City Update With George Proakis (Hosted by the Watertown Business Coalition)
This is a recording of a presentation from Watertown City Manager George Proakis for a City Update event held by the Watertown Business Coalition at the Hampton Inn at Arsenal Yards on March 11th, 2025. Listen to hear George's thoughts on the economic development in the city of Watertown at the moment.
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (full transcript below)
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Thanks to podcast promotional partner the Watertown Business Coalition, a nonprofit organization focused on connecting local businesses and strengthening our community. Check them out at https://watertownbusinesscoalition.com/.
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I usually sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. But this time I actually just recorded an event. I wasn't interviewing. I was just there to record. This was an event put on by the Watertown Business Coalition where they invited city manager George Proikis to come give a city update with a bit of a focus on economic development in the city, and this event was hosted by Hampton Inn over at Arsenal Yards. And, yeah, we'll hop right into his presentation, which gives you a little bit of insight into the city manager’s and the city's views into the economic development of the city.
George: 0:51
All right, thank you. I didn't prepare my zoning presentation today. It's just a little too early in the morning for that but I did decide that I would give you a bit of an overview of kind of where we are from an economic development perspective as I see it at this point. Certainly there's a lot going on in Watertown. You know, as Bob and Doug said, there's just a lot going on. This past week, as we were finishing up our five-year capital improvement plan with Councilor Piccirilli and the folks at the Budget and Fiscal Oversight Committee of the City Council, we were having a conversation about parks and open space and I realized that, you know, while we were working our way through a number of priorities that have been on that front, we finished five park projects in the last two years. We've got three more under construction to open in July. We've got three starting this summer with Howe and Bemis parks and the second phase of Victory, which is based upon some planning efforts that have been going on for many, many years. So I'm really happy to be here. It is a fast pace but I'm really enjoying the work and everything going on here. So I want to take a moment to thank and acknowledge all of you for being here, especially with a call out to our elected officials. I see Rep Steve Owens in the back here, I see Council President Mark Sedaris and Vice President Vinnie Piccirilli and Councilor Nicole Gardner in the back and I probably missed somebody. So, oh, Caroline Bays, there you are. Good morning, all right, and I have a number of city staff here who I'll probably call out as I go along just as we talk about some of the things that we have going on on this front. I kind of define what I'm doing today around four topics: strategic priorities, where are we now, industry outlook, and kind of our planning and developmental work within City Hall on planning. And some of this, if you've sat through a budget presentation or a number of presentations with us around any particular topic that I have covered in recent years, you may have seen some of these topics in the past.
George: 2:39
So I'm going to jump to this piece first, which is our Home Rule Charter, which was developed through a pretty extensive process just before my arrival here. I arrived in August of 22. The change to the charter, which really sets out and defines what we are as a city government and who we are, one of the big things it did in that charter and then that vote that came along with that charter was the conversation about calling Watertown a city, but there were other pieces in there. It established the role of the Residence Advisory Committee to help me find members of our 25-plus boards and commissions. It established a path to get a Human Rights Commission, which is now up and running. But one of the things that community members spent a significant amount of time with was talking about the guiding principles for who we are as a city, what we are as a community and what we want to be. And they established this statement, which is the preamble statement. It talks about the guiding principles for civic and environmental stewardship in the charter, highlighting the need to prioritize safety and tranquility, health and well-being, excellence in education, creativity and innovation, equity and diversity, and accountability and transparency. And then it notes that these principles yield a list of things that is what we strive for as a community in the work we do every day. Vibrant and welcoming neighborhoods, high quality and inclusive schools, transparent and accountable municipal operations, including performance, excellence, responsiveness and collaboration, and I don't want to forget the last one on that list, which is thriving local businesses. So you put that whole list together and it sort of gives me this kind of bullet point list of how to focus on what we do every day. Now I have combined that with two other lists that you will see me use in just about every presentation I give in Watertown before the city council. So if you're really interested in looking at that, Tuesday April 8th, I believe, should be the day that we'll be presenting the city budget to the council and I will again be talking about how the budget and how our priorities frame around the home rule charter provisions, around the strategic priorities and around the leadership formula that I work with. So, from the basis of the strategic priorities, I try to focus on these particular issues. Continued fiscal stability, and continued, I use that word continued because I'm building on a pretty substantial base when I arrived here in 2022.
George: 4:54
The council, my predecessor, Mr. Driscoll spent a significant amount of effort trying to make sure that we don't find ourselves in the position of a number of other communities where we're struggling to pay for schools, where we're in a structural deficit that constantly requires us to go to overrides, or where we're in a circumstance like that our capital planning falls so far behind schedule that we fall into this trap of deferred maintenance, where we're constantly chasing down the need to fix our public infrastructure, fix our buildings, fix our parks, and there's never enough money to do it. So you end up spending all your money instead on spending it on emergency repairs rather than on saying, okay, here's our long-term plan on where this goes. So fiscal stability is a key piece of this. Climate mitigation and resiliency we've been a leader in that area and we want to continue to be. A commitment to planning, it's tough to hire a 20-year public sector planner as a city manager and not have them put that up there. So that's been something we've been focused on.
George: 5:53
Enhancing our organizational effectiveness, you know I'm almost reaching the point where I could take that one off the list. I feel like we’ve completed a lot of the work in that area, particularly in that we did some realignments and reorganizations to kind of focus on getting the city government's team to match the city council's policy priorities to make sure things are going forward. And building for the future, which fundamentally is a term that's been used to describe the programs for our school buildings. And we are definitely continuing to work on the building for the future program that has been a replacement and upgrade for the schools in Watertown and, beyond that doing some other building for our future as well there, and that has been a priority for us. I take the Home Rule Charter pieces, I take that strategic priority list and this is kind of how I present it back to my staff. And I'm just going to share this today because, even though this is usually more of our internal list, it does frame how I talk to city staff about what we're trying to accomplish and how we try to accomplish it and how we work day to day to do it within city government. The first by maintaining the highest ethical standards. Second, by ensuring our departments are collaborative, work across each other, don't kind of sit in their silos and do their own thing. It's one of the dangerous challenges of government when you have technical expertise in one department that isn't talking to technical expertise in another department about how those pieces work together. We are a small enough organization and we are one that can make sure that we make those connections and we try very hard to make sure we do that every day. Accurate, courteous, and easy customer service. Part of that is our 3-1-1 phone system, where you call 3-1-1 and you can ask them anything about city government. If they don't know the answer, they will chase it down and find it for you. Our community outreach team, making sure that we're getting information out to the community as quickly and successfully as we possibly can. Which leads to the next one, about transparency and process and outcomes.
George: 7:50
I've said for years that when it comes to community process, the worst, the second worst thing someone can say to you in a community meeting is I don't like what you're doing. The worst thing they can say is nobody told me about this. Like I don't ever want to be in the nobody told me about this business. We're doing everything we possibly can and please sign up for our web alerts. Sign up for our Eversource emergency phone call systems, sign up for everything you possibly can, and there is no way you won't know what's going on in Watertown, because we are going to get that information out to you.
George: 8:17
And then the last piece of that leadership formula, which I call be abnormal, is essentially to make sure that we don't necessarily have to do things the same way we have done for a long time. There are paths forward, there are creative solutions, there are strategies we can use. There are different ways we can look at approaching things in government. There are creative ways we can look at figuring out ways to solve problems here in Watertown and I don't want anybody to squelch an idea because they're afraid to suggest it. We'll think about anything. We'll try to see what's possible. A lot of times the answer has to be no, but sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes something works that just happens to work.
George: 8:54
We've added a cadet program in our police department that I think is a creative way to try to get more people interested in a field that's become more difficult for recruitment. We've added a dog in our DPW department that chases geese off of the field. That ended up being the most cost-effective way to address an issue that really was the cause of a lot of complaints when I first arrived and has really been a step forward to making sure that our fields are usable. And if there's a creative solution, we're gonna try to explore it and see if it works for Watertown. So that's kind of the overview of where I am every day with what we do.
George: 9:32
I want to talk a little bit more about where we are now as a community. When I presented the kind of mid-year budget overview in October, I shared some of this economic research and data that our finance team had pulled together and one of the interesting things about Watertown is that we did as many communities do have that drop in employment that came with COVID. By 2023, we have mostly recovered to 2019 numbers. I think when I have 2024 data it'll be above that number 2025, I can't really tell you exactly what's going to happen at this point, but that is kind of where our average employment is. Our unemployment rate you see that peak in 2020. It's down to a very low number by 2023, making staff recruitment and kind of regional growth particularly challenging. Residential sales data sales volume dropped a little bit in 2023. I think that may have more to do with the number of units being put on the market than any lack of interest or demand. I think that demand for housing continues to be stronger than strong and honestly, one of our greatest challenges to regional economic development is how expensive it is to find a place to live here. And our median sale price kind of at about $810,000.
George: 10:44
Construction permits, as you can see, were very strong in 24, 23, 24, and 25 in terms of total numbers. But this is my favorite slide of the whole bunch, which is permit fee revenue. And what you see here is the impact of the real intense growth in the lab industry, which is really such a strong industry cluster for us, that in fiscal year 22, we pulled in permit fee revenue that was $10 million more than we did in the year before, the year after. And those are all the buildings you've seen kind of grow up around us and open around us and it's really built a lot of our new growth. And you see that sort of new growth pop up in 22, 23, 24, that kind of came out of all of that construction. We had a couple of really good years with new tax growth, particularly new commercial tax growth. I am not anticipating that that trend is something that's going to continue for the next couple of years.
George: 11:40
We've kind of gone back into a more challenging environment but it has done very well for us in terms of total property value. And you know, I remind people often that the reason why we're able to build a new high school without going to the voters asking for a debt exclusion, asking for everybody to raise their taxes beyond the Proposition two and a half caps, is because of that. We've had this new commercial growth and we've had this round of good years where our total property valuation has gone from 5 billion, 5 to 11. So you know, we're at a big jump here, and the relative share of commercial versus residential has also started to close a gap. So we're now, in terms of property valuation, about 28% commercial. We were under 20% just about six years ago. This is the dream for a Massachusetts community, based upon kind of where you know, from a tax fiscal perspective, kind of closing that gap between residential and commercial, continuing to have a strong balance of both and being able to have a commercial tax base that is a part of your mix allows you to be able to do a whole lot of things that other communities of our size really struggle with. And so we have been very successful in that fiscal outcome, and I think a lot of it is a lot of strategic positioning around economic development. A lot of it is we have an excellent industry cluster in life sciences and a lot of it is that we've done the public investments that make the private investments possible in terms of planning, in terms of infrastructure, and been able to have some success on that front.
George: 13:15
So I want to talk a little bit about kind of what our top industries are. We've recently named the fastest growing life science hub in the United States by CRE Daily. We have 4 million square feet of lab space now and while vacancies are currently high, indicators are that the industry is still growing, with job growth outpacing layoffs. And I think that last thing is the key. The industry built very aggressively in the lab field in the last couple of years, very aggressively. They definitely saw a move in that direction.
George: 13:45
In a world where a lot of office workers are working remote, lab workers need that opportunity to do their scientific work on site. The opportunity there was growing. The interest in life science was really strong and so far we continue to see growth. That growth is a lot slower and what happened is the square footage of real estate growth took off a lot quicker than the growth in the industry. So there is probably a period now where one needs to absorb the space that has been built before more will get built. That's okay. We are in a situation where we still have one of the most appealing locations for life sciences. Our positioning between Cambridge and the western suburbs is very appealing for that and my expectation is that over time we'll fill that growth. At the same time we have 10 lab buildings permitted in Watertown that have gone all the way through the permit process, that have not started construction.
George: 14:36
When we build our new growth projections for city budgets, I don't include any of those buildings in the five-year outlook and the reason I don't is because I don't want to build a financial plan for the city that depends upon one of them if we don't know when they're going to happen. At some point in time that switch will click on and that will happen and I'll start putting them back into our growth projections. And then there are some things we can figure out what to do at that point in terms of some of our capital project proposals that are unfunded at this point, or looking at how that might create general tax relief across the board. But at this moment in time, with that not clear, it's tough to do that. That brings our budget new growth numbers down a little lower year after year. They're pacing right about at the rate of inflation, which makes it difficult to be able to implement new programs under those circumstances, adding programs, adding staff, adding things, is a little bit more difficult when that new growth number isn't quite where it was before.
George: 15:30
But life science remains a strong industry and we look forward to a continued long-term collaboration in that industry. Beyond that, manufacturing medical devices, pharmaceuticals, companies like Exogen radiation monitoring devices these are folks that, including newer companies like Seven Cycles, the largest titanium and carbon filter custom bicycle manufacturer in the US. And thanks to Erin and Erika for getting me this information, because I myself am still learning about all the cool things going on in Watertown. Construction services is strong. Number one employer in Watertown is VHB, one of the largest national engineering firms. They're right here up the street. I've had the chance to work with them on projects in my 20 plus year planning career. They are our hometown team in that area and they're a big employer in town. But there are also trades that relate to construction pipe fitters, plumbing, hvac, electricians, you know and then our mile of tile companies over here and FW Web and Home Depot, and you know there's a whole bunch of things in the construction services field that all kind of come together here in Watertown and make it a piece of what we are. And then restaurants. We have 85 restaurants in 4 square miles including food that reflects the diversity of our community. Europe, Asia, cuisines from Nepal, the Caribbean, Armenia, Japan, Persia, India, Thailand. Like I mean, we have all of these creative things going on in the restaurant industry that makes us a destination. That makes people want to come to Watertown, stay here, participate in our community.
George: 16:57
Obviously, there's a lot more things outside of these industries, but they're the ones that are generating a lot of energy for us right now and, as I said, we have a commitment to innovation here. We're top four in the state for investment in life science, along with Cambridge, Boston and Somerville. We have $650 million in public and private investment in 2023 alone. We're home to MassEcon, which helps more than 80 companies across the Commonwealth relocate. 31% of those are relocating from elsewhere in the US and 10% global relocation, so they're bringing things into Massachusetts. And a big part of that, that is that should say more than 250 patents have been issued to Watertown companies between 2020 and 2024. I knew there would be a typo on at least one of my slides, but 250 patents issued to Watertown companies, and I think that that’s been a great part of our story here. I think our assets are strong. Our location, as I said, you know, we found ourselves in this great spot where we've got Cambridge's university world just east of us, the suburbs just west of us.
George: 17:56
There is no better place to locate if you want to be accessible to folks who want to commute in from various suburban locations, walk here from places you know to work, from places that are in a very walkable set of neighborhoods and still have close access to the amenities of Cambridge and Boston without necessarily having that extra leap of having to be deep into the middle of the city. We have nine MBTA bus routes that serve Watertown, strong transit connections to Harvard Square, to Waltham Center, express buses to Boston. I'm very committed to continuing to work with the MBTA to make sure that we have the most reliable, high quality transit system we possibly can. For those who've been reading my three-part series lamenting about parking policy, one of the things I said in part three is I want people to be able to have alternatives to transportation. We need to make sure our transit system is continuing to work well. I had a chance to host the general manager of the MBTA in my office and we had a long conversation about that. You know, while I didn’t quite get him to sign up for my red line extension from Harvard, I at least got him to continue to work with us on making sure that we are a priority in their bus prioritization process which is designed to create regular reliable, you know the kind of bus service where you don’t have to be reading the schedule every minute to try to figure out what bus you’re going to miss. But where if, you know, you go stand out at that stop within a few minutes you'll get an opportunity to get a ride in the direction you're headed. We have our own transportation management association with local shuttles and we're doing studies to see how we can grow and work on that and, thanks to Gideon and the transportation team that works in our planning group, we're going to be diving deeper into figuring out what our options are to create internal transportation connections within the area here. Direct access to the Mass Pike at Newton Corner. Strong commitment to bike and ped infrastructure. We have the Greenway, the Charles River access, the Mass Central Rail Trail. There's just so many transportation connections around us on this front.
George: 19:46
Housing is our third big piece here, but I do think it's challenging. We have diverse housing options. We have easy access to surrounding communities. You know the real estate market kind of spikes in where it goes. We've had years of good lab growth. I do think that when the market starts to come back, you'll see the housing side probably come back first, just because circumstances surrounding labs have so much absorption time to go and I don't think we should be afraid of the possibility of housing in the right place in the right circumstance in the right time.
George: 20:12
I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go. It is still our greatest economic development challenge as a region that if people can't afford to move here and live here and raise a family here, it becomes very challenging for companies to choose to locate here and be successful. And we have everything else going for us. We need to address this housing challenge. There's a lot of discussion going on at the state level on that, a lot of discussion going on in communities around us. I'm really proud of all the work we've done in Watertown as we work to address those issues.
George: 20:38
The last item on my list is culture and community. I just think this is a really awesome and interesting place to work and live and be and you know, I hope that more and more people see that as we look at why Watertown has such strengths. I just want to talk a little bit about planning and growth in Watertown. First of all, our own public investment. Second, another note about life sciences, federal programs and then kind of our new economic development functions. And I'm going to kind of flip that list a little bit. I'm going to focus on the economic development functions first.
George: 21:07
So in 2024, after I had been here about a year and a half, and Steve Magoon, our deputy manager for community planning, development planning, and Gideon Schreiber, who at the time had the title assistant planning director, and I we kind of worked on a number of different ways to kind of organize and think about the planning functions in Watertown. And what we ended up coming up with was this system that basically, under Steve's leadership, has two different divisions that work very closely together. It's a little inconvenient right now because they're located across the river from each other, but I do hope by the end of calendar year 25, they'll be together in one space where the interactions and connections between them will be even stronger. But they are very strong right now. So Gideon's team leading permitting, transportation work, housing work, zoning work, and then Erika Jerram, who joined us in mid 2024, is leading the team we call Community Design, which includes the Arts and Culture Planner, the Open Space Planner and Erin, who's sitting here in our front row, who is our Economic Development Planner.
George: 22:06
You know, when I hired Erin and we put together this whole thing talked a lot about the idea that well, Watertown has put economic development as their number one budget priority every year on the revenue side. It's always, you know, remember, use economic development before. We don't want to talk about overrides or other strategies, we want to use economic growth as a strategy that we didn't have a person completely focused on economic development within city government to do that work day to day and just stay focused on it. In particular while some of our larger businesses are able to find their way relatively easy, you know, my focus on having an economic development planner was really to make sure to focus on our small businesses, our corridors and squares, and the emerging industry clusters. The things that are not quite where life science is, but could be if we continue to cultivate them. There's a continual interest in investing in climate tech in the greater Boston area, and making sure that we are part of whatever comes next, along with the strong industries we already have, was a key part of that. Since mid-2024, they've met with over 50 businesses and organizations in Watertown, updated the economic development website, started a newsletter and social media program and have been involved in many activities, including Watertown Square redevelopment, rezoning, working with the planning and zoning team and really fun stuff like making sure the businesses in Coolidge Square are protected and are included in conversation as we rebuild Mount Auburn Street, so that the construction itself doesn't have negative impacts on the day-to-day work with the businesses there, and that is a well underway project that requires quite a bit of work.
George: 23:38
But I'm going to do these kind of backwards, I'm going to take the last, the first one last. I just wanted to say we talked. I talked a little bit about life sciences in Watertown and where things are headed. I do think that there's a future to keep an eye out. I did want to say one little note about federal programs because this is a conversation that comes up quite a bit lately.
George: 24:02
And I'll just share from a from a direct government funding standpoint, we are in a position where we are less dependent upon what goes on in Washington than a lot of communities around us. We're not a community development block grant entitlement community who has, like the last two places I worked, where they have staff that are funded directly by federal programs and we are not receiving large federal grants to do day-to-day work in our community. That means that when it comes to a federal government that comes to a change in administration and they say, okay, we're going to cut this, this, this and that program, it doesn't have a direct, immediate effect on us. There's one $800,000 transportation grant in our pool right now that we were potentially right on the edge of getting. That's a little unclear right now where the program is. Our grant administrative staff basically told us that it's kind of in an up-in the-air moment at this point but relative to running an organization with a $220 million budget, that is less worrisome than some of the other local governments around us have.
George: 24:54
Obviously, from a bigger picture, when you've built a regional economic strategy around education and life science, keeping an eye on whether or not research grants for education and life science are going to flow at the level they have been before does have economic impacts on us as a region. So that's just, it's something to keep an eye on in that, you know, the larger economic growth strategies of the region may be inconsistent with some of the priorities coming out of Washington now, and that is certainly something that we at the local government keep an eye on.
George: 25:27
I am, by nature, as a city manager, not an individual who's going to get involved in the day-to-day of politics at the local, state or national level, but I am going to try to make sure that Watertown's interests are protected and priorities are protected and work closely with our delegation at the state and federal level to make sure to do the best, to do what we can to keep things running here and to keep our priorities and statewide national priorities in order. I do think that one of the things we are keeping an eye on is some of the state government funding programs and how that affects and gets implemented to us. We do rely for a portion of our budget on state aid. The numbers that came out from the governor's budget work fine for us, but you know, as if there's bumps in the state budget, as Rep Owens knows, sometimes those trickle down to become bumps in the local budgets and we just have to keep an eye on what those are and where those are. You know, as you kind of ride the ups and downs of economic priorities of you know kind of rough day on Wall Street yesterday, you know there's. I guess what I am saying about this item is we're in a moment of uncertainty. We're well aware of that. We're monitoring that uncertainty as best we can. You know we have talked quite a bit about how that affects us as a community from an economic development perspective. If you want to talk more about how that affects us from other perspectives, I'm happy to do so. But it's almost 9:15 and I could go on to that and never make it through the rest of these slides.
George: 26:49
Just from a planning perspective, the last thing I wanted to share is our comprehensive plan efforts and the implementation of that plan that we finished in 2023 are underway. We did this plan on Watertown Square area that was based upon zoning amendments and design for streetscapes the zoning amendments. The vote is done. That's complete and now the review of projects under it are in process. The urban revitalization plan for Watertown Square, which is the next step, is something that our planning development team is working on, and the designers for the streetscape and parks will be selected soon.
George: 27:18
We have the Parker building, which we've called our kind of our city hall annex building was a great opportunity for us to purchase a building when an office building came up for sale when the office market wasn't that strong and we were able to make sure that we have space for all of our staff and everything. Currently, we've moved our public buildings, our health and our IT department over there. Our community development and planning team is now split, but in the long run, the entire community development and planning team, the school's family network, the food pantry, a public meeting room, permanent space for our human services functions, an additional space that is still being leased but we could use if we wanted to. I'm really excited about the opportunity of bringing community development and planning together in one location in the Parker building, in this office space that should be done by the end of the year. And I think for people who are looking for a permit, a zoning answer, a planning question, economic development support, having it all behind one front desk in one office is going to be an exciting step for us and I look forward to doing some sort of a ribbon cutting on that by the end of 2025. And then I couldn't be up here talking about our economic growth without talking about Watertown Square. The intersection here in the square, which we did through the community design process last year. We're going to get designers on board to take this through to a full design. We've been setting aside funds and a plan to get that done. We're also looking at the idea of doing structured parking behind CVS as a way of it opens up the ability to build more housing back there. This is a kind of a drawing of what the Santander Bank site could look like if we had the opportunity to do redevelopment there. So there's all sorts of possibilities there. And then you know, with the square going well and the conversations going on and being able to get Parker, the Parker building, where it needs to go.
George: 28:59
Last but not least, I don't want to forget the investment we've been making in schools. The new Watertown High School is under construction. It's on budget, it's, you know, I'm not going to bore you with the numbers on the numbers slide, but just to say the total budget of $220 million. We've been able to hold a solid number now on the budget for a couple of years, even through post-COVID inflation.
George: 29:19
There's a number of different funding sources that have come together to make this possible and it's great to have our high school project underway. The conversation we have going on next with the city council with three elementary schools done and a high school done and a middle school not done is that we have entered into a feasibility study and a conversation about what the future might be for our middle school building. More to come on that, more conversations with the school building committee and the city council on that. We hope to, we have put together a capital plan that would allow us the ability to do a pretty substantial renovation project over there, but whether or not that's the right fit is what the feasibility study is going to try to help us figure out. So, needless to say, there has been a lot going on in the last two and a half years and I am thrilled to have the opportunity and to have the city council have chosen me and continue to stick with me to be here in Watertown to work with this community to try to do the best we can.
George: 30:09
I think there are a lot of things going well. I think there are, as I said, between bumps in real estate markets, in Wall Street markets, in uncertainty in federal funding for some of the types of industry that are priorities here in our region, and we've got to keep an eye out on all those headwinds. We've tried to, as a city, be fiscally conservative, to try to be responsive to those situations, while continuing to lead by the values in our charter principles that I laid out in that very first slide and use the leadership formula and the strategic priorities to move us forward. So that is where I am and I thank you all for coming to hear me today.
Doug: 30:54
Do you have time for a few questions?
George: 30:55
As long as everyone else does, I'm good.
Doug: 30:58
George is okay to take a few questions. So, Matt, we have a second mic, right? Maybe we can walk around with a microphone. I guess fire away, right. Who's got a question?
Speaker 4: 31:09
Thanks. What about the old police station? Haven't heard about that in a while.
George: 31:13
So the old police station building, the one that is next to the library there is, we've decided, essentially we've gone as far as deciding that the building itself isn't really able to be retrofitted to much of anything. It's currently storing some city archives that we are still in the process of digitizing and removing, but it should be a pretty empty building pretty soon. The Watertown Square plan identified it as a potential redevelopment site. There's one or two or three different ways of looking at it that we could still consider. One is it could be a housing site. It could be an affordable housing site. It could be mixed in, the library is doing some strategic planning now, so it could be mixed in with a library expansion since it's right next. You could take it down.
George: 31:52
One of the things the square plan suggested is the possibility of building a library expansion and affordable housing, kind of like wrapped around the existing library and then parking for the library kind of built into that. That's kind of a dream. I don't know where it will go, but it's a great site. At one point in time we looked at that for the city annex offices, but it just doesn't work. Buying Parker was a much lower cost and effective option than and a larger site than it ever would have been. But I would love to be able to see you know if the library strategic plan leads to an expansion plan, seeing if there's a possibility to do. Boston's doing a lot of things right now where they're doing library rebuilds with affordable housing and kind of mixing those things together. So it would be interesting to explore. But it's a little too early to determine, other than to say that you know we've put some funding in the capital plan to actually demolish the building but we haven't actually gotten to the point to do that yet.
Speaker 4: 32:43
Hi, Sherri Kennedy with Turtle Studios. They used to be in Watertown. I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about the cultural district designation and how that plays into economic development and that vision.
George: 32:55
Sure thing. It has been a substantial, really great undertaking by the cultural boards, our planner, Liz Helfer, who works on the arts and culture programs, to get us a cultural district designation. Now the borders of that surround Watertown Square, so it intersects really well with the existing cultural facilities that are there, with the Watertown Square growth plans, and making sure to keep the cultural district in mind as we look at growth and change in the square is a key part of that. But I often remind people that even though the district may have a boundary, it does allow us to capture those cultural facilities that are beyond the boundary and kind of bring them into the whole conversation.
George: 33:37
I think at the end of the day, building an economic development strategy that has arts and culture at its core is always a strong strategy for bringing people in the community. It helps our restaurants, it helps our small business. You know my 20-year planning career was in Somerville and Lowell, which are two places that you know really thrived on making the arts a big part of their economic development strategy, and I'm hoping that with the cultural district designation we'll be able to spend a lot of time focusing on that here too.
Doug: 34:06
We know we have a lot of business people in the room too. If you have to fly, don't be bashful.
George: 34:08
I won't feel bad, but at the same time I'm also happy to answer questions.
Speaker 5: 34:12
Thanks, Libby Shaw, Trees for Watertown. So I'd love to hear what you can tell us about Watertown's plans for making sure that our city stays environmentally a good place to live as it's being densified. As you know, there's a concept called the 3-30-300 rule the idea that it's being embraced actually internationally for urban environments. The concept is that for the highest quality health in urban populations, you'd like to build things so that every house has a view, every home has a view of at least three healthy mature trees, every neighborhood has at least 30% tree canopy and every home or business is within a five-minute walk, that is, 300 meters of a healthy green park space. And I'm just hoping that you can talk a little bit about how Watertown's plans are working towards incorporating green planning along with densifying our neighborhoods and our Watertown Square. Thanks.
George: 35:11
Sure, and thanks for the question. We have been a we certainly have been a leader on climate issues and that has been a real focus for us. How it translates from a plan level to a neighborhood plan and individual development projects is still something that we are working through case by case every day. I will share that there's a couple of things that we are trying to do the best we can to move some of those efforts forward. One of which is we've done a pretty substantial investment in the parks and open spaces and making sure that people have a walkable public open space within short distance of wherever they're living. And focusing and this has been a subject that we've needed some work on focusing on making sure that there's tree canopy and shade and opportunities for both sunny spots and shady spots within those parks and open spaces. And, with the addition of the open space planner to the staff, making sure that every one of our park rehab projects looks at the ecological impact, looks at the health of the trees within that park and looks at making sure that while there are multiple priorities for an open space, one is play structures, one is recreation space, but one is having enough mature trees both to provide a better environment there and, on the sunniest, hottest days, to provide shady spaces as part of what is within those parks. So that's a priority we're working on. As far as our own public open space goes. We certainly also are very focused on our street tree canopy and our continued investment in street trees. We are planting at the most rapid pace we possibly can on that front. And then, as it relates to individual developments, the challenge is always looking at kind of how to fit the ecological priorities into the space we have available under the circumstances. It's something we're still we're going to continue refining and working with as we pursue the redevelopment plan and the design plans for Watertown Square.
George: 37:08
One of the things I'll say about Watertown Square that we are doing we're putting out to bid to hire an engineer and then, after we do that, the engineer and us are going to go out to bid to find a landscape architect that can both work with that engineer and work with us. It is common a lot of times on these street projects to look for the team together where the engineer and the landscape architect kind of bid together and the result of that often is you end up picking the team that's the best engineering team, because you need the best engineering team and the landscape architect sort of becomes whoever they decided to bring with them. And I just want to make sure that for Watertown Square that we're very strategic. I mean there's a small but incredibly important pocket park in that design behind the CVS block.
George: 37:50
If we do that redevelopment work there and we structure the parking, that green space, that that little park, it's not that big, but it is the key piece to pedestrian activity and connecting kind of everybody in two other buildings nearby and kind of strengthening the retail of Spring Street and Mount Auburn Street and creating a place where people want to be, in addition to the Delta, which also, you know, everything is kind of we want to take a look at all of it, as we, you know, we're picking up three acres of land that is currently vehicle infrastructure with that plan. We want to make sure that we use it the best way possible. So all of that is underway and I also appreciate your kind thoughts about Mr Brady, my new DPW director, who's also here in the room, who you know has a background as an arborist and working with trees, and he'll be a big part of our conversation as we're doing design work in the community as well.
Speaker 4: 38:42
It's great that you finally got some more space for your city staff that they can all fit in. But the Parker School is kind of hard to get to if you don't have a car and it's a very long walk between City Hall and the school. So I wonder if you're considering a shuttle between the two as maybe part of your look at local transit.
George: 39:05
So I will say, on a nice day for those who are willing and able and can do the trip, the walk between City Hall and Parker is one of the nicest ways to get out of the office because you have to walk across the bridge in the Charles River and along the riverfront paths and it's a pleasant walk if you can do it. And we're also, Fifth Avenue is one of our streets that we want to upgrade next and want to make it more pedestrian friendly. It's a very wide traffic street. It's part of that connection on that walk and those of us on the staff who walk back and forth every day probably often spend a little bit of time looking, going, oh, this could be quite a little bit better for us. So my first goal is to make it the nicest, greatest walking path route that it possibly can be and take advantage of the fact that wandering back and forth across the river is pretty nice. It is for the most part faster than getting in your car and trying to drive through Watertown Square and around to actually do it.
George: 39:56
But you are correct that for the services we're providing there, we are concentrating our human services efforts in the Parker building because it's the best building for it. I want to make sure community members have the best access to it. The food pantry program, the human services program, our veterans officers going over there. We do have a shuttle the Transportation Management Association shuttle system that currently hits various places in Watertown. We are doing a study at where and how we can more effectively use it and get more ridership on it. There may be a link, if we could find it, between that shuttle system and efforts to get people to Parker who need to get to Parker. So I do want to make sure that members of the public who need services there can get there. I do think that's very important. So we'll be looking into that. We'll be exploring that the best we can, and I'll also be exploring making sure that's the most pleasant walk it can be too. So we have both options available.
Doug: 40:53
Thank you so much. We have the room for another little while, so if you want some coffee, some pastries, hang around, meet a new friend, say hi to a colleague, feel free to do so. Just a couple of quick announcements. As I see this picture of the new Watertown High School over to the right, the Watertown Business Coalition and the Watertown Public Schools are combining for a first of its kind, community STEM night. That's going to be on April the 29th, from 530 to eight o'clock. This is an opportunity to showcase a lot of the amazing opportunities that there are from grades six through 12 in our schools and a sneak peek for a lot of our elementary school kids and families too. So please put that on your calendar.
Doug: 41:29
And if you want to celebrate our newly minted Watertown Cultural District, our May event is going to be at Bar Cino, out back. By the time that rolls around, which is May 21st, we will have had a successful yard art. Matt Hanna, raise your hand, an amazing porch fest run by Matt Hanna and a great committee. So that should be a great celebration. We'd love to see you out there. And that, I believe, is going to be May 20th or 21st. I think we've got a solidified date. No, sorry, our event Porch Fest is the 17th. Absolutely be there and don't leave the city that day, but thank you all for coming. We got a website for that. And, George, thank you. We truly believe you're the right leader for the right time. Thank you for sharing your morning with us this morning. Thanks so much.
Matt: 42:16
So that's it for the Watertown Business Coalition event, the City Update with George Proakis. If you're looking for more updates from the city, I also just released a local government updates podcast I do monthly with Tyler Cote over at City Hall and Victoria Weichel at WCA-TV, and we touch on a lot of different things than are brought up in this conversation in a light conversation. So check that out if you're interested in that. And you can head on over to littellocalconversations.com for more episodes, events and things to look out for. All right, I just want to give a couple shout outs here to end this. I want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast, and I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org or massculturalcouncil.org.
Matt: 43:07
I also want to give a shout out to a promotional partner, the Watertown Business Coalition, who is the host of this event with George. They're a non-profit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. Find out more about them at watertownbusinesscoalition.com. They have some other events coming up, such as the STEM night that Doug mentioned at the end. Check out all their events out at their website. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
