 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise V's and generous donations from viewers like you. Good evening. This is one of three meetings tonight. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. This meeting of the town council is being conducted via remote participation. I am going to call on each counselor and ask that they say they can hear us and they are present. And then also please mute. So let's start with Jalini Balmille. Present. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Pat DeAndalus. Present. Darcy Dumont. Present. Lynn Griesmer is present. Mandy Jo Hanneke. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. Steve Schreiber. Here. Andy Steinberg. Present. And Sarah Schwartz. Present. Okay. This meeting was, therefore I'm calling the town council, special meeting of the town council on January 4th to order at 633. The meeting was called and posted for this single purpose. On December 21st, 2020, a motion was made to postpone. On the first occasion that the question on adoption of a non-emergency measure is put to the council. If a single member presents up objections to taking of the vote. The vote shall be postponed until the next meeting of the town council, whether it is regular or special. We will proceed. There is a motion on the table. And we show that motion on the screen at this time. Can you enlarge the picture please? Thank you. This motion was made and seconded on December 21st and remains on the table. Exit my full screen. So that I can. See. We will now move to discussion. Kathy Shane. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I want to move to amend the CRC motion on the table with a substitute motion that would change the wording in multiple paragraphs. Motions that would significantly amend the original motion are known as substitute amendments in the Roberts rules of order. And the reason I'm doing it as a substitute amendment is because I substantially changed multiple parts. And I have, I've sent the text into Athena, both of the substitute amendment, the entitlement to be able to do this and the substitute motion that I'd like to present. Please hold on to this original motion and, and, but put the substitute motion up and I'll ask is there a second. Second shall any. I think she should read the whole thing so people who can't read the screen know what's on the table. Great. Thank you. All right, Kathy. I'd be, I'd be happy to, um, did, did people hear that shall any seconded it or do I read first. Okay. So the, the substitute motion. Um, reads as follows to direct the town manager to present zoning amendment options to the planning board and the town council community resource committee and ultimately to the town council. First neighborhoods affordable housing and new growth in downtown and village centers in accordance with the town council economic vitality performance goal for the town manager. July 1, 2020 to June 30, it should say 2021 and where possible consider climate action, housing affordability and social justice goals. So, we'll start with the planning time periods. Number one, design guidelines throughout the year begin discussions and development of design guidelines that could be added to the current zoning bylaws with a focus on the central district BL and village centers. Secondly, by March 15 2021 review, assess and recommend options regarding the BL limited district district lot size and building coverage dimensions and assess the reasonable list and impact of adding footnote a special permit authority to modify dimensions or be applies to residential lot dimensions. Again in BL assess parking requirements assess need for design standards, including setback from street sidewalk widths and provision for open space. Moving back out the potential assess review and recommend you're going to have to read this this way with me the potential of a revised STU bylaw, similar to the 2018 town meeting proposal. Assess review and recommend options regarding demolition delayed bylaw revisions, including those of the historic commission. Work with the town council to begin a conversation on housing type expansions in preparation for the meeting the September 1 2021 priorities below. Assess the impact of removing footnote M in the RG district, which is the general residence. By September 1 2021 review assess and recommend options regarding in the BG district which is general business assess setbacks from the street and whether to add step back provisions for upper floors, whether to move apartments to SP, which is special permit and more zoning districts, potential revisions of apartment definition, potential revisions of mixed use, building definitions, lowering barriers to development of owner occupied duplexes and triplexes with design guidelines. Look at the appropriateness of use table for VC Village Center what kind of businesses are allowed or encouraged in VC district food entertainment services things that make the community meet basic needs within walking distance. Transportation issues sidewalk with building setbacks from street standards may not already be in our zoning code, and then I more generally use consultant money for design guidelines and form based zoning for specific neighborhoods, zoning districts and if you want me to I can highlight and give a rationale for the changes from the original but I think people should probably try to absorb it this way because it has lots of track changes in it. I want to confirm that there is a second confirming there's a second. Wait what. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Kathy do you want to speak to your motion. Yes. I, but I think I would like to do is order. Yes. I know means want to mess up Kathy's ability to explain this I'm just wondering if Athena has this can she upload it to our packets so we can read along at home in addition to trying to look at it on the screen. I've heard since obviously none of us have seen it until tonight and she's going to give a great explanation but it's helpful to be able to follow it along. Right. We'll be doing that while Kathy begins Kathy start over. Thanks. And I think what you might want I think if you just with your fingers I think you can make the font a little bit bigger so that those in the audience can see it as well. You might have a piece of paper in front of me but I wouldn't be able to read it otherwise. Okay. So meantime, Athena will be sending it to counselors and it will be in the packet. Okay, thank you so so just as a lead in, I want to go through the the significant changes that were made and as I said there's a tracking. What what the intention of the proposed substitute motion is to continue the momentum toward a beginning discussion of our zoning bylaws with the goals of stimulating economic and cultural vitality and potentially providing more affordable housing while preserving open space. I think we have an ability to build on the strengths of Amherst as a university college small town, the reason people want to live here, but we need to move with caution. Our master plan itself points out the design standards can help ensure that new development meets our needs and that we know what we're doing. As an overview to what's in this substitute amended emotion, I want to focus on the big changes for starters as you can see the lead into this at the very beginning. Each of the dates is review, assess and recommend options. Instead of being an explicit to do list. It's saying focus on these areas and come back with us with what might be done in each of these areas so it's not as much about to do list, although it's framing where the focus is. In addition, it moved design guidelines right up to the top and has it been overriding concept. I did. In Amherst, CRC and others have done, at least me a big service by sending me to multiple places but many of them said in other towns that you can do design guidelines is exactly the same time you're doing a zoning change. So form based code is a really big overlay but you could if you're focused on a particular district you could say how do we want to design this. So it calls for doing that throughout the year rather than by a particular date. To set the short term goals. I clustered everything under a be limited district district to focus just on that district, which seemed to be the concern particular concern that the current lot size and the current building dimensions don't seem to line up well with the rest of zoning. Assessing the reasonableness of adding a is also just assess the zoning dimensions we could just change those. There's a concern that was addressed in the memo we had from Chris Brestrup from 2016 is be careful what we do in BL because we got to think about parking requirements if more people live there where do they park. And there's a need for design standards there are a lot of narrow streets with or without sidewalks. So we need to be thinking about if we open it up we want to also say, there should be some open space for small yards patios that each dwelling unit has a little bit of green space. And I found examples in other towns that have done this in their limited best district. Again, the lead in to this whole section is options so it keeps the potential of the revised SDU bylaw the 2018 but allows for discussion maybe there are other things we should be looking at. It keeps what was in original one demolition delay but added thinking about recommendations that are coming from the historic commission that are often looking with this. The next bullet is exactly the same as the original CRC. This is the last bullet accepted asks for the assess the impact of removing footnote M. It took me forever to find out where the footnote M was it's on the RG the general bit residents I don't know why it's there and I don't know what the impact would be. I want to change the wording to assess. I moved out of short term. I just moved it down the looking at the definition of apartments, which was up above, and added look at the definition of mixed use building that's been on the planning board and zoning committee list for quite some time that we really don't have a definition of mixed use building. And there's been a lot of discussion in the BG down downtown, whether we shouldn't be looking at setbacks from the street and whether to add step backs for upper floors where they'd start. So that could be in a short term list of come back and should we do this with options. It says potential revisions to apartment definition potential. So it's asking for options, lowering the barriers to development of duplexes and trip plexes, I meant to add and I'm not seeing the word I meant to say owner occupied should be in there and maybe that just didn't somehow fit in this, but I wanted to add that word, and I thought my version did that. And then look at the appropriateness of table VC what kinds of that's the village centers that stays pretty much the same. So, so what I wanted to say is I moved some things to a later, and then I deleted things. At the end of this is not my latest. Sean, you have a. This is not my latest because I, I changed a couple of things in this second section. Yeah, Sean, you have an updated version that was sent to you late this afternoon. Would you please show that I apologize I'm just seeing missing words. We're trying to get that up Kathy hold on. I'll explain what you're about to see. Thank you, Alyssa for and make sure everyone gets a copy of that. Um, so that they're reading along with me. If it's in the packet online and in SharePoint now. Okay. And, and Sean is going to put up the most recent version. Meantime, Kathy, was there anything else you wanted to say before I call on channeling. You know, you know, I have a longer statement, but I think the sentiment behind this is to not stop action to keep moving forward, but to really call for options rather than a specific. And I think as I've interacted we have a fantastic planning staff who can be very creative. If we don't give them just a to do list they can work really hard and they can look for best practices and other places. They can ask them to think about design they can do it. So the sentiment is to keep moving forward but soften the specificity of it to really adhere to what I went when I went back and read the master plan throughout it there's various you know be really careful about what you do because we're building on a rare asset called Amherst and historic Amherst in our neighborhoods, think about design standards in each place so that you say where do you want to go. And there's really some terrific wording but I don't want to take a lot of time with that. We can talk to it later, Lynn, but the sentiment behind this was to keep things moving rather than to stop action. I really think all of us need to understand what we're doing. Each piece of this interacts with every other piece so what I'm hoping is when it gets to the planning staff will get 3D designs will get visuals we checked. They can do 3D what it would look like if we did any of these changes. So if you can make it a little bit bigger Sean, I just want to go through what Alyssa asked me to do so in the when I get down to sorry. I got to go back to the other page. So I, out of March 15 I moved down several pieces and I just want to say within the March 15 the other big change is the original CRC list had the option adding footnote a special permit throughout town as I read it. I just did it in BL a allow special permits to wave dimensions. So just focusing on this one rather than doing everything. And then in the September list there the original version had a look at frontages everywhere in town. I think about several other dimensions and other things, and I think it was too big a list so I just deleted them so those are no longer in it. But here, one, one thing I want to point out on apartments that's important. The original wording said, moving apartments to SPR and more bonus zoning districts, I've made it just special permit and that's really important. And actually, the CRC Longer Memo pointed this out that special permits are directly linked to our inclusionary zoning law. If you asked to do more apartment units, for example, it would trigger having to add affordable units, and we worked hard to get that article on the books. If we want to leave, it's almost an incentive bonus. If you want to build bigger with more units, you're going to have to build affordable units. So, again, it's an option should we do this whether to move apartments, allow them in more zoning districts but only with special permits. So, on the wording change on development of lowering barriers to duplexes and triplicas, I added the word owner occupied. It's a big difference if spaces are owned and occupied by the people who live at them. And I think those are the major changes other than some edits and indentation. And I just want to end here because, you know, the rest of what I have is rhetoric, and I just want to end with, I'm in thinking about this I really see this as our legacy. What we do will have an impact for years to come. My kids if they can and I asked them about zoning priorities last night, they had a bunch, but they'd like to be able to move back here people want to live in Amherst diverse community in Amherst, because of the small town were semi rural and university town and we can really build on those assets, we have, we have a gold mine to build on if we get it right. We could have a much more thriving town in the future with some more affordable units, but we have to be really really careful. So I think stepping back and asking for some options leaving time for public engagement, so that by the time something comes back to us as a zoning amendment. We've had a really big discussion, and we haven't hamstrung our zoning our planning department with a laundry list we've really said, be creative. They've been thinking about this for years and they have some things they can pull out that they've been talking about. So it's in the interest of moving forward, rather than just waiting that I'm offering this substitute amended motion. Thank you. Tony, you have your hand up and you made the second so would you like to speak to your motion to your second name. Yeah, I just wanted to say that number one. Thank you to everyone who's put in so much work into bringing and presenting and doing all the work to reach this point including the residents we've heard from so many residents about this. Thank you and I actually do not think necessarily they may seem conflicting what they're proposing and what the residents are saying but it really seems to me that everything that's being said and shared right now is actually part of one whole and I'll attempt to share what I why I'm second name Kathy's amendment. I think I was, you know, hearing all the residents and, and then at the same time the reason that CRC put together this list I just want to clarify much of this might be for public, but also shares what what I'm thinking about. The number one thing that we all kind of know is that we're stuck with certain zoning limitations that are preventing from housing to be built like in the BL district. And we all want more affordable housing and we want housing. So we're losing housing and we're losing property taxes. So that's one issue. But then we also have zoning right now which is allowing certain buildings to happen without the setbacks and, and things we want so they're also zoning needs to be and design guidelines need to be fixed there so what we have right now is deficient and there's no zoning at so many levels. So when we combine with the CRC list is and what we're hearing from the residents I reached out to four different community design consultants to an Amherst and to in Cambridge, and there was kind of like this consensus that we want to include community feedback into this process and which is what we're hearing from residents. So one way we can do that. And I just want to highlight that we've already had two downtown forums on June 29 2017 and December 6 2017 with very detailed input that was collected and it's actually there on the town website if anyone wants to read. So the idea would be, and what I heard from these consultants is collect all of that information. So take what CRC and the limitations that that came in the CRC list by the way is based on information from the planning department. Based on planning board priorities and town counselors, right. So take that CRC list that is there right now. Take the community feedback that we already have and give it to the planning department or if you need an additional consultant. If they don't have the bandwidth. So they can then assimilate, categorize, synthesize this community feedback that we already have and there's a lot of rich information there where people shared responses to what do we value what needs to be improved. What's working and ideas to improve living working and playing in downtown and areas list or what kinds of services that people want at different times. So all of that information is already there and also take all the responses we got in the emails. So if all of that is assimilated and then fed back to the central like the planning department with the assistance of maybe some local UMass design school or the people like I spoke to. And this work can be done in three months where they assimilate and then based on that and the suggestion so we're not leading with a solution that add footnote A and B to BL but we are saying that this is what's broken and we're asking this group of planning department to take all of this and provide us with a vision with the visuals and with the impact of what is this going to look like. And then that's where we again it's a reatory process we already have some community input and every and then we come back to the community to all of us to the planning board and present that and get feedback. I mean it doesn't feel like these are competing like but we are what we're doing is really making sure that everyone in the public knows that there is a way to actually include this and do the design guidelines and as Kathy mentioned what these people with the design community design consultants also said that not form based zoning it takes longer. It can be done faster but that can be done later but there's the design the community design process can be done actually in three weeks where they take all of this information and work with our seemingly completing needs where we want density but we wanted to look in a certain way have setbacks allow for all of this and they can do that and present do that within three weeks and up to three months. So it's very much within the timeline that we already have with CRC. Are there additional anything else. Are there additional comments. Mandy Jo Hanneke. So, um, I can't vote for this alternative motion so I will be voting no for it. It adds a bunch of things, particularly parking that is outside of what the planning department has said can be done in three months under the three month guideline. And it under Kathy's own words has a goal that doesn't it that is quote potentially providing more housing. Well, Michael has tasked CRC with coming up with a comprehensive housing policy to provide more housing, not potentially provide more housing, and many of the things that were deleted. Some of the things that might or were restricted a lot in this alternative motion, including owner occupied duplexes with design guidelines instead of just duplexes and triplexes or even owner occupied duplexes and triplexes. So, um, with design guidelines has a lot of limiting factors to it. The removal of apartments to SPR there's not a single apartment that I think is SPR in the use table right now they're all SP they're all special permit so that the removal of the words SPR for basically calls that entire part of trying to increase housing from this proposal that came from CRC and we have a massive deficit of affordable housing in town. And if we are going to be serious about creating affordable housing in town, we have to be willing to modify things like residential lot sizes. That doesn't mean we get rid of green space and things like that. And, you know, there's other things in here I could probably speak for a long time on this. But it is, it's not, it's not something that sets up the council, or even the planning department for success. But it Kathy said she deleted the residential items because there was just too much, yet she added a ton of stuff to this. And then requires the planning department to present multiple options for each thing. And some of that in three months some of that in nine months. We're going to the, we're setting up the planning department for failure there whether they even have the bandwidth and in terms of design guidelines. There's the planning department said they needed consultant money for that. The consultant money is available for only downtown planning. So, Shalini's point of well we could just find money to do something else there's no money appropriated right now to do some of that other things that you're talking about. If we need to appropriate money, we have to wait for the next fiscal year or we have to find it from free cash or somewhere else, whereas what the CRC proposed for design guidelines was within what's already been appropriated money. Well, I, I appreciate that we need to start discussing a vision and priorities and and actual things but right now, I think we're, we're floundering around in a debate because we're talking in the abstract because there's a lot of hard actual proposals in front of us with language to actually analyze discuss and find the impacts and a vote on the proposed vote. So I can't vote for the proposed amended motion because that's still just talking about things in the abstract, and I believe we really need to move to stuff where we're talking about actual proposals and so I'm, I just can't vote for the amended motion. Evan Ross. Thank you so this is an interesting motion and I was to be honest a little surprised because it does seem inconsistent with the sponsors previous position in that it adds a whole bunch of things that were not on the original priorities list without the background information that CRC provided in now about 30 pages worth of documents to provide how these things connect to the master plan, their rationale, what they mean in lay terms, and so all of a sudden at the last minute, we're trying to add new things that have not been in the public sphere for the past month, unlike the CRC priorities have not been provided the information and so I was caught a little off guard by this motion if I'm being honest. My big concern with this and why I can't support this motion is I do agree with Mandy that it places an undue burning on undue burden on the planning department and sets the planning department up to fail. It does two things it adds new things new priorities so it takes a list that many people were already worried was too long and it adds more things to that list. And then it asks for several options. I mean the way I read this motion it sounds like we ask the staff to produce multiple amendment options, which means developing text analysis and reports for several options around a proposal, as opposed to them just bringing forth what they view as the best amendment to achieve the priority that we put forth for them. There's a lot of work for the playing department this dramatically increases the workload for department that is already dealing with a pretty big workload in which already has other things they're working on, like the flood, the flood maps and all these other things that this is this is an excessive burden on the playing department whereas the original priorities were much more focused and directed and would allow them to give us something much more specific and sets the playing department up and the council up to have some success in zoning. I'm not worried about that first section of design guidelines, because I worry conflicts with the bigger recommendation, we have money that's been appropriated for design guidelines, we can move forward with that. But if we have playing department using their limited resource to try and develop that design guidelines but also consult there. It's in conflict and it's potentially duplicative so to me it's easier to just say, we have this consultant money. Let's do the design guidelines. It also doesn't make sense for me to us to do them piecemeal going to do the design guidelines for the BL, which is just a few parcels, while the BG is being done by the consultants. I agree with Mandy that adding parking requirements and the design guidelines to the BL package add significant work for a short span of time. Parking is a huge deal. We have the downtown parking working group report we should be as a council working with that now. But to say that we have to have parking requirements out in three months is not going to happen. I want to point out that we already do have design guidelines on duplexes. I'm not sure if council Shane was aware of that their basic design lines. I question why we feel we need additional design guidelines and in my heart of heart it feels very classist for us to say that duplexes need more design guidelines than we already have on them, whereas we require design guidelines of single family homes to be able to make mansion as long as it confirms with the building code, but when it's a duplex we want more and more design guidelines. I absolutely object to taking out the dimensional regulations for the RG and the RVC and the frontage regulations I also find it interesting that the reason for taking those out was that we had so many things and yet the motion adds new things. But let me say this, dimensional regulations for the RG and RVC frontage regulations, those are really important if you actually care about housing affordability. Right. If you can report we have says this small smaller houses on smaller lots are one way we can achieve housing affordability right now our market is tilted towards luxury houses single family houses because of our lot size requirements because you need at least a fourth of an acre, even in our densest zones. So if we're thinking about more affordable housing, not subsidized affordable housing but housing that is affordable to people, smaller homes on smaller lot sizes is a good way to do there. Everything about senior housing, senior housing, having small houses on small lots, which means less to maintain both the house and the lots, that's crucial. So to me, I absolutely cannot support something that takes those two, the frontage regulations and the dimensional regulations the RG and RVC out. So for these reasons at this point, I don't think I can support this I would, I would support the original CRC priorities, we can have a discussion. We can adopt these priorities and we can amend them over time we do that with things like the, the, the budget guidelines, right. But at this point, I don't think that this motion is ready to move forward and there's too many things that are concerning to me to move forward with it. Thank you. Thank you, Evan. Dorothy. Well, we're having a discussion here and we have a discussion here and the main is what is the future of Amherst going to be. And we know that we're right now in the middle of a national international epidemic. And it's a time to stop and to think. And, yes, we want to, we do have to make changes to lot size Evan I do agree with you and we don't know that some of our lovely neighborhoods have in fact lots that are smaller than those required in the zoning. One of the things that we have discovered is that we really need space air greenery sunlight in order to manage this live through this epidemic when we are all locked in our houses. So, we need to take time to think. There's a lot of details in the original motion. It could take an intelligent person a week to go through them and still not understand them and still have no idea of how they all come together or what it means. I know that you've done a tremendous amount of work so no one is saying that that sincere sincere effort and work has not gone into this. We've had one of the most amazing outpourings of letters from citizens and just I've read every single one of them. And there are a couple that repeat each other but most of them are individual and heartfelt, and they're talking about what the town and what their neighborhoods mean to them. It's a great fear that this change is going to be made without what they regard as sufficient input. And Shawnee we did have some big meetings but I thought those were 40 our meetings, and this discussion truthfully is broader than 40 are, I mean I stand corrected if I'm wrong on that. But we need to take time to think about what we have to do efficiency is not the issue here. We have time we are all locked in. We don't even know what our economy is going to be. We do know that people seem to prefer to come to a town like Amherst than to stay in the city. So I think for us to be creating recreating quarters concrete and brick quarters of tall houses and limiting the amount of green space at a time when people are fleeing those areas to come to a town like Amherst is short sighted. So I would urge that we support the second substitute motion, because it doesn't tie us or commit us to this or that. It says, let's look at some options. And then let's discuss them, and let's have some more input. And I think Shawnee is working with the designers was a great idea. This is a big topic whenever you look at successful towns. My guidelines are major. They're a major part of success of a small town. Thank you. Thank you, Alyssa. So to try not to repeat, but to say something slightly different. I will say that in my experience based on the emails we are receiving most of the emails we are receiving the very vast majority are in fact cut and paste. Only a few have additional personal items and we always always appreciate that we do appreciate those personal viewpoints. And of course the vast majority as always are from white homeowners. Many of which state their clear intention that they need to be protected from change. That's not everybody, but that is a clear message we are getting from many of those emails so I understand that fear is what is driving this fear that they are going to lose money and what they perceive to be their major investment which is true for most homeowners in the US. So I think that fear of change and fear that they won't be included in the discussions, whereas what I have tried to continue to point out to people as I did at our last town council meeting is the nice thing about this process messy as it has been, and even though I haven't agreed with you know every survey of every constituency worked is that we are talking about it in a way that people know that something's coming and then they can follow it along. That was never the case with representative town meeting representative town meeting members got a warrant that said here's some zoning changes and you're going to probably see a planning board report with that soon if not right away. And here's what happened very few town meeting members had any idea that those hearings were taking place, certainly at the larger number of residents did not. So I want to be really, I am really pushing back on the people who are saying we are doing less we are not being transparent we are in fact being far more transparent. And some would cynically say and this is the thanks we get for being more transparent, because we're talking about priorities before we have actual concrete realities. When it comes to those concrete things. I struggle with this to because and I did have a conversation with Kathy and for the public's benefit understand that none of us could see this proposal before it came out tonight because of open meeting she couldn't express her opinion to him to quorum, but I did have a conversation with her about process and what my experience with process had been. And certainly, who doesn't like the idea of options. But the kind of things that people particularly that we're seeing in emails where people are asking for outside of the normal realm of district meetings and hearings and public meetings they're asking for additional listening sessions additional visioning sessions 3D modeling. That never happens with zoning changes. In Massachusetts, I mean on very rare occasions right you have a series of forums associated with 40 are or with downtown and we've done that and we will continue to do that on specific areas and maybe that's part of the issue here that we've been talking about right now. Are we focusing on versus what it's connected to and how can we make it amount that we can bite off into but realistically, we're not going to get these amazing. I know we have different capabilities than we had 10 years ago, but that's not the kind of decision we normally have before we make a final decision, much less as we're considering it so I think whatever happens tonight which whatever version happens, we need to be super clear on what we think is coming back. And at what points in the process, because I fear that many people have these inflated ideas of how all these UMass folks are going to run off and make us a whole bunch of cool stuff for free. We suddenly have a ton of options and that's just not realistic. The other thing I just wanted to be clear on is, I know that I struggled with this with the last motion and and I see the struggle here too, as to, and I understand that we got KP laws opinion at 430 today, but in terms of directing the town manager. That's what we do we direct the town manager we don't request the town manager do something because then he can be like well I was busy and then we all go well that's okay then. I'm not directing, but I'm not clear on who we're expecting him to present to because I personally feel more comfortable having more of this conversation at the full town council. Then I do saying it's all going to happen at CRC and planning board meetings all along. I think there are points for that to happen but I think there's also a point where I was hoping with the original motion that this was going to come back to the full town council and the full town council would say items one two and three. Yes they go over to the planning board because that's the next thing you have to do. And that means CRC as well items four and five those stink those weren't at all what we thought we were asking for. Let's not go any further with those, but instead it sounds like this process is headed more toward planning board and CRC to the exclusion of the town council which I say exclusion because the town council meets at a certain time that everybody expects us to meet and has much better coverage and much better initial engagement, then any individual CRC or planning board meeting ever could not through intentions but just because realistically that's what's going to happen. So I want to make sure that we as a town council, whatever we decide tonight. We know what's coming back to us, what level of detail it's going to have and when we're going to see it versus when we can go to a CRC meeting to see it or planning board members to see it. Thank you. I'm going to skip over people with a spoken and go to Steve Schreiber. Okay, I'm having trouble hearing. So, so this is exciting. So, I think that the outpouring of emails. I also read all of them and I especially look for the parts that are different in the different emails and Kathy's alternate here and then individual conversations with one or two of you have been enlightening. So, in a way, the process is working because people are talking about zoning and they're talking about neighborhoods. They're seeing the relationship between zoning and, you know, neighborhoods. So I think it's been a messy process. I don't know how this will get resolved. I think that Kathy has put a ton of thought into this alternate proposal. My, I'm going to stay with my vote on the CRC with the original motion but I really appreciate all the work that Kathy has done. But my vote on the CRC motion is not by any means to vote that those are the zoning amendments that I think should happen. The motion reads like we think footnote whatever should be removed. It says that that will direct the planning the other time manager to ask the planning board to I don't, I don't have the original motion in front of me. But the idea is to at least put that on the table to see whether or not we should be considering that as a change. So any zoning amendment requires a vote of nine of us, right? So nine is the two thirds majority required for this. And I think just based on this conversation, any a zoning amendment that comes before us will have to be airtight, you know, it'll have to be vetted through the community. We have to do that anyway, we were planning to do that anyway. But any zoning amendment that comes before us has to be airtight. So I have, you know, little concern that we will pass zoning amendments willy-nilly I think that the indication of what's happened over the last three weeks is a sign of that. So thank you. Andy. Yes. The comment was made earlier by another counselor that we have time all in that we shouldn't be pressing ahead and we should be taking the time to step back. And in the course of what I'm going to report to you, kind of give a counter view a little bit on why I'm not sure that that's right. And ask you to consider it. Yesterday, I ended up writing a email to a number of the people who had sent us emails, send it individually because obviously I didn't couldn't share it with everybody. I've thrown into open meeting a lot problems, but I was really addressing three points in it. One was that I was trying to explain the problem of new growth because new growth popped up a lot in various emails as a term and I don't think people necessarily understand the new growth is really a term that exists out of finance law, not out of zoning law. It comes from proposition two, and it is the one exception that you can make to raise money without an override additional money but two and a half percent increase, which we know just keeps us in level services and never gives us the ability to do anything different unless we cut back on some current service. And we know how difficult that is because services that we provide are all important to people we hear from all of the time. And in order to give us budget flexibility, we need new growth because it is the only large increase that can come about. I also acknowledged in the email that the question isn't whether or not we just need new growth, but we do need to have a discussion about what is the appropriate new growth. And the question of appropriate new growth is really what it's about and I had a number of responses that acknowledged that and appreciated the point. The difficulty we have is the more time we spend talking about what is the appropriate new growth. There's sort of two things that happen at the same time. One is that we may not get as much growth as we want. And the other is that we get growth under the current zoning bylaws and not everybody is happy with what has been built under the current zoning bylaws. So I don't know that we gain anything by substantial delay. The other thing that I pointed out in the email was that this is what was being proposed by CRC is the beginning of a process. It is not the adoption of a bylaw. I think that some people were assuming that a vote tonight in favor of what CRC is proposing is in fact then a commitment to make those changes where there's a whole process that would be triggered with the planning board and with the council that requires hearings by both and substantial opportunity for dialogue and revision as those hearings take place before getting to a final vote, which requires not a majority but two thirds of a council whoever is on the council at that time in order to enact it. I think that there is a lot of process built into what is there already. So I guess I'm concluding by going back to the major point that I have at the beginning, which is, will this amendment delay us from being able to clarify what we want in zoning for the key areas and will it delay us moving forward on both new growth development. And as pointed out tonight, housing priorities, which I didn't really touch on in my email. Back to Shalini. I just want to clarify a couple of points, having spoken to four different people that the cost can be anything from 5000 to 12,000 or even less so we're not talking about big consultants this can be, we can hire people who are the design schools and one of them worked in for a better Cambridge nonprofit and they're from Harvard and from the design school and they're willing to work and so is our own local design studios in our schools and they would work within five so we can make this work. And that would help our planning department which is already as everyone has acknowledged that they're extremely skillful and extremely burdened at this point. So getting someone from a design school or who's a fresh graduate and there are many people like that would be willing so I just want to address that. I don't think cost is an issue. The second thing that Steve said was that we would have the planning department to us and we can refuse to pass it then, but why not start the process why not why not provide and and perhaps this is already there in the CRC but all I want is that it should be more clear that we are starting with an integrative plan rather than taking this piecemeal each of these and I maybe that's not even the intention but that's how it comes across to me, but if you could just clarify that all of these suggestions, because they are sort of interconnected in the downtown and BL areas. So we have the planning department with maybe a design community design consultant to show us what how these different pieces will be how they look and and that's the other thing and the third thing is the advantage of getting people like this is that they do have additional ideas like you know just the idea that we the property taxes that we're losing right now because we're not building anything, even if we don't end up building affordable housing, we could take some of the revenue from there the property taxes that are coming from there and be transferring that to affordable housing and there are examples of that of creating funds that can be utilized really easily for affordable housing. So the one last thing I wanted to say was the downtown forums were not for 40 are they were specifically and actually participated in them there was one in bank center and I think one at the library. And there was specifically about what you could love about your downtown. What are your values, what do you want to see and all of that information is already there and it's very similar to what we've been hearing about music and concerts and wanting outdoor seating and how it the character and all of that so all of that is already there and seeing that we should again have a process to come together and listen is I don't think that I think that's redundant I think what we really need is to assimilate all of this information. Have someone who's doing this in a focused way and then provide us and all of that can be done in three weeks is what I heard from four different people. So again, I'm going to go to pat the angels to is not spoken yet. Um, I may abstain from voting for either this version of priorities or the CRC version of priorities. I'm grateful for the work that CRC has done and I'm grateful for the work that Kathy has done. And what it's done for me is slowed me down. And it's allowed me to look more carefully at a couple of issues, particularly those issues around inclusionary zoning. At the inclusionary zoning bylaw, it's clear that only buildings developments that need slight site, special permits because of modified dimensions are required to provide affordable units. So that would disappear with changing with taking that special permit process away. There is also right now going on in the state legislature age 3507 and which is an act promote housing choices. And this is a created by Baker, Governor Baker, but it's supported by chopper. So I'm talking about reducing the ability to pass zoning laws, moving it from a required two thirds to a simple majority vote. One of the things that I felt like before when I withdrew my motion. The last meeting was there was a kind of protection in the two thirds majority. If bakers bill goes through that protection is taken away. However, they're smart enough and it's one of the reasons that Chapa is supporting it is that they are still going to require special permits to enable developments that have more density or fewer parking spaces. So the thing that I've discovered by waiting and slowing down is how interconnected all this material is. And I feel like you're right Kathy throws in a bunch more stuff. The CRC list is too confining. And I, I really want us as a council to postpone voting on either one of these, so that we have time to have some discussions about what our priorities actually are and then share those with the town manager and ask him to move them to the planning board. That's one part of the process. The other thing and probably the last thing I'll say is I want to hear from the planning board, not CRC right now. And the planning board meets went this Wednesday, January 6 and one of the things on their agenda is this group of priorities which I'm sure they have the original priorities so I, I, I would love us to slow down for another meeting at least. And begin to have some conversation from the planning board. Thank you. Hope it wasn't too rambly. Kathy you have your hand up. Yeah, I just wanted to respond to a couple of things that were said. Pat, I certainly agree. I threw a few more things in here and Evan pointed some of them out, but it was in part because just before I was elected I started to go to the zoning subcommittee of the planning board where Chris Brestrup was there. I pulled the things that they've been talking about for a number of years, so they were really focused on some of these issues and similarly I didn't just throw parking in on B dash L or as a go deal with parking but it's part of the overlay project. And I looked at Chris's memo that to in 2016 that said be careful what you do in BL, because it could be a lot more people living on small lots, where nobody has to have a place to put their car, and just be you know it was like think about it so that was where these extra pieces came and I totally agree with Pat the that interconnectedness we wrote an inclusionary zoning law that is in effect an incentive if you, if you want to build more units in an apartment building, you've got to make part of them affordable. So I just it the list didn't come from out of the blue it came because it was under discussion for the two year the first two years that we were counselors and apparently we asked them to slow down with recommendations that were going to be flowing up to us through the planning standard. But I would like to see what they think about and I talked to Chris just on something else I was trying to figure out what a property line is what a setback is where it's measured. And she said many places measure it from the street, which is part of our weird. What is the look in the field of the place so that's a design standard that's not very complex and Steve had said to me think about BL. The half acre lots so I'm wondering we'll make them smaller the lots minimum lot size just go for the dimensions. And what is a duplex triplex design and I found I went to Bend, Oregon because I Google duplex trick place design and Bend, Oregon allows duplex or townhouses on some fairly small pieces of land and says every single one of them has to have 100 or 150 square feet of a little garden. So everyone's got that little piece of green space which is what people are fleeing cities from because they don't have it so I think we have to be really careful about lot coverage. So I don't think we're going to get more of these dimensions are crude in our current zoning law, but they just, they just said we're going to get more units on a piece and we have our zoning law allows duplexes owner occupied or not, and lots of places. We just don't talk much about it, you know, what, or townhouses and so I don't think it's asking I think Shelly is right it's not asking for a lot more to say think of these as interrelated. I think we're going to talk with something that changes it had the different pieces all together. So I would be fine. As you know I was trying to delay a vote, so we could have a public dialogue. And I thought of that is bringing the planning department and bringing our planners in to say, which is these things really go well together. So it wasn't to slow the process, but to be thoughtful about it. It wasn't to stay on the CRC list of bullets, but I'm, I'm would be happy with a shorter list altogether, very focused and start with thoughtfulness. And just the last thing on Andy on new growth, Bend, Oregon, who knows what, what's happened in Bend, but they are growing, it didn't stop growth to be thoughtful. They just put thoughtful standards in so that they could think about their downtown and look about their streets. They've put street designs in, as did Aurora, Colorado and a lot of people ran on smart growth. The smart growth folks have put up you want to see some examples. Here's one for streets. Here's one for housing units. So we can learn from what other people are doing we don't have to just pick a laundry list. So, I would be happy slowing down and saying let's just pick a few things and this motion was a substitute motion that said let's put things that we've been talking about for a really long time on the list, and that Chris Brestrup was pulling out memos from 2015 2014 with redefine mixed building that was on the to do list and it never got done. I think they could move fairly quickly on some of these because they've been thinking about them for a long time so it wasn't out of my hat. But I, and I would be happy Evan you said you've written a long piece or Mandy for CRC on Justin, I'd be happy to write a long list that goes with each of these but this was just this amazing Roberts rules that called there is a substitute motion that's an amendment. I wasn't asked to do that but but I think we need this bigger discussion, not in a voting situation but really say what what do we want here. I just put forward with them with an idea of allowing breathing room for planning staff and planning department to do the work to be thinking with us or for us. That's it. I just didn't want to say that these came from just out of my imagination they were, I pulled them out of meeting notes and minutes and meetings I attended where North Hampton was talking about how did they make their changes. They're growing is not easy a commercial district. And we've got to be careful about housing to get the kind of housing we actually want our new housing has not been affordable. It's really expensive. So if we really mean about affordable we've got to keep looking over at the bylaw that we all worked hard to put on the books. So I'll just stop there but I think affordability is, you have to be able to be able to buy it, or be able to rent it and some of it's going to have to be the developer wants to be here they're going to have to. We have some conditions that they're going to have to adhere to. And that was an important concept that we put in the books and we shouldn't lose it. Thank you. I'm going to use my opportunity as a counselor to speak. And just say, I want to make sure that I completely of communicate my understanding of where we are. First of all, a committee that was assigned this responsibility came forward with a proposal and a, another counselor has another count another proposal on the table. Regardless of which proposal is adopted or how we move forward. There are no zoning amendments on the table in either proposal. We are not making zoning changes with this vote. We are not making it with whatever an intended net intention to do that. The second thing is whatever the town manager comes back with from the staff of or this is absolutely correct. It comes to the council first and we get to decide does it get stay in the council doesn't get sent off to CRC or some other committee. And it's, by state law, it has to have a public hearing by the planning board, and they have an opportunity to spend time on that. Once they do that, and our, we have also had a flow chart that shows how they interact with CRC, and how they can do hearings together so that there is a joint effort between planning board and the council. So that it still has to come back to the council, and it has to pass the council by individual zoning bylaw by two thirds vote. So, I, regardless of where we end up tonight on this, I want to make very sure people understand. It's a beginning. There are a lot of steps along the way, those steps along the way include many opportunities for the public deployment and an opportunity to help shape how this discussion goes, as you have done by sending in all of the emails which by the way, as of three o'clock we cut the timeline off. They are now in your packet as well. So that's, I just felt the need to make sure that we clarify what happens regardless of which way we go. Dorothy, you have your hand up. So, there are some things which I find kind of confusing. This proposal by CRC is supposed to be just, let's have the planning department look at these things, and that it's not going in any direction, particularly except creating more housing. And the word affordable housing has been used but I look at the list. Okay, move the apartments to SPR and more zoning districts. So that way, as has been mentioned before, you remove the need for special permits, which in fact, triggers inclusionary zoning. There is no mention of inclusionary zoning in this proposal. We have the revised the apartment definition. Right now the apartments definition says that an apartment building has to have a variety of apartment sizes. There are two and three bedroom that it cannot be all of one size. Well, that's because families and people come in different size apartments, unless you're thinking of having it just a B and B Airbnb, or some kind of a dorm. So, these things have been removed. I don't see family housing here. I don't see affordable housing here. So although it doesn't say it's not a particular proposal. There's a direction which seems to be a direction that many people don't want it to go. So, if you want to have more affordable housing downtown, that is a very desirable objective, but so is preserving community that is a desirable objective to the original motion seems to many people including me to set growth ahead of preserving the Amherst, the quirky Amherst that we know and love. So Kathy's motion, I believe, says that both can be done we can have more affordable housing, and we can preserve communities, we can do them simultaneously. So I would definitely support Kathy's motion. I know you have your hand up. Yes, I call the question. Okay, the question has been called, and the, if a question has been called it requires a two thirds vote. That would allow us if if it passes to move to the question on the substitute motion. I'm going to hold as we do determine on the vote with Lynn, can you clarify which one of the voting has been called which is on the motion that's on the table at this time, the motion that's on the table at this time is the substitute motion. Okay, the substitute vote right now is going to be on stopping debate. All we're doing. Okay. This is stopping debate. So the motion is to stop debate. Alyssa. Yes. At the Angeles. Yes. Garcy DeMont. Yes. Reese Mersey yes. Anarchy. Yes. Pam. Dorothy. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Johnnie Balmille. Yes. We have ended debate on this motion. You will now move to the month to the vote on this motion. Okay. And the motion that's on the table is the one that was presented by Kathy Shane as a substitute motion. If you vote yes, you're voting in favor of that motion if you vote no you're voting against that motion. If you vote yes, it is for the substitute motion. If you vote yes, it is for the substitute motion. If you vote no. It is for the. It is against the substitute motion. Okay. Yes. Reese Mersey is going to be an abstain. Anarchy. No. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. No. George Ryan. No. Kathy Shane. Yes. Shriver. No. Andy Steinberg. No. Sarah Schwartz. No. Johnnie Balmille. Yes. And Alyssa Brewer. No. We have seven. I have five yeses. Seven noes and one abstention. So the. Motion on the. The substitute motion fails and we are now back to the original motion. Is there any further discussion at this time? Nope. You don't. Yes. And Alyssa Brewer. No. I have seven. I have five yeses. No. You don't. Okay. Then you have your hand up. Yeah. I just wanted to, to make sure I correct one thing. So with regard to apartments and special permits. What we were looking at was moving the use from special permit to site plan review. The inclusionary bylaw is triggered. It's required for use, but also for modification. So just because you move an apartment from special permit to site plan review. Doesn't mean the inclusionary zoning bylaw no longer applies to it. You know, in the BL, you can only have three floors. So if they want a fourth floor, they need to get a special permit and then the inclusionary zoning bylaw would kick in. So it's incorrect to say that moving apartments from SP to SPR means that the inclusionary zoning bylaw doesn't apply. It doesn't apply to use, but it would still apply to modifications, which they would likely have. I want to make sure we correct that. Thank you. Shall we. Can I ask a question from the planning department staff? Please. So I would be interested in knowing what the process would look like for them. And in terms of how they might take this. List from the CRC and what would be your process to. And I mean, I'm sure it's not a, but, and I guess more specifically, I'm thinking would you have the capacity to. Or would you need. Or would you like assistance in the designing a community design consultant who might help with the visualization and, and even provide maybe some amount of community engagement at the right times, or is that something you would do yourself and what might that process look like? I want to clarify that if the planning department feels comfortable addressing that question, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I need to have more time to answer that. Okay. Christine. I am not particularly comfortable working with. Student classes. You just never know when the project is going to be scheduled. And you don't know what the quality of the work is going to be. So if we were talking about hiring a design consultant to help us. Who is actually a professional. I might be welcoming of that. But right now, you know, we have $40,000 for a design. Consulting work. And we have thought about that as being earmarked for the downtown. And so that's really what I would like to do. And if the town council, you know, feels that we need other consulting help. Then we'll have to talk about raising some more funds. We do have a certain amount of capability here in the department. Our latest hire. Is. Along with other people in the department. We really have three people who are capable of. Of doing. 3d modeling. It does take a long time. So if that's something that is very. Important to town council, we can, we can. Make that happen. But so. Is that a good answer? Is that a good enough answer? Thank you. Thank you so much. Can I just clarify one thing? Yes. And I didn't mean just student. These are graduates of design school. And so they're not yet big. That will charge a lot, but they're also not students. So there are options is all I'm saying. But thank you for your response. Steve Schreiber, you have your hand up. I don't know if you have your hand up. I don't know if you have your hand up. I don't know if you have your hand up. So I'll, I'll like to see him, but maybe I'll pipe in here. But I would, I would caution us to. Keep the legislative branch and the executive branch. Separate. So I think that we should give the planning department. Or actually the town manager. The direction or. But we want to go and let them figure out the best way to execute. But I don't think that we should be recommending. Consultants or, you know, sort of getting into that arena. And I think that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. And yes, I agree. Kathy Shane. Yeah, Evelyn spoke about special permit, but Evan, one of the things I read was in what you, I think you and Mandy wrote is the long description that went with us. That one of the issues with site plan review versus special permit. Was escaping. The inclusionary zoning law. And I think that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. Many, as I've started to read other people's codes. Is even saying, you know, should an apartment building be 24 units? Is that the limit? They keep their limits so that when someone asks for more, it triggers a special permit. You know, so that the, the, the current requirements trigger it. When you want to go bigger or you want to change some things. I think we have, it's a, like a density bonus, but it's linked to affordable. We've got a couple of places in our current code that we do that. And I think the more we can do that, the better. So I'm was reacting overall. To as Dorothy said, there's the words being used affordable housing. But I'm assuming people have looked at the rents of all the new places that have come online and including. You know, the, the soon to be open or just open spring street, which has, you're not going to get too much smaller than 350 square foot studios. This starts being New York size. And we're talking about $22,000 a year. So currently what people are building. Is really pricey. And I think it's partly because there's a market for it. Partly because the land is expensive. You know, you can build cheaper on cheap land and Amherst. So we're talking about affordable housing. So we're talking about affordable housing. So we're talking about affordable housing. So affordable housing for houses doesn't necessarily make them affordable. We could get. Pricy new things. So. So I just wanted to say there's, there's nothing in the current list that promotes affordability. Even though I think we're all on the same page as we'd like to see more of it. And then my only other thing is if these weren't directives, I'm not going to be able to read them. I'm not going to be able to read them. I'm not going to be able to read them. I'm going to be able to read them for the staff and the planning board to think about the dimensions of BL. It doesn't say think about them. It says think about A and B. And you have to keep reading, flipping it over. What is A and what is B? Why not just think about the dimensions. So when I redid it, think about the dimensions. It's a table. We could revisit the table. So I'm. I'm going to go back to the list of things that are on this and say, I could live with this one. Not that one. I can live with this one, not that one. And why did you write it this way, not that way, but we've never had that discussion. We've had a vote on the whole thing or vote on none of it. And limited time to, to discuss it. Why these, where did these come from? Because I started. I was listening to the CRC meetings. They seem to have jumped in at the very last meeting. people as they were responding. So it is a reaction to what seems like very specific instructions rather than a call for focus on a few districts and think about what could be done there. What's the barrier here? It didn't, it didn't, doesn't read that way. Thanks, Kathy. Steve you still have your hand up and I'm assuming that you've already spoken so Mandy Jo you're next. Call the question. Okay, question's been called again as in the past. This is a vote to see whether we end debate. It requires two thirds. I'm going to start in this case with Pat DeAngelis. If you vote yes, we're ending debate. If you vote no, we're not. No. Darcy DeMonte. No. Is a yes. Anarchy. Yes. Tammy. No. Evan Ross. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Jane. Kathy. No. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shalini Balmille. No. And Alyssa Brewer. Yes. The vote is eight to end debate and five not so we don't have the majority. So we continue discussion. Alyssa, you have your hand up. Thank you. I think the thing I'd like to focus on right now is when we walk out of here assuming that we are doing something with this list rather than just kicking the can down the road is reflecting back to what Steve said about drawing the line between legislative and executive. I think the part that we often forget is that it's legislative with policy direction. What does that mean? That's very gray, very, very gray in comparison to other forms of government that have a clear legislative and executive. So I would want in the spirit I think of some of what Kathy talked about is that I don't want planning staff to just be working in a vacuum until March 15th and then say here I want the town manager to be reporting to us all along not making dragging them to our meetings heaven knows but but having the town manager report to us they decided they were going to cut this they were going to do this first and they talked to the planning board about it at their meeting because they've had a lot of ideas about it and then this other thing happened rather than it just being a black box until March 15th. I think that's going to be incredibly important for us to have some understanding and it may well be that based on other things that come up whether they're flood maps etc that the town manager may say you know what we had to pick and choose in here someplace there's only so much we can get done by March 15th and then we'd have that conversation and that would be totally reasonable but I do agree that we need some kind of concrete proposals to figure out what we want and so I just want to be clear that when we when people say we want to hear from the planning board we have heard from the planning board the CRC's heard from the planning board we as a town council have heard from the planning board I also point out that the planning boards appointed not elected it was not elected with a vision of Amherst and most of their members haven't served for a significant period of time so they're wonderful people and I want their input all along but I don't want them to be driving this either I think we have to take responsibility for that which is why perhaps it might sound like and it is true that I want the town council to take some responsibility for this as it unfolds rather than just saying hey we dumped it on the town manager now whatever he comes up with we'll just say yay or nay I think it's reasonable to expect there be some reporting out along the way not that we so that we can make sure we're all headed the same direction thanks Melissa George I think the fact that this discussion is now going on an hour and a half is exhibit a in the importance of us voting for the motion that's now before us getting something specific to to the planning board and to the planning department and getting back something we can sink our teeth into many of the questions and issues that have been raised by councilors this evening and by citizens who sent us emails will all be dealt with and discussed in great detail but we need something concrete and specific to work on and we see how when we have this kind of discussion about long range vision and and and so forth it just goes on and on and on so I urge my colleagues to vote for the motion um and let's actually get something that we can have a real discussion about thank you so many yeah I just wanted to clarify that I was not uh I to me the design guidelines and the vision is an important part of the policy decision we're making so I'm not coming from a perspective of trying to um talk about the the actual executive aspects of it but they seem to be intrinsically linked and so if I and since especially when that's not part of the current motion the design guidelines are not there it's just the form-based zoning is down there and we we are not and having spoken to four people my understanding is that we do want to have a vision and a integrating all of the the feedback and and also the other aspect is again rather than leading with a solution which is very specific right now if we can point out to the planning department that this is where we are where we see there is a problem and a lot of that is coming from the planning department actually the footnote and and the and a lot a lot of this is already coming from there but but I just don't want the planning department to feel that that's specifically what they have to work on rather I want them to look at these issues and see that this is a problem come back to us with actual solutions um along with keeping in mind that and that's what I'm not sure I'm hearing from from anyone how the design guidelines are going to be and and I heard that we already have design guidelines but apparently those design guidelines are allowing us to build in a way that doesn't have setbacks or and I and so forth so I just want to be assured that that that is also happening in along with the zoning changes that we are proposing that that is happening so that's all I want to hear thank you shall any Dorothy I want to back up what shall any is saying and I want to say to read word of phrase if the town has no vision it will perish now Bob and I've been watching Bridgerton and it's clear that marriage is an economic necessity and a good but what we see if you watch the show is a lot depends upon what kind of a marriage it is so I think that we need to have standards and we need to have design standards and we have to have ones that fit and that are connected to Amherst's history and its culture so I am not saying no growth I understand Andy the necessity of of new growth but I agree with Shawnee we must have design standards and a vision in place that guides us and that keeps us from letting more mistakes happen downtown any other comments from counselors at this time Darcy Dumont I would just say that I agree with Shawnee and Dorothy on establishing design standards and I know during my campaign there was a lot said about design standards for downtown and you know basically talking about how nice the Hastings block is as a as a model for a standard for downtown I just well I just want to make a statement that I don't think that when we were elected we it was a mandate to make the types of changes that we're putting forward right now there were a lot of other suggestions made by residents they've been made during the campaign they were made over the last two weeks by I counted at least 60 people contacting us there were 51 people in this meeting today that's that may be a record so no uh term residents are very very invested and interested in the outcome of this issue and I would really like to think that we are going to get attention and let residents have input at the outset of what we're doing rather than um rather than specifying exactly what we want uh Kathy you have your hand up um yeah I just um since the longer document um invoked the master plan in multiple places I do think it's a pretty amazing document when you look at it and when it talked about I'm just these are its words and it really urges us as we think of planning to minimize the impact on Amherst small town rural character increased density when strict design standards and planning guidelines are met emphasize adaptive reuse particularly of high quality historic area downtown it it it didn't say don't grow it said think about what you're doing and put some things in the code that allows you to get where you want to go and I think that's what we're asking that's missing from the current motion it's just missing those words are missing the sentiment is missing of um if you don't uh Steve talked about a roadmap uh a couple weeks ago and I just said but you would like a roadmap where we're starting where we think we're going um are we um are we trying to get to 100,000 people in Amherst do we want uh how dense do we want to be why um will any of it lead to affordable housing I can show you a bunch of suburbs that don't have any affordable housing that are really dense just because there's more so I the opposition to the existing motion is it so specific and it's missing this this broader be careful think about it we have an asset that we are putting at risk um and so speed could get us um I in the wrong place it's not that we shouldn't move I think we should be moving so it's and and we have such a good planning department the staff can do some of this workforce if we don't hamstring them then they say just look at these small set of items so that I think that's where the concern about the current list is and most of us I have to look at all 13 faces here maybe in the last three weeks had to go find the zoning book to even figure out what these things were you know what is the bl what is a what is b what is m um we shouldn't be voting on something we don't understand and we can't visualize so that that's the objection to the current list seems so specific without a where did these come from it's not a coherent package um if we said just one district focus on one district I could see that thank you Evan yeah so um I would disagree a bit with what some of what's been said so first of all I I agree that we should have design guidelines which is why design guidelines are in this recommendation we we recommended using consults existing allocated money for design guidelines for the downtown and I and I support that what I do have a problem with personally and this is just my personal beliefs is prioritizing design guidelines before we can do anything else I understand the concerns about character I understand the concerns about charm it wasn't but I'm also saying that we are in the midst of a housing crisis and the strategies that were chosen were chosen because they came from the housing production plan they came from the real estate market study they came from places that specifically told us here are things you can do in order to increase housing in order to make housing more affordable in your community they have a place where they come from and I do have a lot of problems saying we can't move on lowering barriers to duplexes we can't move on creating smaller homes on smaller lots we can't move on supplemental dwelling units all these things that are the studies that we paid money for told us will be useful in our community we can't do that until we have design guidelines for downtown that is something that I do have an issue with because to me we keep you know there's been a few times that we said we have time we have time but time is time is for those with privilege right there are a lot of people who are struggling to stay in this community whether homeowners or renters who really don't have time and I understand that a lot of the new housing that's gone up has not been affordable but what happens when that housing goes up even if it's expensive is people who can afford that housing go to that housing and that opens up housing elsewhere that would have been consumed by those people who have the ability to spend more but who because those luxury options aren't available are going to be consuming housing that perhaps could be affordable to someone else and so it's an ecosystem and you can't just point to new buildings and say those rents are expensive so new housing doesn't bring affordability because it does open up opportunities elsewhere and I don't want us to to pump the brakes on moving forward with things that could make our community more affordable and more accessible to more people because we feel like we need design guidelines first design guidelines are part of this I support making them a part of this but I don't think that we need to hold everything until we get those design guidelines thank you Pat thanks I agree with Evan about the guide design guidelines issue I am concerned that throughout the the documents that and the sharing from CRC there's an emphasis on reducing costs for developers and there's this attitude that if we reduce costs for developers by not requiring certain things that somehow or other they'll magically lower rents and that's not true we're a capitalist society and it's about profit and so when we pretend even in our wildest dreams that a developer is going to want to have units that rent for less than what the building next door renting that's not going to happen so I feel very strongly that we do need to look at these things but I do feel like what the recommendations that are here are pushing us in a certain direction and that direction is not is going to backfire on Amherst I all I I it does seem to me and I thank my friend who shared this with me we do need specifics to wrestle with and whether I because some of what CRC has proposed I absolutely do agree with I would love to see tiny houses in residential district in Amherst I think that would be phenomenal but I also disagree with aspects of it but the idea right now of dealing with specifics and until Baker's thing goes through if it does we have the ability to have require nine people on every one of these changes it makes me feel like I I will I don't know what it makes me feel like this has been a wrestle for many weeks now so I'll I'll know what I'm going to vote when I vote if Shriver so just for Councillor D'Angelo's the legislation to reduce by state law the requirement for two thirds to 50 percent has been on the books has been around for 15 years or so so it comes up all the time zoning reform so it may or may not happen but I believe that in the legislation that we would still have home rule that we'd still could make our own decision about what our ours is but the other thing I want to push back on is this so so I wrote this to my neighbor who was complaining about the buildings downtown and thought that you know that it should have affordable housing and it should have little stores and it should have this and it should have that and it's like in the last 120 years I think that this is a true statement the last 120 years the only buildings that have been built in downtown Amherst that are more than two stories are the three archipelago buildings and the Takratath building and then you have to go way back to you know the Hastings block so other than that we've only had strip mall buildings built in downtown or a couple of two-story buildings so that's where our soul searching has to be is what is happening with this town that nobody wants to build here or is there something in our and and you know it's the right question are we giving too much to the developers but nothing's getting developed so there's something about our zoning laws or or the the attitude I'm not sure what it is but there's something that's happening that is has really left a huge part of downtown as surface parking lots that's not the highest and best use of that land it's not the kind of character knowing small town new England character there's nothing funky about it so that's where the and you're maybe you're you're right that we gave too much to the first three buildings that were built there's plenty of other sites available but this is not the hot market where like south boston or something like that where you know everyone is trying to build and really the town doesn't have the leverage that other communities have and by the way we do have design guidelines the design guidelines are both in the they're in the zoning code but they're also we know exactly what buildings in downtown look like because we know what the height is we know what the setbacks are so those are the principal parts of design guidelines um shallony when I was asking uh sharing about consultants and design guidelines I don't mean just the aesthetics of it I then I am talking about the actual flow that builds community and it includes strategy it includes a combination of design and um and zoning bylaws which solve actual problems that would seem like competing problems like how do we have density and uh and allow for setbacks and have flow and have spaces for entertainment and and so the actual solutions that come through these conversations like they're doing very innovative things instead of having parking under each apartment they they're providing block uh neighborhood block parking which is being done in summerville or uh building affordable housing above a library which we can't do because of height limitations or something but there are so many different solutions that come when we are engaging in a way that's looking at the whole picture and that's what I mean I'm not just talking about the you know just the aesthetics of it but it's more got to do with the flow of how where things are where is the parking solution going to be and where is the community spaces and and just looking at the whole flow of things rather than um increasing the density um I I want to make sure that um what where we are and also that we have two other meetings tonight uh and um I also want to point out that minutes of meetings become part of the record they become part of the message and this while this has been a very very full and filled with all kinds of thoughts and um so forth we're not going to solve it all tonight that's not the plan uh the plan is to try to see if we can find a way to move forward uh Pat you have your hand up I call the question okay that calling the question requires a two-thirds vote the end of the debate and so I'm going to begin in this case with Darcy Demond yes yes Glenn Griesper is a yes Mandy Jo Hanneke yes Dorothy Pan yes Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes Kathy Shane yes Steve Schreiber yes Andy Steinberg yes Sarah Schwartz yes Shalini Balmain yes Melissa Brewer yes Matthew Angeles yes Darcy Demond we did okay it's 13 we're moving to the vote this is the vote on the original motion that that carried over from December 21st okay and we begin the vote with Lynn Griesper and I am a yes Hanneke yes Pam no Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes Kathy Shane no Steve Schreiber yes Andy Steinberg yes Sarah Schwartz yes Shalini Balmain Shalini yes Melissa Brewer yes Matthew Angeles yes Darcy Demond okay the motion passes 10 in favor against no abstentions no absence um I want to thank everybody for all of their effort in this conversation I am going to adjourn this meeting we are going to take a five minute break and when we come back we are going to move immediately to the public forum on the Belcher Town Road okay please unmute please mute and put your picture on and when you come back put your picture back up thank you so rather than spending more time on that I am just going to quickly check that each councillor can hear us and we can hear them and um let's begin with uh uh Mandy Jo Hanneke present uh Evan Ross present we skipped over Dorothy sorry Dorothy Pam hello hi Evan Ross yep Ryan George Ryan yes Kathy Shane yes Steve Schreiber here Andy Steinberg here Sarah Schwartz present Shalini Balmain welcome back to Shalini a moment Alyssa Brewer present Matthew Angeles present Darcy Demond Darcy Demond to say that you're present please here I'm here thank you um and uh Lynn Griezmer is here and Shalini Balmain please here got it okay uh given that we have a quorum of the council I'm calling the special meeting to order at 827 the purpose of this meeting is to discuss a off-cycle purchase um that requires a uh special item if you will public forum um originally it was supposed to include the finance committee Andy is there anything you would like to say about that the finance committee does not need to meet originally the plan was we would then be moving to a vote tonight but since that changed it changes the process so we're not calling a finance committee meeting okay thank you then I'm going to go on and ask for a very very brief presentation by Dave Zomack and John Hornick and I hope you got the message very in brief and then Sarah uh Marshall who has joined us I'm actually going to include Sarah in public comment okay David sure thank you Lynn and good evening everyone we will we will be very brief and I'll turn it over to John in just a minute um for for those watching at home um um members of my staff specifically Rob Moore and I have been developing a proposal and working collaboratively with John Hornick from the housing trust for a few months now looking at a very exciting opportunity along Belcher Town Road there are three parcels of land that are available for purchase and working with our town manager we've secured a purchase and sale agreement in an attempt to buy that land for affordable housing um our goal is to work collaboratively with the trust and put that land out in an RFP in the coming months to develop more units of affordable housing for the town of Amherst I would call your attention to a presentation that we made on December 21st there is a full um um full uh powerpoint presentation with about 10 slides that outline the uh the proposal in more detail but tonight we just want to be brief and so I'll turn it over to John Hornick John thank you Dave I assume you can hear me yes we can thank you I'm going to give a variant of the presentation that Sarah heard before CPEC uh some days I feel like I'm on a roller coaster particularly in the last few months with the end of the state eviction moratorium I know that many households are hanging by a thread on a November morning I was on a call organized by Pamela Schwartz Executive Director of the Pioneer Valley Network to End Homelessness there were over 40 people on the call including Senator Cumberford, Senator Heinz, Mayor Narcowicz and other state and local officials the news was not good in Western Mass alone over 900 households are already in the pipeline for eviction many households have already received notices to quit more are expected the governor's programs to prevent evictions are rolling out very slowly statewide is estimated that there are 26,000 households backlogged awaiting processing for RAF, the state's program entitled Residential Assistance for Families in Transition in Hamden, Hampshire and Franklin counties the RAF providers do not have adequate staffing to handle the workload nothing I'm going to speak about this evening will address the immediacy of this disaster it is the principal responsibility of the housing to focus on the development of affordable housing we do this so that the kinds of problems that families and Amherst face today can be better addressed in the future the Community Preservation Act Committee are our primary partners in this endeavor without commitments of CPA resources we cannot encourage or support appropriate development in Amherst as I said to CPAC this is one of if not the most important investment they can make not only will the dollars they commit support the development of housing for individuals and families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness it is the most highly leveraged use of CPA resources that they or U-town council can make for every dollar you invest in affordable housing development eight to ten dollars are added from the Commonwealth Department of Housing and Community Development or other public resources nothing else that CPAC funds has a multiplier eight to ten times the investment in affordable housing development all of this is preamble to explaining the largest ask that the housing trust has ever made of CPAC or town council as chair of the housing trust my goal has been to seek whatever reasonable opportunities are available to build a pipeline of affordable housing it's not been easy over five years ago when the town adopted the housing production plan Amherst committed to adding 45 affordable units per year a modest goal I think that we have yet to reach 20% of that so we are very interested in this opportunity the purchase price for the property on Belcher town roads approximately 2.6 acres is $735,000 that's less than the appraised value in addition we will probably have at least another $50,000 in costs related to property evaluation addressing wetlands issues and closing costs Dave, Rob Moore, the building commissioner and Nate Malloy, senior planner have all taken a close look at the property Rob estimates that 40 units can be built on this site so while 800,000 sounds like a lot of money the per unit costs of land acquisition are likely to come in at around $20,000 that's quite reasonable for Amherst with the unanimous vote of the housing trust acting an executive session in October we formed a partnership with the town we expect to close in mid-February in addition to talking with Paul Backelman Dave Zomac, Rob Moore and Nate Malloy I have also been talking with not-for-profit developers and a financing expert one of the things that I learned is that if we can purchase this property and combine it with the East Street school site we have a much better chance of getting state financing to develop both together this is a very important opportunity you may not know that Laura Baker the real estate manager for Valley Community Development spent two years searching for an Amherst property that we now identify as 132 Northampton Road that search ended and Valley decided to purchase the property which it would not ordinarily do afraid that it would be scooped up as other properties Laura looked at had been many of you may know that the zoning board of appeals just two months ago approved Valley's request for comprehensive permit last month Valley submitted a financing application to DHCD and a very important element of their application is the $500,000 at CPAC and recommended to support this development and town council approved assuming everything goes smoothly from here on out it will still be at least two years from now before the first tenant walks in the door of the Amherst studio apartments as I come before you today to ask you to approve the CPAC recommendation to award a grant of $600,000 to the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust I do so in the knowledge that most of us will no longer be in our current roles in town government when people actually move into the planned affordable housing for me as well as for you it is an act of faith both to make the request and to approve it you've been talking earlier about the importance of affordable housing in Amherst this is an opportunity to actually support a specific development that gets us on the path that we want to be on thank you for your consideration thank you Dave and John Hornick this is a public forum when we are we'll open it and I would like to see people raise their hands if they would like to speak and while you're considering that we're going to go to Sarah Marshall who is the chair of the community preservation act committee and she inherited that job just this last summer and is doing a great job on that so Sarah thank you and please proceed thank you Lynn good evening everyone yes I'm Sarah Marshall and I have the pleasure of chairing the CPA committee this year and on behalf of the committee I would like to convey to you our unanimous and enthusiastic support for the land purchase for which we have recommended borrowing at the time we voted on the trusts application negotiations the housing trust and the seller were ongoing and the precise location of the property was unknown to us in the week since we have been pleased to learn that the purchase of the property on Belcher town road was successfully negotiated and at a lower price than anticipated we had recommended in fact borrowing of up to $800,000 and we are pleased that the sum needed is $600,000 one of the main purposes of the community preservation act is to acquire create preserve and support community housing expanding the options for below market rate housing in Amherst is a long-standing goal of our community and purchase of this large parcel with CPA funds will enable construction of a relatively large number of new units to listeners unfamiliar with the CPA program I would note that the money to pay down the $600,000 CPA's portion of the purchase will come entirely from CPA's funds and not from the town's operating or capital budgets or from reserves so in closing we hope that council will approve the borrowing request thank you I'm looking to see if there's any other public comment at this time yes Alisa please state your name and where you live and you need unmute we definitely need the housing so I want to speak in favor of this I think it's a very effort by a lot of people that's making this happen and so glad thank you thank you for your comment Linda Slake please state your name and where you live my name is Linda Slake I live at 18 Notting Avenue I'm also currently the president of the Amherst community land trust and I really speak strongly in favor of this and I want to applaud Don Hornick and the trust members for the effort that they've put into pulling this together it looks like a really exciting opportunity to move the work forward thank you Dr. Slakey I hope you're doing well Janet Keller please state your name and where you live sure Janet Keller I live in Amherst board member of Amherst community land trust and I too want to speak in enthusiastic support of this project we all know the need it's enormous and I want to commend the work of John and Dave and the folks who work with them to have this conversation and also our thanks to the CPAC committee for working so beautifully with them thank you I just want to remind people that we're taking comment on this issue at this time and it's a public forum for this issue only Kitty Axelson Barry and I live at 89 Stony Hill Road which is not very far from the Belcher Town Road parcels and I think it's a great location for housing for any kind of housing my question so I'm all for it my question is however there was an article on December 23rd in the Daily Hampshire Gazette that said there was a 14,000 square foot building plus parking for 40 apartments and it's on 2.6 acres altogether but if you do that when I did the math it's like that if there were 40 apartments as John just stated that would mean less than 325 square feet per apartment but I think that would mean that this would be more than very small one-person apartments let me just clarify that during public forum we have agreed that answering questions is perfectly appropriate and it's part of the dialogue so I'm going to turn to David Zomek sure and if Rob Mora is still on this call I think he is I don't know if it's a good question but I don't know if it's a good question but if I said to say that we are nowhere near any kind of final concept or anything of that sort on the property I would like Rob just to comment we've done some preliminary concept plans and Rob was instrumental in developing those so maybe Rob you could say a little bit about Rob Mora so the concept plan that was proposed showing the 13,000 square foot building was envisioned to be possibly a three-story building removing the common areas for hallways mechanical spaces it actually works out to be an average of 780 square feet per unit of course all that changes with some number of smaller units some number of larger units of the building so I'm going to turn to David Zomek just kind of rough way of estimating it and if you remember the concept plan it doesn't at all maximize the buildable area of the property it leaves a lot of open space a lot of area for playground for grass areas so there's still a lot of development options that will be available to the developer could I just add Lynn that the if we move forward with this proposal and we hope we will this property also abuts 20 acres of conservation land with trails and community gardens etc that are in development right now so it's a wonderful location walkable on bus routes etc close to a village center so a lot to talk about there and we will be with the C.R.C. and finance committee tomorrow and then I believe finance committee and C.R.C. jointly tomorrow and then some other meetings later in the month. That is correct. The joint meeting of the C.R.C. and finance committee is at two o'clock tomorrow and Andy Steinberg and Mandy will be co-chairing the C.R.C. meeting. I don't quite understand because if it's a 13,000 square feet is it 13,000 square feet per floor and then three floors? Okay. The shaking is head yes. Yes that's correct. Okay thank you that answers my question. I would like to my calculation shows I need to go to 848. Adrian please enter the room and state your name and where you live. Adrian you need to unmute. Thank you. So I'm Adrian Turzi and I live on Pondview Drive and I'm speaking tonight on behalf of the C.R.C. and I want to enthusiastically support John Hornick as well as the C.P.A. to for bringing this project forward and I hope town council will appropriate the funds that are requested tonight. Although most of you know that the league is a national state and local organization and we've long had policies supporting affordable housing. Our Amherst League undertook its own study of housing needs in Amherst and we certainly advocate for safe, healthy and affordable place for people to call home. We encourage the expansion and preservation of housing that is affordable to our low and moderate income families and individuals and certainly this proposal is something that is going to bring us further along to meeting those needs in Amherst. So I thank everyone who has supported this along the way and thank you for your time. Please vote to appropriate money for the budget for this excellent proposal and thank you John and the housing trust as well as Sarah and her C.P.A. committee. Are there any other comments from the public at this time? Then let me just say we also want to add in addition to John and C.P.A. we want to thank David Zomack who always has an eye for this kind of thing and his staff as well and Rob Murrow for coming up with some initial thoughts on the design. We are going to be ending this public forum. Let me just mention that this will come before the council for a vote on the C.R.C. committee. But prior to that as we mentioned earlier it will be on the agenda for a joint meeting of the C.R.C. committee and the finance committee tomorrow at two o'clock. The information about that is on your is on the town website. Mandy Joe you have your hand up. I just wanted to note that CRC is joining the finance committee tomorrow for questions about the C.R.C. meeting. I think we will be discussing or voting on its recommendation until January 12th. Thank you. There will be another meeting on January 12th that this will come up and that is a C.R.C. meeting. Thanks for that clarification as well. With that we are going to adjourn the public forum and immediately move into the regular meeting of the council. I don't see that we have any problems with people. With that I am going to call the regular meeting of the town council to order at 8.49. The announcements are on your agenda and they state the meetings that we have just referred to so we are not going to put those up at this point. We will be meeting jointly with the planning board for a presentation from the pioneer planning commission on January 20th but our next meeting is actually January 25th. We have no hearings and so given that we are going to move immediately to public comment. Public comment. I will base how long public comment will be for each individual based on the number of members of the council. We will respond during public comment at this time and so we will move forward. Hilda Karina bomb would you please join us state your name and where you live. It won't work. Now you got me. I want to say I am very disappointed by that last vote. A 15 minute discussion almost two hours ago. I don't think the people who wrote the 30 page legal document, that document was full of mistakes. It needed rebuttal. They don't understand economics. They don't understand the real estate market in this town. I think that a lot more public discussion needs to go on before any more bylaw is going on. The planning board and the planning department finished the revision of the current bylaw which fixes up a lot of its problems of inconsistency before any more bylaws are enacted. I am just very disgusted and very sick to 10 people were both for something they did not understand. It is very clear from listening to what they said. I don't think it is going to change a thing. I don't think it is going to change a thing but I said what I think. Thank you for your comment. Is there other public comment at this time? Janet Keller. Please enter the room state your name and address. My comments be included in your packet this evening. I am not seeing them. At some point I appreciate hearing from you on whether or not you are going to make that kind of information available. I think it is important information that other citizens should be able to see and would very much appreciate if you haven't provided it for this evening. If in the future you would make it available. I hope that going forward that much more attention be given to explicitly how the very complex proposals from the CRC will affect affordable housing. We just with the Amherst community land trust worked with a family that is going to move in the orchard valley to one of our affordable home ownership opportunities and to see what a life changing thing that was for that family of five was an incredible experience and I hope you make it available. I would like to act on our behalf to make affordable housing a true integral part of what goes forward. I could say many other things but I know you have a long night ahead of you and a lot of work to do. Thank you for the opportunity to comment. Thank you for your comment. Thank you very much. Thank you. We will correct that tomorrow. Ira Brick, please enter the room. State your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Ira Brick. I live at 255 strong street Amherst. I just want to appreciate the hard work that goes into being on any of the town committees. And though people might disagree, I would like to say that I wish would happen, though I'm not on the town council and even you on the town council don't get to wish for things. I would like to see a moratorium and construction of more five story buildings. Even Steve Schreiber said that maybe we gave them too much. I definitely agree that we did. And I think that a couple more of those five story buildings is really going to hit a tipping point in the town. So I think that's the right thing to do. I'm sure some people mentioned this before of what has succeeded in comparable towns. College towns around the world. How people have made it a place that creatives want to live and do business. I think that we need to describe precisely what we want. I know that Kristine said before that 3D modeling takes a long time, being unattractive and unwanted. That takes a long time also. I think that we also need to show that these are profitable developments, the things we want. I would love to see more three story buildings with mixed use businesses on the bottom. I know mixed use refers to residential also and the housing above for two floors. I've said this before, but I think that we really could create the numbers that would show developers that these are profitable projects that could go up. I also want to say that the master plan, which I just reread, is a lot of things that were not included in what was passed tonight. Really, there was a lot of cherry picking and very little of the 15 different mentions in the plan about character of the neighborhood, which I just want to reject the idea that that is a racist dog whistle as one of the council members said to me. And I also want to check that the master plan is still what we want and need. It's an aging document and the world has changed a lot and living in a college town during COVID. We don't even know what the future of the relationship between a major university in the town is going to be when we have at least four more years they predicted until tourism picks up and travel picks up. And I would say also maybe college is gonna be affected by those same trends and forces. And I know that you have said in the last meeting that a lot of you were feeling an urgency as your terms end to get something done. And I would just say you would be heroes if you just got a good planning and a good conversation done following up in the listening sessions in town where people spoke very clearly about what they did not want. There's a lot of things that are being proposed that I think are not wanted or needed. So thank you so much. Thank you for your comments, Sarah. Erica Zikos, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, thank you for joining me tonight. My name's Erica Zikos and I live at Portie Falls Grove. I just wanna appreciate the counselors for your consideration of the vote earlier tonight in this special meeting. I really appreciate that you're all asked to become expert in all things on short notice, on short timelines and appreciate that you voted to send this issues the issues of zoning changes back to the planning board for further consideration and ultimately more public input before a vote takes place. I think that's the right thing to have done tonight. And while I also think that the goals identified by the CRC in their report, their recent report looking for more density and identifying affordable housing as a top concern are excellent. I think the intentions are good and whether the solution is right or not is still an open question, but it's absolutely right to study it and chances are it's the right move. Thank you for your comments, Erica. Pam Rooney, please enter the room and state your name. Hi, Pam Rooney, 42 Cottage Street. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. I want to express appreciation for the substitute amendment that looked more broadly at what the issues were and the issues with the very fragmented zoning pieces that were being put forward by the CRC rather than stepping back and saying how did those separate fragments actually work together? How did they fit into a bigger picture of what's trying to happen? So I would ask having heard your vote that a very, very clear process is described for the community that clarifies the confusion between what does the planning board do? What does the CRC do? What does the council do so that people actually understand where they can roll up their sleeves and participate in that process? So just clarifying that would make lots of anxiety go away. I'm also very supportive of the need to look at all of those little pieces as individual changes, but also in a very, very comprehensive and cumulative effect of all of those little pieces. And I think as we all know, there will be some surprises that come out of what do those pieces and those changes do cumulatively. So that's the charge to you all is to make sure that we all are part of that process. So thanks very much. Thank you, Pam, appreciate your comments. Ken Rosenthal, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Ken Rosenthal, I live at 53 Sunset Avenue and I'm not here to urge any solutions on you but to comment on process. We know we are in for a major change in the way we live and the way Amherst exists. It's imposed upon us by the pandemic economic consequences that will flow. You have extraordinary human resources available to you when you've heard in writing and tonight from voices of people who I think can want to help you in your decision-making process. Like you, the people who are writing to you and asking to be heard have chosen to live and work in Amherst. Many of us have served in town government in many roles, including leadership roles on boards and committees. Among us are former chairs of the Planning Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals. A disproportionate number of us I suspect have lived in or close or live in or close to the town center. And collectively over decades we have seen the town center grow, change and evolve and we have disproportionately I suspect spend time in town center, living there, shopping there, enjoying the restaurants and cinemas. So take advantage of us. And one way I think I propose that you can do this soon is to invite us to speak at your district committee meetings. We can speak to the issues with you, not at you. You can engage us in your district. You know us, we know you. You know how we live and we know how you live. And I think we can be helpful to you as you go through this process of deciding. I hope you will take advantage of that in the next couple of months. Thank you very much for listening to me this evening. Thank you for your comment. And are there any other public comments at this time? I see none. Then we are going to move to the consent agenda. I'm sorry, it was split over two pages. And the consent agenda motion is very short. We're going to put it up on the screen. And the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy. To remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting, ask that it be removed when I list the item. The request to remove an item from the consent agenda does not require a second. So this is the actual motion. I'll be looking for a second. The motion is as follows. To move the following items and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit. Six A, to proclaim January 18th, 2021 as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And to adopt the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Proclamation as presented. Six B, to proclaim February, 2021 as Black History Month. And to adopt the Amherst Black History Month Proclamation as presented. Is there a second? Second, Hanaki. Thank you. Is there any further discussion at this time? Dorothy Pam. I understand why these items are in the consent agenda but under our rules of COVID, I'm just wondering how does the town, how do we share these with the town? How are they celebrated in these cold and COVID times? The items are posted in the packet as well. And then the actual events that they are linked to will be put on the website in any number of ways, including virtual gatherings that are happening in relationship to both of them, okay? Is there any other? People can easily find where they can join with others in some kind of Zoom commemoration. Yes. Okay. Are there any further questions at this time? Seeing none, then I'm going to move to the vote on the consent agenda. The motion's been made in second. And I'm going to start with Griezmer and it's a yes, Hanaki. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Matthew Shane. Yes. D. Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. Shalini Balmilm. Yes. Lisa Breuer. Aye. Pat D'Angeles. Aye. And Darcy DeMont. Yes. That is 13 in favor, none opposed, no abstentions, no absence. It is unanimous. We are moving on to a topic that is actually listed under the 48 hour rule. Let me just explain every once in a while, not hopefully not very often. A proclamation comes to our attention or a call for proclamation comes to our attention. And we don't have an opportunity to have a committee meeting. In this case, it would be a GOL, governance organization and legislation. So George Ryan stepped to the plate and we are going to put on the board the proclamation that was drafted with some input from a few other people. And then when we move to vote, we have to move to Wave Town Council rules of procedure 8.6 for the current agenda item. So could you please enlarge that? And George speak to the proclamation. As Lynn pointed out over the weekend, we all received a email from my resident who alerted us to an event that's being planned for January 19th, a day of recollection for the victims of COVID-19. So Lynn reached out to me and asked me to draft a provisional proclamation, which I've done. You got input from Lynn, also from Alyssa and from Andy Joe. And so what you have in front of you is that product. The reason for haste is of course the date. The event is January 19th and the idea is to have towns and cities around the country through some kind of gesture. For instance, in our town, perhaps the ringing of bells and the showing of lights and the reaching out to the community as a whole, including the faith community to recollect and to honor those who have died in this past year from COVID-19. So that's how this came about. And I could read the motion or you can simply let you look at it. But this is what I have put together with the help of my colleagues. The motion also is in the packet and posted for the meeting. Are there questions at this time? Then I'm going to start with the first vote, which is to waive town council rules of procedure, rule 8.6 for the current agenda item. Is there a second? Second, DeAngeles. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion or questions? Then we'll start with Mandy Joe Hanakie. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. Melanie Balmille. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Aye. Pat DeAngeles. Aye. Garcy DuMont. Yes. Ian Griezmer is an aye. It passes unanimously. We're going to move to actually adopting proclamations in support of a national day of recollection to honor those who have lost their lives to COVID-19 as presented. Any questions at this point? That's a motion. Is there a second? Second, DeAngeles. Thank you, Pat. Any further questions at this point? Okay, then we start in this case with Dorothy Pam. Sorry. We're voting on this one right now. Is that right? Okay, yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. Melanie Balmille. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Aye. Pat DeAngeles. Pat DeAngeles. Aye. Darcy DeMonte. Yes. Griezmer is an aye. Hanna Key. Aye. And it is also unanimous. We are going to move on. And George, thank you for stepping the plate on that. And we look forward to having other counselors join in this national celebration at 5.30 on the 19th and more information will be coming forward. Okay. We are now moving on to a COVID update. And I'm going to call on Paul Bachman and Emma Dragon, who is the director of health. And we have a slide presentation. Sean, would you please put the slides up. Thank you, Lynn. So we have not done a presentation to you for about five weeks now. It's an important time for us to do it because we're seeing some trends start to develop. And we're at a turning point in terms of the end of the calendar year. The trends that we're seeing are not good ones. We're seeing increased cases. And we'll talk, we'll show you a little bit more what that looks at looks like. We'll also talk a little bit about some of the new initiatives that Emma has introduced. And, you know, I just wanted to, before I introduce her and take over to go over, you can go to the next slide, Sean. Emma has really hit the ground running for us. She has worked very collaboratively with Jen Brown, who is the public health nurse and the interim health director with Tim Nelson, our emergency management director and fire chief and all the department head. She's been very collaborative around across, across the board. And also that we've done real good work working with the community. And I know that she's been a part of the kind of, she's been at the North Hampton and their health director, where to the leery, meeting weekly with her over the last couple of months. So that's been very important as well. So you go to the next slide, Sean. I'm going to hand it over to Emma to do the next bunch of clients. Great. Thank you, Paul. So as we can see here, this is, um, of two days ago, so certainly these are a little higher now. At this point we're over 12,000 deaths in Massachusetts alone, 367,000 cases, and one thing I do want to highlight is the large amount of testing that we have been able to do with over 11 million tests provided so in Massachusetts so far. Next slide. Here we can see the active cases that we've had in Amherst over the last several months. Active cases means those cases that are happening at the same time as others with a contagious period within our community. We did, as you can see on this slide, December 14th really right after that, two weeks of that Thanksgiving holiday period. We see a large influx of the number of active cases that we had during that time, and we are still seeing an elevated number right now of over 90 cases. Next slide. Here we can just see and review what's going on with our institutional partners. I think one thing that we can see here, I apologize the print's so small. Sometimes I forget that with my glasses, I feel like I have laser vision. So that really since the last time we got to speak with you in November, there hasn't been a huge amount of growth in the testing or the amount of positive cases associated with those institutions, and we do believe that that's probably related to the end of the fall semester. Next slide. Here we can see the testing and positive cases that are being reflected on the UMass dashboard. This information does only show the on-campus, the testing that's being done by UMass as a campus. It doesn't show any of the community testing that they are doing for the asymptomatic site for the community. And here I think at the end we can really see kind of this big fall off where the end of the semester occurred, so they have less testing being done there now on campus. Next slide. And here I thought this would be an interesting slide. How many tests is Amherst doing as a whole? This does include tests that would be performed at our institutional partners for individuals who reside in Amherst, not necessarily individuals who don't reside in Amherst. But here once again we can see at the end of November really a huge drop. We're consistently in Amherst, we're doing about 6,000 tests a week. Next slide. This is where we can see how our positivity rate is happening and adjusting. At the end of October, mid-October, we can see a small rise at that time. And then, you know, anytime that I think things are kind of in our face, we become more aware of what's going on around us. It might be more inclined to be more careful so then we can see that dip in early November. And then we can see that very steep incline leading throughout the month of November. I'm really kind of plateauing to where we are today with the amount of test positivity that we're seeing. Next slide. Here is our percent positivity that's being reflected. We see an increase in that. I do want to highlight that that's where we are seeing the increase of that is also around the time where UMass is not doing such a large amount of the surveillance testing with their students. So there might be a correlation there, but I'm not a statistician. I'm a nurse. So I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on that one. Next slide. Where are these cases occurring? I know when I spoke back in November, really, our cases were only really with the 19 to 23 year olds. We had some very small children and some young and middle-aged adults, but now we're seeing a really big variation throughout the age span with cases. We are seeing it in children. Certainly, as you can see on this, the big hauler here is still those young adults in our population that are getting positive, but really it's throughout the age span at this time as well, too. Next slide. So this is just a reminder slide about the metrics that Massachusetts uses to help us analyze our data. And Sean, we can go to the next slide and really look at what's happening with the town of Amherst counts and where we're seeing our clusters and related cases. And this is really consistent that their transmission at this point is very, very highly correlated with household transmission. Here we can see, I got so excited. I'm talking about the next slide. Isn't that funny? Because I'm just like so eager for this presentation. So here, this just shows you where Amherst is comparatively in our data and testing. When this came out on January 1st, our percent positivity was 2.22. Sean, now you can go on to the slide that I was already talking about, about all that household transmission. Even when we compare it to long-term care facilities, child care, congregate settings, really the high density blown off the charts with clusters and confirmed cases is that household transmission. So that is people that we live with or maybe socialize with in small pods. Those are really the variations for those. Next slide. Here is a little snapshot of the town-based COVID testing that we were doing for people who felt sick from COVID or that they might have been exposed to COVID. This was free testing provided under grant money that we still had slotted under our health department carers funds. I was really, really proud that we were able to pull together this service for the three weeks that we were able to do it at the end of December. Over that time, we did do quite a number of tests for people who showed up and around each time that we did those tests, we were getting about a 10% positivity rate, which was an interesting thing to see. I felt very happy to know that those people were tested that we had the availability here for them to get that done because as I think many of us have heard, sometimes there is quite a delay in testing availability and access and many other barriers to being able to get tested. So I'm glad we were able to augment the UMass Mullen site, which is an amazing site, that asymptomatic testing, but for these individuals who needed it because they felt ill, I think it's something really to be proud of that we were able to pull together. Next slide. So what an exciting time in a pandemic to be able to shift our focus to vaccine distribution. In Massachusetts, this is just starting. Here you can see some pictures of the different phases of the vaccine rollout. Next slide. And here I wanted to highlight where we are, even in just phase one. So these are listed in order of priority as determined by this Department of Public Health. Now I will say that they continually reevaluate and take feedback and suggestions on how this priority list is developed and how it's going to be implemented. So if you feel like you have comments or suggestions, you can go to the mass.gov COVID vaccine website and there is a link for an email to there. They've been very receptive with that. So currently we are shifting our focus and very excited to start working for our first responders. For Hampshire County, myself and Meredith O'Leary, the Public Health Director for Northampton have been working for many weeks with our fire departments and emergency managers with the Hampshire Public Health Preparedness Coalition to prepare for vaccine distribution to our first responders here in Hampshire County. That is something that we've been very involved with. It's been a very collaborative process and I am just really excited that we are going to be able to provide that service to our first responders. This is something that local health is very passionate about. We have lots of experience with doing. We do have done years of drills and exercises, doing those flu clinics. We have good experience with and knowledge with vaccine and medication storage, handling, documentation, all of those things that I think for me are very exciting and maybe for someone else, not so much, but we are following the direction of the CDC and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health with being how the rollout and distribution of the vaccine is occurring on the local level. We are being given clear directives and how that will be equitable and ethical under the direction. We want to assure that our community that we are continuously working on it and feeling committed to serving our community when the time arises to keep expanding that on the local level. Just try to stay calm and check back often because information is always changing. I have never seen it change before. That is exciting. Paul, do you want to go ahead? Yes, we can do the next slide, Sean. That is an important thing. We are at this phase where our health department is basically taking Eastern Hampshire County. Northampton is basically taking Western Hampshire County and inviting first responders through their fire cheese and police cheese and dispatchers to get vaccinated and the vaccination will be done by nurses that Emma has or paramedics from our fire department. The same thing is happening on the other side of the river. It is a real coordinated effort between fire emergency management health and the city of Northampton and the town of Amherst. It is a really good opportunity to collaborate. In addition to that today, the state announced that there is going to be a generic sort of open vaccination site at UMass at the campus center for anybody who does not fall into any of the other categories if you need to get it in a different way. Those are just for first responders. You need to sign up for hours in advance. We will have a booking system laid out. Everybody will be given an invitation to join if they are eligible. You need to present your badge or whatever it is in order to gain access. It is a pretty elaborate process. Vaccines are hard to come by. Emma has stepped up. Secured freezing capacity so that we can store it safely. Next slide, please. We have a couple of things. I always give you an update. What we are noticing is that everything is still operation go. Things are moving forward. We have seen additional, just as you have seen it in the community, more and more town or fish town employees are either being exposed or contracting COVID-19. That requires us to then, if they have had contact to have those people quarantine, that is happening pretty much every department at this point in time. We have de-densified our buildings to the greatest extent possible. If you have the ability to work remotely, we are encouraging people to do that. I have asked each department head to go through to give me their staff report, their staffing plan. The governor has de-densified office buildings to about 25% capacity. We just cannot afford to have an entire office be out of commission. Each department is working at their own length. Next slide. We continue to do communications weekly call and show. The biggest thing that is happening here is that we have ramped down the ambassador's outreach efforts. They are still around, but they are working fewer hours. We are preserving some of the funds for when the students start to come back in February. We have the director on staff, and she is still working on that. In terms of the other part-time employees, they have lowered their hours until the students start to come back. We need to reach out again. Next slide. We have one last slide on the recent update. That was going to do. Next slide. So, pretty similar topics to what Paul and I got to speak to last time in November. We are still in the pandemic. I know that lots of us are tired. Really try to just be aware of that pandemic of fatigue. I can't speak anymore. My heaven. And as we have more time inside, that will happen as well. Holiday gatherings are happening and trying to navigate those in a thoughtful way. One thing that they did notice was at the airports is there was actually very high travel rates this winter. And in the last weeks, more than they were expecting. So, we do continue to see increased numbers of cases. Trends are up nationwide. The town is not exempt from this. And even on the local level, we are feeling it as well regionally. I think in western Mass, we did not feel the weight of the pandemic in such a way like the eastern part in Worcester area of the state did earlier this year. But we are certainly feeling it now. And we are just really trying to thoughtfully plan with the schools and the university that how the students and staff will be returning for the spring semester. Continuation of the robust testing regimen that they are going to be happening there. There will be the community surveillance testing but on a reduced level, I believe, right, Paul? That will happen. And I know that one thing that I have been continually working on is trying to have good communication with our partners, seeing what is working well with others and really just trying to build off the successes that we had this fall and the lessons learned and how we are going to make a better spring. I will just close by encouraging people to sign up for the community testing at the UMass Mullen Center. It is incredibly well organized and really easy to do. It is self-administered. It is a short swab. You are in and out and usually less than 10 minutes free parking. Plenty of parking there. And they have it really super well organized. You get your results within 24 to 36 hours. I have gotten mine in less than 24 hours. I go weekly. You are allowed to go once a week. It is just to make sure it gives you a sense of peace of mind. And I encourage every member of the community to take advantage of that while it is available to all of us in the community. That concludes our presentation. Thank you. We really appreciate that update. And Emma, thanks again for coming on board. Paul, we are going to proceed with a master. Oh, I am sorry. Here are counselor questions. And I might actually have a few myself. So let's start with 30 p.m. Okay. Quick question. I am really interested in phase two and phase three. So like when are we going to be getting vaccinated? And the second question is what is that little ratio number, the one that they use for the schools in determining in person schooling? Sure. So for the first part of your question, Dorothy, phase two is estimated to be between February and April, like between February and March. But these are always subject to change. And then phase three is estimated to start in April. Phase two, even today, they adjusted that to include individuals that are 75 years and older, even without comorbidities. So that was a great change to see for our wise population in our community, evaluated that way. So that's just constantly changing. UMass will be having this large vaccination site that will be available. And from what we have heard, will be here throughout the spring as those phases evolve. Us on the local health department level will be augmenting them. And people's primary care providers should be receiving vaccine this spring as well for eventually. So more to come. And we're learning more each day. In terms of the metrics for school, I believe I was not part of the committee that set those metrics when they were initially set. So I would have to go back and review that because I don't have that straight off my mind right now, Dorothy. I'm sorry. So I don't want to answer it unthoughtfully. Thank you, Emma. Alyssa? Yes. Thank you, Emma. Thank you for pointing out that, you know, even though we didn't get our slides until noon today, they were already out of date after the governor spoke. So that was really helpful. And it is really useful, as you indicated, especially for our community, right? We have a ton of people who are over age 75 here. So that's really helpful. And that will be well received, including by my mother-in-law who lives with us. But the thing I wanted to add about that is we're seeing some really what I would consider to be very unfortunate press about, and this is actually more for Paul than it is for Emma, from first responders elsewhere who are saying, I'm not getting that vaccine. I don't trust that vaccine. I don't need that vaccine. I'm not going to get sick. And that's really the tone they take. It's quite embarrassing to me if our public safety staff were quoted that way in the newspaper, I'd be mortified. And so I'm wondering if you have a sense from our public safety staff how they're feeling about it when it comes to, you know, fire, police, DPW. And I know that obviously the governor's required that school and college students have the vaccine. There are some workplaces that have the flu vaccine. I'm sorry to be very clear they have flu vaccine, although they extended the date. There are some workplaces that are requiring flu vaccines. Given best practices, given this is a brand new vaccine, I'm assuming we are not making the requirement for the vaccine for COVID-19. But are we doing so? My questions are, are we requiring flu vaccines for any of our staff? And secondly, what's been our local public safety response, which I am sure is going to be a much more positive response than the response we were reading about in the newspaper. So we do not require any vaccines by any employees. It's a negotiable item and we have not pushed that as an item that we want to push on with our first responders. My understanding is that our most of our public safety officials will be accessing the vaccine. Not all. There will be many who don't or there will be some that don't. You know, part of it is public education, but part of it is more cultural or a sincere scientific fear that the vaccine hasn't been tested adequately to take it. So I think that and who knows if there's a political component as well. So we won't have everyone, but the vaccine will be readily available to all of our first responders and dispatchers. I think we should keep track of how many are actually vaccinated and be able to respond to that. Obviously, we're not even all accessing it yet, right? They're saying the 11th, but when they can, I think that will be an important number for our community to feel more comfortable. Thank you, Paul. Kathy? Yeah, I just want to follow up on the questions about when and how this distribution starts. Emma, you said that UMass will be a distribution site. Will UMass be a distribution site for the whole community the way they've started to do testing or will be mainly UMass? And I'm asking because what we're reading is that vaccines arrive and then we don't have the ability to give them to people because they're either and we've got a nurse and staff at UMass. We don't have a medical school, but in terms of vaccinating lots of people. So I've been so impressed, Paul. I've gone twice for the COVID testing. They have such a smooth operation and seeing the people. So is UMass going to actually be opening that up for the communities that we go into these phases? I think there's more to come with that. Initial discussions have given that first impression, especially with how they're being involved with the first responder site. But I know that all of us are just eager to get more information when it's ready and prepared to be clear, Kathy. Yeah, so I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. What we do know is UMass will be offering vaccine to first responders period. That came out today. So whether it's going to be opened up to the community, whether it's going to be flowing through the local boards of health or not, whether it's going to be through Walgreens and CVS or through your primary care physician, none of that stuff has really been communicated out for the general population. Is that because it's a state? Someone said to me, you know, we've been saying the vaccine is coming at some point. People had to have been thinking about this. But so is that at the state level making a decision? Yeah. Yes. And they have really high quality people. Dr. Beninger, that M&I both knows, he's at MGH on Beth Israel, MGH. And it's just very complicated. And then who actually distributes it becomes an issue as well. And who has the storage facilities to store it. And that's why I commend Emma for being ahead of the game, getting us a freezer that we can store in the Moderna. We're going to be holding the Moderna vaccine. And so having that being able to store that, and there's all these protocols for how you manage once you open a package, where it's a timeframe, you have to make sure. And that's why we do it by an appointment basis only. So we're not having one person show up and you open a whole package for one person. It's not going to happen that way. All right. Any other questions at this time from the council? Okay. Then Paul, we are going to move to the MassWorks Pomeroy Village grant. And you put a memo in our packets. At this point, you said you would just talk to us about this. And I believe the vast majority of this will be on our January 25th agenda. Right. So the idea of this is, this is, we received the MassWorks grant for $1.5 million to redo the intersection at Pomeroy, West Pomeroy and West Street, what we call the Pomeroy Village intersection. What I want is to lay out the process that we would recommend that we would make a presentation to you at the full council at January 25th meeting. You would then consider the proposal I have put forward to you today in terms of how would you like the public to be engaged? Typically, we would have the staff organize that outreach, but it should be, there should be a host committee of some sort, whether it's, you know, whichever committee you will move this to at your, when you refer it, when we refer it. And the big question for the council, and it's really going to be the council decision is whether you went a signalized intersection or roundabout. And we'd like to be able to have the opportunity to present both options to you, take those out to the public. They're about the cost, the costs are about the same for each of them. The state was okay giving us a grant with us not deciding which way to go with this, which we were worried about initially. So, but it's an important decision. It's a major intersection. It's a primary location in the south part of our town. And so it's a big decision for the council to come to. We're hoping that you would be able to do that before July 1st. So you have plenty of time to think it through, listen to the public, ask all the questions and get all the engineering answers that you need to get from us. I was trying to lay out a process for the council on how do we move this forward to that decision point. The grant requires us to expend the money by June 30th, 2023. There's a time frame. There's a schedule in the memo. And so that's where, that's what I'm presenting to you tonight, not for any action, but anticipation of your meeting on January 25th. Are there questions at this time? Melanie? Yes. I had three questions. I think first is what is the scope of this project? Is it just the intersection and the roundabout? Or would it also include, you know, like installing the bus stops and surrounding areas, like easing the road traffic and sort of the whole area? Yeah. So it does go a little bit down West street. How far we're able to go depends on pricing. Quite frankly, we want to do the sidewalks, the bus stop on both sides, make sure the crosswalks are all done, all that things. But so we estimated a certain length down Pomeroy West Pomeroy and down West street on either side. I don't think we cross the stream on the north side of West street. Okay. And the other question is, I'm sure we're going to go into more details, but I was just curious what is the cost of maintenance of an intersection versus a roundabout? That's a really good question. We can bring that. Yeah. And that can be answered later. Yeah. And the last thing is what sort of feedback are we looking for from the community? So we will be reaching out to the businesses in the area, people who live in the area and sort of one on one and sort of talk to them through it. But also, I think the council will want to host some general meetings of the public, at least a couple of them, just to get feedback from people as we make it typically the way those things work is that town staff would make a presentation and then say now we're in the council would open the floor to feedback and you would listen to what people have to say on that. Kathy Sheen. I'm not sure this is directly to Paul, but I saw it like it's coming back for discussion for ideas of how to do this. If we have some and we can't talk to each other a lot before we come to the next meeting, is there a way that we can write things down and get them to a central place so that we're not all just sinking on our feet so that we can get a collective group? And it's some of the questions are building on the kinds of things that Shalini had, but if you could get us what you know about the engineering design so far, I had a question how far on Pomeroy could a sidewalk go? If we ever get the Hickory Ridge land and we have a lot of people and we have a development you'd want to be able to walk and bike lanes. So just some sense, but if we wanted to collect a bunch of ideas that then would be vetted at some community thing, how could we collect them first and then talk about a process? I just ask you to send them to me and we can try to answer as many of those in advance of the presentation on the 25th. Okay. I want to also mention that when the District 5 meeting was held, they had a very nice discussion about this and I would hope that as we look at additional district meetings that would be relevant to this intersection that we might be able to use the district meetings as well because I found that conversation to be extremely interesting and very thoughtful. Dorothy, you have your hand up. Yes, I just wanted to underscore the importance of what I think Paul was saying that you're going to the town will do direct outreach to business owners and to other groups because there are people who come to our meetings and the majority of them don't and I think it's going to be really hard to do in COVID, but I think that actually could mean actual door knocking and standing their masks six feet apart because otherwise we're not going to get the kind of feedback that I think we should get. And we've already done some of that prior to when you know with a grant during the grant making process to the major property owners specifically, but we need to do more of it. Alyssa. Okay, so a little pushback on that. We absolutely cannot expect to send town staff out to people's doors during a pandemic to discuss this. This is not an emergency. This is not what you use town staff to do. It's a risk to everyone's health. That's not appropriate. We need to think of something more creative than that. I agree we need various kinds of outreach, but it's ridiculous during a pandemic that someone's going to come to my door to talk to me about something. No, not okay. But so please don't feel obligated to do that because I think that's a horrible idea. The thing I did want to point out that I want the town council to think about because you've never done this before is it's important and I'm sure Paul and I will have some disagreement about this in terms of the edges, but I think we are solid on the base, which is as he said, this needs to be hosted by a town council committee because this is a town council decision staff does this immense amount of work to make this all clear to people. They come up with all different kinds of possible sometimes an exercise not counting on that this time, but different ways of interacting. Obviously it's all going to be Zoom, so it's not going to be the usual like put little stickers on things, right? We have new ways of doing things, but we have to be clear that the town council owns this and we don't sit there and say, well, staff just said what they said. I mean, I don't know. We own this situation, but what part of what that means is that whichever committee has this, when we talk about this in future, whatever committee has this, they need to feel like through Paul, they can talk to staff about how this is going to work because you do not just show up and say, so what's staff going to do? That is a recipe for failure. I have been through these when we have had amazing dedicated staff who've talked for 40 minutes straight at people before anybody could actually get a word in edgewise to talk about anything else. I'm not saying that was going to happen this time, but it has happened in the very recent past. So think about whichever committee is going to end up having this, what's an effective way for you to work through Paul to talk about how this layout is going to work, even though staff is going to do 99% of the work, because otherwise your constituents are going to be mad at you and you're going to be frustrated and nobody wants to blame staff because they're awesome. So figuring out a way to balance all that is really going to be important, especially given we don't have the physical contact we normally do. Mercy? Yeah, several people have mentioned that we had a District 5 meeting where we brought this up. It was our last meeting and we had a number of comments that we forwarded to Paul. And so I think that if we know that this is a project that's going to span a couple years and we know that we're going to be reaching out to residents and businesses and so on, if we could come up with some timeline and plan for that outreach and incorporate some of our district meetings in District 5, that I think would be helpful. And as we like to work with staff to be able to do that, I think a lot of the people at our first meeting, you know, they had some strong opinions about Roundabout versus Intersection. I think that the town is obviously going to be putting forward some rationale for a Roundabout that the residents haven't heard before. But I think that we all need to maintain an open mind about that. So to the extent that we can get a timeline and work together on outreach, that would be that would be good counselors and staff. Thank you Darcy. Shalini? Yeah, I was going to actually piggyback on Darcy that having an engagement timeline that's posted on the town website. So having a clear town website page for this with showing what are the different stakeholder meetings and whether they're the council, public meetings, listening sessions of focus groups. And all of these can be done over Zoom, even having a project newsletter maybe. So after every stage of data, you know, I was through schools and district people and neighborhood associations, we could be sending out information to them. And I was wondering in terms of collecting data, like we have the focus groups, you have the public meetings, and you had mentioned bang the table. And I don't know if that's something that can also be used as another. So we want to open up as many channels as possible to collect. And I think this is really an opportunity for us to use as a prototype for community engagement, like what, you know, what are different channels we can use and making sure that all key stakeholders are being represented. Right. Other other comments from counselors at this time. Okay. Seeing none. Thank you, Paul, for that. And we look forward to a more full discussion on the 25th. We are going to move to the action items. And the first is the capital inventory. And I'm going to start, I mean, have Andy Steinberg introduce it. But meantime, Andy's of Sean is going to put up on the board, the actual motion, which you may want to make and then call for a second. We need to suspend 8.4 first. Oh, I'm sorry. All right. So in order to move this forward, we need to suspend rules of procedure rule 8.4 for this agenda item. Is there any discussion? That means because we're not bringing up twice. I'll second it. Thank you. Any other discussion? Then we start with Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Chain. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. Shalini Balmium. Yes. Melissa Brewer. Aye. Pat D'Angeloz. Aye. Garcy Dumont. Abstain. Okay. And Griezmann is aye. Mandy Johannike. Aye. Dorothy Pam. Yes. 12 in favor. None opposed. One abstention. No absences. We are now going to move then to the actual motion and any an opportunity for discussion as well. Andy. Okay. You want to start with the motion itself and does it need to be read in just the beginning part? I think you could just with whatever's up there and then people can read that. It's in there. It's on the motion. I'm going to move the recordings with Charter section 5.7A. It is recommended by the December 7, 2020 Finance Committee 2021 Inventory Recommendations established the following requirements for the 2021 Capital Inventory. And then the motion continues with sections 1 having to do with buildings including strategic infrastructure from enterprise funds and that includes age condition maintenance and repair history renovation or major repair history amount for which it is insured, comment field to note plans for building note empty buildings and options for future use of buildings not currently in use in the second part of the list is vehicles movable equipment including age condition remaining useful life mileage purpose of the vehicle frequency of use type of fuel and budget replacement price. Is there a second? Change seconds. Thank you. Would people, Andy, why don't you give some background about this and then we can ask counselors for questions. Okay. I will try to be very brief. I want to point out that at the last meeting which I think was December 21st maybe there was a finance committee report and the process was described in that report which so it has been before the committee for several weeks but I realized that many of us read the current packet not the past packet so just real quickly this was recommended by the committee on a vote of five to zero of the five voting members who are the counselors at the time we had two resident members both resident members spoke in support of the motion. The process that we engaged in to remind you that Town Manager pointed out to us that there's a provision in the charter that requires that the council establish requirements for an inventory and that was referred to the finance committee on August 31st. We discussed it over a number of meetings that followed beginning with really I guess three stages of the process. One is we tried to identify the many needs for information that might be needed to assist the council committees and other multi-member bodies and we reach out and do some consultation including with reaching out to ECAC because we recognize that they might have some items that they would be concerned what want to have included in the inventory process. We then looked at what information is currently available to us and we realized that there are inventory items that are collected for various purposes including our audit for information collected for insurance purposes and those kinds of things that we already know that is information that is collected on an annual basis and the third thing is we discussed the timing process and consulted with Finance Director Mangano about this and Mr. Mangano was feeling that it's very important that we try and make this decision as close to the beginning of the year 2021 as possible so that he can incorporate it into the process that he will be using with departments to assess capital needs and that they're integrally related and at that point the committee referred matter back to Mr. Mangano and myself and we discussed it and proposed the resolution or the proposal which was in the packet for this meeting and as well as I believe the last meeting and that's what was supported by the council so I think that having gone through the process a little bit I'll see if other members of the finance committee have anything that they want to add or emphasize in particular I was not going to do that but if others want to do if they can or just open it up to questions. Okay any members of the finance committee who would like to add anything to Andy's description I see none and I'm going to move to questions from the council. Alyssa. So I'm going to preface this with saying although I'm not real fond of dwelling on past failures this was one of the select board's past failures and Andy makes reference to that in the report that thank you you reminded us was in last times the select board had asked for this inventory information for years and years and it didn't happen it was in town manager goals for many years way before this town manager and then finally it did happen and then unfortunately there were some there were some staff challenges at that time it was a very difficult time and so when it did get finished there was almost no time to work from it so it's one of those things that like it just seems like we should have but it's not it's not been that simple so I appreciate the finance committee relooking at that particularly since Andy was there when we had this last conversation one of the things that for example that we went to sideways on previously was asking them to rate like in some rating scheme what the quality of the building was it's like don't make it that complicated right just give us this basic information but there are a couple of extra pieces of basic information I'd like to include here and I'm hoping the finance committee can find a way to do that one is because some of these buildings are not just things like you know town hall right we're not going to we're not going to knock downtown hall I totally get that but other things are odd like the DPW shed at the high school like the child care facility in the wildwood parking lot and so it's important I think that we show the zoning district that things are in and I think it's important I'm sure there'll be a map anyway but that we show the zoning district things are in and then the other separate thing is any strings that are attached to the property because of past funding so for example the North Amherst school had block grant funding associated with it and because of that block grant funding we have some limitations for a period of time as to what we're allowed to do with it so just adding that and it doesn't have to be a lot of detail but just say you know go look at the block grant funding information on this I think would be helpful because people often come up with really cool ideas of things to do and it turns out there are strings attached that we're not able to do it with. Yeah I just wanted to say that I understand that that you're putting this out now because it's a charter requirement and you're just sort of putting together the basic requirements of an inventory and I'm glad that you asked for ECAC input but it's still one of the things that that I had recommended was that we really need a master inventory because we have multiple inventories now and you know I've seen the you know a school department list I've seen a DPW list and I know the green communities has to have a separate list for you know on a regular basis looking at the different things and so I guess I just think it would be logical to have a master list and have all the different requirements added that are needed for all the different inventories in one place. Okay are there any other comments at this time? Kathy? I just you know I was in the finance discussion and if you look at what was laid out just in response to Alyssa I completely agree you know doing strings we had this column called comments and you know in theory it could be used for that because there's not going to be strings to this building but there would be you know put pertinent information and the other the thinking is that the to make this useful we have to make it easy to continuously update without a huge amount of staff effort you know so the information is easy to get and plunk it in so so over time if there's a way of cross linking some it may not be easy Dorsi to do a consolidated everything but if there's for more information on this at least cross listed so we the the goal is not to say we we've done it once took a huge staff effort and it would take another staff effort to update stuff so this was the easier to update list starting thing but I think that comment column is a critical one to cross list things and tell us other things about encumbrances you know the old school Alyssa is a good one because it's only partially used by the town it's rented out to other people you know so not only do we have block grant issues but we have we only partially use it so it's a that's going to be a heavy populated column for some items but not others and I guess that I would go with Darcy's comments where I did think about a ECAC as I was working with Sean on the proposal that came forward we were doing it with the timeline that we really had come to the conclusion that John needed to get moving on the first round right away and that I assumed that additional requests might be coming from ECAC as it continued its process because I know that it is a work in process and there was two things that we recognized and that one is that ECAC might make its own direct requests on a one-time basis for certain information and that I'm sure you have been doing that already and will continue to do that when it's relevant and important information for the committee to have and second is that this is just the first year and if there's an ongoing inventory item that it might make sense to add to the process once we've identified it and find that it's feasible we can recommend to future councils the beginning of year from now we add it so it certainly we did think about it. So Andy I guess I want to go back to you as chair of finance would you assume under comment field to note plans for building that we would include something there about what zone it is in or is that a separate bullet that we want to amend this with? I guess that way we probably would want to have staff in several departments think about questions like that because I think the question also is relevance of zoning to what extent to town buildings are they required to adhere to the zoning does the zoning apply and to what and how does it apply so I think we probably would want input from staff on that and then to move forward but it is a logical question if it is relevant and obtainable information then appreciate the suggestion. So in the similar way the issue of whether there's any kind of restrictions on the building based on prior funding when I can totally appreciate because when you're doing the grant money it's just complicated. So we are assuming that's going to be under the field notes but I'm wondering if our best process at this point is to go ahead and pass this tonight take it back and then we can always bring it back with amendments to add these other items. I certainly will report it to the finance committee when we meet tomorrow is none anticipated additional item but really at that point I think we would be looking for Mr. Magano to give us make an assessment which you may not be able to do on the spot at the meeting tomorrow but we can get that back then to the council is to can these items that have been suggested be added with specificity to the common field and does that really require than any change as long as there's assurance that it's happening that's something the council can decide at that point. Okay so in other words you your your desire would be to go ahead and move the motion the way it is and then come back with amendments later. Yes I think that in order to adhere to the plan for Mr. Magano to at least start collecting the information that is on the list that would kind of give him the license to do in instructions to do so. Okay are there any other questions and listen does that work for you? Sort of I mean I feel like I'm hearing if they feel like doing it as opposed to it's an important thing to keep track of so even if we don't fill it in the first time around because we're focused elsewhere I think it's important that it be in there and so if you will take that to finance committee as it's important to have it in there and then you can expand on what the comment field means I think that would work out just fine. Okay all right I think both suggestions are important I just think we we want to try to figure out how to proceed now. So Alyssa you still have your hand up is did you have anything further to say? Okay then we have a motion on the table and it's been seconded and it is the inventory as presented is there any further discussion? Okay I'm not going to read the full list and I'm just going to say so the motion is in accordance with Charter section 5.7a and is recommended by the December 7th 2020 finance committee 2021 inventory recommendations to establish the following requirements for the capital inventory and Andy's reviewed those no further questions at this point then we're going to move to a vote and starting with Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Hugh Shriver. Hi. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Hi. Shalini Balmille. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Hi. Pat DeAngelis. Hi. Darcy DuMont. Yes. Lynn Gryfner is an I hand, Manny Johanicki. Hi. And Dorothy Pam. Yes. The pass is unanimously but it's not the last you've heard of it. Okay we're going to go then to the retreat follow-up. You may not be ready to vote on this tonight but we do need to finish it. The first is the library trustee memo and this time I did some major revisions based on feedback from people from the last time but you didn't get it until yesterday and it wasn't in the packet till this morning. So if you would like to wait until the 25th we can do that however we will the library trustees are obviously quite aware that we're discussing all of this. Kathy. I for one thought you did a really good job and I had one pretty minor comment the in the table that talks about total costs you've got you've got an asterisk going it was kind of awkward to find it you could find it saying we mean inflate the price up to such and such a year you know but I just want to make sure that it really strongly emphasized because otherwise we're likely to get back you know and total costs you have somehow to convey that total what I call total total costs you know that are we putting in energy efficiency into the building have we is it more expensive to build in 2022 than it was so just I think putting that is fine but just maybe say a few more words of what what we're asking to be done there because otherwise we're likely to get back on the grant program what was in the original piece because it's always been the same number so just okay is there any other comment at this time then unless I hear otherwise I am going to move to authorize the town council president to send the revised memo dated January 3rd 2021 request for financial information regarding library expansion projects to the jones library trustees on behalf of the town council and it will be as amended because I will make those changes is there a second ryan second thank you any further discussion darcy demont some reason I thought you were in the process of putting this off until the next meeting because it came to us so late we we can do that unless people are ready to vote I would like to get it to the to the library people because they need to start putting the information together yeah I guess I just feel like there wasn't a adequate time to look at it um but you know getting getting things the day of the meeting is doesn't you know and we had a problem we didn't have a problem but we were delayed this time because we had vacations going on etc so that's part of the problem this memo has been before the council two other times I just want to point that out right yeah no I I actually told no problem with the form that it um as as you know because I didn't submit any any comments um but you know when I saw it today I just you know skimmed it and saw the mess you know everything's completely changed and so I haven't had time to look through and see what that's all about one of the I think significant suggestions was that the same questions that are asked of regarding the building renovation and expansion should also be asked of all of the repair options as well and so the attempt in the memo was to make parallel the questions as they are asked both at the cost level and then on through the whole rest of the memo and not have it be chopped up into two different separate things I think what I would suggest is that we move that we do it as amended and if there are other scribner errors or any other major thing we would do it but George or Alyssa you had your hand up I I totally support the hey we didn't get this until very recently concept except for the fact that we've seen different variations of it and we do want it to move on and it's not the be all end all right and so we get all these answers and then before we have the public meeting the forum whatever we're going to call it for the public that we do jointly with them we can say you know what I think we still need this other set of information this isn't ready so as long as we having as long as we do it now I feel like we give ourselves enough time to prepare for that forum very first page describes in fact that this is not the end all to be all of any further questions George did you have a question no I just wanted to echo what's just been said I think we've seen this before it's important that we get it to the trustees for them to look at and we'll have ample opportunity for follow-up okay so um I don't know that we ever had a second on the motion second wait wait a fortune seconded it thank you um is there any further discussion okay then we're going to move to a vote and we're starting with George Ryan yes Kathy Shane yes Steve Schreiber hi Andy Steinberg Andy Steinberg yes uh Sarah Schwartz hi Charlie Balmone yes Alyssa Brewer hi Pat D'Angelo's hi Darcy Dumont the same Lynn Griezmer yes uh Hannah uh Mandy Jo hi and Dorothy Pam yes Evan Ross yes it's 12 in favor none against one abstention none absent okay we are going to move to the and the next item is the draft memo we want requiring possible to require and possible agenda items for 2021 and let me just say we're just at the beginning of this process and all you have in your folder is the compiled comments that we got back from all the from seven counselors and even then I know a couple more might still want to comment the next step is that at each of your committee meetings that you have over the next two weeks please make sure you and your committee look at this from the perspective of your committee and just make sure that anything and everything you think might be coming up or should come up or you would like to come up this year is on there get that to me by the 15th and we'll take it from there okay so we're not voting on that tonight it's just a update on where we are on it right um any questions on that okay then we're moving to appointments we have none committee and liaison reports CRC nothing to report new um and andy finance nothing additional okay gol george no nothing to report jcpc pathe no we haven't started meeting nothing to report uh tso darcy we're just meeting on thursday and we're going to be talking about the water and sewer fly laws and uh north common we need people's comments by uh the end of the day on friday and that will be taken up at the next tsr meeting after that on the 28th and the one on the 28th would be joint a joint it would be a committee of the whole is that correct darcy and you've just you've decided okay thank you um anything else any uh liaison reports at this point yes alissa yeah i just didn't want you to think i forgot about board of licensed commissioners you know how the charter says that um individual committees can make their own rules for public comment they did that so if you have any committees you know of that are looking for rules they did some and then the other thing they're trying to do is come up with some rules for how they review applications you may notice that they have public hearings when people apply for an alcohol license and they realized they don't really have a lot of guidance in terms of what they're allowed to say yes or no to and under various circumstances so they're going to come up with some so good on them thanks nice update any others for liaison reports okay seeing none we do not have any minutes to approve they will be there will be a couple that will come forth on the 25th uh we're to the town managers to report paul um just a couple things i want to note that the community safety working group continues its work it means again wednesday um they will be talking about two public forums that they're trying that they're going to schedule one is for wednesday january 13th at 5 30 p.m and one on saturday january 16th at 3 p.m at least that was the last dates that they had talked about so that's just a time for them to be able to start hearing from the public about the things that they're working on they you know give you a heads up that they're um going to be challenged to meet any kind of january deadline which is what we what the council put to me but they will they will give me an update that i will then present to the council on january 25th in terms of where they are in the process i think so and they and they but they're very actively working they took the week between christmas and new year's off um so they're very diligent working every week and just note that we do have a redesigned website that still has a lot of work to be done on it it's got it's basically got a new sheen to it but it's still there's a lot of organizational things that need to be done on it and we're working on that sort of you know over time as we improve the website and its functionality so that's all i really have there's you know this report was done prior to our vacation so it's you know there'll be more coming next time let me just also point out that if you don't update your version that you look at the website with it won't work well i learned that the hard way um and uh are you saying paul that the community safety working group that you will provide an update on the 25th and if they want an extension you will bring that to us yeah i think the council asked me to report back by the end of january and so that's why it's okay okay okay all right anything any questions of paul or comments okay um then town council reports i really don't have a president's report are there any future agenda items our councilor comments pat de angeles thank you lin um i just wanted to say to the council that when we passed the resolution that was a commitment to structural racism um part of that was an agreement that the council on action that would engage in individual and collective work to understand bias and his and the historical role of racism in our lives and and amherst um and this is ongoing work and so shallonee and i have been looking at a variety of or beginning to look at a variety of anti-racism trainings and workshops that we will be presenting to you to make a decision that we as a group can participate in i think it becomes really important because there'll be no change in amherst unless we are prepared to examine how white supremacy and has shaped us and personally and uh shaped every aspect of our personal and communal lives so i will be bringing that forward with shallonee you know in a probably hopefully at the next meeting or the one after that in february thank you are there any other councilor comments or future agenda items okay then i am turning the meeting over to um athena for the election of officers thanks lin i'm going to review the process really quickly for just to refresh everyone's memory it's been a while since we did this and for anyone listening at home um you all have this in your packets but i'm just going to read it aloud charter section 2.2 requires the town council to elect a president and vice president who shall serve a one-year term the town council rules of procedures section 2.1a states that the clerk of the council shall preside over the election of the president i will ask you for the name of the person you wish to nominate as president nominations are limited to a name not an explanation or discussion nominations do not require a second counselors may nominate themselves after each nomination i will ask the councilor nominated if they accept acceptance is limited to a yes or no not an explanation or discussion when there are no further nominations i will ask each nominate if they would like to make a brief statement up to three minutes i'm using a timer i will call the roll and each counselor excluding nominees may make a brief statement on the election of the president up to three minutes and again i'm going to use a timer when we're done with that i will call the roll for a vote please state either the name of the nominee you wish to vote for or abstain at the conclusion of the roll call vote i will announce the results the nominee who receives the majority of vote at least seven will be deemed elected as president if no one receives a majority of votes i will repeat the process beginning with accepting nominations so we're going to start with nominations len did you have something okay councillor steinberg i nominate me and joe hannacky also hannacky do you accept the nomination yes how's our pan i nominate lin greesmer president greesmer do you accept the nomination yes are there any further nominations seeing none i'm going to ask each nominee if they would like to make a brief statement i have a three-minute timer councillor hannacky go ahead thank you long before i decided to run for president of the council i made the decision to not run for a third term as vice president because i have a firm conviction that it is time for another councillor to learn from the experience of being vice president two years in the roll is long enough only then did i even begin to think about whether i wanted to run for president yes the pool of more free time was a big reason not to be here tonight seeking your vote for president but i realized that i had something to offer this council in the next year i want to bring positive change to the role of the president when we adopted our rules of procedure we also adopted a statement of values many of those values are relevant to my candidacy creating a culture that promotes healthy balance respect for different points of view experience and knowledge teamwork and transparency in everything we do including processes and decisions in a pandemic change can be hard but this council can have stability while changing leadership having served as vice president for two years CRC chair for little more than one and on gol and jcpc since the beginning i'm well versed in the workings of the council the upcoming issues and the running of meetings which will provide stability but in addition to stability i also want to make the presidency more transparent and create a position that offers a healthy balance by bringing more counselors into the work make no mistake i do not intend to make the presidency a part-time job i've tried hard not to do that with the vice presidency or with the chair positions i've helped i don't intend this this to change i plan to spread out the workload especially the numerous meetings with other groups that lin attends in her role as president i'll invite other counselors to attend in my stead seek input about concerns and discussions prior items prior to those meetings and i would report to the full council as appropriate on those meetings let's share these opportunities together and help achieve a healthy balance for the role of president encourage more teamwork among counselors and provide more transparency about who is meeting with the leadership as i've shown throughout the past two years i also value our differences i've worked with several of you on legislation that has been heralded as bipartisan in an amorous way and i've worked with others to ensure that their motions and ideas for council action are presented in an actionable manner even if i don't support them i would bring that same spirit of collaboration and cooperation to the presidency the council's never before had a choice for president while that can sometimes be a good thing it can also be problematic one of the reasons i'm running is to give this council a real choice in its leadership and a choice to decide our values and how long a leader's tenure should be if you want stability while also desiring a presidential role to be treated a little bit differently with a goal towards more transparency better balance and more emphasis on teamwork i ask you to vote for me thank you president grisner yes thank you um being on the town council has been a great experience for all of us and i have enjoyed working with each of you as colleagues on the council my statement reflects what i've learned and what i've heard from you it is short and to the point it focuses on the following action words in the coming year the actions are listen to all the members of the council and to the public communicate regularly with each member of the council and with the public include counselors in decision making such as agenda setting and other key issues delegate to count two other council opportunities to represent or lead the town council's presence at events and other meetings both in person and virtual and explore options and seek solutions by identifying areas where counselors and or counselors and the public are in disagreement understanding why and looking for a path forward that is the greatest to the greatest extent possible allows all to feel they have been heard like all or most of you i hope that the that the residents of my district see fit to return me to the next council however i am constantly reminded that as we begin the final year or three or term there are many issues on our plate and we need to accept that we will accomplish some move some forward and leave some unknown and unknown for future councils for example some issues are required that are required for example passing a balanced budget that funds our schools library town services and capital needs another is our commitment to racial equity social justice and also the climate action i sincerely hope we make some significant strides in these critical areas knowing full well that we will take much longer to accomplish them and while we may make some serious progress in addressing the four major capital investments yet even with a tightening of our belts we will not break ground on a new elementary school during this term i have sincerely enjoyed the challenge of being president we have made great strides towards setting a new tone for this new form of government yet recognize that some residents are not always in agreement with our actions though none of us ran on a pandemic ticket we continue to manage the challenge that has been that was been presented to us i'm standing on my own record and i'm asking for your vote as president for a third term with the goal of making the job more doable more transparent and for those who will follow thank you thank you i'm now going to call the role in each counselor may make a brief statement on the election of the president for up to three minutes i'm going to follow where we left off so we'll begin with councillor shane thank you thank you both for statements i think both candidates are we're very fortunate we've got two strong thoughtful hardworking creative um and dedicated people willing to serve as president um well i want to speak on behalf of lin in terms of my experience with her as president um both on the very positive side but also ways to improve and i think she's already mentioned a few of them i've found both the way you conduct the meetings listen to people who are talking um particularly residents um are reaching out to all of us when you can sense there's um potentially different points of you and trying to figure out a way of bringing those points of you into the meeting if there's not a natural vehicle i think has been truly heroic um and i can only imagine how much thought it takes between each session you mentioned in your where you see that your next year going the one place i think that it could be opened up more is asking any one of us to take on um some of the leadership roles you've done whether it's going to a meeting and giving a talk at the veterans association or if and when we ever open up the north amherst library with this anonymous thing thinking of a local district council as being it you know so that you don't need to be the only spokesperson for the council and i think in your statement you said you recognize that you can loosen that up um so i think in this instance it's really important to keep that tone um that warm and welcoming tone and i certainly think you know mandy it's been a joy to work with you um working on projects with you has been truly amazing and i would hate to lose you in that role because i think you know rather than on procedural things you really when you're when you've got something to work on you do an excellent job so i i just think this the role of president has this other um the warmth in a face uh listening when little kids have come to talk to us i've been very impressed with it and i just encourage you land should you win the election uh to really stay committed to opening it up and to rotating the agenda setting thank you councillor schreiber just thank you both for running and i'll yield my time thank you councillor steinberg can i be heard yes okay um i guess i would let me just say i was pleased to start out by saying i was pleased to nominate mandy um as uh she said in her statement the council should have a choice and that was um one very important reason for me to come forward with the nomination recognizing that i've worked very closely with lin over the last two years and i've known both of those these uh candidates for much longer um we're very fortunate um as kathy said they have two extremely qualified candidates um but um i and i'm gonna be interested in what the rest of you have to say before i decide on my own vote but i did as i said only give a choice i wanted to just say a couple things about mandy however since i did nominate her i've known her since town meeting days i supported um her candidacy for the charter commission as a member of the select board i attended uh most commission meetings and spoke with commissioners outside of meetings mandy was vice chair of the commission and involved with each step of the process to uh develop the concept for a new form of government and a charter to implement that concept during that period we talked about the various options mayors chief executive a mayor elected to be the council chair working with town managers chief executive council electing a president with the town manager and um i've lived in cities or observed cities that had all of these forms of governments and mandy and i over that period of time when she was on the commission had several good conversations about the pros and cons of each alternative and i really appreciated her thoughtfulness and her understanding and her own study of each of those issues and other things that came forward um as far as um problems in challenges as we developed a uh charter a financial policy for example and town manager evaluation which i'd experienced on the select board and consulted with some other councils around the country to get their sense of what they were doing when we first elected a president i knew that mandy understood the charter and the skills required to be president and i was willing to support her at that time but i think we all coalesced at that point around the idea that uh we should start with uh linus president and uh but during that time as mandy served as vice president and has uh demonstrated that she has knowledge skills and commitment to be a good president um but we've worked with lin for two years and we've also observed her skills too so um we have um two very um qualified candidates and um a difficult choice to make for all of us thank you councillor swerx i'll yield my time councillor boneville thank you both for um running for this very um it's a very difficult um position to hold and uh it's been really hard for me and i have to say i still have not decided i'm listening to everyone um the one question that does come to my mind is um that what you know we are going to be making decisions in the middle of covid around some very important capital projects like the library school and and what i'm what i'm thinking about or contemplating is who is going to bring not that one is better than the other or anything but it's just so hard both of you are so good but uh i am thinking of who has uh the experience and skills to navigate the difficult conversations that are gonna happen and gonna be able to um channel those discussions to engage the public and and the councillors in a way that's constructive and moving forward so that's uh i think one thing that i'm keeping in mind as i make my decision thank you thank you councillor burr as everyone says this is incredibly difficult with mandy joe back when we were all running when she initially we were all just running for town council and she asked for my support for president i said of course obviously um and so um then it turned out that that lin was running for president and i'm sorry i'm hearing a lot of noise am i not i'm i'm muted okay so wherever i was um so and then um ended up meeting with both she and lin trying to figure out because as you all say we have should they both bring incredible skills to the table and we are very very lucky that either one of them is willing to serve in this very difficult and challenging role um i certainly uh you know andy mentions his history with mandy joe i recommended her to the town moderator for an appointment to a committee when she was an even younger more fresh faced town meeting member um and i see how hard she's worked in all the roles especially the charter commission where my friend andy says that he was the show horse but she was the workhorse and that was incredibly important and her skills of bringing what the charter commission thought versus what necessarily ended up on paper has been incredibly valuable and so i'm so glad she's been here and been in a leadership role at the same time i've also um enjoyed working with lin and found that even though lin and i have had several long and difficult conversations where she in fact decides not to agree with me on something i appreciate that she does work to listen to me and consider my experience even if she chooses to go a different direction and i feel like in talking with others that she does work to listen to each of us and has worked hard in her role to not play us against each other which i think is so tempting for people to do in a leadership role and i've been very pleased that none of us have done that here that i'm aware of i'm feeling comfortable with her leadership at this point and feel the changes she's willing to make because you all remember me complaining that every time we have this election that i think that there should be less of a team between the two and that there should be more delegation of work and not even looking at it as i'm delegating to you but rather that it is a leadership opportunity for someone else to step up and so i'm really incredibly pleased to hear that she has can that she is planning to embrace that for this final year i think we're ready for that and i think her leadership in capital projects in the past is really going to help us move forward thank you councillor dangelis i have great respect for both of you so i'm going to yield my time okay councillor dimont yeah i find it very interesting to hear that so many councillors have not yet decided and i guess you can count me among them so i i am i am going to yield my time too councillor pam well as everyone has said this is a very difficult decision because both lin and mandy joe have worked together so effectively as a powerful team these last several years but i am supporting lin to continue as president and these are my reasons lin is inclusive she's open to opposing views she does not limit contact to only those who agree with her she's a practitioner of openness and transparency she works to make sure that people have the information they need in a form that they can understand she is respectful of others both in council and town government as well as a residence from the various neighborhoods and amherst she's open-minded and thoughtful and after consideration has been known sometimes to change her mind when presented with new facts and opinions but i think one of the most important qualities is she's very pragmatic she's not doctrinaire and finally sometimes she has been known to have wisdom so i strongly support lin to continue as our president thank you councillor ross i will echo what others have said that we face a tough choice because both of these candidates are incredibly qualified i think the positives that have been spoken about mandy are true about lin and the positives that have been spoken about lin are true about mandy which presents us with a really difficult decision and so i just want to thank both of you for stepping up to this role for running for putting yourselves out there even if you have made it much more difficult for us tonight council ryan and i think this is one of the few council votes where you can't lose whichever way you vote so that in some ways makes it attractive to me whichever way we go i think we're going to go fine i do share some of the sentiment i'm hearing we're going to have some rough waters i think in this third and final year of our term not that it's been smooth sailing for the last two but i think we're going to face some difficult challenges and issues and i guess i'm feeling that i'd like to have a consistency of leadership if only for the public's sake in terms of who's the president so really more for that certainly there's nothing to do with qualifications mandy would be an excellent president and i'm sure she'd handle these things well as well but i just from the point of view of the public the point of view of lin's ability to manage in a way that i know i never could do the many demands that are placed upon her her familiarity with that and the public's familiarity with her i am very much leaning towards her more for the sake of consistency in this third and final year okay we're going to move on to a vote please either state the name of the nominee you wish to vote for or abstain at the conclusion i'll announce the results we're going to start with councillor schreiber greasmer councillor steinberg greasmer councillor schwarz greasemer councillor ball meld greasemer councillor brurer greasmer councillor d angeles greasmer councillor du mat greasmer president greasmer councillor hanneke Councillor Pan. Griezmann. Councillor Ross. Griezmann. Councillor Ryan. Griezmann. Councillor Shane. Griezmann. Congratulations, Lynn. You would please raise your right hand. Do solemnly swear or affirm to faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all duties incumbent on you as president of the Town Council for the town of Amherst. Congratulations. I need to go. I want to pause for a moment. And just because you've been so clear. That you're not willing to run for vice president. Even though I've said, well, what if I nominate you? Well, somebody else, please feel free to do that. Because I want us to hear her act. Absolutely. Say no. This is, I know there's times that you've all felt we had this little, cabal. Well, let me just tell you. It was an amazing experience to be able to have Mandy Joe as vice president these last two years. And she has been. Outstanding. In every possible way. There's going to come a time. When she will leave this council. And I look forward to that time. I know there's times that you've all felt we had this little cabal. Well, let me just tell you. I know they've all been looking forward to that time. So we're going to go on. And I hope that others will have an opportunity to say thanks to Mandy Joe for her work as vice president, unless you nominate her and she becomes president. You know, she may change your mind. So I have to find the script because I guess I do this next election. council vice president nominations are limited to a name and not an explanation or discussion and nominations do not require a second. Counselors may nominate themselves. After each nomination, I will ask the counselor to nominate if they want to be nominated and they agree and they have to accept this and so forth. When there are no further nominations, we will have brief statements of up to three minutes and then we will move on to asking for comments as well as move on then to the roll call vote. So, Alyssa Brewer. I nominate Evan Ross. Evan, are you willing to accept the nomination? Yes. Steve Shriver. I nominate Kathy Shane. Kathy Shane, are you willing to accept the nomination? Yes, I am. Okay. Evan, would you like to make a statement? Yeah, sure. So, thank you. I'm honestly honored just to be nominated to serve as this council's second vice president because, you know, when I decided to run over two and a half years ago, I actually wasn't sure I stood a chance. You know, I was a first-time candidate. I hadn't really engaged much in local politics. I'd only lived here for seven years, which in this town I might as well have moved here yesterday. And so, I really wasn't sure if the public would give me a chance, especially running against and alongside folks with more established status and reputation, many of which I'm surrounded by virtually today. And so, to be nominated and to be considered for a leadership position on this council, to have that vote of faith, it's really significant. And so, I just want to say I appreciate being considered. And I'm also really appreciative of Alyssa for nominating me. You know, she's been a mentor to me as I've grown into this role. She's provided a sounding board, advice, guidance, and, you know, occasionally she's not been afraid to tell me when I'm doing something wrong. So, thank you to Alyssa. Serving as this council's vice president, it wouldn't just be meaningful to me. Symbolically, I think it would be an important move for this council. I am the youngest member of this council, a council which I think we can all admit does not reflect the generational diversity that we see in our community. I'm the only renter on the council in a community where the majority of households are renter occupied. And look, I know I'm not representative of the renter community. I know that I have a lot of privileges that many renters in our community don't. But I have strived to be a voice for renters on this council to represent their interests. I'm also a counselor who balances this role with a full-time job, at a time when we're trying to send the message to the community that the job of a counselor is doable for working folks. And so for the council to elect their youngest member, their only renter, a working member to a leadership position would send a message to our community that we value those groups and that we elevate their experiences and perspectives. But I'm not just asking for your vote simply because it would be symbolically important to members of our community whom are often underrepresented in our town's politics. I believe that I have shown you that I am capable. For nearly a year, I chaired OCHA, guiding us through a difficult and often contentious process. From the start, I worked hard to achieve consensus among diverse opinions. And while consensus did inevitably prove elusive, my goal and my process always revolved around consensus-building and trying to find common and middle ground. And I'm so proud of the work that we did at OCHA, and I believe that my tenure there helped prepare me for this role. And I hope that my colleagues from other committees, whether GOL or CRC or Biola Review Committee or TSO, can also attest to my work ethic and my competence. I also want to assure the council that I have the capacity to do this. While I do support a more restrained role of the vice president, and I will say that I want to be a vice president who serves in a more limited capacity, I do have the capacity to fulfill the responsibility of stepping in when needed. A year ago, I served on four committees, four, and I chaired one of them. I don't know how I did that. Now I serve on two committees and I chair neither of them. And so I believe that I have that capacity at this time to serve in this role. And so I'm asking for your vote because I believe that I have proven myself capable to this council, because even though some of that self-doubt when I was deciding to run, I think I figured it out. And I think that I've worked hard and I think I've earned the title of counselor. And I'm also asking for your vote to show our community that our council values young people and renters and working folks. And so I want to thank you for your consideration and also hopefully for your votes. Thank you. Hey, Matthew. Thank you. Thank you, Steve, for nominating me and for all of you on the council for considering me as vice president. One of the things that has been an incredible joy to me was my decision to run for council because I've lived in Amherst. Evan, you said you've considered a youngster here, but we've been, we've lived here for, our son is 41 and we got here when he was 39. So I dated by our kids. But I didn't know people in town because I was always working outside of town. I was one of the commuters that managed to live outside. So running and knocking on everybody's door played to what I have always valued as a skill of listening really closely to different points of view. But the words people are using because sometimes we talk past each other just because we've stated in one way versus another way. And I would like to be able to bring that set of skills to be the support person to the president. Those of you served with me on committees, whether it was the ad hoc committee on percent for art, or the finance committee where I've got this incredibly strong leader called Andy, Andy, that we all know. But when he reaches out or when he asks me to do more or he seeks my council, he listens and we end up having a conversation that I think just makes things better. And that is who I am. And it probably comes out of the more than a decade I worked with labor management issues, often very confrontational. But then I would think if we both have the same goal or the same, let's get through this and make it better. And my proudest moments were when the opposition completely ignored me, didn't treat me completely very well, but adopted everything I'd come in suggesting. So it meant that I had been heard in a quiet way. So I see that as a skill and I am, I've been a fast learner I hope on the council. I am now chairing committees where I hadn't before. So I know I can preside, but I would see it as a support role to step in. And what I would bring to it is really listening to what we're all saying and that sharing of a gender setting like what haven't we been talking about? Or where should we create more space to have those conversations is what I think I would bring. I think you have two great choices, which we said about the president. We can't lose here. When Evan said he's the youngest, he's the renter. What I really liked running up in district one was when one of the people said you can't lose, you're going to get a woman because all four candidates for district one were female. But I think you have strong candidates here. And I would be honored to serve a couple of people have asked me if I have the time because I have taken on leadership roles and others. And for me, I like the diversity of things I'm working on. So I don't plan to spend an inordinate amount of time as vice president. It more broadens my spectrum of what things are coming up for the council. So I can think ahead. I don't have to do that right now. So I think I'll end that statement. I'd be honored if you vote for me, but I think you've got good choices as well. Thank you. Okay, then I believe. If I'm wrong, that the first person that's starting with I'll slow Steinberg. Oh, Andy Steinberg. Thank you. Andy. One minute, spot again. Again, we have two very strong candidates and I have enjoyed working with both of them in the very in the capacities that they have been on the council with. I think that we all have Kathy has been a really tremendous vice chair in finance. I've worked with her and during capital planning on the percent for arts and her organizational leadership skills have been great. I've observed the same qualifications coming out of on the committees that he's chaired that he's referred to and on his work that he's done, for example, now in CRC. So I think that we have two great choices and it's going to be a tough decision to make, but so is the last decision we made. Sarah Schwartz. So I guess one of the things that I would say is that the year that I chaired OCA was very difficult and I had to step down for personal reasons. And Evan took over OCA and I was not surprised, but completely impressed by the way that Evan was able to organize our conversations and he was able to lead us through some very difficult conversations. Evan actually has a lot of warmth in addition to, I think, being a leader. And I would have to say that he has definitely been one of the brighter spots that I have had on this council and I'm impressed by the leader that he is and that he's willing to listen to other people and that he actually has a lot of humility. Melanie. Today's council is literally giving me ulcers. I don't know about the candidates, but I am really, again, both amazing candidates and we're lucky for that. Thank you both. I can say for Kathy that having been in some of the committees with her that, of course, we all know she's extremely thoughtful, extremely hard working. And one thing I particularly appreciated is her bridge building capacity where we would get stuck in issues and she would be able to listen to different perspectives and provide a solution moving forward. And one of my concerns about her right now, not concern, but would be that you are already providing a lot of leadership in the different committees that you are already participating in. And with Evan, I don't think I've even shared this with Evan, but I heard him during the campaign somewhere in some public meeting and I was like, this young fellow is going to be in a leadership position in politics. And I recognize that potential in you and you've proven me completely right in your work ethic and the initiatives you've taken with the different bylaws. And even with the CRC, I may not agree with you completely with what went down, but I'd so appreciate you taking the time to actually understand those complex issues and moving us forward in that. And I also, I did not come into this meeting decided because of different people and everyone was so good. And I was like, why don't you all just decide who between yourselves? But now that we are here and I would like to see a mature, wisdom led leader and the opportunity to have a younger person who's mentored. And as Evan said, having the youngest person really sends out a message. We do want to invite more people who come from diverse backgrounds like, yes, and being a woman is definitely diversity as well. But also renters and no doubt Evan has been a voice for renters. And so I am leaning towards, I would say. Yeah, that's my reasoning. And it's really, really, really hard. Listen. Okay. Racing with the with the clock is we know that Kathy is very capable. I worked with her on rules of procedure. As she pointed out, she was not engaged at all in town government before she ran with for town council. And I was very skeptical of that. And she has shown herself to be incredibly capable, diligent, thoughtful, and trying to bring people together around a number of different kinds of issues. There's no question that she does a great job. And I'm supporting Evan for vice president for just some of the following reasons. Evan is obviously smart, capable, has a sense of humor, but yet doesn't take himself too seriously and does take our work very seriously. He explains things really well at district meetings. I've seen him do this. I've seen him engage with college students. And he does a terrific job. It's clear that he wants town council to be more accessible to our residents. He is far more patient than I will ever be. You will see that if you look at back at any of our hoka meetings in particular, if you look at our TSO meetings now, you will see that he is far more patient than I could be. And as he pointed out, we do not in fact agree on everything. If you think I've forgiven him for disbanding Oka, that hasn't happened and never will. But the reality is we work together well and I think he works together with others well. He always worked very thoughtfully and diligently to ensure that all points of view were represented and the reports he wrote as chair of Oka, which was not easy because we had some really, really hard conversations. He never ever said, I'm the chair. So I decide he never takes that approach. And I think that is so incredibly important with 13 really opinionated people to work with. And as he said, in a town with our demographics, we need to look at how we look to the community. Seven of 13 of us are over 70, which comports super well with the emails we just got, but also tells us a little bit about the emails we just got. So, you know, this is not about ageism, but it is about the fact that people of the global majority, people of color, people who aren't anywhere near retirement age, need to be able to see themselves as leaders in municipal government, which seems really boring in comparison to a lot of other things they could do, but in municipal government as well as all the other organizations that people are always recruiting young people for people who aren't older white homeowners, who don't participate, don't participate, not just because they're busy raising their kids, it's because they don't see themselves within the town council. And it's really important we do that. You might think it's strange given how much I complain about the president and vice president team, I believe someone else referred to it as a cabal, although I certainly did not. But I still see the vice presidency as a good way, not an essential way, but a good way to learn about being president. And I very much plan to have Evan B. Town Council president in the future for all the reasons he talked about. And so I think this would, I'm thrilled that he has the time to be vice president now. And I really hope that you'll support him in that role. Pat D'Angelo. Oh, I work very well with Kathy on the wage theft work. I've worked with Evan and a variety of committees and particularly loved our work on the bylaw review committee. I will yield my time. Two very good candidates. Darcy. Yeah, I would just like to say that that I think that it is, it would be really valuable to have a president vice president team that is represents more of a view of a mix of viewpoints. And more so than what we've had. And along the lines of what we promoted when we had our first election, if you recall. And I really, really admire Kathy's ability to, as Shalini described, really collaborate, really bring people together of different views and help them to move forward, just like she did today. You know, she really, her goal was to get something done and to do it in a way where she was trying to get everyone to agree different sides. So I'm supporting Kathy. As I get to actually say something, let me just say I could work with either of these people as vice president, each brings something to the table, different from Mandy Joe, but in a very, very equivalent way. And so I'm not going to weigh the way at this point, but I am going to just assure you that as one of the old people in the crowd, I'm more than glad to work with the youngest in the crowd, and I'm also glad to work with one of the other old people in the crowd. We're nailing people for their age these days, seven of us over 70. Ooh, I don't know if I like that one. Slap for your shots now, gang. So let's just say that I yield the rest of my time and I go on to Mandy Joe. I yield my time. And Dorsey Pym. Well, I'm going to say to Evan what a lot of people say to young people, which is we appreciate you very, very much, and we know you'll still be here tomorrow. It's not as if you're going to disappear from your leadership role, which you have been playing a very strong leadership role by not being the vice president. But I support Kathy because, yes, although she is older, she actually does have the same energy as someone of Evan's age. I have worked with her a lot and have enjoyed it. She works very well with others. She's fair, trusted, a positive force, a talented researcher. She's very collegial. She goes the extra step and she brings us into the picture. And she's a great listener and she often incorporates the ideas of others into her vision. I did like the word that I forget who said it. I think it was Shalini, that she's a bridge builder. So we have great choices here, but just as Lynn is going to reach out to Mandy Joe, as she always does to find out what is the right movement here, she will be reaching out to Evan too because we know where his strengths are and that he's an active positive force. But I do strongly support Kathy in this particular role. George Ryan. I felt that Alyssa had stolen my speech. She really touched on almost all the points I was going to make. So in a sense I want to say what Alyssa said. But let me just say briefly that having served with Evan on what is it, GOL, OKA and now TSO, that I can very much attest to his respect for process and for how hard he works for consensus. And those are two things that I've certainly taken, observing him when he was chair of OKA, as Sarah mentioned. I've tried to, in my own small way, emulate as chair of GOL. But he very much is someone who cares about process and seeks consensus. And he has extraordinary grasp of complexity. The current structure that we have of council committees is largely his work. And I think it's a testament to his commitment to council and to his intelligence and to his work ethic. So for all those reasons and numbers of others that Alyssa has mentioned, but you know my main reason is I just want to vote for somebody who's half my age. I'll try to compose myself after that one. Steve. Steve's run. Yeah, so thank you. So you might recall that I nominated Kathy Shane for this position last year. And she, as I recall, you declined to run. So that was an open offer. And I'm really honored that you, I mean I'm really happy that you accepted this time. So I have had the honor of serving with Kathy on, well, Kathy's been chair of two committees that I've been on, the Public Art Task Force and the, I'm sorry, the 1% for, the Percent for Art Task Force and currently the Elementary School Building Committee. And I think she's done a fantastic job in terms of being fair, in terms of organizing, in terms of communicating during the meetings and between meetings. So I have a tremendous amount of respect for her. Councilor Jamon also hit on a reason that I nominated Kathy because I think that differing opinions, not that we, I don't think that this council really has any blocks. I think that there are those that want to think we have blocks. I think that our blocks change the way that we vote changes depending on what the issues are. I do follow Kathy on the voting, so I'm right behind her. So I should know whether or not we vote the same way or not. But just if nothing else, I think that, you know, at least the perception that we have differing opinions at the top, I think is important. I should also speak to Councilor Ross, so he's my neighbor, he's my fellow District 4 Councilor, he's my UMass colleague. And we've obviously served together on District 4 meetings, but we're all largely organized by Evan and we've served together on committees. And I have tremendous respect for Evan also. He's all of the qualities that Kathy has. And I think others of you have said this, that he's also organized smart, great communicator. So I think we have a win-win situation here. We have included individual comments, and we are now going to move on to the vote. I'm going to ask the Clerk of the Council to call the roll call. And when you do that, you state the name of the person that you are voting for, for Vice President, or you state abstain. And so with that, I turn it back over to the Clerk of the Council. Councilor Schwartz. Evan Ross. Councilor Ball-Mellon. Evan Ross. Councilor Brewer. Evan Ross. Councilor D'Angeloz. Evan Ross. Councilor Dumont. Kathy Shane. Councilor President Griezmann. Abstain. Councilor Hannake. Evan Ross. Councilor Pan. Kathy Shane. Councilor Ross. Evan Ross. Councilor Ryan. Evan Ross. Councilor Shane. Kathy Shane. Councilor Schreiber. Kathy Shane. Councilor Steinberg. Evan Ross. We have eight for Ross, and four for Shane, and one abstention. Congratulations, Councilor Ross. If you would please raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear or affirm to faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all duties in coming on you as Vice President of the Town Council for the Town of Amherst? I do. Congratulations. We have concluded that. We have a big year ahead, and it's late at night, and so the meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.