 I'm going to begin the meeting, which is our regular Town Council meeting. It's our third meeting tonight using the same Zoom. Let me just begin by saying under Governor Baker's March 12th, order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, General Law C, Chapter 30A paragraph 20, allows us to hold this virtual Town Council meeting. I'm going to call on each of the Councillors and make sure again that you can hear me or still hear me, and we can still hear you, and then we're going to call the meeting to order and review the order of the agenda. Okay. So we're going to start with Chalene Balmille. President. Elizabeth Brewer. Oops. President, I'm having a little trouble with my internet connection so I keep turning off my camera. Okay. Patty Angelus. Here, President. Darcy DuMont. President. Lynn Grease-Murray is present. Mandy Jo Hennikey. Present. Darcy Pam. Present. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. Steve Schreiber. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. And Sarah Schwartz. Present. All 13 of us are here and can be heard and we can hear you. So we will begin with the announcements and Serge, you're just going to show them on the screen. I'm not going to go through them except to add two small items. One is to congratulate Jack Jemsik, who is a member of the planning board. He has been elected to the executive committee of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission. And this is the first time we've had somebody on that executive committee in a long time. So thank you for taking that on. We also want to urge you to check the town website for the Juneteenth celebration, which is this Friday, July 19th. And we're going to move on then and see if we have any public comment at this time. So if you would like to make a public comment, please raise your hand. And we'll try to bring you into the room and again, but we have a little difficulty doing this in the last part of this meeting. Is there any public comment at this time? OK, seeing none. Then let me just review the order of the agenda, because what we've tried to do is have those items that require outside our staff to be with us in the beginning of the meeting so we don't tie up their entire meeting. So our first presentation is actually going to be 7C, which is the water and sewer rates. This then appears on the consent agenda, where we will just vote to refer it to the finance committee. But rather than just refer, we wanted to make sure there was a brief presentation. And I know that we have the superintendent of Public Works and the assistant superintendent of Public Works with us tonight. After we get done with that, we are going on to the consent agenda. And then after that, the proclamations. And then rather than do the rest of the presentations now because they are all really internal to the council, although certainly the public is more than welcome to watch, we are going to do the action items and literally just go straight down the list. Then we'll come back to the presentations, which include the town manager evaluation, the zoning bylaw amendment and the policing discussion in Amherst, and then appointments and the rest of the agenda. So if we can begin by having Guilford Maureen and Amy Rusek and the town manager and also the slides that pertain to the water and sewer rates. Lynn, there's a hand up in the audience. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't hold on. I don't want to start if we have a public comment. Yes, could you please identify your one. Yeah, yeah. This is Amy Zuckerman. The page went blank. So I just want to talk briefly about, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you, Amy. Okay, I'm hearing myself. Here's what happened. Just so you know, the place was blank, I could see you. I got something pretty exciting of having this town, which I'm working with a number of businesses, Targeted Town Council. We'll have your inbox about promoting many authors in our books and businesses to the actual royal family. These include Emily Dickinson, Evercarl, Book, My Books, Jane Yolen, et cetera, because right now the royal children are learning all about literature and they're learning all about foreign languages. And I think it's about Tom that this town joins them and have our books in this town promoted as they're on Zoom all the time. Also, I'm sorry, oh, Equal is, I sent you this information by email in the town council today. So somebody just asked if we want something positive in these our books. So we get wonderful literary figures, including weekly categories and skateboarding. Could you hear me? We could and we did hear your email. Okay, there's another one more very positive thing is that I'm working with developers on what's called the art and deed remediation. That's 74 acres to both the biosciences and much to the right of that. But one thing, can we please try to respond to the end of the closed digital studio? Sorry, this is terrible. Amy, you're creating a very serious echo. I know, what's happening? Let me turn my phone off. If you're now in the room, if you'd like to unmute, you have about another minute, please. I don't know what the connection problem is, but Amy, what we're going to do is encourage that you, we know we did receive several emails from you today and they did go to all the council. Are there any other attendees that would like to make comment at this time? Okay, then I'm going to go back to our presentation and this is on the water and sewer rates. So Serge, we're going to go ahead. Can you make the picture bigger? No. Now you can see me. I appear to be talking and I shut this off. There was a problem with technical problems that we discussed later. Yes. So Amy, we did this on with the rest of our meeting. I'm going to turn it on. There was a real serious problem with technical. I'm turning you off. Good night, we'll talk later. Okay? Thank you. Yes. Is this better, Lynn, or do you want me to try to zoom? What we're seeing on the screen is all of rounding things around the presentation. And... Okay, let me see if I can hide that. This is just all the documents that will be coming up. So I'm just going to see if I can open this separately. Is that better? That's better. Yes. Perfect. So Paul, would you like to introduce this? Yeah, so thank you, thank you, Lynn. Every year we do a meeting to talk about water and sewer rates. The council is the board of water commissioners and board of sewer commissioners. And it's your responsibility to set the water and sewer rates. And this is what we're doing today. And this is your first look at it, basically. I think typically what happens is this will get referred to the finance committee and then come back to you in two weeks so people have a chance to digest it. These are water and sewer rates that will be implemented on July 1st. And I just want to note, the way we'll work this is that Sean will go through a few slides and then Guilford Maureen, who is the superintendent of public works and Amy Rusecki, who is the assistant superintendent of public works are both here to answer any kinds of questions that you may have. But before we start this year, we'll be seeing a significant percentage increase in water and sewer rates. But I do want to note that our water and sewer rates are some of the lowest in the area. And we're about $400 a year below the state average. So we have very competitive water and sewer rates and we'll go through what, but they will need to be increased this year for a number of reasons. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Sean if you're ready for that. Yep, can everyone hear me? Yes. So, and the other thing I'll just note is that the water and sewer rate conversation is heavily entwined with the enterprise funds as we look at those going forward. So there'll be a lot more conversation on enterprise funds as we dig into the budget. And Sean, before you start, I do want to confirm that there will be a vote later as part of the consent agenda to refer this to the finance committee. Yep. Thank you. Sir, can you go to the next slide please? So, yeah, that's perfect. So the proposed FY21 rates. So for FY21, the water is being proposed to go to 420 per hundred cubic feet, which is an increase of 30 cents from FY20 or 7.7%. And the sewer rate is proposed to be 460 per hundred cubic feet and that's an increase of 60 cents from FY20 or 15%. And as Paul noted, their size will increases, but we're going to go through the financials of the enterprise funds in a second and you'll see a couple of the reasons why. This chart just shows the history of our water and sewer rates. The solid lines are actual or what was budget for FY20. And the dotted is sort of the trend going forward of what's needed at the pace of the, of what's needed for the enterprise funds going forward. Next slide, Serge. So there's really three, maybe a couple other ones, but there's three main causes for why the rate is going up. In general, we've seen water consumption decreasing approximately 2% per year over the past several years. We have really good data on consumption that we can look back quite a ways and look at trends. And so over the last four or five years, we've seen it going down about 2% a year. And in general, that's not a bad thing as we use less water, but it does mean that the enterprise fund can't bill as much. And so there's lower revenues going into the enterprise fund. And one thing about enterprise funds is they have a lot of fixed costs, infrastructure costs and things of that nature. And so they can't flex as easily as the, as you might want them to. The second piece is both of the enterprise funds, the water and sewer fund. They both have significant capital improvements coming up, which in order to meet the debt payments, the rates will have to go up to maintain the current level of services and meet those debt payments in the future. Water has a centennial plant, which is FY22, estimated at about $11 million. And that's factored into the future rates. And sewer has the gravity belt thickener and the reuse water. And FY22, which the sum of those two projects is 7.3 million. And then the third one that really caused sort of a second look at our rates and really was unpredictable is the COVID-19 and the closure of the colleges and university. We've seen a pretty steep drop off in our consumption, not so much in the rest of town, but particularly at the college, college and university meters. And so that's caused our consumption coming a lot lower for FY20, which means we're gonna most likely see a revenue gap in FY20 that we're gonna have to make up. And then depending on what happens in FY21 in the fall with the colleges, that issue could roll over into the fall. And as I mentioned, the enterprise funds, we'll discuss those in more detail when we talk about the FY21 budget. Our next slide, Serge. So this is a comparison of our rates to our neighbors and to the state average. So it's based on 120, I think 100 cubic feet per year usage. And so it's taking the new rate multiplied by 120. And so for water, it's $504 per year. And for sewer, it's $552 per year from total of $1,056. And you can see how that compares to the state median, the state average, and then many of our neighbors nearby. And I think that's it. Serge, can you go to the left side? Yep. And then we're happy to answer any questions that you may have. You're muted, Lynn. This is an opportunity for counselors to ask questions. Remembering that this will be coming to the finance committee actually starting tomorrow. Kathy Shane, you have your hand up. I am on finance. So I know I get to ask more questions tomorrow. So I just, when I'm assuming when you come to finance, you'll be able to talk to us about what actually are the operating cost personnel. And I have last year's budget and the extent to which those are fixed when water consumption goes down, as opposed to we can say, looking forward if we're gonna have much lower use, is it less people time? I realize the machines may still, or do we turn off a machine? So it's a question of how fixed are the overhead costs? And we had a, so that's just a comment, but also a question for tomorrow. The second is how much of the rate increase that's being proposed is looking forward to the centennial plant, because we were told a year ago that you start to build in some of the anticipated costs, the debt service costs, so that we don't get rate shock. Has any of that been built into it is my question. And then my third, and I know it isn't for the coming year, we had a briefing on, particularly on water rates, but that we have an option as a town to talk about setting two tiered water rates, one for really large consumers, the big colleges or universities, versus the residential rate, and we could think about doing that. When would be the time we should have that discussion if we wanted to do it, not this coming year, but a year from now? Cause I think we said the council will get you some ideas and then Guilford could give us estimates on what that does to the rate structure. So those are the three on how much is fixed, how much of centennial is built, if anything is built in, and I'm just focused on water right now. So the, how much is fixed? Yeah, tomorrow when we meet, we'll get into much more detail about the expenditures, both the operating expenditures, the capital expenditures that are proposed, and then also the debt payments. So we will dive into the spreadsheets that support the overall enterprise fund. And in terms of the rates, so what I could tell, and Guilford can weigh in on this as well, it did appear as even before COVID-19 happened, the rates were starting to ramp up to where they need to be for when that debt does come online. So it did appear that we were making incremental steps starting this coming year FY 21 to get to where they need to be. But Guilford, you may wanna add to the nature of some of your costs in the water fund. I'm going to suggest at this time, unless people need the charts that we take the charts down search so we can see each other. Thank you. I believe we were gonna ask whether you had other comments on the water and sewer. So on the water and sewer, the rates we were building in some, we were building in additional costs for both the projects in wastewater and the projects in the water department, which is Centennial. The bigger increases are pretty much based on trying to account for the 2% loss of water we've been seeing over the last three years. And just the fact that we had this problem with the COVID and the shutdown of the universities. So the bigger increases is kind of a response to those issues and trying to keep the enterprise systems profitable. You will see, if you look in the charts of what we're spending, we actually did do, the budgets have been reduced by about two to 4%, two in water and about 4%, I think in wastewater, I might have it a little backwards. And those are numbers we took out because even though we have many requirements, which many requirements right now aren't very much affected by the changes in the water production or the wastewater treatment. What is being affected though is because we have one plant offline. We've been taking, we took out some of the electricity costs for that plant, some of the operating costs for that plant because we aren't gonna need it. So we reduced some of that cost or reduced a couple other costs that are basically based on how much water you produce, not how much staffing or how much regulatory compliance you have to meet right now. Alyssa, you have your hand up. Yes, thank you. Guilford can probably predict what I'm going to say. So there's a slide in there that talks about capital improvements coming up with Centennial and Gravity Belt, Thickener and Reuse Water. But we keep hearing about our neighboring communities in particular, Northampton, having stormwater management investments that they're having to make. And I wonder if we can find out where we are with that and why that's not listed as one of the upcoming capital expenses on that slide. So the reason we're not listed is we've just joined the stormwater program. We're in our second year right now. Northampton's already been through one cycle of the permit. We're just starting out in the permit cycle. We have a lot more leeway to get our house in order and make some decisions about what projects we want to do and about how we want to fund it. So when you hear other communities talk about what they're doing for stormwater, we're five to six years behind them because our permit wasn't given to us until two years ago. So that's why those aren't listed in the budget right now. They are coming. Mandy, Joe. Thank you. Mandy, Joe Hannake. I think this has been answered, but I just want to make sure I'm clear on this. The rates that are being proposed have accounted for the decrease in use that we expect because of de-densification of the higher ed institutions. That's correct. The rates are actually pretty conservative for that. If the university's come back stronger, university and colleges all come back stronger. It would be very, we'd be better off, but the rates do take into account that they're not coming back 100%. Thank you. Are there other questions from the council at this time? Yes, Dorothy. Okay. I just want to backtrack a little bit. And so we have not been part of a stormwater management, but I'm sure we've had stormwater and you've managed it. But so there's some new group or some new grant system. I don't really think I know anything about this. I sounds interesting, but what did we do before? Why did we join a new group? And how is it going to be different? In the past, we took care of stormwater issues as they came up. And basically it was just fixing pipes. What's happened is the federal government says you now must look at water quality in your pipes, not just your pipes. Okay. So the federal government has decided we should join this because the federal government thought it'd be a great thing for us to come do. It's a nice party we should come to. So that's what's going on. So the bigger issue that's going to come up is not just fixing infrastructure or pipes, it's going to be how to improve water quality and make things better for the animals and for the people who use and live in the water. Are there any other questions from the council at this time? Okay. I just want to remind you that this will be on the consent agenda. And we will not have another presentation later. So Darcy, Darcy, you need to unmute. Yes. Sorry, I'm sorry, I just wanted to mention that the municipal vulnerability preparedness grant is presumably going to be providing funding for stormwater system improvements at some point after they're identified as needs. Do you see that as in the plans, Guilford? The goal is, is once we get a definitive plan on what we're going to need to do and where we want to go first with our stormwater plan, we will be applying for just about every grant that we can find. There's several, the Colvert replacement grant is also another very good grant we can use to improve stormwater quality. And then some other, there's some other ones in that same realm that we would use as well. So there's actually several grants out there that can be used for this as well. Are there any other questions of the council? I just want to remind attendees that we aren't having public comment on each of these, but if you would like to make public comment, the finance committee of the council is meeting tomorrow at 2.30 and the council itself will be taking this back up again on June 29th at our regular meeting. Are there any other questions from the council? Okay, then we are going to go on to the consent agenda. I want to just take a little time going through the consent agenda and making sure that if there are counselors who would like items to remove, remove they let me know, but let me go through it completely to begin with. So the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy to remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting, ask that it be removed when the president lists the consent agenda items. The request to remove an item from the consent agenda does not require a second. So the motion for the consent agenda is to move the following items and the printed motions there under and approve these items as a single unit. The first one is the adoption of the pollinator protection resolution. The second is the suspension of town council rules and procedures, rule 8.4 for the following agenda items. 8C and all this does is allow us to act on them tonight. It does not mean we've approved them. Okay, 8E is the approval of community preservation act committee recommendations. 8F is the extension of the deadline to adopt FY21 budget in accordance with charter section 5.9. And 8G is to authorize the president to sign a letter to the zoning board of appeals regarding Valley CDC project at 132 Northampton Road. 8B is referral of the water and sewer rates to the finance committee. 8C is referral of capital improvement program to the finance committee. 8E is approval of community preservation act committee recommendations. 8F is the extension of deadline to adopt FY21 budgets in accordance with chapter section, charter section 5.9. 8G is the authorization of the president to actually sign the letter. In that case, that would be the approval of the letter. And then there is 11A to D, which is the approval of minutes. I see three hands. Mandy Jo, please tell me which item you are speaking to. I would like to remove item 8G, the authorization of the president to sign the letter to the ZBA. To be clear, I'm not asking to remove the suspension of the rules for that authorization, but the actual authorization. Thank you. Is there anything else? Not that I'm asking to remove, no. Yeah, Darcy. I'm asking to remove the two references to 8E, the suspension of the town rules of procedure rule 8.4 and the later approval of community preservation act recommendation. So there's two of them. I'm asking that we remove the one where we suspend the rules under 8.4 and also the approval of the actual recommendations, 8E. Yes. Rector. Okay. Pat DeAngelis. Pat, you've taken your next one. Yes, yes, yes. Pat, you're... Yeah, I think I finally unmuted. Yes, you did. Both of those things, one of them I wanted to have removed and Mandy Jo took care of that. I have a question on the capital, the CPA committee recommendations. Does it include the money for the library? No, it does not. Okay, then I, okay, fine, thank you. But it's being removed anyway from the consent agenda. Yes, but I just still wanted the answer to that question. Thank you. Certainly. All right. So I'm going to make a motion and then look for a second. I move to move the following items and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit. 6A, the adoption of the pollinator protection resolution. The next item is the suspension of town council rules of procedure, rule 8.4 for the following agenda items. Please note, we are skipping 8E. We are going to 8F, the extension of deadline to adopt FY21 budget in accordance with charter section 5.9. And 8G is the authorization of the president to sign a letter to zoning board of appeals regarding Valley CDC project at 132 North Hampton Road. Again, that only allows you to act tonight. It does not approve the letter. 8B is referral of water and sewer rates to the finance committee. 8C has an improvement program to finance committee. 8E is approval of community preservation. Oh, I'm sorry, we're taking 8E off. 8F is the extension of deadlines to adopt FY21 budget in accordance with charter section 5.9. And 11A to D is the approval of minutes and the meetings particularly that those refer to are May 4, May 18, May 1 and June 8th. Is there a second? Second, Nandy. Nandy, Joe, seconds that. Is there any further question or discussion? Hearing none, then we will move to roll call vote. And I will begin with Alyssa Brewer. Aye. Pat DeAngelis. Aye. Darcy DeMont. Aye. Reese Muir is aye. Hanneke. Aye. Pam. Aye. Kevin Ross. Aye. George Ryan. Aye. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Aye. Andy Steinberg. Aye. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. Shalini Ball-Mill. Yes. Okay. Then thank you for that. So we are going on to we actually have done the resolution and we want to thank John Root for bringing this to us. We want to thank the co-sponsor who's Darcy. And I do want to mention, I should have said this earlier that CRC did review it and stated that it was ready for our review. Okay, we're going to skip over the other presentations and we're moving to the action items. The first one is the temporary zoning amendment, article 14. And this is the article that was brought to us by the town manager and his staff. It has been reviewed by a number of different bodies. TSO reviewed it for the purposes of looking at the public way. And then CRC reviewed it and also reviewed it in a joint hearing with the planning board. And then it is coming back to us as a council. And there are several items related to this. And I'm going to be calling on Mandy Jo and George as we go through and eventually hopefully a motion. So the first is the emergency preamble charter section 210B. Do you want me to start with that, Lynn? Please do. Okay, so there's a preamble that if we want to adopt a measure under the emergency procedures and this generally under charter section 2.10B relates to bylaw amendments because bylaws under the charter are required to be read twice. And charter section 210B says if you want to adopt it as an emergency measure you can forgo two readings of a bylaw and do so and adopt it and have it also effective immediately or in less than 14 days if you adopt a preamble stating the emergency. And it needs to declare and define the emergency and it has to be separately voted on by seven members with a passage of seven counselors. So there is that motion I will read at some point when we're ready to read it but I took the language pretty much from the preamble of the temporary zoning bylaw itself. And also then added the charter sections and why we need it as an emergency because delaying this action would not serve the purpose of what we're trying to do with the zoning bylaw. Okay, are there questions regarding the first part of this? And let me just mention the first part of this which is as Mandy Joe explained the exception with the charter requires a majority vote of council. Are there questions? Okay, then Mandy Joe, do you want to please make the motion? There's the answer. I'm sorry. Darcy has her hand up. Oh Darcy, I'm sorry, go ahead. I guess I'm just sort of surprised to see this emergency preamble show up at this point in the process. And although I do see the major part of this as an emergency, I don't see the part of it about opening new businesses as an emergency. So I'll probably vote against it because of that. Just because it doesn't strike me that we should use emergency as a cover for opening new businesses. Kathy Shane, you have your hand up. It's more of a comment because I asked a clarifying question earlier today that voting this is just to be able to declare this under emergency rules. When we turn to voting on the actual proposed zoning bylaw change, we will be back to the regular two thirds vote. So it's a separate consideration. So I had asked that and Mandy had confirmed that because I was trying to read it to understand what the implications were so that I'm correct. Yeah. Yes, you are. Are there other questions or comments from the council? Shallowney? Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to address the concern why this opening of new businesses is concerned is considered an emergency. And we had a robust discussion about this several times. And what we're hearing from the local businesses, from the business improvement district, the chamber is that many businesses are not gonna be able to reopen. And they're gonna be a lot of empty places downtown. So what we want to do is make it easy for maybe other businesses, pop-up stores, other opportunities for people to fill in those spaces. Or we're gonna be left with a lot of empty spaces. And the other thing is that the neighboring towns are providing similar provisions to businesses. So we will be then losing some of the new businesses that might want to open in Amherst and go off to the other towns because we're not providing the same ease in opening. And of course, we've already vetted who this is gonna apply to and how it's gonna be vetted by the local town staff and how the experience is gonna be used in making sure that the businesses are still... I don't know how to say this. They're still complying with what is necessary. So even though we're expediting it, it doesn't mean we're letting them do whatever they want. It's just that we are not gonna take 70 days to do it. And we're gonna rely on the staff and the experience which they have confirmed they have enough of and we know to make sure that they're doing this in an expeditious manner. Marcy, you have your hand up. Yes, I understand the arguments for doing it, but I also feel that it's giving away too much of the oversight that we normally have done to use an emergency to bring in new people, new business, perhaps not known. You could have an occurrence as we did with, I forget the name of the bar that went crazy, Porta. And I think we discussed this before and we said, could there be some review or analysis after the fact? I mean, I can understand wanting to get things going and opening, but when several of us asked for the ability to examine and re-examine maybe change some conditions, I don't think that was accepted. So I know generally it's not good to buy a pig in a poke. So that's kind of why I'm having a little problem with this. Are there any other comments from the council? All right, then I'm looking for a motion. Mindy Jo? I'll make the emergency preamble motion. So motion, whereas the requirements of charter section 210A regarding bylaws, including 14 day publication on the town bulletin board, readings at two separate meetings and an effective date no earlier than 14 days after adoption would tend to defeat the purpose of the zoning bylaw article 14 temporary zoning, which is to encourage and facilitate the reopening of existing businesses and the opening of new businesses and to stimulate economic activity in the aftermath of the COVID-19 emergency. Therefore, zoning bylaw article 14 temporary zoning is hereby declared to be an emergency measure under charter section 210B. Is there a second? Ryan? I want to know who's seconded. Say it, me, second. Okay, Thana, do you have that? Yes, I have, Sarah, thank you. Thank you, okay. Is there any other conversation? Then we go to a roll call vote and we begin this one with Pat DeAngelis. Yes. Dorothy Dumont? No. Rhysmer is a yes. Hannake? Yes. Dorothy Pam? Abstain. Evan Ross? Yes. George Ryan? Yes. Kathy Shane? Yes. Steve Schreiber? Yes. Andy Steinberg? Yes. Sarah Schwartz? Yes. Melanie Ball-Milm? Yes. Melissa Brewer? Yes. The vote is 1111, 1141 opposed, one abstention, no one absent. We're going to move on then to the fact that this is, I need to explain this that this is the first reading for zoning bylaw 14. We will do a second reading in two weeks. The first reading is what allows us to keep moving forward, but we need to do the second one because normally the zoning bylaw would only take us out for 61 days. And the second reading will allow us to go to the full 180 days as recommended. Mandy Jo, did I get that correct? Pretty much, yeah. So if we adopt this under the emergency measures under 210B, it stands repealed on the 61st day, no matter what. It could be repealed earlier. So we have to also go through adopting this under the normal process. So it is already posted on the bulletin board for the 14 days. It will come back for a second reading on the 29th. And then it would become effective under the permanence sort of basis that then has that sunsetting clause of 180 days. It would become effective 14 days after the 29th if we pass it on the 29th. It's just sort of the bootstrapping of the emergency and continuing it on to make sure it stays effective for the full 180 days, as Lynn said. Okay. Okay, with that, I'm going to then ask for Mandy Jo, the community resources, community committee report. Yes, so the CRC, and to go on, it's the first reading under 210A, but this also allows us, the motion we just passed allows us to vote under 210B to make it effective. The motion would have it effective tomorrow. So on May 19th, CRC discussed this proposal before it went to a hearing. And on June 10th, CRC and the planning board held a joint public hearing as required under MGL chapter 40A for this zoning by law proposal. Members of both committees were allowed to ask questions. The public was allowed to ask questions and make comments. At the end of that meeting, the planning board voted seven to zero unanimously to support, to recommend the passage of this zoning by law. That report was added to your packet today. And after the planning board voted unanimously, then the town, the CRC members voted unanimously to recommend the council enact zoning article 14, both as an emergency measure and as a regular measure to go through that two-step process. The things that were expressed the most about this were, there were concerns as Dorothy had indicated about the actual granting of a land use permit that could be permanent without having an opportunity for individuals and neighbors and debudders to actually comment on the application. The building inspector Rob Mora was able to answer questions about what would happen if say a land use permit was granted for outdoor dining and noise became a problem. There is a review process for that. And he was able to explain what that is. And the main concern, and that was the main concern about the bylaw as proposed, the members indicated the need for this to help economic development in this time of need to shorten that timeframe for land use permits from that 70 days down to 10. And we have a very short summer window for businesses to be able to operate as the governor lifts some of the restrictions and 70 days would take us through that summer window. And so that was recognized by committee members of both committees during the hearing. And I think that that takes care of my report from CRC on this matter. What was the vote at CRC? CRC was unanimous as well as the planning board being unanimous in support while in recommending adoption. Okay, thank you. GOL, George. GOL met on June 3 and voted unanimously to declare the bylaw to be clear, consistent and actionable. Okay, are there any further questions or discussion? If not, we're then going to move to the actual vote. And this requires a two thirds majority, which is nine counts or I'm sorry, Kathy, Shane, you have your hand up. Sorry, the raise my hand button was not raising my hand. So I waved at you. Okay, sorry, I now see it, but go ahead, please. I just have a question on what happens after the 180 days. So someone zips through new or old and does everything come back for review on what we just approved? And I don't want to treat new versus old differently. I want them not to say new gets forever and old has to go through. So is there a way of collecting information over those 180 days? Did we move too fast on saying yes to certain things? And so at the end of 180 days, we review some specifics or does this group that came under the 180 days, they just keep going on whatever happened. And then we go back to normal. So I just want to know what happens at the end of 180 because I listened to the planning board discussion and one member has suggested putting in wording that says the permissions will expire in 180 days. And there was a discussion of not wanting to put that into the actual change, not an automatic expiration. So do we have, even if it's informal, it's a verbal assurance, a way of, it worked pretty well. And I guess part of my, it worked pretty well. Maybe we should revisit why it normally takes 170 days. So can we be looking at some processes to say, could the new normal be a little shorter on what used to take so long? So I don't mean just should we pull away from what we agreed, but I just, I'm totally for this idea. And I just want to have some way to the town to go back at the end of those 180 days and say, what did we do and how did we like it? And were there any concerns or there anything we can learn from it? Okay, Mr. Bachman, I'm going to ask you and I know we have Rob Morrow and Chris Brestrup in the room and I know that Dave Zomac is in the attendees. So thank you, thank you, Lynn. So yeah, first I want to credit our building commissioner Rob Morrow and planning director Chris Brestrup for coming up with this idea and moving it forward to the specific of your question, Kathy, I think Rob is probably in the best position to answer that. Rob, please go ahead. Rob, yep, Rob Morrow. So a couple of things. First of all, two things could happen with these approvals as administrative approvals. Some of them could expire, some of them could run out seasonally or at the end of the year or at the end of this 180 days. However, some of them could be more permanent. An example that in the conversations I'm having over the past weeks and a half, two weeks helping to get some of these restaurants open with some outdoor dining, following the governor's order is what is a temporary measure of putting out some chairs and tables on an existing surface? And what about expanding that surface, creating a little bit larger concrete or paver patio section in making it more permanent? So in that type of situation, we would be looking at that being permitted to continue on and not expire and give the business owner confidence that the bylaw won't or the approval won't expire. So both could happen over the period of time. Now, in any case, I just wanna remind everybody that the standards and criteria of the bylaw apply. It's just that in this case, in this, during this time staff will be reviewing the bylaw conditions and criteria to make sure that the proposal is appropriate and in line with the bylaw requirements. I would be one, and I think Ms. Breschrup would probably join me in looking forward to the opportunity to come back to the council as we get closer to the hundred exploration of 180 days to talk about what has worked well and what hasn't and start to frame the conversation of what could be more, what could be looked at as a longer term or permanent changes to the bylaw as we're moving to hopefully that discussion pretty soon. Chris, did you have anything you wanted to add to that? I, not really, but I think that our, I guess I do. So our criteria and standards are pretty strict. There's a set of criteria for the zoning board and a set of criteria for the planning board. And we always go through those when we're reviewing a permit application. And I think that Rob and I would review those criteria and standards each time that we review an application. And so it's really Rob and me who are standing in the place of the zoning board and the planning board, but we're using the same criteria for the decision. Thank you, Mandy Jo, you have your hand up. Yeah, I was just gonna try and explain it maybe in a little bit more of a layman's terms because it can get confusing and it took me a little bit to figure it out. So what we would be in doing is enacting a law, but that law has a sunset clause. And so this law, if we pass this with nine votes, Article 14 will be in effect for 180 days, which means who approves the land use permits changes for 180 days. Right now it's planning board and some ZBA. That would switch over to the administrative approvals that this bylaw has at the end of 180 days, the approval method switches back to where it was today actually. But the permits that might be granted during those 180 days will stay in effect for however long that permit has a grant for. And that's what Rob was talking about. Some of those land use permits might themselves have a sunset clause. Other land use permits might not have a sunset clause, but that is dependent on what the permit says. Who is issuing the permit is in effect for 180 days if this bylaw passes. And that would move to administrative approval away from the planning board just for those 180 days. And at the end of 180 days, it flips automatically back to planning board and ZBA. In the meantime, whatever lessons we have learned and I'm sure there will be many will be brought back to the council in a discussion about are there some changes we feel could be permanently made to help businesses move through the process better. That's what I've heard. So thank you for that and your additional comment. Dorothy, give your hand up. Thank you. So I keep hearing things, but and I would like to vote for this, but I heard several meetings go. I mean, I've been to every meeting I think where this has been discussed that a new place may put a lot of money in it. And because they put a lot of money in it, we can't say, oh, this doesn't really fit here. This doesn't, you're causing problems with buildings next door or whatever it is. So I follow to a certain point, but then I say, okay, when the 180 days is over, if the town whom I trust, building inspector and planning, I trust them. But if they think, oh, you know, we let somebody in and it is not really working out for that area, that neighborhood or whatever, is there some way that you can say, no, you had the permit that 180 days are over and that's it. Because I thought I heard at some meetings that you can't say that because they could say, I spent all this money setting up this store and what do you mean? I have to close it down. So that's where I'm having my problem. Do you have, will you recognize the authority that to say, this isn't working out? Or can they say, no, we're here, we're here forever? Oh, or Rob, Laura, let's go with you, Rob. So I would say to your question, probably not. You know, what happens with a land use permit now is that it's issued based on a management plan. So at the time of the application, it's found to be meeting and satisfying the requirements for the bylaw. And the way they're drafted now or crafted now is so to ensure that the management plan is effective. So we would do the same thing. We would establish a series of conditions, ensuring that the application meets the intent of the bylaw and the opportunity there in the future, if there is an issue, is to have the business owner react by improving or adjusting their management plan, not removing or suspending the permit, which we do not do now as a matter of practice, anyone with either the planning board or the zoning board of appeals. Arcee, good morning. Yeah, this conversation has been clarifying for me. I was all ready to vote for it, but I was completely unaware that there is an intent to, that this just be the first step toward doing something like this permanently. And that is, I mean, this is being done supposedly because of COVID-19 and the emergency. And I guess that is a big surprise to me. Arcee, go ahead. Was I on mute? No, please go ahead. No, that's really all I had to say. I was just, I am now confused because I had no, I was, I felt sure that this would be over in 180 days and that there wouldn't be any further, you know, slippery slope. So, Arcee, I'm going to step out of my role as president to say in every emergency, there's opportunity. And this is an emergency that is providing us with an opportunity to learn whether or not there are more efficient ways to do our zoning in Amherst so that we are no longer continued to be seen as a town that is not business friendly. It doesn't mean we have agreed to any changes. It just means that we're going into this with our eyes open for the possibility of learning and maybe making some changes. Kathy? Since I raised this, I meant it as a learning opportunity and I meant it in both ways. Some things could be have gone wrong because we, what used to take more time had more voices coming in because of a butters coming in, people talking and they raised some issues that people hadn't thought about. But what I'm wondering with Rob saying with the planning and zoning board, there's one more piece if it was a restaurant or something that required a license and the management plan or what we thought it was gonna be, we have one restaurant in downtown that we all know which one it is that's empty right now because it was closed back down after getting a license and they spent at least some money on paint because the colors change in a pretty dramatic way. But if it were a marijuana shop, if it was a restaurant, if it was a bar bistro that had to get a license, would any of those, the licensure would still have to be being compliant? Am I correct on that? So I mean, they would have that getting a license to run but you could be saying something's not working well here or come back, fix this up, address these concerns. I'm gonna ask Chris Prestrup who has her hand up to go ahead and respond to that. Chris, you need done mute. I wanted to say that there's no possibility of a marijuana shop sneaking in here. It's not one of the uses that is considered. We have three uses, food and drink establishment, personal care establishment and retail stores. And marijuana has a whole section of the bylaw that's all devoted to marijuana and it's not contained in any of those three uses that I mentioned. Second thing I wanted to say is that the ability to grant these permits under this 180 day window will stop at the end of the 180 days and Rob will no longer be able to grant administrative approvals for these types of uses. However, some of the uses will continue because some of the uses will fit exactly what the bylaw had envisioned. And it could be a restaurant that has pretty strict conditions on it like most class two restaurants do, but that could conceivably continue. But the ability to grant permits will not continue unless town council decides at some future date that it wants the ability to grant these permits to continue. So I think Ms. Dumont's fear of having this go on for longer than 180 days, it's all in the hands of the town council. It's not anything to do with article 14. So I just wanted to say those things. Thank you. I just want to say on marijuana, I only use that word because someone asked me. So thank you very much, Chris. Alyssa, you have your hand up. Thank you. And so I think I might have said this the last time we talked about it, which is what's the worst that can happen? And I mean that really genuinely, I really despise the color Porta is and at the risk of offending town staff, I think actually Porta could have been forced early days to paint it back over again because they didn't have permission to change it to that color. And that's a missed opportunity because now it's a really ugly color, which I quite like actually just not on a building, but isn't that the worst that could happen in a situation like this? And that happened before this, right? Because they just went ahead and did something and then we just didn't worry about it. And we revoked their license. Their license really had nothing to do with the fact that they were idiots and painted too soon. And then they had their license revoked because they were bad actors. And so if maybe somebody who's really scared about this could give an example to Rob of something they're really scared about and then he could explain how he would apply the management plan so that the issue would be dealt with. I don't know if somebody's worried about live music or what they're concerned about, but I'm not understanding what would be so bad to be able to not continue after the end of the 180 days, aside from that purple color. Are there any other questions or comments from the council? Then we're going to go ahead. Mandy Jo, I believe you're going to make the motion. I will. I just noticed as I was reading it through again for Athena's benefit that the first reference to the charter section has the wrong letter. So that one should be 210B. So I will read it correctly, but I wanted to note that for Athena. Thank you. So the motion is to adopt zoning bylaw, article 14 temporary zoning as an emergency measure in accordance with charter section 210B, as I believe it's amended to be effective on June 16th, 2020, and to stand repealed on the effective date of the future adoption of said identical bylaw as a measure under charter section 210A. Just a minute, okay. Is there a second? Second. Any other discussion at this time? Lynn, if I could explain why I used as amended. Yes. If you look at today, there was a new version put in. The preamble section before effective uses didn't have a heading. And so I added the heading to include that it was the emergency measure preamble, and it also just had a generic date, the word date. And so that changed to June 16th, 2020. And that has been in your packet since last week. It was added today, that those two changes. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Are there any other questions at this time? Okay. Then with the motions been made and seconded, we'll move to a roll call vote. And we start with Darcy Dumont. I'm staying. Reismer is yes. Hanna Key. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shalini Balmoun. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Pat DeAngelis. Yes. The motion passes and the bylaw passes 12, the zero to one, 12, four, none against one abstention. No abstentions. Okay, we are going to move on to the next item in our agenda. We've already done water and sewer rates. We've already done the capital improvements, the one month budget. And the reason this could not be on the consent agenda is because of it's a financial matter. So, Andy, I'm going to call on you to give the finance committee report. And if there are any questions about the one month budget, Paul and Sean and Sonia are with us. Okay. The one month budget has really been presented to the council and we had a hearing that was a joint meeting of the finance committee and the council. And there was plenty of opportunity to address questions and get explanations. So, I'm hesitant to go very deeply into it because I think that we've actually had plenty of discussion already and there were many questions that can come forward as questions and probably be responded to. The finance committee reviewed it after the hearing that I referred to and voted unanimously to recommend the order that establishes this to you. And I think that the one thing that I asked to be put onto the screen was the order itself, which is part of the finance committee report. And I don't know if that's still possible as we go forward. It is, Surge is ready. No, that is not. It's out to the bottom of the document where the orders are. And so it's the next one. This is the Community Preservation Act, so we need to keep going. Here we go. So, stop. So, the one thing that I would stop right here, it's perfect. What I wanted to do is to just point out to council that the appropriations that are referenced in here are set forth in the table. And the actual appropriations are in the left-hand column for amount appropriated. And so that you'll see, for example, the town operating budget is a appropriation of $1,620,000. On the right-hand side, after that big black bar, is the source of the funds. And the source of the funds has to do with the enterprise funds. It shows that those come from enterprise funds and that the other items that are listed in here have to be our funds that are being raised and appropriated, which is the term that we always use in appropriations that was used in our former government and it's used now to indicate that it is gonna be raised normally by taxation or other means and appropriated. And so that this is an act of appropriation for the one month. And I guess the last thing that I'll just point out and then see as the president, if she wants to ask her questions, is that as has been previously explained, this is a one month measure. And when we adopt an FY21 budget, this amount will fold into that budget and become a part of the FY21 budget. The purpose of this one month budget is to allow the town to operate during the month of July while we take a little bit more time to develop the budget, see what the legislature is doing and review the actual FY21 budget. So with that, I will pause and turn it back to the president. Thank you, Andy. Are there any questions? As I think Andy observed, we've had several conversations of this and an opportunity to ask questions. So seeing none, then I'm going to ask Andy to go ahead and make the motion. Okay, I just have to find it on my motion sheet. It's item D. I thought. So I move to adopt appropriation and transfer order FY21-04A in order appropriating the town of Amherst FY21 operating budget for the month of July, 2020 as recommended by the finance committee and shown on pages five and six of the finance committee report titled Town Finance Committee June 15, 2020. Is there a second? I second it. Thank you, Kathy. Are there any further questions or discussion? Okay, seeing none, we're moving to a roll call vote. You start with Griezmer and I support this, yes. Hannake? Yes. Pam? Yes. Ross? Yes. Brian? Yes. Shane? Yes. Schreiber? Steve Schreiber? Maybe I'll come back to that. Andy Steinberg? Yes. Sarah Schwartz? Yes. Del Milne? Yes. Elizabeth Brewer? Yes. Pat DeAngeles? Yes. Darcy DuMont? Yes. And Steve Schreiber, have you returned? You may have taken a break. Steve, oh, he's come on twice. I'm wondering if he's having connection problems. I'm having sound problems. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes, we can. I'm having a sound problem. And did you vote yes for this or what was your? This is the vote. I voted yes. Okay. All right. So the vote's 13-0-0, no absences. Thank you, Steve. We're going to move on then to the Community Preservation Act. This item was pulled consent agenda. And I think at this point, Serge, we want to put the same finance committee report back up again and show the 12 projects that were recommended by the finance committee. It was in the previous part. There we go. Great. Okay. All right. This came before the finance committee. I think that at this point, hearing a finance committee report would be appropriate. And that would be Andy. So... I'm sorry. It also came to community resources. And so Mandy Joe will also be asking you to speak to your report. Okay. Yes. The finance committee unanimously recommended this motion. They need to make an explanation. It sort of came up in an earlier question. And I just want to clarify. And it gets to why this is on the agenda at this point in time and why the next motion will be to suspend the council relate point four. What we ended up doing with both the community resources and finance committee is to decide that we would ask the Community Preservation Act Committee to present its recommendations that were related to expenditures from the current year for the current year. And that we would not ask for a presentation at that joint meeting that was referred to in both reports on the one item that involved borrowing and was a item that was not going to require expenditures to be made in July. And so that the one that was obviously I'm referencing is the Jones Library request. That is not a part of this appropriation and transfer order. What the Community Preservation Act does is that it has a special piece of taxation that gets paired with some money from the legislature and provides the ability to make appropriations for very specific purposes, community housing, historic preservation, open space and recreation. And those items are reviewed by a Community Preservation Act Committee according to state statute. Once the Community Preservation Act Committee makes the recommendation of expenditures, it then belongs to the council and the council then votes up or down on the slate of program that are recommended or on each one. But the one thing that it can't do is it cannot add another proposal. So if somebody came along with either a proposal to increase an amount or to add a whole new program, that could not be done without going back to the Community Preservation Act Committee. So what's before us is what was recommended by the committee. The reason we wanted to do this now and not delay, which is of course different from the one that was removed is that these are projects that begin in July, they were requests were made by various sources, various applicants for funding for projects that they would like to see happen during FY21, which begins July 1st. And in order to allow those entities that they asked for the funds if they have the opportunity to spend the entire 12 months of the fiscal year doing whatever it is that they have asked to do, we needed to move that forward. And that's why we created the process that had the joint hearing before the two committees, action of two committees to decide whether to make a recommendation on these projects and then presented to the council, which is what is proposed for tonight. And the reason that I will later be making a motion to suspend Town Council rule 8.4 for this purpose is because that allows us to make the appropriations and allows the projects that are before you as you look at the screen, if they're supported by the council to begin their work, each of all of them. And I asked the committee this question and was assured and they did some tracking and they assure me that all of these are ready to move forward. The committee had, the finance committee had some other comments about that. These proposals are incorporated into the report and I can come to that later. So I guess I'll stop there and see if the community resources committee has anything to say. Mandy John. Thank you. As Andy summarized much of it very well, I just want to go into the discussions the community resources committee had and then its vote. We in our discussions recognized that nearly all of these projects, if not all of them have an impact or have a greater importance due to COVID. It might not seem it immediately, but when you start thinking about it, all of the housing projects for affordable housing, that one I think is obvious for many people why that one would be so important as we pull out of COVID, but also trails, they are in high use right now. And the project at the high school for the track, again, something that is in very high use right now. So even though they might not appear as important due to COVID, they are recognized by the CRC as important due to COVID. And in relation to that, we also recognize though that there is a reserve and we don't know what the future is going to behold come this fall. And so we wanted to point out that there is a possibility for supplemental appropriation with that reserve to be able to better tailor and address issues that might come up that can be funded through the CPA that also might relate to needs because of the COVID pandemic. After that discussion, and again, we did not discuss the recommended library funding. That one was for reasons that Andy indicated put off, even though it was mentioned in the CPA presentation. So after all of the discussions, CRC voted unanimously to recommend the council approve this appropriation and transfer order. And Andy, what was the vote on this finance committee? Go back and look, but I believe it was four to zero with one number absent. Okay. Are there questions from the council? So I'm not seeing any questions. So the slate of projects is before you. As mentioned earlier, we need a vote to suspend rule 8.4 and then we're going to go on and vote for the projects. And Andy, would you please offer the motion? I move to suspend town council rules of procedure 8.4 for the current agenda item. Second. Okay. That was the second. Is there any further discussion on that? All right. Then we begin with Mandy Joe. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Chaleney Balmille. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Pat DeAngeles. Yes. Darcy Dumont. Yes. And Lynn Grease-Merzy. Yes. Passes 13-0-0. Nobody absent. And we'll move on to the main motion at this point, which is, are to the motion, and that's the, Andy, would you please proceed? This is the motion on the transfer order. Yes. I moved to adopt appropriation and transfer order FY21-07 in order appropriating the FY21 Community Preservation Act budget as recommended by the Finance Committee and the Community Resources Committee and shown on page four of the Finance Committee report titled Town Council Finance Committee June 15, 2020. The second. Second. DeAngeles. Okay. Any further discussion or questions? Okay, then we begin with Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shalini Balmoun. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Pat DeAngeles. Yes. Darcy Dumont. Yes. Lynn Griezmerzy. Yes. And Mandy Johannicky. Yes. Passes 13-0-0. And we now move on to the letter to the zoning board of appeals regarding 132 Northampton Road. I just want to make sure I'm correct in that. Yes, yes. No. Yes. This was done by consent. Okay. We're on to the letter to the zoning board of appeals. And let me just say that this was my two week assignment to try to come up with something. We have an opportunity, the zoning board of appeals is getting ready to begin the hearing process for 132 Northampton Road. In the process of doing that, it was brought to my attention that normally a body such as ours or any other boards in town may wish to file a letter. And so I drafted this letter using examples of previous select board letters as well as the letter we sent to the Department of Housing and Community Development in support of the project earlier this year. If we proceed with this, we do need to suspend rules 8.4 and then we need to authorize with changes the president to sign the letter. So one of the options that I pointed out was that we could actually take a vote which we've never done that actually says we support the project or we can just authorize the letter. We did take one vote when we put out the CPA money which was $500,000 on that was last July 1 and we took another vote when we sent the letter you authorized the president to send the letter to the Housing and Community Development. And so this is a draft obviously subject to all kinds of changes and we'll start with Mandy Jo. Thank you. I asked for removal for a couple of reasons I have some requested changes on the draft but I'm gonna bring up the same thing I brought up the last time we had this in front of us for a DHCD letter which is when we were dealing with this with all of the residents back last year regarding the CPA money we kept telling them and then for months afterward that we were just our only involvement was to grant CPA money that then they had to go other places. And yet here we are again actually contemplating taking a vote in support of it which I think belies it's not that I don't support that vote it's that I don't think we should have been so adamant to the residents that opposed this project and wanted a say in front of us that we didn't have another say. And then we get a letter like this in a potential motion and it comes out on the weekend without barely any notice to the residents although it appears at least one resident noticed it given some emails that have passed today but I think that is bad practice. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to remove it because I don't think I can vote for it I think I will what I did with DHCD is the same which is a stain because I don't think we should say one thing and three months later do something else. The changes I am requesting despite all of that is in the revised letter the sentence that was added in the very first paragraph should be residents ENTS not ENCES just in terms of just a grammatical thing. And then there are two items the first one is on page two in the paragraph that starts on January 6th, 2020 Valley CDC provided an update to the town council right after the change removed the line but making a number of requests for improvements there is a sentence that says this letter was written after an extensive public comment process during the 30 day comment period. I think that sentence is misleading. We did write that letter in the middle of the 30 day comment period not after because we actually had to as a council comment during the 30 day comment period we did not actually review any of the public comments prior to writing our letter. Yet this sentence I think implies that our letter was written after review of all those comments. And so I would ask that it get deleted because I think it miss informs and implies something that didn't actually happen. And then my- I just wanna clarify so you wanna delete the sentence this letter was written after an extensive public comment process during the 30 day comment period. Correct. And then the next request is to the bullet points. It's the very first bullet point I believe on the next page the second bullet point of the primary reasons for support. It starts the need for additional market rate housing has been well documented. This building project doesn't have market rate housing. I believe this is a holdover bullet point from a previous letter. I would recommend deleting the whole bullet point. Okay. All right. Anything else, Mandy John? That was it. Okay, Steve Schreiber. So I don't oppose the project but I do, I'm not in favor of a letter. And the reason is very simple that we are the appointing officers for the zoning board of appeals. And I don't think it's appropriate for us to try to be influencing on any other matters including something that we clearly have supported in the past, you know, also the letter says pretty much everything that is public record anyway but I don't think that we should be trying to influence a quasi judicial board that we appoint. So we're very different from the select board that way. Okay. George Ryan. Just wanted to point out that I think what we're seeing on the screen is not the current amended letter. Is that correct? I think we're looking at the first version. So I think there's a second version that should be on the screen. I don't have to go to the top, Serge, for me to see which letter we're looking at. You are correct. This is not the amended one. The change on the amended one, the sentence that was removed or asked to be removed by Mandy Jo. I'm sorry, it was amended is in the first sentence. When conducting the lottery for those who will be housed we also ask that preference be given to Amherst residents. And that would be the second sentence of the first paragraph. And then the other change that was made was the removal on the second page and the paragraph that begins on January 6th, 2020 is to remove after the word development, the phrase, but making a number of requests for improvement to the plan. And then the request that's now been made is the next sentence be removed. And that the paragraph that are the bullet that begins the need for additional market rate be removed. I don't know whether Serge is able to find the other letter at this point. Let me go ahead and display it. I think I have the right one in front of me right now. Okay. So Evan, you have your hand up. Yeah, so I was actually curious about the sentence in the first paragraph that was added. So, and I also read through the email the change that occurred with a resident earlier. I don't personally remember the council taking any position on exercising our local option to give a local preference. I don't remember ever voting on that. It was something that was discussed, that's all. And so that sentence to me is a decision that we actually haven't discussed as a council. And it's actually one that I don't support. I think that there are a lot of great people who currently afford to live in Amherst, who live in other communities, who would love the opportunity to move in here. And I think that we would really benefit from them coming here. And so I don't want to exclude anyone just because they can't currently afford to live in Amherst or it didn't happen to end up in an Amherst shelter, an Amherst hotel. So I certainly first wouldn't want to include that sentence without having a discussion in this body. And two would actually like to see that sentence removed. Okay. Alyssa. I was hoping to go later. I just want to point out that, so I have a difference of opinion with Steve as to his rationale, because I'd like to tease that out a little bit further, because if Steve had been a member of the select board back in the day, then perhaps he would have told the select board not to write such a letter because the select board appointed the ZBA, just like the town council appoints the ZBA. So I don't understand the difference there in terms of that rationale, unless one argues that our policy leadership role, which is very big in the charter, it is not an executive authority, it is a policy leadership role, but it also appoints the ZBA, which let's face it means that our opinions of what should happen come through in our appointments to the ZBA and the planning board, that's simply a fact. It's not some generic neutral position we have when we make those appointments. So is the question whether or not you're wondering whether or not our policy leadership extends to this? And I totally understand as I did before when Mandy Jo said that, since I was one of the people that was so adamant that said, we don't have any further decision points. I cut this a little differently than she does in terms of deciding to send a letter to the ZBA based on all the things that we heard at meetings that we held and that we continue to hear. To me is not the kind of decision I need to ask the public whether or not again they agree with a particular letter that we're going to send, just like I'm not going to ask the public if they agree with a letter I'm going to send to promote the Student Opportunity Act or a whole bunch of other things that we're going to do legislatively and have done in the past. So yes, it's out there in the public but I'm not going to ask them to edit it or tell us not to sign it because I base it on what we've already discussed prior to the letter being discussed. So I appreciate the changes that have been made. Obviously things are different. It's not exactly the same but I don't agree with the argument that it's because we appoint the ZBA that in fact is exactly false in my opinion. But I understand the concern that we've not talked about it at length and I appreciate what Evan just said about the local preference in that we really didn't have the right setting to have a voted conversation about how that would work in a different world. We might have referred that to somebody but this was our first go round at this rodeo as a town council and it didn't happen. So at this point the additional deletion is the sentence that was added in in red on your screen. Dorothy Pam. Okay, I just want to ask a question and to make a statement. The local option, and I'm not expert in this at all but I thought I heard that the town had to apply for it. And I do agree that we should discuss this as a council before we put it in the letter. I do want to speak for the local option. We need to many, many need to talk to many, many people of this project. I think we've come to an understanding now and Valley CDC has made a number of changes and responded to a lot of questions and issues. So I think that we have something that will be okay. However, in the discussion, in the selling of this the words that were used again and again was that it was going to help with the problem of people who live in Amherst or who work in Amherst or also maybe who shelter in Amherst that it wasn't a general thing we were doing for the public. I mean, Evan made a good point but in terms of when we talked about this at meeting after meeting and Valley CDC did too though perhaps carefully, it was the idea that it was going to deal with a problem that existed that some people who worked here couldn't afford to live here and some people who lived here couldn't afford their rent at all and some people who didn't even have a home but came through Amherst or sheltered we're going to try to have supportive housing. So I think that still is our strongest point. So I would like to suggest that the whatever the process is for asking for the local option and I think maybe the town applies but I think that we should, you know I guess vote to do that and to apply for it and then to if we do send a letter which again, that's more discussion on that that it should be there but we had not discussed that as a council so that that's really part of the issue that people are bringing up. So although I agree with the impulse behind the addition I do think that we need to go a little slower here. I'm also going to ask Paul Bochum and to speak to that issue a little bit but in fact, Paul why don't you go ahead and speak to the issue of the local option since you investigated that with your staff earlier today. Thank you, Lynn. So yes, that question did come up and I asked our staff and what they basically said is that typically is incorporated during the ZBA comprehensive permit process that that's where that decision is made. Although I'm just looking at documents now and it's not entirely clear because this just all came out this afternoon. I think it's very possible that at this point we need to take that out of the letter because it's not been thoroughly discussed. We don't have time to discuss it tonight. We could return to it but we could also find out more about how that happens. Okay, Pat, you have your hand up. Thank you. I am totally opposed to the local preference so I'm glad you're saying let's get it out but if it comes back, I will vote no. Evans shared some good reasons but I wanna talk about two things. One is we had extensive public comment with this process and it might not have been in a 30 day window but we had massive public comment and public input on this project and I think that should be reflected in the letter. But the other thing is during that process of listening to public comment, I began to understand the racism and classism that was driving some of the opponents of the project and normally I wouldn't bring that up but given what the times are, I feel very strongly that I need to bring it up. Quotes that I have in my notes, if we open it up to people from outside Amherst, they will come, that's one quote. I don't want a homeless person using my street as a shortcut to walk to Amity Street to get the bus, another comment and I have more of them. I think those two are enough. It's coded language but it's classist and it's racist and we should not be supporting that in any way, shape or form. Thank you. Garcia. Yeah, I guess I just wanted to say that I agree with Mandy Jo's initial comments that if we have earlier taken a position that we are not going to take a position that it seems like we should not be doing this. And I appreciate that you put all of the work into it, Lynn but I'm wondering, I guess I wasn't aware that you were doing that and that didn't first come to the council to get our, okay, before you put all the work into it. Let me just say that whether I put the work in or not, I think it's important that the council knows where the process is and that it's moving forward. I would suspect that some counselors may decide to attend the ZBA hearings as they begin. Of course, when they speak, they need to speak as counselors. I mean, as individuals not for the council. And so whether or not we did all this work which there is a difference of opinion, I would say across the council as to whether or not the letter is appropriate but whether or not we did it or not, it is important that we as a council recognize where this is in process. Alyssa, you have your hand up. Thank you. Just to follow up on what you said about that is that this is, I'll take fault on this on a couple of areas. One is again, a difference of opinion as to what it means to say we aren't an approval process. I didn't say, I know I never said to the public that very full room and the bank center and elsewhere, I will never have an opinion on this again because that's not true. I knew I would have an opinion in the future on this. One of the reasons we didn't get to it sooner is of course pandemic and we didn't know when the letter, when the actual comprehensive permit was gonna get filed for, right? So you don't write to the ZBA prospectively knowing that months from now they might get something cause something could have changed. So I think I understand the differences of opinion on that and that's fine that we can disagree on that. But one of the major concerns I have based on my actual service in town is that I know that some of you are going to go to the ZBA hearings and if you're going to talk, even if you say, I'm not speaking as a town counselor, you're going to sound like you're speaking for the town council. And so I would feel much more comfortable when you do that if there was a letter from the town council that said, here's our basic deal. Here's the things we heard about over time. Here's what we said and understanding for example the local preference needs to come out because we didn't talk about that to the extent that we could vote on it. But if we write nothing and individual counselors show up the ZBA, how on earth is the ZBA supposed to interpret that and how is the public supposed to interpret that? So while I understand that some people have a discomfort level with writing a town council letter on the other hand, if we don't have a base document it is literally the Wild West in terms of what individual counselors say and what that implies about the town position. So careful what you wish for. George Ryan. The only formal vote that we've taken that I'm aware of was taken in regards to the CPA funding where this body did in fact, express its strong support for this project. Everything else that's been mentioned are things that individuals may or may not have said at a public meeting about what may or may not happen in the future. But the only thing that we've done formally as a body in a vote was to express our strong support for this project. And this letter it seems to me appropriately asks us to reaffirm that strong support before it goes to the ZBA. And so I think Alyssa makes a number of good points that I would support. And I think this is something that we should do. We've already done. And I think that it would be appropriate for us to do one more time before this goes to the ZBA. Okay, so we have a question of whether we should send the letter at all. Then we have the question of if we're going to send the letter what should the letter say? And once we do that then there's the authorization of the president to sign the letter on behalf of the council. So before we go on and edit the letter I would like to make a motion that the council, in fact, send a letter to the ZBA in support of 132 Northampton Road. Is there a second? I second it. Okay, so now we're going to bring that question to a vote, okay? And the first one up is. Lynn? Yes. I could I clarify what this motion is? I mean, our motion sheet has an authorized you to sign a letter. Your motion was to send a letter. And is that motion to send the letter that we've seen or just a generic send a letter? It is a generic send a letter because the question that's been raised by you and at least two other counselors is whether or not we should even be sending a letter. So rather than spending more time editing a letter I'd like to know whether or not we believe we should send one. Further question, manager? Nope. Thank you for that clarification. Okay. All right. We start with, I believe Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Stain. Stain, okay. Steve Schreiber. No. And Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Kalani Balmone. Yes. Melissa Brewer. Yes. Pat DeAngelis. Yes. Darcy DeMonte. No. Readers, yes. Hanneke. No. Okay. So the vote is nine in favor, one against, I'm sorry, three against and one abstention. So it passes that we should send the letter. This is interesting. All right. So let's go to the actual letter and the question is whether or not these are the changes I've seen. Okay. The first one is to remove the sentence in red completely. On the next page, all the way down at the bottom in the paragraph on January 6th, 2020, it is to remove the phrase but making a number of requests for improvements to the plan and also the next sentence. This letter was written after an extensive public comment process during the 30 day comment period. Okay. And then the third request was to remove the bullet on the beginning of the next page, which is the need for additional market rate housing, et cetera, et cetera, ending with the library. Is there any other changes to the letter at this time? We point out that the letters suggested there would be a vote to support this. Do you want to include that? So are there any, I see Patty Andrews, please. Yes. Let me see. I would like to have this letter was written after extensive public comment because that happened before we just made any decisions about the CPA money or anything else. And so not to have that we've had an extensive process, I think weakens that section. So I don't think, I don't know if Mandy Jo is right about the 30 day comment period, but our public comment process was intense. I think including visits by counselors to the abutters and them taking us on a tour of their neighborhoods, et cetera. And that. So can I suggest that the part of the sentence that people felt most uncomfortable with is process during the 30 day comment period. So what you're suggesting, Pat, is the letter would include, this letter was written after extensive public comment period. It doesn't quite work as a sentence yet, but. The town council submitted the letter to blah, blah, blah, demonstrating support of the development after an extensive public comment process. How's that? Yes. All right, Andy. I just wanted to say I would support that as the person that recommended deletion of the full sentence that Pat's revision, I support. Well, the sentence would now read, I just wanna make sure is the town council submitted a letter to DHCD, demonstrating support of the development after an extensive public process. Yes. Andy Chow. I think it's after an extensive public comment process. After extensive public comment. Yes. An extensive public comment process. Got it. Thank you. So the sentence reads, the town council submitted a letter to DHCD demonstrating support of the development after an extensive public comment process, period. Andy Steinberg. Yes. I guess that I wanted to understand what the proposal was regarding the bullet at the top of page three that begins the need for additional market rate housing was the proposal to take out the first sentence only for the entire bullet. The proposal was to take out the entire bullet. Okay, then I wanna just point out that I would suggest not taking out the last two sentences because they deal with a different subject matter. The first has to do with reference to the housing market study and market rate housing and that this is not housing that fits into that category. The second two sentences have to do with the location of its consistency with the master plan and its proximity to public transportation, retail services in the library. If they are different subject matter, I think the objection to the first sentence made sense, but I would suggest not removing the rest of the bullet. Mandy Jo, you were the one that suggested. That's fine with me. I think I was really focusing on the first sentence and didn't catch the other two. Are there any other changes to the letter? Okay. So we come to the very first sentence and the first sentence says that we would voted today. Would people, I really need to get a sense of the council whether or not you want to vote today in support of this project or you want me to modify this and just send the letter? Can you tell me what the alternative wording would be? Would it be the council authorized you to send a letter or what does it say? I mean, it would be very similar to the letter that's attached, which is the letter that we sent to the letter we sent to CHD and it says, thank you for the opportunity to provide comments on the application for project eligibility, blah, blah, blah. The project is seeking a comprehensive permit. So in other words, it would become basically a statement of why we're sending the letter. It's on the second, it's the attached letter to the other one. I think it's later. Yes, keep going, keep going right here. So it would be more like that opening of sentence. And then I blended it in. Does that answer your question, Kathy? It does answer my question because somehow it feels very odd for me to vote on a letter. You know, as a statement, it's a clear way for me to, to me to say by resending this. Although I guess we're not thanking ZBA for the opportunity to provide public comment, but whatever that is. Dorothy, you have your hand up. I want to say that I am very disappointed at the idea of taking out the request for a local option. When you put forward something which is a good and something which is needed, the people in the area, in the town, say maybe that could be me. Now, this is not going to be where the people are going to be judged as by need. It's a lottery. People will be vetted to be included in this lottery, but it's not going to be ranked by, this is the most needy, we got to put this one. They have to get through some kind of basic screening and they get put in a lottery. When you do local option, all the names in the bag are not people who either live or work or have been sheltered in Amherst. I think maybe there's 70% of the people in the bag, but still, their names are drawn out of a bag or else there are two bags. I did read the description and it is in detail, but I don't have it. I just know that when they do housing like this, say in New York City, where so many people have been waiting for affordable housing, being somebody who lives in the town and got on the list or whatever, it matters. So I just feel that I theoretical principles are great, but I'm a town council member for Amherst and I'm thinking of there aren't even that many apartments. And I talked about so many people who actually work in the universities or in the town or in businesses or whatever and can't afford to live here. And then they're going to find out that it can be anybody. I just feel it would be intensely disappointing to people who might have been looking forward to this and supporting it. Dorothy, I'm going to suggest that we put aside the issue of local option. I think we decide as a council that we want to have a further discussion about it when we can find out what that really means and how it's really done, that we might add an addendum to this letter at a later date, but to try to resolve that without the advice of people who understand local option, I think would be a useless circuitous discussion tonight. I agree with you. Okay, Kevin. So now that I think I'm understanding your question about whether we want to say that we voted because there's what are we actually voting on and Kathy brought that up. I don't like how the DHCD letter actually started now that I'm looking at it because I always think that you need to lead with what your message is in case they only read the first sentence. So I'm suggesting maybe we just say the Amherstown Council recommends approval of open with that and then we're voting to authorize you to send this letter. So we're de facto voting to recommend but it's not separating. I think it's good. Okay, so the first sentence would be the Amherstown Council recommends approval of. That's my suggestion, yes. Kathy Shane. I very much liked the idea of bringing the local option back for discussion item. Lynn, no, not doing it tonight because I heard a lot about this. So I just, I don't want to extend the, but not just some time in the next distant future but if you can squeeze it in while this process is going on. Okay. Is there any other comment? We're not going to add local option tonight. We are not adding it tonight. We will bring it back at a near and future agenda. Could we go back to the very beginning of the very letter and let me just one more time of state where we have made the changes, okay? The first change is, the first sentence will read the Amherstown Council recommends approval of, okay? The next is to remove the line in red which is around the local option. The other changes that people have made are all the way on the bottom of the second page and in that case, the second sentence will read the town council submitted a letter to DHCD demonstrating support of the development after an extensive public comment process period and will eliminate all of the other words around that including but making a number of requests for improvement and this letter was written and processed and during the 30-day comment period, all of that will be eliminated. And then on the next page under the second, what would be the second bullet in that paragraph, we're eliminating the first sentence only and then we are leaving in this increased housing production and its location, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Are there any other changes requested at this time? Okay. Then I would like to make a motion. First of all, we need to. Consent covered suspending the rules, Lynn. I'm sorry? The consent already suspended the rule. Thank you. So then we need to authorize President Griezmer. Always sends a little strange to sign the letter of support to the zoning board of appeals. Permit zoning, ZBA, FY 2020, 30-39 Valley. Mainly development corporation 132 Northampton Road. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Then we're going to go to a roll call vote and we begin with Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Patrick Shane. Abstain. Steve Schreiber. No. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shalini Balmneum. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Pat DeAngeles. Yes. Darcy Dumont. No. Lynn Griezmer. Yes. Mandy Johanicki. Yes. And Dorothy Pam. Yes. So the vote is 10 in favor, two against and one abstention. Thank you. I will share the final letter with you in your packet. So we are going to go on to a memo that we began discussing last week and this is the memo regarding what to do with permanent public way requests. And we did have some conversation and I just want to reintroduce that the memos has two different suggestions. And then it suggests that it be sent off to TSO for discussion and eventually then to GOL depending on what TSO comes up with. And the issue as I presented last time is that we've been inconsistent with how we handle a permanent request in the public way. And that has led to sometimes people showing coming to a council meeting, expecting to give a presentation and then finding out after they do it there they also have to do it again for TSO. So before this, we move to recommend to move to refer this. What other things would people like to say at this point? I'm not seeing that anybody wants to add anything further to what we've already said. And so this is, there's a motion. And it's to refer President Griezmer's 53120 memo options for council review of long-term permanent changes public way to the town services and outreach committee and to the governance organization and legislative committee for court and recommendation to the town council in 90 days. Is there a second? Second, Ryan. Thank you, George. Any further discussion? Okay, then we'll do a roll call vote. We begin with George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Dave Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Melanie Balmille. Yes. Alyssa Bloor. Yes. Patty Angelis. Yes. Darcy DeMont. Yes. Lynn Griezmer's a yes. Mandy Jo Hanneke. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. It's referred with a 13-0-0 vote. Okay, we're moving on to appointments. Let me just get myself reassembled. Lynn. Yes. Is there, what is the timeframe? Is that 90 days or what? 90. Okay. Lynn, your schedule had us going back to presentations. Thank you. So, it's been my night. So, I sent out about two weeks ago a timeline for the town manager's evaluation. I have since taken that timeline and revised it based on comments. I received actually from only two counselors, but they were substantial and useful. And the one question that did get raised is, at this point as a council, we are scheduled not to meet on July 20th, 27th, 3rd and 10th. That makes this a jam, but we've done it in the past. And so, as we look at this schedule, we need to keep that in mind. Alyssa Brewer, you have your hand up. I'm so sorry, I was hoping to catch you before. So, for all of us who've been here since 5.30, could we plan on a recess pretty soon? Yes. Let's do this with presentation and discussion, town manager evaluation calendar, and just reminder of the process. So, Mandy Jo, you have your hand up. Yes, thank you. The schedule for finance and all of our budget stuff includes a finance committee hearing, the required budget hearing on the full year budget on Monday, July 13th. And it also then has a vote on the budget in the full town council on July 20th. That is a schedule that we adopt, or at least I believe the finance committee adopted, even though I know our original year long schedule did not have a meeting on the 20th, I think it was moved from the 13th to the 20th, given the COVID issues and all, and the need for pushing the budget into July. So, if the finance committee is not holding their budget hearing until July 13th, we absolutely must have a council meeting either July 20th or July 27th, because we have to vote that budget by July 31st, or July 30th, I think is what it was in the motion we passed today. And so I would recommend, I think we also need a couple of, there's so much built up in pandemic and things take longer. I would recommend we move the items on July 13th to July 20th, and on the 13th hold the budget hearing and we vote the budget on July 20th as all of the, including all the rest of the stuff that in this memo was listed on July 13th. But I also recommend we hold a meeting on July 3rd for regular business, so that the July 17th meeting can be less than regular business. I'm not sure how reading stuff and the distribution will work electronically. I'm not sure, because we used to get it all in paper at once, so you know, arrangements haven't been worked out, but it will probably take longer for people to read if it's sitting on a computer than in a paper form with running back and forth and all. So it could take longer than we had before. And so I would advocate adding a meeting on August 3rd for regular business in August 17th. And then my only other concern on all of this was that the schedule right now has the draft manager goals being delivered on July 13th, or with my proposal July 20th, but not being discussed until August 17th. That is a really long time, in my opinion, to have the goals out there without them actually being talked about by the council. So if we're not gonna discuss them until August 17th, maybe we could just have them delivered as part of the packet for the August 17th meeting 48 hours in advance or something so that they're not out there for a full month without us being able to talk about them. So Meg, do I wanna understand you're suggesting we meet as a council on July 13th for the purpose of the hearing of the budget? Well, that's the finance committee budget hearing schedule right now. And I think it's normally called as a council meeting, but I would recommend that's all that happens that day. Okay. And then, but on Monday, July 20th, which we had also need to have without the budget, we would move everything that was listed for the 13th to the 20th. Yes. Then I'd need to make an adjustment on the 16th, but I can do that. And that we also then meet on August 3rd. Is that what I heard? Yeah, for regular business so that we can remove regular business from August 17th. Okay, and that the goals might be distributed on the 3rd, but discussed on the 17th or distributed in time for the packet for the 17th. Yeah, I would like to see a closer timeframe between when the goals are out in the public and when we actually get to discuss them. Are there other suggestions, Darcy? Yeah, I was on the previous goals ad hoc committee and I think that it worked very well. And I'm just, I'm missing whether we had a discussion about how we should do it this time around. And it seems to me like both the evaluation and the goals should be, it makes more sense to do them with an ad hoc committee. So I'm interested in knowing what other people on the council think of that. I don't have any problems with this timeframe. I know that if we appointed an ad hoc committee that would throw it off a little bit. But I personally think it makes sense to make sure that we are as objective as we can be and not putting it all on our president who has needs to be interacting with the town manager on a daily basis. It's a little, it feels like it's a little, we could put a little more distance in there by having an ad hoc committee look at the evaluation and the goals. And like I said, the goals committee worked together really well. I thought we were very efficient in getting the goals together, although very late, of course. So just wondering what other people think about the possibility of having an ad hoc committee do this rather than putting it all on Lynn. All suggestions been made are there other comments. We needed that what we did last time was we brought the goals to the council and then when it was apparent there were a lot more discussion needed, we formed the ad hoc committee for the goals. And people wanna have an ad hoc committee for the goals we can, but we need to get started a lot sooner and we need to get it done a lot faster. Alyssa? So time passes and we see what worked well and I understood what Darcy was in favor of doing the same thing we did last year. I still don't understand why, and that's something I don't understand hasn't changed over the past year, which is that I don't understand why an existing standing committee doesn't have this as part of their responsibility because existing committees are not going away during this time period. So again, it's one more workload for a group of people to work on something. And I appreciate what Lynn said about previously it was drafted, then I said, okay, here's a committee that can take a look at what was drafted and figure that out. I would be a big proponent this year doing things as easily as what works for people as possible, because our workload has been literally insane. And so to ask people to have a whole another set of committee meetings that might go on for several weeks, I think is asking a lot. I also think that we have some pent up desire to change some of the evaluation process, right? We talked about that last year, but yet we can't do that this year because we simply don't have the bandwidth to do it this year. So I'm in favor of whatever seems simplest and then work on a start earlier next year, even though who knows what our pandemic situation will be in the spring next year. Are there other comments at this time? Dorothy. Yeah, I'm remembering the process now. I was on that committee. And I remember as we sat as a full town council reading all the little steps, I thought we should just have those steps as things we think about, but we shouldn't answer yes, no, whatever for each one of them. And the process could be so much simpler. I mean, I think we did a good job of laying out all the things we can think of. We might want to add a few more, but the nitty-gritty of going over each one was I think redundant, really redundant. But within categories, we could discuss them and in our discussion, we could bring up the different items that are in that category, but not necessarily have to put an evaluation of all of them. Okay. Additional comments. All right, so what, yes, Kathy. Yeah, I had separately earlier today sent Linda note, I just want to build on what Dorothy was referencing to. We talked about having a much simpler evaluation format that would have the big category with some kind of rating, easy. And then a comment thing that you could make, say why you thought all of this, but not having to go over every line. So it would be short. We wouldn't go through everything we put and make it easier and then have some space toward the end of it that would give you give you more free reign to talk about any issues that had come up and other things. We don't have such a form. I would be perfectly willing to draft it and make it short and sweet if we, if that would be helpful because I wasn't sure with this process as proposed, if we get the performance goals as we set them up, I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do if we, right now, if we got the performance goals as we set them up and then my memory is we tried to keep it to three pages and it kept being four pages, five pages. Are we supposed to write something on every line? So I think we just need some guidance that's really simple, that's not very rigid on, what should we do? So is it just, yeah, so that's just a major area. Right. So let me just mention that, Kathy, I think you were also on that committee and we discussed changing the form, which I have not messed with yet, so that people could do individual comments under each, but they, and they could, and they could do an overall rating for each of the broad six or seven categories and a broad set of comments so that they would not be put in a situation we all found ourselves in last year, which was, my God, when will this end? So it's like, I totally agree with our, that was a discussion of the Goals Committee last year, this past fall and into the end of December. And I think that that guidance is still absolutely true. I wanna separate these, we're having two conversations. One is about the evaluation, yes. Another one is about setting the goals. It was for the setting the goals that we had the committee. In terms of formats for the evaluation, I will be more than happy to take comments and come up with a format that is much, much more user friendly and be glad to do that. Sarah, you have your hand up. So I just wanted to bring up that it is a job evaluation and however you look at it, and it's to help guide Paul because you don't know if you're doing a good job or if you're hitting the marks that the people who are hiring you want you to hit unless they're actually written out. So I would rather that we weren't vague, that we were more specific. And I'm okay with however we decide to try to do this with ease this year. But who knows how many of us are going to be gone after another year and not quite a half. And I would like to actually maybe take up what Alyssa said and maybe we do give this entire evaluation process how we're going to do it and also think about how we all set goals for Paul together and start that now with a committee so that we actually leave something permanent for the next council that comes in. And that's it. You're suggesting a committee that tackles this. Or we just give it like Alyssa said maybe it's part of a committee's charge. And I'm not saying for sure let's do this but it seems like if we already have committees formed then it might make sense for one committee to just start working on it. Obviously the whole town council would have to then look at something and reflect on it. It's all of our decisions but at least we'd have when the, because look how fast this year went, right? And we're all still now looking at this whole situation saying, oh yeah, I remember how hard that was last year. So I just think that maybe even if we wrote it into one committee they could just start working on it now and maybe we just set a timeline. But that's me spitballing this late. Darcy? Yeah, I just wanted to remind people that originally the evaluation was in the, in OCA. And then it was removed. So, and all the different appointment functions got farmed out to different committees. And so I mean, it's possible that part of it could be in one committee and part of it, you know the evaluation could be in one committee and the goals could be in another committee. And once we have a format of how we're doing it generally it, you know, year after year it won't be as hard. You know, we won't be reinventing the wheel. And yeah, I would be for doing that this year but I don't know what kind of support I have for that. Alyssa? Just super briefly. So part of why it was so hard this year of course is it was different for all of you who weren't previously on the select board, right? So for Andy and I, the idea, the evaluation wasn't that complicated although Andy's never been a big fan of the form we used. The form we used isn't the form we used meaning the select board used this clunky old table slash Excel spreadsheet but it meant you could flip back and forth between it. The Google doc, the Google form was a disaster that was part of the problem. And so we have not only the how do we rate things and are we kind of grouping it in a general sense or are we going point by point by point or is our problem with the execution of the form we used that had never been done that way before and there was a reason for that and it didn't work well for us. So that's part of what has to be dealt with too. And that was not discussed with the council at all as to whether or not we think that that execution of the actual filling it out would work. So I don't have an easy answer which is why I'd like to see a group work on it longer term to kind of figure out and then talk about all the employee evaluation, right? We've always talked about how that doesn't work out quite the way we'd planned for it either. But to do anything this year, I'm willing to cut corners so to speak in terms of making it go faster but I think we have to recognize that we have a number of different issues here and it's not just the form itself the evaluation goals have to be translated into the form you can't just have a set of goals and then have the form say something else and you can't have the form be that weirdo Google doc that we had last year. So we learned from that but we need to make it easier for ourselves to fill out and that made it much, much harder for me to fill out. I think it was actually a survey but I will look into other ways of doing the survey. Yes, George. I like the idea of using existing bodies. If the council wants to have some ones look over both elements of the evaluation and the goals, we can simply refer it to a body or to two separate bodies that already exist. If that will help, I agree with the idea of trying to make it as simple as possible. It sounds like we do want someone or someone to look at it and give some sort of input back to the council before we move forward. We could leave that with Lynn. That's certainly an option. The other it seems to me is simply to refer one or both of these to a specific body and asking them to get back as obviously quickly. The only thing that we're now faced with is that and I know this is an unusual summer but some people are still planning to either stay at home vacations or whatever is we try to do the staff and the committee chairs and the committees and the public starting this coming week. The form for the council is not that fast. So I just wanna point out that one of the reasons why this comes up at this point is because of always wanting to do it earlier in the summer, if you will. Dorothy. I like George's idea of having a committee do it but I'd be a lot happier if it was GOL then TSO. TSO has so much they have to do right now and we're still figuring out how we're doing it. So I don't think we could probably handle this responsibility at this time. Otherwise an ad hoc committee. Okay, I'm open whatever you wanna do, Sarah. So yeah, I for some reason but I guess I just blocked out OCA in general after last week but so it did belong in that charge. So maybe we do wanna think about where it would fit in the current standing committees because I would think that this is something that any town council would wanna have a committee either refining or at least making sure that forms and everything were going out on a timeline. So I guess maybe we think about where it makes the most sense and do it. I don't know if we wanna add something else on because it's still more like separate time for all of us. And as somebody who's on a committee and is a liaison and is now an ECAC, I'd rather have it in a committee even if it was my own than another subcommittee or a subcommittee. Oh, and I just wanted to say too that the goals you can't really separate them. That's what Alyssa said and I think it's true. I don't think you could separate those two out. I would probably wanna have one committee be working on both, I think it would make more sense. So George, are you willing to put this under the 48 hour rule? And GLL, George, you have your hand up. Sorry. Yes, I would be willing to put it under the 48 hour rule but my colleagues and GLL may wish to speak on this as well. But if there is a committee that the council wants it to send this to, it would seem to me speaking personally that GLL would probably be that committee but others may have other thoughts. Are there other thoughts? Mindy Jo? Yes, I would want clarity on what the committee is supposed to do. Are we drafting goals or are we not drafting goals? Are we coming up with the evaluation form or not? Like I'm at this point I think the referral if the referral is fine in that sense but I would want definite clarity on what if it's goes to GLL or TSO or wherever it's going what that committee is supposed to do and when they're supposed to return a product. It's an outstanding set of questions. Dorothy? Well, I think the answers have been given in this discussion. Start with the work that was done with the goals committee. Take that, take the form. Alice is right, you've got to work. The goals must match the form. Start with that and look at it and then go over some of the different alternatives we discussed and see how to refine it. I would say starting from scratch would be really silly and a waste of time. We've got the raw material and then the tricky part is that somebody has to technically figure out how the form works. But I would just say use some common sense. Okay, could I suggest that this be referred to GLL who will provide guidance on the evaluation process including the development of the counselor's feedback form and develop a set of goals to be brought to the council proposed goals to be brought to the council. And so basically what I'm suggesting is that the GLL will work on using this calendar and I'm going to suggest we not do very much to change anything with regard in collecting community input and staff input, and that we focus on the counselor evaluation and the actual form and that they also work on the goals. Darcy? I actually think the most important piece is the letter combining all of the counselor comments. And so if that could be done in some kind of group process in GLL, I think that would be good. And if it ends up that everything just gets farmed out to you anyway, Lynn, because you're on GLL. The goal is to have more voices involved and to have it done in a group process. So I would say make sure that that is included. There's a number of things that just are gonna be done by the town staff anyway, right? All these things in the first week. They didn't do anything that we don't ask them to do. Right. But I can see the bottom of this. Could you scroll down possibly so that we can see the bottom? Maybe Joe, you have your hand up. I would not support assigning the compilation of the letter to a group because once you do that, as Darcy sort of indicated, it would be done in a group. So it would be done in open meeting, but that means that all of the evaluations must come out before that open meeting and we generally don't send those evaluations out until on this schedule, it would be the 17th distributed exactly at five. So once you say the letter is gonna be compiled in GLL, the newspaper and everyone has every councilor's evaluation prior to that GLL meeting when that letter starts being drafted. And that would be required to be well early, wherever that is, probably before Tuesday, August 4th in order to be done at one or two GLL meetings or more. So I would not support sending the actual compilation of the letter to a committee. Kathy. One of the things Mandy asked for, which I think is right, she asked for being as explicit as possible what they're supposed to do. And I'm just looking at this. It includes a draft of the FY21 goals by ex-date. We've got some very specific short pieces. So I agree with what Mandy just said. I don't think a group right of composite letter is a good idea, but it's already, we have to get something out to the council, all of us that we respond to in some way. That's task number one and it needs to have a due date on it so it can go out to all of us. And then the other big task is an initial draft of what are the goals for the coming year so that we don't hand over performance goals for a 12 month period with only five months left in the year. I mean, we're trying to catch up. So there's some explicit dates here that if we send it to GOL, there's a fair amount of work that needs to be done. Two different pieces with dates set on them. Dorothy? Okay, I think that I have two different points. First, we have to use common sense. I'm remembering now what Lynn did last year. That's not, it's ridiculous. We cannot keep piling on work on top of people. We are working too hard as it is and the time is short. So I think that you have to say, this is what we did. Here's the papers and documents. How can we simplify this within the time? Because we don't have unlimited time and our schedule seems to be throwing things really on top of each other. The other part that we're not talking about and that was the part that was poorly done last time was the getting comments from the community and from the staff. And we don't quite know why but we just really didn't get many comments. That's something that perhaps TSO could look into because outreach is part of their title. Trying to think out, are there any things that aren't too complex? Any ways of increasing participation in the non-council members is part of the evaluation because that was just very, very skimpy last time. But for us, it's got to be simpler than it was last time. It cannot be some burden that has people staying up and not sleeping for two weeks. It's just, we're getting crazy. So I'm just urging us to simplify. Narci? Yeah, I guess I would just say since I personally think the most important piece is the cover memo is that I think that there would be a way to deal with the problems of the open meeting law problems by either assigning it to two people to write the draft and talk about it in an executive committee. Yes, no? There is no such thing. No. Once you have more than one counselor, you've got a meeting. Not if it's a one-time deal, right? That's not true. Not if it's not an official subcommittee. It would be an official subcommittee because you just said that. Well, it's not a non-official subcommittee. There's no such thing. No such thing. Alyssa, any further comments? So I just want to, I mean, beyond the fact that I will fight anyone who says that we did, we did anything poorly. We didn't do anything poorly. We didn't get a great response rate. That doesn't mean that there was anything wrong with our process in terms of the actual forms, for example, but they need to be looked at. And they need to be looked at by a committee that has time to do this more than, oh my God, we have to send them out next week, which is literally with position work. So they're good enough to go out this week in terms of the email that goes out to the committee chairs. It's good enough to put out the staff evaluation. We wish we would have done it differently this year, but guess what? We didn't. So we're going to send the same form out, which was fine and at least as comparable to last year. And unfortunately probably won't get a lot of response. And we need to be clear on who's doing the goals, which is going to go to a committee. The form itself does not need to come back to the town council to be reviewed. It certainly didn't last year and ended up with the mess that I didn't like, but the form is just the goals turned into something. And given the short period of time we have, we don't need to believe that. The goals need to be drafted by somebody. That's a committee. The form needs to be created by somebody that will just be the form because it's the form that's based on the goals that already exist. It's not new. And then we need to have the future conversation, which maybe GOL can also have about, oh, well, when you consider the email that has to go out, this piece, this piece, this piece, this is who should work on it over the course of the next year. And just make it simple for ourselves now. All right. I'd like to make a motion. I move that the evaluation and the evaluation be referred to GOL for the purpose of guiding the process through this year, including the development of a format that is counselor friendly for our responses. And to draft the goals to be brought back to the council on in time for our meeting on August 17th. Is there a second? Second. There any further discussion? Evan. Sorry to be a pain. Can I just ask that the motion be reread? Athena, can you reread the motion? Sure. That the evaluation be referred to GOL for the purpose of guiding the process for the year, including the development of a format that is counselor friendly and draft goals to be brought to the council in time for the August 17th meeting. Okay. Motion's been made and seconded. Any further comment? I'm so confused. I don't get it. Darcy, you have your hand up. Yeah, I just wanted to make a quick comment that I felt like the goals, the ad hoc goals committee that existed for FY20 was successful because it combined a number of people that had different interests and expertise. Shalini was on it and had her interest in economic development and I was on it and I had interest in sustainability and so on. Anyway, obviously whatever GOL does is gonna come back to the full committee for comments. I just wanna make sure that the committee takes into consideration all those different interest areas. I just got lost one on the dates because I'm sorry, I know Athena just read it and I totally got lost. So I get the fact that it's fine if we don't have draft goals until the middle of August. It's fine if we don't do goals until November. It's not ideal, but it's fine. What we need is we need to form. We can't get a form on August 17th. We're supposed to have completed it before August 17th. Really lost about where we are. Melissa, we already have for this year. Well, right. So why are we talking about a form? We're talking about a form for this year which is not gonna be the same as the form last year. So therefore it is not existing yet because the thing we had that was the user friendly part but like we have to fill it out. So we have to get it before August 17th. We're not waiting until August 17th to fill it out. And the motion is that GOL will guide that process and look at and make sure we have a friendly form. But when are we filling out the form? That like when are we... Hopefully in the month. Right, so we don't have the... Okay, somebody wanna tell me the date again that they're gonna get us a form by because it's not gonna be August. It's in your calendar. Then why did we specify a date for the goals but not a date for the form? Then we can add the date to the form. Let's see, I'm just trying to find the date for the form. Counselor evaluation form would be sent out by July 8th according to the calendar and the counselors have to fill it out by August 4th. Right, so somebody's gotta create it. Right. And we'll have it in our hands by August 8th by July. The calendar initially says that the email is sent to the town counselors with individual counselor evaluation form is somewhere between June 16th and June 29th. The initial one. I'm just trying to see when GOL is supposed to have the form done by, I guess I don't care if they don't care. So it's fine. Twice, give me twice. Maybe even three times. Further discussion, Darcy? Oh, no, I meant to lower my hand. Okay. There's a motion made in seconded. Is there any further discussion? Sarah. Okay, so I'm sorry, I just wanna make sure, so I know that we're trying to make sure that we take care of this year, but I also wanted to just make sure that we are putting this in, if it's gonna be GOL, that it's gonna become part of their charge so that we're not put in this situation again next year, that somebody's solely working on doing the deadlines and getting things ready, starting now for next year. That's just that we're thinking about doing that because that's, I think, more important to me. That's not part of this motion, but it does sound to me like GOL needs to look at its charge and bring it back to the council. Okay, thanks. Okay. All right, motion's been made in seconded. Any further discussion? Okay, then we're going to begin with Shane. Yes. Schreiber. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. Worts. Yes. Balmille. Yes. Brewer. Yes. The Angelus. Yes. Dumont. Yes. Riesmer. Yes. Hannake. Yes. Pam. Yes. And Ross. Yes. And Ryan. Yes. 13-0-0 on the referral. Moving on to zoning bylaw amendment process. Mandy, Joe, do we need to do this now or do we want to mix up? You do not need to do it tonight. Okay, we'll move it to the 22nd, 29th. And then the next thing is this is a discussion regarding policing and I've asked Paul, Shalini and Pat, several of us were including in the audience at the recent discussion with the police chief and staff, the town manager and residents. But Shalini and Pat were actually in the panelist group, as was Paul. So, Shalini and Pat. Shalini is going to share our reflection. Okay. Sure. So, I just want to start off by saying I personally found it very hopeful to see the honesty and discussions that we had, the commitment shared by the chief of police, by a town manager to continue to listen and to do better. So, I don't know. I mean, there were nine of us counselors there. So, I don't know in how much detail I want to go. Paul has already shared a video that people can see if they want to listen into the dialogue because I think it was a really good first conversation to be had. There were 50 residents, there were nine counselors, the chief of police, captain Ting was there and maybe I can just highlight some of the things that we learned, just a couple of really good points that emerged, like for example, the first thing we, that the chief of police shared was about the extensive role they're playing in handling many more situations than they used to. And so, there was an agreement that maybe we can look at our budgets and how we can align our local budgets to address some of these needs. The other thing that was really interesting is that none of the, even though there are a lot of trainings and implicit bias that everyone goes through and that was really great that we have a lot of policies in place for de-escalation, the use of force, but there is no training that provides a history of policing and even the chief of police was interested in having more training from non-police staff. So there were a lot of like really good ideas that came up like that or needs that were expressed and shared. So, like I said, that was just the first of the meetings, Ghazid Khaya-Khousi who initiated this meeting along with Dr. Shabazz and Dr. Shabazz. They sent a little feedback, I mean, just after the meeting, so they kind of reflected that this is the first and they'd like to continue this conversation. They specifically requested for having a town hall to give opportunity for the 59 attendees to share their concerns. So that's one of the things that Lynn, Pat and I sort of did a little debrief afterwards and we came up with some ideas including having a facilitated meeting with the residents and the chief of police and our town staff. And we talked about maybe having a task force that with the diverse group of people including some residents, town staff and town counselors to look at the systemic issues because this goes beyond policing issues. This is looking at all our domain, maybe using this as an opportunity to look at the different sectors in our community that where racism and inequities exist like the schools, the development areas or housing. I mean, so these are really like, it's an opportunity to study all of these different issues to look at the data in hand but also listening to the lived experiences of people. And so as of now, what we are proposing is maybe having a special town council meeting to discuss this on maybe June 22nd or July 6th and really would like to hear from everyone else right now what ideas you might have and if that wants to add on something to that. Well, a couple of the other things that came up and one of them was some kind of citizens review. Yes. There is no civilian oversight of our department and I did not get a feeling that the department would be resistant to that. Which was a really good thing to hear. And so I just wanted to add that but I'd love to hear from other people who were virtually there. That's what I meant to do. There's no conversation. Raise your hand if you'd like to speak. I crossed the raising the hand thing. Oh, okay. Dorothy, go ahead. I can't find the, when I click participants, it doesn't come up now. Yes, I want to second what Pat said. The chief made it very, very clear that he, his department did not have opposition to some kind of civilian review. And I was thinking of it as kind of like an audit. I mean, just looking at seeing have there been uses of force? Have there been any discipline problems? Are there areas that they think that they want to improve on? I felt it could be done in a friendly manner because I don't think doing it in an unfriendly manner is going to get us very far. But I wanted to add another thing that I think would be useful. When I lived in sunny side, we had the 108th police precinct community meeting every month and we went to it and the police would open it kind of like town council with what things they were looking at, what problems that were in the community, sometimes warning us of local frauds or whatever. And then residents could just stand up and ask their question or make a statement. And it was a very friendly, productive and it was part of what you did in that neighborhood. And I felt it kept a good climate and it kept things from building up and boiling up. I also think that I think Pat alluded to this that in terms of really reaching out the community, maybe some of these meetings should travel and go to different parts of the town because after a while you get used to who comes to town hall and it's not that big a group of people. But to have a good, I mean, it seemed to me that the chief and Captain Ting were making it very clear they valued and wanted open and free conversation with the people of Amherst and did not feel in opposition and welcome the idea of working together with the community in a little more detail. So I thought it was a very positive meeting. So I know that Pat talks a lot about coded language and I think that it's important for all of us to sort of think about things that we say. And when we're talking about having people of color talk to white people about racism, racism isn't very friendly. And so I'm not saying that, I'm just saying that when you say I wanna keep it friendly, I feel like it's in some ways saying to people of color, make sure you stay in your lane. So I know that's not what Dorothy was saying, but I'm just saying that we need to be careful about how we phrase things. That's right. Right on. Are there other comments? Put my hand up, I thought I did. So the hand up function is not working? Okay. Kathy. It's working. No, it is working. I just couldn't make the participant thing go up because I've got everybody's face on the screen. So I couldn't find it. I was a listener and one of the things, one of the exchanges I thought to build on Sarah's point was the barriers people face when they want to register a concern. And the person who was leading the discussion listed a whole bunch of different ways that you might feel uncomfortable or including a language barrier, but also a fear of authority. And the response was, we've never heard such a fantastic list. That was really important for you to list that out. And then the other was the types of training on how do we work on things in different ways that the trainers we find are former police officers. And we've reached out at different times to UMass or Amherst College for suggestions of other people because we're totally open to thinking about different types of modules. So it was a very open discussion of welcoming ideas, welcoming suggestions, welcoming concrete things rather than, and the concrete list of barriers was stunning that was given and everyone was not in their head now, yes. And then you think of personal stories. So I thought it was a healthy beginning. It was clearly just a beginning. Narci? Yeah, I attended and I really appreciate the fact that Shalini and Gazit Haya organized it. I, Gazit Haya is actually doing outreach for the Energy and Climate Action Committee through the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Grant. And she has brought that same kind of energy to ACAC in the outreach that we're doing there, bringing community leaders into our task groups that are people of color that she has brought in and she's doing individual one-on-one consciousness raising with members of the committee and leading a caucus of the people of color community leaders that are gonna be in our task groups. So it's a whole new world of making the white members more aware of just what's happening, you know, how thinking is changing. George? I, what struck me in listening to this, I listened to it on the later, was how increasingly we are asking the police to deal with issues for which they really aren't trained and probably could never be trained, but they are in a sense, the ones who are the first responders. I'm thinking particularly of issues around homelessness and mental health. So I hope that whatever conversation goes forward that people from that community, those in the mental health community, those who work with the homeless will be involved that this won't be focused simply on the issue of race as important as that is. Because what I heard, at least what I heard from this discussion was a real willingness on the part of the police department to engage in dialogue with the community and also request for help and a sense that in many cases they find themselves tasked with things that really they're not suited for. And yet they're the ones who have to deal with it. So I guess what I'm saying is I hope this, I did definitely heard a willingness for a lot more discussion and I'm glad to hear it's gonna go forward. I hope that this will also include members of the mental health community and those who work with the homeless as part of this discussion. Cause I heard, I thought very clearly that police department would like some assistance there. Okay, so Evan, I'm gonna take your question and I'm gonna ask that we shape, we shape the conversation a certain way, but go ahead Evan. So actually George sort of beat me too, but I just wanted to say that the thing that I left at the forefront of my mind when I left that conversation was what they said about how increasingly their calls are responding to non-criminal calls, especially things around mental health and homelessness. And I don't wanna read too much into tone or try to interpret him, but it seemed like something that the chief was uncomfortable with that that wasn't something that they had originally envisioned their role as being and was an area where he was certainly open to perhaps re-imagining their role. And then I saw as I'm sure many of you did the announcement from the mayor of San Francisco yesterday that they would be replacing police officers with trained professionals who would be unarmed to respond to non-criminal complaints around mental health, homelessness, neighbor disputes. And I hope that becomes a part of the discussion going forward is who responds. And also a big piece of this that I'm gonna be pretty vocal about is when does a response require the responder to have a firearm? Because I think that's gonna be a big piece of this. When we are responding to noise complaints, when we were responding to traffic violations, does whoever's responding need a firearm on their hip? And so who's responding, what their training is and are they carrying, I think need to be important parts of the conversation. So what I want the council to answer at this point is, let me shape the question. There's responsibility that the town manager has to make sure that our police department and other first responders, because this also happens frankly with ambulance people, it could even happen with somebody from DPEW when somebody doesn't like how they snowplowed. And I'm not being facetious. I mean, we get complaints about that all the time. So there's the responsibility of the town manager, but the real question before the council is, what do we want our role to be? And one of the suggestions that was thrown out was the idea of having a council meeting that would be more like a public forum, if you will. Another suggestion would be that there'd be some kind of task force formed or some kind of civilian review audit. And there, any number of these things, for instance, particularly a task force might be something that's jointly done between the council and the town manager as a committee that we jointly appoint people to and have a jointly agreed to charge or whatever the case may be. But it's not a one-sided thing. It's not either the council is gonna do this or the staff are gonna do this. It's something that we have to do in a way that we're doing this together. Out of it may come some policies or budgets, things that we want to see changed, but we're not at that point yet. So my question is, what is our next step? Dorothy, you have your hand up. Okay, okay. So the thing I've been thinking about is the question that has been brought up at a number of times, which is when we asked the, or when I was a silent observer, when the chief was asked about going on mental health calls or whatever, he said he went with a trained member at EMT. So my first question is, does the police officer need to go at all? Because some towns are saying, okay, let's take, remove some responsibilities from the police department and put them on more social service-trained people. But then I thought, well, okay, but the police have a coverage thing and they're available in a way that many other people aren't available. I mean, they're available, they have 24-hour job schedules. So this question, which is really one that we can have some input in, but it's also one that is really experts in policing and mental health need to be giving guidance on. And Paul probably has some thoughts on this. Is there a way to restructure some of the responsibilities of what the police do with people who would be adequately trained and available to come when needed? I mean, I read the police broader every week. It's interesting and quite amusing reading. And, you know, some people from some other big cities would say, oh, wow, you have such little problems, but they're problems for people. They're going out for somebody who's yelling at somebody in the sidewalk. Somebody was piling leaves in the street for some reason. People are having an argument in their house. Most of the stuff that they do, the result is they told them to go on their way. So they are keeping order of some sort. Maybe some of those cases they didn't need to go on. Half the time they say that something was reported in a neighborhood and it turned out just to be two people walking home or that in fact the suspicious person wasn't suspicious. So isn't that really the use for our police? Is there a way of rescheduling, reorganizing first responders that would be better suited? I mean, I agree, Levin, no one with a gun should be going on all kinds of issues. If half, I mean, almost all recent murders that have taken place that are in the news right now are places where there was no need of anyone with a gun. You know, why do you need a gun to go tell a man, wake up and move your car or something? Not that I accuse our police of behaving that way, but Paul, are you doing some rethinking of how to structure the policemen's job or is someone doing it? Paul, I'd like to hear from you, but I really want this group to get to the issue of... What we're gonna do. Yep. We can't solve these problems sitting here tonight. We can all raise our thoughts, but what is our next step? Kathy. I just wanted, Lynn, you said, is it a task for what's a place to start? When we were looking at what some towns had put into their ability of their counselors to do, one thing was something called a dialogue where it wasn't the council making a decision, but it was bringing in people. And Evans just mentioned San Francisco is going a route of trying to change the composition of a police force and things. So we could start with something as simple as a dialogue where people are bringing in ideas and it's around table. It's not decision making. And then figure out if we actually want, need a task force or something because I think we need buy-in, we need some thoughtful ideas, we need some, everybody is rethinking this, right? We're in a C community. This question of when do you need a trained police officer who has a certain kind of training and when do you need a different kind of person? Should one of them be in a pair with somebody else so that you don't know what the event... Right, right. We can't answer those questions, but we could begin to have a discussion with some information and then say we want then the town manager and the police to come back with a recommendation of what we might think of doing, because you can't turn on a dime either. I mean, we have some 50 FTEs working in our police department, which includes overtime. I mean, we have to be thinking, what do we want a year from now? What do we want where we can make changes? So dialogue might be a place to start if we didn't want to make a formal task force, but task force usually are supposed to go out, do some studying and come back with a report. So that gives you a more of a timeline of gathering information when the people who are starting it don't have a lot of information themselves. Darcy? I think that's a really good idea to have a community dialogue. My only worry would be that it would somehow undercut the organizers, the community organizers and leaders who might wanna do something on their own. But I think we could probably do both. I just would wanna respect their wanting to have some kind of leadership role in organizing what happens. Next. Shalini? Yes. I think I really wanna emphasize that we really need to listen, listen, listen right now and create opportunities for people to be heard. And I just heard from Gazitaya too and she also mentioned that there is such a desire to be heard right now. And I imagine that anything you can do to create opportunities to listen will be appreciated. And of course, when we are creating these opportunities we're gonna be working with the organizers initially and seeing how we can come together and work on that. The other thing I just wanna do also say was it feels like through these listening opportunities we can also identify what's already in place. And then part of our work as counselors is to communicate that because most people don't know what we're doing right, so let's share that with the community. And then I'm thinking in terms of short term and long term actions. And so there are some out of these listening sessions we may be able to identify some actions we can take right away. You know, like some things that are out there like the eight can't wait or just kind of see like what are some good best practices that we can put in place right away but then also have a task force to look at things in a more systemic way and bring longer term and that's gonna take a longer time, I think. Pat? A building a little bit on a couple of different things. One of the most important things I think we can do and I learned this from the DPW community outreach that we started was going to speak to people directly for our community. And I know virtually that's a little tricky right now but I think that there are ways that could figure out how to do that as members of the council to move out. But I think that, and so I do really want to see us develop some kind of task force that I'm not sure I like that comfortable with those words but the piece for me is as a white person my starting point has to be the ways in which systemic racism has impacted my life in the sense of the reactions I have to people of color, the fears I have about people of color, the limitations I place on people of color until each one of us on the council begins to do that individually, but not gonna get anywhere or we'll get somewhere that won't be very far. It really seems to me that one of the things that this council would benefit from and I don't know how to make it happen in terms of the open meeting law but we need to get together and in our dialogue between ourselves about these issues as well as asking the community to participate in a dialogue. Otherwise we're just collecting stories and that's not enough. So I want to find a way for us to be in a facilitated situation where we're talking about systemic racism and I don't know. Is there anything else, Pat? Not right now, no. Okay, Alyssa, you have your hand up. Yes, thank you to try and not repeat things other people said. So collecting stories is surely very valuable but definitely not enough and having been just to part of that meeting I'm eager for us to continue to express that we as a town council want to hear more from what different parts of the community want us to do. So absolutely, the people who organized that meeting, definitely, but also to hear from HRC who are they hearing from and to hear from other groups that we've heard from in the past but are maybe not hearing from right now because there obviously is no monolith group that is responsible. So what can we do to be responsible to reach out and say, tell us more things about what you would like us to do. I know that feels soft in comparison to doing something like setting up a task force but I really think the last thing we need right now is a task force that doesn't have a clear goal and there might be a task force that is having a conversation about the different types of policing we were just talking about but that's a future thing. So I wonder if what we could also look to is have the town manager come back with some suggestions. Obviously, he's been talking with staff. He's been talking with APD and I know that Mel Rose is, for example, doing a thing where they were supposedly and the report should come out soon where they were looking with in town hall at the procedures and policies and public interactions they had and saying, what could we do to promote racial equality and equity? I am sure that our employees have some great ideas. They've all been to various kinds of trainings. They've all had various interactions with the public. I'll bet they have plenty of pent up ideas. It's just this crazy pandemic time. And so I would love to hear more from people who are doing the work and people who are experiencing the experiences to tell us what they want from us. So it's clear that we, but that we want to do something because it's kind of shocking, I'm sure, just like the rest of you, even though we're not seeing our friends because of the pandemic, when we do touch people, people are saying, what are you guys doing? And it's like, well, I don't know, what are we doing? And so being able to not just say, I really appreciate that this got added to the agenda because we need to do something, but I think we sometimes jump right to, oh, well, let's have some speaker come in. Oh, well, let's have this task force. I want to find a way to continue to reach out in the relationships that Shalini and Pat have already been building that we're able to make that meeting to say, what do you think we should be doing? What would be helpful to our community? Because we are in this wonderful place where we have town councils never dealt with this as a town council. Oh, you have your hand up and it's long overdue to let you talk. I know I hate to prolong this, but I think the energy from the council is palpable, so I appreciate everybody's engagement. I look at this, I think this is a unique opportunity and unique time for us. And I think that the council plays a really critical role because people, I feel, are looking, they need a venue to speak. And they want to speak truth to power. You and I are power. You know, we may think we're all part of the community, but you are the biggest power in the town of Amherst right now. People need that place to be able to speak to you and to our police chiefs and leadership that way. I think we are a way, I think we're in a unique position. It's a conversation we've had multiple times every day. We're in a unique position because we have enlightened leadership with our police department, progressive policies that we're very proud of, but the real experience of people is different from how we say how great we're what doing. So I think we need to hear more, we need to do what Pat said, we have to educate ourselves and take that responsibility as well. But when I think about what does the council do, you have a unique role in that you are, you can convene people. And if you say we're going to be someplace to listen, people will come. And I think there were 50 people on a moment's notice showing up at something that one counselor and an organizer put together and it was spectacular and important. So that's where I think, I think all those other things down the road, like, you know, we're looking at Eugene, Oregon, that they have a different kind of model as well because the university town, there's lots of different places out there who are doing things differently. So I think all those conversations, but I think that first thing where we are in space right now is that people need to say what they feel and they experience. One of the thoughts has been that we would hold some kind of council listening. I don't know what he was saying, dialogue, but listening. And I mean, I just have to use the parallel that we went through this with 132 North Hampton Road. I was, you know, lining up a facilitator and so forth. And then the citizen said, no, that's not what they wanted. They wanted to just, you know, come and talk and present and so forth. So the really is, the issue is what do we want to do? What format and what time? Dorothy. I have an idea of one thing we could do. We could go to a black church in town. I don't remember the name of the one that, I guess it's Jackie Wallace, but I went to a number of events there and just ask them if they want to have a meeting and we would come to listen, as Paul says. Well, none of us are going anywhere at this point because we're still, I know, but you know what? I'm getting, on this topic, I'm getting ready to say, let's do it with social distance. I really, I mean, I really feel people have to see you and they have to feel heard. And it's awfully hard to do that on a Zoom. I agree. Mandy Jeff. If our goal is to listen, I bring back the charter commission. We just called them listening sessions. They were a meeting of the charter commission. They were held whether or not a full quorum was present and the agenda most of the time was, frankly, to listen. There was almost never an actual presentation made by anyone on the commission. There was an opening statement by the chair who said, we're here to listen. And then we sat there for however long it was until people were done talking. If we had a quorum, we had minutes. If we didn't have a quorum, we still took minutes. We just didn't call the meeting to order. Because we weren't going to be transacting any business. We didn't actually have to technically have, even if we had a quorum, the town attorney had said, we didn't technically have to call it as a meeting, but we chose to, to make sure it had that import that Paul was talking about. So maybe we don't have to find a specific thing in our rules or a specific thing in the charter. Maybe we can just say, we're having a listening session. We could call it a public forum under the charter or we could call it a working dialogue or whatever. Or we could just say, it's a listening session. And my concern with putting it on the 22nd and maybe I'm too concerned about this is that it's too soon to ensure that everyone knows it's happening and to get schedules cleared to come. And so I would definitely want to listen to, you know, Gazikaya and the doctors, Shavas to see if they believe that that is sufficient to notice to, for people to come and talk. And if not, would July 6th be better? But I don't want to schedule something to a time period where people believe we rushed it and they don't have the ability to be able to get free to attend. What I'm hearing is the suggestion that we reconnoiter back with the people that Shalini and Pat were meeting with. We try to select a date for listening and that is appropriately far enough down the road that people get notice and can clear their calendars, but not so far that we're, you know, just pushing this off. That, Darcy, Darcy, you have your hand up. I just would recommend that any meeting would be a format that was similar to, well, actually no, not similar to the meeting that was already had, but an open public meeting where all attendees are visible on the screen because that would be much more welcoming and people-friendly and egalitarian for that type of meeting, I think we just have to have it wide open. Would we do registration? I think you could do registration, but just, you know, allowing everybody in so that they're all in the room. Got that, yeah. Pat. Basically, I was going to say something similar to that. I've been in several, recently several seminars dialogues where there have been over 250 people, all visible, and but the people running the meeting are controlling what's to move it on. And I think it's, it would be quickly more persistent. Oh, and I also wanted to just highlight that there is an HRC meeting this Thursday on 18 June at 6 p.m. that if counselors want to attend that. So there are other avenues that we could be attending also. So in order for us to continue on with our agenda, which we still have some things to do, I'm going to suggest that I will get back with Pat and Shalini. We will talk with the people that originally pulled this last meeting together, see if we can find a time and a date and the council will use its power to convene, but in this case, it's power to listen, okay? All right, Dorothy. I would suggest two dates and council members do not feel, should not be made to feel they have to all go to both of them. But when there's two dates, you're going to get maybe different people and it could be good. I like that. Okay, all right. Can we move on? All right, we're on to the town council, town manager appointments. I'm going to ask, this actually went to TSO. So, at this point, Dorothy, let's pick back up with you. Are we talking about the list of reappointments? Yes, the ones that you did two weeks ago, it's the Agriculture Commission, et cetera. Okay, so yes, we have a list of a number of different appointments to boards and committees that were done. They're reappointments that were to expire on June 30th. So, We'll put that memo up. Oh, I just lost mine. There we go. So, yeah, this, we had little discussion about it. We voted unanimously for the appointments for the recommendation of the town council to approve them. And I would be glad to read the motion if we're ready. So, it is a motion to approve the following town manager reappointments under Charter Section 211B, for terms expiring on June 30th, 2023, to the Agricultural Commission, Masoud Halshini and David Mitrowski, to the Affordable Housing Trust, Sidonia Ferrera, to the Board of Assessors, Richard Morse, to the Council on Aging, Gregory Baskoam and Tim Neal, to the Design Review Board, Erica Zecos, to the Historical Commission, Janet Markhart and Hedy Startup, to Leisure Services and Supplemental Education Commission, Yusef Fidel, to the Munson Memorial Building Trustees, Claudia O'Brien, to the Public Art Commission, William Cazen, to the Water Supply Protection Committee, Christina Keonfrey and Jack Jemsik, and for terms expiring on June 30th, 2021, to the Residence Advisory Committee, Kisha Dennis, Constance Krueger and James Pistre. Is there a second? Mindy Jo, you have your hand up, but is it to make a second? It is not to make a second. Is there a second? This is the end of y'all, this is the end of y'all second. Okay, now Mindy Jo. It's late, I was gonna ask to split out the Historical Commission. Instead of splitting it out, I'm just going to state my statements now so that we can just take one vote because it's late, my vote will be an abstain from the whole set. So the Historical Commission has money, much more power than some of us may think it does or may realize it does. It has the power to institute a demolition delay for 12 months on a property if it determines that that property is a significant structure and that this demolition of that structure would be a detriment to the historical or architectural assets in town. And that sounds all well and good until you actually read the bylaw. And in reading the bylaw, I realized that nearly any structure, no matter how old or how young, could be deemed a significant structure because of how the bylaw is written. A structure that is five years old that is placed on a main highway can be deemed to have geographic significance because it is a landmark or a visual landmark in the neighborhood. The wording might not be exactly that way, but I am concerned about the makeup of the committee as a whole and some of the votes the committee as a whole has made. I am concerned about the bylaw itself and I thank the town manager for suggesting a meeting and I had a productive meeting with a number of staff members today about the bylaw itself, about potential revisions to it. But I am concerned in some of the meetings I watched and some of the minutes I've read that some members may be using the bylaw improperly in that because you can, as I told staff today, essentially drive a truck through it and deem nearly anything significant structure that if you don't like that I fear that some members of the commission have been coloring their desire to institute a demo delay or not by what might go up there and what the proposal to go up there is and why the demolition is occurring. So I'm using my time here as we have to deal with appointments and approval of appointments to not agree with the historical commission appointments, not to make it about any one person on the historical commission, but I think the commission as a whole might be broken partly because of the bylaw itself, but partly because of training. There are no definitions in the bylaw and anyone can interpret them any way they are. And because of that, I'm using this to bring that to the attention of the manager and to the members of our council to see if there's something we can do because instituting a demolition delay can really serve the purpose of harming economic development in town. And so if we're going to leave the bylaw the way it is, I think we need to look much more closely at who the appointments are to see whether those appointees espouse the same desires that we do in a way that we look at planning borders, the ZBA as Alyssa Brewer said earlier today about certain appointments when we were talking about a letter to the ZBA. So that's it. I will, instead of asking to separate out historical commission, I will abstain from all of the votes because of that, but I wanted to bring that to the attention of everyone and particularly the town manager. Thanks, Kathy. I wouldn't have thought of this at all, Mandy, if you hadn't just mentioned demolition delay, but I don't know about the composition of the committee per se or their training, but in district one, I know of at least one family and this was not an issue about postponing development, but for whatever reason, a barn that was falling apart hit this delay and because of it, they couldn't insure the property. No one would write insurance. And if a child walked into this barn, they were at risk of having something fall on them. So there is also, I think, a training or a need thinking about the consequences for property owner of using this. So it sounds to me, I don't know exactly anything about the people, but it sounds to me, we need to revisit what this clause should mean, could mean and how it gets interpreted because this was, it costs them a lot of money because what they wanted to do is tear it down because it was unsafe and it wasn't that old. You know, this was a, as someone said, well anything that is earlier than 1960 is historical or whatever it was, but boy, this is a eyesore, not an emblem, but so I think you brought a different issue to our attention. So thank you for it. Are there any other comments at this time? Chaloney. Yeah, I also want to acknowledge Mandy Jo's work in bringing this to our attention. And does this mean we can remove this particular word? Are we going ahead with leaving the historical commission appointments today? One of the options is to separate out this historical appointment separately. Mandy Jo, I believe that was initially your intent. That was in my initial plan, but instead I am not going to request that instead I'm just going to abstain from the entire vote. Is there any other? Okay. So the motion's been made and seconded. Pat, please get your hand up. I was just going to say, I would like to, I have not, thank you Mandy Jo for, I would like to remove the historical commission appointment, commission appointments and move ahead with the other recommendations. So I'm going to treat this as a consent agenda. And that is that if one counselor asks to separate out one of the committees, we will do so and proceed with the others as the motion has been read. I am asking we remove the historical commission appointments. So we're going to separate them off from this at this time. Okay. Darcy. It doesn't seem like, I mean, these are two separate appointments to the historical commission. It seems like only whoever is being objected to should be, I mean, why should we prevent the other person from being appointed? I, I, that, that's a good point. We can also move this off to another meeting and find out when we have more time. So we just take that committee, people continue to serve and we'll bring it back on a future near agenda. So that we don't have to try to resolve that issue tonight. That's what I'm suggesting. George. Well, the initial sponsor withdrew and I also feel that we're, it's somehow singling out to individuals where the issue seems to be more with the bylaw and its vagueness and issues of, of lack of definition and clarity. It seems the issue is more with the bylaw than it is with the individuals who are tasked with carrying it out. I share Mandy's concern of how I feel at times this might have been misused or even abused. But I think singling out these individuals seems inappropriate unless someone has some concrete argument they want to make that these individuals have been egregious and not fulfilling their responsibilities. Otherwise, I think we should let this just go as it is and instead pursue the larger and I think more important question of the bylaw itself and whether it really says what we wanted to say. Okay, so I'm going to just state the following. We've already had one council who is asked to separate out a committee. We can actually delay the vote on that committee to a future meeting but proceed with the rest of these votes without getting into individuals or the bylaw and bring the bylaw back as a separate discussion and bring the committee back as a separate discussion. So the issue of it being separated out has already happened. We can bring that back to a vote tonight for that commission or not. Steve? Yeah, so, well, first I object to breaking out that particular group. I think we should vote for this as a block. The historical commission is a political body. They're not working with science. They're working with basically the information that they have before them. And so I am certainly aware of controversial decisions that they've made, but they're doing their job. They're doing due diligence. We may not like that. I don't think, but I've never seen anything egregious that any member of the historical commission has done, including the incumbents. So I would object to not taking this vote tonight. Melissa? I'm sorry, was that me? Yes. I understand the sentiment behind splitting it out. I appreciate what Mandy Jo did to save us time. And now of course we're not saving time anymore is that I agree with everything George said and understanding as Lynn also stated that these people are gonna keep serving anyway. So if we're trying to punish them, which is literally the only way to read that, then that's what we do. If you're going to pull them out and then vote on them separately and then that way have several abstentions because you're wanting, that's fine, but it doesn't make any sense to postpone them to another night, whether it's a big postponement nuclear option or not because they're going to continue serving whether you do anything or not. So I would not do, I would not separate them out or if you have separated them out already and can't take that back, then I would go ahead and vote on them tonight as well. The total may just be different. The way we treated this was consent agenda. If one counselor asked that it be separated out, we do so, we did that. So we are back to the original slate that is here minus the historic commission, historical commission. Dorothy? I agree that it would be not very unfortunate to single out this committee or any members of it. And I know that at least one of them is very new. I have been paying attention to these demolition delays for a number of years because I didn't know what they meant. It's a clearly it's been established practice in this commission. So I think that the issue is the charge of the commission and looking at that, which many people have mentioned. So I would support voting the whole slate or none, but the idea of stripping out one committee is very punitive and I think very misguided. This thing of demolition delay with different barns and whatever it's been going on for 10 years, at least since I've been here, I've been paying attention to it. So I didn't know what it was. So I thought it was interesting. So I would say we should vote the slate in and then deal very seriously with the commission's bylaw. Here's the dilemma you've placed me in. One counselor has asked to separate out and as on a consent agenda, it then gets separated out and is not debatable nor does it need a second. We can still vote on it tonight, but it would be voted separately. I withdraw that idea. So we're back to the full slate. Complete slate, all right? We're back to the original motion. Is there any other discussion? All right. The motion is the complete slate as you see it on the screen and we begin with Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Hi. Sarah. Yes. Thank you. Yep. Shalini Balmell. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Hattie Angeles. Yes. Garcy Dumont. Yes. Lynn Griezmer is an abstain. Mandy Johanicki. Abstain. Garthy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Votes 11-4, none against and two abstentions and it passes. Okay, we now have to move to the elementary school building committee. I sent out an email, many people responded. I sent you a, in your, I'm finding my own memo. In your packet was a memo and it listed eight counselors. Okay. We need to get to the point that we have recommended two counselors. I'm going to make your lives easy. I'm taking my name off the list. It's not because I wouldn't like to do that. This it's not because I don't feel I'm qualified. It's just that I enjoy being president of the council and can't take this on right now too. And there's many other qualified people. Hattie Angeles, do you have your hand? Yes. I'd like to remove myself. I was hoping that my educational background would be valuable to the committee, but I have a feeling that people more versed in finance would be helpful on it. So I'm going to withdraw my name. Are there any other people whose name I missed when I came up with the list? Are there any other people who would like to add their name to the list? Lane, can you just have him scroll to the name list so we can see it right now? That's, thank you. That's the charge. We're actually moving to the memo, which is dated June 14th, 2020. Yes, that one. And move down to the list, please. Here we go. Thank you. So the list has been narrowed to six. They are Alyssa Brewer, Darcy DeMont, Mandy Jo Hanneke, Kathy Shane, Steve Schreiber, and Andy Steinberg. The way the charge reads, there should be one person from finance and then one person from the council at large. That does not exclude that that person can also be from finance. It just means that one of the people has to be from finance. So I'm going to suggest the following process. We're going to have, first of all, discuss the desired qualities for this choosing this person, what we are looking for, what we think is important to have represented what was supposed to happen with the select school committee, but really didn't, given that eight people were vying for it, this may be easier to accomplish. So that was just a side comment. Then you're going to make statements. The six of you, and then we're going to have a poll where, or who you think should be on from finance, and then we're going to have a second one after that, where we basically say, who else would you like to vote for? And when we go down, we just do state the names, okay? So what are some of the characteristics people feel should be included in counselors we select for this purpose? I will start out by saying, first of all, I think finance is important. I think procurement is important. I think that being able to listen to different voices and represent them back to the council is important. Dorothy? Thank you. At some meeting recently, there was a clear statement, which I cannot reproduce, that said the school committee feasibility, this committee, building committee, will not be working on this, it'll be working on that. And that statement, I'd love to have it repeated exactly what, so before we talk about qualities, that we know what is doing and what it's not doing. This committee does not work on the program. The school committee is in charge of deciding the program. This committee is about the building that will fit the program that the school committee decides. Essence, that was the state. Paul, do you have a better way you'd like to state that? Kathy? In addition to what you listed, Lynn, I think listening and working well with people is going to be critical from different points of view. My understanding of this is both, we've got to be willing to get up early in the morning to get to the meetings. But there's a volume of work to this that will be ranging from trying to understand all the nuances of the options that are being discussed to when it gets nearer to some initial decisions being made, being willing to look at complex documents, read them, think about them and ask questions. So it's both finance skills, but stick toitiveness around a lot of work. So it's got to be eyes wide open that this is not going to be a quick read on some of this before you get to the meeting. Other characteristics, Steve Schreiber. Okay, so unmute. So I think probably one of the most important qualities is to not, for the committee members to themselves, not be the experts, but basically be able to listen to experts, listen to the community, synthesize those, to know what they don't know and to basically humility to not know everything, but to understand what they don't know, to be invested in the public schools through your own actions, I think is important. Okay. Medija. I think we need someone who's well-versed in finance because, but what I mean by that is someone who questions and is willing to question expenditures and keeps the building itself in mind as to how much things might cost and starts asking those questions, whether that's digging into the guidelines about how big rooms should be and stuff like that and sizes and stuff like that, but is willing to ask all those questions and push back at some answers because our job as a council is going to figure out how to fund it when it finally comes to us. And so we need people in there who are always cognizant of what that cost is going to be and brings that regularly to the table and doesn't ignore costs until the very end. You know, this is a five to seven year team and we already know it's gonna be a lot of work from day one. I think it's gonna be really hard for people to jump in and out. And while we as counselors may not know at all how long we're going to serve on the council or whether we're going to run, I do, unfortunately, I don't think it can be answered now, but I do think consistency of the counselors is going to be important. How we answer that now, I'm not sure, but I don't think we as a council want people trading out every year because that harms the council's knowledge of the committee's progress going forward if every year someone has to re-figure out and get back up to speed about everything that's gone on the year before, or two years or five years. So I think that's important too, yeah. It does seem to me, however, that in order to remain on the committee after the next election, you have to be on the council or we have to re-look at the requirements because the possibility that somebody's going to serve for all seven years is slim to none. So, all right, any other comments? Shalini? I just have a question. How important is institutional memory for this work? I think people can be prepared to speak to that in their comments if they feel it's important. Okay, all right. Oh, and I don't know, this is a little, it's late and whatever, but this is on my mind, so I'm just going to say it, that we've been working great as a council, but I think there's a certain perception in the residents, few residents anyway, the emails that we're getting about the earlier, whatever it's called, and so it might be, I'm just putting it out there that might be good to vote for councillors who were from different perspectives. I don't even know if I'm making sense, but I'm hoping you understand what I'm saying. Are there any other comments? Okay, then I did ask that you be prepared to make a state no more than two minutes, why you think you should be elected by the council to this position, and we're just going to go straight down the list. Councillor Brewer. So as you noticed when you read the charge, the SBC doesn't do the educational program, because the school committee does that, they're elected to do that. What is the importance of institutional memory that of course is a good question? I was on the school committee for five years, so I have a really good sense of what's the school committee's job and what is the school building committee's job, I was on the select board, when the select board in fact took a leadership role associated with the last school building project. One of the things that I think is critically important here is that we have the two town councillors, one I think should definitely, as I agree with the charge that says it should be from the finance committee, I do not believe that both need very strong finance from the standpoint of being on the finance committee. I think it's important to bring another perspective in the second councillor, and I believe that I do that, in that I have had those experiences and I have seen what happened during the last process. And I think one of the things that fell apart during the last process, which I will point out, only failed at the town meeting vote, it did pass through a tax override, is that there was not enough communication to the community about what the school building committee was doing versus what the school committee was doing, it was very unclear to people. And so people felt really left behind, people who were huge supporters of the schools from the League of Women Voters to the PGOs, just didn't feel like they knew what was going on throughout the process. And so that's what I bring to this is the focus on ensuring that everybody, whether it's the town council or anyone else in the community knows what's going on. And we have a tendency when we have committees that are heavily staff-based, which this has to be because of the technical skills that are required associated with evaluating all the work of the vendors, is that we need the dedication to ensure that the information will get sent out to the public in a whole bunch of different ways and not at the last minute, meaning like every month, like every meeting, like every newsletter. So people know exactly where we're at. And I think that's incredibly helpful. I also wanna point out that both of my kids went to Mark's Meadow and so I am very understanding of financial constraints and we closed that school for a financial constraint. And I think it's important that we have a counselor who has had kids in the school and has those connections to the different parent groups as well as the wider community groups. So I skipped my written speech because I was trying to address some of the things people brought up. Thank you. Arcee, you're next. Okay, so I'm really interested in this position and I think that the person who gets it should really be familiar with the Fort River School building plan and the Wildwood plan and the Crocker Farm plan and the grade six study. Both of my kids went through the Amherst public schools. They went to Crocker Farm, the middle school and both graduated from the high school. We moved here because of the school, the school systems. So I have worked the first year I was here. I substituted and so I got a chance to actually work in all the different Amherst public schools. So I have an idea about the floor plans and actually all the different schools in the region I worked at. Then I got a job in Holyoke and I actually found a school that had a worse floor plan than our Fort River and Wildwood floor plans, which was actually a circle. I worked on the inner row of the circle that were all rooms that were pie shaped that had no circulation. So I taught elementary school for 20 years. Eight of those were teaching art and 12 teaching in the classroom. And as an art teacher, I taught a class for autistic students and one for multiply disabled children. As a classroom teacher, I of course participated in IEPs for kids that were receiving special ed services and in Holyoke, I was working at downtown schools, all three of the schools that I worked at were downtown schools and they, 90% of the student population were from families that were below the poverty line and a majority were of Puerto Rican ancestry and many of those, of course, spoke Spanish. So also I worked with the zero energy task force while they were preparing to get our building bylaw passed. That was a great experience. And I think that is about it. Lots of experience in education. Mandy, go, Hannity. Thank you. So I'm gonna start with that I have a child who's finishing up sixth grade. So I believe on this council, the most recent experience, navigating elementary schools, classrooms and all of that as a parent. That experience I will admit is not at the Amherst public schools, it is at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School. But that gives me a unique perspective that is very new to this area on space needs as it relates to dual language programs because I've seen it for seven years now. And that is something that I believe any new building will have to deal with. And there are not many examples in this area dealing with the unique needs of a dual language program as it relates to a building. So I think I bring that experience and perspective and all. I also, as you guys, I don't think I have to say this with you all. You've seen of the last 18 months that I do my research that I listen to people, I listen to people of various perspectives and I am not unwilling to, I'm not shy about asking questions regarding the choices that are being made that would impact the town's ability to pay or the cost of the building that I believe it's very important to keep that front and center as we're looking at a new building. And since the school building committee will be dealing with decisions that directly relate and go to the costs, the ultimate projected cost of the building. I think it's important to have that upfront. And I am one that will always keep that there. And I do work well with all opinions and I'm willing to always listen to all opinions. And I do think a committee is better suited when we as members bring an open mind to anyone contacting the committee members about their thoughts. Thanks. Kathy Shane. I'm a trained economist and have worked most of my life on finance issues, albeit more focused on in the healthcare world, but I had a number of years where I worked with a labor union where I was a research and policy person, which meant that any budget that needed to be looked at, I was the one who looked at it. It was a nice, for me, it was something I just loved doing and trying to think through complex problems as where the school will be with multiple issues on which site should it be and is the sixth grade moving up or not? How can it be configured in a way that it will make it feel small and intimate, but be the larger school as we're envisioning it to be is something I would love to be working on. Cause I like the complexity. I like to read complicated documents, but also to listen. One of the labor union experiences I had was always being in a potential controversy where two sides. And my role was to bring everybody together by finding where there was enough commonality, but also to listen to nuances. But I think what Mandy said at the beginning on what qualities is those of you who have been with me on the finance committee or recently JCPC, I like to ask tough questions and I would like to be able to be in a position to ask for more information that we need to make decisions about how expensive does this building need to be? But also if we spend a large amount of money are we getting extremely high value for the design so that we can be proud and the town can be proud and celebrate a building when we bring it home as something that will bring lasting benefits to the kids who are in it, to the people who are teaching in it. And then last, I think not least is I like to work hard and I'm willing to put in the extra hours and I am particularly a morning person. So I was thrilled with 7.30 in the morning starting time. So I work best when I'm fresh in the morning and then can go back and read. So I don't think I'll say anymore. You know, the training I had as an economist didn't completely prepare me for the world of federal state and local tough decisions, but it meant that we always were dealing with complexity and trying to think through issues. And then the public finance side had to deal with documents all the time. So it's one of the reasons I ran for the council actually, that's it. Steve Schreiber. So when Lynn was, when the president Greece mayor was leading us through the exercise of what we thought the ideal qualities are, it's really hard to answer that because we don't know who else will be on the team. So it's like asking what the ideal qualities of a baseball team are when you only have two players named. So I feel very strongly that there needs to be an architect on this building committee. And I'm the only person on the council that has that experience. And furthermore, I'm the only person on the council that worked for the architect that did the Fort River School feasibility study. And then furthermore, I'm the only person on the council whose students designed the Fort River School as a student project last semester. But I say that kind of tongue in cheek, but obviously my experiences as an architect will give me the ability to really help me work with the committee to ask, hopefully to ask the right questions. I certainly don't know a lot, but I know how to, I know what I don't know. And I know how to find out things that I don't know, but I also know how to help the other members of the school committee and my fellow counselors who are not on the school committee, I'm sorry, the building committee to basically lead them through the discussion on things like site selection, the development of the building program, the architectural characteristics of this. The, my daughter, we have one child, my daughter, she's an alumna of Wildwood and also the Amherst Regional Middle School and also the Amherst Regional High School. We live halfway between Fort River and Wildwood. I love 7.30 in the morning, I'll work hard for you. And I look forward to this opportunity if you grant it to me. Annie Steinberg. Okay, I'll be very brief, but start out with something that Steve had mentioned in his too, which is that I had two children who went to Fort River School when it was a fairly new school and went through the entire Amherst School system then, gave me the unique experience of observing what was then a fairly new Fort River School and seeing how problematic it was in the design to the mistakes that had been made in choosing what was built and how it was built and where it was built given the time that it was going on. I think that we need to be very vigilant and learn from our past experience and do it right this time. I was very involved in, as a member of the select board in the prior process, but I was not on the school building committee. I did speak at town meeting on behalf of the select board in support of the proposal every time it came up, when it came up before the town meeting. And so I became fairly involved with the project then. My observation about the prior project was that there were problems and we do have to be very vigilant that the school building committee is not the school committee and decisions about where sixth grade goes are not school building committee's decisions. They are the school committee's decisions but that there has to be a way to have a dialogue between the two committees because of the consequences and the ability to pay for the decisions that are made and to recognize that in that last round that some of the community dissatisfaction was in the educational plan and part of it was in the building and that they really do go together so that there has to be a good dialogue with a respectful dialogue and a respect of each other's appropriate selected roles. Just a couple other things is that the fact that I've had all of this institutional memory was something that we talked about and the last one is that I do think the energy factors in the building are important, as mentioned by one other counselor, Councillor Jamal, I was in the group that worked together between people who were representing the town manager and people who were the original advocates of the first net zero energy to derive the net zero energy by-law as then it was ultimately passed and it's now in place and if given the opportunity, I hope that this becomes the first building where we really can achieve the goals of that particular by-law and prove that it works. So I guess that's all I can say, thank you. Okay, now we know why you're all in the council. So we're going to do a roll call vote and when your name is called, first round of roll call is going to be to vote for someone who represents the finance committee. At this point, the only two counselors on the slate that represent the finance committee are Councillor Shane and Councillor Steinberg. So in the first round, that's what you will be voting for, one or the other. And I begin with Steve Schreiber. Councillor Shane. And Steinberg. I'm going to look at Steinberg. Schwartz. Steinberg. Balmille. Kathy Shane. Steinberg. DeAngelis. Shane. Dumont. Kathy Shane. Riesmer is abstaining. Hanneke. Shane. Pam. Shane. Russ. And I. Ryan. And Steinberg. And Shane. I guess I'm going to do what Andy did all abstain. Well, so at this point I have six votes for Shane and four votes for Steinberg. And three abstentions. We can do the round. Andy, your hand is up. Oh my God. I think that at this point that we've had a vote, I congratulate Councillor Shane. We're sure well. And that's going to be a very hard process. And I asked to withdraw them because I do think that it should not be to be able from the finance committee. Okay. All right. Then I will move to the next one, which includes Councillor, Lisa Brewer, Darcy Dumont, Mandy Jo Hanneke, and Steve Schreiber. Lynn. Yes. I would like to withdraw. Okay. So it includes Brewer, Hanneke, and Schreiber. And we begin with Steinberg. Schreiber. Schwartz. All male. Schreiber. Brewer. Angus. Brewer. Dumont. Schreiber. Reismer. Is abstaining. Hanneke. I'm going to vote for myself. Hanneke. Ham. Schreiber. Ross. Shane. Schreiber. Did I already call on Steinberg? Yes, I did. Okay. You didn't call Steve. I'm sorry. I don't think you called me. I'm sorry. Yeah, Schreiber. I'll abstain. Okay. So in this case, Schreiber has seven votes, which is a majority and Brewer has three. So, I would like to make a motion that we appoint to the elementary school building authority Councillor Shane and Councillor Schreiber. Is there a second? Yes. I think we need a way of, we need a way of 8.6. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. All right. And let me move to the way of council rules procedure, rule 8.6 for councilor appointments to the elementary school building committee. Is there a, that's a motion. Is there a second? I don't know what it means. Second. Yes. This means we can do this tonight. We don't have to bring it back a second time. The motion's been made and seconded. Is there any further discussion? Okay. Then we start with Schwarz. I abstain. This is to waive the rule. Oh, sorry. Yes. All for it. Thank you. Okay. Shallonee Ball Moon. Yes. Brewer. Yes. DeAngelis. Yes. Lamont. Yes. Griezmer. Yes. Anakie. Yes. Pam. Yes. Ross. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Shane. Yes. Schreiber. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. Okay. So that allows us to then move forward and in this case, the motion that I would like to make is that we appoint counselors. Lynn. Yes. We have to recommend the town manager appoint. Thank you. I would like to recommend that the town manager appoint Councillor Shane and Councillor Schreiber to this elementary school building committee. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? Oh, you just need, we had a motion. And shouldn't we specify that one's from the finance committee? I'm sorry, you're right. I couldn't see the motion. Thank you. All right, this is my motion to recommend the town manager appoint under Charter Section 3.3C, counselors, Matthew Shane from the finance committee and Councillor Steve Schreiber to the elementary school building committee. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Evan, you have your hand up. Yeah, I felt a little uncomfortable with this. And so I'm going to abstain, but I'm also someone who believes you should explain when you're abstaining. So I want to just state very briefly, this whole thing feels weird to me because the town manager is the appointing authority and he is the one who is responsible for taking a holistic view of the committee, looking at everyone else who's on it, the residents and putting together what he thinks is the most effective committee. We did a little roll call of who we think should be on it. And I think that he has that information. I think he's heard the statements from everyone, but I actually don't feel comfortable recommending to the town manager who he should appoint. And I think that if he disagrees with either of the two people who got majority votes, he should feel free to appoint someone else. So I am going to abstain, which is nothing against either of the two people, but I want to just make that clear. Okay. Any further discussion at this time? All right, then we're going to start with, shall we, Balmille? Yes. Elissa Brewer. Yes. Pat DeAngels. Yes. Darcy Dumont. Yes. Reese Mersey, yes. Hanna Key. Yes. Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Stain. Ryan. Yes. Shane. Yes. Treiber. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. And Schwartz. Stain. So it passes 11 for none against and two abstentions. Okay, we're moving on to the town council appointments. And this is where I'm going to call on Evan, because it's regarding the planning board. Yes. I'll keep this brief because you have the report. Oka met to discuss planning board appointments. We had been laying the groundwork to deal with the three expiring terms on the report. Oka felt that the pool was insufficient at this time to move forward with appointments. And so decided that we were not in a position to actually move forward to interviews and make a recommendation for appointment. Technically, if we do nothing, members can continue to serve beyond their term, but we felt that it would provide the body and us a little more feeling of security. If we extended the terms throughout the summer, we've confirmed with all three members that they're willing to serve at least for a little bit longer after their term. Makes part of the 30th, even if some of them are not seeking reappointment. And so this buys the council and now the CRC some time to recruit and to do some active recruitment so that we can do a longer term appointment to the planning board sometime this summer. Okay, so any questions at this time? Okay, so the motion is go ahead, Evan, if you would please. The motion is to extend. So I moved to extend the appointments of planning board members, Michael Burtwistle, Christine Gray-Mullen and David Levenstein from June 30th, 2020 to August 31st, 2020. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Any further discussion? Okay, then I'm gonna do a roll call vote, Brewer. Yes. DeAngeles. Yes. DuMont. Yes. Rees-Mers, yes, Hanakie. Yes. Pam. Ross. Yes. Ryan. George. Yes. Shane. Yes. Shriver. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. Fort. Yes. Vaughn Mellon. Yes. Okay, and that is unanimous. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Oka. This was your last task that you needed to do. Your first chair was Sarah and succeeded then by Evan. And I wanna thank the entire committee. You blazed trails, you took your hard knocks. You dealt with the issue of process and then passed it on to other committees. And I really wanna just thank you all for serving on this committee, your continued service up until this very point when now the appointment of the planning board becomes the responsibility of CRC. Okay, so thank you. We're going to move on to committee reports. Very quickly. Mandy Jo, is there any other report? I just wanna use the opportunity to announce that this Wednesday, there is a public hearing joint with the planning board at 630 on the zoning bylaw amendment for zoning bylaw 11.250 voting qualms as it relates to site plan review. Thank you. Andy finance. There's no real additional report beyond what is already in the written report. Just wanna remind everybody to check the dates on when we have hearings on various departments and if they're hearings that you're interested in, you should be sure to block them out on your schedule. Those are actually not official hearings. So they're just meeting for the. No, they are, you are correct. They are meetings with department heads to hear from them about their particular sections of the department budget. Right, but it's an opportune time for counselors to learn more in depth about each of the issues related to the budget. George, GOL. Just point out to my colleagues that we have come up with a process for making recommendations to the town council for finance appointments and that's in the packet. We are very much indebted to OCA and we followed their process fairly closely but with one difference regarding interviews but that's in the packet for people to consult if they have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them but at this hour, I'm hoping they don't. I'm sorry, Kathy. JCBC. We have nothing new to report. You got our report, which was very long that you could read it. We have nothing new in the future. Outreach, OCA, anything else, Evan? Yeah, I know it's late but since this is the last OCA committee report, I wrote this in the report but I did wanna say it publicly that I owe a deep amount of gratitude to all the members of OCA. This committee has worked for 17, 18 months and I put in the report some of our accomplishments because I wanna make sure that I recognize the members for the work that we put in because it's really been an incredible amount of work and some of it has been difficult and grueling and sometimes so painful and a lot of it has been around process and I said this to the committee in our last meeting that process isn't often the sexy stuff that makes headlines that people get excited about and so often I felt like we didn't get necessarily our due for the hard work, not from y'all but more broadly and so I wanna thank them because they worked really hard and I especially wanna thank Sarah because she was a really great chair during what were definitely the most difficult months as we were getting our footing and dealing with getting that first complicated process set up and spending week at literally every week in meetings and sitting on the phone with a town attorney and it's stuff I never wanna do again but I wanna thank everyone for putting in the time and it was really a pleasure and my only sadness at this point is that we weren't able to spend our final meeting together in person or able to go get a drink after it so thank you to honestly to all members of OCA for all of your work because it was a tremendous amount of work and this entire council owes this committee a debt of gratitude. We have produced for you a 30 page document outlining our process and all of the different steps it was put in your packet today. I wanted to get it to you earlier but Adobe Acrobat was fighting me on it. I don't expect you read it for today. I don't expect that many of you will read it ever but it is there as your gift from OCA on how this council can bring together can bring forward recommendations for appointments to multiple member bodies appointed by the council balancing privacy, transparency and working within the incredibly annoying but important constraints of open meeting law. So thank you. And I would like to ask Athena to strike from the record that they don't start drinking at 11 30 in the morning. Darcy Dumont, you are doing town services? Yes, I don't have anything to report other than that we had another group of free appointments today and the school building, the basic appointments to the school building committee which are coming to the next town council meeting. And we started at our review process but I also did want to say that I did that modification that GOL made to the interview process that allows people to each of the members to ask interview questions and to ask follow up questions. We did the approval of minutes on the consent agenda. Town managers report Paul. You have my written report. If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them. Are there questions of Paul? Yes, Mandy Jo. I apologize, I have a lot of questions. And I know it's late. So I'm gonna run through them all. You don't have to answer them all tonight. Some of them are just basics. But the library, I watched the library meeting, gosh, Thursday, Friday. I don't even remember when it was when they came out reopening. And one of the things the library director said was that you were saying that the buildings wouldn't open to the public until like September. And I am very concerned about the library not being able to open and stating that right now, not being able to open until September to the public. I know in phase one, which was four weeks ago, they could have been allowed to open curbside were four weeks out from that first being able to and they're still not doing curbside rentals or loans. Phase two started a week ago and that was allowed under that for libraries, circulation desk pickup, inside desk pickup. I don't know what phase three will bring for a library but phase two started a week ago, phase three might start two weeks from now and we still don't have curbside pickup at our library. But curbside pickup in library books are not in what I see as the most dire need for libraries at this point. We've set it from the time these buildings closed. We don't have public bathrooms with the buildings closed. We don't have now at summer a cooling station with these buildings closed. We don't have for our most neediest internet access and computer access. None of that can be transferred to an outside curbside pickup. And so I would really urge us to think about which buildings need to be opened sooner rather than later for things to serve our needy residents and cooling. And this goes to one of my other ones, homeless. It's not just the homeless that need an indoor cooling space. It's our elderly that don't have air conditioning in their buildings when we hit 90 degrees four days in a row this week or whatever it's calling for. We don't have a place to send people to get out of the heat right now. And I think we need to start prioritizing that and a library is a fantastic place to do that. So that's my point on library and homeless. I was curious when meters will start to begin to be enforced again as we are, you know, we know it has a significant strain on the budget and as things start opening, the demand for parking will increase. And the economist in me says when demand goes up, you know, supply will go down and then you need to start charging to even those out. So I was curious when the thinking on charging will be. Elections, you mentioned in your report that location options are being considered. I'm curious what some of them are. And I'm wondering if outside in a parking lot is an option for September, even if we have to do tents to allow for social distancing and all. And then playgrounds. Yay, can I say yay that they are open? My daughter and I went to one this weekend in Mill River and it was fantastic to allow her to actually play on a playground. It was easy to social distance in general. But I was wondering about the school playgrounds because when I drove by Crocker the other day, I think the snow fencing was still up around the playground and without the school playgrounds and with Groff Park closed, there is pretty much one playground in town. And that will make it harder as school gets out to social distance. So I wanna wonder about how we can get more playgrounds open if the school ones aren't open. And I wanted to mention that the closed sign was still on the bench at Mill River, potentially creating confusion. It might be better if we create a new sign that indicates some rules and expectations about the use of the playground, including mask wearing and all. And then it sounds strange, but when Groff opens, are we gonna have a ribbon cutting? Because I think it would be really good to have one even if they're socially distanced. So sorry for the long number of questions. That's it. Lynn, I can run through those if you'd like. Ribbon cutting, yes, we've been talking out to go to the reverse order. Ribbon cutting, yes, we've been talking about that, how to do that successfully. We don't wanna draw a crowd. We're one of our tensions that we have is that we don't wanna create things that draw people together, but on the same token, we're establishing places where people can come into town and eat because we wanna support the businesses. So if there's a balance to be had, we choose, we will do it. There'll be some kind of ribbon cutting of some sort, but it might be very small number of people and it might be some televised or something like that. Signs on the bench, we can get that fixed. Thanks for pointing that out. School, when we open the playgrounds, we're in communication with the schools, they have chosen not to unlock their playgrounds, but I can check back with them if they've thought anything differently about that. Elections, we're thinking a lot about that. We've looked at, we're looking at outside tents, because these are, we're talking with the schools right now, we'll probably have one, right, we're thinking about one location that has a minimal impact on the schools and not because the schools are gonna be open because they are scheduled not to be open on the two days, but for the sort of the cleaning of the building afterwards and things like that. We have some options, the town clerk is leading the team that has the fire chief, the DPW superintendent and the facilities manager working with the school district. We also have talked about closing a road down and just taking over a road for permit for voting on that day and also encouraging people to vote in advance if at all possible. So lots of different options available. They have to come to you at some point. Charging for parking, we sort of have a metric in our minds of about July one, evaluate that again, depending on, you know, paying attention to the number of parking spaces that are in demand, knowing that we're gonna be taking away parking spaces as we start to move restaurants onto the streets. So monitoring that, right now we're utilizing our parking enforcement officers at different utilizing other things. So we will reprogram them back into town. And so there's some other things about that. Opening the library, opening buildings to the public is a pretty, is a challenging thing. Very few places are open to the public and making sure that we have protocols in place are the, is the real key. And just even opening this building that where I am now the town hall and where it looks like you're virtually there is just for our employees has been a big challenge because we have to maintain, we have to maintain the names of everybody who come in. They, we have multiple sanitized stations as you walk into the building. So when we start to open to the public, that's a bit of different things. The cooling centers, we've talked about that. We'll look at different options for that as well. Recognizing the need for that at the same time and don't have ready solutions to announce right now, but it is something that our team has been talking about for a bit now. And there are different options for that as well. It's not just the library, there are other options that we can put together for that. So, but on our list. Yes, Alyssa. I was just gonna reiterate again because I always like to say it that I really appreciate how hard you're working to try and figure out how to keep staff safe, right? Keep staff safe first and then bring in the public. One thing I just wanted to check in on is given the different phasing when offices were first open in theory, it was for 25% capacity, but it sounds like in the report that you're bringing everybody back. So how, how do we thread that needle? Is it now just everybody's allowed to go back to work as long as you put the plexiglass in or what's our approach to that? So we have installed plexiglass, but we've also distanced people utilizing meeting room space to put people in. So we are social distancing people where the 25% capacity is in a, you know, we're working on that as sort of the metric, but there's also, you can have someone in an office next to someone in another office, they're not considered in the 25%. There's still people who are working remotely. If they can do that successfully, that's, we leave that to the department, but we have had our team, which is the HR director, the facilities manager and the assistant town manager sort of going through department by department, person by person as to who is eligible to come back and who isn't. So we've accommodated as many as we possibly can at this point, but not everybody can be accommodated in the building. Dorothy, please unmute, Dorothy. Dorothy, you need to unmute. I'm working on it. Okay. A comment to the question. I think the library starts curbside pickup this Thursday. And I know that seems to be a little delayed, but I think that they're starting it. So then my question is, why is Graf Park, we were told it would open in May. I know we've had COVID, but construction was allowed to go on. And then I heard yesterday there was gonna be a water slide, which I wasn't aware of. I have gone by and peeked in through the locked gates, and I see a lot of really interesting looking things in there. So when is it opening and is there really a water slide? There's no water slide. We don't have a date for it to be open. There are a lot of punch list items that our contractor is working on. And some of the things that our DPW is gonna have to do to get it open. The end is in sight, but before we can remove the fencing and open it up, we have a meeting out there tomorrow morning at 7.30 a.m. to sort of go through what the punch list items are and review that with the superintendent public works and the assistant town manager. I look forward to it. Yeah, it looks awesome, I have to say. I've seen a picture of it. Any other questions at this point? Okay. Then on the town councilor comments, I basically will be doing follow-up from this agenda and setting the agenda for the following week. We have a bunch of financials, things coming up on the 29th and also then on the 13th and the 20th of July. But given the hour, I'm not gonna go into any more than that. I will be letting you know as we get the agenda set. Future agenda items, questions, comments, okay. And then any other councilor comments, okay. We dealt with topics not reasonably anticipated by dealing with the policing discussion earlier. There's no executive session and so I call the meeting adjourned. Thank you.