Recap of April 8, 2025 Regular Meeting of the City Council

Agenda on City Council Public Portal

Recording on Youtube

Recording on MCM

This was a long meeting. We went out of agenda order, moving some short items earlier in the queue. 

We took up the petition to amend the 282 Mystic Avenue special permit. The petitioner is seeking to upgrade and replace two digital screens on a signboard and seek a potential reduction in the permitting fee. After discussion, we continued this paper to the next regular meeting. 

Two Elections Commissioners presented the 2025 Medford Election Calendar (a required step for each election). 

We approved the Mayor’s request for a loan order for School HVAC Infrastructure and Roof Bonds. This is to enable necessary work over the summer to repair HVAC and roofing at the Andrews and McGlynn schools, so students can have working HVAC and uncompromised roofs when school starts back up in the fall. The City Council approved an initial $5M loan order in December 2024; this $25,775,000 loan order is additional. 

We approved a Community Preservation Committee appropriation request for $11K from the CPA General Reserve for a pergola at the Winthrop Street Gardens. This project meets the CPC’s open space and recreational lands objective criteria. 

We approved the Gender Affirming Care and Reproductive Health Care Ordinance. 

This project was sponsored by Councilors Tseng and Lazzaro, and I believe it was first initiated by former President Morell during her tenure. I am so grateful to the sponsors for shepherding through this draft ordinance. It strongly defines and mandates protections for seekers of gender-affirming and reproductive health care in Medford. 

This ordinance disallows any City agent from interfering or abetting interference into people seeking health care; and it disallows Medford police from providing information or assistance to any other law enforcement agency or entity that is investigating or inquiring into health care activity. It states, “it is contrary to the City of Medford’s public policy to participate in the enforcement of another state’s civil or criminal law when that law seeks to deny an individual’s right to bodily autonomy or criminalize a person’s efforts to live as their full, authentic self; and thus, the City’s resources should not be expended toward that end.” No brainer. 

This draft went through a careful legal review, and the sponsors took care to ensure it was aligned with similar ordinances in other communities, and with relevant state law. This protects the City: it ensures that if the federal government decides to pick a fight with cities that wish to allow their residents unfettered access to health care, then we wouldn’t be fighting that battle alone – we’d be going in as part of a cavalry.

We are in a moment where the federal government is condoning attacks on women’s access to health care, and weaponizing health care for trans and nonbinary people, in a deliberate attempt to score hollow political victories at the expense of humans’ health and wellbeing, and create a distraction from their catastrophic economic agenda. This ordinance is an important part of local strategy to protect people from this destructive agenda. I’m very grateful to all of the residents who advocated for this measure, and held us to account for making it happen. 

We discussed and approved a resolution to advocate for the release of Rumeysa Ozturk.

We discussed and approved my resolution for the City to create and distribute “Know Your Rights” with ICE information. I spoke about how I have been talking to community members who are upset and scared, and how the precise goal of increased ICE presence is not to make us safer, but to make us scared. If the goal was to make us safer, “Border Czar” Homan wouldn’t be targeting one of the safest metro areas in the U.S., and ICE wouldn’t be illegally deporting and imprisoning noncitizens who have no criminal record. 

In the midst of this, residents are asking – what can we do? How can people be protected when they’re in their homes, in their cars, in businesses, just out on the street? What are the rules? The least we can do as a City in our official capacity is to make every effort to ensure that residents know their rights. 

There is no better use of our City resources than ensuring that every resident knows what to do if they are targeted; and is able to empower their friends and family with that information; so that this knowledge can replace uncertainty and confusion in the community. 

My resolution called for the City to utilize its resources to create simple “Know Your Rights” flyers and have them translated into all the major languages spoken in Medford, and distributed at municipal buildings and community centers in Medford. Here are some of the basic rights that could be included: 

• You have the right to remain silent.

•  You have the right to not answer questions, including questions about your immigration

• status.

• You have the right to call your attorney.

• You have the right to see your warrant. ICE must have a warrant signed by a judge to

• arrest or detain you.

• You have the right to not sign any documents, even if ICE instructs you to.

• If ICE comes to your home, you have the right to not open the door. If ICE claims to have a warrant, you have the right to ask them to slide it under the door. If ICE agents do not have a warrant signed by a judge, they cannot enter a home without permission from an adult.

• If ICE comes to your business, you have the right to not answer questions about specific employees. You have the right to not introduce ICE agents to employees that they request to see.

• If ICE comes to your business, you have the right to not allow them into private areas of your business. If ICE agents do not have a warrant signed by a judge, they cannot enter private areas of your business without your permission.

We then took up the draft City Charter. (By the time I’m writing this, the draft City Charter was further amended and then approved in a Special Meeting on April 15th, which I probably won’t recap. But the Council voted to publish this statement recapping the Charter review process and its outcome.)

At this meeting, we were reviewing a draft City Charter that had been amended by the Mayor. In a 6-0 vote (one absent) on March 11th, the Council approved a draft Charter and referred it to the Mayor. The draft the Mayor referred back made a number of edits which can be seen in the redline version of the document. The most well-publicized of these was reverting back to an 8-3 Council makeup (8 ward councilors, 3 at-large) from the Council’s recommendation of 4 district councilors and 5 at-large councilors. The Mayor also included a residency requirement for ward councilors (a requirement not imposed on any other electeds, and especially prohibitive to renters seeking public office). 

What an interesting process this Charter review has been. It has been characterized by hard work by many people, including those who volunteered on the Charter Study Committee. The CSC’s process was as thorough and as expansive as it could possibly have been, given the few resources they were allocated to do this important work. 

I regret that the Council’s participation was limited due to having to fit our statutory review into just a few short months. (The Council had requested back to begin the draft Charter review process in the fall of 2024, but unfortunately this request was not accommodated by the Mayor and the CSC.) Fundamentally, I think this is an insufficient timescale for considering a matter as nuanced and important as the City’s guiding, foundational, legal document. It’s certainly slim time for genuine collaboration (or genuine negotiation). And I have maintained throughout the process that I think it would be inappropriate and irresponsible for a Council to simply rubber-stamp a Charter document – no matter how eager we all may be to complete the project, no matter how good-faith the source material is.

I reflect that these few months of City Council meetings about the Charter have been largely consumed by one issue – the makeup of the City Council. We have discussed Council makeup, ward vs. district councilors, at greath length. In Committee, I elaborated on why I preferred the district model. While both methods would have created more local representation for residents on their City Council, I think 5-4 would have done it better. Among other concerns, I feared that eight (very) small wards would lead to uncompetitive elections. I don’t think that the point of local representation is representation for representation’s sake; I think what residents deserve is robustly competitive elections, each and every time. 

I was pretty dug in. But coming into the April 8 meeting, I had resolved not to die on that hill of 5-4 vs. 8-3. If the central kernel of the whole debate is the issue of representativeness, then whether the Council is 5-4 or 8-3 doesn’t actually get to the heart of the issue. 

I believe the most important thing we could do to meaningfully engage with the topic of representativeness is reevaluate our Strong Mayor system of government. A more “representative” City Council only matters so much when the Mayor, most of the time, holds all the cards. An alternative to a strong mayor system was never presented or rigorously considered in this process. To be clear, I don’t mean that as a criticism of the CSC’s work – that was a volunteer process with volunteer resources and they made great strides given the resources and the time that they were given.

But this process did not interrogate our current strong mayor system, notwithstanding that I think we have seen strong community interest in considering alternatives. For example, in 2023, there was considerable support for attempts to renegotiate the balance of power between City Council and Mayor in the budgeting process, through the proposed Charter amendments (which did not advance) that would have increased the Council's power to appropriate funding in the operating budget. Not to mention: The very most frequent thing I hear from residents are countless requests for the Council to do something, fund something, change something, and the answer is truly almost always: we can’t. That’s the Mayor’s purview. Talk to the Mayor. All of the Council's major functions –  ordinances, zoning, budget overview – all are constrained by the far greater jurisdiction of the Mayor.  

I think residents want not just representatives not just for talk, but for action and outcomes. That would be meaningful representation. All that to say that this process, including the back-and-forth about Council makeup, eventually clarified for me that I believe the will of the community is for a more genuinely representative system of governance where the executive office is more meaningfully checked by the School Committee and the City Council – in addition to people enjoying more local representation on the School Committee and the City Council. 

I recounted all this at our meeting not to say that the Council should scrap the current draft and write a new draft with a Strong Council or a City Manager or something like that; but to explain why I would need to see some amendments that at least started to engage with the topic of the Mayor/Council/School Committee power imbalance, in order to support it. Especially given some of the Mayor’s April amendments that moved the draft in the opposite direction. 

For these reasons, I made the motion to remove the Mayor from the School Committee. I believe it would be more properly balanced and healthier for our local democracy for the School Committee and the Mayor to be true negotiators during the budgeting process. Let the Mayor be the Mayor, keeping an eye on the City’s bottom line. And let the School Committee fight for what’s best for MPS, rather than being vulnerable to having that Mayoral perspective baked into their ask from the beginning. (Also worth noting that in the CSC’s survey, 43% of respondents supported removing the Mayor from the SC, 35% supported keeping the Mayor on the SC, and 15% responded they didn’t know.)

I supported amendments from my fellow Councilors to protect and preserve the City Council’s right to make appointments to Commissions unless otherwise specified; and to remove the Mayor’s residency requirement for ward councilors, which places a burden on ward councilors relative to other electeds; and I motioned to have future Charter Review committees be made up of 3 Mayoral appointees, 3 Council appointees, and 3 School Committee appointees, reversing the Mayor’s amendment to 4 Mayoral appointees, 3 Council appointees, and 2 School Committee appointees. 

All told, I think these amendments let us skip over the window dressing of 5-4 vs. 8-3 and more meaningfully engage with the City’s power imbalance. Together, they left me feeling comfortable supporting this draft. 

I know that there was a lot of impatience to get this process done; I strongly felt that this was too important to rush to a vote before it was as right as possible. As your Councilor, I felt responsible to push as hard as I could for a draft Charter that I could personally and enthusiastically endorse and campaign for, because that’s what the community deserved. And if that took an extra Special Meeting, that was fine with me. 

The disembedding of the Mayor from the School Committee did not remain in the draft that was voted on in the following meeting on April 15th, and that is why I was the dissenting vote. I am glad that the draft charter is moving forward to the State House and glad that residents will get to decide for themselves at the ballot box in November. I hope that as regular Charter review continues into the future, the next iterations meaningfully engage with improving the balance of power between the Mayor, the Council and the School Committee; and I hope that our conversations the past few months have moved that ball forward. 

Thank you to everyone who worked hard and had hard conversations in service of this important project.

Okay, back to the remainder of the agenda. 

The draft Vacant Building Ordinance, sponsored by Councilors Leming and Lazzaro, was referred to the Administration & Finance Committee. 

We approved a resolution calling on MassHealth to enforce authority pertaining to provision of Applied Behavioral Analysis services to Massachusetts children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

We approved Councilor Scarpelli’s resolution regarding tree removals at Capen Park. 

Councilor Scarpelli put forward a resolution “Encouraging Peace, Unity, and Constructive Dialogue on the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Condemning Antisemitism.” I was greatly aggrieved and offended by how the text of the resolution dehumanized Palestinians and improperly conflated antisemitism with activism criticizing Israeli war crimes, terrorism, and genocide. I delivered lengthy remarks explaining my position, which I have posted separately, and the paper was tabled. 

We took 25-020, a request from the Mayor for the transfer and conveyance of the McCormack Avenue Parcels, from the table and rejected the paper.

We adjourned sometime after midnight.