Adjournment

Transcript (~29 min @ 2:01:30)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 2:01:22 Christopher Cinella: seeing the objection the public comment is now closed i will entertain um a motion actually there's no objection i'd like to go to recess this meeting so that we

▶ 2:01:32 Speaker 2: can finish up okay we are now mr president uh yeah i think a motion to recess um i already

▶ 2:01:38 Christopher Cinella: did that through unanimous consent thank you um do we have um back to you chair

▶ 2:01:59 Maya Jamaleddine: thank you president senella and we're back to order 2022-27 do we still have mr chu

▶ 2:02:19 Maya Jamaleddine: Mr. Chu, if you'd like to speak, the floor is now yours.

▶ 2:02:25 Speaker 11: First, I want to say thank you. Thank you all for having me. I'll say thank you to Mayor Broder for both kind words. I'm very excited to get started and really help out Melrose here. So, as a little bit of background, my background is in epidemiology, and so one of the focuses I've had in the past was infectious diseases. When I first came to my role in Manchester as a public health specialist, one of my focuses was on substance

▶ 2:03:06 Speaker 11: prevention. So, one of my main focuses was on substance use prevention, and a lot of the work revolved around data analysis. And so, based on our partnerships with public health and public Safety. One of our main partners were police and fire and so we worked closely with them to work in a harm reduction framework and this moved away from kind of an enforcement kind of classic way of enforcement around drugs and we wanted to move towards harm reduction services. So one of the things one of our main focuses here starting as the health director will be to hire a strong candidate in the substance use coordinator position. That is one of the things I wanted to address as early as possible. Also, the COVID, the ongoing pandemic is something that will also have much of our attention in terms of keeping our children safe in schools, as well as having our nurses perform the contact tracing that they've been done. I believe that former director clay and our interim director elaine silva has laid a great framework in terms of which which direction department is going and one of the things i hope to contribute is to bring a data data mindset to the department we i have a very strong interest in evaluation one of the things that i hope to bring to the department is a transparency so everyone can hold us accountable in terms of the mission that we're pursuing and that's uh for a lot of for a lot of issues including covet as well as um substance use in mount rose so i want to say thank you again for everyone for considering my nomination thank you mr shu and uh we have next

▶ 2:05:04 Cory Thomas: uh counselor thomas thank you madam chairperson mr shu welcome um your credentials are impressive And as an epidemiologist, you're absolutely qualified to lead during the ongoing pandemic and beyond. I was also pleased to see your password pertaining to substance abuse. As a public health director, you have many responsibilities, including hiring a new substance abuse prevention coordinator. Notice has not had a substance abuse coordinator for almost a full calendar year amidst the ongoing pandemic. Many adults in an increasing numbers nationally teams have turned to substance abuse during the pandemic. How will you help bring awareness to the dangers of drugs and alcohol abuse in our community? And once hired, how will you help our new substance abuse coordinator to bring awareness and education on the dangers of substance abuse to our most vulnerable students at the middle school and high school in Melrose?

▶ 2:05:57 Speaker 11: Thank you for your question. So in terms of the substance use here in the community, it goes hand in hand with some of my experience in the diversity, equity, inclusion framework as well. A lot of the ways we talk about substance use and health nowadays, a lot of the focus is on language that we use. And so we want to make sure that everybody's kind of on the same page in terms of this being an ongoing disease that individuals will struggle with. And so when we look at that in that framework, we want people to understand that there is different pathways to recovery. And so it's not kind of a one-size-fits-all type approach. And so, when we look at, you know, services out there such as MAT, Medication Assisted Treatment, there's also sober living houses, so there's many different pathways to recovery. And so, we at the department will hopefully bring that mindset. In terms of hiring a strong candidate for that substance use coordinator position, I will say that I was in a very similar position actually in my previous position in Manchester, New Hampshire. They had actually not had a substance use coordinator position, and my public health specialist role actually filled that and the epidemiologist position. So I do have a great appreciation for someone who has that ability to do coalition building, that relationship building. We actually have a great partnership here at the Mystic Valley Health Coalition. That's the surrounding area, the six communities. So there is a lot of work already being done in surrounding communities. And one of the things I hope to find in a strong candidate would be someone who appreciates Um, you know, the value of data, but also someone who appreciates the qualitative part of it. So they're able to do those focus groups. They're able to do those interviews and really pull out, you know, those underlying factors that individuals struggle with. And then we can find, um, services that we can connect them with related to that. So, um, 1 of the priorities that we'll be looking for in the visuals is experience in substance use, but more importantly, that relationship building.

▶ 2:07:58 Cory Thomas: Thank you Mr. Chu. There has been a lack of programming and a lack of involvement with the substance abuse coordinator's office, not only for the past year when the position has been vacant, but even years before that. I've talked to the principal at Melrose High School and the principal at the high school said that there was no real connection between the students and the substance abuse care with the public health office. Would you want see more programming at the Melrose public schools the high school and the middle school

▶ 2:08:34 Speaker 11: about the dangers and awareness of drug abuse? Yes absolutely so really it's that question we have a great partnership obviously with the town of Wakefield they have a model program and youth action teams so they do a lot of great work in terms of youth advocacy when it comes to awareness of drug drug use and so we have a really strong staff in Wakefield that already has this program in place and realizing that Melrose and Wakefield are not the same community each community has its own struggles and they have you know unique pieces around them I believe that you know engaging the elementary and middle and high school level it never it's never too soon to start I believe and having you know having that framework already in Wakefield hopefully we can find someone that can partner with them and bring that here as well and then tailor to the needs of

▶ 2:09:20 Cory Thomas: Thank you again. I'm very familiar with the programs that Wakefield has over there. It would be great to see similar programs in the Morrill's public school system. I thank you for your openness and honest answers. I look forward to voting for your approval. Thank you.

▶ 2:09:38 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Thomas. And next we have Vice Chair McGeary.

▶ 2:09:43 Leila Migliorelli: Thank you, Madam chair, and thank you, Mr shoe for being here tonight. As you can see, you probably appreciate that. This public health is such a huge topic right now. And the intersection between public health and so many of the other issues that are affecting our city right now is something of great importance. So, I'm, I'm excited to see read your resume and hearing more about your background and seeing what you can bring to Melrose. I just wanted to ask a question a little bit. I heard. I think. um you would had to develop some a successful strategy for communicating to the public about um covid and i was just wondering what kind of practices would you bring from your experience to this role um and and what are you seeing as maybe improvements you can do in communicating about the you know various stages of pandemic as we move through them um with the greater

▶ 2:10:33 Speaker 11: community great uh thank you for your question so in terms of covid um in terms of communication i think one of the biggest things that I'm taking from previous experience is we had created kind of an all-inclusive dashboard so that includes easy to read graphs including interpretations as well for the City of Manchester. We were working closely with the state as well to provide data that is relevant to the citizens of our city and so we're hopefully going to bring that as well to Melrose. my my goal is to build internal capacity as well so myself i have experience doing the epidemiology doing the data pieces as well but we have very strong staff on hand that have that kind of flexibility in terms of their abilities to work in the public health realm and so there is interest in building out that capacity for epidemiology and so one of the things that one of the things that i want to focus on is the data pieces data you know is very important and very useful but it's only as useful as you're able to communicate them to the public in that fashion. So I think that once we build out this kind of dashboard that lists out the metrics that are relevant to us right now, then hopefully we'll have kind of an open line of communication. People have questions about how to interpret data at a certain point, then we can point out what trends we're seeing, how it reflects currently, and how it compares to the prior stages of pandemic as well so hopefully we'll be able to build out that framework and then have you know the contact tracing pieces the resources as well as clarifying a lot of the different policies that are changing so that's including cdc guidelines the destiny the department of elementary and middle education so secondary education so having those policies clearly listed and then kind of justifying which policies we are really holding to And maybe, you know, policies that we are holding to a stricter standard here in Melrose. And so, you know, clarifying the reasons why we have certain policies.

▶ 2:12:40 Leila Migliorelli: Thank you. I appreciate that answer. I think it's, it's such a complicated. amount of information to kind of digest for any one person and people are often seeking different sources. So it's gonna be helpful to have you in this role to help centralize these communications and what's driving your policy decisions for the city of Melrose. So, thank you very much.

▶ 2:12:59 Speaker 11: And if it would be okay, I just want to expand a little bit on some of the COVID data that we're seeing. So one of the issues that I wanted to tackle was we have a lot of focus here and rightfully so on the spread of COVID in schools. And so, to protect, you know, protect parents and protect children, we have a lot of DESE guidelines in place that, you know, in terms of close contacts, we have test and stay programs. We, you know, in terms of testing, we have pool testing, and then we do the, you know, protocol. If there's a positive test, we have two BinaxNOW rapid antigen tests. But a lot of these policies are just layers of protection. Other layers of protection that we're hoping to address, and this is both true in Melrose and other surrounding communities, is after-school programs. A lot of these after school programs, children participate in programs that may not be directly linked to the schools. And so this is also an avenue of exposure and this is something that we want to focus on. We want to reach out to these organizations and kind of express the importance of them following similar DESE guidelines because they are not part of the school system. We can't enforce DESE guidelines with them, but we can do the education and we can, you know, show them that That what their, uh, what the implications of the testing and the distancing that they have going on in their programs can affect, um, children, um, in their school systems.

▶ 2:14:21 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you. Thank you Mr. Shu. I, um, I want to thank you, um, uh, for, for stepping up and taking and applying for this position and for helping our community, uh, improve. Of course, I just point of clarification, you know, you mentioned about your interest in working with the to focus on substance use and working with this population. It is very important to clarify that the difference between. Substance use and substance abuse is just because we have mentioned both terms. So there is a big difference between the substance use and substance abuse. And we just want to take into consideration that because I don't know how important that for this population question, how are you planning to collect the data? We know that this is a very wide population that is not limited to age or to race or to any different criteria. So, how are you planning to collect your data?

▶ 2:15:39 Speaker 11: Thank you for your question. So, I'm glad to clarify just the in terms of terminology language is a very big part of the substance use tackling the substance use. um and epidemic a lot of the you know the stigma that revolves around substance use is based on you know outdated language or you know misunderstanding of individuals that struggle with this disease um and you know there's a wide spectrum of individuals and what and what they struggle with and to what degree they do i think um in terms of delta data collection i can speak to experience in the past i've worked closely with the new hampshire state department in terms of collecting data from the emergency department setting so in in that sense we can also i will also be reaching out to the state level to talk about a data sharing agreement in the emergency department setting that becomes a kind of a strong piece in terms of having a chief complaint text form so and then we also have diagnosis codes and so that kind of gives us the basis of kind of quantitative data in terms of who's visiting the ED environment, to what severity they are being seen. We also had response unit numbers, so we had AMR, American Medical Response was the main agent in terms of responding to calls for service when it came to opioid use and substance use. And so we also worked closely with them to understand what patterns they were seeing in terms of when they arrived, was there a naloxone administration, what condition the individual was found in, and we wanted to really understand what factors contributed to refusal of service. And that was one of the big pieces that we focused on was what factors prevent individuals from accessing resources that are already existing. And so one of the other ones we wanted to work with are sober living houses and shelters. We wanted to seek out individuals and do this kind of qualitative interview and qualitative analysis and thematic analysis to see what themes we could pull out in terms of what resources may already exist but are hard to access and really understand what barriers there are that maybe we haven't considered in this community. So each community obviously has different factors and we wanted to really understand that so i think group interviews and specific qualitative analysis is definitely

▶ 2:18:11 Maya Jamaleddine: one of the main pieces we're going to go for thank you great to hear your plans it's really important to see what is it that you're going to bring to our community especially we know that we have a good number of our residents that can benefit from those plans that you have for us. I would also love to see the work that's going to be between our new social worker and your department that can be expanded and support our residents and on any level possible. And on that, I would also remind and ask again to

▶ 2:19:04 Maya Jamaleddine: expand our social worker services. If there is no one, oh, I have Councillor McMaster.

▶ 2:19:11 Shawn M. MacMaster: Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm a non-voting member of this committee, so I would defer to any committee members before speaking but i did want to at least get in queue at this time

▶ 2:19:20 Maya Jamaleddine: i don't think i have anyone um that would like to speak so you're on if you'd like thank you

▶ 2:19:31 Shawn M. MacMaster: madam chair uh good evening mr chu happy to have you before us this evening you uh the mayor talked a little bit about your experience um of uh prevention work and risk mitigation relative to COVID-19 you talked a little bit about that as well can you talk about how you can transfer that experience to an issue you heard earlier tonight when we discussed the rat problem you know based on your experience and based on some of your academic background and again very very impressive academic background what are the some of the things you think we can be doing as as the city in terms of having a robust prevention program. Councilor Migliorelli mentioned earlier, we are limited in terms of what we can do in terms of passing laws. And I think we all stand committed to looking at other ways for effective code enforcement and to working in collaboration with Mayor Broder. But in terms of some of the other things that you think that we can do based on your professional and academic research experience, what might those things be and what would they look like to the public?

▶ 2:20:42 Speaker 11: Thank you. Thank you for your question. So, in terms of the rat issue, since it's coming on, I've definitely had the time to hear about many sides of this. Many people have spoken to me about this, and so I've had the chance to talk a little bit about this with other communities as well. So, one of the things, one of the most important things, so there's, I believe there's a two-prong approach to this. One of them is making sure that we have a strong a strong partnership with other areas that are dealing with similar issues and so the rat problem is really a regional issue and so we have a great partnership with our mystic valley health coalition and so we've spoken at length and there is a program that we are working on right now uh internet involves messaging involves clear communication as to risk mitigation techniques and so uh one of the issues i was heard earlier was about the garbage disposal um there are many there are many other things that we can do we can help promote in terms of messaging but in a positive manner um a lot of the a lot of the negative kind of connotations that comes with enforcement may not be as effective but if we talk about in a sense you know how we can partner with our citizens here to do the risk mitigation is definitely an important piece so one of the things that we've talked about in this messaging and once we've developed this This kind of consistent language with our partners in the Mystic Valley Coalition, we will be releasing more materials, more education pieces, as well as other resources that we can turn to for residents. And so one of the things that we've talked about is disposal of garbage in a proper manner that includes barrels and includes dumpsters. And we've talked about regulations and this is a little bit further down the road. So, we haven't had some talks about what the city can do in terms of cleaning up dumpsters and talking about monitoring of those. But for private residences and other areas, we can talk about trimming trees and shrubs to remove overgrowth and this prevents some of the habitation areas for rats. We've talked about feeding wildlife that has been one of the issues that has come up. uh pet waste is actually a source of food for rats and so cleaning up pet waste and removing standing water that actually hits several several areas including mosquitoes and vector vector areas where they can breed and then just keeping generally a clean area in front of residences and around the residents these are all risk mitigation techniques that we can communicate public you know you know in an efficient manner where we're also working from our end to regulate you know that's cleaning air public areas but we also want you know to make sure that the public citizens understand that they also play

▶ 2:23:37 Shawn M. MacMaster: a role in what we can do here Thank You mr. Chu for that comprehensive answer one of the things that we saw at the mayor's educational forum was an actual tangible map of certain problem locations in the community. Although I appreciated that, I do think there are some opportunities with heat mapping, and it sounds like you have some of that academic experience to perhaps do that in a more visually effective way, in a way that is able to look at real-time data, where the rats are, where they're moving, and to perhaps do that in collaboration with some of the other communities in the Mystic Valley area. So I'd really encourage you to look into that, and to the extent that we can be supportive of that, I think we would all like to be. My other question relates to the idea of community partnerships. You discussed that. You have some experience in that arena, and it touches upon something that Councillor Migliorelli astutely said, which is the intersectionality of social issues, and that's something that she and I and Council of John Maldon have had conversations about in a meeting a few months ago, among the three of us to discuss different ways that we can respond as a city in a less siloed way. So when we talk about multidisciplinary teams, oftentimes, it is formal community based networks, but I'm wondering what the opportunities may be to develop a more systemic connected networked team across city departments understanding that individuals facing substance use disorder domestic violence serious mental illness or any other number of issues where we do see that intersectionality that we are able to approach it in a real robust way where the police department is talking to the health department in the fire department and other city departments that may not be obvious like our librarians who are engaging public so what opportunities do you see to create that networked team approach across city

▶ 2:25:48 Speaker 11: departments and what might that look like thank you for your question so I think I see great opportunity in terms of the crossover between departments so as you said traditionally there may have been some kind of siloed work in terms of public health staying in that realm and you You know, please say in 1 realm and fire 1 of the things I will draw on from my previous experience is the sharing of roles. So. We actually in my previous position worked closely with police in terms of positions and so we've actually had. We actually had communications, public information officers employed at our department as well as the police department. But they reported to the other department, so we've actually had those positions shared between between groups and those actually have allowed us to have different avenues of collaboration in that aspect. We've also had community health workers, so 1 of the things. You know, the list of priorities I have is to have community health workers that really reflect those populations that we are trying to serve. And so having those work closely with law enforcement, we're really trying to integrate them into the community as well. So that the community can build that trust and that relationship with the police as well as having those community health workers that may have lived experience that they can help explain certain issues, or they can help really understand what is going on. I think also for the public library system, I see a great opportunity in terms of education. And so for diversity, equity, inclusion issues, it's still Kind of a large kind of heated debate nationally as well. So I'm sure it's not indifferent here. We want to do is we want to include the library as a place for education. We want to be able to hold seminars that kind of have people explain, you know, what struggles that they face in the public realm. And we can talk about, you know, how we can foster that environment and we can reach out to different groups and really do that kind of recruiting in terms of having them fill positions that traditionally they may not see as open avenues. So, I think having shared positions is definitely something I'm looking forward to have to discussing with police and fire as well as the public library. I want to see that collaboration and turn to data collection we've had in the past emergency management coordinators that have been hired by our health department, but have worked in the fire department. And so we've been able to work in both places and have them kind of share their experiences with both places. So we can really get better.

▶ 2:28:20 Shawn M. MacMaster: Thank you Mr. Chu, and if your appointment is voted favorably out of committee tonight, I do look forward to voting to support you tonight before the full council. Thank you. Thank you.

▶ 2:28:34 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you Councilor Master and

▶ 2:28:40 Cory Thomas: Councilor Thomas. Thank you Madam Chairperson. I'd like to make a motion for recommendation.

▶ 2:28:46 Maya Jamaleddine: 2nd, we have a motion for recommendation made by Councilor Thomas, seconded by Councilor Stewart. Mr. Chair Jamali.

▶ 2:29:06 Speaker 2: Yes, vice chair. Yes.

▶ 2:29:12 Speaker 2: Councilor Eccles yes. Councilor Stewart.

▶ 2:29:16 Speaker 2: Yes, Councillor Thomas. Yes. And President, yes, that's 6. yes.

▶ 2:29:24 Maya Jamaleddine: yes and motion passes and thank you again

▶ 2:29:32 Speaker 4: Mr. Hsu and with that do we have any motion for adjourn second we have

▶ 2:29:44 Maya Jamaleddine: motion to adjourn made by president Sinaloa seconded by vice chair McClure

▶ 2:29:58 Speaker 2: early mr clerk chair Jamaleddine yes vice chair Migliorelli yes councillor eccles yes councillor

▶ 2:30:04 Speaker 2: stewart yes councillor thomas yes president sanella yes six yes thank you and we're adjourned

▶ 2:30:24 Speaker 7: thank you back to you clerk what i am here i'm just waiting for host privileges back thank you

▶ 2:30:28 Christopher Cinella: Let me know the opposed privileges. Still recording? I guess I can go.