Public Participation

Transcript (~5 min @ 0:50)

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

▶ 0:46 Peter D. Mortimer: Alderman John Tramontozzi, Alderman Mary Beth McAteer-Margolis, Alderman Jennifer Lemmerman, Alderman Scott Forbes, and President Donald Kahn. This meeting is being recorded by MMTV and is available for future viewing on the MMTV website or on the City of Melrose website. Alderman Zwirko has made a motion to open the floor for public participation, duly seconded by Alderman McAteer-Margolis. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, hearing none, public participation is now open.

▶ 1:21 Speaker 2: Mr. Moroz, good evening, sir.

▶ 1:30 Speaker 3: Hi, good evening. Good evening. I see that on the agenda for tonight you have the charter. And I'm just curious whether that's something that you're going to plan to do over an extended period of time, whether everything's going to happen tonight is that I mean I I don't want to talk too long about too many details tonight if you're if you're not going to

▶ 1:56 Speaker 3: be doing the whole thing tonight but is there any so let me just to me one of the more critical issues about the Charter is the issue about whether the the mayor is on the school committee or not and um and to me it would it would be better for the

▶ 2:13 Speaker 3: mayor not to be on the school committee um i went to the charter review commission meetings and you know the expressions that i heard about why it would be good to have the mayor on there as well he can bring information to the meeting and he can um you know he knows what's going on in the city and that type of thing and i don't really see that as really a necessary element or component of a school committee member to do those things if the school committee needs information just like the board of aldermen bring up the city staff and representing the mayor they can do the same thing at a school committee meeting the the harm that i see as the mayor on the school committee is operating right now is that the school committee loses some of its independence as a board even though technically they have a majority and can vote anything they want without the mayor approving it but the mayor basically has a lot of say and over the last number of years has basically set an amount of money for the school committee saying this is what you have

▶ 3:21 Speaker 3: to work with and everybody has basically followed suit with that and they basically said okay well mayors we have this much money to work with so they always talk about we have a deficit budget and we have to cut this and do this and what's the trade-off between you know this thing and that thing and that they that they desire all of them now um i believe that the proper forum to make the resource allocations in melrose about how much to city how much the schools is actually in this room here with the board of aldermen and if the school committee asks for a lot more money than what apparently we would have if we funded the city full it's up to the alderman to say you know maybe we should maybe we should um you know fund this one a little bit less or fund this one a little bit more or vice versa but for the mayor to have the power to push on to the school committee and on to the superintendent because he does have a mayor does have more if you will apparent control on the school committee whereas if the school committee was a completely separate body I don't believe the superintendent would be as likely to say okay we got to do this you know the superintendent you know frankly probably sees the mayor as her highest boss and and that shouldn't be the case and make the superintendents boss should be the school committee and I feel that we don't have good policy decisions made at at the budget level in school committee because of the mayor there I could go into more detail and depth and and and and I probably will at some point but but that is one of the major elements that I worry about even after the Charter Review Commission heard this and and there was a school committee a former school committee member on the Charter Review Commission who has one person's perspective as a school committee member that was on the school committee and it felt to me as if people were deferring to that one person's perspective quite a bit about well is this true or isn't this true and And if she said, oh, no, that wasn't a problem, it seemed to be to me that it was kind of like, okay, we don't have to worry about that because it wasn't a problem from this person. And I think that something as important as the charter, as the framing document of the city that actually defines where the power is, I think that's a conversation that really needs to happen here. Thank you so much for your time.

▶ 5:45 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you very much, Mr. Moroz. Are there any other persons wishing to come forward to participate in public participation? God bless you.

▶ 5:55 Speaker 4: Motion to close public participation.

▶ 5:56 Peter D. Mortimer: Second. Alderman Zwirko has made a motion to close public participation, said motion duly seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor of closing participation, public participation, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, hearing none, public participation is now closed. The first order we will take up is order 2017-140. It is the City of Melrose operating budget for fiscal year 2018 in the amount of $77,397,000, $9.19. We are continuing discussing individual budgets within that overarching order. And the first budget we will discuss tonight is pension.