After the inauguration was rescheduled due to snow, my first city council meeting took place Tuesday of last week. We re-shuffled the seating — I ended up taking up Justin Tseng's old seat, while Justin moved into Zac Bears' old seat. The first thing I did was clear out a bunch of old wrappers in the desk and order a new lightbulb on Amazon for the desk lamp (one had been burnt out for years). Before the cameras rolled, the city council collectively bantered with the city messenger and the clerks. When the meeting started, the first thing we did was elect Councilor Bears as President and Councilor Kit Collins as Vice President, an official repeat of the soft election that had happened a month prior.

*I wasn’t ready at the camera when Zac took his oath of office, so I present — the VP oath!*

The general public noticed the new format of the meeting agenda. Councilor Bears had gotten the City Clerks to use a software package called Civic Clerk to design it, so the new format was clearer than before. The agenda had the usual beginning-of-year details, like adopting papers and standing rules from the previous year. The biggest change in content is that it listed the Council's upcoming projects and timelines for those projects, which would be hammered out under a new structure of seven standing subcommittees: Administration and Finance, Education and Culture, Governance, Planning and Permitting, Public Health and Community Safety, Public Works and Facilities, and Resident Services and Public Engagement. There are several proposed projects for the next year under each committee, and Councilors were given until the 18th of January to submit their own projects to be incorporated into the draft. During the meeting, Councilor Scarpelli, the longest-serving member of the new council, asked that the city website (which, as of this writing has a list of 18 subcommittees, though it will likely be updated shortly) map the old committees to the new ones.

*Zac, Emily, and Lawrence, the City Messenger, watching Kit take her oath.*

*Justin, center, in his new desk with two operational lights, and George, with Anna invisible to the left.*

Of the new committees, the one that's most pertinent to my own immediate interests is Planning and Permitting, since that's where re-zoning will come up — an eighteen-month-long process that involves consultants, the Planning office, and a lot of public input. In addition, I submitted a few pet projects that will be debated at the Committee of the Whole Meeting on the 24th of January, including a potential Transportation Demand Management program that I've been pushing for behind the scenes (linked is the explainer of the TDM program in Everett). To get volunteers to help in drafting other ordinances, I later messaged Housing Medford’s mailing list. Other upcoming projects include three Home Rule petitions: a real estate transfer fee, rent stabilization, and tenant first right of refusal. These are called “Home Rule Petitions” because we need to petition the State to enact them. Similar petitions have been submitted by many other communities. If the Affordable Homes Act is passed in the form we’d like and some of these rights are granted to towns and cities by default, these petitions become moot. But, if not, all of the current home rule petitions under the State's consideration would all be passed all at once, and it's important to ensure that Medford is on that list. Of these, I think the real estate transfer fee is the most potent overall in terms of its likelihood of becoming a reality and its potential impact on housing.

The other papers that came up included Councilor Lazzaro's resolution to ask the Board of Health to place a moratorium on Winter evictions, which prompted a question from me about how often evictees came into the Malden Warming Shelter (Lazzaro helps to run the warming shelter). Another resolution was brought forth by Councilor Collins: a discussion about a Good Landlord Tax Credit, which would offer landlords tax incentives to rent out properties below market rate. This saw support from both myself and Councilor Callahan — both of us would like legal ways to discriminate between local landlords who have a face-to-face relationship with their tenants and absentee/corporate landlords who see real estate as an asset to extract wealth from. Distinguishing between different types of landlords is pretty difficult to do legally. During the meeting, I pointed out that Good Landlord Tax Credits, in general, also incentivized landlords to maintain their properties — but, I did some research later and realized that I might have been mistaken in saying this; there is a bill for a Good Landlord Tax credit going through Beacon Hill now, and that bill only discussed tax incentives for landlords renting out at below-market-rate properties, not an incentive for maintaining properties; landlords can claim tax deductions for repairs in general, but that was outside the purview of this particular tax credit.

The rescheduled inauguration took place the next day. The Mayor used the opportunity to give her State of the City Address — two birds with one stone — and we all took pictures with the state delegation. Afterward, the City Council, School Committee, and Mayor went for drinks at El Tacuba. The next meeting is a Committee of the Whole, this coming Wednesday, in which we will discuss School Committee salaries.

The first city council meeting

Results of the vote on School Committee raises

Instructional books and School Committee salaries