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Emily Lazzaro is sick of discussing the city’s legal budget, but not so much that she was ready to vote on funding the entire package during Thursday’s City Council meeting.
Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn asked the council via memo at the Nov. 10 meeting to fully restore the balance of the proposed Law Department budget to the tune of $269,295.81 for salaries and ordinary expenses.
A clearly exasperated Lazzaro said, “Respectfully, I cannot do this anymore. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t talk about this anymore. We have been talking about it too much,” and she started to make a motion to approve the request.
That is until Council President Zac Bears pointed out Lungo-Koehn was seeking to restore the full budget, not a monthly installment, which is how they have been doling out the budget for the last four months.
In August, councilors voted to reduce the budget for legal services to two months, a reaction to not having received information from Lungo-Koehn regarding legal expenses. But the fight over the Legal Department dates back to February, when the first request for information was made.
Earlier this month, Lazzaro, Bears and Councilor Liz Mullane met with the city’s top administrator once again to discuss the legal budget, along with the request for an audit of Law Department finances and the posting of the city solicitor position.
Medford does not have a city solicitor. Lungo-Koehn uses KP Law for the city's legal needs, which the council believes is much more costly than filling the position.
The council proposed an audit be done by a third party to answer that question.
During a special meeting held Nov. 2, the council approved $52,507.63 to restore ordinary expenses for the month of November.
Bears said then that if the council received a progress report toward the end of the month from the administration showing it intended to do the audit, “we could then approve, two, three or four more months of funding until that review is complete.”
To the obvious irritation of Lazzaro, Lungo-Koehn wasn’t ready to settle for the $52,000+. In a memo dated Nov. 5, she asked for the full balance of the budget and pointed out that the city had to do it before the Nov. 17 tax classification hearing.
Chief of Staff Nina Nazarian said that once council set the tax rate, “we will no longer be able to raise and appropriate further funding in FY 2027.”
“This is not what we talked about, Breanna,” Lazzaro said, raising her voice and speaking to the camera. Lungo-Koehn was not in the room. “This is not what we talked about. You can’t just put whatever you want on the agenda and save it for the end. What are you doing, Breanna?”
Bears suggested that rather than give the mayor all the money, the city could appropriate funds as a transfer to stabilization or a supplemental appropriation to a general fund contingency account as a way of getting around the tax levy issue.
Nazarian said they considered the stabilization fund transfer idea but worried it might raise a bond-rating issue, and they don’t want to do that with a plan for a new high school in the works.
In regard to the audit, Nazarian said they are not against it but are having trouble finding anyone to do it. She said they have reached out to several firms and plan to reach out to more but have yet to find anyone to tackle the job.
Nazarian also said neither she nor the folks the administration has been consulting with have heard of such an audit.
Councilor George Scarpelli said Nazarian’s remarks were typical “of what we’ve been seeing with this dog and pony show.”
“It’s very simple for me, Mr. President," Scarpelli said, referring to Zac Bears. "I would not support anything until we get the answers that we’ve requested multiple times in professional manners."
Reiterating she was tired of talking about the legal budget, Lazzaro talked about a train station where a man was killed crossing the train tracks. The MBTA subsequently received $5 million to improve the safety of the train station, but they haven’t done anything yet, she said.
But the other day, as she was driving by, Lazzaro saw a group of people in reflective vests and hard hats standing around so she pulled over and asked what was going on. She said she was told she couldn’t stand there without protective gear because it was unsafe.
“So, what I would love to spend our meetings talking about is why Keolis and the MBTA and the Federal Railway Administration is not talking to us about the safety procedures they’re trying to update and where that $5 million went to improve the safety of the train station, so that people won’t be hit by trains and killed,” she said. “What I don’t want to talk about anymore is the Law Department budget.”
But they will. Since they had already approved funding for November, Councilor Matt Leming made a motion to table the request for remaining budget and the council will have to take it up again at a future meeting.
