← Appropriations & Oversight Committee · 2019-11-25 · Appropriations and Oversight Committee Meeting
Public Comment
Agenda original PDF
Minutes original PDF
Transcript
▶ 57:42 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Appropriations Committee which I think we opened but I think what we need to do right now is just open the floor for public comment because that needs to happen within 30 minutes at the time that the meeting was scheduled so that people who are here to speak to any item on the agenda for our appropriations meeting and there are three of them are welcome to come forward at this time to please state your name for the record and let us know your comments on any of
▶ 58:12 Michael P. Zwirko: these orders and one point of order before we open for public comment please read the three orders that are before the committee so members of the public are aware of what they could comment on certainly thank you sure so
▶ 58:19 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: we have on our agenda tonight police fiscal year 29 1 1 support an incentive grant that was awarded to our police department our second one is a request for an update on the status of the community mitigation funds grant and our last item is related to the public hearing that we just held on the classification of property so those are our three items and if anyone is here tonight to speak to any of them we would welcome you now motion open the floor
▶ 58:50 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: for public comment madam chair second motion to open the floor made by councillors work Oh seconded by a vice chair Boisselle all in favor aye any opposed thank you so we're now open for comment let's take a page from someone
▶ 59:26 Speaker 6: at a prior meeting and do a couple handouts here so my name is finn mcsweeney i'm here to talk a little bit about 2020-39 which is the request for update on the community mitigation funds i am a member of the pedestrian bicycle advisory committee here in the city I wasn't on the PBC I didn't live here when the grant was announced or applied for so I'm not speaking directly from experience but I did want to bring a couple of comments that PBC members had raised to me and then also just talk a little bit personally about this so the purpose of the grant for folks who are in the room was the Mass Gaming Commission gave what are the city of Melrose $100,000 I think it was 2017 2018 in relation to the encore casino which was being built and the purpose of that money was hey you guys are located on a corridor to the orange line we expect there to be more traffic to the orange line you might be impacted by that traffic let's see if you can use this money to improve pedestrian and bicycle access down to Oak Grove the members of the ped bike committee began to outreach the city in 2017 just to ask for more information on what the city was thinking in terms of how they were going to apply for the grant what they wanted to use it for and they were told at that time that they were going to use it to prioritize ped bike access which was great there's a section of the Melrose forward plan section three point 2.5 where the recommendation is consider allocating funds in the city budget for traffic calming and traffic management pilot projects we talked about this a lot in the city but the line is always that there just isn't money in the budget for it which is often true so everyone was very excited to learn that we would be receiving this money from the state in that it would explicitly be going to improve pedestrian and bicycle access to Oak Grove we did the the committee did ask Elena for information on the project throughout 2017 2018 she did provide some information on the work order I did want to raise that one of the deliverables in the work order was that the contractors Stantec who did this survey we're supposed to conduct a public workshop we don't believe that's happened and in the previous year year and a half we really have received very little information from the city on how they went about asking Stantec to do that work we were not solicited for input we were not asked if we if we would like to help and we I wanted to express sort of the the disappointment that the city's really transit advisory committee wasn't approached or really communicated with at any point during the process in in the process of applying for a grant specifically for that committee's purpose the the city spent 27 I think 20 around $27,000 to these consultants that money's been spent folks in the city have probably not perceived there to have been any improvements that have been made thus far to the corridor which is true $27,000 of the money has been spent and the report which is attached to the IQ m2 is a really really hyper detailed like listing of the crosswalks in in the corridor so I'll let folks decide how much value they think they got out of that $27,000 of the money but the the handout that I that I passed around tonight we don't have to if the city wants to improve transit access and the city wants to pursue traffic calming measures which the city should want to pursue because every single person in town wants to see better walking access and wants to see slower traffic you don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on consultants to do that what I passed around tonight was a very similar this is a picture of a street in Somerville where the the city recently they had been hearing from residents that traffic on this this street was being used as a cut-through right there's a 25 mile an hour speed limit in Somerville just like there is here residents were observing people are flying down this road 35 40 miles an hour every single person sitting around this table knows of a street in their neighborhood in their district where residents are complaining about this exact same thing what the city of Somerville did was they said we hear you we can put six cones on the street here and 399 worth of paint and you know what we'll have it down for six months we'll have it down for 12 months and we'll see if it works and if it works and if If traffic is slowed down on the street and people like it, we'll make it permanent. If it doesn't, we'll send out a guy with a truck to pick up the cones and no harm, no foul. A hundred thousand dollars could be used to do a lot of very simple experimentation on traffic calming in conjunction with experts, volunteer experts that we have in the city. The chair of the Pedestrian Bicycle Committee has a background in urban planning, in transportation planning. We would really, really like to see the city, when this subject comes up, not to have the first thought be, let's go commission this huge study. Let's kind of not really tell anyone about what it is or what we're doing. um and that's let's leave people wondering what's going to happen with the rest of the money when are we going to see it thousands of people commute to oak grove every single day the study area included the lincoln school the city commissioned a a safety study in 2012 or 2013 i think care showers piloted it with walk boston that recommended uh walkability improvements in in the area of the Lincoln School, which is in this study area. Nothing was ever done with that study, as far as I'm aware. But it's unclear to us if after having received this money, the city then went back and reevaluated any of the information in the previous study, or was that sort of just a waste of time and now we're redoing it. We'd really like to encourage the decision makers in the city to be more transparent, to be more proactive on improving walking, biking, access, and traffic calming measures, which every single person in Melrose wants to see these things. Other cities around us who have the same exact problems as we do are experimenting with these things very cheaply we can do this here for us it's really about having that conversation making people want to do these things as opposed to for some reason even though we talked so much about transparency and communication and accountability for some reason there just appears to be a reluctance from the city to be open and communicative about these things so we I'll conclude by thanking councillor McMaster for raising this the reason I originally brought it to the ped by committee's attention and this year was because councillor Lipper-Garabedian email newsletter she always sends out the DPW schedule so this is something I hope a question gets asked tonight and I think it was her May or June email there was a line item in the DPW schedule that said something like West Wyoming Washington community mitigation funds and there was a block in there that said the DPW was doing something I don't know what that was what it was about but I started asking questions hoping someone would pick this up and find out what happened and I very much thank council McMaster for doing that and for raising this hopefully with the rest of the money that's left the city can proactively start to address some of the concerns that no doubt mr. McMaster's constituents have highlighted in the district and if we need to have more public discussion I'm sure that can be facilitated very easily so thank you very much everyone for your time
▶ 1:09:23 Speaker 10: on any of our three orders?
▶ 1:09:29 Speaker 10: Seeing none.
▶ 1:09:30 Speaker 1: Motion to close public comment, Madam Chair.
▶ 1:09:33 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Second. Motion to close public comment made by Councilor Zerberko, seconded by Vice Chair Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, I will now entertain a motion for recess.
▶ 1:09:42 Speaker 6: So moved.
▶ 1:09:44 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Second. We have a motion for recess made by Councilor Zerberko, seconded by Councilor Wright. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, we are in recess and we'll return to legal and legislative.
▶ 1:09:53 Speaker 2: For the last time, right?
▶ 1:10:36 Francis X. Wright Jr.: Okay, we will once again return to the Legal and Legislative Committee, third time being a charm. I assume we'll get through the remainder of our orders.