Appropriations & Oversight Committee — 2025-03-24

Attendance

Cal Finocchiaro present; Mark Garipay present · Chair; Ward Hamilton present; Maya Jamaleddine absent · Vice Chair; Manjula Karamcheti present; Leila Migliorelli present · President, Ex Oficio; John Obremski present; Devin Romanul present; Robb Stewart present; Kimberly Vandiver present; Ryan Williams present

Agenda

1. Call to Order (9:22)
2. Public Comment (10:00)
3. Minutes Approval (46:30)
4. Grants (47:00)
5. GRANT-2025-11 : Requesting the acceptance of State Earmark for the Melrose Council on Aging in the amount of $50,000 (47:10)
6. Orders (52:48)
7. The Mayor produce before City Council any City Officer, member of a city agency or city employee who shall provide information and answer questions relative to efforts to reduce crashes and improve vulnerable road user safety on Franklin Street and other roads in Melrose. (53:00)
8. Adjournment (3:18:08)

Minutes

CITY OF MELROSE APPROPRIATIONS & OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE CALENDAR● MARCH 24, 2025 Council Chamber, First Floor, Melrose City Hall Committee Meeting 7:05 PM 562 Main Street, Melrose, MA 02176 Attendee Name Title Status Arrived Maya Jamaleddine Vice Chair Absent Cal Finocchiaro Present Ward Hamilton Present Manjula Karamcheti Present John Obremski Present Devin Romanul Present Robb Stewart Present Kimberly Vandiver Present Ryan Williams Present Leila Migliorelli President, Ex Oficio Present Mark Garipay Chair Present

(ID # 12509) Grant Requesting the acceptance of State Earmark for the Melrose Council on Aging in the amount of $50,000 Ought to Pass City Council

(ID # 12428) Informational The Mayor produce before City Council any City Officer, member of a city agency or city employee who shall provide information and answer questions relative to efforts to reduce crashes and improve vulnerable road user safety on Franklin Street and other roads in Melrose. Recommend Place on File City Council City of Melrose Page 1 4/2/2025 3:35 PM

Transcript

▶ 0:02 Kimberly Vandiver: Good evening. The time is 6 46 on Monday, March 24th, 2025. This is recording in progress. This is a meeting of the Boards and Commissions committee. Melrose has over 25 active boards and commissions. If you're interested in being considered for an appointment, you may send a letter of interest in resume to the mayor's office. I'm Councilor Vandiver, the committee chair. Joining me tonight, our Vice chair, um, KAM Shady and voting member Councilor Stewart. Um, this will serve as a notice of a quorum for the record in accordance with the open meeting law. This meeting is being recorded. I'm broadcast live on MMTV. I will now motion by unanimous consent to open the floor for public comment. Seeing no objections. We're now in public comment.

▶ 0:46 Kimberly Vandiver: This is the portion of the meeting where the public may speak on any item on tonight's agenda. Uh, comments expressing any viewpoint on other matters are also welcome. And as a reminder, this is board's in commissions. This is not yet the meeting that I'm assuming most of you're here for. Uh, is there anyone who wishes to speak about the appointments tonight? Madam Clerk, is there anyone online? There is no. Um, so if there is no objection, I will now motion by unanimous consent to close public comment. And seeing none. We are closed for public comment at this time. I will motion by unanimous consent to approve, uh, without reading the minutes from March 17th and seeing no objection, those meetings,

▶ 1:27 Kimberly Vandiver: those meeting minutes are now approved tonight. We have three, um, appointments or reappointments before us. The first is ID number 1, 2 4 8 2, the reappointment of Brian Gregory, 1 46 West Wyoming Avenue to the Melrose Planning Board for a five year term. Said term to expire on the last day of February, 2030. Are there any, um, questions or motions from the committee? Yes. Councillor Stewart. Thank You, Madam Chairman of Chair. I'll make a motion to recommend this to the full council. Thank you. Second. Okay. So there's a motion to recommend, um, from Councillor Stewart and a second from Vice Chair Karen Shady. Um, anybody on discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So that will go to, um, back to the council with a motion

▶ 2:21 Kimberly Vandiver: with a recommendation for passage. Um, the next order of business is ID number 1 2 5 0 5, the appointment of Christopher j Greg 28 Ner Avenue Melrose to the Melrose Scholarship Fund Committee for a term of three years, said term to expire the last day of March, 2028. Uh, we have the mayor and, uh, Mr. Greg with us, please, uh, feel free to introduce the Candidate. Thank you. Good evening, Madam Chair and counselors. Thank you for having us tonight. Um, Mr. Greg is here before you for consideration for appointment to the Melrose Scholarship Fund. I know in your last meeting, we appointed two other members to that board. Just as a reminder, this is one of the tax donation accounts that the, um, then Board

▶ 3:09 Jen Grigoraitis: of Alderman created back in the early two thousands to accept donations. This one is, um, specifically around supporting scholarship for Melrose students. Um, and the fund in the 22 ish years that it's been in existence, has accumulated about $14,000. So, given our current budget situation, we wanna make sure that we are leveraging every possible mechanism. Um, by law, these funds can only be used to provide supplemental support. So the first step is making sure that the commissions are actually up and running. And to the best of my team's knowledge, no one had ever before been appointed to these, um, bodies. So I'm thrilled to have Mr. Greg here that he volunteered to step up as an engaged Melrose Public School's parent.

▶ 3:51 Jen Grigoraitis: As you can see from his resume, he brings deep experience in the biomedical and biotech field. Um, has a variety of experience with VC funding, um, actual science, which I won't speak to, um, but brings a variety of skills as we think about how best to support some of our students who are in greatest needs. So I'm really appreciative of him, his willingness to lend his time and talents to this. Um, yes, thank you, uh, to everybody in attendance. I just want to, um, uh, just thank you all for the consideration. Um, I think this opportunity aligns a lot with, um, my belief that, um, you know, if we can invest in nothing else, we should invest in education. Uh, I think it's really a powerful mechanism

▶ 4:32 to pay it forward, um, into the, you know, the future health and prosperity of our society. Um, and in particular, you know, I've found myself being lucky enough to walk through the public school system and into an educational pass path that landed me, um, in, um, cutting edge science and biotechnology in general. Um, and one of those things that has been keeping coming back to me is that I wanna make sure that students see this as a future that they can get to. Um, and so that has underlied a lot of the kind of outreach that I've done to public school districts around the Commonwealth to bring them into our company, um, to bring them, uh, students into these lab environments to talk about what we're doing, just

▶ 5:11 Manjula Karamcheti: to open their eyes as to what is possible. Uh, and so I see this opportunity is really kind of synergizing with that and, and being able to open doors for, uh, students and we'll, you know, let history write where they're able to walk with those opportunities. So, I'm happy to take any questions, but I thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Uh, vice Chair Carm, jd. Um, I don't really have any questions. Sure. I just really appreciated a lot of your comments about students and experiences and being able to learn what the possibilities are. Um, and you seem like a great candidate, uh, for this, for this group. So, um, thank you so much for, for being here. Absolutely. And Councillor Stewart,

▶ 5:52 Kimberly Vandiver: Thank you, Madam Chair, Madam Mayor, uh, thank you once again for bringing, uh, a very qualified person to, uh, our boards. Appreciate it. Um, uh, Mr. Mr. Gregs, I think, uh, you'll be a great fit. So, Madam Chair, I'll make a motion to recommend the full council, and I will second We have a motion to recommend from Councilor Stewart and a second from Vice Chair Carm Shady. Um, anybody on discussion? Um, all in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So that will also go back to the full council. Um, you don't need to attend that meeting. You're welcome to if you'd like to. And thank you so much for, for stepping up to fill this, this role. Absolutely. Thank you for your time. Thank You. And the final item on our agenda tonight is ID number

▶ 6:37 Jen Grigoraitis: 1 2 5 2 1. The appointment of Alison Boone, 1 1 71 Trenton Street to the Board of Registrars of Voters. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm thrilled tonight to be joined by Ms. Boone for your consideration to be appointed to the Board of Registrar Voters. Um, as I believe you were all well aware, that is a body that oversees our elections in Melrose and is governed by state statute. Um, and it actually requires us to have a partisan body. So we have to have no more than two registered Republicans and no more than two registered Democrats per state law. Only our city clerk is allowed to be unenrolled. Um, so as we've had two recent, um, vacancies on that board, Ms. Boone was one of the names put forward

▶ 7:19 Jen Grigoraitis: by the Republican City Committee when I reached out to both the Republicans and the Democrats seeking nominations. So I'm really grateful to her for putting her name forward. She's a nearly 30 year, I think you're like just under the wire resident of the city of Melrose. She brings a long career in healthcare, so she certainly understands working in a heavily regulated system. Um, and she has expressed an interest in getting more involved in her community, and I really appre her appreciate her willingness to step into this role. Thank you so much. Anything from the committee? Uh, councilor Stewart? Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, thank you again, uh, Madam Mayor and Ms. Moon, great to see you here.

▶ 7:57 Robb Stewart: Um, I've, I've known Ms. Boone for a while now. She, we live on the same street. That's right. And, uh, she's in my ward and I've had several very good conversations. I think she's a great fit for this role and I look forward to supporting it. Thank you. Thank you Madam Chair. And, and I, uh, if is there anything that you wanted to say as well? I realize I didn't specifically ask? Oh, uh, no. Just it's an honor to be here. I really, I've like Jen's, Ms. Mayor, sorry, I said I've been here, you know, 30 years. I raised a 26-year-old daughter and, um, I just always wanted to get involved in the city and give back. And I think this was a great opportunity to get some experience and get started. So.

▶ 8:39 Kimberly Vandiver: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much with that then, what is the will of the committee? I'll make A motion to recommend. Second. Okay. Motion to recommend, um, vice Chair Carrum, jd and second from Councilor Stewart. Uh, any end discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So that will also go back to the full council with a motion, um, for passage. And you don't need to attend that meeting, but you are welcome to. And thank you so much for stepping up to serve the community in this way. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Um, with that I will entertain a motion to adjourn. Madam Chairman, make a motion to adjourn. I will. Second Motion to adjourn. Councilor Stewart. Second from Vice Chair Carm Shady. All in favor? Aye. Aye.

▶ 9:22 Mark Garipay: Any opposed? We are adjourned. Good evening. The time is 7 0 5. It's Monday, March 24th. This is a meeting of the Appropriation and Oversight Committee. I'm Mark Ape, the chair Joining me tonight. Our council is Williams Hamilton Kati Reky Stewart Vandiver, VRO Romano, and President Mi Ex Officio. This serves as a notice of a quorum for the record in accordance with the open meeting law. This meeting is being recorded and broadcast live on MMTV. Um, I will motion by unanimous consent to open the floor for public comment, see and no objections. We are open for public comment. This is the portion of the meeting where the public may speak on any item on tonight's agenda. Comments expressing any viewpoint on other matters

▶ 10:18 or on other matters are welcome. Also, uh, if there's anyone here in the public that would like to speak to our orders tonight, please feel free to come up and state your name and the city where you live. Come on right up to the table there. Thank you very much. You can just sign in. Okay, sure. Thank you. My name is, uh, David Norcross. Uh, my wife and I live on the corner of West Highland in Ashland. Um, we've lived there for 37 years and I know that there are a lot of issues with traffic. Uh, I'm sure you've all at some point heard some things, uh, negative about traffic in Melrose. Um, but we have our particular concerns on West Highland. And I think overall the biggest concern is people who are using this as a cut through

▶ 11:22 and what it is we can do to reduce that slow down the cars and, um, the volume of cars that are going through. And lemme just say first that the demographics in our neighborhood have changed significantly, uh, over the last 30 something years. When we moved in, there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood, you know, the circle of life. All of a sudden, all the kids, nobody comes by on Halloween, then all the kids are back. And we have a lot of young kids, preschool age kids, toddlers, um, and there's a big daycare center. And, and that's a concern, um, when you see the amount of traffic, uh, that is going on. Uh, we also have, uh, some people with, uh, disabilities on our street. And there was some older people, uh, like me, you know,

▶ 12:27 artists Prize who used to be in terms of getting out of the way. When I think about this problem, uh, it, it is literally bringing the problem to you. Um, I noticed that there was an interesting example, uh, on Lynde Street when you talked about, uh, there were three streets and you came up with three interventions on those streets. And Lynde Street was the unforeseen circumstance. And it's easy to say, let's put more cops there. Let's put more signs here. Let's put, uh, road bumps, road humps, road pillows. Let's make all the streets go back and forth. Um, but the average person is not going to know the unintended consequences there. And that applies to Franklin and West Highland. So because we are parallel to Franklin are

▶ 13:26 where the issues come from. So the things that I would want to point out and, and make sure people are aware of is, um, that in order to avoid the lights in Main Street and Franklin Cars will take the turn down onto West Highland, even though there are two signs that say not to do that in the morning hours. Um, to be fair, they are not terribly big signs, but they are there. Um, and then you have people who are coming up the side streets. Cliff Street in particular is one. Um, come up Cliff, go down West Highland, get on the main street and go left. And, um, also there is a regular number of almost every day someone is going the wrong way down Shipman. And there have been a couple of accidents,

▶ 14:30 one very bad accident there. Um, and so we are, we, being my neighbors that I've talked to, we're fairly confident that people are going over the speed limit. And I did see in the report that, um, there's a sort of optical illusion that occurs on Franklin because it's so narrow that it looks like cars are going really fast, but they're really not. And I'm gonna let the people who are worried about Franklin deal with that, I'll say on West Highland, they're going too fast. Um, and when we look at the new construction that's coming, which is all, we can just look down the street and we can see the old VFW and you know, um, if you want to go, uh, you can go back to the Lyman's old grocery store.

▶ 15:26 If you wanna go back far enough, uh, r and Ds, all those are gonna be developed. And no one, I can say this pretty confidently, no one on West Highland is convinced that traffic will not get worse. And I listened in on all of the discussions by the planning board and I heard about that. You know, I looked at the cars coming outta the, you know, uh, the liquor store and I made some judgements. Traffic's gonna get worse. So we wanna be prepared for that end, resolve the issues we have now. Lots of thoughts, bigger signs, um, you know, you're going the wrong way. Sign on, uh, up at, towards the end of West Highland where it meets Shipman. But mostly I think what we're saying is, Hey, can you guys help us out?

▶ 16:24 Where's the expertise? And that's what we really want, is sit down with us, sit down with my neighbors. Let's talk about this. There's no silver bullet here. I know that there's no one way to do this, there's no one way to fix this. But there are things I believe we can do, and we would really appreciate your help in finding those answers and in advocating for a safer street for the number of kids we now have in particular. So I just wanna say thank you very much for your time. Um, and someone else, I'm sure will mention Ashland Street and parking for the daycare, but I'm gonna let that, uh, I don't wanna take all the glory. Thank you very much. Thank you Mr. Norcross. Uh, anyone else? Uh, good evening. My name is Andrew Riedel, my family

▶ 17:29 and I live at, uh, two 10 West Wyoming Avenue at the corner of, uh, Melbourne. Um, sort of, uh, piggybacking off the gentleman who just spoke, we are very concerned with the speed of traffic on West Wyoming Avenue and the lack of any sort of traffic mitigation along West Wyoming Ave. I'll be, uh, brief with these two anecdotes, but within a one month period, both my wife and I experienced near misses, walking our 5-year-old son to school in the morning. Uh, the first incident I was crossing in the crosswalk at, uh, Melbourne, right in front of our house. There was a stopped MBTA bus in front of our house blocking the entire travel lane. So theoretically, traffic should have been stopped behind the bus.

▶ 18:17 There was no traffic coming, uh, heading west towards Stoneham. So my son and I were at the crosswalk. I looked to the, you know, to the east, saw no traffic coming, saw the stopped bus, no traffic coming from around the bus. So I presumed it was safe to cross. We get halfway across, I see a pickup truck speeding towards us on the wrong side of West Wyoming, passing the stopped MBTA bus. I grabbed my son, the survival instinct just kicked in. I got him across the street. I was absolutely terrified. I, I just, I, I was, my heart was probably racing 200 beats per minute. Um, the driver of the truck did stop. He rolled his window down. He tried to tell me that he was gonna stop when he saw us.

▶ 19:05 I asked him, well, why did you drive around the double yellow line to pass the bus? He just looked at me and said, I passed a stop bus. This was a one-off. And then he drove off. So I can assure that man, the safety of my family and the families in my neighborhood is definitely not a one-off. And I can't believe just the attitude that some drivers have driving down West Wyoming as if stopping for pedestrians is an inconvenience. Uh, the second incident, my wife was walking my son to school about a few weeks later than that. They were at the flashers at the crossing by, uh, Bob's market, um, due to solar glare and icy sidewalks. There was, um, the crossing was especially treacherous. So, uh, my wife

▶ 19:52 and my son were attempting to get into the crosswalk with the flashers going car heading eastbound. Didn't even see them. Just sped right through the crossing, probably going 30, 35 miles per hour. Thankfully, my wife was alert and she made sure my son didn't step into the road. So within a month, two incidents, just with, just with my immediate family, that could have been tragic. And I can only imagine how many other incidents occur on West Wyoming on a daily basis that I don't even know about. So why I'm, why I'm here tonight is just to stress the fact. I mean, I've been in contact with, uh, counselor Stewart, who I'm very grateful for his, um, you know, his advice on this. I've been in touch with, uh, mayor Jen,

▶ 20:40 who I've also been very grateful that she's aware of these issues as well as, uh, Sergeant GK of the Melrose Police. Um, he's very kindly offered to increase patrols on West Wyoming. But I guess my why I'm here tonight though, is there needs to be more permanent measures put in place on West Wyoming to ensure, you know, to limit the speeding, to make people aware. This is a residential neighborhood. This is not a four-lane highway. And people like my entire neighborhood, kids cross West Wyoming all the time. Kids going to school, parents going to the commuter rail, people catching the bus, people just walking downtown. West Wyoming is a residential corridor and it needs to be treated as such.

▶ 21:29 So I'm just here tonight to stress, uh, the importance that we feel that this issue needs. And just hoping that, you know, we want to work with our elected officials to make our street and our neighborhood as safe as possible. And we really want to be proactive, not reactive. We just, we just don't wanna wait until God forbid a tragedy occurs and say, what could we have done to avoid this? Because right now there seemed to be a lot of things that I could think we could do to make the street safer. Anything from temporary speed humps to crossing signs in the middle of the road that forced people to slow down to, uh, maybe, uh, councilor Stewart and I were talking about maybe putting a small island at the

▶ 22:17 crossing in front of Bob's. These are all items that I don't think would break the bank, but would make that street so much safer for everybody. So, uh, that's, that's what I got. And I just, uh, thank you all for your time and I really appreciate it. Thank you. Is anyone else looking to speak? Good evening. My name is David Simko. I reside at 99 Ashland Street, um, right next to David Norcross, who spoke earlier. I resided there for 33 years, raised my family there. I love my neighborhood. Um, the, the situation at the corner of Ashland and West Highland is, is gotten, um, ridiculous. The, there's a blatant disregard for the stop sign on West Highland entering into Ashland Street. The cars, um, frequently, let me start

▶ 23:12 by saying I have an un from a portion of my home. I have an unobstructed view of the entire intersection from my home office. I don't see the intersection so much, but I do see the one way section of West Highland Street and Daily, there are cars coming the wrong way out of West Highland Street onto Ashland Street. And I think the city knows that because there's actually a stop sign there. Um, so, which I think has mitigated the, the, the accidents that used to occur there with some alarming frequency. Um, there's also a daycare center in the church, um, downstairs, which is a thriving business. Great. Um, but the drop off and pickups morning and afternoon with the families, um, during ru rush hour obviously, uh, narrows the street,

▶ 23:58 Ashland Street there to one lane. It's a two lane. It's a, it's a two-way street. And the, the, the doors opening and closing as children are taken out and put into their cars, uh, it, it, it, it, it frightens me because I see so many cars, especially in the evening, cutting up Ashland to go down West Highland to miss the light on, on Main Street. It's a constant steady stream of traffic. It's not just a few cars. So, um, I, I hope the city can do something about it. Um, I I, I just, I see a tragedy, um, on the horizon and, and I know we'd all like to avoid that. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Simco. Anyone else looking to, uh, speak Mr. O'Donnell? My name's John O'Donnell. Um, my family, we've been here since my father bought the house right

▶ 24:51 after World War ii and there's, I live on West Highland Ave. In between Shipman Ave, Ashland Street, there's eight houses. Three other houses are generations that have been there since the end of World War II is we have a blind lady that lives on the street. Um, we have another lady that's 94 years old and it's a one way and they thought about it years ago, make it a one way, this way, everybody doesn't run instead of going up Franklin Street doesn't run up West Island ave I've been threatened with my life. I had a gentleman tell me, 'cause I wouldn't get out of his way either. If I get out of the car, he's gonna kill me. It didn't really bother me that much, but I reported it to the police.

▶ 25:50 I've been hit my cooler. I had my cooler in my hand and I was hit by a lady who was dropping her child off at the daycare center. And I jumped on the sidewalk to save my life. I ran over the cooler. She went to the police station and they all let that go. And it's to a point where either somebody's gonna get killed and I mean, they've got sign, they put signs up on Chipman Ave. There's two big signs. They're probably two by two on both poles. They had one down the other end of the street. They have a stop sign down there. They put the bike lane down there, which is used. Everybody uses it and it's great. But when the cars are coming the wrong way, and I have, my grandson is challenged and it's, somebody's gotta do something, it's got it's time

▶ 26:57 for the city to step up. And I mean, we've been complaining about it. I've, I've turned around, had the police there numerous times, and everybody just kind of, and I also, the officers are asking me, what can we do? I goes, park your cruiser in my driveway. Just sit here. Well, we can't do that. I'm like, why? You're gonna protect, you are gonna protect us. And, and I have nothing. I mean, Merrill police is great, but it, it comes down the chain and somebody's gotta do something before somebody really gets killed. And we got the daycare there and there's little kids running around everywhere. Thank you for your time. But Thank you Mr. O'Donnell gonna argue over this. My name is Carol Alton

▶ 28:00 and I am representing Woodland Avenue Neighborhood. Um, I think everybody probably should be aware that we are deeply concerned about the cut through situation on that street. Um, we're not professional, so we don't know what the answer is other than that. It, it is a crisis as West Wyoming, Ashland, west Highland. I mean this, from what I've heard from these gentlemen, is a citywide problem. And from my neighborhood, I'll speak for myself, but I know I speak for other neighbors. We don't feel like we're being heard. Um, you know, deliver. Drivers don't wanna come up our street police details when they rep pave the street, didn't want to work there because people have no respect for the human being.

▶ 29:02 What can being done? I don't know. But we're asking for some help to please find an answer for all of us that have these concerns for our safety as residents. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Alton. Hi, my name is Lonnie Nelson. Um, I am here speaking as a mom of a 3-year-old at the Franklin School. I also live in that neighborhood on Linden Road between Green and Lin Falls Parkway. And I was, uh, one of the people on that, um, part of Lynden who witnessed fatal crashes on Lin Falls Parkway. And we put, put together a petition a few years ago that got a ton of signatures and just emphasizes like a lot of what everybody is saying, that something needs to be done. And I understand there are challenges

▶ 29:49 and jurisdictional issues within Falls Parkway, but just emphasizing that is something that's come up again and again. And I know it wasn't on like the official thing, um, brought today, but I don't wanna forget the people who have died on that street and the people who have been permanently like traumatized from having dead people in their yard because there hasn't been action. And we were out with our neighbors at four in the morning seeing somebody die in their car right there, like, and then multiple times. So that's as mom. I'm also here as the chair of the ped bike committee in Melrose. And we're a group of just volunteers who are trying to make the streets safer and we bring together voices

▶ 30:23 of people across the community, but also try to like work with the city and advocate to make the streets safer for people. Biking, walking, and moving around. Um, as you can hear from everybody who's spoken so far, the need for traffic calming is really clear. Uh, and it's not just on Franklin or Highland, it's across the whole city. There's people on other, the other side of the city saying the same thing. Um, and our group represents people from all across the city. So I think you all have heard enough of that. Um, what I'm gonna try to emphasize is that not only should the city not wait to do everything they can to slow down cars right now, but I don't think that we need to do studies upon studies measuring the speed of cars

▶ 31:03 to find out that people are going too fast. And it's the difference between 25 miles per hour and 30 miles per hour that people can die versus being injured. So there are things that can be done with like quick actions that don't require studies and consultants in years and years. And then finally in five years, there will be a permanent speed hump on Franklin. Like there needs to be something that's done before then because somebody will die or get seriously injured and then it's gonna be on all of us, all of you who are in power. Um, so I don't think we can rely on individual people to follow traffic rules as much as everybody seems to think it's, oh, distracted driver, somebody wasn't paying attention, they ran a stop sign.

▶ 31:42 You can design streets in a way that will minimize the injuries and the deaths that happen. And there's people whose professions are like built on that. There's theory, there's ideas, um, that have put put out there. Our group did some research and put together our proposal for recommendations for Vision Zero, um, recommendations for Vision Zero Action Plan. And we met with Mayor Jen and shared some of that. And I just think, and we talked about safe systems and safe streets, it's not just assuming that people will do the right thing and drive slowly. We have to make actual changes to make it easier for people to not kill somebody. 'cause nobody wants to do that. It's never what they're intending to do.

▶ 32:22 Um, one thing I wanna emphasize is that all, a lot of the people that already spoke talk about near misses. And that's a huge thing that we don't capture right now. There isn't a place where you can go and see how many people almost got hit who almost got their kid run over. And that's something that I, our group is interested in helping with gathering data, trying to like pull people to get that information in a place. 'cause there's so many people in our community that experience that on a day to day and they don't know who to tell and then they come to the, to this group or the traffic commission. But it would be great to like gather that information of people who almost got hit because that would inform some of the decisions that have

▶ 33:00 to be made, how to prioritize these interventions. Um, so that's something I wanna emphasize and I know there's other people that wanna speak. So I think that's most of it. Thank you. Thank you Ms. Nelson. Anyone else looking to speak? Thanks everyone for your time. Uh, Finn McSweeney, um, live in West Wyoming. I just wanted to, you know, with members of the administration here, um, encourage, you know, act as another voice encouraging Mayor Grita to accelerate work on, uh, turning Melrose into a Vision Zero community. I think it's part of her platform that she ran on that I was super excited to hear about as a voter. Um, this is obviously an issue that cuts across basically everyone, um, in the entire community.

▶ 33:50 We all know that we're a community whose resources do not match. Its, you know, ambitions of, of what we think we can be. Um, but establishing a Vision Zero policy and commitment for the community helps with all of the little decisions that we're always making every day, every month, every year, kind of along the way. It's not something that needs to necessarily be accompanied by a funding source. Uh, you know, we passed a Complete Streets policy to access funding, but without a dedicated city side of, you know, a a dedicated city funding source. Um, we passed an electric vehicle first policy without a dedicated funding source for purchasing them. There are ways of kind of guiding all of the decisions

▶ 34:36 that we make along the way and making sure that we are remembering kind of what our goals and ideals are as a community for traffic safety. We may not be able to, you know, spend $20 million a year on permanent, um, streetscape improvements, but every year, you know, we have traffic commission meetings where they are making decisions and it would be really helpful for that group of volunteers to be able to point to a document that says, here's kind of the gold standard for what we want to see in Melrose. One of the other, um, speakers tonight talked about his experience in the highlands of a stop sign being installed and how he felt that was really helpful in reducing crashes. I think the traffic commission here is like two

▶ 35:19 or three of those requests probably every single time they meet. And the committee members don't always have clear guidance to say, well, do we want to, uh, approve stop signs as a way of mitigating crashes? Are stop signs appropriate? I think with a Vision Zero policy, it helps those resident volunteers make those decisions. We have a DPW who works super hard in a multi-year planning process on their paving schedule, working with, um, national Grid and the utility companies and giving them another tool in their arsenal to say, right when we're rebuilding this portion of sidewalk when we're rebuilding this portion of a street, we want to see, um, really forward thinking safety improvements.

▶ 36:05 Some of the other speakers tonight talked about the development work happening in the Highlands. Um, every time the planning board talks to a developer on one of these multifamily projects, they have an opportunity to ask the developer to make small contributions toward the neighborhood for improvements. We had a developer who had a, a project, um, actually in, uh, Wyoming Hill who agreed to look into funding a speed hump over by fades way barbershop as part of their project. Every time a project of a certain size gets approved in this community, the developers have to pay money into a streets scape improvement fund. But there's kind of no policy at the city level to say, where does that money go to?

▶ 36:46 I think it'd be a great story if we could tell the residents of the Highland, Hey, we have these three projects that got approved. If they are built, the community's gonna get, you know, say a hundred thousand dollars across those three projects and we know we're gonna use that money to improve street safety for pedestrians in the Highlands. Right now, that policy document just kind of doesn't really exist. Um, you know, I'll conclude by saying that people love to talk about kind of the Victorian atmosphere in Melrose and we hear about it all the time and how charming the city is. I think that people tend to overvalue the look and feel of the houses and undervalue the look and feel of the street scape and the built environment.

▶ 37:30 I walk and bike in this community every single day, and I never have to cross a highway. It is amazing when we were looking for places to move to, my wife said the number one place I want to like live is somewhere where I can get off work and walk to a yoga class. And we have it here. She literally, you know, six years after we moved to Melrose, she has that, she literally does that like three times a week, walks downtown and goes to a yoga class. And so many people cherish that walkability of the community. Um, and we need to be really forward thinking and proactive about saying, this is our top priority, is making sure that we always protect and preserve that walkability and that people are always feeling safe.

▶ 38:15 Um, so that's it. I appreciate the time. Thanks everybody. Thank you Mr. McSweeney. Um, I'm just gonna jump, uh, shift over to, we have some people online and we'll come back to anyone in the gallery that wants to speak. Would you like to say Anything? Hi, can you hear me? Yep. Yes. Yes. Okay, lovely. Yeah, so I live, um, coast of Franklin Street on West Highland. Um, I have two young kids and a dog and we love to go for walks. And my main concern is just around the speed of cars. I know that there's a lot of traffic volume and you know, people like to be in Melrose, they like to drive in Melrose and people commute through Melrose and that's, you know, largely, you know, unavoidable. There's gonna be a lot of cars around.

▶ 39:15 Um, but there's enough speeding fast enough that I just regularly feel unsafe. Um, particularly having a toddler. You know, we live right by, um, a lot of other families with young kids. Um, we live near that daycare that's been mentioned. Um, and I know there's always gonna be some speeding. Um, but it feels like regularly, particularly on Franklin, you know, on West Island too, but particularly on Franklin Street, um, the section that we live close to is, uh, 20 mile an hour zone, which might be, you know, a little bit overly optimistic, um, but cars go fast enough that I really just don't feel safe with my kids and that I'd like to feel safe walking with my kids around the neighborhood. So I don't really have a solution,

▶ 39:57 but that's the, that's the concern. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else on mine? Is it? Um, yes, there is. It's Michelle. Is she Michelle? Is she not come? Michelle, Eddie here she is. Michelle. Uh, yes, I I live on Ashland Street and I have, um, similar concerns that, that Dave and Dave have mentioned earlier. Um, we have a very small dog and crossing Ashland Street near West Highland is frequently concerning and dangerous. Um, we, we often carry our dog across the street because of this. And, um, I think something needs to be done about the speeding down Ashland Street and, and people speeding on West Highland. Okay, thank you very much. Is there, uh, anyone else on line? Um, I think that's it.

▶ 41:13 That's it? That's it? Mm-hmm. Okay. Is there anyone else in the gallery looking to, uh, speak Mr. Olin? Good evening. Uh, Jim o Locklin 39 Lincoln Street. I've lived in Melrose for over 30 years now, and over that time I've addressed both the city council and the Traffic Commission multiple times concerning road safety. And I just want to echo some of the concerns that I've heard from my neighbors here. I've come down multiple times to talk about speeding on Lincoln Street, speeding throughout the city and people running stop signs. I also want to echo the concerns that Finn brought up. I walk down to the square at least once a day, if not twice a day. I'm always walking and it's very important to me

▶ 42:02 that I can walk around across the street and not get hit as such. I was very glad to see road safety on tonight's agenda. Personally, I believe for enforcement is an important component of road safety. While I'm eager to hear what the city can do regarding road safety, I think the Melrose community needs to be realistic with respect to available funding for city services, including traffic calming and enforcement. And I do want to acknowledge, I looked at the PowerPoint before coming down here tonight, the 68 page PowerPoint, and I think the city is doing a lot with a little, and I want to apply, uh, the city for that. But frankly, with the current state of the city's funding for fiscal year 2026, not only am I concerned

▶ 42:48 that we will not have enough funding for additional traffic control measures, I'm also concerned that we may not have enough funding to maintain what we have. To that end, I pulled some information from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue Divisional Local Services website. The first thing I looked at was municipal per capita operating cost for fiscal year 2025. This rate is a community's total operating budget divided by its population. For Melrose, the per capita operating cost would be the $113 million budget divided by our population of about 29,000. That works out to be about $3,900 per person per capita. Operating cost is equivalent to per capita revenue and is one measure of municipality's ability

▶ 43:39 to provide services. This is a 20,000 foot look and there are of course, many factors and nuances, but what I found is that melrose's per capita operating cost is that the 27th percentile when compared to all other Massachusetts communities set another way on a per capita basis, 73% of the communities across the Commonwealth are spending more than Melrose on municipal services, 73%. I also compared our per capita spending to that of the seven peer communities that the city assessor uses to compare property taxes, Malden Saga, Stoneham Wakefield writing Linfield and Winchester, except for Malden, which has more than twice our population and may have some economies of scale. Melrose has the lowest per capita operating cost

▶ 44:38 of these peer communities, the lowest directly relevant to tonight's discussion. I also looked at per capita public safety costs as presented by the division of local services for fiscal year 2024. The most recent year that that data was available, Melrose's per capita public safety cost was at the 29th percentile when compared to other Massachusetts communities. Said another way. On a per capita basis, 71% of the communities in the Commonwealth are spending more than Melrose on public safety. 71% Melrose also had the lowest per capita, total public safety costs of the seven peer communities evaluated. In summary, on a per capita basis, more than 70% of the communities across Massachusetts are spending more on

▶ 45:36 than Melrose on public safety and municipal services. We are also lagging behind our peers. While there's always room for improvement based on this per capita analysis, Melrose does not have an efficiency problem. We have a revenue problem. It is clear to me that an override is needed and I plan to support it this fall. I ask the, I ask that the community support it as well. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Olin. Is there anyone else online? There is not. Is there anyone else in the gallery looking to speak? There are no objections. Uh, I'll motion by unanimous consent to close the public comment portion of the meeting. Seeing none, we are now closed for public comment. Uh, at this time I will motion, I'll also motion

▶ 46:36 Mark Garipay: by unanimous consent to approve without reading the minutes of the March 17th, 2025 Appropriations and oversight meeting. Seeing no objections, those minutes are now approved. Uh, moving on just for the public, we have one item, um, before the order regarding, um, the traffic and public safety, um, that we're gonna address first. So it is a grant ID number 1 2 5 0 9, requesting the acceptance of a state earmark for the Melrose Council on a aging in the amount of $50,000. And I believe we have Ms. Uh, Ms. Bro. Good evening counselors. Thank you for having me. Um, as you said, this is to, uh, propose the acceptance of the State earmark grant for the purchase of a new van for the Council on Aging.

▶ 47:30 Um, council on Aging has a, uh, an aging fleet. We have two, uh, existing vans that are 2013 models and one that is a 20 a 2017 model. Um, these vans provide transportation in and around Melrose, um, to residents over 60. Um, this can include anything from medical appointments to picking up prescriptions, um, to going to the Y to work out. So, um, we do accommodate, uh, a lot of residents here. Uh, the van we hope to replace has a history of mechanical problems, uh, and only seats eight. Um, and because it has a smaller interior than the other models that we have, um, it it has some challenges for mobility inside, um, for residents with challenges. Um, just some data on our, our transportation program.

▶ 48:25 In fiscal year 24, the Council on Aging provided 1,718 rides, uh, to Melrose residents with 35% of those going to medical appointments. Uh, we served 84 unique residents, um, in our regular transportation program. And then we also had 221 passengers with 129 unique riders who joined us for, uh, day trips to museums, restaurants, sports venues, and more. Um, adding a van to our fleet would help us provide, uh, help us continue to provide, um, reliable service to Melrose residents, uh, especially those who are seeking transportation to medical destinations. Thank you, Ms. Brown. Any questions from the council? Mr. Council Stewart? Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you Ms. Brown for being here this evening.

▶ 49:23 Um, uh, would there be any additional funding that would be required by the city? Uh, yes, there would be a, um, an additional ask. Um, the price of these handicap accessible vans, um, can range anywhere from 75,000 to, you know, a newer model being upwards of 130,000. So, um, there would be an additional, additional ask, um, which I'm working with Mayor Jen on to, um, allocate funding. So we're looking for 30 to $80,000 potentially? Correct. Okay. Alright. Thank you Mr. Mano. Thank you madam. Uh, Mr. Chair, Any other questions from the council? Councilor arm Mano? Um, thank you so much for, uh, wrangling this grant. And, and I'll just say, um, uh, as someone who's mother-in-law was wheelchair bound

▶ 50:15 Devin Romanul: for the last couple of years of her life, knowing how much a, uh, uh, catalyst for being involved in the community for the ability to access medical appointments and just be a, a person in society, I know how important this is. So I, I thank you for that and, um, wanted to make a motion to recommend. I'll second, um, motion to recommend by Councilor Armano, second by Councilor Common City on discussion. Uh, counselor Common. You had your hand up. You, you just, I'm good. Make, I was gonna make a motion to recommend Tiller Williams. Did you just raise No Counsel. Stoic. Thank you Mr. Chair. Uh, Ms. Brown, just one follow up question, um, to this, are we do, are we bound or required within a certain time period to

▶ 51:01 Robb Stewart: spend this grant money, um, with the additional funding that will be required from the city? Uh, I believe the grant award would be a fiscal year 25 ending June 30th. So we have to spend the money by June 30th? I Believe so. Okay. And we have to find it in this fiscal year, not next fiscal fiscal year. I believe so. And do, do you know if we have already identified that or do we, are we still working with the administration? Uh, I think we're still working, but I think the hope would be a free cash request. Free cash request. Okay. Okay. Thank you Mr. Brown. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Council of Van Devar. Uh, thank you. Uh, my question was about the, with this type of vehicle, what is the expected lifespan

▶ 51:46 Kimberly Vandiver: of this potential new vehicle? Sure. Um, so we generally do not put a lot of miles on the van, which is, um, good. The 2013 model, I think has less than 75,000 miles on it. Um, so, um, you know, we generally stay within Melrose. Um, the 2013 model is functional. It's just, um, a bit clunky and outdated and like I said, does have some wear and tear, um, from, from use. So I think we could expect, um, you know, at least 10 plus years out of a new, a new model. Okay. Thank you. Any other counselors on discussion? Madam Clerk, can you call the role please? Yes. Councilor Occhio? Yes. Councilor Hamilton? Yes. Council Chetty? Yes. Cremsky? Yes. Councillor Romanul? Yes. Councillor Stewart? Yes. Councilor Van Devin? Yes.

▶ 52:44 Mark Garipay: Council Williams? Yes. President Melissa? Yes. Chair Gareg? Yes. Motion Passes. So will get recommended to the full counsel. Thank you for your time, Ms. Brown. Next up is order. 1, 2 4 2 8. The mayor produced before ci, um, mayor produced before city council. Any city officer member of a city agency or city employee who shall provide information and answer questions relative to efforts to reduce crashes and improve vulnerable roads, user safety on Franklin Street and other roads in Melrose, uh, for the public. We have a presentation by the administration. Um, it's, um, 68 pages as someone already had mentioned. Uh, we were, uh, told that we're gonna move pretty quick through it. Um, at the end what I'm gonna do is based on, um,

▶ 53:39 Mark Garipay: sections in there, we're gonna take questions and I'll start. I know there's a lot of concerns with Franklin Street. We'll start with the Franklin Street portion first. Um, so anyone here, uh, for that, for that sounds like, uh, there's a lot of people for that area, the section of town. So, um, we have the Chief Failure Superintendent of Public Works Pro Elena Proli in Mayor Jen. I should have started with the mayor. Sorry. It's alright. I'm happy to go last. Thank you Chair gpe. And council. Um, I just wanted to briefly tee things up before I turned it over to, uh, our two content experts. Pardon me? I'm sorry. Yes. I'm meant to ask the makers of the order just to introduce it. Oh, my mistake. Sorry. I apologize.

▶ 54:23 Manjula Karamcheti: That's okay. Uh, thank you Chair Gu pe uh, tonight with Councillor Rio and Councillor Williams, we bring before the City Council an issue of critical importance to the safety and wellbeing of our community. The persistent danger on Franklin Street and many other streets in Melrose. For years, the safety of Vulner vulnerable road users, especially pedestrians and cyclists, have really been the number one concern raised by my constituents in Ward One. It's also a matter close to my heart. As 10 years ago, my son was nearly struck by a car while getting on a school bus on Franklin Street. And unfortunately, this threat remains very real. Um, early Sunday morning, a driver hit a utility pole on Franklin Street.

▶ 55:03 Manjula Karamcheti: There were injuries and work that needs to be done or needed to be done. Just this morning, while I was dropping my son off at MHSI witnessed four cars disregard the crosswalk while a child was crossing. Later I saw a near miss as a driver attempted to pass me while I was stopped at the same crosswalk, nearly hitting a mom who had just walked her kids to school. To me, this is unacceptable. We must take immediate and comprehensive action to reduce crashes and ensure the safety of all residents. The purpose of this information order is to get an update on past and present issues, current and future efforts, and to collaborate on a clear, actionable plan to move forward. A lot of work has been done and I wanna name and honor that.

▶ 55:46 Manjula Karamcheti: And there is just more that we need to do together. Uh, we must work to create the safest possible conditions for everyone, residents, students, families, and visitors on Franklin Street and throughout Melrose. The time to act is now. I wanna thank Ms. POAs Ellis, chief Fowler Mayor, mayor Greg, and everyone else for being here and for speaking. And I'm really looking forward to this president, uh, presentation, all 68 sides. Um, and I know we'll have a productive conversation. I know we're on the same page and the same team on this. Um, and I look forward to working together. So thank you Councilor Williams. Thank you. And I want to thank, uh, councilors Rum Shady and Joe Caro for joining me on this.

▶ 56:26 Ryan Williams: And a big thank you to Mayor Greg, uh, chief er and, uh, director Ellis for, for joining us tonight to talk about this. It's very humbling to have, uh, an issue of such importance to me personally and to obviously a lot of the folks in the audience be dedicated to a meeting tonight. Um, street safety. Some of you knows the reason that I got involved in council, it's because of my own personal experiences that I shared with a lot of the folks who, who have come here tonight. And if anybody has been outside their car for more than a few minutes in Melrose, you've definitely experienced the same thing. So, um, the reason that I, uh, contributed the, the concept of, of citywide street safety to the, to the order is

▶ 57:02 Ryan Williams: because I believe that to really solve our street safety problems on Franklin and Ashland and all these places that we need to talk about the entire street network citywide. And not just what we've done in the past, which is substantial and much appreciated. Um, but also whether that is working to what goals, what our philosophy is and what we're planning for the future, and how we're involving people of all backgrounds to ensure that the infrastructure that we create works for families with small children, seniors, people with disabilities of all kinds, everyday pedestrians and people riding bicycles too. For some background. Many of you know that I've been a part of the local pedestrian and bicyclist advisory committee for many years.

▶ 57:39 Ryan Williams: I'm also a member of the regional Boston MPOs Vision Task Force. That's the group that conducts all the federal transportation planning for Melrose and the other 97 cities and towns in the metro region. And I'm also currently working with Smart Growth America as part of their, uh, transportation Champions Institute, along with, uh, counselors, even the mayor of, of Revere and, and other folks from, um, from, from cities all across the Commonwealth. So I can tell you, we're not alone in these experiences. This is all, uh, happening to basically every other city in town. And, and the good work that's being done here is being done elsewhere, also on tight budgets. Um, and I'm, I'm, I'm very excited for it to continue

▶ 58:17 Cal Finocchiaro: and I hope that this meeting will serve as a kind of launchpad to the conversations that we need to have as we move into the Vision Zero future for Melrose. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Williams. Uh, councilor Ra. I originally told you I was not gonna say anything, but I don't have, um, something prepared to say. 'cause originally I was just gonna have, uh, councilor Williams, caram Chetty say something. But again, thank you for being here. Um, I really got involved with this informational order primarily because, um, well we were speaking about, um, Franklin Street. I grew up on, uh, Richardson Road, which is right off of Ashland Street. Um, my parents still live there. I walked those streets.

▶ 58:58 Cal Finocchiaro: I went to the Franklin School. Um, I, three of my boys went to the, um, congregational church daycare there, the preschool. Um, I drive those, those streets still all the time when I go to my parents' house. So I have noticed, um, the uptick in traffic everywhere West Highland Ave is, has always been a concern for me. Um, and Franklin Street, um, as well. So, and I've heard from residents there that know me from just, uh, growing up there. And so anyways, I'm, I'm happy to be part of this and thank you for the presentation you're gonna give us tonight. Thank you Councilor Ro um, mayor, I, my apologies for cutting you off again. Um, so no, I just wanted to, before we dive into the presentation first, um, acknowledge,

▶ 59:46 Jen Grigoraitis: I think the public comment was really helpful. I think probably everyone in this room agrees that there's more work to do and is eager and excited to do it. I do think there's also a really important conversation about the level of resources that we have to put before this. And one of the things I do wanna highlight as we get into this is staffing. First to thank, um, DPW, director Par Ellis and Chief failure for the work that they put into this. I would say this presentation was probably about 20 hours total between them and them, their staff. We do not have anyone on the infrastructure side of DPW who is even part, part-time dedicated to traffic calming. That is just not how we are structured as a department.

▶ 1:00:21 Jen Grigoraitis: This is done as part of full-time jobs that already exist. Um, and that staffing is gonna get more challenging. I think I had let the council know that our city engineer, VNI Reese, who has really been the lead on on a lot of these projects, has let us know that she's gonna be heading to greener pastures in the private sector at the end of this month. Given the city's unending budget shortfall, we likely will not be replacing that position, which will both result in a loss of immediate resources we won't have v's. Expertise. Her vision, her ability to deliver things. She's also our primary grant writer and grant administrator for all of the state and federal funding that we primarily use to support these efforts.

▶ 1:00:58 Jen Grigoraitis: 'cause to the public comment, um, comment, you know, we're behind most municipalities in terms of the actual city money that we're putting toward this. So on the um, police side, we do have Sergeant Gogh, who's our traffic supervisor. We run with three officers on at a time. I know you probably don't like it when I highlight that. Um, but that's the number of officers we have on the street citywide at any given moment. So I think we certainly hear the requests for people to have more enforcement. The reality is, without additional resources, we are static in the number of people who can write tickets, who are available. So I just wanna highlight that as we move through this conversation. 'cause I do think we,

▶ 1:01:33 Jen Grigoraitis: and they have done a lot with a very stagnant pool and frankly a shrinking pool of resources available to us. Um, so I'm very grateful for the work that they both do every day and their teams. Um, it's 68 slides 'cause we did get 107 questions from you all. So when you ask 107 questions, you get 68 slides back. Um, and it really ranged from specific streets like Franklin and other areas of the city to much broader topics of conversation. So I know Elena tried to group things so that we could have sort of a thematic, um, conversation. The other thing I just wanted to highlight is I know the Traffic Commission has come up a couple times. We have three members of the traffic commission in the room

▶ 1:02:11 Jen Grigoraitis: with us tonight, Councillor Williams and my two colleagues up here. That is a separate regulatory bo body that is governed by state statute and city ordinance. It is subject to the open meeting law. I know I don't have to remind all of you that we cannot turn this into a defacto traffic commission meeting without getting in trouble with a lot of lawyers. So, um, just wanted to flag that that is its own group with its own set of rules and protocols. And with that, I will turn it over to Alina and Chief. All right, thank you. So I promised Councillor Garipay, I would try to get through the 68 slide presentation in half an hour or less. Um, and so, and as Mayor Jen said, we, I tried to group the questions.

▶ 1:02:53 We got so many questions, but I tried to put them into sort of buckets so that we could address them in sections, um, to make it a little bit easier to get through everything. So, um, I'm gonna try to get through the whole thing and then we'll do questions at the end and as Councilor Gpe. So we can start with the questions that pertains specifically to Franklin Street since that was the original impetus for the order next. Okay. This is just the wording of the order, which you've already heard, so I'm not gonna read that. Um, so the, the categories are Complete Streets, Franklin Street area specifically Traffic Commission, traffic, calming Toolkit, vision Zero and Crash Crashes Enforcement Funding,

▶ 1:03:36 and then a handful of questions that I just couldn't fit anywhere else. Next. Okay, so the, I tried to make it so that you could tell which slides are the council's questions and which slides are my content and chief failure's content. So, um, everything with the black text is your questions. Um, so as we go through, it's a little hard to tell what's black and what's blue on the screen here, but if you're following along on your laptops. Um, so these are all council questions. The first category of Complete Streets. We had general questions just about what measures we can take to improve cycling, pedestrians, all of that. Then we had specific questions about improving crosswalks, high traffic crosswalks, um, crosswalk markings, um,

▶ 1:04:22 flashing signals. Next, Um, then we had a question on bike accommodations. A bunch on safe routes to schools, and a handful on, uh, public transportation. So the reason I put these all into the Complete Streets bucket is that Complete Streets has been our program since 2016, um, which is geared at looking at every road that we touch for anything. We look at it by, um, how accessible it is, how safe it is for pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and vehicles. So we're looking holistically at safety next. Um, so we adopted a Complete Streets policy that the city wrote in June, 2016, signed by Mayor Dolan. And we scored over a hundred points. We actually got some extra points. Um, so we had a very solid policy. And we use this policy.

▶ 1:05:17 It's not just something that we wrote and stuck in a drawer. It is the guiding principles for every capital project that we do. Every time we pave a road, every time we fix a sidewalk. Um, and every time we review a development application, we look at these same principles and we try to apply them. Um, so if we see a road where, you know, there aren't accessible curb ramps, there's not a crosswalk where we think there should be, there's not proper signage. Um, we, we, or an intersection needs to be modified. We make all those changes when we're doing the capital work on that street. And it's just part of how we design things, part of how we do things next. Um, so in the time since we've had that, uh,

▶ 1:06:02 that policy in place, we've added 15 crosswalks. New crosswalks are within the jurisdiction of the traffic commission, so that each of these was voted on and then implemented. It costs us anywhere between, I'd say, eight and $14,000 to add a new crosswalk to put in the accessible curb ramps, the paint, the signs, and that's without even putting in a flashing beacon. Um, so these are all crosswalks that we've added, um, on major roads in the last several years. Um, this next slide, all these yellow dots are new, uh, crosswalk beacons, push button beacons. They're called RF bs, rectangular rapid flashing beacons. We've put in 27 sets of these, these cost about $7,500 per set. So we've spent over $200,000, um, in a variation

▶ 1:06:52 of traffic, calming money ride share funds that we get each year. Um, anytime we have a funding source, we try to buy more of them because they're in high demand. RFPs change the, um, compliance of drivers. I believe the statistic I read when we first started putting them in was compliant crosswalk compliance. Like a car stopping at the crosswalk happens about 16% of the time on average. And these beacons bring it up to over 80%. So over 80% of the cars will stop at a crosswalk when the beacon's flashing. So it's a huge, um, has a huge impact and it's, you know, it's not cheap, but it's also not a ton of money. Um, every time we pave a road, we look at the sidewalks or the lack of sidewalks.

▶ 1:07:38 We have a list from the Complete Streets policy. Um, the prioritization plan, that's about 45 projects that we had hoped to do over time. Every time we're doing other capital work on those, those streets, we add sidewalks if there are none. So, and occasionally we have a street where the re the residents really don't want a sidewalk and they advocate strongly against it. And when that's the case, we don't end up necessarily putting those in. We like to have at least 50%, uh, buy-in. So Windsor Road, I know is one where we thought about adding sidewalks, but the neighborhood was against it. And we have lots of places where people want them and we don't wanna allocate our resources. We're where we're gonna get a big fight.

▶ 1:08:17 So, but all these streets on the left, we've added sidewalks in the last 10 years and all the ones on the right. We've done major sidewalk modifications, um, cherry Street being probably my favorite that we, uh, the pedestrian traffic on Cherry Street between the elderly housing at the end and Shaw's is nonstop. And we were seeing pictures all the time of people with walkers and shopping carts and everything going right down the middle of the road 'cause the sidewalk wasn't safe. Um, so we've made a lot of major sidewalk improvements. Uh, this is just an example of a Complete Streets project. Whitman in the Hoover School neighborhood didn't have a sidewalk on the top, has a sidewalk now the entire length

▶ 1:08:57 from, uh, echo Street all the way down to Grove Street. We've also installed 20 of the solar speed feedback signs. So this is the signs that flash and tell you what speed you're going. I personally find them very effective. Um, you know, nobody likes to see their speed flashing at them, telling them to slow down. Uh, those cost about 4,000 each, and we've spent about 80,000 on them total. Um, I think if you can go back one tangie. Sorry. That's okay. There we go. Okay. Um, and then also, again, when we're doing capital work, we always look at intersections that could use modification. Um, this list, Howard Green being the biggest one, the, the roundabout, but also small adjustments that we made,

▶ 1:09:48 like at Warwick and Sears and Warwick and Dyer. Um, and then a pretty major change to Poplar, excuse me, to Emerson at Vinton, which I have the picture of There. You can see there's a ton of pavement in the top one and in the bottom, everything is tightened up. We added the four-way stop, um, and we eliminated the cut through from, uh, Vinton onto Emerson. And I find it to be much safer. This is an intersection I've driven through many times even before I worked here. Um, and I think it's just far better. It's better for pedestrians, it's better for vehicles. Um, so these are the types of improvements we're constantly making. This was a grant funded project. It was about 75,000 in Shared Streets money.

▶ 1:10:31 And the roundabout, the next picture, um, that was also a complete streets funded project. The city had to put in some money, but it was, uh, largely funded through Mass DOT Bica accommodations. Um, we've added the North South bike route, the route down Main Street, and also the commuter route through the side streets. Um, we've added shares in a lot of places. I know shares aren't, aren't the greatest, but where the roads not wide enough to put in bike lanes, at least it's, it raises awareness that there could be bikes around. Um, the Mystic Valley Greenway signage went up recently, that was also a grant. Um, and Lebanon Street we're working on a federally funded project that I just found out today.

▶ 1:11:13 The new estimate for the total project is over $10 million of federal funds that we're hoping to get through an investment. We have to pay for the design, and then they pay for the construction. So the next slide is, this is an example of our change in bike accommodations. That's the intersection at Main and Sylvan. And you see on the left, there's really no bike accommodations. And on the right we've added, um, just a major change to it. It also is a change to the pedestrian, um, crosswalks, but major improvement to the flow of that intersection and the safety for somebody on a bike. Um, safe routes to schools. We've done a number of safe routes to schools projects. The biggest one was probably Melrose Street

▶ 1:11:57 around the high school, um, but also the drop off area at the Winthrop School, uh, which we funded with, um, city Money and improvements, small signs and lines improvements around the Lincoln School. Uh, in 2023, that was about a $6,000 grant from the state. Um, if you go to the next slide, sorry. That's okay. This is just an example you can see on the right hand side on the bottom, the drop off area that we extended significantly on Melrose Street right by the high school. Um, you can see on the top slide that didn't exist. We also moved the crosswalk. We added some bump outs. Um, we indented a drop off lane on Melrose Street. And things flow better than they did before. They don't always, they're not always perfect,

▶ 1:12:42 but at least, um, this is a substantial improvement. And then the next two slides are the Winthrop School. Um, we added a drop off area there too. You can see on the bottom slide, you see the drop off area on the top side, you don't see it. And then if you go to the next slide, um, some of the counts as questions were, you know, are our crosswalks well marked enough? Are the signs well maintained? Is the paint well maintained? You can see the huge improvement on the bottom with the crosswalk signs, the paint, the tactile warning pads, the A DA, um, pads on the ramps, the handicap signage. Um, you know, every time, again, every time we do a capital project, we try to improve all of those things.

▶ 1:13:23 And so we're moving our way through the city making these improvements every time we touch a street. Um, public transportation, we haven't done as much. We had some questions about bus shelters. There was an MBTA Pro project to improve bus shelters, and we did submit a list of desired locations and then that never came to fruition. So I'm not sure the planning department was spearheading that, and I don't know what the status is. Um, but MBTA sort of dropped off on that one a couple years ago. Um, but we have added markings for bus stops on Main Street. And, um, the Highlands area we completely reconstructed, which you'll see in a minute. Um, improving commuter rail parking and, and, um, pedestrian experience for getting to the train.

▶ 1:14:07 Okay, so the next slide. So these are all the questions that we got from the Franklin Street area from the council. Um, and some of them I know were submitted via residence. Um, so we had general questions on safety measures, just how we can improve pedestrians, uh, blind spots, curves, slowing down traffic. Um, pretty much all the same comments that you heard from the public. And then next slide, we had a number of enforcement questions that chief failure, um, is prepared to answer. Next slide is more enforcement questions. And then a couple questions on crash history, which we also gathered the answers to. And then on the next slide, we actually have two slides worth of questions on the West Highland Shipman, um,

▶ 1:14:55 Ashland area, which again, echo the same questions that you heard, um, from the public. So the, the next slide as well is the Highland questions. Um, so trying to answer as many of those questions. That was the five slides worth of questions were all Franklin Street area. So trying to just boil down the answers to those. Um, in the last decade, we have done a ton on Franklin Street in the interest of, uh, traffic calming and safety. The biggest of which was the Highlands Mass Works projects, which was completed, um, 2014 to 15 Bumpouts were added. And the, the, um, the street was tightened, the travel lanes were narrowed, and the parking was in indentations with Bumpouts in between. So it shortened all the crosswalk distances.

▶ 1:15:43 Um, it also made it very hard for a car to like pass another car when they're taking a left or, um, you know, go around somebody that the story about going around an MBTA bus on Wyoming, it makes it a lot harder. Obviously if someone's crossing the double yellow and driving on the other side of the street, that's, that's a different case. But, um, it, it really tightens up the driving area and makes people generally drive slower. So all the way from Ashland to Vinton, that is definitely slowed speeds. Um, if you go to the next slide, there's an example of this is Franklin at Tremont, where you can see the crosswalk distance the picture on the top. You see the car on the left hand side that has a huge swath to drive in.

▶ 1:16:27 And if someone was turning, there's definitely room for someone else to go around them. And then on the bottom, you see now the parking is indented with large curbs. It also helps the sight lines when people pull out from the side streets because there aren't cars parked right up to, you know, within 20 feet of the intersection. Um, So we've also, we've added two new crosswalks in recent years. One at Warren Street, uh, one at Botolph Street with new accessible curb ramps and signage and paint, adding crosswalks on an area that was previously just a, you know, threw away with no sort of visual break that can just slow people down just by giving people more that they are aware that they have to look for.

▶ 1:17:11 You see the crosswalk signs, you see the crosswalk paint, and it makes it look like less of a speedway. Um, so those two new crosswalks were in the area of Franklin that is really just wide open from the stoneham line to Vinton. Um, and then at Warren, we also added a bump out for that crosswalk so the pedestrians can be seen, um, a little better. That was just about a year and a half ago. Uh, we've added the flash, the flashing beacons at the crosswalks at Vinton and at Batal we added a solar speed feedback sign that tells you your speed as you're coming in from Stoneham. Um, we did perform two traffic studies, uh, one at Franklin at Vinton and one at Franklin at Greenwood. And neither one of those intersections met the warrants

▶ 1:17:56 for adding a traffic signal. So that's an important thing to note that we can't add a traffic light at either of those intersections. They don't meet the federal warrants to do that. Um, but we did make some minor parking changes that actually increased the safety at Franklin, at Greenwood because we found that there was a sight line issue. We did a detailed crash analysis and found that the ability for, to see coming out of Greenwood Street trying to take either turn on Franklin, people were coming way out because of the last car parked there. And when we eliminated that parking space, it definitely decreased the number of crashes, um, improving those sight lines. And then at the bend at Vinton Street, we also know

▶ 1:18:34 that's a crash location. Um, we added more signage paint on the ground, you know, an arrow saying, shown that the road was about to bend. Um, so that was what we could come up with to improve the traffic safety there. Um, here's Vinton again. That Mass Works project included indenting the parking on the bottom, you can see it goes from a wide open street to a much narrower street with the fog lights painted tighter in and the crossing distance shorter, and there's signs now and there's the push button. Um, so a big improvement to that intersection. Um, the next one is Franklin at Warren. That's the crosswalk that we added with the small bump out. It was under construction when Google went by.

▶ 1:19:20 And then the next one is Franklin at Botel, um, where there's, again, the new crosswalk and you see how the signs and the paint just, you know, make a, a big visual break in the straightaway that you see. So our future plans, um, we did submit for a mass DT grant for another rapid flashing beacon at the crosswalk that's right by the Franklin ECC. A lot of parents crossed there in in drop off and pickup times. And so, um, mass DT had certain criteria and were hoping that, that they conclude that Franklin Street met those criteria to get one for free. Um, there's also the crosswalk at Warren. We have a request on our list for another flashing beacon there. We, we look at those when we have a funding source.

▶ 1:20:07 We look at what the next high priorities are in terms of speeds and traffic volume and pedestrian volume. And so this is a location that will definitely be considered. Um, and then any future initiatives beyond all that we've done in these couple of things that we have on the horizon would come out of the Vision Zero process. And I'll explain when we get to those slides, what the Vision Zero process looks like. So turning it over to chief. Thank you Elena. So, um, thank you all for having me. And I want to give credit to Elena for most of this, all of that presentation. It's a little technology deficient for me to put this PowerPoint together. Uh, but I did help with stats and so forth, so just wanted to thank you so much for that.

▶ 1:20:51 Um, so a lot of the questions that were presented specifically to me in the police department were, were data questions. And, and I did my best, along with Sergeant Co to come up with accurate data that we have, at least in our record management system. So as far as the number of crashes on Franklin Street, we went back, um, three years, a little, little over three years, and we average about 14.6 per year. You can see 2022, we had 1123, we had 1724, we had 16 and 2025. Uh, as of 3 1 25, we only had two. And we did have one over the weekend. So we have at least three in 2025. Uh, Franklin Greenwood had four crashes in 24. Franklin at Tremont Intersection had five crashes in 2024. And reviewing the, uh, accident reports

▶ 1:21:40 and the traffic sergeant reviewing them, mostly all were due to human error is, um, what, what we had determined. Failure to stop at a stop sign or a driver misjudging approaching vehicles, the last three serious crashes. And we put them in quote, serious, I mean, they're all serious to me if someone's in a crash, but these were sort of the ones that, um, either you all have reached out to me or someone had reached out to me asking questions about. And, uh, they all resulted in, in, in some injury. And that was Franklin at Ashland. Uh, the operated in that case didn't stop at the stop sign, just went right through it, um, coming out of Ashland and struck another vehicle on Franklin, um, minor injury.

▶ 1:22:18 It was property damage. It was night and it was dark. Uh, Franklin just prior to Ashland, that was a single, uh, vehicle crash. The vehicle jumped, the curb hit a stonewall, and that person was arrest, uh, charged with, I believe arrested on scene. Uh, certainly charged with, uh, OUI. Uh, and that case is open. I don't wanna really talk too much about it, but that's what the cause of that one was. And Franklin at Tremont was the other one that we listed as a serious quote, quote was a pedestrian crossing from Tremont northbound to Shipman. And that person was struck during the daytime at a, at a low speed by an elderly operator, uh, resulting in a leg injury, Some citation data. We were able to pull, uh, certainly for last year,

▶ 1:23:03 most recent, uh, all of 2024 to the present, which would've been around March 1st. When we did these stats, uh, in our record management system, we had 50 total citations, um, broken down. It was speeding, 12 of them distracted driving four zero for crosswalks, uh, zero for U-turns, and the rest were unlicensed, uninsured suspended licenses, unregistered vehicles, marked lanes violation, equipment violations, and failure to yield. We did get questions about verbal warnings. How many do we have? Uh, unable to determine in our record management system the way it's, uh, it's just done. Uh, but the sergeant had informed me, they, it, it's unknown, but probably a little over 50. They u he had stated to me, they're usually probably

▶ 1:23:50 around the same as we write, uh, written. But again, that's, that's just a guess as best as we can provide. So make sure I'm not skipping. Sorry. Okay. Um, so, uh, as far as speeding enforcement on the Franklin Street area, uh, offices, our offices historically conducted, uh, more on the Stoneham line, uh, down to Vin, down to Vinton Street. It's kind of an open area, it's an easier area for us to set up, uh, with radar, lidar, whatever they're using. Uh, it's safer for the officers to either hide or put their crews at other side. Um, the sort of the, the, the, I guess you'd call it the business district more downtown on that part is a little bit more difficult to set up. Um, it's more congested. There's vehicles parked everywhere.

▶ 1:24:33 It's kind of difficult to set up at least a marked cruiser with a, with an officer with lidar radar. And, um, you know, as was alluded to earlier, sometimes, um, when it's congested area like that, if vehicles are going 25 to 30, quite possibly it may appear to the visual eye that they're traveling faster just due to the congested area. Okay. Yeah. Um, okay. So, uh, I had indicated previously that, you know, the only future actions we were planning for Franklin Street itself, that was the two RFPs, and then anything that comes out of Vision Zero. But in the Highland neighborhood, we did have some specific thoughts in reference to the specific questions that we got. Um, the police department does have equipment

▶ 1:25:18 that they can put out to do traffic counts and speeds, and so we can put that out on West Highland at some point. Um, now that the weather's getting nice too, I think we, we don't usually like to do those, um, traffic studies when there could be a snow storm or such, but we're getting into decent weather. Um, so we can put that equipment out. It will tell us what speed people are going and how, um, how often cars are coming by and what time of day is the heaviest travel. Um, the turn restriction signage at Main Street. So we already did put in bigger signs and I think we added a second sign, but there are still a lot of people turning there, uh, during the restricted time and chief failure.

▶ 1:25:59 And I did discuss, uh, enforcement. So that's, that's something that we can try to do, um, because if I, at a certain point, I think it's the same offenders over and over, they know the signs are there, they're just taking the turn anyway, when they don't wanna wait at the lights at Franklin Street during the rush hour in the morning. Um, we did get a comment that some of our own employees have driven the wrong way up Highland. And, uh, it was acknowledged to me that during Snow, that has been something that's been done. Um, and I've requested that that no longer be done. And then we also talked to Cosella, our trash hauling, trash recycling hauling contractor. Um, and I don't know if their drivers were ever going up the

▶ 1:26:41 wrong way on that portion of Highland, but we said make sure that they aren't. So, uh, we've reminded our DPW staff and, uh, Sela not to do that. And certainly if anyone sees that behavior from our employees, we're happy to hear about it since we have told them not to. And, and I mean, we shouldn't be turning the wrong way up. Posted one way Streets anyway. Um, parking on Ashland Street, there was a question about restricting it at the end of the street or restricting it in general between Franklin and Highland. And the traffic commission already took that up a few years ago, and we substantially restricted the parking on the Franklin Street end so that we mitigated the issue. Where formerly, um, there were cars parking all the way,

▶ 1:27:25 basically up to Franklin Street. And then if someone was taking a quick turn onto Ashland and someone was trying to come out of Ashland, there was only one lane. They, they were in a gridlock situation. So we restricted, I would say it was about three car lengths from Franklin Street already. And we found that to be, um, uh, effective in mitigating the problem that we were trying to mitigate. Um, if people are no longer obeying the signage, that's something that we can, we can look at together to see if, if we need to be writing tickets out there. But, um, the, the reality is the daycare folks do need someplace to drop off their kids too. And so we can't restrict all the parking on Ashland because that is actually the safest place for them to park,

▶ 1:28:10 to bring the kids inside. We don't wanna create a situation where people are having to park, you know, across Franklin Street and then cross the street or anything else. So we wanna keep some parking there, but we just moved it down. Um, I mentioned before we're gonna talk more about Vision Zero and how that might help Franklin Street. Uh, there was a question about resident only signs for certain streets. We don't do resident only signs. That's a request made very frequently to the traffic commission and it's just far too difficult to enforce. And, uh, there's too much gray area. And so it's something the city has traditionally not done. Um, the traffic calming toolkit that I talk, I'll talk about in a minute, west Highland is on

▶ 1:28:54 that list already for consideration, um, and ranks fairly well in the prioritization. So it is a location where we can, uh, look at doing something for a pilot project. Um, and then engineering does provide comments on all the development projects to mitigate, um, potential traffic impacts. So that's something that happens with the planning board. Um, that was a direct answer to another question. Okay, moving on to traffic commission. So there were only three questions that I put in the category of traffic commission. And the reason is that the traffic commission's charge, if you can go onto the next slide, is very specific. The enabling legislation passed in 1998, um, specifies that the traffic commission is the regulatory body

▶ 1:29:41 for modifications basically to the traffic code. Um, these are things like speed limits, uh, traffic lights, stop signs, crosswalks, uh, crosswalks aren't even in the code, but we had a legal opinion at one point that they should be because they are a regulatory item, meaning that the police can, can stop you for failure to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. We decided they were regulatory enough that it was good and it was good to have a mechanism to, um, approve those parking restrictions and travel restrictions one way. Streets time, turn restrictions, um, do not enter signs, no turn on reds. That's what the traffic commission does. Um, the traffic commission was created because the city council was,

▶ 1:30:26 I have been told under tremendous political pressure from constituents for ward counselors to vote to put signs, stop signs and whatnot in the neighborhoods of their constituents. And, um, decisions were being made based on politics and not based on technical, um, you know, uh, regulations and recommendations. So we now are making decisions based on, we try to stick mainly to the M-U-T-C-D, the manual and Uniform Traffic control devices. We try to stick to those standards. Um, occasionally we go off of that when we think something is really a high need. But for the most part, in order to have consistency, we try to stick to those standards. Um, the next slide, what the traffic commission is not.

▶ 1:31:12 So the engineering division of DPW makes all the design decisions. If we are putting in traffic calming, if we're changing the configuration of an intersection, if we're adding speed humps or moving curbs, moving line painting, those are all design decisions. And that happens within the DPW engineering division. Um, and as I mentioned, whenever we pave a street, we look at it holistically at all the things that we, that we can change to improve safety. Um, we, we seek neighborhood input, we do onsite meetings for most of our paving projects. And we also run the Traffic Calming Toolkit, um, which you'll hear about in a minute. Um, the process for traffic commission in case anyone has items, counselors are oftentimes

▶ 1:31:57 the people who submit items. If you have a regulatory item or if you have an item that you're not sure if it's regulatory, you can email Jen Rosa, our clerk, she'll take the information, she sends it to the chief, to me, to Sergeant Gok, and we all collectively figure out if it's a appropriate traffic commission item. And then before the agenda is set, we also have a meeting with the mayor's office each quarter before the meeting and run through all the proposed items and make sure that they're all appropriate traffic commission items, um, and go through any internal questions on those. So there's a really solid process in place for getting things onto the agenda of the traffic commission. Um, and then we hand deliver

▶ 1:32:33 notices to all the neighborhoods. We like everybody to have notice who might be impacted. Um, the com the counselors asked if the speed limits are appropriate in the city, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour for all thickly settled areas. And pretty much Melrose is a thickly settled city. Every street in the city meets the qualifications of thickly settled. And as one of the, um, residents noted earlier, this is something we hear a lot in the traffic commission that, you know, we wanna keep the traffic on the main roads and keep the traffic off the side streets. But at the end of the day, every street in Melrose is basically a residential street. We don't have big commercial strips, um, even downtown.

▶ 1:33:19 We have people living upstairs from buildings. So I think everyone needs to keep in mind too when we're talking about speeds and safety and, um, cut throughs and everything. Every street is somebody's street. Um, I mentioned before about how the traffic signal warrants were not met for Franklin at Greenwood or Franklin at Vinton. They are met for Lynn Falls Parkway at Melrose Street. And so a traffic signal is coming and that's a DCR project that we expect to see put in this year. And we're hoping that they might take over the other two traffic signals that are adjacent at main and green so they can time them all together. But we're still working on that, Um, traffic calming toolkit. So the next slide is again, questions.

▶ 1:34:07 Um, is it the next slide? Yep. Yeah, yeah. Um, so we're back to questions. These are all questions about traffic calming, um, and how the Traffic Calming Toolkit works. So you can skip through the next one as well. And one more. Okay. So the Traffic Calming toolkit is, um, We had a consultant put together a very detailed, uh, tool that allows us to prioritize every street. We had questions on the methodology, the links that are here, I'm not going to, I was gonna click on it and show you, but I won't bother. Um, but the link that takes you to the prioritization tool, um, all the methodologies described right there on the page when you're looking at it, there's three scores and each one has a whole bunch of criteria that

▶ 1:34:56 that factor into it. And they're all listed on the, within the tool. So if anyone wants to know how we came up with the methodology, it's all right there. Um, and the way we use that is the other piece of the toolkit is a list of possible traffic calming measures. And the way engineering uses it is they look for the streets that have high scores in the prioritization tool and then they look at the tools sort of in their tool belt for traffic calming, and they decide on good pilot projects for those individual streets. So, so far we've piloted Speed humps on Howard Street, on Woodland and on lined, and we've now applied for grants to get the ones on Howard and Woodland hopefully installed permanently.

▶ 1:35:44 Um, we applied for 122,000. We really hope we get that money onlined, we have to do a little bit more work because we did see, we had complaints from the adjacent streets that it pushed the traffic toward them and then they were coming before the traffic commission looking for one ways and stop signs and, you know, other measures. Um, every now and then the traffic commission, when someone comes to the traffic commission with a request that we deemed to not be regulatory, we kick it over to the Traffic Calming toolkit and ask engineering to put it on the list. Um, and, and when we look at the where at, where to pilot things, we look at what scores highly on the those prioritization scores. But it's not like we're gonna pick necessarily the highest

▶ 1:36:27 street as the next street to pilot. 'cause sometimes we might have a street that ranked highly, but we might have a neighborhood who's really just has major present issues that we wanna help them address. One example I have is East Wyoming at, at Summer Street we had a lot of discussion traffic commission. We didn't end up being able to do anything regulatory there, but I think that intersection could be reconfigured a little bit. So I think this summer we're gonna try to pilot some barriers and such to just tee up that intersection a little and hopefully get it to, um, operate a little more safely. Uh, it did have a question about what materials we have for the toolkit. Pilot projects. This is a list.

▶ 1:37:08 Uh, if you go one more, this is a list of what we have that we got with a Shared Streets grant a couple years ago. I'm not gonna read through all these, but they're, you know, cones and barrels and barriers and speed homes. Um, I already mentioned the three streets where we've piloted already. Um, the police department uses the, uh, the equipment that they have to get before and during speed and volume data so we can actually see how well the, um, the pilot works. We also gather information through a neighborhood survey because we wanna know what the neighborhood's impression was, and sometimes we even try to gather feedback from the broader neighborhood again to see if there are unintended

▶ 1:37:51 consequences to adjacent streets. Um, as I said, we've applied for the grant funding to permanently install some or all of those, and we're in the process of identifying pilot locations for this year. But our takeaways from the pilot program is, I know there's a lot of questions about why can't we just do these all over the place? Why can't we do, you know, if residents want them, why can't we just put them up, you know, in 12 different locations in the summer? And the takeaway from having done several of these now, is that they are very time intensive. Even if we have consultant support, it's very time intensive for our staff. The putting the speed humps out is time intensive. Um, it also damages the road.

▶ 1:38:33 So we've decided we won't screw those speed humps down with a hundred different screws and brand new pavement. We're not gonna damage our new investments. Um, and then the collection of the data before and after by the police department, the analysis of the data, um, taking everything back out before it snows. It's a lot of work and we don't have the capacity to be doing this every, every place somebody wants it. We can't just run out and, and put that equipment down. Okay, vision Zero. We're getting close to the end here. Um, there are questions on the Vision Zero committee that the mayor has committed to. Next slide. There are questions on crash data and then everything that says Vision Zero analysis,

▶ 1:39:18 all these next questions and they go onto the following page. Um, you can go one more page. These are all questions from counselors that relate to items that will be analyzed as part of the Vision Zero program. And so we don't have answers to these, um, but we will pass them along to the, um, the Vision Zero committee and then demonstration projects. We had a handful of questions about those on the next page. Um, so going to the, to our information on the next page. Uh, so Vision Zero is focused on fatalities and serious injury crashes. That is, its whole intent is to try to have zero of those across the whole community. That's what it means to be a Vision Zero community. Um, and I wanna emphasize that it's critical

▶ 1:40:10 to do a true Vision zero analysis. You first have to understand what your crashes are caused by and where your high crash locations are, um, and where your high severity locations are. So, um, you know, while we all understand that, that putting up speed humps and, you know, uh, chicanes and roundabouts and everything might slow traffic and create some traffic calming, that doesn't necessarily tell you if you're gonna mitigate the serious injury crashes and the, um, fatality crashes. And so a big piece of the, um, the initial analysis is figuring out the root causes of the crashes that we have. And that's something that the Vision Zero consultant is going to do for us with the first a hundred thousand dollars.

▶ 1:40:59 Right now, the only funding that we have definitively committed to Melrose is a hundred thousand dollars from a St. Safe Streets for All federal grant that's going through the Metropolitan Planning Organization. And we're still waiting for them to tell us that they have the agreement for us to sign, and then we'll bring it before counsel to approve acceptance of that first a hundred thousand. And that money is for the consultant to analyze our crash data and determine what the causes are. Um, the, obviously the, um, mitigation measures, if they're all caused by OUIs or distracted driving, that's different than the mitigation measures. If it's speeding or, you know, a problem with a road configuration.

▶ 1:41:43 So we really need that data before we can throw money at solutions. Turning me back Over. Sure. So, uh, more, some more data. Um, few questions on how many crashes have, uh, do we re respond to and report through the police end of it. So we pulled some stats. This one would be what, five, five or six years total. So last year we had 328 20. In 2023 we had 2 61 22, we had 2 76, 249 and 21. The low number in 2020. I think we could all understand why that's, that was the really the big covid year, right? And then prior to that, which is hopefully, well do we want it, hopefully the numbers going back up. But if you look at 2019, that was three 14 and the 2024 were 3 28. So just prior to Covid. And now those numbers seem to be relatively consistent.

▶ 1:42:34 And is that higher? Is it low? I don't know. Not a statistician, but at least those are the numbers that we have, uh, in our database anyway. Um, and those are the one, the reports that our officers write. There are an additional crashes that we may not respond to, we may not get a call to in which civilians exchange paper and they fill their forms out. We average about maybe 60 or more of those a year that come into the police station where they drop their forms off. But we don't count those as far as what offices are responding to and investigating. Um, some questions we got, well, what's the streets with most crashes? And, and in the 2024, um, again, I, I thank Sergeant Gach and his staff for helping me out here.

▶ 1:43:15 So Main Street we had 79, that was the, the highest, uh, Lebanon Next was 34 Upham 18 West Wyoming, 15 Franklin Street 12. And of course, all the other numbers are in between to make up the total crash in 2024 intersections with the most crashes. Last year in 24 main at Lin Fells Parkway, we had seven, that's the high, high number. Lebanon Street at Upham had six, and Franklin Street at Tremont Street was five. Um, so real quick, this is actually a repeat of most of what I just said before, but you know, the Vision Zero process will be a deep dive into that crash data, doing crash diagrams, figuring out exactly what the causes are at the high crash locations, and then, um, determining from there

▶ 1:44:06 what the appropriate mitigation measures might be, um, to, to prevent those types of crashes. And in the meantime, everything that's traffic calming related will continue to go through the Traffic Calming Toolkit process with engineering. Um, we're gonna continue doing those pilot projects, but they'll be under that, um, that umbrella. So next we have enforcement questions. These questions were very specific for the most part. And so rather than doing slides on all these specific items, um, excuse me, chief F's happy to answer any of these questions. I don't know if you wanna go through them now or do them during the come back through, come back, yeah. Okay. That's okay. Okay. Um, funding questions.

▶ 1:44:52 Were all basically what do we, what money have we had? What money are we going to have? Um, so if you go a couple more slides, those are the council questions. And then the next slide. Um, so right now, for this year, we have a $450,000 Complete Streets grant to put sidewalks on Swains Pond Ave. That is one of the most requested locations in the whole city for sidewalks. It's dangerous, it's curvy, it's narrow. So we're very happy to be able to do that with state money. Um, this is now we have been awarded over 1.2 million from the state in that Complete Streets Tier three grant program. Uh, we've been very successful with that program. Again, vision Zero. We have the a hundred thousand dollars.

▶ 1:45:34 Um, to get started on the analysis, we have the Shared Streets grant for the permanent speed humps is 122,000 that we've applied for, but we're awaiting the decision. And then the mass DOT Rapid flashing, beacon crosswalk push buttons, we applied for four locations and we're awaiting the decision. Um, and there was a question, you know, why did we apply for some money? Why didn't we apply for other money? We applied for every grant that we felt met the administration schools and that we had the staff capacity to manage and implement, um, the Lebanon Street Tip project. We got questions on the status of the funding. We've spent 477,000 toward the design. Um, that gets us up to about 25% design.

▶ 1:46:18 Um, we're looking at many hundreds of thousands more needed to complete the design. But the good news is that, again, it's a $10 million construction project. So if we come up with the money to do the rest of the design, which I'll have more information on soon, um, we'll have a $10 million grant through the federal government. Hopefully, if nothing happens to the TIP program, uh, chapter 90 funds, we usually get about 530,000 a year. We use that for our annual road program. Um, paving sidewalks, ramps, curbing. Uh, we have about 500,000 a year in city road bonds that we also use toward that program. So we're around a million dollars a year. There was a question, if we get more Chapter 90 funds,

▶ 1:47:00 what will we do with it? Sadly, we've estimated that we need 2.5 million per year just to keep up with our capital paving program, paving sidewalks, paving in sidewalks and curb ramps, just the ordinary stuff. We need two point million a year and we're spending about a million. So if we get more Chapter 90 money, it's just gonna be more money to, you know, to still fall behind, but to try to keep pace and your grant. Um, yeah, so we've got some questions. I, I know you all, uh, had approved the, uh, traffic safety grant, uh, back in September. Unfortunately we haven't even been able to touch that yet or utilize that due to some staffing concerns. We are definitely gonna start, well opening it up in April.

▶ 1:47:42 We haven't until September to spend that anyway. I don't foresee us having a problem. It's just, it's staffing levels that the mayor alluded to earlier. We were down, uh, and we're still down about 20% of our patrol force. And when I say down, don't misinterpret that. Uh, they're budgeted physicians, most of them are getting paid. But as I stated before, it takes about a 12 month period before, uh, the academy, uh, excuse me, background investigations. Once an opening happens, then it's a six month academy. I have to find an academy number one. And then if we find one at six months, then it's three more months of field training with an officer. So we've been down the patrol force. Patrol, uh, rank has been down 20% for the whole year.

▶ 1:48:22 That's a lot for us. And um, just the four that you saw on the paper recently, they're gonna be out of field training in May, so they're gonna fill four open spots. Uh, I get another officer graduating in June that we hired last year, but I'm losing two more in, hopefully not more, uh, than that. Um, so that was my challenge. We need to fill the staffing on the street before we can fill extra quote unquote, uh, grant money overtimes because we are mandated obviously, to fill the open spots on the street and we just couldn't fill the positions that we'd like to do for the traffic safety grant. But my, my, my plan is once I get those four offices, uh, off the leash and ready to go on their own into spots,

▶ 1:49:04 I'll have a little bit of a cushion where we can now staff this, uh, grin. Uh, I don't know if you've seen it, but I did assign the field training officers with the four new recruits. Uh, they were told to hit Franklin Street, hit West Wyoming, hit those spots, hopefully you saw them. I hear them on the radio, I see them out there. So in the meantime, they're actually getting valuable training on traffic enforcement with their training officers while also responding to regular calls. So, um, that money we will, we will get at it. That's all we have. But it's, it's, it's certainly something. And I think my plan is hopefully when the weather gets better too. We still have a couple mountain bikes

▶ 1:49:39 that I tuned up a couple years ago. Brand, you know, not brand new, but got 'em tuned up, they're ready to go. We weren't even able to use 'em last year 'cause of staffing. My goal would be to use some of this grant crosswalk safeties, um, enforcement downtown or wherever, put them on mountain bikes. It's a little bit easier. You don't have a big cruiser sitting in the street. You can sit in the mountain bike right by Starbucks or wherever and grab them as they come through. So we do have plans myself and the, in the traffic division and the patrol commander to get at this money. But that is the money that we have that will assist us for more increased traffic enforcement. But I don't wanna keep harping on it.

▶ 1:50:14 It's hard to do traffic enforcement, a lot of it. 'cause it's needed. There's no, I'm not denying it. Every town like council, it says it's a hot topic everywhere. My last agency, same thing. It's just hard to do it with three offices on the street when we're getting bounced around from domestics and mental, mental health and, and just your normal regular stuff that we do. So we will try to increase enforcement for sure. Okay. And the last slide is just to catch all of the other things that didn't fit into, into any category. There were a handful of questions on traffic congestion, which really is a totally different topic than traffic safety. Um, and so we really didn't have anything to offer at this time on those.

▶ 1:50:59 Mark Garipay: And then we had a question about Linville's Parkway, which is DCR controlled. So, um, I just put those in the other category and with that we'll take questions. Thank you very much. Um, I think how I'd like to proceed is have the counselors ask questions based on the categories. Um, and then once we're done the category, we'll move to another one. Um, and I would, uh, just encourage the councils if your questions were answered within the presentation, um, you know, feel free not to ask it again. Um, so why don't we start with, um, Franklin Street and, uh, anyone, councilor Cameron Chen. Thank you. Chair Repe. Um, just, I, I hopefully some really like quick simple questions from me on Franklin.

▶ 1:51:58 Manjula Karamcheti: Um, the first question was just the intersection, uh, for the lights. Could you explain just what the like requirements are to get that approved? I think I'm just yeah. Surprised about Franklin and Vinton given like the, the traffic that congregates around there and the accidents that have happened there. So I'd just love to understand like what the requirements are. Yeah, so I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it's a, it's based on traffic counts and turning movements. Um, you need to have a certain volume on both streets for a minimum of, um, a certain number of hour long periods during the day. So, and I wanna say it's eight hours out of the 24 hour periods. Okay. You have to have, um,

▶ 1:52:53 a certain volume from both streets. So you could have, you know, you could have a street that has 20,000 cars a day on it, but it's not gonna meet the warrants for traffic signal at a side street that only has a thousand cars a day. That's not to say Vinton is that low. It's not, and Franklin's not quite that high, but it, so it has to be both streets that have the volume that you need. And if that's not, if it doesn't meet those warrants, then there are warrants for crash history and if it doesn't meet those warrants, then there are also warrants for like sight lines or other unusual geometry issues. And then if it doesn't meet any of those but it meets 80% of each of them, then you can still say it meets the

▶ 1:53:39 Manjula Karamcheti: warrants for traffic signal. And it didn't meet at both of those intersections. It didn't meet any of them. Yeah. Okay. I believe you. And I'm still surprised just given like the solar piece, the, like, the churning but, and just like the crashes that have happened there and anyway, thank you for sharing that. Um, and has there been any like, thought to, and again, acknowledging crosswalks are there, there are lights on batal and then further down more in the business area to putting something like in the road? And I ask because like a barrel or a cone or like something in the middle just because what's there doesn't seem to be enough to get people to slow down or stop at those areas when there are humans

▶ 1:54:37 trying to use them. Yeah, so I actually, I like those pedestrian signs that go in the middle of the road. We have one on Maine at Highland I think. Is that where we have one? I know some people don't like them and that's something honestly chief failure and I have never discussed. So maybe we'll discuss those offline at some other time. But, um, I think there's something we can certainly look at. You can't have them in the winter. Mm-hmm. Um, on Howard Street, they used to have one that the poor crossing guard, they're very heavy and the poor crossing guard just drag it out to the middle of the street every day and then back to the side of the road. Um, but I know there was some hesitation in some locations

▶ 1:55:19 because of emergency vehicles. Mm-hmm. And um, you know, them being difficult sometimes for fire trucks to navigate around depending on the width of the road. But we can, we can certainly look at it. I'm not opposed to those. Yeah. I'd be interested in exploring that with you as a possibility. Yeah. Another, um, similar technology that we tried at Wyoming and Berwick, we tried putting a little island with two like safe hit posts and a, a reflector, um, in the middle to sort of create a median island for a pedestrian to stop halfway across. And we put some paint, um, and we found that trucks couldn't make the turns out of the street, um, out of Berwick Street onto Wyoming without hitting them.

▶ 1:56:01 And then once they took out the posts, we thought well, maybe we'll still leave sort of the raised little island thing in the middle without the posts. And then we saw a cyclist just coincidentally take a really bad fall, um, hitting that, not seeing it. And so we thought okay, that maybe that's not the right, um, the right treatment either. So we took it all back out. So now you just have the paint. Um, so we, we can look at what things we can do, but it's always amazing when you test something. The other things that you find are other hazards that you didn't expect. Sure. And my last two questions just, and this might enter into that traffic commission sort of thing. So I just wonder about the business area on Franklin,

▶ 1:56:49 Manjula Karamcheti: it being 25 as well, and like considering the possibility of that actually going to 20. Um, because it, it is again, a high area of crossing. There are railroad tracks and like the business is there and the, um, church preschool, like it's all kind of right there. And people are still going 25 and slamming on their brakes and not necessarily paying attention to the people waving to cross and whatnot. We could, we could probably put the equipment out on Franklin Street in that area someday and see How the Yeah, that's something, um, because before we would look at a traffic safety zone, we would wanna know what speeds people are actually going. Of course. Um, but I'm not sure the daycare might allow it

▶ 1:57:36 Manjula Karamcheti: to qualify for a traffic safety zone. I don't think the business district does. Um, I know it's parks schools, um, do you know what else? I don't? Yeah, so we'd have to look into it. But that, and that would be traffic commission and if you want propose that. Okay. Um, certainly you can send that to Jen Rosa and we can take a look. Thank you. And then the last was just the, as as you mentioned, that sort of runway from Stoneham down. Have there been discussions with Stoneham about like working collaboratively on how to like slow cars down? 'cause they generally tend to speed up as they're going down the hill and there is that solar glare. And just curious if there's been any traction there.

▶ 1:58:20 I think when we first did the 25 mile an hour zone, um, we had talked to some of the neighboring communities and Stoneham was not interested in that. I don't, they're not a 25 mile an hour city. Right? I don't know. I don't think, I don't think I've ever seen signs. I think it's 30 up there maybe. Yeah. And, and so once they cross over, people tend to accelerate instead of Down. And that's why we put the, the sign there that tells you what speed you're going Yeah. To try to curb that right. When you come in and we have like the entering Melrose, the 25 mile an hour sign, the Melrose Cares drive for safety sign and the, the solar speed feedback sign. So that was our attempt at Yeah. And I honor the attempt

▶ 1:59:05 Ward Hamilton: and yet people are still, the behaviors haven't changed unfortunately. Um, but that's all the questions I have. Thank you so much. Okay. Any other counsels have questions regarding the Franklin Street category? Council Hamilton, If I could just make a general comment, um, maybe not specific to Franklin Street, but as we approach nine o'clock and I think, I'm guessing there are a lot of questions, um, that people are gonna want to ask. I think it should be a robust conversation around these topics. Um, I submitted 25 questions and I think a lot of them were answered. I'm not sure. And, and thank you for your delivery and all the work that went into that. So at some point, and I don't wanna cut off any fellow counselors who want

▶ 1:59:58 Ward Hamilton: to ask questions, but I think what I would like to do, just speaking for myself, is at some point I think it's, uh, would be a motion to hold and committee and to adjourn to give me an opportunity to regroup with, uh, residents. The residents are the, the people who supplied me with those 25 questions. And as we know in our process, residents are, uh, relegated to public comment where they get to come in and make comments and we listen. And that's kind of the end of it. So my approach was to give residents an opportunity to give me questions that I could ask and get responses. And so, um, between now and, and hopefully the next appropriations meeting where we wrap this up, I'd like to regroup with those residents.

▶ 2:00:43 Ward Hamilton: I'd like to review the 68 slides and see what's been answered adequately, or if that's the wrong word. I would like to identify what questions we should go back and, and readdress. So I just want to mention that. Um, Do we, um, so Do you Want to continue on, you want to continue on for a little, little bit longer? Is that a motion or do you wanna, you want to continue it on? Um, I don't want to, I I, I bring it up early. Hopefully not prematurely because I'm guessing other counselors have questions. If that's not the case, I don't wanna make that motion at this time. Um, I do have other questions and comments I wanna make at some point, but I just want to throw it out there as we approach nine

▶ 2:01:33 as opposed to we, I don't wanna say drag it out, but we go another hour. Yeah. People Are tired. I don't wanna Wrap this up in the wrong Way. I want to really, don't we, um, don't we continue on and just see out, see how it goes if, if we see ourselves. Thank you. Going, um, thank you. Any other questions on Franklin Street? I do. I have a question for the chief. You said that there were 50 tickets issued on Franklin Street. Yeah. Um, Citations, I, I don't wanna use the wrong word. Sure. Citations, right? Is a citation a ticket or can a citation be a warning? Those are, uh, written citations. Yes. So it could, it could be a written warning in that, um, sort of category. Okay. Uh, but what I say, 50 citations, those a hard copy,

▶ 2:02:18 Ryan Williams: um, citations handed to a Person. So not necessarily a ticket that costs money or a summons that requires somebody to do something. Uh, correct. Okay. And the 16 I saw were 12 four speeding and four four distracted driving. And then there were another 34 that were other things. Is this like you pull over 16 people in a year for speeding and then the people who are really egregious tend to have other things going on, like no insurance or, you know, you, you check 'em out and they've got a, I don't know, busted taillight or whatever. I don't get pulled over a lot, so I don't know what The, me neither. Um, I, I, I am not sure if I understand the question. So My Question you asking, is it double counted or No,

▶ 2:03:02 Ryan Williams: No, not if it's double counting. My question is, when you, when you say you have 50 citations on Franklin, really what it looks to me is that you pulled over or that the police force pulled over 12 people for speeding and four people for distracted driving. And then something else, um, came up in those interactions. Or is it more like, would they pull somebody, you know, in that other category mm-hmm. Of, of 34, you know, insurance, you wouldn't know if somebody doesn't have insurance 'cause they're driving down the street, you'd have to pull 'em over for something else first. Uh, not necessarily. Okay. No. If you, if you run someone's license plate, it runs the, it automatically runs their license

▶ 2:03:34 Ryan Williams: and their registration status. Yeah. So if you get, if it pops that they're suspended, revoked license and or registration, you can then you can pull 'em over. But don't you have to stop somebody first to run that? No. Okay. So it just, Yeah, so no, you don't. Uh, so some of those others, as we call it suspended license, uninsured could have been the reason for the stop in and Of itself. I see. I see. Someone goes by and it pops up and says, that one right there, uh, suspended license. And that's how, you know. Yes. You, you put, you know, run the plate or call it in and they'll give us the status back. I got it. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Um, that's my only question, although I did wanna point out Stoneham is a

▶ 2:04:10 Robb Stewart: 25 mile an hour community. Oh, It's, yeah. Okay. They're, they're not like us. We're every single road because they have a diversity of roads, but they did adopt the same policy that we just not as fast as us. 'cause we're ahead of the curve. Good to know. Thank you. Any anyone else on Franklin Street category? We'll move for, uh, ahead to, uh, why don't we go to enforcement counsel? Yes, Mr. Chair. Um, I've been thinking about what, uh, const Hamilton had suggested, and I tend to agree with him that it may make sense for the council to, uh, hold this in committee and regroup, uh, so that way we don't have to be here until 11 or 1130 at night because there's a lot of questions. So, with that, I'll make a motion

▶ 2:05:00 to hold this in committee second. Okay. We have a motion to hold this in. Committee by Council Stewart, seconded by Council Hamilton on discussion. President Mei. Um, I do not support this motion. I think we have asked questions. Most of them been answered. As the mayor pointed out, um, the chief and, um, director of DPW have spent a considerable amount of time, um, away from their jobs asking our questions and presenting us in this very lengthy, um, presentation that goes into great detail, all aspects of what we had asked for. Um, I think if you have follow up questions that you need to get back to on residents, I would suggest that you could follow up individually on those questions. That opportunity is always available to any counselor.

▶ 2:05:46 Um, I think where the council supplied the administration with so many questions, um, it should have been prepared for a long night. And, um, as such, I do not support holding this order. I think we could, if there are remaining questions that haven't been answered. Um, also, let me just point out too, in the, um, charter, the informational order, all questions had to have been submitted ahead of time, um, which the administration had provided answers to. Any questions that are asked in this meeting should be completely relevant to the other questions. But if they have all been answered, um, I don't see, I don't see a point to pro prolonging this particular information order. If there are aspects that the council would like to

▶ 2:06:30 Manjula Karamcheti: file a separate order on a specific issue, fine. But I think I, I think of maybe lesson learned here is that a general informational order on every single street in the city of Melrose is a large informational order that requires a lot of time and effort, um, from our staff. So I would not be supporting that. Hold. Thank you. Thank you, uh, president m uh, council. Um, I was also gonna say that I do not support this at this time, similar to what President Melli said, but also we shouldn't assume that everyone has more, a lot more questions preemptively. I think we do the due diligence of asking the questions that we have and move forward. Um, and this was a 68 slide presentation that is exceptionally detailed, very thorough.

▶ 2:07:20 Mark Garipay: So the questions shouldn't be new questions at this point. They should be clarifying questions that hopefully we can get through. So just wanna add that. Okay. Um, I'll, I'll say it. I mean, I'm, I'm willing to, to go, to go on a little bit long, a little bit longer. I mean, if it does get into, uh, you know, 10 30, 11, I think we, we definitely need to, uh, reassess that. But, um, I'm, I'm willing to not support it at this moment where it's just, uh, nine o'clock. Um, because I think budget season is gonna be coming up and we're gonna have a lot of late Monday nights. But, um, council Stewart, uh, Thank you Mr. Chair. Uh, Mr. Chair. I, I've given the feedback from the council, I'd be willing

▶ 2:08:02 Ward Hamilton: to withdraw the, uh, motion Withdraw the second. Well, um, yeah, 68 slides, which got this morning, so we just blew through it. Did all 25 of my questions get answered? I know. Should we go one by one and find out? I'm trying to make a suggestion that I think I totally agree. It was tough getting the, uh, the, uh, presentation this morning when we were all working to really cross reference what our, what our questions were. Um, but with that, um, you withdrawn the second motion. I was waiting for the second. Yeah. To withdraw. Withdraw the second. Sure. We're gonna withdraw the, yeah. Ms. Joe withdraw. I withdraw the motion. Alright, moving forward, uh, we're gonna go to enforcement category.

▶ 2:08:58 Ward Hamilton: Any questions on enforcement? Point of order, Mr. Chair. Um, the last time we had an informational order, we went through the questions one by one in order of the document, um, that I assume the city solicitor put together for us. So I wasn't prepared to jump around from Franklin Street to enforcement, and I don't have my questions set up in that format, so, Um, Okay. Also, Mr. Chair, I just wanna say that in the 14 months since, um, I've, that I've been serving the single by, by far bar none, the single most important and most prominent issue that constituents have co contacted me about are the issues we're talking about tonight. I think that this is very important. I, um, feel very strongly that we should not hurry this

▶ 2:10:00 Ward Hamilton: through tonight, and I'm willing to stay as long as my fellow counselors are, but I don't think this is a simple, no, I don't think this is a matter of, here are the questions, here are our answers. Let's go budget season's coming. Um, so I, I'm, I'm willing to continue moving forward, obviously, uh, but I don't understand the format that we're using. Yeah. Jumping around from one area to the other. Well, as the, um, presiding chair, I, I make the, um, I can decide which way we're gonna go and, uh, where we had a lot of people on Franklin Street here, here to speak, I wanted to get that out of the, out of the, um, you know, wanted to get that moving for them. But, um, you still have, as we move along,

▶ 2:10:46 Robb Stewart: you we'll still have, if you feel your questions on, on answered, you can motion to hold that. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to enforcement Council Stewart. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you Ms. Pella, uh, chief and Madam Mayor for, um, all this great information, and I do appreciate it. This is comprehensive and, and very helpful. Uh, I'm looking at the questions that I had submitted, uh, which were late to enforcement. Uh, you did touch upon a lot of them. The ones are that I have are a little bit more specific to my ward. Um, so I did, I I, I am interested in, uh, this, the enforcement on West Wyoming Avenue, because that is the number one, um, as I'm sure you're aware, uh, issue for safety, um,

▶ 2:11:40 Robb Stewart: as it was addressed early this evening by one of the constituents. Um, you know, I've, I've lived in that neighborhood for over 30 years and I've seen it, um, and lived it. So if you could just address, um, what's being done for enforcement within that area, that'd be helpful. Sure. So, thank you. I, the answer to your question is probably gonna be the same answer to any other counselor or a council at large that has these, um, streets that people are speeding on. People are, uh, violating chapter 90 violations. We respond, and I'm gonna be, very frankly with this, we respond when we get complaints. Really, we do. It's hard to be everywhere. And when, when a counselor, such as yourself, a ward calls me or texts me,

▶ 2:12:28 and I also want to just say for the record, I'll stay as long as we want, but you also have my cell phone. You also have my email. At any point, any counselor in this room, I will sit down within my office with my staff or just me and answer every single question. So I just wanna let you guys know that if it's, if it is too late and someone wants to call us, I'm also good with that. I'm an early, I go to bed early, um, but I can a hundred percent answer every single one of your questions out of this room that you can bring back to your constituents, if that works as well. But to get back to West Wyoming, sir, we, we enforce it as needed. I, I, I get it. There's speeding all over the city, and we try to put our personnel where we think it's best,

▶ 2:13:13 Robb Stewart: but we just bounce around, quite frankly. We'll get complaints, we'll put 'em over there for a little bit, then it dissipates, then we go here, then we go here. Could there be a better strategic overall strategy on how to enforce chapter 90 violations? I'm sure there are. I I just don't have the answer tonight for it. Okay. Yeah, I know it's whack-a-mole, right? Yeah, I got it. Um, s one of the questions I asked was, has consideration been made to install an island by Bob's convenience store to help slow the traffic? And can you share what your thoughts are? And if that's impinging too much on the traffic commission as you pointed out earlier, just let me know and we can, uh, bring that to the traffic traffic

▶ 2:13:51 Station. Yeah, so that's more of a design question. So that's really something the administration can do. And, um, we are gonna measure, I had seen an email about it, um, last week, and we are gonna measure the road, see, see if we could do something similar to what we had tried to do at Berwick. Um, but again, with the same caution of we can't put something in that keeps people from being able to properly turn out of Cleveland. Um, and, you know, taking the right turn and not hitting whatever's in the road. Um, but similar to the discussion about the, those, just the crosswalk stanchions that you can put in the middle of the road too. We can look at either of those, but we have to measure up the road first.

▶ 2:14:33 Robb Stewart: Okay, great. Um, appreciate that. Okay. Um, so do you have, um, any percentage of speed enforcement? Do you have any plan or is it really, is truly whack-a-mole? You, you hear something and that? I we don't, I don't have any percentage answer. Okay. No. Okay. Um, are there any, any other plan infrastructure improvements that you're thinking of or considering? Um, to help on West warming avenue to enhance some of the safety and the vulnerability that we talked about? We, we really don't have anything new. We have the new crosswalk that we're putting in at the Celo house, and we have a request for rapid flashing Beacon in there, and we've ordered it. Um, we decided that was our next location. Okay.

▶ 2:15:21 So that's in the works. But aside from that, um, you know, we're, as you can see from the slide presentation, we're kind of in a constant state of, of trying things and adding things. And, and, um, you know, in Wyoming we did, we tried to do the thing at Berwick, we did the signs and lines grant for the Lincoln School. We added paint, we added signs. We've added several rapid flashing beacons at Bob's at, uh, two up by the Lincoln School. Um, you know, we just keep doing little things, but the reality is there are always going to be people driving too fast. And, um, one thing I've heard Sergeant go say at many traffic commission meetings is most of the people driving in Melrose, not most, but a lot of the people driving in Melrose are

▶ 2:16:08 people who live in Melrose. And so they're driving safely on their own street and speeding on everybody else's street and then coming and complaining that everybody drives too fast. And so it's, it's an issue everywhere and it's just a really hard one to solve. But we'll keep chipping away at, at, you know, as we have good suggestions and, and things we can try and money to try things. Great. Okay. Uh, that's what I have for enforcement, so thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair, counselor. Um, on the enforcement side, is it possible to find out how many tickets have been issued where people actually have to pay money? Um, I would think so. Uh, is there a reason why? I'm just super in, like, I'm just super interested in like the behavior change

▶ 2:16:57 Manjula Karamcheti: portion of if people are actually ticketed and fined, like potentially I see that as a possibility of changing behavior, understanding like what you said about three patrol cars, and like I get that part, but I'm just in thinking of, are people getting like warnings as opposed to tickets? Like, would tickets be the change agent for some behavior? It Could be, but it's also not strictly just money. So some of those citations are criminal citations, like unlicensed operations, suspended license doesn't come with a monetary fine written on the ticket. It's a criminal application that goes to criminal court. And if they're found responsible, there could be some court fees and stuff. So that, like we would,

▶ 2:17:37 Manjula Karamcheti: I don't wanna get too much in the legal depth. Yeah, Yeah. And we're just thinking for the Civil violations, certainly it's very easy $50 here, but, uh, some of those citations that the council was asking about Sure. No, no, no. Totally criminal applications as well. And that's why I'm asking specifically about like speeding violation tickets and like finding out about those. Um, sure. And, and part of my, the rationale for me asking that question is since we put in this, uh, informational order, I have noticed a, uh, an increased presence of patrol cars on Franklin, and it really does change behavior. And again, understanding that that can't happen every day, but even when the car wasn't there

▶ 2:18:19 Jen Grigoraitis: during those weeks, cars were slower. And so just kind of thinking about that impact strategically. Um, but conversations we can continue to have. Sure. But, so I'm just interested in that. Okay. Just the course. Expand on that. Um, I'm not sure how, depending on how much each of you're following what's happening at the state level, but the governor did file legislation as part of her, um, chapter 90 bill that would allow if it should pass, that municipalities would be able to have traffic cameras, which are currently not allowed in Massachusetts. Um, and I believe it was, what she's proposing is based on population. So under what she's proposed, Melrose would be eligible for five traffic cameras that would be able

▶ 2:19:01 Jen Grigoraitis: to issue citations we haven't talked about. We may have different feelings about that, but I just recognize that, and I'm sure there's broad feelings in the public about that. But that is when you consider what it costs for us to put an officer on the street or on the six different streets we've heard talked about tonight, um, that is a more cost effective way to be getting to the, um, speeding violations that you're talking about. So I encourage, um, you know, is that something of interest to follow along with what's happening at The, the state level. Absolutely. Thank you for that. Appreciate it. Council Councilor Ro and then Councilor Roal, then Councilor Vanderbilt, chair Garipay. And thank you

▶ 2:19:36 Cal Finocchiaro: again for this presentation. Um, I know it takes a lot of time outta your regular schedules to put together, so we really appreciate that. Um, I just wanna echo what Councilor Chetty said. Um, my experience is where there are, where there is some patrolling, there's definitely a decreased speeding. I know you can't put, you know, a cop everywhere on every street. Um, but for, for instance, Upham Street near the incarnation, I know people that I talk to like, oh, I'm always very careful on up 'em because I know that's usually someone there. Mm-hmm. Um, I do think that, I mean, everybody speeds at some point and there's so many more cars on the road, people texting, not paying attention. Melrose is tiny, right?

▶ 2:20:21 Cal Finocchiaro: So if you're not gonna go down Franklin Street, you're gonna cut through on West, um, west Highland because you're trying to make through, I mean, I live on Goot Street, people come up, um, east Foster cut through to get to bypass the light on Lebanon up. Mm-hmm. And it's those high traffic times. But I do think, you know, we're never gonna solve this issue. Even if you put calming, um, cones and stuff like one street, like we saw lines, then you see other, an uptick on other streets around. So it's never a perfect science, but I really do believe that the patrolling is the number one thing that will help people slow down if it's a consistent enough. Like you see Apple Street, and I know you can't be on every street,

▶ 2:21:03 Cal Finocchiaro: but if there is so many crashes on Franklin Street, it's up there on the list. I know it's not the highest, but, or West Wyoming or Lebanon, people pay attention to that, you know? Yeah. The flashing signs and speed. I mean, some people wanna see how fast they're going speed up, but I think that, um, so if I just leave one statement here tonight, is I do think that, and that's a struggle because of staffing issues. Right. But that I think is, um, the number one thing that's going to help with speed. So, and I don't disagree. Yeah. Whether or not you get pulled over or it's just a visible deterrent by seeing a police officer in the area. Right. It slows you down. Right. I don't disagree, But thank you again. Sure.

▶ 2:21:43 Kimberly Vandiver: Council Ro Ramal, Actually, my, my one question was answered by the mayor about, um, uh, automated, um, ticketing, um, given what other states are doing. So thank you for, um, I was gonna ask if that was a, a useful tool in your arsenal, but thanks for the Thank You. Thank you. Council Vanover. Thank you, um, to chair and to the presenters for all their work. Um, I was the one who submitted a question about Felds Parkway and the fact that it's out of our jurisdiction. I was wondering about specific to enforcement, is that, is there any collaboration that, that does happen or could happen to, to effective enforcement? Or can Melrose enforce on that road? Yes, we can. Um, it's, it's, yes. We, any, any, any sort of anything in the city

▶ 2:22:27 of Murrow was sworn police officers. We have the ability to enforce traffic and or criminal citations historically in every agency that, every agency that I work for two. But, um, in police departments, there's state roads and there's local roads. It's a, it's, it's a jurisdictional thing in the sense it's a territorial thing. Right. We don't, we, we would never set up radar or lidar on Lin Falls Parkway. We just wouldn't do that. That's their road. However, and I was saying this to Elena today, if there's, uh, someone blows through the red light at, at Lin Falls Parkway and Tremont Street, and they're on the Fells way, a hundred percent, we can ft on. Okay. We just wouldn't do, uh, we wouldn't do targeted setup sort

▶ 2:23:03 Ward Hamilton: of speed traps on Lid Fells Parkway as a state road. We just wouldn't do that. Okay. So the, so there are certain limitations, but, but, but you are able to enforce there. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. If someone's speeding, if someone's doing any type of, uh, uh, motor vehicle violation on a state road, we still have the power to pull 'em over and cite for Sure. Yep. Thank you. Um, anyone else on enforcement Council Hamilton? Thank You. Thank you, uh, everyone for being here. And I didn't mean to suggest that, um, anyone was hurrying anything through. I just wanna make sure that we address our constituents concerns. Uh, a couple weeks ago, chief, you and I had a conversation on the phone, just

▶ 2:23:46 Ward Hamilton: so people don't think I'm, you know, jumping into some conversation about deterrence theory. Um, but deterrence theory talks about, or it's about the certainty, the ity and the severity of a punishment. So how likely is something gonna hap is it that something's gonna happen? Like I turn a corner, I'm not supposed to, there's a police officer there. Uh, the swiftness with which it gets addressed, and then the severity, I'm gonna get a, a ticket. And, um, and I mentioned to the chief, um, and I think the mayor will remember the, uh, Connecticut State Police had a reputation in the eighties and nineties for pulling people over, going two or three over the speed limit. And we laugh at how crazy that sounds,

▶ 2:24:28 Ward Hamilton: but on 84, we didn't speed, and if somebody sped biased, there was a decent chance we're gonna see them get pulled over. Um, I wish you had the resources to do the things that we're talking about. Um, you know, people who take a, a ride on West Island between seven and 9:00 AM I wish you had the resources to station an officer there to yank people over enough times. I live at a busy intersection, Bellevue and Emerson, where I sit on the porch and watch near Mrs. Constantly. It's, we live in a city and things are crazy. And, um, one other point I just wanted to to mention is that, you know, I know Officer Go talked about Melrose, people's speed and moral, no doubt. Um, but we are a cut through city.

▶ 2:25:14 Ward Hamilton: You know, we have 93 to the West, 1 28 north of us, route One to the East, and you know, 16 and 60 to the South. And then the Lin Fells runs diagonally right through. And, and people are moving from A to B. And why are you gonna go all the way down to Upham and banging right on Lebanon when you can shoot across Bellevue and catch the Lin Fells? It's all over the city. It's always been that way. But we just have more cars now. Um, and, uh, I don't, I don't, I can't speak from a place of data, but I think we've all made observations. We lived in upstate New York, New York for 18 years, and as we'd come back to visit family between 95 and 2013, the thing that caught my attention is Main Street.

▶ 2:25:54 Ward Hamilton: The, the amount of traffic on Main Street in Melrose came to remind me of Broadway and Everett. It, it was just like busier and busier. There's just more cars on the street, and I'm sure there's the data to support that. So I'm, my question I'm getting around to is Elena, you, I'm sorry not Elena, but Ms. Parelli, um, you mentioned, you know, so we, I've traveled a good bit through Newton, Brookline, Medford, Arlington, and they have whole neighborhoods, right? Where you're on a busy street and it's like local traffic only, local traffic only. You mentioned you don't care for, um, that type of an enforcement measure. Why is that? Well, again, quoting Sergeant Gok, um, 'cause I've heard him say it at many a traffic commission

▶ 2:26:38 meeting, uh, it's very difficult to enforce because you pull somebody over and they say, well, I'm going to babysit for my daughter. You know, you check their license and they have a Medford address. Well, I'm going to babysit for my daughter who lives here on Bellevue. I mean, how, how far are you gonna take that? And everybody has an excuse and a reason why it's not why they should be. They are the local traffic. And so he, I mean, I'm sure you have, you Medford has a bunch of those. You probably have Thoughts. Well, we, we did. And I'd be interested to know if they still do. Uh, because my concern always was, uh, council Hamilton was, uh, constitutional rights. Um, you need reasonable suspicion to stop someone.

▶ 2:27:21 It's just that's the law. I can't just pull you over for no reason. And I used to always say these in these type of conversations, what would be my reason to stop someone? I have no idea if they're residents or not. Right? Then you run into this Fourth Amendments, uh, circuit seizure. You know, I was always very weary of respecting. Well, I, that's, I wanted respect people's constitutional rights, so I was always against them because how are we gonna enforce it? An officers gonna have to pull someone over random, right. Which is not the law in order to determine if they live on the street. And then you just run into a world of problems whether or not, um, civil rights violations come into effect.

▶ 2:27:59 Ward Hamilton: It, I just always felt it was setting our offices up for failure. And quite frankly, I don't even know if it's legal, quite frankly. I just, I don't wanna speak fully on it. I just have a problem with it. Um, that's my reason why I think that makes, that makes sense. Um, so how do you enforce a sign that says no? Right between seven and nine, you're pulling someone over 'cause they turned right between seven and nine, then you found out they lived on that street. Yeah. So now you have reasonable suspicion that they violated the, the, the sign. Right. So now they committed a moving violation that the officer witnessed a hundred percent good all day to stop them and then investigate. So if we had cut through streets like Woodland Ave

▶ 2:28:39 where people were coming in, or they were coming down, Franklin, could we put a sign that says no left seven to Nine? So that is a perfect, that, that is the perfect example because the traffic commission voted in favor of a turning restriction onto Woodland from Greenwood, um, for morning, uh, commute time. Right. But the sign has to be in Wakefield and Wakefield refuses to put it up. Alright. But, but I mean, So, but yes, so we, we do pr we do support those. And when the traffic commission feels that one is appropriate, we have absolutely voted in favor of it. Uh, Linden at Green, I think there's one, the one at Highland. And then that we also voted that you can't turn onto Albion from Melrose Street

▶ 2:29:26 Cal Finocchiaro: at certain hours of the day. Um, those are the ones in the time that I've, that I've been on the commission. But, but the Woodland one, I mean, we honestly would love to restrict the turns onto Woodland, but don't have the ability, 'cause the intersection sits in Wakefield. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, council Ro Yeah, sorry. I just wanna, um, speak about something that I didn't touch upon when I spoke last, and I don't want to come across that I'm inferring that traffic calming measures don't help, um, growing up here, I just wanna say the, the changes that we've made to the streets, like Franklin Street, the, the roundabout on Green, uh, green Street, um, and Howard, you know, all of those changes have been,

▶ 2:30:08 Cal Finocchiaro: I think, beneficial for residents and safety. And so I wanna say that I do agree and I, I love all the, the changes we've made to the, the landscape of the streets. Um, I was just stating that I do think that the patrolling, um, is very helpful for people not speeding. So anyways, just wanted to make that comment. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. Uh, complete Streets. Anyone have any questions on Complete Streets Council Vandiver, Thank you. I'm trying to cross what, um, trying to cross reference and make sure I get the right questions of the right category as well. Um, but I think I have at least a couple on com, uh, complete Streets. Um, so sorry. And can you refresh for me and for all of us, the terminology

▶ 2:31:06 Kimberly Vandiver: around when we're talking about Complete Streets, the section of questions we're addressing? Yeah. So the Complete Streets questions were anything about, um, crosswalks, you know, pedestrian improvements, uh, bike bike infrastructure improvements, um, transit oriented improvements. And I feel like I'm forgetting one. Well, accessibility would be in that same category. Oh, safers schools. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Okay. In that case, I think only, I think most of mine are actually in a different bucket. Um, the one comment I guess I would make quickly in that vein, I know you mentioned on one of the slides that every time that streets are redone, we assess them and, and do things holistically at that time.

▶ 2:31:53 Kimberly Vandiver: Um, and I, I know we recently redid Tremont Street, which is, which is lovely and much easier to drive on now, but I didn't notice a lot. And I was wondering if you could comment about anything that was looked at as that one was repaved recently. Tremont Street from, uh, Oh, excuse me. Trenton Street. Excuse? Trenton Street. Oh, Trenton Street, yes. Thank you. Um, Trenton Street was in a little bit of a different situation because that was, that paving happened as a result of the gas work that was done. Um, we ended up doing a swap with National Grid. Long story. We used to, um, we used to get monetary comp contributions from them, and then we would do the paving as part of the road program,

▶ 2:32:35 and then we would do the much more holistic look. Um, Trenton Street was paved entirely by National Grid and we just did the sidewalk improvements. So we, we, um, you know, replaced any cracked blocks, tried to fix tripping hazards. The same with Washington Street and Clinton. That was all done. National Grid did all the paving. We did curbing and sidewalk improvements. Um, we did add if there were any missing ramps along the, the sections that we paved, we did make sure those met a DA But other than that, um, that was kind of in a, in a weird transition year where we were trying to work out with National Grid, if they won't give us money anymore, how we can just swap for them to do Curb to Curb in some neighborhoods.

▶ 2:33:16 Kimberly Vandiver: And we do curb to curb in the other neighborhoods. Um, Okay. Right. And, and I did notice the, the a DA accessible ramps and the, the, um, the, those things. I, I guess just my comment on that one, if at some point that might be a candidate for Paint to narrow it, because it's quite wide there and people do go quickly. Actually we did, when we added the shadows, I think we, um, we striped the lanes at 11 feet. But I'd have to confirm that. I can check that. But that's something, that's one thing I didn't mention. We've, we've tried to narrow the, the driving lanes to 11 feet on all of our major roads. We did it on Upham Street a few years ago. We had to black out all the old lines. And, um, and that has a definite traffic calming effect

▶ 2:33:58 Ryan Williams: to have painted fog lines 11 feet from the center line. Okay, great. But yeah, I'll look at that. Council Williams, Thank you. I want to consolidate some of the questions I have. 'cause they, they're relevant, um, but they don't fit neatly into the categories and I think they kind of fit into the implementation of Complete Streets work. One of the questions that I asked was around, um, how you involve the voices of different constituencies. And I, I don't want to ask the question again because I heard what you said. So I suppose instead I just want to make a plea that, um, a lot of times when we're doing these projects, we're putting a lot of focus on the people that live right along the project area.

▶ 2:34:36 Ryan Williams: The people who live, you know, on that street in a very narrowly defined segment of the, of the road. And what we run into in the case of line, for example, is that then people who are just a few a street away or, or you know, a couple of houses down from the corner don't get a chance to weigh in. And I'm not suggesting that everybody should be giving you their opinion on whether a speed hump works or not. 'cause that's not their job. That's the city's job to, to convince residents, um, that these things work and then monitor the, the impacts of them. Um, but I do think that there, as we progress in Division Zero, um, I think that there should be a more holistic approach to gathering different viewpoints, different perspectives

▶ 2:35:17 Ryan Williams: of the users of the road, people with disabilities, um, people who are, you know, with young kids and push strollers, people with mobility issues, seniors, families, et cetera. And this, I think could be the bedrock of the Vision Zero Commission to, um, ask the questions and provide the input that is not specific to whether the person who lives on that street likes to have a speed hump outside of their driveway. Um, because the road network, as we've discussed is, is kind of comprehensive and we really can't just talk about one street. We do have to talk about our approach to all the streets. Um, so that was one of my questions was, you know, how do we incorporate that? I heard you say you talk to Abutters.

▶ 2:35:55 Ryan Williams: Um, and I would like to just suggest that we need to, to go bigger on that and maybe we can save ourselves some collective time, um, as I actually feel we've done here tonight, because instead of having, you know, a hundred conversations over the course of the year, we're having one big conversation. Um, the, the second question I have on Complete Streets is with regards to the pilot materials that you had listed on the slide and all the pilot materials that we got a grant for, um, I heard you say you don't like to use them on New Streets. Um, so is there a plan to use them, and I'm sorry if I missed this. Is there a plan to use them in this year? The speed humps, the traffic calming materials on other streets?

▶ 2:36:36 Manjula Karamcheti: Yes. Okay. We don't have the exact list of streets identified yet. We have certain candidates that we are more highly considering, but I don't want to Okay. Say specific streets if in case something changes between now and then. Yeah. Um, okay. That's it for Complete Streets. Thank you. Anyone else? Councilor McNaught? Um, just Sort of related to Councilor Williams in terms of, um, the materials that we have available for, for Calming, do what, what would you like our role to be in sort of advocating for different things within our wards and around Melrose? Like, because I saw that list, I was like, Ooh, I want a cone and I want a barrel. And I think that would be great here. Um, just like would love your feedback on like

▶ 2:37:31 what is sort of most helpful. How would you like us to interact with you in regards to that kind of thing? Yeah, so I think the, um, the process that we're trying to put in place is that when a street has sort of chronic issues surrounding speed and a need for traffic calming, then the request would go to the engineering division to add to the list for the traffic calming toolkit. We would then look at the priority, you know, on the prioritization tool. We would look at the ranking of that street and we would put it on our list in that order. Um, and I think the most helpful thing is when we get to the point where we are considering implementing something on that street, that's where, um, when we did the Slow Streets initiative,

▶ 2:38:20 we had like street captains and we had, you know, people who were interacting, I think, were you a street captain? I was Like, I was like all the street captains. Yeah. So, um, that was really helpful, having someone else interfacing and especially with ward counselor, having someone else interfacing with the public surrounding the pilot as we're ramping up to actually pilot in a specific neighborhood. Um, that's where I think there's the most dialogue and the most need for feedback. And I think there's, you know, a real place for the counselors to have like, solid involvement in the process when we're at that point. Um, I think on the, you know, on the beginning end when it's just a street that wants

▶ 2:39:01 Robb Stewart: to be on the list, I think it's educating the public about how you get on the list, what the list is, you know, some of the sort of educational stuff that we tried to put in tonight's presentation sharing. That is helpful. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Councilor Stewart. Thank you Mr. Chair. Um, so you had talked about one of the examples that you gave, uh, in your presentation were streets that didn't have sidewalks and that you're putting sidewalks in, which is great. Yeah. Uh, particularly when it's close to schools, uh, for kids to walk on sidewalks and not in the streets, like on Cottage Street. Uh, so what is, what is the determining factor of being able to assess whether you're gonna put a sidewalk in or not?

▶ 2:39:56 So on any street that doesn't have a sidewalk, the first thing that we look at is the Complete Streets prioritization plan. That list was based on a whole bunch of factors about proximity to schools, to parks, to business districts and everything. If a street is listed on that plan for addition of a sidewalk, then definitely we're gonna try to add a sidewalk on that street. Um, even if a street is not listed on that, if it looks like there's an open corridor where we could put a sidewalk, we will approach the neighborhood and say, we'd like to add a sidewalk to your street and, and try to get general buy-in. Um, and like I said, really the only times when we don't end up doing it, when we're paving a road, well, private ways,

▶ 2:40:40 we're only paving a private way if we are there because we tore it up for utility work. And in that case, we're not making improvements. We're not, you know, changing street scapes and such on a private way. Um, but if it's a public way and it doesn't have a sidewalk, we're pretty much always gonna recommend that a sidewalk get added and, you know, unless there's a real good reason not to, um, then we will add one on Windsor Street. The reason why we didn't, and the reason why a lot of the residents didn't want it, was the tree canopy is huge trees right up to the curb on both sides of the road. And we didn't wanna disturb that canopy and we would've needed to substantially narrow the road and there just wasn't, there was no appetite for it

▶ 2:41:26 Robb Stewart: and it's a dead end street. And so we said, okay, we'll let that one just stay as is. The other one I can remember in the whole time I've been here that we didn't do was Sycamore Road. Um, they didn't want it. We had a neighborhood meeting and there was really no desire for it. Um, so we didn't pursue it. And do you make this decision, um, solely based on, uh, the complete street, you're gonna do the street and include the sidewalk, or will you consider doing a road that is in fairly good condition, but there's no sidewalk, but it needs a sidewalk? So the only streets where we've done that, um, were the, uh, the Hoover neighborhood where we did the Complete Streets Project to add just purely

▶ 2:42:12 to add sidewalks. That wasn't a paving project. We didn't pave, um, Glen Dower or Whitman, um, Swains Pond. The streets' not in great shape, but we're not paving as part of this project. We're just adding the sidewalks. Um, Baystate Road, we didn't pave, we just added sidewalks that was also on the Complete Streets list. So there, and then G***h, the sidewalk work we did last year, um, that was with, uh, ARPA money and that was a street that it had sidewalks, but they were really deficient, like terrible condition in some places. No break from the center of the road all the way up to the back of the sidewalk, just flat pavement, no grass strip, no curb, no berm, nothing. Um, which I consider pretty unsafe

▶ 2:42:57 Robb Stewart: condition for pedestrians. So, um, yeah, so we do quite a few that are not, not just because of paving. Right, right. And and the reason why I ask is I think of a couple of examples within my ward, uh, that lead to park to Conan. There's no sidewalk leading to Conan. Uh, there's no sidewalk leading to the Lincoln Park, um, on on. And so I'm wondering if there is that list of priority that's available so we can understand and I could be effective in communicating if people are asking for that. So the list has traditionally been that prioritization plan that we did in 2017. Okay. But I'm not sure that either of those is on it. And I also have maintained another list of just like G***h Street was on that list that I had

▶ 2:43:46 of like, things that I just noticed in time driving around that were like sidewalks that really needed some work. Um, so I can add those to my sort of unofficial list. We can't apply for Complete Streets funding for anything that's not on the prioritization plan, but we can certainly, you know, when like the ARPA money, that's how that G***h Street one got done because suddenly we had a little bucket of money mm-hmm. And we were looking for sidewalks to do. Okay. Um, so what's the other one? Lincoln? So the Lincoln, the, the Cottage Street that leads down to Lincoln, there's no sidewalk there, There's no sidewalk on Cottage Street at all? No. No. Okay. On that side of, of, uh, Wyoming. Correct. Okay.

▶ 2:44:28 Robb Stewart: Correct. And, and you're familiar with the, the sidewalk on heading towards Conan. Towards Conan Park. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And do you need to get the, uh, the residents buy-in for this? Um, if we were ever to, to have the funding and to say it was next on the list, then yes, we would have a, a neighborhood meeting. And you know, if We, you don't just have eminent domain that you can, we Do. Okay. We, we absolutely do. But again, we have so many neighborhoods that both need it and want it, that to fight the, the, the staff time that it takes Yeah. To, to put up a fight for something that people don't want. When there's so many neighborhoods that want us there and want the improvements, it's just,

▶ 2:45:07 Kimberly Vandiver: it seems like a waste of our resources. Got it. Got it. Great. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you. Uh, anyone else on, uh, fleet Streets moving to Traffic Common Toolkit? Kind of, I think it was kind of touch base on that Complete Streets, but anyone else on Traffic? Common? Cool. Uh, yeah, toolkit, traffic Council, Vandiver. Thank You. Uh, I think I can throw this question on onto this topic. Um, uh, can anything in the Traffic Calming toolkit be done by residents or directed by residents without taking City? Um, time? My question originally in, in the list is about supporting and empowering residents. Is there anything that we can do to, you know, not just let them give input but let them do something about their street?

▶ 2:46:02 So I think the one challenge there is that, well, two challenges. One, we'd have to rely on the residents to make safe decisions. And I don't think we can really be a hundred percent certain that they would make the right decisions as to where to put something. Um, and two, I guess that just opens up the whole discussion of like, can you do traffic calming everywhere all at once? Right? I mean, obviously we only have limited materials, but what if we had 10,000 cones can do we want, and can we have every street in Melrose have cones creating Chicanes and you know, slowing various things. I mean I think it's, I dunno, it's more of a philosophical question of what is the, the limitation of allowing people to take measures into their own hands.

▶ 2:46:57 And, um, I don't know. I have, I have a lot of fear about that approach. The closest we came to that was the Slow Streets Initiative. But even that, you know, as Ryan knows from, from his, uh, involvement in it, even that had pretty strict parameters about getting a certain percentage of neighborhood buy-in, um, going through a process that the mayor's office at the time had set up. And that was also supposed to be like a covid measure of helping people get outside and be able to enjoy their own surroundings without like venturing to, you know, congregating at parks and stuff. But, um, that was a very resident driven process and it worked pretty well. But at its maximum we had six neighborhoods, um,

▶ 2:47:39 that had the materials out all at once. Mm-hmm. Um, I mean, I've thought about whether we should reinstitute that program and the, the Traffic Calming Toolkit has kind of replaced it for now. We did offer to the neighborhoods who had it previously that we would let them put the stuff back up if they all answered a survey saying what their neighborhood, like if enough people in the neighborhood answered a survey saying what they thought of the process and of the six neighborhoods, only one neighborhood returned the survey, which is why we've had lots of questions. Why does Borough Street have slow streets materials every year and nobody else does? 'cause we sent the survey out to all six streets

▶ 2:48:19 Jen Grigoraitis: and they're the only ones who returned it. Oh, I, I think to connect with what Councilor Williams was saying, I think we also, from the city's perspective, we have to be looking at every street in the city. And I think when we get into my street, my street, my street, we also know that there's unintended consequences, um, like we've seen with some of these examples. So I think, you know, we really wanna be thinking holistically about how we tr calm traffic throughout the community and not on Street a and not thinking about what are the consequences on B and c. And I, I say that as someone who lives on a street, that I think actually everyone would be perfectly happy to have all the traffic go down.

▶ 2:48:52 Jen Grigoraitis: But I think to the point that was made earlier, we wanna be looking at it from the lens of someone lives on every street in this community. And so I think we welcome the feedback and the concerns and the input, but we really wanna make sure that we're looking holistically at how we're implementing measures. And then I think strictly from a liability perspective, we really don't want people, um, I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but like engaging in their own infrastructure, um, improvements. 'cause that could have real consequences for us legally and financially as well as for them. Yes. Thank you. Understood about the cautions and, and the kind of not wanting, you know, 30,000 people

▶ 2:49:28 Ryan Williams: to all do their own things suddenly, but um, but yeah, I think it might be interesting to consider, you know, what of that program could come back or in what ways at some point. Thank you Council l Williams. Thank you. Um, I was not a fan of the number of people required to get the Slow Streets program, but that is, is is in the past. Um, I wanted to ask about the Traffic Calming toolkit, uh, resources notwithstanding and the fact that we don't have people on staff to do all this stuff right now, is it your intention to continuously update the information within that? I asked because one of my biggest points of contention around Complete Streets was that we had this Complete Streets, um, this fantastic prioritization plan, this great task force.

▶ 2:50:13 Ryan Williams: They met one time and then they just disappeared. And it was supposed to be a process of continuous evaluation that would do the work that we're doing right now on an annual basis. Um, and the traffic coming toolkit. I have my own like, personal role in this, but I, I find it to be a really fantastic resource and I'm just, I'm wondering if you will please find a way to keep it up to date as the years go by so we can continue to use it. I would love to keep it up to date. It definitely requires neighbor ways, uh, GIS folks to, to keep it up to date because it's not something that we have the resources, the technical know-how to do in-house. Um, so if there's a funding source to update it periodically, um, we would intend to do that.

▶ 2:50:59 Right now we're paying, I wanna say $6,000 a year just for them to keep the, to house the data and keep the website up and running. For us, it might be a little bit, maybe it's 3000 a year, but we're, we're paying a maintenance fee, but that doesn't include updates. So it would be great if we had the funding for that. Yeah. We could also have a person on staff who had the GIS expertise to do the work themselves. Yes. Although this is probably the most detailed GIS analysis that I've been a part of, and I've been doing GIS for a long time. So even with like fairly good technical skills, like Jane Pitts here has fantastic GIS skills. Um, teaching her how to do the specifics of what Neighbor Ways does with this process is,

▶ 2:51:45 would be a substantial effort, I think. And they, they, they manage it. They host it. So I think having them do it is the, the easiest and maybe even cheapest way to go. Okay. Regarding the Complete Streets Working Group, I actually wanna acknowledge that. I completely agree with you. And that was just a staff resources issue. We did, we met a bunch of times in developing the prioritization plan, right. But we never had the annual. Mm-hmm. We had a, a list in, in fact, in the, um, policy, we have a list of metrics that we were gonna try to evaluate on an annual basis. And we have never had the time to do that. I would love to someday do that. Yeah. That sounds great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Councilor Stewart? Uh, thank you, Mr. Chair.

▶ 2:52:32 Robb Stewart: Um, I think this falls underneath the, the category. I'll go with it. Um, we, you talked about some of the visibility of the traffic signals and signs, and one of the questions that I had asked was, how can that be improved? And, and my suggestion, uh, would be, um, we gotta wait until it's full foliage because that's when the signs get blocked. Right? Right now, yeah. You can see all the signs, right? 'cause there's no leaves on the trees. But, um, I, I know that there's several areas within my ward that it's hard to see some of the signs when it's full foliage. Um, and so I would employ, how can we help, um, you to make that a better situation? That's a fantastic question. I had interpreted the question about visibility

▶ 2:53:20 to be more about the quality of the signs themselves. And I felt like we do a good job replacing our signs when they get faded. But visibility from trees, unless you're driving down that street and see it, see an obstructed stop sign or whatnot, you don't notice it. So having you all, if you see those put in a work order in e gov for us to do a tree trim, that is absolutely the best way. And we, we get out there, especially with stop signs, with anything like with serious regulatory and safety, um, implications, we get out and try to trim those as quickly as we can. So yes, please report them. Call the main number at DPW and we can put in a work order or go online and put one in. Great. Thanks. Um,

▶ 2:54:06 and you, you kind of alluded that my second question is, there are signs that are fairly old and faded. Um, the process is the same, just to let you know, you'll replace 'em right away. We won't always replace 'em right away. If it's a stop sign, we'll definitely replace it right away. If it's a parking regulation sign, we will replace them when we're ordering a bunch of signs or doing a bunch of signs. We actually did a sign inventory with the GIS. We did probably three quarters of the city and hope to have interns finish it at some point. Um, and from that we had established a list of all the faded signs, and we replaced all of them at that time that we had on record. But, um, that's something we, we would love to keep up,

▶ 2:54:46 Kimberly Vandiver: you know, up to speed on with interns every summer if we have the resources. But, um, certainly report them and if they're important safety signs, they'll get replaced quickly. If they're parking signs, they'll get replaced when we have a chance in the moment. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you. You, Mr. Chair. Anyone else? Council at the end. Thank you. Um, building on that topic, I just wanted to ask about, um, when it's foliage that's not city foliage. There. Like, there's one on West Wyoming, there's this giant hedge, it's on a corner house and somebody's hedge that obstructs sight lines. And at the corner you have to pull into the crosswalk to kind of see what's going on. There's another one that's on Pleasant that there's a sign

▶ 2:55:28 that's back in someone's lilac bush. Like what is the recourse when it's a private foliage? So when it's private, it's a little, um, if it's causing a substantial safety issue, we can, we can, um, issue something more formal. But for the most part, we try knocking on a door. And I mean, we encourage you all to also knock on a door if it's something, you know, if it's someone in your ward and it's an easy thing to do. But, um, we usually send out our parks and forest foren or our operations manager to knock on the door. And, um, then if they don't, if nobody answers or they don't feel they got an adequate response, we'll send a letter. Um, if it's something that is actually a violation of a city ordinance, like it's blocking the sidewalk

▶ 2:56:13 Robb Stewart: or whatnot, and they don't respond to the knock and the letter, we can issue a citation. Um, we haven't had to get that far. We've threatened, but we've never had to get that far. People have always taken care of it. Thank you. All set. Thank you Council Stewart, Just to one last follow up too, what Council Vanderberg was asking. Um, there, there are instances and I I I think about the intersection of, um, west Wyoming and, and Trenton where you have a repeat offender and do you twice a year, we have to call 'em and say, you gotta cut your hedges down because can't take a look down West Wyoming Avenue. And I think, uh, the chief will recognize that's one of the major areas that we see accidents like fairly serious accidents too.

▶ 2:57:06 Robb Stewart: Like, it's like once, once or twice a year, you know, we hear the, the dishes drop in the big crash sound, right? Um, so how can we be more proactive about addressing those situations? And I'm not just talking about this one instance, but citywide, we know who the offenders are. How can we be better at, at letting them know or policing that I, I know, excuse me, one or two times, I think Counsel, I think you, you may have contacted me on Port Street, some, somewhere in that area. Yes. Um, and, and we have helped as well, uh, sending the traffic sergeant out our officer to go out and, um, speak to the resident. Unfortunately, sometimes they're elderly and they, they can't do it, right. So I, I know we reached out to an elderly's adult daughter

▶ 2:57:54 who worked in the city or somewhere local who got someone who got someone, then they came over and trimmed the, the Hedges. That's a success story, right? What if, what if, what do you do if you can't, we gonna cite them under the city ordinance, a 90-year-old lady who lives alone. I feel a little dirty about it, but, um, I, I don't have a a hundred percent answer, but in conjunction with the DPW and myself and you, if there's ever a problem, we'll, we'll, we'll help. Okay. Because we have sent police officers out as well with edge problems and visibility issues. Great. And I think sometimes Inspection services gets involved as well. Um, you know, if it's something that in any way violates any sort of zoning code, um,

▶ 2:58:32 Kimberly Vandiver: they're able to also get involved. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Vision Zero. Any questions on Vision Zero Council Vanderberg. Thank you. Um, uh, you mentioned that the status of the Vision Zero committee is we're waiting for, um, the a hundred thousand dollars for the paid consultant to do data analysis on what we already have. Um, it is, I, I guess my question is, is that, you know, as the current chair of the Boards and Commissions committee, we have, you know, over a hundred very dedicated, skilled volunteers throughout the city and many more who have, have a lot of skills and interest. Is, is that something that we really need to wait for an outside consultant for? Or is there something a committee could get started on

▶ 2:59:28 Jen Grigoraitis: in anticipation or doing some of that work? So I think like most things in government, we move too fast for some people and, um, too slow for others. So I, you know, I recognize there is a group of folks who would like to see us go, go, go. We're thrilled that we're gonna get this a hundred thousand dollars. Hopefully it's federal funding. So I think there's an open question about the, the long-term viability of that money under this current administration. Um, we wanna wait to understand the grant, partly because if we move, first of all, we can't work on a grant without you all accepting it. So that needs to happen. Um, and we wanna make sure that we're not doing work that's gonna then put us in jeopardy of being able

▶ 3:00:02 Jen Grigoraitis: to leverage that funding. For those of you that are familiar with federal and state grants, there's a lot of requirements including oftentimes saying that we sign legal documents, saying we haven't done any of the work that's gonna be considered part of the grant until we've accepted the document. So we're hopeful that we'll have more information, um, about what is expected of us. I think the vision for Vision Zero to, um, be queued is to make it a permanent commission. So to actually come before you all and ask for it to be added to an ordinance so that it is like the Human Rights Commission, the Women's Commission, the planning board, where it has, um, a defined like, um, role and it's baked into City Code.

▶ 3:00:39 Jen Grigoraitis: I think one of the things when we talk about things like Complete Street, which did produce some, um, definitive policy that the city's adopt adopted, but a task force is only as active as the current administration that's in place. And so, you know, which is, there's benefits to that. They're able to be nimble to advise the mayor, but they're not codified into the city. Um, so I would like to see this codified so that we know that there is a place where we are leveraging residents, but also other stakeholders to help us to come forward with a plan. So I think we gotta get through the budget and I'll do, um, hander partly to understand what our own capacity is gonna be, because I don't wanna over promise,

▶ 3:01:16 Kimberly Vandiver: but we, that is sort of the intention is to bring something before this body so that we can create a commission that exists, whether I'm the mayor, you're the mayor, whoever. And that that's sort of the work of that body can move forward, you know, beyond whatever election cycle that we're in. Thank you. Um, and, uh, I, I, two other kind of topics on that, you, me, you mentioned Wyoming and Burwick and the past work that was done there. So that was actually really helpful for me because I've wondered about that history and I know that that treatment originally was done. There was a, um, crash in 2018 and there was a fatality there. Mm-hmm. Um, and you know, so I would hope that in the spirit

▶ 3:01:57 Kimberly Vandiver: of Vision Zero, that that that is something that we come back to, you know, anything in the, that crash history and find out what would work in, in a place like that to prevent that from ever happening again. Um, so that it's not left with, you know, even, you know, due to those challenges left with, with that situation. Um, and then, and then also just along that line in the presentation, there was a com, a categorization comment about human error. And I, I think with the Vision Zero framework, my understanding is that wherever possible we should try to move away from human error into the commenter previously about what, what can we do about the built environment because nobody wants to, to hit somebody else, you know,

▶ 3:02:39 Kimberly Vandiver: and we need to anticipate that people will make a mistake sometimes or will drive too fast. And so I just advocate for wherever possible, if rather than human error, we could, you know, try to get towards what happened because of that error. Did they fail to stop? You know, even if they should have known, even if, you know, didn't get towards those. And I think I would assume that would also be helpful to the, the coming Vision Zero commission. Yeah, I agree. Thank you. All set. Council Williams, I did have a chance to speak to the MPOA couple days ago, and they don't have an update on the federal grant, however, they said that they have a person who works inside the agency who feels that it has a decent likelihood of survival.

▶ 3:03:25 Jen Grigoraitis: That being said, um, anything can happen. Mm-hmm. Right. Especially right now. Is there a point at which you cut bait and you say, we're not waiting for this anymore, we're gonna move forward. Is that point, you know, July, is it August? Is there, is there a time when you think you're just done waiting and we we do it? Yeah, But I don't think that we've decided what that time is. So, um, I mean, candidly, and I know, not that we can't all do more than one thing at once, but knowing, you know, we're building a very challenging budget, which is also gonna, particularly I think for some of the things we're talking about that are really important but are not legally required for DPW to be doing the way snow shoveling snow

▶ 3:04:06 Jen Grigoraitis: and putting custodians in schools are, we really have to understand first what is our capacity so that we can then make a timeline that's gonna match what that capacity is. And you know, VNI has been a huge asset to the city, thrilled for her for it to move on to her next thing. But that is a massive step backward for us. Um, both just in terms of the knowledge and expertise she brings, the money that she's leveraged for us. And recognizing that Elena can only do so many jobs at one time, and it is likely that, you know, that will be, we will be down an engineer. Um, so I think we really want to kind of assess, assess internally where we are at. Understood. Yeah. Thank You. And we will keep our fingers crossed for federal money.

▶ 3:04:46 Robb Stewart: We'll do that again. Anything else? Any other councils, uh, moving on to traffic commission? Any questions on the traffic commission? Based on the presentation? Council Stewart. Thank you Mr. Chair. Uh, you spoke of how the communication goes through Jen Rosa, so thank you for sharing that. That's very helpful. Um, and she determines what is appropriate for the traffic commission? Well, she, she forwards them on to Chief failure and Sergeant Gach and I, and, and we Okay. We provide Advice. She knows there's certain ones that she knows because she's encountered them six times before and she just gets back to the person says, that's really not a traffic commission item, but I can put you in touch with so and so.

▶ 3:05:36 Robb Stewart: But then if it's, if it's a gray area, she, uh, consults with us. Okay. So, so she facilitates it a better way to put it. Okay. Great. Um, is that process that, um, our community, if they want to reach out, is that posted online? Is there a place where that'll give them guidance? If you go, I believe, and I can look as we're talking about it, the traffic commission page has her listed as the clerk and has her email address, I believe as a contact. Right. I, no, I, and I did look earlier. Okay. Okay. But there, is there a description of the process that you go through to go and make a request to the traffic commission? There is not, but there certainly could be. Basically we just say meets quarterly to consider

▶ 3:06:22 Robb Stewart: and vote upon regulatory traffic and parking issues, such as proposed new parking restrictions, speed limit changes, modifications to roadway regulations one-way stop, sign, and associated regulatory signage. So that's it. It doesn't say, you know, the, the steps. If you think that would be helpful, we can certainly Sure. This was part of the questions that I had asked. It was really label community involvement and feedback, but it's kind of the same along the same lines. Um, it, I was really, you know, how can the city more actively get the residents involved in helping to present their cases because, you know, they can come to us and as counselors we can help facilitate it like Jen does for you.

▶ 3:07:03 Robb Stewart: Um, but it's fairly unclear exactly what you do. Right. You know, um, I suggest you put a petition together and then you can put it and then they get signature and so forth. But is that necessary or it's so to, I think that would be, uh, of interest to people that have reached out to me saying, what do I do? I want a stop sign, um, you know, on this corner and how do I go about making that request? So that's, that's something if, if that you don't have, I think that would be really helpful for not only the council, 'cause then we can facilitate that effort and, and help them manage the request. Because when we get involved, when you know, it's on and off and we might not get it right and so forth.

▶ 3:07:49 But I'd like someone that really has the vested interest to be able to have that information. Yeah. We can see about putting some more details on the webpage, but I will say a lot of it ends up being a case by case basis. And Jen is really a huge resource in terms of, she's been with the commission long enough now that she has a really good handle on answering residents questions. Like we typically tell people a petition is not required, but if you come to us with a request to turn your street into a one way street, we really wanna see that you have the vast majority of the people who live on that street already in support. 'cause we've, we've taken up items where we spend half an hour listening

▶ 3:08:29 to everybody on the street about why they don't want a one way when one person wanted it. And that's just, that's a waste of time. So if the, if the resident could go around and talk to people and realizes that nobody else wants it besides them, it just, you know, it saves the whole process. So, um, but there's not a requirement to have a petition. But for one way is we usually tell people, yeah, don't, you know, until you have signatures of the majority of your street, like, don't put it, don't ask to put it on the agenda 'cause it's, it's just gonna get tabled until you get more, um, feedback. So we can try to give some sort of general guidance, but I will say any questions, reach out to Jen

▶ 3:09:07 Robb Stewart: or have the resident reach out to Jen and I think they'll be pleased with the, uh, the level of detail she can provide. Yeah. And I think, I think that general guidance plus the commentary saying We're happy to support you on specific questions, blah, blah, uh, I think would be really valuable for people that have interest but aren't sure where to go. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Chair. Anyone else? President Elli. And then council ro I just wanna echo Councillor Stewart last comment about having more information about the traffic commission online. Um, I think obviously like the staff and team does really well, but it might actually take some of the burden off to have some of that information just spelled out there.

▶ 3:09:49 Whether it's just simple like, like hi, you know, frequently asked questions, ask questions. Yeah. Um, whether it's utilizing the e gov website and having people submit questions there gets filtered there. Jen can go through them that way. Um, but I just wanted to ditto Stewart. Counselor Stewart's comments. Okay. Council Fania. Oh, I'm sorry. You all set? Great. Um, I just was, I don't know if this falls under this, um, but the list for the rapid flashing beacons, is that housed within the traffic commission? No, The Rapid flashing beacons are not a regulatory device. Okay. They're just advisory. So that's just maintained by the engineering division. Okay. Um, and we, we just posted a map showing where they all are.

▶ 3:10:41 Mm-hmm. Um, we've had many questions about why the list isn't in order. A lot of people, well, where am I on the list? Well, it's not a first come first serve thing. It's, we put everybody pretty much on the list if they request it, we know when it was requested, who it was requested by. But then when we get funding, we look at the whole list and we decide what we think is the highest priority. And those priorities are constantly changing. It could be like, Wyoming at Berwick is a perfect example. After the fatality we wanted, we said we have to do something here. That's when we were trying to do the traffic island and all those things. But we also added one we had previously passed on that location because it has a solar problem.

▶ 3:11:21 And so sometimes we don't get enough light there for them to, to consistently work. Um, but, you know, you're weighing the, the pros and cons of each location each time. And it could be that maybe it used to not be a high crash location and maybe something changed and suddenly it's, you know, someplace where we need to put more attention or maybe we have a change. Like, you know, I mean the, the police station, I don't know why that in particular would mean that more people would cross there, but you have a change in the use of a building or you have a new development and suddenly there are a lot more pedestrians in an area and then that rises to the top when maybe at the time when it was requested it wasn't at the top.

▶ 3:12:00 Cal Finocchiaro: So we really shy away from like putting it in a set order and publicizing that order and um, but we do, uh, try to make the best decision working with the police and with our operations folks When we have money. Makes sense. And if I wanted as a ward counselor to find out like where one that I was interested in getting, would I, you know, Contact you, like, just to find out if it's on the list? Well, I think this one I'm just in one particular on the list, but if where it is on the list, you know, contact, that's what I'm Contact. So we don't have any where it is on the list. It's either on the list or it's not. Okay. And when we have the money, we pick from the list. Okay. So that's, yeah. Yeah.

▶ 3:12:36 So I think there's one in particular on near Geneva and, um, Stratford that we've been talking about. So like, if I wanted to find out if it's on the list, I can tell you right now that we are pursuing that location. Okay. We're, we've been working with Council gpe, we've are cutting down a tree and we're gonna put them up dead. That's Yeah, the dead, the tree's dead. We confirm the tree was dead. The tree is dead. It is, It is a blind spot. Tree is now. Oh god. It's important. Well, so it's the, it's the very dead one. Yes. There's one that's not, that's very the Very dead one. Yeah. There, there were three trees in question, but one of them is very dead. And going away, we're gonna try to put the RFPs up

▶ 3:13:18 with the other two trees in place and if we still have solar problems, we might try to trim or, or if the tree is deemed, there was one that was kind of like, had some root, I don't remember the word for it. The arborist said it, it was one that maybe would be on its way to getting unhealthy and we could take a look at it. So if I were to check to see if, uh, one was on a list, I would call tech the engineering department. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay, Council Williams, I just wanna say congratulations. You've already written the traffic commission website. 'cause it's in this presentation There's Like, like four slides that get everything anybody wants to know. And a lot of it's the questions

▶ 3:13:58 that people ask all the time. Take it, put it up, add some links. It looks great. Thank you. All set. Um, just the funding and other moving on funding and other categories. Anyone have any questions on that? Does anyone have any questions that they don't feel was answered or, I know it was tough cross-referencing. I apologize. Um, I understand what my fellow counselors were, were saying with, um, trying to make sure that their questions got answered. Um, so what's, um, anyone else have any questions regarding this? We have a motion to place on file. Second. We have a motion to place on file by Councilor Williams, seconded by President Ley on discussion. All in favor? Oh, Oh, Sorry, sorry, sorry.

▶ 3:15:01 Manjula Karamcheti: I was slow. Um, I guess my question, it is on discussion. I guess the question is whether there are counselors who still want to have some time to process and go back to constituents. I just wanna like, name that from before. But also I think it's been made very clear that if we do have follow up questions, this team is more than ready, willing, and able to work with us, um, whether we place this on file or not. So just kind of wanted to say that out into the world. But Anyone else on discussion? Council? So Stewart, Thank you Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair. Um, It may be worthwhile to have a follow up, um, at some point, uh, maybe early next fiscal year, um, to understand, uh, where some of the progress has been made.

▶ 3:16:03 Robb Stewart: Uh, and I think that it is really important that if we continue to have questions that they should, these questions should be asked in a public forum. Because really the questions are coming from a constituency, right? Yeah. We have our own personal goals as board counselors or, um, general city counselors, you know, at large. But I, I, I think that, um, you know, the information that we bring to them and that they convey back to us, will, I, I think that does need to stay in the public forum and that's important, which is why I would suggest coming back, uh, maybe early next fiscal year. Thank You. Thank you. Thank you Madam Mayor. Thank you. Um, can I wait, can I be on discussion? I dunno.

▶ 3:16:48 Jen Grigoraitis: Um, no, I just wanted to echo I, you know, I know the, the lever, the council has an info order lever, which we, you know, comes with some restrictions around questions being submitted in advance. I recognize it was probably not the most, um, adept way to do this. It's, we are happy to come back. I mean, if, if it's something that's being filed by the mayor, obviously it can be a more broad ranging discussion. Um, we recognize that this is an important and valuable piece. I, we're happy to commit. I'm happy to commit to doing that so that we can provide some updates, particularly after we make it through the budget and have a better understanding of some of what's to come. I also think it's important, I know I'd had this

▶ 3:17:24 Jen Grigoraitis: conversation with Councilor Williams to think about other formats that aren't a council meeting. I agree it's important to have these conversations in public. I also know that this isn't always the most accessible, um, way to have them. So as you all, particularly the ward counselors, think about ways that we can, you know, help support you in having those discussions. Um, I think there's a lot of ways that we can kind of try to engage with the community, um, beyond this forum, but also including it. Any more discussion? So we have a motion to placement file. Um, all in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? This will placed on file. That concludes it. Do you want me to do a roll call? I don't think we need to do a roll call though.

▶ 3:18:08 Okay. Um, that concludes our business for tonight. I'll entertain a motion. Mr. Chair, make a motion to a judge. Second. Motion to adjourn by Council Stewart. Seconded by Council Vandiver on discussion. All in favor? Aye. Opposed for saying that. Thank you.

Original documents

• Minutes (CivicClerk PDF)
• Agenda (IQM2 PDF)
• Bulletin (IQM2 PDF)
• Minutes packet (IQM2 PDF)
• Agenda packet (CivicClerk PDF)
• Agenda packet (IQM2 PDF)
• Other (CivicClerk PDF)
• This meeting on the city portal