 And so we'll start, as we always do, with public comments. Is there anyone here for public comment? Not related to something on the agenda, generally. So if there's not anyone here for public comment, then we'll move on to our agenda. And yes. No, no, no, just about topics not on the agenda itself. So we'll get to that in a minute. So we have a few things under our Licenses Public Way and Metered Parking Reservations as a general section of our agenda. I think we have folks here for that. So I think we'll start with the folks that are here for Halloween Fest. That would be you. All right, great, thank you. So just tell us about the event a little bit. And if you want to mention, so start by your name and who you're with. And then if you want to guide us through your event and tell the town about that a little bit. And then we'll talk about what we need to do. Thank you. Relative to the reservation space, so. Awesome. So good evening. I am Stacy Laquie from Amherst Leisure Services. And I am here to request the North Common Parking Lot and the North Common and Pleasant Street from the North Common to Kellogg Street for our annual Halloween Fest. And this year is our 50th year. So we've made it to 50. It's going to be a fabulous event. I expect last year we had between 200 and 400. I think it was 400 by the time the parade actually hit the Bang Center. It's a great event for families, little ones. We all get dressed up. I have been the witch for the past 10 plus years. We'll leave it at that. A good witch. Right, something like that. I do that just to be recognizable so that people understand where we're going and where we're doing. We meet at the North Common. We'll have some sort of little event. We're kind of in the planning stages, either pumpkin roll or pumpkin decorating. We'll meet there. Amherst Police has always been great about meeting us out there, stopping traffic, kind of guiding us down and bringing us to the Bang Center. I've had some non-formal or informal conversations. And they are more than willing to help us out again and be the front and back of our parade. So it will be happening on Sunday, the 28th, weather permitting. We did have that one year where it snowed. So we're all gonna cross our fingers that that doesn't happen again. But it's Sunday, October 28th, starts trick-or-treating with the businesses. We'll start at noon. But for our purposes tonight, we meet at about one o'clock on the North Common parking lot to start our parade. Any questions? Are there questions? If not, then I'll entertain a motion for the reservation that we need, which I think is on our new motion sheet as well as our old one as well. I think it's under B, seven B. Move to approve the metered parking reservation of the Main Street parking lot on October 28th, 2018 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the leisure services and supplemental educations. Halloween pumpkin decorating. Stacy, the Curve Program Director. That's me. Say a second. Is there further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? So that's unanimous. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. I don't see you guys there. Great. So next up, we have request for parking meter reservations on North Pleasant Street and Bullwood Avenue for the Valley Kid Fest on September 29th. So if you'd like to come up and introduce yourself and tell us about your event and sort of your need and we'll go from there. So my name's Maura Roberts. I work at UMass, representing the Office of Student Parent Programs. And so this is an event that we do in collaboration with Valley Kids. It was formerly known as the Apple Harvest Festival and now we are the Valley Kids Festival and Craft Fair. And so this involves, there's crafts, there's things for people to purchase. We have performances that are free for people to come to. And then we also do little games and petting zoos and things which we charge for and all proceeds go to the Amherst Family Center. And so this is happening on September 29th from 10 to four. And so we were hoping to get the meters bagged on Bullwood and North Pleasant so that our vendors can unload and then load up. Great. Thank you. So do we have, I'm looking at the motion. You don't have the time, some motion. Right, I'm looking for that, too. And do we have a specific, presuming you need them for the whole day? Yes, yeah. All right, so it'll be the time. People will start coming at eight to unload. And then, so it's narrowed to the town common. Town common perimeter? And then it would seem. It seems unlikely. Well, and then what about Spring Street, which is inclusive of that. So it's on the part of the town common across from the Lord Jeff, so I believe it's a south town common. So it would be Bullwood between College and Spring. And then it would be North Pleasant between College and Spring. And that's actually South Pleasant Street. I'm confused. Yes. So this is not your fault. We're trying to figure out our paperwork here at this end. And so we don't actually have a letter in here anywhere from them that says what they wanted. We only have a motion. I'm confused by that. We usually have a map. We usually have a letter that says we want the same thing we got last year. And perhaps since we don't seem to have any of those things for some reason, maybe we could ask them to ask, right? But we could also ask them if there are any changes versus last year if she happens to know, putting on. I do know. Great, sorry. So we are running this this year. It was a previous person before, but it'll look exactly like it has every other year. So we would like the same thing as previous years. I would suggest that we allow us, because you meet on Monday, there's plenty of time you could bring a motion with a map and everything for your action on Monday. Okay. Why don't we do that? We're trying to make it. Yes, Mr. Silver. So what were the hours of the event itself? It's 10 to four. I think that my concern is that if the event ends at four, what time could the parking be yielded? Because there are people who go to Amherst Cinema on Sunday night and look for parking. And I don't want to tie up spaces longer than necessary. Right? Yeah, it could definitely just be between eight and five, because we just need four to five to let people unload, if possible, or to reload. Right. So I think that what we need to do is to sort out the specifics for our motion, your fault, more our fault is sort of nailed down that particular meters and streets. Because it sounds as though you don't need the entirety of the envelope of the common, but just the southern part where the green space is not the trees part. Right, yes. So we'll have to figure that out whether Spring Street's involved or not. So we'll look at what we did last year and have to see if we can be fine with that if they did the same thing last year. Yeah, that would be perfect. We'll bring that back to the board on Monday and hopefully it doesn't seem to be a lot of opposition as long as it's the same. Okay. Is that okay? Okay. So thank you, and I hope everybody can attend on the 29th. Yes, before. I appreciate what you said about figuring out what we did last year and hopefully we didn't make this mistake last year. Oh, we might have. Sometimes we repeat. But the other thing, when we are revising the motion to show the specific parking space, the X amount of parking spaces on X roads or whatever, if we could also indicate that this does benefit the Amherst Family Center since Valley Kids Fest is not like saying burgers or something that we all know what that is. Oh, because it's freebie. It's a benefit, yeah. Well, and just any time we're doing a thing, it seems like we should show who it's for, like we do for big brothers, big sisters, for example. Thank you. So next we'll take on the, we have a, excuse me. We have a common victual license for North Hot Pot, 20 Belt Shown Road, and so if you folks will join us and tell us a little bit about your place of business, feel free to move a chair up. Introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about your business, and then we'll take up the license itself. Okay, hello, hello. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening. This is Jeremy. My Chinese name is Jerry Liu, so it shows on the paper. So my English name is Jeremy. This is my partner, Jian Huang, Jason. So it's kind of interesting like I just graduated from UMass Amherst two months ago. So I really love this town. So that's why we start to open a restaurant here to contribute more. And then after a few months, we find a good place in the 20 Belt Shown Road, Michael's Village Bar. So we take over their business and try to open a hot pot. Hot pot is kind of new stuff here, but it's very popular in Boston, New York, almost many places in America. So we want to bring this fresh restaurant to UMherst because we have many international students here and we have many local students here. So in this case, I think more and more people love the hot pot. So what the hot pot is, is like we got off the raw food, the meat and the vegetable to customers and bring the soup to all the customers. And the customers will put the raw food into the soup. We have the induction. So induction gonna heat the soup, make sure all the foods will be wrapped. For the meat, we're gonna cut it pretty thin slice. So in this case, as long as the temperature is enough, at least 15 seconds, the meat will be 100% safe. And for the vegetable, we're gonna put the guidelines in the menu to make sure everybody can cook it around two minutes, at least two minutes to make sure everything is pretty good and safe. And then we have, yeah, we have enough parking lot space. We have around 42 parking spaces and including the handicapped, yeah. And that is located in the big crossing. So I think, what about the, whatever the traffic or something, I think our restaurant gonna handle that. So yeah, any questions? We're happy to hear. Thanks. Questions? Ms. Brewer. So for our own benefit, the motion once again says Amherst. And since we don't approve the common vicks for things that aren't in Amherst, I just just soon leave that out. I do appreciate the street address. A question I actually have for the town manager, perhaps more so than the applicants, is we do have a restaurant in town that has hot pot tables installed. And there was a large bit of confusion about that when they were first installed and they weren't able to use them at first. There were very specific codes that were involved in a parent, one story, which may not be true, but one story was that maybe they bought them one place that didn't meet another place's standards, et cetera. And so I don't actually believe they've ever been put into use in that particular restaurant. The restaurant has been open, which is under different management now next to Miss Saigon. But just in terms of the confusion, I know that because they had a restaurant in a different town, maybe different rules, and maybe they had the tables a lot longer ago, et cetera. So are we going to have difficulties with that this time out is what I'm wondering, because we tried this and it got difficult. Right, thank you. The fire department, I believe, has already raised the issue in terms of whether the equipment they want to purchase would be acceptable in terms of our codes, electrical codes, and fire department codes. So I believe they've already, I'm told that they're in that conversation with you about what kind of equipment you'll put as the hot pot on the table. Yeah, I gotcha. So all the equipment is from the China and we're gonna deliver all the equipment by the boat. And in this case, the town already have the conversation with us. So we talked to the manufacturer to talk about the UL label and the ETL document. So in this case, they told us they really have the document, but they probably take it well for the process and give us the document to show up to your guys or town hall. So in this case, I promise, we are not really, really stupid by something is unsafe and really bad. We need to make sure everything is pretty safe and good quality. So in this case, we trust our manufacturer and they promise us they're gonna give us the document as quickly as possible. So in that case, we're gonna show the document to show all the equipment has good quality and safe for sure. Yeah. So the fire department says we need to see the UL certification and they don't have that yet, but they are aware that that's a requirement before you can open, or before you can use these tables. Definitely. Yeah, we also want to make a promise like we're gonna show the other document to make sure the town hall won't worry about their safety or something. Then we're gonna open that. We won't open that before we give you a document. Yeah. Thank you. I just wanted to be sure that was clear because I know that was a confusion point in the previous restaurant that tried to do that. So hopefully we can explain it even easier in the next time around. Those are one of the things. So there is a liquor license for Michael's billiards at this location, but they are not seeking to acquire the liquor license. So Michael's billiards still has that liquor license, but they're not seeking a renewal of it either. So these gentlemen will not be coming to you as far as I know, unless you apply for a liquor license in the future. Yes. So the follow up then, and it did take me a few minutes to realize when I was reading the packet over the weekend that this is for the Michael's billiards site because there's nothing there that indicates that other than the street address is as you indicated, they do have an active license right now. They've indicated, it sounds like to you that they are not planning to renew. They are not currently in operation. So it's a form of pocket license but it's for a relatively short period of time and it's not preventing someone else from obtaining a license at this point. It's not holding on to something. That's a resource that others are therefore unable to apply for. So it'll just wind its time out and, okay. Thank you, that's helpful. Other questions from the board? If not, I would entertain a motion or if you have a comment or question. No, this is a motion. Okay. I think every, I don't think with one word eliminated, I meant a lot of changes. I moved to approve the common and particular license for CHN Northern J&J Corporation doing business as North Hot Pot 20 Belcher Town Road. Monday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 12 a.m. the following day. Zeru Lu, manager. Is there a second? Hi. So we have a motion and a second. Is there further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. And that's unanimous. Wish you very best of luck in your restaurant. Oh, thanks very much, yeah. Thank you. Actually, we are pretty nervous, but thanks, you guys are really nice. Good. Okay, thanks. All right, great, thank you. So just a touch base on our agenda a little bit. We do have a public hearing at 710, so we won't start that early, but we do have other things to take up. We'll get to our consent calendar later. So I think we'll hopefully be able to do our fourth quarter year in budget update. Is that possible for that to happen in 15 minutes? I presume it is, since there's no, to my knowledge, no surprises. So if you want to come forward and give us your report relative to the budget, please, that would be great. Sonia Aldrich, a comptroller, and I'm here to present the fourth quarter in the fiscal year ending report for fiscal year 18 and during June 30th, 2018. Our general fund generated an operating surplus of $1,567.89 against a budget of $79.9 million. This is great considering we had such a difficult year, fiscal year 18, with our health insurance deficit that we covered within our existing operating budget. Everything is spelled out here with the revenues that came in and the expenditures that came in, so I'm just gonna go through some, highlight some of them, the ones that stand out the most, fines and forfeits. Actual revenue was 130% collected and this is due to zoning violations at the presidential apartments that were collected this year, so this is a one-time source of revenue and it won't occur again next year, hopefully. Investment income is at 145%, and this is mostly due to CD investment timing or when they mature. We still budget very conservative in this revenue stream. Miscellaneous non-recurring. The actual receipts here are 106% and I know there was a request to have a little more detail on this. This is where we booked the UMass funds received for the strategic partnership program that we have, agreement that we have and Amherst College contributions that come to the town. So Amherst College, we received $80,000 this year. The UMass strategic partnership is $120,000 and then we also received $163,241 from UMass in lieu of hotel motel taxes. And then there was about 7,000 in miscellaneous income there as well. Other departmental receipts were at 160% collected this year or 163,000 in excess. And the bulk of this is increased fees for the planning board that's in that category. And prior year refunds and increased fire permits. Prior year refunds was 69,000, 58,500 of that was a reimbursement for Wildwood debt, MSBA. It's timing because it didn't come in on time. It becomes a prior year refund. Those aren't what's there. Penalties and interest at 176%. This is due to large tax liens collected in this fiscal year. Revenues that were below, relicenses and permits. This has been trending down as the large construction projects have been trending down so our budget hasn't been adjusted. Property tax and state aid are as they should be. On the expenditure side, surplus funds return were at $291,981 and that's a really small amount compared to an $80 million budget. And again, this is due to us covering our health insurance increase in health insurance for fiscal year 18 within our operating budget. The slickboard town manager budget was overspent by $20,000 and this is due to the assistant to the town manager retiring and to the payouts for that and then some charter commission expenses. And it's here, we do account for that separately. We have separate accounts for that so we can definitely say what was spent out of the charter. It just grouped in here with the town manager but that's the way you miss once it grouped and with the slickboard town manager operating section. And I can give you more details on what was spent in the charter if you want after I'm done here. Public safety turned back $60,000 amongst all the entities. Public works turned back $8,000. Savings and street lights and equipment maintenance covered the overages in the other areas of that, of the other divisions of that functional area. Planning conservation and inspections turned back $13,000 and community service turned back only $10,000. However, at the annual town meeting we moved $125,000 from community services to general government to cover some of the health insurance overages. So it really was over $100,000 return there and the bulk of that was from veterans benefits. We paid out less this year and leisure services. The reorganization of leisure services saved us quite a bit of money this year. Schools turned back 25 cents. Again, they were dealing with the health insurance deficit too. Enterprise funds all returned, all returned funds for free cash to increase their free cash except for sewer. We had lower consumption from fiscal year 17 to 18 water consumption and this is basically due to having so much rain that we weren't watering gardens or lawns during the summer, months. And Paul mentioned this morning to me that with the, when the colleges were under construction they use a lot of water in that construction so it was probably higher last year than it was this year. So, and that's pretty much it. Good question. There's one. That is on the revenue side under property taxes. The amount that was budgeted and the amount received the actual revenue difference was about $750,000. Was that due to new growth or in things coming online? It's collections from prior years, taxes. Because our collection rate for fiscal year 18 taxes was 99.5% so we collected quite, did really well in our collections for this year but then there were other prior years that we collected 2017. We collected 646 which is not part of what that is budgeted. Okay, so the new developments that came online was already built into the estimates to begin with. Yes, yes. Okay, thank you. So I had a couple and I appreciate the breakout on the Amherst College and UMass funds because it's important to recognize the separation there and hopefully someday we can find a way to continue to do that. I realize that munis is what you have to work with but it doesn't make any sense to me and it doesn't need to. I just need the words that you put in the explanations. It's also important because Amherst College, for example, donates that $80,000 but Amherst College doesn't pay anything for fire service whereas UMass does that 120 and then also pays for fire service as part of the strategic partnership agreement. So sometimes people make assumptions about where all that money is and there are different ways of accounting for those different contributions that they make. I had asked also about the lower consumption and so we're basing it so I was wondering where did the drought feed into this and all the other things. So we're saying it's lower construction use on the campuses, they needed more before. So it's a combination, when they're building the big science center specifically they have to water the concrete constantly so that's a big piece of it. But also we just use less water in general as a community so it was both of those pieces together. We had an inordinately high demand the prior year and we had a lower demand both through construction and through weather related and this summer will probably be a lower usage as well because the summer was fairly wet. And the sewer that you pay is based on the water that you use so. And I was trying to, I mean if we were gonna take it as a win because we did new conservation measures great but if it's also just because we had an unusual year now we're back more to a normal year then that makes perfect sense. And then I would like to, it doesn't have to be at this meeting but I would like to have us have a reference document on the Charter Commission expenses. Sure, so we can give you a report. I mean we have a spreadsheet but I think we can make it a little more understandable for you so you can see where the, the big categories were to the Collins Center which was the bulk of the money to KP Law which did work on reviewing the Charter. We separated that out for printing the Charter booklet which was about $5,000 and for the mailing for those. And then there was some costs incurred in terms of people who were videotaping or their meetings and things like that. But we can break that out in categories for you so you can see where the money came from. And so they, I think the total was $45,000 that we spent and I felt it was important for the legal advice to be given to the Charter. So it was more than the appropriation plus the $5,000 and so that I authorized that to come out of the town manager's budget as well because we needed to get it right and we needed to and they needed to get the legal advice to make sure it was right, done right. And I am in no way disputing that those were the appropriate charges. I just think it would be useful because there was a lot of talk about how incredibly expensive. And of course it has been incredibly expensive associated with people's time working on many, many things that you don't get to charge against that account. But in terms of the very specific things like postage and printing and additional legal help, I think it's worth being able to show that accounting. So thank you. Are there other questions or comments relative to the fourth quarter? When, since someone threw their hand up right away, I'll ask this question. So you're in the process of submitting the final numbers to the state and getting free cash certified and all that. What's sort of your expectation about when those will be sort of tidied up with the state? What do they usually do as far as when they're? We're actually, the town's collected all the outstanding grant receivables that are coming in. We're waiting for a couple for the school and as soon as they do it's all set to go to be sent in so it could be as early as next week or it might take two or three more weeks before I submit, depending on the receipt. Because if we don't receive those, it hits our free cash. Right, right. Ms. Krueger. So I don't know if I really open this can of worms, but it's nice to see that we came out so much ahead which seems to be somewhat of a pattern and I get that we budget in a conservative manner and then we do better on revenue than expense. That's good, but some might say if we're so consistently over our estimates, why are we being so frugal on some of our lines? And so I think this sort of is this the right amount to be over and how historically is this really where we're trending or is this just a good year? Offsets a sort of potentially bad year. I feel that if you go back and do the comparisons from year to year you'll find that the sources of money for excess money come from different places practically every year and also we can't forget the Medicare D reimbursement that comes in and goes into the general fund. It's not budgeted for so it's part of that big number and it comes out and goes into OPEB. So there's a lot of moving pieces there. So I wouldn't say that this can be counted on every year. I'd like to add to that. It's not like magic and just we bulk up all the numbers. There's active management of all the budgets and the comptroller Ms. Aldridge works very hard and identifies weaknesses in people's budgets very early in the fiscal year. Fire Department was one example this year that she brought down the hammer and really had them really looking at all their expenses for the rest of the year. So they came out in the black. It wasn't just oh well that happened. There was active management of all of our budgets coming from the comptroller's office. So I think it's not just something that happens. It's really terrific active management of the budgets that makes it happen. I think you've heard the comment on the other side. I think the critical point that she made though with regard to that is that those sources that create those excess which is a really tiny percentage of the whole budget by frankly are always different. So it's not like it's always the same section of the budget that kind of gives us this chunk that we can call get turned into free cash. So I think because of that it makes it, it's not predictable. So it's nice that it has been coming out in our sort of favor in that regard, but it's not, if it was always the same section of our budget that always turned back $150,000 that we need to budget that section of our budget differently, but that's not the case. And I do appreciate the active management comment you made associated with that. It doesn't just happen because we just build in big numbers and then it all works out great. So thank you for that. One other aspect following up on something Mr. Slaughter said earlier about timing of free cash certification, et cetera. So one of the transition pieces we know is a challenge is setting the tax rate. Because we usually do that right around the time of the swearing in of the counselors. So how or what's our timeline on that? Do we know at this point? The assessor and the board of assessors have had that on our calendar for November 17th and 13th and they've got the ad ready, everything's ready to go. And they're ready to go. They could go this week if we wanted to, but we think not quite this week, but there's an advertising requirements, but we're prepared for that. November 13th, I think, is that the date? Yeah. Right. Thank you so much. Again, we're having to make all sorts of shifts in all parts of the buildings, not just this building. So I appreciate that. Right. Great. Thank you very much. Let's hear another comment. I don't think so. But thank you very much. Appreciate that. So it is actually 710 and we have a public hearing relative to an all alcohol license application for Jake's at the mill, 68 Coles Road. So for where is the manager? So, gentlemen, would you join us? I do have to formally open this hearing, right? So I will formally open this hearing at, I think the iPad time for, I can hit the button. 711 will be our official start of our public hearing. Note that. And so, I'll dig our paper out because there's plenty of that relative to this, so give us just a moment. Certainly, yeah. Section. So if you'd introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the addition to your offerings that you're seeking and then we'll ask some questions and we'll see if. Great. My name is Christopher Ware, one of the owners of Jake's at the mill on Coles Road. And I'm Alex Washett. It's nice to be back and see you all again. Yeah, thank you. So our plan is to obtain a full liquor license for our restaurant to be able to serve brunch style cocktails during the legal hours until three, when we close, 3 p.m. Specifically, we're just looking to do mimosas. So that would include champagne and juice and Bloody Mary's, which would consist of vodka and tomato juice and kuchimons. Do you want to tell us a little bit about training you're doing, license, ID checking, that's what I think you can kind of walk us through what your processing procedure's going to be. So our business in Northampton, we have had a beer and wine license there for the last six years? Six years. Six years. So we plan to do what we have done there, get all of our staff officially tips trained. We plan to have software in order to check IDs as well. And that's kind of the specifics of those. Right, and infrastructure wise, we have lockable equipment to store the alcohol. And really, because we're just looking to do in a very small capacity, once again, is mimosas and Bloody Mary's. Our inventory is extremely low and very easy to keep track of. And a lot of our current staff there has experienced bartending and with alcohol sales. Right, as is our front house manager, specifically in Amherst comes from a decade plus of specific bartending experience. Knowledge of the few different systems that we're looking at to implement software systems that we're looking at and tip certified as well. Does the board have questions, Ms. Brewer? So of course, we always like seeing that there have been no prior disciplinary actions. And so I'd appreciate you sharing your experience with Northampton and full disclosure. I've been to their restaurant many times in both locations, especially this one. And was in fact, just wondering the other day, hey, when are we gonna be seeing this application? And here we go. So, because you had indicated to us back when you did the common Vic that you'd be going down this road. You mentioned that you've been doing beer and wine in Northampton, I know Northampton has a shortage of licenses and so that's certainly part of that. You also mentioned mimosas and Bloody Mary's here, but this being an all alcohol license, there's nothing stopping you from the next day deciding that you wanna have beer and wine. And so while that might be your current business plan, it's that we understand that we can't limit them to that and so that is part of the nature of the public hearing, I suppose, because there, I suppose it's possible that some people would look at those things differently, but again, it is a breakfast and lunch place, it is not a late night place. And where the hours to want to be extended because someday you just have to be open all the time, then they would come back for extended hours but because this alcohol service would be limited to these hours even though it would be all alcohol, even though they don't intend to use fully all aspects of the all alcohol license. Does that make sense? Is that how we're understanding it? Yeah, all alcohol means they can serve anything. But they can't, while they can choose to serve any kinds of alcohol beyond what they're talking about today, they cannot choose to serve past 3 p.m. if they decide to start keeping the restaurant open later than that because we are approving an alcohol license that ends at 3 p.m. Your motion will reflect what hours they're allowed to operate. That's what I wanted to be clear on. Just a follow up, because I was thinking, once we granted it's then all alcohol and it's nice to know what you're thinking is but we're not limited, we couldn't and shouldn't limit you to the mimosa. Right. But I think you had mentioned last time you were here about thinking about possibly doing some special events like a Sunday night, I'm making this one up, like a Sunday night gathering. So if you were to have alcohol for that, you would come in for a one day license or how would that work? Right now they couldn't, you couldn't use your alcohol license say after 3 o'clock but you had an evening event. In order to provide alcohol for that special event what would they need to do to make that legal? Exactly, according to the law you can't have a one day license if you already have a license premises. So that would not be an option. Well, I mean, as you know, I mean, no business is a set structure and certainly this is our focus right now from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. That's the hours of operation, we've been running for seven years now. But certainly if the plan isn't working and we do have to adjust our business model, definitely some clarification as to that process going forward. If we do have to make those adjustments, if we do have to do different hours or expand hours or we do have to start doing onsite catering at some point to supplement the increase in X, Y and Z, where would the necessary steps have to be taken and that's a pretty common question. We are aware of that, but we want to make sure that everyone's aware that we can. Yes, we knew you knew. Yes. So once you figure out what you want, then you can come back to the board for the town and say we want to adjust our common vixeler and our alcoholic beverage license to reflect these hours. It'll be a similar process. Okay, great. And special permit, but not us. Yeah, it depends on what the special permit says. Okay, sure. Gotcha. Mr. Samford. Northampton restaurant right now, I recall, has mimosas and beer available. Yes. Yeah, we currently have a beer and wine, year round beer and wine license, and we're not restricted on any specific time frame there in Northampton. It's open. Yeah. The champagne is open. The champagne is open. So that's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that you would offer additional here would be the Bloody Marys, which you could not offer there. Correct, yeah. Correct. That's right. And there might be other similar kinds of drinks that you find are appropriate for service during breakfast and lunch in those hours. And of course you have the freedom to do that. Yes, certainly. Yeah. It could, you know, the offerings within the context of the, you know, brunch beverages could expand. You know, maybe we want to use a sake, you know, rice wine, different flavor going that direction, but the general, you know, the scope of the brunch cocktails. That's just what we do, you know, seven to three. So that wouldn't change. We have no plans of changing that. That's, you know, the model that we're working on right now and we can plan to work on. I have a traditional thing that I usually end up being the one to do. My fellow board members would be unhappy if I didn't say this. Being a college university community underage drinking is a problem. I was very pleased to hear the training and systems that you've proposed because that really helps to address that your experience of running this kind of an enterprise. In fact, the Northampton has some of the same population, not quite the same percentage, Dr. Stammer's does. This gives you some experience at it. We just caution all licensed holders to be aware that this is a problem of great concern to this community. We believe that responsible alcohol use is a very important part of the business community. And but we also recognize that we look for cooperation and for our business community to work with us in our police department and our consortium with the university college called the Campus and Community Coalition to assure that we don't create situations that lead to unhealthy use of alcohol or illegal use of alcohol. And a little bit less concerned because of your business hours that this is a problem but I did wanna at least make sure that you understood that this is a ongoing concern of this board. And I'm sure that when the new license commission takes over under the charter that it will be no less of a concern to them. Yeah, we can certainly appreciate that. And we discussed this at length having known the area and grew up here that that was a serious concern for us and our business, which is why we chose to invest in a software based, full proof kind of checking as opposed to simply a training with an ID book or so. Yeah, it's certainly, it's not issue we take lightly. And we don't take lightly in Northampton and as you mentioned, Northampton is much less of a concentration of, so we're just really being serious about it and we expect the same level of seriousness from all of our employees going forward. And I appreciate that. It is the last piece that I sometimes say but I don't think I need to because you just said it for me is that these training programs, there's only good as the training programs and the, but it's the management and the oversight of management that really makes it happen and I appreciate the spirit with which you've approached this, so thank you. So if there aren't further questions or I don't presume there's anybody from the audience that wants to offer public comment on this particular thing, yes. I was just gonna say that actually one of the reasons we go into that level of detail, even when we know applicants have experience elsewhere and clearly haven't had any violations elsewhere, et cetera, is for the benefit of the public who might be attending for that purpose, but as you indicated, it doesn't appear already what actually came with it, which is probably a good sign, right? They saw that and they said, fine, no problem. But just so that the public understands. There's people from the public who may want to comment. Okay, good. So if there are people that wanna comment, is now's your chance. So just step to the mic if you could and if you guys can make a little room, just introduce yourself at the mic and feel free to offer comment. My name is Gordon Green. I'm a neighbor adjacent. I don't have any extensive comment. Just that I'm glad to hear that there is a time limit and I hope that the select board or whatever body reviews the hours of the alcohol permit in the future. Keep in mind the noise level of the neighbors. We're used to the harp. So that level of noise is something good, but it's something that is, I think something everybody's used to, but any sort of big deviations from that, I think would be good to consider in future changes into the license. That's all I had. Great, thank you. Appreciate that. So is there any other public comment relative to that? If not, then I'll close the hearing at 7.24. And so if someone would like to offer a motion, Ms. Cooke. I move to approve the annual all alcohol license application for Jakes at the mill. 68 Coles Lane, Coles Road, Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Christopher Ware, director. Second. And there's a second. Is there further discussion? I am on Sundays. It was my understanding, it was 10 a.m. on Sundays. Yeah, is the message used as law? But except it's not, because Amherst has never, that Amherst has never accepted that provision to start at 10 a.m. on Sundays. Okay. And while other municipalities have and some other licensees may forget that. On occasion, we have not at town meeting had to have accepted that provision and we have not. It could happen in the future under the council. It absolutely could. Under the council, that would be something for the license commissioners to look at and perhaps bring to the council and say, let's do this. It's one of those honor to do list things that has never gotten addressed. Thank you for clarifying. So we're sorry that that wasn't communicated effectively. Surprise. So is there any other discussion or comment roll for that? I can hear you like quivering. Yeah, well I was just, wait a second. So Northampton's done it, but we haven't. Right, yes. So all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? So that's unanimous. Congratulations, good luck. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. There'll be a better notice that you need. Yes. If you would give those to our clerk. If you would be so kind to hand those, Mr. Steinberg. Thank you very much. Great. We'll record those. Thank you. Coming in. Be filed away. All right, so that takes care of that. Move to the next spot in our agenda, which is notice of intent to convert use of chapter 61 Land, Epstein, 37 Bay Road. Mr. Zomek. Mr. Burgess. Thank you very much. I'm joined by Mr. Burgess. And also in the audience tonight is the executive director of the Kestrel Trust, Kristen DeBoer. If the board has questions for Kristen later, I'm sure she'd be happy to come up and answer those. I start a little bit with an apology. I was here last week with what I had hoped to be the last step in the acquisition process of this wonderful project down in South Amherst that I know the board is very familiar with. But for those watching in the audience here tonight and at home, if I could just tell those folks what we are doing, but through a state land grant and town meeting action, the town is proposing and is nearing completion and headed toward closing to buy about 30 acres of land in South Amherst. We are partnering, if you will, with the Kestrel Land Trust, a longtime Amherst partner. And the Kestrel Land Trust is buying the land outlined here, which is about 3.4 acres. Late last week, as attorneys got together toward moving toward the closing, working with Mr. Burgess on some final details, collectively they realized that a very small portion of the excluded land, if you will, was in chapter 61. I know the board is very familiar with chapter 61. I hope I am not becoming the king of chapter 61. I don't want that title, but here we are. And so we realized that the Balderwood Trust, which is the trust that was formed by the Epstein's and is selling the bulk of the land for conservation to the town of Amherst and the 3.4 acres in change to the Kestrel Trust, needed to notice the town that a very small portion of land was still in chapter. And in order to clean this all up, it was decided to notice the town and come before you tonight. I want to give an opportunity if it's okay with the chair for Mr. Burgess to just say a little bit about that. Or do you want to add anything to that in terms of your discussions with the attorneys? Sure. My discussion for the attorney was with Mr. Spencer and his original intent was to simply release a piece of land, file a release on that piece of land. And after talking with him and myself, we decided that it would be better to release the whole property because there are certain areas that cross over into each other. And there's actually an 8.3 acre exclusion on the original deed or the original lien. And back when that was filed in 1981, we did not require anyone to split out the areas just to say that they were leaving 8.3 acres out where the house sits and the area around that. So to make it clean and make sure we had everything out, it was easier to release all liens at one time. And that includes the 17,000 square feet that Mr. Zomak's talking about on the 61 land. So I just showed a context map but I also wanted to provide the board and the viewing public with a more specific map zeroing in on the 3.4063 acres that the Kestrel Trust will be acquiring and the land in question relative to chapter 61. So again, all of the 30 acres around, the pond and the exclusion will be acquired for conservation purposes. And then this area will be acquired by the Kestrel Trust. And a very small portion of that outlined here, this 17,000 square feet is part of the reason we decided to bring this to you to simply clear this all up. Now I realize this is a little bit out of our normal practice. This is the A&R approval not required plan that was reviewed by the planning board, reviewed by the planning director, the town engineer, the conservation commission, my staff and I. And I spoke with Christine Brestrop regarding whether now your normal practice is to have a memo from the planning board and the conservation commission. In this case, I felt number one, we're moving very rapidly, our hope is to close on this in a few days but the planning board has been involved if you will in this project. They understand what the outcomes will be. Likewise, the conservation commission has been around the table from the get go. So this very small piece of land and this need to make sure that we clear up the title for this 3.4 acre site really was the genesis of why we brought it to you tonight. So my hope is that you would take the action to not exercise the town's right of first refusal since our goals have been clear from the outset. Are there questions or comments from the board? Oh, yes. I think it's fairly straightforward, yes. I think this falls under if you tell us about it often enough in enough different ways. We eventually say, okay, we're out of questions. So I think we're, since we actually went over this quite a bit with the last couple of 61's we did, right? We're pretty familiar in the general area. So anyway, so if there's not questions or comments for the, for Mr. Zomek or Mr. Burgess that I think a motion would be in order if someone would like to make a motion under section four of our motion. I don't have to be the reader of it but I can. I move that the select board not exercise the option to purchase granted to the town under mass general law chapter 61 to purchase properties located at 37 Bay Road and contiguous plots as identified by the assessors as all or part, parts of parcels. 25B-19, 25B-20, 25B-21, and 25B-59 containing 3.4063 acres, more or less, a portion of the premises described in deeds recorded with the Hampshire Registry of Deeds in book 4116, page seven. So we have a motion and a second. Is there further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That's unanimous. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I hope to not bring this project back to you again. Let's see it. Thank you. Thank you both. So I think we have some guests waiting for us. So I'm going to hijack our agenda a little bit and move to the shade tree regulations which are at the bottom of section four which is F because I don't think we have a lot of discussion there necessarily but nonetheless I think we do have a fairly clear set of actions to take. Sure. I recognize that the tree warden is here and he may join us. So at a previous meeting in July, you reviewed the shade tree regulations but they were in a format that wasn't in compliance with the way we were developing our bylaws and regulations which you will see more in more detail when the bylaw review committee comes to meet with you on Monday. So we edited slightly and put it in a different format to comply with the way the bylaw review committee. For instance, we put the penalties and fees in what they call a data block upfront. And so everything you will see will be in a data block upfront so it's very clear what the penalties and fees right now, penalties and fees are sometimes incorporated into the bylaw, sometimes separate. So we just wanted to provide some consistency but typically everything else was either part of the original bylaw that was proposed in which the board determined wasn't appropriate for the bylaw but should be part of regulations and or else it's in here as part of the regulations and we also followed the same numbering, lettering convention that they use. So that's really the only change that we made from previously. So I will say I know that some folks on the public shade tree board have reached out to me. I've not gotten back to anybody. So this time of year is an extraordinarily busy time for me and I haven't called anyone back about anything, including my mother who called me about five times in the intervening weeks since we saw this. But anyway, nonetheless, I wasn't intentionally ignoring you just not having an opportunity to get back to you on that and in some ways I didn't have much news until we saw this and so we were waiting for this to be sort of retrofitted into the shape it's in now and the content was fine which was the content of our conversation the last time. So I think we'll probably take it without too much exception. Ms. Brewer, did you have something to ask her? Actually, great. So one question is more a matter of along the lines of what you explained about the formatting. So this is new to us and this looks nice and that's great. So what is the new philosophy associated with that in terms of how it's clear that there are regulations and there's a bylaw and that those things live together or are connected in some fashion because lots of bylaws don't have regulations and some regulations don't have bylaws. So how do people know there's both and maybe that's something for the bylaw review to talk about. We did not identify that. I mean the bylaw allows for the regulations to be established but there's nothing in the bylaw we'd have to change the bylaw to say there have been regulations established. I guess what I'm asking is more of a tie them together. Is how, I'm not asking us to go back and fix the bylaw because that's fine because there are plenty of bylaws many, most of which don't have regulations I associated with them. So I would just want that somebody who's looking at this and this is more a matter of how we're gonna file it. So that when somebody's looking it up online or they're asking the office for it, they say oh well I see the special town meeting action but oh there's regulations I didn't know that or vice versa. Yeah so I think the bylaw review committee has contemplated that. They have, as you can imagine, they've thought about this in a comprehensive way and they wanna put together one document, not a printed document but an electronic document where you would hyperlink things, regulations and you would find things like that and they're formatting it so that it's easily readable online and they wanna put together one thing that includes everything so people say what are the bylaws and the regulations of the town you'd go to one site and find everything versus trying to hunting and pecking for them. Sounds really terrific. More specifically, in terms of my notes from last time I have a question here when we were talking about fines and so this is now in that data block right up front. It said we were working under the assumption of 300 because the bylaw says 300 and suddenly it still says 500 in that data block. The state gives you. Yeah, it was just a, it's somebody's desire that keeps coming through the word processing without it actually being, as far as I know, legal. When we were a town, 300 was I believe the limit but now that we're a city, known as the town of Amherst, that limit may not apply. Now whether or not, because the bylaw hasn't been changed, they may have to adopt it so that they set the upper limit just because it's in the bylaw. They have to amend the bylaw. That was a, that was a. If it's legal, but I flagged that off. My understanding is that that was desired but was never actually true. So I think that desire came through so we should keep that at 300, the ankle bites, good catch, yeah. Did you have more Ms. Brewer? I actually had one that I hadn't found yet and maybe somebody can point me at it now that it's, I know we organized a good bit of this since the last time we talked about it on July 23rd but I had a note about the mass general law associated with five inch DBH but I don't actually remember. I think the goal was to move the definition of DBH earlier which it's the second thing into the definitions. But there was also an inch requirement that also was a little confusing at one point and just like we didn't really go from 300 to 500 I just wanna make sure we didn't really change something else there. It's probably driving Mr. Snow crazy to watch me struggle with this. But... Do you wanna keep looking for it at a couple? Yeah, I don't know where it is now. If you would go right ahead. I definitely saw the 500 instead of the 300 but right at the beginning, because this where it says $90 per inch DBH right away, I had no idea what DBH is so I know we have it right there in definitions but where it appears above it should say diameter at breast height DBH and then it'll appear again in the, because it's the common reader can't figure that one out. And then this is just like critical root zone also caught at the end of that paragraph or that definition also called the root protection zone. I think also called should be in the same sentence with the critical root zone. This is just, I'm taking these in order but not of order of importance. And again in definitions, the first time I see APSTC, I don't know what that is. Figured it out later. Oh, that was just one I missed. It's under gift tree fund. Right. So, but more of substance, what I had near the end on, what's the, well, let's just say the last page. F hardship waiver reductions if requested, the tree warden can consider financial hardship as a reason to waver, reduce the removal fee. This is an issue I had going back to when I sat on the planning board. If we're gonna have a hardship waiver, I wanna know what the criteria is. I don't think any one person should decide based on whatever that that's a financial hardship for a person or a household. We need to have a standard and we don't. And I raised this earlier when we've reviewed this and I still don't see it here. So I'm having trouble supporting this because it's great to have a hardship waiver but I want to know what it's tied to. And a little trouble in the next one. Three, appeals, any resident or interested party may appeal to these decisions. I wanna know what the standing somebody needs to appeal. Like I live across town but I don't ever want a tree removed so I can appeal. I just, that's really broad. I follow up on that one without the regulation. Okay, Bill, can I just, let me just spin it because then enforcement, the tree warden shall have the power to enforce these regulations and collect all fees and fines owed but what happens to those fees and fines? So I'm assuming the way this is written that the tree warden has some police power to enforce this because it refers to it earlier on. If that's not really where the police power is for enforcement, we need to think about how that happens and then collecting fees and fines. We talked about this, who actually tracks the money and what can it be used for? So it should just be consistent with the standards that we use for other things like this when we have non-criminal disposition. That's what I found and yes, you had one on one of those. So my note said we changed it last time that under appeals it said anyone may appeal these decisions. There was no definition of resident or interested party. My notes, it's crossed out and it says anyone may appeal these decisions. Whether that's true or interested because that was a way of avoiding interested party. Is it an interested party from Northampton or is it an interested party from across town or is it somebody that's in a butter? I mean, either it's anybody in the world or those words have to or words like resident or interested party need to be defined because interested party, that should not be subjective decision. So what do you want it to say? That's why I said anyone. Clearly that didn't make it through. Looked to sort of a more legal, what was standing to an appeal, like a zoning decision or a planning decision, that kind of standing to appeal. Not just I didn't like that you did that. I'm gonna appeal. Well, I think right now it is anyone. Currently it's my belief it is anyone. And so if we either we wanna keep it being anyone or we wanna define who it would be an interested party doesn't define that. I don't really care which way we go. I just don't want words that don't have meaning to be in here. I don't have a solution. I just saw there's a problem. I'm more concerned about making sure there's a viable appeal process for the applicant. And that's what I think my earlier reading and you found your notes and I didn't look for mine is about if somebody doesn't like the decision of the tree ward and what's the procedure in making sure that they have an appeal in this case the appeals heard by town council. But this looks like anyone who doesn't like it whether it's keeping the tree or not keeping the tree can intervene. Which is currently true. I think it's potentially problematic. So I think the logic is that trees are a public resource and that even though you may live across town you may walk past this tree every day and so you may have interest in this tree as part of the landscape. So I think that's the logic. It's not just a butters or a butters to a butters that might benefit from a tree. And just on the enforcement this fits in there is global language on enforcement that they have adopted that the bylaw review committee has adopted in terms of where the money goes who can collect the money the collector can only take the money things like that will supersede everything that goes for bylaws and things. So they've sort of and that's why the bylaw review committee. Yeah. So they've they will they don't they didn't want to restate that in every bylaw that they reviewed. They just said let's say that up front and then it's going to flow through everything. Yeah. But it's a it's a good question. Yeah. Mr. Wall. I mean I appreciate Miss Kruger's question about the hardship clause. But I mean as far as I know we don't define it anywhere really. The example I'm familiar with for example as a local historic district and the wording there is a certificate of hardship issued when the commission determines that disapproval of an application would cause substantial hardship financial or otherwise. So it seemed to me a parallel thing that in one case you've got a commission charged with administering bylaw and one case you got the tree warden and that's a responsible person who presumably understands the law and will make an informed decision. I mean that may not be a satisfactory but that's what I've seen in other aspects of our government. So is there any case for hardship that was actually defined? I'm not aware of it. I'm not saying there isn't. But have you had folks. Yeah. I'm not sure. But I know that I believe LSSC uses a standard to determine financial hardship financial hardship for waivers. I'm not sure if that's something we could use for this or not. It's the only one I'm aware of. The reason I feel so strongly about this is that you're really making a decision about a particular household's ability to pay without having the background information to make that decision. You might say well there's two professors who live there but you don't know that they're supporting. It's just to me it's a slippery slip and there should be an objective standard. I don't care so much what the standard is but some kind of reference we could tie it to what you know CWG uses or LSSC and pick something that's commonly used that's a cut off but I worry that without that it becomes quite subjective. Well we can search and see what other communities have done if they've allowed for hardship. And I brought it up before but no. I just missed it. Mr. Wolff. Can we also just flag it then for the whole bylaw review process. I mean can we flag it for the whole bylaw review process. Yeah I think that I think it raises that specter across the board. I mean Ms. Krueger mentioned. I mean explicitly direct their attention to that issue that's come up now. Right. There wasn't appeal by the way too. I mean a case came before us involving a certain tree right. We've had a hearing a couple of years ago so that part of the process we're familiar with at least even though it's not spelled out here in great detail. Yes. I believe that this particular appeal number three here comes from chapter 87 and it's relating to when the tree warden has told it up because they cannot remove the tree. Not that they can remove the tree but you need to pay these fines fees. So what is the appeal process when the tree warden says no you can't take down this tree to you know fix your driveway. What is the appeal process for that. I think that's what this particular line refers to. The appeal process for someone who requesting to take down a tree is already set going to the select board or to the charter. So to belabor the appeal process just a little longer. As I'm talking about who is allowed to do that when we talked about anyone and we argue about that a little bit. But when it says these decisions which decisions including the hardship waiver the decision to prune the decision to pull out. I would argue we need some clarity as to which decisions can be appealed because this section refers to decisions in kind of a generic way that might make things more complicated than we really want it to be. Under requesting to last page. Yeah but it's numbered because it's under requesting tree removal or pruning but it also includes the hardship waiver section so that could be appealed as well and maybe just saying can you know may appeal a decision to remove or prune. You know I'm just asking for that level of specificity. Whichever of the things we actually want people to be able to appeal not just some to be clear what they can complain about. So for example when they say we have many many trees on this driveway that you want us to remove and or that you want us to pay a large amount of money which we have had that conversation already with particular and then they say you know can that be appealed as both can the amount of money that you're charging us be appealed versus the actual removal or the pruning. Yeah now it does raise an interesting question because of the structure of the bylaw with principal sections A through F since the appeal section is a under F is it limited to F the implication some matter of general statutory structuring would be yes that the appeal only would be applicable to something that arises under that subsection request tree removal or pruning and I'm not sure that's what was intended. Formatting error. Formatting error. Well it raises a question of whether there should be some general section additional you know even a G which is general provisions or something like that that you then put appeals and enforcement under so that appeals and enforcement applies to the entire bylaw and not not by implication to just a section of it. Right. So it makes it vulnerable to challenge and I think that there are certain things that can become problematic because without doing something more it will create the need for standards that can be applied. You want to make sure that the standards of the standards of the during the regulation themselves because that's what we are trying to do and by just giving the responsibility to a 13 person council I think that they're almost going to have to meet the first time this comes up visit the whole thing all over again and create a process that they would apply to this because they really don't have any guidance out of this as to how to apply it. Oh I'm sorry I'm sorry. I didn't read this until this afternoon and then I felt really badly because it was like I can't really accept this without these clarifications that I've been talking about and I was like I would have if I had done my job earlier I might have called the manager and said you know I think we need to do a little more work on this before we bring everyone in because I. So can I just sort of summarize what I heard make sure we've captured everything and so D.B.H. and the first line $500 should be $300 just as a standard the by law review committee is putting all definitions up front that's how they that's their standard. That first paragraph critical root zone we're going to put a comma after diameter lower case a the PSTC the AP STC committee should be PSTC but you'd like that spelled out along with D.B.H. Just to go back in that first paragraph that also called the re-protection zone could probably be a parenthetical phrase after the critical root zone CRZ as I can move forward to the beginning. So critical root zone print CRZ comma also called the re-protection zone RPZ comma is the circle on the ground corresponding to the dripline tree. I think that's my understanding of what folks were thinking about that. I don't have anything on the second page and of course this is not numbered or third but then we go to the last page and the things I have there is some kind of standard for hardship waiver some research on that possibly pulling out appeals and enforcement is a separate section. I'm hearing that anyone can appeal a decision but what decisions are we talking about. And then verify that on the enforcement they collect all fees and fines where does that make sure that that's covered previously but we might want to say it explicitly here. I think I missed. I would suggest under the any resident or interested party I'd go with any resident I think should limit to residents that would be my opinion. Because I think that's you're saying it's a public resource for the town I think then those then if we're going to be broad enough to not fair you know what's that. Non-resident tax payers. What's that? No I don't care about that. No he's saying if you say resident then there if there are people who pay taxes and they don't have a home property but it's not their primary residence. But they aren't residents. That's why I know anyone sounded really loose but I couldn't come up with anything else. Maybe it needs a little maybe we can tie it to something. We can just use passive voice appeals maybe. Also I would like it to be people over 18 I really don't want to parade of young people. Just say adult. Saying what? Adult. So we have to sort of you know what I'm saying it could be it could be any resident or property owner for the students. You know age of majority. Yes. I don't want someone arguing that someone who lives here for three months is not a resident. It's just not worth it. They are because there's no durational standard in the state allowed. So one day you're a resident. Is somebody going to say there is? Well that's it but they're going to lose. That's why I'm not here. Their resident as soon as they are released or they pay an electric bill or whatever. Yes. So going back to number three the appeal process. Again that is relating to the decision I believe is the intent that is decision by the tree warden to not remove a tree. I don't know if we want to have the second one being the appeals process for permission to remove a tree and paying the fees and replacement costs. I think the applicant would be the person who would be interested in an appeal process who has denied permission. I'm not sure if the average citizen would want to appeal a no decision on a removal but maybe they would. I'm not sure. So do we want to have the second appeal process defined based on chapter 87's current definition of an appeal process? If we could reference state law it would be nice. We'll work on this. Mr. Wall. Maybe one question for the tree warden and then also a comment. Do you have a sense of what kind of removal fees one is talking about? It says one can appeal to waive or reduce the removal fee. So it's a placement cost based on the size of the tree. So it can range significantly. I mean in your practical experience do you have any numbers? It's not uncommon to be three to $6,000 to $10,000 if they're taking down significant trees in the Broadway. That's good. I have a question about that. My experience is with things like demolition. So on the one hand do you want this sense of a metric? Not just I don't want to do this because nobody wants to pay money for anything. I'm putting three kids through college and taking care of my sick mother and I've got debt on my car. I don't think there's anybody in any case in town I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I don't want to have to demonstrate in the sense of college financial aid application or something what your financial status is. So I think that's what comes down to the reasonable standard of the tree warden. The CDBG program I don't know if they're doing it now but when they were doing rehab loans they would get waivers and it's not just people claiming I have these expenses but there is a kind of cut and dried way to get if they want the benefit they sign the release and there's a way to analyze it. And then your actual income is within the range that qualifies you for the hardship. But that's to what to get? That was to get like a really low interest or deferred and I think that incurring a debt and borrowing from the public funds is different than saying I can't afford to cut down a tree. $20,000 in tree removal to relocate an unsafe driveway. I'm just saying I'm sure there will be people who concern about privacy too so it's an issue with raising across the board but I'm not aware of a standard so far to apply to other parts of appeals for town bodies like this. I do have a question about for the sake of inviting for clarification. E, Subjects and E has four identified prohibited acts. The fees provision that's at the top of the regulations has proposed fees. We've raised the question about the $500 one for E1 E2 to E4 is $50 and are we intending that the appeal process cover those and by having placed it under F the implication is no but then where's the appeal process if somebody is unhappy with the fee and did we have a particular intent in your drafting to exclude an appeal process for those violations. So under non-criminal disposition there's a separate process that stands along and that would be outlined as an overarching thing so non-criminal disposition you can appeal but to the court not internally so it's like basically writing a parking ticket in essence that's what the appeal process is. So is it our intent to leave it I'm just this is the question for the select board is our intent to leave it as Mr. Bachman just described it which would then mean that we should actually leave the appeal section where it is. I think it's a clarification that we needed. Further along those lines aren't we glad we didn't do this but we still need to know though even if we say that the appeals process doesn't apply to this appeals process doesn't apply through 2-4 because it applies to the non-criminal disposition you get a parking ticket you don't parking tickets we may not a great example but you take it to court rather than you take it back to the tree warden you know you burn the tree that goes a different path but that doesn't address the issue of whether or not appeals associated with waivers can be dealt with and so that still needs somehow whether it's layout or format we need to figure out if people can appeal that because otherwise the way you got it set up it looks like you can appeal hardship waivers and you know if somebody makes one and then they're told no then they can appeal that maybe we want to maybe we don't but we need to be we might think we know what it means today but what it means to other people six months from now is perhaps not entirely clear apparently because of that and then speaking of appeals if we are talking about the appeals process that is in MGL 87 section 4 which of course as so many sections of MGL has absolutely nothing to do with towns that will have our form says cutting down or removing public shade trees approval of selectmen or mayor so we can see we don't fit but it says if at or before a public hearing as provided in previous section objection in writing is made by one or more persons that's it doesn't say it has to be somebody who lives in town somebody who's 18 somebody who's nearby it says one or more persons and that is exactly the argument we have had in the section 4 the tree warden has decided the tree warden totally appropriately of course according to the select board wanted to cut down some trees and one person said no you cannot cut down those trees that was the appeal that was happening and we had to have that hearing under this provision so if that provision still applies to our new form because they don't seem to give us an alternative then I don't believe that given that I don't believe our bylaw gave us some authority which would have been checked by the AGL and all that to be different than I don't see why we could limit it when it appears not an attorney but it appears that the MGL 87 section 4 says who which is by one or more persons we may be stuck with that we are limiting that so maybe we just adopt that language and just stick it in there and be done with it that's what the law says I think articulating what is or isn't appealable sort of what that applies to is important there again that's for the when someone requests to remove a tree and the permission is granted the appeal process would be for one or more persons but the other appeal in section 3 here that appeal again is just for an appeal to somebody who is told no they can't cut a tree down but that's not explicit enough I think because it's just these decisions we should be explicit about what they are appealing so it sounds like we have 2 and actually 3 if you count the hardship way there are many kinds of decisions that in theory could be appealed but maybe we don't want to allow for the hardship decisions to be appealed on the prohibited acts where we have the $300 for one and the $50 for 2, 3 and 4 I am wondering number 4 cause or encourage any fire or burning near or around any public shade tree should that be $50 or $300 that seems pretty dire but then you damage the tree and it triggers 1 and then you get the $300 I know in chapter 7 the $50 is for non-criminal $300 would be for our criminal intent is my understanding of chapter 8 both non-criminal you don't have criminal power non-criminal disposition E1 and E234 at the header part correct anyone else think $50 is too cheap for putting a fire under a shade tree apply but anyway yes so they are to be clear amongst all of us all these are non-criminal dispositions there are no criminal dispositions associated with and then the other question I have and I don't know the answer to it and I don't know if it indeed needs to be answered because we I know talked at length and there's no explain to us in great detail where we wanted to measure the tree in terms of height and then diameter the note I had before that I was confused about I realized in the new section is under item F requesting tree removal or pruning item 1 and it refers to a size of 5 inches DBH which I am not seeing in mass general law so I'm either I'm missing it is it really possible or it's something that we are choosing to do because we think it's a better choice which I am also fine with but I'm just trying to be clear that that was intentional as opposed to the 300 and 500 confusion that we've been having it was intentional and that's in relation to the replacement cost so any tree over an inch and a half is a public shade tree but if it's 5 inches that's where the replacement cost would enter so just we skipped over the burning the tree the fire under the tree issue I think the the estimate on that was 1 the number 1 which is the higher cost or the higher fine is where you actually are destroying it's kill or destroy any public shade tree whereas you could have a fire near a shade tree it doesn't kill it but you don't want to be constricted to having a $300 fine on that the other you know Adams 2 3 and 4 are more endangering a shade shade tree versus killing it but if you have the fire and then it did kill it then you're in one you're in one right if you kill it yeah it doesn't say by me how you kill the tree we're not splitting those hairs so now when everyone writes to the newspaper and says true haggars we know we deserve this reputation was it 5 inches or greater or not so so we'll work on this and bring it back to you at future meeting so breast height could vary quite a bit well that's why they defined it what is it 4 and a half feet okay that's on who's who so we'll take this up hopefully soon but we'll just tidy up again from or do it again again the intent is not changing it's just sort of those nuanced pieces that we run up against when we try to make it enforceable and a living document that you know regardless of who reads it and when they read it it's functional for them so I tidy it up I appreciate that and as I said earlier meeting when we started this process that's exactly why I wanted to bring it to you because you see all these things and it's really important it'll make my job easier if it's very clear and we know exactly what we're supposed to do so I really appreciate your effort thank you very much thank you alright so moving on in our agenda to 4C to go back to 4C which is select board budget policy guideline process do the appointment just because oh I didn't realize that or we could have done that ages ago I didn't realize someone was waiting so since we're skipping around we'll go to 5 on confirmation of appointment of Shoshana King to public arts commission I'm sorry I didn't realize you were here or we would have done this hour not hours ago you're sitting with a tricky boat I hang out with them too she's on both thank you for being willing to serve on the public arts commission I didn't know if Mr. Bachman or you know offer any comment or introduction to this at all so the public art commission is below the required numbers under the new charter there are no appointments that can be made unless they are below a quorum plus one public art commission is below a quorum plus one we had one applicant Mr. Wald I interviewed her and Mr. Brody is the chair of the public art commission and Mr. Wald for his add to that also as King has been attending meetings regularly it's very up to date and all the activities of the commission is really eager to get going so we're happy to make this appointment and to give you the opportunity to serve officially finally thank you that's what we do do you have to do a motion do you want to make a statement relative to this or you're welcome to I'm excited to serve my community great thank you I did have a question for Mr. Wald I did when I was looking at this I saw there were two other people who had applied within the past year was inquiry made to them as to whether they remained interested Ms. Mills I'd actually start to schedule appointments and one of the people through the meeting yes so we did and others weren't interested in interviewing at the time we actually had two scheduled and one person dropped out correct thank you so I would entertain a motion if someone would be so kind I moved to confirm the appointment of Shoshana King to the public arts commission for a term expiring on June 30th 2019 and should we explain so this is again because of the charter we're making these one year appointments and the new council will take up further appointments second so the motion is second is there any further discussion hearing none all those in favor please say aye and that's unanimous again thank you very much for offering to serve thank you and on the shade tree committee tail for volunteering to go to those meetings sorry to make you wait no so now that all the attendees have accommodated I really would have done that sooner she was here with the shade tree okay good so we'll go back to select work budget policy guideline process and so I believe in our packet we have our guidelines from last year just as a frame for our conversation we had a little bit of that conversation last time and I'm sure we'll have a robust conversation about how we might want to approach this topic for the coming year given the change in government if I can just find it which I can see it's under here I'm buried budget was that about a paper was office from everything ah there they are I found them so in years past we have taken a more hands on approach because we had that role and responsibility to lay out budget policy guidelines to the manager for the coming year and I think we sit in as is the case a lot of times we sit in a sort of strange place relative to a change in charter and we won't but nonetheless do and how do we want to offer advice both to the manager and potentially the council as to how they should proceed with the budget I think there are some things under overall philosophy and key concerns a lot of those are going to be you know the same as I was reading through this you know OPEB is still going to be a concern how we manage our debt how we you know use our resources how we interact with the three institutions of higher learning so you know some of those kind of things I think are completely fine to reiterate publicly and and offer again as comment on the budget process but anyway I'm open to hearing what people think absolutely and my suggestion is this so we talked to when we talked about this we talked about you know well okay what's the purpose of the four boards meeting given where we are differently and we agree that that's a terrific educational benefit to the entire community and well will the finance committee be doing guidelines and if they are then well we want our shot at it too at the same time I wonder one approach might be the following that approach might include saying here's the old document what we did with the town manager goals let's say here's the old document and here are the four things that Ms. Brewer is concerned about and I'm betting there might be some others that others are concerned about that you could be thinking about moving forward rather than trying to rework each one of these paragraphs and say well should we tweak that one a little bit to talk about this that of the other thing and so I will give you an example of my four concerns that I think are not addressed fully and some of them actually probably were addressed in the finance committee book for town meeting but are not going to be clear to us if we were just sitting here in a normal year we don't necessarily know the answers to these questions until the town manager says well that was on page 53 of the finance committee book or the big binder and so therefore it's not going to be useful to the council moving forward either so for example on page 2 under item M it says this budget will be constructed without knowing whether the town will have chosen to so rather than having to rework that the second part of that says any increases and expenses for the implementation of a new form of government should be identified so there's election cost was one that was identified as a possibility but the cost that we just talked about earlier tonight could be mentioned in a paragraph or reference to a document that's what those costs turned out to be rather than trying to rework this paragraph so I'm going to go to one just after that because I did say I had four the next item is actually directly below that which is item N when we wrote this back in December we said several town meeting actions in the past year will have negative implications for the creation of the budget for FY19 so what was the upshot of that I think is going to be important for people to recognize moving into the next budget cycle I'm not sure and either we should figure that out now and say you all should look at that as the budget is being developed because we need to be able to we can probably come up with it off the top of our heads tonight but it needs to be attributed somewhere and similarly on page three there's an extraneous and in item B which I know is critically important to all of us but under items for other new revenue the other two that I wanted to bring to our attention is item C service fees need regular evaluation to assure they are in line with costs this is traditionally not been one of our strong suits in terms of where when we can report to people while the last time we looked at the things in the planning department was such and such year and we changed three things and we left all the rest the same because we all know that we can't just jack up the price to whatever we want it to be it has to be associated with the services but to say we're on schedule to examine the fees in the clerk's office this year and two years ago we did the ones in the planning department I think would be valuable to people because this is the kind of thing people always say well have we done all that it's like well we evaluate it periodically and we don't ever seem to have a report as to what we've actually changed that we can really explain to the public and similarly item E is when grants involve funding of individual personnel we need a clearly community communication strategy for whether those positions will be continued and we do have a waste reduction position for example that's partially grant funded that needs to be accounted for moving forward which I know obviously staff is doing but I'm talking about understanding you know where choices will eventually have to be made associated with that just like in the past we've had to do with firefighter grants or with police grants or other grants like when we've used block grant money for example for various people's positions so those are just the kinds of things that people get confused about I think going forward and since you're going to have a new set of people who are not going to know all that I guarantee they don't know those things now to be able to think about a way to express some of those things as the entire budget unfolds I'm not saying they need to know it the first day they walk in but the rest of these things to me and I'm sure some others have pulled out some other things do feel very much like a continuous sort of focus thing that doesn't necessarily need to be particularly updated for this year thank you there was another one that I'll get to in a minute so actually I don't agree with taking the same approach that we used in the manager goals I think maybe because I marked this up a lot today I think this could easily be updated I think most of it's the same there's a couple things that just aren't relevant or out of date one the other one was the rising cost of health care and the health insurance trust fund resiliency which is one G and it goes to the top of the second page that's a different situation that also would need to be updated along with the one about the town will have chosen a new form of government which is mentioned that one maybe by just keeping the second sentence that's the update so I think most of this is still could be repeated as the FY20 guidelines with a couple of updates or corrections what I did when I read it it's really in the weeds but some places we say we and are and other times we use we step back and the tone or the structure is more formal so you know at the beginning one A, B, C it's like overall physical sustainability growth and state and then you get to E and it goes we support maintaining a level services so the voice alternates between a statement and then a sort of sentiment or and I tried to mark this up I tried to take all the reason ours out that I possibly could to make it consistent in voice throughout so that's something that's more in format we've already talked about a couple of the updates and I did a couple of other like the third page three economic development B it says growing our property tax base because they're growing the property tax base and again I tried to make that consistent so I I mean I could be kind of otherwise I would opt for you know turning in our changes and maybe just giving us a brush up and using it as the FY20 budget policy guidelines I don't support the thing of like here's the four things we updated and here's the one from last year I think that that's not as useful but others might disagree I follow up on one particular item so I I freely admit that many chairs over many years have cobbled this together from things that we've said and so the voice does change because it expressed the sentiment more than that we were concerned and I actually like the we statements because they seem more user friendly but I get that that is not everyone's style however given that we have facts like item C okay we're just on the first page yeah item one C Amherst relies very heavily on president on residential property taxes as well as on new growth to fund town services I mean that's in some ways just like well yeah we all know that so that's really not that is part of a philosophy is it a concern it I don't know what it actually is I mean we've done our best this over the years but given that sort of statement then how do you change since you indicated that you mark this up how do you change E when you're talking about we welcome a short prioritized list because that's saying we the select board want to see that short and prioritized list so how did you change that a short prioritized list with rationale for budget additions should funds become available those where like I just circled the two weeks but I haven't rewritten that particular one so it's my point being not saying it should be developed for whom that's my point that that's one of the reasons we end up saying it this way is we welcome a short and prioritized list because we want it back if funds become available if you're just going to say create a list it's like for who to do what so in in the past in the past it has been that statement is a directive to the manager that's just right whereas this is more a message to the manager in creating a new version of this we're trying to modify the voice of it it has that kind of directive we can't who gives the list to who that's what I'm asking you because if it's not specific then why do it is part of what I'm asking I mean like this these are things smart people do daily as part of their job and so if we're saying what we want out of it if we want a short and prioritized list if we don't want anything if we don't think the council should get anything if we think people should just do their jobs because we reminded them that Amherst relies very heavily on residential property taxes really if you follow that this is from the select board to the manager it would be implied the manager should provide a short and prioritized list with rationales for budget editions should funds become available if funds become available I want to add another I won't say one of our favorites another trash collector or whatever so I think this is for me more grammatical who cares about we welcome welcoming is it doesn't seem to me to belong here it's a directive of if more money is found these are the first things you're going to find and we've used that it's happened and the manager then says why that is my next priority should I be able to afford it and then we kind of know that that's been signaled and it's been funded on time right and the other thing is I think in there are probably several places in here where we could it's not necessary to write in a directive manner because he isn't reporting to us at that point in time and so it would be things like it's advisable that the manager create a list for you know what I mean it's partly to frame it for the council to consider as much as it is for the manager to consider so I don't know if that's but that sort of begs the question I think that's why you suggested what you did which is here's what we did in the past and here's some things amongst those that are still issues of concern that you're going to need to contend with and so you know it sort of absolves us of trying to nuance those kinds of directives versus not is the idea there so correct all the grammar should be item one put it all in the same voice Mr. Steinberg I raise a question preliminarily after looking at the charter again as to whether we ought to be issuing these guidelines at all and I know it's we talked about that I know we talked about it but when you look at the when you look at the charter the charter indicates that the process essentially begins much later and not later than March 15th excuse me the town manager town manager so submitted at least call at least one public forum on the topic of the proposed budget the forum is intended for the town council and the manager to present priorities context based on prior years budgets revenue and expenditure forecasts and other relevant information it's a solicit feedback from the public there's really nothing in the calendar that's earlier than that in the budget process going forward what's the forum saying I think what we're trying to do is to get a process moving but the question isn't the presentation of the information and the creation of the information about the town finances I think that's always valuable to do it's always valuable to give that context to the schools and to the library so that they can begin work on their budgets but these at most are suggestions to the council about criteria that they might want to consider because they as a council have March as the timeline to give to the manager and this January budget this is all written around the January budget that the town manager had to provide to the select board and the finance committee under the now former town government act in the new procedure he has a later date March 15 to provide the budget altogether so I think we need to be I know I wasn't here sorry about that you need to be thoughtful about why we're doing this we weren't unfaithful which we were when you weren't here and one of the things that came up was as we said the four boards meeting another thing that came up was I believe I phrased it who's going to tell the finance committee it's not their job to give out finance committee guidelines this year because it's not based on what you just read not that particular section but the whole theme of the transition period I don't see that it's the finance committee's job at all to be putting out guidelines this year that's separate from the four boards meeting except they usually meet right literally right after the four boards meeting but I don't think it's entirely appropriate for them to do that but I'm not in charge of them and so if they're going to still do that then the question was let's pull this out and see if it's something we want to do one possible thing was my suggestion Ms. Krueger had another suggestion of a different way to do it I think no matter how we look at it given the timing exactly that you mentioned and in light of the finance committee's independent actions that in light of the fact that the town manager said he's still going to start working on the budget basically in this traditional time frame even though the charter requires later time frame luckily is that then this perhaps given all those things becomes more of part of these mythical not yet existent guidelines for the future town council as opposed to being our substantial directive to the town manager for the department head meetings he's having now and soon about budgets even though he's not required to issue a budget in January like he used to be he had given us I had walked away with the impression that he would still be interested if we had something particular to say about that given that he was still going to be starting those meetings he wasn't going to wait until after the council was seated to start working on the budget so given that and given the talk we keep having about giving direction offering our pearls of wisdom to the future town council that that is more what this document is rather than their traditional we need to get this done so that he can have the department head meetings so that then he can do the budget in January and everything falls into place that way so it's off cycle but is it a thing we can use because we don't yet have any things we can use to give to the council as something that's more advice than it is directive I'm resisting to say we should just write a memo that says good luck spent wisely signed by all of us and really big thanks but I think the notion of what's sort of coming to my mind relative to your comments is that perhaps in thinking about a document coming from us to the council as advice or here's things section on financial policy and guidelines in the order of this sort of thing much the same way we might write a section relative to evaluation of the manager so those could be separate memos on different topics or they could be one monster memo with multiple sections but it should not be used to support recurring expenses that's like one of our faves absolutely and we'll pass that by so long whether formally or informally I'm sure I just wondered if the manager had an opinion on this what you'd like us to tell you to do I think we did talk about this last time and it doesn't hurt to have this document out there we are following an earlier regular schedule with the council and I think there are some reasons internal staffing plus the schools need their number and some concern about whether when the council will have their ability to sort of focus on it so I think having the document I mean all things this document survives year to year it doesn't take a whole lot to we would just wrap up this whole document that's doable just I just want to make two points that Miss Brewer brought up one about evaluating service fees we do look at service fees every year part of the budget with department heads is to go through the service fees and we don't do a thorough analysis and a cost analysis of are they in line with all the other communities but we always go through all the fees and revenue collected and in terms of the position that you mentioned in terms of grant funded position that position was funded specifically as a two year position and nothing beyond that and if the department deems it to be a high need they'll present that in their budget process but it's not it was advertised and hired as a two year position as a grant funded two year position so we were cognizant of that for the position that you mentioned was Mr. Summary as far as the finance committee guidelines are concerned under the new charter provision in future years there'll be a budget coordinating group as structured according to the provisions in the charter which has some similarities been on entirely and it will receive the budget projections and it's presumed in the way that it is written I think fairly clear that it's the one that's going to provide guidance to the schools and to the library about how much money they should assume for the bottom line as they develop their budgets to submit back into the process according to the timeline established by the charter and I think that what is kind of lacking this year is that that process isn't in place and so what is to happen to give that guidance and I think that was the purpose of probably having the finance committee come forward with guidelines and it's but you know because I can't have them any other purpose as far as our guidelines I think Mr. Slaughter has actually stated it well because their statements that really we're putting forward to share our expertise as you indicated and that the council will take that as appropriate but that really falls into the March process that I described earlier Ms. Cooper. I think we did refer to that in our discussion I think it is an exceptional year it's running in a different track we may have feelings about what we think the current finance committee should or shouldn't do but I really think that's separate from whether we want to do this and how we want to do it so I would like to I don't think this should be a response to they might do something and therefore we want to do this I think we think this is valuable we want to do it and how we want to do it is our decision and I'd like to just separate it from that what they may or may not do which they were not we don't appoint them they're not under a purview and you might have opinions based on our different understanding of the charter I think their role is but I think we should focus on what our role should be I think moving ahead really the question is sort of you know how do we want to frame this up and I think that this document as it stands from last year is a valuable resource certainly so it could be part of what we give to the council's advice as far as hey here's how we frame things up this might be a valuable tool to you as well or you may want to take us you know slightly they'll take a slightly different you know approach to it but I do think I'd love to hear how people think about whether we should write like a memo relative to finance related stuff specifically you know or not I mean I'm of a mindset that you know there could be either a component of a larger memo or like I said before or a or a standalone memo relative to budget and you know guidelines and suggestions for how to work with the manager in that process you know I don't know if that's how we as a board want to do that or not yes I think all of these alternatives are good I mean there's no right answer there's no perfect answer to the best way to do it I think we're just trying to figure out what's going to be the most helpful and the least amount of work for us because the reality is we and I just can't emphasize this enough we haven't done anything yet that we are giving to the council right and we're changing this over on December 2nd and so in light of not letting the assumption that somebody's suddenly going to develop an extra 40 hours in their week to write all these things up if somebody wants to volunteer to write a cover memo or somebody wants to volunteer to write a chapter about a thing that's awesome but at this time what I'm just I mainly wanted to have us not do is to say the council should somehow magically know that a year ago the select board wrote FY19 budget policy guidelines and that or place that burden on the town manager to say I don't know if you care but here's what select board wrote a year ago or I don't really care how we do it except I'm just really worried that we're not doing any things yet and so if this is our first thing and we just say we have a new colored folder that this goes in and look it's our first thing there's your thing and maybe we just keep putting things in it and then as the things accumulate we say oh we need to write a memo that ties why these five things are in this folder but I just really feel like too much of this is becoming oh we could do it this way we could do it that way and then like it's all we're all going to be saying so Mr. Slaughter when did you spend 80 hours writing that book for them and and that's unreasonable you can't we can't expect you to do that and so we just need to figure out a way whether it's a folder it's a could we take this as it exists knowing it's some of it's update and we don't love all then put it in the folder with the idea that maybe two weeks before that transition under the direction of the chair which could be to ask for help right there's some kind of cover memo that or letter that just says here's what we've put in here and here's how we think it might be helpful and that's you know the framing tool and it could be short and this could be you know document number one and maybe the manager goals because we kind of did our part the three month and then here's some other ones from before so that could be document number two if people agree right we got to win the folder where's our folder purple folder and gold trim because we can all imagine these really elaborate really cool ways we could have done and yet they'd be right so okay so that refocuses us and it complies with I think Mr. Steinberg is concerned but we start to accumulate something because we're not going to write chapter and chapter it's not going to happen nice idea in any way they would probably chuck it right no I think it yeah I think that whatever we provide is is something that you want to be a good reference document and we're doing the right places but not necessarily just voluminous for the sake of being voluminous you know in other words it has to have the detail at the sort of right places so that when they refer back to it has what they need to know but lots of it will sit and collect dust and they never get read but anyway well for me that was helpful to sort of articulate that a little bit and kind of chew on that a little bit it is and I knew it would be in some respects but I did want to get some of other people's ideas about how to kind of approach some of that could we literally bring that folder like we're having our yellow folders with us from now on so that we can even if we sometimes just want to write a note to ourselves and stick it in it's like our sign folder a folder that we could start to just put these things in so you could feel better at night how about the clerk would like to maintain that folder maybe a video tape with each of us talking for five minutes a video message yes go down Amherst we did for two minutes I'm campsing that's right precisely so far for the contents are updated town manager performance goals and not updated budget policy we just did the FY19 right exactly so I think I'll move us to the next topic on our agenda which is additional town meeting appropriation PBT root restoration what I was hoping to discuss with you this evening about this was what roots what additions could be made to roots that were caught what those would cost and so I had gotten a list of what a list of add backs that we could do which totaled about $80,000 for which would have added them back in the intersession timeframe and some ridership numbers so we could because obviously we only have $53,000 work with there about $80,000 in cost so I'm going to sort of frame that up a little bit but on Monday evening when I was going to work on that and send it out to you all I received an email from PBTA saying UMass transit is not able to hire enough drivers so they're going to actually make additional cuts just because they don't have bodies to drive the buses and so some additional reductions in service are going to happen on top of what has already happened and so I spoke with the administrator of PBTA yesterday a little bit about it and I was asking they're hopeful to be at a more full staffing level by the second semester they actually one of the great things about the UMass transit is actually train the drivers they get them the CDL license that allows them to drive the buses and those classes take about six weeks to get through as a result of this shortage and it's actually it's a shortage kind of nationwide and I think other transportation authorities in other parts of the state are struggling as well you know one of the things that UMass has done is to boost the base pay to I believe it's $14 an hour is what they're going to pay is the starting salary and then every semester you drive I believe you get another quarter per hour raise which is a pretty significant raise if you think about it but they are quite frankly short handed and they've been sort of patching together as best they can literally pulling people out of other work in their facility to do this and they can't you know they've got people that maintain buses that can drive and have been covering some shifts and that sort of thing so there's actually some additional reductions in service that are going to happen this fall so one of the questions I ask because if that's the case and they're running less then they potentially have a little gain in the budget and you know because they're not expending you know gasoline and those sorts of things to drive those those routes and so the question I posed to the administrator is well with the savings from not running those routes in the fall plus the money that we have could we potentially you know restore those routes once you get to full ridership I guess would be the best way to full employment for the shifts you know would we maybe be able to cover completely the rest rations of those routes that we were talking about and it's not a complete restoration of those routes it was you know adding on to it was adding the evening routes that get cut off is primarily so the differentials in what they call headway which is time between the cycles of the buses those are a lot more complex and difficult to change because you know a driver runs one route and he runs another route and so you relays those things together in such a way that to change those headway times between times that stop is a much more complex process but add another one on the end of the of the day or a couple of you know the end of the day is a much more clean sort of addition and like I said that added about eighty thousand dollars we owe a little over fifty thousand available you know to the manager for restoration routes if the savings from the additional cuts that they're making could augment that we might able might be able to get to a sort of fully restored or more fully restored system for the second semester of this year however they do have to look at whether or not that would create savings or not in some respects because additional training expenses additional driver expense you know one of the big partners in this is UMass and whether you know if they're not you know getting the service that they were committed to paying for are they going to pay you know are they obligated to pay the full amount if it's for services not being delivered so there may or may not be you know sort of money available so they were going to check on that it's going to take a little bit there is a meeting of the PBTA next Wednesday hopefully I'll have answers about some of those things certainly if I get answers relative to that question of whether there are sufficient savings or that savings in combination with ours might be able to do a more complete restoration of some evening routes and that sort of thing I'll share that out with you guys as soon as I know it but so I'm really kind of disappointed that I have to come in and say we're actually going to have even further cuts and again it's not because of money not being available but about the resource of drivers not being available so they've been you know very actively pursuing new drivers and trying to get more more folks to drive but they're just not going to be in a place where they're going to have them in-house and trained fully until second semester so that's the sort of status of where those things are at this moment I want to make you aware of that and like I said if I we will however though you know again the process of sort of altering routes has a long lead time in advance and so if we are going to and to what extent we might do some root restoration we'll need to be pretty firm about what we're doing around the middle of October because they and we have a meeting right in the middle of October so hopefully that timing will work out pretty nicely but the manager will have to you know execute a contract with PVT for those services so again it's advice to the manager from us which we have to do in a serial way as opposed to doing it where we express pain to each other through email and that sort of thing but like I said as soon as I have more information I'll share that with all of you about what's possible in regard to that and we'll say anecdotally that one of besides the economy being very good which means other jobs are paying well and so students are making different choices about where they work and that sort of thing one other thing that was mentioned and again it's anecdotal I don't think they crunched the numbers on this but one of the things if you drive a bus and especially if there's federal money involved is that there is drug testing involved with recreational marijuana being legal in the state they think that that may be a factor as to why some are not choosing that as an option don't know if that's real or not but anecdotally they don't know I mean but that could be who knows what sort of numbers that influence it could be one or two it could be ten I don't have any idea but it was an anecdotal sort of thing that they shared which was interesting but anyway so that sort of is the story on that section of route restoration at this moment we're still sort of figuring it out but I think there's possibility to do some work on that but I don't know exactly how much it's going to be a little dependent upon you know what the current further reductions you know and how they impact the budget and what it'll take to bring those back and potentially add to the routes so not the best of news there but anyway so anything you wanted to add on that or know about that topic or concerns about that alright so next time in our agenda is charter transition and I think we kind of in some ways covered a little bit of that with our last conversation about the policy because it's sort of you know kind of covering that I didn't know if you had anything else you wanted to share with us that has come up or that you want to just to know that Monday the bylaw review committee will be here with not to show you their work but to show you how they're approaching their work and sort of looking at a broader context of how everything fits together and how it's going to be presented to the public we're really fortunate to have this committee of people who are former town administrator former town council who Mr. Richie who does this for a living and just highly organized so I think you'll be pleased with their approach give them feedback if you think they're going the wrong we'll offer Mr. Bachmann is going to be annoyed with me and I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway so we talked about last time the events of the potential events of December 2nd and being held in the afternoon and we talked about all the various conflicts and holidays starting et cetera et cetera and I know that strangely enough just voting for a charter did not mean that we suddenly had additional staff members who had time to plan all these things I wondered if we'd made any progress or had in terms of anything we could report to people or have people start thinking about saving the date associated with that if we know where we might do it yet or if any of our partners have offered us their spaces not yet but we need to do it soon so people know I get it because that brings us back to the point of in this beautiful tiny point type which I really appreciate that we use it all on the page because it really is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven meetings it's actually five realistically that we have left because I didn't even count December 3rd one of those is the four board that's right exactly that's the 18th yes so should we make a note that where it says Monday December 3rd then in fact that might be Sunday December 2nd or Saturday because we can't do it after we swear people so that won't really quite work well but if we need to Sunday afternoon is less of an issue I'm sorry if we are going to actually inaugurate people on the 2nd as we talked about and some rather glorious plans that we were just theorizing about it's kind of like our transition document sounds like a good thing it's sort of a fabulous term that we then we obviously if that happens on the 2nd because it has to happen before noon on the 3rd then if we do need to be planning on Saturday or 10 minutes before the inauguration meeting we should just sooner rather than later because it's odd timing could we say that maybe at our next meeting it will be Monday that we'll have an update on this issue that satisfies I know you want it now but no, I realized there's just so many hours in the day if we run into somebody from a particular institution and say so when are you giving us that space we could do that, we could help no, I don't think you want us to help that way more will be revealed soon so we will definitely discuss that so is there anything else anyone wanted to offer or had relative to the charter transition I have a subject that's close to it but one of the things we wanted to do before we concluded our life as a select board was to approve all of the minutes that have accumulated and our staff did produce drafts and sent them to me I did one of them and I said I am going to go into a process where I am committing to do one a day to get them done then I got very sick day after I said that so as we know I was then literally out of commission to do anything for a period of almost a week I think that my request to all of you is that we actually change the process and divide up the minutes amongst ourselves so that each of us take responsibility for two or three sets and because the purpose of going through it is to review the minutes and as they are drafted and hit upon the obvious errors or corrections that should be recommended and then get them back to the committee I mean it's not the final review it's never been taken to be the final review but it sort of gets rid of some of the things that like appearances of who is before the board and things like that so I think that my request at this point has to be as a practical matter if we are serious about the minutes before transition that we need to do something other than doing it and I apologize for that but I just think it's realistic I'm certainly you know I think that's a fine idea and if you are I don't know how many sets that you have that have accumulated certainly I think doling them out is fine so the process is we get a draft I review the draft we send it to to the clerk who then reviews it and sends them back we format them up if there's any changes about half a dozen that are ready to go to the clerk which I've held off on sending but if you want me to divide those up that's certainly doable if people are wanting to take that task on there was a whole group of them I think there was maybe 10 or so sets that you had previously sent to me you may have those in your we have a list we'll look at the list and see what's up yeah no I have them all accumulated in one point in my hard drive which doesn't do any good if they're not getting looked at reviewed that makes sense and of course because it's my assumption that if we don't get it done which of course is not an option but if we didn't get it done they would just become the minutes without us having approved them and that's just the way it would be just like right now if somebody asked for them which of course no one will and but in the meantime any that you assign to me I have to have a hard copy I can't do it electronically I have to print something out for me because my brain just doesn't work that way and so if you want to stick them in my yellow folder right for Monday night or put them in my packet for Monday that'd be fine but unfortunately I don't have a good enough printer and I can't do it alone does anybody have any favorite years? let's randomize it well we should probably keep you know it should be a meeting you were actually the person wasn't at that one like every other right you should probably cluster them I can go over the list with Ms. Mills tomorrow and if they're not easily findable elsewhere they're easily findable by me now and they're probably easily findable here too there's some I think what we did is we have a list on what's outstanding what's in my court and which ones have been approved already and which ones have been posted on the website so we sort of have these different check marks along the way for each set of minutes so we'll end up with something like this on our agenda with minutes hopefully we'll do a few every week but they're fair number outstanding and we're building some every night right right so I think we'll definitely tackle that by a divide and conquer method if we can so I believe now what's left here is before we get into town management reports like board member reports is the consent calendar under section 7 so if anyone has any particular item within the consent calendar they want pulled out or if they want to offer a motion thing or yes so I just talk fast and get it over with but seven hour receptions I'm not grasping why they suddenly need to start running seven hour receptions at the fine arts center because to me that sounds like what has traditionally been a beverage or two before you go into the show beverage or two when you have the pre-meeting with the artist then you're going to have an after meeting with the artist and you're keeping people out drinking at midnight after a show I'm willing to sign off on these but I'm starting to get a little uncomfortable with that level of hours so I think the university is trying to get ahead of the curve because these are all for 2019 and they don't I'm guessing they don't know the exact hours because they just know they have the date and they're putting this bracket of windows from 5 to midnight it could be 5, it could be 8 we don't know sure so let's just put a bracket on it could the minutes reflect that somehow that's what we're working under that assumption that it's not that we're encouraging the future license commission to give out six hour special licenses once or twice a week every week in the spring that would just make me feel better that we're not setting a precedent but we are trying to help them in terms of realistically getting their scheduling done and I think that we've actually asked them to expedite all the requests to us just to get as many of the licensing done as early as possible just to not have to whatever the license commission is doing they're not struggling with this so yeah but if we could just have our minutes reflect something along those lines that we assume it's a window but not that they're actually serving alcohol for seven hours straight those events that just seems unlikely perhaps not perhaps untoward something along those lines but were there any particular ones that anyone wanted to pull out for special attention and if not then a motion relative to the consent calendar would be perhaps advisable in the direction and I appreciate the effort staff went to to make it clear that it was to midnight time that was difficult this is so much work to get all these details I was thinking about doing something like I moved to approve the consent calendar from the September 12, 2018 as presented with the understanding that the hours as listed are preliminary and tentative because actually preliminary and tentative would probably be sufficient unless you want to add something more for a reason whatever makes it clear that we really would not be fond of the idea of seven hours at a stretch week after week like that not that they have to come back so I'm not expecting them to come back and say no this one's four to six and this one's five to eight and as Mr. Backelet referenced but whatever makes that clear to everybody is fine with me. Do you want to add some more Mr. Stemberg? Then we could add something to the effect that again we have to approve the consent calendar from September 12, 2018 agenda as presented with the understanding that the hours as listed are preliminary and tentative and the actual hours will be less than listed. Yes. The Perenns watch the tape. Is there further discussion? Hearing none all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Comments unanimous. So I believe that takes us to the town manager report. Thank you Mr. Chair. The first thing is one note that the today the UMass Board of Trustees committee on administration and finance met and voted to move forward on they received a presentation on the request for interest that the university issued back in June of 2017 at that point the university reviewed about 10 responses to that most of the responses were of the residential in nature and the university has reviewed them and has gone to the trustees to get permission or guidance to move forward on the next step which would be to issue an RFP request for proposals for two particular projects. One is is to replace the North Village apartments expected it would be an expected phase in at the existing location this has been noted to us that this is a high priority for the university the housing up there is needs serious intervention and they would look for a developer who would come in and work on North Village apartments. The second is undergraduate housing the university has completed a housing demand analysis which identified a need for up to a thousand additional beds mainly studio one and two bedroom apartment style units they voted today to move down this path using utilizing the public-private partnership method for financing this the university will do an additional analysis and expects to have responses to the RFP by January of 2019 the campus master plan the U3 report and the demand study all point to potential development in the southern part of campus along Mass Ave and is probably obvious to everybody that this is the big parking lots where the visitor center is and that's the parcel that everybody by points to it's where undergraduate students have said they prefer to be living near campus at that location it's an area that has been under utilized by the university and so this is where they would conceptually look to put a thousand units of student housing they alerted us this meeting to us the fact that this meeting was taking place earlier this week and they met this afternoon and voted it and so that's all the information I have there are no proposals for actual housing heights, distances anything like that what they hope to do is to say we need a thousand beds in this unit in this area a thousand give or take there's some graduate student housing the Lincoln apartments they may incorporate in they may not we expressed our concern to them that we know and hope that when they do the RFP that they take into account the neighborhood that is always impacted by development in this area and also the impact on downtown businesses depending on what they include in the RFP they want to include commercial aspects or not so there's I think there's always been interested in having the university step up and take some more responsibility for housing students they feel there's a demand the other thing I think they feel is this gives them some ability swing space maybe to renovate some of their other housing units it gives them the capacity to as people choose other dormitory type buildings they can then go into another dormitory and build on that so that's the basic information I have on that it's important information it's a big step forward the fact that the trustees are supporting it it's in line with what they have done at UMass Boston and UMass Dartmouth and I think they're following the same path here so if we could since we knew this was going to be a big exciting thing right and we've been waiting since a year ago to hear more about it just in terms of some of the things that we've talked about before associated with that I really appreciate you mentioning both the downtown and neighborhood because the neighbors have talked about that at the various other meetings we've had at UTAC and different other meetings and how that might impact them and so I appreciate you bringing that to UMass this attention again and then in terms of public-private partnership you know we've talked about this for decades in terms of being able to actually do this and the idea would be under a public-private partnership that we would receive tax revenue from the or I mean what's the basic when we tell people what this means now that it seems like it could actually happen because it's happened at UMass Boston and UMass Dartmouth what does it mean to us other than more beds will be created it's not the same as when they built the North Apartments for example which was just an expansion of housing on campus I think we may have different opinions about what it does for revenue and I think that's something that we would need to work out in it we believe of its private enterprise doing something on campus that it should be taxable but I think they we will have to have that conversation with them. Thank you because then it's not there's not a bright line apparently we believe there is but they may not agree but there's a bright line. They have a different bright line. There may be bright lines but in different places. Any other questions relative to that? Well I was just going to add sort of not up to speed but my days on the Board of Assessors I know that just the fact of it being on campus property by itself is not the determinant so I'm sure those conversations will happen back and forth of all of that it's clearly important to us to have it in our favor meaning more revenue but just the fact of the land isn't by itself my understanding of the determinant but if Mr. Burgess were still here I'd put him on the spot. And then when they said they're looking for responses to the next stage and their analysis of January 2019 so if in theory they get a good response I believe you said January 2019 for response to RFP really just a few months away and so when people respond what was the impression the trustees were left with in terms of so therefore that means that we might have a thousand new beds by 2020 or 2022. So I'm actually from my nose I'm not clear whether the RFP goes out by January 2019 or if it's so I just need to clarify that but I would say that of the responses that they received to the RFI the bulk of them were for residential. They put out a lot of different things that they were searching for hotel kinds of things they put in the RFI but most of the interest was on residential and that's what they responded to. That's where the market was. But did they give the trustees any impression today of and then if we continue to get good responses on residential we would then the idea would be that the borrowing would happen in 2022 or 2020 or 2050. Do we have any idea? They met at 130 this afternoon and they didn't report. I just said just text me when the meeting ends and if they voted yes or no so it's unknown and that's okay. That's different than it's going to be a year from now. I think there's a lot of planning because it's just a concept at this point saying we want to put housing here so there's going to be a public process. We want them to have it engaged with us in a very public process and we've asked for that and they've heard us I think. So other things. This weekend Electrify Amherst is having their event which is that to paint some utility boxes downtown so on Saturday all day you can go and watch people paint utility boxes. So the marijuana review town review team I don't know remember the name we settled on had its first meeting today to sort of scope out how it wants to move forward in terms of the recreational marijuana recommendations that it's going to make and Kruger represented the board at that meeting and it was a pretty efficient meeting and got some good things laid out. The meeting is scheduled for recreational marijuana one on September 26th at 6 p.m. at the Hangar and one on October 1 I don't know at the time probably 6 location to be determined for two recreational marijuana producers who have to have their required public outreach meeting before they meet with the town review committee. I don't know how many things coming up. The just let you know we've received bids for our property and casualty insurance so we're reviewing those bids in hopes that we'll be saving the town in schools money. This Friday the first responders pick picnic so our DPW police and fire along with University and Hadley first responders in North Amherst and sponsored by the chamber and a number of other sponsors as well which we really appreciate and it's their way of saying thanks to all the people who are putting in extra effort and are the first ones on the scene of any kind of natural or person made disaster. The bid block party is a week from tomorrow night September 20th. I'm not sure if I reported this last time but they on the day of the meeting last week they came in and basically said there's no expectation to provide relief from the moratorium for the foreseeable future and they're going to be starting to add campaign saying there's nothing we can do, we need our pipeline or else we can't expand our supply and so there's clarity on that but they don't have a backup plan so that was pretty disappointing. The going to have a cup of Joe with the police chief at share coffee this Friday September 14th from 7.30 to 9.00 a.m. and that's pretty much it for my report if you have any questions. Question about the community outreach meetings as we've known before those are just something the companies are required to hold and we find out about them because up until having the marijuana review team we they're required to meet certain state requirements but they haven't been particularly effective at communicating with the town that they're doing them and I know that was one of the things that was talked about in the guidelines for the marijuana review team and so are we now able to put a little influence on them to get that information out more to our community since we have a wonderful town calendar for example that they could themselves submit to right so it's not just that a staff member has to do it they could submit just like so many organizations due to community events because it's not a posted meeting but it's just one more thing the way that people would see it because we all know people don't read legal notices so. Right and I think you know there is some influence the economic development director who is our lead on this has been advising them to not do it on Friday at 5 30 before a three day holiday weekend that that's exactly at a location that nobody really knows how to get to even though it's a public space to heaven places where people know put it at we felt like I think the committee felt like six o'clock generally was a decent time because it could be it would be after work but if business people were around they were still here if you were going to attend your board meeting so and trying to do it on a day of the week that was accessible to people again allowing staff to make that extra effort so that more community knows about it. Yeah. Any other questions for the manager if not we're on to select board member reports and I gave mine earlier relative to PBTA that was the main thing I had as far as news and notes have some things to offer relative to their liaison work or other well mr. Bachman reported on the marijuana proposal review group whatever it's named and we had about 40 minutes today to get going and mr. Kravitz has distributed the proposals and members will go to as many of those outreach required outreach meetings as possible and if we can't we'll get that information from mr. Kravitz and also the applicants have to report on those meetings so it was good and the next task is to read the proposals and work together on some questions because each applicant will also have an interview with that group and then we'll get to the recommendations we made to the manager so we're a pretty fast timeline of being done by early October and remember if we picked an actual date but intent is to get this done there were six proposals to look at and so that was good to get going kind of a defined chunk of work my other update member report is the that this morning they hadn't met during the month of August this breast drip planning director came and presented the three concept plans for the North Common that we talked about and discussed last time in a somewhat similar select board there was a variety of opinion in that group not one consensus opinion and I think some of what was said would be communicated back the design firm saying take this from that one take this from this other one you know nobody liked X so I think some of it was similar to what was said here but they did make that stop or that was it was presented to the working group and they were appreciative of that and the other update is that there are I think four proposals to come in for the parking consultant that will be helping to update the parking data study and make other recommendations on how to better manage our parking system and there will be three staff members and two members of the downtown parking working group and that will be Christine our chair Catherine Porter will be the two representatives from downtown parking work group sitting with staff to review proposals and make a selection so that can get underway as well so I think that's all I mean definitely lots of meeting notices and scheduling coming in tomorrow the municipal strategies subcommittee is meeting first of the season this community coalition is scheduled to meet next week on Yom Kippur so a bit of everything starting and sort of feel the pace of September right you didn't have anything else besides minutes from that side of the table I've reported on mine did you have I was just going to mention that I appreciated the firefighters including the community in the 9-11 ceremony on Tuesday they're holding that and welcoming the public to it it's a small and brief ceremony but it's always very meaningful to the people who attend so thanks for sharing with us we could have some folks there to attend I couldn't make it but I know a couple of you did I have a completely couple things just to follow up on another time trivia be if we are I doubt that we are up this year but hey if people want to have a rah rah talk board team that's on October 25th Thursday the 25th that morning is the chamber legislative breakfast which I many of us frequently attend but in terms of a group thing we had the group thing sometimes we've done the trivia base so people are thinking about that that's the date but the other group thing we do do and that the town takes care of for us is the chamber A plus awards so we'll ask us that's being arranged because that first week of October is coming right up on us so Miss Brewer when you said maybe we'll do a swan song team does that include you because sometimes you get us all psyched up but you don't want to be on it I did it for years my role became cheerleader so if you would be willing to be on it I would consider it but don't get us all psyched up because they're going to start sending us emails pretty regularly till we say now I think we could have some great costumes for what does an outgoing go-to-select word passed yes I'm sure we could be quite inventive so I think however for this evening that we've gotten through our agenda unless there's other member reports so if there's nothing else I'd like to entertain a motion to adjourn move to adjourn is there a second all those in favor please say aye and we're adjourned at 9 29 which seems so much later thank you Amherst media