By Ana Celerier Salcedo

Following the formal recognition of the Gilman Square Neighborhood Council, members and community members of the Union Square Neighborhood Council voiced their concerns regarding transparency in the city planning and development department.

By Khoa Tong

The Somerville Pedestrian and Transit Advisory Committee (PTAC) held their monthly meeting on Thursday, May 25, hosted by Alessandra Seiter, chair of PTAC. The primary focus this month was to present and discuss with the Somerville Traffic and Parking Department their plans for automated parking enforcement as well as reviewing the Committee’s letter to the mayor and City Council on FY24 budget priorities.

The Somerville City Council Traffic and Parking Committee will hold a virtual (online) public hearing on Wednesday, May 31, on the City of Somerville Bike Network Plan. The hearing will start at 6:00 p.m. Community members may submit testimony either at the hearing or in writing. The hearing will offer an opportunity for community members to share thoughts, ideas, and concerns about the Bike Network Plan. The plan was developed via a one-and-a-half-year public engagement, research, and analysis process. Visit the city’s website to learn more about the plan and how to attend or submit testimony at www.somervillema.gov.

By Ana Celerier Salcedo

On May 23, Demetrios Vidalis, the Director of the Water and Sewer Department, and Stephen Haynes, the Director of Finance for the Water and Sewer Department, presented the finance committee with a rate proposal increase plan for fiscal year 2024.

Eagle Feathers #280 –Somerville Firsts

By Bob (Monty) Doherty

Memorial Day is an American federal holiday which honors those who died while serving in the United States military. It always falls on the last Monday in May creating a three-day weekend and unofficially launches us into June and the beginning of summer.

Mayor Ballantyne has submitted her proposed budget for the fiscal year 2024. City officials must now work together to hammer out a final budget, one that comes as close as possible to serving the wants and needs of as many of us as is practical and doable.

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Review by Off The Shelf Correspondent Lee Varon

It sounds cliché to say of a book that the author’s words leapt off the page. Yet I can’t think of a better expression to describe the feeling I had when reading the poems of Susan Sklan. The letters on which all of these poems are based, are actual letters written by Sklan’s grandmother who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto before her presumed death in the Treblinka concentration camp. Most of the letters Sklan’s grandmother wrote were to her son (Sklan’s father) in England. He escaped Warsaw to England when he was seventeen, a few weeks before war began. After the war he immigrated to Australia, the only one of his immediate family to survive. These lucid and beautiful poems are reflections on the letters of her grandmother, and often contain her grandmother’s own words.

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Bestselling Author, Timothy Gager has published 18 books of fiction and poetry, which includes his latest novel, Joe the Salamander. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over 1000 works of fiction and poetry published, 17 nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio. In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 150 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager. Timothy was the Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, MA.

Last week Mayor Katjana Ballantyne, Representative Christine Barber, Preservation of Affordable Housing, Somerville Community Corporation, Somerville Housing Authority, residents, funders and partners celebrated the groundbreaking for Clarendon Hill Apartments, Phase One.