Medford needs more revenue to fix the short-term budget crisis.

The Medford City Council won major improvements to the FY23 Medford City Budget last night—including increased funding for our schools, our library, legal and zoning support for the Council, and more. Thank you to all of my fellow Councilors for sticking together and demanding better. The negotiation that happened last night at 1AM—at the last possible second—should have happened weeks or months ago. 

I thank Mayor Lungo-Koehn for publicly taking responsibility for the broken process that led us to that point, and I also thank her and her entire staff for committing to do better in the weeks and months ahead. The City Council once again took a leap of faith, and I hope last night represents a true shift towards the collaboration, transparency, and equal partnership Medford residents deserve from their city government.

However, this compromise does not solve our urgent short-term need for more revenue to fund essential public services and avoid barebones budgets for our schools, roads, sidewalks, library, and all of our city departments over the next several years. This compromise certainly is not a plan for the long-term budget needs crisis we all live with every day. We still face a structural deficit of between $8 million (FY23 approved budget) and $12 million (FY22 budget and original requested FY23 budget). We can’t rely on hope to fill in that budget gap.

Without more revenue, we’ll be asking City and school departments to “do more with less” with barebones budget proposals in FY24 and FY25. The clock is running out for us to do something, and I hope that, by July 14th, the Mayor will submit a more detailed proposal to the Council than the one we received yesterday about how we can avoid more cuts in the next few budgets without raising more revenue. If not, I will ask my fellow Councilors to take action and give the Mayor the option to trust in the voters to make this major decision about Medford’s future through a citywide referendum on an override.

Special thanks goes out to the thousands of Medford residents who watched, participated in this process, and stood together as a community alongside the Council. Thank you to our MPS educators, our city staff, and Medford residents who so powerfully spoke up about the harm caused by systemic underfunding of our budget, and why we need to invest more so that everyone in our community gets the city and school services they deserve.

There is a long road ahead and a lot of work to do, but I know we can build a better future for Medford together.

In Solidarity,
Zac Bears
Medford City Councilor