Read on for my lightly-edited highlights from our May 2024 City Council meetings.
City Council Highlights, 5/14/2024
if you’d like to follow along, here is the meeting agenda on the City Council’s public portal.
We took items out of order on Tuesday, but this recap will go in order of the agenda.
Our meeting started on a delightful note. At our previous meeting, on the motion of Councilor Tseng, we invited the MHS Orchestra to play in the Chambers in celebration of their gold medal win at the prestigious Massachusetts Instrumental and Chorus Conductor’s Association Concert Festival. I was genuinely so moved and impressed by their performance on Tuesday. We administered citations to all members of the Middle School String Ensemble, who took home the silver medal at the same Festival, and trophies to all members of the High School Orchestra. Congratulations to all the players and Conductor Chang!
We debuted a new agenda section, “Refer to Committee for Further Discussion,” with a motion by Councilor Leming. (This new section is for items that are intended not to be debated on the floor, but rather just introduced and sent immediately to committee where substantive discussions will be held.) Councilor Leming’s resolution was to explore ways to allow the Director of Veterans’ Services to offer housing incentives to veteran renters. Director Shaw shared a bit about her preliminary ideas for incentives that might help combat how veterans are often stigmatized/disadvantaged in housing searches. This sad topic shores up a point that the Council has heard recently, how housing (unaffordability, precariousness, homelessness) is one of the most critical issues facing veterans in Medford. Councilors offered some initial words of enthusiasm for these ideas but held further questions and comments for when this matter is taken up in the Resident Services and Public Engagement Committee.
We unanimously approved the Action Plan for this year’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding appropriation. The previous week, we had a Committee of the Whole where the CDBG Manager and funding recipients gave more detailed presentations about their work in the community that will be funded by CDBG this year. Many of the funding recipients are returning from previous years, and this funding allows them to continue their work in Medford on the program priority areas, with services such as housing resources, and food and transit assistance.
We unanimously approved the special permit for extended hours for Pinky’s Pizza. We first discussed this two weeks ago and tabled it, asking the business owner to speak with neighbors to try and come to a mutually agreeable compromise, and allowing the Licensing Subcommittee Chair to look into the topic more deeply. The business owner came back this week with a scaled-back request, just to midnight Monday–Thursday and until 1am Friday–Sunday, which we approved. (11pm is the default close of business time unless otherwise requested.)
We unanimously approved a Lodging House License for 28 Winthrop St., which is a Tufts University-owned property. In recent years Tufts purchased this building and did a significant remodel to modernize, improve and densify the building; it will now fit 28 students, 1 student per room. Any students who live in the building will park their cars on campus. The building has already been approved by the Community Development Board and passed all inspections, so this vote was just a one-time license approval so that it can go forth and be operated as a dorm. I appreciate Tufts investing in housing more of their students in dense, high-quality student housing near (and ideally on) Tufts campus.
We reviewed and filed the Annual Public Report on Surveillance Technology. Under the Community Control over Public Surveillance (CCOPS) Ordinance which passed in 2023, this is the City Council’s reporting obligation. Under CCOPS, all new surveillance technologies or uses of surveillance data by City departments must be approved by the City Council. This report documents, in the previous calendar year, how many new technology/data requests the Council has approved, denied, or made modifications to, as well as including copies of any Surveillance Reports by City departments that are using surveillance technology.
As lead sponsor of the CCOPS Ordinance, I prepared the Annual Public Report. It was easy to do because currently, the only eligible surveillance technology in use by a City department are body worn cameras, which are in use by the MPD as of December. In finalizing/negotiating the ordinance in 2023, we exempted body worn cameras from the City Council approval process until 2028. So the number of new-technology requests approved, denied or modified by the Council in 2023 was zero. If folks are interested in reading more about CCOPS, I wrote about it in April 2023 after the ordinance passed.
We reviewed an Open Meeting Law complaint that was filed against the City Council for something I wrote in a Reddit post in April. Per law, upon receipt of an Open Meeting Law complaint, the Council is required to review the complaint in a regular meeting and decide on a response. Prior to the meeting, one of the City’s KP Law attorneys reviewed the complaint, found that no violation occurred, and drafted a response to that effect. We reviewed and unanimously approved the attorney’s response. (TLDR on OML: A quorum of a public body debating a matter that is before that body, outside of a duly-noticed public meeting, would be a violation of Open Meeting Law. The intent of the law is to ensure that all discussions about matters before a public body, by that public body, are happening in public with proper notice to the public.)
On the motion of Councilor Scarpelli, we unanimously passed a resolution to support H.4624, “An Act relative to municipal tax lien procedures and protections for property owners in the Commonwealth.” Here’s some background from WCVB.
We entered Executive Session to discuss various matters of litigation/claims with a City attorney. Entering executive session means the Council talks privately about a specific topic – no public Zoom, no TV cameras, no audience. There is a limited set of circumstances under which public bodies are allowed to do this, which includes discussing strategy with respect to litigation.
City Council Highlights, 5/28/2024
We started this meeting by giving a commendation to former Councilor Caraviello to celebrate him being named the Medford Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year, which we voted to do at a previous meeting. I am so glad that Rick was present to receive this citation and a bit of well-deserved praise in person.
We passed resolutions to honor and celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month, Asian American and Pacific Island Heritage Month, and Memorial Day.
In the new(ish) agenda section, “Refer to Committee for Further Discussion,” there was a proposal from Councilor Tseng to create a residents’ guide to City Council Procedures and Processes. After a brief description by Justin, this paper was referred to the Resident Services & Public Engagement Committee. This new agenda section is for items that are intended not to be debated on the floor, but rather just introduced and sent immediately to committee where substantive discussions will be held.
We reviewed a Petition for a Common Victualler License from the Great American Beer Hall (!), and gave it a conditional approval, provisional on the resolution of the various departmental approvals that are pending. The Great American Beer Hall also has to go through the special permit process for extended hours from 11PM to 1AM, so they’ll be back again on June 25th for a public hearing on a conditional special permit for extended hours.
I offered a resolution inviting representatives of the Brooks Park Tenant Association to come before the Council to speak about the status of their tenancies and their efforts to negotiate with their new property owner. I will give a synopsis, but I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested to take a little time to watch this section of the meeting so you can hear this testimony from the Brooks Park residents, their allies and other community members directly. I found much of the testimony extremely impactful and moving.
Many Brooks Park tenants attended; four spoke, including the leader of the Tenant Association. Many supporters also spoke, including organizers from City Life/Vida Urbana, who provide free support for tenants that are going through displacement struggles; residents of 26 Bradlee Road, who unfortunately faced a very similar displacement in 2022-2023; and other community members who spoke in support of the tenants and of their efforts to remain in their homes.
The tenants explained that after their building was sold last year and transferred into new management, they were served Notices to Quit, and told they must vacate on short notice. They talked about how it is impossible to find other places to live anywhere near here that are suitable and affordable to them. They talked about their many requests to their property manager, asking to meet with them to discuss their situation, collectively bargain, and figure out a mutually agreeable way to remain in their homes; and how these many requests have gone unanswered.
I started hearing about the Brooks Park issue in late summer of last year. My first time hearing about it was from a Medford resident, though not a Brooks Park tenant, who saw the “for sale” sign and was worried – they knew that this apartment complex was affordable housing (not public housing, just “naturally occurring” below-market-rate housing) and feared what would happen to the tenants if it sold.
A week later, I got a call from an affordable housing developer who was trying to compete with a market-rate property owner to buy the building. For several days, myself, other electeds, and City Planning staff collaborated to try and find ways to support the affordable housing developer’s bid. The affordable housing developer could certainly not compete with the market rate property owner’s bid purely in terms of dollars and cents. Could we marshal, and offer, enough seed money or political power to sway the seller to go with the affordable housing developer instead? We tried, but we couldn’t succeed. The seller wanted to sell quickly, the affordable housing developer’s offer wasn’t cost-competitive, and the City was not remotely in a position to purchase the building and place it in Trust or make it deed-restricted affordable housing. Even if our Affordable Housing Trust (codified in March 2023) had had enough time to be up and running by then, the AHT Fund hasn’t anywhere near the deep pockets that would be needed in order to make a play for the building.
This year, as anticipated, the Notices to Quit were issued to the Brooks Park tenants. The Brooks Park Tenant Association formed; they got in touch with their property owner and asked to meet, discuss, negotiate; this request was ignored; they got in touch with Councilors to keep us updated and ask for our assistance. I wrote a sign-on letter to the property owner, which most of my colleagues signed onto, urging them to do the right thing, be good neighbors, and meet and negotiate with the Tenant Associate to find a mutually agreeable solution. This and many other messages from Councilors and other electeds went unanswered. The Tenant Association continues to seek the opportunity to meet with their property owner to discuss their situation and try to work together to find a compromise that will allow them to stay in their homes, because they know that if they are displaced, they will be displaced far, far away from their friends, family, jobs, community ties, from the neighborhood they call home.
On Tuesday, one of the speakers, a housing organizer, drew a parallel between the right of labor units to collectively bargain, and the intent of units of tenants to collectively bargain. He posed, why is one seen as legitimate, and the other so often ignored?
I think it is very important to hear stories of displacement, of uprooting, directly from the people being affected. In our community, in the past couple months, the issue of housing stability and what we ought to do about it has been made polemical and abstract. Some forces have a vested interest in dissuading voters away from certain mechanisms that could protect tenants from unchecked rent hikes. At the very minimum, as we are deluged with no small amount of fearmongering, we should be sure to have our information environment also include real-life, real-time, real-person stories of displacement that is happening in our community, for which we currently have no real and sufficient recourse.
I thought the Brooks Park tenants were so generous and courageous to testify about their displacement, anxiety, and trauma in front of the whole community, and I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart. When any one tenant speaks up for themselves and their neighbors, they are speaking up for all tenants. Currently there is no limit to how much rent can increase. But all residents – whether you rent or own – deserve protection from limitless cost of living increases. One community member made the point that Prop 2.5 provides this upper-limit protection for folks who do own their homes: you can’t control the valuation of your property, but it provides for a cap on how much property taxes can increase per year. What a difference it could make to have any limit – any limit at all – on how much rent can be increased per year.
I was encouraged (for the most part) by the public testimony that followed these tenants’ testimony. So many community members had genuinely meaningful, important points to offer about what we should be doing to prevent this kind of further harm to our neighbors. Nearly everyone who spoke agreed that we have to do something. I agree; I think that we should do many somethings. But what this story of emergent, real-time displacement makes acute for me, is that we no longer have the luxury of just planning for housing stability in the future. Certainly, we must plan for housing stability in the future – we must endow our Affordable Housing Trust with the funds to do its job. But if we do not also take steps to develop tools to protect the residents that are being displaced right now, we will wholly miss our chance to keep Medford a community where people from all backgrounds can live. Nobody wants that. But to prevent it, we have to have honest conversations about the tools available to us.
I was so resolute about keeping this brief, and then I started talking about housing. We ended up passing a motion to send a letter to Charlesgate and the property owner to meet with and negotiate with the tenants. Councilor Scarpelli offered a couple amendments around investigating if CPA funding could be used to provide assistance or mediation to tenants.
We then referred several proposal Zoning Ordinance amendments to the Community Development Board:
Amending the format of the Table of Use and Parking Regulations - switching from a code-based system to the actual numerical parking and loading requirements (no material changes to parking and loading requirements, just a change in formatting)
Amending the Definitions section to update and add some Definitions into the Zoning Code, for either present or future use
Adopting the new GIS-based, digital version of Medford’s current zoning map (no changes in zoning designations, just officializing the 21st-century version of this document)
Exempting the Municipality from certain requirements in Table of Use and Parking Regulations and Table of Dimensional Requirements (to streamline process for major municipal builds)
This is the first packet of proposed changes to come out of the Planning & Permitting Committee’s work with Innes Associates, the Council’s zoning consultant. Procedurally, proposed changes to the zoning ordinances must be referred to the CDB (Community Development Board) first, which was this vote; then the CDB will refer the proposals back to the Council with their recommendations, should they have any, and then we will take our votes to codify the ordinance changes.
Councilor Tseng put forward a motion requesting an update on the creation of a Community Liaison Position for the Asian American community in Medford. Currently the City has Community Liaisons for Arabic speaking, Haitian, Spanish speaking, African American, and Brazilian Portuguese speaking communities. Councilor Tseng stated that he was informed that the City is working to secure grant funding that will enable the hiring of an Asian American Community Liaison. The other Community Liaisons positions are also currently grant-funded.
Councilor Scarpelli offered a motion to “review all options in supporting the School Committee budget and review the Mayor’s budget needs.” Per the Council’s recent recommitment to avoid vague resolutions/resolutions of indeterminate intent, President Bears asked Councilor Scarpelli to put forward an amendment making his resolution more specific and concrete.
Councilor Scarpelli put forward an amendment requesting the Mayor appropriate $5–7 million from the City’s free cash reserves to go towards increasing the School Department allocation, so that it could be appropriated before free cash is certified. (Certification of free cash is a monthslong State process, which begins after the fiscal year ends, and during which free cash reserves cannot be allocated or spent.)
As an aside – a reminder I like to give early and often, not as a direct response to anything that was said but just because it’s topical: The authority to make appropriations for every City department and Medford Public Schools lies with the Mayor. The Council cannot originate appropriations nor reappropriations; we just get a yes/no vote on the overall budget, and can make line-item subtractions (which is seldom done). The Council also has no authority to determine spending within the Schools Department allocation. If a free cash allocation were to go forward, the Mayor would have to initiate it, and it would have to be approved by the Council.
Councilor Leming cited that he’d like more time to consider Councilor Scarpelli’s amendment, because the free cash allocation request was brought up on the floor and not in the written agenda, and motioned to table it. The motion to table failed.
Councilor Scarpelli talked about concerns from residents related to the Schools Department funding; concerns the possibility of an override proposals and what would become of the Schools if an override were to be voted on but fail; concerns with a lack of commercial revenue; and talked about a desire from residents for evidence that every possible stone had been overturned before resorting to an override. He expressed grave concerns.
President Bears agreed that $5–7M seems needed to increase the Schools Department allocation and said that to appropriate free cash without also pursuing a long-term funding solution would just be postponing the inevitable and would kick the can down to the next fiscal year.
The conversation grew heated and the Council briefly recessed. When the Council returned, Councilor Leming invoked Council Rule 21, which allows any Councilor to table any financial paper until the next regular meeting, so we will take it up again then.
Thanks for reading!
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