 Okay, we're recording. Go ahead, Andy. Thank you. Okay, I'm calling the finance committee meeting to order. May 17, 2022. It's just about three minutes after 9am. And for those of us in the council and the staff who are present, it's our second meeting of the day. And I need to. Recognize the members of the finance committee and make sure that all members of the finance committee. Can hear me and be heard so. Lynn. Present. Bob. I'm here. At present. Bernie. Michelle. Here. And Alicia. So I think the one person who is not present. And I think that we have a quorum of the council. This has also been posted. As a council meeting. But we don't have a quorum yet. I believe we only have six members of the council. Okay. Let me know if the. If we do get to a quorum and you need to stop and call the meeting to order. I'll just. Let me know. And just for everybody's. Information. Who's not been in a one of these meetings is here. The way that we proceed is that. There's a brief introduction that. Each of the department. Makes. To give us sort of an overview and the critical issues that you would like us to be aware of. And we've assigned one member of the. Council who's responsible for each of the areas. And that person gets to ask questions first. And then I recognize all members of the committee and all members of the council. In order that the hands are raised. To ask questions. I don't. Distinguish in any fashion. So. That Lynn. Your hands. We now have a quorum of the council. So given that we have a quorum of the council present. I'm going to call the ad hoc. I'm sorry. The committee of the whole meeting of the council to order. I need to check to make sure that. The additional counselors can hear and be heard. Let me just look quickly. Dorothy Pam. I can hear. Jennifer. Do you want me to say. I just say you can hear us and we can hear you. Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. Anna Devlin, got here. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can hear you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can hear you. Mandi Joe Hanneke. I'm present. Thank you. Okay. So could you put the agenda up again for just a moment please. And then. So I want to. Two things for having the agenda. First of all, just to remind everybody that. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 extended by chapter. 222. This meeting is being conducted by remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting. May do so by a zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public is. Permitted. But we've made every effort to make. To ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings by a technological means. I will have the agenda put back up later again in the agenda, but I want to go through the first part really quickly. There. We're going to. Be going directly into public safety. The second item only is on the agenda. In case there's general budget issues that people. I don't know. I don't know. From the committee raised during the meeting, but it's not specifically planned for an allocation of time. So the next items are public safety and followed by. The community services sections that are listed. On the agenda that you see on the screen. And we will take public comment. But it's the. I don't know if we can really. To take public comment later in the meeting after we've had presentations. So with that. I think we can. Proceed. And. Oh, and I guess one other thing I will. Just say is for that is there will be. At least one item I will take up as. Unanticipated business and just follow up on last night's meeting. Chief Livingstone. Welcome. And I. Turn this over to you and let you be the one to. Introduce others from the department and. People that you otherwise supervise and. As we go through it. So, but please proceed and. Morning. Morning. Thank you. And. Good morning to the. Committee members and the members of the town council present. With me today is captain. Ron young, who's our administrative captain and captain gave team who oversees. Operations. Also. My curtain from the communication center. Is also with us to answer any questions that you might have. Specific to the communication center. Andy, if it's okay with you. Is it okay if I go in reverse order animal welfare. Communications and then police it's. We've kind of traditionally done that just because it gets some of the smaller. Items out of the way in that way. My curtain can. Get back to communication center because he does. Have dispatched responsibilities as well. That's fine. So Carol didn't want to join us today on zoom. She's not a big zoom fan. I don't think she needs any introduction, but she didn't have any specific orders given to me to give the. You or any specific stuff that isn't. In her. Her package, her budget packaging. So I would just say that. You know, Carol continues to be the. So person responsible for all things related to animal welfare issues. And that includes, you know, responding to calls for. Complaints. You know, animal bites, you know, patrolling the areas of the. You know, areas of town where there's frequently dog. Issues and that sort of thing. And she does all of that very well. She responds to. Pretty much anything people ask of her. Everybody has her cell phone number and she points out to me. And she continues to do a fabulous job. Just going down her list for reasons, accomplishments. And I think. Very, very proud of most of the, all of these actually. You know, her annual inspections of the farms. I don't know if a lot of people recognize that, but she is part of her responsibilities that she goes to every farm. That's licensed in the town and does inspections annually and make sure that. Things are up to speed. And. I think most of you are probably aware of the recent incident. When I went to the farm down in southeast street, that was not one of the ones that was on her list. And as that most people are aware, that is in a. Legal proceeding now, but Carol did an outstanding job. Specific to that farm. When it was brought to her attention. You know, she continues to have a. High priority of licensing all the dogs in towns, which is sometimes difficult because a lot of times students will bring animals with them and they are her responsibility. So, you know, the fact that she gets about 85 to 90%. Of the animals that we're aware of in town dogs license is a pretty good job on her part. For key challenges and long range objectives. You know, she's forever. You know, dealing with the license of dogs and the inspections of the farm. So that's something that she continues to do. Throughout the year. You know, it seems like she's receiving more and more complaints. For unleashed dogs off of the conservation areas in particular. And other areas like grove park and Mill River rec area. So she patrols those areas pretty frequently whenever she can. So that's part of what she does. And it's part of what her key challenges are as well. She always wants me to make sure that I continue to add in that. Part of the challenges and long range objectives for her is going to be the preparation for a recession plan. She's always threatening that she's going to leave me and retire. But, you know, I'm not too, too overly concerned with that. So. Her prior year objectives. You know, we do continue to look for membership into our, we call it a regional dog shelter. So we do have our selves, the town of North Hampton uses of services there. And the town of Padley currently does both Hadley and North Hampton are also in the process of looking at starting up their own dog shelters. So, you know, we'll continue to search and look out for, for membership into a regional approach. But as you, as probably you've read other. Municipalities are looking at, they're looking for membership into their own dog shelters and animal shelters. So that'll be a continued year objective. And she has done a phenomenal job every year about placing the placement of animals that come to the shelter. If they're strays or people just can no longer take care of their pets. She's very, very proud of that. She has 100% placement. I think every one of our police officers that owns a dog probably doesn't have a dog. So, you know, she, she has a way of swaying people to become animal owners. And she does a fantastic job with that. Other than that, you know, her budget is mostly her full-time benefited position. There's a little bit of overtime and fuel costs and maintenance costs, but really that's about it. So if there are any questions specific to animal welfare, I think we'll be happy to answer those. Or I can follow up with Carol if I don't know the answer to those questions. Scott, there was one question about that Kathy sent in about, about Carol working with health department staff. Yep. So the question was presented. Do we have one, we have one person for the function of animal control officer. And then the news recently, does the person work directly with the health department staff? The answer to that is yes. I think we have one person for the function of animal control officer. The previous, the previous health director, Julie Fetterman and. Outstanding relationship. Jen Brown and Carol have an outstanding relationship. Typically a health department will reach out to her when they get complaints. It's usually complaint driven. And Carol works very closely with the health department. When we get issues with that. The incident down in Southeast street was more at the state department. I think it's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think that our health department would have been prepared to deal with and handle with. So that's why the MSP CA was brought in. With my detective bureau to work on that specific case, but generally speaking, Carol has a. Really great relationship with both Jen Brown and previously with Julie Fetterman in the health department. Alicia Walker has joined. You need to. As finance committee. Yeah, Alicia. Hi. Good morning. I just want to make sure that you can hear us. Hi everyone. Yes, I can hear you all. Thank you. Excellent. So are there. Any questions on animal welfare? If not. Take it back to. The chief to. Proceed to the next part of the budget. Which I think was going to be. Dispatch. And my curtain has joined us and I'll let him jump in. Probably in a hurry because he really is the expert on this, but you know, the communication center continues to operate. At 12 full-time positions, including Mike. So Mike has dual responsibilities as both the director of the communication center, but he also has dispatched responsibilities. As well. So he kind of wears many hats up there. We are at 12 full-time positions. We have been notified by two of our dispatchers that they will be retiring in the next fiscal year. So we are currently in the process of recruitment. Matter of fact, I have a couple of people that are coming in later today to have discussions about potentially filling those jobs. So Mike, I'd let you kick it off now. If you want to jump in. Sure. Thanks chief. So I guess probably the easiest way is just to kind of follow up with chief deal with the animal welfare. We'll go through our accomplishments. Chief, did you forward my answers to Kathy? The question she had specific. Okay. We're going to do those verbally. Sure. Okay. So. Our reaches recent accomplishments is something we have to do every year, but. We have to maintain our state certifications as emergency dispatchers, which requires a certain amount of continuing education credits have to meet into certain requirements that they have. We also applied for a couple of grants, which are integral to our operations. A training grant, which we received from the state for 19,000, which helps take care of that training pay for the majority of cost. There's only a few incidentals, but very little that the state training grant doesn't pick up. It allows the dispatchers to keep their certifications. Without a certification, you can't answer a 911 phone, which basically means you can't do the job. We also received a support and incentive grant for $133,000. We use that to pay for a full-time position with benefits. And the additional is used to supplement a pretty extensive overtime budget that we have. In FY 22, we were still serving as one of the two regional dispatch centers in the state. Participated in some ongoing efforts to investigate public safety responses with the towns and the colleges. We're able to, through COVID, to maintain a lot of staffing. We met all our training with the COVID issues. We also were able to apply for and procure a lot of COVID personal protection equipment from the Massachusetts emergency management agency. Our long-range objectives are always to maintain the health standards while continuing to staff 24-7 operation. Even more challenging, obviously, with COVID. We work with the state 911 department to maintain our necessary training to maintain our state certifications. The state has a tendency to tweak some of these things every now and then to add some trainings to add some additional layers. So we are always staying on top of that. We are always struggling to maintain our staffing levels. We have to balance this with the contractual obligations for leave. We were fortunate enough a couple of our members had some children this year. But that does leave to some openings that have to be filled. Sometimes it leads to some forced overtime, but we were able to meet those challenges. We have some essential in-person meetings, something like this today that with the COVID and the CDC regulation, some of our training, CPI training, things like that have to be done in person. So that was a little bit more challenging during these times. And we're still looking at regional dispatch. Anybody that might be interested in partnering up, trying to merge some centers. We haven't had the best of luck with this, but we are still looking at it. Prior year objectives, one of them to meet the state requirements to maintain our certifications that was accomplished. To address the need for proper staffing levels, provide coverage for known contractual leaves. We're always able to accomplish that. And again, sometimes that leads to forced overtime, making people work when they really don't want to, but we have to maintain a minimum of two people on duty at all times. So it does happen. One of the things that we're looking at doing, we have myself as the supervisor, we have one lead dispatch position, which provides some after-hour supervision. We're looking to add a second lead dispatch position to provide even more after hours or hours that I'm not here supervision. And the first lead dispatcher is going to have to start spending some hours with me learning some of the administrative tasks. Right now it's Jason Rushford. He does an excellent job with the day-to-day operations, but there's a lot of things with the grants and payroll and things like that, which he needs to spend some time working with me, which would kind of leave some of these after-hour shifts, not necessarily supervised by so many communications. We do have the luxury of having a good relationship with the police and fire departments where some of the questions that pop up can be answered by those personnel. Sometimes I have to be called after hours to answer some things. And we are just finishing up. We're kind of waiting on the new phone system. I know the rest of the town has a new phone. We're waiting on the new phones and public safety to fully equip our backup communications center, which is up at the North Station. So we're always looking to keep that location up to standards if we need to, for some reason, evacuate the police department where we're located, which gives us capability of operating everything except 911 phones. We have a process in place, but we can't get replacement 911 phones up at the backup center in North Station, but everything else up there is in good shape. Upcoming objectives, I know I keep coming back to this, but it's critical our training and our meet the state requirements to maintain our certifications. There's always new trainings coming down the pike, and it's important for us to stay on top of those. We're always looking to address our staffing levels, provide the proper coverage. Still hoping and we're in discussions about filling the second lead dispatch position to provide those, the after hour supervision. We're going to be upgrading the backup communication center as new technology becomes available, new radios, some new technology that we may be able to put up there to make sure that that location is good to go in case of a circumstance where we'd have to evacuate the police department. One of our objectives is going to be integrate the Crest program into our dispatching protocols. We've got a really good start on that. Got a few things to button up, but we will be ready to go with that when the Crest responders are ready to hit the streets. And we're always looking at recruiting and interviewing and retention. It's very difficult in the communications field. It's a tough profession to keep staff on board for several reasons. And that's it for me for right now. Thank you. Sean, were there any questions that. Yeah. Yeah, do you want me to put on the screen or do you want me to read them? Or if you have them, Mike, if you wanted to run through them. I do. I'm going to switch over to the response I sent to chief, but I'll go through these are Kathy's questions. So the first question was a call trends have been down with COVID. What has been an experience year to date for FY 22. So at this point, our call volume is only up 1% from 21. That's when we're starting to come out of the UMass issues over COVID. We are up 7.5% from the 2020 numbers. And that was as of yesterday. Do you want me to give some time? If there's any further questions on that, and you just want me to go. Why don't you go through these and then, because there's some other counselors with hands up. So I'm going to go through these quickly. And then we'll go over to the other questions. Okay. There was a question about what is a business line call? And can these also be calls for assistance? So basically a business line call is any call that results in us either dispatching or sending down to our station officer. So it's any call for service or assistance that has not come over our 911. What's called an answering point unit. So it's any call for service, at least in our budget when you're looking at that number, it's any call for service that we didn't get. Called over the 911 line. To dispatch. Next question is what is the difference between EMS call and emergency medical dispatch? So emergency medical dispatch, those are the medical pre arrival instructions that dispatchers provide to callers. We provide those instructions until a higher level of medical, medical care is on scene. Usually a paramedic. And EMS calls is an emergency medical call. So some EMS calls. We don't end up providing emergency medical dispatch, pre arrival instructions for, and this can occur when there's a higher level of medical care. There's a doctor or registered nurse or nurse practitioner or paramedic. There's a higher level of medical care on scene. We defer to do the people on scene to take care of the, the patient. And sometimes the callers, it's either an alarm company calling in and they're not with the patient or we get calls from people remotely calling for help. Emergency medical dispatch is kind of limited on what we can do. Have the next question is have protocols been developed or in process referral to crest staff when in place. And best guess on share of calls. So we are pretty far along in the process. We're waiting on the final answer to what type of calls crest will be initially responding to. We have a pretty good idea. It just needs to be made official. So, our current protocols will be to have to be updated or tweet a little bit to include the crest response. Some of it's on a technology side where our record system, we have to make sure that we're tracking what crest is doing. We're currently discussing a lot of parallel responses with crest and PD or crest in the fire department start. Meaning that while this program is getting going, there will be some things that we're going to send crest and an officer to begin with just to kind of see how it works out. I'm sure those will be changing a little bit as time goes by. Once crest has its standard operating protocols or their SLPs in place will integrate them into our operations. Same way that we integrate the police department and fire departments, standard operating protocols into our protocols and guidelines. We'll be taking our lead from crest and some things. If there's, if they'd like to do certain things in a certain way, we'll see, we'll integrate what they'd like to do in the, into our protocols as long as it doesn't cause any issues or things like that. Initially, I was just running some figures. It looks like crest will respond to about 10% of the calls that we take. The majority of these will probably be that parallel type response where they're going with the police or fire department to start. But this doesn't take, does not include any type of self-initiated activity. The crest program may generate someone talking with her all. A lot of the things that they'll be doing, we'll be kind of self-initiated. We'll be documenting them, but they'll be letting us know what they're doing. So the 10% number, that's kind of existing calls that we're looking at right now. But that's a, again, it's a guess and we'll have a much better idea of six months from now. Any concerns with staffing? Yes. Nationwide emergency dispatchers, it's a critical staffing level. The normal dispatcher career is between seven or three to seven years, depending on what you're looking at. It's stress. It's hours. It's a pay level. Those are the contributing factors to the turnover and difficulty sometimes in recruiting and retaining staff. So we have to be cognizant of, we have to be cognizant of, we have to be cognizant of in town, our staffing is in okay shape right now. Again, we do have two retirements coming up. And what we always have to be cognizant of, is when we have a retirement, we run into issues of more forced overtime. So if we have this open shifts for months, and more people start getting forced, we reach this burnout thing. And that's a big part of the whole process. Of having to be cognizant of some of the issues, but at the same time, we need to be cognizant of what the resources are, and we need to be cognizant of the potential. When, when you're in a disability, you're not getting ingrained. There's no effect. So we have to be very careful to, to avoid that. Just in talking to the HR department. We're trying to get more of a jumpstart. We know we have leaves coming up. Get started a little bit earlier in that recruitment process, that's a fiscal challenge when you're carrying extra staff for a little bit, but it's necessary to stay ahead of the game. And those were all the questions from Kathy's list. Okay. Let me just ask a little real quickly. You had your hand up first, but if it's a dispatch related question, I want to go to Kathy because it was her area and then come back. It's only related to Pam Rooney who has joined the meeting to make sure she can hear us and we can hear her. I can hear you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Kathy, is there any follow-up that you have? I just wanted to those who are wondering where my where the origin of my questions on page 133 of the budget book is where there are all the statistics on the communication center. So that's what I was going down and looking at the trends and trying to understand COVID distributed thing. You can see some drop-offs, but it's this high volume. So it was just providing a context. Thank you very much for Mike for your answers because I was trying to understand to what extent you're anticipating and I know Earl will be coming on as part of this and you can't know this, but once Cress is up with staff, will that result in potentially an increase in volume that people know they can call for help? Will there be a separate line they're calling in so that difference between what your business line in is what your emergency that's where I was just looking at what do we have to anticipate for staffing and I guess that's we'll know that a year from now when we start staffing up and understanding how much of its teamwork and the current volume can be handled. So thank you for the answers, but that's what I just want people to be able to see what I was looking at Andy on. They provided a very useful table and you can see the pre-COVID numbers in some areas were a lot higher than the volume they've been handling recently, which was why I asked about staffing, you know, because there might have been less stress on staff for a short amount of time, although COVID put its own kind of stress. So thank you. Okay, thank you. So the the hands that I see up right now in the order that I believe they raise their hands are Bernie, Dorothy, Mandy, and Lynn, Bernie. We're going to switch on the icon. Thanks. Thanks, Andy. Two questions, somewhat different. The first question is what what employee assistance protocols or services are in place now and that the dispatch center is subjected to a considerable amount of a variety of pressures. And so I'm interested in knowing because I can't tell from the budget how employees are supported in their emotional and physical health. That's one question. And the second question is people don't always tell the difference between UMass and the town of Anders. And I was curious as to how what kind of an impact it has on duplicate calls when our dispatch might get calls that are really intended for UMass and vice versa. Sure. So as far as employee assistance, we do have the Tony AP program. We do trainings on stress management, healthy lifestyles. The HR department is always sending out things for the wellness program, which several of the dispatches are partaking in. It's physically, it's a pretty sedentary job. So it is a concern with lack of motion. We don't have the ability to leave the center to take a 30 minute walk. We don't have lunch breaks. So that can be trying at times. We have a peer counseling program with members of police and fire departments for any critical incidents that happen. They're always including the dispatches who are on duty. Those trainings or those debriefings are usually available for anybody that would like to attend, but we always really push the people that were directly involved into attending things like that. The fire department has a chaplain that is of service anytime that anybody needs to speak to 24-7. It's amazing what he does. So we do our best for the well-being, for the mental well-being. It's a lot of our training and a lot of it is venting to co-workers to realize that we can do a lot, but we're limited in what we can do. We're not on scene. There's calls that stick with people. So we do our very best in-house to take care of that. As far as the UMass in town of Amherst question, we are pretty proficient at determining whether the call is ours or on UMass campus. There's not a whole lot of things that are dual responses where we're not sure who say our car accidents sometimes. They'll be at the corner of Mass Ave, North Plaza, you may get a UMass officer and a Amherst officer show up for it before they can figure out your addiction. As far as the noise complaints and things like that, the majority of calls that come in are the town of Amherst property and the town of Amherst police department are responding to them. The fire and the EMS stuff, we often get the calls for the EMS side of it where we will start the Amherst fire department over there and they will notify UMass that the fire department's going to be on campus and then they'll respond along with it. As far as if there's a question in there and I think I saw some of Kathy's questions towards the police on how much of the activity that we're dispatching on is generated by the student population in town, that would be some, it would take some time to get into some good stats on that, but I could throw a guess out there that 95% of our noise complaints are generated by student activity. Thank you. Thank you. Anything else? No, thank you very much. Okay, Dorothy, hi. Okay, so my question was about a career ladder. Where do people who work in dispatch, do they go into the police department and also what are your relationships with say schools like Holyoke Community College and their criminal justice program? Do you have interns? So I'm just curious to know where people go in the job and that's got to do something to do with retention, I imagine. Absolutely. And thank you. One of the things with the career ladder and this is this lead dispatcher position until we got this up and running going on two years ago, there really was no clear career ladder within dispatch. It was dispatchers and myself dispatch supervisor. The career ladder aspect I think is critical in retention. It gives the employee that wants to go above and beyond. It gives them something to strive for. There are a certain amount of any job, there's a certain amount of people that love their job the way it is and are happy with it and want to leave when they go home for the day, try to forget about the job for to their work next. There's other people that would prefer some type of advancement opportunities. That's why I again pushing for the second this the second lead position just kind of provide that that coverage we need. The Holyoke Community College aspect, a lot of the criminal justice, most of those students are looking to go into police work. We don't necessarily, we haven't had people kind of crossover from our dispatch center to go into police work, but it does happen in some larger centers. There's some centers where to get into the police field and not really Massachusetts, but I'm thinking Texas, California, where the candidates actually have to spend a year in dispatch before they they can move up into the police candidate section, but that's not the way that it works in our center. We do have a certain amount of dispatchers, I think three dispatchers that have second jobs in fire service, either usually a part time or on call on a type basis. So I'll make that till we've left. So, you know, a career ladder would be a great thing. I wish that I had it moving up, but that's just kind of the way things are set up here. Would you recommend future people wanting to be police officers serve some time in dispatch? Absolutely. I mean, right now, the new police recruits and the fire department, they'll send their recruits the police department does all the time to sit in dispatch for a while to kind of get our perspective on things. Yeah, it's I do think it's valuable training and same way the dispatchers will do right along with the police department and fire department to see the type of things that they have to do puts a face to a voice a lot of times. You know, we don't see people as often as we would like to. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Kathy, for asking some of the questions I had. There's one that wasn't covered and hopefully it's an easy answer, which is we are a regional dispatch, hazmat dispatch center, which is great. But I'm curious whether the state provides some funds for us to maintain that as a regional hazmat dispatch center. And if so, how much so we are no longer going to be that regional dispatch center. They the state has moved that responsibility to me ma. They have four dispatchers on duty. So they've moved that responsibility. There was funding that came through went into a revolving fund that accounting kind of manage. I believe it was $10,000 a year. But the the Department of Fire Services runs the hazardous material dispatch. They've discovered that they could get it done for nothing from MIMA, Massachusetts emergency management. So they they moved that direction. Thank you, Mandy. Do you have anything else? Okay, because your hand was still up outside. Lynn? This is a theme you're going to hear from me periodically. And it doesn't just apply to this dispatch. The time to be thinking about an evaluation system that will collect all of the data that tells us how Chris is doing. And what has changed is now because you need some baseline data, which we need before we start. And then, of course, we want to see the data of the grows. This is an impressive program. I think we're off to a great start. But I do want to urge and ask whether we are already looking at evaluation models that will bring in all of the disparate data from places like dispatch, everything to individual stories that then are viewed for content analysis, et cetera. I mean, I could start with that. Then, Mike, you could probably jump on and maybe even Earl. Lynn, that's a great question. What we found out because, you know, in the end, we are the keeper of records here in the police department. And what we're finding is with our people from IT, the types of questions that people want answered, we don't always have the data for them. And our system here, IMC, that we use in both police and fire is 30 years old. So we have begun the process of looking for a new system, both for dispatch collection of data. Everything that we do as far as report writing and that, looking at a new system. And I put it in, I think, the FY 24 client item request for capital. And it's expensive. You know, most recent quote we got was in the $350,000 range. And that's for police only. So what we found when we started working with Earl to see how we could start the data collection with the Crest team is that it's not easy to do. The things that the Crest department is going to be looking for are capable of doing for them with the current system. So working with IT, we're kind of cob jobbing some stuff together initially, but we're going to need to come up with a new system. And we're going to need to do that as soon as possible. Mike, anything else? I think you covered it, Chief. We can gather raw numbers for the Crest team. We can know how many calls they were dispatched on, how many calls they self initiated, some very basic type of calls that they're addressing. But when they start digging down into the data, our record system is not very proficient at that. Anything else? Yeah, I actually wonder whether there might be, given the national interest in the kind of program that we're developing in Amherst, whether there might be a way to upgrade the system faster and actually implement a more professional evaluation that would bring in other factors besides just the raw data. I just really urge that, given the nature of this program, given the leadership that I believe Amherst is taking in this area, and given our own interest in wanting to have proof of concept, that we really look at this now, not later. Thank you. Yeah, I was just going to say that some of what you described, Lynn, is what is going to be paid for from either our one-time ARPA allocation or the DPH grant had a big piece on evaluation and there's a strong focus on evaluation that Earl can speak to later from that grant. Well, thank you. Michelle? Yeah, thank you. I have kind of a multi-part question. So I was a little surprised to hear the 10%. It seemed lower than I had anticipated and I understand that this is evolving. But I do have three questions related to that. So how was that quantified, that 10%, how did you reach that number? And how many calls does that equate to per week or per month, just to give a better sense of what 10% means? And then also, do the number of current responders that we have proposed for this meet the needs of the 10% that we're expecting right now? So those are my three questions. So I can start, Michelle, thanks for the question and you're probably not going to like the answer, only because working with Earl and Gabe and Ronnie and Mike and Timmy Nelson and his crew, Mike started tracking types of calls months ago about, hey, would this be a call that Crest could handle? And we would check off, yes. And so it's kind of, and it's really just kind of written down on paper about what types of calls Crest could handle and what sort of calls we might need a parallel response on. Something simple like, okay, we all anticipate that the Crest team will be handling most of our calls associated with homelessness, right? That's kind of a no brainer, okay, that makes sense until we start thinking about some of our homeless individuals and we know that some of them are, well, quite frankly, they're violent and that's not something I would feel comfortable having a Crest member go to alone. So I guess the simple question is we have an idea of the types of calls we want them to go to, but we also know it's not as simply cut and dry as they're going to handle all homelessness issues, they're going to handle all mental health calls, they're going to handle all, you know, I think it's going to be a lot of communication between Earl and his members and the dispatch center, quite frankly. And then there's going to be a lot of communication between the police officers and the Crest members, because I think at some point, police officers are going to get dispatched to a call and they're going to be like, this is something Crest can handle. So they'll call and say Crest should handle this and in reverse, Crest is going to go to a call and they're like, yeah, this doesn't, we don't want to be here. We need police to respond to this. So I think that's the type of calls we're going to see at least for the first six months, probably a year. Earl or Mike or Gabe, you want to jump in? Yeah, what I would like to just add is we're standing up, right? Right now, Crest has one employee, it's me. So part of what when we talk about the 10% or the smaller numbers at the beginning, they're the reality. You know, I'm going to need to get folks confident and I'm going to need to be able to trust them, not just for safety, but to make sure that we're competent when we go places. Lynn, to what you talked about earlier, how do we measure the qualitative and quantitative response we're getting from folks? And how do we kind of carefully and tactically not replicate services that are already delivered in this town? So when you hear numbers on the lower end for the first six months, those aren't about, I'm not talking about what Crest's capability will be in year two. I'm saying in year one, we are really, really going to need to make sure we make every step deliberative and thoughtful and so that we can build on it. So it isn't about lowering the capacity that the CSWG offered us, it's really saying to get there, we need to be mindful and thoughtful also so we can keep the folks we hire. If we go too fast, too quick, it will be hard for them to maintain this shop. So I just don't want folks thinking we're going, that we're going into this meekly, we're still going to be brave, we're still going to be as tough as everyone else, but we're going to do that in a way that allows us to kind of sustain. I just follow up, I just really appreciate that. Thank you so much and thank you, Scott, as well. I think it really is important to build the confidence and to also know what the capacity is right now. So thank you. That's really helpful. The only thing I could add there, thanks Earl and thanks Chief. Yes, we want a successful launch. We want Crest having successful outcomes on these original calls. And again, this is as we get going, this is not including because it's not happening right now. I don't know what percent of call, I don't know how many calls that Crest will actually be out there self initiating things. And talking with Earl, he's already been out there stirring the pot sometimes for things in town. So there's going to be calls that we will start generating reports on that we're not doing right now because we haven't really launched. So that could be 50 calls a week for all we know. So that will come back to our staffing and see how it will impact our staffing and our ability to stay on top of these things. The 10% is basically, it's based on the type of calls as the Chief said that we've been looking at now. This would be a good call for Crest to go to or Crest could go as a parallel response to this type of call. Some medical mental things, some homelessness issues, some trespass issues, some just regular suspicious calls about somebody looks like they may need to be talked to on the street, some parental things where somebody wants some parenting done or some assistance with with a youth that we don't have anybody sent to right now. So it's those type of calls and the program will certainly grow from here and I'm sure those numbers will reflect that growth. As far as the staffing for Crest, I don't know if the current staffing was that question about the current staffing for Crest, will it be sufficient? Yeah, I was asking, I think Earl sort of answered that and saying that he's a department of one right now, but I was wondering if the proposed amount of responders will meet that that 10% need if that's or if it's sort of going to be moving together as you see, okay. And I'm sorry, I wrote something, but I don't know what to the third question was. I think it was I think you you covered everything Mike, I think it is all covered. Thank you. Welcome. Good. Thank you. Kathy, you had your hand up. Andy, why don't you let Alicia go first because I spoke earlier. Okay, I will vary from the order fans raised Alicia. Thank you, Kathy. I have a couple of things that I am wondering. First, and I'm just going to read them all. First is that I'm wondering why we're going with parallel response when CSWG specifically advised against that and said that we don't believe that that will be the right the right format for the town of Amherst. And then we also talked about that Crest will be responding to 10% of calls. And there was something mentioned about 90% of noise complaints come from UMass students. So I'm wondering if Crest will be responding to noise complaints at all or what the idea is with that. And then I also just wanted to set like just set a reminder for everyone because I feel like this is continuously lost in translation that the CSWG was created to create an alternative public safety service with the intention of serving the BIPOC community who has troubles and there are existing trust issues between some people in the community and the APD. And this was the goal to help create an anti-racist environment in the town of Amherst. This is not just to address homelessness. This is not just to address mental health issues. And a lot of people live, their identities exist somewhere in between all of these things. And so I think that I'm kind of worried about that. And my last question is that we're talking about staffing levels and the ability for Crest to respond. And is that because of there aren't enough responders, there isn't enough funding? Or what is the reason Crest can't respond to the calls that were intended by the CSWG and that were recommended? Chief, I don't know if you mind if I take first because I think some of these are probably more mine. So I just want to work backwards if you don't mind. So I've heard this from folks, the idea that Crest being anti-racist and biased, kind of who we work with and where we spend our time. So I've met with a lot of the homeless folks in this town and they are people of color. They're also poor people. They're also victims of sexual exploitation and abuse. They are folks who have not been connected to systems. And so it has felt important to as much as possible be a lifeline. We're also doing events in the apartment complexes. I'm involved in several mediations between BIPOC tenants and their white neighbors in apartment complexes across the town. We intend to do everything we can to kind of meet the goals of the CSWG and the LEAP report and everything we do. The lower numbers on the responses at the beginning are not about the overall capacity. It's about that we won't be able to hire anybody who's been a Crest Responder before. We won't have anybody who comes in with a ton of experience. So it's less about kind of what we'll look like as a fully formed group and more about how do we make sure that we're doing the right thing and we're doing it in a deliberative way. Parallel responses are actually I thought I felt like a response to pieces of the CSWG report. The pieces about how could we be involved in situations like domestic violence where there is a crime and there is a victim. And we're still really game planning that out. But really our goal is that when there are situations that could involve more than one sort of response that maybe there's someone who could use some community support. Maybe there's someone who could be in need of that. That would be helpful. But also that I recognize that redemption since at the core of Crest's responsibilities and that even perpetrators have a right to compassion and care. And so meeting folks at those instances in which police may be the main person. We still intend to support them at the county jail while they're there and when they come home. Our kind of overarching goal has been to serve every Amherst resident wherever they may be to the best of our ability. So I just want to acknowledge too this is this is a tricky process and we're not going to be perfect. So we're always you know hearing and learning from folks. Thanks Earl. And I think he covered the parallel response question and the 10% calls specific to a leash. The noise complaints. There might be times where they can respond to a noise complaint. The issue where and we started to look into that. Okay what calls might they be able to respond to you know neighbor disputes just having conflicts there or you know the barking dog complaint that sort of thing. What we don't what they won't have the ability to do is take any sort of punitive action that includes you know writing TBL violations and or testifying in court. So if they respond to a noise complaint of 100 people and they get no cooperation then what happens or you know we don't want to put our crest responders in a situation where they don't want to be crest responders anymore. Because you know I think and Earl has brought a lot of light to this. There's not a lot of people looking in to get into the social services field and you know the recruitment part of it's going to be important for us to make sure that we get people who want to be here for the right reasons and are sustainable. So you know I think we are looking at the potential for them to respond to some noise complaints and there's going to be a lot of noise complaints that they can't respond to. So for that reason we're going to have to have potentially some sort of parallel response at least in the beginning specific to noise complaints and probably other calls as well and as Earl pointed out and Mike I think what we're going to see in year one of the crest program is going to be you know different from what we see in year two. So you know it's going to be a lot of hey did this work did this not work what worked and what can we expand the call volume to so I don't we just don't have all the answers yet so Alicia I was trying to come back to the person who asked the question to see if there's follow-up so please if you have something. Yeah just two additional things thank you Andy. The reason why I asked that because I know we did talk about some of those things in the implementation team meeting but we also talked about possibilities of having crest respond and maybe having the PD like somewhere in the wing so that if they are needed they can be called and they can't be far but that we don't need to always have a parallel response because again the purpose of the crest was for an alternative program to exist and to me this is sounding a lot like just an extension of the PD and so I also want to know like what specifically is the crest program doing to differentiate itself from the PD to create an anti-racist culture what what types of training and degrees that are different from the PD like what is distinguishing this as an alternative and not just different like moving things over to different people. That's a great question I would say the folks who are applying for these positions are a huge differentiator we have folks who are coming from the educational system the human services field the training we're offering our conflict resolution by the CRG group out of Springfield that does restorative justice between inmates at the Hampton County Jail and their victims. NVC nonviolent communication we're receiving that training from two residents of the town of Amherst our homeless outreach framework is coming from Jay Levy an internationally kind of recognized frame for engaging with folks who are treatment resistant which is likely how folks end up chronically homeless we're receiving training from as many lived experience groups including the wildflower alliance and we are kind of continuing to pursue those I think what ultimately is going to make us look different is our actions and it's hard for me to to exactly quantify how our actions are going to be different we won't have weapons which that's meaningful and I think to Scott's point we don't have a stick we're an engagement strategy right we're we're with you we're working with you we're doing our best to convince to support someone to change their own lives because that's ultimately how this works so some of this is is hypothetical and it's hard to answer hypotheticals for a program that doesn't have a real there's nothing quite like Cress in the country not one that is so tied into municipal government so I guess coming from the state that is my unsatisfying answer for the day and a commitment to find you a better satisfying answer in the months to come thank you uh Mike can I just add um the term parallel response that's actually something that are all brought up and we're going to try to differentiate this from a cold response so touching on Alicia's question we do foresee calls where we will be telling the officer um you know we'll be telling the officer that Cress is responding to such in such a location for a well-being check and that'll be the key knowing that in this call Cress is primary and the police officer is back up and vice versa there will be calls we'll be telling Cress that we have pd responding to such in such a location for a well-being check that'll be the key to the Cress team to know that the police are going to be primary here till it's investigated the police may get there and say oh this is good Cress can handle this and they'll be gone so we did look at that we're just trying to again trying to have this program be successful we don't want to send Cress responders someplace on their own that we in dispatch said oh we don't know this person doesn't sound like it's gonna be a problem Cress responder gets there and bottles start getting thrown and now the police response may be five minutes away um so we're trying to desperately avoid that type of liability and the police response would need to be more aggressive in that situation so we would have if something like that were to happen we would have you know unintentionally harmed the ability for de-escalation by the police so it's also kind of looking at the potential ramifications you know we don't want to be so eager that we make life harder for our for our community shondi i just wanted to call out that we're about 20 minutes past the time we had allocated for police communications and animal welfare and it seems like we're sort of stepping out of the budget conversation and more into operational stuff and I just and Cress is coming up too that's a they're gonna have their own their own time and a few one more department so I just want to call out that we're we're straying into where we might have to reschedule some departments if we don't get back on track okay thank you that's helpful Kathy actually I wanted to echo what Sean just said because I think um I have a lot of thoughts and in terms of my other life before the council in the healthcare world watching new workforces be developed and evolved and I just think we could shift this to a terrific different conversation out of the budget side and you know there's a lot of evidence that you have to move not just move slowly but build experience to know what you can do and I think there's some good models out there and people who have learned from them and I'm not saying in the Cress world but in the healthcare world when they brought in huge newly trained differently trained people and and what they did so I would just like to recommend that we move this and create a space to have the discussion because the expectations we need to do this well and it's an incredibly exciting program and it right now it's not a budget issue so I'm recommending Andy that we not even financially and if we can just find a space that anyone who wants to come and have this kind of discussion it's more of a working group discussion on evolution of human service programs and data systems too Lynn I think are critical and I think we can learn from some people that don't try to buy an off-the-shelf $300,000 one that may do what we want or may not but really be thoughtful about it so that was my going to be my plea. Thank you all for both of you for getting us back to reminding ourselves that this is budget that we can't solve all of the operational questions within the budget meeting and address budget we may need to ask Paul at some point to create some kind of program and maybe after there's a little bit more experience we have a little we're closer to actually being operational with responders I had a question I mean I don't want an answer to it because it's just another example which is experiences that we have from working with University of Massachusetts and some of its programs working with students that are student run through the office campus housing office and whether that gives us any instruction but I think that that's the kind of operational question that I don't want to take time with today Bob. Yeah I do want to just raise a financial issue and that is with with the with Cress you know becoming operational we may find that there are a lot of hidden costs or things that we we can't anticipate now so I would just like to suggest that you know Chief Livingstone, Mr. Miller, Mr. Blackelman just track where we are as we go into FY23 and make sure we don't kind of find ourselves in a hole somewhere down the down the pike I mean it would be helpful to have you know updates or to know that we're we're on tag target or we're spending too much or whatever that's all. Good thank you Alicia. Thank you so I am in support of like shifting the conversation but I do want to state however that I appreciate the answers to my questions because the way that the programs operate directly affects the budget and so my questions I need to understand how the budget is set up how money is allocated and how all of this is working together and how it's going to be funded and if like these questions were all directly related to the budget so I just want to say that because I think it was really important for me and my understanding to have these questions answered right now so thank you. Thank you so Chief you just we've really talked about the police department budget. Yeah we can do it another day Annie. I mean we should probably finish police and then follow the schedule we have and if we get to you know by 11 o'clock we're not on to community services we may want to invite some people back we have a we have a meeting at the end that we can use that we didn't fill out the agenda yet so. So do you want to move forward Sean or Andy? Yes I'd say please and okay because I think we need to talk about staffing in the police department and I know this is a logical time to do that. So yeah the first item actually on the public safety or the police line item budget excuse me was the police facility I don't think Jeremiah is here and although I know a lot about this building. Yeah don't do facility that's what I thought. Yeah we'll do that at the end with the other facilities. Sounds good so I'll jump right in and try and go as quickly as I can and I know Cathy you presented a bunch of seven or eight questions and I want to make sure I get to those as well and I'll try and go quickly and then if there are questions we can jump on board but I think everybody's aware that so we are budgeted at 46 police officers and two subordinates staff in the budget that's down two positions from last year and I know there's a question directly specific to that and how it's impacted us I'll try and go quickly to our recent accomplishments unless you just want me to jump right into the financial part of it Sean or Andy. The recent accomplishments and key challenges haven't changed a lot over the years so I could you know jump through those if you prefer. Yeah and as you do I'm you know focused on what are the new challenges that you've seen with them last year in particular. You know and again going through coming out of the COVID year we anticipated that you know call volume and calls we're going to get back to you know what we call normal and that's it pretty much exactly what's happening you know it was a relatively quiet year when it came to quality of life issues in the COVID timeframe for obvious reasons with the students not being in town on one year and then very restricted for the half of another year so the call volumes are returning to normal as we anticipated and we have dealt with those as we always have. The calls for services so going back to 2017 we're in the 17,000 range and there now this past year back up to 16,000 and some change in the categories I know you all have on page 121 you know those statistics are getting back again to pre-COVID norms and again this was all anticipated and expected and we deal with it on a regular basis. You know I'll jump right into to cap these questions if people want and that way we can come back with questions that are more specific to the town police budget. Well I'll read the questions and then I'll give you the answers as best that I can. Question one was how many of the 16,000 plus calls listed on page 121 are officers responding to neighborhoods or are officers related to UMass off campus? Now that's a difficult answer our question to answer Kathy we don't track the individuals and we'll respond to those types of calls in other words we don't we can guess that they're probably UMass students but it's not something that we actually track so I think Mike pointed out you know it's a general guess that most of our noise complaints are related to UMass students although we can't quantify that with data so you know we get there and there's a whole bunch of 18 and 19 year olds you know it's pretty obvious who's responsible for those types of parties but put a specific number or percentage on that you know we don't have the ability to track that. Question two was of the traffic stops for DUI and speeding and other significant motor violations what are the percent related to students and perhaps using the numbers between the summer months and the school months would help with that you know I can tell you that surprisingly the majority of our OUI arrests are not UMass students I was surprised to hear that when we did the analysis because that's something we can track when somebody is arrested we do ask you know as part of you know their job or what they do as a profession and they answer UMass student we can track that so you know the arrest numbers are up for both alcohol and drug related OUIs but the larger percentage of them are not students so only 20 percent of those are UMass students and the rest are other individuals so that gives you an idea of where we are with the OUI question and significant motor violation charges like endangering and that sort of thing and Gabe if there's something I'm missing don't be afraid to jump in. Question three was a table shows a decline in nuisance house violations in FY21 compared to pre-COVID what has been the experience this year and the specific to revenues and repeat houses so again you know we can we can make an assumption that the majority of the nuisance house violations that we issue are to students but that isn't something that we would track necessarily as far as the fines they are consistent at $300 and those go to those fines go to every individual in the home so if there are four people on the lease who are responsible for hosting a large party that becomes a nuisance and the officer makes the decision to issue TBL violations each individual person on the lease gets a $300 fine so if it's four people it's a $1,200 fine typically those get appealed to the court what we don't have any control over is the decision made by either the judge or the clerk magistrate so if there's a $1,200 fine in most cases those are reduced to $300 which I don't like it I've spoken to judges about it but it's their mechanism to try and hold these people responsible in a different mechanism a restorative justice type of thing I can tell you that of the nuisance house violations that we do have and we do write citations for rarely do we get a repeat offender so we are not going back to the same location and having to issue nuisance house violations to those locations so that you know that's a positive that comes out of that question for is there an estimate of how many calls for service might be handled by crests or a team with crests I think we kind of address that and I'll move on and maybe Earl can jump on that one when when his budget comes up but again you know we're working on on that and that's going to be subject to change I think over the course of six months a year so Earl I'll dump that one off on you when your turn comes up question five was mental health medical assist we're up substantially in FY 21 what is the FY 22 experience been please discuss and how we respond to that if it's a joint EMS or medical assist and where are the locations that people bring other than the ER and it's Cooley Dickinson a resource for the mental health patient stabilization the first part of that medical mental calls are up they're up substantially and that trend is continuing you know the majority of the calls that we get sent to usually have an EMS response to it individual is known to us and a lot of these people are known to us so you'll get both police and fire responding to medical mental or medical assist type calls our only avenue right now our only resource is Cooley Dickinson Hospital to have those people transported and quite frankly Cooley Dickinson isn't set up to handle these types of calls they're just not and it's there's no other area that we can bring in a lot of that falls on EMS when they're making the decision on where they're going to transport somebody you know if somebody's attempted to harm themselves they may end up going to Bay State or Holyoke Hospital but the majority of those transport go to Cooley Dick and I'll give you an example when we've had to section 12 somebody and what that is is a mechanism for us to take care of somebody who's not capable of taking care of themselves and or have caused harm to themselves and that's kind of a last resort for police officers but we do have the authority to do that but it is not uncommon for us to section 12 somebody and have to section 12 that person 24 hours later so the individual goes to Cooley Dick gets an evaluation and they're back out on the street in 12 hours so that's frustrating for both EMS for Tim's people and for us as well so that's an area that needs to be fixed that's at a much higher level than either myself Tim or Earl so you know that's a discussion we probably need to have at a regional level um question six was um page 119 indicates COVID challenges for staffing and please discuss the time commitment you anticipate police time and COVID receding um so we had a lot of different protocols that were put into place to minimize contact wherever possible when it went during the really high COVID time and that included things like noise disturbances so if police officers were sent to a noise complaint and there were two or 300 people there the officers had to be extreme you know they were even when they were masked up and everything needed to be very careful about how they handled those situations so we had to change protocols about how they dealt with with the individuals including not going into homes and that sort of thing to deal with certain calls so you know that was a major change on how we did policing um for a lot of different types of calls um you know we had a lot of officers who over the course of the time caught you know contracted COVID themselves so you know they're out for extended periods of time and then officers needed to be hired on over time to you know fill those voids so it was a it was a pretty stressful time um like for every department right all the departments that had to deal with it but in particular for our officers because I don't know the exact numbers but you know a dozen maybe or more officers contracted COVID some multiple times and you know it was stressful for them it was stressful for their families and so that was it was a tough and it's it's good that we're coming out of that um question seven is the department is operating with two fewer officers in FY 21 and police discuss how this resulted more over time turnover or staff concerns and um what is anticipated as Crest expands with staffing um so yeah I could probably go on for several hours about that question directly responsible for the two officers that we lost last year to the defund um we had an officer that was assigned um as a neighborhood liaison officer specifically to downtown amity street lower main street so that it was kind of a knockoff of Bill Laramie's position because Bill was being overwhelmed with a lot of his work so we were looking to build on um the neighborhood liaison positions and so we basically just started that and then we had to eliminate it so the officer that was assigned to central downtown lower main street amity Lincoln that position was eliminated and we had an officer who was assigned directly to the district attorney's office to handle a regional um crime task force that position was eliminated so that officer was responsible for doing a lot of investigations that were more regional and approached um you know we had some houses that were drug houses we had some um regional um sexual sexual cases and assault cases that were at a regional level we also had a number of break-ins and I think you probably all read about you know thefts from vehicles and catalytic converter type um investigation so that officer would work regionally with all the other police officers that were assigned from other agencies um and so that position was eliminated so those two positions were were eliminated and taken on by the officers left in both the detective bureau and patrol you know I know we had addressed this a long time ago um when we did a budget uh overview but you know we only have three police officers on any shift at any time who are actually out on patrol but you know I I know that surprised a lot of people I think a lot of people thought they were like six or seven police officers out on patrol and so for each shift there's only three officers one's assigned to North Amherst one's assigned to the center of town and one's assigned to South Amherst so that is our regular shift so when somebody takes a vacation day or calls out sick that officer has to be replaced on overtime and a lot of times that overtime is mandated um so officer coming off the midnight to eight shift finds out at six o'clock in the morning that somebody called out sick you know or has a family member a kid that's sick and they can't come in a lot of times that midnight to eight officer has to stay and work you know the entire eight hour shift so a lot of our overtime is forced overtime and um you know that that's just that's just the norm so um so yeah and the last question it looks like UMass has shifted its graduation date next year to the memorial day weekend will the police need extra support as a result can we quantify the cost and staffing and to please UMass police help and what is the plan so yeah there's a I'm probably not the most popular person up at the University of Mass Administration right now um when I found out about this I got on the phone immediately with some people that I'm close to up there and I maybe we're still friends I don't know uh but I'm not happy about that decision quite frankly and I can't sugarcoat it you know back in 2008 and 2009 when they made the transition to the earlier graduation time it was a relief to my police staff and police officers the month of May was always extremely dist stressful the weather's beautiful students are really getting excited about graduation large day drinks were the norm we eliminated all of that through a lot of the community outreach that we did and quite frankly just from not having a whole bunch of students in town in May you know everyone's familiar with the Hobart Hoedown if you're not google it it's it's quite telling and I'm nervous about things going back to the old days and um you know the other thing of UMass being able to help out usually when we're busy they're busy so um it's easy to help each other out when there's a planned event like uh you know a Patriot Super Bowl party or the Red Sox game seven those are easy um you know the Blarney blowout we bring in additional officers what I don't want to see trying us have to have to do is bring in mutual aid partners for the entire month of May trying to deal with what we anticipate are going to become more frequent large-scale party events with alcohol and types of those events because we've done a really good job of eliminating that through a lot of hard work over the years and you know Bill Laramie was instrumental in that as were all the sector officers so you know I know we're going to be anticipating additional meetings with the university I've stressed to them I um I'm not happy with the fact that they're changing the graduation date you know and a perfect example is we this past graduation this past weekend we had 13 posts that we were trying to fill for trap just for one day for traffic for graduation and we were only able to fill five of them so you know it's little things like that were by the end of the year by the end of this year officers that are ready to take some breaks and June July and August are when they're allowed to take those breaks we restrict time off we don't allow officers to use vacation time on Thursday Friday and Saturdays in the months of September October yeah March end of March April and May so you know that's kind of a big deal when you know you have your boss telling you you can't take time off to go do relatives um wedding or something to that nature so you know I'll get off my soapbox now and just ask if there are any additional questions that I can answer thank you Kathy did you have anything else or shall I you know the one and this can be um maybe we can try to quantify it at another time one of my trying to link the level of service that you're providing to the fact that it's UMass I feel they are not contributing adequately to the Amherst town services budget so I think the more we can quantify some of these in terms of time so it wasn't meant so so your answers were great but I Andy that's why I put some of those down you know that um the the fact that our our police are often called out for uh and and contrast with summer months so I don't want to pursue that but that's where I was going with some of these questions is trying to get um Paul and Sean on a number you know like x percent of our police budget is related to the fact that there's a University of Massachusetts and we can document in the following way or you'll see I've done the same thing with EMS and fire so it's just trying to make a link to the fact that we are providing services but not getting paid for them because they don't pay taxes to us so I'll just stop that's that's thank you very much and uh for your answers I would just also add I mean I kind of skirted over a lot of stuff and try to go through things relatively quickly we have attempted to do in the past mutual type patrols with the university uh it hasn't worked out real well there are some issues with the university police patrolman's union also some issues with jurisdictional issues uh you know mass police don't have the authority to do certain things including some arrest and that type they don't have the ability to write tbl violations and that sort of thing so you know if we could get them to respond they would have to respond mutually with an Amherst police officer okay so we have about five hands up and I want to um allow a question or two from each of them and uh then we need we do need to move on so because we need to get on we have crest and fire and uh Sean looking like and we may not get beyond public safety today yeah I mean I agree with you I think um maybe we should just let the senior center and and the public health department and veterans go and I'll reschedule them for the the last meeting in May and my thank you to Haley and Jennifer for being here and I have my apology for not being able to uh run it as quickly I think it just is a lot of interest and important questions that came up um so coming back to counselors uh and committee members Matt hey thanks Andy and thanks so much chief and to everybody for the time and work that's gone into this and uh you know I just want to echo what others have said about the excitement around this crest program the excitement about the Kennedy Center partnership I hope that's a place where we can get some good data analysis and third thought partnership on this um to Lynn's point and uh I actually have a very specific question for the chief that I didn't give in advance so if you just want to sort of say I'll get back to you that's okay too um I'm just wondering and this does tie into um obviously questions about crest as well I'm just wondering of the you know 16,000 or so calls for service um how much of that is dedicated to the to the pre-k to 12 schools um I know that's a very loaded and and you know very complex issue on a programmatic side but I was just kind of looking at it from from the numbers if you can if you can ballpark that for us that's great if you want to just get back to me that's fine too thank you I could probably get you some pretty specific numbers on response to schools Matt probably just take a matter of a day I'm guessing that I can tell you from experience they're probably not very high um you know we we don't have a school resource officer in the times that we are requested at the school it's it's for you know minor types things and that sort of thing but I could get you some definitive numbers on that but probably not a lot of calls okay well thank you if you do have anything uh you can send it to Sean or through me and uh we'll get it to the committee but thank you uh Pam thank you um and thanks to everybody the staff time is um greatly appreciated here um it's a question about overtime and I don't I would be interested to know there's been a lot of discussion about overtime what is sort of the ratio of the hours of overtime that are paid out at presumably a higher rate and the cost of a position with benefits or where do where do we sort of average out on that I'm not up to speed Sean on the benefit part of it um so the question is rough I mean benefits it depends if an individual selects a family plan a single plan an hmo a ppo so um you know so it varies widely I'd say sort of the maximum is probably in the uh in terms of the town's share of the cost is somewhere in the 18 19 thousand dollar range maybe a little bit more now um but that would be for the town share so and you correct me if I'm wrong if you've got more specific numbers in front of you and that would be just for health insurance um with with pension costs it's it's part of a bigger formula we belong to a group so it's not sort of a one-to-one with pension costs and I shouldn't have been quite that that general but but if we if we took a if we took a let's say just a starting officer officer benefits you know how how does that how does that compare to you know what you pay out in terms of overtime and where does that I'm not expressing this well yeah no I kind of get where you're going Pam um you know we've been funded oh back in 2007 or eight I think we are funded at 51 police officers and we are on the house now funded at 46 I can tell you the overtime budget hasn't been affected drastically by changing two or three positions either up or down again um you know we're at kind of a minimum of officers on the street so typically as I mentioned three officers are out there at a time and when somebody is if a detective calls in sick we don't have to replace that right or if I call in sick one day we don't replace that I'm talking almost exclusively on patrol officers so when the patrol officers call out sick those are the ones that need to be replaced on overtime and we usually always exhaust our overtime budget and it's $290,000 I believe so you know would it be easy to say if we had another two officers would the overtime budget come down to the amount that those officers cost it doesn't really work like that you know unfortunately so I hope that kind of I mean our starting salary is $46,000 and it goes through 10 steps to 65,000 and of course overtime is paid at one and a half times the officer's hourly rate so you know if it's a lot of young officers working overtime we can get a lot more out of them than some of the older officers but and that's typically how it works thank you yeah Jennifer yes thank you this is more probably a request than a comment about the budget although it might it does pertain to what Kathy mentioned of how much of a police department calls is related to having UMass in our town but the comment was made that I guess I would ask if when the police respond to noise and nuisance or any it could be banned you know any other calls to a student house it's pretty clear it's an absentee owned student house or it's a student house whether the owner lives there or not presumably it's I mean it's probably absentee what why couldn't that just be recorded that the call went to a student house and I was very interested I guess it's confirmed what many of us who've been following this for years have noted that 95% of noise and nuisance calls tend to be related to students because on the council we are getting an increasing number of emails from throughout the town where more and more homes on what have traditionally been you know streets where non-student households have lived that there are more and more absentee owned student houses and there are noise and nuisance and other concerns related to that and I think there's been a response on the part of people that this may not be part of their daily lives that this is an exaggeration that it's not so much happening and it would be really helpful as we're trying to document this if there could be some just notation when police respond to calls that it's a student house and it was encouraging to hear that when the Amherst police department's experience has been that when they respond to a house once and they give a noise and nuisance violation that they're not called back although I know in one of the neighborhoods I represent like 20 Allen Street, 35 Phillips, 164174 Sunset and I may be wrong 342 Lincoln that they're you know there definitely are houses where the repeated calls and then of course there's the issue of every year when the occupancy changes then there's calls to the same house even if it's different people living there so I guess I would just on behalf of many neighborhoods and an increasing number of neighborhoods in town ask if there could be a way to be able to keep data on when calls to from the police department are to absentee owned student houses thank you sure yeah and I would agree with Jennifer we're finding we're certainly finding more and more homes are being purchased in non-traditional student housing areas correct so somebody buys a house and they rent it out to four students and where we end up responding there a lot and the turnover is an issue as well because you're getting new people in there the next year and so you know we're continually responding to the same location a lot of times because certain houses get reputations and hey this is a great place to live if you like to party right and you know we are cognizant of that and Bill Laramie does try and track certain houses for sure but yeah there might be a mechanism where we can just say yeah no question student housing and keep tabs on that and I can speak with Gabe and Ron about doing that that tracking type thing yeah thank you and even if you're not keeping tabs that might be a lot of work just so there's a record of how many calls are to student houses thank you yeah thanks any um I once asked the police chief I was working with what if he could have any kind of any in the innovation in the system any kind of technology what would he like what would he prefer and he'd said he wanted a da who could go for a rest conviction in 45 minutes um so that question is about court time chief and how much it impacts us and how relationships have been going with the with the court system in terms of managing officers time in court sure so court time um mostly because of COVID so there are a lot fewer arrests and a lot fewer interactions so you know take COVID years out of it but um and we're also part of the restorative justice program through the DA's office so what that does is eliminate the need for officers to go to test and then testify so officers aren't testifying in court as frequently as they did well like when I was a young police officer I was seemed like I was in court every day so um and there's a lot more um desire by the district attorney's office not to have things go to trial uh it's just it's um they're backlogged um the police departments are backlogged so the the more serious crimes are getting the priority so um fewer and fewer of course are taking issues to court uh criminal court I'm speaking of and um our court hours are down substantially yes thank you Bob thanks Andy um chief uh we all know that um um radicalization and hate crimes are up over the country and we just saw an example of that in Buffalo a couple of days ago um are are are you tracking that or monitoring that uh in Amherst and uh is the budget any hindrance to your ability to do that so will you do track that and we are mandated by law to track that and Ronnie are you still on um I'm here chief okay yeah maybe you can speak to the to the the tracking of hate crimes and that sort of thing whether we've seen enough increase or decrease in that actually we uh ironically the the numbers have stayed pretty much the same over the last decade or so we're required as you pointed out chief correctly the we're required to report those on an annual basis to the state um and the state actually keeps those on file and then compares them to the to the statewide averages the AG's office uses that data and they help facilitate training is law enforcement techniques etc etc so yes we do track those um fortunately we we are on the lower end of the state numbers um particularly eastern part of the state there were some shocking and surprising numbers this past year that um was impacted like many things by COVID a lot because a lot of our calls for service and a lot of uh response to service were diminished over the last two years but yeah the short answer is yes we do track that data and it is readily available typically Bob those calls would go directly when we do get those types of uh calls for investigation they go directly to the detective bureau who handles those so it wouldn't be a patrol function okay well thanks yeah okay um Mandy and then maybe we can move on from police but uh thank you Andy um just two questions I know Kathy asked about the increase in mental med assist calls it looks like it's been really high up are those something that Crest will be able to handle um in the future um you know is is that a result of a change in protocol um or you know just can you expand on that a little bit more as to what what is going on in when uh APD responds to those types of calls and then the other one is a staffing question um I looked at the charts and you know you have on the um I don't know which side it is you have a captain or lieutenant um and a sergeant supervising six detectives it looks like um and it looks like there are nine supervisors in the LT's and sergeants supervising 26 patrol officers which in my estimate was an average of one and a half supervisors for every four patrol officers or essentially one for every three patrol officers and one for every two to three detectives uh that seems like a whole lot um that might not be necessary um especially when we look at our fire department which has one supervisor for every four to five um firefighters EMT so can you explain um why we have so many supervisors and then a similar question which is you talked about the overtime needed for patrol officers um when one calls out because there's only three on our LT's and sergeants on the operation on that side um taking over those shifts um since they are presumably on shift at that time um instead of calling in overtime are they going back out on patrol to avoid overtime sure so every shift has at least one sergeant on um that oversees the patrol officers the four to twelve has two supervisors on so one um sergeant and one lieutenant and that's the same with the midnight to eight um the biggest reason is um one of the largest litigation issues in policing and police work is failure to supervise so um we have found in our agency um the well it's basically nine supervisors in the patrol and uh that oversee the patrol officers that includes a sergeant and a lieutenant and one sergeant is also working seven p to three a.m which is on the desk that oversees prisoners brought in answers questions of the public oversees the phone lines that sort of thing so that's another uh supervisor is assigned there in the detective bureau you have a lieutenant that oversees um six of the detectives there's a sergeant that also handles detective work so in essence that sergeant for instance is currently working on child sex exploit sex exploitation cases so in essence you have seven detectives in overseeing by a lieutenant but yes one sergeant who handles more sensitive cases i guess is the best way to put that um when it comes to overtime replacement so yes when a sergeant is out sick he's replaced he or she is replaced by a sergeant there are times where if it's not a busy time of year like take the summer for instance if a sergeant takes calls out sick and there's a lieutenant on duty that lieutenant would just fill in so we don't we don't hire somebody if we don't have to so that lieutenant would be responsible for going out on the road on patrol and filling in where that sergeant has has either called out sick or maybe use a um a vacation day that sort of thing but current so like currently a good example is one of our sergeant is out on extended medical leave um he broke his leg and he's going to be out probably for six months so a lot of that a lot of that replacement is being taken over by a lieutenant who would be working those hours normally anyway so not all of that vacancy is being filled on overtime so you know those types of things happen if there's an extended patrolman who's out we would have to juggle the um work assignments and move bodies around to you know not use up all of our overtime budget on one individual let's say somebody a patrolman is out because they were injured or something of that nature and we have to move bodies around sometimes we have to take detectives out of the detective bureau and put them back in patrol and uniform to fill those vacancies and that sort of thing so there's a lot of juggling that goes on um I hope that answered most of your questions is the one I missed oh thank you for that you're welcome um I know we want to get beyond police uh but I want to see if Alicia has a question and she really needs to get out so Alicia yeah I just had a quick question about like staffing level and availability and if it were be a help if it would be a helpful thing to limit things like detail because I know we have like police officers who work like traffic and why can't we just have a person direct traffic like we have cross and if that would make a difference or how that ties into how everything runs sure so um officers are only allowed to work details on their off time so you know if it affects and they're restricted by how many hours they can work in a 24 hour period so um um you know the only time an officer can work a traffic detail is on their time off like if it's their day off or that sort of thing um and that's when they you typically would see them working construction construction companies ever sourced they have the option of hiring civilian flag people if they want so they don't have to hire a police officer if they don't want to the majority of them prefer to have a police officer out there but you know that's not our decision that's not our call that's up to the contractor so uh if somebody wanted and if it's a state job what I did learn was um because they changed that law um 10 years or so ago if it's a state job it's more expensive to hire a civilian flagger than it is to hire a police officer because they get the union rate um which I kind of found surprising but it's is true so um you know we do monitor the number of hours people work how many they're allowed to work um that sort of thing um I think that's about it thank you Alicia thank you Scott and just to clarify so that doesn't doesn't come out of overtime budget or any budget that's a completely different thing correct as a matter of fact the town makes money off of that we charge 10 to build those people to do the paperwork and stuff so the town does get a little bit of money out of it but yeah it doesn't cost doesn't cost my town or my department or my anything other it comes strictly out of the contractor whoever's employing that officer thank you you're welcome okay so um thank thank you chief and both the captains uh round and cave for um being with us uh just welcome to stay because we're still in going to be in public safety Sean I assume we're going to fire next yep uh chief nelson's here and um he will lead us to a fire okay and uh so uh chief uh turn it over to you and uh you can introduce people that you have with you PD is a tough act to fall fall fall of what we'll do we'll do our best I guess so you know so uh there's me I've got assistant chief uh Strom Stromgren and assistant chief homestead with with with us as well to chime chime in as needed uh I'll probably fall fall fall scott scott's lead and you know um uh if you want uh if we talk talk about a challenge challenges of course I mean uh but you know just a couple of the uh comic or comics that's that we that I want to uh I want to bring up I mean we've we've done well come coming out of COVID uh trying trying to get back back back on track uh we've done we've done done well in in the grant arena arena we keep we keep doing well there to get to get a quick equipment for our department department one one thing that I've kept kept up is that we've we're we're we we build we keep building up our supply of protective equipment you know code uh not not so much uh because we're we're we're that that concerned with uh COVID or or and anything like that but just just just you know the the the availability is there and we build build build up our supplies to a health health healthy level and that's and that's allowed loudest for for instance to assist the homeless shelter shelter with supplies so that's that's that's one of those good good things and again we've we've done done done well with grants in the past past year for uh two different types types of uh quick equipment for our line per personnel um challenges challenges as I said Ico scos Scotty uh you know our our call call vol vol vol volume is back back up the preco COVID level uh we're we're back we're back there um and at the same time uh what I'd like to say is if it weren't weren't for bad bad luck we'd have no no luck at all we uh our staff staffing issue re re re re remains but at at the same same time we've we've we've got uh quite quite a few few folks out long long term in in in trees uh long term ill ill ill illness uh we've we've had some uh a couple of resident nations you know actually which is good good for them bad bad for for us they they they went on to bigger and better things which is which which is great great great great for them but it still leaves us with with with holes to fill fill so here right now we're probably we've got about uh nine nine nine nine slots slots that are that are empty right right right right now because of uh in in in trees and ill illness so and then uh you know we we we we did did add uh four four additional positions but that takes time to you know to bring folks on get get them trained trained trained trained up in and again we're still still short um as the whole world is experiencing we're we're having supply supply chain issues uh in terms of keeping keeping our equipment uh in in in top top shape it takes time it takes takes time time time to get to get the uh some supplies in uh for for us and for our vendors and then and of course the cost has gone gone gone gone up as well as as everyone has seen and includes uh fuel fuel prices that's that's that's that's what's affecting us as well so you know those those are some of the some of the challenges the challenges that that we've had and we i'm sure sure there's going to be cool cool questions and we can kind of dig dig deeper but uh we're we're open open open to questions okay Kathy uh did you have anything to start you're muted i know i i'm trying to unmute i have a window open um yeah thank you chief i i sent a few questions in advance but i know not um a lot in advance but i just want to pick up on one thing you just said and then i'll ask my other questions um on the nine out nine slots empty to injure injury and illness is the injury rate higher than you saw three or four years ago how much of this is a staffing issue um you know is or is is that um yeah so how does that compare to i think our injury rate as uh remained remained the same this is a labor intensive intensive business and it's a dangerous business and folks get get folks get hurt but i don't i haven't really i don't believe believe we've had had had a spike if if if you will i mean uh we do uh folks folks folks get get get nick they they get hurt and they they take to the den and and you know they they they can't can't can't come come come to work but we've had a mix mix of that we've got i mean as as as a COVID restrictions have been been reduced uh especially when uh they they took the the math math man man mandate away away from from schools a lot of our folks have kids and the kids bring stuff home and whether it's COVID or not we've seen an up an uptick in people just getting sick and the smart smart thing is don't bring it in here because then it'll spread spread spread like wild wild wild far so that's it that's a big part part part of this our injury injury rate has not really in has not really in increased that that that much that is a fear fear fear of mine and i've stayed stated that in in the past that you know not not not not in increasing our staff staffs staffing could at some point increase our injury rate because you have less less folks doing more more work and being being being being being exposed to more more hazards so so just don't going on that um when my first question was we're we're adding we either either are adding or have added four staff using arping funds um does that staff get you to a point where you staffing is more adequate um can you comment on your sense of with those four positions how yeah well those will will will help but they're not going to help right right right right away i mean we've we've got some it's gonna it takes at least a year a year you gotta get get get some some someone full fully trained trained trained up and that's in in house for training and uh the academy academy academy academy and then there's the e the ems side side side of the house as well and even without you know and those those positions we we we we we still have to have to fulfill we just we just finish finish finish hire hiring for those slots. Their first day is Monday, but it took us a while to higher folks, as you know, throughout the world. It's tough to bring new hires. The pool in our state is quite small, and we're not the only game, game, game in town. There are a lot of departments out there that are hiring right now, so people have, you know, so those can't, can't, can't they? It's a, I guess it's a buy, buy, buyers market, no, sellers, sellers, sellers market, I guess, they can kind of pick and choose where, where, where, where they want, they want to go and combine that with the fact that the pool of talent, of all qualified talent, talent is small, small, small, small, smaller. It makes it, it makes it difficult to bring, bring folks in and that, and that, and that, and that, and that takes, adds, adds to the amount of time, you know, to get, to get folks, folks spun up. So the addition of the slot of the position is great, but it's going to, it's going to take quite, quite a while to re, re, realize the benefits of that, and then add on to that, that we're all ready behind the eight, the eight, the eight ball now with folks that, that, that are out. So, you know, I won't say, you know, one, you know, one, one step forward, forward, two, two steps back, but it's, it's, you know, right, right now, we're trying to try, trying to get to a stasis, stasis point. So, and, and, and it's the difficulty because it all takes time. Paul, you had something? Yeah, I think the chief now did. I mean, we did add four new positions to this, to the fire department budget. That's a significant addition to the department, 10% basically. And that's, but as the chief said, it takes time. We had interviewed and the fire department had interviewed and selected six people to offer jobs to, four accepted, two didn't. So, now we are going back out to find those other two slots we needed to fill. We were trying to get ahead of the, the curve because the chief was, was absolutely right that when you hire someone, they're not, if they start Monday, they're not really available to them until they get through the academy and do all the things that they need to do. And they just don't walk out and suddenly they're able to do the job. It takes a lot of time and the fire department has a very extensive, sophisticated training regimen they have for their new firefighters, which is why people appreciate the services that they get from the fire department. But I think, you know, we're, you know, there's just a lot of turmoil, a lot of changeover, you know, people retiring, taking new jobs. It's, we're, they're not immune to what's going on throughout the entire country. And, and so just, we're just running to catch up and the quality of the staff we got, we're getting good people, but you know, they, the really, a lot of people have options too. And they choose not to, they choose, they're looking at different departments, every department is hiring right now. So it's a really competitive marketplace, as Tim said. But, you know, I think we're working as hard as we can. And I think, you know, to get promotions filled and as people do retirements and we interviewed yesterday for promotions for captains, but then that creates a new vacancy, right? So it's like that appointment and we can't, and so we're trying to get ahead of the curve with HR, but it's a tough world right now. And, and you know, I, I'd be remiss, so I did, didn't say kudos to the town for step, stepping up and adding for new positions. It is additional. I mean, this is some, some, something that's been a hot topic since before, before I came. And the town, town fine found, found, found a way, a way, a way to step, step up and add, add, add those four. It's, it is a great step in the right, right, right direction. I mean, I've, I've said for 10, 10 or 12 years, we need, we probably need, you know, in addition to those four and another four, four, four, four, four to six, six more to get where, where we need, need, need to be, but you can't do that overnight. It's not, you know, it, it takes time, it takes, it takes money, it takes, it takes, it takes a lot of work, but this is a great step in, in the right, right direction. So Andy, some of the other questions are asked or related to the trends and the data that I saw on, in some page 125 for fire EMS. And rather than take time to go through that, I sent them in late. But some of them, if we could get answers to a few of them, Sean, maybe later and no one else has seen them, but examples are if we, how many of the, when EMS goes out, how many end up at the hospital where we can bill it and how many we don't. And I can sort of see it in the data, but how many of the non-billable went to Applewood and the Arbor's for lift and assist. And at one point we talked about, could we bill those to private insurance as a way of avoiding an emergency trip. So some of them are finance related that we don't get paid for those trips. Actually, I think give a little background on that or some context. I'd like to, like to, as the Chief Olm said to jump in here to kind of add some context to that, because it's more than just data and numbers. Yeah. So I'll try to answer the question regarding particularly Applewood and going to the Arbor's. So COVID changed a lot of things. And one of the things that happened at the Arbor's in particular is that once they figured out that people couldn't come from the outside and to help them, they had to become a little bit more self-reliant and figured out how to do lift assist on their own. So that was one of the strange positives that comes out of the pandemic. We didn't do very many, we do some lift assist down at Applewood, but not nearly the quite the same format. And remember that when you're at Applewood, you basically live in your own place. And there's not really this type of staff that you have in the assisted living format at the Arbor's. Those are, they're two different types of styles of housing and two different levels of assistance that you're going to get in those type of residents. So it'd be important to kind of separate those out a little bit. Was there another billable billing question that I could try to help? Well, I was mainly looking that in the past, you know, and so it's post COVID is you're going to have, we're still in the moving from hopefully to post COVID, but my sense is that the ambulances were going out a lot without resulting in a hospital visit. And then you couldn't bill for that trip. And I'm just thinking in terms of billable. And I remembered, so it may not be that at one point it was mentioned that there was some discussion with Blue Cross or the insurers that if one of the things you were doing was basically doing home health care when you went out there and premenid could you bill to insurance? So I'm looking at the revenue side of the department. And I don't know where those discussions went. So those discussions would require us to do more home health care or specific home health care and then try to figure out what the Medicare Medicaid availability for funds would be. We don't really offer that service yet. It's it's prevention for EMS. And we haven't really ventured into that at this point. It is a staff driven idea. We would need more staff and we would need to do a little bit extra training with that staff and some small but important diagnostic equipment that would go with that. If you looked at other other services that provide those kind of mobile integrated health care across the state or even in other states. So right now that's in the idea mode knowing that this is something we need to look to in the future, but we haven't started doing it currently. And you know, when I met with Earl last week, these are things that we might be actually work together and share in some future endeavors not unlike what we found when we got into the pandemic and we started working with public health and we could be a force multiplier for public health when we got into the vaccine clinics, homebound visits and things like that. So we have the means, we have the capability. If we're going to build something out, we would actually need to add some more staff that would be able to specifically work in those areas or more specifically work in those areas and still cover all the emergencies that we do now. So I hope that answers most of your questions. Yeah, it does. And then the other one is just my UMass related question. When I'm looking at the service levels, what share of staffing trips of ambulance are related in any way to UMass? But we can come at, you know, ambulance trips, wear and tear on our vehicles. There it's a huge proportion of our population and I'm not sure we get fully reimbursed for it. So it is. I mean, we go to UMass quite a bit, but in the trend trending, what we found is that UMass does grow but at a very, very, very slow rate each year. Our growth, the largest amount of our growth in our call hall volume is from town and our surrounding and the other town, town, town, town's research service. That's where most of our growth is. So my quick request would just be, could we, we don't have those trends in this. So if we could get just something separate and it's not essential right now for the budget discussion shown, but I haven't seen that kind of trend report for a while. I saw the earlier studies, when Hadley was leaving us. Kathy, just to clarify, you want, we definitely have numbers on calls to the UMass campus and Mike's still here. Maybe Jeff knows this. I don't know if we have solid numbers on calls for students, which I think was your, what you distinguished with the police when it's not current ones. No, because please recognize that the, as Sean said, those numbers you see for UMass are on UMass campus proper. They don't reflect going to Phillips or Allen or Nutting in that area. They are, they're specifically on campus buildings and residents that we go to there. Jeff, we might be able to ballpark though. I think in the past you've been able to look at age. We've done an age based report and then try to push out addresses that would push us into, if it's on College Street, it's much more likely to be Amherst College. If it's on West Street at 893 West Street, I know it's Hampshire College. It's those kind of things that you can do that are not super scientifically specific, but pretty close. And that's all I'm asking for. The earlier ones, you could see what was happening on Friday and Saturday night with the ambulance trips to the hospitals. And it may not have been to the UMass campus, but it was a party or... You can extrapolate and say, well, yeah, this was a student driven call. I'm just looking for any way we can start to document across our department. So the draw UMass has on our budget sets. So, Sean, that's, I don't need that answer now. Right. Just to be clear, we do document very carefully the calls to UMass campus because that's how our billing arrangement with UMass, our reimbursement arrangement with them works, is based on calls to the campus. So we do have good numbers on that piece of it and trend on that. You know, I had one homebound elderly resident. He's not alive anymore. He said he and his wife did the best they could, never to fall or need help on Friday or Saturday because the ambulances were too busy to come to them. So they would... Not that you can choose when you need it. No, but you know what? We're not too busy to come to come to them. They just had a sense and they... I understand. And we do a lot of work to let folks know that that should not be a concern. If it's not us, we have a very robust mutual aid system. And at the same time, on all those busy nights, we are still going to get advanced life support care from an AMR fire crew at your side to take care of the issue. The ambulance transport may come from another town, but you're going to get paramedic care at your side from AMR fire medics in a timely fashion. So... So let me... Kathy, can we move to the other two counselors? Okay, Michelle. Thank you. I noticed that the rescue responses, which I think include motor vehicle calls, have gone up from 386 in FY 18 to 848 in FY 21. That just really... That stood out to me and I'm just curious if something maybe has been added into that item that wasn't previously there or if that's a true increase. And what's happening there? It is a true increase, but I'll defer for that. Is that to Jeff and Lindsay to fill it in? So there is a change. We changed our... How we dispatch and how many people we dispatch to certain types of calls. March of 2020, actually. So some of what you're seeing in that is the fact that the overall fire responses reflect the actual number of times the fire truck is really going out for calls. And in the reporting system we use to go to the state and to the national agencies that collect it, that gets put into that rescue category. So that's why you're seeing it there. And what that means is to say we have a chest pain call, a shortness of breath, stroke, cardiac arrest, motor vehicle accident, unconscious over 30, a significant trauma. We will send an engine with an ambulance. So hopefully what we're sending is up to five people to go take care of that situation that is critical right then, right there and hope to stabilize it at the scene. The other thing that happens is that it allows for by having more help quicker. We can take care of patients better. And you think about the people that you see these days, we're all sort of myself included. You know, we're a heavier generation than in 20, 25 years ago. People are heavier to pick up and move or even our stretchers as nice as they are using hydraulics or heavy to carry. And we bring a lot of equipment, defibrillators, bags with us. So having four or five people to help you actually manage patient care, treating somebody, and then even extracting them out to the ambulance and all the equipment, having them there in that first 15, 20 minutes makes a big difference. So some of what you're seeing is reflective of the fact that we changed our, our how we how we dispatch and how many people we sent to the initial call for help on certain types of calls. And Michelle, that's what the notable trend, not as detailed as what Jeff just explained, but that's what the trend is trying to state about the change in protocol. Can you just say, so just so I make sure I understand, there's nothing that has really changed in terms of what's happening out there between FY 18 and FY 21. I mean, that's a huge increase. So I'm just trying to understand why it's a better reflection of sort of work done than we were compiling before. I see. Okay. So it's a matter of a better way. There isn't necessarily a, we're not doing that many more car accidents or that many particular types of calls. It's sort of how we're handling those calls and how we're documenting those calls that has changed. But it gives you an overall look at, it doesn't tell you that we've done that many more fire alarms. It's telling you that we're doing that much work. And if you had, for example, if you had two separate agencies, a fire agency and an ambulance agency, you would see that same kind of call trends. So if you were in Springfield that has two separate agencies, you would see those numbers. And yes, they go to a lot of the same calls. And this is giving you an idea of sort of sort of work done. And, you know, the answer and slayer benefit, which was why we changed is that there's a study Jeff found, found some studies that show that the patient outcomes are better with the more help, the more help you send. You spread, spread, spread the work. You have a greater number of eyes on this situation, working to get that better outcome. The other pieces is that you spread the work. You spread the weight. It means there's less lesser chance for injuries. One backing injury because you only have two people moving a large patient. I mean, besides the pain inflicted on individuals, there's the loss of those folks for X amount of time or surgeries and that type of thing, which we've had here. And one of the things that it's helped is our power structures that we've had now, Jeff, almost 10 years. Almost 10 years. And that was driven by back in in, in, in resins or surgeries and just to spread, spread, spread, spread the work, the work load. That means there's less, there's going to be less stress on, less physical stress on our staff. And means they're able to, you know, to do the, do the, do our job. So. And just if I could just simplify it, what is happening, what used to happen was we'd send an ambulance if there was a medical call. Now we send an ambulance with a fire apparatus with it. So we're sending two vehicles to a situation where we used to send one vehicle. And you're seeing what that, and that's, that's based on the fire department's assessment that that's a safer as they explained. They feel that that's a better way to respond to medical calls. And that's why you're seeing that number. And that's where, where that number is being reflected under rescue calls. So, but instead of sending one vehicle, we're sending two vehicles to the same call. There's not more calls, more apparatus responding. That's helpful. Yeah. Thank you. I want to keep moving along because I want to have some time also for Cruss and so we can finish the meeting. Mandy. So my questions actually relate to the same question because and it goes to budget in that, you know, so one question I have is, are we the only town in the area sending these multiple vehicles to one call? And are we the only town sending a fire apparatus as the second vehicle instead of another ambulance? And then as that relates to that, what is the cost on the capital to adding in a fire vehicle to all of these calls? An extra 500 or 600 or so a year, it looks like given some other numbers somewhere between five and 600 a year, in terms of how long the vehicles will last, we already know that the fire department wants a high of quicker replacement schedule for our ambulances that that we were not on necessarily a ideal replacement schedule for the ambulances. But what kind of effect is this going to have on the fire apparatus to in terms of long term costs to the town, not just in terms of savings on maybe the operational side for injuries and all, but costs on the capital side for wear and tear on vehicles because they're on their own costs more often and driving more miles. You're going to see, I would say yes, you're going to see in increase wear, wear, wear, wear and tear if the trucks are out or out more, that's a good given. We're going to add miles and that type of thing. It means that repair repair costs are probably going to increase in fuel costs. But we did this because we want to make sure that we have good patient, better patient out outcomes and the data shows that that's what happens. Yes, the other benefits are going to be less chance of injuries to our folks and that type of thing. But the driving force behind this change was better patient out. Outcomes. And I don't want to sound too dramatic, but I will, I guess. What costs do you put on that? We're in the business of taking care of people the best way we can. And this was one of those ways and it was based on data, solid data. And Paul likes to say that Amherst should be at the forefront of innovation and that type of thing. This is an example of that. I'll do that because mainly, Joe, your first question. In fact, locally between Northampton and Eastampton, which are two of the other larger EMS agencies in the Hancher County, we were the last one to do this. In fact, Northampton has been sending an engine for as long as I can remember. And Eastampton either sends a squad, but their staff less than we are and have to kind of manage their options a little bit differently. So we do this because we're doing both the fire and EMS simultaneously. And sometimes that means that engine that's going away might have just one person on it. Sometimes it might be two people or it can be as much as three because they're always keeping their ear and eye out for the next call that's behind them. And so it's a way to use all the pieces as efficiently as possible. And Andy, if I can just add to that, we did ask and what Jeff just said, we did ask, could we send a different type of vehicle to those types of calls? But Jeff filled it, you know, which I think we all thought made sense is if there's a call that comes in while they're assisting one of these calls, they want to be on the truck and ready to respond immediately and not have to drive back to a station to get into a different vehicle or to get a truck. So that's why having an alternative type of vehicle might not work. The last piece I'll add to this is that there was an AMR, the large AMR service, if you're not familiar with AMR, they're nationwide ambulance services and one of their data points is that a back injury costs an average of about $60,000. A significant back injury is worth about $60,000. So for a company that is labor intensive and we spend 90% of all of our money is on personnel. So I think just for relativity's sake, when you put that out against fuel costs and even maintenance costs, those back injuries really add up and they hit us in multiple ways. Thank you for that. I just request next year for capital planning that that data be sort of translated into what a new replacement schedule might need to look like given the change in practice. And then Andy, if I could have your indulgence for one more thing, I forgot to ask my other question, which is this budget document talked about community paramedics and changing from an EMS response to a community paramedic response and how that might cost. So could you talk a little bit more about what the difference between that is and the reason for changing from one type of service to another? And I might be describing it wrong because I don't actually understand what it's talking about, but it was in the key challenges, long range objectives, I think is where it was to assess the implications of how the EMS transition to community paramedicine will impact activity level in the way the town delivers EMS. And I just didn't, can you talk more about that and the cost and what those differences are? So this gets a little bit into Kathy's question earlier when we talked about sort of that, how we might be able to bill for it. The community paramedicine is essentially doing preventative EMS care in the same way we use fire prevention and try to decrease fires and rescue responses in town. So sort of apply that same principles and how we could do less perhaps emergency transports to hospitals, which in the healthcare world costs infinitely large amounts and increasing amounts of money every year. How do you prevent those? And this trickles down all the way to the local EMS agencies. Can you go to houses and do wound care that sometimes has been covered by other things? Can you do post-surgical follow-ups and be able to have dialogue with primary care doctors looking for alternative locations to take patients? So that's really the heart of the mobile integrated healthcare effort statewide. And we know it's coming down the road. We're just not sure where we're going to intersect with it and how to intersect with it yet. And what it would take is using our paramedics. Strangely enough, a number of our paramedics have started going to nursing school. It's a little bit different skill set, but an increased level of knowledge that they bring with them when they come to work based on their education. And how can we use that to do less transports to the emergency department that may not be able to always help them? You heard us talk early with Earl and Scotty talking about emergency departments are not really built well for mental health cases. They're not built well for substance abuse cases. We need to look at different models in the future to try to take care of folks. Thank you. I need to move with the law, Dorothy. Just a very quick question though. It's true that the budget, the finance hearing is more the most interesting meeting of several weeks. This has been very, very informative. What is unconscious over 30 mean? That was a... So an unconscious patient, a patient that's not responsive. But we know in our demographics with the student population, we take care of the alcohol and being unconscious is not an uncommon call response. We go to say for college students, Friday and Saturday nights in particular, we're not sending an engine to every one of those because we know we can manage them because of our experience and taking care of them, largely we can manage those with a two-person single ambulance. As opposed to the rest of us in this room, if you're unconscious, there's probably a significant medical reason for that and we want to take care of that. It's probably not just about alcohol. So we send more help to do more work than we would probably need to do for the unconscious 18-year-old male at a certain dorm on campus. Thank you. Thank you very much. And one thing we didn't talk about is when we send in a digital engine to a call, we have a set of criteria that we use that where we will just send only an ambulance or an ambulance and an engine. So again, this dispatch has that. So it's a set. We came up with criteria to dictate what level we'll send to a call. So I'll make my pitch to the police department brought up changing out IMC and changing to a different dispatch format. One of the limitations of this old IMC format is it really can't help us tell you exactly how many of these co-response type calls there are and how they go out just because of their limitations on the IMC side. So I'll make my pitch that if there's money in the future finance capital to go after that it would help us as well. So first of all, I want to really appreciate the fact that two actually three because Anna had to leave of our counselors who are on JCPC have been part of this meeting and the ability to ask the kinds of questions they've asked particularly as it relates to the use of engines and the whole area of replacement schedules and so forth. And so I just want to acknowledge that and say that it's a perfect example of where some counselors get into areas much more deeply and then they bring it to other discussions. And so Kathy, Mandy Jo and Anna who had to leave thank you for doing that. So I really want to ask about reimbursement and insurance because clearly being one of those aging members of the Amherst population, I want the best healthcare out there. And if you make a difference between my living because you were able to get to my home with better equipment and better trained people and if I didn't need to go to the hospital or you were able to get me there but still save me, I appreciate all that. How much of my insurance is my insurance going to reimburse for those two vehicles, for those additional people and so forth. And part of the reason I'm looking at that is because that money is part of what goes in then to buying the new equipment. And if we need to be looking at new healthcare models that we as a town decide like CBS has become a healthcare hub, if we're going to be getting into those new models, I'd like us to make sure that we look at the financial relationship of those models to the model itself and our ability to pull it off and maintain it. Because what I'm hearing is a sea change. It's an exciting sea change but I'm worried about the finances. So the reason those things changed at least particularly nationwide is really about money. It's about insurers. So for perspective about 52% of the folks that we transport from the Amherst fire department and this is similar across a large portion of Hampshire County. Honestly, it was some more numbers in Hadley and my folks in Northampton have similar demographics. About 52% are covered by Medicaid, Mass Health or Workman's Comp which means those are structured formats for reimbursement. So Lynn, if we come to your house tonight, we take you to the hospital and we charge you $3,000. Medicare is going to give us about 450 bucks. So if you have constituents who come to you and say, how come the ambulance costs are so expensive? It's largely about reimbursement and it's about the fact that half the people we take care of have a fixed amount of reimbursement and that doesn't mean that the other 48% are all on private insurance. Insurance is changing. So I talked to a gentleman yesterday who took care of his wife back in December and he was very happy with the care. You get this bill for $2,300 and wanted to know why it was so expensive and I point him in the direction of we use that money about $2.2 million in fees. Most of it comes from ambulance fees to help cover the operational budget of the department and to make sure that services are available. So a lot of folks that we might take care of in the preventative side probably live in a fixed insurance format that we get limited money for. So if you're a mass health, we're probably, if you're a mass health patient, we're probably getting $250 for that transport regardless of what it costs us. If we take care of a Medicare patient, it's probably for between 350 and 450 depending on what you're signed up for. And if you're Medicare A versus Medicare B, Medicare A doesn't even cover ambulance services. So that becomes billed patient and if you're Medicare B, they probably want a copay that goes with it. So this actually is looking at it from a financial standpoint as much as anything else because we're really limited in what we can receive from patients that have those fixed insurance formats. Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate that other side of that one. Okay, other questions? What I want to thank all of you from the fire department who've stuck with us for such a long period of time. We really appreciate it. It's been very informative and I think will help us. But also, as has been pointed out, when we get back to the capital budget, so it wasn't just about operating budget, but Tim Lincey, Jeff, thank you so much for having spent the time with us this morning. And thank you for all that you do in the community and to be at our side when we need you. Not a problem. So I think that we want to do is try and finish public safety and let Earl, for the first time, meet with the finance committee and tell us a little bit about your perspective on the budget for your department and see if there are any questions that come your way. Well, this is a scary part of the job I didn't anticipate, but I'm excited for it nonetheless. Accomplishments are pretty, pretty small. I've only been here a couple months. Our main focus has been relationships. This is a town that is a real community and I and the folks who joined this team will need to do the legwork to make sure that we are good neighbors, good citizens, good partners before we can ever do a response that's meaningful. We need to demonstrate that we care about this place and I want you to know that I care about this place. I have been supported greatly by everyone. The budget that Paul has put through is absolutely going to meet our needs. And I think more importantly, I've heard a lot of folks in the last couple of days question if I could get support if I need it and I have no doubt of that. I have no doubt that when things have come up and I've needed something as far as a communication system, Michael and Tim and Scott have dropped what they were doing to make things work for me. They have been incredibly supportive. We're in implementation. Well, we need to stand up. So what you may expect from us next year is that we will make sure we do things in a way that moves mindfully and is trying to solve actual issues. So kind of as opposed to saying what we think are challenges at the schools, we're going to spend time at the schools and learn from the folks who are there. We're at the senior center. I painted some tulips poorly. I wouldn't put it on my resume, but really that sort of thing is really important. And we have a lot of sweat equity to put in before I'll be here asking for more. But we are going to grow and we will someday need more. I feel comfortable asking for it when the time is. But right now, it's time for us to work. Kathy, I didn't know if you had done anything. No, actually, Earl, you just lead into my only question because as you said, I couldn't read in the thing, but the sense that you're building teams, even if they're not sitting next to you with dispatchers, with EMS, what I just heard with this notion of paramedics, and I just keep thinking of some international models that deliver care differently and are using the social service mental health income combination. So I just have to say welcome because I think that kind of thinking is what's going to do us all well. And painting tulips at the senior center sounds like a perfect way to meet seniors to me. So it's this sense of you're out there and been very visible. So I guess the only question I have is because you were in the news with working with the school system. And we just heard that the police don't. Is your sense that potentially that will be a role for Cress over time? Absolutely, it already is. So I chaperoned the middle school dance a couple weeks ago. What a time to be alive. I'll be helping the chaperone at the high school at the prom week from this Friday. We are going to be working with some students who have volunteered to be kind of active bystanders at the school next year. We're going to provide them some training over the summer. We're going to participate with Cress. We're working with Summit Academy to build up some capacity in those youth. I'll tell you I identify a lot with those young folks. So wanting to make sure that they feel is supported in this town as I have been is important. And really working across all of them, some of the most important things we've done there really has been just giving folks a break. The school staff are all really stretched. So one of the things we're planning for next year is that Cress will have some role in helping with the cafeteria with holding a lunch room at the middle school. Not just because it gives them a break, but it gives us a chance to meet the students there to shake hands to get to understand where they're coming from. So we're thinking of ways in which we can solve problems kind of across systems while also providing an additional resource and getting a chance to meet folks. So we're going to be really busy at the school and grateful for it. Those are our future residents of this town and they should get the full benefit of this immediately. Randy? Thank you. And you know I want to say say to you Earl that everything you said today including when we were discussing police department and all sounds fantastic the building up of the system and not wanting to overburden the new responders as you hire them and sort of building them. It sounds like when they become sort of the supervisors and can train the next sort of set of hires and all. So I think everything sounds great. I do have a couple of questions about funding and some of these might be for Paul more than you. Will some of the services that you provide be reimbursable by Medicaid or Medicare and if so are we intending to aim for those reimbursements? And then the next one is with your work with the schools. I wholly support that work but I ask this of DPW regularly. One of our schools is a regional school that gets funding from not just our town but three other towns. And then there's also the school budget itself which is just another line item in our larger budget that we're looking at right now. And how are those funds distributed between them? Is there going to be sort of a charge back to the regional school for the services that you're going to be providing them and all of that? It's not to say I don't want you providing the services but I ask it when we do the DPW does the maintenance and the lawn care. How do we as a town sort of receive the benefit of the fact that that school system has three other towns paying into it and so that maybe that could subsidize some of this program? And that might not be a question you can answer. That might be more for Paul or Sean but are we looking at for those cross departmental services a way to particularly for the regional schools receive funding from the regional schools for that? I want to add to that first part because the second part I am wholly unqualified for but the first part is yeah I mean I think we're working with state providers. We're having conversations about what building would look like. How could we be eligible? It's a very complicated thing. It takes a long time and certainly I mean the good thing is I know the folks there so we're going to have honest conversations about you know would that be a replication? We are having active conversations with everyone who might benefit from our resources about how we can share. This is a partnership obviously we're the new kids so we will be expending most of the energy at the beginning but give us a year or two in the value we add. I think folks won't have a problem contributing back and I also know that there's some behavioral health things coming down the road in the next two or three years around who's eligible for Medicaid billing that will be incredibly valuable so I guess more to be continued and hopefully this is my last round of unsatisfying answers. Pretty soon there'll be work. Paul please say or anyone else the second part? Yeah so I think a big piece of the way we've conceptualized this which is different than Northampton and other communities is that this is a third leg of public safety so along those lines we don't charge the schools if the police respond or the fire department responds. I mean if there's going to be a steady ongoing relationship that we're going to have someone stationed there from Crest or there's going to be we might look at that as a partnership with the school but again I think it's really important for us and Earl and I think one of the things that has been really powerful about the development of this program why it's getting so much attention is that it has been super cooperative among the three agencies. I mean Earl deserves a lot of credit but I also think you know Mike Curtin this could have gone in a lot of different directions. It's going in a really positive direction because of the leadership in our police and fire agencies and the dispatch because they're saying okay the town wants this how do we build it to the best that we can and they're very professional about doing that and so I think you know we want to continue to look at this as a public safety lens I've had the conversations with Northampton they look at it as a public health lens and they're looking at really different it's a direct you know very different approach so I think CSWG and that was a mind-opening moment for me when they said no we really see this as public safety and so we're that's the path we're walking down and I think that that's a pretty good path for us to explore right now. Though I do feel like we're just with the regional school question our neighboring communities need to have a better understanding of what it is that we provide to schools in public safety when they start complaining about the assessment method. There have been folks from some of the surrounding towns who started the process of reaching out to learn about Cress what the process was like and understanding our capacity so I don't think it's a conversation that I just think you all know this better than anybody it takes a while to wrap your head around it. Andy if anything else I can ask Pam because we're really running closed. I'm good and thank you for that note Andy about maybe we need to work with our regional school committee to start identifying all those areas that the town provides that don't show up in the budget. Pam. Hi thanks and thanks to Earl for being here and thanks to Paul for hiring him. I was looking I was trying to find the number for training training costs as you go forward and I'm wondering if you have some sense of of dollars that will be needed for training. Secondly what kind of training do you envision and who provides that kind of thing for you. I know this is hypothetical but it needs to be in the plan. This isn't hypothetical because we're playing we're scheduling those trainings right now I would say the dollars Sean I made default to you defer to you on the the dollars piece of it. Who's doing our training we put a priority on folks who have a mission that lines up with Crest so that has equity has some experience around public safety and and understands how to train folks to work with communities. We're working with the wildflower alliance which was a recommendation of the lead report. We're working with the CRG community community conflict resolution group out of Springfield who work with folks in the criminal justice system to support folks in the community. They have just a really really thoughtful well done way of dealing with concerning situations and things that may feel dealing with your own internal biases about someone else's action which feels really important. NVC nonviolent communication we're actually getting that training from two town residents. Jay Levy from Elliott homeless services is offering is providing our housing training or working with houseless folks training and then we've basically anywhere we've been able to find a content extra we've gotten one. The other thing that feels really important is we're getting first aid we are public safety so we want to make sure that we also have the same fundamental training as public safety so that when we show up even if we're not going to play those roles we understand what they're looking for what they're assessing for so we'll have a lot of you know we call live drills we're going to bring in folks to role play things and we're going to kind of practice what we're doing and then build training I wrote this the other day we're going to train practice train and then work and so when you see us take a deliberative step it's because we want to make sure you know sometimes if you're trained off just a little people do what they're trained to do and if you're trained incorrectly then you'll you'll work incorrectly so we're really at the intersection that we're also open to any ideas training like like our public safety sister agencies is going to be kind of a regular and consistent part of what we do so the training will never stop the two months we'll come to a close at some point but every we're planning have one day where everyone's in so we can have a bit of an in-service brilliant. Hey Sandy Earl welcome to Amherst it's nice to see somebody with the background in human services it's nice to see somebody who's got some extensive street level as well as management experience and in human services and DMH I appreciate all that questions for you is around the operating expenses $13,000 seems to be a real robust amount of money and I'm wondering how much of your current operating budget is actually off budget because it's it's grant funded the other question is I'm glad to see you've made repeated reference to the LEAP report which is I thought was pretty informative and had some excellent ideas in it around staffing and training have you given any thought at this point to what you might do for respite services or to secure a mental health bed given the population would be working with and if you've given any thought to a case management role for Crest honors or if I answer the part I can answer first and then you can go right ahead you can get all budgeted so yes I'm trying to get that second part down right so we are looking at some grants DMH has recently opened some grants up to us to make us eligible for them which is is wonderful and I think happened in a larger context for things like living room programs drop off centers things like that we're also kind of actively working as a stakeholder with state agencies to increase their access and you know really I think you hit a really key piece the huge part of the mental health crisis in Massachusetts in particular is the lack of beds is the reality that people are often needing to be moved across the state so we are it that's going to take time there's a new safe havens program opening up there's a couple of them there's more funding for them we're going to make sure we have a real roll over those particularly in getting folks back and forth from Amherst the case management question I'm really glad you asked that one we have within our current contract providers who can do some kind of longer case management but as far as targeted goal specific the sort of case management that that is I think more time limited we do expect to be able to do that so you know for instance someone is on the streets looking for some support getting into a place but then kind of meeting their basic needs for a month or two those are things that we anticipate being able to do and it's part of the reason why I know the 911 calls are kind of it's easy to spend a ton of time on that but actually if all we do is respond to crisis then we're just chasing our tail forever so we're really trying to think of how can the follow-up be something that provides some immediate sort of wrap around a handoff to services that's meaningful but also a warm connection back if that person ends up in crisis again we're hoping that they'll be able to call us directly they'll have a number we can show up and so you know we really want to get upstream which is the direction the department and the state are going as long as we kind of keep meeting folks on their worst day it's really hard to prevent those issues moving forward so and the good thing is I have a lot of really good mentors and there's no shortage of folks offering good ideas here so I am not uh I recognize that I'm not the I do not have a monopoly on a good idea so if you if you have any thoughts Bernie I'm here for him now and I'll be here for him later thank you and I'll just add quickly the 13,000 in the operating budget we knew that would be a starting point and so this year we'll work with Earl and find out what that needs to be on an ongoing level for this first year we have both the DPH grant and the ARPA grant which large portions of those funds are earmarked for training and to the mental health piece one of the things we are working or we will be working with Earl and Jen Brown is that we have an allocation from ARPA for five hundred thousand dollars for mental health and it's to do some of the things that you described and so we'll work with those two who are experts on how to best utilize those funds that's great because I think Earl's running target when he said if we don't if we just don't want to keep going in circles you know you don't you don't want frequent flyers you want to be able to encounter somebody to do the work you need to do with them and then get them into a safe a safe place in terms of services place to live that's one of I think that's one of the reasons why everybody refers to cahoots I think one of the reasons why Whitebird Clinic has been so successful is because they they're a full service shop you know we neither Northampton will have to explore this as well and I don't think there's a Ithaca's exploring this kind of thing you know there's a number of communities that are looking at it and being able to connect people up with services in a meaningful way and maintain a contact with them so that they know where to go if they start feeling uncertain it's going to be real important so thank you yeah I just I just want to offer us it's not just us reaching out we're getting calls from folks all around the country at this point with new sorts of referral systems we're working with an agency now that can do same-date medical assisted treatment prescriptions for folks where I think a lot of our challenges there are folks way outside of Amherst thinking about solving them with us and we're going to build a real network here and I'm excited if you guys take nothing away from this I'm still very excited thank you we're glad you are yeah Michelle I really appreciate that excitement Earl I think we all are and so I have a comment and a question my question sort of related to the $13,000 in the operating budget which I heard it was sort of a start my question is how are we doing with recruiting the community responders and given this is such an innovative program and department and more sort of leading the way in this are there ways that if recruitment is not going as you hoped that we could be marketing in different ways or finding ways to get the word out about this in different channels that maybe weren't initially considered yeah I I think I think it's easy to be radical until you have to go out and do it and I think that's the thing we're facing I think there's a lot of people on paper who would like to be here but it comes down to the reality I can't promise folks that I can promise them this won't be easy work this is going to be challenging work the shifts are going to be long I think you all heard Chief Nelson talk Chief Livingstone talk about you don't necessarily get to pick your days off and you can be asked to fill in more we're getting good candidates I would say we're not getting huge numbers of candidates but the people we're getting are good I'm proud of the amount of internal candidates we're getting of people from this town who've seen this process who want to join us and people who work in in human services who want to join us some of it is I think this is the scariest part possible it was scary for me to think about joining this because I don't know what it looks like none of us will know until we start taking calls so we're balancing trying to make it attractive and I think it is attractive the pay is certainly attractive in the context of of what human services pay the fact that it's a union pension position is meaningful I think it'll be easier when we start going and I can say well this is what the work looks like or you could come do a ride along and see it I give tours in that kind of space without a carpet all the time just trying to have people see my vision but once there's something there if you know anybody if anybody knows anybody I have found that it's much easier when we can have an individual conversation with someone about what are they their skills at and and really telling people that we want to we want people so the things you're good at we want to make sure we empower you we did we did you know we we were ultimately able to find someone for a program assistant and without you know getting into details of that person it is an incredibly competent qualified person who you know if tomorrow I couldn't make it in would be capable of leading this department I heard someone say eight supervisors you know my goal is that we have 10 directors that as these programs pop up that there are folks coming from the Amherst Crest Department to start these I don't think this is the last one but I do think we get to be first and that's a real so whoever there's a maybe it's apropos since we just hired someone from Notre Dame that those who stay will be champions I believe that and thank you Earl and just one comment in this conversation it sort of became clear to me that there are maybe a lot more services that you envision Crest being able to provide and I think as a council it would be really good for us to stay sort of on top of that and and or at least sort of be aware and abreast to those as as as the program evolves and expands and the ways that we can think about it I can imagine that sort of getting lost on us and then oh you know so I just I'm really saying that I think to Lynn and fellow counselors is just like for us to really be aware of all of the ways that that the community can be served by the Crest Department I realized I skipped one part of your question Bernie I just want to circle back to it the leap report is like the Bible I read it like twice a week I really I appreciate that that was put together people across the state read that I meet with the leap folks two to three times a month they're going to continue to be involved in our world and now we're helping them to provide support to other towns that are considering this one of their recommendations was that they come back at some point to do another evaluation and that's something we're kind of in the very early stages of discussing so we certainly won't we're going to start a lot of new work but we won't give up good work that's already happened thank you for that I would encourage all the members of the council to to read that Amherst community respond to report I think it was really well done that's got a lot of good ideas and a lot of the questions that are coming up and there are a lot of suggestions to respond to them and thank you girl for for affirming that hey I see no other hands in the council and we really need or the committee and I think we really need to move along to conclusion I need to do just one or two things one is that officially I need to ask whether there's any members of the public in attendance who wish to be recognized for public comment and I don't I think the answers could be probably not but I do need to ask and of course public comments I was welcome so if I don't see hands go up I'll keep an eye out for a hand up but I would go on to the other couple of comments that I have so we can conclude and adjourn the other thing I related to public comment is I said this earlier just for the benefit of our resident members there were a number of written public comments that came in in relation to yesterday's hearing that we're going to work to figure out a mechanism to get them to you in the most efficient manner so that you have the benefits of the written public comments that the councilor member council members of the committee have and Athena is working with us to find the most efficient way to get that done another thing that I just wanted two other things that I want to note is that I think that there's an issue that has to do with public safety that we really haven't addressed that was extremely evident in all of that written public comment as well as in public comment that we received during hearing itself in verbal form and that is people questioning the judgment in the was behind the town manager's recommendation on how to fund the various arms of the public safety budget in particular making assertions that we were inadequate that he was recommending inadequate funding for crests and too much funding for police to be blunt about it but we have not had the opportunity and did not really get into that issue today I think when we get to discussing as a finance committee our recommendation to the council on the budget we may need to make some reference to that and some findings on it and I don't know if anyone either Paul or Earl or I'm not expecting any comments from anybody today about it but it is sort of this elephant that's out there in the room and we can't I'm not sure that we can totally ignore it when we come back so the last thing that I just want to say which is we're going to be standing up we're going to need all the resources we can get so I you know whatever that means for folks I just want to say that like we have had great partnerships with our other public safety agencies and we're going to need that for the next year so just for your consideration and I appreciate that and we will I think the committee does is going to have to have that conversation as to whether that they want to respond to that in its report to the council and the last thing that I just wanted to say again for the benefit of our resident members who weren't didn't stay with the entire council meeting yesterday after the hearing was over is that there was a referral that we are going to need to take up not during the budget season but pretty quickly afterwards which was the request of the african heritage reparations union to talk about marijuana revenue and assuring that and their recommendation that marijuana revenue go to reparations fund and that was referred to the finance committee and is going to be something that we will need to work into our discussions once we complete the budget discussions but I wanted to make you aware of that referral so I don't have anything else today that was my one thing that I was referencing at the beginning that was say within the last 48 hours probably more like in the last in the 12 previous hours but in any event turn it to Lynn Kathy since your hands are up and then Michelle but let's try and be real quick because we are after 12 o'clock already and I want to get us adjourned but Lynn you don't have anything then I'm sorry I'm trying to see if I should adjourn the council one two three six oh no we still have seven yes I want to ask a clarification on the assignments for Thursday I have DPW but I it was a little unclear to me whether I also have the enterprise funds yes I believe you took all of them so I have everything for Thursday yes I did I did warn to split them up don't forget I did warn that but you want thank you I just want to invite counselors individually to send me any questions they have okay yeah and I do want to remind people that on Thursday I will convene the meeting at the beginning but immediately turning it over to Kathy who's going to be chairing the in managing the entire meeting once we have started meeting so just say that again Kathy that was actually what I was going to say Andy has asked me to chair next Thursday so in addition to Lynn's request that she amalgamate and I didn't make that with the police EMS but I didn't share I didn't share the questions I sent Sean but I would like my request would be is you get a composite could you could we see them maybe at the beginning of the meeting so we just know what has already been asked and I don't know what it's your name to answer it now because I just Mandy was waiting to see if I would ask something I had a couple things on the list that I didn't go into it just it would be useful if Lynn I will send you whatever I have but I'm going to be chairing it so that was my only just comment yeah thank you Michelle yeah following up on assignments I have general government which I realize is really big and I want to make sure I get my questions in as far enough in advance as possible so that perhaps even we can have written answers for prior to the meeting I think general government is a week from today so just asking if counselors have any questions to please send them to me as as Lynn did and I also wanted to say to Andy and I can't see you now oh Andy I did send the public comment with respect to the AHA's request to our non-voting members what I had so far as well as the memo that I wrote for counselors but I really appreciate that there's a something in the works that will make that a little bit easier as we move forward with with that discussion and any discussion that the non-voting members might want to have public comment for so thank you Yeah and I want to thank you for having made that forward it saves me one step because my next thing would have been after the meeting adjourned today to go through what we had yesterday in the packet and see if there's anything that needs to be forwarded to them and you've taken care of a piece already so thank you So no hands up there's nothing else that I'm aware of on the agenda and before I guess I'll declare the meeting adjourned