Local Government Update, September 2025
Listen to the latest conversation with Tyler Cote, the Community Engagement Specialist for the City of Watertown, and Victoria Weichel from WCA-TV to discuss things that have happened during the past month in Watertown through key moments, success stories, and important numbers.
Released September, 9th, 2025
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
Links mentioned in episode:
August 18th School Committee Meeting
ADA Self Evaluation & Transition Plan
August 12th City Council Meeting
What's Up Watertown Newsletter
Trash and Recycling Strike Updates
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Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode, I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This episode is one of the monthly local government updates that I do with Tyler Cote, the community engagement specialist for the city of Watertown, and Victoria Weichel over at Watertown Cable Access. We had this conversation over at the Cable Access studio and it's for the month of September 2025. So let's get into the conversation.
Matt: 0:36
Welcome to the local government update episode, and I'm here once again with Tyler Cote.
Tyler: 0:41
Hello.
Matt: 0:42
And Victoria Weichel.
Victoria: 0:43
Hello.
Matt: 0:44
So we're back to school, we're back to fall, back to September. But first, do a little rewind, moments from the past month. Tyler, why don't you take us back to something that happened this past month.
Tyler: 0:55
Sure, I think I've taken up a lot of the time on this podcast talking about Walker Pond so I don't want to bore people too much, but I think it's such an interesting project. In August, mid-August, we hosted our first community meeting about Walker Pond. You can find the recording of that on WCA-TV. I thought it was a great success of a meeting. So, not to step on the toes of one of our next categories of success stories, I'll keep them separate, but it was a great meeting. It was a great opportunity for our community to come. Had about 60 people come on the day to the Jewish Community Day School, which was great. We already have over 250 survey responses, which is fantastic. I love to see those numbers. It's great engagement for a community engagement specialist, love pointing to that. But it was a great meeting. Our consultants were able to speak about some of the ecological side of it. I know I've spoken in the past about, you know, how there's a bullfrog somewhere, but we haven't been able to identify it.
Matt: 1:46
I still think it's in the shed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tyler: 1:48
There's stuff going on here that maybe we can't see. There's something like 2,000 bat calls that they heard in the night, which could just be one bat calling 2,000 times. It doesn't mean there are 2,000 bats. You know, getting into the size of the goldfish of people that dumped it in that pond several years ago or something. So it was an interesting presentation about some of those things that can sometimes be perceived relatively comically, but then also like this is the reality of the site. These are some of the invasive trees that are here. This is what's possible, what's not. Here's the deal with the soil. It's fine, it's safe, which is an important thing to detail. It is safe soil. But it is something that being aware of what is there can impact what is possible. And it was a really helpful presentation. Then, after we did the presentations, we broke off into six groups. So we had about six groups of 10 or so where people were answering questions of what's your vision for Walker Pond? What would you like to see? What is something that does not exist in Watertown that you would like to see here? You know, it sits on the west side of Watertown, as we've talked about, right on the Waltham-Watertown line, next to the BJ's, over on, I believe that's Seyon Street. And there's just a lot of opportunity with that site. We have, of course, the Charles River, but we don't really have a body of water that is kind of like a blank canvas, to be what it is that we wanted. So it's a great opportunity.
Tyler: 3:10
Something I heard from one of our residents at the time was that they would like to see Walker Pond be less organized and more magical, which I thought was a really interesting way to describe the future of the space, or at least their vision for it. They don't necessarily want it to be kind of like strict lines and squares and have it be specific fields or courts. They kind of want it to be this unorganized place that they can go and passively enjoy and sit on lawn space, have shaded areas. And we heard a lot of that. We heard a lot of different ideas. You know, there's an existing broken down structure there. One person was saying that they want to turn it into a rock climbing wall. I'm not saying that's what we're going to do, but those were the kinds of creative ideas that were kind of flowing in the room and as soon as creativity starts going, you know, it's hard to stop that ball, which is a good thing.
Tyler: 3:57
So there's currently a survey up. You can go to watertown-ma.gov, slash walker pond, all one word. And you can take the survey there. You can see the presentation, you can watch the recording, you can see a video that I took walking through the Walker Pond site so you can actually get a sense of what it's like if you've never been there before. That survey is open through I believe it is September 15th. So please feel free to go on, take the survey, share your opinions. We're going to have our second community meeting at the end of October, early November. Please keep an eye out for that announcement when we have that finalized and ready to go.
Tyler: 4:32
But what we'll do once we get all this feedback in is the design team will work closely with the city, taking a lot of that public input to identify what are some potential options, and then we draft up several different ideas, several different options, and then we'll go back to the community and say this is what you told us we'd like. Here is what it could potentially look like. Now it's just a draft, no decisions are made. We'll have that second opportunity, more surveys, more chance for people to actually get feedback. So it was a great opportunity for everybody to come out. I thought it was a fantastic meeting and I'm excited that this project is continuing forward the way that it is.
Matt: 5:04
Yeah, glad that so many people came out. That's good for you. And still the early stages so people can still get involved. But things kind of snowball from early ideas sometimes, so get your thoughts in early.
Tyler: 5:14
Yeah, absolutely. Please get your thoughts in, take that survey, share an email with us any way you can.
Matt: 5:20
Gotcha. Maybe someone will find the bullfrogs.
Victoria: 5:22
I think the bullfrog needs a name.
Tyler: 5:24
Yeah, we should add that to the end of the survey actually. Just fill in your name for the bullfrog.
Matt: 5:29
A little mascot for Walker Pond.
Tyler: 5:33
There we go. That could be our logo for Walker Pond. You walk in, have a little sign as you come in. That’d be beautiful. There we go.
Victoria: 5:39
Maybe work with art and culture, work with art and culture and get like an artist to draw up one.
Tyler: 5:42
This is what we're talking about when we say creativity snowballs, and it's hard to stop that ball once it gets rolling.
Matt: 5:47
I'm sure people would love to spend city money on like a full body bullfrog mascot outfit for someone to stand in.
Tyler: 5:54
24-7, always at the park.
Matt: 5:56
It's a good thing I wasn't at that meeting. Great. Well, yes, people check that out and keep a lookout for the next meeting. All right, Victoria, what's your moment from the past month?
Victoria: 6:06
So, speaking of back to school from earlier, during August 18th school committee meeting, WHS principal Joel Giacobozzi revealed that the high school will be the first public high school to pilot an app that will disable a student's phone while they are in class. So a little bit of how this app will work. The students will download an app to their phones. Students can leave their phones in the front office if they don't want to participate in using the app. The app is called Doorman. Students then will tap their phone to a device within the class and it will take attendance, but it will also tell the app and the phone that the student is in class. So it will block text messages and limit internet access for the student on their phone. As soon as the class is over, the app will bring back internet access, text messages, and all that. It does not block phone calls. As Joel discussed in the meeting, that is typically not a problem within schools. It's more just scrolling through the apps like Instagram and Snapchat. It will also let school admin know what apps students are trying to access if they are trying to scroll through it, try to bypass the app. Giacobozzi emphasized that it was important for students to have access to their phones, as the high school allows upperclassmen to leave campus, so it will not affect them if they need to get in contact with someone when they're not in class or if they just go to Moxley Field.
Victoria: 7:19
The app doesn't collect any data and the school admin can lift the locks if they need to. So if there's an emergency, the school admin can lift the locks if need be. Joel mentioned that another school is using it. It is a private school. And this is just a pilot program as of right now. So at the end of the year they'll meet, discuss it, see how they feel. If they want to continue using the app, it will be $5 per student to continue using it. This app will be compliant to a possible state legislation that would require districts to adopt a similar policy by fall of 2026.
Matt: 7:51
Yeah, now, does the city have any perspective on this, or is this a?
Tyler: 7:55
This is something that definitely goes back to the schools and the school committee more specifically than the city. So no real comments other than that I think it's a really creative solution to something that the school committee and school department has kind of identified as this kind of percolating issue of phone use. And, like you said, it's creative in the sense of no access to text, necessarily, or social media, but then still having access to phone calls. And I believe principal Joel had mentioned that phone calls really aren't the problem that they're facing, which anecdotally makes a lot of sense.
Matt: 8:27
But the school committee. So they said they're going to look at the end of the year or they're going to make like periodic check-ins throughout the year about this?
Victoria: 8:33
They did not say, but they will have someone with the company, Doorman, in Watertown for the year. So if they come in with any issues, there's someone there for tech support. At the end of the year, I believe Giacobozzi said he was meeting with the other principal from the school that is also using it and they're going to give feedback back to Doorman about how they feel about the app, tell what they liked about it, what they didn't like, and all that.
Matt: 8:53
And we are recording this on the first day of school, so haven't heard any feedback out in the world yet. So, but we'll see what happens with that. Let's move on to our next section, which is success stories. Tyler, what's your success story?
Tyler: 9:11
Yeah. So this actually lends back to something Victoria mentioned a couple of months ago when the ADA self-evaluation and transition plan. There was a meeting about it which is, I believe, what Victoria had spoken about, in front of the Commission on Disability, which essentially the city received a grant to do a year-long evaluation, ADA evaluation, of our program services and buildings. And this is something that several communities do. And essentially you get the grant from the Mass Commission on Disability, which is a state office, to evaluate all your programs, buildings, everything, see how ADA accessible they are. They make recommendations. That goes into something called a transition plan. And then us, as a city, will now be able to go back to the state and we qualify for extra grant funds because we did this transition plan. So it kind of opens up this door of funding for us to make our city more accessible, which is good. That's a benefit and something that is also incredibly important, right.
Tyler: 10:04
Now, when we had spoken about in the past, the report had not been finalized, but now it is. And I just haven't really had a chance to talk about it with this busy summer, but I'll make sure to include the report appendices, everything in the show notes of this episode. And really what it looks at, it looks at some of our programs and services and identifies ways that we can make them more accessible, moving meetings to accessible locations if they currently aren't. And then there's, of course, the built environment side of it as well. So it really is everything from add alternative text to your photos on the website to this bathroom is not ADA accessible and you need to rip it up and rebuild it. There was nothing that extreme, I don't think, in terms of like you need to completely tear apart a bathroom and make it more accessible. A lot of times it's just small fixes here and there. Or a ramp might not be the perfect grade and needs to maybe be a little bit shallower grade as opposed to something so steep. So all those recommendations are sent to us and now what we're working on is the implementation of all of these things.
Tyler: 11:06
Now, the reason that I'm putting this into our success story partially is because we’re already working to get these implementations and some of them are already up and running. So one thing that I can share is that we have iPads over at City Hall now where if anybody needs to come by and needs ASL interpretation, then we’ll have that right away, which is great. I may have mentioned that in a previous episode, but that is 100% final now, which is fantastic. We'll have signage up at all those places, which is great, so that when people walk in they know who to go to, how to get that ASL interpretation at a given time. If you are getting ready for Faire on the Square, you'll go on the website and any of our future promotion about it and you'll see a statement on there that says that if you need reasonable accommodation, you can reach out to X email, which is ADA at watertown-ma.gov, to submit that reasonable accommodation. We do ask if it's possible for you to submit that about seven days prior to an event just to allow us time, a reasonable amount of time, to actually fulfill those requests. And then what you'll start seeing on all of our agendas here, probably some point this month as well. Part of this is the tech side of making sure that it all can get input into our online systems, but on all of our city council agendas, boards and commissions, all those, email and statement of how you can request reasonable accommodation for those as well. So those are some of like those early steps that are coming from this self-evaluation plan.
Tyler: 12:25
By the time this episode releases, several of those that I just mentioned will be up and going. I know the Faire in the Square is going. If you're following the Walker Pond meeting, all of that promotion included ADA accommodation language as well. So it’s really important to the city that we are making our programs and our services accessible for people to come, and make our programs available in a way that people don't have to think about whether they can join. They're just thinking about whether it works with their schedule, for example. Those are the things that are most important to us, so we're making sure that we're taking those steps and continue to stay tuned on those items. I'll continue to keep people up to date through this podcast and then, of course, through our normal channels. But I'm happy about the early steps that we're taking. Myself, city manager's office, public buildings, public works, human services, we've already met and started documenting all these things that we're going to be working on here in the short, medium and long term, which is great, which can also be found on the transition plan. So there's hard work already happening on this front and making this city more accessible to everybody. And, yeah, stay tuned.
Matt: 13:26
Great. Sounds like all good stuff. Victoria, what's your success story?
Victoria: 13:30
My success story is during the city council's August 12th meeting, the city council voted to approve a new policy for controlling the lights at rec department run fields in general, but the big one is Victory Field, especially as now it is under construction for its long-awaited phase two. These policies vary to balance community needs, public assets, and energy conservation. There was some confusion among councillors so it will be getting refined a little bit in the future, but the council approved it unanimously. So if you have any experience with lights staying on too long, I know Victory Field was one of the big ones being brought up, you should be seeing changes very soon.
Matt: 14:08
So they basically changed the schedule that the lights are going to be on or like, made it easier for, like I don't know, Ernie or someone, to just click the button on his phone or something to turn them on.
Victoria: 14:18
It's a little bit of both really. It's mostly just making sure the lights are turned off at a reasonable time. They're not coming on and off frequently. If they're going to be on, they're going to stay on until they're supposed to be shut down for the night.
Matt: 14:29
Gotcha. Sounds like that encapsulates it all. Great, all right. Let's move right along then to our next section, which is, did you know? Hey, Tyler, I'm just going to give you a, hmm?
Tyler: 14:38
That's perfect. Yeah, so this isn't necessarily like a city procedure or explaining a policy or anything. So if you both have questions, please feel free to send them my way here in this discussion. But I thought it'd be helpful for me to give a little bit of an insight, or pull back the curtain a touch, about the way that our communications team looks at announcements. Because a lot of times that is how, obviously just by the nature of the name, our community is finding out about things like meetings and parks coming up and community opportunities for survey input, things like that. I think it'd be helpful to kind of talk about all the elements that kind of go into how those things come together. So there are some items that we end up announcing a month before. So let's take Arsenal Park, for example. The opening of Arsenal Park. We announced the save the date for the ribbon cutting about a month beforehand because wanted to build anticipation, wanted to get people talking about it, have people kind of excited about the upcoming of that event. Now I believe that ended up, that event I believe was on July 15th. Now our Walker Pond meeting was on August 14th. The interest in Arsenal Park and Walker Pond, there's certainly a Venn diagram there and that's something that us and our communications team are thinking about. It was also very important to us that we didn't release those two things in a way that was confusing to people. Show up to one on July 14th instead of 15th, but actually it's August 14th that the event is and July 15th something like that. So we'll wait until after that event at Arsenal Park to announce Walker Pond because we want to cut down on any sort of confusion that can come from just crisscrossing dates.
Tyler: 16:17
You know, everybody has so much going on that we want to make sure that we are making things as easily accessible and understandable as humanly possible. And there's more to it than that, because there's other items that may come up that we are looking at and we're thinking this is really only going to impact one or two streets in Watertown because construction happening in that specific area, it's not an artery street, as it's called, or an artery way, which is meaning that it's mainly only accessed by people that live on that street, right. So the announcement process for that, from a communications perspective, is more okay, let's type up letters and have those dropped off at those properties and then maybe we'll do our Everbridge system. Which is we can go into our maps and kind of draw a circle on that street only and then a phone call will go to those houses specifically. And with construction schedules, throwing into another loop of those are generally not 100%, we can't really say that this is going to definitely happen on Wednesday and this is definitely going to happen on Thursday. So when you have that, that creates even more complexity in terms of our timing of getting that announcement out, because we don't want to send it out a month beforehand, because what if it rains for a week straight and then all construction schedule gets moved back. So therefore we have to end up releasing that, probably up to maybe a week before, maybe 48 hours.
Tyler: 17:45
We don't like doing 48 hours. That's not a lot of time. We try and do as much time as we possibly can. But all this is to say is that we're really trying to match the scope of our announcements with the amount of time that we're giving beforehand. So something like the survey after Walker Pond we're not going to announce, this is where you will find the survey necessarily like a month before, because we don't want people to forget about the release of that survey. So typically wait, build anticipation as we get closer to it, release more details about Walker Pond as we get closer to that meeting and then, as we're getting right up to the meeting, saying that a survey will be released soon after where people can give that feedback.
Tyler: 18:24
You know, it can sound quite simple and I don't want it to sound as though that I'm explaining something that everybody understands. But we have 20 departments in the city that we're trying to coordinate announcements from each of them at any given time. And sometimes it can feel like we're not announcing something or announcing something too soon. But it's really fitting into kind of this grand calendar that we're kind of looking at at any given time and making sure that we're matching pieces. So the reason I'm bringing this up is partially because a general rule of thumb that I like putting on people's radar is that big events, big community meetings, we typically do one to two months before that event. If it's something that is a little bit smaller in scope, you'll probably see that down to like two to three weeks before. And then if it's strictly educational, so for example, the short-term rental announcement reminding our residents about the short-term rental, how it's prohibited in Watertown for anything less than a month and that we only allow for medium and long-term rentals here. That's something where we release letters to properties that may have been identified as operating short-term rentals. As those were getting drafted, there wasn't a need to talk about, you know this is going to be being released soon, beware. We really want to time up the educational piece with the release of the information all at the same time so that people have a full understanding of kind of what's going on. So all that is to say is that everything kind of fits into a grander calendar. We are working as hard as we can to kind of make sure that we're matching that up, not to say that we're always getting things correct. So if you feel as though that you want to know about these items sooner, that feedback is really helpful. You can send that feedback to communications at watertown-ma.gov or you can call 311 at any given time and just let them know.
Tyler: 20:06
We're really trying to be thoughtful about the way that we're releasing our information as much as we can. Our typical go-tos are, if we're doing like citywide announcements, you'll see it on our website homepage. You'll see it on our social media. If there's anything super timely, we'll email it out through news announcements, which you can sign up for right through our homepage as well. And then a lot of those items end up going into our end of the week newsletter called What's Up Watertown as well.
Tyler: 20:30
So if you only want to do one thing and get information and announcements from one area, What's Up Watertown is a good place to do that because it's a newsletter. It's in your inbox every single Friday. It gives an update of what happened this week, what's coming up next week, and then what's some of the stuff coming up in the next few weeks. So that's a great way of kind of keeping up to date of what's happening across all our departments at any given time. So forget my belaboring about how do we think about announcements in the city. But I think just framing it in terms of like okay, I can plan out that maybe a month ahead of these things we'll start getting updated. And a month is really, it's not a set in stone rule, but it's generally, we wanna make sure that we're not announcing things too soon to where it falls off people's radar, but not doing it too close to the event, to where people aren't able to kind of match it with their availability and their schedule.
Matt: 21:16
That all makes sense and it's good that you have like the, you know, the thing with announcements on the front page or on social media like they drop off the radar soon, so like the newsletter is nice because you can skim through everything. So having places where you can have quick looks and then permanent pages for all this stuff, it's hard to juggle all that.
Tyler: 21:31
Yeah, and that wasn't. I don't want this to come across as our communications team, our job is so hard. I don't want that to be the idea and I'm not asking for any sort of sympathy. It's more of thinking about the idea of like how we approach our announcements. And also, so that our residents know, our communications team views our website as the backbone of all the communications that we do. As frequently as we can, if we can point back to a city webpage in some form to kind of give more details, that we're going to try and do that as much as we can. And if you feel like we're missing info there, let us know. We can start building webpages that actually fill in those gaps if you feel that they need to be filled.
Matt: 22:07
Gotcha. Yeah, like I said, the only thing I feel like that's missing is TikTok dances.
Tyler: 22:10
Yeah. Yeah, I think we might need to get into that. I'm going to have to talk to our digital media manager.
Matt: 22:17
Maybe you can get George on that? Or do some overlap with Dancing with the Stars, you know,
Tyler: 22:21
Oh, yeah, that's true. Coming up.
Matt: 22:23
Yeah, maybe you can do some recruitment from that.
Tyler: 22:26
Great idea.
Matt: 22:27
Yeah, all right. Well, thanks for that little insight. Great, well, let's just move right on then to another question. Questions we get a lot. What question are you getting a lot these days, Tyler?
Tyler: 22:36
I'm seeing it pop up every once in a while on social media and then we're getting phone calls, emails about it, and it wouldn't be a monthly podcast if I didn't at least mention the trash and recycling strike. So we're getting asked why we aren't giving updates about the strike more specifically and only giving updates about the services. And there's a very good reason for this and it's partially because the strike is between a private vendor, a vendor of the city, but a private company and their laboring workforce. When it's all said and done, we have very little to basically no influence. We have no influence really in how these negotiations are going, any of the agreements that are being made or not being made. It's really out of our hands.
Tyler: 23:18
A lot of the information that we receive regarding whether negotiations are happening or not, we're seeing it through media reports. So we are seeing it the same way that a lot of our residents are seeing it. Whenever our city council or our city manager ends up penning a letter or sending an announcement or sharing any communication directly with Republic, then we post those online and post those on the Republic Strike at watertown-ma.gov slash republicstrike. For all those details and information, we make sure that we post them there. But when it comes to having insights as to like where they are at with the strike, our webpage really isn't the place where you're going into getting those, because we don't really have the information. We want to make sure everything that we're sharing is helpful and useful to our residents at any given time. Our communication is directly with the professionals over at Republic that are helping guide where drivers are, ensuring that we're actually executing the service in a way that is timely, or at least as timely as it possibly can be, making sure that we're going back getting missed pickups, all that stuff. But anything with regards to the strike itself, we are not getting detailed information that we would be able to even make any sort of announcement about. We recommend going to any of your local news sources to find that info, much like we're doing.
Matt: 24:38
Right, and I think the story is that not much has changed other than, you know, you guys keep doing your thing with the services. Yeah, well, hopefully that will be a question we don't have to get a lot soon enough. All right, well, let's move on to the next one, one of the more fun ones I usually like, because I have no idea what the number means. So I'm thinking, 110. I don't know. You got any guesses, Victoria, what Tyler's number of 110 means?
Victoria: 24:58
It's hard to say in Watertown because I feel like a lot of things would be a lot bigger.
Matt: 25:01
I mean, we already knew that the bat calls was 200. So not bat calls.
Tyler: 25:06
2000.
Matt: 25:07
Oh, 2000. I was off by a magnitude.
Victoria: 25:08
It's a smaller number than I would think that would be associated with Watertown.
Matt: 25:14
110. I got nothing. What do you got?
Tyler: 25:22
Number 110 is the number of booths that you can expect at this year's Faire in the Square on September 13th at Saltonstall Park behind Watertown City Hall and the Watertown Free Public Library. Everything from community groups, city departments, local businesses, elected officials and more. It's a great opportunity to come and just get a lay of the land of what is here. We are four square miles of a lot. A very diverse, great opportunity to kind of see and learn who's in the community, who's doing what, how can you get involved? Like so many of these community groups that set up booths are looking for volunteers. If you're interested in volunteering, this is a great opportunity to come down and connect directly with the executive director of a local nonprofit. Or to connect directly with a community group that get together, you know, once or twice a month to have a conversation about art and culture or something. So this is a great opportunity to come down.
Tyler: 26:12
I recommend everybody does. There's going to be food, beverages, community activities. There's more competitions this year than I know what to do with. There's like a chili competition. I think there's a pizza competition that's ongoing right now and an award is given out at Faire in the Square this year. I believe there's a pie competition as well. I'm looking at Victoria to give me affirmation as I list these off. There's going to be music, live shows, face painting, photo booths, lawn games. Our recreation department is going to be out there doing a lot. So highly recommend everybody come down, 149 Main Street. It's going to be behind 149 Main Street, which is Watertown City Hall, on Saltonstall Park and in the parking lots in the surrounding area. So come on down, get to learn who everybody is in your community, what people are doing, have a good time, get some giveaways. There's 100% going to be giveaways. So you can go down, have a good time, spend no money. It's a great opportunity to just engage with Watertown in several different ways.
Matt: 27:06
Yeah, let's see. What other food items are we missing there that we could, you know, like a taco contest. I don't know. Anything to share on that?
Victoria: 27:16
I was just going to say Watertown Cable will be there. We'll do similar to what we did last year. We'll have our own booth so you can come talk to us, but we'll also be broadcasting live from the Faire as well.
Matt: 27:24
Nice, awesome, I'll be there too. So if you've got questions for either one of us, come on up and see us and eat lots of different competitive foods. Is there competitive food eating? That's what they need. Then they need like a pie eating contest. To go along with the pies.
Tyler: 27:37
Hot dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll workshop that for next year. I'll pass it along to our city events team.
Matt: 27:43
So bring that along with the TikTok dances. Lots of good material for you today.
Tyler: 27:47
Yeah, I have a lot to report back to, report back on. So again, that's September 13th, noon to five. Downtown Watertown, Saltonstall Park by Watertown City Hall.
Matt: 27:57
Should be good. All right, so let's just wrap it up then. So that's kind of an upcoming thing along with the number of the month there. Anything else upcoming to mention, got anything, Victoria?
Victoria: 28:08
Just check out our public channel. We'll be having stuff for elections coming up soon. Keep an eye on our social media as those get announced.
Matt: 28:15
Will do. And Tyler, how about you?
Tyler: 28:23
And I'd say the big thing is Watertown State of the City Address will be taking place on Tuesday, September 30th, at 6 pm in the Watertown City Council Chamber at 149 Main Street. This will also be broadcasted live on WCA-TV or you can watch it at home on RCN3 or Comcast 9. It's going to be our city manager, George Proakis, city council president, Mark Sedaris, kind of giving an update on where we are at from this past year of successes and some of the action planning that's been going on and then what you can expect moving forward here in Watertown for the next year. So it's a good opportunity to again, in a different way, get the lay of the land of where we're at from a city's perspective. You can either come down in person, watch online, and we hope that you're able to tune in or join us live in person.
Matt: 29:05
Delightful. Cool. Well then, that's going to wrap it up for this episode. Everyone enjoy your shift into fall and thank you, Tyler, for joining.
Tyler: 29:13
Thank you, Matt.
Matt: 29:14
Thank you, Victoria.
Victoria: 29:15
Thank you.
Matt: 29:17
So that's it for the update with Tyler and Victoria. I'll put links in the notes to things that were mentioned. If you like these episodes or want to hear some of the regular interview episodes I do for the podcast and other special episodes, you can head on over to littlelocalconversations.com. Have all the episodes there. You can see upcoming events, such as Watertown's Open event on September 19th, which is an event to share stories of Watertown business owners that are collaborating with insights from Erin Rathe, the Watertown Senior Planner for Economic Development, and the Watertown Business Coalition, and a whole bunch of local business owners. That's going to be over at the Get Lively Health and Fitness Studio, September 19th at noon. You can find information on the website littlelocalconversations.com. You can also sign up for my weekly newsletter there to keep up to date on all the events and other things going on. And also, like I said, I'll be at the Faire in the Square this weekend If you're listening to this the week it comes out. So come by my table, my booth, say hello and I'll be collecting some stories there to release an episode later. So hope to see you there.
Matt: 30:17
I'd like to give a few shout outs here to wrap things up. First one goes to podcast sponsor Arsenal Financial, which is a financial planning business that's owned by Doug Orifice, who is a very committed community member. And his business, Arsenal Financial helps busy families, small businesses, and people close to retirement. So if you need help with any of those, you can reach out to Doug and his team at arsenalfinancial.com. I also want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So 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 MassCultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org.
Matt: 30:39
And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners. First one goes to the Watertown Business Coalition. They’re a nonprofit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. And the Business Coalition is actually the group that is running the Pizza Fest that is going on right now in the week leading up to Faire in the Square, where they'll award the golden slice to the best pizza in Watertown. So check out their website, watertownbusinesscoalition.com to see details of that and vote for your favorite pizza in town. And lastly, I want to give a thank you to promotional partner Watertown News, which is an online newspaper run by Charlie Breitrose. It's focused on Watertown and it's a great way to stay up to date with everything going on in the city. Check that out at watertownmanews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
