The Framingham City Council Finance Subcommittee met on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, to review the FY27 Fire Department and Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs budgets, join with the School Committee Finance and Operations Subcommittee for a revenue and school budget discussion, and take up the capital improvement program referral. The joint portion began at 8:05 p.m.; the School Committee adjourned at 8:54 p.m.
The finance subcommittee of the City Council is comprised of five council members and considers any or all questions appropriate for the purpose of considering the budget. Including the creation of new positions to the payroll, changes to the employee classification plan. Or any matters pertaining to increasing the City of Framingham employee headcount. The following City Council Finance Subcommittee meeting coverage is brought to you by the government channel, a service of the City of Framingham. Council Finance Subcommittee will come to order. And that's the third item on our agenda. Joining us this evening myself, Council Stefanini, Councillor Cannon, and Councillor Malik. First order of business is public participation. If there's anybody here that wants to publicly participate on any of the items that are not on our agenda this evening, feel free to take the podium and publicly participate. If not, we ask that you wait for the item that you're here for to come up on the agenda. Okay, let me just go out the zone land. And I knew it. Okay. Yeah, there. Um Chris Mulroney. Uh you're here for the school budget, is that correct? That's correct. Okay, so we're we're doing fire with them when we're doing public uh uh park and recs, and then we'll make sure you are signed up for the school part of the portion. Thank you. Thank you. Umbody being on public participation now. First order of business. A presentation by and a discussion with Chief Michael Butcher of the Framework Fire Department regarding the Department's FY2027 budget. If you want to introduce your team and we'll take it from there. Thank you, Chief. Good evening, everyone. Thanks, Mr. Chair. Uh I have uh Assistant Fire Chief John Schultz with me, and Mr. Dana Hagginson, who is our director of admin and finance. Um thank you for the opportunity to present the fiscal year budget for the for the fire department. Our mission is clear to protect life, property, and the environment through professional emergency response, fire prevention, public education, and community service. That mission guides every operational decision in every dollar in this proposal. This past year, your firefighters responded to nearly 33,000 calls for service. Behind that number are medical emergencies, working fires, technical rescues, hazardous materials responses, public service calls, and thousands of moments when our residents relied on us without hesitation. The demand for service continues to grow in both volume and complexity. Tonight I'm also presenting a modest but critically important staffing request request, the addition of four firefighters. This would add one firefighter, one firefighter per group, allowing us to move closer to staffing each frontline apparatus in accordance with the National Fire Protection Association Standard 1710, which calls for four firefighters per apparatus for safe and effective operations. These four positions represent the first step in rebuilding staffing levels, something that has not reoccurred in more than 40 years. As you'll see in this presentation, during that same period, our call volume has more than doubled, yet staffing has remained constant. The hazards facing our firefighters have increased, larger buildings, more complex construction, higher call acuity, and increased EMS demand. But our baseline staffing has not kept pace. And thank you for your continued support to the men and women of the Framingham Fire Department and for your commitment to a safety of our community. Um the PowerPoint in the uh because we have such a great agenda uh large agenda. If uh if you if you've seen this presentation, uh I will walk you through it, but if you've already seen it and you just have questions, we can go with that, but I can also go through the presentation if you'd like. Okay. Okay. Uh as you can see in our first slide here, um, personnel uh accounts for about 94 percent of our budget, uh, and and the rest is facilities and equipment. Uh and there's a slight uh increase, there's an increase this year, and that is due to uh contractual uh uh obligations. Next slide, please.