Linkage Home Rule Petition
More and more this term I’ve been focused on Medford’s budget, since most of the shortcomings in City Hall can, in some way or another, be traced back to our small budget. Our linkage program is an important component of that. Linkage programs are when cities charge developers a standardized schedule of fees for their developments. Medford has one, and it doesn’t charge that much because we haven’t updated our fee schedule since 1990 ($1 in 1990 is worth $2.41 today). In this blog, I previously discussed linkage fees as a mechanism to fund the City’s new Affordable Housing Trust. This past City Council meeting saw a small update to that effort as we passed a Home Rule Petition to update the state’s enabling act.
To the Honorable Representatives Christine Barber, Paul Donato, and Sean Garballey and the Honorable Senator Patricia Jehlen,
Attached is a home rule petition to update the 1989 act that established Medford’s linkage program. Since 1989, this act has provided a critical source of funds for our police, our parks, our roads and traffic, and our water and sewers.
The current act requires a new study every three years to update the exact amount of the linkage fees, but in practice, since its institution in 1990, Medford has never performed such a study. Thus the exact linkage amounts have not been updated since its institution 34 years ago and have been drastically undervalued by the effects of inflation. As the City works to update the linkage fees and add a new source of revenue for affordable housing, we find that the original requirement for review every three years was likely too cost-prohibitive.
We therefore request two updates to the Act. The first extends the period of review from three years to 10 years. This mandates a more reasonable period in between studies. The second allows for automatic updates to the linkage fees in between studies, based on an inflation index. This would prevent fees from being undervalued over time from inflation and uses the same language as that established for the City of Watertown in 2022 (Chapter 302 of the Acts of 2022).
We have enclosed the proposed language of the Act.
Councilor Leming
AN ACT UPDATING THE LINKAGE EXACTION PROGRAM IN THE CITY OF MEDFORD
Chapter 488 of the Acts of 1989, “AN ACT ESTABLISHING A LINKAGE EXACTION PROGRAM IN THE CITY OF MEDFORD”, is hereby updated as follows:
Section 2, part 5 shall now read: The level of any exaction shall be reviewed at least every ten years and reset as required based upon the recommendation of the office of community development and the mayor of said city. In between reviews, updates to any exaction may be adjusted, over time or retroactively, based upon changes in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers compiled by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To recap: City Councils can’t pass a single ordinance without legal authority coming explicitly from the state. We could only establish a linkage program because the state gave us permission to in 1989. I asked a few months ago if we were able to just update the city’s ordinances so that those fees could be updated automatically with an inflation index, since we hadn’t done the required study in 34 years. The city’s lawyers told me pretty explicitly that we can’t, since it wasn’t outlined in the 1989 enabling act. Luckily, as noted in the letter, the legislature let Watertown do something like that two years ago. So I copied and pasted that language in the hope that they would do it for us. One the Mayor signs onto the draft above that the City Council passed, it’s called a “Home Rule Petition”.
A few things are happening in the backend with this linkage program. First, the city’s planning office is trying to establish a fifth bucket for affordable housing. This requires its own study, which may cost around $80,000. The City is trying to gather up the money to pay for that study. I proposed an ordinance update to do just this back in April, but, oddly, we can’t pass that ordinance before the study or else it might be subject to legal challenges. I’m pushing for it pretty hard because that $80,000 could lead to much more money coming in every year for the Trust. Second, updating all of the linkage buckets may cost as much as $150,000, which is why we would like longer periods of review between updates (as requested in the HRP). Last, a recent supreme court ruling is making City planners generally a bit uneasy about the legal basis for such programs, so it may need to be logistically revised in the future, but that’s more of a long-term consideration.
