Appropriations & Oversight Committee — 2018-09-17
Attendance
Manisha Bewtra ; Robert A. Boisselle ; Scott M. Forbes ; Jennifer L. Lemmerman ; Kate Lipper-Garabedian ; Shawn M. MacMaster ; Monica C. Medeiros ; Peter D. Mortimer ; John N. Tramontozzi ; Francis X. Wright Jr. ; Michael P. Zwirko
Agenda
Minutes
CITY OF MELROSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE CALENDAR● SEPTEMBER 17, 2018 Aldermanic Chamber, Melrose City Hall Committee Meeting 7:20 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 Jennifer L. Lemmerman Chair Present Scott M. Forbes Vice Chair Present Peter D. Mortimer Ward 6 Alderman Present Robert A. Boisselle Ward 4 Alderman Present John N. Tramontozzi Voting Member Present Francis X. Wright Jr. Ward 3 Alderman Absent Monica C. Medeiros Alderman at Large Late 7:23 AM 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
ORDER-2019-8 Grant Acceptance of a Regional Tobacco Prevention Grant for $60,000/ year for ten years from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health. Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen City of Melrose Page 1 Updated 9/20/2018 10:09 AM
Transcript
▶ 0:07 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Good evening. The hour being 720 on September 17th, 2018. I call to order the meeting of the Melrose Board of Aldermen Appropriations Committee. I am the chair, Alderman Lemmerman. I'm joined this evening by Vice Chair Alderman Forbes, as well as committee members Alderman Mortimer, Alderman Boisselle, Alderman Tramontozzi, President Zwirko, Alderman Bewtra, Alderman Lipper-Garabedian, and Alderman McMaster. This meeting is being recorded. broadcast live on mmtv and it can also be accessed on the city of morrow's website motion to open the floor for public participation second public comment madam chair we have a motion to open the floor but for public comment made by alderman mortimer second by alderman
▶ 0:51 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Boisselle all in favor any opposed the floor is now open for a public comment any member of the public may come before us to speak on the item we have one item before us this evening are there any members of the public wishing to speak seeing them motion to close public comment madam chair second we have a motion to close public comment made by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman Boisselle all in favor aye any opposed we have one item before us as i mentioned it's order 2019-8 acceptance of a regional tobacco prevention grant for sixty thousand dollars per year for ten years from the massachusetts department of public health motion to suspend the rules that we may hear from our director of public health ruth clay second alderman makes a motion to suspend the rules
▶ 1:34 Seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? We are joined this evening as Alderman Mortimer mentioned by our Health Director Ruth Clay. Good evening. Thank you for being here. Would you like to open with a little information about this grant prior to going to questions? Sure. So we are just completing a seven in a quarter year grant from the state health department for this regional tobacco grant that included seven communities it was put out to rebid and we received a new grant which is a 10-year grant it's only for five communities not seven and it's a significantly less amount of money we were receiving over $80,000 a year and this is $60,000 a year. The five communities left in the coalition led by Melrose are Melrose, Malden, Medford,
▶ 2:44 Wakefield, Winchester. So it is effective October 1st and the plan is to maintain our current staff Maureen Busby there's there's enough funding for one year of full-time after that we'll have to start decreasing the hours it's just not enough money to continue you know each year there's a small pay increase but there isn't there isn't any money in there left of that so this will just cover salary benefits and the cost of doing compliance checks thank you hopefully you can answer this question I mean obviously we're happy that we get grant money every year but is there been an explanation why it is significantly less in the state like did you get any type of was there any communication as to why the grant money dropped it's less number of communities that's five
▶ 3:56 Michael P. Zwirko: instead of seven okay sounds good thank you thank you thank you madam chair I'm just a few questions here regarding this grant you said that it will go towards staffing for Maureen Busby's role and also you at the very end you said for spot checks and compliance checks is there any preventative education that is part of this grant or is it just for the staffing and compliance checks well part of the staffing's work is the education and she does the outreach will come to a great deal of outreach the good news is all five communities have five boards of health have adopted the latest versions of the recommended tobacco regulations so the policy work you know as of now it continues to change but as
▶ 4:53 of now we are up to speed we had already passed the provisions that the state just passed on a statewide level all five communities had already done that plus more so she does a lot of work in each of the communities with the schools and community groups as I'm sure you know vaping is really the issue du jour you know but you know over time with tobacco control I've watched the issues change over time you feel like you get a handle on one thing and industry comes out with a new product so I'm sure that won't be changing well thank you for that's all I had at this time Alderman Tramontozzi thank you thank you miss clay for coming in presenting this my question is does this grant require matching funds from the city no for any of the other cities well no matching
▶ 5:59 funds so is it that is it your discretion how that 60,000 is to be split amongst the community part of this well what we do in previous tobacco Tobacco grants over time were done on a per capita basis. This is not how they do the grants anymore. So we don't divide up the time based on like the population of each of the communities. Medford and Malden are designated communities of need for tobacco control by the state health department and the majority of the time will be spent in Medford and Malden. then you know lesser but obviously time spent in all the communities so we have you know that one person divides her time around we don't have a very specific formula like everything in the health department you know we move the
▶ 6:54 resources where the needs go however that being said this particular grant is very specific about communities of need it had a formula that we had to abide by which is why we have a different we have a lesser number of communities 40% of the communities had to be what DPH designated as communities of need which was Medford and Walden around here there really aren't any other communities of that really are close by except for Woburn which we did approach and ask if they wanted to join which they did not so to keep that 40% with Malden and Medford being two of them that's why we have only three others but the the narrative and the of the grant is very specific that the concentration of work is medford malden right does the acceptance of this grant have to be approved by the legislative
▶ 7:57 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: bodies of the other cities and towns no okay that's all so thank you motion to recommend second the motion to recommend for passage made by alderman Passed seconded by alderman mortimer on discussion for the first time alderman Letter garabedian sure thank you for being here and i'm pleased that even though it's less than we've had in the past we still received one of these grants Am I correct that they are competitive grants so that we weren't guaranteed a continuation? True. Okay. And you did mention vaping in passing, and that's been in the news, including at the national level, and I think even maybe referred to or considered being studied as potentially an epidemic. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about what Maureen Busby is doing in that
▶ 8:39 regard and who are some natural partners for her in the different communities, whether that's school nurses or law enforcement or you know who else we can sort of turn to to assist with this issue so the biggest natural partner well two natural partners one are the school departments because it really is an epidemic among the youth and we're seeing a lot of use of e-cigarettes are actually technically jewels in the schools now they look and bring a flash drive with me but you know they're about this big and they look like a flash drive so it's very easy to not realize that it's a jewel it's easy for the kids to use pretty serendipitously and people don't notice so we do so we're doing a lot of work with the schools to educate the staff the teachers the SROs we're
▶ 9:38 We're also part of a regional, actually a couple of regional grants on substance abuse in general, tobacco being a substance abuse issue. So we also work really closely with our MOPSI grant and substance, our regional substance abuse grant. Those are, as you know, the state is also working really hard on it, so we work within concert of the state health department and it's actually a national issue so everybody's kind of working on it together so that we have a consistent message we're all saying the same thing there's a lot of education the products keep changing Maureen keeps coming into the office with new new products to show us like this is this is the latest so it's an ever-changing situation and
▶ 10:40 Shawn M. MacMaster: ever-changing industry thank you thank you any other members wishing to speak for the first time Thank You madam chair Thank You miss clay for being here and I just like to thank the Health Department for obtaining this grant I'm very familiar with the work of Miss Busby outside of this chamber and she does an incredible job not just for Melrose and the surrounding communities but she's even been called upon by communities outside of the grant area as an asset and to share her expertise so I'm glad that we were able to find a way to sustain her position through this grant and I hope moving forward we might be able to be creative and be supportive as a board to try to sustain that position in the long term so thank you Maureen is really has been recognized statewide as
▶ 11:26 leader in tobacco control and e-cigarettes and and has been asked to talk to other communities and at other conferences so we're we're really proud because she's representing Melrose and I think it's a really great reflection for Melrose thank you in regards to this is this specifically for tobacco could you talk about if there's any overlap or now especially with the the anticipated you know legalized recreational marijuana as well as you know they already legalized sure so actually there's actually a meeting on this for what boards of health can get involved in in our role on Thursday that Maureen is attending for me because I'll be out of state so even though she's funded through tobacco
▶ 12:28 control we do let her go off the reservation a little bit to work on other to work on because it's the same group of people are working on it she does also attend a regional substance abuse control meetings with the other communities so yeah so just as there's unintended uses of legal cigarettes or jewels there's unintended users potentially and in minors of legalized marijuana so it's certainly I would imagine that this overlap so I well it's a very active issue including nationally I'm sure you've probably seen on the news that the FDA is finally putting their hat in the ring as far as jewels and marketing towards youth and have told the manufacturer of jewels that they have I think 60 days or 90 days to come up with a plan to show that they're
▶ 13:24 Michael P. Zwirko: not marketing so I'm anticipating some significant changes we see it first on a local level and we try to deal with it on a local level and then you know eventually it kind of percolates up thank you thank you thank you any other alderman wishing to speak for the first time thank you madam chair I wanted to have everyone speak on this item because I spoke to clay earlier last week actually late last week about another issue that's not on the agenda but I wanted to take this time to ask a couple of those questions if you don't mind sure thank you so I just had a couple of questions I know that in July we had the public outreach and the hearings on the issues of revolving around rodents in the city and I know that you and your office had put out some materials and
▶ 14:21 Michael P. Zwirko: also had a vendor come and speak actually in this chamber about what things that residents can do and I was just curious since the time has elapsed lapsed of July and where we are now can you speak to what has actually been done because I know that there have been some enforcement efforts and I know that your office has also acted on some some of these issues so I just like to get a kind of an update on that sure thank you so we've spent a lot of time this summer and now on road and issues throughout the city and as we said at the community meetings it's not really a Melrose issue it's happening in all the communities that's happening across the state try to put that word out so that people don't
▶ 15:05 really think that it's something very targeted to Melrose so over the summer we've done it a number of different things we've had the mayor's blog put out information about road and control we've had articles in the newspaper we've had individual neighborhood meetings oxymoron individual neighborhood you know small neighborhood meetings with specific groups of homeowners who had questions and have had issues when we get a complaint we not only deal with the person who has the concern but we also um paper the neighborhood with information about rodent control because it's the kind of thing that isn't really limited to a particular property has to be dealt with on a larger level we have a new system in place where one of our inspectors patrols main street down to the malden
▶ 16:08 line on a regular basis several times a week checking dumpsters and issuing fines if necessary we have we have a distribution list for all of our restaurants so we have sent an email out to all of the restaurants kind of putting them on notice saying you know we check dumpsters as a regular inspection but that's really only a few times a year so we put them on notice saying people really need to be on top of things and again warning that we'll be doing enforcement action if there isn't looking down my little list here so yeah I've been enforcement actions led to fines in some certain yeah they have and also um I noticed this this past week for trash day around neighborhood at times there's actually trash bags that aren't put in receptacles they're just kind
▶ 17:00 of laid on the tree belts and whatnot for pickup i did a quick search prior to this meeting looking in the city ordinances that is currently legal correct you can place a trash bag outside of a container on the ground waiting for pickup yes what we do as far as trash bags go is we allow that unless that neighborhood is having a wildlife issue so sometimes the wildlife in a particular area gets very active usually raccoons and they tear open bags in those cases we'll talk to those particular homeowners in the neighborhood and say you really need to use covered trash barrels not that raccoons can't get into those either but they're better than trash bags we haven't really seen an issue with trash bags being ripped open with rodents if
▶ 17:54 that if we do find that we would talk to that neighborhood also about switching to covered trash barrels I forgot one thing and efforts that we've been doing one of the areas actually that we had a major issue with this summer was actually the area around City Hall and the City Hall parking lot so we worked we worked we spent a lot of time working with basically a public-private partnership some of the buildings around here obviously are owned by other people some of them are owned by the city Public Works spent has done a lot of work on maintaining areas of growth that actually took some fencing down and cleared areas out and put new fencing up areas that hadn't really been accessible for cleaning before we've worked with the building owners in the area they
▶ 18:54 they did a lot of work and are actually continuing to do work including paving over parts of their green space it's not really green dirt where there were boroughs like I'd never seen before so just getting rid of that whole area is an opportunity for boroughs it it's worked really really well that things seem to be under control now so everywhere we go it's really a public private partnership and it's worked really well I think I'm glad to hear that and if you have any other resources that you could send along to us be helpful when we get calls from constituents and things like that I'd appreciate that so sure I appreciate your time this evening Thank You madam chair those are all the questions I have any other Alderman wishing to speak on
▶ 19:40 Robert A. Boisselle: the item on our agenda this evening we have a motion made and seconded to recommend for passage at the full board meeting all in favor aye any opposed this will be recommended later this evening at the full board meeting Thank You miss clay motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second motion to adjourn made by Alderman Forbes, seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? We're now adjourned. Public Works Committee is now in session. This is September 17, 2018 and it's 740 members. To begin with, first of all, this meeting is being televised and taped. You can see it on the Comcast Channel 22 and Verizon 38. Members of the committee, the chair is Alderman Boisselle. The vice chair is Alderman Monica Medeiros.