ORDER-2019-85 : City of Melrose Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2020 in the amount of $86,662,987.61. (Eighty-Six Million, Six Hundred Sixty-Two Thousand, Nine Hundred Eighty-Seven Dollars and Sixty-One Cents).

Transcript (~32 min @ 57:12)

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

▶ 57:13 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: second motion to close the comment made by Alderman's work Oh second by Vice Chair boys all in favor okay that concludes our portion of public comment I'm wondering should we turn directly to our agenda item for which was a public hearing. That was to start at 8 p.m. This is a review of the fiscal year 2020

▶ 57:33 Speaker 5: ambulance rates. Motion to open the public hearing. Second. We have a motion to open the

▶ 57:35 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: public hearing made by President Lemmerman, second by Alderman Medeiros. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? So we are now open for the public hearing portion of our meeting to hear from anyone who wishes to speak about the fiscal year

▶ 57:55 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: 2020 ambulance rates. Seeing none, motion to close the public comment portion of

▶ 57:58 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: public hearing. Second. We have a motion to close the public comment period of public hearing made by alderman i'm sorry by president Lemmerman and seconded by vice chair Boisselle all in favor any opposed okay so we then i think can turn to our first order on our agenda tonight which is order 2019-85 city of melrose operating budget for fiscal year 2020 in the the amount of $86,662,987.61. We have tonight on our agenda the police, capital outlay, and fire. And I see members of the departments here with us tonight.

▶ 58:37 Speaker 5: Motion to suspend the rules.

▶ 58:38 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Second. We have a motion to suspend the rules made by President Lemmerman and seconded by Vice Chair Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? OK. So we are under suspension of rules, and I believe we have the police department listed

▶ 59:10 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: first on our agenda good evening thank you for being here i don't know if you want to

▶ 59:15 Speaker 3: share some remarks to start um this being police week i'd like to mention a couple extraordinary incidents involving a couple of our police officers if you don't mind over this past year if you're if you're okay with that um the first thing uh about two two weeks ago Officers Bill Higgins or William Higgins and Officers Joseph or Joe Stemegner responded to a medical call in the city. I don't want to say the street because I don't want to offend the family for unresponsive male possible heart attack. The officers responded, they arrived on scene, clearly this man was in distress, he was gone. These officers initiated CPR with the help of Melrose Fire, Contaldo. They brought the man back and we got a lovely note from the family stating that he was on his way to recovery. So kudos to those two officers. And the other one, I don't know if you're familiar, some may or may not be, Detective Gregory Forstow. He's assigned to the DEA Task Force, and he had a career case. And it's actually an unfortunate thing, but this officer, detective, did an extraordinary job. The family lost a loved one in an opioid overdose death in 2017, January of 2017. He stuck with that family through this whole crisis, kept them informed of the whole process. He was able to obtain the individual drug deal that sold the drugs to this kid, as well as a number of other residents in our city, as well as neighboring communities. Ultimately, there was a trial this January. This guy pled out, he is due, he was due actually to be sentenced last week to nine to 14 years. was a postponement on the 23rd of this month this gentleman gentleman this individual will be sentenced to between 9 and 14 years so i give a lot of credit i'm proud of all three of these guys especially greg forestel for what he did for this family in melrose so thank you thank you

▶ 1:01:16 Speaker 3: police budget um as as many years this is another uh interesting year for for the melrose police department this past year we had seven officers i know it says five in your notes but it was actually seven officers when I went through it I was doing my best I was out of state communicating with my admin staff Kim Upton to try and coordinate the questionnaire to have it in time on Friday there was seven officers that were injured this year and we also had one officer in a military deployment right now we have two officers they're still out both of them been out for almost two years one has been over two years one is just about two years and it's really done a tremendous negative impact on our overtime so i want everybody aware of that

▶ 1:02:02 Speaker 3: i certainly have backup documents if you need information on that

▶ 1:02:15 Speaker 3: something that someone may be pleased to hear about as far as our records requested this year as i said these numbers were were done long distance actually the police department did 12 requests year to date last year for the whole year was 777 so there's been a dramatic swing in records requests from the public the district attorney's office and obviously legal councils

▶ 1:02:49 Speaker 3: that represent individuals motor vehicle crashes for this year 400 year to date there was approximately 332 involved in a police response and the remainder 67 were less than a thousand dollars where there was a paper exchange when we got the information we did have one fatality last summer over by saint mary's i know you all might be familiar with it that's an ongoing investigation i can't say much more than that tonight as far as parking year to date we've

▶ 1:03:20 Speaker 3: We've had approximately 5,500 parking citations issued to a tune of about $205,000. Citations, 1,066 citations.

▶ 1:03:38 Speaker 3: Of that 1,066, it was approximately 146 in civil. 32 arrests, 84 criminal complaints.

▶ 1:03:54 Speaker 3: Service calls for this past year, 12,793. and a surprising number that concerns me is our domestic violence calls for this year there was 141 calls for domestic related incidents last year was 103. i find that concerning something positive for our community this year we had year to date we've had 11 saves with narcan last year we had seven deployments we had five saves and two deaths

▶ 1:04:32 Speaker 3: some policies that we are working on because of a state voluntary mandate that we that we went through as far as the structure the police department we're going to be creating a new blood-borne pathogen plan with a policy we have to have a policy relative to how we pick up discarded syringes we're working on that those are the two items that are outstanding a marijuana policy a safe storage of firearms policy, and obviously our active shooter program continues.

▶ 1:05:04 Speaker 3: Some new programs that we're looking forward to in 2020.

▶ 1:05:10 Speaker 3: The courts are mandating now that we'll be filing criminal complaints electronically. That's going to be a challenge for our IT department and the police department to get that online on and before July 1.

▶ 1:05:25 Speaker 3: We are going to try to institute some online reporting for residents. Some mundane tasks, a lost cell phone, things of that nature, so they don't have to come into the police department.

▶ 1:05:37 Speaker 3: And we have applied for a pretty hefty grant for domestic violence. And another program that you'll see in a line item in our budget is called the Be Safe program. That enables the police department to have blueprints for all the schools. We'll share them with our fire partners, so that if there's an emergency situation at any school, including the library, the police would have a map their laptops or their mobile terminals as well as hard copies in case the terminals go down to find any area in the building that may be an emergency on site thank you and i'm available for

▶ 1:06:16 Speaker 2: questions alderman our rights chair Boisselle good evening chief thank you for coming i see in your

▶ 1:06:19 Robert A. Boisselle: report here that you have three new cruisers uh this year have they been uh updated to for

▶ 1:06:29 Speaker 3: carbon monoxide monitoring all our cruisers have a small device and it's a carbon monoxide detector that's it now in all the years that we've deployed it since they had the problem with the fords and it went i believe it was something with a seal on the tailgate or the latch

▶ 1:06:45 Robert A. Boisselle: um one off once very good uh how's the fleet now i mean i've been we've been told that the dpw has put a fleet report together we haven't seen that yet but how does that report

▶ 1:07:05 Speaker 3: reflect what you and is there any problems overall the fleet is is in pretty good shape we have two cruisers that that are earmarked for replacement I believe that's coming up one is a 2011 Ford Fusion that has a hundred eleven thousand miles on it it has serious transmission issues and I think it's just throwing good money away that is expired it's so you're phasing out the

▶ 1:07:32 Speaker 3: older portion of your point while they're tired they're just the expenses outweigh the value of the vehicle that's one and then the other one we it's something we discarded because it wasn't worth even roadworthy okay very good

▶ 1:07:41 Robert A. Boisselle: all right thank you thank you very much thank you madam chair of course alderman

▶ 1:07:45 Manisha Bewtra: thank you nice to see you too nice to see you again today um I wanted to ask if you could detail what the types of expenses that were included in overtime we talked earlier about different events and other things that come through your department that where you have to provide police details for example are

▶ 1:08:11 Speaker 3: you talking about as far as community events community events but any other

▶ 1:08:12 Manisha Bewtra: what the dollar amount is pretty large so just sort of breaking that down for

▶ 1:08:20 Speaker 3: some of that covers obviously a priority of shifts shift assignments to see how sectors are full with a number of injuries and I don't have the luxury of just taking officer Rex and moving them to shift why that's all selected through collective bargaining and I respect that so for instance the two offices that are still out injured around the day shift we call it the B shift the day shift and that causes us four days a week over times to fill those voids they're in overlapping so there is some coverage to support that but there's four over times

▶ 1:09:10 Speaker 3: a week just on those two individuals alone as far as vacation so vacation time goes up as the department gets seasoned or as years of service go on so So last year we had approximately 6,200 hours of vacation, this year we're up to 6,400 hours of vacation. So that 300 hours of vacation is additional funding that we're going to have to come up with, or different creative ways to do it. In all that time that we did not use 6,200 hours of overtime,

▶ 1:09:47 Speaker 3: it was probably about 20% of that, injury and illness.

▶ 1:09:57 Speaker 3: go hand in hand as far as the police department I I categorize a you know the top five would say four hours so sick time this year was was 1399 hours but in

▶ 1:10:12 Speaker 3: reality that the overall usage for the year was was 2740 but actually we had a cover 1399 hours of overtime and that was due to those when I said those seven injures were out injured some was on the job and some was off the job so one individual playing basketball got injured so they use their sick time whereas some is 111 F where I check all injured backfills so we had thirteen hundred ninety three hours of injuries and 976 hours of backfills for those

▶ 1:10:49 Speaker 3: injuries then there's something that it's also we have a light duty policy so that if somebody is out injured and they are suitable to do light duty tasks we bring them in but we still have to fill their shift with overtime so that was 776 hours military backfill we've had an officer deployed in the military since september he's due back on may 18th that was his total hours of 1560 the overtime was 840. those are the big ones but there's some that like you mentioned community hours this the road race that occurred yesterday the police department covered the cost of that road race we've been doing it since its inception

▶ 1:11:26 Manisha Bewtra: and and are those sort of um planned budgeted sort of overtime expenses or how does that work

▶ 1:11:34 Speaker 1: they just come out of the bottom line got it that's it yep it's something we accept all right

▶ 1:11:37 Manisha Bewtra: thank you very much thanks for being here tonight and for your time earlier today as well welcome

▶ 1:11:45 Michael P. Zwirko: alderman's work go thank you madam chair thank you for being here this evening chief lyle um I wanted to say, and I never actually had a chance to do it publicly, last year, probably about six to seven months ago, you gave us your annual report. It was a very great bevy of information that was provided to us on all the items that the police is generally doing throughout the year. And are you going to be doing that again this year? Yes, we will.

▶ 1:12:11 Speaker 3: I make a goal to have it out before August 1. Okay. We get a notice from the city, the mayor's office, sometime early July. we start we've already working on it now so that when July comes it's not a monster it's something that we can manage pretty quickly we'll look forward

▶ 1:12:27 Michael P. Zwirko: to it this summer I wanted to talk because I know that we had some grants money that was supplied for this are you seeing an uptick in

▶ 1:12:38 Speaker 3: distracted driving around the city I'm hopeful that the legislators come up with that hands-free bill as far as cell phone so distracted driving is very prevalent in every community yeah you stand on a street corner you can see them left and right yeah it's not just talking on cell phones it's a wide variety of things people do

▶ 1:12:59 Michael P. Zwirko: yeah the other uh the other question i had was uh with respect to the um the fleet which alderman Boisselle brought up earlier if i remember correctly last year when we were appropriating funds for the fleet we actually you had requested uh for five yes but we were only able to due to funding to fund three yes um are there plans this year are there discussions that are occurring that those

▶ 1:13:27 Speaker 3: other two are going to be next on the list um i believe they're in queue later this evening one one has already been approved and the second one is tonight but uh what what's the quality of those

▶ 1:13:37 Speaker 3: two vehicles right now um one is is no longer with us it was disposed of because it was just worthless it had major major mechanical issues and you know what it was you know 2013 it was

▶ 1:13:50 Michael P. Zwirko: beyond its use and from the time that we hire a police officer um and they go through the various academy what's the uptick in terms of the life cycle that they're actually on the force and on

▶ 1:14:01 Speaker 3: the ground you're talking about the police officer um well i've been here for 33 years it's generally by the time they're trained it's about a year about a year approximately a year from the day we start looking at them to the 10 time they get out of the academy and they're ready for for patrol ready for patrol okay thank you chief those are all the questions i had at this

▶ 1:14:25 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: time thank you madam chair uh president Lemmerman thank you um thank you chief for being here this evening and uh since you mentioned police week i just thought i'd take the opportunity to recognize that literally as we speak starting at 8 p.m. this evening in Washington DC right now is the annual candlelight vigil happening at the law enforcement memorial with over 300 names being added to the 20,000 that are already on there so yes so we do look forward to having you and your officers here in this chamber next week as we have each year thank you just a couple of questions the questionnaire that you have recognizes in a couple of places is looking at the changes year over year for the overtime backfill that's needed for a variety of reasons in your staffing. And looking at the line here, it is level funded, but when we look back at previous years, it's been higher as the year goes on. So just confirming that that will be this year. We anticipate that we will see you again in this chamber.

▶ 1:15:25 Speaker 3: I believe you will, yes. I mean, we had an extraordinary year injuries and illnesses in the military deployments we never know what's going on in southern borders Venezuela I have no idea right okay thank you and then just

▶ 1:15:40 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: a small item the the increase there's a 25% increase in postage is that the records requests that you're receiving okay that's great okay I think that is it thank you very much chief thank you thank you thank you thank you uh i was hoping that you

▶ 1:15:58 Monica C. Medeiros: could talk a little bit about uh administration in your office i know um last year there was a vacancy and you know how's that going and how is your staff time administrator um outstanding

▶ 1:16:11 Speaker 3: selection i have made no bones about it to the administration that kim upton is an all-star in our department and we just hired a rachel jacobs jacobsmeyer and i i told city hall today that she would be in a succession plan for the future of the mellows police department years to come when i certainly retire and when kim moves on at some point when she retires we have a perfect placement certainly i would ask for more hours from here the workload is certainly there with the records request that we are really getting inundated with so that's about uh she works 18

▶ 1:16:55 Monica C. Medeiros: hours now one part-time and uh in the past you had been using um some senior citizens to help

▶ 1:17:04 Speaker 3: with the work off program is that still happening uh well two of them had developed medical problems so we're waiting for them to return and well we have one on one board right now okay i'm sorry

▶ 1:17:15 Speaker 3: to hear that but it's okay no no no they're always welcome yes and um

▶ 1:17:23 Monica C. Medeiros: well so actually can you talk about where uh where we are with collective bargaining agreements and

▶ 1:17:33 Speaker 3: i know we just settled a contract not that long ago um both of them within the past 90 days both patrol and supervisors have settled the supervisors ratified theirs today okay excellent so for the

▶ 1:17:46 Speaker 1: next three years um smooth sailing are all those numbers factored into this budget the fy20 budget

▶ 1:17:50 Monica C. Medeiros: yes and so for instance like when we see for instance a increase of uh 5.2 percent in the

▶ 1:17:58 Speaker 3: overall salary line so that's that encompasses both sellers uh both the patrol and supervisor

▶ 1:18:03 Monica C. Medeiros: salaries okay great big patrol and supervisors and as we go into overtime we're probably It looks like that number is flat from last year, what we've budgeted, so it seems like we're probably going to go over.

▶ 1:18:17 Speaker 3: I call it the base, not the ceiling. So we start there, and obviously if we have a bad year like we did with injuries, I know that every year that we're going to have illness and injuries, Family Medical Leave Act, and the unknown on military deployments, and certainly the administration has been very good to support us in that.

▶ 1:18:35 Speaker 1: And we are expecting one back in just a matter of days.

▶ 1:18:38 Speaker 3: May 18th, he is due back. Richard Connors, yes.

▶ 1:18:41 Monica C. Medeiros: That's also very good news. Some of the other line items, like, for instance, food, is that to do with the contractual?

▶ 1:18:51 Speaker 3: So the food is for our prisoners, and to my surprise that one recent detainee had a food allergy, so we had to go seeking certain types of meals for that individual when that person was detained. Okay. So we had to increase that line.

▶ 1:19:14 Monica C. Medeiros: And then in the salary section, there's a line for accreditation, Narcan, defib, hazardous duty stipends, and that's actually a $6,500 decrease from last year's budget, which was $75,000.

▶ 1:19:30 Speaker 1: I'm just-

▶ 1:19:36 Speaker 3: That is all broken out into salaries. So when you see the officer's actual salary on the previous pages, those stipends have to be added into them, and I don't have those numbers broken down, so I can't answer that. I mean, I could have it broken down and give you the breakdown completely if you'd like.

▶ 1:19:54 Monica C. Medeiros: I mean, just maybe a little bit of an explanation of why the decrease is there.

▶ 1:20:00 Speaker 3: Because Dave Roy is one of our officers that did retire this past year. Dave retired, he reached the age limit and he retired. That's probably the main factor in that.

▶ 1:20:16 Monica C. Medeiros: Are these stipends tied to years of service, so some officers receive more than others?

▶ 1:20:20 Speaker 3: In some cases, yes, the accreditation is for the patrol only, knock-in, defib, hazard duty, broken down by everybody in the police department but some work days they do not get the hazard duty some work evenings they do get the hazard duty there's different breakdowns as far as that's structure thank you so when I sell reason if you are sellers every year bodies move around on different shifts and it fluctuates our salaries that's all it might just be something as

▶ 1:20:52 Monica C. Medeiros: simple as that all right well I think that covers the majority of my questions thank you very much thank you to your department thank you thank you for the

▶ 1:21:00 Speaker 1: support Alderman McMaster Thank You madam chair

▶ 1:21:02 Shawn M. MacMaster: thank you chief for being here this evening also a special thank you to all the men and women of the Mellor's Police Department for your great work throughout the course of the year I'd also like to personally thank you for all of the work that you've done with me and Ward 5 relative to traffic safety and parking enforcement so I know the residents of the ward appreciate all of your efforts thank you chief I only had a couple questions the first question relates to a matter last year I believe there was an item from two years ago that was cut in last year's budget and if I recall I think it was $7,500 for a PR firm I don't see that reflected in this year's budget did that cut carry

▶ 1:21:53 Speaker 3: over for the upcoming fiscal year is we still have the same company that handles so yeah I'd have to explain it to you as far as our PR our PR firm actually is a byproduct of the website it's John Guilfoyle and Associates they manage our website and part of that package is they handle our PR for us at no cost and

▶ 1:22:15 Shawn M. MacMaster: Chief does that include social media presence as well yes and as part of that contract that they required to perform so many tweets throughout the the course

▶ 1:22:27 Speaker 3: of the year did I send them the information they handle the tweets for me because my day is pretty pretty hectic so I may just call them I may send them a short email or a text please put something out and they shoot it out pretty quickly the most recent one was the exploded missing children that they put out i attended the conference last week and that when i was down there i was sending them information back and forth they've been very very supportive of our department and are they required

▶ 1:22:53 Shawn M. MacMaster: to um send out so many press releases a year no they uh they support me uh nine to five obviously

▶ 1:23:00 Speaker 3: if it's three o'clock in the morning and i call them out for an emergency yes i will get an invoice

▶ 1:23:08 Shawn M. MacMaster: for that and chief where is that reflected in this budget i just don't see it in there and i i seem to have some recollection from a prior from last year excuse me that it was uh that it was cut if not cut completely that it was cut um by a certain amount um they're they're under computer support

▶ 1:23:32 Shawn M. MacMaster: okay and the only other question chief that i have is i noticed there's a 25 increase in postage um does that increase correspond to the increase in public records requests and the mail associated

▶ 1:23:44 Speaker 3: with uh yes communicating with yes but there's no um we the most of our records requests do come paper copies we do get a fair amount from email voicemail the da's office fits us pretty hard but a lot of that is paper okay thank you chief thank you thank you madam chair vice chair Boisselle

▶ 1:24:03 Robert A. Boisselle: chief in your training section is live fire training included in that training line yes now do you have to do all the officers have to qualify in that area yes annually and so

▶ 1:24:18 Robert A. Boisselle: everyone's up to date on that particular live fire now that's done once a year or how many times a

▶ 1:24:27 Speaker 3: year do you do live fire we we try to do it twice a year so we i have a relationship with another agency and we they allow us to use their ranch um so we do our live fire at the ranch up in bedford sorry Chief Bongiorno and then we we try to do an active shooter situation we're working on that right now in the coming weeks we should have that okay very good

▶ 1:24:53 Robert A. Boisselle: going to another topic has of this morning 48 for no 41 police officers died in the line of duty this use this year within the past five months and When a question comes up to protect our police officers, we've purchased vests at this point. What is the status of the warranties of these vests, and are they wearing them? Are all officers required to wear these vests?

▶ 1:25:26 Speaker 3: Anybody assigned to patrol is required, and then there's exemptions as far as the requirement to wear them. If an officer is undercover, they may not have to wear them. If they do an administrative function like I do, as well as a number of lieutenants and sergeants, the prosecutor, we wear them when we're out on patrol.

▶ 1:25:49 Robert A. Boisselle: The warranties now, what is the status of those?

▶ 1:25:52 Speaker 3: Each vest has a five-year life cycle. We have a grant, 50% from the federal government. called the BBB program ballistic vest program 50% from the state 50% from the government and the net cost of the city is zero we buy the first vests for our officers when they come on out of the Academy and then moving forward they go

▶ 1:26:17 Robert A. Boisselle: into the program okay so there's no you're not purchasing any vests this

▶ 1:26:20 Speaker 3: year or yes we are you are right now but it's not tied to this it's tied to the grant to the grant okay you wouldn't you would not see it on our on our budget

▶ 1:26:30 Robert A. Boisselle: okay good my third concept is again within the past couple months we've had not in this state but in other states two school shootings yes have you done any training in our schools for the for drills of any sort or instructions to the teachers and so forth

▶ 1:26:49 Speaker 3: we have done a number of trainings as far as situational shootings in our schools along with our partners in the fire department we've done them in a business setting we try to do them in every every scenario we possibly can think of and obviously what goes on in the country we're well

▶ 1:27:14 Robert A. Boisselle: aware of what happens okay thank you very much thank you madam certainly you're welcome any

▶ 1:27:16 Speaker 3: member of this board wants to go to one of our trainings we'll put you in the equipment you'll see we'll see what the police do as well as our counterpart in the fire department very good thank Thank you. You're more than welcome.

▶ 1:27:29 Speaker 2: Thank you, Madam Chair.

▶ 1:27:30 Speaker 1: Thank you.

▶ 1:27:31 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: Chief, thanks for being here. I think one thing I would just be interested in hearing a little bit more about are the top line terms of the two contracts that were recently completed. I know they're retroactive to beginning of July 2018, and I'm just wondering, obviously there was some salary increases for both union members. then were there any manage sort of concessions or things that management I

▶ 1:27:58 Speaker 3: don't have the contracts with me and I apologize and I could certainly get that information to you if you wish I you know I try to bring everything I possibly can that's okay the supervisors I just got an email this afternoon that they had ratified there's there what there was some some segments of the unions got a fair increase others just got a standard increase the big thing I've got was with job descriptions for the supervisors the patrol officers continued to support the accreditation program I don't maybe

▶ 1:28:36 Speaker 3: Patrick has any additional information for the auditor but I could certainly

▶ 1:28:43 Speaker 1: get you a copy of that if you like sure that's your convenience and I can have it in the morning okay we appreciate that very much any other questions for the chief I do know that on our agenda we have I believe one revolving account