybody of any age, any background, any needs.

Agreed.

Well, thank you. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Thank you so much for appearing and have a great rest of your night. Okay, moving on to recreation, just recreation. There are parks in recreation, but the title is just recreation. And I believe we should have Director Ohamon Shomaton with us and possibly also Finance Manager Linda, and I might need help with your last name's pronunciation, Young or Zong.

It's Jung.

Jung, thank you. Please introduce yourselves and tell us all about Recreation.

Thank you, Chair. So for those who don't know, my name is Elhaman Shrumton. I know I've met some of you guys in my first six months here, so it's good to see some familiar faces. I am the Director of Recreation here, and what we do is we provide programming for all demographics across the city. This past fiscal year, we've reached about 6,000 registrations through our new programming, and we're looking to increase that year after year. Outside of that, we are also looking into incorporating new programs by using data via summary stats. working with other departments such as the police department. We are working with chunks on aging. So we're really trying to diversify our programmings and really reach everyone. Yeah.

Thank you so much. I'll just briefly summarize this one question and answer that was in this memo, which was what's the hiring plan for the new teen programming space at the TAB building? And the answer was that the Teen Center will be staffed through a partnership among Health and Human Services, Youth Services, Equity and Belonging, and Recreation, with each contributing staff and programming. Anything to add on that?

That is correct.

Thank you. All right. Any questions or comments from members of the committee? I have one. Now, there was some confusion in the process, sorry, about the degree to which it would make sense to include questions about the Dillboy Enterprise Fund and the Kennedy School, Kennedy Pool Enterprise Fund here. And I know that those The funding for those is its own, you know, partially self-contained and partially outside appropriated funds. But I'm wondering if questions about Dillboy are something that we could ask now and that you'd be interested in answering, Director Chabotin.

We can. Just what the accounts of the Department of Public Works for certain accounts like electricity and other utilities. Mm-hmm. we might be able to answer questions for Kennedy and Dilboy. And if you can't, then we'll just refer you to the Department of Public Works. Thank you. But you were asking specifically for the electricity questions. Did you want background on that?

Yes, I was interested in particular in that electricity question because there was a sharp increase in electric costs.

So, um, unfortunately what happened to the Dilboy electricity was that back in May, 2024, it was decided that, um, certain accounts would be transferred over to the Department of Public Works and then other accounts would stay within Recreation. And also at the same time, we had transitions in leadership and also transitions in other staff that were handling invoices. And also within that same time, Recreation also changed office locations from the Edgerly School to the current location of the TAB building. And unfortunately, during that time, all of the invoices were being mailed physically to a former location that no one had access to. This was also around the time when we weren't present in the Edgerly School, just for political reasons, I believe. And when it was discovered that those bills weren't paid, we worked with the Department of Public Works to negotiate reducing late fees with Eversource and Edstar, who was the electricity provider. And since then, we've also consolidated accounts. And I believe all of the electricity accounts are now under the Department of Public Works. And everyone's aware of what the current accounts are, what the correct accounts are. And we've sorted it out with the vendor. And this shouldn't be an issue going forward. But it was an accumulation of invoices that hadn't been paid since, I believe, 2022. But that was resolved in December 2025 with approval of the council of payment.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I know it was not the fault of the two of you. I would hope that somebody would be on top of things enough to notice, hey, we haven't been getting bills that we expect to get, even if tracking down exactly what's going on is tricky. I'm saying that to our city in general, but with appreciation for the explanation and for figuring it out and getting us solvent again. Any other questions or comments from members of the committee? Okay, seeing none, I will, oh, I am, all right. Last minute, we got one from Kassler Hart. Please take it away.

Thank you so much. Through you, Chair, I just wonder if you could tell us briefly a little bit more about your priorities for the rest of the, let's say, or for the upcoming fiscal year.

Thank you. Through you, the chair. A lot of our priorities is refreshing what we currently do. We've been a fantastic department as of now, and I think sometimes we want to take a clear look at things and refresh the things that we have, introduce new concepts, see what other programs that we are capable of running successfully. I don't want to keep recreation a space where we know what we're doing and we're going to stick with it. I want to introduce new concepts. That's going to be one of my main priorities this fiscal year. Another priority is making sure that our brochures out at an earlier time so that way our constituents can properly, you know, absorb the information that we're giving out. We do have a lot of programs, so we want to make sure there's a lot of time for parents to kind of plan out what's best for their children and, you know, the best way to, you know, especially with those multiple children, we want to make sure everyone has some time to ingest what we give out and then properly plan it. So those are two of the big priorities I want to go through this fiscal year. The last one is to really make a stronger connection with some of our nonprofits and other youth groups across the city. There's, we have so many great organizations doing a lot of different things. I really want to be the hub for everyone to kind of know where to send the kids for activities or for extra help or for, you know, even guidance. So I really wanted, those are my three main priorities. Thank you so much for sharing. Appreciate it.

Thank you for all your

And I'll just share my appreciation. My two children have made extensive use of many of the recreation programs and gotten a lot out of them. And one of the things that I think is so wonderful is how there's been this steady innovation in the breadth of the offerings. So they have a chance to do CPR training in order to have a CPR certification. that they could bring to their babysitting and childcare work. And that, amongst many other things, has been really, really wonderful. So thank you to your whole staff. And I look forward to seeing what recreation does in this next year. Thank you so much. All right. Have a great night.

Really quickly, Ms. Jung, could you just clarify, what was your first name? I'm sorry, I missed it. Linda. Linda, thank you.

Okay, thanks. Have a great night. All right. So that brings us to the end of the Culture and Community Department. Members of the committee, are there any motions for cuts or motions for resolutions for additional funding at this time? With the proviso that this is not the last chance to introduce them, we will also have chances on cutmate. Okay, seeing none, let's move on to communications and public engagement. Um, so as, as you can all tell, uh, sometimes I'm not totally sure what is happening in the cabinet sense, uh, with people like not realizing that we had, uh, director Satine Hernandez. Um, so I am, I know that we will get a chance to speak to director of communications, Denise Taylor and finance manager, Marjorie Rizzo. And, uh, I'm not sure if they're going to begin this process, uh, but, We will soon find out. Oh, and I'll just point out that the formatting in the agenda is a little confusing about this. I think the heading there for communications and public engagement should be a full heading. But for procedural purposes, I think it does not matter. Hello, welcome. Would you please introduce yourselves and then tell us all about communications and public engagement?

Good evening. Thank you, Chair. I'm Denise Taylor. I'm the Director of the Department of Communications and Public Engagement. And this is Marjorie Rizzo, Finance Manager.

Grace Mons, Deputy Director of Mons.

So I do want to take you up on your offer to give a brief overview of the department. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that if that's all right. The communications and public engagement department creates two-way information flow between community and local government, which is a core operational service. Through both information generation and sharing, our divisions make sure that Somerville's services and programming connects with the community they serve and that residents trust and participate in their local government. We work in six languages, we serve all city divisions, and we use multiple channels from digital media to paper flyers. to be sure that we can reach people in the main ways that they seek information. So whether it's text alerts, social media posts, newsletters, online videos, mailings, signs, civic events, in-person outreach, or more, we deliver communication access and engagement functions that form the last mile of just about every service in the city. I often say, I think the one team we really don't do much with is weights and measures, but everybody else we support. Our highest priority is directly serving the community, but I also want to flag another impact that is often overlooked. Communications provides proactive information and online services that significantly alleviate staffing burden citywide. I put this in the budget book I would just ask you to imagine, for example, if the 1.1 million people who visit our website seeking information, whether that's meetings or guidelines for how to put their trash out or event calendar listings. If those folks were to be calling and coming into City Hall, we would have to hire a lot more people. I'd note that 311 takes about 120,000 calls per year. Director Steve Craig and I discussed this. It's not a one-to-one, but they'd probably have to hire about nine times as many staff if we weren't here. And that's just the web, not the other channels that we use. So without a doubt, the information ecosystem that we maintain for the city saves significant costs in staffing daily. This year, we have some changes. The Office of Immigrant Affairs began as a communications initiative with just two six-hour staff about 14 years ago. The goal was to overcome language and cultural barriers to information services and civic opportunities. By last year, this group grew to the 28-member Office of Immigrant Affairs that is doing just outstanding work serving our immigrant community as well as the larger community in terms of sharing Know Your Rights information to everyone in the city, cultural celebrations for everyone. After an in-depth planning process, this team is ready for the next step, which is a move of about half of the SOYA staff into health and human services to continue their exceptional work, providing immigrant services, supports, outreach, information, engagement, and cultural celebration. The other half of the team now forms two focused divisions within the new communications and public engagement department. And that is the first is language and communications access. These are all existing staff that were in soya that are moving in there three people. And they will carry on the work of translation interpretation language justice and multilingual content management and overseeing the distribution of it. The second is engagement and neighborhood services, which brings together the part time outreach support team from soya with two former staffers from economic development and communications. to strengthen our service and outreach to both residents and local businesses within one team. And I am happy to take your questions. I thank you for the questions you were sent in advance.

Thank you so much, Director Taylor. I will try to just briefly summarize these questions and answers that were sent in advance. The first is, how will language and communications access staff work with community engagement and immigrant advancement? And the answer was saying that there are existing workflows, staff relationships, and co-location on Cross Street, and that will continue. That language and communications access will work with immigrant affairs, neighborhood services, and communications on translation, interpretation, multilingual outreach, and staff training. Is there anything you'd like to add on that?

Yeah, just to summarize that these are all existing relationships. We're regrouping in order to allow more concentrated focus. The LCA team has some really big goals coming up. and are really hoping to be able with a pure focus on the work that they do to advance translation and interpretation and language justice and plain language across the city significantly in the coming year. So the working relationships remain the same, the co-location remains the same, but what is different is the ability to focus on one task as opposed to be spread across multiple tasks.

Thank you. And I realized as I'm asking these questions, I'm sort of bleeding from the communications and public engagement department overview to the communications division within that. And before I keep going, are you still the right folks to talk to about that communications division? Is there anybody else?

So I am here to talk about the communications division. I also have a overview written up by the director of language and communications access who couldn't be here tonight. So I can share that with you when you're ready for that. And then for ENS, we have Adriana Fernandez to talk about engagement and neighborhood services. And for City TV, we have Steve Craig. Oh, Steve Craig, my goodness. Steve DiCarlo, so many Steve's.

We also love Steve Craig.

Yes, we do.

Well, yes, please. Why don't you go ahead and read that language and communications access statement?

Okay. Okay. Okay, so this is from Meredith Gamble, who has long led our Language and Communications Access work, and she wrote up a little bit of an overview. So, in the Office of Language and Communications Access, we ensure that every Somerville constituent is able to access information, services, programs, and opportunities in their preferred language in a way that is clear, understandable, and actionable. We develop and implement language justice policy procedures, innovations, and systems, assess, triage, and fulfill thousands of translation and interpretation requests annually, consult with and train staff on language access tools, best practices, and craft plain language communications. and develop tools and advise city staff on strategies for multilingual outreach, distribution of materials, and fostering welcoming spaces for a multilingual public. The team includes the director of language access and communications, a language justice specialist, that's the technical expert and the person ensuring thousands of language access requests get done on time and to the highest quality, The director is focused on identifying and implementing best practices and policies so that we have a sustainable and effective system that meets the needs of our constituents. They're also got their sleeves rolled up doing the work every day as well. The Multilingual Information Coordinator is the third member of the team. They ensure that multilingual information reaches the community through interdepartmental coordination, capacity building, consultation, and communications campaigns. The Multilingual Information Coordinator is working on a really excellent campaign that is going to release soon on Know Your Rights. To execute the work, we also collaborate deeply across teams in the city, including SOIA and the Engagement and Neighborhood Services Division, and seek regular input and feedback. The establishment of this office reflects the growth of this work, a quadrupling of services we provide in just four years. This year, we are projected to have completed over 4,000 translations, 200 interpretation, those are live interpretation requests at events, 2,400 conversations between constituents and staff using our interpreter over the phone system, and they've provided us with 25 different languages. This year, we're excited to introduce a citywide language of access ordinance, a translation management system, which is going to be a game changer for this work, That's a technology that will significantly improve translation efficiency, consistency, and accuracy, and launch a language access public information campaign, starting with multilingual signage in every city building, little cards that people will be able to take with them to every counter, identifying what their language is, so that staff that have all been trained up on our remote translation services can help people in any language that they request. So that's the end of her messaging.

Thank you so much. To return to the question and answer summaries, there was a question asking, what's in the $427,000 professional and technical services line? The answer was saying that the increase is mostly from moving language and communications access funds into communications. And that line covers translation, interpretation, web maintenance, accessibility, design events, and outreach projects. Is there anything you'd add to that?

No, just to please recognize that those are funds that would have been in SOIA that moved into our budget. It doesn't represent an increase in communication spending. It does represent an increase in LCA spending and that's for the translation management system. But all of those, yeah, 256K moved into our PMT from LCA.

Thanks. And the next question also relates to that. It's asking, why is software services increasing by about $68,000? And the answer was mostly because of this translation management system, as well as, as I understand it, a document accessibility tool and a small subscription reclassification, as well as some vendor increases. Could you maybe just tell us a little bit about this translation management system? Why is it going to be worthwhile?

Yeah, so this is really exciting. The way that these systems work is that you do, Say 10 translations and all of them get into the system and it saves up repeat vocabulary that might be unique to the city of Somerville that saves up phrasing and sentences. That our staff who have culturally sensitive culturally competent translation skills to make sure that you know they go above and beyond what machine translation might do to make sure that the language is actually correct. that all of the work that they do gets memorialized in the system and saved so that when you enter a new document that might use some of the same phrasing or vocabulary, it pulls it up and pre-translates based on your prior work. So the translations get saved automatically and then repurposed automatically. We have a lot of repetition in some of the work that we do, and staff have been struggling to do that in an analog, manual way. And when you think about 4,000 translation requests, getting them into a system that's going to learn and develop with us is going to vastly reduce the amount of time that staff have to spend working on translations. It will also be used with our contractors. We also hire translators through other companies as well. We can't possibly have the staff do all of this. Ultimately, this should give us back some time. It's going to take more time to begin with. But it should also be improving quality as well. We have to go out for an RFP for that. We don't have the system yet. So it's going to take some time to both select a vendor, and then we'll have to onboard and train with the staff. And we should begin later in the year to start seeing the benefits of this.

Thank you so much. Members of the committee, any questions or comments? I have one. I'd be interested to know about how the requests and the usage of devices for different translations at live events breaks down by language. I imagine there's always a question with sort of a trade-off of should we add staffing and and vendor costs for additional languages? Are there times where there's a language that's not getting as much translation use where we may be overspending? And I'm just curious to know about the breakdown. I don't expect you to have that in front of you, but if it's at all possible to provide that at some point, it would be useful.

To the share, I can share with you that the human language capacity that we've built into this team is driven by census and population and school registration and usage numbers. So Spanish is the most spoken language after English in Somerville. Next is Portuguese. Next is Haitian Creole and Nepali kind of bump back and forth and trade places here and there. um, Chinese is close behind. We work in two different forms of Chinese and print, both traditional and simplified. Um, and there are obviously, you know, in the schools, I think they, they talk about more than 50 languages spoken by students in the schools, but each of those language groups gets smaller and requests tend to follow that order generally. And, um, the, Investment in a particular language in the staff is fixed. We have staff for those languages. When we work with translation services, obviously, we translate based on particular needs. So if we get a request from someone participating in a process that speaks Portuguese, we'll translate into the version of Portuguese that they use. Yeah, so it's a good question, and I can get more specific stats for you. The online call systems and interpretation services can get us well over 100 languages on demand, but the investments are in the primary language groups in the city.

Thank you. I'm seeing a question from .

Thank you. I'm glad for that question because I did want to check in really quick. I always like reloading the data on where we are with the top five spoken languages here in Somerville through YouTube. To our director. So most recently, 2026 data, 2025-ish, 2026 is English, Spanish, Haitian, no, Portuguese, Haitian Creole. What is the list again, if you don't mind?

Through the chair to you, the next languages, again, Nepali and Haitian Creole tend to kind of switch places back and forth. They're about the same. And then after that, we have staff for Chinese speaking members of the community.

Okay, so because I remember right, Haitian Creole was down for about a couple of years, as I recall, and now it's back up in a more frequently spoken language. Neat. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Streza. Councillor Scott.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a couple of quick questions. I lowered my hand. I didn't unmute. So I noted the finance manager position is coming off of grant funding, but the position is going to be retained and rolled into the general fund. I'm just trying to make the numbers in the columns add up. Is that about $50,000 part of the salaries line that's reflected at the top line salaries of $1.4 million?

You want to answer this?

Yes.

Great. All right. Just wanted to make sure, doing my best Barry Joe Rosetti, make sure all the numbers in the columns line up. I guess my other question is just organizationally, you know, taking a look at the org chart, there's 13... You know, when you look at the engagement and neighborhood services, and I know we're going to get to them in a second, but it looks like something like 11 people all directly reporting into a director level title. But when I look at comms, there's 13 people in this division and four of them have director level titles. It seems like a pretty vertical org chart. Does that feel like the right number of directors for 13 people?

So we have functional divisions within the comms budget. LCA is essentially a division, but the auditing department is moving toward collapsing divisions together. So we have three people in a team that absolutely need a director leading that work. The web team also functions as a functional division. That's also three people. And again, it's really important that we have somebody that is of director level competence and knowledge who can be both, you know, working on code for the site, as well as leading strategy, managing vendors, overseeing a complex more than 200,000, and page website, working with departments across the city to make sure that all of those pages are up to date as well as all of the tools. That is absolutely a director level position. The other directors and the core comms team are myself and the deputy. I think that's something that people Ms. Miss about directors and Somerville, which is that we are all also working all the time. So I table I write press releases my deputy my deputy Ms. Is handling the bulk of media queries, which is a really important way that we get information out to the community and honor the role of the state we We are not sitting back orchestrating. We are doing the work daily as staff. And then on top of that, also managing. I think that I heard somebody in the mayor's office discussing the idea of whether directors are needed and they were saying, yeah, guess what? You need somebody to lead a team. You need someone to manage the staff, hire the staff, mentor the staff, guide the work, manage the strategy, In addition to also doing the work, like it would, you know, it would be nice to be able to focus more time on management, but in fact, it isn't something that actually gets shortchanged due to daily nonstop demands to actually deliver output.

So that's how it breaks down. All right. So you would, uh, you'd compare the position, uh, despite the director title of something more akin to a working form, uh, highway department.

The mayor calls us player coaches.

I think working foreman is, uh, a good, a good phrase as well. All right. Well, um, I guess there's some follow-up observations we made there about the difference in working foreman salaries and director salaries, but that's not relevant to your budget. So I appreciate that. Director Taylor, I appreciate the answer. And Mr. Chair, I think I'm all set.

Thank you, Councilor Scott. And I'll just recognize that the Celtics won two championships with Bill Russell as the player coach. So it's a good model. Any other questions? Oh, Councilor Hart.

Thank you so much. I just have a detailed question following up on what Director Taylor just said about working with the newspapers. And I'm just curious if there are relationships and ongoing information sharing between papers, news outlets, and languages other than English.

Yeah, we have a long history of working within language media. It's not just papers like the Brazilian Times or El Mundo, but also, for example, we've done a lot of work within language radio, which is particularly effective in reaching out within the Haitian community and our Brazilian community. We also occasionally work with TV in other languages and it is absolutely a part of the outreach strategy that the multilingual language coordinator leads and that we support. We have had a lot, especially during the pandemic, the Brazilian times became a lifeline for us to get information to the public in language media is really important. So thank you for the question.

Thank you for the answer. Thanks for educating me. Appreciate it.

Any other questions or comments from the committee? I am seeing none. And so I will say thank you so much for your work and your staff's work and have a great rest of your night.

Thank you. I'm going to stay up here with the engagement and services director.

Oh, that sounds good. I, for what it's worth, I have city TV next, but if everyone's happy with the order, we could totally do it. Yep, could do either one. Why don't we stick to it for lack of a better reason and invite Director of City Cable Operations, Stephen DiCarlo.

How you doing, Director DiCarlo?

Would you please tell us about City TV?

Sure, thank you. I'm Steve to Carlo directors need to be in a brief summary of what we do is city TV is the city's government and educational access to the media service. We essentially provide access to our city's government school related events and meetings such as the council meetings as you know community events and emergency communications of course our mission is pretty direct. It's to ensure equitable 24-7 access to city info and civic participation. We do this through many means. One is through our two cable TV channels, GOV TV and ED TV, live streaming, YouTube channels, social media, and on-demand services. We believe Somerville City TV strengthens our communication with the public. Since it creates civic engagement, provides educational community connections, through multiple platforms. And quickly, some stats that we have. Like I said, our YouTube channels continue to grow. Our online presence continues to grow. Right now, for our government educational TV channels, YouTube channels, we have over 8,000 subscribers. And with those two channels for the past 12 months, we've uploaded 400 videos. And from those 400 videos, we've seen over 230,000 reviews. So like I said, it continues to grow our online presence. And having said that, I'd be happy to take your questions.

Thank you so much. I'll start by just summarizing the questions and answers that were submitted before. Question was, which line covers the city council chambers control room overhaul? The answer was saying this R and M are audio visual equipment line. The total line is about 25,000 and the control room work is estimated at eight to 10,000. Anything to add there?

No, that's pretty much, that's pretty much it.

Okay. And the next question was asking what it covers and that includes camera switching, camera control and distribution equipment for cable, YouTube live streaming and remote meeting production.

Yeah, essentially that's our production system. Thank you.

And then a question asked, what instructional videos are planned? And the answer was short topics on various topics, like what happens when you call 911, permitting, road and control, and safe block parties. Anything else on that?

No, we've been doing... I wouldn't say instructional, but we've been doing a lot of PSAs that show how to do certain things like roading control, parking on the odd side, door and snow emergencies, which turned out great. But in terms of instructional, basic instructional videos, yes, those are the ones.

Thank you. Members of the committee, any questions or comments about City TV? I am seeing none. And so I will say thank you so much. Before I ever ran, I spent a lot of time appreciating and using the broadcasts to follow events. So thanks so much.

Thank you.

Okay. And we will move on to Engagement and Neighborhood Services. And I believe we will now have Director of Engagement and Neighborhood Services, Adriana Fernandez. And please take it away, Director Fernandez.

So I'm Adriana Fernandez. I've been working with the city for 13 years. I started actually as a family liaison with the schools. So I was invited by Denise Taylor to start a project which turned into Summer Viva, SOYA, and now Immigrant Advancement. So I'm very proud of being part of this process. And so It has been four years that I went to work with economic development, focusing on small minority businesses. And it was very important, everything that I learned from SOYA, going where the community is, that we decided to do the same with the small businesses in Somerville. So I can tell that after four years, we have like building trust and we are ready to expand this work to other communities. So we are still working on the scope for the services for the new division. I'm so glad I've been working with Matt, Denise and the five equity support team from three youth. So we've been working together to make sure soon everybody's gonna get to know about the new division because we're going to be everywhere. You know.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'll summarize these questions and answers that were sent in advance. First one was whether an engagement neighborhood services coordinator was added along with the director. was some confusion about the sort of titles and roles the answer was no there's one supervisory role the director of ens and this coordinator the engagement and outreach coordinator is a full-time staff role not a supervisor anything to add there okay a question was what staff are moving into ens And the answer was that existing staff are being regrouped from economic development, communications, and SOIA, including outreach staff and multilingual equity support staff. And then related to that, what work will ENS do? And that answer was neighborhood outreach, resident and small business engagement, being part of slice of the city, city hall neighborhood meetings, civic days. programs like bridge builders, outreach resources, and in-the-field engagement. Anything to add to either of those?

Through the Chair, not to add necessarily, but just to let you know that the idea is dividing the City of Summerville into 10 different neighborhoods for us to identify the needs from each neighborhood and make sure our team will be there listening directly to the residents, business owners, and bringing the right services that they need.

Okay, thank you. Members of the committee, any questions or comments about engagement in neighborhood services? Councilor Hart.

Thank you so much. This is exciting. I'm excited to hear about this. new division. And I have a question about the I see in this in the memo, the directors, you know, kind of scope of, of activities. I'm curious, will the will there still be a small business, you know, staff, staff focused on small businesses in economic development? Or is it 100% moved to this new

Actually, to the chair, I'm sorry. We are going to keep working on we've been like, for example, we're working on the licensing process, facilitating the communication on all the city licensing and permitting to make sure we're going to provide the friendly version for people that would like to open a business or apply for a permit. They can navigate the system in a friendly way. So we are already working with the Meredith Gamble team to make sure to language access Gabby and Karin to make sure we're gonna provide this service in different languages too. So, but at this point, it's not just about the immigrant communities, also the non-immigrant communities, because the process, what we noticed that the process has been like hard for everybody. So how to make this easier possible and actually for people to be happy about being able to go through the whole process. So we're working together to make sure we're gonna engage everybody into city services and processes.

Okay, thank you. And one other question in there, it says Davis Square response efforts. So could you elaborate on that a little bit about what will be the scope in this position related to Davis Square response efforts?

If you want to want to just say something that is, but we've been up as economic development small business team. We already been working with Main Street in a Davis where they have the merchant group. So we already reaching out to all those groups to make sure we can collaborate, bring city departments to clarify their questions. So we already working with them. But we'd like to add more areas, for example, Metro Street, Winter Hill, Ball Square. We don't have organizations that will oversee those areas, but we're going to make sure we're going to be there to cover those areas.

Okay. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

And I'm sorry, just to clarify the first of Councilor Hart's questions about the small business support. Am I right in understanding that there used to be a specific role, a specific job around that in OSPCD? And now there's not?

No, to the chair. We're going to just like transfer everything that we've been doing and add more people that will help us out. I used to do this job Actually, I'm still working on it with Patricia, who is the permitting liaison. So we're going to keep doing the same work. But the team that we're going to work with, they're going to be helping us out for us to go even further with two people.

Thank you. Councillor Strezza.

Thank you. Through you to our director, I wanted to ask about with the part-time roles of the equity support team and with outreach coordinator, is there... especially when we talk about minorities and women-owned businesses, that a lot of times there's a snag with the procurement process and that more Somerville businesses would love to partner with the city. But because they're a small business, they don't always have the capacity to... file the tax ID and get into the city system to be able to be one of the businesses that our city chooses when we're looking for, say, restaurants or services or local, you know, keeping locals first. Has there been going into this budget season conversations on that and what that would look like? And yeah, where your approach is and what your thoughts are on that at this current moment.

Through the chair, we are already in contact with Kathleen from equity division and also other departments to make sure we can advocate together for the minority business to have more space and visibility and be able to turn into city vendors. So this is something that we're going to work together to make sure we're going to be able to achieve it.

Okay. Great to hear and happy to have follow-up questions as well on that. And yeah, I'll stop there. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Strezzo. Councillor Link.

Thank you, Chair, through you. I guess I'm happy that we've got more support for small businesses and potential small businesses. I do, I guess, I do wanna make sure we're putting our efforts in the right spot as a city. Having a confusing process that is onerous and then having someone to help you through that onerous process that we've created, is maybe not, like, so I just want to make sure, I understand that, and I still think that we should be, have this position and that we should have help, but I do also want to make sure that we're not solving the problem that we've heard about how complicated permits and licenses and all that are by just having someone help alongside this complicated process and instead are also focused on, and this is probably not even you, but making sure that we have to actually fix the process itself. I know, like, for example, I was just talking today about citizen serve and how someone was comparing Cambridge's implementation of citizen serve and how it is very friendly and easy to use and much more intuitive than Somerville's implementation. So it occurs to me that a lot of this stuff may be in the capacity of, you know, this role, I would hope a lot of that feedback would be going back. There's some sort of feedback loop that can actually serve to fix the process and not just kind of band-aid over it.

Through the chair, we started last year interviewing like city departments that are involved with all the permitting process. We already went through with zoning VPZ and now we're going to go and interview everybody from ISD because we want to make sure we can listen directly to departments. They also have their issues. But even though it's going to take a while for us to go through all the departments, we just started and thank you for mentioning the Seeds&Serve because you're gonna start our material from Seeds&Serve because you're not able to do anything, apply for any permitting with the city if you don't have an account. So do you have an account? But the first question, do you need help with interpretation? So if they do, go through SOIA. If not, so we are working on a system also that they can navigate by themselves And at the end, get a checklist, everything they need based on their needs, right? So it's something that we've been working on. And although the process is going to take long, we're going to start by educating how to navigate the system now. Some things we're not. able to change because they are like state old, but something, yes, we can. And so we've been providing office hours, which is very important for all the ones who would like to communicate with ISD and with city clerk, economic development at the same time. So we host the office hours every week. It's been very popular and we'd like to extend office hours, virtual office hours, and also in person. So the idea is, yes, we're going to look for a big change, but also now, what can we do now? to make sure that constituents can navigate the system and enjoy navigating the system. It's not supposed to be something that people get mad and they don't know how to communicate who is supposed to answer this question. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to make sure everybody's going to be engaged and happy.

Wonderful. And I think just to be clear then, so my understanding, I think I was very long winded in that last question, to put it in like a short, there's a feedback loop that's going to be, that your team will have with whoever's, I don't know, whoever it is that has like citizens or who is in charge of citizen serve and that kind of thing. Is that my correct in understanding that?

Yeah, we've been working with City Club, with Andrea Torres, she's an expert in City Club, but also with Patricia. And as I said, the language team, the language access team also, they're working together, bringing different perspectives, just to make sure we have a broad view of the issue and work on plain language, like simple process and enjoyable process.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Well, then I will thank you very much, Director Hernandez, for appearing here tonight. Have a great rest of your night. And that brings us to the end of the section for communications and public engagement. Are there any motions at this time or cuts or resolutions? Seeing none, let's move on. We are now on Health and Human Services. And we will once again see Director of Health and Human Services, Karen Carroll. I imagine we are likely to see Finance Manager, Anup Malik. And I think we will begin by inviting Director Carroll to give an overview of Health and Human Services. And then we will move into the Health and Human Services Administration Division.

Are you not hearing anything as well?

I'm not at the time. I think they are still waiting to get the right people in the room.

Does anyone want to sing a song or something?

Well, there was a mention of that Parking on the Odd Side video, and that reminded me of how wonderful that video was. Okay. Hello, Director. I believe it's muted on your end.

Okay.

Okay, please take it away. Tell us about Health and Human Services.

Hey, thank you. Through the chair. I'm Karen Carroll, the Director of Health and Human Services here in the city of Somerville. I use she, her pronouns. And I'm here with the members of the team who will introduce themselves. I wanted to give a quick overview that the newly formed Health and Human Services Department unites a broad range of community services under one structure to better support health, well-being, and stability of Somerville residents. In FY27, the department expands to include immigrant advancement and the inspectional services health team, strengthening coordination, improving efficiency, and enhancing service accessibility and equity. Key FY27 priorities include supporting vulnerable populations expanding youth and senior services, advancing immigrant inclusion, providing, improving, excuse me, public health outcomes and reducing barriers to benefits and city programs. Major initiatives include launching a new teen programming space coordinating outreach on state benefit program changes, conducting research on immigrant and refugee experiences, reducing road-related complaints, increasing seniors' access to benefits, and creating a unified low-income certification process. Together, these efforts reflect the department's commitment to coordinated community-centered services and proactive public health planning. So at this time, I can take any questions on the HHS admin memo. And Anoop Malik is here with me as the division head. Let me just introduce. Oh, our questions are kind of came together, excuse me, through the chair. It was one, yeah.

Oh, no, no, please continue. Yeah, sorry.

So, however, if you want to ask any follow-up to those HHS admin, and then Anoop will introduce his division. However you want to do it.

Thanks. His division, meaning the administration division? Yeah, why don't you go ahead, Manager Malik, and introduce the administration division, and then we'll move on to the memo questions.

Through you, Chair. Anoop Malik, Health and Human Services Finance Manager. The health and human services administration budget reflects the newly established division which supports departmental operations and stopping. The department's personal service budget funds 5 full-time employees dedicated to HHS operations as well as compensation for board of health members. It also includes funding for employee-related contractual obligations and other personal expenses required under union agreements. The ordinary maintenance budget provides the resources necessary to support the department's day-to-day operations. These funds cover essential administrative and operational expenses that enable the department to effectively carry out its mission.

Thank you so much. Okay, so there's a bunch of questions and answers here, and I am trying to adjust on the fly to the fact that this meeting is going to go until late. So rather than read and summarize all of these, I'm going to mention just a few that might have skipped attention or that people might want to touch on. And please feel free to shed any additional light on any that I'm missing out on. I'll try to be fast and please pardon my brevity, but I'm making a shift here. Do we have enough staff to maintain food access services? The answer was to point to strong partnerships with social service providers and community food security groups and emphasizing food remains a top constituent need. Do we need more youth social workers or behavioral health specialists if Summerville Public Schools adds a school resource officer, a police officer stationed in the high school? The answer was HHS has not received a school request for more positions. HHS youth staff support systems and referrals, HHS youth staff support systems and referrals, but do not provide individual counseling. Are we ready for increased demand for the food market program? Yes, the mobile farmers market starts July 9th, is staffed and funded, and school markets remain funded at last year's level. Are we ready if SNAP or other federal food assistance is cut? HHS is monitoring federal changes, coordinating SNAP outreach, using community benefit funding for many food operations, and working through the Somerville Food Coalition. And do we have the budget to assist older unhoused residents? HHS and the Council on Aging use Council on Aging staff, housing stability services, senior bridge rent help, and geriatric social workers. The biggest constraint remains affordable housing supply. Anything to add to these? Okay, thank you. Moving to the committee. Any members of the committee have questions or comments for HHS administration? Councilor Strezzo.

Thank you. Um, can we please talk about in our, in our counselors in our notes, the good through you chair to our director, the professional and technical services line of 40,000 K Medicaid building billing contracts. Can you go into a little detail about that, please?

Through Chair Anupali, HHS finance manager, this Medicaid services contract is a partnership contract between Health and Human Services Department and Somerville Public Schools. We manage the contract, the invoicing, the tracking of the revenue that comes into the city. This contract is supporting the school, whereas the special ed department summits data to our third party biller, which is public health, public consulting group. And they in turn take that data and report on that data to the Medicaid and that that's how we get the revenue into the door. And the public consulting group is the third party vendor, so as to speak, that helps with supporting the Somerville Public Schools here.

Can you, through the chair to director, thank you for that. Can you go a little deeper on that, please? How specifically that I get the data, but what What exactly, what services in the public schools that it's used for that we're collecting? Is it, tell me more. This is my first time, first year on finance committee.

Through the chair. I may have to also respond back to this question via email with detailed information. But just to share some of the stuff here is this contract supports the reimbursement, so direct service, administrative activity claiming. It also supports administrative activity claiming in a little bit. So this is related to a number of factors. So public consulting group supports mental health, mental behavioral health services. That's one criteria where the school reports data. They also report on therapy services, medical services. There is direct service logging where each month the school is providing data to the public consulting group, which helps them in billing the Medicaid. This is all to do with the services that the school provides. In turn, public consulting group takes that information and turns that into a quarterly billing. So the types there are behavioral support, counseling services, occupational therapy, orientation and mobility, physical therapy, psychological services, social work services, speech and language services. So these are like operating on a basis of what's available, what's not available. So public health, public consulting group consultants advise on the information that the school provides. and then in turn turns that into billing to the Medicaid.

Okay. Thank you for that. I'm trying to and I will very much be happy to hear more in detail from your email, but I'm trying to wrap my mind around or maybe someone has a motorcycle outside. I'm trying to wrap my mind around, okay, is this when i'm thinking of of how medicaid may be linked into this at first when i i saw this i thought okay was this somehow related to the council on aging and then i'm thinking okay so if we're talking about the public school system are we talking about uh because if we're talking about ot uh in counseling and that that's more in the realm of special ed and then if we're also talking about like Billing for services or Medicaid, then are we going into Cambridge Health Alliance and the satellite service at the high school? So are we talking about the high school? Are we talking about special ed services? Are we talking about... Is it reported out each single school or...

And if I could jump in, I don't mean to derail that question, but just to check my understanding of what you've said so far, Manager Malik. The schools provide many hundreds of thousands of dollars of services to students, and some amount of that can be reimbursed by Medicaid. And so this contract is for consultants who really understand how to make that connection between all the services that we're already doing and spending quite a lot of money doing wonderfully and available reimbursement funds so that we can get some of that kind of credited to us.

Through the chair, that's correct. Councilor Reeve.

Okay, thanks.

And through the chair, to also just add on to Councilor Streitzel's question. For example, in FY23-24, the school together with public consulting group had built for counseling, but no nursing. The 24 through 25 year, they had built for nursing, but no counseling. And the current year and the future year, the hope is that we are heading in the direction of where we can build for both the nursing and the counseling services. And this is all to maximize the revenue that we are getting in. We had budgeted for almost $300,000 worth of revenue that we would be getting in FY26, which we are almost close to meeting the goal. And for FY27, The expectation is once again that we would be getting almost $300,000 worth of revenue into the Medicaid pocket.

Okay. Thank you for that. And yes, looking forward to the email. So thank you for that. One last question, if I may, not related to that specific bullet point, if I may. Oh, please, Councilor. Okay. Yeah, go for it. Thank you. Oh, no. No, I'm not forgetting it. Oh, yeah. Right. How are we on the health boxes? I know that they are a grant funded and they're also a pilot from what I believe. Are they safe for the years to come? Is there thought or projection on the future of them? And where are we on that?

The Chair, thank you for the question. I believe you're referring to the pilot project of the public health vending machines that started in this class. Yes, thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

No, that's fine. They're going really well. Our activity, our monitoring activity, we are starting to get some data back from the machines that automatically sort of record what is being utilized and taken out, distributed. So we're beginning to understand what's being utilized in which of the different vending machines, and there are different patterns within the city. And we've also just recently swapped out more of our winter weather items, warm weather items for more of our summer safety items including hydration, tick and bug wipes, sunscreen wipes, those types of things. Some of the stocks, standard things are very popular throughout the year, including diapers, wipes, body wipes, contraception, Narcan. So a range of products still in there. Again, once we have six months to a year of data, we'll be able to really see trends and whatnot. In terms of sustainability and funding, there is funding through our marijuana funds. Stabilization fund is where that project is being funded out of. This year, we had some funds from a RISE grant to help us get started, but we do have sufficient funds to continue those machines for multiple years.

What exciting news.

Excuse me through the chair. I stand corrected. It's from the opiate funds that this project is being paid for. Yes. Thank you, Director Lee.

No, thank you for all this information. I'm looking forward to circling back about the data as it's ready and how exciting. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Counselor Strezzo. Counselor Hart.

Thank you. I have several questions, so I'll try to be brief, but your department encompasses so much important work that I know that I really appreciate, and I know constituents do as well, and just have some follow-up questions. I really appreciated you outlining some goals for the next fiscal year, and just for more information on a couple of those, one is You mentioned improving public health outcomes, and I'm curious about what specific outcomes you're looking at. And the second one along those lines is, what factors are you looking at to bring down the level of rodent concerns?

Through the chair, thank you for the questions. I'll start with the first one. I'm not sure which of our goals in particular you were referring to. So if there is a specific goal you're referring to there, let me know. If not, I mean, I can confidently say that a number of our goals will be working towards improved public health outcomes. That's what we do using the term public health in a very broad sense to include prevention activities, on improving people's living conditions, the social determinants of health, the human services side of it, sort of the entire life spectrum. All of the things that we are working towards in our goals are focused on improving public health and the well-being of the members of our community, in particular, our most vulnerable members of our community. So they all indirectly connect to that. If there is a specific initiative in general, or I think as we start to work as a new HHS division, we're excited about some potential ways in which we can try some new initiatives or pair new teams to maybe increase access for folks, whether that's to housing applications, SNAP benefits, how we reach people, our ISD team. There's so many areas for overlap. We're excited to start exploring. If there is one in particular that you'd like me to expand on right now, I'm happy to. Let me now just pass over to Colin Sigler, our Director of Public Health, who can answer the question about the bat complaints and that.

Thank you, Karen. Through the Chair, Councilor Hart, The road control program for the city continues to be a robust aspect of public health. We are going to continue with our residential program, reaching more folks, getting more folks involved in that program, ensuring that it's yielding results. It doesn't need to be a program where we're just going out there and setting boxes and walking away. We want that program to continue to give folks the information, education they need, as well as the assistance that often comes from enforcement and the work itself from our pest control provider. So we're going to continue monitoring and enhancing that program. Smart boxes continue to be a part of our approach as well, tracking high activity areas, addressing them through enforcement and education actions, and working with our vendor, Modern Pest, to assist in that communication education. so we can make more realistic and effective recommendations to many of these businesses and residents that might be impacting the road population significantly. On top of that, we'll continue getting out there, doing community walkthroughs, which tend to be very effective in moving people in the right direction towards reducing food, water, and shelter in their neighborhood, as well as providing smaller sectors of rat czars who can keep an eye on things. and move things forward in the right direction under our guidance and the guidance from each other, which we tend to find is a much more effective approach. If there are specific aspects of the Road Control Program you have questions about, I'm happy to answer those. I could talk rats all night, but I know not everyone wants to. But yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing your questions further. Thank you.

Fantastic. Thanks for those details. I also had a question about food access. And in this memo, it mentions that the school markets will be level funded, I believe. But in the budget book, it said that the only increase in food access would be to the school markets. So I just wanted to clarify.

Yeah.

Good evening, Lisa Robinson, Office of Food Access and Healthy Communities. Thank you for your question. Really good observation. So the way that the school markets were funded last year is different than the way it's going to be funded this year. So last year, it came from two sources. It came from free cash and then community benefits funds. This year, half of it will be coming from a state year mark, and the other half will be in the general funds that you see outlined for you.

Amy Nunez, Fantastic and and will that will there be three markets three school markets continuing going forward, I know the haley was a new like maybe pilot.

Amy Nunez, Yes, I know the schools are continuing to evaluate to make sure it has the highest impact there, but as of right now, that is the plan.

And I also wanted to ask about carrot cards, which my understanding is that they're not in the operating budget because it's a different source of funding. But I know that that is a program that's very popular and a lot of residents want to know about it. So I was wondering if you wouldn't mind giving a very short update about where the funding is for that right now and at what level those will be continuing.

We are able to use community benefits funds to continue that program for one more year. There's a few pieces that we're looking to see if they come through another senior mark before we determine what level of enrollment we'll have for next year for students.

Thank you so much. I appreciate all that. Chair Wheeler, I have a few more questions. Is it okay to continue or do you want me to take a pause?

Go for it.

Okay. I had a question about the senior transportation program.

Maybe that's something that we should hold up for Council on Aging.

Okay. Fantastic. So would now be the appropriate time to talk about the youth development again?

I think we'll wait for community wellness. We're right now on the HHS admin division. Admin.

Okay.

Yeah.

Excellent. Okay. I will stop there then. Thank you so much.

Any other questions for HHS admin for the committee? Okay, then we will move on with so much thanks to public health. So we're going to have director of public health, Colin Ziegler, come on back.

Here to chair, good evening. My name is Colin Ziegler, the public health director under the new public health division, which is now going to contain ISD health, our environmental health team, which contains our environmental health coordinator, or RATSAR, as well as the health manager, our fantastic ISD health inspections team, who are out there on the ground keeping an eye on all of the things in Somerville. And if you have any questions about what's going on, they are more than happy to provide you an answer. We're also absorbing our shared services coordinator, as well as public health nursing, and our community health workers, which is an exciting partnership to help Shared services coordinator to leverage some state funding opportunities that we share with Cambridge, as well as interacting with our public health nurses and our community health workers who do excellent work in promoting public health, disease prevention, and then getting out there into the community and interacting one-on-one, which provides an opportunity with our inspectors who also do that work and can help reinforce some of our goals and objectives. Just an overview. The department conducts inspections on or the division conducts inspections of housing, public spaces, addresses environmental health concerns such as rodents and other environmental nuisances. We connect folks to resources. We do education and enforcement work on that end. We also oversee public health programs to maintain a health and safety community in partnership with our public health nurses as well as our community health workers. So that is my I'm happy to take questions. Wonderful.

I'll just quickly summarize this question from the memo. It was asking about how many food establishments are inspected? How often is the city current? There's some charts, but in summary, there are 456 establishments requiring 891 routine inspections by risk level. As of June 11th, 774 routine inspections were complete and the city is expected to finish this cycle by mid-July. Sound good?

Thank you. Councilor Link.

Thank you, Chair, through you.

I'm curious with this new reorganization. So there's obviously some coordination that has to happen, especially in terms of like when we're, when a new business is building out or renovating, right. There's certain requirements that you're going to have, right. And then there's certain requirements that the, the permitting department is going to have for the actual like build out part. How much coordination are you doing to make sure that our businesses are not going to build something only to find out that like the ISD said yes, but then you say no?

Through the chair, that's an excellent question. Our ISD building division and health division will continue working extremely closely We're not moving physical spaces. We have a great rapport with our building colleagues. There is definitely a lot of coordination that happens on the review fields and activities that have to take place. One can't happen without the other. So there's always regular and constant discussion. If there are oversights here and there, those discussions are had fairly quickly. So we'll continue coordinating with each other on a regular basis.

Thank you very much.

Any other questions from the committee? Okay, seeing none, thank you so much for appearing before us. Thank you. And we will move on to community wellness. And we already got to hear from Director of the Office of Food Access, Lisa Robinson. I'm wondering we may also have Director of Prevention Services, Tina Loos. Please feel free to introduce yourself.

Through the chair, good evening. My name is Lisa Robinson, and I'm presenting on the Community Wellness Division. This is a new division as part of the reorganization, so therefore it's a new budget. The Community Wellness Division contains the salaries for 15 employees, including the prevention services, food access and healthy communities, community health workers, and youth services. Our work supports all Somerville residents, and we are responsible for projects such as the mobile farmers market, the forthcoming community food assessment, The co-managing the warming center, the public health vending machines, summer and school youth jobs, street outreach and helping with SNAP and mass health enrollment. A new expense in the budget is within the work of food access to support the monthly school budgets. The line item and rentals equipment reflects the rental of the free period product stations in certain city buildings. The payment for teen summer jobs has been moved into this division from the executive administration office But this is not a new expense. And finally, our prevention team will be working with the communications team on the mayor's priority of the safe spot campaign. Thank you and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much. And to quickly summarize these questions, how are youth development services contracted and what outcomes are expected? The answer said funding is not reduced. Services are competitively bid and focused on youth space, programming, leadership, and advocacy. And measures include youth served, unique participants, workshops, engagement, and satisfaction. A question was what alternate sources fund positions? Marijuana funds support the youth workplace learning coordinator and prevention services coordinator. And a state tobacco grant supports the tobacco control coordinator. Do we have enough staff to support food access if SNAP is threatened? The office relies on strong partnerships with providers inside and outside the city. Food's a top request and community partners do much of the frontline work. Anything to add about those? Thank you. Okay, so I know, Councillor Hart, you mentioned having a question about teen empowerment from before, and I'm also seeing Councillor Scott's hand up. I'm gonna go to you first, Councillor Hart, if you still have that question.

Sure, thank you. One thing is, from the get-go, I'd just like to clarify what I said at the beginning of this meeting when we were talking about the teen empowerment item. I realized what I was trying to express very clumsily, I realized a better way to express it, which is that I think the teen empowerment model is very much about transformational leadership development. And so, which I don't think can really be captured in a needs assessment because you kind of by definition don't know that you, you know, what you would get out of that because it's transformational rather than transactional. So I just wanted to clarify what I was trying to say with the qualitative quantitative distinction. I think it's better captured by transformational transactional distinction. Um, so thank you for, for listening to that. Um, my question is just going back to the earlier question. Um, if you could just say more about what the city's vision is for youth development and then how that relates to the youth service director position.

Um, through the chair, I will start with this as again, many of our divisional directors have, uh, worked in the space of youth development. This year, the youth services director will be under the community wellness starting in FY27. They will be situated in the division of community wellness with the prevention folks who are also doing a lot of work in the youth space. Not that that's not happening elsewhere. Again, we plan to work across our divisions as we form and this new HHS department unfolds and finds its feet. There'll be lots of ways in which new services will be supported. And you heard from Parks and Rec earlier as well with the space in the TAB building that's been identified. We're excited to start partnering with them as well. And we don't know exactly what that would look like yet, but we know again that youth have told us time and time again that they need safe spaces to be, they need trusted adults. These are all protective factors that we want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the youth in all of the various departments within HHS, divisions within HHS, as well as our partner agencies and within the city. So we're looking forward to this continued collaboration that goes on all the time. Again, our roadmap right now, I would say for youth services is really that needs assessment, that that is part of what's really guiding what we're doing with our space, our time, our staff, how we're addressing the needs of what the youth have told us they need from the city. So, and yes, and again, the whole framework has been adopted by our department, rolling it out and sharing it with other teams in the city. We had a conference earlier this year in which the whole framework is sort of part of all of the work that we do, highlighting the strengths of youth and highlighting the protective factors. Again, and this is all part of the new services, things like the job programs, the empowerment for youth, the curriculum, CV development, all of the things that youth need to be equipped for success in higher learning as well as jobs, professional, all of that kind of growth. So we're supporting that as well, all linked to this whole framework that again builds on the positive strengths of youth. And in fact, one other thing on that note, we're trying to modify the wire, what was known as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey for years. would be modified in title, but also in some of the questions to ask and strengthen the data collection around the positive protective factors, understand where youth are, where the gaps are in that as well. So we're excited about that shift as well.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Councillor Hart. Councillor Scott.

Uh, yeah. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I was just wondering if, uh, in the last three hours we had gotten an answer on how many RFP submissions.

Um, through the chair. We do not. I have not spoken with the procurement department tonight, and I don't know that anyone has been able to. So until we are certain whether we can legally talk about the number who I'm not in a position to add any more comment on that, we will follow up with the procurement office tomorrow. And if there is anything that's ready for public that's part of the process, we will follow up with the council for sure.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. Councillor Link.

Thank you, Mr. Sherrod, through you. So I was hoping maybe we could get a quick little kind of overview of what's so the most of the grants or programs that were once in the, the admin section of like last year, we're in the admin section have been moved over. It looks like almost entirely. They've been moved with like the Medicaid one being an exception into this, the wellness, the community wellness division. So I'm just curious though, because a lot of them, they've got like different names or whatnot. Is there, are there any, important call-outs here that we should be focusing on.

Through the chair, can you just clarify, do you mean different funds or lines in the P&T?

Yeah, so lines in the P&T. Some of them have different names. It's hard to compare one to another. It's easy to lose track of the script.

I would say that most of this has just been transferred under my division was existed before that. The food market being the only new one.

Okay, so then, so, for example, like the The one that like called out to me was the local food support, you know, so I'm, did it, did it change, did it split up or something? Cause it was so in FY26 local food support was at, was that 8,500 and now it looks like it's at 2000. So is this another one?

Through the chair, excuse me. We did reduce that for this year because we're interested, we're, bolstering the food programs through the community benefits funds mostly for this year.

Understood. Okay. All right. Great. And I guess the only other thing I'll just say is right now I'm a little concerned seeing that in It was a question I think in the admin section, but I think it actually applied to this one, was talking about, you know, being able to maintain on that topic like food access and kind of, you know, it seems like we're heavily relying on partners, which is something I think we've always done. So that's not necessarily a change, but I do worry that our partners might need to rely on us a little bit. Like we're, it sounds like, it's like the old joke of like, you know, I've got a belt, my belt's holding up my pants, and my pants is holding up my belt, like who's doing the work here? This, you know, I worry, we're relying on partners for food access, partners are relying on us to be able to maintain the work that they do. So I do get concerned that we're, that if we don't keep up with that, especially in these kind of harder times for everyone, including us as a city, that some people are going to get left at the, that our partners are going to start struggling to actually continue to maintain the service. So I do hope that we've got some sort of plan to keep doing a temperature check and see how, see if we need to kind of jump in and do more.

Yeah, thank you for your concern. I think we have a great relationship with community partners, particularly through different coalitions, specifically the Somerville Food Coalition that our office backbones and convenes. So we meet monthly with the steering committee to really keep our ears on the ground and get that feedback and we'll be ready to pivot or act when we hear anything different.

Thank you. I know I'm asking like, oh, sorry. through the chair yeah i know i'm asking kind of an abstract question i just this is something that's on my mind a lot um i really appreciate the work that that you're all doing to to make sure that you know there's um trying to help make sure that we've got food on um on plates so thank you so much

Thank you, Councillor Link. I have a couple questions or comments. So first on the Youth Development Services, echoing what Councillor Hart said about transformational leadership. You know, I very much appreciate doing surveys, making sure we know what we're talking about. We're not just making assumptions and assessing needs. And I just want to make sure that all of us in every department and every role in the city are keeping in mind that things that are sort of readily identifiable in a survey are not necessarily all of the things that are important. Because on paper, you don't see the immediate effects of identity transformation. It's a long-term thing. And it's something that someone might not know they want or need or are ready for until they're experiencing it. And so I just want to make sure awareness of that, awareness of the limitations of only a sort of data, what's on paper approach to these decisions is not enough.

Through the chair, if I can just add that there has been extensive focus groups and qualitative data as well, and that all of the programs we are proposing are evidence based.

Thank you. Talking about community benefits funds, what is the source of community benefits funds?

I'm looking at the development. Yes. Thank you. Through the chair community benefits funds are through a result of development here in the city. They become available to this to the city or use in whatever the city decides to do with it.

Okay, I may follow up with Budget Director Mastroboni to get more clarification later. And then last, and this is a leading question, am I right in understanding that HHS's grants that are received by Union Square Farmers Market and other farmers markets, those make it possible for them to hire multilingual SNAP facilitators and to make matches possible to multiply SNAP amounts?

Yes.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. Any other questions from members of the committee at this time? Okay. Thank you so much for appearing before us. And we will move on to the Council on Aging. And I believe we will have Director of the Council on Aging, Ashley Spelliotis. Hello, Director Spelliotis.

Hello. It's nice to see everyone this evening. My name is Ashley Spelliotis. I'm the Director of the Council on Aging. The Council on Aging is comprised of a multidisciplinary team. We create and implement a variety of programs that are focused on preventative health through advocacy, education, socialization, physical and mental health, and all at little or no cost to our senior residents. And this year we were recognized by AARP who recertified Somerville as a member of their age-friendly community network, and we're also recognized by the Massachusetts Council on Aging as an active aging community, which opens up to different grants and different distinctions, which is really nice for the staff and our senior population. You can see the FY27 budget is largely level-funded. There's a modest increase to the food line, That's to help keep our costs the same for seniors, $5 or $10 for celebration luncheons and cultural events that usually come at a cost of $25 to $30 per person. And then an increase in our transportation line, which reflects some of the counselors were saying absorbing rides that some of our partner organizations just weren't able to maintain this year. So that began in January, 2026. So, yeah. I thank you for your investment in aging in our community and I am welcome any questions you may have.

Thank you so much, Director. To summarize the memo, is the senior transportation cost increase from more service or just from inflation? The answer was both, but mostly service expansion. The program absorbed senior center rides after SCES ended service. I have that in my notes as an abbreviation, but I forget what it stands for, adding about 100 rides per month. And the new contract also added $1 per ride to the cost. Anything to add to that?

No, I'm happy to take any questions on it, but that summarizes it specifically at Somerville Cambridge Elder Services. Historically, for years and years, they were able to provide rides for seniors who ate at their congregate lunch program. That ended this January, and now we are able to offer Somerville residents two rides per week to any senior center location or event.

Thank you. Moving on to questions from the committee, I see Councillor Strezzo.

Thank you. I have a few questions, but I'll start. I'll just start off. Hi, Director Sveliotis. Thank you very much for all you do, for your ongoing on the ground advocacy. I see what you do every day. First, through you, Mr. Chair, through to you, just acknowledging that. With the cost of events, I know that it is $10. And for some of the events, for some, especially as water bills are increasing, as inflation has not gone down, as groceries are more expensive, and how fixed incomes are still very much a real thing. I have heard that comparable cities, their activities and their meals are cheaper. And I know, and this is not a critique, but I know that with all these onslaughts to incomes these days, Those things matter. Have there been any conversations on how to partner or grants or reduce costs even with that? Or if there are seniors who are struggling to pay for that, is there other opportunities for seniors who can't get in but still need that intense socialization? to be able to attend events if cost is a barrier?

Absolutely, through the chair. This has come up a lot amongst our staff, especially amongst our board of directors, comparing to other cities and towns, communities, by and far, our programs are much cheaper, especially the health and wellness programming, the access to social workers, fitness programs. Many communities charge $5 per class. And amongst the board, there has been conversation about needing to charge to offset other programs. Staff and myself feel that's not the way to go. I'm sure I have your support in that, that the majority of our programs are zero cost to residents. The... Meals that are $10 are at Dilboy Post. So it includes the cost of rental, an entertainer, a catered lunch, dessert. We have other $5 programs that are more cultural events focused. And then this past fiscal year, we have reduced some cost of programming for entertainment that is held at the senior center. to $2 or $3. So one answer to your question is that we have a variety of programs at a variety of costs. But the other answer is that we work with our residents every day. And if cost is a factor or a burden, we certainly make exceptions. We don't prevent anybody from attending due to cost.

Okay, that's good to know. And yes, I was speaking specifically when we talk about programs, the meals or the events where that is. So that's what I was specifically trying to get at compared to comparably with other communities. I did have a question about the senior taxi cab program, but I know Councilor Hart had a question on that. So I'm happy to defer to her and then go back in line. and ask my own as well. But before we, so just wanted to put that out there, but I know that Council on Aging has the rental of buildings of ordinary maintenance, the TAP building is in the line. So Are we checking in on the parking lot? I believe that the lease gets signed-ish in July. Is that correct? And I forgot, are we up for it this year? I think it's annual or is it every couple of years? I can't recall. If I may, Mr. Chair, through you to the director.

Through the chair, that's out of my scope, I have to say, but it's ongoing conversation. regarding the amount of parking and the accessibility. So it's an anomaly, I have to say, to answer your question. You know, in the afternoon, there's plenty of parking for the seniors. On Thursdays, it's difficult. But it is an ongoing conversation with the city and with TAS above all else.

Okay, I definitely would like to follow up with you on that because, yeah, I hear that too. It's not solved and it is still a concern, but also I know when we get back into the lease agreement with it, I want to make sure that we are not losing anything, minimally losing any parking or any accessibility in the process of that. Counselors, for those that are new to the council or this conversation, in the past with the TAB building, As you know, we rent it from Tufts, but there was a year when the only way to be able to park at the landlord introduced a kiosk that was credit card only. And any visitors had to pay via credit card or pay for the parking or they were going to get towed. And the city, I fought hard for this as well. And the city did agree and put into the lease that, or the city enveloped the cost of parking into our budget. So I want to keep an eye on that as we head into this fiscal year as well and make sure that that continuity is happening or and that we bring that conversation up again when we need to. But but also when we talk about paying for parking. If you have an ADA placard or number one, you can't even find parking in the area because a lot of visitors to the TAB building, especially with ADA needs, they struggle to be able to park in the area or walk in the area or get to the TAB building. And in the snow, it's even worse. And with the icy sidewalks, it's 10 times worse. It's actually a liability. And so having to pay for ADA accessibility, basic ADA accessibility to be in community and just for some social experiences, that matters. So I'll stop there and hop back in line. But I'm keeping an eye on it for this budget cycle as well. Thanks.

Thank you, Councillor Strezzo. Councillor Hart, do you want to ask about transportation?

Sure. This is just a quick question. My understanding is that there used to be, as part of senior transportation, a service where if you had mobility needs, it was not just a taxi, but someone who could help you get from your home to the vehicle and then at your destination also get out. And I just wonder, is that, am I right that we no longer offer that? Could you tell me the status of that service?

Excuse me, through the chair, there are multiple transportation services and programs for seniors in Somerville. Or which run in Somerville, including the ride, which is a state and federal funded program where seniors are picked up inside of their home. and brought to their location of choice. There is still transportation services provided by Somerville Cambridge Elder Services. That could be rides to doctors appointments or for socialization. And they have the added benefit of a medical escort for some of their rides. And then there is a program called Door to Door or SCM, which is also located at the TAP building here in Somerville. And they provide rides for grocery shopping to medical appointments. We rent their services for some of our programs. The ones that we were talking about at Del Boy and the benefit of their program is that they are 100% ADA compliant vehicles. So they have shared lists on their mini buses and are transportation program, the Somerville Transportation Program run through the Council on Aging, we have a main contract with Green Cab. So our main source of the rides are Green Cab taxi rides. But if a person is unable to use the taxi, then we can also use funding for the transportation program for Green Cab.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, Councillor Hart. Councillor Strezza.

Thank you. If I may on that, Councillor Hart's point, I believe that Councillor Hart was asking specifically about back in the day, there was a program that was somehow related to Cataldo. um is that and and that even may predate you uh director uh yeah but uh do you have any insight or is there any historical knowledge that um yeah okay sure um through the chair it does predate me i can tell you uh working on other locations about

five, 10 years ago, all ambulance companies would have what they called chair car services. Chair car services would bring people home from the hospital to medical appointments. They had different benefits of bringing people up and down stairs using chair lifts, all which other transportation programs, none of which I know of in Somerville, do right now because of insurance billing charges and reimbursement. That service, to my knowledge, has largely ended, but it's directly from insurance companies.

If I may on that. So are there still I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, through you to the director, So it's an insurance billing and thank you. I'm really happy that you can go into detail about this because it seems like kind of a unicorn where we are, um, that this service existed and doesn't anymore. And so you're saying that it was an insurance, um,

Yes, but I just want to be clear that it was never a city program or supported by the city. It was all ambulance companies, to my knowledge, in Massachusetts had this service provided where they would charge insurance to get people from the hospital and so forth, and now they do not. But they, I believe, still have the service, but it is completely private pay for people. But again, not... not for city support or city use. So we never have people coming to the senior center using a chair lift or a chair car.

Thank you for that. One thing that I have heard from some constituents on this and similar issues with transportation is that sometimes if they have like a doctor that the taxi can only go and this is not, this is just like reporting back what I've what I've heard um sometimes uh so constituents they they are there are referred to a specialist in their network of of hospital systems so I don't know mass gen or uh Beth Israel or um I don't know, CHA or whatnot. And this specialist is only in this office on the other side in Alston. And the transportation will not go to Alston. So it may still be in the hospital system, the doctor's covered or within network and et cetera. But the ride does not go to that specific hospital. block or neighborhood, so therefore is invalid for a ride. And residents were saying, well, I can't go to the specialist if I don't have a ride there. There isn't a way to get, they can't. And again, you know, taxi cabs are very expensive on their own and et cetera. And it has created a separate entity of an issue that wasn't anticipated. Yeah. That's more of a comment. I mean, director, that's, it's not on you. You have no role in that, but it is something that I've heard back of feedback and that was unexpected. I did not expect that to be an actual issue. Of course, that is where hospitals and other transportation programs could be useful, including ambulatory programs, but that's a different conversation for a different day. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Strezzo. I have two follow-up questions for you, Director Sveliotis. One is with the door-to-door service, am I right in understanding that has to be booked two weeks in advance?

Yes. Again, door-to-door is not a city-run program, but that is my understanding as well, that they generally require two weeks. And that's Another benefit of our senior transportation program is that we require two business days, so much quicker.

Thank you. And I also understand that the volunteer board for the Council on Aging, who I've had the pleasure of meeting several members of, they've been doing listening sessions for some time. And I'm just curious if there are policy ideas or program ideas beyond what is in the Council on Aging's own ability to provide in terms of social programming and and transportation. How are those ideas or those needs being communicated to the rest of the city government?

You're right, Mr. Chair. The Board of Directors has had two recent initiatives. One is the creation of drop-in hours with board members themselves held at the Council on Aging, so a one-on-one Amy Nunez, Time for residents to come and speak and share about all the great things senior related and the improvements, they would like to see. Amy Nunez, And the board has also paired and partnered with an advocacy group massing your action to hold focus group social settings sessions in each board of the Community. The feedback is varied depending on whether they're held in a predominantly senior housing unit or elsewhere in the community. A lot of feedback, which our survey showed to us and which we can see at the Council on Aging, Prices are increasing for our senior population that incomes in Somerville are on the rise. The median income is about $134,000, but the median income for a senior is in the 40, about 44,000, and then goes down to about 20 and 19, 22,000 for seniors living alone, and that's by gender. Um, so the rates of, um, you know, new businesses going up for meal transportation is, um, it's sometimes difficult for, um, for seniors. And that's why, um, we have done different programs at the council on aging, um, from basic financial literacy, um, to working with, um, our water department for the creation of the water reduction. for helping with a senior tax program and advocating last year to increase the income guidelines. So it's now up to $90,000 and an increased tax rebate from 15,000 to $2,000. So that's a conjunction of the board and the staff of the Council on Aging working on those projects.

Thank you so much, and I figure you must mean 1,500. Yes, sorry, 1,500. Just for the record.

Yes.

Thank you so much. Any other questions or comments from members of the committee? Well, thank you so much, Director Sveliotis, and have a good rest of your night. Okay, next we have Human Services, which includes Summer Promise and Veteran Services. And I believe Nancy Bacci is the Director of Human Services. Yes.

Thank you. Good evening.

Welcome.

Yes. The Human Services Division supports the overall well-being of residents by connecting, aligning, and mobilizing community partners and resources to ensure everyone in Somerville has the opportunity to thrive. As you know, as part of the RE-ORG, this is a newly formed division. which encapsulates Summer Promise, which had its own budget prior. Veterans Services also had its independent budget. The Social Services team, which includes our Youth Law Services position as well. So we will continue under this, and we're viewing this as an exciting opportunity to build off already amazing work by a great team, to provide resources to veterans and their families, continue to support children and families, address basic needs for our social services team and provide support to the community as well as city departments who are LGBT plus services coordinator. I'm happy to hear any questions you may have.

Thank you so much. To very briefly summarize the questions and answers, there was a question of what services do human services roles provide? Social workers serve adults 19 to 59, clinical youth specialists serve youth through 18, and case managers help with utilities, clothing, food, insurance, and referrals. And veterans and LGBTQ plus roles have more defined program areas. A question was, why do we have several layers of directors rather than a flatter HHS structure? The answer was managers and directors help coordinate across programs and act as working managers who can cover gaps and support frontline work. A question was, why have veterans benefit claims declined and what are the precise numbers? So there are details provided. There's mention of claims fluctuating due to relocation, employment and eligibility changes and mortality. It looks like applicants, there were 36 in 2021, and it steadily declined to 24 in 2025. And what services are cut by eliminating Summer Promise coordinator, Summer Baby, and clinical youth specialist positions? The answer was, the department says, it'll avoid complete service eliminations by absorbing administrative tasks, continuing Summer Baby with multilingual staff, and redistributing youth support work. Anything to add to any of that?

I would just, through the chair, I would just indicate our veteran service team has a really robust outreach and engagement program that they utilize, including monthly breakfast. So as they continue to build stronger connections as well, our hope is that we will ensure that all veterans in the city who are eligible for these services will in fact be able to receive them. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Any questions from the committee? Councillor Scott.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm just going to make this brief comment just to say that, you know, the Summer Baby, Summer Promise program is one of those that's rooted in really strong evidence-based practices of having functionally peers going out into these households and you know, being very culturally competent and bringing folks along many times on path that these folks have already traveled. So those are incredibly valuable and historically very underpaid workers doing some pretty critical work. Before this reorganization, I had always been concerned about how many levels of management there were versus folks actually executing those home visits and doing that work. Some pieces of this org chart make sense. There's a manager of social services who has six people working for him. Great. They're on a manager salary. But then we have a director with only five people reporting to them. And again, this is one of those things where perhaps it was inertia, perhaps it was a lack of desire to upset the apple cart, but it is unfortunate. As much as you might say some of these directors are working foremen, I would be shocked to know that these directors were out doing home visits that the summer baby family support worker, for example, is doing. So I just wanted to put it out there that, again, this is a place where organizations are hard to manage. Reorganizations are, of course, very painful. But in my opinion here, the city maybe is going in the wrong direction. in terms of levels of management versus direct service delivery. Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. No pressure. Director, do you wish to respond to that at all?

No, I don't.

I didn't ask a question.

Fair enough. Councillor Strezzo.

Thank you. Yeah, I have my own questions, but I do want to also comment or just toss something in since it's already in discussion about Summer Baby. I do have concerns about the whole postpartum... element of having a baby. And I always saw summer baby as a positive little nod and check in for parents who having a newborn around is very, very overwhelming. And especially in this constant and chronic need of eliminating women's health and all pregnant people's health. It did not go unnoticed by me that this is a service that affects women's health and all who can get pregnant and deliver babies. And I'll stop there. But my question was, and whatever everyone wants to do about that, they can do what they want. My question was on veteran services. And Mr. Chair, through you to our director, I'm interested in putting in a budget line for cut night. or exploring this with everyone, when we have events for veterans, veterans services events, like the Memorial Day events, and either inside or outside, one thing that I have noticed consistently is that there is a lack of, how do I say this? I'm not saying a lack of, but I think it would be helpful if we had hearing impaired services or a teleprompter. I don't know what this looks like. I don't have the answer. But some kind of service where veterans or can in some of our hard of hearing people can read or have another way to hear the program, because one thing I have commonly heard with the events is that it's not loud enough. Now, if we're having services for veterans who have heard the just constant years of barrages of explosions right outside of their heads, like of ammunition and guns and blasts, a lot of there may be need for hearing impaired services and a teleprompter or something, or I'm sorry, not a teleprompter, but a screen or some kind of something for events where people can also read along or something. Has that ever been explored? And if that were explored, I guess I'm thinking out loud right now, but would that be possible for, for outdoor events, for indoor events relating to veteran services when we go forward? And if that was a possibility, again, not an on-the-spot answer right now, but if it was, what would that look like? What would it cost? And I'm happy to just talk it out outside of this meeting or in an email or something, but just a thought.

Thank you, thank you for the chair, I appreciate the question counter stress, though, and I think that we often think about accessibility in a variety of ways. An example to utilize is we have had asl interpreters at various events that we've done for other divisions as well, and that was really based on. asks of the Community, but I do like this idea of a proactive approach, because I agree, we shouldn't we should be thinking about accessibility in the broadest possible way, so I think. In the moment, I would have to say I would want to consult with our veteran services director and do a little bit of research about what that would look like, see if other communities have successfully implemented such a model, and be happy to circle back on that.

Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm looking forward to hearing more, and I appreciate it.

Thank you. I appreciate it through the chair. I appreciate you bringing it forward as a concern.

Thank you, Councilor Strezzo. Any other questions from the committee? I'm seeing none, so thank you so much for appearing before us, Director, and have a great rest of your night.

Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

And that brings us to Immigrant Advancement, and I believe we will have Director of Immigrant Advancement, Maria Theresa Nagel. Hello, Director.

Hello, through you, Mr. Chair, to all of the finance committees. I will begin with my brief introduction. So the Division of Immigrant Advancement is here to co-create and elevate the power, visibility, participation, and self-determination of immigrants and refugees in our community through community engagement, programming, policy, and celebration. And we accomplish this by working across departments, informed by those we serve, to co-build a Somerville where we all belong. This is obviously a new division budget within FY27 here in Health and Human Services. And it was created as part of a citywide reorganization. Therefore, it's kind of hard to compare it to previous SOYA budgets. You will notice in this year's budget, however, that some of our staff have been reallocated to communications and public engagement under language and communications access and engagement in neighborhood services. This is going to change some aspects of our work, but it is also a really great opportunity for us to strengthen the cross-departmental collaboration and engage in more creative solutions to serving our community. And with that, I will take any questions that you might have.

Thank you so much. I'll summarize the memo questions and answers briefly. How well are immigrant residents supported when they need legal representation? The answer was that SOYA connects residents through outreach, referrals, trainings, 311, hub connect, walk-ins, and community relationships, then screens cases and refers to legal aid or to the city's legal services vendor. A question was, is there more funding for immigrant legal services? The answer was yes. The administration is adding $350,000 to the separate Immigration Legal Services Stabilization Fund so cases can be funded all the way through completion. A question was, how will immigrant advancement ENS, the Engagement and Neighborhood Services, and Language and Communications Access. Language and Communications Access, how will the three work together? And the answer was that existing staff and workflows will continue with some co-location and regular coordination. Moving immigrant advancement into HHS is meant to improve case management with family and social services. Do you have anything to add on any of those?

Through you, Mr. Chair, the only thing that I'd like to add is just a huge emphasis on the allocation of $350,000 for this year's budget for legal services. And I have that emphasis because it is the largest allocation to date. Our legal service program is quite unique nationally and unique in the best possible ways. And it has been growing tremendously. And this is a huge sign of support for our immigrant community and for really being able to keep the folks in our neighborhoods.

Thank you. I'm thrilled to see it as well. Members of the committee, are there any questions for the department or the division? I am not seeing any now, which should not be taken as anything but enthusiasm for the continued work. So thank you so much. Sometimes it feels a little abrupt if it's brief, but your work is very much appreciated. Have a great rest of your evening.

I will take it. Thank you very much. Have a great night.

Thank you. And that brings us to the end of the Health and Human Services Department. And so now I will entertain motions for any cuts or resolutions for adding funding. Councillor Link.

Thank you, Chair. Resolution to add funding for the Youth Development Services granting so that Teen Empowerment can have their full funding.

That sounds good. I will note that it might be helpful for us to come up with a precise number for that, but I suppose that is something where given that there's the opportunity to make further motions for resolutions on cut night, on what is called cut night, I think we're okay if we don't have that number before us at the moment. Vice Chair Scott? Do you concur?

I'd just say perhaps as a friendly nod, just $400,000 was the number that was there before. We could just put that on there and run the risk of having more services for teens in the city than we had last year.

I would love that friendly amendment to that resolution.

Sounds good. So, Clerk, why don't we put that in as a resolution using Counselor Link's language and with the number of $400,000.

Okay, just so I have it accurately recorded for the record, I'm just going to read it out. Please correct me if I am missing anything. So this is regarding adding $400,000 in funding for the youth development services granting so teen empowerment can have full funding.

And just for clarity for everyone watching at home, that resolution is not by itself binding and there will be more to discuss around it and all these other motions on Tuesday, June 23rd. Any other motions before we move on? Okay, moving on to public safety. Okay, now I believe we will start with parking. And I believe we have Director of Traffic and Parking, Suzanne Renfret, and Director of Operations, Anna Ribello.

Good evening to the Chair. Good evening, Council Members. I'm the Director of Parking, Suzanne Renfret. Thank you for the opportunity to present the Parking Department's FY27 budget. It's been a very busy year for the department. We've collaborated extensively with many city departments, particularly mobility, engineering, and the school department, while also implementing a new ticket and permit processing system. As you review the budget, you will notice a few changes from prior years. There is a modest increase in the personnel services budget, which is primarily attributable to collective bargaining agreements and merit increases. You'll also see that one head clerk position has been eliminated, My team has successfully reallocated responsibilities and streamlined workflows to improve efficiency. The elimination of this position did not result in any layoffs or reduction in service levels. There is also an increase in the ordinary maintenance account. These higher costs are primarily due to the implementation of the new ticket and permit processing contract. Overall, this budget allows us to continue providing effective parking management services while supporting necessary operational improvements and contractual obligations. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you so much, Director. There were not questions submitted from counselors in advance, but do any members of the committee have questions at this point? I am seeing none. I do.

Oh, please. Give me one second, please. Take your time. We have run a full meeting without any recesses. And it is 9.45 p.m. So, et cetera. Okay. Had a question about poking around. The convenience fee for credit cards. I asked this question. I don't remember which department, but one of them. And the possibility of, I think it was, what was it? Does anyone have that? I know, I know. I'm just asking questions on the fly here, but it was a pretty hefty number. This, if I want to say it might've been, if I read it correctly.

342,000. Uh-huh.

Yeah, that. So is there any way that we can get creative with, And find a way to incentivize those who pay us to go off credit card or find a different way of payment and offset that cost in some way. Through you, your director and Fred.

Thank you for the question to the chair. So the convenience fees that you're seeing on on the budget are all due to meter payments. All the other convenience fees that we do in the city for well in my department, I should say for payment for tickets for payment for permits. All of those fees are paid by the constituents for micro transactions. It works a little differently. There's no way to really charge. There's no way to separate that fee. So the convenience fee is it comes in and then it goes back out. So for instance, when you pay an app, it's a dollar right now, a dollar 25 per, per hour, then there's a 50 cents convenience fee. So it's a dollar 75 per hour. So we're taking in the dollar 75, but then we're also putting back out the convenience fee to the back to the company. Part of that goes back to the company because they charge us $0.30. And then the other $0.20 is used towards our credit card convenience fee payment. But it doesn't cover all of the credit card fees. So credit card fees are very expensive. It depends on what kind of credit card you're using. Everyone's getting a bite of the apple. So we happen to use a merchant that The merchant takes in the money and we use them as a pass through so that we get all of our money right up front. We have to pay for that. So that's how it all works. And that's why the community looks like so much. It's a little confusing and I totally understand if you're confused right now.

Okay. Thank you. I guess I'll just leave it at that because, yeah.

Thank you, Councilor Strezzo. Any other questions from committee members?

the

I will just say I've learned a lot in the last few months just about the breakdown of which body controls what and how the parking department does not determine the rates of meters, the cost of residential parking permits. That's the Traffic Commission, which does have one council representative on it, but is a five-person body. Councillor Scott.

Mr. Chair, given that it's, to my colleague's point, nearly four hours into this meeting, might I recommend we take a 10-minute recess and reconvene at 10 p.m.?

I am certainly amenable to a recess. We would, of course, let the parking department go first. I might try to keep it just five minutes in the hopes of keeping the end time of this meeting from being too colossally late. Does that sound amenable?

Mr. Chair, do as you like.

Okay, so first, it sounds like we're at the end of our questions for the parking department. Thank you so much for appearing before us and staying up late. Have a good rest of your evening.

Thank you. Have a great night.

And we will call a five-minute recess, and I'll see everybody back here at 955. How's everyone doing? folks in the committee room if people are not ready totally understand but if people are please let me know hello how are the committee members fairing are people ready to resume Okay, I'm seeing a quorum. So why don't we jump back into it? So we have the Emergency Management Division.

Sure, really quickly, we will just need to take roll call.

Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate that. Councilor Scott and Councilor Strezza, are you ready for roll call?

Okay.

Okay, clerk, why don't you go ahead?

Alright, so this is just to make sure that everyone has come back from our brief recess. Councillor Link?

Here.

Councillor Strezzo? Present. Councillor Hart? Here. Councillor Scott?

Present.

Chair Wheeler?

Here.

Alright, with that it is 9.58pm and everyone has made it back. We do have quorum.

Okay, thank you. We have the Emergency Management Department with Emergency Management Director William Fisher. Please go ahead and introduce yourselves and talk to us about emergency management.

Thank you very much to the chair. My name is William Fisher, Director of Emergency Management Division. We are a division of two, myself and here with me is Deputy Director Lauren Mahoney. We actually work to strengthen collaboration and coordination during what we call blue sky days, the regular days, so that when a disaster does happen, hopefully it doesn't, but if it does happen, we're ready to respond in a coordinated fashion as a team. This fiscal year, we're focused on our mission and enhancing that mission to reduce the impact of disasters through a whole community approach to ensure everyone regardless of background and circumstance, has access to resources and the support they need to recover and thrive. Some of our goals, we have many goals for the upcoming year, although we're a department of two, we always have these lofty goals, but some of those goals include We're gonna be updating the city's hazard mitigation plan. This is a plan that usually is around for about five years. It needs to be refreshed by federal law, but also we want it to be not stale because it's really the backbone of the emergency management and mitigation. It shows us where we have issues and identifies ways we can mitigate those issues. We're also continuing with our partnership with the HHS, I should say, Health and Human Services Department to continue making improvements on the warming center. It's currently, we finished up the surveys and the listening session, and we're currently in the after action process and review. Looking forward to doing an improvement and coming out with a plan for the upcoming winter season. Still a little work, but thank God. We're also continuing, we started last year in fiscal year 26 with our partner program, which is the preparedness and resiliency through neighborhood engagement and readiness. And we're teaching programs like civilian response to active shooter events until help arrives and we're doing preparedness specific usually around the season trainings and talks around the community, including open to the community and the Council on Aging. One of the most recent ones we did was the Eversource Medical Priority System, which surprised me that a lot of the seniors in Somerville didn't know about, but they had medical issues that required power that could register and there was a whole program and Eversource came out and did a presentation for that. The other thing we're looking to do is, I'm actually fairly excited about this, is that we're looking to explore resilience corridors in Somerville. So what this looks like is we have a lot of different situations where people need assistance during disasters. And we've been able to partner with the amazing Department of Sustainability and Environment Division and outside organizations like Somerville Crew, the Community Responding to Extreme Weather and Groundwork Somerville to research identifying resources and specific locations that already exist in Somerville and kind of bringing that information together. So instead of having multiple different departments and organizations trying to help people, we're doing it in a focused, organized way. And finally, this year, we're hoping to go from third on the list of canine companions to being matched with Somerville's new emergency management community comfort dog. So with that, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Thank you so much. And I'll just note one of the questions was about that, asking what's the $17,000 community outreach slash promo supplies line for? And your answer mentioned 7,000 for the care and needs for the community comfort dog program and $10,000 for preparedness materials and emergency flashlight radios. Members of the committee, any questions for emergency management? Councilor Scott.

Well, I suppose I'll go, Mr. Chair. Hello, Director. I've got a couple questions for you. I'm just wondering, how's the... I'm sorry if I missed it. How is the continuity of operations planning going?

So through the chair, I'm actually glad you brought that up. That's one of the things we've been working on. So for about six months now, I've been working with the schools, meeting weekly, We have the draft plan done. We've recently scheduled on the 30th a tabletop exercise where we're going to take the draft plan, bring a bunch of city department heads as well as school department heads together, and through a simulated school disruption incident, we're going to work through the plan to try to identify. I mean, I can sit down and get all kinds of information as well as schools, and we think it's going to work a certain way, but until we can sit down and work through it with the actual people that do it, We're hopefully going to identify some gaps, maybe find some areas where it's really strong. Once that's done, we're going to go through a rapid process with that and hopefully be back to with a finalized plan once it gets through law and racial and social justice soon. It's been a long process, but it's important. It's not as simple as you know, looking at where we're going to move the school. There are tons of critical essential services that are required that we not only have to have a school open and function, but we have to ensure that we identify those critical services and the nuances of them, but that we are able to fulfill those services as well in that move. We want to make sure that the high level of education and support the schools give is able to be maintained as much as reasonably possible if there is a disruption.

All right. I'm glad it's going to the exercise stage. Not for nothing, did the integrated preparedness plan ever get published?

No, we're actually still working on that. Again, we're a division of two, so we had things come up with our department, whether it was emergencies, fires, and things like the continuity of operations plan, the updates of several other plans. So it's still in the works. I would love to have it been done by now, but we're definitely still working on it because I think it's one of those things that I almost like putting the cart before the horse. I would love to have that done because it's a guiding force. I think we do a good job of understanding and more of a loose sense where we want to go, but I still think it's incredibly important to get that down on paper so that we have that specific plan. So it's something we're going to continue working on and hopefully get it done in this fiscal year. But it's just one of those things that kind of pushed off the side as we're doing things versus planning for that.

I certainly appreciate folks who do things. In the partner program, the Partners in Resilience, I'm sorry if I missed this one too. How many outreach events did you end up doing last year?

HAB-Jacques Juilland- Pulled up real quick to me one second regard that document. HAB-Jacques Juilland- So the part of it spans between staff and communities. And so for fiscal year 26 we get 123456789 HAB-Jacques Juilland- 1617 HAB-Jacques Juilland- 19 events and a total of 130 so of all the 567 people that were trained or presented all right uh and did you end up establishing a stakeholder advisory group on that has not happened but i definitely want to do that i know that in the um i'm gonna get the term wrong right in the city charter the uh civil defense charter there's actually uh language in there for a emergency management advisory committee. It really doesn't fit that, but definitely looking to work with the new administration to find a good fit as well as the council on how to do that. Because a lot of our ideas we have are a lot of the different things we do are based on connecting with the community. And I think we've talked about this before, again, through the chair, that I can have all the ideas in the world and the best practices, but they have to fit Stomerville. And we also have to find those specific groups and ways to fit that. We're a very diverse population, and we need to make sure that we're meeting people, again, I think I said this last time, where they're at. So I'm really excited to get that going. That hasn't happened yet, and it's definitely something we're looking at.

All right. All right, I appreciate it. I'm just trying to follow up on the goals that were stated in the past. There was a bunch of collaboration with the Department of Racial and Social Justice listed on here. I haven't really heard any updates on that. Is that something you'd say happened in the last year?

Oh, absolutely. It's not, so when it comes to like, a good example would be the racial and social justice. It's not something that it's a meeting we conduct. What we did is we fold them into everything we do. So they are, we have our emergency management group or our structure when it comes to disasters and those sorts of things. We're planning for disasters. We'll have a core group and then we'll have more of an auxiliary group, just kind of like an ad hoc if we need them for specific things. And there's certain folks that are part of that core group for everything. And I even brought it up earlier with the coup. Anything we do, we work directly with racial social justice, accessibility, ADA, and there's several other groups. And so we have really worked hard, not that it was that hard because they're a great group of people, to establish that relationship and those regular communications so that everything we can integrates those things. And so that they're... observations and information about how best to serve different communities is reflected in pretty much everything we're doing.

All right. Well, that's good to hear, too. I guess my only last question is maybe a predictable one, given where I've been at throughout this process. But your org chart is pretty interesting. Like you said, it's a department of two people, both of whom have director titles. and six-figure salaries. I guess I'm just curious as to, is it all just working foreman in the department then?

I don't know exactly how you define a working foreman, but I can answer it this way anyway. The department is structured in a way that the work we do, you know, if you're looking at supervision or organizing or project management, we work with multiple different departments at all times and we handle very complex, important incidents. And so where we might not be supervising or directing a staff within our department, we are working with outside departments all the time. And myself being a director of the department, I think that makes sense by itself, but Lauren, If we were able to, at some point over the years, build responsibly to a staff within the needs of the city, that would make sense. But if we're going to have a second person, if I'm not available, I need that person to be at that level that everyone in the city can trust that she has the same abilities and the same authority to make decisions. And they're going to be the right decisions because it's not something that's a day-to-day thing. It is a disaster and it's complex and it's multifaceted and it's multidivisional. Internal and external requirements are involved. And so it's the work we do and the multiple touch points that we do that require that if there's going to be only two staff, that second staff at the very least has to be a department director.

All right. I think there's probably a larger philosophical conversation to be had there, but Mr. Chair, I'm happy to leave that piece aside for tonight. The hour is late. Thank you very much, Director. Appreciate the answers. I think I'm all set.

Thank you, Counselor Scott. Any other questions from committee members? I am seeing none, and so I will say thank you so much for your presentation and your answers and for being here late with us. Have a good rest of your night. And that brings us to the fire department. And I believe we will have Fire Chief Charles Breen, Director of Finance and Administration James Mucci, and we might also have Assistant Fire Chief Sean Tierney, depending on how lucky we are. Hello. Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the fire department.

I am Sean Tierney. I'm the assistant fire chief. To my left is my assistant, is the finance director, James Mucci. And to my right is Jonathan Mancia, our analyst. The fire department, we're pretty self-explanatory. Fire problem is responsive to the needs of our residents by providing rapid professional and humanitarian services essential to the health, safety, and well-being of the city. We will achieve our mission through prevention, education, fire suppression, emergency medical services, disaster response, and defense against terrorist attacks.

Thank you so much. And I know we have in this memo a combination of fire department and fire alarm questions. So I'll try to just answer a couple about the fire department or to refer to the memo about those. So one question was referring back to fiscal year 2025. I think just following up and trying to see if there's any significance for this fiscal year, asking about the roughly $1 million spending above what was budgeted. The answer there was that union contract settlements and retroactive employee payments caused it. These were later funded from the Salary Contingency Stabilization Fund. Sorry, go ahead.

No, that's correct.

Okay. A question was, what's being done to reduce firefighter health risks from toxins? And I believe this refers both to exposure in the course of fighting fires and exposure from equipment. I think on people's mind may be the lawsuit in Quincy, if I'm remembering correctly. The answer was referring to gear washers and dryers, two sets of gear per firefighter, apparatus filters, contaminated gear bags, plymovent exhaust systems. Much of this equipment, I'm sure you could tell me more about, but I do not know. SCBA washer, PPE policies, shower and wipe protocols, and cancer training. Anything you would add to that?

Dave Kuntz, No, I can explain any of the equipment, if you want a plan event system is basically it's a. Dave Kuntz, it's a fan driven system that hooks up to the exhaust. Dave Kuntz, Each apparatus as it's in the station, so when the apparatus is turned on that the exhaust fumes get vented to the exterior of the building, not into the apparatus Bay or into the living rooms. Dave Kuntz, Obviously, we have that at. Assembly Square and being a new station, there's a positive pressure separating the living quarters and the apparatus as a secondary system.

Thank you. And then there was a question about the mobility systems, GPS triggered traffic preemption that can switch lights from being green to red with the goal of facilitating the ability for for fire vehicles to get across town by getting the other cars out of the way. And the answer here refers the question to engineering as the department working on that. We will speak with engineering on Wednesday. So with those questions out of the way, the questions from the committee and I see Councilor Strezzo.

Hi. Okay. Through you, Mr. Chair, to our firefighter assistant chief, I'm sorry, no, assistant chief, deputy chief, forgive me if I've screwed up the titles. It is 1015. Okay. I wanted to ask about where we are with our fire trucks and fire engine maintenance and our mechanics and going into the budget year. Can you talk about that?

Okay. With our fire trucks, we have a brand new engine five is Dave Kuntz, days away from being put into service we've received it from the manufacturer is some last few things and tools being mounted on it, the radio is being. Dave Kuntz, installed and that will be put into service, we also have multiple apparatus that are on order for, and we also have a mechanic structure vehicle to that we're going to take over as well.

Uh, thank you. Uh, and, and have there been any through you, Mr. Chair? Um, have there been any increases of, um, of line, uh, of in the budget for, uh, for more maintenance, for more, uh, for the trucks, for the engines?

Hal Hallstein, is minimal increases in maintenance for the vehicles themselves, but the vehicles will be getting substantially newer we do have. Hal Hallstein, Obviously repairs that we make every year we have. Hal Hallstein, We track what the different types of maintenance issues that we're end up having one. Hal Hallstein, But we don't see anything that's. getting out of the normal curve that we usually are on.

Okay. Thank you. One last question, if I may. Okay. Thank you. I wanted to ask about, now we have even more higher buildings, higher residential buildings. How are we doing with training of fire... fire of calls for service in some of our now more increasing high residential, higher high rise buildings. And now with the fire station and assembly open, what has training look like? Where has that been in since past years and more buildings?

Well, we do have a training division that's staffed by a deputy fire chief, And we have implemented a high-rise SOG that's been modified. There's been a group of different ranks from captains, lieutenants, chiefs, officers that have worked on it and have trained the department on high-rise operations. But with training, it's always a continuous process. There's day-to-day training that companies do on an individual level. in this training that can be taught through places like the Mass Fire Academy, and there's trainings that are brought by our own instructors within the department.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor Strezzo. And Assistant Chief, you said SOG. What does that stand for?

We have a standard operating guideline for operating at a high-rise. We have SOPs. They basically implement all where the apparatus should be positioned, who investigates the calls, who secures the elevator, everything that you can imagine. It's laid out in steps so that every person that responds, no matter what group they're in, who they're working with, what crew, they know the correct procedure of what they're supposed to do. So it doesn't matter if you're the first engineer or the third engineer, you know what your assignment should be. and you know the proper procedures to follow for any kind of incident in the high rise.

Thank you. Councilor Scott.

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. I just had a couple quick questions. First, though, I just did want to remark on the data y'all provided. I really appreciate that in the book. It does look like the city's getting safer and safer. Is there anything in particular you'd like chalk up the decrease in fire emergencies and vehicle pedestrian accidents too this year?

Some of the data that I just want to clarify for this year is as of 4-25. So it's not a full year. So when you see the incidents down 13, 3, 6, and 3, that's as of 4-25. So it's a little bit skewed as far as that it's lower. But as far as the, in the other years, yes, the number of pedestrian accidents has decreased over the last couple of fiscal years, as you can see in the data. I don't think we can talk about the data, Arianna, if we need any more questions. Yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions through you, the Chair.

All right, well, it just seems like maybe our traffic common is doing some good work there. I guess my other question I had was, You know, overtime is one of those things that I know just puts a hell of a strain on guys. And I saw the comment in there about increased overtime for training. That's always balanced. But one thing that has been discussed in prior years is the three per apparatus versus four per apparatus staffing gap. and a consideration moving towards staffing four per apparatus on just a limited subset, maybe just one or two companies per shift so that you'd have a little bit more flexibility. Was that something y'all talked about this year?

We do talk about it. We do have companies that four people are assigned to. It's not a minimum of four, but there are four people assigned in every group. But when people are off on time off, it's not a maintained minimum of four. So at any time, there'll be three people on an apparatus, but on some occasions there are four. I think that as far as increasing that, there'd be substantial costs. I think now that Assembly Square is open, that we could look for ways of funding to possibly increase staffing in the future going forward. But I think the last year we've been excited to get a whole new engine company and service at assembly square. And that's been the focus of our spending.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I guess that your staffing really hasn't gone up all that much over the years. I'm curious, when did that change happen? Cause previously every, every apparatus as far as I was aware was staffed at the minimum level of three.

It's staffed at a minimum of three, but that doesn't mean that there aren't more than obviously if, we only had three on every apparatus, then they would be anytime someone was off would result in overtime. Currently, if you had three pieces of apparatus, just as an example, maybe we have one with four and two with three. So sometimes if just one person is off, we would move that fourth person to the other company to have three even, which wouldn't result in overtime. So the groups are pretty balanced. We have four groups. The numbers are pretty balanced. We have about the same number of firefighters on duty every day in each group so that we have a few members extra. Obviously, in the summertime or different vacation times or through injuries, et cetera, that number goes up and down. However, we're not at the bare minimum at any time.

That is great to hear. Honestly, it feels like I need to update some of my priors. Maybe my information is a little bit dated. So I'll tell you what, let's just put a pin in it. You and I can have a sit down and a conversation sometime. But I really appreciate that. That's actually excellent management and applaud what you're doing down there, sir. So thank you for that. Mr. Chair, I'm all set.

Thank you, Counselor Scott. I have a question, Assistant Chief. I know that there's a variety of different kinds of calls that come in and kinds of situations, right? And my wife's brother, who's in the Navy, he was a volunteer firefighter for many years, and he has all sorts of stories about all of the different kinds of situations that you might not imagine. I know that there are more than a thousand calls per year. Is that right? I forget the exact number that that some vehicles are sent out to. And I also know that there are there are plenty of cases where a ladder truck or another vehicle is sent out where you know, it's, it's a situation that's, uh, it's not a fire situation. Uh, and I also know that there's not, not a ton of flexibility around, you know, there are, there are smaller vehicles that it's easy for, for the same number of people to pile into, uh, with extensive equipment. But I'm curious about, um, you know, just from the point of view of, uh, you know, minimizing the wear and tear on these vehicles, minimizing the wear and tear on our firefighters and their equipment. You know, how does the department approach trying to make sure that the response happening to a given call is kind of only involving the staffing and the equipment that's absolutely necessary?

I think that, Chair, we look... We look at the data that we have. Obviously, certain types of calls require a certain number of members on scene, certain type of equipment, depending on calls. Where you mentioned that a ladder truck versus an engine, we send the closest company to, say, a medical emergency. If we have a medical emergency, we don't pick what type of truck we send. We send the closest vehicle that will get there the quickest. For other incidents, we would send a ladder truck and an engine or multiple engines and multiple ladder trucks depending on if it's a gas leak or a fire. It's hard to say, but we have protocols of what we send depending on the call when it comes in. If it's a residential house that they have smoke detectors going off, We have a different response than if we respond to City Hall.

Thank you. Councilor Hart.

Thank you. A couple hours ago, the subject of our aging buildings came up, and I just wanted to ask about, I'm glad we have the new assembly fire station, but can you tell us a little bit about the state of the other fire stations?

We have an aging infrastructure. The stations do need work. We continue to, when problems arise, we submit them to the city and to get repairs done. We'd like to see in the future that No substantial repairs get made, but we realize with the times we're in, but I think that some big capital improvements would be likely typically happen down the line.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Hart. Councillor Link. Thank you, Chair.

On that point, I noticed that or I had not noticed that there was a, um, but there's no, I've heard, I've heard stories of some of the older buildings having some rodent control problems. Um, and, you know, particularly thinking about the fact that, um, you know, there's people sleeping in these places. Uh, is there, I guess, are we, um, where I'm assuming that that budget line sits somewhere. Um, and how's it being done? It doesn't. Okay. So it's going straight through D, but I mean, okay. Uh, that works in, I guess my only follow-up to that is like, do you do, is there, no, no, I'm not going to ask it. Sorry. I would like to see us doing more, um, for those guys and, and, um, for the guys and the ladies in there, um, taking care of,

our city, but yeah, okay, thank you. Thank you, Councilor Link. Any other questions from the committee? Okay, seeing none, thank you so much for appearing before us at this late hour, and thank you so much for your work.

Have a great rest of your day.

Okay, that brings us to fire alarm, and I believe we will have Chief Fire Alarm Operator Brian Herman.

I will cover fire alarm as well.

Wonderful. Okay. Love it. Well, the first question in the memo is, what does the fire alarm division do? So, Assistant Chief, maybe you could start by speaking to that.

Sure. What I wrote for this, fire alarm receives and processes emergency calls. They serve as the dispatch for the fire department. They monitor and operate multi-channel radio systems. communicate with fire department personnel that are on scene. We provide interagency coordination by communicating with mutual aid companies such as police, DPW, utility companies, the MBTA, EMS, and others. They track our apparatus, they log responses, and they update the computer-aided dispatch and take notes on incidents. They're our lifeline. When we need someone to call, to get information while we were on scene. That's who we contact by radio, by phone, by radio box, whatever means necessary.

Thank you, Assistant Chief. And there's a question about the equipment for fire alarm maintenance. And as you explained to me the other day, that equipment is maintained by IT and by DPW's Lights and Lines Division. Anything you want to add on that?

Well, that's pretty much it. That's all. The equipment comes through lights and lines and IT.

Okay, thanks. And then my connected question to that, which is something that, you know, it might make sense to ask one of those divisions is about how much the cost of the street pull boxes is, you know, for the city.

That would be a question for lights and lights.

Sounds good.

I don't have the data for that.

Totally understand. Any questions about fire alarm from the committee? Okay, seeing none, thank you again for coming and appearing before us at this late hour and for your work and have a great rest of your night.

Thank you.

Okay, next on our list is Community Outreach, Help and Recovery Corps. And we may have Director Jen Korn. Or we may have Police Chief Shumain Bedford. That's whose name I see on here. Hello. Please feel free to introduce yourself and begin whenever you are ready. Just noting that it is on mute.

Good evening, Mr. Chair and the committee. Thank you so much. I know it's been a long evening. Thank you so much for having us. I am joined here today with members of the SPD team. Most notably sitting next to me is Jennifer Korn, who's the director. Would you do the phone?

Oh, sorry. Pardon me, Chief. Hi. Welcome, Mohamed. I believe you need to mute. There you go. Please continue, Chief.

Sure thing. Joining me to my right is Jen Korn, director of CORE. Emily wisdom, our director of administration and finance and I'm joined by several members off camera behind me that have joined us here this evening and obviously want to never miss the opportunity to publicly thank them for their work. I also want to acknowledge the mayor and his administration for working with us in preparation for this evening and working through the budget process. I want to start by mentioning, as we think about FY27 and the budget that has been submitted, we believe that level service does enable the department to deliver core services and maintain our operational readiness. We were tasked by the mayor's office and the mayor's team, like all other departments, to identify areas that could sustain cuts, knowing that it was a very difficult season for discussion. And with that, we're proud to share that Our OM budget does show a 16% cut in what the original budget lines and the amounts were, in addition to $500,000 that we discovered that was funded in excess in our shift differential line. Our budget is lean and our staffing is static. Over the course of the last seven years, from 2018 to 2024, we saw a reduction in patrol officers from 100 to 88. That's a net loss of 12 positions. And we've been at 88 positions since 2024. We are proud of the many recommendations that we've been able to act upon from the 2023 staffing study. And we also appreciate that the study doesn't recommend eliminating positions and deliberately acknowledges the nuances and community priorities that must go into policy decisions around changes that are going to be acted upon. We strive to be great and effective fiscal stewards with the public's money. Over the last year, the finance team has been very candid with the projected concerns around financing that were going to be coming our way. And as a result of that, we instituted some internal reforms. We assigned some greater executive accountability and proud to look at full staffing to help impact and reduce the number of forced holdovers, which we hope will have a direct correlation with a reduction enforced over time. We're proud to report, as I've mentioned, that all of our 88 positions are accounted for. We have finalists that have been identified for each of those positions and conditional offers of employment have been extended by human resources. We have four police officers that are currently in the police academy. We have three police officers slated to go into the academy in July. And we have four police officers that are academy trained that we hope to be joining us in short order. Additionally, we've been working with the state and we believe that we are going to be in line and supported with state funding, assuming that the governor's budget and the reconciliation between the House and the Senate results in the funding that they anticipate. And we hope to be funded with a full-time position to support full-time co-response. Some of the challenges that we face We work in public safety. The hard reality is we must plan and we must be ready to meet the moment. In our city today, we had several tragedies today that we had to respond to, namely a barricaded suspect where we had to rely on not only specialized resources to be available to safely respond to that incident, but we also relied on our co-response team that also responded to assist with an appropriate response. We believe that our budget that has been submitted by the mayor is sufficient for us to provide level service and the level of services that we're accustomed to here and what we hope to be able to deliver on behalf of our community. But I do want to mention a couple of other minor points around community safety. Our community is a safe community, but the hard reality is we are an urban community. We share a border with the capital city of Massachusetts and the economic hub in Boston. We also serve a border with the fourth largest city in Cambridge. And ourselves, we have a population of 81,000 plus. When we look at the reality of the services and the challenges that face our urban communities, we look at our cost per capita. And with the help of some persons from the administration and in consultation with the mayor as well, We're spending and we're looking at about $258 per capita that we as a city spend on police officers. When we look at some of our peer cities, we have Boston at the top end that spends approximately $717 per officer. And on the low end, we have Arlington, which spends about $215. Just above that is Somerville at number five at 258. So communities like Everett, which is a more comparable peer city, Medford, another comparable peer city, all expend more money to support police officers per capita. We are doing more with less. As I mentioned, we saw a net reduction in police officers, namely patrol officers from 100 down to 88. We must have readiness and we must have a readiness posture and have the ability to meet the moment in our community to keep it safe. I believe that we're well positioned to continue to do the work. No one wants to have to work less, but we understand that limited municipal resources only go so far and we're prepared. I have a team here and a talented team of men, women, and all persons within the department that do the work every day and haven't met the moment, we believe that this is an appropriate budget that would support us through level service and would encourage the acceptance of the budget and certainly welcome the opportunity to respond to any questions that you may have that would help you in making that decision.

Thank you so much, Chief. Just to clarify one line, and please don't take this as a nitpick. I was 100% following you. You at some point said the 258 or 700 or so dollars per officer. And then it was clear from the next thing that you said, you're talking about per resident. And I just, in case anybody's listening at home, wanted to clarify that. Thank you so much. I think we're going to follow the agenda order here in terms of the divisions and talk about CORE and then talk about E911, talk about animal control, and then last, talk about the broader police department. So just to begin then with CORE, Community Outreach, Help and Recovery, Director Korn, could you speak to CORE's focus?

Yep. We are really happy to be co-located at the Somerville Police Department, providing outreach and follow-up care to folks in the community that are identified by the police as having a behavioral health or addiction component to their crisis. We've been really happy to have those two additional staff in 2023 to do that outreach work. We continue with our regional training program, training over 80 different departments, Metro Boston in crisis intervention team training, as well as additional advanced trainings. And we're excited to be part of the pilot in the police department with our existing staff and resources to really be part of the hopefully a bigger program in the future.

Thank you so much. Just to quickly summarize the questions and answers that pertain to CORE. So there was a question about the fiscal year 2027 goals and needed supports. You mentioned reaching 100% of Somerville Police Department officers trained in crisis intervention training. expanding advanced training, continuing course follow-up and aftercare, expanding jail diversion, funding at least one full-time co-responder and gathering data, and the need for grants as well as general fund support. Another question was about the schedule for the co-response pilot. The answer mentions typically Tuesday noon to four and Thursday four to eight for eight hours per week. And that core will continue its regular follow-up work outside those hours and helps to expand this pilot with funding. And then there was a question about the source of funds from, and there was some confusion about the opioid stabilization fund or the opioid settlement fund. So that's something I think we could use some clarification on. And maybe that's a question for finance director wisdom.

You're specifically asking which fund or are you looking for any additional response in addition to what was submitted as part of the written response?

Just that there was, I know, a narrow question of there's an opioid settlement fund, right? And I think the word stabilization fund was used somewhere. And I was at least confused about that. Are there two different funds that pertain to opioid sources, you know, opioid funds or?

Through the chair. Thanks so much, Director Wisdom. So that is indeed correct. It was mentioned in the budget book. It is the stabilization fund, not the settlement fund.

Thank you.

Yes.