PUBLIC COMMENT

Transcript (~9 min @ 1:03:20)

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

▶ 1:03:15 Bradley Freeman: At this time, I'll motion by unanimous consent to approve without reading the minutes from the April 6th, 2026 meeting. Seeing no objection, those minutes are now approved. I will now motion by unanimous consent to open the floor for public comment. Seeing no objection, we are open for public comment. Per Rule 33A of the Melrose City Council rules, this is the portion of the meeting where the public may speak on any item on tonight's agenda. Comments expressing any viewpoint on any other matters are also welcome. I see we have people in the audience tonight, so please feel free to come up to the table. Just a reminder, the public comment period is an opportunity for the public to share comments. Counselors will not respond. The public has up to five minutes for comments. I will notify you when you have 30 seconds remaining.

▶ 1:04:04 Bradley Freeman: Is anyone here for public comment tonight? Oh, yeah. Just giving her a little overview.

▶ 1:04:08 Bradley Freeman: And if you can just say your name and your address. Yes.

▶ 1:04:12 Speaker 12: All right. So my name is Billie. I live on Ashland Street in The Highlands. I don't know if I have enough for those.

▶ 1:04:19 Speaker 11: Sorry, Billie, what's your last name? Bloom. B-L-O-O-M. Thank you very much. Yep.

▶ 1:04:23 Speaker 12: Hi again. So I was actually here back when I had a three-month-old. Now she's five-- Sorry. Now she's nine months old. Mm-hmm. Three, nine. Yeah. I have three children, ages four, two, and nine months. And I'm here to speak again on the behalf of the Melrose Parents Committee regarding the Melrose Public Library children's room. The Melrose Parents Committee is a recently formed group of people who want to drive progress towards a welcoming, engaging, and fun children's room here in Melrose. And also want to think more broadly about the experience in Melrose at playgrounds and other spaces. The children's room survey was concluded nearly five months ago. We're happy to see a snack table, three wall art hangings, and a couple of play items added to the space since then. But there's still so much room for improvement. We would really appreciate the City Council and the mayor's support to urge the library to create an environment that the community is truly excited about. This isn't just a couple eager parents urging change. An actual library consultant came and did a report. It's on their website if you'd like to see what the report was, but basically, it actually was a lot of what we had been saying in our report that we did when we visited the 15 libraries, and we handed that to council with photos overviewing the Noble Network.

▶ 1:06:00 Speaker 12: So an example of how easy these upgrades can be comes from our neighbors over at the Stoneham Library. They also had a recent renovation, and they reopened their children's room in mid-January this year. Their children's room opened with just a dollhouse and a Lego table. Within one month of hearing feedback from their community, they added the following to their space: bin of crayons and paper to their new tables, six bins of play items such as dinos, fake food, figures, vehicles, a puppet stand, and wooden puzzles. This happened without a survey, and it happened without an official library consultant coming. It happened without parents nagging and a parent committee putting a presentation in front of the director's table. This happened just from patrons coming to the checkout and saying, "Hey, we kind of expected more from you guys." And the librarian, I talked to her, she's always asking, like, "Feedback. Do you have any feedback?" That is not, like, in our librarians' vocabulary, the word feedback. And we've been working really hard to try and work with the librarians and doing whatever we can. I think I've called a couple of you just to be like, "What else can I do?" And I really don't want to come off as a negative person. We just want the best from our library. We want our kids to grow up enjoying our library andWanting to go there. We want them to be 10 years old and prefer to go there than Dunkin' Donuts because their friends will be there, and they have puzzles and... Yeah, this is very near and dear to me. So anyways, I would really appreciate anyone's support to help urge the library staff to work on this. In my last correspondence with the library, I asked what the timeline was for future editions, and I was told that there is no timeline. And that's really unfortunate because no timeline essentially means there is no plan. I asked if anything else was on order, and there is a delayed farm stand for the last two months, but besides that, there's nothing else on order. We had 500 people take this survey in our community, so clearly a lot of people care and want to see more from our library.

▶ 1:08:27 Speaker 12: But anyways, they've been open a year now. So I think a full year worth of having the renovation and being open is more than enough time, where now we have all these additional elements that have came in that it's like we're ready. We're ready for our library to just make some moves. So I handed out this Melrose Parents Committee chart that-

▶ 1:08:55 Bradley Freeman: You have about 30 seconds left

▶ 1:08:57 Speaker 12: ... we will-- Okay. That we're going to continue to work on and push and hope to see more from our library.

▶ 1:09:03 Speaker 11: Thanks. Thank you very much.

▶ 1:09:06 Speaker 9: My name is Nancy Wu. I live at Richardson Road in the Highlands. I'm also part of the committee with Billy, and I'm actually relatively new to Melrose. I've been here for two years and moved here because I heard it's a great community, it's a great city to raise my children. And obviously, I've left Boston, and since then I've had two kids here. So I have a one-year-old and a two-year-old, and I absolutely love Melrose. And I was very excited when the library finally finished to bring my children to the library, but I was actually very disappointed in the amount of toys there were and amount of a safe place where the kids can play and be stimulated with visual toys, or puzzles or pictures. And it was not until I have met more parents in the city, because I'm still new and I work full-time, so it has been really hard to meet people. But I have discovered there are other libraries in the kind of North Shore, Metro West. So because of the lack of programs that are available for the toddlers or even the slightly older children, like after-school programs, I actually have to take my children to Woburn and Reading and Medford and Cambridge and even Boston, where I used to live, just so that they can attend this music event. Or that they can do a open play area where the library just set a one hour or even 45 minutes where they bring out mats with different types of toys for different age groups. And some of these toys are donated by the residents of the community, and some of them, I think the library has a certain funding to kind of purchase these toys. And I thought that maybe after a few months that it's open, there will be some new programs or improvements to the Melrose Library, but there has not been any. Or there will be a newborn or toddler event, but it would be literally during nap time. So I'm not sure how the programs are being organized or who's doing it, but I just wish there was more programs where I didn't have to leave the city. And it's making me question, did I do the right thing by moving to Melrose? Am I constantly going to Woburn or I'm constantly going to Reading so that now my kids are playing with the kids from this city, and they're never going to see them in kindergarten, right? They're never going to grow up with them in elementary school. And like what Billy said, we have kids that are also getting older every day, and we want them to be able to go to the library and get excited to go there and meet with their friends and play with something or join a music event. Or just even have more things that can stimulate them. Because oftentimes they just want to play with Lego, or they just want to have a play kitchen where they can pretend to cook, because not everybody has the money to have that set in their own home or have a big enough home to actually support big toys. And even little robots or things that-- Like STEM, where they have numbers or puzzles or balls, and we don't really have a lot of that. And I would want my kids to grow up to be exposed to these kind of activities and things, rather than be on the streets doing other things. Yeah.

▶ 1:12:29 Bradley Freeman: Wonderful. Thank you very much.

▶ 1:12:31 Speaker 12: All right. Thank you.

▶ 1:12:32 Speaker 11: Appreciate you coming in tonight.

▶ 1:12:35 Speaker 11: Madam Clerk, is there anyone online?

▶ 1:12:36 Speaker 2: No one online.

▶ 1:12:39 Bradley Freeman: If there's no objection, I'd like to close public comment. Seeing none, we are now closed for public comment. Moving on with the agenda, there are no communications tonight. So we'll move on to new business filings by the honorable mayor, appointments, and reappointments.