Appropriations & Oversight Committee — 2018-06-11

Appropriations and Oversight Budget Hearing

This meeting starts at 0:00 in a recording that covers several meetings.

Attendance

Manisha Bewtra present · Alderman at Large; Robert A. Boisselle present · Ward 4 Alderman; Scott M. Forbes present · Vice Chair; Jennifer L. Lemmerman present · Chair; Kate Lipper-Garabedian present · Alderman at Large; Shawn M. MacMaster present · Ward 5 Alderman; Monica C. Medeiros present · Alderman at Large; Peter D. Mortimer present · Ward 6 Alderman; John N. Tramontozzi present · Ward 1 Alderman; Francis X. Wright Jr. absent · Ward 3 Alderman; Michael P. Zwirko present · President/ Ex-officio Member

Agenda

Minutes

CITY OF MELROSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE CALENDAR● JUNE 11, 2018 Aldermanic Chamber, Melrose City Hall Budget Hearing 7:30 PM 562 Main Street, Melrose, MA 02176 The public should take notice that the Melrose Board of Aldermen may, on certain occasions, have a quorum in attendance due to standing committees of the Board of Aldermen consisting of both voting and non-voting members. Members attending this duly posted meeting are participating and deliberating only in conjunction with the business of the standing committee. Attendee Name Title Status Arrived Scott M. Forbes Vice Chair Present Peter D. Mortimer Ward 6 Alderman Present Robert A. Boisselle Ward 4 Alderman Present John N. Tramontozzi Ward 1 Alderman Present Francis X. Wright Jr. Ward 3 Alderman Absent Monica C. Medeiros Alderman at Large Present Michael P. Zwirko President/ Ex-officio Member Present Manisha Bewtra Alderman at Large Present Kate Lipper-Garabedian Alderman at Large Present Shawn M. MacMaster Ward 5 Alderman Present Jennifer L. Lemmerman Chair Present

ORDER-2018-180 Amending Something Previously Adopted Amend Melrose Revised Ordinances, Chapter 24, Article II - Fire Department, Sec. 24-32(E) - Emergency Rescue Vehicle, to set fees for FY 19. Recommend as Amended Melrose School Committee Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-182 Enterprise Fund Ambulance Enterprise Fund Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of $923,783.75 (Nine Hundred Twenty Three Thousand, Seven Hundred Eighty Three Dollars and Seventy Five Cents. Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen City of Melrose Page 1 Updated 6/13/2018 2:41 PM Minutes Appropriations Committee June 11, 2018

ORDER-2018-183 Operating Budgets (City, School, Regional School) City of Melrose Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of $79,399,945.73 (Seventy-Nine Million, Three Hundred Ninety-Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred Forty-Five Dollars and Seventy-Three Cents). Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen City of Melrose Page 2 Updated 6/13/2018 2:41 PM

Transcript

▶ 0:00 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Good evening. The hour being 7 30 p.m. On June 11th, 2018, I call to order the Appropriations Committee of the City of Melrose Board of Aldermen. This meeting is being recorded. It's being broadcast live on MMTV and is available for viewing later on the City of Melrose website as well as at the MMTV website. I'm the chair. I'm Alderman Lemmerman. I'm joined this evening by the vice chair, Alderman Forbes, as well as committee Member Alderman Mortimer, Alderman Boisselle, Alderman Tramontozzi, Alderman Medeiros, President Search, Alderman Buccia, Alderman Lipper-Garabedian, and Alderman McMaster. We have a motion to open the floor. So moved. Second. We have a motion to open the floor for public comment made by President Search and seconded by Alderman Mortimer.

▶ 0:48 All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? We are now in the public comment portion of our meeting where any member of the public may come forward to speak on any item on our agenda. Good evening. Is it the same thing? No, I just, I'm going to do one call because she's going to, so. Just one, one. One page. One page, one hand up, yeah. Thank you, I'm Jerry Meroz. The page that I just handed out to you was a simple spreadsheet I created using information that was passed out last week by the city auditor regarding indirect costs of water and sewer. And I know tonight that's not on your agenda, but what is on your agenda tonight is the law department. And I want to call your attention to this spreadsheet under legal, the second line down,

▶ 2:10 which under legal and the indirect cost for the water and sewer has been estimated, I'll say, at $25,661 of legal employee time toward the water enterprise fund and $25,661 of legal time extensively spent for the sewer fund. The two enterprise funds together combined to $51,322 that someone is asserting that that amount of money is being spent on behalf of the water and sewer fund, or that amount of resources are being applied from the legal department to the water and sewer enterprise funds. Now, when you look next to that, and you see that the, and I took the total FY19 budget for legal there, I apologize, maybe I didn't quite get the total, but maybe the salaries, but it's $282,061, which means that it's 18.2% of what's being represented as being used

▶ 3:18 by the Water and Sewer Enterprise Fund of the total legal department. Now I want to highlight here that one of the employees of the legal department is used solely at this time, one of the attorneys is used solely for the schools. That makes the percentage be significantly higher when you look at that. I want to say that to me it has not been supported that that level of funds or that level of resources from the legal department is being used toward the legal department I would love you to ask the legal department when they have for their budget how much they actually do and I I do want to mention I took some notes the other night when mr. Della Russo was speaking and he actually used the legal

▶ 4:05 department as an example when he was speaking about indirect costs and he said you know something like if we only look at the legal department there are of procurement services, contract development, authorizations, compliance, bidding disputes, collective marketing, contract negotiations, representation, contract impasse matters, employee grievances, et cetera, workman's comp matters, representation, fact finding, et cetera, contract billing disputes, claims, court related time, contract performance issues, et cetera, legal opinions regarding water and sewer matter, and he said the list goes on and on. I ask you how many collective bargaining units do we have in the city that we negotiate with you know how many things do we deal with for the schools for a

▶ 4:57 whole range of different legal issues can you really say that even of the gross of the legal 18.2 percent are at water and sewer it doesn't pass the smell test to me no pun intended there I'm sorry I do want to call you next because it's also under the legal the the general insurance policy for the city that's listed in the legal department budget line items it's represented that the city pays 520 it it's shown as property insurance and it's not quite clear where everything comes up with its liability or property or whatever but what I found in the city budget was a five hundred and twenty four thousand eight hundred dollar expense in the legal department and perhaps the relevant thing is somewhere else I don't know but it's showing that

▶ 5:47 the water and sewer combined use of what they say is general insurance is one hundred and fifty seven thousand four hundred and forty dollars and if in true that line item in the legal department is what these indirect costs are represented to for the water and sewer is it really true that water and sewer represents 30% of our liability that we're ensuring I the question I don't have the answer it's a question again the caveat is I don't know I'd love to be corrected if I'm grabbing the wrong number but if so please give me the correct number so I can have something to work with that's there so there are a whole lot of other line items on this sheet that aren't relevant to the legal issues tonight but I do think that it's important that we hear from every

▶ 6:39 department and most of the departments are done now but these indirect cost claims without seeing what total full-time equivalent employees are estimated to be being applied to the water and sewer fund you know there's there's nothing to support those claims and and again I don't want to get into the water and sewer we'll do that again when you when it comes back to the full board shortly. However, there were a lot of rhetorical devices used here the other night, which no matter how many times you quote the Department of Revenue Division of Local Services or how many times you say MGL Chapter 44, no matter how many times you claim that some five auditors have done something. The fact is, if you had the real numbers

▶ 7:32 and you could defend the numbers, wouldn't an ordinary person defend their numbers rather than use the logical fallacies of honor by association to try to claim that because somebody else might have somehow been peripherally involved that that legitimizes all these representations? I do want to, again, say that indirect costs are a perfectly legitimate thing to apply as an accounting metric or measure to what does something cost, and of course it's an estimate. And I want to be clear that nobody, certainly not me, has ever said that indirect costs are a wrong accounting measure or somehow there's something fundamentally deficient about them. I'm trying to pick my word carefully here. My concern with what's been done in terms of what's been represented year after year

▶ 8:36 after year about the indirect costs is that they aren't real they aren't accurate nobody has showed us I mean I wanted to show you here even tonight with my what I did in a spreadsheet simple spreadsheet took me about 10 minutes to most the time to grab the numbers because frankly the city site stuff isn't well the indirect crossings that were put out they aren't machine readable which is unfortunate but the issue here is is that it was showing in the indirect cost what the percent of the water and sewer budget was somehow making implying that these indirect costs are somehow commensurate and they were small numbers of course of the water and sewer budget because we all know that the largest huge piece of the pie for water and sewer budget goes the

▶ 9:26 MWRA and for those MWRA costs we don't have a whole lot of contract negotiations going on a bargaining unit negotiations going on or insurance needs or health insurance needs or pension needs when you look at and I will show you this next time but when you look at what the actual percentage of the non MWRA cost of the water and sewer is it is huge the indirect cost of the of the non MWRA cost and so I put that out there I would love to hear the whoever representing the city solicitor tonight to um you know please represent how these percentages and not just declare that they're appropriate i'd like to hear how they're appropriate do we actually have data do we have you know time sheets for different personnel even just within the legal

▶ 10:18 department they use time slips and and see what their time is built at do we have any evidence of that to be able to prove that these numbers are correct are our losses attributable to water and and sewer, or even our exposure of liability due to water and sewer, really this percent of the whole thing? If so or if not, where are those calculations? Why aren't they here in front of you as the alderman so that you can make your own confirmation or determination that the figures that are in front of you that you are going to vote on are indeed appropriate that they aren't just you know you have to do your due diligence and i've heard different people over the years claim that well we have to trust what the city gives us

▶ 11:12 and you know i wasn't a huge fan of ronald reagan but trust but verify is the apt term here right that you can trust somebody so long as they prove your trust and how do they prove your trust well you verify it from time to time and see what it is so again tonight with the illegal um i apologize it isn't tonight is it tonight it is tonight so actually let me jump into the it one that was my last thing i was thinking about um it's showing here that oh i'm sorry a couple other things here 285 000 is what we apply to it and um we're saying here that that the water and sewer combined is 21 percent of that at sixty thousand dollars um you know maybe there's a server dedicated to the water and sewer billing system maybe there's a little piece of

▶ 12:03 munis there um um but if it is part of that and is munis under it as well i apologize i should more prepared here tonight but if munis is under it um if you look at the software licenses and again if somebody has better information than i was able to call from the from the budget please let me know but i was finding that the indirect cost for water and sewer that were applied as represented last week is seventy eight thousand nine hundred and twenty eight dollars the total software and licenses that i see on the city website on the city fyi 19 budget was about i believe 88 000 for munis supplies is what it says and i assume part of that is a munis license um and then there were another about 19 000 as i recall for licenses i combined the two to make

▶ 12:52 107 355 dollars but please tell me what i'm missing when i calculate here that 73.5 percent of the i.t software and licenses budget is being applied as an indirect cost to water and sewer thank you for your time tonight i look forward to hearing your conversation discussion i especially look forward to hearing um if if if Member of the board here can find the answers to my questions thank you thank you mr morris any other Member of the public here this evening wishing to speak motion to close public participation madam chair second we have a motion to close public comment made by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman boisselle all in favor portion is now closed we will move on to the orders before us

▶ 13:39 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: beginning with the departmental budget hearings that are on our list first madam chair if i may just uh out of an abundance of caution i'm not sure if i heard it but did we announce that this is being televised we did remember we did yeah thanks i just want to double check department number 652 is up first it's just pine banks in the amount of 299 dollars 350 299 000 353 dollars and 57 cents excuse me motion to suspend the rules we have a motion to suspend the rules made by uh was that alderman forbes seconded by alderman mortimer all in favor of suspension of rules aye aye any opposed we are now under suspension of rules and we are joined this evening by the superintendent and the president of the board uh mr walsh and mr kieser for pine

▶ 14:27 banks thank you for being here this evening would you like to make an opening statement on this item before we move to questions from the committee sure short summary i've got some new faces here we've distributed our annual report this year isn't red the picture that you see on the first page there was taken last summer by paul hammersley who works in malden he has a drone and it was up over boston rock looking at we have a summer camp there for rugby players for 12 13 year olds and they were on the fields it came out pretty well uh pine banks was created by statute in 1905 taking care of an inheritance from the mayor of malden mayor converse and the statute provides a formula for the determination of

▶ 15:20 funding from the park and then holds that it's to be funded equally by malden and melrose the formula is on page six and it's based upon Department of Revenue reports that are on page four and five and this year that formula comes to six hundred and thirty nine thousand which is up around forty thousand dollars from last year it's based upon the combined assessments of real estate for the smaller base city, which would be Melrose, which is an indication that property values have gone up a fairly good portion, which I think we all understand at this point. Our analysis on the finances is on page 7. We have three types of or categories of income at Pine Banks. One is compensation and benefits.

▶ 16:19 The second is general operations and administration and the third is for equipment purchases and capital. The compensation and benefits for Pine Banks Park are run through the City of Melrose through the HR department and Mary Ann Long. So the staff there are employees of the City of Melrose and they're leased to Pine Banks Park under a contract that we wrote five years ago all the compensation then treats them as Melrose employees and Malden kicks in quarterly the amount that is decided between the two so we are reflective of what the city of Melrose has done in compensation for the projecting it out for the next year. And our detail on that is on page eight. The compensation figures there combine not only the payment that folks receive, but also their benefits, their retirement,

▶ 17:25 their medical costs, and also the costs associated with retirees, which are fairly significant. So the idea here is whatever the cost of Pine Banks is, it's split between the two cities and we try to account for every part of it I should say that we've gotten great cooperation upstairs from all the departments in Melrose and they're working terrifically with the similar staff in the city of Malden it's been practically flawless the portion of the budget that is on operations is on page seven and it runs from line six through line 42 it's the smallest print I could find I apologize for that but it's it's flat lined from what we had last year so there is no increase on those amounts the total increase on compensation going

▶ 18:32 back to the top is on line 5. It's gone from $403,000 to $409,000. That reflects the City of Melrose adjustment across the board, and in our figures comes to a 1.43% increase. The equipment capital purchases start on line 43 on page 7 and go to line 57. The big item there is on line 45 that's the ball field amortization in 2016 we got a mass development tax-exempt bond for about a million eight at three percent fixed for ten years the advantage of that is that it gave us access to practically the equivalent of what would be available on a municipal bond but has the advantage of requiring the guarantee of neither the city of Malden or Melrose to access those funds and it doesn't appear on your balance sheet or affect the bonding

▶ 19:37 of the city of Melrose in any way so we're particularly happy to have access to that those funds were used to resurface the big rugby soccer field and we also continued on with the remediation of the area that was used as the Melrose landfill next to Wyoming Cemetery. We have taken down the trees and capped that area and dedicated it now for a dog park, which is practically an acre in size. So you're gonna have very well exercised dogs. We have an area for large and small depending on your preference. But that was, it's a 10 year fixed rate, 3%. We got it at the time it was at most advantageous we're very pleased with that. Last year we acquired some equipment so Mr. Walsh could do his work up there. Those were on line 46 through 50. You can see that we

▶ 20:40 state the price from last year and we state that we're not doing it again so there's a lot of red numbers there which means we're not spending money. So the The total on capital equipment this year is $202,588.36. That is just the ball field amortization and it's down $97,000 from where we were last year. The total budget this year is on line 72, and it's budgeted at $800,109.50. The statutory mandate was $639,744.88, which means that we're above the statutory mandate, that's principally the amount of the capital amortization of the improvements. Now I also know that your budget process here doesn't take necessarily into effect the capital expenditures that we're looking at. I think that happens in your budget process a little bit later in the year or as Patrick

▶ 21:52 Del Russo has told me but that's about where we are so we flatline the spending from last year we don't have any further capital expenditures for equipment the annual report shows in the back the equipment that we have acquired we were able to use a couple of grants that we got from private foundations to buy some of this equipment so it wasn't all on the municipal for municipal costs and I think we're very pleased with the way things look down there the field inside the track after a year of scholastic use usually looks sort of like the Mojave Desert now it doesn't so we're very pleased with that and then on page 12 I couldn't help it but I put that satellite picture in again just so you You could see how Pine Banks fits in between Forestdale Cemetery and Wyoming.

▶ 22:52 We had a Melrose Eagle Scout walk through there with a handheld computer and measured the location of where all those trails were and the elevations. It's sort of an impressive view of the world, especially as it shows that the larger part of the park isn't the ball fields, it's the wooded area. So that is the annual report for the year. We're happy with the way things are going. We're here to say thank you very much. We appreciate everything the city hall assists us with and for your support over the years. Thank you. We'll let the committee. Alderman Forbes. Thank you. Always appreciate your presentation. Very, very well informed. As a kid, I played baseball down these fields, and it's just truly night and day.

▶ 23:43 Scott M. Forbes: so I think I asked this every year it next two to three years down the road do you foresee any large undertakings as far as capital improvement projects are concerned you kind of forecast that a little bit to identify any critical needs coming down the road no okay and I know the dog park was a big undertaking looks outstanding the one question I just had and I know that John Chenner addressed this as well is there gonna be any type of the way that the wall is now with the the way that the visibility through the through the cemetery is there gonna be any conversation and maybe trying to put either shrubs or a wall or a fence in that area not at this time not this time okay thank you very much thank you thank you president's workup thank you madam chair thanks again for all the hard work

▶ 24:41 Michael P. Zwirko: and the report very very helpful here um i just had a few questions i noticed on page 13 under capital projects that it says that the mystic river rugby team had made a contribution of a hundred thousand dollars is that true yes wow that's amazing um how long has the league been going on that the i mean i know that they use that because i hear them playing at night um but that That's a considerable donation. They're an interesting bunch of fellows. You find them, they're Dartmouth graduates in the financial services industry. So it's very, because they did it before when we originally built that field, which is now almost 12, 15 years ago. They were also, they won the national championship last weekend, which is sort of a big feather in their cap.

▶ 25:30 But, yeah, I mean, we're very, very thankful for it. We're gratified by their interest. And every year they come by with a crew and they take out dead wood and try to do works projects at the park. So they've been very, very helpful. Well, thank you for the contribution and thanks for the information. The other question I had is, this is actually more of an accolade than anything. I can't see oh yeah that Kevin has become a tree warden yes that's a great address yeah that's a great addition yes we'll talk about that yeah Kevin's superintendent at the park and his forte or his real real interest is in arboriculture and he's been dedicated to that since I've been there and beyond that but he's really taken it to the next level and he took a it was a six

▶ 26:26 week training course with from the Massachusetts tree wardens Association and he became a qualified tree warden I don't know it's not an official position obviously but it's it's he's yeah he's certainly knowledgeable and skilled in that in that department well given the forestry on the property alone so yeah it's it's so significant so necessary to be able to identify problem trees or problem areas um invasive weeds that we have all over the place it's been uh it's going to really pay dividends going forward i think so we're really excited about it well thank you and you know it's on banks park we're just so fortunate living as close to boston as we do to have the green space that we do in melrose and being able to share it with our neighbor malden is even better it

▶ 27:18 Michael P. Zwirko: certainly helps reduce costs so appreciate all the work and that track as you mentioned gets used 18 hours a day I can vouch for that you know I would be surprised if it wasn't 20 if we had more sunlight but my last question probably the most important can you explain the hiring process of the chief Canada goose removal warden nationwide search yeah those abroad search no unfortunately I don't make it too sad but we lost our our dog last year pretty suddenly and I'm a dog person so I kind of had to get the house felt empty without another dog there so we got to keep two young kids got a got a golden retriever good family dog and she's been she's been a great addition to the park she comes with me every day to the park and hangs out in the office

▶ 28:06 and I bring her out when I can and take her to the dog park now and she she was a little young in the beginning of the year to chase the geese but she eventually grew to the size where she was a little bit bigger than them and she did she does pretty good so I think next year we'll have we had a pretty bad problem this year so I think she'll she'll be busy this winter and she approves of the dog park yeah if you look at the website you can see her little face she's on there she made those she made the website thank you for that those are all the questions I had motion to move the bottom line on this budget madam chair second we have a motion to move the bottom line made by Alderman Mortimer seconded by Alderman Boisselle all in favor aye

▶ 28:42 Monica C. Medeiros: discussion alderman Medeiros thank you thank you i won't be labor i want to thank you both and especially mr walsh i know you're you're there not just you know nine to five but all the time really and we see you uh active throughout the year i just have a housekeeping note that i wanted to ask if we could we were given the uh the report it's full of information i don't think it got on to our website onto the budget order so i was just going to request that this get scanned in and added so that we can have it with the record and um and for the public to see as well absolutely thank you uh all in favor of the motion to move this item to the bottom line any post thank you uh we do need to start the public hearing in one minute we have one more

▶ 29:32 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: item for these gentlemen in front of us which is uh budget nine three one the capital outlife outlay for pie makes in the amount of five hundred and six thousand four hundred seventy dollars and eighteen cents motion to move that capital outlay amount second yeah we have a motion to move the bottom line on department number 931 made by Alderman Mortimer saying my honor boys on discussion I believe that there's in the capital outlay there's some IT orders IT items I'd like to hold on moving the bottom line until we get the chance to talk to the IT department we do have a motion made in saying it would those be willing to withdraw as well draw what John so we will hold this will there I'm just trying to determine whether we can let these gentlemen go they need to stay

▶ 30:20 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: with us or their questions on that portion for for these gentlemen before us just to verify that the 101 294 is just the bond amortization is that correct that's correct yeah that's it no nothing further thank you and we will hold that until later on in this hearing but your portion is finished so thank you very much for being here thank you thank you have a great evening thank you it is now 8 o'clock we will pause here and move to our public hearing on order 2018 180 amend Melrose revised ordinances chapter 24 article 2 fire department section 24-32 e emergency rescue vehicle to set the fees for FY 19 Motion to open the public hearing. Second. Motion to open the public hearing made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by President Search.

▶ 32:13 John N. Tramontozzi: Correct. In the mileage. Sorry? In the mileage. In the mileage, correct, right. The increases that you have, is that what the general state of the ambulance rates are in this neighborhood? That is correct. Our rate increases are in line with other communities at this time. But just so, I just want to go over it a little bit. Despite the fact of the increase in the rate, doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get that particular rate received. And you presented to us, and I appreciate this, is the projected revenue sheet. The bottom line is, depending on what the transportation is for, for example, if it's an automobile accident, the billing would go to the automobile insurer, which more likely than not,

▶ 33:13 John N. Tramontozzi: at a higher percentage of recovery through an insurance company, an automobile insurer, and a vehicle collision. I'm here to say, as opposed to comparing it to the Medicare rate of recovery. Right, I believe all these, the billing goes through health insurance, or Medicare, Medicaid. So if the bill, say you want to bill as a basic life support at 1835, but it's billed to Medicaid, you're not going to get the full 1835. get a reduced amount whatever the contract basis is for Medicare, same thing with Medicaid. Health insurers will pay whatever they contractually agreed to pay on ambulance rates. That's my understanding. The other thing, too, is if by chance a patient is without insurance, and we know Massachusetts is supposed to have insurance, but assuming there's no insurance or

▶ 34:08 John N. Tramontozzi: it doesn't whatever reason it's not covered what is what is the process in billing a patient without insurance a direct bill but most likely we eat it right so it's kind of a balance so yeah you get the higher rate that you collect from insurance companies you don't push on the billing as much so in the long run it balances out yeah professional ambulance does all our billing so we're kind of hands off on the fire department part of it right which still produces a significant revenue so um oh yes we appreciate that that it's great it's a great service that the city provides um and um we look forward to the continued uh improvements and projection of revenue in the city so thank you so much thank you i know you're a supporter of the

▶ 35:00 Monica C. Medeiros: inbound service so that's great very much so all right thank you thank you thank you thank you chief kalina uh the first time i get to really uh officially call you that so i'm glad to see you here today uh first i wanted to say that you had provided us this afternoon with the melrose EMS projected revenue document for FY 2019 and I just wanted to just officially move that we have that added to this order this is this is the document that's really used to determine the rates is that correct that's correct and that's through our consultant correct they annually they look at our our transports these are real conservative numbers and we pretty much hit our marks every year on their projections um and we're looking for the rate increase um to there's been some contractual

▶ 36:04 Monica C. Medeiros: increases over the last couple years we didn't have a rate increase last year so this would keep is in line with um the rates uh cost for operation so it's right there and uh so what we're looking at proposed before us is a 200 increase for the advanced life support one the advanced life support two and the basic life support rates as well as a three dollar per mile increase yes and i know you said this is conservative numbers so this is being estimated on 1550 transport transports and i know i had read your budget questionnaire and it said uh 1958 medical aid calls are those the same or is that what we did last year um no that's about what we do medical aid calls directly request for ambulance um so they don't

▶ 37:11 Monica C. Medeiros: always leave in an ambulance uh well we do more than that but those are what we call patient refusals there's a lot of uh ambulance calls we can't collect because our ambulance is tied up either on another call in transit transport to uh maybe a boston hospital and sometimes we might lose one or two uh other calls that are going on at the city at the same time and cantalo ambulance is our backup so you know this is important because it's uh you know this is obviously a service that we provide a medical service that we provide to people and obviously we want to make sure that we it is something that we're charging a fee for that's outside of the tax base and we want to make sure that we're you know accurately tying it to the cost so it's

▶ 37:57 Monica C. Medeiros: important that we you know we we do have a self-funding enterprise yeah and so we obviously have to make sure that we're not overcharging but at the same time make sure that we're not losing money so that we're able to to operate and and be there for everyone so it's it's sort of a a balancing act and so we see that the projected revenue on the conservative side is um one million sixty five thousand one hundred fifty seven dollars but yet our the budget that we have proposed is about a hundred thousand dollars less and that's part of just making sure that we're being conservative and well there's other costs that we we receive fifty five dollar contribution fifty five thousand dollar contribution from that was Wakeville Hospital annually that

▶ 38:53 Monica C. Medeiros: usually happens in the fall and my notes tell me I had hoped to have some questions prepared if we had this a little bit sooner but as we can see there's usually a certainly a collection rate that we don't as I think all of tramitosi mentioned we don't always get what we that's correct what we fill out for and do you know like is the increase per mile is that based on equipment is that based on just gas costs or it's it's fuel costs it's equipment we have to purchase these are diesel engines we have to purchase additives to keep the engine running yeah I don't know the exact terminology for it but we have to run it like half an hour and highlight I don't while this product is in the gas tanks and it kind of cleans the diesel engines

▶ 39:57 and I don't have the cost to that but there is other costs to keep the vehicles other than just mile for mile and you know per gallon and so we feel confident that these numbers will will it's very confident okay thank you very much thank you medeiros did you make a motion during that time to add this uh yes let's consider this a motion to add the melrose ems system projected revenue document received this afternoon second we have a motion made by alderman medeiros and seconded by alderman mortimer to add the morrow's ems system projected revenue document to iqm2 and attach it to this order all in favor aye aye motion to recommend the order as amended to the full board for passage second we have a motion

▶ 40:51 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: made by alderman mortimer and seconded by alderman moisel to recommend order 2018-180 as amended any further discussion all in favor aye aye any opposed that motion will be recommended to the full board thank you chief kalina i'm just looking at our next okay we have a few more department hearings before we get back to you thank you thank you very much okay returning to our departmental budget hearings we will now move to department number 112 the aldermanic budget in the amount of one hundred twenty five thousand six hundred and two dollars and twenty three cents we will be joined by our clerk of committees Christine good evening would you like to say anything on this line before we get to questions or move

▶ 41:54 Monica C. Medeiros: straight to questions straight to questions I did fill out a very brief questionnaire and that's added to IQ I'm doing thank you any questions comment or motion from the committee Alderman Medeiros thank you thank you very much this is your first year with us we're happy to have you here I know we keep you busy with the long nights and lots of minutes to take so I just want to say thank you publicly happy to be here and do you have any any plans for this so you so for people who don't know you know you're kind of behind the scenes when people call in to the Board of Aldermen or if they email us and you're kind of keeping things going making sure we're all scheduled and we have the right information and you know in terms of your own agenda for what you see for

▶ 42:42 us do you have any you know things you think have been going well or you think could be better so came on board May 1st it's been a very interesting and challenging six weeks it has been the height of the budget season as everybody at home can see I've learned a lot and I feel I have the most patient bosses in Melrose not just because they're sitting here for the year I hope at this time next year to have some Google Analytics on some website hits from residents hope to track calls emails and have you know general statistic and rates on resident engagement thank you very much thank you thank you you mentioned in the questionnaire a new software system that's going to be installed the legislative file software it's still IQ m2 it's just an upgrade it's part of the

▶ 43:37 Robert A. Boisselle: contract there's no fee added to that and what's the upgrade consists of I mean I'm gonna move to a different server so each user desktop user will be upgraded so hopefully it'll be quicker I am planning on becoming an IQ m2 super user as soon as maybe over the summer so happy to help people with questions or you know concerns do you find the questions that you're getting from the outside or from the public and so forth could could they be answered by some sort of search mode in the software packages that we have in-house honestly a lot of it is informational and I push them to the city's website and then specifically maybe to the ward or alderman or I will engage the ward alderman directly or the alderman at large if it's a concern and a lot of it

▶ 44:25 Michael P. Zwirko: is as I said informational people just trying to figure out what department to go to and from there I just like CC the aldermen so they know okay very good thank you thank you madam chair thank you madam chair just very briefly thank you for everything that you've done so far coming on I know that it was in a period as you had mentioned a little tumultuous with the start of budget season so from the frying pan into the fire but we're welcome to have you here you've been a great help to me personally as well so thank you for that I just wanted to draw attention to the folks because in conjunction with the clerk's office the department has had a hundred percent turnover as you stated in your statement so I know that there will be a lot of upgrades through the

▶ 45:10 Michael P. Zwirko: various not only the city's website but also the IQ IQ m2 upgrades that you mentioned as well so we're looking forward to that and also you becoming a so-called super user I would also say to the extent that it's available either through the Clerks Association of Massachusetts or the Massachusetts Municipal Association continue to you know seek continued education resources I know that prior to your starting you sat in a seminar for the open meeting law and things like that it's very helpful to us as a resource so please continue to look for those opportunities that's all I had motion to recommend the bottom line on this budget madam chair second recommend the bottom line made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? That will move forward. Thank you. The next department on our schedule this evening is Department 155, Information Technology, and the amount of $638,894.28. We're joined by the Director, Mr. Ellis, this evening.

▶ 46:09 all right so I made my I made my presentation look like a tablet it thought it was kind of fitting all right so let me get started with this so just following the format of the questionnaire that was sent out I kind of give an overview of what what we do if you want me to read through all of it but we lead technical projects we connect all the computers in the network in the city and the schools we do the telephone systems audio-visual systems all the projectors printings printing chromebook servers software maintenance and installation pa systems throughout the buildings camera and door security systems wireless networks voice over ip telephone systems copiers we also do smart boards battery backup systems

▶ 48:49 police cruiser installs email website fiber optic on the street reverse 911 we kind of have our hands in everything so just to give you an overview of who's who's in my department it kind of it's split between the city and schools is myself Tom and Jared on the city side and schools as Judy Chan Frank Sorrenti Jimmy Ho and Kevin Connors is the middle school we had 849 help desk requests on city side up to this date from july 1st of last year and 1024 on the school side that have been closed there are still some open and then yet to be closed before the year is out for the budget the big the big stuff um basically we the only kind of differences from last year is we added a line for internet because we had internet costs that we were kind of paying out of different

▶ 50:00 places we just kind of found a home for it um we added a line for 44 160 and 21 that's a the last lease payment on a five-year lease again we just we're taking it out of you know out of my accounts or free cash or whatever was left over to pay this was never solidly put into my accounts and it is now and that's that'll go away after this last payment um that was for uh uh would be from before i was here i guess there was some lightning damage to some equipment that we had insurance covered a bunch of it but not all of it uh we increased the computer maintenance for you know anticipated parts replacement on the upcoming year and we increased the paper and printing to cover oem toner which is toner actually from the factory we order a lot of off-market toners that can cut

▶ 50:54 sometimes damage the printers and the micro toner which is something we have to do now for checks and it's a try to explain but it's a it's a magnetic ink so that's it for that savings these are just some of the examples we did a phone audit this last year we found another fifteen thousand six hundred dollars of we don't need to be spending on phone lines that we we we just dug up they were we were paying and people didn't know why I found the bill and I was like what is this we eliminated a phone management company that we were was tagging along for a long time we were spending about fifteen thousand dollars year we've finally finished that out with the help from mr. van Kampen and Horace band we ended up doing all the engineering for all the equipment that

▶ 51:55 went in for the new buildings and the modulars so we saved another 15 there I mean there are a bunch of other things that we save money on but those are some big ones lastly we did a ton of work last year ton of projects I figured I i go through as many as i can without taking up too much time so we had we put in new servers for city printing we put one in for school printing windows patching security fixes keep updating all the computers all the time they weren't getting updated so they're prone to being attacked we installed a help desk server a new one new one for the schools we installed a new antivirus server to get antivirus out you know kind of shore up things that we're not getting fixed we improved network operations we we did an MCAS server we

▶ 52:59 did a PC deployment server so we can roll out new PCs faster to teachers in in city staff we did two different servers for that the we did we converted HVAC to a server we have a we upgraded the camera videos video storage because we now have about 127 cameras in the city of schools and we put a server in for the gas pumps it was existing on a laptop before so the data wasn't wasn't really getting stored and other people couldn't access it we need other people to be able to access it and see who's getting gas and make sure that no one's no one's doing anything inappropriate stealing gas we did a whole telephone system replacement project we replaced the phones the horseman the Hoover Franklin ECC and Winthrop they didn't have any phone systems before they had

▶ 53:52 like analog lines it could have been in there in 1920 and they couldn't train like if you call the main office and you wanted to get to the nurse you couldn't they couldn't transfer a line because it would these okay call back on this line you can get the nurse so we actually tied them into the voice over IP Cisco system and we did all the engineering for that too on the back end we at the horse man Winthrop and Hoover modulars we we actually contracted out the we didn't contract out the PA system we did all we contracted out the projectors interactive whiteboards the wiring system-wide a horseman I kind of oversaw because they basically ripped out all the wiring in the whole building we had

▶ 54:38 to get it back in before the school year started new security access systems we did those we did about four doors at the Winthrop one door at the Hoover three four five six seven doors at the horse man and cameras at all those buildings we contracted all that work and helped install those we put in new network hardware for all those the new modulars and did the engineering connected all those back we put in a new battery backup systems ourselves too for all those locations or about 12 of those prayers and PCs and all those new spaces for the new school year classroom sound systems and all those new rooms they really have a nice classroom sound systems we try to have a universal design approach to those meaning they're meaning you want to design a classroom

▶ 55:37 so that it fits the the learning abilities of all students in in that classroom so those come with room microphones and teachers can just wear the room mic and it'll broadcast out into the room they can also the projectors are plugged into it so if they play something on their computers go straight out into the room audio those are really nice we did as a horseman office LCD TV screen projection system in the library there we rolled out eight new elementary Chromebooks and one cart we rolled out to the middle school we've got another cart ready to go we're gonna install its we just got it in at the Franklin and we were getting the parts in at the Hoover right now for next year so we'll be setting those up when the summer starts we had a

▶ 56:25 successful MCAS we had a couple issues that we were gonna be able to fix for next year so that's we did report translation project server room switch wiring clean up we rewired all the server and switch closets we installed wireless access points in every classroom and basically meeting space in the school district so I was 160 wireless a piece those were also we ran two wires to each one of those we can upgrade in the future that took a while we got all that done by the end of the last summer we upgraded the fiber optic networks throughout the city through all the schools back to to the internet connections at City Hall those are all 10 gigabit instead of one gigabit now we did a AV project at the Council on Aging so we've placed the bigger to put a

▶ 57:15 bigger television in the tyranny and put in an audio and visual system as a little board on the wall so it's a little bit easier for the folks who use that system just push a button and it switches all the components over goes straight to the TV and the audio systems in the room we also put one TV in the meeting space the meeting office the on the second floor and then we put a huge TV on the second floor meeting space so they can hold you know anything that they want audio video on that second floor too it's a pretty nice system we did that over the summer too that was kind of a we were in expecting that ended up kind of being a side project running over to get that one done we just got all the external

▶ 58:00 speakers installed on all the elementary buildings so you know we had that issue at Hoover where someone ran up from route 1 and we had helicopters and we had an issue where we where we couldn't communicate with the the playgrounds in all spots so we needed to upgrade communication with the playgrounds to get the teachers who are out there and the kids back in if needed or to stay out if needed so we installed those at all the schools so we can all communicate with all the playgrounds now we installed wireless at the city are we install wireless at the BB and we installed a new server for the water meter software and server I know this goes on and on we did like five police cruisers we replaced a hundred mobile phones we ran we wrote a couple new

▶ 58:54 policies who cleaned up and organized everything in the in the district we started a cyber security project which is ongoing right almost in the works right now which is going to do a penetration test of our network see how far they can get into the network and give us recommendations on how to secure things going forward we upgraded the munis software from 10 5 to 11 2 and we were involved in the website I was involved with the website with with Amy camosa a bit but that does it for my presentation I guess if you have any questions I'll answer those now thank you very much first up I have Alderman Tramontozzi well I want to say thank you for the IT department is such an incredibly important department to keep the city running effectively and I want

▶ 59:49 John N. Tramontozzi: to thank you for you and your fellow staff Member appreciate all the hard work i know to keep on top of the needs of security especially on the websites and the telephone systems is appreciated um and what and and i appreciate the list of all the things and activities you did and one of the ones that stood out because of a previous uh earlier discussion was uh the work on the water meters so tell me a little bit about what your department did in the water meter replacement so we formally the thank you we we had the software basically ran on a PC down in the city art and again it was if it was shut off other people couldn't access that that computer to get filed and use the water meter software so we moved we took this we took it off of there we

▶ 1:00:54 installed a new version on a server here at the city and we get the the company to come in and do the software install which we end up we had to help them do in conjunction with Donna Cardillo who was working with us to get that up and running and it's now living here and it's accessible to anybody who needs to get into those those records and yeah it it didn't belong on a on a computer in a room somewhere do you have to occasionally monitor that as well as part of the service the software that is a part of the billing as well yes yeah yes weeks so it's part of the enterprise fund some of that the other referring to this to 285 for the set of the salary exactly right so was that a estimated

▶ 1:01:54 estimated figure from you whether that come from the auditor's office so that that amount which is okay yes so that's that's actually it's I the the it's it's the fifty seven fifty seven five nine eight eight four of that is actually for Donna Cardillo's salary she's in my department for two up two days a week and she does in that time she does all water water billing and works with with Lisa and water billing and goes through all those I mean she's been doing a lot of the stuff for the water and sewer rates lately been spending a ton of time approximately sixty thousand dollars yeah so that's that that that portion of the of my salary is it uh overall salary is is for donna cardillo doing the water

▶ 1:02:54 Robert A. Boisselle: stuff for city yard i mean for for dpw seems pretty reasonable to me yeah but thank you i should get that information i don't have another question this time thank you thank you alderman Good evening. Thank you for coming. Sure. Going through the document, especially the questionnaire area, you have a number of areas. I'm sort of curious. You're looking for more camera system server storage systems for the security cameras. How long do you keep information from the cameras? Is it 24 hours, 48, or a week, or two weeks? We keep 30 days. What's that? 30 days. 30 days? Yeah, I mean, that's usually a reasonable amount of time for if there's an incident to be able to go back and retrieve that data.

▶ 1:03:42 There are occasions when the chief will ask us, oh, you know, we didn't realize something happened two, three weeks ago. Do you have data? Do you have any recording of that? So, yeah, we keep it 30 days. Now, in your presentation, you had a project, a cybersecurity project. Is that the concept of hacking into our systems? Yeah, that was actually grant funded. George Pezos actually applied for that grant and received the $20,000 for a cybersecurity penetration test. They're expensive. What they do is they work with us to do a number of things, including exactly trying to hack in. I mean, they will. They can get into any system, any system out there. These guys are amazing professionals in this.

▶ 1:04:32 They will get in, and then they get to, they try to find a place where they can find access into further systems, like maybe Insight or Munis or email, any of those systems, try to get administrator passwords. And they'll track all that, and they'll document it, and then we meet with them, and they give us, you know, here's where things are pretty strong. know i don't i don't anticipate anyone getting into this system but you know you look at this you know this this might be an area you need to but you know really look at so we'll get that should be by the end of the month very good also that's something here that sort of bothers me uh generator yes generator at city hall now all your main systems are housed in this building

▶ 1:05:18 correct yeah correct and there's no backup generator there's no work are you on battery for time period we have uh different systems on battery our phone system is on a battery should give us give it about 87 minutes the phone system the police have an actual a secondary uh 9-1-1 system their 9-1-1 system is is run uh through a server that goes to the state at the police station so their 9-1-1 system is up even if we're down but the fire uh fire is not but we just recently worked with uh chief kalina and we got more analog lines in there for fire alarm and dispatch so that you know if all hell breaks loose and they can't communicate they've got uh analog lines that the police can call them and and people from outside could actually does

▶ 1:06:08 emergency management have a backup generator that can be plugged into the city hall to after 87 minutes to keep you guys running no no no the the we actually just applied for a state mvp which is a municipal vulnerability um uh grant and it was for 400 our estimate for the generator was 500 000 plus so we were trying to apply for 400 they wanted us to match uh 25 percent and we did did not receive the grant but it's probably the most the most crucial and Achilles heel of the entire operation if we lose power here all of them in the phone systems are gone at the at the here and for six of the schools we know no no high school or middle school phones will be running the internet has run out of here so that's gone there's there are so many systems I can't even

▶ 1:07:10 explain there the what we're trying to do in the future in addition to trying to get a generator here which is crucial is to have redundant systems at some of those locations we the middle school has a generator but it's only for lighting so they it does not power the the server room the addition additionally you have to power the air conditioning in a server room when you if you're gonna power up the stuff so the so we you'd need an uh a generator to power both those things the high school same thing only for lighting so if we were to go down here and there was power loss at middle school uh high school we would be out a lot also also possible has an alternative to have a mobile generator come in and just plug into some hookup within the building itself to give you supply

▶ 1:08:06 we don't have that ability now you you you're right you would need a um you would need to tie in there's a main panel here city hall you would need to tie in an outdoor a spot for a generator to plug into the building the only problem is that you can't idle uh diesel or any other kind of generator that close to the building um if it was a mobile unit you'd have to plus carbon monoxide right generated right so so the ones that are permanently installed uh you know they they run a pipe all the way up up to it up to the yeah and i mean some of it is is even just logistics uh you know we we have one that we could hook up outside throw cords out the window uh in the wintertime drag a generator out there that would probably power our phone system

▶ 1:08:56 so the phones would probably be able to run and they don't really need um that much air conditioning we wouldn't be able to run any other systems but uh even just the logistics of getting that thing out of the basement in the front getting gas into it throwing cords over and hooking it up by the time we've done all that i mean the systems have all crashed and okay well since you mentioned telephone systems a number of times here during our discussion uh you have a comment here it's very old and increasingly not functional yes how old is the system uh it's almost 30 years old 30 years old yeah when your boots up you see that the software years it comes up as one a 1991 1992 uh is when the software was written for the system

▶ 1:09:41 it's a lucent system and lucent went out of business in early 2000s can you get parts for these you can try to find them on ebay or places like that you can't buy new parts for it now is this system wide or just city hall and memorial hall and police and fire it's police fire and city hall in memorial hall there's only really one phone okay so the schools are pretty well up to date the schools have a cisco voice over ip system so yeah that utilizes the fiber optics that we have in the city okay so we're still in the analog systems at this point with the correct digital or fiber optics with the in city hall right yeah no it's it's uh the what i would like to do is to buy uh one voice over ip system for all of the city buildings so that would be

▶ 1:10:32 city hall uh police fire uh council on aging the city yard council on aging and city yard bb they all have uh systems that are just about as old uh the city artist is one is kind of a mess too that that's that's been a Cobb together over the years as well as the other the outlying fire stations the Mount Hood and couldn't connect the cemetery I'm missing one more but all those systems could be replaced with one system that's voice over IP and we could it would tie in with you know like office systems and there's really a lot you can do with it conferencing so basically communications between city government and public safety is it's a problem it's a problem okay in the capital outlay budget you have a city IT tech and school IT tech

▶ 1:11:31 amounts is that special project so what are those for this for we will be returning to this item well i mean it's a city here at the moment uh 931 mr alice capital outlay budget 931 capital outlay i have a capital outlay yeah i have a city i.t tech in school i.t tech oh hold on a second i know i know what you're talking about is that for any special projects uh within the department oh oh oh yes yes yes that's school i.t tech that's um that was here we go so that was uh that's the 150 the 150 000 you're talking about that's the that's the five-year lease uh with the 150 that split from the city and the schools that was uh done by my predecessor three the computers that they purchased yes yes okay so that's part of that

▶ 1:12:45 Robert A. Boisselle: budget yes period okay that's the interest or that's the lease payment yep okay good and that's what a city and that's the city side of it yep okay and the last area in your budget uh you have computer maintenance almost 222 percent from the previous year yes so that's uh that's just it's an increase of roughly $8,000 that's for we anticipated replacing hard drives and several of the servers many hard drives and several the servers some of those hard drives cost $1,000 apiece $700 apiece so basically the problems that you're presenting is the generator backup has a priority in the replacement of the communication systems for City Hall in public safety yeah we had a we did a citywide we had stakeholders from the community and the MVP meetings we

▶ 1:13:55 had you know everyone we had people from Wakefield Melrose rep Broder was there we had every all the department heads came and we all went over basically the we're anticipating given climate change much more extreme weather in the next 20 years and because of that we need to be prepared for that weather and being able to you know serve our community during those times in the number one thing that came out from all those people there was probably 25 different people was a generator at City Hall so it was agreed upon by everyone which is why we went for that MVP grant unfortunately we didn't get it but we'll try to apply for it again it is a it is a real need very good thank you very much thank you thank you thanks for coming and I just want to

▶ 1:14:53 Manisha Bewtra: acknowledge that a lot of what your team dies underpins what the rest of the city and school staff are able to do in terms of responding and providing really excellent constituent services and you're behind the scenes for it so I'm glad we get a chance to talk with you today and to that end can you speak a little bit more to your goals and vision with respect to constituent services as well as sort of your role in being there to support what would allow this city and school staff to provide those services as an extension of what you offer oh so during an emergency or just in sort of general day-to-day as well as I mean I think we kind of touched on the emergency it'd be great to have the backup generator and right touched on the phone systems but beyond that so I

▶ 1:15:50 Manisha Bewtra: guess hmm I mean we provide you mean direct outreach I'm trying to figure out exactly which which direct I guess I can ask my other questions and then we can come loop back around to that um so for example the website was redone this year and I know I have bugged Amy Camosa and Kristin with these questions over sort of like how can we make sure that we as the alderman are able to be very accessible to the public and and yet at the same time I understand there are some sort of like IT concerns around for example the contact form on the website so I guess starting from that very concrete thing like can you explain kind of the the nuts and bolts of like providing our email addresses online versus having a contact form and kind of what the concerns are from an IT

▶ 1:16:48 perspective we could provide we could provide direct email where would where would pop up in your you know would pop up your email provider and you would just email to the person virtual towns and schools and this is kind of the direction that most web design companies are going is to provide a contact form because it limits when you post email addresses online those can be farmed by any web crawler and just put into a database for spam and it's really to combat additional spam for for you so that you don't you don't see I mean we have very good spam services now to weed out we weed out about probably I think it's somewhere around 70% of the email that comes in is spam so we try to get it down about it's around I was a 45% of the email that gets through and that's

▶ 1:17:45 Manisha Bewtra: really really difficult you know you try to not to block anybody who needs to get the email in and I think we've gotten a good point to a good point with that but you know we could change it I know Amy prefers the the contact form we went back and forth with it for the schools I think for the schools there's just so much parent communication back and forth and a lot of it is on mobile phones and it'll pop up the email client I think it just makes it easier for people that way so you know those are the kind of the two convenience versus versus spam yeah Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I think as I've had these conversations with the city clerk's office and our clerk of committees, I understand that I think from my perspective as a constituent many times, like if I whether it's a it's a business or a city government or whatever, if I encounter a contact form, it just feels like a little bit of a turnoff sometimes.

▶ 1:18:51 Manisha Bewtra: sure I know on our end when we get something you know it's very clear like what the email address is that it came from that so it's legitimate and all of that so I I can see where there's kind of a sure some things I have to be weighed there but yeah I personally would love to have our email addresses online just because again of that feeling of being available and accessible but sure I don't necessarily want more spam so yeah I guess where I'm coming from with that other question or through arts just constituent services is like just hearing from you know I know we have limitations on our budget so I'm not saying this to like compare us to what a larger city like Somerville could do but just hearing from what the city of Somerville has done with like their 3-1-1

▶ 1:19:37 Manisha Bewtra: services and that's a combination of again customer service that the city provides but there's like an IT piece of that so again I don't have a specific question but if you have any any thoughts in terms of just how we could be more responsive and also do you feel the other place where it's coming from is from a staffing standpoint I was really surprised to learn how small the IT staff is for a city of this size but I don't know how that compares with other yes yeah I think I think the thing to look at is is the number of systems in devices that were responsible for given our staff which is low we've we don't have a lot of staff for for the number of systems that we're doing I could I could employ somebody just to do telephones I can employ somebody just to

▶ 1:20:25 do the security systems we we do our best I mean we in terms of like a 3-1-1 type system I think I think it's we could we could combine systems like we have ego for people to get put in you know work order requests we could do something around we don't have a receptionist general position for the City Hall so you call in and you get the auto attendant and basically you get bumped to the clerk's office I believe so there they've got people at their desk all the time but they're having to answer the phone and you know they might not be able to spend a lot of time on the phone talking to someone are answering questions and nor do we really nor does anybody in the City Hall I mean we're running a pretty skeleton crew so yeah it's it's it's tough to provide

▶ 1:21:25 those services and I agree the outreach is is key especially in a city like Melrose it's just a lot of stuff going on you want to be able to talk to you know the alderman and whatnot trying to think of I mean one of the things we did on the website that I pushed for was to have you know a trans make everything translatable that is one thing we were we were trying to make things simple so that people could communicate with us as well as possible I don't really have anything in the works on that end on the city side we're trying to improve some communication on the school side with with with respect to communicating with teachers during an emergency and that kind of thing but the other thing I did

▶ 1:22:21 on the school side was that we made a I made an app I built an app for the schools and MPS connect and that you click on it you get on one of the buttons that's for the school I've changed it around now you push on the button for the school gives you the directory hit the directory and it's a list of all the teachers and everybody admin staff in that school you can click on it opens your your email app there are a bunch of other things in there that are that are kind of helpful but again you can you can we can push note if we haven't really started using it we can push notifications like you get one at the top like Facebook does you think you see it pop up and you can you know pull down the menu and and get those kinds of things um we've yet to use those ones but you

▶ 1:23:04 know has an anonymous tip function so that you know parents or kids teachers can say you know it it's that kind of thing is tough because it is anonymous so it's it's really only helpful for as much information as the person provides so you know if they say at this school at this time i saw so-and-so doing this you know that's something you can follow up on but if it's just like you know I don't know why so-and-so I don't know why so-and-so said something you know our kid says put something in there without any kind of description they'll put anyone's names it doesn't really help much but but yeah those are things we've tried to do for outreach so my last question which I think you kind of alluded to a little bit with the website was you mentioned report card

▶ 1:23:53 Manisha Bewtra: translation I'm just curious I mean I don't expect you to have this with you right now but if you could provide information on if you have analytics on which languages that particular feature like how the report cards have been translated to as well as if we have that for the website the website we may I'd have to ask Amy we should have those for the schools it's less a dynamic translation it's a specific translation in we've in we've had parents read through a series of forms and submittals through the school or not really it's not difficult it's just when they sign their child up we request we asked them if they would prefer the the materials report cards and some of the other other reports that go home in a specific language and so we tag it for that and

▶ 1:24:50 then in the system we built it so that those feels like the report card automatically grab those translated sections and put them in the report card so I mean we could get you numbers on how many probably yeah easily we probably do that easily how many number of in a certain language yeah thank you sure those are my questions thank you very much thank you thank you the the horseman rewiring that was just through the the innovation project that was done last year and so that was rewiring the IT yeah so what they what happened was because the where the closet was that call it the main data on those on the second floor and there was a bundle of wires that went from the second floor down to the basement and where that is now is an entrance to a bathroom so they

▶ 1:25:55 the length wasn't such that we could cut it and redistribute it they had to cut all of those lines off and then run all new lines for so a few second floor ones but mostly the whole first floor was ripped out and replaced and that was that was fun and uh so are the other school in the to the end user does that change the service that they receive if anything it improves it because we we upgraded to um that much better wire that can handle much faster speeds so yeah and so so what is the status of the other elementary schools they're running it's different in every school the Roosevelt is running 5e for the most part just different categories for certain speeds that they can run right now none of the PCs

▶ 1:26:51 Monica C. Medeiros: the actual PCs are running more than a gigabit across the network I don't anticipate anytime soon needed to go much beyond that probably for quite a few years at which time we we would have to do a a rewiring project um and who knows maybe uh internet uh wireless is so fast at that point that we just go wireless i don't like just you know just wireless it's can get hairy but um yeah okay and uh you mentioned the mcast server do you have an approximate cost of what so that That was so that we could comply with MCAS and we could have all the kids take the test at the same time on a computer, which we didn't have that requirement before. Do you have an estimate about how much that costs? So I guess if you break it down by,

▶ 1:27:43 I mean the server itself, we just used a PC because the specs for our server to run the MCAS, it's basically a cache. It caches all the data on it between the internet and the Chromebook. So they did it all wirelessly. There's also a second server that does a encrypted communication as a secondary redundant. We set that on an existing server. So that didn't really cost us anything. What cost us was wiring for all the access points in all the schools, which we did for a really low cost. really we did we did the wiring for I want to say it was somewhere on a hundred and sixty thousand less than that I think so that's and those were all cat six a to all those rooms and now that can be used for anybody in the yeah

▶ 1:28:48 Yeah, I mean, we had to do it for MCAS, but the reality is that kids are, we need that for everyday use. I mean, MCAS happens once a year, and they divide it up to maybe two, three, four weeks a year. But what they're, I mean, those Chromebooks are in constant use, constant use. And we realized that to what extent when we had the MCAS, and we had to freeze those Chromebooks to go into the test mode then teachers didn't have them to use for classroom use and they were not happy about that they understood why but it it did put a dent in their their class their lesson plans now um prior to us doing the work for the learning commons project which was more than that at the high school um one of the things we heard was that the teachers didn't you know couldn't be in this in a

▶ 1:29:44 in a seminar for you know professional development and all be able to be on a tablet or a computer at the same time have we resolved that problem are there multiple more than one place for them to be able to the whole building and the other buildings the ones we did this summer we did five buildings this summer all the elementary schools and we did one room we did one room at the Franklin ECC but the they're they're set for we designed it such that there could be 50 devices going in a classroom and we didn't we didn't design it for for area you know a lot of times you can in a business realm you can do it for area because you only have a certain number of people working in any given area so

▶ 1:30:38 Monica C. Medeiros: just need coverage we did this for volume so you know if you look on a radio signal you know it's it's hot entire building is hot uh because you know we wanted to be able to pick up you know several devices in every classroom okay um so some of uh what we've seen and i think is is pretty amazing actually by reading for everybody at home too we have a six p along with the presentation you just did there's a six page long uh questionnaire so which covers a lot of and and it really does stress that you know you're really covering all kinds of departments in the city you know no no department is kind of untouched from the police car computers to the water and sewer meters to the schools to i.t yeah we even set up those traffic signs the ones that

▶ 1:31:33 Monica C. Medeiros: show you yeah yeah i mean it's everything so i mean it's it's really um you know a lot the different softwares and munis is obviously this is one of the big ones are billing sure um i know mentioned uh some your questionnaire mentioned about hr software and um it's so you know looking at all this there's so many different licenses and softwares and and I'm wondering how, you know, you and your staff are sort of keeping up with all the changes, and I see like the professional services line in your budget, no, sorry, not professional services. Seminars. Seminars, thank you, is it looks like the numbers are kind of all over the place that last year we, for FY18 we budgeted FY18, we budgeted $9,500, but it looks like actual spent was zero, but then the projection is $23,000,

▶ 1:32:39 and next year we're projecting only $5,000. Yeah, so the seminars was actually a line that was put in from the auditor's office to do training for the auditors. Okay. It wasn't actually an IT training whatsoever. but but Patrick did hand it over to us this year and we're using that I mean unfortunately in the world of IT a five-day training even an online training we just signed one up for my network administrators five thousand thousand dollars a day so to learn how to do run this the underlying software that runs all of our servers in the city I mean it's incredibly complex I mean the kids a genius that does this stuff and you have to keep up with the new versions it's all change management like you said it's change management constant

▶ 1:33:30 change management in licensing keeping up with the tech you know what's in keeping keeping you know security as well so it's tough because we do we do all the IT the overall IT like server administration all that stuff design work implementation of projects for the schools as well so we're three people and we do we do all that stuff in the school stuff but we really don't we don't have it's not really reciprocal as school folks mostly do just do the school so yeah it's tough for three people the phones I'm happy to see we did this phone audit something that you know I had suggested way back and I'm glad to see that it's and we obviously had you know a lot of discussion about the redundancy is there is there a way that if we were in an emergency

▶ 1:34:35 situation that we can you know we they have things like you know Google phone numbers now we just reroute the whole whole incoming phone number gets rerouted yes can we have some kind of an option to do that is there and I set up a similar system so what you're talking about where I work once before one of the solutions we're looking at for server redundancy is something that actually mirrors the servers on both sides of the city so you'd buy a server here and it it it basically puts it on the other end there's a there's a digital phone connection that's called a sip trunk so it's a digital connection that is basically you can you can edit it online so it it basically comes down with all your phone lines into your phone server and if you mirrored that

▶ 1:35:29 phone server in another place if in you you can mirror those sip trunks so you can have one you can have one that doesn't cost as much that goes into your secondary location one that goes in your primary location if your primary location is compromised i don't know the whole building burns down you go to the second location you go online switch your sip trunk over to the new one you've got your server already set to go with all those phone numbers you just click it on it and you have all your phone numbers up at that new location just a matter of connecting phones into it onto the network so you know you'd have you'd have a bunch of phones for critical people that you need to keep the city running you

▶ 1:36:08 know in that location and again it would be voice over IP so you would turn it up at that location all the other locations would be running city yard it would be back up and running immediately yeah so you know what what's the cost of generally and we talked about Jenna what would the cost of the generator be for City Hall and invert you know versus the cost to set up this duplicate sip trunk and you know you'd want to do both yeah you'd want to do both because what's the cost that we would look at 500 a little over 500,000 for a generator if you want to power all of City Hall which we really might need to because this room might be a place of refuge emergency management is supposed to be running out

▶ 1:37:01 of emergency management our office and all the all the software and hardware all the AC systems those run up to the roof there's a lot of systems tied in all over the place down in the basement so and I know you mentioned that you had been involved and and you know participated in the municipal vulnerability preparedness that regional meeting are you being brought in when we just kind of getting the emergency management department back online with uh with ruth clay as the director have you been brought into those meetings yes yes yeah uh yeah ruth's been great we've been we've actually been talking about the i mean the the engineering and uh you know with dpw and martha grover martha grover and olena proicus and they really spearheaded that mvp uh grant uh in all the

▶ 1:38:06 Monica C. Medeiros: meetings we had for it uh but uh yeah i've been i've talked to ruth quite a bit about the about emergency operations. You're always there, and that's probably good enough. So just in general, the things that you are concerned about are the generator and the cost of getting that. Are there other things, like are we able to, are we in a good place, are we in an okay place, are we behind the eight ball in terms of technology? and you know we're in a much better place now than we were uh i guess before i started i mean i don't not not i mean it's just a matter of things getting updated and not not to appreciate on anyone it's just just a matter of getting things up to date and um we're we're we're we're doing

▶ 1:39:04 okay uh yeah we're trying to keep it as current as possible as we can yeah thank you very much thank you alderman mortimer my question was asked and answered madam chair and i will make a motion to move the bottom line at this time second i have a motion to move the bottom line of the i.t budget uh made by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman boisselle a discussion alderman just a couple questions can you just clarify for us in the public watching the number of uh employees in your department or a number of fte uh the number of fte in the city uh is 3.2 i guess uh with with with donna doing the munis stuff um on the city side it's uh i mean school side the school side uh it's it's for i mean it's judy is sort of shared with kind of analytics

▶ 1:40:05 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: she runs a lot of reports and does stuff for the central admin so she you know doesn't quite work for me you know for a good amount of the week so i mean it might be more like 0.3 or 4 so we're probably 3.4 over there okay thank you um and and i saw that you and you mentioned that you had nine chromebook carts come up you got them online this past fiscal year or the current fiscal year can you confirm that the chromebooks are not purchased by the city is that correct they are purchased by the city they are um do i feel like at some of the school pto meetings that i've gone to maybe oh there are some yes there are some yeah sorry okay no go you go ahead please yeah no there are there are some that were purchased uh the one we purchased for the middle school

▶ 1:40:57 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: was a a combination of different donations uh the one for there's one for the lincoln that was purchased on uh donated uh i think that was all pto or melrose education foundation okay sure and I think there was a tablet cart we built this year that was that was donations okay so some of the the the hardware that you may be servicing is it may have been purchased by the community in other yes correct yeah yeah and it was great to hear a little bit more about the translation of the report cards and also the ability to have website or web different web pages translated for people looking at them I'm wondering if you also are attuned to the need to ensure that materials are accessible to blind and visually impaired users and if

▶ 1:41:56 you could speak to that just briefly sure so the our website when we designed it we we designed it to make sure that it was it had as much accessibility as we could possibly put into it that we that's technically possible one of the one of the things I know it's can be kind of painful is we don't we don't post PDFs really we try to stay away from PDFs any PDFs I don't even know if we do they were all except we had we did formally we did accessible PDFs so the text could be drawn into a reader any text-to-speech all of the all of the Google Docs that are on there all can be text-to-speech straight through Google so yeah we're very cognizant of it is there any type of processor quality control requirement when different departments are posting new materials do

▶ 1:42:55 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: they go through you or do you provide them with sort of sort of a checklist of things they need to keep in mind when they're posting Amy does all all of that okay yeah she she's she's really good with it that's great make sure I guess the last question I have is and you you spoke to a little bit on describing the app that you built which is great to learn about the NPS connect was just sort of the in-house capacity to build apps or online tools so one thing that we talked about last week is with the Department Public Works they have a lot of different spreadsheets and information about the ongoing work they're doing on the water and sewer or the roads and certainly lots of constituents are interested in hearing about any projects that are coming up

▶ 1:43:41 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: that might impact and improve their own quality of life around where they live and so you know one thing that I had wondered about is if we could have some sort of online app that people could type in their street and learn about anything upcoming or just that you know and it kind of goes to alderman Vutra's question about just constituent services and providing people with information in an accessible format so just you know plug or for you to think about or noodle on but if it's great to hear that you're already designing and implementing things that are going to really help people out in the community get it to the information that they're looking for yeah actually yeah we designed I designed two registration forms for pre-k and K this year that was

▶ 1:44:29 Scott M. Forbes: we built so that would take all the information that was entered in for the registration and put it in a PDF send it to the parent with an email that said here the next steps and everything else yeah and we've done some stuff for the city we've made some payments online and kind of did some things to help the clerk's be a little bit more efficient when people come to the counter great thank you very much thank you alderman Forbes thank you I just have one question i thank you very much for your time very informative presentation on thursday i know we touched on indirect costs it was a very large topic of conversation on thursday's uh meeting with patrick taylor russo can you just describe the process on how your department collaborates

▶ 1:45:14 Scott M. Forbes: with the audit department and determines the amount of indirect costs that run through the water and sewer budgets uh like i guess the question i have is do you use historical data do you use projections as they're forecasting is there like backup sheets that are provided then you come up with a figure because i know they're estimates and i know uh mr delarusso said that they were estimates in their approximations but i just was wondering if you could just kind of enlighten the board just because we see the amounts but we don't see how they're determined i actually don't get involved in any of the water sewer rate configuration um yeah we i don't work work on that at all most of that is done with Elena Prakas Ellis and her she has

▶ 1:46:03 Scott M. Forbes: a a consultant that does specifically those those water and sewer rates is that answering your question no I mean the amount of money coming through the IT department for indirect costs for water and sewer I mean they're there they're really it's really just for I suppose insight and not much there isn't so you're not involved in those conversations no no okay I mean other than the fact that the salary for for Donna Cardillo right so you are in making that determination you're involved in those yeah yeah I mean yeah Yeah, Donna's kind of, she's sort of a projects person, so she's been put, you know, depending on what needs to be done on what years, she'll be put in, you know, my department a certain amount of time or another department, depending on what she was in formerly, doing a lot more out of the city yard and working with the water server and software upgrades and everything.

▶ 1:47:17 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: so um but yeah i i talked to patrick and you know we determine how much we'll we'll go into not what she's looking at in the year year ahead in terms of work and putting that appropriately in my budget yeah okay so more projection based on that end yeah okay thank you very much thank you sorry i didn't understand where you're no it's fine we have a motion that's been made in seconding to move the bottom line on this budget all in favor aye aye any opposed that will be moved forward to the full budget thank you mr ellis fields today we have uh we're going to return to number department number 931 the capital outlay so that we can address the two i.t lines that are in this budget motion to uh i'll make the motion just for purposes of

▶ 1:48:04 discussion at this time to uh move the bottom line on the capital outlay budget second we have a motion to move the bottom line of 506 470.18 on the capital outlay budget made and seconded on discussion president Search thank you madam chair just uh real briefly anything in addition to what you talked about earlier on these two items on the line items uh for this order that you wanted to discuss uh for the 150 and the 150. yeah uh nope it's uh it's basically you know it's just to keep that lease going um so we don't pull chromebooks out of the hands of kids and send them back uh yeah so i mean we've we have a lot of uh we've been looking at projections in the in the next about five years of what what we're gonna need uh to keep that money going for it's

▶ 1:48:57 it's it's already spent out like five six seven years so you know do you anticipate an increase maybe in the future possibly there there are some projects that unfortunately they've sat for several years and kind of weren't in a recycling replacing cycle such as the projectors in classrooms and the the classroom projectors at this point through most of our schools are our past end of life their past they're at nine years or plus so we're they're dying constantly we're constantly replacing them it's tough and we're kind of band-aiding those but we're spending like thirty thirty five thousand dollars a year just trying to band-aid those whereas as we could be putting them into new systems but it's all the questions I had thank you thanks on the classroom

▶ 1:49:55 Monica C. Medeiros: projectors I'm actually kind of surprised that we are even using them as much and not using more like just cabling in or wireless kind of you know wi-fi to transmit images from oh those systems are are fairly new um and they've just recently started to come down in price to where it's i mean a projector that's an interactive projector meaning the smart board part is built in so it works on infrared um so it'll follow a pen around a regular whiteboard those are um those are you know up between 1700 and two thousand dollars something so you're talking about the the what with the smart boards right as the projector not necessarily a okay yeah so the projector and the smart board it's all built into one though

▶ 1:50:51 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: projector the smart board and the wi-fi specifically and then it takes a lot of engineering to get it so that you could transmit a wi-fi an image from your laptop over the wi-fi to that device it's it's um pretty complicated not a lot of schools are doing that okay yeah thank you thank you any further discussion we have a motion that has been made and seconded on department 931 all in favor aye aye any opposed that will be moved forward thank you mr ellis i believe that's that's all we have for you this evening thank you next item on our agenda is department number 165 the liquor Commission in the amount of $2,000 and I believe our city solicitor mr. van Kampen is here to speak on this one this

▶ 1:51:41 evening Thank You madam chair Member of the committee the liquor budget that is before you remains unchanged from the previous fiscal year and just to give you a sort of a brief summary professional services really deals with mailings legal notices that the Commission is required to publish on an annual basis regarding licenses that may come before it and the compliance line is intended to assist the health department with compliance checks those are random ongoing compliance checks so obviously I'm not at liberty to discuss when they'll occur but they do occur on a somewhat random basis thank you thank Thank you. Questions from the committee? Motion to move the bottom line on this budget.

▶ 1:52:31 Second. A motion to move the bottom line of $2,000 on Department 155 made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? That will be moved forward. Next up we have Department number 151, City Solicitor's Office, in the amount of $836,731.60. thank you madam chair Member of the committee just by way of summary and to supplement the responses to the questionnaire that I believe everyone should have which I submitted I would just state for the public certification that the salaries line essentially is level funded that is a result of the elimination of the position of special counsel and for the committee's further understanding the goal in fy 19 as part of a restructuring in the legal

▶ 1:53:25 department is to increase the hours of the assistant city solicitor for school and labor matters from the current 24 hours to 30 hours effective july 1st the potential is there in fy 19 to increase those hours to full-time status to 35 hours i'm just not sure yet whether mr delarusso is approving that so there is a possibility and i also do just want to mention madam chair on my salaries that there's a bit of a misconception apparently in the public the assistant city solicitor for school and labor works for the city solicitor her salary is funded 100 percent through the city solicitor's budget she works on city matters at my direction under my supervision in addition to school matters i just want to clear that up so my

▶ 1:54:20 department will have two positions instead of three for fy19 in terms of lawyers we'll have a full-time assistant in my office most of you i believe know kelly cogavan going down professional service as you will note is increasing it's actually doubling the reason for that madam chair is in the unanticipated event that we would need outside counsel in a specialized matter without special counsel now i felt it appropriate to increase that amount and the mayor and auditor have agreed the remainder of the budget is relatively level funded except for you will note our property insurance that is our general liability policy uh that covers everything from every vehicle the city owns every vehicle the school department

▶ 1:55:16 utilizes every building every piece of equipment the city owns every employee the city employs the actions of every volunteer acting within the scope of their volunteerism so it's an all-encompassing insurance premium that doesn't just cover property um it's going up two and a half percent and that is a locked increase for the next three years alderman wright uh for the past couple of years has uh consistently asked me about keeping our rate increase as competitive as we could and we've we've tried to do that and in past years it's been a bit of a struggle However, working with our agent, we executed a rate lock agreement, so our rate for the next three fiscal years will not be increased, will not exceed 2.5 percent, which if you

▶ 1:56:16 Michael P. Zwirko: are familiar with the industry, the insurance industry today, that's a pretty good bargain for the taxpayers of Melrose. So I can pretty much promise you next year when I come back for the FY20 budget, that line item will grow by two and a half percent uh that's all i have madam chair any questions i'm certainly happy to entertain thank you president thank you madam chair thank you for being here this evening mr van campen appreciate your time um so a couple of quick questions the first uh you spoke to it a little bit the the changes in your department so um you said that there were duties that are going to be reassigned or that will be assumed um that were previously performed by the special counsel can you tell who this the special counsel was in the role

▶ 1:56:56 that the special counsel played sure so our special counsel whose whose tenure ended on june 1st is dave lucas i think everyone knows who david lucas is a long-standing family here in melrose mr lucas's responsibilities were to handle all workers comp matters the city was faced with i relied on him heavily to handle any litigation where it is somewhat difficult as an in-house lawyer to handle those matters particularly when they become somewhat time intensive as i'm sure alderman garabedian can understand so his role really was to take a lot of the burden off of my shoulders on those matters that i simply just couldn't handle in-house just because of the way the city hall is staffed so is there a pain point with this change

▶ 1:57:44 Michael P. Zwirko: excuse me is there a perceived pain point in your department with this change I wouldn't too early to tell well I wouldn't call it pain will you know we'll handle the added responsibilities and continue to provide you know excellent legal representation for the city I'll let you know if there's pain next year when I come back with the FY 20 budget well I'd also like at this time just to thank David Lucas for his service to the city I know for numbers of years he filled that role he also steps in at various times on a volunteer effort he did last year during the charter review process so uh just personal thank you from myself extended to him for his time the property insurance you had mentioned earlier about the increase in the rate lock i was

▶ 1:58:30 Michael P. Zwirko: just can you um not not the not the specific increase but i guess more the policy i mean that how is how is that determined is it not to put you in an actuary role but is it due to the agedness of our buildings is it liabilities in our workforce what exactly is the makeup of that complete property insurance is it just as any other you know premium would be derived it's based on history experience the the condition of the assets being insured one year our auto liability i don't have it in front of me went up what i felt was substantially and that was due to the fact that we had an increase in accidents and claims in that particular year so really history experience conditions of the assets as the buildings get older the systems get older or the systems get more expensive

▶ 1:59:26 Michael P. Zwirko: the you know cost to insure them sure will increase I just know we have a bunch of aged buildings in the city so it's good to know especially in our public safety area appreciate the work you do yeah you're very helpful to us individually and collectively so appreciate your time this evening and also throughout the year those are all the questions I had madam chair Thank you, Madam Chair. For the benefit of Mr. Mraz, we'll just let the thing, maybe you might have to watch it on MTV, but the question is on the property insurance. So is it fair to say we would insure the water and sewer lines throughout the city? We would insure our water and sewer lines. We would insure every truck that the city owns that is used to support the water and sewer division.

▶ 2:00:15 You know, the list is almost endless. we we ensure the employees who perform work we ensure I get the city against claims when a sewer line ruptures and destroy someone's man cave in their basement there are just there are a number of items I think that our insurance policy is intended to cover on that front I can say you know honestly this evening uh that is not an exact science in terms of the actual offset uh but i i would say that for me to tell you it's appropriate is an understatement it's entirely appropriate well thank you for i appreciate that thank you alderman deros thank you thank you very much van campen um back to kind of the changes in the whole department you i think you said the

▶ 2:01:11 Monica C. Medeiros: assistant the assistant city solicitor for school and labor is going from 24 hours to 30 24 to 30 hours correct and you anticipate that to you hope that that increases to 35 yeah the objective in FY 19 would be to increase to 35 if we could and my my hope would be to be able to do that in the fall but I haven't gotten the go-ahead yet from mayor inferno and mr de la rousseau so that's the hope and uh the funds are there for it not to cut you off but the funds are in this budget to make that happen okay oh that thing correct you're not looking for additional correct i won't have to come back for supplemental appropriation and um at the 24 hours that that position is now does that include is that that is benefited right it's benefit eligible correct correct and uh the

▶ 2:02:06 Monica C. Medeiros: position that has been has been eliminated the special counsel position that was also benefits eligible correct so in doing this restructuring we've eliminated a benefit package for the for the budget so although the salary is net equal we're saving and benefits correct and that those funds that now I know that the the mayor had used some of the savings from this to office you know to sort of balance the city the school budget is that reflected in the insurance do you know you may or may not know that or is that is that accounted for in the extra hours for the much can you can you rephrase that I'm not sure I understand so the mayor the originally the school budget what the school committee had been asking for was it was more than what the mayor had anticipated

▶ 2:03:08 Monica C. Medeiros: authorizing for the schools and she had through a series of cuts from the city side sort of reallocated funds to the school side and some of that was due to the elimination of this position in in your office and I was wondering if that was just simply for the elimination of the position if that was for the increase in the hours I I don't believe and I'm pretty certain about this and saying this I don't believe that any of the savings in my budget went to support the funding gap in the school department if that's your question okay and I say that I say that because I believe that had been indicated okay that's that's a question for mr. de la Russo but I don't believe that's the case okay yeah and

▶ 2:04:02 Monica C. Medeiros: you mentioned that one of the items that mr. Lucas would work on was workers comp and litigation so will you take over either of those or will that I will take over all of mr. Lucas's responsibilities and will assign as much to the assistant city solicitor for school and labor as I can okay and I believe also the you know the Liquor Commission I believe mr. Lucas worked quite frequently yeah mr. Lucas did you know an exceptional job in assisting and revising our liquor regulations the Charter Review Committee work that was done last year so those are all things that will absorb in the office that'll be a big change for us back to the insurance how do we determine who provides the insurance is that something that goes out to bid so we have a an

▶ 2:05:07 insurance agent it's Laura their insurance they're out of Everett and they have been the city's insurance agent for as long as I have been here and longer in fact I think they were our insurance agent before mayor Dolan took office I have instructed mr. Lara via on an annual basis to shop all of our insurance lines whether it's our auto insurance our property insurance our employment practices liability and he has done he's done that job to the best of his ability a few years ago we did actually we did actually submit an RFP for a new insurance agent and what we found in those responses was that we were still getting the best benefit with mr. Lara Pierre so we continued our relationship with him and last year we began discussions about a rate lock

▶ 2:06:05 agreement as a way to really keep down the increases because this line item is obviously large and any percentage increase just makes it grow even larger so the rate lock agreement is in effect now for the next three years so that's a good thing now do we do any do we do testing for instance of our drivers do we you know have in terms of I imagine some of this might be covered by collective bargaining but obviously we have many employees driving many vehicles and that must be expensive are we are we requiring any kind so we have obviously at initial hire we we drug screen all of our employees including those who drive in the school department in the school transportation department I believe they are subject to heightened requirements because of the nature of

▶ 2:07:06 Monica C. Medeiros: their license so we do I mean you know we do vet and screen and ensure that folks driving our vehicles are doing it safely look at driving records look at prior a driving record is a is a potential disqualifier at initial hire so if someone has a uh you know a difficult driving record i've known cases where we haven't made an offer of employment as a result so obviously that's important for correct overall liability and for not wanting anything bad to happen as well as saving some money on our insurance and i know this was um it touched upon a little bit too but of course we're trying to get a handle on the indirect costs that are sort of being built back to the ratepayers for water and sewer and I imagine maybe for some of the other departments your

▶ 2:07:56 department might be involved with some of the ambulance indirect costs as well I'm not sure are you involved with determining those calculations along with the auditor's department the way the way i have set my budget for 11 years is i would have an initial conversation with the mayor and the city auditor and you know every department has a wish list and we put our wish list out for the mayor and the auditor and we get some things and and we don't get others as part of that discussion I also report on where I've been working what projects I've been working at how much time I've been spending on those projects water and sewer the ambulance enterprise are no different I I think I heard a number of 18% tonight coming out of my out of my

▶ 2:08:53 If 18% of my staff time is devoted to water and sewer activity, that is not even close to the amount of time I spend and my office spends on water and sewer activity. from insurance claims investigating claims disciplining or counseling on the discipline of employees in that division just as an example within the last couple of weeks we had to discipline an employee in the water and sewer division which required many hours of my time to counsel draft the documents etc etc so and again that's that's a situation where I wouldn't even say it's a it's an appropriate thing to do it's an understatement again for me to say that type of an offset is appropriate because it's actually not even making up for the

▶ 2:09:56 work that's being done in the office you know the question of tracking that and trusting and verifying I'm not legally obligated as in-house counsel to track my hours as I would in private practice so I don't do it on that basis and you know in private practice I remember we would track our time on on every six-minute basis there's simply no way to do that at City Hall I try to track as much as I can on a project basis and what's going on so that's why on an annual basis when I talk to the mayor and the auditor we have a conversation about what is what has been on your plate and what is on the horizon so that's kind of how that that I don't know if I'm answering your question the way you want me to or giving you the information you're asking for but that's

▶ 2:10:41 how I do it tell the mayor and the auditor this is what I'm working on this is what I expect for next year mr. Shenna has informed me of XYZ issues on the horizon we've got 15 insurance claims we had a huge sewer break on Lebanon Street there are 15 people involved 15 homes is damaged there's got to be investigations that said well you know it's it's but it's also not an exact science so there could be a week where 18 percent of my staff time is spent on water and sewer two weeks ago I would say almost 65 to 70 percent of my time was spent on water and sewer related matters whether it be an employment matter whether it be a question about the legality of water and sewer rates whether it be a question about an insurance claim involving the

▶ 2:11:28 Monica C. Medeiros: whatever the truck is called the vac truck or whatever it is all that stuff just gets rolled up into the collective of that work so so you're you're you're keeping in your reporting to the auditor there at you know prior to budget time or as you're preparing for the budget and he's taking you know what you're saying and you're projecting based on what you know it's growing up speaking with the other department heads like mr. Shana correct and I think ultimately Ultimately, it's the auditor's judgment call as to what is the appropriate proration, but I do provide my input as to what I anticipate in any given fiscal year. Also, in terms of the general insurance, the indirect cost built back, if you will, for

▶ 2:12:21 Monica C. Medeiros: water and sewer we're about five hundred and twenty five thousand dollars according to this little handout handed by mr. Mraz which I believe is correct do you believe that that's accurate do you think that that is related to simply the actual cost of the actual insurance or do you think that that's some of that is the discussion that we've just had about like the working on claims and is that's some staff time that's involved in that well i have a i have a 19 department line item for property insurance probably in general liability of 524 836. that's the total expenditure the total amount of the check that will be paid to trident insurance for fy 19. sorry i didn't i didn't hear the resident yes i said i said the wrong number there that is the total the uh the

▶ 2:13:13 Monica C. Medeiros: water that's the total of the entire line item um the 157 440 is the amount of allocated to water and sewer so that's 30 of that okay and so that would be a that would be a calculation that i wouldn't be involved in because that would i think be determined by the amount of equipment i don't know what it's costing us for example to insure all the vehicles in the water and sewer division or any of the other equipment owned by the water and sewer division or operated by the water and so I don't know how that gets done that's one analysis I'm not part of okay okay thank you that I think that does definitely answer my question so I thank you very much Alderman Forbes thank you I just I had a quick question as I was gonna ask chief Galena but he's only been on the job for

▶ 2:14:02 about a month so I just want to ask are you part of the committee for the for the public safety building the comprehensive study I am NOT part of the committee okay I certainly advise the committee Alderman Forbes so I'm sure I can answer your question I was just trying to see if there was an update on where that was so we are continuing the mayor and the advisory committee on public safety infrastructure are continuing to explore options study the issue it is a almost to the point of being a dire issue here in Melrose the condition of some of the buildings I know you've been visiting the buildings and checking out the infrastructure so we're in the process of trying to figure out both in the

▶ 2:14:43 short term and the long term how to deal with some of these these dire expensive issues i know that mr schenner is as the i think he's the co-chair he's been having some conversations with the mayor and others so we're still in the we're still trying to figure things out okay but it's moving it's moving along it's just a matter of in what direction it's going to go in okay that's good so hopefully those nothing has stalled there is still an ongoing active discussion at City Hall about what we need to do with these buildings very good yeah thank you sir thank you thank you thank you just two quick questions one on the line item for suits claim I just noticed that it's a sizable decrease of almost three quarter seventy five percent and I'm just

▶ 2:15:33 wondering if you can explain the change there yeah that so suits and claims so the actual I always try to figure out all them and how the the percentage change is calculated so it's so the amount we originally budgeted in 18 was 10 000 the amount the department is asking for again in 19 is 10 000 so it's flat lines it's level funded the actual in 18 that was expended is 34 000 and i i don't have the information this evening as to what that is for i can get it to you i can get you the detail on that but i suspect it has to do with some deductibles associated with insurance claims and other payments that would have gone through that line and I also imagine that I would have it's perfect you know it's probably a simple answer I just don't have it because it would have

▶ 2:16:32 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: had to come through the alderman as well okay so and presumably then whatever increased that line beyond the original budget was sort of one time in nature so you're not anticipating it this coming year okay and then the other question just to follow up on alderman Forbes this question about the Public Safety building committee I'm not entirely familiar with how often it's meeting I recall that the membership includes as you mentioned current city employees I believe some also may be retired employees are also involved it in your opinion is that a public body subject to the open meeting law or is it more in an advisory capacity such that it's not yeah it's the it's the mayor's advisory committee on public safety infrastructure it's not subject to the

▶ 2:17:20 open meeting law as it is advisory to her right it's providing her with advice and guidance over a subject which she could do unilaterally so as a result it's not subject to the open meeting law but to take that point one step further if the Board of Aldermen created or wanted to create a subcommittee or appoint residents to an advisory committee to give this board guidance on the city's public safety infrastructure that body would be subject to the open meeting law because it's born of the board of alderman which is subject to the open meeting law so that it's always who created the committee that's how you analyze whether or not it's subject to the open meeting right and and to your point in other words the mayor could have could have um made up you

▶ 2:18:05 Michael P. Zwirko: know just made some of these decisions on her own or through her own staff correct um and so this is sort of a uh acting in her stead or to support that decision that's not subject to it okay yeah that's helpful thank you so much thank you president's workout thank you madam chair i just wanted to follow up on the uh questioning from alderman Letter garabedian i believe that in the fall uh mr city solicitor that we had a settlement reach due to the contractual dispute that was due to the fields from a couple years back i think that that might be the item of which uh that might that may be it president's work i'm having a senior moment sure and can't remember what I have for breakfast so I can get you that detail okay when I get back to

▶ 2:18:46 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: that I just wanted to foist that as a potential reason for the increase but thank you thank you that's all the question that any further discussion most move bottom line second the motion to move the bottom line made by Alderman Forbes second by Alderman Boyce L all in favor aye aye any opposed thank you thank you the last departmental budget on our list is 221 the fire department We will invite Chief Kalina back up, and this one is in the amount of $4,653,740.31. I'm still working off the questionnaire I submitted. Yes, we do have that. Would you like to give any statements about the line, or would you like to move directly to questions on this one? Move directly to questions. Okay, yes, Alderman, sorry, Alderman McMaster.

▶ 2:20:06 Shawn M. MacMaster: Thank you, Madam Chair, thank you, Chief, for being here. When you came before this committee on April 9th for your confirmation, you may recall that I asked you at that time about your vision for the fire department, and you talked about the need of keeping up with technology. Correct. Now, in fairness to you, Chief, you were not part of the budget process this year, meaning you didn't draft the budget. You're here before us representing a budget that was handed over to you. I didn't have my wish list. So Chief, in reviewing this budget, I didn't see a section or a line item for that matter that's related to technology. And the reason for that is because there really is no technology. The fire department does not have a CAD system, is that correct?

▶ 2:20:55 Shawn M. MacMaster: That's correct. Okay, and can you describe what a CAD system is? It's a computer aided dispatch system that's used to track calls at available apparatus response times document the incidents in depth what type of incident is how we responded what we did okay now the police department does have a CAD system in the form of its IMC software correct correct okay and with that software the police department is able to use it for dispatch purposes report writing attendance and data collection that's my understanding okay and do you not have access to the ims software at the fire department we have our access to the imc software and we use it for attendance purposes only okay is it fair to say that that software is not really conducive to the needs of the fire department that would be

▶ 2:22:00 Shawn M. MacMaster: accurate i think there's better softwares out there okay and because it's not conducive essentially the fire department for dispatch purposes has really been operating the same way since the year 1895. unfortunately yes okay so can you walk us through that process starting with a 911 call what is it that dispatch does at that time and can you can you follow us through each step yes uh we have uh small forms and we uh ascertain uh the address nature of the call a callback number and um we'll dispatch the apparatus through a vocal system tones station tones and uh so they they get dispatched and and they respond okay now that that form is called a run slip correct okay and that's about a four by eleven piece of paper that's cut in half we print

▶ 2:23:05 Shawn M. MacMaster: them out ourselves we cut them the paper in half and that becomes two slips okay so when the call comes in uh the dispatcher will document the the time of the call where the call is coming from the nature of the call and then what the dispatcher has to do is actually scroll down through i think what is an excel spreadsheet to find the actual address in the corresponding box to which you would then dispatch someone that's correct in other words you can't just type in an address and it's going to tell it's going to tell the unit where to go that's correct so somebody has to scroll down a list alphabetically if you had a dispatcher would you would just type in an address in the in the city and it would tell you who do we who responds to that particular address

▶ 2:23:48 Shawn M. MacMaster: okay obviously in melrose uh if it was a house fire we all go we don't have the luxury of having a big department so we all go to that but if it's a service call or a medical aid in a medical aid case obviously an ambulance is going to go but is it the latter going to go with the ambulance or is it the engine two from tremont street or engine three from the east side okay and then when a unit is dispatched the dispatcher then actually has to take out a stamp and not to be facetious but has to stamp a log book wait for it to dry and then memorialize the nature of the call which is then that's our official document yes okay and then the second part of the run slip is filled out that is given to someone in in command staff a captain who would

▶ 2:24:36 Shawn M. MacMaster: then input it into an excel spreadsheet that's correct okay and then a report may or may not be written we only write reports on property loss okay are you aware of any other fire department in middlesex county or the commonwealth of massachusetts for that matter who employs this type of dispatch system no but this i mean this really goes beyond dispatch it also is a data collection issue as well meaning without a cad system you're really unable to track data and other forms of information that that may be important to you for instance vehicle maintenance mileage engine hours and and from a cost perspective can you talk about the importance of being able to do those things well certainly uh you know our apparatus is an aging fleet right now

▶ 2:25:33 Shawn M. MacMaster: and we track by mileage however the dot recommends by engine hours but if we can be preventive maintenance instead of reactive then that would obviously be a cost savings and you know right now we don't track the repairs to the engines it's on an invoice you can put in a file but But if you try to ascertain when the last time engine two had an oil change, you'd have to start digging through files instead of just looking at a maintenance in a computer. Okay. And in terms of data, if we look at calls for service and medical calls, as an example, if this board had asked you to provide us with information about the nature, or let's say the volume of overdoses to which the fire department responded over the last year,

▶ 2:26:30 Shawn M. MacMaster: how many doses of Narcan firefighters administered, how many times you perhaps responded to a particular residence, that's not anything you'd be able to provide us, would you? No, not easily anyways. So you essentially have to spend an exorbitant amount of time to go through the logbooks, to research all of that and come up with the information and present it in a way that may actually not even be accurate. In fact, if we were trying to find out how much Narcan we deployed, we'd have to put a request rule for our ambulance who keeps our records for our ambulance runs and they can do that type of search for us. This would also be potentially a safety issue for firefighters as well. For instance, if you had responded to a residence in the past for an overdose,

▶ 2:27:28 Shawn M. MacMaster: and at that time it was determined that it was a fentanyl overdose, there's no way to put an alert in a system that doesn't exist. We don't have a system. Fentanyl at that residence, whereas with a CAD system, you might be able to have some sort of a flag. We're dispatched if it was sending out a unit to respond to that residence again, it would be known that there was fentanyl there, and the firefighters could take the necessary precautions to keep themselves safe. Absolutely, as well as if you had a problem, an aggressive patient, or an aggressive dog, you could note those things, and then that information would pop up on the screen at dispatch, and you would be able to advise the companies responding.

▶ 2:28:13 Shawn M. MacMaster: Or you might need to send the police because you've had aggressive patients in the past. be a scenario where somebody is hoarding that may present safety risks for firefighters and also the resident at that address. Because we don't have a CAD system, are you having to be selective in the types of reports that you file or that you write and then file with the file marshal's office? You mentioned that you're doing it for burning incidents or property damage? do property damage only well certainly if there's a significant injury that say it was a motor vehicle accident we might write that type of emphasis report but these CAD systems out there they you can generate a emphasis report on all the

▶ 2:29:02 Shawn M. MacMaster: calls we just can't do that it's time-consuming we have to take a three-ring binder flip through the pages type it into a PDF file print it out fax it to the marshal's office I stayed it before and I'll state it again I believe we're the only department that still faxes and she does because you can't generate the reports with them there's no CAD system you can't generate your reports within a system you actually have to go into your desktop open up a folder where it has a bunch of templates and this those templates that you'll use to to write the reports and then you'll print out the reports and if it's a report of a case where there was actual property damage you would then fax that to fire marshals course okay and you have to go

▶ 2:29:55 Shawn M. MacMaster: a step further correct and look for the corresponding code for that that incident so if it was a stove fire there's a particular code that is recognized by the fire marshal's office and you have to flip through a book to figure out what that code is before you could send that report off or before you could generate that report. The report is pretty much all codes. The type of incident, the type of action taken is all codes. So ideally though, you'd be filing reports on every single case if you had the ability to do so. That would be a best practice. There are some departments do and you get a nice profile picture of what they do. So our inability to reliably collect and access data. Do you think this is prohibitive to our ability to bring in revenue to the city in terms of grants that could support the fire department?

▶ 2:30:54 In the sense of not so much emergency response, but certainly in fire prevention, where we issue a lot of permits, and permits expire and you need re-inspections. I'm sure a lot gets lost that a permit may have expired and it's a one person office and everybody's overworked but I think a computer aided dispatch system or CAD system for record keeping would certainly help the department as well as the fire prevention division. On the permits, if let's say, having a familiarity with grants and RFP comes out and you hear about a grant, you only have a week or so to apply. Grants require a lot of data, a lot of analysis and presenting a need. At this point, fair to say you aren't able to access that information in order to be

▶ 2:31:57 competitive with other communities that may be able to bring in revenue to support the department. That's correct. my final question is can you just talk about the state of the department's apparatus at this time the apparatus is age aging it's if I run through our newest piece of apparatus it's it's a car the command car was last year engine Engine two is a 2007 engine that carried water. Engine three is a 2010, that's our newest engine. Engine four is a 1999 Seagrave, on up on 20 years old. Our ladder truck is a 2007 tractor drawn aerial. And our spare ladder truck is a 1996 E1. So that's 22, coming up on 23 years old. And your vehicle repair line item in this budget is an increase of 36 percent?

▶ 2:33:07 Scott M. Forbes: 36.4 percent. That's correct. I have no further questions. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Alderman Forbes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Madam Chair, and just to kind of piggyback on what Alderman McMaster was saying as far as IT, I honestly think in the current condition of your building, you probably couldn't support any IT upgrade. Given the infrastructure and the faulty, I wouldn't say faulty, but the old wiring, it would have to be a complete gut in install. But I guess that's the conversations that we're having. So first I just want to say I appreciate you taking the time, giving me a tour of all three firehouses it was a eye-opening experience to say the least and and just

▶ 2:34:01 Scott M. Forbes: to you know just kind of reiterate the point these are buildings that people live in these are 24 hour seven day a week buildings where people stay perform their job and I think it's incumbent upon us to try to be able to have these conversations so we can a identify what you need and be come up with some type of plan to be able to provide those things for you so as far as the fleet like looking back you know your newest piece of equipment is the 2010 which is eight years old these engines aside from the ambulance aside from the ambulance right how much does it cost to purchase one of these vehicles well it would all be on the design but shares the ballpark figure about five hundred thousand five

▶ 2:34:48 Scott M. Forbes: $500,000? $450,000 or $500,000. And then would a ladder truck be even more than that? Close to a million. Maybe double? Okay. So have we identified, is there, I would assume that we would have to kind of stagger these things, and maybe just because you're a month on the job. I mean, I'm not sure if we've had these discussions with the administration on trying to replace some of these vehicles? could bring it up but it's you know it's needs to be addressed in the in the years going forward sure one other thing I just wanted to see I saw the light item for for a turnout gear we talked at length about this could you just kind of just describe every what turnout gear is why it's important to have two sets and

▶ 2:35:30 not just one absolutely so turnout gear is our protective gear it's the coat Pants, boots, helmets, hoods, gloves, everything, eye protection, that goes into our fitness. And there's a strong documentation that contaminated gear is contributing to an above average cancer rate in firefighters. And the union is pushing hard, and I fully support that push, have two sets of internal gear per firefighter in the department a few years back the this board approved I believe this board approved an extractor which is basically a washing machine and a gear dryer so we can wash our gear properly and this increase goes a long way to achieving that goal won't achieve it completely but it's it's a it's a big first step to getting a second set of

▶ 2:36:37 Scott M. Forbes: gear for all of our firefighters so when the one is contaminated they can wash it and they sell another set to get it yeah especially if you have a call and you come back and you have another call you don't want to put that contaminated gear back on you want to have a reserve set just in case and just in real-time time situation absolutely yeah okay again I would encourage anybody if they have the time to take a tour of these facilities like I said it was a very very eye-opening experience for me and I just want to say thank you for everything that you do appreciate it thank you thank you madam chair I was gonna lead off of Alderman Forbes questioning on the extractor I was gonna bring that up because I remember we funded that a couple years back is the

▶ 2:37:23 Michael P. Zwirko: extractor fully installed now I know that there was some hiccups in getting get installed but with the turnout gear it's it's fully functional yes it was I believe was a power issue up at engine three but our superintendent of fire alarm is a mass electrician he was able to help get the proper power to run the machine properly okay and it's up and running and being used all the time okay great great and then the you had mentioned this the other day when you were here on the staffing so there's a backlog you had mentioned at the fire Academy but we're gonna be bringing on to fill to backfill some positions that have due to retirement and I'm curious if even though there is a waiting period like a nine month I think you said nine month waiting period are those positions

▶ 2:38:10 Shawn M. MacMaster: accounted for in this budget yes they are yes okay that's all the questions I had any further questions motion to recommend second motion to move the The bottom line, made by Alderman Boisselle, seconded by Alderman Forbes. On discussion, Alderman Foster. I'm sorry, Madam Chair. One thing I neglected to say, and Alderman Forbes reminded me, is I did have an opportunity to visit the Main Street Firehouse. And I'm thankful, Chief, for the tour that you gave me. It was illuminating, to say the least. And we've had a lot of departments come before us. And it's very clear that with every department, they've presented a lean budget. I would venture to say that the fire department's budget is really beyond that.

▶ 2:38:58 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: It's a skin and bones budget, and I want to thank you and recognize you for your work and for what you've inherited, and I also want to thank the other firefighters who are present and those who aren't here tonight for everything that you're doing with the budget that you have. So thank you for that. Thank you. I'll make sure I pass that along to them. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. The motion has been made and seconded. All in favor? Aye. aye any opposed that will be moved forward we have our next item before us chief is yours as well so I'll just ask you to stay right there so we have up next order 2018-182 ambulance enterprise fund budget fiscal year 2019 in the amount of nine hundred twenty three thousand seven hundred eighty three

▶ 2:39:46 Monica C. Medeiros: dollars and 75 cents motion move bottom line second we have a motion to recommend for passage by alderman Forbes seconded by alderman Boyce L on discussion thank you thank you chief there are some indirect costs that are passed through from this budget to pay for on the the ambulance rates but but costs that are budgeted in the general city operating budget is that correct so along with we we spent a lot of time talking about this in water and sewer but it is also the ambulance rate and maybe perhaps through the chair if we could request the indirect documents indirect calculate indirect cost calculations from mr del russo's office for the ambulance i believe that some costs are also passed through in in

▶ 2:41:01 Monica C. Medeiros: terms of indirect in terms of something maybe the hr costs or insurance and those kinds of costs i don't know if you have that breakdown do you have that figure okay do you know how much that is and one hundred and sixty seven thousand three hundred seventeen dollars okay and if if you could um please pass that on to uh ms camosa or not ms camosa well actually probably ms kamoska because we'll be going to the full board uh next so it could be added okay and are you involved with the calculations or how that's determined uh no i'm not strictly with the auditor's office correct Okay, and could you just talk about overtime in this line? I mean, we talked some about the fire academy, and, you know, do you have vacancies in this department?

▶ 2:41:56 And the ambulance, the overtime, there is overtime associated with it, and the academy is paid for out of the fire budget. But training, overtime training, we have all our training done at professional ambulances. what keeps their skill set up so high with the simulators that they have over there but my overtime this this ambulance budget pretty much pays for itself it's it's level fund that's actually down a little bit because we had a little bit uh savings from a debt exclude a debt item that went down about 15 000. this is this is an important service that the fire department provides the whole city and to the public and you know we we really appreciate it and we're glad that we're able to do this in in-house and it's been successful and we've been

▶ 2:42:56 Monica C. Medeiros: able to expand upon it over the past few years to add als and um you know it allows our it certainly supplements i think the department and allows it to keep going without being too much about that and so we greatly appreciate it thank you for answering all my questions and well I have five seconds I'll just put in a plug for the the 5k race that is going on this Sunday for the Father's Day 5k for the firefighters so it's a great race and anybody who's interested please come Sunday thank you for your support thank you we have a motion that's been made and seconded to recommend this order for passage any further discussion all in favor aye any opposed that will be recommended for passage in our next full board meeting

▶ 2:43:47 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: which is next week motion to adjourn second second we do have a motion to adjourn we we do need to take a vote on the all the overlay on the entire budget Yes, if you would be willing to withdraw your motion. I withdraw my second. We have the final order on our agenda is Order 2018-183, which is the City of Melrose Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of $79,399,945.73. We have gone through every budget before us in a department hearing for each one. I would also just remind the committee that currently this order is joined with order 2018-169 an ordinance authorizing revolving accounts in the city of Melrose we have also gone through each of those and taken a a motion with regard to each what is the will of the committee motion to

▶ 2:44:44 Monica C. Medeiros: recommend the conjoint orders for passage madam chair we have a motion to recommend order 2018-183 and 2018-169 for passage is there a second seconded Alderman Tramontozzi on discussion. Alderman Duras. Thank you. I'm gonna just move to divide out the order for the revolving accounts which I believe is a privileged motion. I think ultimately this should be in the end should be two different orders and I know it does need an edit which unfortunately I didn't see that order number on the agenda tonight but I know there is an edit that needs to be made for the inspectional services revolving account so alderman Medeiros is making a privileged order to separate these two with the anticipation that we'll move it forward but we do have a motion

▶ 2:45:45 Peter D. Mortimer: made and seconded which i believe would need to be withdrawn in order to do this point point of order madam chair um baldman madero's motion if i may respectfully suggest test is in order, it's an intervening motion, it's privileged, it passes automatically. Except for numbers, except for when it's just a number of changing an amount of dollars, if it's logically possible to divide it, it passes automatically. It doesn't even require a vote. I think we should just pass the whole budget and then we can deal with the revolving accounts and any amendments that may need to be proffered. So the motion to divide the orders is privileged. That passes automatically. And then I would make a motion just to take the remaining

▶ 2:46:44 Monica C. Medeiros: order, the first one, 2018-183, and make a motion to recommend that for passage. Alderman Mortimer is making a motion to recommend Order 2018-183, which is the Fiscal Year 19 operating budget. Seconded by Alderman Tramontozzi on discussion. Alderman Medeiros. Thank you. Madam Chair, I was hoping that you could request from Mr. De La Rosa. I did not see it come through, and if I missed it, I apologize. The — it usually includes an other funding sources document, which includes all the indirect costs from the various accounts not just water and sewer but also the ambulance and usually would be included with our operating budget order like to just request that so we get the whole picture for the full board meeting for Monday we

▶ 2:47:36 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: can make that request further discussion all in favor of the motion for passage recommendation for passage aye any opposed it will be a recommendation for passage of the operating budget for fiscal year 19 at monday's full board meeting we did separate out order 2018-169 ordinance authorizing revolving funds in the city of melrose i'll move to move it forward uh without recommendations but really probably with the understanding with just making that uh at the full board meeting when we have the language in front of us we can make that amendment we have a motion to move this order to the full board meeting without recommendation is there a second seconded by alderman Tramon Tosi on discussion president's workout Thank You madam chair I'm hesitant to vote in

▶ 2:48:36 Peter D. Mortimer: favor of this it's a ministerial edit that needs to be made without recommendation I just feel bringing it forward to the full board signifies more than what we're actually trying to do on these revolving accounts so I'm gonna vote against the motion without recommendation I would prefer a motion in favor considering it's just ministerial in nature thank you I agree with what the president just stated I think we should send it forward the motion to recommend for passage it's it's too bad we don't have the amendment that the change that needs to be made tonight but we can easily make an amendment procedurally at the full board I just agree with what president's worker says that it does show a lack of voter confidence if we don't send it

▶ 2:49:40 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: forward with a recommendation for passage and then leave it subject to an amendment at the full board I think that's the more positive move to take so I'll be voting against that as well thank you I'd like to withdraw my motion to move forward without recommendation the motion has been in the second has been withdrawn I would also just put in another reminder that we will the appropriations committee will be meeting prior to the full board meeting next Monday and this could be also if it were to be held it could be dealt with a motion to hold it in committee we have a motion to hold this order in committee made by Alderman Medeiros seconded by President Search all in All in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

▶ 2:50:34 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: This will be held until Monday during our next Appropriations Committee meeting. Motion to adjourn, Madam Chair. We have a motion to adjourn, made by Alderman Mortimer. Second. Seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? We are adjourned.

Appropriations & Oversight Committee — 2018-06-11

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