 It is Wednesday, April 12th, and 2017 in the Town Room of Town Hall, calling the select board meeting to order at 6.38 p.m. For those of you watching us shuffle papers up front, we have a bunch of revised materials that we're just going to have to paw through as we go along here to make sure we have the things that we need to have. As usual, folks, there's yellow highlighting for us that shows new material, and there is a new item tonight on the revised agenda and on the revised motion sheet, hopefully yellow highlighted, thanks to staff, that shows that an issue that came up with less than 48 hours' notice of appointing some people as temporary registrars of voters. So we will get that to that when we get to it, but that is basically the change. And for those of you who subscribe to the Notices Online, that was the difference between the original posting and the revised posting today was we got some information that we needed to do that, and we had less than 48 hours' notice. So, all my notes that are on a previous piece of paper are now not magically transformed onto this new piece of paper, so we will do the best we can here. In terms of there's that new item on the agenda tonight, are there any other new items on the agenda tonight that we are not aware of? Okay, good. And then tonight is gonna be largely about town meeting articles, as is always true this time of year, although there are some other issues that we are gonna be dealing with as well, including talking with the town manager about his performance goals progress report. This is his first opportunity to really talk with us about that. We'll also be hearing from our economic development director, Jeff Kravitz, about marijuana, and we've just shortened the whole title to just marijuana because there's so many different aspects to this particular issue, but that will be much later in the night. In terms of what order we're gonna do things in, I've heard from some people who have various other places to be, and so we will not necessarily be going in numeric order, but I will do our best to try and keep everybody apprised of where we are at any given moment. In terms of normally after we have these brief, hopefully, opening remarks and agenda review, we normally head into public comment and then frequently skip over the town manager's report and select board member reports until later, although I am gonna touch on partial reports from both of those issues, and then we'll finish those later. But in terms of public comment, is there anyone here tonight who had hoped to speak during public comment on an item that is not on tonight's agenda, meaning if you're here to speak about one of the town meeting articles, you're gonna have to wait? So, okay, great. So if you would, and so I only see one hand, all right. So if you would please come forward. Once you get settled in at the mic, please have it really close, like I do here, and make sure you identify yourself, anything you're affiliated with that you think it's helpful for people to know. And please try and keep your comments to three minutes. Thank you. My name is Ginny Hamilton. I am a South Amherst resident and a Crocker farm parent having moved to town almost five years ago because of this town's schools. I am a member of the Vote Yes for Amherst campaign leadership team, and I'm here tonight on behalf of that team. We are committed to ensuring that our town prioritizes education and moves forward with new elementary buildings in the immediate future. 56% of voters in Amherst voted for a plan that would have gotten our youngest learners and their teachers out of buildings that are inadequate for the demands of teaching and learning today. And yet, a portion of town meeting members overstepped their role and discarded $34 million in state funds without having any kind of plan B. In doing so, they sidelined an impressive education plan that would have also directly addressed the significant disparities for low income kids and kids with special needs in our town. Well, we wish the select board had been a stronger advocate for the school's project before the two town meeting votes. This loss rests on the shoulders of those who voted against accepting $34 million in state aid. Everyone in Amherst now has to live with the consequences of their misguided decision. You've likely heard these arguments before, but they bear repeating as a matter of public record. But just as important, we're here tonight to say that we are opposed to throwing good money after bad. In this case, replacing the Wildwood boiler and the Fort River roof. These band-aid fixes won't address the underlying systemic problems that teachers and students at Fort River and Wildwood have to overcome every single day. If anything, prioritizing these patches over a serious plan B would only serve to underscore the folly of the situation we find ourselves in today. And in a very expensive way, no less. So instead, we are calling on the town manager, the select board and the finance committee to prioritize education and to begin planning now to fund new schools. Recognizing that the loss of state funds requires a shift in capital improvement planning. Education is the business of this town. It's the primary reason people move here and schools are not optional. So now it's up to the town to fund new schools. And we on the vote yes team look forward to working with you to make that happen. Thank you. Thank you. I did not announce as I frequently do that we don't do talk back or dialogue. So thank you for, and we will take that under advisement and it may well be addressed in other comments and other conversations we have later. I should also announce that as usual, Amherst Media is broadcasting us live, taping us for later viewing both on TV and on your computer. And we also have the press here from the Daily Hampshire Gazette. If there's anyone else recording the meeting, we'd like to be able to announce that. So please let us know. In terms of we didn't only have the one public comment, and so as I said, although I don't expect to do the full town managers report and full select board member reports at this point, there was one item that was placed on our desk tonight that I wanted to give the town manager a chance to mention here early on in the evening. So the one new item that you had on your desk and that was in your mailbox was tomorrow there will be a recount for precinct nine for town meeting members. This was done by petition and in accordance with the law. So this room will be set up for recount. There are all kinds of rules that go along with this. It will be conducted by our town clerk and with our town council present. Two of our members of the Board of Registrar's can't be here. They need all four, they would like to have four here. So the request from the town clerk is that you appoint Janice Ratner and Charles Sherpa as temporary registers for the April 13th, 2017 recount. And there's a motion on your, I'm not sure if you want to add that on. Right, that was the revised, that was the revised material. In fact, we could in fact go ahead and do that since you have brought it to our attention. And I wanted just the public to know because they, not as many people might be watching us at 1030 tonight as we're continuing our conversations. And so we do have a motion to do that because of course we already have appointed registrars, it's just that some of them are absent. And so this is filling in just for this particular circumstance, one event. So if someone could please read that motion that's printed in yellow on our revised motion sheet. I move to appoint Janice D Ratner and Charles L Sherpa to serve as temporary registrars on April 13, 2017 for the recount of the precinct nine town meeting member office from the March 28, 2017, annual town election. Second. Great, and there is also a note on our desk which has also been uploaded, the memo from Ms. Burgess associated with that. And so, any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And that passes unanimously. So that's one less thing for her to worry about is that she's got enough people to be there to do that role. All right, thank you. And in terms of were there any, why don't you, if you want, you could go ahead and do the road show mention as well while we still have everybody fresh. Thank you, I appreciate that. We're starting something new this year, and we call it town hall road show, sort of like the antique road show, but we're not going to bring antiques, we're going to bring department heads from the town to your community. On tomorrow night, which is Thursday, April 13, at 6 p.m., we'll be at the Crocker Farm School, and the format is pretty simple. We will have pizza, so if you're hungry, you can come and get a slice of pizza from 6 to 6.30. We will do a small presentation for about 45 minutes where we talk about what the town operations do. We will have our police chief, our fire chief, DPW director, and our assistant town manager for conservation and development who will all be making brief presentations about what they do, but more importantly, what's on the horizon coming up for the coming year. And then we're going to have ample time for questions and answers. People can pose whatever questions they want. We'll try to answer them. If we don't have the answers, we'll get back to you. And next Wednesday, April 19, the same show, except slightly modified because we think the interest might be different, will be done at the University of Massachusetts Police Department community room for the North Amherst community. This is the first time we're trying these things. I've experienced them in other communities. They usually are very popular. It's something where people who aren't the insiders who are coming to town hall all the time might come to listen about things in a place closer to their homes where it's easier to park and ask the questions. There are no silly questions that you need to be afraid of asking. And we've also carved out some time for people to have one-on-one conversations with the department heads who are there. Several other department heads said, well, I just want to be there, even if I'm not presenting. And if there are questions, people will be there for that. Because sometimes you don't want to raise your hand and talk in front of a big group of people, you just say, why isn't my sidewalk fixed yet? Or something like that. Whatever it is, we welcome anything. So that's starting tomorrow night, Thursday night, at Crocker Farm. Next Wednesday, April 19, at the UMass community room, which is a really nice room if you haven't been into the UMass police department, it's right across the street from the Amherst North Fire Station. And while I have the floor, I'm also going to plug my cup of joe with Paul, which I'm going to be at the Black Sheep tomorrow, on Friday morning, from 7.30 to 9 with our police chief. And this, again, is a new attempt to reach out, be available to people. And if anybody wants to come in and talk, we'll just be sitting there and try to talk to as many people as we can. So thank you for giving me the time for that. Absolutely. And no pressure, but I tend to classify these pieces of paper after the meeting. And this one now says, how manager evaluation on it? So that means that people should come and see him, because if you have a party and nobody shows up, it's not nearly as much fun. We'll have more pieces of ourselves. Yeah. Great, thank you. And then I mentioned that I was going to dive in with a brief report as well. And I am going to try and make it as brief as possible. And we may talk about this issue later tonight, but I wanted to catch people's attention early on. So there's been concern expressed, just as there was concern expressed at select board meetings when we were developing the town meeting schedule for annual town meeting. So we voted on the town meeting schedule for spring 2017 on July 25th. We voted for that a long time ago. Then in December, we talked about the fact that we had added a Thursday to fall town meeting. And it provided three-day week schedule for the first week of town meeting, and then we only needed one more day. And so then we talked about adding back in Thursdays as had been historically done many years ago. And we looked at those dates on December 5th, and then we voted on them on December 19th. We talked about a lot of different concerns. I have a multi-page explanation of what all those concerns were that we went through when we did that, which I will be happy to share with anyone. It's not in our packet at this point. I've emailed it to a couple of people who've asked. So what I wanted to announce tonight without going into all that level of detail is that we are trying to be all things to all people. That is obviously difficult. One of the things that we have ascertained is that by providing as much flexibility as possible, that also makes things unpredictable for people. And so it's hard to know, do I really have to hire a babysitter for three nights a week or only two nights a week? Does Amherst Media really need to find interns and set up time for two nights a week or three nights a week? And which two nights might those be? Because there is absolutely no assumption that we will of course meet Mondays and Wednesdays, but maybe Thursdays. We could meet Wednesdays and Thursdays. That's been done. We could meet Mondays and Thursdays. We could meet only Mondays. We have lots of choices, but that makes it hard for people to plan. So just to review, we are trying to provide flexibility. We would not, for example, encourage people to necessarily hope and pin their hopes on meeting on a particular Thursday night because that's not what town meetings used to. When people come to the floor of town meeting and say, I really want to schedule my thing for this certain night because this certain person can be here and they can talk about it most effectively, probably don't want to pick a Thursday for that. But we ask that people be patient, try and figure this out as best they can as we go along. We will do our best to deal with it. Town staff obviously is also trying to sort out what their hours are gonna look like those particular weeks. The base assumption, if there is one beyond flexibility, I would suggest is likely to be that we would not generally meet more than two times per week. We're just not to saying definitively at this point which two nights those would be. And there's lots of reasons for that, which include things like finding out about the budget from the state house, all kinds of other issues. So we will not decide the first night of town meeting what nights we're meeting for the rest of town meeting. We just aren't gonna do that. At the end of every town meeting session, as is always true, there is a motion to adjourn made by the select board chair. The moderator says, hey, are you ready to make that motion yet? And the select board chair makes the motion to adjourn the meeting to a day certain that we don't know at this point which day certain that will be. We will do our best to kinda check in during the night, see where how things are flowing, see how people are saying, oh, if I can't get to this article tonight, then I'm gonna have to reschedule the architect to come in for a different week. All those kinds of things will play into that. We will try and be predictable. If, for example, say it's Wednesday night, the 26th, the very first night of town meeting. Although we originally thought we were gonna meet on the 24th when we voted in July. In December, we changed the date to Wednesday, the 26th. So that's our first night of town meeting. At the end of that night, as select board chair, I moved to adjourn to Thursday night. People said, I'm not coming twice this week. They voted down. Then I'm gonna make a motion to move to Monday and then keep going until we come up with the date that everybody agrees to. I would suggest that that first week, we would try two nights, that would be my first motion. The following week, it may well be that we don't do that. That we try and just assume that we're only gonna do two nights and less for some reason. We need to juggle things around because we need a different night. I would also ask that if people continue to have concerns that they share those with TMCC, which will hopefully share those with the select board as well. I would also state that although we do have some new methods of contacting town meeting members, which is great that TMCC has been working on that, there's an older Yahoo group that's being sort of phased out. There's a new Google group. There continues to be the one-way listserv. There are new ways of contacting town meeting members by email. The select board is not going to monitor any of those groups. So if people go on a private group or even a TMCC group and say, I wonder why the select board did X, Y, Z, you're not gonna get an answer. You need to ask the select board. So selectboard at amherstma.gov. So those are great conversation places, but we don't have the time to go and monitor all those places. So please write to us directly if you have questions. Continue to send feedback to us and to TMCC. And we'll see how things go. So thank you for listening to that. Anybody who wants to see more of those details, please let us know and we'll have that emailed to you. So moving on, unless there's some other particular burning issue that the select board would like to share in one of their member reports now, although we definitely want to get to you before we're all really exhausted later on tonight, I would like to go ahead and move into our agenda. And I am wondering if the town manager, even though as I mentioned, we are not necessarily doing things in numeric order, would you like to do the peg access issue first? Okay. It's very brief. Article 20 of the annual town meeting is a warrant article that requests permission from the town meeting to enter into a contract for peg access with the access provider for a period of 10 years. Typically municipal contracts can only be entered into for no more than three years. So we've had many different opinions on this and in terms of how we were treating this procurement of this service, the inspector general, as you recall, some time ago made a reverse decision, said we did not have to follow a public procurement process. We could just enter into contract negotiations with Amherst media, which I'm happy to inform you, we entered into the first negotiation today. But the question remained whether we could enter into a contract for longer than three years. I have an opinion from town council that says that the agreement with Amherst media, a nonprofit entity, would be for public support and stimulation and not to procure supplies or services for the town. Is therefore our opinion that this qualifies as a grant agreement and therefore exempt from chapter 30B and its requirement for town meeting approval of contracts exceeding three years. Accordingly, a 10 year agreement with Amherst media does not require a vote of town meeting in my opinion. So the upshot is that the town meeting does not have to act on this warrant article and you could recommend that it be dismissed. Questions from the select board about this. We put this on when we were trying to figure out against kind of the largest possible envelope of discussion because there was that back and forth where we got one very strong opinion that said you must do this and then they completely changed their minds and said you don't have to do this anymore. So we wanted to make sure this was on the warrant because the warrant needs to be published at a certain date. So comments or questions from the select board as to yeah, any of this? Yeah, why don't you make the motion and then we'll see where we go. I move to recommend dismissal to the April 26, 2017 annual time meeting article 20 peg access term of contract slaughter to speak to the article on behalf of the select board. Second. Great. Further comments, any reason we see that we wouldn't need to dismiss this? Yes. Yes, Missal, but just I'm wondering if there's something we just when we get to article 20 you explain why we were trying or if we would have some paper or notice so that people already have digested this issue you know with the paragraph on the back table if it's worth trying to give advanced information or I mean I know it's really simple but I wonder if that helps. So I wonder, so two things in response to that thank you and one is that in theory I'm writing up this list of our positions somehow between tonight the end of tonight's meeting and tomorrow morning at nine o'clock and it could include that we are going to move to dismiss I think rather than recommend dismissal since this is our article we're actually gonna move to dismiss it that always gets tricky depending on whose article it is but if is that acceptable to you as the motion and as the seconder that we would have it be that we're actually planning to move to dismiss and therefore we're recommending dismissal to town meeting does that make sense? It was yes to me, yes. Okay great and then do you think that this document I know we're just seeing this in this format although we had heard from the town manager that we might be seeing this is that what would this format be the appropriate thing to put in the back of the room it's not gonna fit in the mailing but the appropriate thing to put in the back of the room about or maybe it will, maybe it will we might just shrink it somehow, it gives people confidence. Is there anything that's not again you're reading this largely for the first time but is there anything that isn't in here that would be helpful for town meeting to know or can we send this off figuring this will cover the issue? I think it seems very clear, no action but if anything pops into anybody's head then I suppose you could tell the town manager later tonight and he could quick revise it right before it goes out the door. Okay so this will go in town meeting mailing number two and it will be actually dismiss and therefore recommend that you agree with us. Further discussion? All those in favor please say aye. Hi. So we will be making a motion to dismiss and that's unanimous. Great, one problem solved and moving on we now have as you know a lot of different people coming to talk to us about a lot of different things but one of the things that we could talk about now if the petitioners are ready to do so is article 25 which is the general bylaw amendment for the local historic district also known as according to this list LSLHDSC. It's not maybe the longest acronym we have but it's getting close. So if you would like to just both get settled in at the mic and once you're settled in we can go through and see what materials we actually have on this issue. We had materials, I'm gonna go ahead and clarify a couple of things and perhaps ask the petitioners for some help on this as well. So in terms of materials we have already seen versus materials we are getting tonight. So in town meeting mailing number one which the whole world has and is online is a report called town of Amherst proposed North Prospect Lincoln Sunset Historic District summary report March 2017. In our select board meeting packet for tonight was a report that was remarkably similar but not identical referred to as the summary report of April 2017. So there are some slight differences between those reports mainly on the first page. There is also from the select board packet so those of you following along at home can look at it as well. The planning boards report on article 25 and that will be in the second town meeting mailing. And we also have on our desk tonight a letter that is in, oh and the other item that was that's also gonna be in the town meeting mailing number two that we also had in our packet was the minority report of the planning board. And we also have a response to the minority report of the planning board. And that is on our desk tonight. Unfortunately it's not stapled together but it is here someplace, yes it is here. We have many things that are not stapled because apparently our copy ran out of staples it just makes our lives a little more complicated. But we will find it, it's in here and it is looks like this and it has steep bloom at the top. And there was also some material left in the back of the room which I put on all of our desks and I assume the petitioners will explain to us shortly. So we often say please bring us materials while we have a lot of materials. The historic committee letter on stapled to the back of the April summer report. I believe it's a separate letter that got stapled in and did not go out in the first mailing. It is, I'm not sure if it's on what you're on. I don't know what we're talking about because these things are identical. March and April are identical except for the first page. That's the only difference between what we got. The town meeting mailing was the March report that ends with this map. The April report that was submitted to the select board for tonight's meeting is identical except the first page has some additional information in it. There is not, I'm not sure what other item you would be referring to that would be stapled to it. Let me make sure if I could just look at that and see if we can find it. Yes, that would be helpful. It's in the, it will be, it is. You know what, it's in the big packet. It's not going to town meeting. It's in the big part, the big one that you have. So the big, the big clip together one is in here. Okay, so we have not seen that until just this minute but let us look for it because you, you take yours back so you don't lose it. And we, how, how far back is it? Oh, it's right here. So it's very shortly after the April version. And so it's my understanding that based on some mailing constraints, we are not sending out a second version of a report that was already provided to town meeting that was dated March. We are not sending the slightly revised April version. So that can be provided for the back table but it will not act and online, of course, like everything is. So people will have it ahead of time and they can study the differences between the two versions but we're not actually mailing what says here, letter to town meeting members second mailing. That's not actually in the mailing. We are sending the historic commission letter that I do not know because that was not part of our conversation. The letter you just showed me that was from this one right here. And you think that one is potential in there? Yeah, on the back of this. But you think that's upstairs ready to be mailed? Xerox with this whole package. But the whole package isn't going to town meeting, is it? Right. Right, because we don't have the weight limit. No, we're not expecting, we just wanted to have the letter from the address historical commission. We understand. They're the sponsoring organization on the warrant so it seemed appropriate. Right. The letter needs to go. The letter needs to go. So you thought the letter was going? Right, well. This is the way we Xeroxed it today. Okay. All right, so the second mailing is not going to go and I'll send you my letter responding to the minority report but I'll get it down to one page. And then, right, because we got a weak problem. Okay, got it. And so we have that tonight. Got it, got it. Because that was provided to us tonight. Believe it or not. That will go in the town meeting mailing number two once it's smaller. That big one you have is actually not, it's, there's like another 400 pages to it. So we spared you. You were selectively curating to give us this much. I did the selectings and we appreciate it. So this will be in the town meeting mailing number two along with the Bloom letter as in town meeting mailing number two. And those are the two items for this article that are going in town meeting mailing number two. Does that make sense? The historical commission letter. Yep. And Mr. Bloom's letter. Which is one more sheet than we'd expected but hopefully the weight thing won't be a problem. We'll start printing them on onion skin or something. All right, so showing my age. So given that we all kind of know what all this material is that we have because we have a lot of it and luckily everybody can follow along online at home. What we have is we are hoping by the end of after the presentation and time for questions and answers from the select board potentially from the public depending on what our timings like associated with this item we would take a position on this article. The way we are going to do this is the way we do it with all the articles which is we have asked ahead of time that people plan to talk to us or at us I should say. For five minutes total between however many petitioners they'd like to split that five minutes and then we will ask questions. See if we have time to have the audience ask questions. See if we have staff questions, et cetera. And we'll go from there. So please introduce yourself to the folks at home. You'll be the first speaker. OK. I'm Steve Bloom, the chair of the study committee. And I'm going to read like a minute statement. We've already made the case why this should be a historical district. You have it in front of you and I think it's pretty conclusive. We've been approved by everybody. Actually I'm just going to start reading. I'm just going to read. I'm not going to get into the justification for it. I'm just going to read a conclusion. We've done everything we're supposed to do and so far I've been approved by everybody there is to approve us in this long and arduous process. So if I may I'll just read the conclusion of the comments I plan to read to Tom meeting as part of the study committee's PowerPoint presentation. This is a neighborhood which wants and deserves to be an LHD. It's not being imposed on the neighborhood because it was in fact generated by it. There has been little if any opposition to the LHD. And as we all know, people in Amherst aren't shy about voicing their opinions. This LHD is good for the whole town. It's good karma. It's actually amazing the neighborhood remains as attacked as it is, especially when it's so close to downtown. An LHD designation protects a significant chunk of Amherst's unique past and identity of what makes our town unlike any place else. Because as we all know, Amherst is a very special place with very special challenges. Personally, I don't know of another town its size in the entire country, possibly the entire world, which boasts not two, but three nationally known institutions of higher learning. On a practical level, the LHD will serve as a much needed buffer and filter between UMass and downtown and the cultural zone that has recently been established in the commercial center. In the course of the past few years, I've made it a point to visit other university towns. In places like Newark, Delaware, and even Ithaca, New York, where protections don't exist or happen too late, the downtown's and surrounding neighborhoods have deteriorated into unending, undifferentiated blight, excuse me, most if not all traces of the past gone. This isn't an effort to lock a neighborhood in Amber. As Max Page, the professor of historic initiatives at UMass, will explain at town meeting, LHD design standards are flexible. LHDs don't prevent rental conversions or densification. But what they will do is create a mechanism for the town and its year-round residents to have a voice in determining our collective destiny. Because once Amherst, one of a kind heritage and character and gone, they are gone for good and this very precious, fragile place we all care about so much becomes generic, just like any place else. Please identify yourself. Yes, yes, Morianne Adams. I'm also a resident of the neighborhood. I'm a member of the study committee. And I want to just add some of the legal context for this, both for the audience that may be paying attention and also reminding you that this is under Massachusetts general law, 40C. There are hundreds of LHD towns in Massachusetts and there are more than hundreds of LHDs. The purpose of which is to balance the preservation of the visible remaining history built into the architecture and the neighborhood with other kinds of development presses. So it fascinated me when I went back to the master plan to read it with great detail that there is a great deal of language in the cultural and natural resources section of the master plan asking that we do exactly what we've done. We have followed the guidelines that are laid out by the Massachusetts Historical Commission of Public Hearings, Working with the Public, having our meetings open. We've looked at the language in the 2005 preservation plan as well as the master plan. We've met with the current Amherst Historical District Commission, which is the commission that oversees the Dickinson Historic District. I'm being very careful with my language here because we sometimes call this Amherst local historic district by the shorthand of the one district that it oversees. We have met with that group. We've had long conversations with that group. They are welcoming us on board. And we have offered to help them with the necessary task that usually comes after an LHD has been established of coming up with the appropriate guidelines. I've established a file of some 20 versions of design guidelines for a number of historical districts in Massachusetts. There is tremendous range. I think that we have agreement with the Amherst local historic district that this will be a task that we will embark on as soon as possible. Partly because that commission through their experience with Dickinson has made some hundred decisions already that have not been contested. And we, because we've written all of those form B's, know the proposed LHD pretty well. So that's some of the context for the remarks that Steve was making. Thank you. Questions from the select board before I ask if the planning board wishes to speak to their article, their report on this. Please. I mean, I'm gonna pose my question and if the members of the planning board want to respond to welcome all input because they're just trying to get a little bit more of a sense of a couple of things about this. And I'm gonna start by saying that having just gone through a campaign, one of the things that happens uniquely during that brief period of time where one is campaigning for reelection to this board is that you run into people who raise their issues. And one of the people who came up to me was somebody who owns property on Sunset and was very upset about this proposal. And so I had the opportunity to hear her out because that's what you do. And I think that the questions that came up was that unlike Lincoln, Sunset is a street with extremely varied architecture and extremely varied economics and uses as you drive down the street. And so I don't think that I was reading her question as being opposition to the creation of the district, but feeling like at least the property that she owned was not in any way historic and not something that was appropriate for the district. And I applied her with some questions about it and one of them being to understand exactly what her concern was. And I think it's something that I've heard in the current historic district, which is that at times, since you're talking about exterior and if you're talking about, for example, windows that a very specialized window can be very expensive or impossible to find, especially if you're trying to look for a one also that's energy efficient. And so I think that just a little bit more explanation of why some of those properties because I did drive down the street just to get a sense of what she was talking about why some of those properties should be in the district and what would happen in a home where a request is made to change a house that really doesn't have any unique historic architectural feature in comparison to most of the rest of the town, quite frankly. Our parameters for this LHD is the period between the Civil War and World War II and anything that's not within those parameters is considered an intrusive property and is not subject to the provisions of LHD, to my understanding. And in terms of houses that are under those parameters, if there's a hardship in terms of there's a peculiarity to that house, which makes it very expensive to replace something, they can be given an exclusion for that as well. But this is the first time we've heard from someone heard about this, I wish we've had two public hearings and a mailing and a question. So this is news to me and we've documented most of those, we've documented all those houses, I'd be curious to know which property you're referring to. Yeah. If I could just quickly add to that, I mean, I think it's important to know that staff sent two letters for public hearings to every address in the district. And we had public hearings. We've had, people are of course worried about the detail of this and it is not necessarily the case that the most historically precise window is going to be the window that the commission asks for. And in the hundred cases that we've seen from the current commission, which would include this LHD as well, they are on the side of flexibility rather than being like Nantucket, which has a tourist town is very precise about every scroll and every window. So it's not the case that she would be refused window replacement. It is the case that we're encouraged to go with solar and heat retaining features. And it is the case that we'll be developing design guidelines that will be able to accommodate the entire neighborhood, which like Dickinson, although it's larger, has a very large range of architectural features. And we have to respect that range. One more. Every LHD or historical district, even a national district, in national, they're not all, there's always, you know, properties that don't belong in the, you know, within the parameters. And in the national historic districts, they're called non-contributing properties. For some reason in LHD, they're called intrusive properties. But one of the things the man dates that in LHDs and national historic districts, you have to have them be contiguous. So you have to, you know, pick a whole block of area. You can't just sort of like, you know, pick some cherry picket. And so that's why, you know, like there's a number of properties on Lincoln, for example, that will build, you know, that will build in the 60s. And those are intrusions and they would not be subject to the design guidelines that we'd be coming up with. Thank you, I think. I can't pinpoint a property for you because in the conversation, this particular voter was more interested in the principal than complaining, making her property the forefront of an input of my discussion. So she didn't give me the address. I didn't ask for it. So I do not know. Thank you. I'm sorry, which of you, whichever of you was first? Okay. If I could just, a little bit there to amplify what Mr. Bloom and Ms. Adams said. I mean, I think number one, first of all, you know, we've just been through a presidential election campaign. And you know, it's hard for people to sort out information and tell what's true and not true and ask the right questions. So number one, I would say, read the FAQs. It's a very nice information sheet because most of the concerns about local historic districts are based on a complete misunderstanding of what they do and what they regulate. They've prepared a very nice sheet that answers all those questions. So once again, to the viewing audience, look at the frequently asked questions and look at the answers and you'll probably find that your questions go away. The other thing I can just amplify a little bit on what Mr. Bloom said is that, you know, there's a reason, these are neighborhoods. They're not like local, they're not like national registered districts, which include and exclude properties. They're supposed to encompass the entire area. I mean, part of the principle is, for example, if this were a district here, we wouldn't decide to exclude Ms. Brewer's desk because it's not sufficiently historical because someone could do something terrible there. You know, so you have to regulate, you're protecting the entire district by encompassing all the properties. In other words, you don't want to allow infusions to come into these places here, but you're not forcing people to make their houses historical, people replacing like, you know, the same thing with the same thing is never a problem. These are really mostly just non-issues, and if that helps a little bit at all. But again, the idea is that you're looking for the ensemble of the character and you wish to avoid something that spoils the character of the neighborhood. So it's not a question so much of making, with this case, for example, the Dickinson district up the street here, there's a very nice ranch house at the corner of Sweetser Park and extensive renovations and expansion has taken place there. And they're in keeping with the house. It's just, they're not in conflict with the overall atmosphere in the district. So I think it's the best way to put it, that we're just trying to prevent things that are jarring and disruptive, not to prevent change and not to prevent the modern. Yes, Ms. Griefer, well, I don't know, maybe, I don't know if we should hear from the planning board and then we're gonna have more discussion or just wanna get it, kind of get it out now. But Mr. Weld, to spoil the neighborhood in jarring and disruptive are words that kind of bother me, actually, because that's what worries me about this type of review. One person's spoiling is another person's appropriate. So I think there needs to be some balance. And I know we don't have design guidelines yet and I wonder will the design guidelines give comfort or make it more prescriptive. So I feel sort of on the fence, I do see the value of a local historic district. I don't need to be convinced of that. I think the authority is there. I don't buy the, I think we're totally entitled to have that kind of limitation. What I wonder about and have thought about and I will admit I'm not in the weeds, I haven't gone property by property as you have. But the size of the district seems large. It seems like perhaps there's two districts that may each be valid local historic districts, but you've combined. And so when I see that large an area with that much diversity, I thank you for explaining the contiguous and that we're looking at whole neighborhoods. But my main hesitation is about the size of the district that you're starting with instead of something more circumscribed. This is originally started when by the College of Amherst Neighborhoods and the area that they actually requested was much larger than what we finally settled on. And when this was approved by the Massachusetts Historical Commission, they actually encouraged us to make it larger to include the other side of Amnesty on Lincoln, which we decided to exclude. I don't, as we wrote in, we make a very convincing case which the Amherst Historical Commission has endorsed and the Massachusetts Historical Commission has endorsed and the planning board has endorsed that this is not two different neighborhoods but this is an interwoven and very unique neighborhood because not only is it the grand houses and I would actually challenge sunset. I could go through sunset. I don't know which house would be considered not historical there, but I think if you read particularly the significance section, this is one neighborhood and it doesn't, the average LHD is 100 properties, but like we said, the island of Nantucket is one LHD and the province town is 1,000 properties. So this isn't really excessive. I just want to add that in the past, historic preservation has been grand houses of well-known public significance. What struck us and was verified by our research which I regret is so detailed but you can only get the story of the neighborhood if you read the detail in that very nice packet that Mr. Toppins put together. Even the summary doesn't do it justice. What we discovered was that as Amherst grew in the mid 19th century from the cluster around Amherst College and farmlands in the area that we're now talking about, the first area was North Prospect. A number of Irish who lived there bought the properties that are now Beston, McClellan and Page began moving over there. So there were families both on North Prospect and in that neighborhood. They bought land that they sold to other Irish and at the same time Lincoln Avenue which had some of the employers of the Irish and then were also the homes that the black, the African Americans both from the South and from farmlands in the North clustering on Beston and Page and McClellan were working in those houses, chauffeurs in those houses, but building a community that we have found from anecdotal evidence and from written evidence was a deeply interwoven community. It's hard for us to understand this kind of class mixing and race mixing and it's not something that we've put there because we believe in it. We found it there. This is unusual in New England. It's a critical part of Amherst's history and what's so valuable about it is that it is a single interwoven neighborhood that emerged from the ground up as these farms were developed into residential communities both for Irish immigrants, blacks moving from North and South and mass agricultural and other people moving into a more established neighborhood of Lincoln and also Irish moving into Lincoln Avenue so that the work relationships, the social relationships, the religious relationships and the family relationships tie this community get together. It's a very unusual, either it's a very unusual case or it's the first such case documented in Western Massachusetts and it's something that Amherst should be proud of and should write up and have part of the tourist and family attraction. Can I do a follow up? Possible. The problem is those vernacular houses in Tambrook are actually older than the houses on Sunset and Lincoln and those are because they're modest houses, they're the most vulnerable and it's remarkable that they still exist and that's what we're trying to protect. And to give an example of what Marianne is saying how the neighborhood is interwoven, like for instance, Beston Street was developed by an Irish builder named John Beston. He died, his wife ended up moving to Lincoln Boulevard to one of the grand houses with her sister and then her daughter ended up living on another address in Lincoln. It's all intermixed and we are protecting, this isn't just about grand houses, we're trying to protect the history. I just wanna be clear, I don't have a preconception that historic districts have value for grand houses, actually value the Beston Street. Area I always thought for the 50 years I've been in town that that's one of the neatest parts of Emmer. So I'm not implying that the value is about grand houses, that that was not my comment and that is not how I perceive this and I understand the value of the more modest houses in the history there. But I do question the size of the district and the two separate areas you've explained, the interwoven social history. Again, I am not the expert on the architectural specifics of one or the other, but I just don't wanna be misunderstood of saying if it's not a grand mansion on Lincoln, whatever, that it has value because I actually have some understanding of the neighborhoods from a long time. So I wanna stop here and so I wanna do a couple different things. I wanna make a statement, but then I also intend to give us a chance to hear from the planning board regarding their report and their and the minority report characterized there. Obviously we're not gonna do these things at length and then we'll have another chance to ask each other questions and have concerns and see if we have any questions for staff or again for the petitioners. And this is kind of an awkward scenario in that we talked about the five minutes at the beginning. Obviously we've had questions and you've told us some really terrific stories about and I say that in the best possible way. That's how things really get communicated in this town is good stories about how things work and how things have come to be to where they are. I'm gonna ask you a couple of perhaps more pointed and less interesting story type questions, but in terms of the practical application because as I think was said rather pointedly at the beginning here is that all the boards that matter already agreed to this and that of course did not particularly set well with me. But as a select point, but I understand it from the standpoint that we are not here to rethink all the work that you did because we know that's what you did. That's what we set up when we initially said, yes, let's go forth and have this study committee. So thank you for all the amazing work you did and so we're just trying to come at it from the different points of view that we bring to the table as town-wide elected officials, all the different things that are under our purview and also the things that we hear from the community who are also people who more than likely have not delved into the great level of detail that you have. So quickly associated with that two particular points I wanna make sure I ask about before I hear from the planning board. One is that it's clear from this packet and from what you have said that you have done a great deal of outreach and so that's terrific. I'm a little misunderstanding and partly I think the planning board and the minority report may touch on this, but also just in terms of the descriptions that I've seen so far, it is one thing to have a whole bunch of people come to a meeting and say what a great thing something is that is terrific. It is also helpful to understand how when we think about this district versus the Dickinson district and of course the Dickinson district had a whole different set of hurdles to get over in terms of it was the first one and people were very scared about things like air conditioner units and windows et cetera and so we had a lot of these conversations then and so to some extent we're past that which is great except for people who've never heard of it before and then it's harder. But it is a much smaller number of properties and so having more and as I understood it a and vaguely recall it, a larger proportion of those property owners were embracing the idea visibly. We're coming forward and saying we are those property owners and this is what we want. There were some that had concerns but there were others that came forward and said yes this is what we want. It's not entirely clear to me based on the different types of statistics that are quoted in the various pieces of paper that we've gotten as to how many residents who live in these houses think this is a really good idea. So if you could give us a sense of that versus all the people who came to a meeting who may or may not live in those houses. I mean a number, well a couple things. First off, can I just go back one for one second. If the objection is that this is two different neighborhoods and it should be two different LHDs. All the LHDs are gonna be administered by the same commission. So the work's already been done. Does this mean that we should divide this up and have another study commission for to repeat the work that we've already done? On a practical level, I'm just bringing that up. In terms of support, this started off with a barn being taken down without recourse and at that time I could read you the language. The Amherst Historical Commission encouraged us to seek an LHD and the neighborhood if you go back three years ago was in an uproar. There was like 50, 60 people. In terms of my own outreach, I canvassed probably 70 people. I didn't canvass everyone, I canvassed everyone pretty much on Cosby, on Lincoln Avenue, not so much on Sunset, and Marianne did people on Beston, McClellan. So yes, and fearing is like way behind this. So yes, I think that the support for this is absolutely overwhelming. And to quote these figures, people come because they object to something, not really to show support. Like I wrote in my letter, when you have a voting turnout that's typically 12%, and you have people that have, we have well over 25% who came to these meetings, plus another 25% that responded favorably to our questionnaire. Yes, I think the facts speak for themselves. Thank you, that's helpful. The people at the meetings were people from the neighborhood. The mailing had gone out to every property owner in the neighborhood. The objections that came from the property owners of North Pleasant were of a different kind, and we have cut North Pleasant out of it so that now it is a residential general neighborhood, where the LHD is supported by the homeowners. The only business there is the creamery, and it's fine with the creamery as well. Thank you. And the other question I had, you've already touched on Mr. Boone, but I'd like you to elaborate on, so one of the shorthand discussions about this is as you just referenced, the barn, the infamous barn. So how would things have been different if there was another property that had such a barn? How would it work now with the new district in place? How would that have changed the way that process worked? So I think that's a practical explanation that will appeal to some people. One regulation is changes that are seen from the public way. So we would need to establish that it was seen from the public way. Then the question would be the reason for the demolition and the impact on the neighborhood. I cannot speak for the current commission. I can only speak for their process, which is one of negotiation with owners to discuss ways of resolving their objection or their concerns about the impact on the neighborhood and the reasons that the owner has for wanting to do something that they object to. So I think that that is probably a question that would need to be given to the current, we should have gotten them here, Mr. Ergud, Mr. Schaefer, et cetera, who work on the current commission. I think that our concern is more with buildings as seen from the public way, when people wanna take down a deck or put up a deck or change a single entrance in order to build a duplex. That's a question that came up. That was an interesting question. There were two ways of resolving it. One is you can have the single entrance going to two separate stairwells inside the house. They would not be seen from the public way. The other is we have plenty of two front door houses in the neighborhood. So it could simply be made consistent with those. What I was struck with in the discussions with the commission is their flexibility and their concern to negotiate. So as not to create a hardship for the owner, but not to create something that is strongly inconsistent with the neighborhood. And I do wanna say that for the Elm Street in North Hampton, which we very much admire, there is a great range from very modern use of materials and modern design to buildings that are old. And in the neighborhood that we are seeking to preserve now, we have solar panels, we have heat retaining windows. So there are examples for that in the neighborhood that could be used by the commission to give permission to move in that direction for others as well. I can add to that as well. I think it was admitted in LHD that they would have, I'm not sure about this, but there would have been a demolition delay more readily. And I also, this has teeth. If the barn were judged, and I'm not saying a word would be judged at the end of this process, to have historic value, an LHD can prevent a demolition, which the Historical Commission cannot. And thank you because that was actually my question. And that is one of my struggles with this particular issue because I really appreciate the diversity of the housing that is there and the fact that we've gotten past all those questions about, will I be able to have solar panels? Will I be able to have a duplex? Because we know, we've seen it in action, that that is going to be possible. Speaking as a concern of mine and others that I've had shared, is that I don't know that I'm comfortable with the idea that the barn couldn't have been torn down because of, if this district had existed. And so that's the struggle, that's really probably the last struggle of having a business. It's not saying that that's a foregone conclusion. Yeah, it's just saying that that is, I mean, something of- That is a possible outcome. What if somebody wants to take down, for instance, the Burnett House? This can prevent the Burnett House from being taken down. What if somebody wants to take down the Robert Frost House? This can prevent the Robert Frost House. So thank you. I appreciate that it's difficult to differentiate between those things in such a way that- And the barn could be rebuilt. I mean, if the person wanted another home in that area, one could consider how the barn could be rebuilt into something that is consistent with the house that it goes with, but would have a different use that would meet the needs for profit of the owner. Or the barn could be judged not to be historically enough significant and could be demolished. You just don't, it's a case by case. What this does, this is why we've spent two and a half years, is coming up with a mechanism that actually has some teeth. Great, other questions from the select board before we hear from the planning board? We'll get another chance after we hear from the planning board. Okay, so if you guys wouldn't mind scooching over, then I know the planning board has a number of articles before us tonight, so I hope you've gotten comfortable. And this is just being the first. You have provided us a report, which will go on the second town meeting mailing, as I mentioned earlier, as well as the planning board minority report. And if you could briefly characterize, I know it's a lot of words to summarize into just a couple of minutes, but if you could do that, that'd be helpful. And then we may have some questions from you. Sure, I'm Rob Crowder, I'm a member of the planning board. Planning board has supported this article, but not unanimously, there was a diversity of opinion. This, the planning board obviously is very interested in the overall shape of the town, development of the town, and specifically the town center. And so we have begun thinking about how the town center might work differently. Better, worse, who knows. But part of planning for any change that we might want to suggest or allow to happen is to be sensitive to the surrounding neighborhood, which is actually an integral part of the town center. The master plan recognizes that there are competing interests and there's a need for economic development, but there's also a need for preserving neighborhoods and preserving the historical significance of neighborhoods. So we welcomed the work that the study committee did. We were impressed, I think, the story that they told. They were very persuasive in convincing us that the district actually was important historically and not just a nice place to live. So our support, I think, is an attempt to welcome all parts of the town center as important and needing care and attention by the town. So the people in that neighborhood wanted, we were persuaded that they wanted the protection that a local historic district offers. And the town through the master plan has recognized that that's an appropriate tool. So we supported it. I think to characterize the minority report, I think it is a big district. It's a little different kind of district than the Dickinson district. I think some people felt that the Dickinson district is more clearly a centerpiece of Amherst than the neighborhood that is the subject of this one. And some people were concerned, had similar concerns as has been raised here about what the impact would be on property owners and how it might impact development in a neighborhood that is so close to downtown. And therefore might be subject to more housing or other kinds of development in a central place. Thank you. Questions from the select board for the planning board about the report, about the minority report? Seeing none, okay. Do, does the select board have additional questions for the petitioners? Are we ready to make a motion and start moving toward a vote? Where are we at? Absolutely. This is a big issue. Yeah, I think, do you want to go first? No, I didn't have a specific, I just had a sense for you. I think that the question that I had was Mr. Bloom made, I appreciated his comments and report about the term which he recognized was an awkward term, but it was a descriptive term of an intrusive property. And when I looked in the list in this particular packet for properties on the street that I was talking about, there certainly are properties that would fit that definition simply because their construction date is beyond the period that was described in the description of the historic district is going through World War II. And so I made me then curious because I'm not familiar with the process in its entirety is to whether property that doesn't clearly fit within that description, as for the reason that I just described is has some automatic status that allows the homeowner to do what they want or is the homeowner bound to maintain the property in the general condition in which it existed at the time it was built. How is, I guess I'm still a little bit of a loss as to how that works because it's more than one property on that street and I didn't look at other streets because I didn't have time, but it seems to me that for every homeowner, their property is significant. So that's the question is a little bit more of an understanding of what happens in those circumstances if anyone knows, I'm sure all has any experience. Sure. Take sort of a, I didn't think we have quite so many controversies and questions about an institution that's been around since the 1930s and as part of messages state law. So we shouldn't be debating the nature of historic districts and their ability to regulate that's established by state and federal law. So I think we're having that conversation, we're having the wrong conversation. Mr. Steinberg's question is a typical one. I guess the answer is, I'll let the petitioners join in if they wish also or Mr. Toplans, you know, no one is required to, the point about these things, their neighborhood is homogeneous, they're not homogeneous, not every property is the same and this one, whether you think it should be one or two, whatever, it has a diverse character. So you've got small houses down by Besten and large houses on Lincoln. And I think the general idea is that something should be appropriate and let me back up maybe and start with a more philosophical statement. I mean, I think one of the problems we have in this town is that we don't trust people and time and again we've seen people say, you know, I don't trust what the select board is gonna do whether people at the front of the room or the planning board. And, you know, on some level, if you worry about the worst case scenario all the time you'll make yourself nuts and we should be thinking about the normal and the average, not the least likely possibility. And if you look at the way the Dickinson district has been administered, which has ranch houses, which has Dickinson historic museum structures, which has Amherst College properties and others, it's a highly diverse district. There have been a number of, as we saw a number of cases that came before it. It's not been controversial. People use the good sense of the average rational person. And I guess I would say also, you know, Ms. Breastrup can help out here. What's been underlying those decisions, aside from common sense and the common good, is the design review guidelines. You know, that's the basic idea which talks about conformity, not in the sense of absolute similarity or identity, but massing forms and so forth. In other words, there should be, you know, it's like form-based codes. There should be a shape and feel that seems appropriate or at least you want to prevent one that seems wildly inappropriate. So I don't know if that answers the question of the infusions. So, you know, if you have a ranch house, more power to you. You're not required to keep it as a ranch house. But the principle we used in the case of the Dickinson district was when building permits are pulled, it goes to a preliminary review by the building inspector. And, you know, he may sign off and say, fine, nothing to worry about. And if there's any question, it goes to the commission and they take a look at it. And then there's a question, there's a process of questioning and conversation. But it's not, you know, we desire the Dickinson district, we try to strike the balance between making things easy for the homeowner and allowing some control to stay in place. Because as Mr. Malloy used to say, you know, if you regulate everything viciously, then that's no good. But if you don't regulate anything, there's no point in regulations. So the idea is always a kind of a golden mean where common sense prevails. And I'm not sure if I can describe the principle any better than that. I think if you try to specify, it becomes much more difficult. But the idea is that there can be a variety of properties. You just want change to be, in a sense, that wouldn't cause someone to walk down the street and go, what in the world was that? You know, what happened there? What big mistake took place? But this shouldn't prevent a modern building. In principle, a steel and glass cube could be more fitting than a fake colonial structure. You know, so there's room for the modern, there's room for diversity. Can I speak to that as well if there's time? If you could do it briefly, that'd be great. Well, first of all, the Dickinson district covers pretty much the same range of styles and time period. I mean, police station, I think, is technically part of the Dickinson district. And also, if you look at the Elm Street district in Northampton, which actually has no historical parameters, it's just the parameters there are just geography. The range of styles is even more extreme. The range of time is 300 years, not 200 years or 100 years. And under the Elm Street parameters, there's a museum that was constructed on the Smith campus that's very modern that was deemed to be appropriate with the design guidelines. And then also, in terms of design guidelines, no LHDs are created with design guidelines in place. The Elm Street design guidelines were created 15 years after the Elm Street LHD was created. I'm going to excuse myself for just a moment. Continue to talk amongst yourselves. Mr. Walgreensons, this is clearly a favorite article of yours. You may go ahead and recognize people to continue. I recognize Ms. Krigger in that case. Mr. Watt, I think you did hit on it about trust. And just to be consistent with myself, I thought that the Dickinson district was too large when we discussed that, too. And if it were up to me, I would probably run it differently. It's not my area in the way it's your area. And I do want to trust that this could be done reasonably. And I have just been in a couple of historic districts in other states where either the downtown was completely included or the district went right up to the downtown. So I don't see that necessarily as a conflict. I am concerned when we're putting this level of regulatory control over so many properties. And I think it's appropriate, as a select board, to ask those questions. And that's not necessarily challenging the authority of a local historic district or questioning the philosophy of it. I think that these are questions that come up for ourselves and other people we talk to in the community. And it's OK for us to explore that. That doesn't mean we don't get the principle of it and the value of it. But I think we're doing what we're supposed to do. And it's an important topic. And it's an important area in our downtown. And if this passes, we're adding another layer of regulatory review, maybe an appropriate one. Maybe this is where it should go. But it is OK to have a range of opinions about these things. And that's why we're having a rigorous conversation. So I think we're within bounds of what we're supposed to be doing with that. So you didn't do anything. Yes, well, of course. But continue, please. Is someone ready to make a motion? Yeah, at this point, I think I will. And I really appreciate the comments, the responses that I've received. It's been very helpful because I'm going to make a motion to recommend to the April 26, 2017 annual town meeting article 25, General By-law Amendment Local Historic District, if he's willing, Mr. Wald, to speak to the article on behalf of the select board. Second. I don't think he has a choice. Then we'll take out the words if he's willing for the motion. OK, so that motion is on the floor to recommend, correct? OK. Further discussion, further questions, additional things that will help people understand this prior to town meeting or at town meeting? Ms. Krueger. Just I feel somewhat torn. I'm leaning more towards supporting it. But I do have those concerns, which I've gotten a chance to express. And you had to step out. So I'm wondering if other members are feeling a little mixed or this is just we're ready to go for this before we vote. Right, it's always difficult to figure out, do you go ahead and choose based on misgivings to not support something knowing that a majority is probably going to support it anyway? And so therefore, does it matter? And in that case, maybe there's no point in voting against it. But reservations are reservations. And those are appropriate, even if you disagree with state law, even at that level, or with anything in particular at the local level. And both the protection nature and the preservation nature, but yet what impact does that have on people moving in and out of the community, which is a question that we get a lot here at the Select Port. So it's a complex issue. And it's not something that, as I understand it, that once you go ahead and town-meaning supports this, that then they decide the following year, oh, that was a bad idea. We don't want to do that anymore. So once you go down this road, you do go down this road. And more things get worked out over time, as you indicated, some design guidelines in some cases that are developed over many years to be responsive to the community. May the petitioner make just two quick comments? If they're really quick. It will be really quick. I want to say that, first, the existing commission has heard 100 cases, and all have been successfully resolved. I take some confidence in that. The second is, I think we haven't said enough about this. We see this as an asset for Amherst. We think it's valuable to acknowledge a district of this sort, to publicize it, to put signage up, and to tell this dimension of the story for visitors and for our own history. So the work that we've put into this was not just for ourselves. We saw it as a real asset for the town that values its history, knowing that its history is very complicated. Other comments from the select board? Are we ready to come to a vote? Let's try and see how this works. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. So I hear four. And I was planning to not vote against, but to abstain. So am I correct in recording that? 4, 0, 1? OK. So could we don't follow Robert's rules? So I'm going to ask that we just reconsider. And I'm going to go ahead and vote with the majority. And so we are going to unanimously support this. And so let the record show that. And it's like the other thing never happened. So 5, 0, and unanimous support recommendation to town meeting. So thank you. We appreciate you coming forward. We appreciate all the work everybody's put into this. I took the historic commission letter out of this. But if you would like to be able to pass this along to someone else, because there's so much good material in here. Yeah, that'll be great. But I did steal the letter out of it, which I understand will be in the packet. So thank you for all your work. All right. So we are now going to probably to the chagrin of some people in the audience. We are going to move into the zoning articles. And we are going to not that's going meaning. We are going to start with planning board article 32. Table three footnotes. Possibly the most exciting title we have on this year's warrant. I'm not sure it. And so we did it twice. Yeah. OK. So I'm Rob Panner again. I'm going to actually do the first two articles. They're both. Great. So you want to do 32 and 33 together? Great. Are articles to remove to pair down the list of footnotes at the end of table three, the dimensional table. It's where all of the minimums and maximums for heights, lot size, frontage, floors, and so on are listed for each kind of, for each zone in town. But there's a long list of footnotes at the end of that that has caused some angst for people. I think it's unnecessarily confusing. And they don't really need to be there because article six of the zoning bylaw provides for a section where the dimensional table is interpreted, described, explained how to use. So many of the footnotes are more appropriately put in that section. So recently, the planning board has been attempting to gradually move the footnotes away from the dimensional table and into earlier in chapter six of the zoning bylaw. So article 32 deals with three footnotes that apply to setbacks, aside and rear setbacks. And all we're doing is moving the text of a footnote into article 6.1 of the zoning bylaw, specifically subsection 6.13, which deals with sideyards, and 6.14, which deals with rearyards. We're not changing how the bylaw works. We're just moving text over. And article 33 deals with two unrelated articles, unrelated footnotes, one explaining what requirements for a buildable lot, regardless of what the minimum lot size is for any particular district, all building lots have to fill the description in footnote H. And so we're just moving that into section 6.1 again. The last one is a footnote L, which applies to the entire dimensional table. It just points you to section 6.6 that says religious and educational uses. There's one exception. And there's no need to have it footnoting the entire table. You should be using article 6 in conjunction with the dimensional table anyway. So again, neither of these change the way the bylaw works. It's just rearranging words on the page. Great. Thank you. Questions from the select board? Luckily, we had these packed. Well, I won't say luckily, because I said they're not coming unless we have the reports in our packet over the weekend. So thank you so much for having the reports done so that we could have you here with us tonight. And we really appreciate that you got them done in time to go on the town meeting mailing as to. Because I know some years past, it's not easy to do. And there's a lot of work involved by both members and staff. So thank you for that. If there are not any questions, please. Yeah, that's one quick question, Schroeder. Just curious, and this is I'm looking at the planning board report under article 32, page 2. And it's under footnote 3, the last paragraph. And I read that about five different times, because I was going into the statement that had been made early in the report, that this was to just take care of this problem that there was both the footnotes in the section. But in that one particular paragraph, you say since there's no default standard that going on I'm trying to get, well, the default is really zero or at least 10 feet, the planning board proposes that 10 feet be entered in the table. Is that establishment of actually a standard as opposed to just clarification of placement? I don't think it is. Whether or not there's a standard in there, you would be using section 6.1 to interpret what the dimension should be. The dimension should be either zero or if there doesn't have to be a setback, or if there is a setback, it has to be at least 10 feet. And having a number in there that says 10 doesn't change the fact that you can still have zero. Okay. Thank you. So that was clarifying on page 2 of article 32. Thank you. Other questions from the select board? Were there questions from the public on articles 32 or 33, I'll bet footnotes really turned them out for the hearing as I believe you indicated in your report. So thank you. And no public input, strangely enough. So thank you. And for the work of the Zoning Subcommittee as well, of course, could we have a couple of motions? We can, I will also preface this with saying if people are worried about, you know, how they really have to give this stunning speech at TAO meeting with the select board recommendation, this could again be the kind of thing where we just tell the moderator to report what our vote was, assuming it is non-controversial. So would someone like to make a motion for article 32? Yeah, please. I move to recommend to the April 26, 2017 annual town meeting, article 32, Zoning Table 3, footnotes, setbacks. No one to speak to the article on behalf of the select board. Second. Put it on the list for the moderator. Make a footnote about that. Yes, we will not make new footnotes. Further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And that passes unanimously. And similarly, a motion on article 33. I'll go ahead and continue. I move to recommend to the April 26, 2017 annual town meeting, article 33, Zoning Table 3, footnotes, miscellaneous with no one to speak to the article on behalf of the select board. Second. Further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And that is also unanimous, because the select board is clearly a rubber stamp. So it's because this is a non-controversial thing that other people have already researched in great detail, and I am grateful for that. So moving on to article 34. Article 34 provides for changing the zoning bylaw in a way that does not change the substance of the bylaw. And hopefully to save steps, save time, save money, not have to go through town meeting for something that is a change, but not really an amendment of the bylaw. You may remember a few years ago, the planning board had contemplated adding a new overlay district. The problem is that there was no room in the zoning bylaw the way it's numbered to fit a new district of any kind. So in order to propose that district, we would have had to reorder section 3.2 of the zoning bylaw in order to make room for a new section. That would have resulted in something like 19 pages, or it did result in 19 pages in a warrant. And unfortunately, we made a mistake when it was printed. It was a waste of time, and it was really not necessary. We are proposing, as some other towns and Massachusetts have done, to provide for changing of numbering typographical errors or cross-framed errors after a public hearing at the request of the planning board and then at the discretion of the town clerk rather than a formal amendment process. Thank you. Questions from the select board? This seems like a really good idea. And so there will obviously be people who are nervous about the idea. But as you indicate, there is still a hearing that gets published about this. It's just that then you can go ahead and act after that. You don't have to then also get town meetings approval after the hearing. Right, and it wouldn't be the planning board who had the final say. We would request the town clerk to make that change, presumably if there was a lot of discussion at the hearing that we had, or if the request to the clerk was not unanimous, the clerk might decide to, might decline to make the change and ask us to go through town meeting, presumably. Thank you. Yes, Ms. Bader. Since we had a theme of trust earlier, I think this starts to move us a little bit more towards something of substance. And I trust the process and I trust the planning board process, I would say the board, but the members will always be changing. But I think this is an important kind of efficiency and makes sense. But I think it may stir up issues that people have had in the long history of people worrying about the wall being pulled and things like that. But I think that this is something that's well in the range of the reasonable. And I trust that this will be carried out appropriately. So I don't want to cut off discussion, but I'd be willing to make this motion as well. If you would go ahead and make the motion, we can continue discussion after the motion has been seconded. I move to recommend to the April 26, 2017, annual town meeting, Article 34, zoning, non-substitutive corrections. You could put me down to speak to this, but I'm also happy to just have the moderator say we pass this. But if it seems we want to go further, I would be willing to do that. Second. So further discussion. This is probably one of the shortest warrant articles I've ever seen from any issue, and the report makes everything very clear in terms of it does require that hearing and the town clerk's participation. So further discussion. Then all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And that passes unanimously. We're trying to use this yellow corrected sheet. Don't ask us why there's a copy and paste error with articles 13 and 14 stuck in the middle. Just pretend you don't see that, because we already voted on those another night. I'm wondering why they asked for that. So it's just that they gemagically reappeared. It was not purposeful. No worries. Yes, you did not imagine that we already did that. And so we voted unanimously. And if somebody needs to speak, it'll be Ms. Krueger. But I will also tell the moderator. Excellent. And so that brings us to Article 35. Article 35 is an article that would enable, facilitate a project that Valley CDC wants to bring to town. That is an enhanced SRO apartment building for very low-income people, people emerging out of homelessness, an apartment, a place that they can live. They can rent at a low rate as they transition into other accommodations eventually. Unfortunately, that kind of building is not really possible under our current zoning bylaw, because the use category under which it would fit, apartment buildings, requires that there be a mix of bedroom counts, at least a 50-50 mix of bedroom counts in an apartment building. And Valley CDC would like to build all small efficiency units, a single-size unit. And they can't do that. So we would like that to be possible. We would like to see this project come to town. It's something that has been talked about for a while. And we're glad that someone is finally wanting to bring it. So the way we're going to make it possible is for an apartment building in which all of the dwelling units are countered as affordable, other than those occupied by a resident manager, the permit-granting body for that use could waive the provision that requires a mix of bedrooms, bedroom counts. Thank you. It mentions here, unusually, that under process that public curing was held. But it doesn't say if anybody came or anybody spoke for anything. No, there was. Maybe you remember better. We had a representative from Valley CDC. And she came and spoke. Her name was Joanne Campbell. I think she's one of the people who runs Valley CDC, Executive Director. And she explained a lot about what Valley CDC is proposing and thinking about. But there were no members of the public who participated. OK. One way or another. All right. Yes, Mr. Slatter. So the Housing and Sheltering Committee and the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust will actually take this up tomorrow and discuss this a little bit so they don't have an opinion about it just yet. I unfortunately will not be able to be at that meeting tomorrow. But there are some questions that some of the members have and they want to sort of explore those and tease those out a little bit before they make their recommendation. But they will be discussing that at tomorrow's meeting. So I want to make the board aware of that, that there's not an opinion from them yet. But they will discuss it tomorrow. That leaves us with a couple of choices. We could determine that we want to wait and find out what their opinion is. Or we could come up with an opinion. And then if we hear a different opinion from them, then we could reconsider ours. Ms. Krueger. Right. It does raise that because I would prefer to hear from them before we take a position. But I think we could have a little bit of a discussion now. And some of my questions, I want to see that kind of project as well. However, I have trouble changing a bylaw for one agency or one type of development. So if we don't have the bedroom requirement right in our zoning bylaw, then we should fix it. But I'm not sure we should just do it with the caveat that 100% of the units be affordable. There are other combinations of affordable housing that aren't 100%. And it's alluded to in the report, or not alluded to, it says you might want to consider changing that at a future time. Certainly, if it's a Chapter 40B development, it's going to be exempt anyway. But I just wonder if the planning board had looked at what we have now, which probably goes back 20, 25 years. And if it's time to just revisit the bedroom mix issue. I think some of the bedroom mix concern was wanting to make sure that there were some family size units. That's often what it's about. I think for other people, it's not wanting students. So we have a tension between not too many small, not too many big. And it would be great to be able to go ahead with an enhanced SRO type of development. But I'm more wondering about the usefulness of the bedroom mix and the existing bylaw and the best way to fix it. Go ahead. Yeah, that's a good question. We struggled with that as well. We are not sure that the way the bedroom mix is required is right. But we were asked by Valley CDC how this could be possible now. And so rather than go through a long process of actually fixing the apartment saners and additions to make it work better overall, it might take longer than Valley CDC has time. They would like to be able to start this year. They want to combine it with a project in Northampton to get funding. So it's not necessarily the case that it wouldn't happen if it didn't happen now. But now is the time that they want to act. So in order to make that possible, we thought the easiest way to do it would be to allow 100% affordability to have the waiver. We considered 25% or 50% because we would like to be able to waive it for any kind of affordable development. But we were afraid that that would be a harder thing for time being to swallow. We wanted to make it as easy as possible now. And then hopefully we will revisit it later. So if you could help me understand because this is not one that I've had adequate time to prepare thoroughly on. And so I'm sorry if you address this directly in your report and I'm just not reading it carefully enough. So with that caveat, at this time, that an SRO cannot happen. What they are trying to talk about there simply is no possible way to allow for it under existing bylaw. So if a particular project is to happen, we have to allow it somehow. And after much back and forth, you determine that this would be the way to address that project. Acknowledging that there are other larger issues as you just did and as you did in the report, is that accurate to say? This just can't happen unless you do this. And so that would be the risk of not adopting this is that it cannot happen. Is that correct? OK, yes, Ms. Brestrup. The only other way it can happen really is through the comprehensive permit process. And that would take much longer than this process would take. And there is also when with the adoption of this, there is not any place in town where someone could choose to do this without going through a process of special permit or you would. It would be special permit in most cases, a site plan review in the general business district. So this isn't going to just allow someone who happens to have the perfect property for this to just go ahead and just do it. That's not possible. But it enables it to happen under certain conditions. OK, thank you. That's helpful. Yes, Ms. Bader? Well, I'd just like to point out that Ms. Baker is here representing Valley City. See if we had any specific questions about the development project. But it's going back a ways. But I was at a zoning subcommittee meeting where this came up. And Ms. Baker made it clear that one way around this is to do a mix of studio in one bedroom, then you get the mix. But I'll let you speak for yourself, Ms. Baker. But that in this instance, even that change would drive the expenses above what was feasible. And it is true that a Chapter 40B permit is an expensive permit for one to obtain, because the state law prescribes so many different things that have to be done in order to fulfill that. So it sounds like this is somewhat of an action of expediency for something that we want, maybe not the ideal way to deal with our zoning. But anyway, just in case you didn't know that Ms. Baker was here. I mean, this did come up in response to that. If you could please identify yourself into the mic, that'd be great, because not everybody knows you. My name's Laura Baker. I'm the real estate project manager from Valley CDC. This idea did come up in response to one particular property at which the only real barrier to doing the type of housing that we were envisioning is this particular 50% rule. I would suggest that we looked carefully at the zoning bylaws for things that might facilitate creation of affordable housing and really did not find much that would favor that. And so I would suggest that this may be beyond this particular SRO project. Valley CDC is developing a larger building in Northampton now. It's 55 units of affordable housing. And 62% of those are two bedroom units. So it's just one example of a type of affordable housing project that wouldn't meet this standard. And the reason it's designed that way is that's what the market study says. So to have an arbitrary 50% rule that doesn't bear any relationship to market conditions again makes it, it's one more challenge in an already challenging business of trying to site and create affordable housing, especially in a town like Amherst, which has a lot of barriers already that are outside of your control like high market costs, limited stock. So this would just open the door a little bit to make it a little bit easier to do this kind of project. And we believe there has been a pretty well articulated need from a number of different groups in town for this type of housing. And it does not exist currently in town. Thank you, that's helpful. Other questions or comments? Are we comfortable with taking a position prior to housing and sheltering and the trust looking at this? Do we need to bring it back to another agenda? Do we take a position now and then consider revising it if they think of something that we didn't because obviously we look to them on housing issues. For more details, they've been talking about SROs for many years and the need has been well established in any number of studies. I personally am comfortable with this but I want to see where the slug bird's at. I just wonder if we already take our position if that kind of in some ways hampers or skews the conversation they're gonna have tomorrow because the slug bird already unanimously supports this. So whatever you say. So I don't think it really sets us back very far if we postpone because we've already had the discussion. We can hear in writing or through the town manager or Mr. Slater the results of that housing meeting and then we can just go ahead and vote some future time. Take two minutes. That sounds really simple but you know, given that we have old motions on our motion sheet and we have to keep track of things from week to week, I'm just a little hesitant to let go of something that's right in front of us. I get it, but Mr. Vakalman. The only other reason to act tonight would be that that would go into the packet that will go to all town meeting members that you voted affirmatively for this. So that might be a reason not to vote if you were nervous about whether you think Housing and Sheltering was going to support it. I will be at the Housing and Sheltering Committee tomorrow anyway so I can report to you prospectively after that. Not nervous, it's more of a courtesy of sort of letting them have their space to have the conversation. So if we don't vote, what do I put in the packet for tomorrow's mailing that says about this because I would rather not say we didn't decide anything because we didn't talk about it, but yeah. I appreciate what you're saying because we do normally look to them as I'd indicated. Do we have any sense of if they've been talking about this recently, I realize they meet less regularly than we do and so it's difficult to get things on the agenda in a timely fashion prior to town meeting. We don't have a meeting next week and then the following week is week. The week of town meeting. So can we just say postponed? In my previous community, the select men there would say we recommend the advice of the Housing and Sheltering Committee, something like that. As our position, waiting. As your position. Oh wow, now you're asking us to give over our opinion. That's a really, see that takes a whole new direction. To defer to them. We want to hear from them. We are not necessarily ready to defer to them. Madam Chair, we do have many examples where we haven't been able to take a position until. Right, I'm just talking about the simple management of the meeting and how it's not as simple as it appears. That is a difficulty we struggle with. But I won't let us forget that we haven't done Article 35. So how does the rest of the select board feel? Do we feel comfortable? Do we feel better about waiting? I could put that we're waiting to hear from the Housing and Sheltering Committee and our position, our little sheet tomorrow. I mean it's not gonna have long explanations. It's just gonna have yes, no votes, yes. So I would lean toward waiting until we get feedback from them. But I think you could say we're inclined to support this however we do want the feedback from them. You know, in case there's something they surface that hasn't come up with us or in our discussion. So. Okay, does that meet with everyone's approval? On the key at the bottom of the article assignment sheet and this was one used by the Finance Committee a lot is deferred until town meeting. Well, I'm not using that coding for our report. So that is a point of information, yes. But it's not that we're waiting to hear something like financial figures or something or to hear more about a motion that might be happening, but we are in fact waiting to hear from. Is it Housing and Sheltering and the trust? Are they meeting jointly? Yes. Okay. So it'd be both. Okay, great. Again, I will not be able to make it. I understand, but Mr. Bachman just told us. So we will say that we are inclined to support what we wanna wait and hear from them. And so we will postpone consideration of that, or I should say postpone, not necessarily consideration, but we are going to vote on article 35 at our meeting of Monday, April 24th. And it would be helpful if there is anything other than just, yeah, sure, from the Housing and Sheltering Trust if they have anything more than that, that gives them plenty of time to submit that to us that we could then have it to review prior to our meeting of the 24th. So appreciate anything in writing from their 413 meeting. So thank you. And we, I appreciate you being here and speaking to that. So we are now at the point of, we are almost done with planning board articles, as I understand it, other than the planning board's opinion associated with the zoning petition that was submitted by petition, which of course you also have to act on just as on other things. I do not see the petitioner for article 36 and a couple of other petition items here tonight. Do we know if Mr. O'Connor has responded to the written request that we've provided to him? No. He has not responded. Okay. And so we are going to just on the off chance that he shows up in a little while, let's shift things around just a little bit and let's go to article 31, limited release of restriction, which does not have a planning board position on it. But if planning board and wouldn't mind hanging around, we're gonna go ahead and I think we'll try and do 30. I don't wanna mix up my numbers, 36, so that planning board could do that. But I know that the petitioner for article 31 was in a different meeting too, so try and get everything done. And when I say the petitioner for article 31, this is kind of an unusual situation and that it was something that the select board added to the warrant because it was considered time sensitive. It was not a petition in the normal sense of the word. We do have a report associated with article 31 it was in our packet, watch me scramble, yes, we still have lots of paper here on our desk. And so thank you, I appreciate that. We still have lots of paper on our desk associated with everything and we know that you provided that to us and it's right here. Thank you so much. And so this is also in our packet for those of you following along come. And so if you would please identify yourself for the folks at home and tell us about this article. My name is Barry Roberts and I'm talking about a parcel on University Drive. The parcel number is 13B-33. It is located south of the New Market Center and north of 100 University Drive, the office building and 100 University Drive. The reason for us requesting an additional curb cut on University Drive is because of the amount of wetlands that are located in the parcel. The wetlands have all been delineated and approved by the Conservation Commission. But if you look at the little map that I provided or this figure one here, if you prefer, you can see that this is New Market Center over here. This is 100 University Drive over here. And this is one developable site here and this is another developable site there of wetlands, of uplands, excuse me. So the idea would be if we were to able to enter into this site here via University Drive, there would be less intrusion on the wetlands because the other opportunity would be to come across the wetlands here. There is a perennial stream that runs right to the center of here. So talking with Ms. Brewer this morning, she suggested that I go to Conservation Commission first, which I have just come from. They voted to support this unanimously. I can't quote exactly their wording, but they said that this was seen as a less invasive way to enter the site after exploring all other viable opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm sure they will provide that wording exactly to you. But the consensus is that this makes more sense than trying to come this way. I think you all know the history of University Drive if you want me to go over that, I'm happy to. There were six entrances allowed by town meeting when it was accepted, which already exists. We're asking for one more, which will take a majority of town meeting vote, we understand. This, we believe, is the last developable site on University Drive, so that wouldn't be additional asks, we don't believe. So we ask your support for this. And the warrant article puts it back in your lap after. It gives, the town meeting gives you the authority after we get town meeting approval. It would be at your discretion when you see what we're coming up with. We haven't developed a project yet because it's gonna change depending on how this vote would come out. Thank you. Questions from the select board about what is technically the select board's article at this point. Will you be available to speak to it at town meeting? I plan to, yes. Excellent. We also have our economic development director with us here tonight who said he would be available if we had any questions for him associated with this article. Do we? Oh, and also Ms. Breastrop, if you would like to come forward please and identify yourself in the mic, and thank you. I'm Chris Breastrop, planning director. I just wanted to point out that you have a map on the back of your packets that show in red the six existing access points and in blue the proposed access point. Thank you, that was actually quite helpful of a map. Appreciate that. And I'm now reminded of what happened low these many hours ago, which is that the transportation advisory committee handed me a statement where I was to read, which is that transportation advisory committee is recommending the select board support the deed modification in article 31 and that in the future when details about the actual connection to the road are developed as well as the development that they will want to make further recommendations. And then you said that I've also, we visited the Shade Tree Commission and of course they, as I said, they hate it when any tree has to be caught, we know that, but we think that if we were allowed access here we could achieve it by only having to remove one tree. I also met with Gilford Moran, director of DPW director and Jason Skeels, town engineer, and went over how this would work with the bike path and we came up with some solutions that might be possible to bring the bike path into one lane without destroying any trees. Cause it needs to be one lane when it crosses a driveway. So we would have to do that on both sides of the driveway. Did you get a note from finance committee? We met with them too when they voted to approve it. Thank you. We're supported or sort of. Other? I'm just wondering since we own this article because for the reasons that were already stated, when this comes to town meeting, we can make the motion and of course turn it over to the proponent, but I think it might be helpful to also have a graphic or a map that can be put up that would show people actually kind of how, even if it's a conceptual like what you, something like what you were just describing, here's an entry drive, here's bike path because it's hard for people to mentally see these things. And to just make sure that we have that material or that maybe the planning department can help us with that. So I'm looking at this and I'm seeing a restriction that goes back to 1963, which was 54 years ago if I did the math right. And I think in theory it makes sense to limit curb cuts. There was a concept of how it was envisioned this roadway might work, but things change over time, even wetlands change. So I think with the view that we are using now, what's actually happening on the ground, this makes sense and it is a compliment to what was already approved by town meeting to allow development on this parcel, but I just wanna make sure we get to town meeting that people sort of understand why we're doing this, that it's really clear for everyone that this is the mechanics of allowing what was already approved to go forward. I don't think a lot of people know, general towns people know that when University Drive was conceived that it was a completely different roadway that what's on the ground there now and it was conceived as a bypass all the way down to 116 in South Amherst, I believe. And we know it dead ended at Snow Street for whatever reason. But if I understand it correctly, it was supposed to be a four lane road or the grass median and that made a lot of difference and it was seen as a rapid transit road and that was the reason for limiting the curb cuts. So obviously that's not what it's on the ground there now. Yes. And I believe the Agricultural Commission had already reviewed this because it is agricultural use now. Right. And the town released the 61A. So when this transfers, the seller will be paying the rollback taxes to I believe about $40,000. It's assessed right now on paying taxes I believe at about $3,200. And of course we do a project there then we'll have more taxable property for tax rolls. Thank you. Did you want to start? Okay. Do we have questions from Mr. Kravitz or for the petitioner or the planning director? I actually have a logistical question. Are you currently a town meeting member, Mr. Roberts? I am not. Okay. So one of us should make the motion then and work with the moderator as to how to best transition that then over to Mr. Roberts. Just because our name's on it, I didn't think we had to make the motion but in this case one of us will need to make the motion. Since we're talking about logistics and strategy, would it make more sense to have there someone from this board or maybe Mr. Kravitz give some of that background history and then have Mr. Roberts or his designee come up to explain the details so that we're giving the history that we just described from a more neutral party. I was just asking. I think Mr. Kravitz or Mr. Moreing both know that history pretty well. So either of the one of them could do that. And it would be the idea, why is there a restriction now? And then they say why do we want it lifted because we want to develop this parcel for this? Right. That's the way you're thinking about setting up. Right, to give that overview of the history and then if there's some details about the specific mechanics or the part that Mr. Roberts just presented, then you could come forward, but I think it makes it a little more neutral to have. So it is at this point the town's article to use the staff expertise to present some of the background. So the select board member who volunteers to do this will want to coordinate with the moderator how the moderator wants to make that flow to go back and forth because it is slightly unusual but certainly workable, I'm sure. Figuring out a way to do that. What do you think, what's the best way to approach this? Yeah, I mean, we all get this nice little script later that will tell, but usually it's board after board, petitioner, particular petitioner who's a town meeting member or someone on their behalf making the motion. It's a little unusual to put staff in an earlier slot as opposed to an answering question slot, but it makes sense for exactly the reasons you just said. Mr. Slater. I've been thinking about whether or not I'd be willing to do this and I think I would be willing to speak to it. So we haven't made the motion yet, but whoever decides to do that can throw my name in there. But I think if that were the case, then I'd be willing to sort of give that background because I've heard it twice now because I was at the finance committee when it was discussed. So I've got to memorize now. I haven't got to memorize. Okay, well then that solves the problem. Obviously if there was something I omit or if there's additional questions about that sort of historical question, obviously Mr. Kravitz or Mr. Moran could step in at that point, but that kind of resolves that. Great, then we don't have to make it more complicated than it really is. Excellent. So I'm happy to sort of lay out that history of what would have been kind of a New Orleans boulevard kind of street if it had been built as original. Boulevard that never was. It never was. I think the other critical piece, if I may just to continue about this, that I think is important to stress to town meeting is that there's no known development yet and that can't happen good or bad. So there's no thumbs up, thumbs down about what goes on the land because they can't get there to do that yet. So it's really about like I say sort of following up on the original intent of changing the zoning on that piece of property to allow development, but then also this is in a sense the same sort of thing as like, oh, this is one more sort of technical step to allow for the exploration of what possibilities exist there or could exist there, I should say. Great, Mr. Steinberg. Yeah, I mean, I just think we should do this because it didn't recommend this because town meeting has already rezoned it and we've already released the 61A. And ultimately then with the question is to what way can those purposes be effectuated in the most ecologically friendly manner and the conservation commission is the body that we entrust to make those decisions and they have done so. So I think we should just go ahead and make a motion which I'm willing to do to move to recommend to the April 26, 2017 annual town meeting article 31, limited release of restrictions. Mr. Slaughter, to speak to the article on behalf of the select board. Second. Further discussion. I'd just like to make one point to what you said. Comcom said obviously we will be going back to them with any project that we develop and so they wanted to make it perfectly clear that they don't know what we're proposing it, nor do we. So but they like the idea that it's less invasive this way than that way. Thank you, appreciate that. Is this a simple majority? And I mean, I don't mean at select board, I mean at town meeting, sorry for the question. Okay, any further discussion? Then all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And that passes unanimously. So thank you. And thank you to the people for being here to speak to that. And speaking of quantum of vote, is it accurate to say that the, and Mr. Wald would know the answer to this too. The local historic district, is that a two thirds vote of town meeting? There was some question about that earlier. It is two thirds, correct? So that's the, that town meeting has to approve that by two thirds, as opposed to a majority. There was a question about it at one point and I'm just not, I just like to be able to tell people the right answer when they ask me. And I'm not sure if it was in our materials. Do you happen to know, Ms. Brestrup? Not that it's your area that you're supposed to know about, but if you happen to know. I don't know and the script is blank in that location. We have majorities written for it, but we'll confirm that tomorrow. Yeah, it would be good to know that before tomorrow. And I'm sorry, I didn't think to ask the planner who worked with the committee on that because they could probably have answered the question. Oops, I knew I had another question I wanted to ask. Okay, so moving to another article. We, I said that we would come back to the other issue that the planning board has written a report on as they are do and have hearings and do the whole process associated with petition articles associated with zoning. And so that brings us to article 36. The petitioner has not arrived. We suspect the petitioner is not coming because he has not responded in any way, shape or fashion to his invitation to come. And so we are going to assume that means he does not intend to show up. And then if you could just tell us, Mr. Crowner about your report, that would be helpful. Okay, so first let me summarize what the article does. It would rezone five parcels on the north side of Coles Road in North Amherst from commercial to a line residential and one parcel on Sunderland Road from commercial to low density residential. All of those parcels happen to be owned by the same property owner and it was represented at the planning board that the reason for the petition article is to provide balance, as they say, to the North Square project that has been proposed and permitted for a parcel that the property owner also owns. Planning board, there are a number of problems with the article, the planning board did not support the article. First of all, there was no planning process that arrived at, that explored the zone, explored the parcels, tried to determine the correct or inappropriate zone for the article, for the parcels. So and if there had been, it seemed to us unlikely that the zones that were chosen would have been chosen in a normal planning process. In fact, the planning board did go through a process a number of years ago for those parcels and the other parcels in North Amherst and came up with a different proposal for those zones, for those parcels. It would also be problematic in that it would create a patchwork of zones along Coles Road and along Sunderland Road in a weird way. Coles Road is currently, part of it is neighborhood residential and then the rest of it is commercial. If this were to change, on Coles Road, you would have neighborhood residential, then comms parcel and then several RO parcels and then another comm parcel, another few comm parcels. On Sunderland Road, you would have just two parcels but the way they're laid out, they actually would create a jagged effect of comm, RLD, comm, RLD, comm. It's very strange because of the parcel that is proposed to be changed, wraps around another parcel there. And that parcel on Sunderland Road actually has, is actually now crosses three zones, it crosses the comm zone, it crosses the FPC zone and crosses and RN zone, I forget what, RN. So the way the article is written, it's not really clear which of those are proposed to be changed or all of them. And so we are hopeful that a motion under the article will clear that up. In any case, the planning board didn't support the article. Thank you and so I wanna clarify, I'm trying to do too many things at once which was also checking the Finance Committee position which isn't listed here but I believe we do know the answer to based on the previous chart we have which is that they voted for zero to not recommend that they had three people absent. So looking at your report as I had asked about earlier in terms of the public response which you often do cover in your process part of the report and this specifically states that no one spoke in favor of the article. It also indicates the petitioner was not present. So we have a situation where a petitioner gathered signatures in order to put something on the warrant that we are required to put on the warrant because the appropriate number of signatures were gathered. The petitioner has not responded to a request to come before the select board. The petitioner did not choose to attend the noticed planning board hearing on this issue although we certainly have read some newspaper coverage of what the motivations were behind this. So this is all very vague at this point. We do have an email that was sent to us which I asked to have added because it was inadvertently omitted from our packet which has been added to our desks tonight that is from Michael Pill representing Cinejones, Devin Jones and W.D. Coles that has I believe also already been uploaded to our packet for tonight so that people can take a look at that. That item will not be in the town meeting mailing but of course the planning board report will be as town meeting members would expect. So we are in a rather odd position here. Is there anyone from the public who had intended to speak to this issue? Okay, good and then Mr. Crownard did you have something you wanted to add at this point? I want to say the petitioner did attend a zoning subcommittee meeting and we had an extensive discussion at that time. So that was where you heard from the petitioner at previous time. Okay, great. And once you get settled in at the mic if you would please identify yourself and try and keep it to approximately three minutes. Thank you. Good evening. Molly Lockwood vice president of real estate development at real estate and community development actually at WD Coles. Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity just to say a few words. You've had Michael Pills memo for a while. I don't want to recap what's already in there but just want to thank Mr. Crownard for going over in his review of the planning board recommendation which we also support obviously. Just a couple of things to point out from our thoughts and concerns about what we see is a poor planning effort for North Amherst which has already been pointed out by the planning board. But also that it's the disappointment of the time and money that will be spent if this were to pass a town meeting being that our position is it's not a legally defensible position and also that it ultimately will not change the zoning of those parcels because of the subdivision process it's open to us to use through the subdivision, Massachusetts subdivision laws. So if anything it might be an expedite development there to be commercial development versus changing it to residential. So just thinking about the overall growth of Amherst and how much land is left for commercial development. Already we have over 60% of the land is we all know is already protected in some way or institutionally owned and then over 90% of the tax base is residential so there's just very little opportunity for mixed use development in the business districts and there's just very few commercial lots left. The planning board staff included in its packet to planning board a lot of maps that we had looked at about showing the history of the area how has been commercial and industrial for over 100 years how those parcels are already degraded in many areas because of the industrial uses that have happened there. So and also we're, you know as Mr. Crown already pointed out where those parcels are surrounded by other commercial uses already. So thank you, that's it. Thank you. Questions or comments from the select board? Are we ready for a motion? And we can always have more discussion after that. I will mention the, as I said before I was at the finance committee meeting for another reason when article 31 came up but also this one came up and the petitioner was at that meeting and I think that the characterizations the planning board has in their report sort of sufficiently capture the intentions of the petitioner. So I don't think there's any news that we don't have in hand as far as the intent. So we're not guessing it's, okay, thank you. That's good to know. Other comments or questions from the select board? Is someone ready to make the motion? I have a comment. Yes, it could be after the motion or before but I think we've seen tonight, zoning isn't this pure abstract thing. It has a context just as we talked about the bedroom mix. There's things that are happening around us that we're responding to. And everybody, Mr. Crowner and Ms. Lockwood were very rational in giving some information, some history about why this doesn't make sense from a planning perspective. This kind of petition article makes me mad. I think this is grudge zoning and attempted grudge zoning that people were unhappy, that the Beacon Communities Project was supported and was approved by our zoning board of appeals by this board and other committees and boards. And this is some kind of a statement or a retaliation back. And I have a real problem with having to spend time responding to this kind of a grudge zoning attempt that does allow the petitioner to get up before meeting and other committees and voice some displeasure with that outcome. But to pretend there isn't a context to where this is coming from, I think isn't something I wanna pretend to be part of. This, I am adamantly opposed to this rezoning. Thank you. Would you also like to make the motion? Sure. I move to recommend dismissal to the April 26th, 2017 annual town meeting, article 36, zoning petition, amend designation of Coles Road Lots. And I'm worried if I were the one to speak to it, I might lose my Coles, so maybe somebody else, because we're not supposed to talk about motivation and intent when we're moderators, it's not like that. Okay, so first of all, do we have a second, even though we don't have any money? All right, so. I guess I have a question on the motion and that is recommending dismissal but since dismissal is a majority vote and if it's not dismissed, we wanna have also say dismissal or recommend against. Right, so. I saw modified the motion. So we could say to not recommend or recommend dismissal since those are our standard phrases, not recommend or recommend. In the second or concurrence. We will not, however, make the motion ourselves to dismiss. We, at this time, we do not expect to be in that position as opposed to some other article, like the Peg Access article that we talked about, where we can make the motion to dismiss it. Because it's, when it's our, that's our position. Right, exactly. So, exactly. Just to clarify, the motion is to not recommend or recommend dismissal than the rest of the motion, right? Yes, right. So either not recommend or recommend, so whichever way, whichever comes up first, that's how we're doing basically, and then the alternate one. And I really don't wanna make things even more confusing but now that I'm looking at my notes on article 20, what I was just referring to it, where we are actually gonna make the motion to dismiss because it is in fact our article and we will make that motion, is that, who is speaking to that? Who is making that motion to dismiss article 20? Did we, did we breeze right past that? Must be you. I'll swatter. I think I said yes. Okay, you were just trying to hope maybe I had. We didn't write that down. Okay, that makes sense to me, but I wanted to double check. So although we can, of course, not to confuse the public even more than I just have, we can, of course, choose to make a motion to dismiss on an article that's not ours, would we choose to do so? That is not what we are doing in this case. We, in this case, are either saying we don't recommend voting for this or we would go along with a motion. We would vote positively on a motion to dismiss. Does anyone want to speak to this? Does anyone have an opinion, and parenthetically, does anyone have an opinion as to whether or not we should have anyone speak to this or we should just tell the moderator those are our positions? Just have a question for Mr. Bachmann. We have the letter from Attorney Bill has, if the answer's no or you feel you can't answer the question, either one's okay, but if we heard anything from our own town council that we might want to consider too. We have not heard on this opinion. He will be here tomorrow morning, so we can ask him a question then. So let me ask the question, a different variation of that question, because that was an important question, so thank you. A different variation on that question. If this zoning passed at town meeting, and of course every zoning article is difficult because it's two thirds, but if this passed at town meeting, given the information we've already received, and we know there are lawsuits over zoning bylaws all the time, it's a regular occurrence, but given that, is there a reason for us not to say anything in terms of keeping ourselves in a neutral, not having added to any fuel to the fire associated with a future lawsuit is there any particular reason we should not speak? No, I think you can take a position as you see fit, and then it's up to you in terms of if there is a lawsuit, how you defend that lawsuit. Okay. Spruer, yes. I feel like it's important for the board to have a stated position, it could be, I think this is something I would like us to take a position on and make a statement about, even if it's somewhat brief, I don't want to suggest. I don't want to be identified as my issue per se, but I think it's important to have a statement. But you would rather we didn't just tell the moderator to go ahead and report out on. So I would suggest, I'll speak to it if Ms. Gruber would be willing to work with me on the comments a little bit because I have some thoughts myself, but I think this could be one where we want to strike a good balance, I think. Because I think there's points to be made, but we also don't want to... Inflame. Yeah, get onto topics that are broader than what this is particularly about. Be short. But at the same time, there are pointed points that could be made. Thank you, and thank you for volunteering and thank you to the two of you for working together on that. So, further questions or discussion before we come to a vote to not recommend or recommend dismissal, depending on the will of town meeting, what comes first. Okay, then. All those in favor of that motion, please say aye. Aye, aye. And that is unanimous. Thank you. That is helpful. Okay, where are we? Are we at? We do have a couple more petitioner articles from that petitioner, but they are not associated with zoning issues and the planning board. So, I believe the planning board's all finished. Thank you so much, planning board, for coming tonight and planning staff. We can now move at last to article... Wait for it, wait for it. 28% for art. Are we ready for that? Okay, so before we do that, I know it's like, you gotta, it's so close. We're gonna take less than five minute recess, but then you can go ahead and get settled in at the mic when you're ready, but you don't have to go there the second. So, we are gonna take a very brief recess and then we are gonna return. And Amherst Media, you can leave everything on. Everyone be aware that your mics are live and we will go to article 28 when we get back. It's brody. Keep track of that two-thirds issue because that could influence our position as well. So, it's in our little sort of prep packet that we, I just got before we came down here. Deborah, it says majority, but it couldn't be majority. It's like zoning, right? Right. I mean, Joel, my notes from the last review say, Joel was gonna check. Jeff looked it up. Yeah. That makes sense. So, Mr. Slaughter, thank you for mics. You're still live. I know, I know that. That's how I'm walking all the way over there. I look at my pile here and I'm like, Mary's gonna say, come on, go, go. And I'll be like, I don't know where to put it. Just turn it over back and start it at home. But then sort it at home. You act like there's time to do those things. She has to set this meeting up for the recount tomorrow. This room up for the recount tomorrow. Exactly. There's five stations. That's a part of her saying, and Jennifer's saying that you take back to stuff and you start the meeting, you watch TV or, in my case, you put it off for years and years. So, this is going in the mailing, but the petitioners withdrawing it. I'm a little confused by that. It is what it is. It's like, oh, it's the same thing. It's a little bit, not urgent. It's not urgent. Okay. If we want to. Do it now. It's not urgent. This has the detail on it. That's what I was trying to be clear. You might not look at that till right before it happens. Well, right. It's just, we're early with the information, right? We're ready for it. I think you put it on the consent calendar anyway, which is where it normally goes. Yes. All right, so we're all back. Thank you, everyone, for being patient, especially to the Public Art Commission. If you would please, go ahead and identify yourself for the folks at home, and you have up to five minutes to give us a presentation, and then we'll ask you a bunch of questions. Okay, fine. Good evening. My name is Eric Brody, and I'm a member of the Public Art Commission that is bringing in this article to town meeting. I know you're familiar with the article from last year's presentation, so I'm going to focus my briefing marks on the revisions that we made, and leave lots of time for questions. There were three areas of concern that were expressed at last year's town meeting. One, being the omission of performing arts as eligible for percent funding. The second was the concern that the town manager had final say over the art itself. And third, the additional cost of taxpayers or added taxes, some put it from the program. Additionally, during our revisions, there was a concern expressed by the town manager on exactly when in the project budgeting process the half a percent was calculated, and what if those figures subsequently changed, the figures being the overall project costs. There was some other minor tinkering with other wording here and there, mostly for clarification, but those are the significant areas of revision that I'd like to address, and they're highlighted in your copies of the article. First, performing arts that a lot of changes are highlighted in yellow for you. After a considerable discussion among the art commission members, we decided to restore performing arts as eligible for funding through the spy law. The way we anticipate that happening is not through the major capital projects, but from capital improvements or renovations. For example, a $100,000 capital repair would generate $500 for the public art fund, which would then become available for other public art uses, including supporting performing arts. It gives the art commission some programming funding, but also provides some funding to maintain some of our existing public art that has no other funding source. For example, the poetic windows in the Boltwood parking lot, the abandoned realignment park project, the poetic conversation in Sweetser Park, all in need of repair. The second concern about the town manager, the concern was that it could conceivably, if the town manager had the final say over what the art should be, it could conceivably put him in a conflict of interest position depending on what else was going on and who he was negotiating with in town. So now the town manager will still have input into the selection of the artwork for the major projects, as will other appropriate town officials, as stated in section 51B number three on page four of the bylaw, and that's highlighted in blue for you. But the public art commission will make the final decision by majority role after appropriate input from town officials and others. Let me skip the cost issue for a minute, deal with the town manager's concern about determining the proper half a percent figure. As you know, the premise of the percent for art program is to have the selected artists become an integral part of the project team at the earliest opportunity in order for the art to become truly integrated into the project itself and not be an appendage. The precise moment of determining at what point early in the budgeting process the figure would be determined is at the town manager's discretion, and I'm assuming that decision would be made in conjunction with, in consultation with the finance director, the project manager, and others as appropriate and needed. The issue has been when in the budgeting process is it appropriate to determine exactly when the half a percent figure would be. We advocate, as I said, early in the process, but a budgeting figure determined early in the process could well change, often increasing, as the details of the project are determined over time. In that scenario, the bylaw provides that the percentage would remain, the amount would remain as the early lower figure. It wouldn't increase. We would not expect the percent for art to amount to increase commensurately with total project costs if the project costs went up. But Mr. Bachmann noted also that the converse was also possible and gave the scenario, for example, of an amount, say $22 million being budgeted for a new firehouse, but when it went to town meeting for authorization, perhaps town meeting would authorize only, say, 15 million. What then? We address that in the first paragraph of the funding section on page two. That's highlighted for you as well in green, by saying that in that case, the figure would be reduced to be in accord with the lower project budget. Finally, the cost. Last year we made the argument that the actual cost for the art to the average Amherst household would be less than a cup of coffee per year based on a 30-year bond. That's still the case, even figured with a 25-year bond at four and a half percent interest rate. But we're not going to use that argument this year. Our argument, and the argument we made to the finance committee a few days ago, unsuccessfully, I should say, is that the art should be considered an integral part of the building project. It should be considered the same as any other architectural design element or landscaping feature of the project. It should become a part of the project as a whole and not segregated and considered as an add-on. Art in our public sphere, in our streetscape, we think that public art belongs to our public buildings and should be considered, along with other elements of the project as they're being designed, incorporated into the project budget when it's first figured with the idea that a half a percent would be allocated for art at that project. So what we want to try and get away from is the idea that this is a frill, that it's just something that can be used, added or not added. I think in Amherst, we value art, public art as part of our streetscape. This is a way to accomplish it at a minimal additional cost to a project and that's the argument that I hope to make in front of town meeting. I'm happy to answer questions as best I can. Great, thank you. I'm actually gonna dive right in and then I will call on my colleagues. So one of the things I did is I compared the information that had been provided to us, both through the warrant and the item in our packet which you really carefully highlighted. Thank you, that was helpful, was not against what we looked at for annual town meeting but what we looked at when we talked about this around the time of fall town meeting, when we were debating whether or not that would be the right time for this article to come forward. And there's a change been made since then that I'm sorry I didn't notice until the wee hours of this morning and did not get a chance to talk to you about that I don't understand why it has happened and so perhaps you can clarify it is not addressed in your highlighted copy but again this is a difference that's in the warrant that are words that are in your highlighted item but are not highlighted and perhaps because they're not different than last spring's but they are different than the material that was provided to us in October when we were having this discussion. If we look at what would people prefer to look at? Do people have the warrant hand here? Would they rather look at the highlighted one? The highlighted one, okay. The highlighted one it's because it's the same. Actually that brings me to a question. Is there any difference? I went through a couple of different versions of this line by line but is there any difference between what you've provided to us in the highlighted version versus what got published in the warrant? Were there any changes that at this point you believe you're gonna need to change or will you be able to move in terms of the article? There are a couple of minor changes that the motion will take care of that we will be moving in terms of the article with I think two basically clarifications that are in this version that are not in the warrant but they don't affect the scope of the article. Okay, because that's gonna be important for us to understand because we don't currently have that information. We are working under the assumption that what's printed in the warrant is the same as the material that you've provided to us aside from the fact that you've highlighted it. So if there are differences in this highlighted version and you happen to know what those are right now from what's in the warrant, that would be terrific to know to inform our discussion. Exactly where they are. They're in underfunding paragraph one, two, three, four. The addition of the words percent for art before in the first line of paragraph four where it says additionally percent for art funds. Percent for art is an addition. It's the words percent for art are an addition there and right under it where it says unused percent for art. Similarly, those two phrases being descriptive of what funds we're talking about. I'm sorry, the first one was joined after additionally between additionally and. In the same sentence? Yep. Unused percent for art funds. Percent for art, phrase percent for art is also added. Okay, I see what you're saying. And the reason for that was someone pointed out that without that it sounded like it was the project funds not the percent for art funds that would be returned or it was just a clarification of what funds are being talked about. We're gonna come back to that in just a moment. Is there any other section other than in this paragraph that you're aware of? Okay, so it's so lucky that that's the one you're talking about because that's the problem I have with this in particular versus the previous addition that I said I'd gone through line by line. So what I had noticed is not the difference between this highlighted one and the warrant, which you've just very clearly clarified as percent for art and percent for art right before the word. Right. Funds. Funds and funds. Yes. Because there are two parts to this. One is yes that does clarify, but the other is that this is a wholly new paragraph that did not exist in October. And you already did have the paragraph if you skip the next one, the one that says any money is appropriated. That information was previously provided to us in October and again I didn't go back to last spring which talks about any money is appropriated to the public art from particular municipal art project which have not been spent within three years of such appropriation or upon special approval select were within five years shall then become available for the general public art needs of the town. What is the difference between that paragraph and the paragraph that's new since October that starts additionally that you've just modified to include the words percent. I don't understand why that paragraph is necessary given that it says in the paragraph I just quoted that if you don't spend the money, this is what happens to it. How could there be any other way of having money? The paragraph just doesn't make sense in light to me. And so I appreciate what you did in terms of adding percent for art because that helped clarify that it was not the whole project's expenses but yet it seems as though that issue was already covered in the any money's paragraph and so I just don't understand where this is coming from and why this suddenly has appeared in this version that went in the warrant. Well I will tell you that following that meeting in October when I appeared before you, there was some rewording that had to do with clarifying things and I wanna credit Mr. Steinberg with helping with some of that wording that he found confusing and together we made some changes. Now I don't have the former version in front of me and so. It simply was missing that entire paragraph that starts additionally and ends in commission. That paragraph did not exist in October. It must have been written that way now. Again, I haven't looked at that since the fall but to clarify what would happen, that it would be possible to use that money for other building projects from that to support performing arts. Perhaps that was the need to include it there so that the money, it would be clear that money that wasn't returned that went into the public art fund would be used to support performing arts. But I mean if you're saying that this paragraph is in conflict with the paragraph that says any money's appropriated. Yeah that's where I'm, and I appreciate that you can't necessarily decide that on the spot. I was just hoping you'd say, oh yeah we didn't need that paragraph. Right, I think that's the. Maybe that's not the answer. And you might need more time to look at that before you decide on your final motion because while I appreciate that you clarified that, I'm just not seeing the difference between that paragraph and the other paragraph. I think the critical difference is the performing arts piece. So if you were to excise the new paragraph, the quote unquote new paragraph that had the additionally percent for art funds, et cetera, et cetera. If you're thinking, and I think it is, a little bit redundant per se about the use of the funds, but I think the performing arts or other public art needs. So in that paragraph, the final paragraph of that section, that would have to be amended to include performing arts in some place to sort of accomplish the same goal. And so without that second change, you get, you know, in order to remove of a stigial sort of paragraph, you have to make an adjustment to that final paragraph because it just says public art needs and not necessarily being explicit about the performing arts being inclusive in that. So you're saying that where it says in what is the highlighted copy, page three, at the top of page three, where it says, for the purposes of the general public art needs of the town, that would want to have that yellow highlighting from that paragraph I don't like put in there. Yeah, I think so. And that would, in essence, accomplish what the yellow accomplished, accomplish what the additional words percent for art in two places accomplished and accomplish not having two things that appear to be somewhat in conflict with each other because they appear to be repetitious. So I would, I'm not basing my vote tonight on this but I would ask strongly that you take a look at this, you know, outside of the pressure of the meeting on TV and look at it with the perhaps with Mr. Backelvin or Ms. McGinnis about, is there a reason for different phrasing between those two things about leftover money because it's not obvious and it wasn't obvious to me at three o'clock this morning but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be obvious with a different amount of sleep. What the difference is between those two paragraphs other than the clarifications about performing arts and making clear that it's percent for art funds not as Mr. Brody already helpfully pointed out it's not leftover project funds. It's leftover public art funds. So that would be good to have super, super clear as soon as possible because the warrant includes it the other way does not reference. Yeah, I think I've beaten that to death. All right, other questions, comments about the changes that have been made which very clearly are responsive to two issues we've brought up in the past. Yes, Ms. Grover. I had a couple of questions. I'm generally in support of this but I, and I, so this isn't gonna again decide whether it's supported or not but I'm confused about the maintenance responsibility and I'm confused about the management of the funds or the fund collected where I get the Public Arts Commission has the lead in choosing the work and taking care of that part but then there's this responsibility for maintenance that the town accepts in section four public art ownership and liability and is that maintenance responsibility? Can the town access the funds to do that maintenance or how does that work? I'm confused about that and it talks in the last paragraph of that section 5% of the total cost of approval are projects shall be set aside in a pooled maintenance account within the Public Arts Fund for ongoing maintenance and serving of additions to the public art inventory. So who oversees that? Is that the commission? Is that the town? And I don't wanna hold this up. We've been trying to get this passed for quite a while. I'm wondering if maybe there's some more detailed set of guidelines or financial administration that comes after the passage of this bylaw that could maybe clarify this because I think it's murky and may give us problems later on and before just a last thing on, one of my last things. It talks on the middle of section five responsibilities, number one, about hold public hearings and I just wonder, public hearings to me has a particular meaning and advertising and I think you mean hold public meetings and hearing maybe doesn't matter because it's not capitalized but public hearings as needed. I don't know that you're authorized to hold public hearings. So that's what I got. So remind us where that here. I would note it's that too. The hearing is section five responsibilities, Amherst number one. I see it. Holding public hearings as needed. Yeah, it's like in the middle part of that big paragraph. Listen, for the town holding, semicolon holding public hearings as needed to determine. All right, I'll address your questions. Taking that one first. The public hearings, that whole paragraph does not apply specifically to the percent for art program. That whole paragraph, as it says, the overall public art program is what we do as a public art commission. This sort of summarizes what we do so that people will know that we do more than just manage a percent for art program and including holding public meetings as we have done to get citizen input on what they think where public art should be in town. So if it's required to change hearings to meeting in that instance, it's just basically telling you what we do. Section B is under that section five, Section 1B is where it begins to get into what the percent for art responsibilities are in particular. And as to your other question about the maintenance fund, there is a fair amount in this bylaw that would be worked out following the passage of the bylaw, including putting some protocols in place and how you develop a jury and so on and how all that happens. Now my understanding from Claire McGinnis is that a public art fund would be a town fund and any sub-account for a maintenance fund could be part of a public art fund. Now presumably the way it would work, although this is one of those things that would be laid out if this passes, then we'd have to begin to develop the procedures, is that the public art commission would determine if certain art needed maintenance and who was responsible for dispensing for approving dispersals from that public art fund? I don't know, that would have to be decided, but I'm not sure that that should be in the bylaw. It's something I think that just, it's a town procedure who has responsibility for allocating money. We would make a request presumably saying that this public art project is rusting or it needs repair or so. And we would request $2,500 to do that out of the public art maintenance fund. So the town undoubtedly has procedures already in place for people who make requests for expenditures like that. I just don't know what they are. Just a quick follow up. So I would maybe ask Mr. Backelman what his thoughts are of how the funds would be managed if it is true that they are managed as town funds and they're subject to the unified town audit, then that gives me some comfort because in reading it, it looked like maybe, sort of give this bunch of money over that was kind of under the total authority of the public arts commission. No, I don't think that's, that wasn't the intent. No, it would be treated just as a normal general, not general fund, but a normal fund for the town. Yeah. Okay. And you don't perceive any imagining worst case scenarios. You don't perceive any scenario where you would say this public art needs maintenance, but we don't want to use this money for it. I mean, that is what that money is for. That's why we're doing this. And it's in your professional judgment that you would say this is when it needs work and this is the kind of work it needs as opposed to just any random person helpfully trying to go out and maintain it. It's that it would, that's the reason for your involvement in it as well is so that you can say professionally how it needs to be maintained. That's right. And that would probably be done in consultation with the artist who installed the work. Other questions, comments from select board, please, Mr. Steinberg. Yeah. So three things. First of all, I really want to thank Mr. Brody. He has worked hard on this. I have had a couple of meetings with him over the months since we last discussed the select board. And I really appreciate the very cooperative work that we did together. And as far as that one paragraph that you cited, Ms. Brewer, I'll take a look at those two paragraphs and see if they come out now as duplicative. My initial reaction is no. But I think it needs more time as you indicated yourself. There is one other thing that I just pointed out to Mr. Brody. And that is in the part of section three that is in green highlight on all of our copies. And we talked about it a little bit. And I was wondering if I should actually just give my copy over to either Ms. Brewer or Mr. Bachlemann to ask this question at the motion review meeting. But here's what it is. In the sentence that begins, if estimated project costs rise after the designated percent for art is determined, that percentage will not increase. I was wondering if it should be that percentage or if it's actually not the percentage we're talking about, but whether it should read, that amount set aside in the designated public arts fund shall not increase. And similarly, in the next sentence, percentage where it says decrease, the percentage designated for the public arts fund will not, but it's the same point. Is it we're talking about the percentage or are we talking about the amount that's designated for the public arts fund? I'd agree. It's the amount. The percent's the same every time. The percent never changes. That's what my reaction was. The percent doesn't change. It seems to me that we're at a half percent for art that what we're talking about is the amount set aside in the designated public arts fund is what we're talking about. So I don't know if in the motion review meeting, but in discussion with the group, including town council, if there's agreement to that, it's not a substantive change. It's a clarification to make this clear. It doesn't affect what we're achieving. It's just trying to clarify it. But I would leave that to others, since I not only won't be at the meeting, but I won't even be in town. That definitely. I'm going to turn to Mr. Bochle and ask him to make sure he reminds me of this tomorrow, because that is the kind of thing that can tie town meeting up in knots in terms of realizing, wait, what? And yeah, we want to get that right in the motion if we can. And there shouldn't be any difficulty with it being within the scope. It's just a different way of wording. Yeah, it is definitely within the scope. It's not, I think it's just a question of clarity. So I don't know. Other? No, that was one thing I didn't. We had started to have this conversation out in the hall and didn't complete it. And I didn't know if you had anything more. Well, I'll just say that strictly speaking, it would be clear if you said percentage for art would, I mean the percentage amount for art would not increase. To me, it's implied in the sentence. And particularly in the second and the last line where, or it says the percentage for art would be recalculated based on the lower estimated project costs. I mean, nowhere, I think, is it implied that we're changing the percentage from half a percent to less or more. No figure is mentioned. To me, it's implied that the percentage is the percentage amount. Well, here's what my problem is, is that what we're talking about is that we're basing an amount on an estimate that is made by the town manager. And then we're dealing with the question of what happens if the cost of the construction project goes up or down. And what we're saying is once he has determined an amount of money, it seems to me that it is the amount of money that we're saying is not going to go up under one circumstance. But it's just, I think, needs to be made certain that we're being clear. Just going to jump in and just say, if it is implied, I think what we do is we use percent for art, almost percent for art, as a placeholder for the world, word for amount. And I think what you're trying to get at is being clear it's not literally a mathematical percentage. It's the amount. It's the percent part amount. If there's a way to make it clear without having to do too much surgery on this, that's always preferable, because it gets really confusing in town to try to explain those kind of changes to the motion. So if it is truly implied with what's here, then, or if there's an easy way by maybe adding a clause to clarify or whatever, but I see the problem we're using percent for art as a holder for the amount. And it's not literally the percent that we're talking about. To me, it's implied. If other readers don't see it that way, then it could be a problem. But the easiest way to do it, without complicating it, to my mind would be to just add the word amount after percentage in both lines. That percentage amount will not increase. Or does that then just? Maybe better. Exactly. Maybe this could be worked on outside of. Maybe we flagged it because this kind of word crafting at this point. If you're saying it's a problem, I don't know if it is. I don't know if it is. But there might be a way. Just change, use amount for percentage. Yeah, just change those words without redoing the whole green bar. We're not talking about redoing the whole green part because we're just talking about taking the word percentage and changing in some words. I think that the difficulty here going back to my days of thinking about legislative drafting questions is that the term percentage for art is itself not a defined term in the definitions section. And therefore, you got a problem there from a legislative drafting perspective. It's a good point. I don't want to try to solve it all now. We love solving things on the fly. We're doing the best we can. OK, additional questions because I have more. So if somebody else asks some other ones, go ahead. I appreciate that you've put a lot of work into this outside the meeting, Mr. Steinberg. So I have another question then, and maybe you'll have more, is in regards to my comparison to last October's edition of this in section two definitions under construction projects, it used to say parking facility. It no longer includes the words parking facility. Yes, because I was advised that that's covered by enterprise funds. And it would not be a general fund out of the town general fund. Which is why, as we've talked about in my notes from before, show that in eligible funds, we don't put it in the words. But as an explanation, we say that people that enterprise funds are excluded and that CPA funds are excluded. Right. Yeah, OK, good. So that all fits together about how that works. Thank you, I appreciate that. And so in the section where it talks about in F, in capital improvements, I know we've worked really hard to try and make this clear, but there's still some confusion. And so for example, new public buildings or additions to existing buildings, including land acquisition costs, which is the only place I believe that's referenced is in this particular section, and equipment needed to furnish the new building or addition for the first time. So my question would be new school furniture? That counts as equipment to furnish the new building or addition for the first time. Yes. Under MSBA, if it's attached to the floor or wall, it's included in theirs. But if it's movable, it's not included. So it's like a chair. But would we follow MSBA? Well, no. Why would we? I mean, what does this have to do? I mean, that is one point of reference. I'm not denying that that's a valuable point of reference. I'm saying I don't think you can assume one way or the other from the way this is written. What constitutes equipment does a projector can include a piece of equipment? Do desks count as equipment? Because you've got to have some kind of desk or table, right? The way I think it's intended, anyway, is that you're trying to think the reason why you mentioned that is because furnishing it, including projectors, tables, chairs, and that sort of thing, is part of the total project cost. In other words, you wouldn't build the building and have it be empty. Wouldn't be just, I mean, unless you're building a barn, which we might for DBW or something. But in general, I think the intention here was that you have a project which includes the furniture that goes within the building and the computers and all that other stuff that may be all part of a project cost. And that the intent here, as far as the capital improvement is to include that cost as part of the dollar figure. I mean, that's my reading of that piece of it. But that may or may not be other people's reading or what was intended. That was what was intended. That was what was intended is that the desks would get. Well, because let's come back to what you said about MSBA. So when we do this in our own minds as to how we have to divide up our capital plan, what will MSBA pay for and what will we have to pay for? And obviously you can't open a building without a bunch of stuff in it. And you might not choose to do whiteboards or whatever the current theory is around that. But you're definitely gonna have to do something to sit in and something to put papers on. So the desk and chair issue would not be paid for by MSBA. That's normally on the town dime. And so that would, we might put it in a different part of it. We might put it in our capital plan as the furniture we need to make the building. But therefore it's in a capital plan, but does it count for percent for art then? Right, I think that the way I read it though too is that let's say you build a building, let's say with a fire building. Well, we're gonna move the fire truck from the center of town there. So we didn't buy anything. We still put it in there. So we don't wanna include the cost of that truck because we already had it. Whereas if we were, on the other hand, the other furniture that we're buying explicitly to put into that building because it is new and we can't use what we already have or it's larger and need more stuff, that's part of that project costs. When you go to borrow the money for it, you're gonna borrow it all at once and it's all part of that project. I think that's what's to be included. And that's the way I read this. And I think what was intended by that. So that's kind of how I see it. And again, so MSBA has useful reimbursable expense. Again, part of the reason why they don't put furniture is because they're thinking you're likely gonna move all the stuff that's still good out of your old building because it's less stuff you have to buy. And especially if they incentivize it by not reimbursing you at some percentage of the total. I mean, that's the other thing is that they don't want you to chuck stuff out for no reason other than you can get new for 40% off or whatever it is, or 60% off. So again, I think getting back to the sort of intent of this is that it's sort of what's the project costs. And so when you're thinking of we're gonna borrow to do X that's gonna include equipping the building which might include desk and chairs. And so then my continuing questions along this theme are we had a question both that came to mind when we were looking at the JCPC report and also that came up this morning in a discussion is that when you go into the second bullet point here in particular, major alterations, renovations or improvements to existing buildings that extend the useful life of the existing building by at least 10 years. Does that mean that, speaking of school examples, a furnace does not do that, but a roof does? I think a furnace would do that. Because if you don't have a heater, you don't have a. And so it was said this morning that it wouldn't include the furnace and I don't think that's true. I think that the furnace is included. Yeah, I would too. I would say the furnace would be included in that. So I think we need to have a shared agreement around this when we get to town meetings. My point is that whether people like the answer or not is not the relevant issue. It's that we're clear and that's been really the evolution of this whole project is that everyone's clear on what we're talking about. So the furnace would in fact count, the roof would count, the furniture would count, et cetera. And to finally, I'll try and have this be my last part. Excuse me, may I just interrupt on the furnace? And talking with Claire again, it's about it. She said that the furnace would not qualify because it's regarded as equipment. Now, if you're talking about replacing the boiler, if you're putting a new boiler in a new school, then it's different because it's incorporated into the first bullet point. But she told me that the replacement boiler for Wildwood would not qualify because it's regarded as equipment. I would take a different point of view on that. Yeah. I mean, it's different than. So here's a distinction I would draw in that regard. It's like, let's say you want to buy new desks and chairs for a classroom at Fort River. That would not be, that's equipment. Whereas the boilers integral to the building being functional. And I think that's a distinction that's important here. So I would suggest that the boiler is an allowable, you know, capital improvement that would qualify under this because if you don't have it, you don't have a building that you can occupy except a few months of the year. Exactly. Which is not the opposite of what the school would need. But anyway, but I think on the other hand, you don't want to include, you know, oh, we're going to buy desks and chairs for every employee or we're going to buy new computers for every, you know, town staffer that has a computer. That is distinct because those are bought not, and they're bought in a project sort of way, but they're not bought to initially equip the building or to make that building function in its state. Whereas if you're building new, say you're building a new fire station and you're going to bring in, you know, desks and chairs to make that a functional space, then I would include that in that circumstance because that equips the building initially. So again, when we're at town meeting, what we need is we need not to have town staff say one thing and have us say the other. So that's the kind of the crux here so that town meeting doesn't get confused. To follow up on that point, I think to be clear, it doesn't have to be in the by itself, but to be clear for, you know, this sort of procedural thing that we're going to, it's going to come afterwards. Who decides this? What's the process for making? Because it's not, there's different ways of looking at, is it capital, is it major alteration for extending the useful life? But if I'm understanding what Mr. Brody said earlier, say the boiler project for Wildwood happens and we decide that that qualifies, then that's 500, if it's 500,000, then that's half a percent of that is... I want 5,000, I think if I do the math right. Is, no, that sounds like, that's too high. 250, 2,500, okay, so say it's 2,500. What I thought I heard you say earlier is that would be, because it's like a renovation that that would be used for the performing arts. Not necessarily, it could be performing arts. It could be, but not necessarily. It would go into the public art fund for other public art uses, which would include performing arts, but not exclusively. Okay, I misheard what I said earlier. Okay, thank you. More questions? Well, keep going, keep going. So land acquisition costs. So we haven't been talking about this. That's a very different level of conversation. That this only applies for land acquisitions associated with a new building going on. Right, right, obvious, right. That's a very good point. It's not just land that we purchase for conservation or land we purchase for maybe someday. It's that land we're going out because we need to build a project on it. Right, so it's part of the project cost. It would be part of that project cost. Okay. Fire station and we need land. So it's for a specific project. So land acquisition, the SACO property would not have qualified because it was not that we were buying it in order to build a school on it or a fire station on it. We were buying it to have it to do what we wanted to do someday. But we may use it, say we wanted to extend the North Amherst Library onto that land. Ooh, what would you do with that point? What if it's not? That is a good question. Directly, you buy it and the future use is not known. Is that where the timing comes in? I would suggest that becomes a separate project. But suppose you had that with the intention. I mean, suppose we are doing this to put a road in and to do an extension. I mean, it was in the backs of people's mind. Then what would you apply? What if you didn't do it for 10 years? How would you? We're going to think of a million scenarios. Right, but just trying to be clear on some recent things, right? Not just spinning hypotheticals, but something we actually just did. And so that's helpful. So thank you. And I am going to, and I know I've monopolized a lot of time here and everybody seems to be well on board with this, is I appreciate that it, Springtown meaning one of the issues that did arise as you indicated was the issue of performing arts. Yes. And so I just want to be clear that that is the main reason I will not support this because I find it insane to borrow money in order to provide money for performing arts, ephemeral performances. That does not mean anyone else has to agree with me, but I'm glad that we're working on making all these other things really clear for people and it's fine if town meetings supports this, but that is my main reason not to support this. It's not necessarily borrowed money, however, for a smaller renovation project, it could be town general funds money that would be used under renovation project or improvement project. Sure. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes. I want to speak to that. I'd like to speak to the performing arts. I was at town meeting when that came up by a number of people and I think the petitioner's kind of in a bind here. Right, I agree. If it were me saying, do you want performing arts added, I would say no, but I'm trying to look at this in total and I think that was probably a reasonable strategic decision made by the petitioners and so I'm sympathetic with why that got added and I'm going to assume for myself that that's going to represent a small portion of what this money's going to be spent on. I'm just going to make that assumption that there will be some performing arts maybe in conjunction with installation of things that I think of as more durable and lasting. That is more what I'm interested in spending the money on, but I appreciate your perspective, Ms. Brewer, because I don't like that being added. I'm still going to support it because I think there's always the things that we would rather warn in here but I would like to support the idea that we're going to put public resources into public art because I think the benefits are worthwhile and so I'm going to support this even though I have, I share that same reservation but I'm not going to. That's what I just choose. If I could to add on. I think one of the things that we should certainly suggest is that there's going to be a set of, as was mentioned, procedures but there's going to be policies around this use. So just as much as we have a policy about we want to use 10% of levy ideally for capital, there's a series of policy recommendations that we could make and we could all make our recommendations so well if you're going to fund performing arts it should be only with non-borrowed money in other words from cash capitalists it's sometimes referred to. So that could be a policy that's part and parcel so the bylaw has the flexibility to have it and yet we can create policies or we can try to inform and encourage our. Or spending guidelines. Right exactly so all those things could be part of the, and I think quite frankly that is a task the finance committee will need to take up very quickly after this is to start to articulate some of those policies just to give guidance to everybody and listen to this conversation, their own conversations and what town meeting discusses and the mix I mean I think that gives us the flexibility and yet we can impose our own boundaries as we need to. So ready for a motion. Since I've asked 10,000 questions and everyone else seems to have theirs answered I am ready for a motion. I will make the motion if people are ready and I move to recommend to, wrong line here. Yes I got it now. You may need to recommend to the April 26th, 2017 annual town meeting article 28% for art, a known person to speak to. Second. I can speak to you. Mr. Walds is volunteering. Mr. Walds is volunteering okay. Ms. Burr. Yes. I'm going to support the motion. Two paragraphs that you were talking about earlier in the evening regarding what would happen if there are funds that are not expended. I guess as I look at them, they're not inconsistent in any respect. They may be redundant in some respect but they're not inconsistent. And given that we are so far along and that we ought to really try and minimize the amendments that need to be made on the floor of town meeting if it is redundancy but not inconsistency that it should just remain and be accepted. Shall so vote. Yeah. Right and people can just be aware of it and us people can be aware of it and the petitioners aware of it. And so then if it comes up and someone else is confused by that or if they blow right past it, it does not seem to cause, as you say, conflict in terms of what to do. It's just probably a vestige of a cut and paste issue that was trying to clarify the last paragraph and it just ended up in another paragraph. Redundancy. I think that's probably what happened. That's for sure. We try and make it as simple as possible and this is one that I'd rather not. Right, yeah. But that's why I'd like to see the percent reference that you guys were talking about earlier with the amount and the percent and what's understood. Yeah, I was going to get my answer. If you could find a way to just make that nice and straightforward for when it's projected. I have some just the language that. Great. For when it's projected up on the screen so that everyone will understand. Whether it's a document or a writing is a different question. I just wanted to find you. Right, because like you say, any change you have to make is just always confusing the heck out of people. Perfect this if we don't need to. Yeah, it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be clear. Okay. All right, so further discussion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. So that is four in favor and one against and that is where we are. So, all right thank you so much for your patience. Just for clarity for me. So the only change, the wording change is the language that Mr. Steinberg just presented to Mr. Bachmann, the rest of it. Except you're going to, you have already said that since you're not, it appears that you are not going to excise what I consider to be the redundant paragraph. Therefore you need to modify it to say public art in two places. It's either throw it out or modify it. And that while it hasn't been done in the warrant but it's been done in the motion. So those, that two places. Percent for art or public art? That is a good point. Percent for art, you are right. That was my mistake in terms of the way I was repeating that. The other change was in Section 5 on responsibilities where it said holding public hearings. The suggestion was meeting that to meet it up. With small age we decided to let it go. No legal standing doesn't matter. And if anybody questions and we can say the generic reference. But if we're not suddenly obliging them to have legally noticed public hearings, that's not what the bylaw does. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. And so we'll see if we can get that motion shaped up. Okay. Thank you for sticking with it. Yes. Tonight and all those other nights. Not a lot. Long road. Determination. Barrier decline. Very good. Okay, so in terms of town meeting, we have a couple of more articles before us tonight. It's now 10.09 p.m. I'm gonna do my usual riff as to where we are. So we have a couple more articles to do. We have a couple of special licenses to do. We have a bunch of minutes to do as amended. We have dog park status, SME status. We have some reports to do. We have the town manager's discussion about his progress report on his performance goals. We have marijuana next steps and Mr. Kravitz is still with us on that. And so we have a bunch of stuff to do and it's already 10.10. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna completely switch gears and we're gonna do those alcohol licenses so that they're done. So somebody quick read those. They're on the third page of our motions. I'd be glad to. I move to approve the application of top of the campus for a special license to serve all alcohol at a reception to be held May 19th, 2017 at the old chapel from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Jenny Lynn Fontaine, board member. Second. Great. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And that passes unanimously. Next. I move to approve the applications of top of the campus incorporated for special licenses to serve wine and malt at receptions to be held April 20th, 2017 in the Goodell, Bernie Dallas room from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. And May 2nd, 2017 in the Fine Arts Center stage from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Jenny Lynn Fontaine, board member. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And that is unanimous. Excellent. So that is done. We have a committee appointment to do and we are so happy that people volunteer for our committees so somebody's gonna skip to that part of our motion sheet and find that and read that to us. I move to appoint Alice Briggs to the Amherst Cultural Council for a term ending April 12th, 2020. Second. For those of you wondering why April, just because. So that, public state law says they can only serve for a very specific period of six years. So we always have to make theirs and at funny times. Further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Then somebody wanna make, we already talked about the dog park task force last time, somebody wanna make the motion to give it SME status. Sure. I move to grant the dog park task force special municipal employee SME status. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And so Mr. Buckleman, when that goes back, that will show at the bottom of the page that we granted SME status on such and such date, which is the 12th and then it says yes, up here as you already indicated, but it shows the vote down at the bottom. That's our convention associated with that. Okay. So we got through some basic things that we needed to do. Excellent. So now in terms of why don't we go ahead with the, we'll come back to the two petition articles. Let's go ahead with our marijuana discussion. Let's do marijuana now. All righty, all righty. Yeah, very carefully phrased there Ms. Cougar. We heard that. There's the letter to Rosenberg and then the memo. We have materials in our packet. We have again, thankfully to town staff for providing us another copy of the March 20th MMA letter, the March 27th testimony that was shared between myself, Mr. Kravitz and Mr. Steinberg. We have a draft letter to Senator Rosenberg based on a conversation we had last time on the third and we have Mr. Kravitz's memo telling us where we're at and where we're headed next. So please, Mr. Kravitz. Jeff Kravitz, Economic Development Director for the town. Where would you like me to start? Memo, letter. MJ folded that one. Mr. Steinberg, do you want to remind us why we're doing the memo and then have Mr. Kravitz speak to that? The letter. The letter to, I'm sorry. I think that actually I think I'll leave it to Mr. Kravitz to do most of it, but I just remind you that I do have a conversation with Senator Rosenberg and explained to him in very basic terms the problems of the timing sequence that we were concerned was not adequately responded to the hearing and that we would like to bring his attention to it because of the problems that come to us as a tenant, other towns that have town meetings given the sequence of the dates and the Senator invited us to submit a letter and Mr. Kravitz has provided the draft of a letter. I think as always he's done a great job with it and those one matter within the letter that I drew to his attention that we talked about earlier and I'll let him say what he wants about that. Yes, so that is in the second potential recommendation adding a new subsection to the end of section five. Mr. Steinberg noted that if it just said the cannabis control commission would not accept licensed applications until the municipality has concluded its 2018 annual town meeting that does not give sufficient time for the attorney general to review it. So I actually investigated that timeframe and after the conclusion of town meeting town clerk has 30 days to submit it to the attorney general's office and the attorney general has 90 days in which to review it. So I would propose adding license applications until 120 days after the municipality has concluded the 2018 annual town meeting. There was, I also received additional feedback which I thought was helpful. The most substantive of that was to move the suggestions to the front of the letter and then provide the explanations for why they were needed later on. I can certainly incorporate that. I've also spent time over the last couple of weeks reading through the 91, 90 or 91 bills that are before the joint committee on marijuana policy. Fortunately, many of them were fairly short but there are two that I think would accomplish similar things. They are house bill 1051 and house bill 3167. 1051 would allow for a moratorium through the regular legislative process until regulations have been adopted and the CCC may not accept applications during that time which is very similar to what we suggest in the letter and bill 3167 allows municipalities to adopt zoning under chapter 40A and prevents the cannabis control commission from approving applications that violate zoning. So that would also, we would be able to pass zoning at fall town meeting and feel fairly confident in doing that. So I would make reference to those bills as well in the letter. You include that in the letter because out of the 91 you found two that would work. Thank you, I appreciate that. Yes, Ms. Currie? Well, just, I think yeah, just saying this is similar to section whatever of the, you know, referencing those bills, I think that's great but I had suggested moving the changes which is really the sort of substance of what we're saying, this is a problem. Look at this recommendation and then we're giving a bunch of reasons why it's a problem in greater detail so that that, the subsections aren't lost but I thought there was a lot of, this makes a good statement and I think if we can just, I had given Mr. Kravitz this morning just some edits and typos and different things but that was I think more of pretty much the substance with just a couple other ideas to just tighten it up. But I think the sooner we get this in or chance it will have, of having an impact or some influence on the process. So among the many pounds of dead trees we have on our desk tonight, one of them is not a signature folder because we knew this was gonna happen that we would have some edits associated with this and so the idea would be that we would look at the edits and then we would authorize the chair to sign the letter after it has the appropriate edits. So we've touched on all the things that at this point, up until this point we tend to incorporate other comments from the select board beyond the feedback that Mr. Steinberg and Ms. Krueger have already provided and that Mr. Kravitz has already described in terms of incorporating the actual reference to pending legislation. So we would be authorizing this to be signed with those changes, both of substance and of word. Yes, I'm just making sure there isn't anything else that we wanna ask Mr. Kravitz to change. It's gonna have to change stuff, might as well get it all out right now. So by consensus we agree that I will sign the letter. Okay, you may sign or you shall sign it. If he does it while I'm at motion review in the morning then it will be signed tomorrow, which will be here before we know it. Then okay, so are we ready to shift over then to the memo that he has provided to us in terms of the recreational marijuana strategy proposal? Do people wanna ask questions? Do you want him to touch on anything? Well yeah, ask questions, don't make him read it to us. What do you want to know? I appreciate all of the analysis that you gave to the response to the question from Chair Jaylon about the 2% is the intent to then turn that into a letter to her as chair responding to the question, how are we proceeding on? Good question. I could certainly do that. Right, what would we, and we can ask the town manager as well what he thinks would be our best strategy for communicating that information? I mean is this, first of all Mr. Kravitz is asking us is this what you were looking for to have communicated to Senator Jaylon and if so then what? Well substantively I think that it is the response to the question that she asked and there were difficulties in responding and you know it describes the best job that he possibly could in a very tight timeframe when you're sitting there having given a limited number of minutes and there are scores and scores of people looking to testify behind you and the atmosphere we were in and to get into all of the detail and to do the analysis of the detail and then also to not have the facts anyway because it was really about we were talking about the amount we would need and she was saying does the amount you need fit the percentage and what percentage would you need and with you know so we're one we didn't hadn't quantified the costs and two we hadn't come up with an estimate of what the amount of sales would be and so it was sort of an impossible question to respond to but I think that it's appropriate to acknowledge to the chair that she asked the question and that we've given it considerable thought and this is our response. So one question would be and I'm sure you've thought about this is you know listing this figure of 27.6 compared to what? Our annual budget. Right. I mean it needs to be put into some kind of context right which is a third of our annual budget or which is way more than Denver, Colorado or something it can't just be, it can't just be a number like in order to generate cover the cost, yeah. I mean if the market's gonna be 50 million then I guess that's fine. Obviously we don't know. One of the figures that we could use that might help put it into context is when medical marijuana dispensaries applied for their estate licenses they had to estimate what the medical anticipated medical revenues were and pretty consistently it was $10 million for Amherst. So I don't know if a three times multiplier it seems reasonable or it would be significantly more or less but that might be the closest one. Would it make more sense to sort of back into a number and say, because that looks really high so I mean I think that's the point to show that but maybe to say projecting you know what $15 million sales revenue the local option tax would need to be X instead of saying yeah to back into it instead of saying at 2% we would need this much sales pick a more probably defensive yeah pick a defensible guesstimate of the revenue or the total sales and then say therefore we feel like we need 4% whatever it is. If I could offer it so one thing I sort of mentioned in out of turn you know do we know what the sales number for say alcohol within the 10 limits are you know in broad sense if we know what that looks like or tobacco or you know sort of name a similar health thing I mean just as a you know it's a different kind of comparison to the I do agree with you this sort of well you know if we think if medical was 10 million let's say recreational is 50% higher that's $15 million but then what's it take to get to $552,000 at least the method like wise you know what's the market for alcohol perhaps you know can we estimate what that is on an annual basis within the city within the 10 limits and you know cause that's a similar avenue I guess of you know maybe and we could say it's a fight we need 5% not 2% to hit that if it's $10 million market you need $500,000 that's 5% tax. Yeah I just think it's more in a way defensible even though this is a real guest and the other thing I'm just on strategy if we're gonna respond to cultured Jalen's question which I think we should would we also you know like you would draft the letter sort of in response to the question from the hearing blah blah blah and then put this out and then we say we have also written to Senate President Rosenberg about the timing which we did discuss in the hearing and it's attached for your review because it would seem like that would be a good reinforcement we've got the Rosenberg letter and then we would inform that committee of that suggested language and maybe it's maybe just refers to it and then it's attached or we reiterate part of that timing question cause that's one of our other main points. I think that's a I think that's an excellent point and oh by the way I see attached. I think that's perfectly reasonable because we did try and talk about it and it didn't necessarily make the impact on the person who talked back to me. Putting in writing and they know it went to Senate President who's also happens to be our reps. Exactly. So that's a strategy. So that's a strategy and so how so I'm gonna be signing the letter to Senate Rosenberg so obviously you need to have that finished so that it can go out and then you'll have it on hand and then you can send it to Senate jail and when you get a chance. So the but in terms of coming up with these numbers did we have any other helpful advice as to how that was gonna be calculated or just say okay we've gotten this far with it you guys figure out that other 500,000 or whatever number that feels comfortable because I mean this is the kind of number you're gonna be sharing with professional colleagues around the state too. Like what's Amherst Market gonna be? I have no idea what Northampton's actual medical market is versus whatever they might have guessed it was gonna be because we don't have a lot of comparison figures yet even for medical much less for rack. Yeah and I think it's hard to make the comparison especially in Northampton because my understanding is that demand far outstrips supply and they're limiting the amount that they sell because they don't have the product in hand to sell it so the market might actually be significantly larger if the supply was higher. So it might be artificial low in Northampton. It's really a guesstimate. I just wanna correct me if this is wrong but I think the proper form for this is that you write to the two co-chairs even though it was her question. So I would, I think you need to put them both and then say in response to you know co-chairs Jaylen's question but I think you send it because that's how it gets to the full committee. I also had a thought that on that because we don't and I don't know whether we will have in time for the letter information about the cost of education and awareness campaigns and I don't know if this is a road if you wanna go down to account down but it was a thought so I'll share it with you and then you can give me feedback is if we think that 2% is sufficient for our emergency response and public safety needs ask for an additional two or 3% to be put in a local fund specifically for education and awareness or whatever we think so that it's not necessarily changing the local option tax and we know exactly what it's for whether or not that would be more palatable than something. I think, I mean we can crank this number up on a lot of different ways. I mean one of the other thing we could do is look at what Colorado communities have if their budget had increased at all for this we might find that they haven't not that they shouldn't have but they may not have I think we're trying to say there is a need at the local level here's an estimate cause we don't know what the need is and we're gonna err on the higher side because that's to our advantage to err on the higher side. I think they will come back and say well in Colorado nobody had to hire extra police officers or firefighters because of even though it's been inundated with marijuana. I don't know if that's true or not but we'll just receive some feedback on that. And is it worth one of the things that is not in this memo but I think would be worth noting in the letter is that the price of marijuana has dropped 25% in Colorado in the last two years which means assuming the amount sold is the same there's 25% less tax revenue which just bolsters our costs the municipal costs aren't gonna go down by 25% which I think is another reason to add some additional flexibility into this. I think that's worth mentioning. I definitely agree that's worth mentioning. How, this is our internal memo obviously and it's been wonderful to have you pull us together cause it was like what, how, where do we even start? I don't think there's any support whatsoever for the statement that the town anticipates the need to hire four additional emergency medical responders. Like again, does Colorado had to, based on what? I mean this isn't Molly we're talking about and so what, why would we need to do that? So if you have an answer or if you don't to think about how we would, why we would say why? That's true. We would not, I mean we have specialized services it's not the same thing but when we have the fire department work with the Mullen Center and have the triage at the Mullen Center when there's an electronic dance concert we know there's gonna be problems. That's kind of a quantifiable expense to set up that triage area and so that's something you can say, this is a thing we need money for and we've worked very well with UMass on that and the Mullen Center. So, Mullen Center not being UMass is, is there a thing that you can do that with as just as you referenced with what's happening in Colorado and maybe they should or maybe they shouldn't but we don't wanna seem hysterical as what I'm trying to get across here. Like, oh we're gonna need all these people it's like to do what, so. If I were receiving this, you know, this letter, this is gonna become the letter, it wouldn't be so much the dollar amount I would be looking at those staff costs and say, is that, you know, oh, do they really need four? Do they really need two? And then I wouldn't worry so much about what that added up to but I would like, oh, they really inflated this to get their number up so. Yeah, we don't wanna look like we're, our credibility is about what, having a realistic number for the additional staff and I'm assuming you kind of went through that exercise when you put it down. Yeah, I think we're, it's hard for everyone to estimate what the impact is gonna be and so I think that these are the best guesses that we have with the information that's available but I am trying to reach out to folks in Colorado, municipalities in Colorado to understand if they have had to hire more police officers or emergency personnel. But the context is important for us because we have so many underage, we have 40,000 students here, the bulk of them under 21 so there'll be enforcement issues, education issues, all types of things that other communities might not experience. So I think we have a unique experience that our costs are gonna be higher than the average community for sure. The other thing I would say, so obviously there's college communities in Colorado like Boulder and places like that so those would be the ones I'd focus on even if the city of Boulder's much bigger than us, I'm not sure it is, it might be. I think the other thing with regard to talking about sort of the staffing question that you could also potentially ask is part of the question is, because maybe that they didn't hire anybody new but they changed what people did. In other words, what did they forego? Reassigned, yeah. There's a cost to that. Now it may not be a dollar figure you can put in it but it is something you can describe. It's like, well we no longer do this service because those people have been reassigned to do this service. So that's a different way to cost it and a different dollar amount. So that's another frame to bring to the questions that you ask folks in trying to defend that a little bit or to articulate what the need is. And we can go on a long time and I try to end but also, I mean I think in the letter, again reiterating what Mr. Bachman said about the different, about our particular population but also to let them know that we do have our own EMT people on staff because a lot of towns contract and we are very, they need to understand that those are town employees and that we run our own ambulances and that they're highly trained and so there is a real cost to that and that's different than other communities. Right, right, they might make assumptions about that kind of staff. They're not permanent, oh, Pat, you know. Well really. Which you're essentially paying for when you buy the service from someone else but it's not quite the same. You're paying it differently, yeah. Absolutely. So they need to understand that this is not something we take so they're fried in but there's a real expense for that. Is it worth trying to put a dollar figure on the educational effort where you go over onto page two in terms of one of the things that pops into mind and obviously you who have served on our CCC before somebody else stole the name is would know better than I would but that educational effort that we are continually doing every single year about those posters and handouts that they take around, here's the keg by-law, here's such and such by-law, here's how not to get in trouble. I mean, I know paper doesn't cost a lot of money but I mean, there's developing that campaign and then there's working on finding different ways to get that messaging out. I mean, that's an actual thing we do. And so if we can put, even if it's just to reference, we already do this associated with alcohol and so we're gonna need another kind of outreach so because we do that, because we're proactive, we don't just say, we live in a college town, whatever. That's something we do. Right, and to piggyback on that idea, the other thing is that because we're in a college town, the population changes, so we have to continue to reeducate. So our cost doesn't go down over time whereas in some other communities it would because the population doesn't move and turn over as much as ours does. So that's a thing. And I think that's where using a 2% tax, using a percentage of sales on its own is a poor mechanism. We need some sort of base that is to cover some of those base costs that we're gonna have every single year and any other community might have every single year. And then the 2%, or whatever percent, or some percentage relative to sales, that helps to accommodate, you know, if sales are larger than expected in our town or some other town, then that helps to accommodate those scales. But the scale up of need, but it's also, there's an economy of scale. So there's a baseline of cost that we have to do the basic functionality around this and then as, say, use goes up, then there's an increase, but the base cost is still there. So, you know, a different mechanism to fund this than just a straight percentage on sales is necessary, quite frankly, in my opinion. I mean, it's kind of the same quandary the state's in around. The gas tax, you know, is that when you buy, you know, when you have electric cars and then, or highly gas-efficient cars, your revenue stream goes down but your road needs are the same because the wear and tear and the aging and all that doesn't change. The vehicles on them change. So it's kind of some of that same parallel sets of arguments around a revenue source that they need to be articulated to in there. I mean, it's simple to put 2%, but it's not a simple problem and the cost structures are complex for people and they need a base amount that can cover some of that base stuff. Mr. Steinberg? I hesitate to open up something else at the sour, but I did at least want to point out that in the current hour CCC, a lot of the community education work around alcohol, what you described was really performed by the university staff because they have the most direct contact with students and they have a unique expertise with it and we are gonna have to think about that question too as to how we are working with the university about this but at this point, the question isn't whether we're going to be in the end feeling compelled to contract with the university to help with this effort in some fashion. It's just the fact of the cost to the community as a whole. Of having this marijuana law has been underestimated. Other thoughts along these lines? So in your proposal for municipal actions is focused largely on fall town meeting in terms of potentially temporary moratorium limitation which we've talked about, the fact that no one still knows the answer to how we're allowed to interpret that in terms of the liquor licenses but the one that I keep coming back to is the public health bylaws and regulations because I do not understand. I understand that our Board of Health has a huge amount of independence and always has had under state law. What I was surprised by was another community that recently put out a whole bunch of board health regs that I didn't necessarily think they would necessarily be empowered to do just because this question passed and so I think we need, and it's not just me as what I'm saying, I think we need a much better understanding of moving forward and so I appreciate all the coordination staffs doing in terms of if the Board of Health is going to suddenly take this on and say we wanna be one of those communities that's right up front talking about and just like they took the lead on age 21 for smoking and for availability of tobacco products that I'm leery of them doing that in complete isolation from just they had the public notice meeting and then they just went and did it and we're not talking with each other because these things all to me are very well connected as opposed to the things that are clearly like tobacco products clearly just under their purview. It's got nothing to do with the select board but these things do dovetail in my opinion and so I worry about our communication with them because we don't have any officially and so we're gonna have to depend on staff I think largely for that and those are town manager appointments and so I mean again it's a very distant relationship that we have with them and if they are suddenly going to start talking about making actual regulations we need to understand how those fit in with zoning and our community's values as elected officials et cetera et cetera. So along those lines we do I mean Mr. Kravitz and Ms. Fetterman do have conversations there are but we have not had I'm not sure if you've met with the Board of Health or not but that is a venue we haven't really that we need to work on. Along those same lines it'd be helpful for us to know since there's a lot of interest from the select board on this issue who in particular we should be including and as we start to look at the legislative strategy will you have a point person to help guide this and that would be helpful to us I think. You don't wanna just call Mr. Kravitz the marijuana sir? I do but it's useful for us what he is. So who gets the crown on this? He's earned that but I know you have all been involved of many of you have been involved with this on multiple levels very early on and have educated yourselves and have strong feelings about it. So I just worry a little it's helpful for us to know who's gonna be the point person because we worry about getting into open meeting things if we start sharing documents and things like that. Spruitt setting that aside for a moment but it's a good question is we were talking about Board of Health that reminded me that technically or whatever officially our boards lay is onto the Board of Health and I haven't gone to a meeting in probably eight months because they have really competent staff and they've been doing their thing and I do see their packets from time to time but it made me think that maybe when as this gets a little bit more flushed out that we have some kind of a joint meeting because not just staff to staff but as we're working on this try to have a time for the Board of Health to meet with us, the Board itself or whatever members can participate to try to have a sense of being in this together and maybe what their role is and what our role and there's a lot of lack of clarity but I had a note from when I reviewed this yesterday just when I looked at proposal for municipal actions I just looked at your five things and I was like then we need to be meeting regularly from now until November because this is actually a lot of stuff and summer it's just harder to keep the momentum it's like if we're really gonna do this and be ready for Faltown meeting it means we have to have a regular meeting schedule of whatever the different entities are because I just know how long it takes so we're gonna get through Springtown meeting which gets a ton of time and energy and then this is gonna be happening so I think connecting with the Board of Health is important, yep. So are you smiling? I'm just thinking of past. Oh. And tobacco wars. Yes, tobacco and all kinds of issues that they... Well when my wife was chair of the Board of Health it was when the Board of Health was passing one of the first in the state regulations banning smoking in bars and the select board in the Board of Health were not in sync whatsoever on the issue nor was the town manager in sync with the Board of Health and so I just couldn't help but remember a lot of things that happened at the time. Let's avoid those mistakes of the past. Even if we don't agree at least we'll be talking to each other about it regularly rather than once something's done and over that that would be difficult. So in response, I'm sorry go ahead. I just wanna point out that as with the zoning we won't know the regulations from the state regarding some of the things that the Board of Health may wanna take up, packaging, regulation of edibles, potency, those types of things the state may address after a fall town meeting. So I just wanted to point out while we're talking about it. I mean it's not stopping the other community that already wrote their own right now. Right, I'm a little leery of us inventing the but we don't have control over what the Board of Health does that way, so if they decide to take that tag we'd like to know. So in terms of point people associated with this issue myself, Mr. Steinberg, Ms. Krueger have all taken various roles up until this point of talking on connecting points of going to hearings. We've kind of shuffled it back a month. They go to the campus community coalition. We don't want Mr. Slaughter and Mr. Wald to feel left out. But. That's me, I don't. So do we need to provide further direction at this point or someone says no I don't care about that anymore or do we just say we'll continue to figure it out as we go along and just say that we will ensure that we won't have any more than two of us at maximum communicating about anything about this outside of a posted meeting. And so if we have a strategy session about the next hearing based on some brand new bill that's come through and that MMA says you need to work on this right now and we're not getting to select board meeting and it could be any one of us. And so technically because we're all trying to keep each other informed as we come along here. So I don't know that we really have an answer to your question so that might be something we want to talk about at the retreat. But at this point as long as while I'm still chair for a little while go through me but then we'll see who's around who's talked about it most recently and we'll sort it out until someone rises to the level of being the marijuana person. But this way we're all talking about it out in the community which is great. And so part of the whole shared leadership thing. So we're gonna have Mr. Kravitz is gonna be editing this letter in the wee hours in the morning and then having me sign it tomorrow sometime before I leave the building after. But I'll be here till like noon. I mean then there's the tree planting right. And so but then that way we can get it out the door if there's any way he can work on it in the morning. So that'd be great. And then in terms of the jail in and who's co-chair I'm totally forgetting right now. Totally know that. Thank you. Thank you. Is there's a little more to be done in terms of another letter to them reorienting that. But and then it'll be on top of the Rosenberg letter but it sounds it sounds like you feel like you've gotten enough feedback as to this is great. Have you considered doing it a little bit like this? And we went to the letter. We want the Rosenberg letter out. Right. But the Rosenberg letters tomorrow. But this can take a few more days. You know 20 more minutes or something like that. So yeah okay. And good. Just a question if I'm not able to find good information on either alcohol or tobacco sales or the cost of education campaigns. I guess I'll try the balance between timing and getting that information. I think that is an excellent question. And I personally will look to see what the rest of the select board thinks because my initial instinct is to say if there isn't some obvious thing like you call up so-and-so and they have an answer and you're done is that it's okay to describe some of these things in words and say it's hard to quantify but we do this campaign around keg licensing and we have to do it with a brand new set of students and it gets done through UMass and it's a cost to the community and it's gonna get done anyway. And so right it's a cost. It's staff time and speaking to that redeployment issue. And so even if UMass hasn't figured out like they need an extra 0.4 of a person to describe it. And similarly saying that we need four additional emergency medical if you say something about like why I think that's more meaningful than saying we need four and this is how much they each cost because then they say wow you pay a lot for your people or wow you don't pay your people enough. So whatever. So I just wanna make one other point if people start to say oh it's such an inflated number just the amount of time that staff is spending on this now and it hasn't even taken effect. It's very high. I mean just your time and you've spent a lot of time on this at many different venues and our staff has too and the zoning staff haven't really gotten involved a whole lot as much as they will but through our health director and especially Jeff with an economic development director but a lot of staff have spent a lot of time on it. So there is a tangible cost to this that we're incurring right now in preparation. And does it make sense to the select board also that I'm gonna sign the letter to Rosenberg but I think that we're good with the fact that it's Mr. Kravitz who is going to be the ongoing conduit of information back and forth with for example the joint committee and so he should just go ahead and send the letter to Senator Jalen and co-chair. Mr. Buckerman will work with him on refining of the numbers. Exactly. It's gonna be. But then it's appropriate for him to be the contact for this particular thing to Senator Rosenberg. Yes, we'll sign. So we'll kind of have to work that out as different issues come up but I think it's perfectly appropriate that then you work on the Jalen thing not at your leisure of course because you know obviously everything has to be done right now but thank you, that's helpful. Does that work? Yeah. Wow, it's not even midnight yet. You're welcome to stay. We didn't... You're welcome to stay. Talk necessarily about the advocacy strategy and I didn't know if that was on purpose or... No, it was not on purpose. We were just tired. That was... It's on the second page, I call it the important part. I had the nine issues and recommended we focus on four and I didn't just was curious. I assumed that you didn't wanna talk about it because you completely agree but I figured I'd give you the opportunity. I mean, do we agree with the nine and focusing on the... Focusing on, yeah. Or if there are more that you want me to add or if you were... We'll concentrate on numbers six, three, nine. Yes. I mean, I thought that was a good list and then I just made the edit. I recommend that Amherst concentrate on issues six and not exclusively because we still care about the other things and they all, they spill over just to say that we focus or concentrate and not just take out the word exclusively. Right, care about. We're not allowed to have a small number of priorities. We always have at least 10 at any given moment but I think that's an excellent point. We do have to pick and choose when it comes right down to it, realistically. All right, and I think we can support other advocates' positions that we agree with and that's a way of showing our support in that way without necessarily taking up a significant amount of our time or effort. And I, despite my recent work with Mass Selections Association, I would also make sure that I caution this just a little bit that we do not want to assume that because MMA writes it, that we will sign up on it. So there's, as we get into the details of some of these things, particularly of certain bills, it would not be a safe assumption that if MMA wants us to support it, that the select board will necessarily do so. So just so that you're not surprised by that. You may want to. So far, I mean, so far, so good. But it's not, it's not a safe blanket assumption to make. Would that be an accurate representation as Krueger based on other issues we've dealt with specifically for MMA? I'm just trying to, there's that, although we may want to support some of those changes, we can do so through the MMA. I think maybe just both the Mass Municipal Association and Mass Health Officers Association are advocating for changes to the regulatory structure. And although we may want, I don't know if we need, although we may want to support those changes. We're not writing that to anybody but us. That's just an internal memo. Yeah, so forget it. You're just making that comment. Right, I'm making that comment that as much as we are quite likely to be interested in supporting the efforts of the people that he has pointed out to us, that we just take, do not make too quick of an assumption that if they write it on their letterhead, we automatically embrace it. I don't see that says that in here. No, it doesn't, and so that's the yes. Because we're providing hopeful suggestions. That's what we're doing. I knew we were doing something. The point out that this is a memorandum for Mr. Kravitz to Mr. Backelman. We're not parties to it. Which is nice of him to share it with us. What did we think of it? The strategy. Right, right, in that strategy, in that secret memo that we weren't supposed to see, that strategy. Okay, great. Well, CC should be, the select word will be in here, right? Could blank CC in their header. So can we let Mr. Kravitz go? Does he, does he have enough? Gotta start that letter. Exactly, yeah. Get crack it on, get that finished. We'll see you on your way out as we leave. Okay. That's kind of enough. Thank you, Mr. Kravitz. Organize enough is a different question. So I didn't even write down when that started because as you said, how much time have we already spent on this? And we still don't feel like we can really make anything happen associated with it either. So we have, we have in front of us a couple of other petition articles that the petitioner has chosen not to correspond with us at all on. So we don't know why they're not responding. And so the question is what position if any we wish to take on those two items. I know that we had a number of items that we decided to make no recommendation on. I am in no way implying that these are the same as that. I'm just reminding us that we have many, many options available to us. So thoughts associated with this. We have no material for either one of these other than what appears in the warrant, which is of course the same as what would have been the petition. We have no idea if a different motion is going to be provided on this material. And wow, so much paper. So referring back to our handy dandy warrants associated with these issues. We have article 37, which is the establishing a low income property tax credit and article 38, which is fire EMS staffing and capital expenditures. In regards to article 37, a question arose in some conversation we were having about whether or not there were privacy concerns associated with the information that was being talked about here. Do we, have we gotten any additional information on how that would work since this specifically talks about the housing authority working on this as well, right? We don't have any additional information. Yeah, can I add also, I believe that the housing sheltering and municipal trust or federal trust are going to talk about this as well. So we may wanna. This is on our agenda too. Yeah, and I just, I've been in touch with Debbie Church and the executive director at the Amherst Housing Authority because I had the question about the part of this is predicated on the idea that the leases with voucher holders would be available. And I do not believe that they can be and that was her position as well. So I think Mr. Bachman will be taking that up with council as well because that, the whole thing doesn't work if it's not even legal not even legal to do what it proposes to do. But there's some other issues with it, but we can wait because I think the housing committees plural will be taking this up. And then it would be valuable for them to know if they don't already, but if you happen to speak with town council in the morning as you are happening to do at the motion review and then you see them later in the day, then you can advise them on that very legal point. I'll try to forward you, I'm trying to remember before we do the email from Ms. Turgeon on that point because then you'll have that information. So we will at this time postpone taking any position on that and it will come back on a future motion sheet and future agenda. And that would be, and it's not like it's some mythical future time, it's the 24th, Monday the 24th, and which will be a regular meeting here in this room because tell me, does it start until Wednesday? And then the other item for the fire EMS staffing and capital in terms of looking to a partner committee or anything associated with that. This is very specific about developing a plan for paying with staffing, talking about going to the university, colleges, one-time donations, specific location for a third fire station, maintaining central fire station, it's all kinds of recommendations. Do we have, since it's not like we have a plan for the petitioner to come back on this, do we have any reason to take, can we take a position on this tonight? And meaning to decide are we going to take a position or not as opposed to we're gonna put it off for a reason because I don't foresee a reason unless one of you sees a reason to dispose of this article in whatever fashion we think is appropriate to dispose of it. I have a question first of all as to whether either two committees, the finance committee or the fire station, the DPW study committee have looked at that and whether they're considering a position on it. Notwithstanding that point, my recollection which is somewhat distant to begin with but at this hour is even more distant is that the report from a prior version of the fire station study committee that was about 2007 or so that I recall because it was about the time that I was first appointed the finance committee looked at that as an option and as a community rejected it as an option in large part, not just because of the construction costs but actually the operating costs and that the additional operating costs were substantially greater to run it at three stations than two. However, we're talking about 10 year ago memory. If we found that I think that it probably is what it said though and I'm not sure that the analysis of made now would be different and I therefore would of course be interested in input from the other committees that I mentioned but I'd also try and take a look and find a copy of that old report see if my recollection is correct and see if the figure still that analysis still bears fruit. Even were you to go to that much effort which I will not say anything cynical about. No, even though it's 11 o'clock because it would be nice to know that but these unless this is getting divided into two portions portion two we absolutely already do this on a daily basis. Town meeting does not need to tell the town to do this. We're already doing it to the best of our abilities to do it and so I don't see any purpose in supporting this article and I don't see why we would take, I mean I suppose we could take no position on it but why would we take no position? No position implies we're indifferent. We're already doing this to the best of our ability to do and so I'm not sure why we need to be reminded to do things we're already doing. So the other thing I would suggest is that some of what's covered in this article is also technically under the charge of the DPW Fire Station Committee now so I find it superfluous at best to take action on this at all so I would certainly recommend to, well I would suggest we not recommend it or perhaps dismiss it because I think it's unnecessary. Yes. Just to add my two cents, I wouldn't spend any time doing any research on this. I think we should just, I think it's an inappropriate article and I think we should not support it. And so therefore. I articulate why and what. Well we don't have to but we can choose to do that or not. It is article 38, who knows how tired everyone will be by the time we get to this at town meeting but given all the things we just said the question would be what kind of motion do we wanna make? I think I hear that recommend is off the table. There's not recommend, there's recommend dismissal that one could argue, I'm sure someone at town meeting could very well argue that this be referred to the select board and the Fire DPW Fire Station Committee where we're expressing our opinion that we really want you to work on this more, the stuff you're already doing. Maybe the people who signed the petition don't know we're already doing the stuff. So what do we wanna, what do we think makes the most sense for us to say in terms of our position? We have the option to make a motion to dismiss. We absolutely, as we touched on earlier, we have the ability to recommend dismissal of this article, so it would be right. So the petitioner gets to make the motion and then usually after the petitioner it would typically turn to, unless you have something different in your script, it would typically come directly to the select board after the petitioner. So instead of the select board saying in one scenario, the select board could say our position is that we recommend that town meeting dismiss this and another way we could do it is we could say, I move to dismiss. And so those would be perceived differently by town meeting in which I know we just expressed purposefully and asking the question, but the question is what's our feeling about that? And I know it's really hard to decide at 1110 at night, but I don't know that we're gonna feel any differently about it on another night when we have a whole bunch of other things to get finished like the school, library, budget, et cetera. I'm trying to think sort of strategically three steps ahead and not knowing, because I don't want this to be like, some kind of like power struggle of who gets to decide town meeting or select board if we do something more assertive like our own motion to dismiss or we just say we recommend town meeting not approve, you know, the town meeting that we not recommend or we recommend dismissal. So recommend dismissal and recommend, oh, not referral. Right, I mean. I don't want referral. That implies it has any merit. Right, which we have said other people are already working on this so it doesn't need to be referred. Whereas in a case of say someone bringing us a petition who didn't know that other people were working on it, that might be an appropriate time to refer. What gets us more towards our given end, which I'm assuming we all agree is to get this defeated, that we take a motion to dismiss or we just say that's we recommend dismissal. I think typically if you say you do not recommend, it means you want it to fail. If you say dismissal, it's just taking no action. So if you want town meeting to say no, this is not a good thing you would recommend, do you would not recommend if you feel like we don't even want them to talk about it or we don't want to talk about it, but it could come back again. It just means town meeting hasn't voted this. So it's, of course, a strategic and you can change your mind depending on the tenor of town meeting at the time when this comes up. Right, it's near the end. I think that my inclination would be to say that we do not recommend the article and that if a motion is made to dismiss, we will support that motion. Cover that in case someone else wants to, like someone from. And then if somebody else, if another committee or an individual makes the motion, then we have already voted that we have a position on it. Right. But I think that would leave our initial position statement since we'll be the second speakers to not recommend and give the reasons. And so this is identical to our position on article 36 for the Coles Road Lots, which is to either not recommend or to recommend dismissal, but not to make the actual motions ourselves to do either of those things or to do the dismissal. So it's not recommend or recommend dismissal. I agree. And I think that I just prefer the language to support the dismissal if the motion is offered. And if not, then to vote it down. But that leaves us as the speakers. We will be speaking against it. Or we don't have to, again, we can just tell. No, I think this one we do. And I think we do because for the reasons we've already stated tonight, I don't think we need to repeat them. So who's gonna be that person? I'm willing to do it. Eh, okay. All right. So there having been more or less a motion been made and so someone wanna second that? Second. I was gonna read the motion. Okay, go ahead and read it. So I moved to not recommend or recommend dismissal to the April 26, 2017 annual time meeting, article 38 petition, fire and email staffing and capital, Steinberg to speak to the article on behalf of the select board. Second. Is there any further discussion? Then all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. That's how that motion will work. And so we have postponed two items to being article 35 and article 37 to Monday. The 24th after housing and sheltering and trust have their joint meeting and provide us with some of their feedback associated with that. They do not have to come on the 24th. You can, they can tell you and they can write us a memo and that's all right. Okay, so that is postponed and that is done. All right, we have yet to do the minutes which we will not do while, Mr. Steinberg is out of the room since he did a great job of editing those and working with Ms. Pupple on those. Why don't you tell us what this is and he'll figure it out when he gets back. In your, or at your desk, there's a memo from our comptroller. And typically what happens is we have our, the recommendation for article four which is the moving money around for this fiscal year. And so this article four FY17 budget amendments and so there are several sums being moved. We have a reserve fund or not, we can't call it a reserve fund. It's a salary reserve to cover salary increases and deficits in other areas. This, and we hold that in general government until this time of year. The sum of, and this is for positions like we have some money from the finance director's position because that hasn't been filled. And then the finance committee has its reserve fund. So there's about $389,000 in that account. This motion would move 155,000 of that to public safety for salary increases which also covers payout of one retirement as June 30th as well that we're anticipating in funds to hire the three new firefighters EMTs to transition in as three existing employees transition out. It moves $70,000 to police for the police patrol union settlement. And if a contract is not ratified by June 30th we will carry over the funds. It moves $60,000 for salary increases to conservation and development to offset some of the reorganization that occurred during the year including we added hours for the electrical inspections because that was much needed. And we take $60,600 from community services because there have been multiple vacancies in this functional area and has resulted in significant savings. And this includes the two retirements that have come that will come prior to June 30th. And lastly we move $234,500 to public works to cover most of this is the cover. Remember if you remember a couple weeks ago I talked about the deficit in snow and ice we can now cover that deficit without having to take care of that over to next year. So that's what this motion will do is sort of clean up moving funds around from different accounts and so we can clean up everything at the end of the fiscal year. And you have already voted to support this article at the time we only had a sum of money because I guess it happens every year that's the way you handle this. So I just want to explain what actually is going to be presented to town meeting. So the actual motion town meeting will have these figures. And so if any of us disagree with any of those figures and look at this more carefully later since we just got this please let Mr. Backelman know and then address that. But otherwise we will assume that our previous motion stands and we don't need to do anything else to make it happen. Okay. So in terms of other material and other things we are doing tonight I'm just I want to get through some of this loose paper that we've got here. You wrote a CPA letter. And so you put a copy of that in the packet. So if anybody has questions about that please let the town manager know or if we need to discuss it we have the announcement that Dr. Michael Morris is going to be interim superintendent for 2017-2018 as well. So congratulations to him, the school committee and to all of us for being able to have his service in that role for another year. We have a letter we received today that is something that is probably very new to the writers of the letter but it's something that we hear about every year or two about having polling places in the schools. And so it would be my assumption as unless the select board directs differently that we are ensuring that the town manager is discussing this issue with the town clerk and the police chief and the school's superintendent and the conversation continues to evolve to continue to discuss how to do things like this. We know that this year for the November election we in fact did not have school on that day which was unusual for us. That was not a typical thing for us to do and so that already addressed it for that election, for the presidential election but folks are raising it of course also associated with local elections. So if people have a different follow up for Mr. Backelman, let me know but otherwise I'm assuming that we will refer it over to them. The only thing I would also suggest is just that if you'd mention it to the clerk to mention as part of our training to make the election staff aware of that question, not that they're responsible for it but just for them to be cognizant of that as they work in those different buildings. Yeah, it's an issue as a former school committee member it's an issue as near and dear to my heart because we've had to deal with this in every school district does because you have to use schools for polling places that are the only ones that are accessible and available throughout the community. So it's pretty normal but managing that is an important task. We will assume that that will be an ongoing conversation then if you think of a reason we need to be part of it in the future please let us know. I can respond to this. Yeah, that would be helpful and that you'll respond because so that people know that we do respond please. And then what else do we have in terms of pieces of paper? We have on our desk tonight with a little number two on the top, date of yesterday associated with additional dates for town meeting. So coming back to a conversation we started nearly five hours ago. We question arose associated with the number of town meeting sessions that have been reserved in terms of the maximum flexibility that I spoke about at length earlier and the current dates as reserved if we use only the first Thursday meaning we would be Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th and we don't use any of the other Thursdays that's 10 sessions for a spring annual town meeting. There are people who fear that for whatever reason we can not get it done in those 10 sessions and town meeting might not wanna meet on the Thursdays which obviously provide additional sessions or that as the whole flexibility issue arose if something else comes up and we don't wanna meet for a couple of those sessions then what happens? We were trying to see what we could get accomplished before Memorial Day based on various inputs we've gotten associated with that throughout the community but we figured we may as well ask about June dates as well because obviously the middle school does not belong to Amherstown meeting it belongs to the regional schools and so we are competing for space as the school year draws to a close. Luckily with all the snow days they're going to school for a long time. So we have asked to have reserved additional dates in June. The first one is Thursday June 1st, Monday June 5th and Monday June 12th. I have no intention of adding this to the second town meeting mailing at this point. This is something that we can speak of at town meeting if the question comes up. We have often reserved additional dates that are not necessarily printed inside the finance committee book just because if something goes wrong. So we have additional dates but if the select board objected to any of these additional dates so that we could release them back to the middle school then I would wanna know that. So let us know if that's an issue but otherwise we've got another backup plan for all of this. I think that's all the loose paper other than our sustainability flyer. We have the wonderful FEMA letter talking about our hazard mitigation plan and with all the feedback and we finally have no time and no energy left to work on the town manager's performance goal six month progress report that he updated for us for this very meeting. And so is there anything you'd like to point us to in this particular document if you can remember from hours ago as to what you would hope to and we will have to I think have a more extensive conversation another time. I think it's better just to have the conversation all at one time versus. Okay. But everybody makes sure that you're looking at the version that says updated April 4th and we really appreciate you including the issue. If I can make a suggestion because I think I feel badly. I think it's in a way not fair. I was glad I picked this up in my pack and I was like I already read this and then I realized no it's different and then I realized you had updated it which I think is a good thing. And I agree we should wait and give it more thoughtful treatment in an earlier hour but maybe we could make it a scheduled agenda item early in one of our agendas so that it does come, we always have a lot of demands and people before us but maybe we could make sure we carved out like a time so that we do this before we're kind of brain dead. And I just wanted to just one comment that I thought it seemed that Mr. Bachman had really gone out of his way to try to meet with people and get around and be visible and we saw that earlier tonight when he talked about the listening sessions and the cup of Joe and so I think that is a theme that I saw throughout and I know Mr. Bachman meant with us individually I think at your three month mark and I wonder, I mean I think it's good for the public to see us do this but it might be more useful to you at some point to have those sit downs for a half an hour with each of us to make it more out of it than something we're gonna be able to do as a group but I just, since you had put a lot of work into this I just want to spend one or two minutes on it. And I think the only thing that I would add to Mr. Bachman is that not only do I appreciate the amount of work that you put into this summary of all that you've accomplished but even more so I want to extend my appreciation for all that you've accomplished as shown both by the memo and by our very good observations of what you've done. Thank you. Thank you. So in terms of practically speaking and it's the part where I say to one of my children that sounds like a good theory but in terms of when we're gonna do this at the beginning of an agenda so we have to remind ourselves we're not meeting again until Monday the 24th which is the night we're doing schools and library budgets and a number of other things including two things we postponed tonight. We are not going to have time to do it then. Wednesday is when town meeting starts. We don't know about Thursday meetings yet at this point. What if we do one of the two following things and we don't have to decide tonight but you can think about it and get back to me individually. One is talk about it at the retreat and the other is to which we are not doing any normal select board business during and the other is to do it on say the Monday night which would be what, the first, the pre-meeting prior to town meeting. And so and say that's our focus because in theory we don't have a lot of things that we try and work into those meetings and we could do it during then. So think of, think yourselves and let me know what you think about that and we won't do a doodle poll or anything but we'll figure out if we're gonna do it. At the retreat or at a pre-town meeting meeting because I just don't think we can adequately address it on the 24th. So maybe the first, yeah. Or if not the first or the retreat. It won't be a film, we won't be doing it. Right, and that is an excellent point. And it's not intended to be for that so. Right, so should we say it's at this point should we postpone it till the first? Okay, so that's what we'll do then. And make it, if people wanna jump on that agenda for other stuff, this is our priority except for something we have to do related to town meeting. Yes, yes, because it won't be the first night of town meeting so hopefully there won't be anything like really amazing we have to do that night. I'm aware that Mary has to come in and set up this room and we need to end. Exactly. Do we wanna find, figure out how we're gonna plan the retreat, not now, but like a process for it. Like who's gonna do that and what are we gonna do? I assumed Ms. Krueger was doing it to them. I agree with that. Does anyone not believe that's true? I was gonna offer to get the food, not buy the food. No, just arrange it. Just arrange it and deliver it as necessary. Maybe I'll talk to Mr. Bachman about what we're doing. Any good? Any ideas? I'm pretty sure my wife's asleep at this point so my offering to do something else is. She's gonna do the food? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I got it, I got it. No, no, no, just the fact that I would offer my time to something else. Okay, so given all of that, I said that we would come back to select board member and town manager report. So what do we need to know before the 24th? I'm gonna be really quick but this is my member report is I collected up from Jen Weston today. All of the citizen activity forms that have come in because a lot have come in and you will be amazed even as we met tonight, another dog park application. There are 11 people are interested in the dog park and that may not be the end of it. So clearly huge amount of interest. So that's something that we need to, we usually have the town manager, the staff liaison which and a representative of the select board and the chair of the committee do these interviews. So this is a new one. So it'd be the town manager and I'm wondering if there would be a representative of the select board who wants to be part of the interviews for dog park and I do not wanna do the dog park. I could but schedules an issue. Yeah, and there's 11. Also I think of 11. Yes, so well we will ask the town manager to as they figure out when they're gonna schedule what the speed dating sorts of interviews with dog park to say these seem to be the dates we staff, you and Mr. Zomet more than likely. Yeah, I think what we would do is ask Mr. Pistrang to sit. Yes, yep. And then you could offer if a select board member wishes to attend, let you know. Does that work Ms. Krueger? Sure. Yeah, so. But it's easier in a couple weeks too. I'm not gonna do it now, but there are other committees where we have some vacancies and we wanna take some action. So I'm just gonna, I think we might wanna talk about this at the retreat. Yes. Not the specific things, but not specific people but approach to getting the work done. Yeah. Because we didn't have somebody here assigned to dog park yet. That's right, we're not gonna have anybody assigned to dog park unless they assign themselves. These are competitive appointments. That's right. And so when Mr. Pistrang, given that he's the town manager, everybody can do this during town meeting season. Carved out a couple of days, so I think we'll do this. Exactly, and then you'll just let us know and if somebody can go, great. From the select board can't go, then you had your chance, too bad. And I will just send some notes to staff and Mr. Buckman on some of the other ones that are. Okay. So there's another committee related issue that I don't wanna discuss tonight, but I do think we need to talk about it and probably needs to be an open meeting, not in a retreat and that is the question of whether there are any committees that should be accepted from our three year or two term limit that we had previously imposed. And I could get into the substance of the discussion now, but I really do think it's an open meeting discussion. It's an agenda item. Is either exception in general or sister city in specific as an agenda item. Yeah, no, I mean, whatever. I just didn't wanna just get it. I'm not gonna name committees or criteria. It sort of comes up on this list, too. Right. Maybe we can talk about the concept of how to address it. We love talking about how to talk about things at the retreat and then we can talk about it at a pre-town meeting, meeting that's on camera. Yeah, because we've been carrying that for a long time. We have been, thank you. Okay, other select board member reports that you're not too exhausted to remember but that you want us to hear before the 24th with all those caveats. We're planning a tree tomorrow, 12 o'clock, over on, is it on North Common or is it on the main Common? It's the main Common. We'll just look for the fall. We'll look for the people there. Okay, all right, and what else? And we wanna give the town manager a chance. He's never gonna get through his whole report but he's gonna hit some highlights. That's three things. Okay, all right, go. So I just wanna let you know that the Numisante Center is getting ready to kick off construction. April 24th, we have a meeting with our occupants tomorrow. Rob Moore is gonna be representing the town in terms of construction because Ron Bahanowicz is sort of shedding some things but that's happening. The DPW Fire Station, they're gonna be making a presentation to town meeting so they have a good plan. They have a good leader, it's a good committee. They'll be making a presentation, not the first night of town meeting but they've talked with the moderator about talking about where they are. They're not asking for anything but they will be coming into the fall. They anticipate for schematic design funding and then in FY18, the fall of 18, looking for design and build funds. That's what they wanna do. We looked at the houseways and means budget and with everything counted in, we were a little bit better by about $56,000 to the good. The house on, you know, we were expecting a little bit worse number on the unrestricted government, general government aid but it turned up to be okay but when we looked at charter assessments, they were down $222,000. Charter tuition reimbursements were down 171,000. Chapter 70 was up 10K. So all in all, we're 56,000 to the good so that's sort of good. Public safety, as you know, they're preparing for the spring weekends. They've already started to ramp up. We're not anticipating this weekend but probably the next weekend especially when we have these informal gatherings, we are not giving out permits to Mill River or Groff Park for these weekends in the spring when they happen to, they usually wind up with alumni gatherings so that has become a problem in the past. And the planning board last week talked about the downtown planning. They know that the select board, this is an important thing for the select board. They asked for people to volunteer who want to help participate and they had almost half the committee volunteer. So, but that's something they know that is important to the people on this committee too. And it's not the sole project of theirs. They anticipate that but they would, they do want to get planning on it and thinking about it with a smaller group because they see this happening in possibly as soon as June. So, but they've done some work. They say some conceptual but they had a very interesting conversation about it. So, the groundbreaking on the health center is on Friday the 28th? No, it's just when they're starting the work. There's not going to be, there is a shovel thing. There's a shovel thing. Yeah. Yes. The 28th, I think. It was one of those, okay everybody out there in the world, don't just send us picture emails because then you can't hit the thing that tells it to put it in your calendar. So yes, it's Friday the 28th at nine o'clock a. So we'll have a chance to talk about that again on the 24th. Okay, so groundbreaking. All right. Yes. You'll have other things you can always email us because we just can't talk about it amongst ourselves. Other things we need to know, somebody make a motion. How about minutes? Good job. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. And it is 1135. That is unanimous and we are adjourned. Thank you Amherst Media, Mary. We'll try and get out of here as quick as we can.