Well, good evening, everybody.

My name is JT Scott.

I'm the Ward II City Councilor here in Somerville, Mass and serving as chair of your legislative matters committee of the City Council.

Calling this meeting to order here on Tuesday, February 17th at 6.02 p.m.

Uh, and pursuant to chapter two of the acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted via remote participation and the audio video recording will be posted to the City of Somerville's website shortly after its conclusion.

Uh to enable that to happen, we will go ahead and take a roll call to establish a quorum.

This is roll call.

Counselor Davis.

Counselor Mbau.

Counselor Young Campin?

Sure.

Counselor Streso.

Present.

Counselor Scott.

Present.

With three counselors present, we have quorum.

All right.

Uh thank you for that.

And uh we've got ourselves uh a bit of a long agenda, but not hopefully too long in terms of time.

Uh it's split up into largely two sections, uh, which is the review of some uh ordinance modifications to bring the city into compliance with the newly adopted charter from the last uh municipal election.

Uh and then the review of some surveillance technology impact reports, uh, which some of which were uh submitted previously and then had some requests for updates and modifications.

So we'll be adopting some of those and uh placing some others on file.

But before we get to it, uh our first three items are approvals of the minutes uh from May 6th, uh from uh and from December 2nd, as well as minutes of the charter review special committee meeting.

Uh, I guess that would be the last one we had.

So we weren't didn't have a chance to approve those minutes in committee.

So uh are there any comments on those first three items, the minutes uh May 6th, March 18th, and December 2nd.

All right, seeing them, we'll go ahead and uh lay those on the table for approval.

And we'll move on to item number four on our agenda tonight, which is uh an amendment to chapter two, article five, division one of the code of ordinances to add a review of multi-member bodies pursuant to the requirements of the city charter.

We are joined here tonight uh legislative liaison, Brendan Salisbury, who has been doing a great deal of work to uh review the code and uh bring us up to speed and uh implement the requirements of the new charter.

So uh let's see, I've got this pulled up.

Uh Madam Clerk, if you could pop up the PDF just so we are all on the same page, that might be nice.

Uh if you'd like me to, I can do that as well.

Um, but uh yeah, here we go.

All right.

Uh Liaison Salzburg.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Chair, for the record.

Brendan Salzbury, legislative and policy analyst for the city council.

Uh, this is actually a very simple one, uh, as you may recall, as part of the new charter, uh, there is a required review of uh the charter, the code of ordinances and multiple member bodies every 10 years, uh, as part of the special act that established the charter.

Uh, it did establish a particular um composition for the initial review of multiple member bodies.

The charter itself does require that this body be constituted by ordinance.

Uh, I will flag that this would be the only body in the city that would be constituted by ordinance once the administrative code uh goes forward.

So that is something that we will likely be looking to change in the future just to maintain um sort of the intent of the charter.

Um, but for now, uh it is required by charter to establish this by ordinance.

Um, and so this is largely just a copy and paste.

Uh there are a couple very minor things that are in here uh that differ slightly from what was established by the uh special act, which is that we do put some specific dates in there uh for the constitution of the or rather the convening of the committee, um, as well as a deadline uh for the submission of the report.

Uh while those things were generally kind of I would say hinted at uh in the charter.

Uh, there is no explicit deadline for the report, so we just added those in there to make sure that there is actually uh a clear standard for when these actions should be taken.

All right.

Uh just a quick question on that.

Uh I believe wouldn't the uh wage theft ordinance still be a multimember body of uh established by ordinance?

It would not, no.

Um the the text of the charter is explicitly clear that the organization of the city may only be accomplished through administrative order.

So what happened to that ordinance then?

Uh it the ordinance remains on the books.

The charter did include a continuation of governance and continuation of law uh provision uh within it.

So until an administrative code is established, uh any of the ordinances that are currently on the books will remain in effect.

All right.

Uh well, then I guess we will.

Uh so is does this create a future conflict then?