City Council

All right, I'll call this meeting to order. Today is Thursday, October 22nd. This is a meeting of the Somerville City Council. My name is Lance Davis presiding. I use he him pronouns. Please note that video and audio recording of this meeting is being recorded and may be shown live on local access government channels and the City of Somerville website, and will be available for future review. Would the clerk please call the roll?

This is roll call. Councilor Ewen-Campen? Here. Councillor Link?

Here!

Councillor Scott, Councillor Clingan?

Present.

Councillor Strezo, Councillor Sait? Here Councillor Wheeler? Here Hardt, McLaughlin, Umbau and Davis. With nine members present we have quorum.

All right, thank you. Councilor Strezo reached out that she had a conflict she was unable to change and regrets not being able to attend. And Councilor Scott is dealing with an emergent issue and hopes to be here as soon as possible. We all hope he will be as well. Pursuant to our Rule 32, let it be known that the City Council salutes the flag of the United States of America and let us recall our oath to uphold the Constitution. and the laws of the Commonwealth to the best of our abilities in understanding. We begin our meetings with a moment of silence, are there any councillors wishing to say a few words about members of our community tonight? Councilor Clingan

Thank you, Mr. President. Through you this evening I'd like to recognize Patricia A., Gavin Sullivan A devoted wife of the late Daniel Sullivan Jr. passed away surrounded by the love of her family on October 4th, 2026 Patricia was the daughter of the late Alice Malone Gavin and Michael Gavin, devoted mother to Michael J. Sullivan of Everett Daniel F. Sullivan and wife Tammy Sullivan of North Carolina and John L. Sullivan, and his late wife Kathleen Sullivan of Somerville, Colleen Madden and her husband Sean of Methuen, and the late Edward T. Sullivan. Mother-in-law to Deb Foti and Ann Sullivan. Cherished sister and best friend to Alice Gavin Tierney, Michael Gavin his wife Tammy of California

Loving Nana of Carrie and Pat Candelino, son of Pasquale, Janelle, and David Pantanella, and daughters Alex, Harper, and Chelsea. Daniel and Amanda Sullivan and daughter Chloe, Michael and Karen Sullivan and son Colton, Justin Sullivan and partner Ashley O'Brien and son Nolan, Sean and Rachel Madden and sons Callum and Leon, Brendan and Taylor Madden, Connor Madden, and the late Jacqueline Sullivan. Let's just say this is a really big family. Many of those people I know personally, Pat Candelino and his wife Carey, and then of course John L. Sullivan who worked was a long time employee of the Somerville Housing Authority as an inspector and so his mom passed on and She lived a happy long life of 87 years. It was always the life of the party, enjoying the company of everyone she had the opportunity to meet

and all her friends and family will miss her much dearly. And I hope that we can all remember her this evening, and her family and friends in a moment of silence, thank you.

Thank you. Councilor McLaughlin would like to sign on? Any others? Seeing none, would everyone in the chamber please rise however you are able for a moment of silence. Thank you. Madam Clerk, next item please.

Next item is 1.3 approval of the minutes of the regular meeting of September 10th 2026.

I see no discussion that item is approved. and we have a request to take several items out of order this evening. These are requests of the administration so if there's no objection, we will waive the rules to take items in the following order. 7.12, 7.8 Then 8.2, then 7.1 which is an executive session We will have outside counsel here for that Then 7.7 is an item related to executive session and then 7 point 19 Okay, so seeing no objection, Madam Clerk would you please read item 712.

Item 712, requesting approval to accept and expend a $25,000 grant with no new match required from the Barr Foundation to the Sustainability and Environment Division to extend the Community Heat Resilience Pilot Program.

Do we have Director Nutter here for this one? Please just introduce yourself for the record and go right ahead. Hold on director, let me fix your mic here. Try again.

Hello again. My name is Steven Nutter, I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer here at the City of Somerville. Thank you for having me and thank you for hearing this motion. Last year we received a grant from the Barr Foundation to do community heat resilience work in East Somerville. We ultimately, through a Our partners use those funds for depaving of private property and help to revegetate those two things Reduce heat in East Somerville and also helps with flooding to some degree. We recently were asked to reapply for additional funds, so additional $25,000 which we received and so we would like to be able to accept that.

We are continuing to work with our community partners on deciding what to do with that $25,000 but it will be used towards similar climate resilience activities.

Any questions, Councilor Bayh? Thank you, Mr. President. Look at the badge that Director Noda has. I've never seen... He's doing a good job.

I'm wearing my flare this morning.

I know. We should approve this. This is pretty straightforward. Thank you.

Any further discussion? All right, seeing none. Councilor Mbah moves to approve and we don't need a roll call that one I think right now. All right then that item is approved thank you all right next item out of order is 7.8

Next item is 7.8 requesting the appropriation of $171,922 from the salary contingency salaries account to various fire department and human resources accounts to fund a collective bargaining agreement with the Firefighters Association of Somerville Local 76 Union.

Attorney Serigou, please introduce yourself for the record and go right ahead

Good evening. Matt Sergu, Labor Council for the City. This is an appropriation to fund the retro component, retroactive component of the collective bargaining agreement with the Firefighters Union that was ratified or appropriated by this council in late August. All right.

Any discussion? Any questions? And the hope is to approve this this evening, correct? Yes, Council President. All right, and Councilor Wheeler?

Thank you, Mr. President. In the interests of clarity about any item that we are not going to send it committee for more deliberation, I'd love to just hear a tiny bit more about the timeliness of this item. Why is it important to do this tonight?

Sure. This appropriation is calculated based upon a sum of money that Thank you Mr. President I am satisfied to approve this item

All right, very good. Then see no further comment. Councilor Wheeler moves to approve. Any discussion? I think we don't need a roll call on this one either, correct? All right very good that item is approved thank you Next out-of-order item is 8.2.

Item 8. 2, Somerset Director conveying an update on measuring and sharing progress for strategic plans.

All right, Dr. Gartzman.

Thank you, Mr. President, through you. Sorry to disappoint I'm not the director of Summer Stat. My name is Sam Schaefer. My title is principal analyst in the division of summer stat and I'm here to present a progress update to the council about something we're calling the focus areas, which is a framework. And then there's a public facing dashboard that's wrapped around it. And this is just a preview to the work and an update on its progress. So first, just to sort of like zoom out and get everybody on the same starting page here. I would love to talk about a few opportunities we had to grow our strategic planning and progress tracking for infrastructure of the city. We have tons of strategic planning, I mean like a lot you guys know this but there are a few complications with it one is that it is in many different places we have summer vision, summer vision 2040 Vision Zero, Climate Forward, Bike Plan, etc.

It can be a little weedsy at times I think I know of at least one division that has about 1,000 pages of strategic planning for work that typically falls in there Domain times all the divisions is a lot of work for people to keep in their mind at any given time. And then it can be a little variable, the sort of giant body of our strategic planning We've been planning some kinds of work for years, like a decade or over. And other kinds of works is quite a bit more nascent in terms of its long-term strategic planning With regard to the goals set in some of these strategic plans, there is also some inconsistency with the degree to which goals are set sometimes at like the boundary of what's realistic and plausible.

And other kinds of goals are set at the bare minimum of responsible governance, which creates some difficult comparisons at times and then some there's some just diversity in timelines so we set some goals about like next year the year after and other goals are like for 2040 2050 and then most importantly here the progress tracking and reporting on these plans maybe has been due sort of a systemic upgrade which is what we have been working on for depending on who you ask, a couple of years. Here are some examples just of the strategic plans. They will not be new to anybody here, Climate Forward, Vision Zero, the SPS Strategic Plan, Open Space Recreation Plan, et cetera. and I'm good Courtney?

Yes, so the next slide here we've been on a few you know on a journey or a couple of journeys on this work Somerset with the help of like Probably most staff, honestly, set out to do a variety of things. One is catalog and consolidate our strategic plans into one place rather than them being really dispersed. The second is to aggregate our shared plans. This is like the city, the community, residents, businesses, all of the stakeholders that we think about when we do local government into a small-ish number of high level policy buckets so that, again, they can all fit in your brain at one time. We set out to frame work in a way that helps us know how we're progressing towards the things we're trying to actually accomplish to standardize language, goals, time horizons, progress tracking, etc. Again, to make things much easier to keep in your mind.

and then lastly lay the foundation for the future which is now uh for public like reporting and um so we can share like we can all be on one sort of shared like set table and we're calling it the focus areas is the name here. So the focus areas framework, sort of in general, breaks up city work into 12 focus areas. So city work for the purposes this includes some of the more autonomous like units including public schools police fire like we're all one team that work all counts They build extensively on existing strategic planning, again, Summer Vision, Vision Zero, Climate Forward, etc. And then also carving out space for future strategic planning. This isn't to say that there is none in the realms listed here of public health and city services, but certainly not to the same degree of strategic planning as some of the other more mature focus areas. Things like mobility

Economic Development type of work has been planned, I think a bit more. The key thing here if people take away You know, one thing is that work is what gets sorted here. So work is a project, a service, time that staff spends working. It is not like people or teams or divisions although those groups of people are the ones doing the work, of course The policy buckets are meant to be of shared ownership and priority and responsibility between the city and the community. And then, the last point here is that there sometimes is overlap in Nomenclature between like a focus area and a division maybe sharing the same name. An easy example here to show that they're not really the same thing is that mobility, the focus area, is advanced by a variety of divisions. Mobility of course

Engineering, Parking, SPD where mobility the division pushes forward a bunch of focus areas so climate sustainability mobility public health public safety cultural community and governance etc. This is a look inside of a focus area. So again, there are 12 and actually I forgot to point to the list of them on the slide before, sorry. You guys will probably notice that most of these are not new. We very lightly tweaked a couple of the names of the original Summer Vision topic areas and then added a few, sort of glued a few onto the side. So the four at the bottom would be the new ones, public health, public safety and then two for city services because that one actually became ginormous unsurprisingly. where one is more day-to-day operations and the other is like longer term systemic investments. Now I'm good Courtney, sorry.

So within a focus area we have sort of this one-liner description tagline thing that might emphasize a vulnerable group and we'll see some examples in a second so don't I'm not going to go down a little rabbit hole here, but they're each broken up into objectives where each focus area has a couple of objectives that include a lot of different work advanced by a lot The focus areas have metrics with goals. Some of the metrics we've identified exist already, while others were still sort of developing the technological backbone For them. And the metrics came from talks with subject matter experts on staff and were chosen specifically because they help us identify progress towards accomplishing our objectives. Each focus area groups the actions of city, residents, private sector, et cetera. Again no individual party is like getting blame or credit here.

And the focus areas are meant to help us understand how well the state of the world is aligning with what we've said we want, not at all Help us understand the performance of individual teams, the city, the community. It's not finger-pointing or anything of that nature And then we can look at a few examples of the focus areas with the taglines and vulnerable groups emboldened. So we have climate sustainability, which is that Somerville mitigates its climate impact and ensures that residents especially in environmental justice communities are resilient to climate change. Commercial local business and arts spaces which is that Somerville expands its commercial tax base while preserving its historical identity and fostering thriving local business and arts communities. Culture, community, and governance where Somervill celebrates different Backgrounds, creates opportunities for people to connect and includes everybody in local decision making. Housing, Somerville expands its housing supply while ensuring that long-term residents can stay members of the community they helped build.

We're going to do this two more times. We have a next infrastructure that Somerville's infrastructure systems are designed to meet the city's demands and work as designed like maintained To work especially for residents with accessibility needs Mobility, Somerville facilitates access to a variety of safe and sustainable travel options especially non-car options for getting around Somervill Public spaces in the natural environment where residents, especially in low-income neighborhoods live near a variety of high quality well maintained public spaces such as parks libraries and community spaces Education, that all residents especially high needs learners are part of a learning community that empowers them to thrive through tailored supports and equitable access to opportunity. and one more time. Public health, that all residents have their basic needs securely met, have access to services and choices that promote lifelong health and well-being and live in an environment free from health hazards

Public Safety, everyone in Somerville is safe and feels safe in their community City Services Operations that all residents are reliably delivered excellent services they want City Services Systems that the city builds modern and equitable systems to deliver well-coordinated services that are easy for all residents to access, understand, and use. That is the end of me reading the long things off the slides. Okay, so that was all focus areas the framework all of this thinking that went into organizing all these strategic plans and then we can pivot slightly to a dashboard that is like a lens into some of that thinking and that framework. The draft focus areas dashboard is currently live, it's in the city's Tableau public profile tweaks to it are continually happening as we sort of finish up I think mostly like aesthetic refinements are the things that we're kind of stumbling upon needing to be made as we go.

It is a living document that will get regular revisions though substantial ones, not more More frequently than annually, we're thinking like beginning of the year January February sort of time The dashboard has an introduction page, which is the sort of top right part here. I mean there's more on it than this but like there's some instructions about what where you are like how you can use the product and has a few like these little question marks this is like a key functionality in the dashboard where you can hover over these things and you can see a lot of extra information that was kind of hard to like squeeze in There's a navigation page, which is the sort of bottom right here where we have a little tile for each of the focus areas that where you can click in and out And browse around and then lastly each focus area has its own section that has the objectives, metrics, status updates and a learn more section which we're going to look at right now. The example here, I'm sure no one is surprised that the example here is mobility.

We don't feel pressured to retain any information from this slide but it's just want to highlight the four main sections here there's like the top middle and then like the left, the middle and the right. That's what's going on here. And then we're gonna just zoom right in on these sections actually. So in the next slide, we'll zoom in a little on the top-middle part where we again get that tagline and then we have these four, there's not four in every single one. Sometimes there's two, sometimes there's five but we have the sort of summary front tab thing and then these extra tabs that you can click around that show some of the measures changing over time and give like a zoomed in longitudinal look into them. We can talk about which ones are there in one quick second. Up on the next slide, we're gonna go to the left part here and that is where the objectives live. The objectives for a focus area have like a sort of shortened-like sort of title name thing. So here we have convenient, safe and sustainable travel and then multiple good non-car options.

And then they're each explained in a slightly bigger depth and then to the right of this in the middle we get into the sort of like meat, the summer stat data like meat and potatoes here. So there are two, here there are metrics for every focus area and they're cut up into sort of two buckets One is we're calling key metrics and a second is additional data. The key metrics represent longitudinal Look, so the data points exist over multiple years and they allow us to look at change over time. There's a couple of other criteria that would like elevate something to this maybe the dataset is reliably updated and we can depend on it like the Census Bureau, American Community Survey type level. Or maybe it just really directly measures

It's not a goal that we have and it isn't as much of a proxy as something that might be in the bottom additional data section where things are maybe one-off surveys or not as reliable data like. Pipeline kind of things would live. And then, so here we have columns in this table that has the most recent year that the data point is collected, its current value and then the goal value that we have for it for that year. Some of the goals are like the same every year and then some of them were on a trajectory. You can learn which it is by hovering over the question mark, which of course won't work in this PowerPoint but please explore the dashboard at your leisure and you can see what I mean and then lastly we have the write section which is the status update and learn more section where there is like this is the data person narration of what's going on here. There's not a lot of editorializing or

you know particularly subjective language going on here but we summer stats were summarized like what the overall picture is here again a reflection of the alignment between the state of the world and where we said we wanted to be not necessarily credit or blame getting thrown around and then there's additionally the section for learn more at the bottom where we've linked a couple of relevant places people might We cannot answer every question any of our extremely engaged public members may have about the concept of mobility all in this one place. We can at least point them to a couple of other places they might find answers to their questions. And then the last piece of a focus area is one of these tabs that shows a key metric over time. So again, the key metrics are the ones we have data for Over time, each one gets a tab to zoom in on that graph.

And this example is crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians, and we can see how the values have been changing over time comparing the state of the world again that purple line to a goal, that dash blue line. And that is the end of our technological orientation here. We have a couple of next steps, so October 26th, that's today. The draft dashboard is live. Please feel free to explore, send around whoever, it is a public-facing document at this point. Next month we're looking for like a full release which in Somerset terms means a somewhat persistent dashboard state for the first time probably ever along with a publicly accessible data set that like powers it so that the community can take the data and do whatever they wish to do with it alongside a data dictionary which hopefully provides some useful reference for any of those

people and then this is again the next part is the January February thing I alluded to a minute ago where we're gonna look to do our first like Data updates, so we're going to be batching, updating the data points as time ticks and then the values of them change in the beginning of the spring sort of time. you know hopefully useful for thinking about strategic investments about the budget like fingers crossed that this is helps in those kinds of conversations and that's all I have so we have basically like one question but I'm happy to kind of take anything but first I do want to thank all of the people that worked with Somerstadt along the way here this is It's hard to represent how many people helped us and on how many shoulders I stand here. Again, happy to take any sort of general questions.

Precision, but if you have anything specific or anything comes up later please let us know about emailing data at somervillema.gov Again, inviting all feedback as always but it would be especially helpful to know the following thing. We tried to show the state of the world at A very high level as we perceive it to be organized around existing strategic planning. The main question here is where have we missed? Are there any ways in which you all think about progress and Somerville differently? This is not to say it's perfect now. With any luck, it can become more perfect later. Thank you. Thank You very much. Any questions?

Councilor Link Thank you Mr. President through you so first of all thank you for this presentation I think that this dashboard is gonna be great I think it's fantastic that we're We're publishing more data. We're making it open and accessible. I am excited to see that. I'm curious, like... So, you know, and I literally just went into one tab so I have not done thorough research. But like, um, I was looking at public health for example and I noticed that Like for rats and air pollution, it's resident concern about rats, resident concern but not like there isn't data on like there are this many complaints about rats or you know air pollution where we have outside of the city but sources of information where we can say like well

Whether or not you're concerned about air pollution, like we know over here maybe you should be. Is there any thought of I realize that this has already been a tremendous amount of work, so I'm not saying like... But is there any thought that at some point these other kinds of data sets could come into this?

Mr. President, through you thank you for the question absolutely we are doing thinking along these lines sort of constantly I can't turn it off honestly regarding specifically rats I don't want to say we tried, but we considered the concept of rodent census or rodent surveillance of some kind in prior iterations of this question and we really came up pretty short. In air pollution we are working on a measure here that provides insight. We didn't quite get there yet. Taking your question a little more broadly, this is good tension to identify about the difference in some of the data sources that we have. These two come from the happiness survey which is going to re-release in April or May of this year, I think. Not that it's up to me because it's absolutely not.

But we have a variety of these perception-based questions in this dashboard as representations of the public's perception of either the severity of a problem or how well We are dealing with it as a city. But yes, thank you for your question. We are certainly working to do more here particularly with air pollution.

Fantastic.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate all this.

Before we go to the next questions, I neglected to note. I didn't want to interrupt this presentation at the top of the presentation Scott, presumably straight from the x-ray machine bravely joined us so let the record so reflect. Councilor Clingan?

No Mr. President thank you I just wanted to say thank you for the presentation and just make note that it's good to see Somerstadt sort of being refocused back to what it was originally intended for with this administration. And then just further to say This must have been a lot of pressure for you since the woman who wrote the book on Somerstadt is in the room right now, our former colleague Stephanie Hirsch, who I think created Somerstad. Thank you for this and I look forward to hearing more.

Other comments, questions, discussion? All right. Seeing none thank you and thank you to everyone else who as you said on whose shoulders you're standing and helped out with this so that will be placed on file Before we go to our next out of order item, because we're going to disappear for executive session here for a little bit and I don't like to leave people waiting in the room. I see a bunch of people in the room, which I love. Are there anyone here for any specific items that aren't the... Well, I suspect not. So if you're here to see a specific item could you let us know and we'll be happy to take that up before Go into executive session. Just raise your hand and yeah, what are you here for? 4.12 Resolution of Councilor Hardt. All right, so if there's no objection we'll waive the rules to take up 4.12 up next. Okay? Madam Clerk would you please read 4.1 too

This is item 4.12 by resolution by Councilor Hardt, Councilor Link and Councilor Mbah imposing the draft combined sewer overflows long-term control plan and calling for a regional solution.

Thank you so much, Mr. President and I also want to thank my colleagues Councilor Link and Councilor Mbah for collaborating on this resolution and thank the many residents and advocacy leaders including those in the room who are working on this and certainly helped me get a better understanding of this issue. And I also want to really appreciate Director Raish for generally generously sharing his time to answer our questions and dive into the complexities of this issue and problem. Second, I wanted to explain what we're talking about here because combined sewer overflows is not a household term yet. So our water and sewer infrastructure was built about 100-150 years ago, and was designed with connected sewer and stormwater pipes. So these pipes are set up in such a way that when it's dry and there's not a lot of stormwater, the stormwater and the wastewater both go to the treatment plant together in the same pipe.

but when there's a lot of rain, heavy rainfall in a short amount of time the pipes are designed to overflow through various outfalls which overflow into the Alewife Brook, the Charles River, the Mystic River and others around, but rather than backing up into people's homes. So this is how they were designed to work. But when this happens it is called a combined sewer overflow or CSO for short So just laying some of the groundwork there. When the Clean Water Act was passed and we had higher standards for our water quality Somerville has been out of compliance with those higher standards so we've been operating with variances So we are legally obligated by the EPA and the MassDEP to come up with a plan to address this.

The City of Somerville has been working with the city of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to come up with a draft control plan. and so that's what this resolution is addressing. And I wanna say that there's so much, I really appreciate the Great work that has gone into coming up with this plan. I feel really lucky that in Somerville we have such intelligent, creative and dedicated staff and this is not, this resolution is not you know to I don't want to criticize any work that has been done, but we have been operating within the constraints of this process which has very much limited what the outcome has been.

Really, this is a technical plan to address what I see as a political problem. And so this resolution is really calling on a political solution to take a step back and look at this problem in a more comprehensive and holistic way including the sources of the problem that and many more. So the proposed plan that has been put forward really comes with a huge price tag and many years of work. But at the end of that, it doesn't really keep up. It's not expected to keep up with what's happening because of climate change and that is really the big thing that is Thank you.

Oftentimes, what's happening in reality far surpasses what was predicted in the years prior. And so our planet is warming faster and the impacts for us here in the Northeast of that are much heavier and more frequent rainstorms so we're getting too much water too fast and our systems are not built to keep up with it and that includes our physical systems and our You know, the ways that we have cooperated and addressed these sorts of problems in the past politically. The problem really is that in wet years such as 2023, the Alewife Brook overflows its banks onto the DCR recreation parks along the banks. and that happened five times in 2023.

A decade before that, it overflowed its banks so much that homes were flooded along the Alewife Brook and it's not just floodwaters, right? This is floodwater mixed with raw sewage because of the CSO outfalls that happen at the same time as the heavy rainstorms that caused the water level to rise as well. So it's only a matter of time before these incidents happen with greater and greater frequency So, and of course it's not just about the alewife. The alewife empties directly into the Mystic River which is one of our city's very precious outdoor recreation spaces that's accessible in this city One of the other impacts of this is that studies have found when there are significant CSO events, there's a corresponding increase in emergency room visits for acute GI illnesses.

This has been demonstrated through studies and the A lot of this transmission is through direct contact with the water but scientists also think that it could be that some of their pathogens are transmitted through aerosols as well. So the sewage contamination is a known risk to human health in a way that stormwater runoff alone really is not, even though it's not... Stormwater run off certainly isn't I'm super clean but the raw sewage definitely introduces distinct challenges and threats. So we need a plan that's resilient to climate change, and leads to a drastic reduction in these CSO events, and at the same time that were devising a more comprehensive approach to addressing this problem, we need to come up with new equitable and fair ways to distribute the costs of these investments.

We need to work to get state and federal funding, work with MWRA, work to make changes to our financing systems so that we can protect low income residents from rising utility costs. So through the whole planning process and the comment period which we're in now, we have a clearer picture of this problem as regional of how climate change is fueling this problem and making it worse. and how stormwater management is a key piece of this puzzle. So we're hoping to say with this resolution through, to the state legislature to MWRA, to all of our elected leaders all the way up to the state that let's build on the work that's been done but let's spend a little more time developing a plan That is aiming towards virtual elimination, but that also is regional diversified has hybrid solutions addresses stormwater and you know so that we can get this right.

We don't want to have a halfway solution that just kicks the can down the road to future generations when it's going to be a bigger problem and more expensive problem. I also wanted to let anyone watching or listening know that the comment period is open until October 30th for written comments next Wednesday, October 28th at 6 p.m. Right here in City Hall there will be the last public hearing so you can come to that to give public comment as well and it's also going to be on Zoom. It's a hybrid meeting so I wanted to be sure everybody knows that as well. Thank you.

Any discussion?

Councilor Bhat? Thank you, Mr. President. I will probably also pass I don't mean to put Councilor Ling on the spot, but I think just want to thank you for your leadership on this. And we went back and forth, but this is like the first time that I actually see Almost every organization that was involved, it's all in alignment. You know we have the chance... Mystic River Watershed leaders over there, the Alleywide Brook folks over there. The only one that is missing is the Charles River Watersheds but I think Emily's also supporting so Christine, Mike and you know like it's really been It's really nice to see all these organizations coming together to call for an end to combined sewer overflow. I believe that just hearing from them, it means we also must work together

To kind of identify funding solutions and build the political commitment necessary to make their virtual elimination a reality. So just, you know, to underscore what, you I think we also have like a moral obligation and responsibility since it's a generational choice that we have to make at this point. And we must decide whether to commit to a lasting solution or settle for half measures or risk doing too little while future generations inherit the consequences. Looking at that carefully, we must prioritize that public health must be the central piece of our discussion and particularly You know, giving community concerns about illness to the sewage exposure around Alleywife Brook.

This is something that we should not underestimate and we also need to understand the implication of the draft plan including potential increase to sewage discharges during five-year storm like you mentioned. So these are things that we need to look at the flooding concern because climate change will only increase and intensify these challenges. And limited storage solutions may not provide the long-term protection that our communities need, so for Somerville in particular I think this is also an environmental justice issue because we are right at the center of it. Public housing residents live near Alleywide Brook floodplain, so this is something that Think about Dillboy Field, Alleyway Greenway are important open spaces.

Yet when you hear about sewage overflows they can leave the area smelling of raw sewage which is nobody wants. Nobody wants that after storms and even during droughts. So cleaning up the brook will protect public health, restore the environment, An existing hazard into a community asset. So I just want to underscore that. Thank you, Mr. President. I'll kick the throw you, give it, hand it to the desk of Councilor Link

Lake. Thank you Mr. President. First of all, I want to say thank you to my colleagues for working so hard on this and especially Councilor Hardt who I attended so many meetings with but she attended even more beyond what I did. There was an intense amount of work trying to get this right. So much has been said already and so much has being said well, I don't feel like I really need to pile on what I will say. My timeline, I can't remember when the first time I heard about CSOs were. I think it might have been when I went to the Museum of Science with my kids and there was this lovely display of different ways that we handle water and one of them shows the how we deal with sewage and of course there's three different examples every time and there's one that's like this is super bad, this one's

Not quite as bad, and then this one's maybe the best but is also not great. And CSO of course, the way we're doing it right now was the super-bad version It was either that or it was when I tried to take my oldest daughter kayaking and found out that there was the water quality was, In the mystic, the water quality was bad enough that they were not recommending children do any water activities. and I looked into why that was and discovered that. So it was one of those two times, so I think this is really important for all of us and it's also an important equity issue and you know as we covered here already It's a tremendous cost. The city of Somerville already has the highest burden when it comes to paying Water and Sewer.

And, you know, we're going to need to fix this. That means that the costs are going to continue to rise. So really, we need also to make sure as Council Hardt and I just really want to underscore this, that I think we really need To help making it so that we can help our community where there are people who maybe cannot afford to continue paying increased water bills. and we need to be able to find ways to make that more equitable so that we can keep our residents here not have them leave You don't have to sell and get out of the city just because they can't pay a water bill. Obviously, I want to see all of these things, and I'm so thankful that we're pushing this forward tonight. Thank you. Wheeler.

Thank you, Mr. President. There is so much that I agree with in this resolution. This is indeed a regional issue for the reasons this resolution's text eloquently explains. It is vital that we take into account the predictions of climate change models What I can't currently agree with, with the understandings that I have today is this resolution's call for higher levels of control than the current plan provides to a level of virtual elimination of combined sewer overflows. I want to acknowledge how much larger this system is and how much these systemic questions are than the little that I know. I have tried to research this massive and complex web of questions as best I can, including meeting with multiple organizations and individuals who are advocating for the environmental preservation of our rivers and the protection of surrounding communities.

That work has been a vital part of this process, and it's crucial that work be taken seriously by our infrastructure and asset management staff in weighing the engineering possibilities in each specific area of the city and the environmental impacts of the various possible versions of these plans. To talk about the brass tacks for ratepayers in Somerville, the current plan's projected annual increases of 15% or more year after year for every Somervill ratepayer is already a colossal burden. I want to acknowledge there's a particular numerical discrepancy here that I have really struggled to explain. According to a February report by the MWRA, The higher level of control plan, that is called for short the 25-year storm plan would only cost 3% more than the typical year plan which is the current plan. But in Director Raish's April presentation to this council, that difference appeared to be about 45% more.

I have tried to track down and understand this difference, and it seems to be the combination of a lot of different things. Different time horizons, different cost assumptions, perhaps different learning between February and April Different perspectives on modeling and probably additional aspects that I just have not figured out. If that 3% number is right, then I am all for it. I'm all for a plan that would achieve this 25-year level. but when I have asked different groups, when I spoke to an outside consultant who has worked on this as well, who I believe does not have a dog in the race so to speak. I came away with more confidence than that 45% gap size I can't know everything about this work area where literally thousands of hours of research has been done. What I can do is listen carefully to our city staff and every group and individual I can find, ask our city stuff tough questions

and try to assess, do I think our city staff is taking this work as seriously as they can? Are they considering every possibility thoroughly and modeling other people's ideas no matter where these ideas come from? Are they making their recommendations with a depth of understanding of all the trade-offs rather than with assumptions? Everything I've learned suggests the answer to those questions is yes. The current plan does allow some sewage overflows in this predicted future year to the tune of millions of gallons, in case of unusually large storms. and that's a problem, it's a real problem in some areas as my colleagues have observed. But in every area of the city, the reasons for doing some work to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and not more or not less do make sense to me.

At the end of the day, I trust the judgment that I have heard across a dozen presentations and conversations with city staff about this. And about as many with other parties. And that means I cannot agree with this resolution's call for a higher cost solution. McLaughlin.

Thank you. Further discussion?

Resolution with a split vote. I love it. So, I think there's two things that are true here is this work needs to get done and it's going to be very expensive and not everyone can afford it. I feel like the city has led the way on infrastructure, on managing sewage on managing our sewers doing work that is a hundred years overdue and year after year we have voted for rate increases to pay for this. And we were told just a couple years ago, once we reach this rate We're going to flatten out. We're not going to have to do it and then the very next year told that we're gonna basically be voting for 100% increase in water and sewer rates for people in this city That's the issue I have and that's what makes it really difficult to deal with. Again, both cases are true but I do believe that this is very difficult for us to swallow.

I think it's a state river. It requires a state solution. I'm glad that I have two state reps here or future state reps who will hopefully be advocating for us to make sure that we don't eat the burden of this cost but I agree with the sentiments of the resolution and I support the resolution because the resolution because I feel like it is, first of all, a resolution. We're expressing our opinion on what we'd like to see happen. I would like to say a regional solution to this and I don't think voting against it or... I could either choose to say what I've been saying consistently for years about this, or I can just eat it and let the state let us eat these chargers. And I do respect the expertise that has gone into this. The city employees are not going to pay the bill on this.

and that's what it comes down to is the dollars and cents to me. So I'll support the resolution, I do have a question, well actually before I say that I supported, I see Director Raish in the audience Are we going to be voting on any money tonight? That would contradict what we're discussing right now.

Director H, would you be willing to address the question if you can? McLaughlin, would you repeat the question for Director Raish please? Could you rephrase the question?

Through the Chair. Uh, Director Raisch what are you here for today? For uh, the capital investment plan. Okay, so nothing to do with this today, right? Correct. But I happen to be here happy to answer any questions.

So Director Raish has been giving us great presentations for at least my time here. and I know the amount of work he's done in the city is done on this. I've expressed consistently my desire to see a regional solution to addressing the financing which isn't to say that the work doesn't have to be done so I support the resolution

Other discussion? I see none. Councilor Wheeler, you raised some questions about the language in the resolution. We certainly have the option to send this to committee Try and sort some of those out and see if there's any changes that would be agreeable, or we could take a vote. I'm happy to entertain a motion to... I don't think I'd be happy with either of those.

Sorry?

Well, I'll leave it to you. If you want to make a motion to send to committee, that would be in order. If not, I recognize Councilor Hardt for a motion too, I assume.

I would defer to the resolution sponsors on their preference of those two.

Hardt, Mbah, Link. Any preference as to whether you want to kick this one around the committee? Sort out the discrepancies or take a vote tonight at the will of the council?

I would move to approve. I don't know if Council Hardt or Councilor Mbah have a different opinion. Sam?

That's fine with me.

Councilor Hardt moves for approval. I move for a roll call vote. Roll call vote? All right, very well. Madam Clerk, please call the roll on the item for approval of item 4.12. Yep.

This is approved roll call on item 4.12. Councilor Ewen-Campen? Yes. Counciler Link? Yes Councilor Scott? Yes Councillor Clingan? Yes, Councilor Strezo? Councilor Sait? yes Councilor Wheeler?

No

Hardt? Yes. Councilor McLaughlin? Yes, Councilor Mbah? Yes Councilor Davis? Yes With nine in the affirmative that motion passes

All right, very good. Thank you for that discussion. We do at this point need to get into our executive session because of several people's schedules and so we're going to go ahead Go back to the original out-of-order plan, which calls for us to take, unless there's any objection, we'll waive the rules to take up item 7.1 first. I don't expect this will be a lengthy executive session as our executive sessions Go in the grand scheme of things. So we hope to be back out here very quickly and hope if you haven't heard what you're here for, you'll stick around and we will be right back. So this is item 7.1. Madam Clerk, would you please read that into the record?

Yes, bears request requesting that this council convene an executive session to discuss the matter of Richard Nurse, Ronald Bonney and Michael Brown versus City of Somerville et al.

I see our city attorney here. Could you please approach and advise the council if this is an appropriate item for executive session?

Evening. Yes, this is appropriate for executive session.

Very good. Thank you very much. All right. Madam Clerk, call the roll to enter into executive session Councilor Ewen-Campen?

Yes. Councilor Link?

Yes

Klingan, yes, Councilor Strezo, Councilors Sait, yes. Councilor Wheeler? Yes. Council Hardt? Yes, Council McLaughlin? Yeah. Councillor Mbah? Yes and Councillor Davis? Yes not in the affirmative

All right, we will return to open session when the executive session concludes.

All right, let's go folks. We got a lot of work to do here left. All right we gotta call this meeting back to order. Counselors, please take your seats. Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll to come out of executive session and re-enter open session?

Yes. This is roll call. Councilor Ewen-Campen. Link, Scott, Clingan, Strezo, Sait, Wheeler, Hardt, McLaughlin, Mbah. and Councilor Davis. With 10 members present, we have quorum.

All right, no votes were taken in executive session other than the vote to leave executive session. So our next out of order item is item 7.7 7.7 requesting the appropriation of $2,500,000

from the unreserved fund balance free cash to judgments and settlements account to fund the settlement of Richard Nurse, Ronald Bonney, and Michael Brown versus City of Somerville et al.

Attorney Sirigu did you want to speak to this one? Evening Council, through you, Matt Serigou, Labor Council. This is an accrest for an appropriation of funds to settle a claim against the city by former employees. Any questions? Any discussion?

All right. Let's do a roll call vote on this one. Yes.

Ewen-Campen?

Yes.

Councilor Link? Yes, Councilor Scott? Yes Councilor Clingan? Yes councilor Strezo? Councilor Sait? yes Councilor Wheeler? yes. Council Hardt? yes, Council McLaughlin?

no

Umba, and Councilor Davis.

Yes.

With nine members in the affirmative that is approved.

All right thank you and our final out of order item is 7.19 There's no objections. Madam Clerk, would you read that one into the record?

This is item 7.19 conveying the fiscal year 2027 to 2021 capital investment plan. Mr. Mayor.

Mr. President, thank you. Councilors I'm delighted to be here with you tonight to kick off a presentation about our capital investment plan This is something that, as you probably all know, is required by our new charter. I'm here to tell you even if that weren't the case We would be right here presenting this to you because it's so important. We have to have these plans. It's been three years since we've had an updated plan, How are we going to know what our long-term strategy is on our capital projects if we don't do this long range planning? So, this was really important for us. I'm very proud of the process here that was done during a period, as you know, of a very constrained budget. Our finances are subject to a lot of pressures that you know all about. I don't need to go into detail. You all lived through that during budget season.

But we're really excited here to come up with a plan that really moves the most important things forward. We're going to continue and finish the projects that are underway, obviously and we're gonna take on new projects that we've identified as having the highest potential risk, and the greatest urgency to do. and we're going to make sure that we're using our reserves you remember the process uh that we've brought these to your attention in the past we continue using those reserves so we can create future capacity to do this Again, the operating budget here is such a key component of it because as you know If we were to borrow more, that would be competing with both the city and school priorities that are so important to all of us. You all went through that in the FY27 budget. The FY28 budget has those same constraints in place. Nothing has changed in terms of robust new growth or anything.

You're going to see tonight a plan that lays out the schedule that we're looking to do these on here in the next few years. It also contains projects that we know need to get done and just because right now we're not in a position to go tackle a bunch of the things that we need to do, that doesn't mean that work has gone away. So you're gonna see that list of them and I'm excited for a day when we're able to go aggressively tackle the infrastructure of our city because Lord knows it is not in good shape out there. We sit next to an 1895 building that we know badly needs to be renovated and converted into city office space. If you drove here, you probably came on Highland Ave. Enough said. So we're excited to get to work on that but we'll start with planning that now so we're ready to move on it when we are no longer constrained fiscally. With that I want to turn it over to our budget director, Mike Mastroboni, who's going to present to you the FY27 capital investment plan. Thank you.

Thank You Dr. Mastromoni

Thank you, Mayor. Bear with me. I'm doing slides and I've got notes. We've got a lot of stuff up here now. That's okay. I get it. So good evening, my name is Mike Mastroboni. I'm the city's budget director What we're gonna do tonight what I'm going to do tonight is walk you through mayor Wilson's proposed capital plan how it fits into the city finances like you just heard there's really important work that we can move forward with now but before we get into that list just a little bit of level setting on the capital investment plan remember that it's our five-year plan for major investments whether that's buildings infrastructure It brings together priorities, estimated costs, proposed timing, financing all into one place so we can mush it all together and see how it affects our city. and the council's review of the plan is separate from approving the money for the appropriation for an individual project right two separate things

A project being listed on here does not necessarily mean an investment is fully funded or that construction is going to play out exactly as we estimate it right now. The plan is also not a full inventory of everything the city needs. We could fill this room with that list for better or for worse, but what we're sharing here is what we propose to advance Now, while keeping future needs visible. So I'm going to skip that slide but we'll talk about three things how we put this together what the financial outlook means We have a couple folks here to answer questions if you have any tonight. So how do we build the plan? We started with comprehensive citywide inventory that we developed in fiscal 23. The last time, we had a full CIP.

that was 50 requests totaling roughly 740 million dollars I actually think it's much more than that because we had a lot of projects that we didn't know the cost you'll notice Some of the more further out projects right now, the investments are TBD. So we took that list as well as the updated spring 2026 CIP list that we put together for the bond rating agencies We met with departments. We updated timing information, we met with Somerville Public Schools, tried to understand what their priorities were for facility investments And then what we did was remove completed work from the active list. We kept this broader inventory that we maintain for future planning What we did differently this year was we used a framework that's becoming more and more common in municipal government about using risk and consequence to identify high priority projects. Risk is how likely an asset is to fail if we defer work, and consequence is what failure would mean for safety, core service delivery and cost.

So that helps us explain the urgency but we have to look at whether scope funding and timing is ready to be able to add projects on. The CIP and the long-range forecast are developed together for a reason. We start with the adopted operating budget and our existing commitments We update our assumptions based on trends, what we're seeing out in the community and on our ledger as well as economic activity. And we build a debt service schedule for all of these proposed investments that we see as opportunities. That lets us see what the decisions today mean for future annual budgets. It also lets us adjust strategies or financing, which you'll hear about before we recommend taking on another investment We have a really challenging outlook right now. Mayor Wilson just shared that, you've heard Finance Director Ed Bean talk about that multiple times. When I look at the forecast I think of the quote from Mad Men, not great Bob but that's okay.

What we're seeing is some slow revenue growth and we're living you all know this under proposition two-and-a-half The single biggest constraint on services in Massachusetts is Proposition 2.5, and that's just the fact. Beyond that... There's more uncertainty in the bond market than I've ever seen in my entire life. In mid-September, just a month ago, Bond yields were 4.3% on a 20-year note, right now they're 5%. 0.770 basis points higher this has real impacts on what our capacity is to borrow and we need to take that into account in this really difficult time So let's talk about what the forecast says. As of October 26, again things change. We're projecting a deficit of several million dollars for fiscal 28

We're working really closely with staff across the city, with our partners in the schools to mitigate this deficit. An important distinction when we're looking at project costs here is that the amount of money that we're investing in these projects is different than the annual budget impact, two separate numbers. Borrowing creates principal and interest payments, and then those payments impact budgets for 5, 10, 20, 30, maybe sometimes 40 years. So what we're seeing right now, again, is that we're seen deficits. However our debt service load is manageable. We don't have a debt issue. We have a cash flow issue I guess right now and really it's based on our fixed costs again we've been up here the finance team has been up multiple times talking about how you know our budget is largely employee wages and benefits and their trajectory current trajectory is making service delivery more difficult to maintain.

Again proposition two-and-a-half The Digital CIP Book, so let's turn to the resources available. If you're a resident and you want to learn more about what's going on in the CIP, the Digital C IP book brings together project scopes, proposed funding schedules, priority ratings, and then the whole financial context Additionally, Water and Sewer Capital Plan is available alongside the General Fund Capital Plan. Remember two separate things. As we go through these tables, the years refer to proposed funding. They're not explicit about when construction's gonna start or finish Like I said, I'm going to be highlighting the groups rather than reading every row. If you have questions, Director of Infrastructure Rich Raich is here if you've got specifics. Okay, so first up are underway investments. Most of these should be pretty familiar to the council you appropriated resources to fund

Looking at the list, all of these at some point in the past year. This is projects already in progress and at least partially funded Proposed FY27 allocations will help move this work forward. So we've got roofs at Franey Road and West Somerville, boilers at Argenziano, space improvements at Healy and the Candy Playground. What's the major takeaway here? We're proposing out of this $8.1 million to fund roughly $7 million in cash and reserves. We have an additional $1 million in Community Preservation Act funding. Again, most of FY27 funding in this group will be proposed to avoid additional borrowing. You'll remember we used the strategy with our free cash at the end of fiscal 26, allocating around $9 million to avoid incurring future debt service. That saves us around $700,000 a year over the life of these assets. This process is going to do the same thing. So those are the underway investments. Next up, we have recurring investments.

These are replacements, improvements that continue on an ongoing basis. We don't see these stopping anytime soon. In fact, we're really leaning into these A multi-year schedule for these type of recurring projects and investments lets us plan them together instead of looking at each request in isolation. A great example here is fire apparatus, right? So current estimates working with Chief Breen are that the lead time has gone from roughly two years to roughly three years. from order to delivery of a fire apparatus. So what we've done is plan further ahead and we're going to continue to update the amounts and replacement schedules as costs, conditions, needs, and timing in delivery dates change. I'm particularly fired up to make some big investments in our DPW fleet. We've been working really closely with the city's new fleet manager to prioritize investments

to our fleet you guys might not know this we learned this recently that the average age of our fleet is 13 years old so we have a lot of work to do are really excited to invest in that So these are your recurring investments. You see those planned out over time. So what does this plan do to our operating budget? That's always the question we should be asking. This slide really shows how early capital decisions, previous capital decisions matter to the next operating budget. So if you took the proposed underway and recurring projects, funded them as we've shared here, you'd add roughly $400,000 to next year's debt service. That's that blue number all the way on the left. If we did nothing, about $900,000 of existing debt would expire, would end and roll off. So that's a net reduction. Now we're at down half a million dollars. That's the green section.

The largest change that we're anticipating for next year is roughly $3.3 million in debt service associated with moving short-term borrowing into long-term bonds. All of those three together is a net increase of $2.8 million for next year. Our long-range forecast includes the cost as shown on this slide. And for me, the main takeaway is that much of this increase comes from earlier commitments reaching their long term repayment stage These are projects like Somerville Ave streetscape, Union Square Streetscape Plaza and Design, Clarendon Hill, 90 Washington Street, and the Fire Station Condo. These are commitments that we've already made The air condition just turned on. That feels great, sorry. These are commitments that we've already made and are now reaching their long-term payment stage. So this is what we see for the impact next year. What about the rest of the projects? What about that pile of great ideas? We took care of this in a couple ways.

The first is the priority pipeline, this is the next set of significant asset needs Again, you notice these are high risk, mostly high consequence items that we've identified here. It includes school exterior work and mechanical work, the armory roof, Teal Square Fire Station, Slabrite. These are real opportunities for us to mitigate risk in the future. Across these six projects, the schedule shows 15.3 million in FY28 additional amounts in later years at this time we're working to identify and confirm funding sources update cost estimates and make sure that these are ready to go and Shelva Ready when the time is right. Lastly, I'll go to future priorities. Again the universe of needs is extraordinary but let me start by saying clearly projects in future priorities remain extremely important Keeping them in this inventory gives us a way to continue evaluating them and then pursue additional funding opportunities.

You see potential alternative funding sources Whether that's grants, CPA, the Mass School Building Authority. We'll get to some more on the next page Each of these projects however needs a financing strategy before we make a commitment to start these projects That might mean grants, scope updates, phasing or deferring for a year. We also need to really make sure that we understand the operating budget impact on any of these investments, to make sure we're always protecting the general fund. Additional future priorities are listed here including the new school on Sycamore, decarbonization, Union Square and library investments. Again, we've got a lot of potential opportunities to identify alternative funding sources here whether that's developer contributions the MBLC so on and so forth. We'll update this plan as those options become more and more concrete

The full digital budget book is available at somervillema.gov slash CIP. As you know, the administration will be back with individual funding requests as projects advance and with an update to the plan on an annual basis as required in the charter. The recommendation right now is to move this important work forward. You'll see free cash appropriations in the future where we can talk about those, really leverage our reserve position where it helps us to avoid future borrowing. and we're going to continue develop funding plans for those other commitments, those other fantastic projects. Thank you. Happy to answer any questions now or in committee as you see fit. We have a crew of folks here ready to talk CIP with you. Thank You

Thank you. Councilor Ewen Campen?

Thank you Mr. President, through you thank you all for doing this first of all you know we've been waiting since before the Winter Hill School closed I believe was you know the last time we saw one of these so it's I think I know for myself, I know colleagues in the public this is extremely welcome. One thing that really just stands out to me before I get to my question Looking at the stuff that we're doing for sure right now, it's really almost exclusively like maintenance on existing buildings. Like largely school buildings, right? And I think it's just noteworthy there's not like items on this list that are like big showy we're taking on a brand new thing to to show off um It just speaks to kind of like the financial situation that we're in compared to I think where we've been at periods in the past, where we were really prioritizing maintenance of our existing buildings. that is the right thing to do, I really like this risk analysis and I think it's

credit where credit is due I think this is not necessarily like the show-offy option this is like the actually very responsible for running a city option so I want to thank you for that I also just want to thank you for, although Highland Ave bike lanes are not included in the priority. I'm glad that they're listed here so that I do not have to blow a blood vessel in my brain It's also, you know the costs are listed and they're very expensive. And I understand, I hope from my point of view and I think for the publics' point of views we can understand why making sure that a school does not fall apart might be a higher priority than this. As disappointing as that is, I think that is the reality. Okay, the question I have... So when you go to the online The detailed breakdown of this. I think one thing that really stands out to me in the next couple years is that the sidewalks and road repairs Dramatically higher than any other single item. It's like nine or ten times higher Is that a change, or is that just how it goes here?

Sure, through the president. That's been an escalating 10% escalation basically per year for a number of years we've just seen construction costs go through the roof. The amount that you're seeing here isn't entirely funded on the city side you know a combination of chapter 90 and other grants that we sort of filter in so it's not, that's not all on the city's dime but yeah construction inflation is

Wreaking Havoc. It's difficult, yeah. But through you, Mr. President, that doesn't represent like we're going to be paving a lot more streets than we did in the past. That's just the cost is going up?

Yeah, through the chair. It's both the complexity of what we build because I like Tough Street for example As we've been progressing and getting progressively more aggressive with our traffic calming and focus on pedestrian bike safety, the construction per mile is higher. and also construction inflation continues to go up. So essentially we're trying to keep the linear feet per year constant whilst addressing the higher cost per linear feet.

Can I add on that Mr. President? It also, this is a priority for us to make sure that it basically if we end up with like if for example you know we're coming at the end of ARPA but you know I gave the instruction to staff you know should ARPA funds We know the condition of our streets are in here. We've got some catch-up to do. I appreciate Councilor Ewen Campen's point about schools. I had a conversation with the CAO earlier today Do we refer to this as maintenance? It kind of feels like maintenance, but some of this actually I'll point out is work that needs to happen for decarbonization plans for our schools. So there is an element of taking us forward. I hear you, it looks like we're just replacing things and that can feel like maintenance but it does play an important part in our goals of getting our schools to be carbon free. Carbon Neutral, I should say.

And if you may Mr. President to the Ward 3 Councilor's point. The other thing you'll see both in terms of the active projects and the ones in the pipeline, which I sort of think of as these are the players on the field. And the ones at the pipeline are the ones on the bench that are ready to go. The school's sort of maintenance projects are primary there, and that is a result of the work we have been doing to proactively understand what systems are about to fail in the building so we do not face another Winter Hill emergency. Capital projects in DPW have expended a decent amount of effort over the past few years to do those inventories, to get into all the buildings. We're seeing items that are ready to fail and we're putting them in this capital plan.

And because we're doing that proactively, we can then also marry it with our carbon neutral goals and do it in a way that advances those. Rather than simply reactive and replace in kind. So it's a product of both of those efforts that have As the former chief of staff was fond of saying, it's like leg day. You know that the lifters want to skip leg day We've been doing leg day for the past three years and these are the results

Link, and then Clingan.

Thank you Mr. President um actually a lot of what Dr. Raich said is kind of what I wanted to get at which is that uh you know i'm really really happy to see that we're Trying to get ahead of the things that we need to maintain. It does feel sometimes like we're just kind of reacting from one Thank you for watching! How to prioritize. I think this is an extremely responsible thing for the city to be doing, and it's painful to look at, but it's what we really need to be

being able to like prioritize and not just have to shove something else to the side yet again to deal with the fire in our laps. I think that this is what's going to get us there. Thank you. Councilor Cleggen?

Thank you, Mr. President. Just two quick questions. So the $9 million for the sidewalk and road work, that's the whole entirety of all roadwork? When you click on the digital book, when you click it doesn't really break down like what are sort of projects where we're resetting curves and stuff versus just street paving or redoing sidewalk panels. Is there a further breakdown on that?

Three, Mr. President, there is a pavement management program site and I think it's linked on there. Is it slash PMP? SomervilleMA.gov slash PMP if you search pavement management program we I think we decided to link to that rather than try and recreate it right so they keep that ongoing schedule and forward-looking plan up to date there

So that's just mainly through you, Mr. President, like the repaving schedule and some of the sidewalk panel. What about larger projects?

This would be all the projects, yeah. There's also resources for an ongoing repair basis in DPW, but this is the large projects, yep.

Okay, so just so people can go look at it if they're wondering where exactly money's going. Last question, Mr. President, through you. I do agree and understand that the fleet maintenance is an important priority for the city And I don't know if you've done a cost analysis with like the old vehicles and sort of what maintaining them costs versus like, you know, whatever. I don' t know if we lease them or buying them. My question is with the one point something million, based on our analysis, we felt it was important to put that money forward versus like... You know, the Teal Square Fire Station. I just want to make sure when people look at that it seems like building issues can be much more pressing when things go sideways versus You know, something to do with a vehicle may not rise to the level.

So I guess I'm just thinking we're pretty confident that the schedule and the work that we do doing with it for instance specifically a tail square slab is We're confident that is going to last and be okay in such a way that prioritizing Vehicle maintenance over that is the move? Yes, we can all say yes.

Yeah, that all factored in.

Okay, again just asking for the public who might be wondering why you know because we know that the fire stations just like our school buildings just like a city buildings are all behind no fault to anyone here but good to see us catching up on those things. Thank you

Mr. President, can I say through you to the Councilor? I understand Fleet has not historically inspired the most confidence from this body. What I'll tell you is we have Someone who appears to be phenomenal now in charge of fleet. That gives us the confidence that we can invest in there and make some really important investments we know are overdue and that it's going to be spent well in combination with a new sustainable purchasing policy has been put in place. So we're going to be buying the kind of vehicles that you all want to see us driving as a city. So, that's what makes us feel good about making those fleet replacement investments and I'll also say yes Thurston Street is on the Pavement Management Plan.

Councilor Sait?

Yeah, through you Mr. President first I'd like to thank you for this. This is very helpful. Thank you for the transparency It's the first day since I got on the council, so this is very helpful to see what we'll be doing. This year, next year and the next few years. I had a few questions but before that I really appreciate seeing schools these buildings have been neglected for decades So making sure we have a plan for that. Yeah, this is like great first step, right? of course you know the cost here now we can all see it is very high so my first question here and which you know because we're maintaining really old buildings and as the mayor said again I'm ready to be for Decarbonization, for the Argenziano School Boilers. What type of boilers are these?

Thank you to the president. The Argenziano boilers are gas fired, but they're significantly more fuel efficient than the previous ones that they were replacing. That project has, I shouldn't say this out loud because I'm going to jinx ourselves, but it's been going very well. Boiler 1 and 2 are already online and that's sufficient for the building. So as we enter heating season, we hit that target. As they switch over, we're working on boiler number three which provides redundancy I don't off the top of my head remember how much more efficient, but it's remarkable.

And can you just, to the public, tell us the reasoning behind that? Why gas-powered when our goal is... I know this is more like an emergency. Like we need something.

Through the president, there's two reasons for that. One, in order to go fully electric we would need to do a lot of modifications throughout the building to the downstream distribution systems which we cannot do whilst occupied and we do not have the capability to move the Argenziano students out of that building to do that work. The second part is that the Eversource grid wouldn't support that right now. So there's pre-work that we would have to do with Eversourse, get in their pipeline additional transformers and additional transmission work to update, to support that. So this is one of the reasons why you see sort of on our and we've talked about this in School Buildings Committee, that the transformer for the edgerly still makes a lot of long-term sense because it's something that would support

Current Needs of Winter Hill Educational Programming, but also then leverage decarbonization at both the edgerly which is going to be part of our long-term portfolio for Swing Space anyway as well as the East. So we're keeping in the pipeline the work with Eversource to do that so that we can sort of unlock that potential that we don't have That's one of the reasons why in the CIP on our longer term pipeline you do see the decarbonization. as a line item and under that general umbrella is a lot of that transformer and electric work that would enable work in the buildings.

Yeah, thank you director. As you've shared this before in the school building facilities and maintenance committee but this is helpful for the public because we're asked this question a lot like this goes you know in opposition to our goals as city so thank you for Power and space. Yeah, we need to get them ready. And the other question I had, so similar to my colleagues looking at the street and sidewalk program that for FY27 is almost 10 million. which you know is really high and I'm just wondering if, is it because we're outsourcing that a lot? Is it part of it? You know but we're contracting out a lot of this work. We looked into trying to have some of that done in-house to reduce the cost.

Yeah, that's a good point and what really isn't captured there through the president I have to give Commissioner Weissman, and Highway Super Jeff Barbieri a lot of credit. They have begun building those muscles. They now have the capacity in-house with their own crew to replace sidewalk panels that DPW had not had in the past. So one of the results is their annual operating budget includes replacement of a lot of sidewalk that used to have to fall to the capital plan. We made the strategic decision to not lower the capital plan by that concomitant amount because as I said earlier in response to Councilor Ewen-Campen's point,

We want to do more and better in terms of safety improvements and larger, more complex stuff. So DPW is handling a lot more the routine sidewalk that we used to contract out and we're now using the monies for the contract to do things like Tough Street.

And Mr. President on a somewhat related note, on the street side DPW has purchased a milling apparatus that can be mounted on a skid steer It's not going to do an entire street, but it can start building some of those muscles to actually do some small scale repaving that we could build on one day.

Okay, thank you. This is really great to hear because this is something that the body has been asking for four years so I'm glad we are starting The last question I had is about the fleet. You have discussed this a little bit, but What I want to ask is, are we looking into electrifying some of the fleet and looking at the priorities? We have the... The DPW roof, electrical panels go there and wouldn't electrifying some of the fleet be all part of a great plan?

through you Mr. President to the Ward 5 Councilor Yeah, replacing that roof. And it turns out we actually have an electrical capacity issue in the DPW yard that solar panels might help address. But yeah I was mentioning earlier about the sustainable purchasing policy A big part of that is making sure that we're buying, when I say the right kind of vehicles, the kind that we want. Yes, plug-in electric hybrids are a part of it and electric vehicles are also a part so making sure we're looking at those in roles that make sense

Thank you, and I look forward to learning more about that.

Director? Just anticipating another question. All the roof projects that you see on here including DPW and West currently in flight and Healy and JFK That are in the pipeline, all of those are including structural improvements to make them fully solar ready because none of them were or are.

Yeah this is great thank you.

Councilor Wheeler? Thank you, Mr. President. I'm so excited to hear about that building of internal capacity for sidewalk and street work. And I'm hoping that means that we're going to be able to especially to address more miles per year of sidewalk. Everyone knows there's far too many parts of sidewalk that are impassable for anyone with mobility issues or disabilities. I also just want to echo my colleague from Word3's appreciation of this risk and consequence framing. I really appreciate how this kind of shows your work and this is something where you know instead of just having a list where for reasons unknown Folks in the administration went into a room and came back and said, this is the list. We have something that shows why these things are the ones on the list and that's something that can invite feedback if there are people who disagree about you know they say this is not a medium, this is a low or whatever it is.

That's a conversation we can have with a common frame of reference I really appreciate that. I think it's a kind of approach that we should look in other areas of our reporting and sharing our decision making

Mr. President, I threw you to the at-large counselor. Yeah, love that about the call out about the sidewalks. I'll say use this as an opportunity for a PSA, please. Submit raised panels on sidewalks and issues with sidewalks to 301. We got news recently that we have already received more 301 requests in 2026. then in all of 2025 we want to see that trend continue people are using 311 I use it you all use it please report those sidewalk issues there that'll help us identify them and deal with them in a way that makes our city more accessible for everyone

Thank you, Mr. President and thank you Dr. Rage for this presentation I guess I'm curious this morning you know Mr. Mayor you mentioned The Kennedy School and the Healey, you know. But I was surprised to see like why is it low priority here? Like I'm not sure why it wasn't... When we're discussing about like all this anticipated

Mr. President, three to the councilor. The Healy, that's a room in the Healy. That's not the roof of the Heely and it's the Kennedy school yard, the playground for the Kennedy. The Kennedy roof and Healy roof are listed subsequent years.

Thanks. Thank you, Mr. President.

Further discussion? Back to Councilor Sait.

Mr. President, I was just going to add the armory roof. I'm really glad to see in the priority pipeline that our I understand that this you know we're gonna need to look into like funding um but again i really appreciate it this is being this is this made it to the list this is making sure you know like we seeing just like we have been listening I've been listening to artists. This is the space that the whole community is using, so making sure that roof is addressed. Yeah, sorry. I'm really glad to see this.

President, through you too, Councilor Sait. Yeah having been in there when they were dealing with leaks coming through there that was not lost on me.

Further discussion? All right. Seeing none, thank you. That item is placed on file.

Thank you.

All right it is 9-20 we have completed nine issues on an 11 page agenda So I will take a page from former President White's book and remind counselors that when an item is read, you don't need to respond. You don't have to speak to it. If you want to speak to an item, raise your hand and let me know. If you don't, we'll assume that it's approved or placed on file or referred to committee as appropriate and we'll move onto the next one. And when it comes to the Committee Reports I also remind folks they are on the Recorded Video Recorded. Detailed reports of all the committee meetings that folks can look at. If there's important stuff to say, by all means, please share it. I don't want to squash any speech or sharing of important information here but let's be... Cognizant of the time and the amount of work we still have in front of us this evening. With that said, Madam Clerk back to the top.

McLaughlin, that Section 7.64 of the Code of Ordinances pertaining to condominium conversions be amended as detailed within.

Councilor McLaughin. I feel very entitled today, Mr. President. And I feel like we're ahead of schedule, so I'm going to make a big speech. You're going to fix that for us? Yes. No, so Councilor Ewen-Campen will address a lot of this in his committee report for the Land Use Committee but this comes out of our discussion with ADUs and triple deckers and condos. I made a very passionate Case 4, the use of condos in the community which allows homeowner opportunities for people like me who can't afford a full house as most people are in the city I would say at this point. One of the things that makes a condo different than a regular rental unit is our Condo Conversion Ordinance, which is the strongest in the state. which is really the only way we can offer protections like relocation fees, making sure that people don't get kicked out right away. The condo conversion ordinance actually empowers us to protect tenants

much stronger than a regular rental unit. Something that came from this discussion was the concept of a building getting demolished completely and being turned into condos, and whether that enacts the Condo Conversion Ordinance. Some people think this is a way to get around the condo ordinance. I spoke to Ellen Shatner about this and she believes that our current condo conversion ordinance does apply to demolition, but this is just strengthen that language and make sure it's very clear. that if you are demolishing an entire building and replacing it with condos those tenants are entitled to monetary compensation they're entitled to time to move and a lot of other protections that we otherwise wouldn't have. So I'd like this to go to the Land Use Committee for discussion.

Any discussion on that? Councilor Ewen-Campen?

Mr. President, I would like to sign on and recommend legislative matters.

That's where we're going to go with this one.

Yep.

Councilor Link and Scott would like to sign on as well, Councilor Clingan, the whole council would like sign on that one. All right, very good. We'll have a robust discussion of legislative matters. Madam Clerk, that will be referred to legislative matters next item.

Next item is 4.2, a resolution by Councilor McLaughlin and Councilor Hardt requesting support for local businesses damaged by recent fires

I'll be quicker about this because we all know the situation with the local fires. City of Boston recently had a similar fire and a city councilor submitted a resolution similar to this to ensure that these businesses are being taken care of. I know the city's doing a lot already. I would just like to discuss it to make sure we're not missing anything and leaving people behind. I'd like this to go to public health.

Okay, any other discussion? Mbah. I'd like to sign on that item is approved with a copy to Public Health, Public Safety. Next item?

Next item is an ordinance by Councilor Link, Councilor Mbah and Councilor Wheeler that the City of Somerville adopt the Artificial Intelligence Ordinance as detailed within.

All right, Councilor Link. Thank you, Mr. President. So this ordinance is, I just want to be clear it's not perfect. And I don't think it ever will be perfect because I'm not sure that there is a perfect But we need to figure out as a city what the baseline, bare minimum right thing to do is. And we know for certain that AI hallucinations are real and that AI can produce desperate outcomes along lines of race, gender, color, and religion. So what this ordinance proposes is that we should not empower these shortcomings to harm our community.

It asks that we ban AI from making decisions about things like eligibility for housing stability support. It asks us that we banned things like police reports written by AI, and it asks that we not use AI models that we know are biased to make decisions when we know those decisions will contribute to disparate outcomes. So that does not mean, I want to say a couple things about what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean the city can't use AI. It doesn t mean that if there is a system that we know has biases built into it, it can't be used for anything. while it might not be able to be used for deciding where a library is, if a new library's built in this part of the city or this part o fthe city. It still could be used

by city staff to figure out how to format an Excel document or what formula to use in it. I lost my line. Anyway, I'll just wing it from here. It also requires an annual report. Telling us and the world what AI is being used by the city. And it requires also that any content that is made mostly by AI is labeled as such. So, To kind of wrap that up, if we don't want AI to decide if an artist gets a grant, if a community member goes to prison or

Where our next library is built or where the next community center is built, then I think that we need something like this. and I'm very excited to see it go to committee and become a more perfect document than it currently is.

All right, very good. That is referred to legislative matters. Next item?

Mr. President, I'm sorry. I did have some brief comments and I will try to be brief. Thank you. I want to acknowledge my co-sponsors. Councilor Link has shepherded this with a lot of feedback from a lot Link commented this week that this is at a point where we acknowledge it's not perfect but it is in good enough shape to open it to the close reads that we are eager to hear from members of the administration and members of public, the rest of the council, and advocacy groups. Briefly, the lines we're trying to draw here are tricky ones to define well And for me, the guiding goal is clarity. We want the public and city staff to understand these limited requirements and the high-risk cases they apply to. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to also give a shout-out to Councillor Link for his leadership on this and thank you to Councillor Wheeler. Again it's just to underscore the fact that this is about ensuring that technology serves the public interest Protect civil rights and maintain human accountability. I personally believe that AI can help government deliver services more efficiently Its use must be transparent, accountable and consistent with civil rights and privacy protections. Residents should be able to know when it is being used You know, materially to influence decisions affecting their housing assistance, city services benefits, employment or other important opportunities. So we should distinguish low-risk administrative uses from

There's data security, there's bias testing, there is clear accountability. A process for residents to challenge consequential decisions because these are things that will eventually happen once we're using this application. So our goal is to establish a practical framework that allows are residents to benefit from innovation while protecting residents and maintaining public trust.

All right, that is referred to legislative matters. Next item?

Next item is 4.4, an order by Councilor Link, Councilor Hardt and Councilor Umba and Counciler Wheeler that the Director of Infrastructure and Asset Management report to the City Council on the status of the roof of the West Somerville Neighborhood School including necessary repairs What the leak has revealed about the condition of the city's aging school roofs and the effectiveness of the continuity of instruction plan.

That item is approved, I will note that Director Raish spoke to the School Committee last week So folks can take a look at that too. But if we can turn that into a report back to the council, that would be appreciated. Yeah, could we send that to school buildings facilities and maintenance please? Okay, that'll be approved with a copy to school building's facilities and

Next item is 4.5, a resolution by Councilor Mbah, Councilor Hardt and Councilor Link that the Commissioner of Public Works conduct a risk-based review of roofing drainage system and other vulnerable building envelope components at city school facilities, particularly buildings undergoing active roof construction or repairs and identify any urgent deficiencies requiring immediate attention.

All right, that item's approved with a copy of the school building facilities amendments. Next item.

Next item is 4.6, a resolution by Councilor Link, Councilor Ewen-Campen and Councilor Mbah supporting the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act of 2025.

Thank you, Mr. President. I'll keep this one brief as well. First of all, I wanted to say thank you to Reverend Christopher Hope who was the person reached out to me and talked to me a lot about this particular piece of legislation So this legislation kind of has the same perspective as the ordinance that has been proposed here tonight. And it goes a little bit farther because it can, because this is at the federal level. In very, very brief broad strokes is it regulates consequential decisions such as those that impact people's rights civil liberties livelihoods employment banking health care criminal justice public accommodations Government Services. It prohibits developers, and this is developers of software not the typical we're talking about people building things So it prohibits developers from offering up AI that discriminates based on protected characteristics or causes disparate impacts.

It requires developers to assess what those impacts might be and identify and evaluate, mitigate any potential bias used or any discriminatory outcomes. and it increases transparency and creates a right to appeal AI decisions to human decision maker. And that's, that's it.

That item is approved. Sorry, I saw the whole council wanted to sign on to that one too. Thanks. Next item.

Next item is 4.7, a resolution by Councilor Link, Councilor Sait and Councilor Scott calling on the mayor to adopt policies prohibiting city staff from using artificial intelligence to generate Public Facing Media and Prohibiting the Replacement of City Employees with Artificial Intelligence as Detailed Within.

Thank you, Mr. President. This is the last of the AI Trio. So this resolution just asking for a policy Common sense policies to be included within the AI policy. One is that since we are a city full of artists and wonderful creative people, if we need Creative work for our publicly shared materials, whether that's a flyer or video we should use those artists and not AI. and two, that the city should not use AI to replace workers. So no layoffs or closed positions specifically So that they can be filled by some sort of agent, AI agent. I'm all for us as a city using AI but it should Force Multiplier, and not something that removes a person's livelihood.

That item is approved. Next item.

Next item is 4.8, a resolution by Councilor Mbah, Councilor Hardt and Councilor Link that the administration develop or update a written protocol for severe weather preparedness during construction in roof repair projects including verification that roof drains are functioning properly temporary protective measures are in place and responsible personnel are available to respond promptly to reports of weather intrusion okay that item is approved next time Next item is 4.9, a resolution by Councillor Wheeler, Councillor Hardt, Councillor Sait, Councillor Link and Councillor Clingan urging the state to protect mass save and clean energy grants.

That item is approved. Councilor McLaughlin would like to sign on? Councilman Bob would like to sign on. Any discussion? No. All right. Take note, people in charge, especially those who will be in charge next year. Next item.

Next item is 4.10, a communication by Councilor Wheeler sharing the Metro Boston Homeland Securities Region's Urban Area Security Initiative Fiscal Year 2024 plan and allocations.

Councilor

Just briefly, Mr. President, this is a document there's no specific timely reason I'm sharing it now It's one that I got earlier this year from this Boston office in response to a public records request. The reason I had requested it was because there were grants that were coming before the finance committee that referred to requirements in this document, but we didn't have the document. So we were having to agree to terms that we didn t actually have in front of us I will point out that um it's a little confusing that it is now 2026 we're in fiscal year 2027 but this is fiscal year 2024. That's because it takes a couple years for federal grant money to sort of make it all the way through the system to us.

So a lot of the grants that we are getting now through this FEMA UASI set of programs are fiscal year 2024 grants.

We'll place that on file. Do you want to send a copy to finance so that you can then mark that complete so it just shows up in another place if people are trying to find it?

That doesn't strike me as necessary.

Not necessary, I just sometimes makes it easier for folks since it's a reference document. Your call.

Sure, if this is an idea that makes sense to you Mr. President let's do it.

Sometimes when I'm looking for things, I might look for this in finance, for example. And so if it was not ever through finance, I probably wouldn't find it. So that just makes it a little easier for folks to use the search engine. So we can tweak it a little bit to make more transparency. Let's do that. So place on file with a copy of finance, and then by all means you can just mark it complete or I guess it would be based on filing committee or whatever the committee deems appropriate at the time.

Next item is 4.11, a resolution by Councilor Clingan that the Director of Mobility install a slow children crossing sign on Heath Street close to the corner of Heath and Moreland Streets That item is approved

Mr. President, Councilor Scott, before moving on to committee reports I'd like to request that we can take item 10.1 out of order so that I can introduce it before committee reports and or I go to sleep

10.1. There being no objection, I will waive the rules to take item 10. 1 out of order.

Thank you, Mr. President. This is one that... Oh, I'm waiting for him.

Thank Item 10.1, an ordinance by Councilor Scott. An ordinance amending the Somerville zoning ordinance to establish the upzoning overlay district at Davis Square, Porter Square and Ball Square.

Scott, I will remind you of our conversation. So we won't have any discussion on this one tonight since it was submitted after their original agenda so this would be referred to land use with a copy of the planning board for scheduling public hearing at which point it'll be duly noticed and everyone can find out about it then.

All right, so no introduction to the item tonight, Mr. President?

No introduction tonight. All right.

My bad. Stay tuned.

And so when that happens, we try not to discuss anything unless it was completely unforeseen and also timely. This wasn't unforeseeing but because it will be noticed for a committee folks will have time to know that it's coming up at that point Tune in to hear all our brilliant discussion about it then. Next item, Madam Clerk?

Next item is 6A1, a committee report of the Committee on Finance meeting on October 20, 2026. Councilor Wheeler?

Thank you, Mr. President. The Finance Committee met on Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 via remote participation with the help of Clerk Delaney Fisher-Cassiol and four of our five members present due to a known scheduled conflict. We took up an eight item agenda. We recommended appropriating $100,000 from the City's Racial and Social Justice Fund for the 2026 Community Grant Cycle. This money is being used for 23 different small grants that represent a wide spectrum of ideas related to racial and social justice Many of them projects primarily driven by volunteer work where our community receives real benefit from enabling this work with a small stipend. We also discussed an order asking the administration to estimate the cost of opening Somerville High School as a teen center after hours. This has been a recurring council budget priority and administration staff reported that work is ongoing, including a walkthrough coming up by the mayor and superintendent this month with the hope of piloting a teen center space soon.

The committee asked who will be responsible for moving this project forward, how anticipated participation and staffing needs will be estimated, and whether outside grants could help pay for this. These questions are all in flight, and the administration promised hard work on them in the coming months. We recommended approval of a $35,000 state Department of Mental Health grant to the police department for overtime and backfill while officers and supervisors obtain or maintain crisis intervention team certification. This was part of a set of related funding items that we have discussed in the past three finance meetings. We received a verbal report from IT and Procurement on the city's contracts involving artificial intelligence, the theme of tonight. The clearest example of this is Blue Voice A product that the police department uses, which the IT department described as a closed-loop AI system.

The city does not currently have direct contracts for well-known tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, although AI is increasingly embedded inside products the city already uses including antivirus software and some traffic control systems. That distinction led to some confusion or frustration in the committee about transparency and as AI becomes a feature inside ordinary software, and maybe that simply asking for a list of AI contracts might not give the council quite a complete picture of where it's being used. The largest financial items of the night concerned the Poplar Street Pump Station. First, we recommended authorization of approximately $3.1 million in additional borrowing to cover a major construction change order caused by contaminated soil. The contractor, in this case, originally sought more. The city's teams negotiated that down. This is an example of how regulatory changes by the EPA and others and what's found underground can create difficult to predict costs in major projects.

We additionally recommended a completely unrelated funding change for this same exact project, reducing the existing Poplar Street Pump Station borrowing authorization by approximately $2.1 million. As we discussed at our last meeting, Arpa money that had originally been set aside by the city for fire vehicles couldn't be spent on those vehicles before the deadline, so the city redirected that money to the Poplar Street Pump project. Finally, we received an update on 808 Windsor Place, the vacant lab building in Poynton Yards. A German investment fund that held equity in the building filed for bankruptcy in August and ownership was transferred to its lending bank. the bank is not planning an auction we learned it has retained the former development team to manage the building and continue trying to lease it so functionally there's been little change in the day-to-day operation of the property The larger concern for Somerville is the weak lab market itself. Vacant commercial buildings can seek lower assessments, reducing future property tax revenue.

City staff reported that community benefit payments in this case and development impact fees associated with this building have already been collected were triggered and are not erased by this ownership change. Staff also said that 808 Windsor's financing structure was unusual, and after reviewing Somerville's other lab properties they were somewhat more optimistic about the broader picture. Chair, I ask that this committee report be accepted as submitted wherever you may be.

Okay, thank you. Councilor Wheeler moves to approve the report as submitted on the report. Councilor Mbah?

Thank you Mr. President I just want to thank Councillor Wheeler for following up on the item I was just curious and it was really useful to see that there was something good that came out of it. Appreciate it, thank you.

Thank you for the questions from my colleague.

That report is approved and that puts one item before assembly for roll call vote.

Madam Clerk? The roll call item is on Item 6A7, Councilor Ewen-Campen. Yes. Councilor Link? Yes. Councillor Scott? Yes Strezo, Councilor Sait. Yes. Councilor Wheeler? Yes.

All right. Before we move to the next item, Councilor Scott would like to reconsider the motion to send the prior item to—the out-of-order item to committee I will allow a statement on your intent. As long as it's not deliberation, there won't be any discussion on it afterwards but I think that's appropriate. The reason we allowed this on the supplemental agenda is for the purpose of transparency so the public can know about it sooner rather than later, so I think a brief statement of your intent behind submitting the item would be fine if that's okay? Scott Moose to reconsider. We're all okay with reconsidering the item. I see nodding heads. All right, that item's back before us. Kind of a brief statement of intent and the intent as Councilor Scott would then be to refer this committee again after you've said... Okay, very well. Go ahead.

Thank you very much, Mr. President. Just to make it, again for the sake of transparency I appreciate this. I am proposing in this item a new transit oriented overlay which aims to increase the amount of housing that can be built and in particular provide more permanently affordable housing to some of the most expensive and transit accessible areas in the city. I will take all the criticisms and flaws that exist within this on myself, but it is something that has been worked on by a large group of community advocates for The effect of this overlay would be to allow up to four stories on most residential parcels and up to six stories on larger residential parcals like double lots.

But all of those projects would be required to comply with the city's affordable housing rules and would create many more new permanently affordable housing homes. Then the current situation where the maximum density available is the triple decker and the backyard ADU. This also recognizes that new construction creates displacement and mitigating that displacement was an important part of this proposal similar to the This recognizes the direct harm that's caused by displacing existing tenants and has built in Because it is an overlay has built in mechanisms by which, in order to gain access to this upzoning overlay, developers must make payments to the city in the form of four times

The monthly average rent, the monthly payment standards which would then go into a fund that we could directly use to reimburse people who are displaced by these kinds of projects. That kind of anti-displacement measure combined with a transit oriented upzoning to the neighborhood residential parcels, hopefully in my opinion will provide a model that Once tested here, could potentially be rolled out to larger and larger parts of the city. There's going to be certainly much more discussion. I look forward to giving my public comment because land use is a five-person committee, so I won't be able to deliberate there. But as a final procedural note, Mr. President, I've been advised that I need to state that I believe that because the zoning amendment requires Modifies regulations concerning the bulk and height of structures beyond what would otherwise be permitted under the existing zoning.

It then complies with Mass General Law 40A, Section 5. which means that it would be able to be adopted by a simple majority vote of the City Council as opposed to a two-thirds majority vote. However, it is recommended by the Commonwealth's guidance that the Planning Board is requested to please include in their recommendation a determination of which voting threshold applies to this zoning proposal. And then it is further recommended, I'm reading from the text now, that the legislative body affirm the voting threshold in its vote on this subject zoning amendment. So hopefully that was not crossing any lines there, sir. It lays out the intent of creating a transit-oriented upzoning district that also includes anti displacement measures and Hopefully provides a test bed for innovation in housing construction here in Somerville. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank You councillor so that item 10.1 is referred to land use with the copy of the planning board now back to item 6b please

6B1, a report of the Committee on Land Use meeting on October 15th, 2026.

Young-Kip.

Thank you, Mr. President. The Committee on Land Use met last Thursday. We had five items. Four of them I would describe as kind of noncontroversial and we recommended approval and then the fifth one has to do with ADUs, backyard cottages that's something that the committee is still deliberating so just on the first on the four items that we recommended approval I'll just state first of all we don't yet have recommendations from the planning board We're still awaiting those, so we can't ordain these if that was the will of the council. So the intent is to get them out of committee so you know we're done deliberating on them lay them on the table tonight once we have a recommendation then we can take our final vote and I'll just briefly summarize those so the first is 26 12 59 this is a zoning amendment to do away with uh the ground story elevation. So currently our zoning says that the front door of Most buildings have to be raised up off the ground.

This was brought forward by Councilor Link and in parallel a group of advocates and the planning staff, so this amendment just gets rid of that. For accessibility reasons, if it's suitable on the site and you want to build at ground level entrance with no steps to get to the door, go for it. and we reconciled minor differences between the mayors and councilor links version so that's it was it was amended in committee and that's now before us The second item, 26-1337. This was a proposal from the administration to make some changes to principal entrances. Put simply, this is basically right now principal entrances the main entrance to a building are supposed to be on the street frontage. Triple-deckers in particular that is really challenging because it The main entrance that has all the stairwells off it to the different units really eats in, in a strange way, to the first floor unit.

So modern triple deckers they like to be built with the primary entrance on the side of the building there is still an entrance to the first floor unit but it's not the entrance to all three units so that's the main motivator for this They also fix the requirement of evenly spaced doors on commercial buildings, which is basically it doesn't work right so we all want small little commercials Businesses, as there are in Davis Square. There are other ways to regulate that. This is leading to, for those who are familiar with the dominoes in Davis square, there's just a bunch of non-functional doors They're compliant with the zoning, but they don't actually work. This is not the way to get that desired outcome. So that's recommended unanimously. 26-1258 this was literally fixing typos that have to do with an amendment we had done on parking maximums there were several thousand changes were made and about a dozen of them were typos those are now fixed 26, 13, 38.

This is a terminology change so our current zoning uses the term ADU for affordable dwelling units The rest of the world uses that to mean accessory dwelling unit, backyard cottage. So this will change ADU will now mean Accessory Dwelling Unit and affordable units are officially called Price Restricted Dwelling Units PRDU So those are all before us and I ask that we lay them on the table once this is approved. And I'll just quickly summarize the ADU conversation. So there's a proposal from the administration to bring our zoning for backyard cottages, ADUs into compliance with a relatively new state law. The proposal from the mayor's office, it does a number of things I'll just list. So it allows ADUs to be a freestanding building, a backyard cottage or to be within the principal building so you can have an addition that's an ADU or basement or attic

It follows kind of odd state requirement in the regulations saying that the overall building height and the number of stories for a backyard cottage has to be the same as whatever the principal building is on the lot. and the proposal sets the maximum square footage to 1,750 square feet. So the committee has had a very robust conversation about this. And if I were to describe the overall thrust of the conversation is that our zoning right now, if you're a regular person and you read it, it describes ADUs as being one-and-a-half stories Each story can be 576 square feet, so that's 24 feet by 24. So we were all anticipating that at the time of passage there would be a ground floor and a floor above that about you know small 24 by 24 but developers have found a way to also add a finished basement which can by under building code can come five or six feet above ground so you're really getting three stories of living space

and these are quite large in many cases, you know up to 1,750 square feet. You know a three story, a three floor single family house So I'd say broadly, I believe there's a desire by the committee to kind of take our zoning to what we originally intended to be one and a half story ADUs. The state has thrown a curveball by making it seemingly impermissible to limit the overall height to 1.5 stories, but what they do give us is the ability to regulate the overall square footage So the proposal that the committee will be considering at our next meeting will be to reduce the overall square footage to two of those floor plates. So that's 1,152 square feet so each floor can be 576 would be two of them That way we can get back to just, well, according to state law, we can't literally say they can only be one and a half stories. We can have the square footage be that that's really what you can build.

So, that's what we're going to be deliberating. There's a range of opinions on this. We also had a lot of discussion about based on the history of how construction has often gone in Somerville just to really nail down the fact that If there is going to be a basement, that counts towards the square footage. That is the case, legally speaking but I think all of us can identify many examples to the contrary in Somerville neighborhoods so that conversation is going to be continued we have a committee meeting next week where I believe this will come up again with that I ask that the committee report be accepted

Any discussion on the committee reports? All right, seeing none that is approved. So those four items are now before us they'll be laid on the table pending a recommendation from the planning board. Next item out of court.

Next Item is 6C1. Report on the Committee on Legislative Matters meeting on October 13, 2026. Councilor Scott.

Thank you Mr. President to make up for my previous speech I'll make this very short we had a very efficient two-hour meeting on October 13th We handled a great many ordinances. First on our agenda was a public hearing that was requested by the In a blistering display of community engagement there were zero speakers. We did then have a discussion of the ordinances to establish a rental registry. The update from the administration being that they're going to work on that soon. The discussion of short-term rentals and our ordinance that... whose enforcement has been mixed is a worthwhile discussion. I recommend you directly to the video on that.

There was a discussion of the proposed ethical procurement ordinance, which was remaining in committee. and just as a preview there is I believe updated language that is being submitted and will be on the agenda for the next meeting which should be posted tomorrow. there was the approval of an amendment to the code of ordinances just to update who enforces certain ordinances mostly language changes over what departments are named and then A whole lot of drawer cleaning in terms of items that have been needed to be marked were complete, most of which were surveillance technology impact reports and technology specific use reports. Because of the quirk of how the ordinance is written, those are not items that are generated by the city council nor can they be amended by the City Council. Those are submissions of the mayor therefore

Even though there were some final changes that needed to be made, all of those items are being marked as placed on file and are being replaced by two items that were submitted this evening. I request that the committee report be accepted as submitted.

Any discussion on the committee reports? All right, seeing none, the report is approved. That puts one item before us for enrollment and then ordainment. Madam Clerk?

This is a roll call vote on item 26-1274, amendment to section 1-11B code of ordinance. Councilor Ewen-Campen?

Yes.

Counciler Link? Yes Councilor Scott? Yes Strezo, Councilor Sait? Yes. Councilor Wheeler? Yes Councilor Hartt? Yes Yes. Okay, Councilor Mbah? Yes. Councilor Davis? Yes But not in the affirmative that passes That is now appropriate for ordainment Ewen-Campen?

Yes.

Councilor Link? Yes! Councilor Scott? Yes Councilor Clingan? Councilor Strezo? Yes. Councilor Wheeler? Yes.

All right, very well. Councilor Scott, do you want to take up those two other items 715 and 716 out of order now so that we can talk about them in context? Sounds good, Mr. President. All right. If seen no objection, we'll waive the rules to take

Item 7.15 Requesting Approval of the Technology-Specific Surveillance Technology Impact Report for Body Worn Cameras and Item 7 point 16 requesting approval of the surveillance technology impact report for body worn cameras

Scott.

Thank you, Mr. President. Just as a way of explanation, as a reminder to everybody who may have forgotten about these, these are policy reports that are submitted by the mayor. They are basically At this point, they are transparency documents. The vote to actually authorize the use of these technologies was already taken by this council I believe in the middle of our summer recess So this is part of the administration's continuing commitment to refine these documents in response to various counselors, like Counselor Hardt and Ward 7, request to add further clarification. I would leave it to Councilor Hardt if she'd like to elaborate on that, or leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the changes. But as such... This adopting these has no change in the council's authorization of the use of this technology. It's simply acknowledging a policy change that the administration has placed into the document at the request of a counselor so

As such, I'd recommend that we vote to approve both of these items this evening. But if Councillor Hardt would like to elaborate.

Thank you, Councillor Scott. And just for the record, I'll note they did include all of the... Reflect all the discussions that I had as well up to that and then so I have no issue with them. Councilor Hardt, did you want to speak

I can just mention a couple of the changes that I remember. One was changing some of the language, just from citizens to civilians throughout and a couple putting in a requirement of issuing reports based on You know, data coming back to the council and civilian oversight body putting in there that civilian oversight would be able to proposed changes to the policies, things like that.

Very good. Any further discussion? Councilor Scott moves for approval of those two items. Seeing no discussion on the motion, those items are approved. Next item on clerk.

to item 6d1 committee report on the license and permits committee on meeting October 21, 2026. Councilor Hardt.

Thank you. So we had a meeting yesterday evening with two grants of location on the agenda, one we approved very quickly and when we had A lengthy discussion about because at the last meeting a abutter had come forward in the public hearing asking for consideration of combining work. and just to close the loop on that I did was able to connect with additional information today and find out there unfortunately we are not able there's no possible way of accommodating the Hardt. So I recommend both of those to be approved.

Councilor Hardt moves to approve the report as submitted. Any discussion? All right, seeing none, that is approved. Next item.

Next Item is 6E1 Report on the Committee of Traffic and Parking Meeting on October 14th, 2026. Councilor Sait.

Through you Mr. President, traffic and parking we had A public hearing regarding construction parking permits and the impact of current enforcement policy on neighborhood residents. We heard from Butters, The residents on those streets. And what we requested from the administration is that we have staff from ISD, from SPD from Engineering and Parking. So everyone is there, everyone is hearing the same version of what's happening and it was helpful to hear suggestions from the residents There was no discussion in the committee. It was just a public hearing, so we are going to have a discussion next month.

and hear from staff so yeah I ask that this committee report be approved as submitted all right thank you any discussion on the reports all right seeing none that report is accepted as submitted

Councilor Ewen-Campen moves to waive the readings of items 7.2 through 7.5 and refer them to land use see no objection next copy yes of course with a copy of the planning board for each of those items. Next item.

Next item is 7.6, a mayor's request requesting approval to appropriate 100,000 from the Encore Artists and Cultural Support Stabilization Fund to support local cultural council grants to artists organizations in schools

Thank you Mr. President I believe this was an item that the administration had expressed an interest in having approved tonight and I'm seeing IG 8 no not 7.6 Okay, sorry that was a point of confusion. In that case I move to waive the readings of item 7.6, 7.9 through 7.12 and 7.14 and refer these to the Finance Committee.

All right, so in addition to the item that has been read, we'll wave the readings to 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, and... No, not 13. 9, We already approved 12. So 9, 10, 11, 14 and that's it right? Okay, so those were the results. Let me start over. Wave the readings of those items and refer them to finance. And then that brings us to item 713.

The next item is 7.13, a mayor's request requesting approval to accept and expend a $1,776 grant

Mr. President, I move to approve this item now because of its relatively small size, its usefulness for our senior population and its evocative patriotic number

Any discussion? Seeing none, that item is approved.

Next item is 7.17, requesting confirmation of appointment of Gary Rogers.

President, I move to waive 7.7 to 7.18 and refer to confirmation of appointments.

All right, seeing no objection. Those items are referred to confirmation of appointments and personnel matters.

Next item. Next item is 8.1 Chief Assessor requesting to appear at this council's November 12, 2026 meeting for the tax classification public hearing and the determination in adoption of tax levy percentages for fiscal year 2027.

Several people have asked me in conversations recently why it is that the meeting before Thanksgiving always takes so long, and I'm reminded this is one of the reasons. But it's important, and we'll talk about it then. So that item is approved.

Next item is 8.3 City Clerk Conveying Block Party Licenses Issued It is still not too cool for block parties

Go to your block parties. Have a block party. If you don't have a block Party, contact the clerk's office and find out how to have a Block party because they're awesome in the year of The neighbor go hang out with your neighbors on Your street hopefully with only other Neighbors and no motor vehicles Alright, that item is placed on file. Next item?

Next item is 9.1 East Somerville Main Streets applying for a public event license for Haller

Yes, I move to waive the readings of 9.1, 9.2, 10.2 ,10.3, 10 .4 and approve

All right, Councilor Hardt moves to weigh the readings of those items and approves.

Seeing no... Mr. President, I just wanted to comment on the 10.3 Mamas Free Store event on November 14th. That's an amazing event. We should all spread the word.

All right. So those items, we'll waive the readings of those items. Take note of Councilor Wheeler's endorsement and those items are approved. Councilor Hardt?

And also wave the reading of 9.3 and send to licenses and permits please.

That item is referred to licenses and permits.

Next item? Next item is 9.4, Caroline Levy submitting comments regarding combined sewer overflow. That item's placed on file. Next item is 9.5, a public communication from Paul Gabarino submitting comments regarding discrepancies between state law and proposed zoning ordinances.

You want to read that one? A committee council here on campus should place on file.

Next item is 9.6 public communication from Lisa Schatz submitting comments regarding item number 26-1023 that chapter 2 article 8 division 1 of the code ordinances be amended as detailed within

That item is placed on file.

Next item is 9.7, Nathaniel Verter submitting comments regarding Tufts University.

That item

Next item is 10.5, John Landry submitting comments regarding item number 26-1501 that short term rental ordinances be amended That item is placed on file And item number 10.6, Alexandra Sheldon submitting comments regarding affordable housing That item is placed on file

Any further items?

There are no further items. No late items.

All right. Seeing no further business before the council, Councilor Scott, old one-leg JT moves to adjourn and we are adjourned. Thank you everyone