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Happy Friday Ward 5! I hope you all have been enjoying the warm weather we have been having recently – spring seems to be in full effect.
This week, the newsletter will touch on two decisions from the Programs & Services Committee virtual meeting on April 7, as well as an update on the resolution to honor Newton’s Fair Housing Committee.
On Tuesday, I attended the City of Newton's anniversary vigil for the 214 residents and counting lost to the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year. We will remember and honor their lives as we continue to combat the pandemic.
Leaf blowers update
This week, on April 7, Programs & Services Committee took up for further revision – and eventually a final committee vote – the ever-controversial leaf blower noise ordinance, always the subject of heated emails from the public in many different directions.
Key summary: The committee ultimately voted that (effective Labor Day 2021) the city should create a registration process for contractor companies to certify that they understand the existing regulations on what they can use, generating a list of these registered and approved companies. If homeowners choose to contract them, the committee proposes that the listed company would be penalized for any subsequent violations, rather than the homeowners themselves being fined. (After several violations a company would be de-listed.) Homeowners choosing not to use a city-certified contractor could face fines too if the leaf blower ordinance is violated. The committee adopted my amendment to end joint enforcement authority by the Newton Police and Inspectional Services and leave it with Inspectional Services only.
What follows below is a detailed explanation of how we arrived at these results in committee after much debate and a description of the remaining process before any of this might take effect.
How we got here
Last June, the Programs & Services Committee discussed what reforms to attempt to pursue this year with regard to the currently unworkable leaf blower ordinance. There was not enough support in committee at that point to pass a year-round ban on gas blowers (which are still allowed in the spring and fall) nor to make any other changes to allowed/disallowed devices (which are already regulated to a maximum decibel level), so those did not end up on the table.
Previous background information of this issue can be found at the bottom of my newsletter update in September 2020.
Our efforts this term are limited to fair and reasonable clarifications (and better workability) of the existing regulations – for homeowners, contractors, their workers, neighbors, and the city – so that we will be better positioned for future debates on whether or not the substance of the regulations needs revision.
The 3 points we decided to pursue last June were:
Regulation of devices (what is involved in that),
Who enforces violations (currently mostly police but also Inspectional Services),
Who gets enforced upon (currently the individual worker using one)
We then drafted a reform on the first point where landscaper companies must be registered with the city with approved machines, having signed a form saying they understand what is or is not allowed and what the consequences are.
On the third point, we drafted a reform to no longer penalize the individual worker holding a leaf blower. A lot of Councilors didn't realize they had voted for that in the first place.
We debated for many months about whether or not fines/warnings for violations should instead go to the contractor or to the homeowner or perhaps to both. The final compromise in committee was that the list of registered and city-approved contractor companies will be available online and homeowners will not be penalized for contractors failing to comply, unless they hired an unregistered company. Registered companies would face fines for violations and eventually de-certification for repeated offenses.
Although we hope the new registration system and the corrected target of fines will make the ordinance more self-enforcing without needing as much action in the field, clearly some additional field enforcement will still be needed, which brings us to the final point of debate identified last June, which proved to be a sticking point in our discussions.
The enforcement debate
Many City Councilors (including me) do not believe armed police are an appropriate body to do this enforcement. The Newton Police have also made it very clear at the rank-and-file level as well as up to the Interim Police Chief that they do not want to have any part in enforcing leaf blower violations. But it is not likely that the Inspectional Services Department alone has the capacity for prompt field inspections of reported violations.
Other suggestions have included using parking enforcement officers or other similar ideas. The administration is opposed to budgeting for a dedicated and unarmed "Code Enforcement" team that can respond rapidly to minor non-police situations like leaf blower offenses, misuse of parks & athletic fields, dog ordinance violations, etc. Perhaps they could even take on the Crossing Guard responsibilities, too.
In November 2020, when we last took this matter up, a majority of the Programs & Services Committee asked to hold this reform package in committee for further work to occur after the police reform task force recommendations came back. We also reminded the committee that it might also make sense to wait for a new police chief (being announced next week, as I understand it) and a new budget draft (coming next month in May 2021), to see where things stand more broadly.
The task force recommendations came back, and I believe they recommend removing a police role on minor infractions such as this. Personally, I believe that the Police Department’s mandate has become overly broad over the years and that we need to divide the Department into smaller parts, splitting off the nuisance ordinance enforcement functions, traffic duties, mental health crisis response, and things of that nature into independent departments or more suitable departments. I believe we could make the budget work with that approach.
Although I would have preferred to continue brainstorming in committee and negotiating with the administration, Chair Josh Krintzman and Councilor Lisle Baker decided to bring the reforms to a final vote.
Unfortunately, the net result of that was that we had to scramble since last week to develop language addressing the enforcement question we agreed to revise back in June 2020, even though we never had discussed specific language. In committee, I offered (amid heated debate) an amendment to end Newton Police enforcement of leaf blower ordinance violations – without replacing it with anyone else (besides the existing authority of Inspectional Services). This amendment passed with support from Councilors Holly Ryan, Brenda Noel, Maria Scibelli Greenberg, and Pam Wright.
My amendment was opposed by Councilor Baker and Council President Susan Albright (although she abstained along with Chair Krintzman), and by the Mayor's Administration representative (who does not vote but does confer with us during committee meetings).
We recognize that this is not a long-term solution, but we believe it is a necessary interim fix for now, and that it will ensure the pressure remains on all of us to come up with a more permanent solution, rather than endlessly postponing removing police enforcement from our ordinance. (We also point to the negligible current level of police enforcement in the data to support our view that this enforcement change would not take us backward, while the other reforms would still improve the situation even without a new enforcing entity assigned.)
(Further coverage of the enforcement debate and decision can be found in this new article from Newton TAB.)
What’s next
The committee also set an effective date of Labor Day for the changes to take effect, which was a compromise between Memorial Day and January 1, 2022. (It’s a bit tricky to figure out when to make this take effect given that it’s not changing the underlying regulations of devices, just how the regulations are implemented.)
The proposal including those changes now heads to the Finance Committee, on which I also sit, to approve the revisions with financial components, such as a small registration fee.
If approved there, it would then head to the full City Council, where any of it could be further amended, and if passed there it would then be sent to the Mayor for consideration.
Athletic fields update
At the same Programs & Services Committee meeting, a resolution from Chair Krintzman recommending policy actions on athletic fields maintenance and investment was considered. It included some non-binding budget advice.
As I noted in my March 17 2021 newsletter, The city is currently under-investing in athletic field maintenance by such a wide margin that some of our fields have simply been dropped from use because they are too run-down, in turn putting even more pressure on remaining fields, which deteriorate faster. This matters because the less we invest on regular annual maintenance, the more expensive the field conditions become to repair later. I believe that there is a wider fiscal risk from failing to maintain things like our fields, even as we consider the fiscal burden of playing catch-up. The future tax revenue growth to the city is dependent on the attraction of quality of life things like the athletic fields to current and future homeowners.
The resolution this week included recommendations from the City Council that called for the city “to replace the surface of the three existing synthetic turf fields and construction of additional turf fields, as needed;...supports a $375,000 maintenance budget as the appropriate level for FY22 to avoid further deterioration of some of the city's most precious assets;...encourages the creation of a 2-3 year plan to repair key fields as quickly as possible; ...encourages the creation of a 5-7 year plan to improve athletic field quality, capacity and availability, which is appropriate for current needs and usage of Newton's fields in a prioritized, systemic fashion;...supports the use of Community Preservation Act funds, as appropriate, to accomplish the goals of this resolution; ...supports the use of bonding as a financial tool to lessen the immediate impact on Newton's budget of the immediate needs; ...supports the increase in rental fees on Newton's recreational fields as an additional means of support for their maintenance; ...supports a more thorough review of Newton's existing practice of renting grass fields to non-Newton based organizations; ...supports the exploration of "Tier 2 fees" - with appropriate mitigation in place to avoid impacts on families - as an additional means of support for the maintenance of Newton's recreational fields.”
The committee voted to recommend the resolution and it heads now to the full City Council for consideration a few weeks before the May 12 release of the FY22 budget.
Fair Housing resolution update
In my March 26 newsletter, I discussed the topic of Fair Housing in Newton, with regard to an upcoming resolution on the subject, and I wanted to follow up today on that.
On April 5, the full City Council took up and passed the resolution from Councilor Bowman honoring the work of Newton’s Fair Housing Committee by a vote of 15-1-8.
The Fair Housing Committee is a citizen advisory board established in 2008 that plays a critical role in helping Newton become a more diverse, inclusive and just community. It works to promote and support the city’s efforts to be a diverse and welcoming community with fair housing choices and opportunities for all, free from discrimination.
Some of the actions the committee is currently undertaking to further their goal include education programs on Fair Housing for realtors, house owners and agencies, city staff and the general public, reviewing major residential development proposals to determine whether they meet regulatory fair housing requirements, and evaluating the use of local preference option in affordable housing lotteries to determine their impact on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.
Full text of the final version of the resolution can be found here.
I voted in favor of the resolution, along with 14 other City Councilors. Eight councilors (Laredo, Baker, Wright, Oliver, Norton, Gentile, Markiewicz, Lucas) stepped virtually “Outside the Rail” to be counted as absent and not voting, which essentially counts as a No vote (i.e. it does not reduce the threshold for a majority). Councilor Malakie voted no outright, citing her disagreements with Federal Fair Housing Law definitions. Altogether, 15 votes in favor was more than sufficient to prevail.
One point the public should understand about Fair Housing Law from the US government is that it confers a right for everyone to be able to afford to live everywhere (i.e. in any municipality), not just to be free of discrimination when seeking to rent or buy a specific home. Taking on the challenge of opening a whole community to everyone means ensuring that there is housing available at every income level in every city or town.
This is addressed most specifically in the recently reinstated Obama Administration rule from the US Department of Housing & Urban Development mandating that all municipalities receiving HUD funding (which Newton does) study best practices for rectifying disparities of “equal access to opportunity” rights for everyone to be able to live in any community, resulting from the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act.
I believe it’s important to emphasize here in my newsletter (as I did in committee) that the resolution only mentioned zoning restrictions broadly as an impediment to ending housing discrimination that the Fair Housing Committee had identified. A number of councilors declining to support the resolution seem to have interpreted this sentence to be a reference to ending “exclusionary” single-family-only zoning, but that was not actually specified in the resolution.
What Councilor Bowman and I have heard (like many other councilors and the Fair Housing Committee) from people who build exclusively low-income affordable housing is that Newton currently does not have any designated zones, even in village centers, where a modestly-sized government-backed project could be built without a zone change on the map first. That is a lengthy and expensive process, which tends to favor major developers of much larger, mixed-income, mixed-use projects who can afford to seek that change.
So, one of the changes Newton would need to make to affirmatively further fair housing under federal rules would probably be to make some changes to our restrictive zoning code – and zoning map – to make it easier to build 100% affordable housing complexes in appropriate, well-supported locations, either by right or by special permit. That doesn’t have to do with whatever objections the other councilors were raising, as far as I heard.