There are now agendas posted on the city website for all of this coming week’s (June 19, 2023) town meetings.

Let’s take a look and see what we’ve got on deck…

Board Of Assessors - 6/20, 9:30 AM

First up is the Board Of Assessors on Tuesday 6/20 at 9:30AM. It’s taking place at City Hall. There doesn’t look there will be a Zoom link for it.

There is also not much detail on the agenda, just “Excise Weeks, Ad for Position, Report from Assessor’s Office & RRG” under new and old business, and then an executive session on tax abatements.

On a side note, recordings of these sorts of board and commission meetings only ever randomly seem to make it to GCTV. There was a brief discussion at this month’s Committee Chairs meeting about the inconsistency of meeting recordings (I think it mostly depends on who’s running the meeting), but these bodies all fall under the Mayor’s office. City Council VP Forgey stated at that meeting that she and/or President Guin would make a recommendation to the mayor that these meetings should be recorded.

Council On Aging - 6/20, 1:00 PM

Next is the Council On Aging, also on Tuesday but at 1PM. This meeting will be at the John Zon Community Center. No Zoom link is listed for this one either.

The agenda is pretty generic—mostly the usual reports from various officers—but they will also be voting on new officers for the new fiscal year.

Board Of License Commissioners - 6/20, 4:00 PM

Still on Tuesday, June 20, we’ve then got the Board Of License Commissioners at 4PM. This meeting will take place at City Hall.

In a previous post, I light-heartedly dismissed this as one of the less significant meetings. However, if you want to have some event in town (or an “automated amusement device,” apparently!), your approval has to through this body, so it is actually pretty informative.

For example, I have only just learned from the agenda that there is apparently going to be a block party on my street later this summer.

Ways & Means Committee - 6/30, 6:00 PM

Finally at 6PM on Tuesday, we’ve got the Ways & Means Committee of the City Council.

The committee will be meeting at City Hall and this one will be on Zoom.

There are motions on the agenda for a bunch of end-of-fiscal-year transfers between various municipal funds, as well as a vote on a memorandum of understanding with the union representing the City Hall and library employees.

Keep in mind that votes in committees like this are just recommendations that will then be brought to the full City Council for the final vote up or down.

Ways & Means also has a bunch of items up for discussion this week, including various reservations of Community Preservation funds, a payment approval for some solar stuff, and “Moving operating budget to June and Capital Improvement to January.”

School Committee - 6/21, 3:30 PM.

Then we’re on to Wednesday at 3:30PM for a special School Committee meeting.

This one is online only, and interestingly, they’re using a Google Meet link this time around.

The only item on the agenda is an executive session related to an unspecified collective bargaining or litigation. The committee will not be returning to open session once the executive session is done.

City Council - 6/21, 6:30 PM

And that brings us around to the final meeting for the week, the City Council’s regular monthly meeting.

The meeting kicks off at 6:30PM at the John Zon Community Center and will also be on Zoom.

The full agenda for this month’s City Council meeting can be found here: https://cms5.revize.com/revize/greenfield/Document_Center/Government/City_Council/City%20Council%202023-06-21%20Agenda.pdf

In addition to the standing agenda items—approval of minutes, reports from the Mayor and the Superintendent, public comment, etc.—they have a bunch of board/commission appointments and several funds/property transfers to approve (or not).

The council will also be taking up (yet again) the motion to rezone properties along the French King Highway from Commercial zoning to Planned Industrial zoning. Variations on this proposal have bounced around quite a bit the last few months, with this current version having now received unanimous positive recommendations over the last few weeks from both the Economic Development Committee and the Planning Board. It will be interesting to see whether these various discussions will have done anything to assuage the concerns of some councilors as to whether the land could be used for housing.

And then there is the termination of the TIF agreement for the Ford/Toyota dealership expansion. Based the documentation in the agenda, it looks like they have reached the end of the TIF, and all parties agree that the terms have been met on both sides.

A few other items on the Council’s agenda:

Wrapping up

That’s it for this coming week’s town meetings. Next week looks to be a fairly light one as we head into the end of the month and the Independence Day holiday.

I expect July and August to be relatively light as well. With budget season finally done and lots of people headed out for summer vacations, the City Council typically tends to keep their agendas pretty sparse over the summer. But we’ll see…