Medford and Tufts University are currently in negotiations for the Tufts PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) program, and the Medford City Council and Medford residents want more resident input in the process.

During last week's Medford City Council meeting, the Council requested the Administration to hold a public meeting or advisory meeting with the Medford residents of the Tufts PILOT Committee to further discuss the negotiations and relationship Tufts has with the Medford community.

“I think it’s something we really can’t pass up,” said Council Vice President Breanna Lungo-Koehn on Tuesday night. “To be educated on the needs the people have come up with is extremely important. It’s made up of Medford residents who know what is needed and what our needs are and want to help the Administration negotiate this process.”

Councillor Michael Marks agreed.

“This is a perfect way to involve the community," Marks said. "I agree with getting input from the public. We have our unique community and unique needs in our community. Anything that takes place in this community should be a transparent process."

The five-year PILOT agreement expired in June of 2018, and the program is a voluntary agreement between Tufts University and the City regarding how much money Tufts will pay the City for the lost revenue due to Tuft's exempt property tax status.

The City is currently in negotiations with Tufts, and the two parties have met multiple times in the last few months to try to create a fair deal.

“They don’t have to pay anything for the services they get in the community,” explained Medford Mayor Stephanie M. Burke. “We are still in negotiations with them. We are hopeful that we can do something before June 30 because obviously they can’t pay us unless we have an agreement in hand. We hope to be able to reach an agreement.”

Lungo-Koehn believes the residents can be crucial to assisting with the negotiations.

“The Committee has outlined a number of things needed in the community,” Lungo-Koehn said. “There is a whole host of things we would try to get into this agreement. This is coming from residents.”

Eric Von Berg, a Medford resident who lives in the Tufts area, said he and other residents have spoke with their Somerville counterparts monthly to discuss the PILOT program, and they want Medford to receive more compensation back from Tufts University.

“Our goal is to get more out of tufts, i.e. parody with Boston, where their PILOT agreements are 25 percent,” Von Berg said Tuesday night. “50 percent cash and 50 percent community benefits is how that is broken up.”

Von Berg insisted the City is not receiving enough money back from Tufts because Tufts was only paying Somerville and Medford 4 percent in the last agreement, compared to paying 25 percent to Boston. He stressed that community input is needed to help assist the process.

“[We want] to provide a space for community input and to have this input incorporated into the agreement and to get more effective community benefits dictated by community needs, not dictated by just what Tufts wants to do,” Von Berg said.

Von Berg noted they met with Burke and other town employees on May of 2018, and they held a community forum on June 14. However, Von Berg said they have not received much feedback from the Mayor’s office recently about the PILOT negotiations.

“We are not really sure what Mayor Burke is up to besides just saying she is negotiating,” he said. “It would be to the City of Medford’s benefit to have the information from the community so that it can be used in the negotiations.”

However, Burke explained she didn’t give feedback about the negotiations right away due to a couple of different factors, and she said she wants feedback from the community in regards to the PILOT program.

“When we first had the meeting, it went quiet for several months after the meeting because the [Tufts] President was traveling and he didn’t have much of a timeline to meet with us,” Burke said. “In the last month and a half, we have met a couple of times with him. Over that time period, which appeared to be stealth but it really wasn’t, our assessor was working with Tufts University to make sure that all the properties that they owned were valued correctly in the proper name. She spent about four hard months working with Tufts University and Somerville to come up with an inventory that reflects current day values and actual properties that are in Medford versus Somerville.”

“We were working on those assessments,” Burke continued, “and I didn’t want to sit down with them until we had the assessments that we were 100 percent accurate so when we took that hiatus it was because the assessor’s database was not accurate and now it is and we are very comfortable with those figures.”

City officials want a fairer deal

The City Council and Burke both believe Medford should be receiving more money from Tufts in the PILOT program.

“We are talking about a good amount of money Boston receives from Tufts that Medford needs to tap into,” Lungo-Koehn said. “We have seen outlines of what more can be done and to have a committee to help do this work, you need to tap into that.”

Councillor George Scarpelli insisted that Tufts needs to do more for the community.

“The numbers are true,” Scarpelli said. “They are right in front of us. I should see a lot more benefits coming back to our community. I think they need to be better neighbors.”

Burke said it is not fair that Boston receives $600,000 in payment from the PILOT program, while Medford only receives $250,000, even though Medford offers more services to Tufts than Boston does, such as providing the Fire, Police and the Building Department. She explained this concern to Tufts in the negotiations, and the two parties are trying to make a fairer deal for the future.

“They took recognition of that and pretty much agreed that at the end of this whole process, they want all three communities to be equal in their structure,” said Burke. “They are really keen on equality.”