 And we are recording. Yeah, I would like to call a finance committee meeting of December 6, 2022, to order at 3 o'clock, 5 p.m. And thank you, everybody, for being here, including those of us in the council who were up until 12 30 or one o'clock after getting home from our usual short brief meeting. And I'm going to start by the usual announcement that pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 is extended. This meeting will be conducted by a remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so, I assume, or by telephone, no in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time by technological means. And I also want to remind anybody who's involved with the meeting in any manner that this meeting is being recorded. So with that, I'm going to go through the members of the committee just to make sure that everybody can hear me and be heard. So, Lynn? Yes. I'm here. Matt? Present. OK, Bernie? Present. Michelle? Present. Kathy? Yes, here. And I think Alicia is the only one who is not here. We should keep an eye out to see if she comes in accidentally through the attendees list. I don't see her now. No. I'll check. OK, and I see that Anna is here. And she will, you know, we can bring her into the meeting later. Actually, I want to just, we have a little bit of a problem because we may have more counselors than can attend without creating a difficulty with the open meeting law requirement that we not have a forum present. But what I'm going to do is since the first agenda item that's going to be an actual discussion item is on the sewer regulations and the financial implications of the sewer regulations, Hanno is really involved in extremely important to the discussion at the TSO Committee of the regulation and is very familiar with regulation. And if she would like to be brought into the room when we're having that discussion, then I invite Anna to raise her hand and then I'll know. But in any event, what we're planning. Alicia is also in the audience now. OK, then she should be brought in definitely right now. So while we're dealing with that, let's see. Alicia, hi. Can you just confirm that you can hear us? Yes, thank you, Andy. OK. So we really haven't started other than just the introductory part and I was going to just on the reviewing of the agenda. What I am planning to do, if it is, unless there's objection from the committee, is to turn the order around a little bit and after inviting public comment to do the sewer regulations before the budget guidelines in order to limit the amount of time that Guilford-Boring and Amy Rusecki have to be with us. And so we would then proceed to go back to the guidelines discussion as far as we can there and to do the residential property transfer, fear, tax, whatever we're going to call it, is the third item. So that would be the order. And if there's no objection to that, then I'm going to turn to members of the public and see if there's any member of the public who would like to offer comment on any issue that pertains to the finance committee, including but not exclusively items that are on the agenda. They should raise their hand and we'll bring them into the room so they can make their comments. So seeing no hands raised, then last time, Anna, if you want to be brought into the room for this discussion. OK, please bring Anna in for this discussion. So just to clarify, we're not starting with water and sewer. Andy? Yes, we are starting with water and sewer. As I said a moment ago, Anna was extremely involved and was extremely familiar with the regulations. And so she was the key person at TSO that brought us through the process. And she's well aware of issues which we're going to be talking about, which is the portion of the proposed regulation that would change the responsibility for problems with sewer lines that are between property lines in the sewer main from the homeowner or property owner to the enterprise fund. And so it has implications for the rates. So those are the two things. Alicia, you had your hand up, so I wanted to. Yes, thank you, Andy. So I don't have any like I'm OK with the rearranging of the agenda. I'm just wondering, so like I'm currently at work and I just take an hour to come to the meeting for topics that I would like to discuss. And I wanted to talk about the budget guidelines. And so I'm wondering if it's OK that I leave for a little bit and come back when that discussion starts, because I can only stay for one hour of time on this meeting. That's fine. If that works for you, if it doesn't work for you, then we'll switch the order back. But if it's otherwise, do you want to do you want somebody to text you? I can text Alicia when we're ready. Yeah, that would work. I don't need the order to be switched because I'm sort of flexible in that I can take the first hour or the second hour. So that's OK. It would be helpful if somebody could just text me when we're going to switch back to. OK, Kathy has your cell number apparently. So she's going to text you when we get to the end of the sort of regulations. And then you'll know. Thank you for being so flexible. OK, well, thank you. I appreciate it. So, Sean, are you going to introduce us or are we going to have Gilfrid or Amy introduce this? I'll give a quick introduction and then turn it over to, I think, Amy or Amy, are you going to make the presentation? So you reviewed water regulations already. We're bringing back sewer regulations, which you haven't discussed in detail. And you'll see that from the presentation some of the impacts. I think one of the things that Amy and Gilfrid, Paul and I have spoken about is that we really want to emphasize the financial impacts of the changes in the regulations. I think in the prior meeting, we focus a lot on the content of the regulations, but didn't get into the impacts on rate payers and how significant these changes are for rate payers. So you'll see some of that information in the presentation. But essentially, what it results in is a 10% increase in the rates just for the impacts of the regulations plus whatever regular percentage increase we would have in a given year. And so we just want to make sure that the finance committee, when you provide feedback to the counselor, if you provide to another committee, sort of the gravity and the magnitude of the impact on rates is communicated. Because I think there's been a lot of conversation about the changes and sort of individually what they mean. But I'm not sure. We've kind of taken the step back and looked at what it means as a whole. And because we're starting to work on rates for next year, we're starting to model what those impacts are. And it's pretty significant because we already have a centennial project which is going to push rates up as we ramp up the funding for that project on the sewer side. We have a gravity belt project and some other infrastructure projects, which are pushing rates up. And so when you add this, layer this on top of it, it is going to result in some pretty, at least for one year, a very significant increase that might be difficult for some people to absorb. And it's going to require a lot of communication so that people understand, at least with this part of the increase and the rate, they are sort of getting a benefit in some ways. Are they're getting something for this increase? You know, they're getting some protection by paying more. They're sort of spreading the risk out. But it does mean everyone's going to pay more for that sort of distribution of risk. So I will hand it off to Amy. And Leslin, you want to ask a question first? Just as we're going through that, I think we should keep this in mind in terms of timing and relationship to the school override vote and also any other increase that might come, should we move forward on curbside pickup, recycling and composting? Thanks. Bye. All right, so Amy, do you want to go ahead and do to have share screen ability? I, it looks like I do. So I get to see all of you guys. And if you guys are OK, I'm going to, oh, no, post-disabled screen. All right, let me, I think I can give it to you. OK. All right, why don't you try it now? Oh, I can. Awesome. Cool. So I'm just going to walk through. I apologize that we've talked about this to so many different committees. So some of this might be information that you guys don't know or don't know. And so I'm just going to, I'm going to try and go through this as quickly as possible. But, you know, obviously, you guys know that we're talking about sewer use regulations. And they're important. There's kind of three big things that they're doing. And the first thing is just ensuring that all the materials and construction standards and everything as people connect to the public sewer system, make sure that they're all meeting the same standards. And so that's not only people's sewer service lines. That's also private sewer systems. So like if a development, if, you know, a developer builds a development and they want to connect into the system, making sure that there's a consistent standard. It also defines this, the federal and state discharge requirements, which really impacts the user in terms of it says what you can and can't put down the drain, because ultimately we're going to take that and discharge that to the environment. And so that's things like fat soils and breezes. You know, you can't pour a bunch of chemicals down the drain and then solids such as flushable wipes, dental floss, stuff like that. And then industrial discharges, which right now we don't have anything that qualifies in town as an industrial discharge, but there's a place holder for if that ever happens in the future. And then the last part of the major part of these is the ownership, responsibility and resolution process. And that's where we're making a major shift in terms of service line ownership and responsibility. So previously owners would own the entire length of their service line and the town was only responsible for the main sewer line. So the larger diameter network of collection systems, but not the individual line that goes to your house, your business, the apartment that you live in. And what's proposed in these regulations is for the town to own the service line, anytime it's within the town property and the owner's gonna own it anytime that it's not on the town property, which means most of the time it's just on the owner's property, but every once in a while, because as Anna will tell you, sewers run by gravity. So sometimes in order to get the gravity down to the main line, you're gonna be cutting through your neighbor's yard or cutting through, you know, some other parcel of land to get to the sewer line. And so the owner would own it basically until it goes onto the town right of way. There are, because everything runs by gravity in the sewer system, you know, there's a little carve out there for easements where the easements that we have to run our major lines that might go through someone's backyard, that easement only allows us to maintain the larger diameter sewer main. And so in that case, the owner would continue to own to own and be responsible for the sewer line, their sewer service all the way to the main line. And this is consistent with a lot of other towns that have the ownership model that we're looking at. This is how they slice and dice the easements. And what this will trigger because there's gonna be different ownership on different portions of the line, the sewer service line, what this triggers is the need for us to have cleanouts, which is basically an access portal that would be at the change in ownership location so that both parties can access their portion of the sewer line to do any maintenance, to do any cleaning, any flushing, anything like that. And so, you know, we would require this at the property line, understanding that we're not gonna force all, every single house in town to install this immediately. This is gonna be something that anytime there's new construction or connections or when there's sewer service line work being done, that we will have them come into compliance with this requirement. So that's gonna be a slow trickle process. So that's what's being proposed in terms of the ownership change. We have looked at, over the last, I think, three years, we've looked at all of the permits that were pulled for people to do sewer service improvements or repairs. And so we're able to pull out the cost from that and it averages about $7,300 per repair. And we're estimating that we probably need about 100 to 200, we would have to do about 100 to 200 of these per year. And partly it's because anytime we would be doing a road construction, if we're responsible for that sewer service line, we're gonna make sure that the portion that's underneath that road is gonna be repaired and brought up to the standard and in good shape. And then there's gonna be the breaks that happen over time. There's gonna be a lot of different things that trigger this. So you do the 100 to 200 service lines times the cost of per repair. And you're looking at some pretty hefty numbers in the sewer budget. And I hope it's fair to say, I know when Sean and Paul and Gelford and I were talking about our budget for this year, we were proposing, much as we need more than the $500,000, we were proposing that at least for year one of this to soften the blow a little bit, but also get towards what we needed. We were proposing that we put $500,000 in the budget in year one to start covering the cost of what we would be responsible for. And so ultimately, like Sean said, he's modeled that out and ultimately it's gonna impact the rates by about 55 cents per 100 cubic feet. I use that to just pull a couple of numbers. We know that the average Amherst user uses about 92 100 cubic feet per year. So you can see what their impact is on their annual bill and a conservative Amherst user is about 57 100 cubic feet per year. So again, you can see, depending on what your water usage history is, you can see how this might impact you in the long run. So I can pause it here. We've got additional slides that just kind of show some of this backup information, but I think hopefully this is enough for you guys to kind of discuss. Okay, Bob? Yeah, I just have a couple of questions. I'm a little confused, Amy, about where the ownership switches from the homeowner to the town because there's the street and then there's a right away that's between the street and property. Well, the property line goes to the street, but you have a town right away. That's 10 feet or something like that. So where is the exact point where the homeowner and responsibility versus the town ends? Is it at the curb, if you will, or is it? It's at the right-of-way line, which means basically, you own, I mean, in simple terms, you own what's on your property. We own what's on our property. It just gets a little complicated where sometimes your sewer line might go over your, under your neighbor's property and you're still gonna own that like you do now. But once it goes on to town property, town owns it. Okay, so it's at the right-of-way boundary. It's at the right-of-way boundary, yeah, which is wider than the roadside, but different widths at different places in town. Got it, got it. Okay, and then you talked about funding the repairs. Have you looked at insurance rather than funding to see whether we could ensure these lines for less money annually than we'd have to pay? I might kick that too. I know, you know, Paul, maybe Lynn did some research on that. And I think we looked at the model where we didn't take ownership and private homeowners could have the option to get insurance. Yeah. But I was thinking for the town to buy insurance. So the town could do that as well. We purchase insurance for each individual household. There are companies out there that provide that insurance. Forget exactly what the cost is. I could pull that out. And we did get quotes on that. So I think that might be an option as well. Paul, maybe they spoke about this. I think the one difference here might be, insurance is usually insured against some sort of accident or breakage or something like that happening. It sounds like from Amy's description, there's gonna be some proactive replacement, even if, you know, work done to these, that's gonna require money when we do roads. We do a certain number of roads every year. And so there's gonna be proactive costs that I don't think insurance would cover that because again, it's usually you're insured against some sort of accident or something happening. So there may be some insurance, but it's not gonna take all the cost of what was described. I also, I heard Bob's question as to whether or not the town should take out insurance for our portion. I didn't, I mean- Yeah, I agree. But Paul investigated was what would it cost a homeowner to take out insurance for their portion? I just threw it out there. It just might be cheaper than paying for it out of pocket, so to speak. I'm trying to find Paul. I thought we did talk about the possibility and I'm trying to find the email, Bob. I'm sorry, I don't have it up fast enough, but I think we did look into that and it still was not, TSO still opted for this direction, but I'm gonna, I'll try to look for that. I mean, it might be more expensive. That's fine. I just thought we should have that information if it's available. My recollection is TSO was talking about the part that Amy described as to where the delineation was. I don't think we talked about the question of insurance that I recall. Guilford, did you have anything? Just one other clarification on the property who owns what? There's right-of-ways and there's also easements. There's a lot more sewer easements because sewer flows by gravity. So there's a lot of people, especially downtown who goes out the back of their house. There's easements back there. There's some, some of them are not easements. So we either go to the road lay outline or to a sewer easement line, not just to your property line. That's defined in the proposed rig. I assume. Kathy, your hand up. Yeah, thank you. I have one more general question. Could you please put in the packet the proposed change that we're talking about in terms of financial impact? I know there was a TSO report. I just didn't see it in the finance package. So it'd be easier just to have it. So on the, on what was just priced out, this, the current, what we currently do is if anything happens on your property, it's your problem. If anything happens anywhere within your sewer line, your sewer service line. So that includes when it's under the town roadway before it connects to the main line, that's, you know, that's your service and that's your responsibility. That's the current model for both water and sewer. So it's a sewer line under the road and then from the road onto your house. The change that's being proposed is the road, the sewer line under the road and up. Yeah, the sewer line under the road would be the town's responsibility, not the homeowner's responsibility. And the homeowner would still be responsible for wherever that line is back to their house. Is that correct? Yeah. And once it's on their property. And then if they're responsible, including if they didn't have the clean out access that we're now putting in a standard, so you're gonna be actually upgrading, but would you only upgrade as if the rest of the line is being disturbed? Yeah, the way we're in some way, they're building something new, they're putting a new, you're tearing up the road and running a new line. So there wouldn't be, I mean, I don't get sewer, we're beyond sewer, we're on septic. But so it's that, and that is what is 730 to 1.5 million, 1.5 in costs based on how many properties you think a year have something happen to their sewer line from their home to their street, correct? From the street line to, yeah. Yeah, so to the middle of the road, yeah. Okay. It's also based on what we think we'll have to replace when we're doing any other type of roadwork. So there's the number of people who have problems, but if we're tearing the road up and we know there's a bad sewer line there, we're gonna replace the sewer line before we pave it because we don't wanna cut the pavement again. Right, so some of it is because a problem occurred and some of it is because you're doing preventive maintenance by upgrading. So I think we're gonna have to make those parts clear. And then what's, Sean started out with saying it's hard for me to think of $31 to $50 a year without a context of what's happening to the rates if we didn't make a change. And the, so maybe when we come back to this next, Sean, just as simple over the next five years, I realize we're in the super guesstimate range, but some of it is we've got the built-in other costs. So I don't know whether, I know everyone's been facing pretty substantial rate increases anyway. And then this is on top of them. So it's not just the one year increase, but it's then from ever more, your rate is now at the higher level. So, so- Yeah, Andy, can I- $30 a year doesn't sound bad. It's just between water and sewer, I need to be able to see them both. So the $50 increase will be both on sewer and water. So think about those as combined. It's gonna be in that $100 range when you do both. And it'll be a big bump up in the first year. And then we'll have that first year to sort of evaluate, are we at the right level? Do we need to tick it up again? I think that's one of the reasons why we're being a little careful on how much we increase it because we want to get that actual data to see what plays out. But it could tick up again the second year if it turns out our number is low and we need to get closer to the numbers that Amy provided, it could be another bump up the next year. But once we get to the right level, then it'll sort of balance out. But yeah, it could be a couple of years of steeper increases to factor this in. And we can provide that data. We can provide what it would be with and without. Okay, so did you just say we're just looking at sewer, there's another $50 that's water? Yeah, so the water, which was already discussed is gonna have the same sort of the same, a little bit different, but a similar impact of assuming more cost than we currently have by adopting the regulations as currently written. And the water line is exactly this mirror image of this that town is responsible for up to your property line and up into your house at you. Okay, yes. Yeah, that is the discussion that we had when we talked about the water, Greg said a few recall and Amy at that point made a similar presentation where it helped us to determine how much was being paid by homeowners who were complaining when they had to pay for repairs under the street, the cost of transferring that to the town and the effect that we'd have on rates. So it's really the same thing. And we all have to remember that we had several council meetings where we had very vocal unhappiness on papers. Andy, I did remember it, but I'm just trying to sit, the memo on the financing to me is you get an impact here, you get an impact here, and this is what would have happened in general. And then I added it all up. I can't pull them into the little boxes. We talked about something a couple of a month or so ago and here's another piece of it because I think, yep. So I'll stop. Those are my questions just to make. You know, it's a good point, it's obvious that when we enact both regulations, those of us who are on sewer, we get one bill. So it'll show up at one time, not two times. Bernie? Yeah, just to be real concrete. And then I have a question. The being real concrete is from my house, there's a curb about 12 feet away from the curb going towards my house, there's a property bound. So this would encompass that the town would be responsible from, for everything between the curb and where the property bound is, is that correct? If that's what the layout is at your house. Okay, fine. The other thing that's sort of obvious here is that we're gonna put a surcharge on for this particular set of repairs. Is there a plan to have a separate account for this? So the money segregated out and people won't be suspicious. This is somehow using to pay for other things. So we're not currently treating it as a surcharge. We haven't discussed that. We're just showing it as an increase in the rate. But we will report annually sort of the income and expenses to see if we had the right estimate. There will be an expense line budgeted for this. We'll be able to see if we spent those, spent the funds that we allocated for this or if we came in under or came in higher. So we will track it to see how we do in terms of our estimates. There'll be reporting, but there'll be no separate line. Currently we're not approaching it as a surcharge. I just wanna, could you earmark those monies flowing in? Even if it was a phantom account the way Bernie's talking about it. So that people don't think it just went into the centennial cost more than we expected it to. The three other things that are bumping up our rates. Yeah, I'll take a look with Sonya at our chart of account structure and try to think about, if we could. It's all on the rate. So it's all gonna come in in a similar fashion. It's not like sewer entrances where there's sort of a separate bill that they pay, but there may be ways to back into the number, just knowing how many cubic feet we sold somebody and taking 50 cents times that number will know how much was for this, was for this. Yeah, I think it would, cause we're gonna be some folks who another $100 a year is will shrug for other people this will be a significant impact. And I think having some way to demonstrate that the money's been allocated or segregated or targeted for just this particular type of repair. It's a pain, I know, but I think it gives people some assurance. Yeah, I mean, while we have Gil for an Amy, I'll just pose a question to them. I think they'll know off the top of their head. Will you be able to segregate the costs of these types of repairs from your other sewer water infrastructure projects? It's gonna be difficult. We would have to set it up to start that way. And then we'd have a method for doing it. Otherwise it would just, for paving this road and we have five sewer lines that would just be in the sewer lines. But as long as we, I guess as long as we set it up as we go along, we should be able to keep track. Okay. Yeah, I wanna go back to my original comment about staging this with regard to tax increases and based on the elementary school and also the issue of the potential of adding to our going into a holler contracts for this town. And just say that I think we need to be thinking now about the public relations aspect of this. I think we need to make sure people understand what they're getting and what they're not getting and what insurance they have the option of getting and what that insurance would cover or not. That's just kind of a public service. So I just wanna make sure that we take all of that into consideration as we move forward. And I'm, I do want to, I guess, request or ask that when we receive sewer rates and water rates in the future that we get comparables to other cities and towns that are have policies that are similar because otherwise it's apples and oranges and it doesn't mean anything. So. Okay. Michelle. I have a bit of maybe an unpopular question and a little bit biased too. I'm like Kathy on septic. And I'm just wondering if in terms of what we're talking about here, if the town has any plans to deal with the remaining folks who are on septic given that we're talking about, you know, providing additional services to folks in the community but there are still some of us that are on septic. I'll let Guilford come back to that in a second. Of course, what we all recognize is those of us who are on sewer pay for sewer fee in addition to our water fee and it's separately listed on our bills and people who don't have who are on septic don't have that second charge. And but there are reasons why people who are on septic might prefer to have been sewer. So Guilford, do you have a response? We do have a plan for how we would possibly sewer the rest of the community. We haven't updated it. We updated it maybe 10 years ago but we haven't updated it since then. So we do have rough prices. If the sewer commissioners are a group of people were to come to the sewer commissioners and ask we have that information and then it would be up to the, you have to appropriate money for it. So it would come down back to the sewer commissioners slash council to appropriate the money for the project. So that's how these projects can move forward. Thank you. I appreciate that. I didn't even know how many folks were still on sewer and I don't mind my sewer so much but I just was curious given that we're talking these big numbers and thank you. Paul? Yeah, the way most of the communities do it is that if you extend the sewer line whoever is benefiting from the extension pays a better mit tax. So the people who are benefiting from it pay the infrastructure cost in addition to being, you know having the opportunity to put your sewage into the sewer line. So if it benefits your property it's assumed that you'll pay for that extension. That's not how this town has done in the past but it's helped a lot of communities do it. Jeffy? I just wanted to make a quick comment that not everyone who's on septic would prefer sewer. So this is, it seems like it's a discussion for a future date. I mean there's some people who aren't on water because they're on wells. So just how we might do it. And I really want to underscore what Lynn said that we've got a May 2nd vote on a school. And my mind just needs to get around all of these what else is happening to our tax pool base whether it's in the enterprise funds they have to have, if you have water and sewer from the town you have to pay those bills. So I do think timing of this really matters a lot. And if we make a decision, is it in an F, Sean showed an FY24. We ought to have that as a decision we can make rather than a decision that's already made. So at least be able to look at that piece. So do we, if we were going to do it it's good to tell people it's coming but you don't necessarily have to start it in FY24 could start in FY25. So I just want to think a little bit have a better sense of the whole basket. I'll come back to that. Yeah, I guess that's the question for those who've been working on this more closely with the other committees is the decision around ownership of the lines sort of settled or is there still are you still looking for sort of the insurance information and what would be sort of the comparison of somebody pays $100 more on their water and sewer bills or they put $100 towards insurance if they choose to and what do you get for that? If you'll see if Anna has a response to that. Yeah, pretty settled. So this is something that we, TSO and I know Andy and Amy can chime in on this too. TSO really did land on this versus the insurance mostly because it felt like the most equitable option. It feels like everyone chipping in versus folks who can afford insurance get to avoid the situation where their water line gets crushed under the road from big trucks even though they can't control that and now they're stuck with a tens of $1,000 bill this really spread out that, spread out that cost. And so, the insurance because it's an opt in and because I could not, I can't find in my email, Paul I don't know if you found it but I couldn't find the prices because it's an opt in, we're still privileging folks we're still privileging those who have the ability to pay instead of spreading this out across the town. So that was one of the reasons why we landed on this and I don't know if Amy or Guilford have other things to add but this was very settled from TSO. But Anna, that's each person making a decision whether they want it versus Bob does the town just buy an insurance policy that ensures people. Right, in which case everyone's prices would go up as well and I don't know Lynn has something to add to that. I don't know that I don't have the numbers on that in front of me. I'm not sure that it came through as a viable option or not. I don't think we ever explored the town having and taking out insurance for private property. I think we only explored what private property insurance might cost an individual. Yes, I believe so. And that's even different from the question that Bob raised earlier, which was should the town ensure for our part of this? Right. Yeah, Amy. I more just want to speak to one of the questions that I think Kathy asked in all of that is, do we look at these regs and do we have to make a decision that this is effective in FY24 or do we look in the future? And certainly, that's a conversation that you guys can have. I'm gonna stand on my soapbox for a little bit and say that both the water and sewer regs, there's a lot of stuff in there that's really important for us to move forward that's outside of this sewer service issue. And so I really want to see these move forward regardless of where the town lands. And obviously we just need to go into it with our eyes open. And I do think that even if we say, hey, we're not gonna, we're gonna implement all of this, but maybe not the sewer line bit until 2025. I guarantee if you have alert leaky service or you've got a sewer line that's got some routes going up, but you're just gonna wait out the clock and put it on the town's bill. So I think that once we make this decision and make it forward, the town's gonna kind of own it whether they all stack up to when we have to pay for it or whether it happens immediately. Just my opinion though. Yeah, I get concerned that those homeowners that have to do something under the roadway during the interim period are gonna be very unhappy that the decision was made. We all heard from the one homeowner about the expense that she incurred with the water line. And if that happens during an interim period because it was delayed that homeowner or any other homeowner would be very unhappy that we delayed the switch. And, you know, it's a balancing act, Bernie. Amy's point is really well taken. You know, we're very fond of pointing to a police fire community responders as emergency services, but we tend to ignore there's a lot of essential stuff that DPW does both in terms of water and sewer and in terms of emergency response. So I think it's important that we move forward with this. If we need to do some explaining, that's why I said it would be helpful if we could somehow segregate the funds. The other concern that I have in the back of my head here is the DP's making changes in the septic system regulations which is causing a great deal of concern right now out of the Cape. But at some point we'll come inland and bother us where we have a property that's on septic now but is marginal when it comes to doing any kind of upgrades. So we've got a lot of fish to fry here and I'd be inclined to put this in place and probably work to phase it in, keep our fingers crossed that we don't have an inordinate number of repairs we have to do in the intervening two to three years that this gets phased in. Yeah, Bernie, thank you for that point. I think it's a good one. And I also want to just, one of the big advantages to this plan and in addition to sort of spreading out the sort of making sewer really a community resource that's the floweriest way I can think of saying that but it's true. The other thing about this is that we also, it's improving our infrastructure, right? And so right now you can have lines that aren't like Amy said, you can kind of just keep kicking the can down the road unless it's really busted. And the way that this is written with DPW going in and upgrading people's services and fixing things that are broken, it really is ultimately leading to an improvement in our infrastructure that will down the road lead to fewer things getting neglected and getting placed in the wrong spot and all of that. So there's short-term and long-term benefits to this in my opinion as well. Okay, additional questions. At this point, the regulation of TSR review was extremely complex because it was dealing with a number of issues that Amy referenced earlier that are important for our compliance with regulations that are requirements on the town. So there was some urgency on getting through them. They were not matters that really had a financial implication. This was the one that had a direct financial implication because it was going to affect rates. And that's why it's here because we review at the finance committee the rates every year. So I just wanted to point that out. I think that the question is, do we need more or are we in a position where we should just have the finance committee consider a motion to support the change? I think TSO has already taken that action and it's now waiting on finance before it goes to the council. And Amy's explained it. Kathy. I'm willing to do a motion, but I really need a memo that pulls this together for people. And I am fine with not getting into the weeds of the bigger regulations and just cross-referencing the TSO report, but the report could just have the not flowery. Anna, what's a good financial impact of doing this kind of summary, that this is where we think rates are going base rates, but the sewer improvement, and we can write it in a way that says, this is buying an improved infrastructure and protecting everybody. We can write those words. I just think I would like that to come with the motion. So if we can write that next week or something, but not just send a motion forward, that would be my preference. And I may be talking like two pages. I'm not talking about a tone. So what I'm hearing is that you would like to see the finance committee would approve the sewer regulations and maybe you would ask for us to have an implementation plan for the financial aspects of the plan. So anything that's going to impact the ratepayers, you'd say, well, when would we implement that piece? So it could be a phase thing to take into account the increases in taxes and all the things that people are trying to help manage, pay people manage. Is that am I accurate on that, Kathy? Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, Sean has done these, I said it's not a lot of words. And if you do some of it in a table and just there's some sentences above it, it would be great so that people can, yes, I won't say any more about that Paul. So I'm thinking short, but clear. Yeah. And we can say we approve the motion and here's the attached document that talks about the phase in and the impact. And you guys prepare that. So, Lynn, I'm seeing you, you know, I just want something to come with us, not just a motion, yeah. Yeah, I'm agreeing. It seems to me that our job as a finance committee is to look at the financial impact. I think our discussion has been appropriate in that we've talked about phasing in, although I really have to look to Guilford and Amy and Paul to and Sean on how would you phase this in? But what I'm also hearing from Amy is we don't want to hesitate to pass the rest of the bylaw and our motion for the council will need to include a motion to adopt the bylaw and the phase in plan. So at some point we will need to see that phase in plan. Yeah, so, and so I guess I need more clarification. We've proposed a number that we want to start with in terms of the impact that we think we'll have in the first year. We'll evaluate that impact in the first year to see if the amount we've set aside is sufficient or not sufficient or if we have to increase it more. I view that differently than a phase in plan where we're phasing in pieces of the regulation. So my understanding is we're phasing in all the regulations and really what we're talking about is different levels of funding set aside for the line replacements. And we can show that we can show if it's $500,000, if it's $750,000, if it's a million dollars, what those different levels are. But ultimately we won't know for sure until we implement the regulations and we see how the year goes. Sonia had messaged me that the costs for these line replacements will be set up as a capital article. So what that means is they will be a separate account with the money that we are estimating for these line replacements specifically tied to that account when Guilford or Amy spend, they'll charge those accounts. So in year one, for example, we'll have that $500,000 set up, we'll spend it down. If they spend less than that $500,000, it'll carry over to the next year and they'll be able to charge it. But if they're right on, we'll request another capital article the next year. So there will be ways to track it. I think that will be satisfying to the committee to monitor how much we're spending on this. But in terms of, I guess, am I off on the phase in or is that what you, is what I described sort of what you're looking for? I think basically what we're saying is both of these have a bylaw and regulations. And what we're saying is once we pass the bylaw and accept the regulations or whatever the correct term would be for the council's role with regard to regulations, we are going to move to implementation immediately. And this will, we will move to implementation immediately and the first that people will see the change in their rates will be FY24. July 1st, right? July 1st, 2023, which is FY24. And Sean and Paul, does that fit if we pass these regulations in January, does that give you the kind of time you need at a council level? Does that give you the kind of time you need to bring that into the budget discussions for FY24? The cost pieces moving right now, the sewer line, the service line, the homeowner's responsible from the main to the home and we're moving it to the property line to the home. So it's that new piece of pipe that the town is now taking responsibility on. That's the cost increase. That's the policy decision the council is making and there's a cost that goes along with that because that's shifting it from the private property owner to the town. And so the question is, you can manage that two ways. One is sort of put some money aside and start to manage it over time and see what that number looks like over time. Or you can say, we're going to make that effective in year three, you know, but up until then, but I think that Amy has identified well, then you need to see a lot of people just not fix their sewer lines and that's a problem. So I think that that's sort of the sort of economic decision that the council is faced with. And what I was suggesting that we could give you a plan for how to implement that. And January 1st, I think would be fine in terms of in terms of building into our normal process for presenting the water rates and having to go to finance committee and be reviewed and all of that, January would be, if it can be done in January, that would give us time. I mean, that's the current plan is that this would all come to the council and finish up in January. That was my initial question. And then, but it does seem to me then that when we look at the rates for FY24 for sewer and water, we will be adopting rates that now reflect this additional cost. Yes. Okay. So I'm assuming that's yes. Bob? See you. I just wanna say that before I could either support or not support this, I need to see a little bit more information about the strategies for paying for this. Whether it's just in the water and sewer rates or whether there's an insurance policy or whether we have other options. And maybe you guys have already discussed that. I haven't seen it. So I need to see what the obvious, what the options are and make sure we're choosing the option that has the lowest cost over time. Yeah. So we can bring back again, there's not gonna be an insurance policy for regular replacement that we would do for road repairs. I just knowing how insurance works. I can't imagine there's gonna be a policy that will cover that. But we can get numbers on what it would be for the town to ensure against those sort of unexpected breaks that are not rows we're repairing where we do have to go in and tear it up. That's probably covered under our current insurance already but we can look and see if there's an additional cost to if it's not covered. And we can include that in the memo that we're gonna provide. Okay. Thank you. Just one comment on that. It would seem to me, Sean, that our insurance company would need to be aware of the change in policy because they may change our rates. So it's feeling that we can wait for the motion until we get the further memo that John just described. So any objection from staff and doing that? So it would, or do we wanna go ahead and... I would, I'd feel better to have the... When do we meet next, Andy? We're meeting on the 6th. So we have to, I think, so we're meeting on the 20th, I believe, if we're gonna keep our current schedule of meeting after council, if we are gonna be on the 20th, that would be sufficient time for us to put together the memo that you're asking for. We actually have to discuss that later in the meeting because of other problems that may force us to think about in earlier meeting. Okay. But does that give you enough time that if you wanna come back to the full council of this, and are you saying in this January, like, yes, does that give you enough time? Yes? Okay. Okay. So Lynn, you're muted. You said we're looking at January for bringing this to the council and because it's a bylaw, it's gonna have our first reading and adoption. Okay. Okay. So we would hope in the December, one of, we will have at least one more December meeting to come back to this. And Sean can let Amy and Guilford know what we decide on the next meeting date so they don't have to hang around the meeting, just to find that out since we're not gonna discuss it until later. Is there anything else that people wanna ask now about this issue? Otherwise, we're gonna get ready to move on and I would ask Kathy, if so, then Kathy's gonna make the text message. We're going to financial guidelines now, Andy, not the other, thank you very much, by the way, for your tour. Okay, so Amy and Guilford, thank you very much. It's been very helpful. And if you're willing to please share the PowerPoint through Sean so that we can get the numbers exact when we double check against the minutes. We'll do. Okay, thank you. Sean, can you throw me back in the audience and you have a chance? Yes. Thank you. Yeah, I was gonna actually. So Anna will be with us later for our third agenda item, but at this point, she's gonna go back into the audience level and we wanna switch to the discussion last night of the guidelines and see if we can make some progress on it because that will actually help inform our later discussion about next meeting, whether we need an additional meeting. I think one of the things that happened last night is that towards the end of the meeting, there was a request made that we give the word version of the guidelines to members of the council so that members of the council could make suggestions and comments. And we haven't received any as of this point. We haven't actually said a deadline so. But Andy, Pam Rooney sent you an email, you and me. It came in an hour ago. So she did send comments. In addition to the comments we got last night. Yeah, at this point, we have the comments we got last night. I didn't put on on the spot. She had been talking about submitting comments and we looked it open. And I think we would need at this point in any event to let counselors to the whole know when we would need to get comments because we don't want to foreclose other counselors at this point from submitting additional comments if they have them. It would be very difficult, but I think it's important that we go through the questions that came up last night and proceed in fashion. Michelle, I know you're back. I'm going to have to do this to just ask you to confirm that you can hear and we can hear you again. Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. And this Athena taking care of the minutes later is that plan shown as far as you know. Yeah, she has not asked me to take the minutes or I don't think she asked anybody. So one of us will capture the minutes based on the video. Okay, so we'll just let it show that in five minutes after four that Alicia rejoined the meeting. She's not here yet. No, she's not here. Andy, you thought Michelle had left, but Michelle hasn't, she's here. Oh. Alicia's not back. Alicia's not back. I'm sorry. And she's not in the audience. I did texture, but I don't always get, it depends on whether she's in the middle of something whether I get an immediate response. Maybe we can go through the things we heard last night. Okay, why don't we do that quickly? And then the other thing is just that I think that Mandy had, has a time limit today too. And so our third agenda item is the real estate transfer fee. So we want to make sure that we do it while they're available. And I just want to make it very clear on something for when they joined the meeting for that purpose that is because there are already five members of the council present. If the two of them join us, then it's a quorum of the council. So we consult, I consulted Athena this morning. And what Athena said is that since they're co-sponsors that we should limit their participation in the next section of the meeting when we get there to only questions and answers. And we should not do any deliberation while they are attending the meeting and participants as opposed to attendees. And I will repeat that when we get there, but I just wanted to let you know that we did check with Athena and got direction from her on how to proceed. When you had gone through and taken some notes on what you heard and then we'll see what others were at the meeting last night when they added questions that come up from those who are not there, which is our resident members. So I'm not going to claim I got them all, but the first note I made was on page four. And it was the question about whether this in this paragraph is embedded something that constitutes a suggested policy change with regard to the reparations stabilization fund. I'm just gonna go through them and see if there's others I've missed, okay? The second thing I picked up was it was questioned why just these were listed here? Shouldn't it be all the policy goals and how that relates to the rest of the sentence? Lynn, can I just say that in addition to that, the suggestion was that if we broke the paragraph, so after the single year, the next one became a paragraph. So because people were reading it is that we might have to forego climate action because those have been flagged. So it was suggestion of just separate those two thoughts instead of one paragraph make it two was one way of solving the way it was reading. Yep, got it. The next was down here and this is where I stuck the question about the salary study this year and when we're doing that and so forth. Okay, then there was a question as to this being referred not just to BCG but to the finance committee. Okay, then down here was a comment. This is one I'm not sure I have the full intent but the whole issue of making sure that we view this with regard to a climate lens. The next one was just a note to us that we need a motion to refer the policy regarding surplus real property disposition to the finance committee. But this is a place where I think we also went Paul to weigh in because they're actually in the past has been a separate committee that has looked not at the policy but looked at the application or recommendations to come based on the policy. And then toward this part we did make a note about pilot legislation and those were the notes I picked up but I was trying to run the meeting and make notes. So open to that. And just could I speak on the pilot legislation that was that the way we get money back from the state, the formula. So it's a similar issue to the charter that the formula for state owned land. So it was to make it clear that it's not just it's not just the charter. So it was to I think add a sentence there, Lynn to review that. A whole lot more to this than just that because it's pilot legislation with regard to state owned land and then it's private, it's pilot legislation privately owned land. Right. They're two separate kinds of legislation or bills. And Alyssa, Alicia said she was coming soon. So people should just keep, she tends to come in on the general public line. Yeah, I'm watching that side. But she said, got it, we'll be there soon. So one of the things that I'm just anticipating that she wanted looked at here is the whole issue of our fields and our recreation. And I opened to suggestions about where we think that would fit in. Can you, I've got, well, I've got it on mine too. We have a line on an overall plan. There's a, let me, I'll go to my own documents so I can find it. But we have a line that talks about a long-term plan for town owned conservation land. I'm not sure we have recreation land that, so it was in addition to the buildings. And I thought that would be a place to put it. So let me just try that. Yeah, I'm searching, I'm not getting. Okay. And it may be in goals not here because commercial. Yeah, because I don't recall it. I've never heard this so many times. Okay, let me just look. So why don't you go up to the top again to the first item that was listed in order, which may have been the reparations, I believe. Yes. I mean, Andy, do you want to, I want to be sensitive to the fact that we've asked Anna and Mandy Jo to be here. How much time do you want to spend on trying to edit into this versus just noting? Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe we should just at this point, note it and see if there are any questions from members who are the committee who were not in attendance last night about general impressions of what happened or anything else that they would like to hear. Okay, I'm just gonna say on page eight is the paragraph where I thought we could add it. It starts with the capital budget includes debt services. This policy essential to maintain and improve infrastructure. Then we do streets, town buildings, if we put town, land and recreation. Do you see the paragraph, Lynn? Right there. Got it. So I think that is like, there's a big picture of what's on the list for this year, next year, 10 years from now. Yep. Okay. Got it. I'm just foreshadowing based on what Alisha was. Can we just come into the audience? No, and it's what occurred to me last night is a place to stick it, because we also don't have a budget in FY24 to do what we need to do as Bob had put in, to fix our, worry about our buildings. What's the plan on them here? But it's buildings and land. Yeah. I thought it was a place to put it. And I see Bob, I'll stop talking. And Bob has his hand up. Before we do that, Alisha, you're here. Yes, thank you, Andy. Okay, let the minutes reflect the time that you came 20 after four. Thank you, Bob. I just had a question about as a point of order or whatever, but if these are comments from the council and the council wants to change these guidelines, why does anyone in this committee need to address them? I mean, isn't the council the decision-making body? The answer to that is yes. There's been the tradition of this process that in order to make sure that the wording comes out correct and to give finance committee an opportunity to inform the council about additional comments about any change that we do take it back through the committee one last time and have the revisions done so that it ends up being a single cohesive document by having the editing done at the committee level and not at the council level, which is why it's kind of like a first and second reading approach for the guidelines who just done that every year. Okay, thanks. So I had one just sort of a minor thing. It was really at the very last section where we talked about pilot fees. And I thought someone in the past had said pilot is a dirty word for some of the institutions in town. Maybe we could just reduce, just eliminate it. In this paragraph here, two paragraphs above the one that's highlighted, assessment of fees, instead of pilot fees. I mean, just a thought. I mean, it may not, I realize there may be, there is a pilot, well, the state is presumably working on some sort of pilot legislation, but I don't know. If there's a way to not bring in pilot, given what my understanding is the sensitivity, we should eliminate it, that's all. I just wanna mention, I can't raise my hand or at least I can't figure out how to raise my hand. The reality is our higher ed institutions do pay fees. They pay for sewer, they pay for water. We get reimbursement for services such as ambulance and fire. So confusing that word fees is somewhat confusing to them. The philosophy of pilot is a much different philosophy. And I'm sorry if they're offended by the word, but when you sit on 38% of our land, then, and you're not getting any taxes, that's payment in lieu of taxes. So in higher ed institutions all over the country are facing this kind of demand from the communities that they sit in and some of the Boston institutions are actually forking up some big bucks. So I, you know, they may not like it. They may wanna donate pianos to the Drake instead, but that's the problem. Well, the one thing I would say, Lynn, is that the legislation as opposed to pilots, which we're going and asking for payment would actually allow at least one version of it would allow us to tax a share of their property value. So it's not payment lieu of taxation, it's taxation has to reduce rate, whatever you wanna call it. And I don't think they would be happier with that wording Bob, you know. I mean, another form of the legislation wants to tax the amount they have in their foundation funds. And they're, you know, they're excited about that as anybody would be. Well, the city of Boston allows for actions that benefit the community in terms of their pilot program. And when you look at the actual amount of money that the 47 institutions who qualify for the Boston pilot program contribute, it works out to be nine-tenths of 1% of Boston's operating budget a year. So it's not big, well, it's big bucks in as much as Boston spends $3.7 billion a year operating. But in terms of the overall budgetary impact, it's not that great. So I would think if we're gonna, we wanna talk to tax exams in general, not just the three colleges, or two colleges in the university, which is a whole different thing, about, you know, what actions they might take to benefit the community. And Amherst College leaves a considerable amount of property in the tax room. That's an action that benefits the community. And, you know, we wanna be able to recognize that and encourage that as well as gifts. We do mention on page nine in the letter that North Hampton Smith is a multiple year agreement with North Hampton, which is a little bit of a misconstruction. When North Hampton, Mayor Narcowicz proposed his pilot program, the reaction he got from Smith College was, no. Smith has given gifts to North Hampton regularly, and the half million dollars is a three year gift that the college gave to North Hampton to be spent at the mayor's discretion. It's not the function of any kind of formal pilot program. So I'd like to move us, we need to talk with the tax exempts. Not just the colleges, but all the tax exempts in town about making some contributions. And I'd like to move us away from thinking that this is somehow this immense pot of gold that we're just gonna open up in mind. You know, so if we're gonna mention pilot programs, let's talk about contributions and let's talk about actions that might benefit the community. To be clear about what happened in North Hampton, Narcowicz and I believe even beforehand, Claire Higgins would press for legislation through the legislative delegation, and by continuing to press for litigation, even though legislation, even though it never came to fruition during that time, it did get their attention. And the legislation has generally been written that it's not mandatory, it's something that town cannot to do. And it was viewed by North Hampton that if they could get that legislation, it would be a negotiating tool. I was having conversations with Claire at the time because I had 20% of Deerfield's property, either controlled by the state or by tax exempt organizations and was dealing with three schools, which gave us gifts. And we had our own way of negotiating those gifts, but we never was never a formalized pilot program. So, you know, I think that, and again, going by what was reported in the Hampshire Gazette, Smith decided to give North Hampton half a million dollars to be spent at the discretion of the mayor over a three-year period of time, which amounts to less than one, amounts to do about one-tenth of 1% of North Hampton's operating budget over those three years. Nice gift, big impact, no. Smith also gave some money for community connections and they gave another grant for another project. They've been very targeted how they've given money. So, I just think if we're gonna talk about pilots, we wanna be reasonable about it. And again, you simply include that phrase, you know, they could take other actions that benefit the community. And again, an example of that would be maybe a piano to perform in space isn't the greatest gift in the world, but it's a start. Access to their track and field. Now, I'm just saying there are some communities. Deerfield Academy maintained the town of Deerfield's playing fields as part of their income contribution. Or helping to maintain them, you know, with the school that they have that does turf maintenance. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are the kinds of things that were helpful when we had an emergency. They, the Deerfield Academy's kitchen fed our firefighters, police and EMTs. You know, there were things like that that went on that were valuable, but weren't financial contributions. You know, weren't actual money. And then they gave us a gift. So. Okay. So that's noted is a topic for discussion when we return to it, because I don't, we're not going to complete this today. It's obvious for several different reasons, but time being big, big number one of it. Are there other topics that should be added? Kathy. What I was going to suggest is two things. One is Alicia, Sean says he's been trying to bring her in, she's in the audience. But what I was going to suggest is, I mean, I can work with you, I can work with Lynn, but we can do a red line edit that incorporates, you know, addresses these things. Many of these are word smithing Bob rather than major changes. The one question is, did we mean to change a policy on reparations? Because it looks like it the way we wrote it. So we could do a red line version that incorporates a few others we got was just pure suggesting of a word switch. So we're not trying to edit with the third. And then we could share that document and maybe we get to a final document that way. You know, just if we've agreed there, I don't have anything else. This lent what was flagged last night and what we did just to today. So I don't know whether anyone, but I was thinking of getting to the next agenda item as a way of not trying to actually figure out what the word should be in each of these places. I know that there was one other thing that came up and I think it was Anna and she was going to submit suggested language to us by edits on a version of the, our word version of the guidelines and that had to do, I believe, with how to look through things through a climate lens. And so we'll, we can't really finish this out until we've given counselors, not just one counselor, but all counselors, an opportunity and notice of what the deadline is. So I'll just stop there, Michelle. I was just making sure that Alicia was in the room when Kathy made the suggestion about adding the language around the fields and if she wasn't, just if that could be reiterated. I'm in my car, so I can't see whose hands are raised or anything, but. Alicia is in the room and her hand is raised. Oh, okay, sorry, Alicia. Alicia. Sorry, are you following up? Okay, I wasn't sure, sorry. Thank you, Michelle. So I actually was going to ask my question and I was not in the room when Kathy made the suggestion. So I'd prefer to hold off on my comments and hear what Kathy's suggestion was, if that's okay. Okay, Kathy, why don't you repeat it? Yeah, if you can see the screen, Alicia, I said on page eight, we have a section that talks about capital. So one time expensive and adding the words right before it said infrastructure, including streets, sidewalks, town buildings. I suggested adding recreational fields, track and fields to that as a list where we want a plan of how we're planning on doing that to be developed. So I was adding those words to something that says, you know, this is an issue that we need to be addressing and we can do it on a multi-year basis. So that was the place I thought that it fit to that we had not mentioned that as part of our assets, the way we've mentioned buildings, roads, sidewalks. Awesome, thank you, Kathy. And I'm pretty sure that that adequately addresses the concerns that I had, but I just wanna make sure that essentially this would be doing what I was trying to do with my motion for at least the two B portion in terms of like creating a, or finding out what the possibilities are for fixing the recreational facilities. That's what this would do, right? Yep, and it's recreational facilities and land. So just for people who haven't done the JCPC side of all of this, we get a what looks feasible within the budget for FY24. And then what's on the list of high priority that we couldn't get to this year, but when we think we would get to it, so we get that for a lot of things, but so far we've never had it for fields. At least, Andy, at least in the few years that I've been on JCP, we've had it for playgrounds. You know, we've had those on the list. So, you know, the town-owned pieces. So I thought this would be a place to add it as something that we want the big, a big picture. And I see Sean's hand is up as I'm adding this category. Yeah, Sean and Sean. Thanks, you know, because we take these, you know, Paul and I take these budget guidelines really seriously. We want to, you know, I just want to make sure I fully understand sort of what this ad is requesting. So the way capital requests get created are that department heads, you know, who are responsible for different areas of the town, you know, they identify the needs, they maintain their own sort of sort of running lists of what is needed to be repaired and they submit requests each year. And we kind of capture the five years' worth on our five-year plan. So fields that are part of schools, those requests would typically come in from the school department. So for example, the elementary schools, those requests would come in from the school department as a capital requests for Fort River, Wildwood, Crocker Farm. If it's a non-school field like Plumbrook or something along those lines, it would likely come in from our DPW or a conservation department. If it's a regional school field, it doesn't come in the same way. And I am including community field. I know it's owned by the town, but the primary user of community field is the regional schools with the football field and the baseball field and softball field there. Regional requests typically come in through a debt assessment, which we do talk about at Joint Capital Planning, but that process starts with the superintendent and the school business manager presenting their own capital plan to the regional school committee with what their highest priorities are. School committee makes a decision on what they want to add to their capital plan, what they want to approve each year. They will vote on something, and then that goes to all four towns to consider and each town, all four member towns of the region to consider. And then if it's approved, then it gets rolled in to our, to the town of Amherst Capital Plan as a debt assessment. And so hearing the specificity of the motion that was proposed last night at the council and then seeing this, I just, I wanna make sure are we proposing some sort of change to that process? Or are we just saying to, or is this more meant to be a reminder to think about our fields when we develop the capital plan? Lisa. Thank you. So I don't have an exact answer to that question, Sean, but I have another question in that. So is it not possible for the town to take or make initiative on any of the fields? So I think when I brought this up at the council meeting last night, I ran into the same challenges in terms of the like ownership and whose responsibility is whose of which fields. And so if we're saying like the town owned fields, is that more specific? And would that change things than just saying recreational land? So I'm wondering if that specification would be helpful? And then also like since we own the community field and we received so much public comment from the people who play on the field. And I know there was even a parent who came yesterday who said there was a divot in the field that he fixed himself so that his kid wouldn't get hurt. Can we not just take initiative to say at least, well, this is what it would take to fix it and not even necessarily say like, yeah, we're gonna fix it right now. But just like looking into what it would take for us to make that happen. Yeah, no, it's a good question. Community field is sort of the outlier because it's a town owned field, but again, the users are the regional schools. And I guess it's a question for the finance committee. I mean, I know I sort of sit in a place where if there are going to be improvements to the community field, I feel like the other member towns should share in paying for that because their students are the primary, the split that we have with the member towns of the region, they are all users of the community field for athletics. If the town was going to pursue this sort of independently, that would mean the town is deciding to sort of go it alone, which could be an option. But I guess it's a decision that the council will want to make if you're in these guidelines are you telling us to consider going it alone on something like community field and not go through the regular regional process which would allocate the costs out according to the regional agreement or these budget guidelines or budget guidelines for the town manager, the budget guidelines for me, but they also can be perceived as budget guidelines for all departments of the town. There could be sort of a section here that is something we could convey to the regional schools of the council as the town of Amherst is one of the largest member town of the region. We really think when you develop your budget you should think about this and it could also be could go that way as well. That's the other thing I should point out is the other source of funds for recreational is Community Preservation Act funds. That's an entirely different process. And just so everyone knows the region's about or Amherst is about 80% of the region. So if it's a million dollar project just to keep it simple, it would mean Amherst picking up an extra $200,000 or so that would otherwise be contributed by the other towns. And can I, sorry, I wasn't sure if you might because I kept my hand up but I had more to add. Is it okay if I respond again? Okay, so I think in my opinion at least I'm not sure what Kathy's intentions were adding is that I think the need is apparent. I think what's not apparent is like the capacity like what our capacity is as a town to be addressing these things. So I think that's what I'm, that's the information at least that I was looking for. And so even just like these are the options kind of a similar thing that we had in terms of the capital projects. And when we looked at funding percentages so like maybe even something like, well, if we funded it 100% we couldn't even do this until the next 10 years. Or if we were to fund the 80% we could do it in this year and we would need the other towns to also have a portion in this year so that we at least have like an idea as to what it would realistically take. So I think I'm not looking for changing any processes but just like making the options more clear in terms of capacity. Can I respond to that quickly, Andy? Yes. I think that makes sense. And again, I think it's something we would work collaboratively with the region on. One of the issues with any of these fields with doing these field projects is if we do move forward with the track and the field within the track project next year like the hope is we wouldn't be ready to do I don't think a community field project next year anyway because taking community field offline and having that track and field offline the same year I think that would really be an impediment to the programming and the sports up there. So they probably have to be phased in a certain way anyway like the memo we provided last night sort of calls for another review and sort of a phasing plan for how you would address these fields. So I think that it is something we can work with the regional schools on because it's become a high priority for the council. Lynn has her hand up, Andy. Yeah, Lynn. Yeah, Alicia, I'm really glad you're capturing this and I've taken notes. I don't know if you can see the screen and it's so small you'd need a magnifying glass but I just want to echo Alicia's sympathy about this. Realizing how poor our fields are has been an eye-opener for all of us. Kate Atkinson. And I really want to make sure that through our regional budget process and our CPA process we bump this up on the list so that we begin to take better care of these items. That's just my statement of support for this. Yeah, I don't know if we are going to be able to have this discussion when we have our four-town meeting but I think that John has actually raised a very good point that if the region does it sort of creates the understanding that it is a regional enterprise to get it done, we still pay 80% of it. However, they're the ones who take the leadership and provide the impetus for other towns to participate, recognizing that their kids play in the field. I mean, we heard from people with kids in other towns during the last few nights of meetings. So I don't know if it'd be worth, someone having a discussion of superintendent and finance director of regional schools regarding their willingness to take that on. Sean, did you have any? Yeah, I mean, I think it is appropriate for the next four-town meeting for usually the first four-town meeting of the year they'll solicit input from the four towns and feedback from the four towns. And I think it's certainly appropriate for the representatives from Amherst to say this is a high priority. We'd like to see this in the budget, in the capital plan or in the budget that's presented sort of thoughts around this. Okay. So where I think that we're at and I'm doing this based upon the clock is that we really need to talk about an additional meeting to come back to this. The Lynn and I appreciate your taking notes that you have and by circulating that item, everybody will share in the notes and then anybody from the committee can add to it. We will invite other counselors to also submit their suggestions and come back on another date which we're gonna fix at the end of the meeting to complete the work on the consolidated draft and to answer questions that Bob raised earlier. I think it's just easier for a committee than an entire council to come up with consolidated draft which is why we do it the way we do it. But I wanted to at least pause for a few minutes because we have a couple of people from Anna and Mandy Jo who are here to make a presentation and answer questions about the real estate transfer fees that's been called. And so they're being brought into the meeting and let me just check, Anna, you can hear Mandy, you can hear. Yep, hi. So as I said a few minutes ago and I've just repeated really quickly that we have been advised by Athena that when you're here and there's a quorum of the council present that we cannot deliberate on your request. We can only ask questions of you. And so I just wanted to make it clear that why we're doing this, we're doing this on advice of Athena regarding compliance with the open meeting law. Andy, is it possible to keep one of us in the room after that so we're not at seven? In case questions come up during deliberation which I think they are. I don't know that we're gonna have too much time to deliberate but we wanna get started and I just wanted just to one introductory piece and then I wanna hear what you guys are gonna have to say to begin us off. But the request started with special legislation and the request of step one of a multi-step process to have the council do a request to the legislature for special legislation and there is a time limit on that because in a prior conversation with Representative Dom she advised that at the beginning of the session and I, and Lynn is gonna check on the date in a regular meeting that there is a date by which bills have to be filed and while the actual bill doesn't have to be filed she said to me was that you have to at least file enough to create a placeholder with the words she used. And so I think that we need to be conscious of the fact that if we're going to recommend step one of multi-step process that was described in your memo we do need to be conscious that there is a deadline date that we can't lose. And so with that, I don't know, have you thought do either one of you wanna start us off? I wanna kind of say like. Sure, so we don't have a formal presentation. I mean, I think you all have seen our formal presentation for the most part. And I believe that you received the memo that we wrote from Andy, which really explains this clearly but one of the things that we were trying to do here was some of the problems we were trying to address we're not necessarily solving them but we're trying to reach them through this special legislation and accompanying bylaw is that we simply need more funds in order to protect capital A and lowercase A affordable housing in Amherst but also we are seeing the impacts of inflation on both our general and especially our capital budgets. And so with the creation of the Capital Stabilization Fund this year that's something that we are hoping to supplement through a property transfer fee. And there's a really important note here this is not a tax that's something that has come up a couple of times there's big differences between a tax and a fee this is a one-time property transfer fee that is based on certain conditions around the property transfer. So I wanna just make sure that's very, very clear we are not proposing a new tax, this yeah so on the front of it. The way that we built this is that we would be we started off writing a really complicated convoluted special act that allowed us to only put a fee on certain types of transactions. And what we realized was that in order to get this through the legislature and in order to have flexibility to adjust this based on the needs of the town what would make more sense is for us to propose a special act allowing the town to impose a 2% property transfer fee on a blanket fee that is then governed by bylaw. So the transfer fee special act has many, many exemptions that we would then write a bylaw specifying what those were, right? So we are not, no one is planning to do a 2% fee on all property transfers what the bylaw and we included some sample in our memo we included some sample bylaw, right? That we would have to obviously write in pass but it would be homes on a 2% fee payable by both the buyer and the seller on 200% of the average property price. And so we're basically the goal here is to collect this fee from two types of properties. It would be both non-owner occupied properties. So if they're not claiming a homestead exemption and properties that are over 200% of the average median sale price for the town or assess, excuse me what did I do? Yeah, assess price for the town. So that's the general gist of it and those funds would then be similar to the way that reparations has built their fund up. We would have the first, I believe it's 500,000 goes to Mandy, am I right there? Sorry. We proposed 250, one of the things that needs a discussion. Yeah. So one of the things that we anticipate having a discussion on is the amount that would go to the affordable housing trust in our initial legislation we pitched 250 that was based on looking at what they have requested from CPA in the past and sort of trying to divvy that up a little bit. And then the rest would be split between the general operating fund and the capital stabilization improvement fund. And so our back of the napkin math just to give you an idea of the impact of this for 2021 this would have been about 1.4 million over 1.4 million. So that would be 33,000, these are rough 33,000 from homes that are over 200% average assessed and about 1.4 from non-owner occupied properties. So that's the general overview Mandy if you have anything to add. I apologize y'all, I got my booster yesterday and I'm still a little bit coming out of that fog. So bear with me please today. Mandy, I don't know if you have anything to add. Yeah, I would add a couple of things. We say up to 2% in the bylaw, the bylaws very general because the special act would be very general because it's easier to change a bylaw if the special act goes through. I think the things that would need to be discussed are that percentage, 2% seems to be where most towns that file these fall, some fall earlier lower, not too many go higher. And then where the money would go because once that's in the special act, we believe that in talks with Senator Comerford and Repdom, we need to put somewhere that the money's going. And so once it's in the special act, it can't really be changed. We've proposed this split that Anna talked about with some ability to deal with that split and adjust that at least as to anything remaining above the AMHT portion, we picked a number for AMHT. We have heard that it might not be enough. It might not be liked. We just picked a number to start with. We will be talking to the housing trust on Thursday to get their ideas of the special act. So we're on their agenda for Thursday. And then the other thing is those items that are exempt no matter what. So we've tried to say, let's put as much into the bylaws possible, but section two says these items, these transfers have to be exempt. No matter what, if the special act passes, these have to be the ones in there. So getting that list right, making sure that that list includes only those we would never want to charge that fee for, never have that transfer fee on is also important. So I think that's all I really wanna say at this point. Okay, I have a bunch of questions, but as usual, I look to other members of the committee first and try and not just leave with my own questions. So I see three hands up and Kathy, you were first. So if you think of possible unintended consequences as opposed to hope for consequences, which is no one gets hurt very much is some wealthy property taxes to pay a bit more when the property moves. Does this stop any interest in multiple unit housing? Because once you have it, these are in the 10 to 12 million dollars, whatever we would assess them at, once you have it, you're never gonna be able to sell it to somebody else. So does it make it of less interest to build that kind of unit, multi-unit, multi-tenant housing in Amherst? Not that we have a lot of land left to build it on, but potentially. So that's one question. Do the who's exempt, Mandy? I think that's an important category. So how would you treat farms on the list? And we don't have Texas kind of farms, we just have little farms. How would you treat, I could go through a list, churches don't sell themselves very often, but pretty low income. So does it halt the liquidity of the housing market to be able to move? On the positive side, does flipping houses become more expensive? So you're less likely to see flips. You're encouraging longer term residents that if you're gonna live in the house, you're gonna buy into Amherst, you're here to stay. So I have a kind of what's the dynamic and is there a way of knowing that, not just speculating, have we seen places that have done this with a preferred after? So I will stop there because my biggest concern on these kinds of things is you can't really calibrate them by the, it's not like an income tax where we can just target it for the highest income folks, but it could have some unintended consequences. I'm stopping. I will try to answer some of that. There may be unintended consequences. You don't necessarily know exactly how it's going to work until it's instituted, but the beauty of keeping the special act general and mostly relying on a bylaw is that the bylaw can then address some of those unintended consequences rather than if we had proposed a special act that had everything in it, because then you'd have to go back to the legislature to do it. And so, if for some reason we see that, if in the bylaw we had a lot of exemptions, right? As Anna explained, we intended this, the bylaw intends to only have it applied to certain transfers. And so if we found that that bylaw didn't exempt X property transfer and that was really halting those transfers and we were hearing that or doing harm with those transfers, then we could add that as an exemption to the bylaw. And so, for example, right now, the special act says all real property interest transfers, but we have said we intend it to be residential property interest transfers, I believe. And so those are things you can look at. Owner occupied to owner occupied, we'd be exempting. That's not in the transfer, the special act because we wanna be able to have that flexibility. So a farm that gets sold to another farm for owner occupancy, or we could work that exemption, you know, what does owner occupancy mean, right? Into that bylaw. One of the hopes is that it would make more expensive non-owner occupied transfers, especially at the low end of the scale, which may or may not disincentivize investors from investing in Amherst. We don't know whether it will, but if it doesn't, the fee would then add at least some money to counteract some of the issues that those types of ownership transfers provide or present in town, right? As we all know, we can only tax them at the residential rate. We cannot tax them at the business rate on that sense, but we know certain types of occupancy provide certain issues in town. And not all of those occupancies do. And this is a way to garner some fees in order to help alleviate some of those costs of those certain types of transfers. It's also going to be really important as we have this discussion to differentiate between the content that's in the bylaw and the content that's in the special act. So all of those exemptions are bylaw exemptions that we would actually draft, right? The Mandy and I in the packet have that sample bylaw, but that's really a sample. We have not pitched any bylaw yet. And so I just, I wanna, and I have a feeling we'll keep coming back to this, really look at the special act on the face of the special act because we're voting them separately. And we will have to go through the entire bylaw writing process, but we didn't wanna do that if the special act wasn't gonna get through. So that's the reason for the phasing of this. We recognize Bernie. First off, thank you for what's a really good idea and some creative work. One of the few I've seen in my gazillion years here in town, I appreciate it. I think you're gonna wanna spend some time on the bylaw. I think some of the questions and concerns that have been raised are gonna be raised in the legislature. And you're certainly gonna have opposition to this. So you may find that you're changing the actual legislation more than you presume. And it's a tough fall to get a special act through the legislature, especially one that involves money because the legislature tends to be very poor. They're very productive or protective their ability to raise revenue. My question is around transfers between family members. Would that, it says as maybe defined by bylaws. So the transfers between family members is we're looking primarily at rental properties. The 50% or some of the single family houses in town that are rental properties. I don't see a reason why Uncle Joe who's gonna transfer a house to unless it's at no cost to nephew Billy shouldn't pay the 2%. So is that something that again could be contemplated in the bylaw or is it transferred between family members? Do you wanna specify in terms of transfer between family members as gifts and in terms of those two sales might be another way of putting it? Yeah, that is something that would be kind of sussed out in the bylaw and that has, we did a lot of research in other towns that have this and I will just say no other town has eliminated the family, the sale to a family member exemption. That is something that is present as an exemption in every other town that doesn't mean we couldn't do it differently but it may make it challenging in some ways but that would be an exemption in the bylaw. Well, our concern here is more the speculators and the folks who come in by house, set up an LLC and then flip it. Yes, but unless they're claiming a homestead they made this fee. So the first person, so Uncle Joe in your example, if he's buying it and then selling it to him for giving it to a family member for a dollar or whatever it might be, that first time unless Uncle Joe is living in the house that fee would be expected to be paid because you can only claim one homestead. Okay, thanks. Yep. Mark. Yeah, I have some serious concerns about this whole idea. I'm sorry to take a contrary attitude but first of all, when I look at the list of properties that would be subject to this fee although fee and a tax are the same thing in reality. I would think that everyone nearly all if not all of these properties are already subject to the CTA surtax. So we're already taxing these properties for the same purposes that you wanna add a fee onto. And so I don't understand what the purpose of double taxation is. Secondly, I don't think this addresses the issue of investors buying owner-occupied properties and converting them into rentals. It won't stop that. It won't stop people from doing that. It really just, it's silent on that. The third thing is for if there are, if there's an investor that owns a property or rental property and you put any fees on that investor, that landlord, they're gonna pass those fees onto the renters. They're not gonna pay them out of their pocket. So if you're trying to make housing more affordable you're what you're doing is actually raising rents on people that are having a hard time meeting the rent. So you're not really making affordable housing. You're making less affordable housing. And then not every $800,000 house or $700,000 house is owned by someone of high income. It could be that someone bought a property and invested in it, added a lot of improvements to the house and now it gets up into the range where it's subject to this fee. You're punishing people for increasing the assessed value of the house, which is already being taxed by the town. Also think about someone who purchases an owner-occupied house for say $800,000 and then the market crashes, they have to leave town. They have to sell the house at 750 or 700,000. They've taken a capital loss but they have to pay the fee going in and they have to pay the fee going out. So you're punishing people for market circumstances beyond their control. I just think there's gonna be all sorts of issues like this and I really think you should reconsider this whole idea. I don't know if there wasn't really a question in that Andy, so I'm not sure if you'd like me and I to respond. I mean, you're, I guess... I would like to respond to the CPA issue. Because yes, all properties are subject to that CPA surtax but CPA as we all know is only usable for four areas, one of which is affordable housing and actually requires that 10% of any CPA raised in any year be used for recreation and another 10% be used for historic preservation. So it's not all dedicated to affordable housing, the CPA tax, the CPA surcharge. And our transfer fee special act actually says there are other costs to providing affordable housing beyond just the building of affordable housing or the provision of it that the trust deals with which is why we're sending some of the capital improvement stabilization fund and the general fund also places that CPA surcharge can't go. So I don't see that as whether you consider this fee a fee or a tax as double taxing for housing purposes. I'll add, you know, I think to the other points that were raised, we might just have a fundamental ethical disagreement and that's okay, right? I think that for me, if someone buys a house and fixes it up to the point where it's now worth $800,000 and they're selling it for that, then yes, they should be subjected to this fee. That's just personally what I believe and that's part of why I wrote this, co-wrote this legislation with Mandy. And I think that, you know, people are going to do the math if they are, if they, if the market drops they bought this, they pay the fee and then they have to move and sell it for whatever reason, you know, I think they'll do the math on pricing their house knowing that this fee is in play and that's their prerogative and their ability. I also, you know, I think that the difference in terms of passing on to renters should, if this were a tax in my mind that were occurring every year, which it is not it is a one-time fee, then yes, I would have those same concerns. However, when people are paying a one-time fee on an investment property, I don't think that it's going to impact the rents as much as something that would be a regular, a regular tax and annual tax. There are surely other things, maybe there are or maybe there are not other things that can be done to address the issue that we seem to be having in Amherst about properties being purchased by folks flipping them into rentals. This is one way for the town to benefit from that trend. It's not necessarily going to stop it in its tracks, right? But it incentivizes folks or it de-incentivizes folks a bit and supports folks buying those homes that are perfect for rental properties and are not 200% of the average assessed price in town. Shil. Thank you. I'm a little scattered because I was, I picked up Alex and came back in the middle of this whole meeting, so bear with me here. So I really, really like the structure of this in terms of having the legislation on its own and then the by-law having flexibility where it can be amended. One of the questions I have or just I guess to put out as a consideration is in terms of the split, it sounded like, I think I heard Mandy say, and I think I heard or read in the memo that you have to choose how the fee money that you collect will be used in the legislation and that's sort of the part that you can't amend at a later time. So given the feedback that we've received around the need to increase affordable home ownership opportunities and given the fact that we are potentially limited on the amount of affordable housing we can create, I might just think through a little bit more how we can reach that goal of home ownership possibilities in terms of the split. And I'm not sure how that would work if it's another type of stabilization fund or if it's something else or if it could come out of the one that you already are currently proposing but just to think about that split. The other piece, a question about the Homestead Declaration, my memory of the Homestead Declaration is it's something that you have to sort of, most lawyers will just do it, right? It's not something you necessarily have to ask for it to be done, but I just would, is that sort of the indicator that it's an owner occupied and if that isn't claimed for some reason, how do we look at that? And then lastly, I have a similar concern to Bob. I looked sort of at other communities that are doing this and I really honestly think this is just a potential home run for our community but the unintended consequences in terms of, like we've heard with the rental registration fees where those are gonna get passed on to the tenant. And that is something that we sort of hear reoccurring. And so my concern here is we have a lot of non-owner occupied rentals in this community and I don't feel as bad for the ones that are like out of towners, but the ones that actually are part of our community. My concern, and I feel bad, I mean, as Bob indicated, I think it's the renter that's gonna end up really paying the price. And so is that inadvertently creating an unintended consequence? So I think, oh, and then just one final thought is with home roll petitions, we can do local approval by having a vote of the town council or by going out to the town and having a townwide vote. I'm not suggesting that we should have a townwide vote to get local approval here, but I am wondering what you've thought in terms of receiving public input on this prior to potentially filing it. So there's my, that's all I got right now. Thank you. We're gonna have to cut off the time in a few minutes on it. Do you have responses? I have a quick one just to one of them that I have the answer ready to go for, which is the home ownership element. I hear you and it's something Mandy and I are meeting with the affordable housing trust on Thursday, but ultimately it's their decision. So the money goes to the trust and how they choose to allocate it is up to them. So we have made clear that we are hoping that they will start to consider using some funding for something like down payment assistant grants or things like that. But ultimately it's, they are the body that is responsible for promoting and protecting affordable housing in Amherst. And so we don't wanna overstep them by dictating how the funds can be used and we can't overstep them. It's legally there, they're right. So. If I could just respond. No, that wasn't my suggestion. I totally understand what piece. My suggestion was more along the lines is that the split you want. So do you want that much to go to before? Yeah, that was, I totally agree with you. Yeah, and we're open to that. That's the other thing we're gonna talk about with them on Thursday. We're open to that number being adjusted. Again, I mentioned at the beginning, 250 was just pulled kind of from sort of looking at their CPA requests over the years and taking half of it basically. And so that was the, yeah. Sounds, yeah. So the other thing I would add is we were very cognizant that the AMHT, the trust has limits on what it can use its money for. And especially as to affordable up to certain AMIs only for big A affordable and all of that. And so one of our thoughts in throwing to a general fund is that that would then allow some of this other money to potentially be used for that little A affordable. Those higher sort of moderate income needs that we know are there through different types of contracting provisions potentially. And that's why by bylaw. So it could say allocated to the general fund to be used for X, Y or Z too. It doesn't have to be just the general fund. That would show up in a bylaw, but that was also a reason that it might look a little lower than you'd like for the trust. But we were cognizant that in our market, you might need to use those funds to get affordable housing at levels the trust can't actually use those funds for. Thank you. Kathy. Okay, I also feel like we should be ending this. So I'm going to try to gather that this has come back around from my first having the hooray reaction. I should remember when you proposed it. I've heard from a few people. So I want to formulate some of the questions and even the helping people buy. I just saw the CPA document on allocations they provided and the funds unspent. And one of them that seems to be completely unspent is first-time home buyers. This is not that easy to do in our market. Even if you want big A or little A, Mandy. So the general comment as starts to get packaged and I want to get into Bob's comments on, because he was to address the unintended consequences. I'm worried, maybe this boomerangs on us. I want to think that through, but I wouldn't over promise on what this can do on the housing side. I think if it generates money, we have plenty of uses for the money, but I wouldn't want to over promise that suddenly, $800,000, $600,000, $400,000 houses somehow are, because we can't really administer things the way wayfarers or some of these others can. So that would be the caution just on the why this is a good idea to leave those purposes the way you did. So how do we, if I formulate questions and I'd love a list of the towns that have done this, you probably already got this in your memo and whether I can see whether any of them have had it in place for a decade, for example. And if you've got that, just if you can link me to it, that would be great. Cause I'd like to know how it has worked when once they put it in the marketplace and Bob's, the last piece is Bob's, we are unusual because so much of our houses are rentals. So it may have been less disruptive to renters in communities that mainly had home ownership as opposed to what we've got, where we've got a lot of people. So just getting some links to other things I can either read and I will send you my questions. Happy to do that, Kathy, really briefly. Most of the, many of the places that have done this have extremely high rental populations as well, which is why they've done it. Okay. Thanks. Cambridge and yeah. Yeah, Sean and then I have a few questions then we're going to close it. This is really quick and I apologize if it's already in the document. If there are any purposes for the funds that would stay with the town that are sort of borderline, whether the town can currently legally do it, you know, anything that would potentially fall in the anti-aid amendment world, then you might want to explicitly include them in the special legislation. So they're approved and authorized on the front end. Again, I'm not sure what those purposes might be, but again, if there's anything you're thinking will come out of the capital civilization fund as opposed to the housing trust, you might want to just list them in the special legislation. Thank you. Yeah, I had a series of questions. Kathy's asked one of them, which is other towns that have done that. And obviously I'm looking for Massachusetts communities that have done this. And if you have that list and how long I did not see it in the memo because you go into a fair detail, including a listing of property sales that occurred and I appreciated all of that. So that was one thing that I would be looking for. Just a couple of other things. We did get a fairly comprehensive email from actually two from an attorney who practices elder law and has been in Amherst for a long time. And I know he's been in Amherst for a long time because when I was appointed to the original finance committee, I filled the vacancy that was created by his departure from the finance committee. And that was probably 15, 20 years ago. So, but in any event, he raised a number of questions that I don't know if you recall his email. It wasn't to the entire council, but amongst other things, he was pointing out elders who have, you know, the house is their asset. They've been sitting on it for a long period of time. It's gained value simply because of the length of time that they've owned it. And now they're gonna have to pay a transfer fee to dispose of it at a time when it's their only asset and they're trying to sell it for their estate planning purposes and the fairness of doing that. There were questions about whether it would encourage rental properties to become LLCs more readily because then you could sell the LLC and avoid the transfer tax because you're not transferring the property. The property stays in the ownership of the LLC and you're selling the LLC. And so there were those kinds of issues about avoidance. And for just for the record, he also made the point that it is a tax because the difference between the tax and the fee according to his characterization was that a fee is if you are providing a service like we talked about earlier, charging a fee for being able to dispose, to have your sewer hooked up to the town sewer system, that you're getting something of value for it, whereas a tax is something that's being charged that is being used for the general good as defined by the government and is not for the benefit of the person who's paying the amount of money. And I think that is what the difference is. I think that he's right on that, that that's the difference between a fee and a tax under standard parlance. And so it really does amount to a tax if you apply that kind of thinking to it. So those were some of the comments he had requested that when it's assigned to a committee that we contact him and allow him to come in and speak to the committee. And I probably do have to notify him that we've begun to take it up. I have not done so, because this sort of came up in a hurry and I knew there was going to be limited time today. So those were just some additional thoughts that came out of reading his email and just generally, because I had started out with the first one which is Kathy's question. I think it's important to notify all members of the public to contribute on this issue as well. I mean, I think, yeah, we received- I agree. A year ago, but yes. He just made a request. That was the only reason that it came up. Yeah, I wouldn't respond to the LLC issue because in section one of our proposed special act, we try to address that concern of just LLC. The property doesn't transfer the ownership of the LLC does, but it's still the same LLC. And so transferring a controlling interest in a trust LLC or other entity that directly or indirectly holds an interest in any class of residential real property situated in Amherst is also, would also be subject to the tax. So that's how we've tried to address the LLC concern. It might need different wording to ensure that it does address that concern with his indication of shares and stuff, but we are aware of that issue and have attempted to make sure that those types of transfers would not would be subject to this fee, would not be able to skirt it by doing what has been indicated. Okay. No, thank you. When we get the list of other communities and look at other special acts and see whether they're similar provisions, if any time you take a special act to this type and you're adding something that's new that the legislature has not dealt with before is gonna immediately tweak a higher level of scrutiny. And we all know from a ranked choice voting, the kidding special acts through the legislature is never an easy or certain process. Which is why I think that we really need to work with you if we're gonna do this to get something back to the council so the council can get the request to Mindy. And I think that, which gets us to the last item, you don't have to leave because I'm gonna be real quick about this. We have several members of the committee who- I actually do have to leave, so thank you so much. Okay, if you've got to go, that's fine. We do need to schedule the next meeting and it needs to fit in with when we can finish out the guidelines and it needs to also recognize the timelines of this particular matter. And I don't wanna try and set the date with so many people who are not here. So I'll work with Athena or just directly send out some poll to come up with dates trying to stick with consistent times where we have met based on experience with some of Athena's prior polls. And I wanna tie that to several things. Lynn's conversation that she's gonna have with our legislators about filing deadlines and when we would need to act on this, we're gonna act on it for the next legislative session and when we intend to get the guidelines back to the council and set the deadline date for council comments to the committee so that they come in advance of our next meeting. And I guess my last suggestion would be that maybe working with Kathy since one of us taking the lead so we're not acting as a subcommittee but one commenting on the other's work to try and do a first draft of changes to address these issues so that we have a real working piece that we can do at the next meeting. And you're talking about guidelines now. That's guidelines. So I think that's what I would suggest as far as steps forward. I don't know if there are any comments. I was just trying to be quick about it and proposing a plan. Just a quick, what Lynn just did makes it extremely easy to do some quick inserts. Once we see whether there are a bunch of other comments that we're getting from councillors so are you gonna send, set a deadline that anyone has to send? So Pam Rooney sent. But anyone who has any comments on the existing things get them to us by today is Tuesday, by Friday afternoon so that we could then do a marked up version. That is the intention to set a deadline, absolutely. And it ties to our meeting date and our meeting date will tie in in the end to what Lynn Anna's chair and vice chair advised us is a date we should be getting this back to the council. We had an original plan. This is not like the legislature's deadline. There's a little bit of flexibility in it and the legislature's gonna give us. So anything else? Lynn? I'm just gonna suggest that we quickly ask people whether we could meet next Tuesday and then we at least know whether we have any option with this group for next Tuesday at three. Well, we can ask that question to the people who are here. We have so many people who. There's nobody missing from the committee, Andy. So mad, I guess. Just mad. Mad. True. I mean, I think that helps set a date so that Friday close a business and I just, I'm ready to send it off but I need to know are the comments coming back to Kathy or to you, Andy? That's just him. Let me see. Can everybody indicate either by raising their hand or using raised hand function as to whether they could do next Tuesday? So, and Sean said, okay, with you if we did that. Yep. Yep. And Bernie? Yep, that's fine. Yeah, just hit that. Okay. I was saying something. So, okay. Why don't I just send something to Matt, let him know what was going on. I'll do that tonight. But I think we'll probably go with Tuesday nonetheless and three o'clock. And so go ahead and make it Friday as far as the deadline date and I'll leave it to Kathy to make the decision as to whether you want to come to you or to me. Well, you know, I saw Pam send them to you with a copy to me, which is a really efficient way. So it's in, you know, just, it's CC to me. So if you tell people the deadline is end of the day, Friday the ninth, and then you and I can just talk after this, if you want me to take a shot at what Lynn has already done once these others come in, I'm happy to. I can do it over the weekend. Okay. Well, thank you. I really appreciate that because I was wondering if it might be good after I've spent so many hours on this, if you're giving a fresh look at the guidelines this time round, it's supposed to me if it might be good. Michelle. I just really want to thank you, Andy for all the work that you've put into this and everybody who's contributed. It's really, it's an incredible document and I just, I appreciate the time that you've spent on it and the thought that you've given to it. So thank you. Well, thank you. Alicia. Sorry, I just very quickly want to echo Michelle's comment. Thank you, Andy, so much for all of the work you did on this document. It's really great. Well, thank you and hopefully we'll all work together and give it through and have a real, so Kathy, if you change your mind, let me know but otherwise we'll switch roles this time but because we don't want to be a subcommittee somebody has to be taking responsibility for the draft and can consult but it has to be the responsible party. I just sent out the email with my document attached to, oh, I need to send it to the finance committee people too. Sorry, I'll do that. Okay, so without anything else that people want to raise is not unanticipated otherwise I'm going to declare it as adjourned. All right, then I think we are adjourned. It's a five. Thank you. Thank you.