City Council met for close to 2 hours on Wednesday the 15th to begin the process of developing the FY 2019 budget that starts July 1, 2018. The work done yesterday is very preliminary, and the first part of the session involved staff leadership speaking with the Mayor and Commissioners about their ideas and concerns, and the Mayor and Commissioners providing their thoughts about the city and what issues might be addressed.

Some of the issues that I came away with from these discussions included the following:

1. Consideration of reorganizing some staff positions to make them more focused and productive and anticipating the potential of transitions of staff leadership that may be taking place over the next several years. As the past two years have shown an increase in development in Cambridge and additional demands on city staff, additional positions may need to be considered.

2. With the changes coming with the Dorchester Hospital and potential Emergency Room and Medical Facility in town, the sailwinds project has the potential of taking much of our attention as does the upgrading some of our infrastructure. We also need to develop a comprehensive plan on how to address the aging infrastructure that exists.

3. Helping our police force to receive more education and training opportunities as well as housing opportunities in the city in order to help keep them here for a more stable and professional police force should be strongly considered. It is not to the benefit of the city for us to train young officers only to have them leave for better paying jobs elsewhere after only a few years here.

4. We need to look at how the Marina can create positive cash flow for the city rather than continue to break even except for the debt that is assigned to it that creates a loss of approximately $250,000 a year for the next 5 years.

After the above discussions, The Mayor, Commissioners, Staff, and Sharon Smith, the one citizen who attended to public work session, then had the opportunity to brainstorm a visioning process led by the City Manager that addressed these questions:

1. If you were in Cambridge on November 15, 2027 (10 years from now), what would you like to see?

2. At a meeting of citizens who lived in your ward (or in the city) what would be the accomplishments that you would like them to know about.

3. When interviewed by the local newspaper, what are the 3 most important accomplishments that you think have taken place in these past 10 years.

From those responses and the discussions that followed, the City Manager and Staff will subject them to some analysis that will be brought back for further discussion as we move forward with the planning for the 2019 FY budget.

I felt that the morning was well spent and that there seemed to be much consensus among both elected leadership and staff on what priorities need to be addressed moving forward.

Thanks to the City Manager, Elected officials, Staff, and Sharon Smith for a well spent couple of hours on behalf of the City of Cambridge.