 We are recording. Okay. So now I am going to language that's been sent to me by Jennifer Moyston, which I as always mislead, but pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021, this meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. Follow the instructions on the Amherstown website, www.amherstma.gov. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. I now call this meeting to order. Okay. And I will say that the town is recording this meeting. And if anyone else is doing so at this time, please notify us now. All right. And hearing none, we will move along with our agenda. Let me share my screen. So what would you say if somebody said they were recording it? So if someone else is recording, we just need to be aware. That's up to them whether or not they wanna do that, but we just have to be aware of it because there's laws about being recorded without being notified. Yes, we used to call it when I was working as a prosecutor that's called, I believe that's called the wiretap statute. That is correct. Yes. That's not allowed unless the other parties agree. You need mutual consensus to choose it, yes. Okay. So for example, I wanted to record a phone call that came into your house without telling the person that would be a violation of the wiretap statute. Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. So I will share and get this. What do we want here? Do you all have the agenda? I'm drawing a blank as to what I normally show you. I think I'll show you these because you all have the agenda. Three system minutes. The agenda and the minutes to us yesterday. Okay, great. So then we will go down the agenda. There looks to be no public participation, but we can leave that open if everybody is okay with that and move along to approve the minutes from the February 10th, 2022 meeting, which I have up here for everyone to see. Gentlemen, have you had a chance to look at the minutes? Yes. No. Okay. Move for approval. For approval. Second. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Then we have the motor vehicle excise abatements. I can pass that along to Theresa. If anybody has any questions about these in particularly. Looks like somebody was busy with an adding machine. As you'll see, these are mostly Commonwealth UMass. There's some others mixed in there as well, but Amherst College, this was just the big commitment that went out at the beginning of the year. Does anybody know what black squirrel is? So I think it's a bed and breakfast or something. I'm not really sure, a farm. Okay, just wondering. All right, I'll move these quickly then so we can get to the bottom here. Today, maybe. So this is excise weeks from February 2nd to the 28th, so it's the whole month and that's partially why it's as big as it is. So here we have, oh, it's got, did this have two years worth, Theresa, is that why there's two amounts there? Okay, so the first 1,011 abatements I believe was the abatements that were done for fiscal year 2021. And that was in the amount of $80,430.93. And then the second portion of this commitment was 100, excuse me, 1,018 abatements in the amount of $81,145. So does that mean we didn't do abatements last year for these or what? Why are we doing this? No, so this is part of the excise that is sent to us every year by the registry of motor vehicles. And the first commitment that comes in of the calendar year is usually pretty large. So this is an abatement that we have to process every year for vehicles. We're looking into, I think as we mentioned last time, we're looking into a way to actually just mark the university exempt. So we don't have to process every single abatement. We can actually just mark them exempt. They'll show up on the commitment as being there, but they'll be exempt. And so you won't see them being included in the totals for taxable. So why do you have two years? So there were two. So there's also another commitment that comes through at the same time for the end of the calendar year, 2021. And so generally when that happens, we get some abatements on those as well. But every person or business or anybody who owns a vehicle that's registered in the state of Massachusetts has three months or one year after the bill has been paid, three years or one year after the bill has been paid to process an abatement. So if somebody just somehow forgot about it and just got around to it because maybe they got an excise tax bill for this year or they said, oh, I forgot to do this last year. They have the ability to do that. So that it could have been a number of things why we had two years there. So it sounds like the university masks forgot about it last year. Nope, this is one that we have to process every year for them. So they could have had some new vehicles that they bought at the end of calendar year 2021, which is maybe why we had some for 2021 for them. But the majority of theirs I think was 2022. You'll see over on the left-hand side, the calendar year there is listed. I can go back up to the top and see. Sorry, I'm gonna ask you to do that. Okay. To go back up just so I can understand what it. Yep, so see there's this small chunk here of 2021 abatements. And actually it looks like there's just two from UMass. And so chances are they got those vehicles new at the end of calendar year 2021. Seeing the amount of 139.07, it was probably two brand new vehicles. That was probably for, could have been two months, could have been a month depending on what the vehicle was. It looks like it was a Ford of some sort. So my guess would be that's probably one or two months worth of bills. And then you'll see all the rest of that was everything. So you'll, I'm sorry to mean to interrupt. So you'll see that there's three years of abatement or there's a 2020 bill that we received in abatement request from Nissan Infinity 4. So we processed that one too. I didn't even see that one up there. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. Okay. So at the totals, I thought we were approving two totals. We're just approving one total. Yeah, the big amount at the bottom, the very last total will be the total of this 1798 for 2020, the 551,054 for 2021, and then the larger amount for 2022. Okay, I got it. Which is the 22 is pretty much mostly from the commitment. From the first commitment. Yeah, for the first commitment of this year. So the 81,145 is a total of all three of those years. Okay, got it. Sorry about that. I goofed that up in the beginning. So my apologies. All right, I move to approve our signatures on that. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. That's unanimous. All right. We've got a little bit of an easier one here. So we have, again, two years. So we have 2021 and 2022. And this is for March 1st through March 4th. So we have the one for 2021 single for $29.06. And then the total for 2022 is 561.20 and 29 cents, totaling 5.90 and 35 cents for this particular week. Move to approve those abatements with our signatures. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. All right. Catching up with you. I didn't get my notes done ahead of time this week. OK. All right. So the only other thing I'm going to stop sharing for the moment, the only other thing that we have on the agenda today for the public section of the meeting is just the principal assessor update and to verify our next meeting. So I will go ahead quickly and give you an update as to what's going on here. For that point of information, I saw you several weeks ago walking around the South Amherst Common. I wondered what you were doing. But I don't want to get in the early, relatively early morning, and I wonder what you were up to. Yes. So I was completing an inspection for an over-evaluation so I can give you more details specifically once we get into the executive session. OK. But basically what I was doing was completing an inspection of a property. So I did an interior. At that particular house, I had wanted to take a picture of the exterior of the house. And I really don't like to get my car in the picture. I try to, when I'm taking photos, it's sort of an unwritten rule that you just don't get people. So if there's people in a front yard of the house, you just ignore that photo for now and go back to it later. Or if you have really good software, you can Photoshop them out. But it's just best not to have the picture with people no matter what. And so I sort of run that rule with everything. So I like to try to get just the things that we can't move. Or sometimes the people don't have a garage or something like that. But I tried to get all of my things out of the photo. So I had parked it in the center at the common. And I had walked back across the grass to get a photo of the house without a car in the driveway. OK, you parked right next to me and I was working on my car as an undistinguished aging white male and we watched you at work. And I didn't say anything. And I just was wondering what that was. So yeah. Gotcha. That's what I was doing. Well, very concentrated. You didn't notice me at all. I didn't. I did not. I often, a lot of times I can pull out of the driveway to a point where I'm still in the driveway within I'm not in the middle of the road and I can get out and take a picture. But sometimes and sometimes I can just pull down the road a little bit, being that it was a bit of a tight road. And I knew that there was a parking spot right there. I just figured, you know, so sometimes you'll see me doing stuff like that. Sometimes you'll see me right in front of the house. Sometimes you'll see me at the top of the driveway or something. But that's what I was doing. So I enjoyed that proof that you were doing your job at our for our taxpayer dollars. Yes, yes. OK, all right. Well, along the lines of me doing my job, my assessor update today is very quick. We are finishing up on the over valuations. We have a bunch of them to go through in executive session. And I think I have maybe only three or four left that we'll talk about in the next meeting. Some of those are just the more complicated ones. And I just haven't finished them yet. And then there's one that I'm waiting on the applicant to be ready to do an inspection. And we may have to get an extension on that, which I can again explain more so in executive session on that particular one. Otherwise, Teresa has been working her tail off on personal property. We've gotten in a ton of form of lists since she's been working really hard on entering those. We have gotten in the income and expense. The deadline has passed for all of our forms, so the income and expense, free ABCs, form of lists. Anything else? What am I forgetting? Form of lists, three ABCs, income and expense. I think those are the things. Yeah, just those three. Those three right now. So we have our deadline has passed. It was March 1st. So we're now starting to enter all the information that we have. What was the second one? ABC? Three ABCs. So that is for nonprofit organizations. Oh, OK. Are we seeing more personal properties because folks are working at home more? Do you think? What do you think? I mean, I don't know if the piles that we have look like normal. But I would say if people were working from home more often, we would probably see less of them, because maybe the business has shut down altogether and they've gotten rid of their items. In many cases, that's not the scenario. They still have their office space. And so if the space still belongs to the business, even if it's empty, it's taxable. Theresa and I actually did a seminar the other day with the Hampshire County Assessors Association all about personal property. And in the beginning, I thought, oh, my God, this is so complicated. But in the end, I felt much more confident in my ability to be able to assess personal property. It was a great seminar on how to assess personal property and how to do an inspection to find personal property. So that was really, really helpful. Can you invite us? Can you invite us? You should have gotten the email, I think, if you're a member of the MAAO. But is there a video of it? There was, but they didn't. For some reason, they didn't record it, which was, it's too bad because it's nice to be able to go back and look at those. So you want action? But I, well, I didn't say anything. I can certainly, if you guys want to, we can set up a time to talk about personal property. And I can certainly relay that information to you and also show you the copies of the slides that we had received from them as well. So if that's something of interest, we can certainly do that. So we're working on those things. David was in the other day. We worked on some supplemental bills that I'd been waiting to get the occupancy permits on. So we got those completed. He'll be back next week on Wednesday to work on the RFPs for the cyclical and revaluation inspection process that we have to go through with the state. So we have to put out a request for bids for help with those projects because those are massive projects. I've been in contact with the DOR and they're aware of where we're at with all that stuff and just waiting to hear when we actually send those, the paperwork out for a bid so that people can bid on that position. Is it a position or a project? It's a project. So it's a position temporarily working with us, like a contracted service. I guess I shouldn't call it a position. I should call it a contracted service. And so once- Properties? Right. And once that's completed, that service will be no longer needed for that particular item. So there's a line item in our budget and in your budget for that? There's not a line item in our budget. So the way that Amherst does it is they put it as a capital expenditure because it's something that only happens with the REVAL every five years and with the cyclicals every 10. And so the way the budget works is that if I put a budget item line in our specific budget, we have to use it that fiscal year. And that... So it's much more complicated to do it that way because then you have to estimate how much it's gonna cost you per year instead of the total amount that you need for the whole project. So much easier to do it with the capital project because then you can get funded for the whole thing. And if it takes multiple fiscal years, you still have that funding available to you. So you don't have to worry about trying to get more because you didn't use it all and so on and so forth. So, but otherwise, I think, you know, I mean, duties as normal excise abatements, you know, people coming in with questions, emails, things like that, pretty much normal right now. It's quieting down slightly to get ready to ramp back up in the springtime when it gets warm and we can go out and do our building permit inspections and all that. Not a whole lot to say today. Gentlemen, any questions? Do we pick a date? So, yes, we can pick a date for our next meeting. I think, let me just look at the calendar. So we have the 10th. So right now, it looks like it would fall on... 14th. Thursday, the 14th. Yep, yep. Looks like that would work for me if that works for all of you. Okay, all right, so we'll schedule the next meeting for the 14th of April. And... That is on Thursday. So like in person? I think it's a possibility. I think from what I understood the other day, they're still working on trying to figure out what to do and should have a vote by the end of this month. CDC and federal guidelines have given us the ability to... Not CDC, federal guidelines have given us the ability to actually be remote or hybrid until July. But it sounds like the council has been discussing what to do with that. There was a meeting the other day of... Actually of non-union staff members and that was one of the things that was discussed is how do we feel about the remote versus the in-person? Just so you know, I spoke up and I spoke to both sides of that. I said that basically it doesn't get a little harder for us because we have a lot of sensitive documents that we can't just email to each other because if it ever gets hacked, someone's financials could get out there. So it would be easier to meet in-person. However, if someone isn't home and they travel, it's nice to be able to do the remote meetings. Also, when it comes to the late night, not so much for us, but the late night meetings, it is nice to be able to do that from the comfort of your home. And I said, from the bottom down, you could be in your jammies. Just comfortable and nice. And you know, when you're in-person, you can't do that. But, so you know... Richard, you gotta stop coming to your pajamas. I just wanted to report that I'm fully clothed. You're not the Folger's guy with his... Hi, hang on. So anyway, so I know that I spoke for both sides of that just to be fair. But anyway, I think with that being said, if there's no other questions or comments that we can do in the public section, we can close the public part of the meeting and move into executives. And don't we have to give at least a public reason why we're going into executive sessions? Oh, yes, yes. So in the executive session today, we will be discussing two personal exemptions and a pile of overvaluations. All right. And then directly after executive session, we intend to adjourn the meeting. Right. So with all that having been said, I move that we go into executive session. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay, so we will close public comment and I will stop recording. Is there any other things that we want to put out to the public before we go directly into executive session? Okay, hearing none, I'm gonna go ahead and stop that recording. Thank you.