Public Comment

Transcript (~33 min @ 25:20)

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

▶ 25:13 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: this meeting is being recorded in accordance with mass general laws it is available on the mmtv website on mmtv and on the city of morrow's website madam president i make a motion to open

▶ 25:22 Peter D. Mortimer: the floor for public comment second we have a motion made by alderman mortimer to open the

▶ 25:26 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: floor for public comment seconded by alderman Boisselle all in favor aye aye any opposed this is the portion of our meeting where any member of the public who's here this evening may step forward to the table in front of us to speak on any item on our agenda is there anyone here to speak this

▶ 26:05 Speaker 6: evening good evening cargill street i'm here to ask that you put the brakes on the proposed agreement with waste management though i'm not sufficiently informed to make

▶ 26:20 Speaker 6: an exhaustive statement which nobody needs to hear anyway i listened to enough of the previous meeting to have a number of concerns about the issue concerns that were raised by some of you and i really appreciate that you raised those concerns i appreciate when mr on alderman's As Werco asked why now, if this has been in negotiation for two years, and even by the city's strategic planning process where there was a mandate for this important, valuable piece of property to be discussed and in an open and public process, why wasn't it? This is one of the rare opportunities in a city with very limited commercial development. This is a large, valuable piece of land, and we should have had a public process. Like so many other things, the public process did not happen. Now it's hurry up and make a decision, just as has been the case with teachers' contracts and any number of other things. That is not good governance. All the stakeholders should have a chance to weigh in on this. This is a very substantial opportunity for the city and also a potential liability. The city solicitor made a bunch of arguments that I considered questionable. One of them, there was a stipulation that perhaps while waste management has operated in a highly regulated fashion, that previous many years of dumping on the land was not with the implication that perhaps there's dangerous contamination in the property. If that's the case, we as a city still own that property and we do have a responsibility to make informed decisions, not bury things under the rug and hope that we don't get sued down the road when some worker at whatever company is operating there, if a company is operating there gets sick with cancer and sues for example this is something we should know something about there should be research there should be a discussion as we've seen with Brazil Street apparently city officials would rather not know what the science of the matter really is but I think that's irresponsible and I think that the concerns raised by some of you about the

▶ 28:56 Speaker 6: whole premise of this agreement were valid and should be taken very seriously under consideration and not in a hasty process. You know the million dollar incentive, that's paltry and this company sure they want to know for their own planning what they want, what they're going to be doing long range. That should have been an issue two years ago when negotiations began, and that could have been discussed at that time. I don't believe that that's a good reason to hurry up and sign an agreement right now. I think that that's even more of a reason to hold off, wait until a duly elected mayor is in place, and this process can have a more orderly procedure for it. Thank you.

▶ 29:47 Speaker 7: Thank you.

▶ 29:51 Speaker 7: Other members of the public who wish to speak? Thank you for being here.

▶ 30:00 Speaker 6: Hello. My name is Susan Barron. I live at 18 South High Street, and I'd like to come and speak in support of the plastic straw limitation. I'm sure that you've heard a great deal about statistics concerning the plastics that are choking our seas and filling our landfills, and I can't really add to that.

▶ 30:22 Speaker 6: However, I'd like to leave you with two images that walk with me all the time. One image is that of the aquatic animals that are being choked to death by plastic. The other one is an image of the children that walk the street of Melrose. I see them all the time with their parents being walked in their prams, and they're wonderful. But I think to myself, what kind of a world am I leaving them?

▶ 30:59 Speaker 6: kind of a world are we leaving them I would like this plastic straw ban is very small when you consider all the plastic that is being thrown into waste but let's take at least this step to help those children and as you vote for this I'd like you to think of those two images together those the terrible waste

▶ 31:21 Speaker 6: of the struggling seas and also the children of Melrose thank you for your

▶ 31:43 Speaker 1: kind attention thank you Gina McNeil Melrose recycling committee excuse me zero waste Melrose I forgot our new name I wanted to summarize a couple of the

▶ 31:58 Speaker 1: points that we covered in the legal and legislative committee I know not everyone on the board was present for that meeting and it's been a few weeks now with a holiday in between, so I wanted to recap a couple of things. Just to follow on to one of the points that the previous speaker made, the conservative estimate by market research firms is there are 170 million straws used every day in the United States. And so if you do the math, that works out to 14,000 plastic straws every day used by by Melrose residents which again these are relatively small bits of plastic but this is a pretty big number when you think about 14,000 plastic straws every day that we use and so the intent again of this law is really just to nudge people not to completely eliminate plastic straws there are instances when people might or a plastic straw or need a plastic straw so really this is just a small effort to to try to make a dent in that 14,000 daily use number but also to really change people's mindset hopefully is the bigger impact of this law to make them think is this maybe I'm not using as many plastic straws as I used to, am I using fewer of other single use plastics as well and that's where we really start to see that snowball effect from ordinances such as these. In addition to that I also wanted to point out that I think that the strong, the level public support that we've seen for this ordinance um and reviewing the items that are part of the agenda packet tonight i think there are 21 letters that were received up to august 20th all in support we had a dozen speakers last time at this session all in support and i know there have been a number of other resident emails received since the august 20th probably another dozen or so at least that i've that i'm aware of and there may be more than that in addition to the endorsement letters from the massachusetts sierra club the mass audubon and the united states humane society i don't know if all of the members of the board were able to see those letters of endorsement that were emailed late last week and then the humane society one came through today i believe so i think it's just a good reminder that the level of public support that we've seen has been all in support of the law in terms of people who have actually bothered to come here to speak and to write to the Board of Aldermen. So thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

▶ 34:41 Speaker 6: Good evening. Good evening. I'm Trudy McDonald. I live at 34 South High Street in Melrose.

▶ 34:51 Speaker 7: I spoke last time, so I won't repeat anything that I said then, but I have a few other comments.

▶ 34:55 Speaker 6: I'd like to reiterate my reasons for supporting the ordinance to reduce the use of plastic straws. I've watched the documentary of Plastic Ocean several times now, and I'm convinced that if every one of you saw it, you'd be voting in favor of this ordinance. And if you haven't seen it, I'm going to be showing it at the Senior Center on October 8th at 1 o'clock. It's in the middle of the day, but I could probably do another showing some other time for the whole dramatic group, if you'd like.

▶ 35:25 Speaker 7: So every year, I want to tell you a little personal story.

▶ 35:28 Speaker 6: Every year for the first past 25 years, I've gone to the U.S. Virgin Islands to snorkel. I love snorkeling. Not a great swimmer, but I like snorkeling. The fish there are just beautiful. But every year for the last 25 years, I've seen fewer and fewer fish. I thought, well, maybe it's my imagination. But I just read a new study that says that the total number of marine species that is adversely affected by plastic pollution has risen from 260 in 1995 which is about the year I start going there when the first assessment was done to 2 to 690 and 2015 and to 1450 last year and in 2018 closer to home a majority of the fish tested in the Great Lakes contain micro plastics as does 73% of the fish surveyed right here off the New England coast. Microplastics, they're tiny, they're microscopic, we don't see them, we can't see them with our naked eye, but that doesn't mean that they're not there, they're everywhere. Microplastics have been found in our tap water in 94% of American cities that have been tested. I urge you to pass this ordinance. It's a very minor inconvenience for those of us who may have used a straw. The consequence of doing nothing will negatively impact the quality of the life for our children and all future generations. By the way, someone asked whether we had been doing any outreach to the businesses, and I have spoken to three businesses, Starbucks, they seem ready and prepared to take this on. I've spoken to Turner's, and they have already eliminated straws a long time ago. And Bohemian Coffee Shop, they're ordering different kinds of tops for their containers for their cold drinks. So I don't think it's going to be a major hardship for anyone. I do hope that you will support it. Thank you very much. Thank you.

▶ 37:35 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Any other members of the public wish to speak?

▶ 37:37 Speaker 7: No, please.

▶ 37:43 Speaker 6: Hi, my name is Janet Ocello. I live on 31 Leonard Road. I just wanted to comment that a lot of places that I frequent do not use plastic straws. I was in, I had lunch in Rhode Island last year in a restaurant and they had a sign up that said they don't use plastic straws. But when I ordered a drink, they brought it with a plastic straw, but it wasn't plastic, it was made out of corn. So it was biodegradable. So you can't really tell that you're using a straw that's not plastic when you have it. WHEN I WENT INTO ANOTHER RESTAURANT IN BURLINGTON LAST WEEK, THEY SERVED WATER WITHOUT THE WAITRESS HAD STRAWS IN HER HAND. NONE OF US ASKED FOR A STRAW AND SHE DIDN'T OFFER THEM AND WE DIDN'T NEED STRAWS. NONE OF US WANTED TO USE A STRAW. SO A LOT OF COMPANIES, A LOT OF RESTAURANTS ARE TURNING AROUND AND REALIZING THAT IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE THE PLASTIC STRAWS. SO I DON'T THINK IT'S GOING TO BE THAT DIFFICULT TO TRANSITION FOR THIS ORDINANCE TO GO THROUGH.

▶ 38:42 Speaker 7: Thank you. Thank you.

▶ 39:14 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Other members of the public wish to speak?

▶ 39:18 Speaker 7: Just quickly, Rebecca Interbartolo, 33 Woodland Ave, again in favor of the straw ordinance. I think the whole premise of the ordinance is not for people to switch to put a burden on businesses to have to offer paper straws. The point of the ordinance is to say what can we eliminate and do you really need the straw? really like a straw then bring a metal one just like the purpose of the bag ban was not for businesses to have to give you a paper bag the purpose was for people to bring their own bags and the point is just to reduce all of our waste of single-use items across the board so not just switch to paper or switch to compostable but just think do I even need this at all so that is our hope to just get people to reduce their use you know when we walk into a restaurant and we bring our own metal straws and my kids see a person using a plastic straw they say oh there's another dead sea turtle and it's just something that's kind of so prevalent now it's just not it's one small step that we as a community can take to do what we can to try to eliminate plastic waste to try to to get it out of our oceans and try to leave the world a better place. So please, I urge you to vote in favor of it. Thank you.

▶ 40:49 Speaker 7: Good evening.

▶ 40:50 Speaker 6: Hi. My name is Ginny Vinody. I had an experience recently, actually, Sunday night. I believe this ordinance is supposed to not ban plastic straws, but make it so that it's not the first choice. But when we went out, one of the people in the group we were with did not care for the paper straw. He felt it really diminished what he was drinking. He asked for plastic straw turners, and they said, we don't carry them. You know, I generally don't like bands. I have made a lot of choices in my own life that are better for the environment. I happen to be a vegetarian. That's much better than all the other stuff you guys are doing. My carbon footprint is a third of most people's. but I don't make that choice for other people. Again, I know it's an ordinance and not a ban, but when stores decide, well, we won't carry the other option, then it becomes a ban.

▶ 41:54 Speaker 6: And also, plastic straws are not the number one pollutant. They're not even in the top 50%. The number one is plastic cups and one-use drink containers.

▶ 42:14 Speaker 4: Thank you.

▶ 42:23 Speaker 8: Good evening. Good evening, everybody.

▶ 42:28 Speaker 8: Joe Pelrine, 70 Howard Street.

▶ 42:33 Speaker 8: I'm just gonna move on a little bit to a different subject. I'm here tonight, I'm sorry I missed the committee meeting on the water and sewer bonding issue, but I have a few questions that maybe we could look at before we say yes or no. I'm wondering if the Mother's Day storm, what was that, like eight or 10 years ago, the city borrowed a ton of money from the MWRA. Has that been paid off yet? And I'm just curious, if not, how much more we owe. These two proposals, one for the sewer for 375,000 and one for the water for 1.4 mil, how long are these bonds gonna be for? And what will the monthly payments be? And more importantly, where will we get the money to pay these bonds? I kind of feel like we're saying yes to these bonds for 2020 and next June the City of Melrose is going to say we have to boost the water and sewer rates again to pay off this bond. Now if the Mother's Day bond is paid off then obviously there's room for more borrowing but if we're borrowing on top of that it just doesn't seem right. So I was wondering if we could take the $375,000 bond out of the sewer enterprise fund. We were all sitting here years ago when the handpicked consultant from the city of Melrose urged everybody to have a savings account. And when we asked what will we do with that money, the consultant said, you would use that money to pay for small repairs or fix things and you won't have to borrow any money now the city is saying that we can't spend that money because it'll affect our bond rating well in june early june i sent an email to everybody and i'll ask you again tonight if we were to spend the money and our bond rating was to go down how long would it take for the bond rating to come back up six months seven months it doesn't seem like i have to borrow money to pay for things and if i have a savings account i use it and we have a huge savings

▶ 45:09 Speaker 8: account in those two funds and then lost my place of course with no reading glasses

▶ 45:20 Speaker 8: okay i guess that's it for now i just am asking for everybody to reconsider before we push ahead on this what's the rush why do we need to vote on this tonight we have a new administration coming in in january hopefully a new dpw director who might have a different thought pattern of which way to go on stuff like this so you know i'm sure the mwra loan will still be there in january or february and still have plenty of time to plan for the construction next summer thanks thank you

▶ 46:18 Speaker 3: I want to start by talking about the waste management contract.

▶ 46:25 Speaker 3: Some of you made good points, as Ms. Corkamella said earlier the other night. I find it strange that this long-term process is condensed and squeezed around a Labor Day weekend. There's something that's certainly not transparent about that. But in terms of doing due diligence in this contract, it wasn't that this was a surprise to us in any way. The administration actually knew about it years ago. Waste management approached them two years ago. Over all that time, what diligence did the administration do to see what other uses of the site would be productive? Did they put out an RFP? I think the answer is no. Did they approach any other waste management companies to see what they might be willing or interested in that property? I never heard any mention of that. they can consult with a real estate professional to evaluate the site and its possibilities they didn't in the discussion the other night they were

▶ 47:16 Speaker 3: there were irrelevant things brought up while the relevant things were missing and this is a pattern of the administration that coming to this board of aldermen they aren't giving you the information you really need to make a competent decision they're coming in with a rush job oh we have to do this as a deadline we have to get it done there's you know something's going to happen if we don't you know that you're being disrespected I urge you to understand that you don't have the information you need to sign on to a contract today it's not there how many times does waste management currently handle a year what are the tonnage rates the 125 or 150 per ton that they're proposing how do they compare to the to the market was that presented did anybody do an evaluation of what other sites in the area or transfer stations are operated similarly, and how many are so close to Boston? What competitors of waste management are jealous that waste management has that site? Did waste management buy the waste firm in part to get that site in the first place? All these elements weren't discussed. Now, there's certainly things in a contract negotiation that you don't want to publicize, but did the administration ever come here and have an executive session with you to talk to you about the parameters of the contract, what they were negotiating, what they were considering, what they'd like to see? It sounds to me like the answer to that is no as well. This isn't a collective bargaining issue where you're constrained by collective bargaining laws or the agreements not to talk about things publicly. You know, we have a pleasant fellow here from waste management. You know, the city solicitor identified him as a liaison. Well, waste management is a global, powerful, sophisticated firm. They negotiate with contracts all over the world, all the time. They know how to get a contract done to their benefit. That's how they make money, 15 or 16 billion dollars a year.

▶ 49:15 Speaker 3: At some level, Melo's is an easy target. How sophisticated were, if they didn't do the due diligence, did we get walked all over? The one million upfront payment is a red flag to me. That's a common tactic people use in negotiations all the time. Make something look good because it's right there and it's so enticing, they grab that million dollars so people won't look at what they're missing the three, five, seven years down the road, right? Oh, that money's really beautiful, isn't it?

▶ 49:49 Speaker 3: You know, the claim that somehow waste management is helping us to the tune of 250 or $300,000 a year by letting us use part of our property, maybe they have been, but why would we codify that same agreement, that same permission if you will into a long-term agreement if we need that property we use it it's our land why don't we hold it why don't we sign an operating agreement for the rest of the property for them and hold on to what we need as beneficial to us then the question is is why is our ancillary use of the property to the tune of what they estimate is 250 or 300 thousand dollars worth more than waste management's for-profit use of that property on an ongoing basis, right? Our passive use of the property to store some things there is claimed to be using $250,000 or $300,000. That's the worth of it. But the value of waste management's use of our property is only $135,000 to date, and even under these agreements might be, what, $175,000 through 2021, and a minimum of $200,000 beyond that. There are so many issues that weren't addressed, it makes one wonder, what are the real issues here? An earlier speaker mentioned about the toxic waste that might be on the site you know mr shenna I think it was you know mentioned that oh you know the old-timers at DPW have stories to tell about the dump over there well you know if this toxic waste in that site we have a responsibility to identify it and remediate it nothing short of that we don't want to stick our head in the sand and say oh well let's just went to waste management because it won't come out for another eight or ten years you know leaving toxins in the ground is not environmentally sustainable and if you want to talk about other environmentally sustainable things you don't leave toxic waste in the ground if you believe it might be there if you don't know you ought to do the work to figure it out put it sink some test wells do some soil samples do a lot of things there to figure it out I don't know the specifics of that site is a dump probably very few people around town do but we ought to find out if we own the property and I find it

▶ 51:59 Speaker 3: interesting that we're composting and giving people compost to put in their gardens on land that might be a hazardous waste site a little bit unfortunate there you know all the information that wasn't brought to the table and all the irrelevant information that was makes me wonder what are they

▶ 52:21 Speaker 3: trying to hide why are they doing this did administration drop the ball on something they're trying to cover it up do they feel that the toxic waste issue is so much they don't want to talk about it and so let's just you know be hush hush and do a thing with with waste management you know backroom deals are backroom deals they may not be cigarette smoke filled rooms now maybe they're filled with some other kind of smoke but it's not working for the city of melrose this kind of government process is not what the citizens want it's not transparent this has been sprung on the board of alderman as well as on the public of melrose for those of you who want to remain alderman who want to become mayor what needs to change in Melrose isn't who's in the office it's how the business is done too many times year after year after year we have these things where administration comes, springs something on the board and says oh it has to happen this way there's no other alternative this is not a binary alternative, it's not waste management or nothing you could have a four month extension until January, give a new mayor a chance to look it over and figure things out sign a two-year additional contract extension with waste management to get us till 2023 that gives them four years to evaluate other sites in the area they might find that melons is worth a whole lot more than they're willing to pay right now because they can't find an equivalent place around that's this close and they'll get the business for them there are a lot of issues here that are at play that if you vote for this you are ignoring you are basically making an uninformed decision And an uninformed decision is worse than no decision at all. Because an uninformed decision, you're working on things that are counter to reality, not on the reality itself.

▶ 54:21 Speaker 3: You know, I do find it so strange that waste management knew more about this process ongoing. the people with whom is on the other side of the bargaining table with us knew more about this process for the last two years than any of you apparently knew and that's another red flag so the red flags of the million dollar upfront payment why is that enticement there you know what it is it's to bind us in so we find it harder later once we spent the money to be able to get out of the agreement when we find there's a better thing you know the red flag is that the 250 to 300 000 of city benefit is not something additional and tangible on top of the waste management lease payments the waste management lease payments we don't know whether they're market or not we don't know whether the tonnage rate is market we don't know what other sites in the area are you know it costs a lot more for a hauler to go up to you know somewhere a lot farther away to make a transfer than to drop off here and go and make another run there are so many things that might be desirable about this but we don't even know it because nobody did the work if nobody did the work i suggest that start with a four month extension if you want go with a four month time before you act on this or vote for a two-year extension of the contract that puts waste management the position they were in two years ago if they want to go and do their due diligence and figure out what are the sites in the area they might want to take and leave us alone that's fine we can investigate the parcels next door that we own and that sagas owns that maybe we want to do some work with them we can do a project that's a much better project for the community and the environment possibly There are lots of possibilities that have yet to be examined. To have the binary decision of waste management now or nothing else ever, or that we're going to not have any money coming in, that's absurd. Thank you for your time. I hope that you can step back from the brink here, and it never hurts to take a little bit more time to figure something out for real. Thank you. Oh, one last thing on water and sewer. I have to ask you to... and I'll be very quick with it one of the consultants the other night said something that was untrue on his slide he didn't show the 2018 data on inflow and infiltration it's been publicly out there since January I actually had a conversation with that same gentleman about it after one of the water and sewer committee meetings again why was it left out it was left out because it shows that in 2018 the sanitary sewage that we contributed that went to people's houses and went to the pipes was only 37.3 percent of our flow for the whole year 50.1 percent was due to infiltration through the pipes and 12.6 percent was estimated to be due to inflow they don't want you to see it because their aggressive campaign is not getting the job done that's what the issue here is we've talked about this before we'll talk about it again but water and sewer can't just wait for you know only for a bond authorization in the fall and a water and sewer rate in the spring somebody needs to take control of the water and sewer system and make it better because again we're wasting the environment we're wasting resources by putting by this account six 62.7 percent of the flow we send to mwra shouldn't be in that

▶ 57:43 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: flow thank you other members of the public wishing to speak this evening

▶ 57:48 Peter D. Mortimer: motion to close public comment second president you have a motion to close public comment made

▶ 57:51 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: by alderman mortimer second by alderman Boisselle all in favor aye any opposed public comment is