City Council - Regular Meeting

Check, check, check.

Let me do it again. A quorum being present, I'll call tonight's May 19th, 2025 regular meeting of the Cambridge City Council to order. The first order of business is a roll call of the members present. Deputy Clerk Crane, would you please call the roll?

Counselor Azeem. Present. Vice-Mayor McGovern? Present. Present. Councillor Nolan? Present. Councillor Siddiqui?

Present.

Present. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler?

Present.

Present. Councillor Toner? Absent. Councillor Wilson? Absent. Councillor Zusy? Present. Present. Mayor Simmons? Yes. Present. And you have two members recorded as absent and seven members recorded as present. Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Please stand if you're able and join me in the pledge of allegiance and pause for a moment of silence. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Electronically? Yes. Please let the record show that Councilor Wilson has joined the meeting. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, adopted by the Massachusetts General Court and approved by the Governor, the city is authorized to use remote participation at meetings of the Cambridge City Council. In addition to having members of the council participate remotely, we have also set up Zoom teleconference. for public comment. You can also view the meeting on the City Cambridge open meeting portal or on our cable channel, which is 22. To speak during public comment, you must sign up at www.cambridgema.gov backslash public comment. You can also email written comments for the record to the city clerk at cambridgema.gov. We welcome your participation and you can sign up to speak up until 6 p.m. Please note that the City of Cambridge does audio and video record our meetings and make it available for future viewing. We also, please note, third parties may be audio and video recording our meetings. We will now move to public comment. We have, Ms. Stephan, how many people signed up for public comment? 26? Public comment may be made in accordance with Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 30A, Section 20G, and City Council Rules 23D and 37. Once you've finished speaking, the next speaker will be called. Individuals are not permitted to allocate the remainder of their time to other speakers. Please state your name and address for the record and the items that you're speaking to you. Given that we have 26, 27 speakers signed up, each speaker will have two minutes. Ms. Steffen, I will turn public comment over to you.

Thank you. Our first speaker is Alex Yu followed by C.U. Huang. Alex, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Excuse me. I'm sorry, Mr. Huang. I meant to suspend the rules and order. I have a late policy order, so if I could just suspend the rules in order to take a late policy order. It has 2025 number 78. So to my colleagues, it's on your- It's on your desk. Late policy order, reason NEFS custodian contract for the city. So on suspension on the rules.

Roll call, please. Councillor Azeem. Yes. Yes, Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Yes, Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes, Councillor Siddiqui.

Yes.

Yes, Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes. Yes, Councillor Toner is absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons? Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent.

And the rules are suspended by the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. I'm bringing late policy order reason R-E-N-N-E-F-S custodian contract for the city. Discussion?

Hearing none, roll call. Councilor Azeem? Yes. Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern? Yes. Yes. Councilor Nolan? Yes. Yes. Councilor Siddiqui? Yes. Yes. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler? Yes. Yes. Councilor Toner is absent. Councilor Wilson?

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent. Thank you.

So the late policy order is now before us, which is important. So it means that anyone wants that wants to speak to this late policy order and EFS custodial contract may be able to speak on the record. Ms. Stephan, I turn it back over to you.

Our first speaker is Alex Yu, followed by Siyu Huang, then Jeff Allinger. Alex, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Thank you, thank you. Good evening, city council members. My name is Alex, this is my wife, Siyu. We are the owner and occupants of 49 Alpine Street. We firstly sincerely thank the city council for approving our curb cut application last week. So today we're here to just make some clarifications to a few points raised during the last week's discussion. The first one is, I want to mention, according to the Cambridge official curb cut application guidance, the abutters of the property are defined as owners directly touching or opposite our property. For 49 Alpine Street, this includes the 43 on the left, 55 on the right, 48 across, and Tobin School directly behind. All of this for direct neighbors, we have full approval of our curb cut, which is 75%. Over this weekend and including today, we have received an additional number of strong supports of neighbors who reside on Albany Street if we're to believe some of your city council members also received the email as well. Secondly, we very much appreciate Councillor Nolan's suggestion to reconsider a broader group beyond just immediate neighbors. So even expand to eight neighbors, so two on the left, two on the right, and one diagonal cross and another one diagonal cross, there's eight properties. Of the eight, five gave us a formal approval letter. That is 62% approval. Further expansion beyond these eight properties seems unnecessary for me because this is not intended as a popularity vote. Thirdly, just to clarify, during last week's meeting, a claim was made by a neighborhood association, Mr. Doug Brown. I think Councillor Zusy brought up his claim that only three out of the 20 homes have curb cuts on Alpine Street. Yesterday, I had a very good pleasure to walk with Councillor Zusy. I'm sure we have currently more than three there. I counted later, there's about 16 curb cuts on Alpine Street, 10 north of Concord Avenue, and six south of Concord Avenue. Really? So thank you very much for your attention.

And thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is Alice, sorry, Siyu Huang, followed by Jeff Olinger. Siyu, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Good evening, council members. My name is Siyu. Great to meet you here. I'm here to share more about the background of our family and this property. So we're a multi-generational household. My husband and I live with two young children and our elderly parents. So it's eight people in the household. My mother has a significant vision impairment due to age-related mycology generation and a past trauma resulting in severe strabismus and over minus 1,200 degree of nearsightedness. She has fallen downstairs in our current house in Cambridge three times in recent years and once while holding my son in her arm. So it's actually quite severe damage to her body and even my son. at that time. My husband Alex has undergone four knee surgery procedures in the past year, with the most recent surgery was just two weeks ago, and his doctor have advised him to avoid stairs as much as possible to support both my mother and my husband. We have designed the ADA accessible path from the street to our front door. And we know there are questions about children's safety in riding bikes, and I firmly believe that, because we are the parents for two kids, and we also have other kids in the neighborhood, we have surveyed all the parents, and they actually, some of them, they even wrote letters to the counselor that they believe curb cars enhance the safety, actually, for children, particularly for those cycling activities, that they help minimize street-side congestion and improve visibility. The curb cut is not just a convenience. It's a necessity for our families' safety, mobility, and well-being. It's what allows us to create a home where our family can age in place with dignity. As someone committed to sustainability, I also plan to enhance our landscape with trees and native plantings that will thrive for decades to come. And I know Cambridge has always been supporting with value and exclusivity and accessibility. We really wanted to bring this to many generations to come and also bring sustainability to the neighborhood.

Please email the remainder of your comments. Our next speaker is Jeff Olinger, followed by Eric Quartz, then Robert Simha. Jeff, you have two minutes.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Simmons, Vice Mayor McGovern, and the rest of the City Council. My name is Jeff Olinger and I live at 216 Prospect Street and I represent Olinger Architects who designed 49 Alpine Street and is currently assisting the owners in their curb cut application. I'm here to provide clarification regarding the recently approved curb cut application for 49 Alpine Street, which received the council's approval last week. In response to Councilor Zusy's suggestion of a side yard or one car driveway, the new home is built on the same foundation and footprint as the previous existing structure. That means that the site that it sits the building only seven and a half feet away from the property line and does not permit to have a legal driveway on the side of the building. We would have loved to have used that opportunity because we would have liked to have used the front yard for a more charitable purpose. The proposed curb cut also will allow for a oak tree in the front yard to now be exposed to the street. So in fact, the front yard will be providing a large new mature street tree to the public realm. We believe that the additional curb cut will also achieve the ADA accessibility requirements for the owners and allow for them to have their multi-generational family live with the building that they've invested so much in the neighborhood with. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Eric Quartz, followed by Robert Simha, then Denise Gilson. Eric, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Good evening to everybody. Thank you for letting us share our thoughts today. I just wanted to summarize and reiterate some of the points that my clients and Jeff have already made. Jeff has done a wonderful job designing this property to be beautiful and aesthetic and pleasing. And this curb cut is integral to that. They're going to have a beautifully landscaped front area, pavers, preserving the tree. That was always one of the goals for Alex and TU. It was really something that we thought was an important part of the character of the house and something that we've planned around and really want to keep there for the neighborhood. A concern that some people might have would be storm water management. We've heard that raised. I wanted to point out that we've vastly improved the drainage of this home by adding two large coal tech chambers into the front. So there's actually no runoff gonna be coming from this property. All of the gutters, all of the drains from the roof are all directed into the coal techs and discharged that way. The pavers that we're applying are gonna be a permeable paver. Um, and really, you know, go into that same storm water system. So I know that might be something some of the neighbors are anxious about, but that is a concern that Jeff and the civil engineering team have addressed well in advance. Um, I also wanted to reiterate. Many of the houses on this street already have a curb cut 16 to 17 of the other properties. And our opinion, we're improving the parking for the neighborhood by removing more cars from the street than we are removing street spots available for people to park in. So we see this as overall a net benefit to the neighborhood. And we appreciate everyone's support with this application. Thank you very much.

Our next speaker is Robert Simha, followed by Denise Gilson, then Rabbi Yoni. Robert. Robert has not joined us. We will go to Denise Gilson. Denise, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good evening. Denise Gilson. I'm the executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association. And I'm here tonight to ask for your support for POR number 71, which supports the appropriation of $72,000 for an RFP toward the development of an engineering study that will guide the transformation and repurposing of an abandoned MBTA tunnel beneath the streets of Harvard Square. We've been working on this project for a very long time and are pleased that we are now in a position to move it forward. We sincerely appreciate the council's leadership in this matter and thank all of you as well as the city manager for the time he's already spent with us on this issue. To fund the RFP, I respectfully request that the TPT's $300,000 pedestrian study be scaled back to allow for the funding of the RFP, with remaining monies to be used for the study, as well as the curation and programming required for successful street closures. The HSBA has supported appropriate pedestrianization for over two decades. We were instrumental in the development of Winthrop Street in 2006 as a pedestrian friendly street with the daily schedule of closing the street to vehicular traffic. We would like to implement a similar program for Palmer Street and look forward to the completion of its construction project at the end of this year. We're also envisioning a comparable program for Dunster Street when the kiosk plaza is completed. Last week, Councilor Nolan, Board Chair Jessica Scully and I walked the square to share ideas and look at the challenges. The HSBA's understanding of the cadence of the square is unparalleled. Our knowledge along with expertise from city departments like TPT and CDD in your vision can make additional appropriate pedestrianization a reality. In summary, a scaled-back study will allow for the RFP to be funded with monies left over for the curation and programming of a more pedestrian-friendly Harvard Square, which we are fully committed to and would love to program something as early as this summer. Thank you very much.

Thank you for your testimony. Our next speaker is Rabbi Yoni, followed by Eileen Pires, then Sean Hope. Rabbi, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Hi, I'm speaking with regard to city manager's agenda federal update. So the things that I was particularly concerned about in recent changes in federal funding, that the budget for next year, the HUD budget is scheduled to, the White House is proposing to cut it from $77 billion to $43.5 billion. and about 26.7 billion would come from cuts in rental assistance programs and in pushing it back to the states. And so this is something that is on the radar. I strongly support the work by some counselors in putting together municipal vouchers. These are issues that could be coming much sooner than we would hope. And so to think about how to make the budget that is being voted on now resilient to such drastic changes without causing residents who depend on Cambridge Housing Authority federal funding to become homeless. And the second issue related to HUD is that the federal budget is cutting particularly the fair housing enforcement And I suggest that we figure out how on the local level we can support more of our tenants in asserting their civil rights, whether it be through MCAT or equivalent, particularly by providing vouchers for private attorneys to help these tenants, whether it's through MCAT or through the Superior Court. It's really important to pick up the slack where the where the federal government has chosen to target specific populations. Thank you for considering this as part of the budget for next year and the federal update. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is Eileen Pires, followed by Sean Hope, then Jessica Scully. Eileen? Eileen has not joined us. We will go to Sean Hope, followed by Jessica Scully. Sean, you have two minutes.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, members of the council. For the record, my name is Sean Hope. I operate a business at 33 Church Street. I'm here tonight to address policy order number 71 that was referenced earlier. This is about an allocation of funds toward what I believe is a pretty significant project in Harvard Square. Briefly, for the last five years, I've operated a myriad of businesses in Harvard Square. They've all been experiential in nature. I've had an arcade. I'm currently operating a nightclub at 33 Dunster Street. So I spent a lot of time seeing patterns of development, of behavior, of people walking around. This past Saturday, we had a block party. We had about 6,000 people. It was a vintage clothing and music block party. So I've really been focused on trying to activate areas that I've been in, and Harvard Square has really become home for the last five years. And then when I think about this potential study, this tunnel, I've been in the tunnel. It is amazing. When I look at it, all I see is opportunities within the built environment. It's really challenging to find more space in a city as dense as Cambridge. So I see this as an opportunity to explore. I think it's a great use of resources. But I'm hoping that this is the first step for the council, first to do the research to see what the opportunities are. But I really feel like this is an opportunity for Cambridge and maybe one of our historic squares to look towards the future. If you look at Assembly Row, if you look at the Seaport, these all have kind of anchor opportunities and open spaces and something unique to draw them there. As a person who's trying to advocate for more people to come to Harvard Square on a Saturday, I think these are one of the steps that is really forward-looking, and I think it's something that the council should continue to do. I also just want to say thank you. I've opened three businesses in the last three years, and I have received funding from initiatives from this council, from CDD, from the city manager's office. So I think the council is doing a great job at promoting business, and this is just another step, but I think it's an important one and a bold one. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Jessica Scully, followed by Kaylee Hassan, then Pauline Quirion. Jessica, you have two minutes.

Good evening. I'm Jessica Scully, a business owner in Harvard Square, a resident, and the current board chair of the Harvard Square Business Association. And I'm here this evening in support of policy order 71. The order's request for an appropriation to develop the RFP for the tunnel engineering study is both modest and essential. This is a critical first step toward reimagining this unused MBTA tunnel as a people-centered hub, one that can knit the square together and create a weatherproof public space. The tunnel study is the kind of bold planning that could allow Cambridge to be at the forefront of urban innovation. The funds are already available. The recent budget's already earmarked $300,000 for a pedestrian traffic study in Harvard Square, and dedicating $72,000 of that to the RFP would keep the project on schedule without impacting any other priority. Inviting, well-programmed public spaces are the glue that binds Harvard Square's eclectic mix of residents, students, workers, and visitors into a true community. Active public realms make the square safer and more accessible for people of all ages and abilities. And culturally, these spaces become stages for the city's creativity, potentially showcasing everything from student ensembles to neighborhood festivals, and reinforcing Cambridge's reputation as a global innovation hub that values human connection. Investing in welcoming public spaces in Harvard Square is not just a local amenity. It's a citywide strategy for economic vitality, social cohesion, and sustainable growth. and Harvard Square cannot afford to stand still. Other districts in our region are already developing these human-centered spaces, and if we want the square to remain vibrant, competitive, and welcoming, we've got to create that future today. So let's put the remaining traffic study funds to work, programming new pedestrianized moments right away, building on our wildly successful street closures of Oktoberfest and Mayfair to show residents and visitors and investors what a people-first Harvard Square feels like. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is Kaylee Hassan, followed by Pauline Quirion, then John DiGiovanni. Kaylee, you have two minutes.

Good morning. My name is Kaylee Hassan, or good evening, sorry. My name is Kaylee Hassan. I live at 19 Orange Street. I'm speaking in support of the third policy order resolution on today's agenda that the city council go on record to support the Clean Slate bills and the Clean Slate campaign in Massachusetts. I'm a student at Harvard Law School, and I'm part of Harvard Defenders in the Prison Legal Assistance Project, where I've worked with clients who are currently or formerly incarcerated and clients who have criminal records. I'm speaking in my personal capacity this evening based on my experiences and my belief that everyone deserves a fair chance to contribute positively to their community. This year, I've helped several clients with the criminal offender record information or quarry sealing process. Having a criminal record negatively impacts our clients' job, housing, and community engagement opportunities. For example, having a criminal record makes you ineligible to volunteer at your child's school or go on field trips, leading to intergenerational effects for the 50% of children in the United States who have a parent with a criminal record. For many folks, these are charges that are eligible to be sealed. Their cases were resolved the requisite three or seven years earlier. However, the sealing process itself poses needless administrative barriers. There is often a months-long backlog to review sealing petitions. THAT MEANS THAT, FOR EXAMPLE, ONE OF OUR CLIENTS COULD APPLY FOR HOUSING BUT THEIR APPLICATION WOULD BE REJECTED BECAUSE OF THEIR CRIMINAL RECORD. EVEN IF THEY WERE ELIGIBLE FOR COREY CEILING, IT MAY TAKE FOUR TO SIX MONTHS FOR THEIR PETITION TO BE REVIEWED. THAT IS FOUR TO SIX MONTHS BEFORE THEIR HOUSING APPLICATION CAN GET APPROVED. THAT'S WHY AUTOMATED CEILING IS SO IMPORTANT. I also want to bring up that charges that end in dismissals or charges that are dropped still go on a criminal record and are not immediately sealed. The clean slate bills would change all of these issues. That's why I hope that the city council votes to approve the resolution to support the clean slate bills. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is John DiGiovanni, followed by Dennis Carlone, then Julie McCormick. John, you have two minutes.

Thank you. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and counselors. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here. I'm here speaking regarding policy order 71. My name is John DiGiovanni. I'm with Trinity Properties that's been active in Harvard Square for over 70 years. And I would also like to thank the city manager for his time over the past two years. As many of you know, he is skeptical about the ability to develop the tunnel into a venue. I appreciate his skepticism and his innate determination to be frugal with public funds. However, there are a variety of reasons why it's worth spending these initial investment dollars. To mention a few, ticketed venues are the new anchors for districts. Harvard Square's conservation district and its built environment limits the ability to create venues of this size. We're late. Other districts are doing this. The tunnel sits below a city street and abuts a city parking lot. It's been vacant for 45 years. Approximately 35 years ago, this site next to the tunnel, the hotel, was fully permitted to come down. and they were using this, they were gonna use the tunnel for parking. So we know you can access this tunnel. We've been exploring this for about 10 years. We've spent funds, the association has, for a 3D Reddit computer imaging of this tunnel. We've been in there several times. In February of 2020, we met with city leaders and several property owners to outline a plan to begin this investigation. Since then, we lost three years to the pandemic. We're spending the last couple of years working with the city manager. The time is now. The amount of time that it will take to actually get someone to write the RFP, to write the RFP, to issue the RFP, and someone to actually come back and tell you how much time and resources it's going to take to answer the fundamental questions, which is, can you access it from a public way? And what's the capacity? You find those out, you'll find out whether it's economically viable. It's a worthwhile investment. This city is a leader in innovative thinking. I'd hope you see this as an investment to be transformative to an important economic engine for the city. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony. Thank you. Apologies. We skipped Pauline Quirion, so we will go to Pauline, followed by Dennis Carlon. Pauline, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Yes, good evening. My name is Pauline Kurian. I live at 125 Ridge Avenue in Cambridge, and I'm the director of the Corey and Rianti Project at Greater Boston Legal Services, which has an office in Boston as well as in Cambridge. So I'm here to speak on the third policy proposal, which would be to endorse clean slate legislation. Where I work at GBLS, we have the oldest criminal record sealing process in in the entire state. And day after day, what we've seen over the years is the current system really fails people. It's plagued with backlogs, which can be as many as like six or seven months to seal a record, which you wait years to seal because there are three-year waiting periods for misdemeanors, and seven-year waiting periods for felonies. So people have done their time, they've finished their sentences, it's been many, many years, but there's a real difficulty with the current sealing process. So what other states have done is they've found a way to resolve the problem of backlogs and also underutilization because the current rules are so complicated that frankly, even attorneys call me up to figure out when their clients are eligible. So it's not unusual for us to have clients. Sometimes they'll come into the office and they'll have offenses that are 20 years old. So Massachusetts should join the other states, which are Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, California, Colorado, Delaware. Michigan, Oklahoma, Virginia, Minnesota, and Utah who have passed Clean Slate legislation. So I urge this body to do the same. Everybody deserves a chance to work and support their family and to participate in their communities. And Clean Slate would do exactly that if it was enacted. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Dennis Carlone.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I have a handout that I would like each of the council members received, and there are copies for the clerk's office as well.

Ms. Irwin's going to come and collect that from you. Thank you.

I see the clock is running.

Oh, stop the clock, please.

So I am Dennis Carlone. I live at 9 Washington Avenue, and I had the pleasure to serve on this council for 10 years. During that time, we passed an upzoning cost reimbursement benefit. For any upzoning, a certain amount of money would be charged per square foot, which then went back into the community. The reason I'm bringing this up, there's an excellent handout by the manager, 212. which talks about the Community Benefits Advisory Committee and the wonderful four projects that were funded. I understand that the upzoning payments to the public are now under the Community Benefits Advisory Committee. That was not the intent of the nine zero approved ordinance order, excuse me. The order states, and you have a copy, the additional value created for the owner petitioner by upzonings for development of more than 50,000 square feet, along with the recommendation of proportional contributions from said property owner petitioner towards development impact mitigation infrastructure improvements, community public benefits, and or fulfilling city council goals projects. The reason I bring that up is that is not the order of the community benefits advisory committee. There can be no infrastructure improvements. It is not allowed. Now, a building is permanent.

I was going to call you counselor. Mr. Carlone, your time is expired.

Yes, Vice Mayor? Move for suspension to give former Councilor Carlone an additional minute. Thank you for the courtesy, Vice Mayor.

On suspension, roll call.

Councilor Zinn? Yes. Yes, Vice Mayor McGovern? Yes. Yes, Councilor Nolan? Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui?

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler?

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Toner is absent. Councillor Wilson? Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy? Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons? Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent.

The rules are suspended and giving the next motion is to give, I'm going to call you Councillor again, former City Councillor Dennis Carlone additional time to finish his remarks.

Roll call. Councillor Azeem. Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui.

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes. Yes. Councillor Toner is absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Councillor Zusy. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent.

thank you thank you vice mayor I the reason I'm bringing this up is the council approved an approach to how the funds were to be used and that is as I understand it not presently the opinion of the administration however the council has not changed this order Um, and I, I question that, um, to think that new development that affects a neighborhood, those mitigation factors are not permanent. Like the building is seems wrong. And I just wanted to highlight that. I thank you for your attention and I must know my additional comments took less time than all the voting, but thank you all. And it's good to see you. Thank you. Very good seeing you. Thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is Julie McCormick, followed by Otoniel, Figueroa, Duran, then Tina Alou. Julie, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you, City Council members. My name is Julie McCormack, as you note on the screen there. I work for Harvard Law School. I direct the Safety Net Project and the Criminal Record Sealing Initiative and have done so since 2019. I'm speaking on my own behalf and based on my own experience doing that work. And we'll note that both Ms. Hassan and Attorney Kurian have already spoken. eloquently in support of policy order number three, which is the policy order that I'm speaking about in support of. Since 2019, I have worked with well over 120 people and have helped them move on from law enforcement encounters that have led to their being denied opportunities like new apartments, educational opportunities, job opportunities. The reason that we're asking the Cambridge City Council to support policy order number three and to advance the clean slate legislation across the state is because there is reluctance. in many quarters to say yes to folks who've had law enforcement encounters. There is concern about the prospect of a sealed criminal records And having the City Council carefully consider this policy order, carefully consider this legislation and support the advancement of this legislation goes a long way to allaying those concerns across the state. And so again, as I'll remind you about the eloquent testimony you've already heard from others supporting this policy order and urge you to do so and support our clean slate legislation that will permit folks to move on from these encounters and will permit them to hear yes instead of no on the basis of a criminal record. Thank you very much. Thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is Otoniel Figueroa-Duran, followed by Tina Alou, then Elizabeth Moran. Otoniel, you have two minutes.

Thank you and good evening, Mayor Simmons and the City Council. Thank you for having us and for always opening the door to working families that are members of 32BJ. My name is Otoniel Figueroa Duran. I am the Director of Employee Relations for 32BJ, a union representing 185,000 service workers in 14 states, including 20,000 here in Massachusetts. We currently represent the cleaners in Cambridge City buildings employed by a contractor called Compass Facility Services. A number of them have joined me here today. The city recently issued a request for proposal for cleaning services starting this year through 2028. The RFP specified that the service contract would be awarded to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder. When the bids were recently opened, a company called New England Facility Services, NEFS, was the lowest by a very slight amount. However, based on our recent experiences with the company, 32BJ has serious doubt that they can be considered responsible. NEFS has not demonstrated an ability to meet its legal obligation under the National Labor Relations Act. They recently took over another account at Boston South Station with a unionized cleaning workforce. For four months, they have refused to recognize and to bargain with the union. It has resulted in the union filing charges, unfair labor practice charges, at the federal level against that NEFS, which is in pending investigation. NEFS has demonstrated that it's neither in fact responsive or responsible and it should not be considered eligible for this contract award. The Purchasing Department of Cambridge should be encouraged to choose a responsible contractor. We urge you to vote yes on Policy Order 78. Thank you. And thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is Tina Alou followed by Elizabeth Moran, then Ann Robart. Tina, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Hello, my name is Tina Alou. I live at 113 and a half Pleasant Street. I'm testifying tonight as the Director of CEOC on City Manager Agenda Item 10 regarding the work of the Community Benefits Advisory Committee's work. CEOC was fortunate enough to participate in one of the four partnerships, the Family Stability Project, along with De Novo and Transition House. Although all of our agencies had strong working relationships before the project, the community benefits funding allowed us to create a no-wrong-door approach for residents seeking services from any of our organizations. This was incredibly important, especially during the pandemic. We were able to design a comprehensive intake process that was conducted at the initial visit to screen for a multitude of issues that the family was dealing with. This enhanced the capacity to work collaboratively and make successful referrals to each of our agencies and to the other partnerships. We were able to develop a data system to track the number of individual serves, the type of services that they received, and at which agency. And working with the committee and an evaluation partner, they assisted us to measure our outcomes. We're continuing to use all these tools. What was also critical about the funding for this project was the fact that it allowed for a multi-year intervention. For families to have success in maintaining housing stability, to move forward in economic mobility, and to address mental and behavioral health issues, it often takes an intensive process that is multifaceted, flexible, and addresses the individual needs of the family. This funding made that possible. We're happy to share additional information with the council to give you more details about the project, but tonight we want to thank the committee for giving our agencies the ability to participate in this effort. Thank you.

Thank you, our next speaker is Elizabeth Moran followed by Anne Robart, then Larry Kim. Elizabeth, two minutes.

Hi, good evening everyone. I'm Elizabeth Marin, I live at 4244 Alpine Street. Tonight I want to clarify some facts and details surrounding the curb cut application at 49 Alpine Street. This information is different from what you've heard from the owners and their supporters so far this evening. There are 17 houses and one and two family houses on Alpine Street between Concord Ave and Vassal Lane. Bill Simmers is on the southeast corner of Vassal Lane and Alpine Street, and he lives at 8 Alpine Street. Nancy Menzen is at the opposite end of Alpine Street and she lives at 56 Alpine Street. Both of them have written letters in opposition. I hope you'll read them. Nancy wrote an eloquent letter and referenced the historical value of our street. I hope you'll make a special point of reading her letter. There are 11 homeowners on our street wrote thoughtful letters opposing the curb cut. Now onto the abutting neighbors. Four abutting neighbors were asked by the city to weigh in on this curb cut. Two of the abutting neighbors Noam Kersom and Robert Filene opposed, I'm sorry, were in favor of the curb cut. Two opposed the curb cut. They are Ann Robart and myself, Elizabeth Marin. We are, as far as I know, the four people, the abutting neighbors who were asked by the city. Ms.

Marin, your time has expired. Please text us, email us the balance of your comments.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Ann Robart, followed by Larry Kim, then William Simmers. Ann, you have two minutes.

Thank you and good evening everybody. I'm Ann Robart, 55 Alpine.

Bring the mic closer to your face.

Sorry, can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, thank you. I'm here for R2, the Alpine curb cut. And I know you don't want to do this, talk about curb cuts. I don't either. I feel like there's a lot more important things to be doing. But we're here for the moment because this is still in your purview. And this is the body that's supposed to pay attention to what neighbors care about as opposed to the staff who approve things in a different way. I live right beside 49. I am opposed as are most of the neighbors. And counselors may not have known before now that some of the letters that they received in support are from people who don't live on the block or even on the street. The block we're talking about runs between Concord Ave and Vassell. One abutter is supporting it, three are opposed. Of the people on the block, two who live there support it. You have 10 letters in opposition. The applicants have been counting another block of alpine on the other side of Concord Ave. And the blocks were built at very different times in Cambridge history. My block used to be a brickyard. It was a clay ground. It was built post-war. Anyway, so the houses are situated very differently. The other block has driveways, our block has not. Until very recent years, we only had three curb cuts, and those were because of city easements, minus one of them. Now we have a couple of more. Most houses do not have room on the side for a driveway, they don't have room in the front, and this application is a cut to drive two cars in and parallel to the front of their house in what would be the garden. I don't want this to be a precedent. Over time, a house is sold, the buyers seek to get a curb cut, and park privately in front. Ms.

Robart, your time has expired.

It sets a bad standard. Please email the remainder. Thank you so much. Good night.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Larry Kim, followed by William Simmers, then Joy Hackle. Larry, you have two minutes.

Thank you. Good evening. I'm Larry Kim. I'm here to comment on the recent discussions around the Cambridge Peace Commission. The face of the commission is Brian Corr. As you know, he is on an unplanned leave, which means that commission has no face. So I'm here to be a face. I have served on that commission for the last 15 years. The majority of that time I've been either the chair or the co-chair of that commission. I'm currently the co-chair of the Peace Commission. I'm here because some counselors have decided that now is the time to question our existence. This is while our executive director is on an unplanned leave, our interim director is on a planned leave. To bring up these issues right now has not been received very well by me or my co-chair, Elka Coleman, who could not be here tonight. We are in a moment of transition that is true, but it's not a transition where we pause, reflect, make thoughtful decisions. We're in a moment of transition where we have a lot of unanswered questions and we are working extra hard to do the work of the commission and to keep it running. I'm asking for two things here tonight. One is that instead of questioning our existence right now, you're free to do so later, but just not right now. Instead, I'm asking that you would support us and you would support us by passing the budget that's been proposed. I'm asking that you would also find ways to support us or either stand aside and allow the city manager to support us because he has. He's even come to our meeting. He's thanked our peace commissioners for the work that they do. All of that has been received very, very well. Second, I'm asking that before you call our commission redundant or not a priority, that you would learn who we are and what we do. The person best equipped to do that is Brian, but he's not here and you know that. And so I'm here to offer myself. I'm second rate Brian. I'm happy to talk to you about what we do. If after that you decide we're redundant, not necessary, so be it. But I'm simply asking that right now we need your support. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony.

Our next speaker is William Simmers, followed by Joy Hackle, then Suzanne Blier. William, you have two minutes.

Hi, I'm speaking remotely. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can. Please go ahead.

I am Bill Summers. I live at 8 Alpine Street, which is at the other end of the portion of Alpine Street between Concord and Massalane. I really want to speak up mainly. I am an architect, so I may be more visually attuned to what's going on, but I'm really upset about the fact that this whole curb cut situation is an interruption to the consistency of the street to which practically all of the people on the street really adhere to. It has been historically a very integrated unit with very consistent designs and particularly the design of the front yards. So I am very leery of this lengthy driveway experience does show that when you make a lengthy driveway, you're going to fill it up regardless of how close it is to the front lot line. And so I would urge people to understand that people on this particular segment of the street are very passionate about how the consistency and the neighborhood feeling of the street. And I feel like the parking in front of the house is not the way to go. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you for your testimony.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Joy Hackle, followed by Suzanne Blier. Joy has not joined us. We will go to Suzanne Blier. Suzanne, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Suzanne Blier, Five Fuller Place, and there's several things that I want to talk about. One is the Harvard Square tunnel and Charter Right. I'm speaking now both as myself and for the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association in support of this. I think it would be a really terrific thing to look at and part of a key vision for the square and for the city. And I urge the funding of it and the creation ultimately of a citywide committee to look into questions about its use. We also support even more streets opening to pedestrians year-round every week, and hopefully we can work on that as well. And first floor retail citywide and that coming before the city again. Right now, if you want to put retail in your building, you can do it. You can simply write that in. But I hope this will go to neighborhood and long-term planning because there are impacts on water and electricity, noise, parking, etc. Solar energy systems matter. Please support them. It should have been as part of the upzoning, not, but it's critical. And on the federal issues manager, agenda number one and the finance committee, boy, are we seeing cuts? I mean, massive. And I speak of this from experience. And right now the city has to step up. I mean, we're talking really important, really serious ones that are gonna impact housing needs and money coming into the city by way of revenue, etc. And you can't simply level that on the shoulders of current residents. So please do that. Dennis Carlone's statement seemed to make very good sense. I wasn't aware of that. And as a spouse of an SEIU shop steward, I also think that what they had said also makes good sense. So thank you very much.

Our next speaker is Lee Ferris, followed by Nancy Menzen. Lee, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Good evening. I'm speaking for the Cambridge Residence Alliance in strong support of policy order number one, which commends the black response for its work generally and specifically for creation of the film, Where Do Black Men Live?, which powerfully highlights the lived experiences, struggles, and stories of black male populations in Cambridge, bringing greater awareness to the critical issues of housing, justice, and belonging. I hope that all counselors and many residents will attend one of the showings of the film, Where Do Black Men Live? On May 29th at six at the main library, June 19th at 11 at the Brattle Theater, followed by a Juneteenth celebration on the Cambridge Common. or on June 26th at 6 p.m. on Zoom. The Cambridge Residence Alliance has worked closely for several years with the Black Response in the Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition, and we deeply appreciate their contributions to Cambridge. We also support Policy Order No. 3 to support the Clean Slate Bill for automated sealing of records. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Nancy Menzen, followed by Heather Hoffman, then Tava Moses. Nancy, you have two minutes.

Please go ahead. Okay, thank you. I just saw the unmute. Good evening, everyone. At 56 Alpine Street, one of the immediate abutters of 49 that's in consideration. First of all, I'd like to correct the written material that we got said that of the five immediate abutters, it said that three were... I'm sorry, they left me out. Okay, it said that of the five, there were four who were in favor, but that's not true because of the five immediate abutters, one does not live here. So of the four immediate abutters... there's there are three opposed including myself and i will say as respectfully as i can that i think it was really a bit disingenuous to include the other block of alpine street which really resembles ours not at all it might as well be somewhere else because this street has an interesting historical history that bill simmers alluded to these houses were all built post-war somewhere i thought i heard gi housing i'm not sure of that piece uh but they were all there there are only three models of house original models on the street and they all have small frontages and small side sideages if you will And I would really invite you all to come take a walk down Alpine Street because I think it may be unique in Cambridge with the way people have taken these three models of house and made them a little individual and planted. What I invite you to see is how lovely this street has become over the years. It was a development in 1948 and a brick yard, as Bill Simmer said.

Nancy, your time has expired. Please email the remainder of your comments. Our next speaker is Heather Hoffman, followed by Taba Moses, then Richard Harding. Heather, you have two minutes. Please go ahead.

Hello, Heather Hoffman, 213 Hurley Street. I want to second what Dennis Carlone said. I hope that you will listen to him. And what Lee Ferris said, especially about the value to our city of the Black Response Cambridge and the way it has spoken out. I could not be more appreciative of what they have done to bring a different voice to city decisions. With respect to sealing records, I could not say it better than others have before me. With respect to first floor retail, I'm pleased to see that there's a proposal to change this, but I wish that all of you would realize that one size fits all, is a dumb way to run a city this size. In fact, there are differences. You just heard it about Alpine Street a bunch of times, and that's two blocks. How about when you spread that over a more than six square mile city? It's small, but it's not that small. So please, please, you are running into the results of your unthinking adoption of foolish zoning petitions. We're gonna see that tomorrow. But finally, with respect to the budget, I hope that you will think long and hard about what we really need to spend money on and what we could stand to not. And I'd suggest screwing up linear parks would be a good thing to think about not doing.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Taba Moses, followed by Richard Harding. Taba, you have two minutes. Please go ahead. Taba, if you can unmute yourself, you have the floor.

I just did. Can you hear me?

Yes, please go ahead.

Okay. Yeah, I'll keep it short. I just want to say I appreciate you guys. And I'm calling in to say that we support the new ordinance around packaging on the retail side. And it's critical for allowing stores to function and have an opportunity to be more profitable in a really tough market. I think it's great for Cambridge and it's great for the cannabis industry. That's it.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Richard Harding. Mr. Harding, you have two minutes. Richard, if you can unmute yourself, two minutes, please go ahead.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes, please go ahead.

UH GOOD EVENING MADAM MAYOR AND REST OF THE COUNCIL GOOD TO BE WITH YOU JUST REALLY QUICKLY I I'D AGREE WITH TABA RICHARD HODDEN REPRESENTING GREEN SOLE CANNABIS UM I THINK THE RECOMMENDATIONS THAT ARE BEING MADE TONIGHT THAT UH FOR THE CHANGES IN REPACKAGING WILL UM FOR ONE BRING UP THE CITY WITH THE CANNABIS COMMISSION WHICH I THINK It's something we should always watch about while we're in the hearing sometimes and the councils are asking what could help operators be more profitably and more efficient. It's catching up with the regulations that the CCC recommends as it relates to cannabis as this is their full-time thing. So I just want to thank Christina DeLeoso and her group for advocating and paying attention to this important piece of the retail cannabis industry. I'd also say that I think the council has made a will make a huge step by removing the obstacle of the HCA as it relates to new businesses opening. It's one of the hardest. It was at one time one of the biggest obstacles to negotiate an HCA with the city. Cambridge has been pretty good about it, but I think moving in this direction will allow more people to be able to take a calculated chance at getting into the business without having to go through the long, arduous process of negotiating the HCA. So I just want to thank the council and those who are working on this particular issue, and I hope that they would vote in favor of the changes proposed tonight. Thank you. Have a great evening.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. That is all who are signed up to speak.

That concludes public comment. It is the pleasure of the City Council. And a motion by the Vice Mayor to close public comment. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Ayes have it, and public comment is now closed. We now go to the submission of the record. We have two sets of minutes. There's the minutes of the City Council regular meeting on April 14th, 2025, and minutes of the City Council regular meeting on April 28th, 2025. What is the pleasure of the City Council? on a motion by Councilor Nolan to accept the minutes and place on file discussion. Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. And the minutes of April 14th, 2025 and the minutes of April 28th, 2025 have been accepted and placed on file by the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. We now move to reconsideration. The first item on the reconsideration list is the first floor retail policy order. This reconsideration was pulled by Councilor Toner. I will give the floor to Councilor Zing. Councilor Zing, the floor is yours.

I would just like to make a motion for reconsideration for the reconsideration item number one.

On a motion to reconsider, discussion?

Hearing none.

This is a roll call vote.

Councillor Azeem. Yes. Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Yes. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui.

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes. Yes. Councillor Toner. Absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative and one recorded as absent.

Reconsideration passes on the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. Councillor Azeem.

uh thank you madam mayor um nothing new here just the same amendment that we voted on last week there was just a technical error and we didn't actually get the vote counted and so just have to vote on it again and then it'll go back to economic development and neighborhood and long-term planning it's like the same vote we took last week we just have to retake it So I was just gonna make a motion to further amend policy order 2025, number 70, by amending the first ordered as follows, that the city manager be and hereby is requested to direct the community development department to draft and propose a language necessary to, and here's what we are adding, codify the allowance and of the addition of first floor retail strikeout by right, um done with the strikeout in residential districts addition where they already exist and in other appropriate areas of the city done with the addition thereby protecting this charming neighborhood characteristic and ensuring the continued operation of valued local businesses so exactly the same vote as last week just have to do it again um yeah discussion hearing none roll call counselor zine yes yes vice mayor mcgovern

Yes. Councillor Nolan? Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui?

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler? Yes. Yes. Councillor Toner? Absent. Councillor Wilson? Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy? Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons? Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative and one recorded as absent.

Thank you, and the motion passes on the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. Councilor Zinn.

Sorry, the third piece is we just have to make a motion to adopt.

That's on back to you. Oh, okay. As amended. Yes, as amended. So Councilor Zinn's making a motion to adopt policy order number seven as amended. Discussion?

Hearing none. Councillor Zinn. Yes. Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui.

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes.

Yes.

Councillor Toner. Absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent.

And the policy order is adopted as amended on the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. We move now to number two on the reconsideration list. It was a curb cut at 49 Alpine Street. Reconsideration was filed by Councilor Nolan. In order for us to take this up, because Councilor Nolan was not on the prevailing side, we have to suspend the rules. So I need a motion to suspend the rules. on a motion by Councilor Nolan to suspend the rules.

I do think it's a point of information first.

You want to ask a point of information? And what is your point of information?

If something gets reconsidered, could it then be referred to another meeting? I mean, we have a meeting on curb cuts on Wednesday, so is that appropriate?

Well, if it gets adopted, you can send it anywhere you want. Okay, thank you. Further discussion? Okay, so a roll call on... Mayor Simmons?

Yes.

We can discuss the motion to reconsider. We can discuss the motion to reconsider. So, right, what's before us right now is the motion to reconsider. It takes a two-thirds vote with six people voting. So, is there any other discussion on the motion? Oh, wait a minute. Here's Megan. Oh, okay.

Oh, great. Where have you been?

Yes, on the motion to reconsider.

So I think the first is the motion to suspend the rules.

Suspend the rules, thank you, sorry. So we have to suspend the rules first. I'm sorry, I said reconsider. We have to suspend, she has to get the suspension of the rules. Thank you, Megan.

Madam Mayor.

So is there discussion on suspension of the rules? Madam Mayor. Vice Mayor.

Thanks, I'm just gonna explain why I'm gonna vote no on suspension. Mm-hm. I think it was my first term, Madam Mayor. I think you and I are the only two still around then when we changed our rules to say that if you were on the losing side of a vote, you can't automatically file for reconsideration. You needed to move suspension first. And the reason we did that was because there were People were filing reconsiderations a lot when they were on the losing side of the vote to basically get a second bite at the apple. And it was not a productive use of time and so I never vote for reconsideration when that's the case. I think it's consistent, I support the rule that we have. and especially when I don't really think there's any new information to be had. So I will be voting no on suspension.

Vice Mayor, you'll also floor for the discussion on suspension. Councilor Siddiqui.

Thank you. Where I've landed is similar to Vice Mayor, and I'll say what I said last week as well. I think we have this procedure in place. It's written the way it's written. We will have pending discussion on that. This was approved by ISD and other departments. I understand that there is opposition that happens on these issues. And I understand and I hear that. And I think relitigating this and referring it You know, I think there's a lot of important matters upcoming and it's, you know, I don't, I think I'm landing at the same place given just a week ago as well, given that we've, there's certain things we've followed and to, Let's see how tomorrow goes, but if we are going to be in the habit of reconsidering these curb cuts, it sets this precedent that I'm worried about. So I appreciate everyone who's come and written, but I'm landing in the same place. So just wanted to get that on the record. Thank you.

Councilor Siddiqui yields the floor. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler? Thanks, Madam Mayor. I continue to think it really doesn't make sense for the council to weigh in on curb cuts. If it were the overwhelming interest of the body to lay this on the table, to offer the meeting, I'd be fine with that. It doesn't seem like it's the will of the body, and looking forward to this ordinance meeting tomorrow, hoping we can change the structure of this, because I don't think weighing in on all these individual ones makes any sense. I yield back.

Councillor Subini will use the floor. Councillor Zinn.

I just wanted to concur and say that like I think curb cuts are exhausting. They're very specific to a specific street and very small in comparison to a lot of the other things. So looking forward to the conversation about reprioritizing city council time.

Councilor Zing yields the floor.

Councilor Wilson. I'm sorry. Just a point of information. The meeting is Wednesday, not tomorrow.

The meeting is Wednesday, not tomorrow. Councilor Wilson.

Thank you, and I look forward to the meeting on Wednesday. I can imagine these conversations must be really difficult for community members, for neighbors, for the individuals who are requesting the curb cut, and for the various needs as to why many of our neighbors are needing them. I voted present in the last conversation and I will vote that again. And I just believe because I don't think that this could be coming before the council and really do believe that we need to have a better process to how we are handling curb cuts. So while I look forward to the conversation, I understand that tonight's vote is a really difficult one i never want to be in between quality of life and challenges that families may need to better access their homes so i'm voting present because i just believe that i'm not in that position i don't want to be in that position of saying you deserve this or you don't deserve that recognizing that a present vote is still theoretically technically a no but i just wish that we had a better process that did not actually come before the council thank you

Council Wilson yields the floor. And this vote, Council Wilson, is on suspending the rules. Further discussion? Hearing none, so on suspension.

So I will go to the Deputy Clerk. Please call the roll. Councillor Azeem. No. No. Vice Mayor McGovern. No. No. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui.

No.

No. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Present. Present. Councillor Toner. Absent. Councillor Wilson.

Present.

Present. Councillor Zusy.

Yes.

Yes. Vice, I'm sorry, Mayor Simmons. No. No. And you have two members recorded in the affirmative, four members recorded in the negative, one recorded as absent, and two recorded as present.

Suspension fails for lack of a majority discussion, so the vote stands as it was at the last meeting. We'll move now to the city manager's agenda. What is the pleasure of the city council? Madam Mayor? Yes, sir. Vice Mayor?

Number 12.

Pleasure of the city council.

Mayor Simmons.

Councilor Nolan.

Number one, unless it's been called already.

Pleasure of the city council. Mayor Simmons. Council Wilson.

Number nine, please.

Pleasure City Council.

Mayor Simmons.

Council Zusy.

Four and 13, please.

Four?

Uh-huh.

And 13?

Yes.

Madam Mayor. Vice Mayor. I'm sorry, number 10 as well.

Pleasure City Council. So on the balance, we have several roll calls on two and three. Let me just go over what I believe I heard was pulled. Council Nolan pulled number one. Council Zusy pulled number four. Council Wilson pulled number nine. Vice Mayor pulled number 10. Vice Mayor pulled number 12. Council Zusy pulled number 13. Am I correct? If so, I think we will take a roll call on the balance and the roll calls will be on appropriation and placing.

Madam Mayor.

Council Wilson.

Apologies, did you say number six?

No. No, I did not.

Can I pull number six, please?

Excuse me. Very good. I will entertain a roll call for two, three, Five, seven, eight. Refer to the petition on 11. And that's it. Any discussion? Hearing none,

I will entertain a roll call for those numbers I just called. Councillor Azeem.

Yes.

Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Yes. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui.

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler.

Yes.

Yes. Councillor Toner is absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy.

Yes.

Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent.

And the balance, the consent agenda of the city managers was adopted on the affirmative vote of eight members, one being absent, and number 11 was referred to the petition. We'll now go back to number one. This was pulled by Councillor Nolan. It is an update on the federal update. So, Councillor Nolan, do you want to say some few words before the city managers speak?

Thank you, Mayor Simmons. Given the news every single day, and certainly every single week, we just got an email from MIT about their layoffs. Every day there seems to be something new, and I'm really appreciative that the city has scrambled to help all of us figure out what's up. To let folks in the community know there's so much going on behind the scenes, it's really important we understand some of the ramifications of that. So I look forward to the update. There may be other questions to ask after this city manager gives his update. Thank you, Mayor Simmons.

Excuse me. Thank you, Councilor Nolan. Use the floor to hear from the city manager. City manager, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Through you, Mayor Simmons, I wanted to provide a brief overview of some of the federal funding impacts and also an update on how we are processing the potential for interactions between federal ICE operations and local police, as we saw in Worcester over the last week. On federal funding impacts, we are tracking the impact of federal funding cuts in our community, and some of the greatest impacts have continued to center on Harvard and MIT. Harvard University is now up to $3 billion of federal grants frozen or canceled. That's billion with a B. with over 100 termination notices sent to researchers last Thursday alone. Though it's uncertain how much of this total funding is tied up in various court challenges, this is nonetheless an enormous impact. And there have been real impacts on faculty, staff, and students as major ongoing research projects are left in an uncertain position. Harvard announced a hiring freeze on March 10th, and some initial layoffs have already occurred within areas most affected by federal grant freezes, particularly at the School of Public Health. In response, Harvard has also taken significant financial actions to support existing operations and research, including issuing a $750 million bond to raise cash and allocating $250 million from their central budget to support ongoing research. My sense is that we are still waiting to understand the scale of the short-term impact, but that the long-term impact on research, careers, and our local economy will be substantial if the worst case funding cuts are made permanent. MIT is in a similar position, though they have been not quite in the bullseye. MIT placed a hiring freeze on February 14th and has received at least 20 stop work orders for federally funded research grants. Over the past two weeks, as Councilor Nolan noted, there have been dozens of staff layoffs as the Institute is seeking to stabilize its overall funding and ensure that it has financial flexibility moving forward. The Institute has also issued a $750 million bond to raise cash, similar to Harvard, and is involved as well in litigation regarding attempts by the National Science Foundation to slash funding for facilities and administrative costs as part of federal grants. At the state level, the Healey administration has published dashboard over the weekend of the $360 million of federal grants that have been frozen or canceled to the state thus far. The largest cuts have been to the pandemic elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund, ESSER funding of about $100 million. Two thirds of that funding really impacted two school districts, Springfield and New Bedford. The other major grant that was frozen or terminated was $90 million for climate resilience infrastructure through the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants. But there are potentially a number of smaller grant cuts that we will seek to better understand in terms of the local impact, including grants on digital equity, community mental health services, food insecurity, and public health initiatives. Some of these grants are in active litigation, but the economic uncertainty driven by federal funding cuts, tariffs, and broader market upheaval has also led the state to implement a hiring freeze that will start next week on May 27th. I believe that our actions thus far remain consistent with these challenges. And while our financials are somewhat more insulated from these major impacts, we will continue to monitor and make recommendations to the city council if a more conservative approach will be required as we enter FY26. On local police interactions with ICE, I wanted to address some of the issues that we saw, particularly as the city manager of Worcester released body camera footage from the encounter that unfolded last week. That body camera footage really did feel important for the community in terms of providing greater transparency into how things unfolded, though it was very difficult to watch. A woman was detained in front of her daughters and a crowd of community members surrounded the operation in protest of the federal action. The Worcester Police Department was called through 911, responded, and ultimately sought to restore order by supporting the exit of federal agents through the crowd. During the incident, one of the daughters was arrested. The Worcester Police have since released the minor and recommended no charges be brought. i want to first clarify that similar to worcester cambridge has a welcoming cities community ordinance which states that the cambridge police department does not inquire or store information on immigration status and does not participate in enforcement for civil immigration actions However, our ordinance, similar to Worcester's, notes no officer or employee of the Cambridge Police Department may participate in an operation led by a federal agency to detain persons for deportation purposes except in response to a request to assist with support services deemed necessary to ensure officer safety or to prevent a breach of the peace during a federal operation, such as requests to establish traffic perimeters, control traffic, or provide police escort. I've had a number of conversations with police commissioner Elo, the police leadership team and the city solicitor's office as we have wrestled with what this means in this unique and difficult time. I understand the frustration and anger in our community regarding federal actions on immigration. What we have seen over the last four months is more than simply immigration enforcement actions targeting undocumented individuals with outstanding criminal investigations or warrants. We have seen students detained for publishing op-eds critical of US foreign policy, then immediately moved out of state without informing family or lawyers. We have seen federal agencies detain people by mistake, deport them to foreign countries and then refuse to take any actions to correct the mistake even after being ordered to by the Supreme Court. We have seen social media being used selectively to identify individuals who were detained while other individuals detained were only located through the media checking the public log of detention facilities. At the highest levels, we are seeing senior federal officials speak of suspending habeas corpus, the foundational writ, the meaning show me the body that requires law enforcement to present a detained person before a judge to justify their detention. While there have been some successful court challenges, the system of checks and balances is under severe strain. It's these actions which have shattered trust in due process, the rule of law, and the legitimacy of immigration enforcement. Without trust in federal agencies, our community is living in a state of fear and uncertainty, which I know is turning into anger, activism, and a willingness to consider civil disobedience. That has put us as local government officials responsible for local law enforcement in a bind. We as a welcoming community do not support or defend this federal administration's policies on immigration enforcement. There are significant questions about whether many actions taken are legal or constitutional, and the federal government's record in court where they have lost a number of cases is reflective of the lack of trust and legitimacy in their actions. But we also have a responsibility to maintain public order and to abide by the rule of law. Some brief guidance that is important for us in our community to understand. There is significant latitude that federal agents have to detain individuals in public spaces. The threshold is probable cause in a judicial administrative warrant is only required to enter private spaces, but not to make an arrest in the public domain. Federal agents have significant latitude in how they plan and carry out operations, including whether they are wearing plain clothes or uniforms, wearing masks or not wearing masks. And a lot of that regulatory authority is out of our control as a municipality. Witnessing and documenting what is happening in public is allowed, but acts to mislead or stop a federal operation can be prosecuted, and obstructing a federal operation is a significant violation. The reality is that the path to challenging an arrest has to happen through the courts rather than on the street, and I recognize that this is where the breakdown of trust and legitimacy is what makes this moment so difficult. In the case of a significant confrontation between our local community and federal agents, I have confidence in the professionalism, the empathy and training of the Cambridge Police Department, and I know that the goal will be to communicate and to de-escalate. This is the same conversation that I know so many communities are now wrestling with, and we're also looking to coordinate across municipalities to ask for guidance from the state attorney's general's office and to ensure that we're able to communicate to our community what is happening, what the role is of local law enforcement, and how we might manage some of these really difficult interactions. Thank you all for just this space, the ability to have these kinds of difficult discussions together. And I know the police commissioner and our city solicitor are also available for this discussion.

Pleasure of the city council. Councilor Nolan.

Thank you. Through you, Mayor Simmons, can I follow up? because it's a question we're all struggling with. We know in buildings, we ask for a warrant, we make sure it's legit, we understand. On the streets, they don't have to show a warrant and we can't intervene and make sure that it's a legal person as opposed to just someone who bought an ICE jacket off the internet and is saying they're from ICE.

Mr. City Manager? Madam Solicitor?

Through you, Madam Mayor. So the ICE agents do have to meet the standard of having probable cause. It's a little bit more nuanced. They also would have to have reason to believe that the person they're seeking to detain would flee if they didn't act then without a warrant. They do have to show their badges and identify themselves when asked. And I believe what the commissioner would say is, if they're communicating with federal agents, they know who is and isn't a federal agent. So if there were a situation where the police were called to respond and it was someone impersonating a federal agent, I think the police would be able to handle that.

Yeah, I think it would be really great to get this kind of training out to the city and let folks know that at least that is there. We have a know your rights. Part of the know your rights is you have a right to ask for ID, presumably. You have a right to certain things. I'm not sure how well known that is because on a public way, I understand we don't have as much control. However, I think that's, as the city manager alluded to and we've all seen, that's where people have been taken and it leads to a situation that is quite troubling and scary and anyway so that's that was the main question I'm I'm glad to hear from it but it's the more we can let people know the equivalent of know your rights you know ask for ID and call the police who can then confirm if it's a maybe that's something to do thank you mayor Simmons council no one yields a floor vice mayor floors yours

Thank you, Madam Mayor, through you. Thank you for that. My brain hasn't even gone to people impersonating. I was just so concerned that ICE would be inappropriate. I didn't even go there. It's frightening. But I do want to make sure that we're really clear with the community about what we will and will not do. Again, I do think there's some confusion about what being a sanctuary slash welcoming city is and what we can prevent and what we can't prevent. Um, and sort of in line with that, and I, I haven't seen the body cam footage from Worcester yet, but, um, is it fair to say that we will not cooperate, our local police will not cooperate with ICE in detaining someone and, and apprehending someone. But if there is a large crowd or there's something we may be called to prevent a further disturbance, right? And I think, and again, I haven't seen the Worcester footage, so I'm not defending them or not defending them. I don't, I saw a little bit on the news, but I don't, but I believe that they were called to control the crowd that was coming, right? So I just want to make sure that people, if we get called, you know, hopefully not, if we get called to do that, I don't want people interpreting that as we're helping ICE. And so can we just, can you make that distinction and can we be clear about that?

Commissioner?

Through you, Madam Mayor, yes, Vice Mayor. We need to say explicitly, we need the crowd to know explicitly that we're there to keep the scene safe, but not to cooperate with ICE in any way, shape, or form. We're there for scene safety, and that's it, not to do any federal immigration enforcement. And also just to try to de-escalate the crowd. and let them know that you know they have an operation they're going to do and of course counselor nolan we would make sure that they're official officers but just making sure we're defusing the crowd letting them know what's going on that's really going to be our role vice mayor thank you madam so there may be a situation where ice is there and the cambridge police are there but that does not necessarily mean that we are helping ice we are not helping ice thank you right

Vice Mayor Yielsa, floor, Council Wilson.

Thank you so much, and through you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for the update, Mr. City Manager. I think also, I think we saw this, was it in New Bedford, where there was a gentleman who was apprehended, and yet he had all his papers on him or something like that, just in case this was to happen. kind of moment and so just thinking about advising members of our community if when in doubt or if you are worried about something to do with your status or whatever the case is it may be a proper procedure and i would love to through you madamaya to maybe um Madam Solicitor in terms of just like how could we just advise members of our community to walk with your documentation if you have it just to like what does that kind of look like and how could we kind of set that deliver that message so that members of our community can one be identifying themselves making sure that they are you know legal if you would and could then be released or whatever and not have to necessarily be detained.

Madam Solicitor. Through you, Madam Mayor, I'm a little hesitant to answer that directly, just to stay in my own lane on my area of expertise in immigration law. But that's definitely something we can follow up with our legal services partners who've been helping us with the Know Your Rights training and getting out other guidance to find out what they're recommending as the best practices for someone in that situation. And we've been putting out information periodically with the Human Rights Commission, you know, through the CERC's website. And maybe I should have actually said CERC, not Human Rights Commission, but on their website we have a whole lot of information. And I can make sure that, you know, working with that organization, COMMISSION THAT WHAT'S ON THEIR WEBSITE RIGHT NOW ALREADY INCLUDES SUGGESTIONS FOR WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD DO OR MAKING SURE WE UPDATE IT TO INCLUDE THAT AS WELL.

Thank you very much. I think that that's very fair and I appreciate that response, Madam Solicitor. I think in terms of this is really some trying times and we understand that members may be approached in various spaces of daily life, right? And this will impact or could impact the lives of members of our community. And we want to be sure that we are doing everything in our power to keep members of our community safe. recognizing that I think the goal of ICE is just not obviously the Cambridge way of how we do things and we want to make sure that folks feel supported and do know their rights and do, especially if you are with your children or whatever the case may be, that that we help to kind of get the support that they need. And so I do worry about, like, can you just speak to if there are children involved, kind of what, if any, role or responsibility might the city have if there are children to be involved in a possibility of being detained?

Madam Solicitor.

Through you, Madam Mayor. So that's an issue that the school department has been working a lot on and getting that information out to its staff and the community, the school population, to let them know how, if there was any action, ICE enforcement action at the schools, that they would be contacting parents guardians getting someone there and So that's definitely an area where they have procedures in place to address that similarly with our after-school programs we've talked about Also, you know making sure we make contact if that should ever arise with the families of any students and then in You know if it's out if there's something unfolding in the public and the police respond, just like when they respond to any call, I'm sure they are taking into consideration children who might be bystanders, who might be family members. And then also, you'll note if you do watch the Worcester body camera footage, children have a greater privacy interest than adults. So for example, the body camera footage is public record, but faces of minors are blurred out to protect the minors who might be involved in any capacity.

Council Wilson.

Thank you very much. I yield.

Council Wilson yields the floor. Council Azeem. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

I just had one question. There was also like this general scene I think many of us have seen of ice breaking into someone's car, right? Are those something that the ice officers would need a warrant for or?

Through you, Madam Mayor, I will start, and then the Commissioner might want to jump in. I don't know. From looking at that, I do know that for them to enter private property, they do need a judicial warrant. So those actions that we all saw in the news surprised me, but I don't know more than that.

Commissioner.

through you it was it was shocking to me also only because there was no threat you know in that car so why they had to take that pickaxe was was pretty shocking councilor z and in general i feel like you know we talked about the court system maybe it's the proper place to do this if you have a situation like that where you know not taking anyone literally but let's say we decide that generally enter private property you need a warrant and as officials decide to not enter without a warrant is that somewhere where someone would be comfortable calling Cambridge PD or would it be that you just wait until afterwards and you know um go through the court system but would Cambridge PD be willing to take action if someone is entering without a warrant

Okay, through you, Madam Mayor. So I just want to make sure I have your question correct. So you're asking if ICE goes into a place without a warrant to get somebody on some probable cause, could the police go in and interfere with that?

Yes, if it's private property.

if it's private property. I would say we'd be, I don't know, I'm gonna go back to Megan for this. I'd have to figure out what that would look like. That would be a really compromising, intense position for the Cambridge PD and federal authorities, two armed police departments, one trying to execute some kind of a warrant and the other one trying to stop them.

So. Solicitor Beyer?

And through you, Madam Mayor, you know, Anything we're saying here is, of course, very fact-dependent, and there could be variables that change any of what we've said here. But generally, no, I don't think Cambridge Police Department has the legal jurisdiction to interfere with a federal agency's law enforcement or immigration enforcement operations. And it's really hard to be a witness and... to not have the ability to intervene or or want our local police department to intervene but a lot of this is going to have to play out on an individual court you know individual case basis um when there's a deprivation of someone's rights and just really quickly we're going to document every interaction that we have all you know everything that happens with ice when they call us will be properly documented for this reason

Councilor Azeem. So just to close on that note. So in the carjacking situation, again, you know, taking this, you know, maybe there's details to the hypothetical that we don't know, all that sorts of stuff. But in general, let's say we hold that in private property, you need a warrant, a car counts as private property, and like Cambridge PD end up being on the scene. Could, you know, the person whose maybe rights are being infringed end up when they go to court, like ask for a Cambridge PD to come testify in those sorts of situations?

Through you, Madam Mayor. If we were there and we were called to testify, absolutely. I think the relief is in the court and not out on the street.

Councilor Azeem.

That was it for now. I know we're doing the federal update. I have one question on just like budget cuts, but I don't know if that's off topic for where we are right now. So I'm happy to come back.

What was the question?

I just wanted to ask more about like the governor's federal hiring freeze because of the federal cuts and just if we had any more information there.

I would see that as appropriate if the city manager has the information.

Sorry, through you, what was the question again?

I was just asking about the governor's hiring freeze and if we had just any more information on that.

City manager? Through you, Mayor, nothing more than what I think has been publicly shared. So I think the hiring freeze is going to start on May 27th. There are ultimately some exemptions, for instance, on certain essential positions, public safety positions, I believe. But I think how it actually rolls out is probably going to be more internal and tied to specific needs. I would guess that they would have some sort of internal exemption process as well if agencies feel like they really need a certain position. But then there is a broad freeze in terms of adding new positions, backfilling positions. Just to back up on your question, I think just a clarification and Solicitor Beyer, you can probably either follow up or clarify. I think my understanding is cars are a distinct location and so they don't count in the same way as your home. So probably the highest privacy protection is if you're in your home. If you're in private property, I think there are significant protections where warrants are required for law enforcement to enter or federal agents to enter, but a car is not protected in the same way. And so there's slightly higher thresholds than if you're just standing on the sidewalk, but you aren't considered in private property when you're inside your vehicle.

Councilor Azeem. Thank you on that.

Councilor Azeem yields the floor. Councilor Sabina Wheeler, after which we'll hear from Councilor Zusy. Councilor Sabina Wheeler.

Thanks, Madam Mayor. In the cases in Worcester and Somerville, do we know if ICE alerted the police departments or city officials beforehand?

Commissioner Elow? I do not know in those two cases.

Councillor Sabina Wheeler. Thanks. Yeah, I've just been thinking a lot about the fact that we know of these cases because people happen to be around and they were in public situations, but I'm sort of catching on footage, and if they hadn't been, if they'd been detained in more isolated areas, this could have gotten worse. very differently or just been a lot more questions. So still thinking through all the implications of that if there isn't any notification and it sounds like we don't know if there has been. The other question I had, I was looking at our welcoming community ordinance and there's a section there on reporting that says every six months there has to be a report to the city council on the total number of ice detainers requests uh lodged with the cambridge police department i just wanted to confirm we i haven't seen those reports just wanted to confirm that's because there hasn't been any ice decrainers requests administrative warrants in the past past few years no police interactions with ice that we we're aware of solicitor bear

Through you, Madam Mayor, I think that requirement sort of fell by the wayside when it didn't seem as, you know, there wasn't as much happening nationally. I think Commissioner can talk about detainer requests.

Through you, Madam Mayor. So I know that we've had at least four ice retainer detainer requests, and we have not honored them.

Councilor Sabina Wheeler.

Thank you. And that's helpful in processing that. I haven't honored them as good here. Do we know if there's been follow-up on those? And this is my ignorance of what exactly a detainer request means. If the Cambridge police haven't done it, has there been action for ICE in Cambridge that we know of that city officials haven't collaborated with?

Commissioner Eilert.

Through you madam mayor, so we do know that ice actually we had somebody in custody a couple of weeks ago and that we don't know their status and ice called and Asked if they were still in custody and we said we don't cooperate with ice and they waited outside of our police station And when the person was released on bail, they picked them up. So ice is very active They're not asking us for any information, but they are active in our community.

I

Council Sabina Wheeler.

Thank you for that. I'm still processing that and looking through next steps and what this means, but I'll yield back for now. Council Sabina Wheeler yields the floor. Council Susie.

Thank you, Mayor Simmons. Well, that's scary. I just wanted to recommend that everyone watch the webinar, know your rights, because it is really fantastic. And to me, the big takeaway was that in the same way as when you travel, you Xerox your passport, your license, your health card. and you have a copy at home and you have maybe a copy with you. If you are an immigrant that might be stopped by ICE, they encourage you to leave a copy of your papers with your family and at home so that they can help to track you down, otherwise you could get lost. And apparently they don't have to contact your family for like 10 days. So it's it would be it's really important for families again to have copies of their documentation at home Thank you.

I yield council Susie use of floor council city. Did you have any questions? hearing none One one question. I'm sorry council Wilson

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just had an additional thought as I was sitting here as Chair of Public Safety and Co-Chair of Human Services to really think about maybe hosting a round table at some point. I know that our city has done a really great job of having the Know Your Rights trainings, but really thinking about having some immigration attorneys, having the police commissioner and know your rights also be at the table so we can really have a more thoughtful conversation. So that's something that we're thinking about and we'll probably try to consider to do before summer or right in the fall, I think will probably be more ideal, but just timing is pretty, It's urgent times, we understand that, and we also know that when we're trying to work with multiple stakeholders, that scheduling can be a little challenging, so it may have to be a fall conversation, but more to come on that one. Thank you.

Council Wilson yields the floor. Council Wilson, just to follow up a little bit, if you decide, if you'd like to have a round table, please let me know, but I'd also say let's invite the school committee as well so that they can be a part of that conversation. I had a question, and it's actually from Ms. Seminoff. Apologies to catch you off guard. We're getting ready to embark on the Cambridge mayor's summer youth program, and I'm just curious. We've talked about what the schools know to do if they come into a school building. Some of our programs are run out of the school buildings, and I'm just curious, will you be doing some training for the supervisors? Not so much for the students, because I don't want to scare the students, I want to make sure that they know their rights and responsibilities. But have you thought of, are we doing some training with the folks that are running those programs, those sites, particularly if they are sites? I don't know if you can do it with a business site, but are you doing it with our sites to kind of keep those adults that are taking care of those young people to know what their rights and responsibilities are?

Through you, Madam Mayor, thank you for raising it, because I'll be honest with you, I hadn't thought about it, but I suspect it's quite possible that George Hines and the team have in fact thought about this, and what I would say is the city solicitor's office has done that training for city staff in general, and I am guessing that as we roll it out The mayor summer youth employment program we can in fact communicate with all of the folks who are supervisors to let them know I see the city solicitor is nodding so that we can in fact make that available and And we can take a look at what we might want to do for we have a number of nonprofit sites that house our young people. And so we could also be in communication with them. Thank you.

I would think it'd be important to have these adults No, and they may not be thinking about it, or they may. So we want them to have the right information. So it's not too much, I think, whatever we can provide them by way of information for themselves and for the young people in their charge, I think that'd be important. Solicitor Baird, did you want to speak to that?

YES, TO YOU, MADAM MAYOR, JUST TO ADD ON THAT. SO AS MS. SEMENOV MENTIONED, WE IN THE LAW DEPARTMENT HAVE PROCEDURES IN PLACE FOR IF THERE EVER WAS ICE ACTIVITY WITHIN A CITY BUILDING OR WITH A CITY PROGRAM, AND WE'VE AND SOME TRAINING FOR CITY STAFF ON THAT AND WOULD CERTAINLY DO THAT FOR THE MAYOR'S SUMMER YOUTH SUPERVISORS. AND THEN ALSO, LIKE COUNCILOR ZUZI MENTIONED, THERE WERE THEN SEVERAL KNOW YOUR RIGHTS TRAININGS THAT THE CIRC SPONSORED, BUT ONE OF THEM WAS SPECIFICALLY GEARED TO SERVICE PROVIDERS, AND WE ENCOURAGED A LOT OF OUR STAFF IN THOSE TYPE OF RULES TO WATCH THEM, AND I THINK particularly that one might be one we would want the supervisors to watch as well.

Excellent. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none on placing city managers. I was looking down. Councilor Nolan?

Sorry, this is on another topic we could talk about. There was news today that the governor has some changes to the shelters across the state. Is that affecting any of the shelter provision in Cambridge? And it may be too new that we don't know.

Through you, Mayor Simmons, I can follow up. My understanding is that the program for the, and I don't remember the current acronym, but the family shelters that are being run, including the one in Cambridge, are SEPARATE FROM THE HOTEL PROGRAM THAT IS THE FOCUS OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT TODAY. SO I THINK THE GOVERNOR REALLY ANNOUNCED THAT THEY ARE GOING TO NO LONGER NEED TO HAVE FAMILIES HOUSED IN HOTELS. AND THEY ARE ABOUT SIX MONTHS AHEAD OF SCHEDULE ON ESSENTIALLY MOVING FAMILIES INTO MORE PERMANENT HOUSING. BUT A SEPARATE PROGRAM FROM WHAT WE ARE SEEING IN OUR FAMILY SHELTER.

Yeah, thank you. I think it's good to have the update, and it seemed that was the case. I just wanted to make sure that our community knew, given we hear these things and then we wonder about it. Thank you. I yield.

On a motion by council, no one to place the city manager's agenda on file. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Ayes have it. And City Manager's agenda item number one is placed on file. We'll move now to City Manager's agenda item number four. It's a communication transmitted from Yan Wang, City Manager, relative to a five-year contract for AED installation and maintenance. This is pulled by Councilor Zusy. Councilor Zusy, the floor is yours.

Yeah, thank you very much, Madam Mayor. I just wanted to add, why do we need 47 external defibrillators? And where are they? And how much did they cost? Were they part of the budget? And I know they're fantastic. A friend of ours was saved at the supermarket because there was a defibrillator there. But where will they be placed around the city? Thank you.

And please introduce yourself for those that may not know you for the record. Thank you. Thank you.

Captain Jeremy Walsh from the Cambridge Fire Department. And through you, Madam Mayor, I would let Chief Cahill speak first. He's online. Oh, he's online, okay. Do I get to say I knew you when you were a kid?

Yes, you were downstairs for me. I knew him when he was just a kid, and here he is now. Look at this. Cambridge best. Chief Cahill, are you available online?

I am online. Can you hear me? Yes, the floor is yours. Okay, thank you. So through you, Madam Mayor, I will let Captain Walsh speak a little bit more about the cost associated with this, but I can't tell you they're going in every public park. So every public park will have one of these devices once the installation is complete. We're incredibly proud to be a part of this policy order that absolutely will save lives. I just want to thank Emergency Communications Director Giacobbe and Captain Walsh who really did the yeoman's work to get us here from the minute this policy order was implemented to finally the point of installation right now. So I'm happy to be here and part of this discussion, but I will defer some of the technical questions to Captain Walsh. Thank you.

Chief Cahill yields the floor. Captain Walsh, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Chief. To answer your questions, the Chief alluded to every park in the city of Cambridge. Basically, I took the the city map of all of our athletic fields. Because that was where the policy order two years ago was about athletic complexes. And every single athletic field, football field, baseball diamond, soccer field, the golf course, tennis court, big and small, will have at least one defibrillator on site. They will be there 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. They're going to be in a cabinet that is heated. climate controlled. Most of them will be in the vicinity of a police call box and they will be accessed by, you can't just open the cabinet and take the AED out, but you call 911 and I've been able to make this happen with Christina Giacobbe at ECC. You call 911. They give you a code. It'll be a simple code. It won't be difficult. And it has a little push button combination on it. It opens up the cabinet. There'll be an AED inside. And there'll be a stop the bleed kit inside as well. The AEDs that we're looking to purchase are a new device from a company called Avive. They're unique because they have two-way communications. ECC and myself as the administrator of them can see constant data about where they are. Are they functioning properly? Is the battery charged? Are they moved? Do they have GPS? Are they being used? If they're being turned on, we will know it immediately. If they're being used, defibrillating somebody, we will know it immediately as well. There's another feature to it which we probably will not use because of our situation where there's reverse communication, meaning ECC receives a call for a cardiac arrest, let's say, at Donnelly Field. They can send an alert to the device saying there's an emergency in your area. please take this AED to the emergency, and there'll actually be a map on it which can guide you to where the emergency is, and you can use the AED. Because ours are gonna be in locked cabinets, we're probably not gonna use that feature, but it's just something else that it comes with. But basically, 46 AEDs in every city athletic field. They will not be in just playgrounds that don't have, some sort of basketball court or something, but they'll be in every athletic field in the city.

Thank you.

Thank you. That's fantastic. I hope there'll be one at Magazine Beach Park, which is a, you know, DCR park, but used by the city.

So through Madam Mayor, through you. Yes. We need to talk to DCR about that, but we have it earmarked for the location. There's no... electricity at the baseball diamond but so the closest electricity is at the little gym closer to memorial drive there's a light pole right there and please let me give a shout out to city electrician mark mellow he's been working very hard on this with me as well but he said we can use it get the electricity there we just need to talk to dcr about it but yes it's on the list

Thank you.

Council Zusy. I'd be happy to share a good contact for you if that would be helpful. Anyway, that sounds great. So was this part of our budget? This was planned? It's you're responding to a policy order? Captain Walsh.

Through you, Madam Mayor, yes. $270,000 was earmarked for this two years ago. And we are under budget so far. So yes.

Council Zusy.

Yeah, it sounds like an important thing. So it'll say call 911 to access. That's what it'll say on the box.

Yeah, the box is bright yellow, highly visible. And yes, it will say in an event of emergency, call 911. Like I said before, there'll be an emergency call box right there in most cases. And you'll get a code from ECC.

Council Zusy, are you yielding the below? Thank you so much, I yield. Council Susie yields the floor. Vice Mayor, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Through you. What about some of the, like Danahy, that's such a huge field. You've got the fields on one side, you've got the playground on the other. Are we going to put more than one?

Captain Walsh?

Through you, Madam Mayor, yes. Danny, he's one of them. So, and I'd be happy to share the plan with the entire council at some point. I can email it to you. I have a large, I have a hard copy right here, but it's a very long PDF. It has a map of everything, has a Google Maps link where you can see all the locations, pictures of where they're going to go, et cetera. For example, Danny Park is getting three. Now, I just used my best judgment when I was planning this. A lot of the very smaller places are getting one. Places like Danahy, Hoyt Field, Hillwood Fade's getting two. Danahy's getting three. The golf course is getting four because of the large spread out location. But a lot of the places are getting multiple, the larger ones with multiple fields, et cetera. Yes.

Thank you. Vice Mayor.

Yeah, through you, Madam Mayor. Could we maybe think of, just the question of Concern Susie brought up magazine beach. You've got you know where that outdoor gym is is began a sort of way on on one side You know maybe even thinking of can we? Post some signage in some other places that you know if you're at the powder house, and there's an emergency You're not necessarily going to know There's an ad all the way. You know and that's a you know so it's not written it. You know I It's not right next door. I don't think I could make that running back in an easy amount of time. But maybe put some signage up in some other locations and say if there's an emergency and AED is located at, something like that, especially in the places where there's just one.

Captain Walsh?

Through you, Madam Mayor, yes, that's a good idea. One of the things we're gonna do with this is educating our high school coaches, whoever uses those complexes frequently, like Ridgefield, stuff like that, letting them know that these are on site. But a sign would certainly be a good idea. I've also had the idea of maybe, so they're gonna be too, like I said, they're gonna be heated, so they're hooked up to electricity. They're not air conditioned, they're just heated, so in the winter they're good. But two of them at the golf course will not be heated, so we're going to remove them in the winter. Technically, the course is not used in the winter anyway, so we kind of have no choice. In order to spread them out well, they can't be heated. So they're going to be on a pedestal that we're going to remove every year. And that's an option we could do for that baseball diamond or do a sign either way. But yeah, we'll do something.

Vice Mayor? Yielding? Vice Mayor yields the floor. Councilor Azeem and Councilor Nolan.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just had a quick note, which is like maybe some years down the line, I would be just curious about the usage statistics. And I think that would be a good indicator that we put them all in the right places and what effect that they're having would be really cool. Thank you.

Chief Cahill, did you want to add something?

Yes, through you, Madam Mayor, one of the questions from the Vice Mayor was about signage. And I think one of the reasons, we have a little bit of a cushion. And ideally, we implement the amount that was specified by the policy order. But look at these different and unique situations where we either need signage or we need to increase the amount of AEDs that we have there. So that is definitely something that, you know, it's not on the back burner. It's at the forefront of this policy order.

Chief Cahill yields the floor. Councilor Azeem, you've yielded the floor as well. Councilor Azeem. Okay. Councilor Nolan.

Thank you. I am interested through you too, Councilor Azeem. I think it'll be great to get the data on this to see how they're used. And also to the concern about the signage. That's a great idea. And presumably our ECC team will be so you call 911 and they can say, hey, you're really close to an AED while you're waiting, here's where you can go. So I see a nod of assent that I think that's also another important part of this communication and the training of if you're in an emergency, you're gonna be calling that 911 and if they can direct you to the nearest one, that would be a positive note of safety that will help these get used when necessary.

Councilor Noem yields the floor for the discussion. Hearing none, on a motion by Councilor Zusy to approve and place the item on file. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? The ayes have it, and the matter is approved and placed on file. We'll move now to number six. This was pulled by Councilor Wilson. It reads as follows. Transmitting communication from Yi-An Huang, City Manager. Relative to the appropriation of $298,795, No, $298,794. Anyways, funded by the Executive Office of Housing and Local Communities to the Grant Fund Department of Human Service Programs of the Ordinary Maintenance Account. Funds will be used for emergency shelter operating costs at the Cambridge Salvation Army Shelter. Additionally, funds will be used toward workforce development costs for the shelter's direct line staff. Council Wilson, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Madam Mayor. And I do recognize that this is a grant. And so just wanted to, I appreciate that we're able to utilize this for shelter services. Can you, through you, Madam Mayor, to... Yes. If you could speak a little bit more to exactly what this is entailing and what those workforce development supports are going to be looking like for the shelter. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Thank you. As you may recall, the Salvation Army was previously fully funded by the state, and when the state didn't fund it, the city stepped up with the hopes that the state would continue to provide some funding for it. And this funding from the state, we had assumed we would get it during the year, so we were counting on it. this money coming through. And I think the main things that the funding is going for, let me speak to the others and then to the workforce development piece, it is the funding for the food. There are all day long, the Salvation Army remains open during the day to any members of the community. You don't have to be a resident. of the Salvation Army, there's a short period in the late afternoon that they're closed, but they stay open over the course of the day. And we have staff who go in there to work with people from the Multi-Service Center to be able to work with people. We've had folks from the Cambridge Employment Program go in there to talk. So there are a variety of services. There's a health clinic that's operated by Health Care for the Homeless. If you haven't visited the site, I would recommend that you go take a look. I was there not all that long ago, and It was actually a pretty nice atmosphere there during the day so I would encourage you to reach out to the shelter and if you want assistance you can reach out to me and our staff could go. As to workforce development, there was some additional money from the state to ensure that we could provide more training for the staff of the Salvation Army. Many of the staff are very Former guests and long time service providers when the city took it over because they were not being paid the living wage. We both needed to and wanted to increase the rates of pay, but this is also to be able to provide some more training for the staff who are there.

Council Wilson.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Madam Mayor. And on that, I will take you up on the offer to visit. So while I don't have a contact, I would love to go through you, Assistant City Manager Seminoff, and others that may be my colleagues that may want to join me on this field trip. Thank you so much.

Council Susie, were you waving or saying, I want to go?

I want to go, but I do have another question.

Thank you.

Yeah, my question is, so Assistant City Manager Seminoff, so does Cambridge apply for these grants or does Massachusetts just distribute the funds? I just don't know how it works.

Through you, Madam Mayor, we get grants in different ways. Typically, we apply for them. In this case, when we agreed to take over the funding, we had numerous conversations with the person who, for the state, oversees the individual shelter program about the ways in which we very much hope that the state would contribute to our. We didn't exactly apply for this, but we were asking for it repeatedly.

Great work. Council Susie. Thank you. Great work. I yield.

Council Susie yields the floor. Pleasure, City Council. On a motion by Council Wilson to approve the appropriation and place on file roll call.

Councillor Azeem. Yes. Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Yes. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui. Yes. Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes. Yes. Councillor Toner is absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative with one recorded as absent.

And the appropriation is approved on the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent, and the matter has been placed on file. We'll move now to number nine. This was pulled by Council Wilson. Reads as follows. A communication transmitted from Yi-An Huang City Manager relative to the Cambridge Out-of-School Time OST Expansive Study Report. Councilor Wilson, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, and through you, I would like to appreciate the work that went into this study here. This has been really a long time coming, to be honest, and as a former community-based organization, program worker and employee and just someone who grew up in our out-of-school time throughout our city I really just appreciate all the efforts for everyone that participated in this study from parents to OST staff to so many more across our city like the list is really quite impressive to be honest. I really want to say thank you to Kari Milner and Susan Richards of the Agenda for Children and everyone. As we look at the recommendations that are here, and of course, this is being referred to the Human Services and Veterans Committee. Myself and Vice Mayor will look forward to having this conversation when we can get it on the books, probably in the fall. But I'm just curious about the recommendations that have been offered. I mean, this is quite an extensive packet of the reporting here. What would you like to highlight, Assistant City Manager, through you, Madam Mayor, to the Assistant City Manager Seminoff? What would you like to highlight here if folks are not able to digest the whole packet?

Through you, Madam Mayor, I think we tried to summarize, even in the city manager's letter to you, the five key recommendations, and there's obviously so much more that goes behind that. But first, as I think many of you know, adequate space for out-of-school time program. IN ORDER TO OPERATE EFFECTIVELY, OUR CURRENT SPACE IS INADEQUATE, NEVER MIND ACTUALLY EXPANDING. THAT REQUIRES DEEP WORK WITH THE SCHOOLS. Interim superintendent has expressed interest in doing that work with us and so I would say that one critical piece here is actually thinking about the spaces in the school more as our spaces rather because they are all of our children who are being served. The second is appropriate pay and benefits. One of the things that we struggle with is being able to recruit and hold onto staff, which has to do first with all the different opportunities that are out there these days, many of which allow people to be remote. If you are going to be in an out of school time program, you are going to be with young people pretty much all of the time that you are working. and the pay rates and I would say that we have over the last several years done some look at that and I would say as we do the compensation study, it is another opportunity for the city to look at those pay rates and the benefits for staff. I think we've talked about this, Councilor Wilson, a number of times, that there are a number of children who should be able to be served in our programs, but because, and I think, Vice Mayor McGovern, you spoke about this recently, because of the nature of what the programs are like with lots more children in one space many children who can be served need more support to be in the program and so some of this is how do we make sure that we can actually get staff to be our extra staff a second thing is that it takes us and we spoke about this i think at the budget hearing We often have families who are waiting a very long time because we need to be able to see the child in the school classroom. We need to be able to meet with the parents. And there are some children where it looks like we probably could serve them. And so we are looking hire some outside staff who with expertise who could come in at the very beginning of the school year and then later when we're admitting more students later on so that we could take some children and explain to parents this is a trial run your child can come for two weeks and we will be able to work within the classroom to figure out what supports do we need? How do we support the staff who are there? And so our budget actually for this year includes some funding to allow for that. It also includes an additional inclusion support specialist because one of the complaints understandably is both the support that they provide to our classrooms as well as the interaction. So we will be hiring for that position. And so we're conscious that that will not, right now, solve the issue for every parent and their children. So there is more work to be done with the school department and with the city and our community programs to be able to figure out what can we do more. So I think that's a third recommendation. although I think we have done much better this year, the application process and the enrollment process are somewhat complicated. And we just do it now. We've unified all of the city programs, but there are still five nonprofit programs, and you need to apply to us, you need to apply to them separately. So one of the possibilities here, again, not overnight, is could we look at, a unified application process that would allow families to be able to choose, I want this program, I want this program, I want that program, and to engage with us. We know from the Cambridge Preschool Program how complicated the system is that allows families to apply simultaneously for all these programs. So we know it's not impossible. So I think that is another thing we wanna look at. And finally, we know how busy our school teachers are and we know how busy our after school people often are, but we need to figure out ways for deeper partnerships between our school staff and our out of school time staff. We have it in some places and we need to figure out how to do better on that. So I would say that those are the big things and what leads me to be somewhat encouraged here is that the process of producing this study, at least as much as the data that you have, is that we work closely with lots of the different out of school time programs, all of the community programs, we're deeply part of this, a bunch of the principals, teachers, lots of parents, so we have a lot of people who have some engagement and I think we will need that kind of engagement to move forward.

Council Wilson.

Thank you. Through you, Madam Mayor, I appreciate that response and appreciate the work again. These five things are, again, as you mentioned, some stuff that we've been talking about for a number of years. And so for them to also then elevate to be the top five here is not surprising at all. Some of which I feel might be some low-hanging fruit, and hopefully we can get some things implemented sooner versus later. I know that the space and the partnership with our Cambridge Public Schools has been often challenging and complex. And so really thinking about how do we continue to engage in that partnered conversation. And I appreciate that the signature also includes Interim Superintendent Murphy on here because it's... It just shows that there's that commitment to the partnership and trying to really remedy those needs and challenges. So I look forward again to having more deeper conversation here. And of course, as we talked about, even from my time on the school committee and having special education support committee roundtables around how do we support young people with special needs. this is like critically important like that i want us to have like as the number one thing is really how do we service and work and make sure that we have the adequate staffing so that all of our children who need access to after school programming are not kind of Restricted or just not able to kind of enroll because we don't have the staffing to get us there So again things that I know may take a little more Work and effort in terms of making sure that we have the staff like that's something you can't make up right you have to have the right number of staff to support our young people and But we really have to work on that because that is really a significant need that too many of our families are grappling with when it comes to after-school care and support for the students who may have special learning needs. So, again, I appreciate this report. Look forward to further conversations. And with that, I yield. Thank you.

Council Wilson yields the floor. Council Zusy, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Mayor Simmons. I just wondered, Ms. Semenov, so were there any surprises from the report? I actually read the report, and I thought the meet was between pages 34 and 55, but were there any surprises from the report for you?

Through you, Madam Mayor, I would say one of the things that was surprising was some of what came out from the staff. And I think that one of the very useful pieces of this was the engagement with a lot of the frontline staff from both community programs and city programs. And I think while salary and benefits was a big deal, it was not the only piece and I think it isn't I don't think I should have been surprised because I understand how important the culture of a program is to people but I would say we saw more of that than I maybe I was thinking that people would mostly be talking about the salary and benefits and I think I shouldn't have been surprised but I was a little bit at how important the the culture of the programs and that work.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, culture is essential. And then two other questions. One is, so when we, well, maybe it's three questions. In the report, it sounds like we're serving 2,000 students. It does say 3,000 one place, but I think that was a mistake. But it says that there are 369 kids that aren't provided for, so there's a gap of 2.1 million. So is our budget filling that gap or is that gap gonna remain? I understand that you're providing vouchers, I think 91 vouchers for kids with special needs.

Through you, Madam Mayor, no, we will not be filling that gap and I think one of the things that I think is really important is that we really need to shore up what we have before we do significant expansion and that's why what we were trying to do was focus specifically on making sure that more of the families with children with special needs were getting served before we were doing a broader expansion and I think I would say that in a budget year in which the message was Figure out how to not grow your budget too much. I would say that the city manager was exceedingly generous knowing what a high priority this is, in that the 91 scholarships, so that was one of the few ARPA funding that was continued because we wanted to make sure that all of those young people served in our community partners were able to continue, and the additional staffing around inclusion as well. What I would also say is, and maybe when we have the committee hearing we could go into more detail on this, When we looked at the overlap between people who were on a wait list in one of the community programs versus actually in a community program, they were on a wait list there, but they were in one of our programs, it did narrow the numbers. The last piece of that 369 were some folks who were identified by the schools over the course of the year and had not applied to any of the programs. And so it's a tiny bit of mixing apples and oranges, which I'm happy to talk more about when we have the committee meeting, but I would say this year we're adding one more classroom at the Tobin because we will have the space to be able to, but other than that, we are mostly holding the line right now with the expectation that we need to do the work that's here before we start adding more students.

Councilor Zusy.

Yeah, understood. And just one last question. So when we talk about how many low-income students do we have when you're providing programs? Is it for, do you have a number? Assistant City Manager.

Through you, Madam Mayor, I could certainly get you that number, but what I would say is for the Human Services Department, Overall, it's between 30 and 40% of the families that we are serving in our out of school time programs are what we call priority families, which is based solely on their income. Many of our nonprofit partners serve pretty much exclusively low income children. So when we look at their programs, that is not true across the board, but of the five serve a very high percentage of low income. So I would say that the percentage of low income children compares favorably to who's in our school system and then, but I would say there's room for us to serve more as we can.

Councilor Sousa yields the floor. Yeah, I yield the floor and I thank you. Councilor Siddiqui.

Thank you. Through you, I wanted to lift up what Councillor Wilson said, and I think it is important that we've included funding this year for the additional supports that will allow you all to better meet the needs of some additional children with special needs. I think in the committee hearing, it would be great to get an update regarding your inclusion of students with disabilities. in the after school programs. I think when we had met in November, that was the day after the election, that meeting, it was 66 students that were on the waiting list. And then I had gotten an update in March that it had actually gone down to 36. And so it'd be good to see how that's changing. And I think with additional staff,

you know it will take time because hiring has been such an issue but how we are um working on those numbers um and updating the council that'd be great thank you council sadiki yields the floor vice mayor thank you madam mayor through you um i also want to say thank you for the the additional support and uh for our uh special needs uh kids um i was just thinking like This goes back a long time. When I was a community member of the Family Policy Council, before I even ran for office, you and I were working on, because none of our after-school programs took kids with special needs at that point, and we reworked everything. So this is, time flies. I wanted to follow up on a question that Councilor Zusy asked. When you come back with some of the numbers, I think we often, It's important to know the percentage of lower income kids or any of the percent demographics. as compared to who's in our program, but it's also important to know what that percentage makes up of the kids who applied, right? So you might say 40% of our programs are low-income kids, but that might be 100% of the low-income kids who applied for the program. So I don't know what those, I would like that number too, or some of those numbers too, because I don't know how many of those kids, we know who we're serving compared to kids in another demographic, but I don't know the percentage of kids who have applied that we're serving. Does that make sense?

Through you, Madam Mayor, I could give you an off-the-cuff answer, and then when we have the committee meeting, we could actually give you the real answer. By and large, we accept every low-income child who applies to our program provided there is a space So we run the lottery the same way we run the lottery for the Cambridge Preschool Program, and we give priority to all of the low-income children first. So if you are a low-income child who applied to our program and you selected enough programs so we can't if our program is already filled we can't add you but we put low-income children into each of those slots so for the most part Low income families who are on our wait list are on our wait list because they either applied for programs where there were no seats and they didn't have a choice that included a program that had seats. Or they applied significantly after the closing date of the program, so of the application process.

Through you Madam Mayor, I think that's something we should be proud of and tell. We often don't, to say we're serving 100% or 98% of the low income families who applied, that's great. So I would just encourage us to use those numbers as well when we're describing how we're doing. Thank you, I yield.

Vice Mayor yields the floor. If there's no further discussion, Councilor Nolan.

Thank you. I will say I have not read the full report. I only read the executive summary because I look forward very much to the committee. But I will just appreciate the study questions on here and look forward to that discussion because it seems like they really cover the essence of exactly what we need, all the workforce, meaning student needs, caregiver capacity, demand gap, values and perceptions. Did we learn something from the community research from other communities who have been expanding their programs?

Through you, Madam Mayor, we learned some things which won't surprise you, which we serve a higher percentage of the students who are looking for out of school time than most other communities. And I think what we also learned is that this approach to identifying what the barriers are and then trying to take a systematic APPROACH TO SLOWLY ADDRESSING THEM. IN THE FULL REPORT THERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE SPECIFIC PROGRAMS, BUT MOSTLY WE LEARNED THAT WHAT WE STRUGGLE WITH ARE THE SAME THINGS THAT ALL THE OTHER COMMUNITIES STRUGGLE WITH.

Again, not a surprise, but it's always good for people can learn from us and we can learn from them and any benchmarking we can do as we move forward on understanding this. I won't ask more questions because I look forward to the committee discussion.

Councilor Nolan yields the floor for the discussion. On a motion by Council Wilson to refer to Human Services and Veterans Committees. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it and the matter is so referred to the Human Services and Veterans Committee. Move now to number 10, this was pulled by the Vice Mayor, reads as follows. A communication transmitted from Yanwang City Manager relative to the executive summary of the city's community benefits advisory committee's work over the past several years. Vice Mayor, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, through you. This is also a great report, very interesting report. So I wanted to, one, allow you the opportunity to highlight some things for folks who may not have read it but are listening. And also, I don't know if you heard former Councilor Carlone's question about the, I'm going to get it wrong probably, but that the money wasn't, the original policy order was about some of the funding going to The community benefits advisory committee. The preservation and infrastructure. And it didn't seem like money went towards that. So I don't know. If you could just talk about how

you know what you did and how you made those decisions and and why it's it some things didn't get funded um through you madam mayor let me start i will confess i didn't hear counselor carlone's so i'm gonna take a guess based on what you said so i might be wrong but actually one of the few things that the community benefits ordinance does not currently allow is money to be used for infrastructure. And I think that at the time, and I'm not sure who else was here at the time, I think some of the rationale for that was that we didn't know how much money there'd be, and it seemed like using it on infrastructure would end up using up so much money for one or more projects and that the great desire given the work that had been done was to ensure that we could fund partnerships of nonprofits to actually deliver services differently than the way they were doing it. So that was a choice that was made at the time that the ordinance was adopted to exclude infrastructure as one of the permitted uses of funds. Vice Mayor?

Okay, thank you. He pointed out it was what we asked in the policy order that originally

the originally past it was in there but now it wasn't in there in the final version when we did zoning okay um and then i don't know if you want to highlight anything real quick um uh through you madam mayor um the um the committee um the city council passed the ordinance which is provided in here and the committee was the terms of the committee were laid out in that ordinance it's um 13 I, Lisa Peterson, originally was the chair as deputy city manager, and when she retired, I became the chair. There are three city employees, three members of the nonprofit community who are, and then three residents who can be from anywhere with any set of expertise, and then business representative, a foundation representative, and there's a third one, oh, university representative. So the committee came together, and first there was a needs assessment that was done, and the needs assessment Instead of doing original research at that point, we had a lot of needs assessments. And so we looked at, we hired a consultant, looked at all the needs assessments that had been done, and then brought together representatives of university, community agencies, did In those days we called them world cafes. I'm not sure if that's still the name. And so we did that. We also got a number of the nonprofits to do focus groups with residents. And we took all that information and then the committee worked over the course of about a year and a half, met with all of the different community agencies. We hosted several. public gatherings to talk about what should be the focus of the funding. Because low income folks were supposed to be the focus of the funding. It didn't have to be families, but there was very strong support for it being low income families. And what should be the that we were looking for. And the committee ended up, after multiple community processes, recommending that the services be provided to low income families with a preference for single parent households, although any low income families with children under the age of 21 were eligible. And the services that needed to be provided were services directed towards housing instability, financial instability, and mental health related services. And the individual nonprofits needed to apply as collaboratives. So the idea was what could you do with partners different from what you could do on your own. We started with planning grants on the theory that if we wanted the nonprofits to be able to actually come up with a plan, it was important to provide them with funding. We started, I think, with six months, and they all came back and asked, could we have another three months? They had a nine-month planning process. Out of that, some of the partnerships expanded from where they started and came into apply. And you'll see on page. three of the summary will show you the partnerships that were funded and I would say that we learned a number of things to try to cut to the chase so that you're not here too long. One of which was because the date that we issued the grant agreements for three years of funding was March 17th or 16th of 2020, that might be meaningful to you from COVID. So we issued these grants just as so many things shut down because of COVID. And so the first year, the partnerships operated very differently. The city agreed to give them upfront funding, which we hadn't previously done because they needed that. And they were working to provide basic needs for families. So we allowed them to change what they were doing for that year. Gradually, over the course of the next year, they began to provide the services which they had committed to do. The partnerships were all a little bit different, which was the idea here, which is you tell us what it is that you think you can do to make a difference in families' lives. And so, Families Moving Forward, which was headed up by Justice Start, was a program based on the empath model, which some of you may know about. But anyway, it was a small group of families who got intensive case management services over the course of three years. It turned out to be closer to four by the time we and they were able to set goals and get support towards working for their goals, and they also could earn savings money by reaching the goals that they had established. So that was one partnership, and it was quite a large partnership. You can see they had six or seven different partners. The Family Stability Project, which was De Novo, and CEOC and Transition House had a somewhat different model, trying to set up a no-wrong door. You need our services. You come anywhere. We will hook you up with whoever it is that can best meet your needs. So that was what their partnership looked like, and also training for other nonprofits. The Port Arise Institute, which was interesting community arts center, Margaret Fuller House, and Tutoring Plus, all three of those organizations had leadership changes during the course of this partnership. And one of the main things that they talked about they changed a lot of what they had planned but that what it was how critical it was to them to be part of a partnership as each new director came in they were part of something larger than just their organization and then finally the Strengthening Families Together, which was the Community Arts Center, the Baldwin Community Center, and East End House. And that was a partnership which was really focused on supporting parenting and mental health services for families whose children attended those after-school programs. And I would say the kind of critical learnings for the partnerships, first, how critical case management services are, that if you stay with families over the long haul, that the amount of trust you need to build before families begin to talk about what's actually going on, so you start with families believing that Sharing with you there's this problem and the longer the staff work with the same family Families share different things and are prepared to work on different things. I think a second piece was that Family's perception of their well-being was something that changed considerably or even if They were not actually in a physically better situation. Families' self-reports of their mental health status and of their own well-being improved over the course of the program. For some families, their actual outcomes improved as well. But being part of these programs made a difference in the way families perceived their own situation and in their knowledge of other services. And I would say the other piece of this was how much the partnerships learned internally about how they could change the services that they had to meet the needs of families. And just one more comment on what we at the committee learned. I think we came in having done so much work pre-pandemic, not exactly prepared for what it would be like to try to support these partnerships during the pandemic. And I think it took a little while, and it's actually a wonderful group of people, you can see on the last page, It took us a little while to get our legs under us to figure out how flexible we needed to be in order to allow the partnerships to operate in the best possible manner. And I guess the last thing I would say is, Most families need more than the services that any one entity can provide for them. And one of the real values of this is when you allow the partnerships and you pay for the partnership work, which is something that people partner, but there's no support for the partnership, then you actually can get better outcomes for the people participating.

Thank you. You yielding the floor, Vice Mayor?

Thank you very much, yes, I yield.

Council Siddiqui?

Thank you. Thank you for the report. Two quick comments. You know, I've been to many of these meetings. I wasn't on the council in 2015, but I've been following along. And I guess I have two wonderings. I'm wondering, at a future human services meeting, we talk about changes to the ordinance, if possible. You know, I think when you bring up families, when you bring up this money, I think There can be a lot of uses, and I think about cash to families directly, obviously through organizations, whatever kind of things we can think of, but I think there's great work to follow up on, but I think times have changed as well, and so thinking about at least having that conversation in human services I think would be great. Thank you.

Council Siddiqui, you'll lean the floor. Council Siddiqui yields the floor. Council Zusy.

Thank you. Again, it sounds like you've been doing fabulous work. My question was, so where did the 8.6 million, was that from a specific project?

Through you, Madam Mayor, I don't have in front of me the specifics, but I would say that the Volpe project is where some of the money came from, and Alexandria rezoning was the... other very large piece of funding. And we're now, there will be eventually some more funding coming but there's not a pipeline right now of new projects that would allow the community benefits projects to continue this way.

Thank you so much. So I'm confused. I guess I haven't seen the ordinance, but speaking to what former Councilor Carlone said, it sounds like historically community benefits have gone to infrastructure projects at 585 Third Street, $40 million was used to build a theater and fund Global Arts Live and relocate the gas transfer facility at Moderna and MXD. Monies were used to purchase the Grand Junction land, 135 Fulkerson and build a substation. So why did those not go through the community benefit fund if that's how it was structured? Assistant City Manager.

Through you, Madam Mayor, a couple of reasons, and I would say perhaps if we do have the Human Services Committee hearing, we can call on some of our other partners who may be a little more expert in the zoning-related side of this than I am. But let me just say that the council, I believe, passed the Community Benefits Ordinance so that at least some of what was stated at the time was that rather than having individual projects, individual non-profits, all of whom were lobbying for funds when there were either zoning changes or development Instead of that, have there be a process by which the funds could be allocated. But I want to say there's two pieces that are quite separate. There is a lot of infrastructure work that happens, either city-related infrastructure, which is money that the city gets, for example, like for the Grand Junction or other projects. And so it is not, it is just that the community benefits process for this ordinance is not about infrastructure. So for example, when one of the members of our committee works for Alexandria, and she was able to talk to us about a number of these processes. So typically a developer will work on many different levels, so committing traffic money, committing other sewer and whatever the specifics. But in addition, when you talk about the benefits for the nonprofits, that's really what the Community Benefits Ordinance was designed to take care of.

Thank you so much for you, Madam Mayor. I look forward to reading the ordinance. But I guess this pretty soon we'll be talking about 320 Charles Street where Biomed Realty is hoping to give their community benefits to the East End House to help them to continue their program. Because it sounds like they'll really be up the creek without that funding. And there aren't a lot of services in East Cambridge. So anyway, I hope that this discussion won't eclipse that discussion because I think the community is really, and East Cambridge is really hopeful. There's broad support for funding East End House, which provides support for 300 families. So we will have that conversation. I see the pros and cons to both, but in this case, I feel like East Cambridge doesn't have a social service organization. So I really, I hope we can support East and House. Thank you, and I yield.

Councilor Zizzi yields the floor for the discussion. Council Wilson?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. And through you, I'm trying to be very brief because many of my colleagues have said a lot here. I think, you know, as I'm kind of getting caught up on the briefings and the works around the community benefits and how it was established and just it's. purpose and the intention of it initially, recognizing that we might be in some different times right now around dollars and what we should be using money for and how could we help and support and prioritize certain programs and organizations so that they're able to maintain and continue to do their great work. We recognize that this benefit right now, because we're having this conversation and we have an ordinance meeting tomorrow, and yes, we'll have a further up conversation on the community benefits as a whole at a later date through our committee. I think it's like it's really important that we figure out how to really ground the conversation because it feels like in the past it was really very much when dollars come in let's be very strategic and supportive of all programs and make sure that we're you know, trying to divvy it up in the best way possible. And, you know, I think right now we know that East End House, like, and again, I don't want to talk much about it because I know we're going to dive much deeper tomorrow, but there is some dire need and some emergency needs there. And I think we'll talk more about kind of like how do we prioritize our programs and make sure that We're able to support other organizations at the same time. And so, Assistant City Manager, can you just speak to how we prioritize organizations to make sure that they're able to continue to provide the quality of work that they've been able to do for a century plus, many of these nonprofits?

Assistant City Manager. Thank you.

Through you, Madam Mayor, I would say that there are a number of different ways that we try to do that. I would say that the community benefits funding is in some way the easiest in some way to provide. But when it comes to infrastructure needs, which I know you're talking about, I think the Redevelopment Authority has played a very large role in helping organizations both do not enormous but reasonable infrastructure improvements and they've also helped different organizations take a look at what is possible. I know they're currently working with the Margaret Fuller House on what could a development look like there that would support the redevelopment of the Margaret Fuller House and the continuation of their services. And I would also say that in the end, The city council also plays a role as you often bring forward information that the city manager and the team look at about how can we be supportive of programs that are meeting a deep need in our community.

Council Wilson.

Thank you so much. And also with all due respect to the city process and how we do things around here, it often could be a long time, right? Like it can take some time to actually implement procedures and processes and all that stuff. And we recognize that many of our community partners, our nonprofits, they don't have a lot of time to wait for decisions to get made from this body in order for the implementation to then roll out. So I think I grapple with the urgency of need with some of our community partners and kind of the rollout of like how long a body takes to make decisions, put things into implementation, and then keep things going. Because, you know, I think about like, for example, the foundry that took like almost a decade, right? Or things around like universal pre-K that, you know. These are great things. I'm happy that we get to these points and it's not that that's the community benefits fund, but just really thinking about just the processes as a whole of how can we do things a little bit quicker so that again, we don't lose maybe a staple in a community that's providing such great need to many members, not only in the East Cambridge community, but across the city. uh to to continue to do its work so again i look forward to having more of a conversation tomorrow specifically to east end house and then at a later day have uh the community benefits um uh up you know to continue to work through how we're utilizing these funds and making sure that our non-profits especially those that are really holding down communities and neighborhoods families from babies to elders to make sure that they are equipped to having all their needs met to continue to do this great work. Because as we look at many of these organizations that are a century plus old, they're in buildings that are that are not okay. I don't know any other words to use right now. I have several other words I could actually use, but I'm going to use the just not okay buildings for the programming that they're offering and recognize that some of them have expiration dates. and will crumble if they're not well-maintained and cared for. So I don't want to see that happen. I don't want to see that lost to any neighborhood or community. So as we can continue to work and push and make smart choices and think about how we can service all or many through dollars that are coming in would be ideal. With that, I'll yield. Thank you.

Council Wilson yields the floor on a motion by the Vice Mayor to refer this item to the Human Services and Veterans Committee. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? The ayes have it, and the matter is referred to the Human Services and Veterans Committee on the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. We'll now go to number 12. This was pulled by the Vice Mayor, reads as follows. A communication transmit for Yan Wang City Manager relative to a planning board report on the Biomed Realty LP petition to amend the zoning map. Vice Mayor?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I know that we will be discussing this tomorrow, so I have no specific comments about it tonight, but there are a few procedural votes. So do you want to refer to the petition? Yes. Unless, I assume no one else has any. No discussion. So I'd like to make a motion to refer the planning board report to the petition.

On referral, any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Vice Chair?

Vice Mayor? Thank you, Madam Mayor. I would like to now move suspension of the rules to move reconsideration, hoping the same will not prevail.

On suspension, roll call. Councilor Zinn? Yes. Yes, Vice Mayor McGovern?

Yes.

Yes, Councilor Nolan? Yes. Yes, Councilor Siddiqui?

Yes.

Yes, Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler?

Yes.

Yes, Councilor Toner is absent. Councilor Wilson? Yes. Councillor Zusy?

Yes.

Yes. Mayor Simmons? Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative and one recorded as absent.

Thank you. Madam Mayor, I'd like to move reconsideration, hoping it will not prevail.

On reconsideration, Madam Clerk.

Councillor Azzin? Yes. No.

Oh, no.

No. Vice Mayor McGovern?

No. No. Councillor Nolan? No. No. Councillor Siddiqui?

No.

No. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler? No. No. Councillor Toner? Absent. Councillor Wilson?

No.

No, Councilor Zusy. No. No, Mayor Simmons. No. No, and eight members recorded in negative and one recorded as absent.

The consideration fails on the affirmative vote of eight members, one voting, one recorded as absent. Vice Chair in the... Vice Mayor and the Chair, next item is number 13, was pulled by Councilor Zusy, reads as follows. Communication transmitted from Yi-An Huang, City Manager, relative to a waiting report item number 25-11, regarding easy ride ETA issues. Vice Mayor and the Chair, Councilor Zusy, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam, and now Mr. Chair. This is great that we're working out the kinks and figuring out the timing with the easy ride. It's great to have expanded hours. I just wanted to express again that I'm concerned about the, I was really glad there was some, I just did the transportation survey and there was a reminder that the easy ride was available to all city staff. So that was good. But outside of that, I've seen no publicity about the fact that the easy ride is available for free. to anybody. So I think publicity of the service is really important. And I worry because in Cambridgeport, I never see a single person on that bus. So I wondered if, so it's a great idea, but it's a problem if people aren't using it. And I wondered if you had any information, any numbers about ridership. I know most of the ridership is in the morning and between North Station and Kendall, but do you have any numbers? Because, again, it's a great idea, but it costs something, and if people aren't using it, it's a problem.

Commissioner McKenna?

Through you, Chair, we did not come prepared to talk about ridership, but we can certainly send you that information later. That would be great. Thank you.

Anything further from Concert City?

Thank you, through you. I use the Easy Ride often, and I've actually seen a lot of people on it. Yeah, I love the Easy Ride. I'm obsessed. I don't use it every day, but I find that there was some issues... There were some issues with the locations moving and all that stuff, but near MIT, there are a ton of people. So I'm curious about the ridership numbers, but I think it's great that they're expanding to the weekend. I think now, I think, sure, there can always be more awareness and there is going to be a ribbon cutting and the council did get invited to that and we should share that and We should all share it in our newsletters. We should help the city also advertise it in our own ways. And yeah, that's a great idea. Maybe I'll do a little montage of me on the easy ride. So anyway, I wanted to say I do use it. So thank you.

Thank you. Anything further?

Just I really appreciate the report and also know and remind us all that we're also in the middle of looking at citywide discussion of shuttles across the city. And this is one of those key critical ones. But the idea is let's think about how we can coordinate, collaborate and have all of this work together so that they're all full. And also everyone in Cambridge has frequent, reliable and affordable transit across the city, which will help so much of our other other issues that we often discuss in this chamber and throughout the city.

Anything further? Seeing none, on a motion by Councilor Zusy to place the report on file. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Those opposed, nay. The ayes have it. The matter is placed on file. We now move to policy orders. Pleasure of the Council.

Mr. Chair.

Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler.

File number two.

Pleasure of the Council. Councilor Sieg.

I'll pull number three, please.

Which number? Three?

Yeah.

All right, trifecta. Okay, we will start with number one, pulled by Councilor Zusy, that the City Council hereby declares June 19th, 2025, as a day of reflection on mass incarceration in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, go on record in support and gives its endorsement of the Juneteenth Festival at Cambridge Common as a vital community event celebrating freedom and resilience, and go on record in support and commending the work of the Black Response, Cambridge, in creating the film where do black men live which powerfully highlights the lived experience struggles and stories of black male population in cambridge bringing greater awareness to critical issues of housing justice and belonging this was uh sponsored by counselor Sobrinho-Wheeler counselor sadiki counselor wilson and myself it was pulled by counselor zoosie but i will go to the main motion maker first counselor Sobrinho-Wheeler

I don't think I have anything to add on this. I'll defer to Councilor Zusy.

Okay. And any of the co-sponsors? I'll just say real quickly, in addition to this event, the event that's going to be going on on the 19th, there's also a planning for the Juneteenth parade that's going to happen on the 19th, and there's going to be more information on that to come too. Councilor Zusy.

Yeah, thank you, Chair McGovern. I will be supporting this. I just wanted to say, I went to the debut of the film, Where Do Black Men Live?, on Thursday night, and it's fantastic. It's very, very powerful Because you're hearing from actors representing black men that Stephanie Gerard interviewed share their lives and their thoughts and their concerns. And you feel like you're privy to reflections that... It seems it's a very special, concerning, and disturbing thing. So I recommend that all of you see the film, and I'm glad that there will be a viewing not only at the library, but there'll be several other opportunities to see it in the next month. So I just wanted to give a plug for the film and the good work that Stephanie's doing. Thank you. I yield.

Thank you, Councillor Nolan.

Thank you to all the makers on this and I also want to note that it was particularly good to see that this is also about incarceration because they're so tied together and we don't often recognize how important it is to understand that transformative justice and reflecting on mass incarceration is something that we have seen has always been tied together with so much of what we've experienced as a society and not really addressed as clearly as we should. So very happy to support this and really look forward to all of the events. I have not yet seen the film, but it's definitely on my calendar. So thank you all to the sponsors and to the folks in the community who have been working really hard on so many of these issues.

Anything, Councilor Wilson?

Thank you. Some thoughts started to come to my head. Yeah, I want to thank the folks who are organizing. I want to thank my co-chairs, co-sponsors on this. But the individuals who have sponsored this work around where do black men live, you know, and just coupling it with mass incarceration. There's some great work that's happening through the Black Response, through the Bob Moses Project with Dr. Janet Moses and the work that she's doing on mass incarceration. I think about Senator Liz Miranda and her work, and then we also have here tonight the Clean Slate. So there's just a lot of work that folks need to be doing around supporting individuals, but specifically black men, and how, when you do have a record, how that just impacts your ability to do so much more, whether that's gain employment, gain housing, really to live a quality life in our city and in any community, to be honest. But, you know, when I think back as just being someone who grew up here to many of my black brothers who grew up many of my peers and the various struggles that they experience from police profiling to then catching their first case on anything. It could be just literally anything that then it just became a huge snowball of limitations and restrictions to just advancement in life. And so again, I want to appreciate the work that's going into this. I'm not sure if I'll be able to catch the film because I do have a prior engagement on the 29th, but in recognizing that this also with our Juneteenth events that are happening, the other Juneteenth event that's on its third annual, that again, you'll learn more about soon. There's a lot going on in our city, right? And I just want to appreciate the many people who are volunteering their time to make sure that our city has robust programming and opportunities to learn more and raise awareness on a variety of issues and topics. So just thank you.

Thank you. Anything further? No? So on a motion by Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler. All those in favor say aye. Those ayes have it. We now move on to policy order number two. that the city manager is requested to explore with the Government Operations Committee whether the functions of the Peace Commission may be improved and enhanced by bringing them within another city commission or department such as the Human Rights Commission and report back in a timely manner. This was filed by Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler, Councilor Siddiqui, Councilor Nolan, Councilor Wilson, polled by Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler. You have the floor.

Thanks, Mr. Vice Mayor. I just wanted to provide a little bit of context for this and answer some of the questions we heard in public comment. The goal of this policy order is not to eliminate the functions of the Peace Commission. It's to look at the structure of the commission and see if that structure can be improved and enhanced by bringing it together with another department. I think in some ways the city is already doing this because the interim director is also the director of the Human Rights Commission. I think it makes sense to review city departments and commissions from time to time. We've been having this conversation about a number of boards and commissions um we have gotten some questions about this one in particular from the public uh with the not having a permanent director since october um so i think it makes sense especially at this time of transition to do this review um to be clear it's not asking the city manager to zero out the budget for the peace commission if we had wanted to do that we could have you know had that conversation in the uh the finance hearings this is about asking the city manager to explore possibilities to improve the the functions that the peace commission carries out and we'll see what the report back from the city manager says. With that, I yield back. Thank you. Councillor Noonan.

Thank you. Yes, I am glad that Councillor Sabrini really clarified. This is an optimal time. As we also know, there may be other commissions eventually. There's a whole range of things we've talked often in this chamber that it really would be prudent to... to think about all the boards, commissions, task forces we have and to think about ways that we might streamline them and make them efficient while understanding how they fit within the city and to maybe have a sunset and review of various ones. So we can't do that all at once. We've really heard from the city manager that's a very large task that will take a long time. one that happens to be in a position to be looked at right now. I did want to, if it made sense for the body, since this is both the Peace Commission and also serves as a police review and advisory board, to make it clear in the order that they should probably also be looked at the same time of the functions of the Peace Commission and PRAB. If something changes, it might be that both of them would change. So I sent that suggested amendment to the clerk. It was just to add in the order after Peace Commission and PRAB.

Okay, thank you, Councilor Nolan. I know that she's bringing that up. I think Solicitor Behr has left the room, so I've got a couple of concerns about this. So I will be exercising my charter right. And let me explain to you why. But you had the floor. I'll let you make your amendment. I will say my remarks. I'm going to move my charter right and I'll explain why. So do you want to continue with your amendment or do you, because it's going to be.

It's up to you, Mayor Simmons.

I would say hold off and let me explain why my colleagues will indulge me for a couple of things. I want to begin acknowledging the intent of the policy order before us regarding the Peace Commission. I really appreciate the ongoing commitment to ensuring the effectiveness and the alignment of the city's commissions, particularly those with critical public safety and community relations responsibilities. That said, I believe this particular order wants further consideration and refinement moving forward with the Executive Director of the Peace Commission currently on leave, The issues before us are as much about personnel matters as they are about departmental operations. And personnel matters do not fall under the purview of the city council. They fall under the purview of the city manager. And I want to ensure that we're asking the proper questions and involving the appropriate city staff on this. I'm concerned that initiating structural changes or discussions about consolidating functions with the executive director while he remains on leave is unwise. We did hear from Pastor Kim that spoke to this and therefore I'm going to be exercising my charter right in order to provide us with some time to tweak the language in order to make it comply with what our authority is and what the city manager's authority is, and to ensure that we're framing the question in the correct way. So I'll yield the floor, but I'm exercising my charter right. We'll move on to then number three, and it was, I can't read your writing. What's? SS? SS? Oh, thank you. Sorry. It could have been anybody. This is pulled by Council Siddiqui and reads as follows. That the City Council go on record in support of HD 1811 backslash SD 1114 and HD 1693 backslash SD 1124 and the Clean State Slate Massachusetts Campaign. This was pulled by Councilor Siddiqui. Councilor Siddiqui is the lead sponsor. You have the floor.

Thank you and thank you Mayor Simmons to you and Councillor Wilson and Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler for co-sponsoring this policy order and thank you to those who spoke during public comment and to everyone who's been advocating for clean slate legislation here in Cambridge and across the state. As we heard, clean state laws are a vital part a broader criminal justice reform. The bills we're discussing would automate the sealing of criminal records for people who've completed their sentences, and they would also expand eligibility so more people have a real chance at a fresh start. And we know that even older minor records, even for cases that ended in dismissal, can create lasting barriers to employment, housing, education, and more. and sealing these records really does change lives it helps boost job prospects increases earnings and helps reduce poverty and this directly benefits individuals families and entire communities and it's really a matter of racial and economic justice so other movie other cities are moving forward springfield just recently passed a similar resolution in support of this initiative and also several members of our state delegation have already signed on to support this legislation. So I hope the remainder of my colleagues will join me and the other co-sponsors in supporting this policy order so that Cambridge can officially add its voice to this important statewide push for fairness, opportunity, and reform. Thank you.

Councilor Siddiqui yields the floor. Pleasure, the City Council. Councilor Nolan.

Yeah, I'd be happy to be added. I think it gives a little more weight the more people are on it, so I'd like to be added as a co-sponsor.

Discussion on the amendment? On adding Councilor Nolan to this policy order? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it and Councilor Nolan is added for the discussion. Hearing none, on the policy order as amended, all those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? The ayes have it, and the matter is adopted by the affirmative vote of eight members as amended. On the affirmative vote of eight members, one being recorded as absent. We now go to the calendar. First item on the calendar is charter right number one. Reads as follows regarding RFP development for the tunnel engineering study. Pulled by Councilor Azeem. Councilor Azeem exercised his charter right and I believe he does have an amendment. So I'm gonna give the floor over to Councilor Azeem.

Flo Jones. Thank you, Madam Mayor. You know, I saw the video that the Harvard Square Business Association put forward for this tunnel. I think it's very exciting, the possibilities in general. I would also say that, you know, what the city manager raised concern last time about what this study and a follow-up study would be in terms of total cost. And in general, I think given all the sensitive conversations we've had about the budget, you know, I think that Councilor Toner and I had this suggestion of just adding the possibility of a budget just to make sure it fits into the broader context but also understanding that you know um there might be places to fit it in um and to give the harvard school business association and the city manager a chance to try to resolve this uh between themselves um so uh here are the amendments before us counselor zine use the floor but the amendment is up for people to

Read, it's in red, the addition of MBTA and the first ordered. That's where the changes are. MBTA and the, and then the next one is consider the possibility of, and They've taken out take the necessary steps to facilitate the release. It just says the possibility of using the 72,000 of the 300,000 budgeted for the study to pedestrianize Harvard Square. And then they struck of 72,000. So it's before us discussion. Council Zusy.

I've really come around with this. I think we should. I think your amendments are great, and I think the city should invest in this study. I spoke with John DiGiovanni earlier today, and he shared that the MBTA has been engaged at the site, so they know about this project. It's not a surprise to them. And also the city must file the RFP if the city might want to pursue or engage in a public-private partnership at the site later. So that's the reason that the city should be doing this rather than the Harvard Square Business Association. And then also the Harvard Square Business Association has already invested 50 to $60,000 in this project. I mean, that's what it costs to do the models, the renderings that showed us all how groovy it could be down in the tunnel at Harvard Square. And then he convinced me also that the timing is actually perfect because it will take over a year to, this has to be bid out, the RFP needs to be written, responses need to come in. So then the city can act on this in a couple of years. And it's time, Harvard Square needs a boost. And this could be just the boost that it needs. And the other thing John Giovanni said was that an outside partner would be funding this. This wouldn't be a big city project. It would be funded by a private developer. So that made me feel better about it, too. I think it's an exciting opportunity, and I think it was a brilliant idea, Councilor Azeem and Councilor Toner, to link it to the $300,000 for the pedestrian study, which it sounds like Harvard Square has already done. So they may not need all that money since a lot of that work has already happened, and the money's been allocated. So great work, and thank you. I support this. I yield.

Councilor Zusy yields the floor for the discussion. Councilor Nolan.

Thank you. I too support these amendments. I think it's critical that since neither we nor the Harvard School of Business Association owns the land that the MBTA has to be named as a player. And also it's appropriate at this point to have this be considered a possibility and then have to ask the city manager to work with them and come back. So I'm really happy to support these amendments.

Councilor Nolan yields the floor for the discussion. So on the amendment, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. On the policy order as amended, discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it and the policy order is adopted as amended by the affirmative vote of eight members, one recorded as absent. That concludes the business on the calendar. We're now going to move to applications and petitions with the pleasure of the City Council. There are three.

Mayor Simmons.

Councilor Nolan.

Number three.

Pleasure of the City Council. Then on a motion by Councilor Azeem to adopt Application and petition number one, which is an application by Gail Wang requesting permission for a temporary banner across JFK at Mount Auburn and Mass Avenue in front of City Hall announcing Boston's Dragon Boat Festival on May 26th and an application received from Bailey Chlerman, the Chamber of Commerce requesting permission for a temporary banner across Mass Avenue in front of City Hall announcing Cambridge Taste on June 9th, 2025. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Application in petition one and two have been adopted. We move now to petition number three. This is pulled by Councilor Nolan. Reads as follows. An application was received from Andrew Jawa requesting permission for a curb cut at the premises numbered 11 Union Street. Said petition has received approval from inspectional service, traffic, parking, and transportation, historical and public works. No response has been received from the neighborhood association. Councilor Nolan, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to write it. I am going to support this curb cut. I just want to say I look forward very much to the day when we are not having curb cuts before us, and I hope quickly after the ordinance meeting on Wednesday that we establish criteria. The criteria for me are really clear that if more than half of the folks who live within a block of the property oppose it, then I could not support it since that's our role.

your remarks to the application. You were talking about the vote that's coming up.

No, I'm talking about the fact that for this one, we have only support. We don't have any opposition at all. It's also extending a curb cut from 11 feet to 14 feet without affecting the public way and the parking. So I will be supporting it, and I hope very much that after it moves forward, we will not see many more of these on our agenda because we'll be able to change ordinances. Further discussion?

Hearing none, on a motion by Councilor Nolan to adopt the application. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. And the application has been approved. We move now to communications. There are 73. What is the pleasure of the City Council? on a motion by the Vice Mayor to take the 73 communications and place them on file. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it, and the 73 communications have been placed on file. We move now to resolutions. There are 10. What is the pleasure of the City Council? Does someone want to move the adoption, making them unanimous upon adoption? Councilor Wilson and Councilor Zusy say yes. So I'm placing on adopting the 10 resolutions and making them unanimous upon adoption. All those in favor say aye. Opposed? The ayes have it and the resolutions are adopted and made unanimous upon adoption. We move now to community reports. There are three. Health and Environment on April 14th, 2025. Finance Committee on April 16th, 2025. And Ordinance Committee on May 7th, 2025. I think, Vice Mayor, you wanted to pull that one, so can we just move adoption on the first two, if there's no other discussion. Is there any discussion on committee reports, health and environment, and finance? Hearing none, on a motion by the Vice Mayor to accept the reports and place on file. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. And the Health and Environment Committee Report of April 14th and the Finance Committee Report of April 16th are accepted and placed on file. We move now to number three, which is the Ordinance Committee on May 7th, 2025. I'm gonna turn this over to the Vice Mayor. The Vice Mayor, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Through you, I'd like to make a motion to pass the amendment to the zoning code article 11.000 regarding cannabis uses standards to a second reading.

Any discussion?

Hearing none, roll call, Madam Clerk. Councillor Zinn. Yes. Yes. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Yes. Councillor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councillor Siddiqui. Yes. Yes. Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes. Yes. Councillor Toner. Absent. Councillor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Councillor Zusy. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative and one recorded as absent. Vice Mayor.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Through you, I'd like to make a motion to pass an amendment to the municipal code 5.50 regarding cannabis business permitting to a second reading.

Any discussion? Hearing none, roll call. Councilor Azeem, yes. Sorry, I said it before you did. Sorry. Vice Mayor McGovern. Yes. Yes. Councilor Nolan. Yes. Yes. Councilor Siddiqui.

Yes.

Yes. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Yes. Yes. Councilor Toner. Absent. Councilor Wilson. Yes. Yes. Councilor Zusy. Yes. Yes. Mayor Simmons. Yes. Yes. And you have eight members recorded in the affirmative and one recorded as absent.

Vice Mayor moves to place the report, accept the report and place on file as in a discussion. Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it, and the third committee report is accepted and placed on file, and the zoning amendments have been forwarded to a second reading. We move now to communications, whether it's the pleasure of the City Council. On a motion of the Vice Mayor to place the communication on file, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it, and the matter is placed on file. Madam Deputy, are there any late resolutions?

There is one late resolution, Madam Mayor, and it is the City Council go on record in proclaiming Monday, May 26th as Memorial Day in the City of Cambridge and in extending its deepest gratitude to all who have given their lives in service to our country.

So I believe we have to suspend the rules to do that, to take up late resolutions?

Wow.

So just to be sure, let's suspend the rules in order to take this up. So on suspension, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. We're in suspension on the adoption of the late policy order. Discussion? Hearing? Thank you. Okay. What did you say? For your service, she said. Oh, thank you for your service. On the late resolution, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. And the late resolution is adopted. I think there's one other late resolution. This was late policy order, NEF custodian contract. I'm gonna move my charter right on that. We don't need a vote. Charter right has been exercised. Are there any late policy orders? That's it, okay. Announcements. before the Vice, before Councilor gets started on her 12 announcements, I just want to turn your attention. City of Cambridge, June 14th, 2025. I think this is on everyone's desk. Army 250th birthday will be on the Cambridge Common from 10.30 to three o'clock. There'll be food, drinks, caricature artists, face painters, petting zoo, pony rides, dunk tank, obstacle course bounce house and live music and entertainment by Monkeys with Crayons.

Do you know who that is?

I don't know.

Dan Barroso, our police officer downstairs.

Oh, Dan Barroso has, the officer downstairs on the first floor has a band and he will be performing. Never heard of that, but I'm anxious to hear my song. I hear it's going to be wonderful. Other announcements? Counselor, the floor is yours. Any other announcements? Who's the one?

Madam Mayor, I'll just announce that there's no meeting on Monday, so enjoy. That's a great announcement.

Just for those people that are looking zealous, he can watch a rerun. Council Zusy.

I have one announcement. So on Thursday night, the 22nd, at the Foundry, the Sisters of the Runway will be having their fashion show, which is a fundraiser for Transition House. So stop by.

Announcements. Please note that Pride of Cambridge is going to be on Sunday, June 8th here in the council chamber. The LGBTQIA Commission didn't want to compete with Pride, so they decided to move it to Sunday, so I will look forward to seeing each of you Sunday morning before or after you go to church at our Pride celebration. Also on June 8th, the Cambridge Museum of History and Culture will be doing How Sweet It Is, which is the history of candy in Cambridge, and that will be at the Kendall Public Lobby on June 8th from 1 to 3, I believe. in the afternoon but I'll make sure everyone gets something in their mail box. Any other discussions other than entertaining a motion to adjourn? Council Wilson. On a motion by Council Wilson to adjourn any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Opposed? The ayes have it, the meeting is so adjourned.