Watertown City Update 2026 With City Manager George Proakis (Hosted by the Watertown Business Coalition)
This is a recording from the Watertown Business Coalition's City Update event with Watertown City Manager George Proakis. The event was on March 5th, 2026 at the Hampton Inn in Watertown. Take a listen to City Manager Proakis' presentation on the city's goals, where things are going now in the city, and then some discussion about planning and growth in Watertown.
Released March 20th, 2026
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
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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 to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This episode is actually just a recording of an event that happened at the Hampton Inn on March 5th, 2026. It was the Watertown Business Coalition's event where they host City Manager George Proakis for a city update. He gives lots of details on what's going on with the city from a business perspective. And he did have slides along with this presentation, but I think you can understand most of what's going on with just the audio. So here's a recording from the event with City Manager George Proakis.
George 0:51
I guess if I'm the senior at the University of Watertown, that means I'm just finally figuring out how everything actually works and pulling everything together here. But yeah, I mean putting together, you know, in the fourth year here and putting together the city budget this year and doing some of the work and pulling the departments together and getting things moving. It does feel like it does help having three years of finished time here under my belt and understanding a lot of the what’s what as we continue our progress here in Watertown. So I think I saw Rep Owens in the room and Councilors Piccirilli and Gardner, thank you for joining us. I have any other elected officials that I didn't see before. Thank you, Representative Owens. Yeah. And I guess it's just the three of you today. But it's great working with our elected officials here. And for what it's worth, you know, I'm the hired manager. They're the policy folks in the room, and they're the folks who are driving and guiding and moving us in the direction of where we can go. And we're trying in the administration every day to do our best to try to deliver the best services, provide the best policy advice, and make sure to do what we can to keep the city moving forward.
George: 1:52
So, you know, some of this, this is a mix of stuff that I've brought up in different sessions. Some of it's new, a lot of it, if you hung out at some of my more exciting mid-year budget presentations, you might have seen some of it before. But I want to talk a little bit about where we are in terms of city goals, where things are going now in the city, and then some discussion about planning and growth in Watertown, and then I'm happy to spend some time answering questions. But I wanted to start with the city goals because one of the things that if you've been following me very carefully, I, we kind of made a shift this year in this past fall in terms of how we are kind of organizing our thought process on what we're prioritizing. It's still mixing together a lot of the stuff we've done before, but I'm just approaching it from a different way.
George: 2:33
So I always like to start from the idea that when you build a goal set about where you're trying to go as a city, you always want to start with a larger vision that the community has bought into. And the home rule charter preamble has been sort of the driving force of that message. And I won't read every word of it, but I think it's something that was a very thoughtful step when the charter was redone about five years ago and a key part of what we do. But the key of it is it talks about these guiding principles about safety and tranquility, learning and excellence, equity and diversity, health and well-being, creativity and innovation, accountability and transparency. And what I had done over the last three years is sort of built these two other kind of pillars of describing what we do around what we called strategic priorities, which was sort of our outward-looking perspective, and leadership formula, which was sort of our inward-looking perspective.
George: 3:21
And this year we took a step, you know, in the in the world of running any sort of business or organization or anything with a budget and a staff of our size of trying to make sure that all of our efforts are pulling in the right direction and that the staff and the community kind of know where we're going and what we're doing and what we're trying, how we're trying to measure things. So our goal was to build a system as we went into the fiscal year 27 budget on city goals. And we sort of pulled the preamble, the strategic priorities, leadership formula, and kind of, you know, I feel like I sort of stuck them all in this funnel and really spun them around and came back out with these six key goals that we talk about is where we want to go as a city. And I want to just take a moment to kind of go through them and some of the things going on with them from the city side, just to sort of give you a perspective of how we think about managing government every day.
George: 4:11
The first is about effective operations that we’ll operate an ethical, efficient, and creative organization that delivers timely and high-quality services and meets the needs of the community. We'll continually modernize systems and foster a culture of collaboration to achieve the highest standards of performance. You know, some of the things that we have highlighted about that is we're improving our hiring process. We submitted the, that's actually a little bit old. We submitted the draft administrative code to the city council in September and a more final copy just a couple of weeks ago. This is a document that kind of organizes how city organization and how boards and commissions work. That is really, in many ways, boring inside baseball, but these rules are scattered over hundreds of different places right now, and they're difficult to find and understand and sort of really understand how the city actually works. We're trying to pull that all together into one place and working with the city council on that. And then we're doing more to collaborate between departments, streamlining projects and improving services.
George: 5:07
On fiscal stability, we'll manage our finances in a professional and responsible manner to maintain a strong fiscal position, use sound financial policies and practices to more effectively use taxpayer dollars, ensure we're equipped to weather economic uncertainty. We continue to fully fund our pension. We're one of about five or six communities in Massachusetts that has reached that point. The second line there is something called it's basically the other, the benefits to our retirees, our other pension benefits that I don't know of a community in the state that's fully funded this account. We are on track to do so by 2031. So we'll be one of the first in that as well. By stabilizing those two accounts, it makes it a lot more possible to dedicate tax dollars towards meeting our immediate needs so that we're not constantly, you know, there are communities across the country that are, you know, having to put tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into beefing up pensions to keep them financially viable. By having these accounts in order, it makes everything else a lot easier for us.
George: 6:05
And we continue to use sound financial practices. We have a triple-A bond rating, which is the top you can have. We continue to pursue new growth, including residential growth, small business growth, attention to our corridors and our squares, and focus on our strong and our emerging industry clusters. Our strongest, of course, being the life science cluster that Sam was just talking about, and then also looking at where there are other clusters and industries that can be interesting for Watertown and how we can support them.
George: 6:32
Third one is community engagement and customer service, prioritizing proactive communication, responsive customer service to inform, educate, and empower constituents. We will ensure that all voices in the community are heard by offering a variety of meaningful opportunities for engagement and civic participation. This is always a work in progress to make sure that we are continuing to get out there and share and get feedback. 311 calls are going up. We've added a staff person in DPW to assist with construction communications, and we're looking to add more pathways to community engagement to try to continue to grow that one. Those are kind of the inward operational side of the business.
George: 7:10
The more outward focused, sort of interacting, kind of where we're making progress on this front. The first is on public health and safety, enhancing health, well-being, and safety of the community, providing programs, resources, and professional emergency response services to ensure a healthy Watertown that's safe for all who live, work, and visit here. We've established the human services department, providing services to employees. Our health department has increased our community programs, everything from sharps collection to sunscreens, flu vaccines, to any of the things that we can do to continue to grow our public health perspective. And then some big steps in emergency response. We're doing our second in-house advanced life support ambulance, which is the most significant growth in our fire and emergency services in a significant period of time. We are in the midst of hiring the staff to do that. We are making significant progress to hiring the staff to do that. Hiring paramedics is not the easiest thing in the world to do. And I'm really impressed with our fire department and HR team and that we're getting this done and bringing people through the process and should be able to fully staff that program in the coming months. So we're making a lot of progress on that.
George: 8:18
On the police side, we've implemented the bodywearing camera program, which has been a priority. The other thing I will note about police is that for the first time in at least 20 years, we're on the cusp of having all of our police officer positions filled. And there have been many times where there have been seven, eight, nine vacancies of the police department, lots of people having to do overtime shifts, a hard time staffing the traffic division when you don't have enough officers. And we're almost at the point where we're a fully staffed department. And we have a, I think just one in the academy now that fills the last slot. So we're making a lot of progress on that front.
George: 8:54
A commitment to the future, we’ll make responsible and timely investments, deliver a resilient and beautiful future for Watertown by enacting a meaningful climate and energy policies, implementing thoughtful community design, supporting flourishing businesses, and investing in state-of-the-art schools, we ensure that future generations can thrive. I will note that, you know, from the kind of building side we're working on, talk a little bit more about the Parker Building, the high school, and the parks in a little bit, but we're working on a number of different projects. I'll also mention that we have one of the most aggressive climate action plans that you will find in Massachusetts or really anywhere in the country at this point. And we're working piece by piece to get through the implementation of that plan. There's a lot of work and a lot of steps to do that. We recently completed a study on transportation strategies. We're working on some things surrounding energy use, and there's just a lot of work on that front. The climate plan continues to be a highlight. It's been something that has been very important to this community, and we've worked very hard on.
George: 9:52
But I will also note that one of the advantages of being a community that's very well focused on climate as a priority is we have caught the attention of some folks who do the type of business around climate and energy. I feel like we're building our next new industry cluster here around climate tech companies and clean tech companies. And I think there's some real opportunities for us in that area as well. We're an appealing place for somebody who wants to solve our major climate issues to set up a business because we're a community that believes itself in trying to figure out how to address those issues.
George: 10:24
Our last one here, Watertown for All, fostering a welcome, inclusive, and accessible environment, investing in cultural assets, and provide diverse programming that makes Watertown a desirable community for all to enjoy. A lot of different pieces on this. Our ADA self-evaluation and transition plan has been completed. And part of that is identifying areas where we need to work more on accessibility of our spaces and making progress on that. We're going to be putting some funding through our capital planning into implementing this plan year after year. Still working on Fair on the Square and Arts Market and trying to bring thousands more visitors each year. I'll talk a little bit more about what's going on in that area in a little bit. And our commitment to ensuring everyone in Watertown feels they belong and are represented is still a priority for us.
George: 11:11
So as you take these six goals, what we're doing right now is working to connect those six goals to the city budget document, which is certainly one of our most important kind of policy and priority documents that we create every year. In April, when we release the city budget, we're working with each department to make sure the department is kind of linked to their goals and their priorities and to the citywide goals and priorities and continues to kind of pull everything together to achieve the policy guidance that we've been given from the city council. So council is very good in giving us budget policy guidelines and recommendations on capital items, and we then pull that information together along with this goal set and build our next steps around that.
George: 11:55
Now, when I present every October, and I and I did this again in the October budget presentation, I do provide a little bit of data where we're headed on a couple of key metrics. This data always lags a little bit behind because it takes a while for folks to collect and have it together. But average total employment in Watertown, and certainly see the dip from 2020 from the COVID year has been pretty much back, and by 24 has gone beyond where we were in 2019. Our unemployment rate, while creeping up a little bit, remains relatively low through 2024. Residential home sales, you see a little bit of a dip in 22 and 23. That's the last data we had in this graph. But we are continuing to see challenges here that I think is not by lack of people having an interest in housing in Watertown, but by lack of inventory for them to be able to find a place to settle in Watertown. Median sales prices are going up.
George: 12:44
Construction permits in fiscal year 25 were quite high. But when you convert that to permit fee revenue, there's something very interesting that I always see in this slide, which is you can see the building boom in the life science industry pretty significantly in this graph. In fiscal year 22, we brought in $14 million in permit fee revenue. Now, mind you, the baseline that we settled back at is still higher than it was in 17, 18. But the push in the commercial market to say we need to build life science buildings happened very quickly and was very intense. And a lot of those buildings started in that same fiscal year and paid their permit fees in that same fiscal year. By the way, that's, this is the reason why you don't bank in your revenue calculations on last year's data when it's a little bit out of uh, you know, I'm not banking on an extra $10 million in permit fee revenue again. But you can see the results from that.
George: 13:42
It then also results in new growth in our tax base, the dark color being residential and the lighter color being commercial. And for a community that was substantially residential with a commercial tax base that was mainly kind of a lower intensity industrial, you can see how the addition of life science and office space and all that has come on with that, and retail space actually, with the growth here at Arsenal Yards, all kind of came together and has provided new growth in the community. Total property valuation up, assessment data. One of the things that's always helpful to see in our graphs is that the total valuation relative share, so the bottom is commercial, which is now by fiscal year 26, 28% of the share of the property value is on the commercial side, 72% is on the residential side. The way we split tax rates, the actual money coming in from the commercial side is even higher.
George: 14:37
So one of the things that keeps our residential tax rate low and keeps us, you know, we're lower than most of the communities around us in terms of average residential tax base is having that commercial base and being able to make sure to maintain and be successful with that commercial tax base. So I know there's a lot of folks in the room who have been a big part of that, whether it's investing or starting small businesses or being a part of major redevelopments in the city. And all of that has been very helpful. And one of the things I'll say if you haven't seen the Watertown Bio report, Sam's report, it actually one of the things it highlights is that, you know, some of the things we've been able to do here because of the new growth that comes from having the life science industry in town. And I think it's very helpful to remember that, you know, half of the benefit of having fiscally strong and conservative policies. Half of the benefit to the city of our financial success has been fiscally strong and conservative policies. The other half has been aggressive new growth. Like it's very good to make sure we have those great policies in place, but we've also depended upon that new growth to do things like building our high school project.
George: 15:42
And so there are some financial headwinds. And I point those out because this is a report that Mass Municipal Association did called a perfect storm, cities and towns facing historic fiscal pressures. The reason I mentioned that particular report is because it highlights some specific problems that have been a concern in a lot of municipalities that either have not found the level of new growth that we've had or have not been able to make some decisions in terms of how to do capital planning like we've been able to do, that find themselves constantly in a catch-up mode on being able to be able to deal with their finances. When I read this report, what I see is I see a lot of communities that are depending upon proposition two and a half overrides and increased residential tax base to be able to do what they're doing. That's not us. I see a lot of discussions about communities that are very dependent upon a significant amount of state aid in order to be able to fund their schools. That's not us. I see a series of discussions about the communities that have not been able to pass overrides, many of whom have tried, who find themselves in a situation where every year they build a budget and the budget starts with a discussion about, okay, what are we going to cut this year? There was a time when that was us, but that is not us right now.
George: 17:02
My goal is to maintain the options and flexibility in the budgets that allow us to continue to not get stuck in that situation. We've had the benefit of new growth, first a significant amount of residential and then commercial. We've built conservative financial strategies in our budgets. We maintain stabilization funds for capital projects. We maintain a system for capital projects that I have not seen other communities doing. Councilor Piccirilli and I were talking about this last week as we were doing this process again. You know, there are plenty of communities that their strategy for capital planning is a 20-page spreadsheet of everything that they can't afford to do. And at the end of the year, they look at whatever came on their bottom line, unspent and free cash. They go, okay, which three items on this list can we afford to do this year? And then try to make it back through next year. The system we have has given us options and flexibility. And my goal is to maintain those options and flexibility as we build budgets and as we build strategies. And we have to be careful how we do it because there are a couple things going on that run the risk of making that more difficult over time.
George: 18:07
The first is our life science industry is strong, but it's not producing new ground on construction in Watertown right now like it was a few years ago. Talk a little bit about the advantages of what's going well. One of the things that's going well is that we are still growing year over year and doing better than a lot of our peers around us. One of the things I have shared is that one of my concerns has always been that as long as this industry is in a growth mode, even if it's a very slow growth mode, we are doing okay. If the industry in the region goes into a contraction mode where more businesses are going out of business and are not being replaced by new business, where there isn't new investment to venture capital, where there isn't the possibility of some of those, you know, I'm worried as well about the concern about making sure that federal health grants going into our local universities that are one of the things that produces new science, that then produces new companies, that then chases new venture capital, that then grow and move to Watertown and become a part of what we are. If that pipeline reaches a point where it starts reversing, that's the problem I am more significantly worried about. Right now, I'll show a little bit more about this. We certainly have a lot of buildings that haven't started construction, but we're in a position where we're still growing, and that has been key to us.
George: 19:26
I shared last year on the federal grants front, that's a financial headwind for a lot of communities. We are less dependent on direct federal money than the vast majority of communities around us. We build our budget with very few federal grants in our budget. But like I said, the region as a whole depends upon federal funding into science and a number of other things. And making sure that that pipeline continues to happen is important to our overall economic development. It is not necessarily a major deal breaker to us putting an annual budget together, but it is something to watch out. Tariffs and new development, you know, this has been an up and down over the last couple of years, but anything that makes the cost of construction or the cost of building new residential and commercial buildings more expensive just closes those margins just a little bit more for the people who are building our new growth. And you know, certainly we need to be very careful about what's going on out there, what we control, what we don't control, a lot of things we don't control. I don't control the price of steel and lumber, but it has an effect on our ability to make the next project work and the next circumstances work for us.
George: 20:33
And then on the internal municipal side, inflation, department expenses, insurance costs. Insurance costs in particular are one of these things. I'm sure anybody who runs a business is probably seeing things similar to what we are in local government, which is when you try to plug in what the employee side of insurance is, and you got some challenges with increasing costs here in the Commonwealth. And you know, in a system where the state system for local governments is that we can collect the taxes we collected last year, plus two and a half percent, plus whatever we get out of new growth. When insurance costs are going up 7% and inflation on the goods and services we buy are going up 4%, and everything else is going up in those percentages, two and a half doesn't cut it. You need the new growth every year to be able to bring the budget into balance without having to step away from things. So it's something we're very focused on on the city side all the time.
George: 21:25
But here's the good news. And I really do believe this. I recycled this slide from last year because this is as good news this year as it was last year. We have a lot of advantages as a community. We have a lot of reasons why business is choosing to come here. We have a lot of reasons why people want to live here. We have a lot of reasons why we have a lot of strength in our community. One of which we don't control, but is just what's great about where we are is our location. We are still in a state that is well invested in new growth. We're in a location in Boston, the Boston area that is more than appealing. You know, I do believe that one of the reasons, I think all four of these reasons, by the way, are reasons why our life science growth is better than all of the communities around us, including Cambridge. But we are in the most ideal perfect location to grow this industry. We have transit access to the greater Boston core, but we are still not so difficult to get to from the western suburbs that it is miserably unpleasant to commute.
George: 22:26
Now, we're just a key spot there. And honestly, that more than price, I believe, is our benefit over Kendall Square. Kendall Square is one of the most difficult places in the world to get to. Watertown is less so. And I think, you know, if you talk to the folks who've gone into 100 Forge or 66 Galen and you ask them, you know, why did you choose these places? You know, this is the list: location, transit, housing. You know, we have a good housing stock for people who want to live and work local, but we're still accessible from the rest of the region. People who are in the Boston core have access through our bus routes that are getting better, and we're working with the MBTA to make them even better and have the opportunity to work and make sense. And then we also just have a great culture and community here, and it's a place where people want to be. And sticking to these strategies, the ones we don't control, like geography, but the ones we do control, like culture and community and offering housing opportunities and continuing to work as hard as we can with the MBTA to make sure that our transit service is the best it can possibly be, just continues to put us in a key place in the region and give us a lot of opportunities.
George: 23:33
So I want to talk about where that's going right now. I'm going to start with the public investment with what we're doing on the city side, talk a little bit about the private investment as well on the public side. First of all, one of the, you know, these are all things that new growth and development allows us to be able to do. The Parker building, this was an opportunity for us to purchase a city hall annex building without having to build one from the ground up. It was a great opportunity to take a building that had been a school that had been used by a private business owner, his offices, and he had cared well for the building and added a collection of businesses in the building. Some of those businesses are still there. We're moving city offices in as well. We're getting a new meeting room over there to host meetings and hearings and events. It's almost done. The food pantry space, actually, that's a little behind schedule. The food pantry space actually has opened in the Parker building. We were in the church on Mount Auburn Street that was bought by new owners and needed to find a new location. And we now are in, you know, this city entity is in a city building. Soon our human services team will be over there too, so that they'll be there every day.
George: 24:36
All community development and planning office space will be located together in this building. It's as early, I'll say mid-2026, but we're making progress. And I mean the plans for these offices, the idea of bringing building inspecting, zoning enforcement, and planning and zoning board staff together in one single space. Something which, I will note this is the third community I have worked in local government in Massachusetts, and I've never been able to pull this off before. So I really, really have been determined that I want to get to the point where you have one counter where you can come to and get a question answered on all those code and building questions at one place, and all the staff you need to work with is on the other side of that door in the same space, and you're not running from one floor to another or one building to another or one space to another. This is a huge, yeah, it's just a huge like customer service benefit for the community. I also think it's great for the staff to be able to work together and collaborate in the same space.
George: 25:30
Climate plan, we're continuing to shift the city fleet to electric vehicles and continuing energy upgrades in city buildings. I have a police chief who is very determined to try to move as much of the police fleet to being electric as possible. I think we're gonna be ahead of most of the people in the Commonwealth on this. You know, we have purchased some, they're now making ground-up built electric police pursuit vehicles, which allows us to be able to do this. Working with the council on funding some of the strategies around charging to make that work. But I think it's gonna be great for the department, for our vehicles, and for our climate goals. We have dedicated staff encouraging private investment in solar and heat pumps to meet our climate goals. And we're working to address vehicle reduction strategies and new development, street design policies, and implementing the plan.
Goerge: 26:19
Citywide comprehensive plan. We're continuing efforts to upgrade zoning to address resiliency, neighborhoods, economic development. We have a long list of zoning-related things that need to be worked on to implement the comp plan. We're continuing our strategic strategies around economic growth and focusing on the historic preservation plan, updating the complete streets policy. There's a lot of policies we're doing on that front as well. High school project is on budget. And the commitment that I made when we got to the council when we first brought this forward, and remembering that this project was designed in a pre-COVID economic situation and then bid in a post-COVID economic situation, which put about a 10% premium on the cost of it, which put a lot of pressure on it. But the high school, with the establishment of the stabilization accounts, and with the work that we did with the council on making sure to set aside additional funding, the goal of the high school is not to borrow more than $150 million. That kept us within the confines of prop two and a half, within our plan of the capital improvement plan, and not having to go back and say, oh, I've got to borrow additional money to make this work. We are there, we're at the finish line. This building will be done this spring and summer. In September, new students will be walking into a brand new high school that is net zero, is LEED platinum 4.0, is one of the best, most energy efficient, and most state-of-the-art high school buildings you'll ever see. I've had a chance a couple times to tour the construction project. It's really impressive. I'm looking forward to having that available for our students in the fall.
George: 27:52
And then parks projects. We're just doing a lot on parks and open space. Arsenal phase B is open. Lowell Playground and Upper Saltonstall Park are almost done. We've completed seven parks since 2022. Victory Field Phase 2 and Bemis are under construction. Community meetings for Walker Pond are underway and expected to be completed. The very near future, we're going into a design phase to get everything together there. Construction will be underway in Howe and Sullivan Park early in fiscal year 27. And then we have more under design, Victory Phase 3 and tot lot, Saltonstall tot lot ready for design this year, and Walker Pond hopefully moving into construction next year. So there's just a lot going on on the parks and open space upgrades in the community.
George: 28:36
And then there's Watertown Square. Just want to say this is, sometimes you finish a big plan and you kind of go into a little bit of a quiet phase where you're sort of working on getting consultants together and getting plans together. And so things have been a little quiet on the Watertown Square project recently, but that's about to change very soon because we have a couple of things ready to go. We've signed up Bowman Engineering, our firm that's going to be working on the intersection design, taking this from this level of concept to an actual engineering design that is buildable, and expect that they'll be out there in the next couple of months. They finished survey work and we're now moving into the beginning of design work, and there'll be some more opportunity for community meetings and discussions on that. And then behind the CVS, this is the early rendering from the plan of doing the idea of doing a parking garage and housing and commercial development and an open space. We're in the midst of refining this to provide some new updates to the community in the near future about what might be possible to do and how it might be possible to do something implementing this strategy.
George: 29:41
I know that parking garage, the idea of parking garages has had a lot of ups and downs in conversation in the community. When the moment is right, I will share why I am still a fan of this project and why I actually think this provides a lot of benefits. But I will share one moment that I did, I was scratching my head thinking to myself how great it would be to have structured parking over the course of the last couple of months, every time we've had to move cars during a snow emergency, and then move them out at 6 a.m. in order to plow the lots between 6 and 7 to be able to use them the next time. The logistics of surface parking lots in midwinter when dealing with snow emergencies is really complicated. I'm not saying that's the one and only reason to do this. The major reason to do this is because centralizing parking for a business district brings visitors in and has them have a known place where they can depend upon being able to leave a car and making sure that you build a garage that is light and open and bright and friendly and welcoming is doable and there's a way to make it work. And I think that there's a lot of benefits to doing that. It also adds parking capacity for everything from events in the square to the ability to grow business growth to even if there's developments that are struggling to figure out how to meet parking on a small lot, you can potentially share and negotiate and work with it. So there's a lot of advantages to doing this. I know there's also a lot of challenges to doing this, and looking forward to discussing it more with the community in the near future, but it is still a project that we are very much discussing and working to share more information on in the very near future.
George: 31:13
Our next challenge is dealing with the middle school project. You know, there's a lot going on with wanting to address Senior Center, East End Fire Station, DPW staging, Watertown square, and the middle school, all of which are major capital projects. We wanted to look at work to do the middle school, but it came in higher than budget with our latest design at about $112 million when our budget originally was about $25 million less than that. But I'm going to spare you all the middle school math that's in this slide and just say it's here if people want to see it. But the basics are that we're working very hard with the council to try to figure out some strategies around this $25 million gap and when to trigger a project at the middle school site that makes the most sense to finish the efforts to build our schools and do the building for the future plan that we put into place. We are in a better place because we bought the modular buildings that are on Moxley Field so that we don't have to pay a monthly rent on them while we figure out the answer to this problem. But I'm also very cognizant of the fact that we need to restore a great field on that site when this is all done and make sure that that's, that remains on our parks list as well. So we're trying to figure out how to do this while protecting the options and flexibility that we have in our budget system. And that is tricky at this point in time.
George: 32:31
I want to talk a little bit about private investment. I borrowed this slide from the Watertown Bio project because I could not find a better way to visualize this than what Sam and his team did here. These are the lab buildings that have been permitted and have not started construction. And they're potentially very important to our future new growth. And they're all in different stages and phases of maybe able to happen soon, maybe able to happen later. Regionally, my best estimate is there's probably enough existing lab space in the greater Boston area that it would take in the range of five to six years to fill that space. So my strategy where we do growth projections three years into the future is not to depend upon the new growth revenue from these buildings being done, but also to work very closely with the owners of each and every one of these properties to make sure that we understand where things are going. We understand what the short-term plan is for the site. We know that there's, that the opportunity exists. You know, certainly some of them may talk about, you know, shouldn't we switch this site to a different type of development? All of those conversations are a possibility. But it's also important to know that this resource is potentially here in an industry that has been very successful for us. And we will watch carefully how and where this industry goes and what it is doing.
George: 33:52
So, you know, you can see Manley Way on the far left is actually, it can be a lab building, but could it could also be a flex tech space that's got a lot of other different possibilities. Coming back there, you have the Russo's and Broder sites that are both permitted lab buildings. What's not on here is the Sterritt site that we ended up buying. 99 Water is in a district where you could do residential or commercial. They have labs underway, and then you sort of see the cluster of the East End side, including Alexandria's plans at the mall, that they did sell a chunk of that development site. So, you know, there's still a lot of conversations ongoing about what the future of all of these are.
George: 34:30
Interestingly, as that has happened, some other interesting things have started to happen in the community, which is the Watertown Square zoning has generated a substantial amount of interest in residential development. Well, we have the building on Main Street that started under construction before that zoning started. 33 Mount Auburn was approved with 40 units. This has been a hole in the ground for a very long period of time, a site where for a while people were talking about a single-story retail building, and now we have a 40-unit project proposed. This one's a little earlier in the process, but this is the site with the Dunkin' Donuts on it. It's right across from where Spring Street comes into Mount Auburn. Proposal right now at 153 units that has gone through a couple of neighborhood discussions. And then 108 water, 52 units. I believe these are going to be condos. This is, you know, right off of Galen Street. So the residential side is showing some signs of movement. And like I've constantly told people, residential is the secret sauce that creates successful retail in the retail district. And I think that this is good for the well-being of Watertown Square retail as a whole.
George: 35:34
Again, I'm not going to go deep into too many words here, but just sharing that we have a number of economic development goals in our comprehensive plan. And these particular goals are turning into specific decisions and strategies, like working with the business coalition, building relationships with emerging industry clusters, making efforts to attract cultural events. And then, you know, on this one, developing strategies and resources showcasing Watertown. We regularly try to work with our permitting boards and our departments to make sure that our policies are as simple as it can be for opening and maintaining a business here. And there have been a number of social media campaigns we've been working on. Interestingly, just a few of our economic development highlights. Charles River Chamber hosted a debriefing session on MBTA communities. Watertown was highlighted as a bright spot for the MBTA zoning strategies that we've done in Watertown Square. Boston Business Journal called out that Watertown is only behind Cambridge and Waltham with the number of life science spaces absorbed in 2025. Sam you're telling me we're probably actually ahead of them.
Speaker: 36:36
Depends on who's counting.
George: 36:38
Who's counting. All right. But we beat out Boston, and our numbers are good no matter how you look at it. So we're doing well, even with some of the softening in the industry. The Watertown 400 Celebration Committee kicked off its work with an organizational meeting in January. Our 400th anniversary is the year 2030. If you go back through our annual reports and look at what Watertown did for our 300th anniversary in 1930, my goal is to make 2030 an even bigger event. And that was a very big event. At the first session, the group brainstormed ideas about what we should be doing. Boston Business Journal also said there'd be more than a billion dollars in tourist revenue expected across Massachusetts from the Tall Ships, World Cup, Mass 250, all these events this summer. But Watertown's getting ready to capitalize on this in a couple different ways. We have created a visitor guide that we're going to be having at hotels and places here in the very near future. Now, I'm going to put Erika and Erin on the spot. The last note you had for me was this was going to be unveiled on March 5th, which I think is today. So is it ready to go?
Speaker 37:42
It's at Alpha Graphics across the street. And they'll have, they'll be delivering it to me tomorrow. They were very sorry they couldn't have it ready this morning.
George 37:50
Okay, thank you. So by tomorrow, we will have our visitor's guide. And our goal to share, it has information about events and restaurants and everything going on in Watertown. So it's an exciting step for us. And I also just wanted to mention that one of the things that Visitor's Guide highlights is Treaty Day, July 18th, 2026. For those who don't know the ins and outs of the history of Watertown, Watertown was the site of the first treaty signed by the United States of America between Watertown and a series of Native people in the in the region, up into Canada, even that helped them work collaboratively on the Revolutionary War. And in celebration of the 250th anniversary of signing that treaty, we have some really exciting things going on on the weekend of July 18th. So we're looking forward to celebrating that. That is what I have to share to begin with today, but I'm happy to answer questions in whatever time we might have left.
Speaker 38:50
Thank you very much for the update on the town. I just had a question. Oh, thank you. On benefit of new growth, how do we maintain that? Should we proactively think about any incentives for the continued commercial growth for the town? What are you guys thinking? Because as we know, the current tenants that are in life science now signed like a five-year, 10-year lease agreement, right? And they might move again, you know, because of their circumstance. How are you addressing that? How are you thinking about it?
George 39:25
So we have stayed very focused on trying to make Watertown a great place to be and a place where people want to be and want to stay. I think we have a lot of advantages as long as the industry starts to grow. There are a series of incentive tools that local governments can provide to businesses and developers. We have not used that toolkit in Watertown. I've been very careful about wanting to do it because if you do it wrong, what you end up with is subsidies that you don't quite anticipate in terms of who's subsidizing what. So I just have to be very careful and conscious about when, where, and under what circumstances to do it. It's one of these things where it'd have to be a very specific reason that it makes sense. Right now, what I focus on is trying to, you know, sell all of the best features we have as a community and convince businesses that they want to be here and want to stay here. I’ll also say that, you know, as markets come and go, it seems that when the commercial market's tough, the residential market seems to be doing, residential construction market potentially is coming to a point where they're doing a little bit better. Many in the business community have said that the greatest threat to economic growth in the greater Boston area is lack of housing. So the ability to focus on the housing growth, particularly in the Watertown Square Plan area, is also a way to build new tax growth that will work for Watertown while we kind of keep an eye on where the business side is. Sure.
Speaker 40:53
Hi, my name is Emily. I'm with Tutor Intelligence. We're a 70-person robotics company in Watertown. And Watertown's been really good to us. I mean, it's been a really great place to do tough tech. Since we were talking about the bio sector and kind of all, I mean there's a lot of biotech labs that are not occupied here. I was curious how you guys think about tough tech and where tough tech like robotics and manufacturing fits into Watertown, if that's something I don't know that you guys think about or that's on your radar.
George 41:25
So absolutely, we do. I when we first hired Erin, who is back there in the back row, who just spoke about the brochure the new work we're doing. She's been our economic development staff member. When we first set out to do this, I said, I want to focus our economic development efforts on our small businesses, our corridors and squares. And then the last thing I always had on that list was emerging industry clusters. Like what's the, we're building on life science, but what's the next thing? What's the other things that we can grow to have more diversity in our industries here? And tough tech's a big part of that. The interesting challenge, I mean, I look at like the Manley Way building where they renovated an existing kind of storage type building into something that can be, can have more people and more growth and more work in it. It is an ideal tough tech space. I've tried along with the owners there to keep telling the story about how that space is, can be a benefit to growing that industry. It is interesting to see whether or not folks who have, we've seen a little bit of it, folks who have vacant space that's equipped for life science will move into a tough tech type space as they look at what their options are. It's a little tricky because some of those spaces convert well for that and others don't. I know the folks over on at Pleasant Street with the old Sasaki building there, they have, they brought a climate tech type company that's doing a lot of really creative science and work there. And uh, but I don't know. I don't know how many other robotics companies we have in Watertown right now. Maybe that's the next thing I need to study. But we're welcoming, and if we can find the spaces or if we have any suggestions on how to create and preserve the spaces to make that industry thrive here, and we'll continue to focus on doing it.
Speaker 43:05
Hi, Tia Tilson, Watertown Community Foundation. George, this has been a great report, and it's been terrific to see so many highlights. One of the things I want to add is the strength of the nonprofit sector. And the nonprofit sector in Watertown is extraordinary, and it's part of the vibrancy and health and well-being of Watertown that is part of our city goals. And as businesses consider Watertown, I just want to give a shout out to that sector in terms of what they do to make Watertown a great place to live. We've got some representatives here in the room, the Mosesian Center, CoLab, Metro West Community Development. I just want to make sure that as we celebrate all that's terrific about Watertown, we don't forget these important partnerships that are there as well.
George 43:49
Absolutely. Thanks, Tia. You know, I mentioned that we have a big focus in our human services team that we're bringing in Parker building as well, but we are a very, very small portion of that work. The nonprofit sector does so much in this community, and that's an important part of everything we're working on, and thanks for reminding us and bringing that up Tia.
Speaker 44:13
I first want to thank you because you are the first manager that we've had that has educated the people, made presentation to know what the finances are. When we were a town, we were close to knowing what was going on with our town meeting members, with the warrants we got at our door, and I can't thank you enough. And I want to, I want to tell you that we're really pleased in your appointment for the police chief and fire chief. Not political. They earned it the old fashioned way. They are so qualified. So I want to thank you for that. I just want to add that I'm the longest elected person in Watertown. Fifty years, over fifty years. I was the youngest town meeting member. So I know what has happened through the years. I have to say that I'm learning a lot today. Other managers never and I was a councilor for twenty-eight years in Watertown, that I was never afforded the information that you're giving. And I really appreciate the time and the effort that you have given Watertown. Now I have something that has not been mentioned tonight in its playing fields. As a lifelong resident, I came from the hospital to Watertown. That's been our biggest problem because a lot of people don't know, oh, we have a lot of parks. But there are state mandates that will not allow us to use those packs for a playing field. So a little history. In 1930, town meeting members in their wisdom said, you know what? We don't have a playing field in West Watertown. So on Westminster Avenue, they took eight houses and they were given, I think, about eight thousand dollars at that time for those houses, and they built a field. We don't have that field now, unfortunately, and we named that after our hero, PFC Moxley, who was killed in Vietnam. So my question is, what is the future? I don't hear anything about that. And that field was used by all youth organizations and adults from east to west Watertown, and they have no place to go. And I'm just saying there were three options to go someplace else and not take that field. I have to say I don't think there's a place in the United States that would bulldoze a field named after a hero that gave his life. I'm not proud of that. Because there were other places. You have to look at Edenfield Avenue and Westminster Avenue. These people can't get out of their houses. The parking is so bad. There was a better way to do this. Now I'm concerned with what you're doing with the middle school. Please look at the options. But what my question is again, and I'm sorry to prolong this, when will we have the the Moxley Field back? When will we have that so that West Watertown has a playing field?
George 47:15
So thank you for the question. I'm not yet at a point where I can answer the question of when it will be back. I think I can answer a question of when I know when it will be back, and that will happen sometime this calendar year when we lay out the plan for what's going on with the middle school. I think the first piece of good news is that high school students are moving back to their other site. If we use the modular for a middle school building, we're moving students that are in the same basic neighborhood, which will reduce some of the traffic impacts. And my hope is that when we have a timeline on that whole project, we'll have an end date on that whole project and we'll know exactly what that plan is. Until we get some more finance data on the middle school project, I don't, not quite yet at the point where I know the answer. But thank you. Thank you, Marilyn, for the question.
Speaker: 48:00
Last question.
Speaker 48:00
Hi, Marcy Murninghan. I want to build on what Tia said because there also is a very critical resource in this community that warrants a lot more support than it's currently getting. And that is Watertown News and Watertown Cable Access News. Those are two entities that help to, they're the ligaments of the community, so to speak. I mean, they're the connective tissue. And to the extent that we can be creative about thinking of different ways of funding and revenue streams and so on, I know it's one of the things at the top of my list, as I've talked to Dan and Charlie about. But without that, I think we would be at the mercy of limited coverage from the metro dailies around here, if there are any left besides the Globe and the Herald, but also within our community as well. So a special shout out to Cable Access News and Watertown News for helping to keep us informed, even if we're not able to attend some of these meetings.
George 49:13
Thank you, Marcy. I think I've been up here speaking for quite a bit, so I'm just going to wish you all a great day. And you know, you know where to find me if you have more questions. Thanks a lot, everybody.
Matt 49:32
So that's it for the city update with City Manager George Proakis. If you want to hear other episodes of the podcast where I do one-on-one interviews with people in the city, panel discussions, local government updates, and plenty of other types of episodes, you can head on over to LittleLocalConversations.com and listen to all those episodes, find upcoming events, which I have three coming up in the next three weeks, two of them business related if you're interested. On Tuesday, March 24th, I have Watertown's Open Storytelling and Marketing for Watertown Solopreneurs. It's going to be happening at Watertown Cable Access, 10 a.m. And on Tuesday, April 7th, Watertown's Open Summer Tourism 2026 panel, also at Watertown Cable Access at 10 a.m. Again, you can find information on the events at LittleLocalConversations.com. There’s a banner at the top of the website with all the upcoming events. Both of those events are in partnership with the Watertown Business Coalition and the City of Watertown's Economic Development Planner, Erin Rathe.
Matt: 50:30
Alright, I want 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 here in Watertown that is owned by Doug Orifice. He's a very committed community member, is one of the co-presidents of the Watertown Business Coalition, and his business helps support busy families, small businesses, and people close to retirement. So if you need help in any of those areas, 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 Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at WatertownCulturalCouncil.org and MassCulturalCouncil.org. And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners, first Watertown Business Coalition. Their motto is Community is Our Business. Find out more about them at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. And lastly, Watertown News, which is a Watertown focused online newspaper. It's a great place to keep 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.
