Watertown City Council (Tuesday January 27, 2026)

I'd like to call the meeting to order. This is a meeting of the City Council of January 27th. This meeting is being broadcast and recorded by Watertown Cable Access. There is Zoom information as well as an email and telephone numbers on the city website. And I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll.

Bates, present, Councilor Feltner, present, Councilor Gannon, present, Councilor Gardner, present, Councilor Izzo, present, Councilor Palomba? Yes. Councilor Piccirilli? Present. President Sideris?

Present. Thank you. Can I get a motion to go into executive session? to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining. If an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining position of the public body and the chair so declares, which I do, We're talking tonight about DPW Union, Watertown Municipal Employee Group, Library Union, Fire Union, Police Patrol Union, and Police Supervisors Union.

So moved.

Is there a second? Second. Roll call please.

Piccirilli? Yes. Councilor Bays? Yes. Councilor Feltner? Yes. Councilor Gannon? Yes. Councilor Gardner?

Yes.

Councilor Izzo?

Yes.

Councilor Palomba? Yes. President Sideris?

Yes. We'll be returning to open session at approximately 7 p.m. Okay, we're back from open session. The next item is the Pledge of Allegiance. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, Thank you. The next item is public forum. If there's any member of the public either here or at home wish to speak. Seeing none, I close the public hearing and move on to examination of minutes. Can I get a motion on the minutes of January 13?

Mr. President, I make a motion that we adopt the minutes of January 13 as written.

Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. The next item is President's Report. I have two items, real brief. First, I want to just take this opportunity to thank Public Works, Public Safety, Police, Fire, Public Buildings. We had a challenging and we still have a very challenging situation with the snow and I believe that every single person that has been involved has worked very hard to do the best they could for this community and I'm sure we're not all happy and nobody's going to be happy but we could not control the fact that we got this much so in such an extended period of time. And Mr. Brady's probably been here since Sunday, and he's here again tonight. for his loan orders, and Denise and Silas and others. But thank you again and thank your departments.

Thank the public safety departments for all that they did. I know we had some challenges during this this weekend. So again, I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you. And then this past weekend, I just want to state that several of us went to different portions of the Mass Municipal Association Conference, and I want to just congratulate my colleague, Councilor Feltner, who was elected president of the MMA. That way. She used to be over here. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Feltner.

That's all I have. Public hearings. 8 is a public hearing and vote on a proposed loan order that the sum of $1,417,000 is appropriated to pay costs of purchasing the following items of departmental equipment for the Department of Public Works, including all costs incidental and related thereto, and they're all listed here. I don't think we need to list them all publicly. Mr. Manager, I will start with you.

Thank you, Mr. President. And as you noted, D.P.W. Director Tom Brady is here to answer questions on these items. These are consistent with conceptual recommendation number 37 for fiscal year 26 loan order for a million dollars. Conceptual Recommendation 23 for fiscal year 25 loan order for $417,000. There are some slight adjustments in which vehicles were determined to be of need, but the amounts, at 1,417,000 are consistent. The list of the vehicles are in the attachment here. I discussed them a bit at the last meeting, and Mr. Brady's available to provide any feedback and answer questions on it. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. Tom, did you want to add anything or?

Thank you Mr. President, members of the council. The only adjustment in this group of vehicles that's of note in my opinion is that there was previously a $200,000 allocation for Tandem axle chip truck. All it would do, we would chip wood chips into the back of it as we were taking down trees or doing pruning. We are recommending to transition that into a small bucket truck because you've heard about the thousand trees that we planted in the past three years under Mike Maselli's efforts. that will allow us to put a secondary crew out and work on the smaller trees to give them structural pruning to get them in good shape for future years. And we'll still have capacity to chip into it. So that's really the only adjustment here.

Thank you. This is a public hearing. If there's any member of the public either here or at home that wishes to speak, please raise your hand. Seeing none, I close the public hearing and ask for a motion from the council.

Mr. President, I make a motion that we approve the loan order for the DPW equipment for $1,417,000. Is there a second?

Second. Any discussion?

Garner, Isso, Offei, Palomba, Piccirilli, Bays, Feltner, Gannon, Sideris.

Yes, thank you. 8B is a public hearing and vote on a proposed loan order that the sum of $510,000 is appropriated to pay costs of purchasing the following items of departmental equipment for the Department of Public Works, including all costs incidental and related thereto. It's a 35 gross vehicle weight dump service truck, sewer pump truck, and the service response truck number 60. Mr. Manager.

Thank You mr. president as noted here this is consistent with conceptual recommendation 48 and 51 these work within the the sewer enterprise fund and to purchase those three trucks at $510,000, including replacing our famous SOAR response truck number 60. And Tom is certainly available to answer questions on this one as well. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. This is a public hearing. Tom, did you have anything to add?

Nothing there. I just happened to answer any questions that you have.

This is a public hearing. If there's any member of the public here at home wishes to be heard, please raise your hand. Seeing none, I close the public hearing and ask for a motion from the council.

Hall. Mr. President, make a motion that we approve the loan order for $510,000 for the sewer equipment.

Is there a second? Second. Roll call, please.

Councilor Izzo.

Yes.

Councilor Offei. Yes. Councilor Palomba. Yes. Councilor Piccirilli. Yes. Councilor Bays.

Yes.

Councilor Feltner. Yes. Councilor Gannon. Yes. Councilor Gardner. Yes. President Sideris.

Yes. Thank you. HC is a public hearing and vote on a proposed loan order that the sum of $80,000 is appropriated to pay costs of purchasing a utility truck for the Department of Public Works as more fully described in line 49 of the annual budget for fiscal year 2026, including all other costs incidental and related thereto. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. The item here, an $80,000 appropriation or borrowing for loan order for the purpose of purchasing a utility truck, this particular Loan Order comes for the Water Division, so it's a part of the Water Enterprise Fund. And again, Mr. Brady is available to answer questions on the details. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. This is a public hearing as well. If there's any member of the public here at home wishes to be heard, please raise your hand. Seeing none, I close the public hearing and ask for a motion from the council.

Mr. President, I make a motion we approve the loan order for $80,000 for the water system truck.

Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Roll call please.

O'Fay, Palomba, Piccirilli, Bays, Feltner, Gannon, Gardner, Izzo, Sideris.

Thank you. 8D is a public hearing and vote on a proposed ordinance to skip the stuff waste and reduction ordinance. This is going to be continued to February 24th. And the reason we're doing this is that in December, We had advertised for a public hearing for the January meeting and we had to have a date certain. We're again putting another date certain so that we do not have to re-advertise. So this will be on the February 24th agenda. pending review of the committee. Nine is motions, orders, and resolutions. And 9A is an authorization to enter into net metering credit purchase agreement with Rewild Renewables LLC. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. These net metering purchase credit agreements are an opportunity to access renewable energy, to save money for the city, and to stabilize our energy costs. But in order for them to work, you need a long term for them to happen. As you are aware Mr. President the state law requires us to seek a council agreement to sign on to any council vote to sign on to any sort of agreement that extends longer than three years. This is, I believe, a 20-year agreement. Silas, our energy manager, can probably answer questions about this better than I can. But, Mr. President, we have this before you tonight to ask for a request for the council to allow us to enter into this particular contract. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. Councilor Palomba.

Thank you. Can you just tell me the difference between an S REC which I get through my home and a REC

Silas Feiler, Energy Manager for the City of Watertown. An SREC is a subset of a REC. So a REC could be like a wind REC. it could be a landfill gas energy. Producing from that would be another type of wreck. Also, what do we call it, a dam. generating energy from that. And SREC is just for solar.

May I? Yes. I don't mean to press, it says in the third paragraph from, it says that while the city, would not receive the associated RECs. The agreement is intended as a cost saving initiative rather than a greenhouse gas reduction program. Can you explain that? I mean, I see that later we're going to get $90,000 and we may get more. Estimate it.

Estimate, I'm sorry. So the basic concept is we're joining a community farm, a solar farm, which is going to produce energy. They are going to apply for smart so that they make more money. SMART is a utility program run by the state. And the SMART program actually takes the SREC renewable energy credits So they can't give it to us without charging us for them. The city gives up the incentive that shows up in the SMART program for taking a municipal off-taker. and that's where the 10% savings come from.

So why isn't this a greenhouse gas reduction program as opposed to a financial? I don't understand the difference.

Because we're giving up the greenhouse gas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're giving up the greenhouse gas reductions. as we're giving up the recs. We're giving them up? Yes. We're letting them claim them so that they can give us a 10% discount.

Oh, okay. All right. Thank you.

Any other questions? Councilor Piccirilli.

Oh, thank you, Silas. So this is a 20-year term, and I noticed that there, other than for cause, there's no way out of this contract. Is that correct? I was just looking at paragraph 2.1.

Typically there is not, but oftentimes there's a 10-year and 15-year exit. If I remember right, there was some sort of exit clause in this, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

No, I think if you look at paragraph two, it says it's 20 years only for cause and for early termination, but it has to be if they don't do certain things, like provide us... And I take your word for it. I mean, I've just... So we're going to assume that it's going to work for us for 20 years, but... and that they're going to provide us the equipment and they have to list a whole bunch of things they have to do. If they don't do any of those, we can terminate the clause within 30 days. But other than that, assuming they continue to provide us the electricity, we continue to consume it. Yes. It's non-terminable. The actual price we're going to pay. I know in 4.1, it says we're going to pay, what, 48% of the... the net metering credits, is that correct?

But what does this translate into like for an actual cost per kilowatt hour compared to what we're paying under our current contract?

that'll change over time. So as we are buying electricity year over year, the price for our electricity changes year over year. So the delivery is going to change, the actual supply aggregation that we do as well will change. but it will always be 10% less than that.

10% less than what our current electricity supply cost. So it's always going to be.

Supply and delivery.

Supply plus delivery.

Plus delivery.

Okay. And that's guaranteed in the contract? Yeah. and as you know, delivery costs seem to be running 30% higher than energy costs these days.

Yes, I agree.

So it's going to be always 10%. So for the life of the 20-year contract, it's always going to be 10% less.

So we will see it show up on our utility bill. At the bottom of our utility will be the net metering credits. The credits will offset that utility bill, and we will pay it. Bill to rewild or whoever they reorganize as the solar farm.

Okay, and then the last question is, Table A lists all the meters. Yes. All the accounts, I assume each account is a separate meter. Correct. City of Watertown. So two questions. Is that every single building or every single electric meter that the City of Watertown has or there's some excluded?

The City of Watertown has about 150 electric meters or electric bills that we pay. This is equivalent to about half of what the energy use of the city is.

So about half the meters in town are on the, no?

Half the amount of energy. So some meters are using a lot more energy than others.

Are the school meters on this?

some of them, the middle school would be on it, but Hosmer would not. Nor Conniff, nor the high school once it comes online. Phillips, yes. Lowell, I can't remember.

So how did you decide or how did the staff decide which accounts we could do this, save this money with and which ones were not?

tended to go for the higher energy use accounts, mostly because it saves on paperwork and administrative processes later on.

and then if we want what's the process I couldn't find it in the contract if we wanted to add more meters at a future date is there a prop are we able to do that or we just locked in with this is all shows up on the

Gosh, I can't remember what the form is, but it's basically an Eversource form. We'll be able to change it over, but we'll have to work with Rewild to make sure that we can move it. So we can move it up a little bit, we can move down a little bit, but we can't move around a lot.

So if we're going to tear down a building, if we're going to tear down a senior center and build a new senior center, we could take that meter off, we could put the new meter on, that kind of thing. So that is, the contract allows us to do that.

It allows us to do that.

Okay, actually I said that was the last question, actually one more.

And Rewild will have to approve those changes as time goes on. They may have extra space and they may allow us to put all the meters on.

So for the remaining meters that aren't on this program, do we have a plan going forward to move them to a lower, like a solar supply, lower cost?

So one of the mistakes that cities and towns often make is to overestimate and put too many meters on this, and then they end up with a lot of extra credits that they've paid for that they're never able to use. and that shows up a lot. So typically what we're doing is on these particular meters, we're only doing about 85% of the electric use. and then we're looking at another overall half of the electric meters being free so that we could have some other function later on.

So we would explore other options in the future.

As time goes on, I would imagine that we're going to have more EVs and we're going to have more air handling units and our electric rates or bill is going to go up higher. And then we'll start looking at this again.

Thank you. Questions? I wanted to add two perspectives and I don't want to overly confuse this but I do want to share that Silas has also been working with the Housing Authority that actually did get in a situation where they bought more credits than they need and we're we're getting a chance to kind of pull some of the credits from them to reduce some of our bills so that we're working on an agreement between our two organizations. We have to be careful and we had a long conversation with our procurement director not to buy more than we need but when someone does buy more than we need, we can actually help them out by buying them back off of them and we're getting a little discount on doing it that way and we've worked out a good agreement. The other thing I just wanted to note, just for record keeping sake, the cover letter that was dated January 20th references Clemsway Solar LLC. If you look at the contract, it actually says Logging Swamp Solar LLC. The LLCs are the particular solar, Farm that we're buying from.

Between writing the letter and finalizing the contract, they moved us from one farm to another. So it is the logging swamp solar. They're located in Rochester, Massachusetts. The project has been approved by the Planning Board and the Conservation Commission there, so we're not buying something from some community that doesn't want it. My understanding is their approvals are in place. This thing's going to get built. It's going to be available to us. in the very near future. It's a different farm than the one that we thought it was when we wrote the cover letter. Denise wrote the cover letter to me last week, so I just wanted to clarify that little error and tell you we are on board with logging swamp solar in Rochester as the site we're going to buy from.

Thank you. Councilor Offei.

Do we have any existing relationship with Rewild or this is the first?

this is our first relationship with them.

I was just thinking about that because of Councilor Piccirilli's comment about a 20 year contract. That seems like a very long contract. What other companies did you look at?

I had the energy broker for the city of Watertown actually look into this and look for a company that worked with this. And I had long conversations with this one particular company. They have recommended them at this point.

I just want to finish up by saying thank you for looking into this and it's very rare that we enter into a 20-year agreement for anything. I'm just curious Given all the fluctuations in electric markets and delivery charges and things that go on with the federal government, why? Why do you think, in your personal opinion, this is a good idea for 20 years?

So I'll start out with, I did this in my hometown maybe 15 years ago, and they've had no issues with it at all. When you look around the state, there's very few cities or towns that are left that haven't done this yet. With the solar adventures that we're seeing from our federal government, trying to find that farm at this point is probably the right time to find one. the incentives used to be about 20% for about six months and then it went dropped to 15% and then it's been 10% now for probably 10 years. That's kind of where it came from.

Okay, Councilor Izzo.

Thank you. So just quickly, was this reviewed at all by the city lawyer?

Yes, city lawyer has gone through this and reviewed it.

Okay, thank you.

All those in favor? I'm sorry, we didn't get a motion. Can I get a motion to approve the net metering credit purchase agreement? So moved. Is there a second?

Second.

All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilors. 9B is a resolution authorizing the expenditure or gift of funds for the Watertown Food Pantry. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. As you know, Chapter 44, Section 53A requires expenditure of gifted funds to be approved by the City Manager and the City Council. As you see in the last page of the item, the Watertown Food Pantry has received $51,582.58 in funds. in recent months, recent weeks, November and December actually. Of that, 17,000 came through the Watertown Community Foundation where Individual donors are able to donate to the community foundation that passes that funding through to us. It also allows people to donate through donor advised funds and some other programs that we can't directly collect from. You see the full list here, and I'm seeking the council's approval for expenditure of these funds for the food pantry. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. Can I get a motion on the expenditure of gift of funds? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it. Next item on the agenda is a resolution authorizing a transfer of funds in the amount of $421,500 from the City Council Reserve account to various personnel accounts. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. Before you tonight is a transfer of funds in relation to the settlement of the fourth of our six union contracts, the contract with Locals 1347 of AFSCME Council 23. This is the, oh, wait a minute. Oh, do you have my, sorry. I'm just trying to make sure I've got this together. Let me see. Okay, right, so this is the Library 1347 at the Firefighters, which is the fourth contract, and Library, which is the fifth contract. These two are together. This agreement represents a fair and equitable resolution that serves the best interests of the Watertown taxpayers, the city, the union members. In the case of the firefighters contract, establishes a more organized compensation system this year and then puts them on cost of living increases in the 2.5% range for the second and third year of the contract.

in the circumstances of the library contract. The increases of 2.25, then 2.5, and 2.5 are the same as in the Public Works Union, and the Watertown Municipal Employees Union. And then there are a number of minor provisions in addition attached to those contracts. There also is attached here a transfer to the city manager's full-time salaries account to cover the fiscal year 2026 salary increase for the city manager. Thank you very much for that. and this does make sure to fund that. So the transfer amount $421,500 into various fire department accounts, various library department accounts and the city manager salary account. And that is what we have here. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. Can I get a motion on the resolution authorizing the transfer of funds to fund the two contracts and the salary adjustment for the manager?

So moved.

Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Roll call, please.

Councilor Bays? Yes. Councilor Feltner? Yes. Councilor Gannon? Yes. Councilor Gardner?

Yes.

Councilor Izzo? Yes. Councilor Offei? Yes. Palomba.

Yes.

Councilor Piccirilli. Yes. President Sideris.

Yes, thank you. I just want to take a moment to say that I had a conversation with the president of Local 1347, and he couldn't come tonight but asked me to read a brief statement. he wanted to thank everyone on the City Council for supporting this MOA and he also wanted to I extend a thank you to the City Council and the City staff from all the firefighters of Local 1347. and a special thank you to Deputy City Manager Emily Monet. She did a great job making the process a positive experience this time around. So that's from the President of the Firefighters Union. Thank you. Next item on the agenda is

9D, which is a resolution authorizing a transfer of funds in the amount of $283,500 from the City Council Reserve to the various city capital improvement accounts. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. Here we get into a little bit of the nuts and bolts of trying to make a number of different projects work and work the best way we can. and the auditor can certainly help me answer any questions the council may have on these items. But there are four items here that we're looking to fund through a transfer from council reserve. The first item is $9,500 to public buildings, which closes a funding gap for the police department's level two charger expansion now. We're gonna talk a little bit more later about level three, about the fast charging at the police station that will allow patrol type cars to run electric because they're able to do quick charging. Right now, detective cars, cars that are used on day shifts, can be electric, and we're looking to make sure that we can have level two chargers available for them all at the police department.

there's some operational capital funds available to pay this, but there was a $9,469.85 gap in this, so we're looking for $9,500 there to cover that particular item. 84,000 to cover the remaining shortfall in the fire headquarters kitchen renovation. This has been something on the to-do list for quite a while. Had a $100,000 budget. over the last couple of years, they were able to set aside an additional $89,000 in carryover funds for this project. But nonetheless, when all bids and everything came in, this is more in the range of a $275,000 project. It's been a capital project we wanted to get done for a while and we would like to seek the $84,000 to cover that gap. $135,000 for traffic signal and safety improvements. This is something kind of an interesting circumstance. We created the new traffic division and staffed it with a new supervisor, Kevin Woodard, and this is sort of just in time.

I mean, we were worried that our signal infrastructure had issues, but now that we have someone dedicated to really looking into it, what we discovered, is the Galen and Watertown Street Signal, the Watertown and California Street Signal, and a series of school flashers need... basically there are some things in need of assistance and then there are five others in there are five locations that are in disrepair. So there's a number of different things here that the Public Works Department recommends is just about $135,000 to fix that we want to make sure that our signals and our systems are working well. Going forward we're going to put an operational budget item to cover this in the traffic division at Public Works. So in the future, you'll see this wrapped in the budget, so we won't be coming back doing this every year.

But being that they don't have a dedicated funding source for this department yet for these sort of operations, we're seeking a transfer from for this year to cover that particular item. And then finally, $55,000 for an EV transit van for human services to support expanded mobile food access. I'm asking for this a little bit out of normal schedule because what we have here is that the Human Services Department is establishing who they are and what they need and what their priorities are as a new department. and seeing food security as a primary need for the community. The Human Services Department launched along with community agencies and direct service providers, some efforts to make sure we have more accessible food programs. The van will allow the department to develop a mobile food access program, expand delivery service, provide pop-up markets in the community as we're concentrating the food pantry into one location in the Parker building that will allow us to provide some of those services in other places.

It can also be used by the community wellness and the veteran service team for community programs and offerings. and that item is $55,000. Together that's 283,500. And like I said, the city auditor can answer specifics about those requests. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. Can I get a resolution? Can I get a motion authorizing the resolution for the transfer of funds of $283,500? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Discussion?

I just had one question, Mr. Manager. Electric Van for the Human Services to handle the food issues. Is that going to replace the red pickup truck that the food pantry uses, or are we going to keep both?

The understanding from the deputy manager is that we are going to, for now, be keeping the red van. The red pickup truck?

Yeah. Okay. This is an additional option. Okay. I just didn't know. I was just curious. Thank you.

Any other questions? Councilor Feltner.

Thank you, Mr. President. Could you remind me, we don't have EV charging at the Parker School, do we, yet?

We do. Silas, could you answer that question if it's okay, Mr. President?

Yes, we have chargers at Parker. Right now we have two, but as the construction happens there, we might expand that. But we have actually put a few extra chargers over at Sterritt at this point, so we're rotating vehicles around. We don't have an issue with charging for another couple of cars over there at Parker.

Okay, thank you. If I may, are they level two chargers? Are they open to the public?

No, they're meant for fleet only.

Okay. My next question is, and I heard the manager say we are going to have operational budget put together. So I'm assuming maybe when it comes to high school, school zone traffic signals or... other signals that might be needed that will be coming forward beyond what's in here is what I heard the manager say.

Now that we have a traffic division budget, the conversations about how to prioritize where we need signals, need to upgrade signals, need to invest in them, is something we can do. We created this division last year and didn't give it a whole lot of resources, and we realized mid-year that that was a gap, and we hope to address that as we build the appropriate budget for the department in the future.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to say thank you to you and Jenna for thinking about this service to be provided with so much food insecurity. I think it's great that we have an additional vehicle helping out using the food pantry when they get to the, you know, from the Parker School, Parker Annex. I think it's wonderful and fully supportive. Can I get a roll call, please?

Feltner, Gannon, Gardner, Izzo, Offei, Palomba, Piccirilli, Bays, Sideris.

9D is the first reading on a proposed loan order that the sum of $300,000 is appropriated to pay costs of purchasing a Spark Charge Level 3 mobile electric vehicle charging platform for the police station. Mr. Manager. Thank you, Mr. President.

This one and the next item, both first readings, move us from a discussion of level two charging to level three charging, the significant fast charging that allows you charge a vehicle quickly and move on. As you may recall, and we talked about line 109 in the capital improvement plan last year that that tried to fund level three charging at the police station so that we could move towards electric patrol vehicles. We were hitting upon a couple of challenges. The first challenge is it takes a while to set this up and there's actually vehicles that are coming available that we could potentially get access to. And the second challenge is that we were working through some operational and cost issues with setting this up. In the meantime, Department of Public Vehicles reached out to Spark Charge, which is a Massachusetts based company that has been really developing some cutting edge innovative strategies for mobile charging.

We'll talk about this more as we get into the public hearing, but this particular item would allow us to speed up doing level three charging by getting this platform in early while we're still dealing with waiting for the item on 9F to come on board and also provide some flexibility. One of the things I really like about this is a fully charged mobile unit. If we ended up in some sort of a major disaster situation and powers out for days and we're working on electric cars. As long as the mobile unit is charged before the power goes out, the mobile unit is then available and we can then charge vehicles off the mobile unit. We'll share more about that at the next meeting, but that's why this is here for a first reading tonight. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. 9F is the first reading on a proposed loan order that the sum of $900,404 is appropriated to pay costs of purchasing three level three electric vehicle charges for the police station. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. This is also a first reading. This would be for the level three chargers, fixed level three chargers at the station. It will take a little bit longer to come online, but they are something we are still pursuing. both this one and the previous one there is a note in here that the public buildings department is still pursuing some electric utility make ready grants that can reduce the cost of these These are the full cost numbers, but we look forward to discussing those with you at the next meeting. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. Communications from the manager and we're going to try something different going forward. We're starting tonight. We have seven requests for confirmation or reappointments to boards and commissions rather than list every single one of them because they automatically get referred. I'm going to just go A is a request for confirmation to the Board of Health that goes to Human Services. B is a request for appointment and reappointments to the Conservation Commission. goes to Parks and Recreation. Request for confirmation of reappointments to the Community Preservation Committee goes to Economic Development and Planning. Request for confirmation of reappointment to the Licensing Board goes to Rules and Ordinances. Request for confirmation of reappointment to the Planning Board goes to Economic Development and Planning.

F is a request for confirmation of appointment to the Traffic Commission. That goes to Public Safety. and G is a request for confirmation of reappointments to the Zoning Board of Appeals. That goes to Economic Development and Planning. The next item is H, and I'll let the manager talk on this one. This is a charter issue, so Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. I will just note the appointment submitted for A through G went through the typical process with the Residence Advisory Committee and I thank you and the council committees for taking the time to review them. for item H, qualifications for a city treasurer collector. As you may know, Melissa Morrissey, our treasurer collector left Watertown a few weeks ago to take a job in another community. These are particularly interesting and challenging jobs to fill. We have not yet posted this one, but we're getting ready to do so. Under Article 3, Section 3A of the Charter, I am seeking to ask for a council committee to schedule a meeting so that we can talk about the qualifications we are looking for in this position. Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. This will go to the Committee on Personnel. 10I is the submission of the proposed fiscal year 27 to 30 capital improvement program. Mr. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. President. I am going to hand this little pile down and take one clipped pile for each councilor and just pass it down. In each clipped pile here is the cover letter, some appendices that cover the capital, Parks project schedule, streets and sidewalks project schedule, prior year items that we believe should be continuing, the color sheet that is the typical process for capital improvement, the water and SOAR ones to follow a little bit later. And I will just note, we have also attached to that schedule items that typically we do afterwards as we submit this. This year, in order to do the capital plan, we really needed to do an iterative process where we were running the debt schedules over and over again as we were looking at the different options in the colour sheet. I thought it was important to put the debt schedule together up front.

What you will see in this particular document is it works to see what a capital plan looks like if we fund the middle school at the value that was given to us by the by Vertex given to the School Building Committee in September, that $120 million number, and then also seeks to fund some additional funding for the Watertown Square Plan and fund the Senior Center. The fiscal year 27 numbers seem to work well. capital expenditures are at 7.97% of the general fund budget exclusive of the building for the futures project, which we're supposed to keep that number under 8%, so feeling pretty good about that 7.97 number. And thank you to the auditor and the team for A lot of assistance from Megan Lang and Mark Lang on pulling this together and also Deputy Manager and all of our departments that pulled these numbers together.

The challenge that you will see in this is that we really need to push up the amount of money that's into the debt service lines and running the full debt schedule. You'll see that the fiscal 31 funding for debt service for for the city reaches about $53 million, which is over 20% of the projected budget for that year. That's a number that I've expressed in the past is some concern, especially if the tax home rule situation becomes a challenge and we wanted to hold back taxation and also if our new growth numbers remain slow. this depends a little bit more on a little bit more new growth than projected right now in order to really work and that's one of the challenges we're going to get to discuss with the budget and fiscal oversight committee when we're at the committee meeting but for now it's here it's something for you all to look at and I look forward to discussing it with the BFO committee in the coming weeks and working through conceptual recommendations as we usually do. So thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you. You can continue on.

Sure. So in case you probably all noticed, it snowed a little bit the last couple of days. And thank you, Mr. President, for your kind words towards the staff. and Mr. Brady's left, but I just wanted to offer my own for a moment to share that we received over 19 inches of snow in Watertown since Sunday. and the DPW crews worked over 50 hours and they're not done yet. I appreciate the work of the DPW crews, appreciate the work of our public safety departments. I also appreciate the many people who patiently took and listened to each and every one of our Everbridge calls and responded to it appropriately. It was a little tricky in that we needed cars moved by noon on Sunday, and then we really needed to move back between 6 and 7 a.m. this morning in order to be able to clear the streets and then clear the... the parking lots and be ready and we should be ready for school opening tomorrow.

School parking lots, drop off spots and with very few exceptions the sidewalks around the schools are in shape for being able to be open tomorrow. and it's taken a lot to get there. You may have noticed that when you're working with a DPW crew that has a limited number of contracts and a couple of folks who've been sick recently and you send them out on an entire overnight and throw three inches an hour of snow, that when you wake up the next morning, sometimes the roads aren't pushed all the way back to the curbs. The team went back through last night as we were getting another three inches of snow on top of the previous snowstorm. and did a lot of work to push the snow back to curbs on streets as much as they could. Two or three things happened in those cases. The first thing is it places a lot of snow back in front of people's driveways again, so sometimes people wake up unhappy about that. Second, there are areas where we end up with very large snow banks, sometimes at corners, sometimes on top of the sidewalks that we're now asking you to shovel.

we're aware that that is challenging under those circumstances and sometimes we just don't get all the way there and time runs out and the Snow emergency's over and people with cars are back on the street at 6 a.m. and the road's still a little narrow. So what I wanted to share is first of all a reminder that we still have an overnight parking ban and we still need the cars off the street overnight and one of the reasons we need the cars off the street overnight is for every one of the next three nights, we're expecting to bring in six front-end loaders, 12 dump trucks and additional equipment, additional six equipment pieces behind that to do sanding and cleanup. and we're going to try to get some of those big piles off the corners. We're going to try to push some stuff back where we need to. They'll be working daytime and nighttime. We want to clean up street corners, bus stops, snow piles, anything that we can as we go. and there's work to be done there over the course of the next three nights. If there are things that are frustrating to people at this point, I urge them during the work day tomorrow to call 311

and share with us what that frustration is because we pass that along to our public works team and they work very carefully to try to address those things. We do... have a rule that one is supposed to clean up sidewalks within 24 hours after the snow stopping, which really is essentially middle of the night, some point tonight. So I do hope folks have taken those efforts to clean those sidewalks. I am realistic enough to understand that if you have an eight foot snowbank at the corner of, if you're in a corner lot and you have an eight foot snowbank sitting at your corner, sometimes clearing an eight foot snowbank created by a plow to clear your sidewalk is just not realistic. I am asking for patience and some understanding of some of the challenges that are faced on all sides here. the folks looking to get around who really could use the benefit of those open sidewalks, the folks who have to shovel them and whether or not those are doable in certain circumstances,

and the folks in our public works team who may have placed that eight foot pile there because there just weren't a whole lot of other options of where to put the snow under these circumstances. We can take it for sidewalks not cleared. we are in a position where we're set to do that. If we have complaints, we're going to investigate them and see what they are and what they look like. But if we get there and the complaint is something that literally was caused by our DPW putting an eight foot snow pile on your sidewalk and you can't clean it, we're going to be reasonable about that too. We're going to figure these things out. It is not easy out there. I think we have done a great job on a lot of things. I mean, I will share that There are pros and cons with being a manager who doesn't live here. The con is that I can't peek out my window every day and exactly assess what's going on. The pro is that I get to drive through four other communities on my way into town every day. And let me tell you from that perspective, I think we've done a really good job.

So I just appreciate everyone's patience and the crews out there doing a lot of work still. The work is not over. There's stories about another storm coming next week, so the work may not be over for a while. I've managed to have three quiet winters as manager and now this, so I'm doing the best to work with Mr. Brady and the team over there to do what we can. So thank you on that. just to keep the particularly interesting conversations going. The other thing I want to speak for a moment about, which seems to be coming up over and over again in the community, is the license plate reader camera system that we had been looking at with the company Flock. I've been hearing a lot about this over the course of the last couple of months and I really appreciate the police did a event last week on how they use technology and how that works.

I think most of the feedback I've received is that there's a lot of confidence and trust in our police department and and their efforts to fairly use technology to address their law enforcement needs without using technology in a way that is intrusive or has privacy concerns, et cetera. There is just realistically a lot of technology available out there regardless of anything that we put on the streets. Our police department and any other investigatory unit is able to find a lot between the body cams that our detail officers wear, the ring cameras that people have on their doors that see things coming by every day, the surveillance cameras that many of our private corporate folks around and you know you drive into a parking lot for a

any of a number of things around here and they may have any sort of system on it but I want to clarify a few things because first of all I would say that that well I haven't organized this thought very clearly. Let me not bury the lead and start with this, all right? My intention at this point is to inform Flock that we're not going forward with this particular contract. I think that is the easiest way to then figure out what we're going to do next. There's been enough concerns about the particular company here and some of the things that's happened to them over the years that I think we need to We've been in a holding pattern. I think we need to go from a hold to a stop and just say we're not going to go forward with this flock contract at this point in time. But I also want to say that to the extent that I have the time to dig into a little bit what comments are going on in the community and social media and Reddit and Facebook.

the amount of misinformation about police technology is pretty vast here. We don't have license plate readers in town. the number of times I've seen somebody say, oh, what's that? Oh, well, that's the police's camera. They're doing something. I'm like, it isn't? We don't have license plate readers in town. This was a contract to do license plate readers with a company. that we signed. And then after we signed, we heard some complaints. We put it on hold. They have not installed anything. And we have been in that position since that time. and I will work with our procurement office on the step to extract ourselves from that contract. If you see something in town that looks like a license plate reader on a city street, it isn't. Maybe some of our private entities in town have it. I can't tell you whether or not there's one in a given parking lot here or there. I know Waltham has them. I know Lynn has them. I know Cambridge had them. but we don't.

There's also my understanding that there was a lot of conversation about the particular circumstances of the company sharing information with federal agencies. our contract was intended to be written in a way that doesn't allow that. There was some capacity to be able to tighten that language. But on the other hand, I feel like a cut and a fresh start on any questions related to this is probably the best way to do this. What I would still like to do is the following though, because I think this has stirred up an important set of questions regarding this thing. First of all, I will share with you that our police chief is meeting with the ACLU attorney who has brought up issues about police surveillance technology. That meeting is scheduled this week. I want them to go forward and have that conversation, review the draft policy that we've written and understand kind of overall how the police use technology and use data collection is still an important conversation as it relates to this.

I would still like to have a conversation with the council committee like we initially discussed about what the council feels is a comfortable and appropriate circumstance of where we use technology and where we don't. if a crime is committed, the worst case scenario of that is a random kidnapping, which is a very rare crime. But if it is committed and all we have is someone who might have stolen a car or stolen a license plate and we have that plate number, the ability to track that plate is valuable. but the ability to track that plate and put the data in the hands of a company that our community members don't trust is not worth, for the limited likelihood of that, it's a very challenging situation to go down that road with the concerns about everything going on at a national level and how it relates to all that. What I want to do is I want to get out of this conversation about flock. I want to have a fresh start at this whole question of whether or not there is technology that works.

There may be other companies that do this. There may be circumstances where we can hold data in-house. There may be circumstances where something works that makes sense. but right now there's enough questions about the specific actions of this particular company and the specific actions of this particular technology as it relates to this. I feel we're losing faith in their ability to manage the data and Well, I have a lot of faith in how our police manages their policies and their data. I can't sit here and vouch for some outside company on this level, and I don't want to do that under these circumstances. I think the best bet is to end the flock relationship sort of have a reset on this question and have a conversation with the council on where how and under what circumstances it's appropriate for the Police Department to be using data. And then if there's some circumstance where we can write a good policy and find a vendor that works right with us or something, maybe there's a point to have a conversation about whether or not this works.

but I think that there's just too much concern, like I said, some of the stuff I can vouch is not actually true, but enough of it is that there is a concern here and there's a moment to say, This isn't the right company, the right technology, the right relationship at the right time. So I want to put a halt to that for now and then move from there. Let me just take a quick look through here and see if there's anything else. But I think that is all I have this evening, Mr. President. So thank you very much. That's it.

Thank you. And by the way, thank you on behalf of the many people that have reached out on this flock situation. Looking forward to having the appropriate discussion in a very public forum when the time comes with the appropriate subcommittee to make a recommendation. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Requests for information? Any requests for information? Feltner.

Thank you, Mr. President. It's more of a point of information on the request for confirmation, or I'm sorry, referral to committee for department head, treasurer, collector. I would think they would go to budget and fiscal oversight versus personnel and town city organization. Just comment, thank you.

if you feel that strongly and you want to make a motion you're welcome to do that but I feel this person would be an employee of the managers and I think it's appropriate that the personnel has a discussion about it.

Thank you. I won't make a motion. This has come up in discussion with council rules and so that's why I was clarifying now. Thank you.

Any other requests for information? Announcements, any announcements? I want to take one minute to say Thank you to Representative Lawn and Representative Owens who today hosted myself, the manager, the assessor, and Tyler for a joint Committee meeting on the Committee on Revenue to discuss our home rule petition on the tax classification study on the class classification issue. It's the second step. The first step was us asking them to do this. The second step was to begin the process of getting the House of Representatives to take this up. So I think this was a very helpful opportunity today for us to go in.

Again, we're trying to do whatever we can for the residents of this community to try to relieve the residential tax increases that could be coming. if we don't get this home rule petition. So I want to publicly thank them for getting us on the docket and getting us to be first on the docket today. that's where we are on that. Public forum, any member of the public here or at home wish to be heard? Seeing none, I close the public forum and ask for a motion to adjourn. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? The ayes have it.

Thank you.