 Okay. The appointed hour is 6.30, having been reached. I want to welcome everybody to this meeting, the Amherst-Zoning Board of Appeals. My name is Steve Judge, and as chair of the Amherst-Zoning Board of Appeals, I call this meeting to order. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order, suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, general laws chapter 30A, section 18, and the governor's March 15th, 2020 order, imposing strict limitations on the number of people that may gather in one place. This public hearing of the town of Amherst-Zoning Board of Appeals is being conducted via a remote participation. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but the public can listen to the proceedings by clicking a link on the town's webpage. In accordance with the provisions of Massachusetts general laws chapter 40A, article 10, special permit granting authority of the Amherst-Zoning By-law. This public meeting has been duly advertised and notice thereof has been posted and mailed to parties at interest. We will begin with a roll call with the regular members of the ZBA who have been in panel for consideration for the items on tonight's agenda. Mr. Steve Judge is here, that's me. Mr. Langsdale. Here. Ms. O'Meara. It appears that she stepped away. Yeah, we'll get back to Ms. O'Meara. Ms. Parks. Here. Preside. Mr. Maxfield. The floor is on the property and I'll start with. Mr. Maxfield. Here. And associate members, Ms. Waldman. Here. Mr. Barak. Sorry for that. Mr. Greeny. And Mr. Meadows. Mr. Presid. Ms. O'Meara, you're here. Here. All right. Also in attendance tonight is Marine Pollock, Christine Brestle, and David Wasakiewicz of the Amherst town staff, as well as Jonathan Witten, a KP law firm who is serving as outside counsel to the board on this matter. The Zoning Board of Appeals is a quasi-educational body that operates under the authority of Chapter 48, the General Laws of the Commonwealth, for the purpose of promoting the health, safety, convenience and general welfare of the town, by the inhabitants of the town of Amherst. One of the most important elements of the Amherst Zoning bylaws is section 10.38. Specific findings from this section must be made for all our decisions. All hearings and meetings are open to the public and are recorded by town staff. Each petition is heard by the board is distinct and is evaluated on its own merits, and the board is not ruled by precedent. The procedure is as follows. The petitioner presents the application to the board during the hearing, after which the board will ask questions for clarification or additional information. After the board is completed his questions, the board will seek public input, if time permits. The board speaks with the permission of the chair. If a member of the public wishes to speak, they should so indicate by using the raise hand function on their screen. The chair with the assistance of the staff will call upon people wishing to speak. When you are recognized, please state your name and address to the board for the record. All questions and comments must be addressed to the board. And I want to remind the applicant, my fellow board members and the public to seek recognition of the chair before speaking. The board will normally hold public hearings or information about the project and input from the public is gathered, followed by public meetings for each. The public meeting portion is when the board deliberates and is generally not open, not an opportunity for public comment. If the board feels it has enough information to time it will decide upon the application tonight. By statute for a special permit, the board has 90 days from the closed hearing to file a decision. For a variance, the board has 100 days from the date of filing to file its decision. No decision is final until the written decision is signed by the sitting board members and is filed in the town clerk's office. Once the decision is filed with the town clerk, there is a 20 day appeal period for an agreed party to contest the decision with the relevant judicial body and superior court. After the appeal period, the permit must be recorded that the registry of deeds to take effect. Tonight's agenda is as follow. A public hearing to consider ZBA 202039, Valley Community Development Corp. 132 North Hampton Road, a request to a comprehensive permit under Massachusetts General Laws chapter 40B to construct a new two and a half story residential multifamily building containing 28 small studio apartments and related common areas on an approximate 0.88 acre property located at 132 North Hampton Road, map 14C parcel eight, general residence and educational zoning districts. This public hearing is continued from July 2nd to 2020. The items to be discussed tonight are as follows. The applicant will finish the PowerPoint presentation from this July 2nd public hearing. ZBA and the applicant will discuss the public presentation, the public PowerPoint presentation from the applicant. The applicant presents a detailed support supportive services plan and the ZBA and the board will discuss that. Board discussion regarding general laws chapter 44, section 53G and a motion on that subject if needed. A board compilation of questions, requests and possible conditions for considerations and other items ZBA chair may deem appropriate. In this general public comment period that we have each time and other business not anticipated within 48 hours. We have a full agenda tonight and I do not expect there will be time for public comment during this meeting. We have had another public hearing set for what we have another public hearing set for August 20th on this application. And during that public hearing, we will set aside sufficient time for public comment on the application as we did for the July 2nd public hearing. Since the July 2nd public hearing, the board has received the following documents. The applicant has submitted the full PEL application and the supportive services plan. The applicant has also resubmitted the July 2nd PowerPoint presentation. Since the July 2nd hearing, the board has received three public comments. An email from Jim and Bert Schlesinger, a memo from Barbara and Al Wulbert and an email from Hilary Wulbert Farrell all dated July 28th, August 5th and August 5th. I wish to note that associate member Maureen, is there any other documents that we've received that I did not list? Yeah, that's it. I wish to note that the associate board member, Sharon Waldman is a designated alternate member for consideration of this comprehensive permit. Although she could not attend July 2nd public hearing, she has watched the video of the hearing and filed the appropriate paperwork and she will be eligible to vote if called upon to do so. Ms. Waldman, is that correct? Waldman, is that correct? Thank you. The first item tonight is for the applicant to complete the July 2nd presentation. After that presentation, the board may ask questions. I'll remind the board members that the supportive services plan is the topic of a discussion item, following discussion of the July 2nd presentation. And I think the bulk of our time will be spent on the supportive services plan. So please hold your questions regarding supportive services until that time. So do we have the representative from the applicant ready to speak to this? One moment, let me bring them up. All right. Good evening. Can you identify yourself and your position and your address, please? Absolutely. I'm Jane Lechler and I am the executive director at Valley Community Development, replacing Joanne Campbell just recently. I've been in the background of these meetings while Laura Baker has been presenting and she's on vacation this week, a well-deserved vacation. And so I'm gonna be doing my best with Rachel and Tom on the line and we have Felicity Hardy here as well, representing Valley, so. Oh, and my address, Valley's address is 256 Pleasant Street in Northampton, Mass. Perfect, thank you. Well, when we last met, we were going through a July 2nd presentation. We did not have time to finish that. And the first order of business is to finish the presentation July 2nd. Great. So you may proceed. Okay. So Maureen, I can just share my screen. Yes, yep. Now, what I'm hoping for here is that I'm recalling correctly where we left off. I'm gonna flip through quickly. I believe we made it through the bike storage shed and we talked about the lighting plan and then we, and the lighting fixtures. So we're gonna pick up right here. Did we talk about the parking management plan? I think that comes, I don't have this completely memorized. I think that's still coming. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Since we're gonna, since you're going to begin briefly discussing the supporting services plan, we're gonna spend a lot of time on that as the next item. So go through that briefly and then discuss the supporting service plan in more detail in the next item. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. We left the slides in the order that they were in. And so really we're just, we have a placeholder here saying exactly that. So thank you, Steve. And so we'll pick up on this in two additional sections coming up. I will just mention here that the request was that we're responding to directly is whether the support and service plan that we submitted as a part of our PEL was up to date. And our response there is that this is a draft plan that has been submitted to DHCD. Described it as a robust plan, but the plan would not be final until approved and the funding is granted by DHCD. So then as we said, we'll go into this in more detail coming up. One of the board's questions was about distance from neighboring properties. And so what we've got here are some measurements narratively. So, and then I think it's easier to look at the plan but I'll pause here on this slide that the footprint of our current house is 79 feet from the neighbor's house. And then the project's proposed location is 66 feet from the property line closest to the massing of the neighbor. And then 90 feet approximately to the west of the property line. So this estimates the new building will be 145 to 169 feet from the neighbor's house at 126. So here is, I'll just use my cursor if you can see my cursor. This is the new footprint outlined in red towards the lower left here of the proposed building. This gray is the existing building. And then this is the neighbor's building at 126 Northampton. And then here is the indications of the measurements that we just described. Here's the property line between the two and then the entire distance between buildings. I think that's pretty straightforward. Any questions on that? Yeah, I have one. Okay. Mr. Langston. You showed the distance from the new footprint to the 126 Northampton road but it's on the footprint it's to the setback of the building rather than the front corner. What's that distance? I do not have additional measures here but we can certainly provide that. Let me make sure I do not believe. Yeah, we do not have that measure on here. So we would have to provide that for you, Mr. Langsdale. Okay. Okay. You'd like it from Northampton road. No. Oh, I'm sorry then. From the corner of the building, the most prominent corner toward the 126 Northampton to the house. You have, you've measured 172.42 from 126 to the setback of the footprint. Yes. Clarifying. I think if I can help, I think what he's looking for is he wants from that point by this, where it's 66, yeah, where it says 66 to the house. Right. Is that correct, Mr. Langsdale? I'm sorry. Rachel, were you going to say something there? I was going to say, I can pull that up on my computer here and can provide that answer in a little bit. I just need to open the file and get there. Okay. Why don't we let you do that, Rachel and we'll proceed. Okay. Any other questions regarding the distance to the, between the two, the budding properties? Okay. Proceed. We have a snow removal plan that includes quite a bit of detail in response to the board's request here about de-icing methods and snow removal. Our snow and ice removal plan, I'm going to just outline the basics of our plan and then Rachel has done quite a bit of research and has some information to add on products that would be used on snow, on ice removal. So our approach here is just to make sure that we're using the strategies that work on paved surfaces and that are the best treatment for pavement and or surrounding planting. So there's a combination of factors there that we'll describe. So the goal of the snow removal plan is to preserve access for vehicles to the property and support emergency vehicle turnaround and access to the hydrant if necessary. The most important part of the plan is the removal of the material from the paste service for the safety of residents and staff and visitors. I don't know, Rachel, if you want to just pick up here. So I think there'd be a little bit more continuity if you... Sure, okay. Yeah, so we're going to use, there are three chemicals that we would like the, and we talked about this before, I think at the last meeting a little bit, but we're going to be using chemicals that have the lowest impact on the paved areas and the planting areas. And based upon what the weather conditions at the time in terms of temperature will help the management decide what's the most appropriate material for that. And that just pointing out that we're using one strategy, one strategy would be to not have any plantings and just push the snow into the site, but then that would really have more of a institutional feel and not feel like a resident. So we're really trying to make this feel homey with lots of shrubs. So the team as developer and the management have agreed to, in cases where the snow can't be pushed anywhere on site, that it will be trucked off site and had its nose. So Ms. Lothar, can you show me on the drawing of the property where the snow would be pushed to if it's not trucked away? Well, I think that the grass paved areas are what we would use first for storage. So I think that that site, I don't know that the site plan I just showed is going to visually illustrate that. I know we do have a site plan that would do that. There's the green-pavared area of the parking that we've described in a previous presentation. And we're not expecting that that area would be used for parking. So that would be the onsite place that we would push the snow. And then if there was snow beyond that that needed to be stored, we would need to have that removed from the site. Excuse me. Ms. Linesville. In previous presentations, you've talked about those green pavers. That's shown as part of the parking lot. So to say that there's not going to be parking there and you're going to push snow there, where do those cars go? Well, we wouldn't push, I'm sorry, let me clarify. We are not expecting that the spaces will all be used. If the spaces are being used in the winter, we will remove the snow from the area where spaces are cars are being parked and we would need to go offsite for snow storage at that point. If there are no cars there, we would use that area for storage. All right, but if there are no cars there at the time the snow comes down, but then there are cars that need to park there after that, where do they park? Well, I think that's a fair question. And I think we would both have a sense of how much parking is being used if it were being utilized, we would clear those spaces and take it offsite. So are you saying that if you have permits and badges for every spot on your parking space, you have to put it someplace else? Absolutely. So if you have leased out each of those parking spaces, you'd have to store it offsite. Is that correct? We would not be leasing the spaces, but yes, if we had- But however you sign those spaces. Yes, yes. Okay. Okay. There's a question about how many spaces. That's, you can talk about that in the parking plan, but. All right. Okay. Good. Any other questions on snow removal from the members? All right. Great. Yeah, I have one thing. I would like to request that when you put these pieces of information up, which are all words, and you start talking about different aspects of it, I don't get to read these. You know, we should go over these point by point. I, yeah, I think that's fair. I think Rachel and I are just getting a little aligned there. So why don't I just make sure that we go through these four slides so that there's no question that we're seeing, that you're seeing all the content. So I'm just going to back up. Thank you. Yes, no problem. So this was the slide that I covered that was describing the snow and ice removal plan. And we, we, we spent a moment there. So I think we're good there, but I'll leave a moment. I had a question with your share. Yes. Don't, yeah. So the idea is that you would, you would put the snow on a parking. You don't expect to be utilized. And then if it's, if it's sitting there and then let's say for some reason you're the tenants wanting to utilize that parking, I believe they're, they're allowed to have guests if people wanted to. Now in the event of a snowstorm, is it just expected that or after snowstorm, there's a lot and there's a large pile there that would, would persist for a long time. Is it just expected that tenants now no longer use those spots? Is it if a tenant says if the parking lot is full, they say, Hey, we expect to have somebody coming here to utilize those spots. Would, would you then haul that off site? Even if it were for, you know, say one day that somebody needed that there, it seems a little weird that in the wintertime those spots would go away and accept that request that, that somebody has to do it. So that's the idea that in the event of heavy snow, you would lose those spots if no one's utilizing them at the time of the snowstorm and then it would potentially continue losing those spots for however long that snow then lasts there. Is that the idea? I'm not exactly. And I'm speaking from my experience and property management and similar situations that there are winters where there is a lot of snow. And typically if a lot of snow and storage on site is getting in the way of the known patterns of parking, we remove all of it. We maximize the parking spaces and we would always do that on this site. So we would want to have all available spaces that are being used. So it isn't a day by day or in the moment decision. It's more that if we are routinely only using eight parking spaces, we would leave the snow there and not expect that it would cause a problem. If all of the parking spaces were routinely being used and there were a heavy snow, we would take all of the snow off site. So following up on that, do you have and have you shown to us other areas where the snow can be moved into? I mean, are those parking spaces the only place you're talking about storing snow? At my level of knowledge, and I'm gonna let Rachel add to this if she and Laura have had other conversations, what we're looking for is a balance that we are not causing snow storage or any of the residual effects of snow being stored, including these materials that we would use for ice removal. We would not want to harm the landscaping. So we would not want to store snow in the middle of the lawn where we've got perennials or plantings that are gonna be harmed by snow storage. So that is why at this particular point, this is the plan that we have is that we would use that area, we would not store snow on the lawn or anywhere else on the site because we need to make sure that this access is available for vehicles and emergency vehicles. So it seems to, go ahead, Mr. Langsdale. Yeah, well, you say that what is going to harm the grass if you pile snow up in one area? Is it the chemicals that you're using? Is that what you're talking about? Well, the balance, what Rachel was describing is that we're looking for the balance of ice removal products that would not bring harm to plants in most cases, but there's the nature of winter that if we've had a lot of ice and a lot of ice removal, we know what's happening there with storing, we just wouldn't want to harm the landscaping. So we would pay to have the snow removed rather than take that risk. So I think, go ahead, Rachel. I could add, there's a physical barrier that we're creating by screening the parking area and putting in a lot of shrubs between the parking area and the front door opening and the street. And that many of those areas cannot withstand dumping snow on top of. It would damage and break some of the shrubs, more of the woody shrubs that have really rigid branches. In this area. Yeah, and so we're using, there are little bits of areas that can take on some snow. And we anticipate that will have over spill from removal operations, but we don't really have wide swaths of lawn that are open and have immediate adjacency to the parking area to push the snow. You know, I think the takeaway from this is that we've got some concern amongst board members about the snow removal plan and that there may be a need to have additional places to put snow, maybe expanding, for example, expanding the pavers from the six or eight spaces to more. But I think what I would like to do is put this on the list of things that we have questions about and ask you to come back. You've heard the concerns, it's pretty direct. And I think we're not gonna solve this problem tonight, but I think you should come back with a plan to have a space where you can push snow and ensure that at least the number of parking spaces you're asking for are available to people all the time during the winter. And then we can have that, we'll discuss that at one of our upcoming meetings. But that's exactly one of the things we wanna talk that we have on the agenda tonight is other questions you wanna pose to you. That makes total sense. That makes total sense. But I don't wanna, please run through the rest of these slides and then we'll go on to the next subject, okay? I wanna make sure that we pause on each of these. So this next slide was describing, I think what Rachel just described, the shrub plantings adjacent to the area. And so this is to, those are to screen the parking areas to increase and the dense shrub plantings are having that impact of helping us with stormwater and then creating a more residential field to the property. And then the contractor being mentioned here would be instructed to avoid those plantings in the plowing path and only use the designated areas. So that's a little bit of what we've described but we'll clarify in future. So then again, the heavy and heavy storms and this would be the case whatever our, you know, wherever we arrive with a plan that suits the concerns here, there is always the option to take snow offsite and then in smaller storms, snow is easily pushed to the periphery of the parking areas and there's no need for any storage or concern or loss of parking spaces. I see no questions, go ahead. All right. So this was the combination of the use of sand and salt that Rachel was describing. Rachel, do you just wanna go through these points real quick? Sure, yeah. We can use sand to provide traction on slippery surfaces. It does not actually break down the ice or de-ice but it is a method to be used. And then as I mentioned before, the treating the icy areas will be using products that are least detrimental to plants. There are a couple of products, they're a little bit more expensive than sodium chloride but that are used. So potassium chloride would be avoided because that especially interferes with the uptake of nutrients to plant systems. Sodium chloride is used a lot and that's why everybody calls it salt because it's very cost-effective and it works down to 12 degrees Fahrenheit but it is notorious for building up in adjacent soils and interfering with plants ability to take nutrients. And so you might have heard of this in other areas where farmers using potable water for irrigation that has high chlorine in it causes problems with crops growing because it's too much salt in the soil. Calcium chloride is used a lot in highway de-icing efforts and it's actually really effective down to negative 25 and it has been shown to have minimal impact on plants. So that's an option that we might use in our tool counts. There's another slide. Also with de-icing, we're also looking at pavement and how that interacts with the chemicals. Concrete cures for the first year. So even after it's poured and it appears to be pretty solid, it's continuing to cure and strengthen and harden. And you guys, people may have seen witnesses in their own homes but if you apply sodium chloride salt on a newly installed concrete step or walkway in that first year, it can contribute to premature spalling and cracking. What it does is it increases the number of freezing with all cycles that that piece of pavement is experiencing and causes it to break down very quickly. So on all our projects, we often recommend using an alternative de-icer on concrete in that first year anyway. We call it urea, it's a fertilizer. And it's effective up to 21 degrees Fahrenheit or down, I should say down to 21 degrees Fahrenheit. Another option is calcium magnesium acetate. It's more of a liquid solution and it's effective down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. But the way it works is it keeps the particles from binding the actual salts, sorry, the actual ice particles from binding. So in summary, we're hoping to use a combination of sand, calcium chloride, urea or calcium magnesium acetate to deal with whatever the temperatures are, the amount of precipitation with the forecast is to be able to manage safely ice onsite. Any questions? Okay. Okay, apologies for a bumpy start there to you, Rachel and to the board. On our slides. Zoom is a challenge. Zoom is a challenge. Well, and I thought we had left off somewhere else. So my head was in a little different place, so. Okay, great. So our parking management plan, we're going to describe here. The board had asked about the plan and how it accounts for the parking needs. So I'm just gonna leave this slide up and describe that we have 14 spaces closest to the main entry of the building. And we will be using a parking sticker for people who have been assigned those spaces so that we can identify that they are residents. And then there will be a guest possibility for stickers as well. Then there will be two handicap spaces that will be reserved for residents who do have a handicap parking sticker or placard. Tenants with a car registered in their name will be allowed to have a sticker and park on site and no household will be allowed more than one sticker. Regular staff working on site will also receive a parking sticker that would include the site manager, the resident services coordinator and maintenance staff on the hours that they're there. Cars in designated spaces without a parking sticker will be subject to towing. And then there are two spaces located farthest from the main entry that'll be available for visitors and guests who do not have a sticker, but are visiting a resident in the studio housing and those will be labeled. And then we would expect, now again, relatively speaking, maybe some higher usage of parking spaces in the evenings and weekends and staff usage during the days. And what we're illustrating this with, we've shown the site plans that show the actual parking spaces. And this is for point of comparison and what we've based our planning on is that in SRO type of housing, we don't typically have residents with cars. We have a lot of residents who walk, who use the bus, who ride their bike, who use alternative transportation. And this is an example of Sargent House, which you'll be seeing some more slides of in a moment. This is just completed construction. And at the Sargent House, we have 31 units and 14 spaces. But at the Northampton proposed project, we are, oh, I don't have the count here and I am forgetting that. It's a higher ratio of spaces per unit. And I'm so sorry that I don't know that off the top of my head, the number of spaces. But our plan is based on, as I said, that we just don't typically utilize the parking spaces and we plan for enough that is based on a ratio of these residents having cars and then having spaces for staff and occasional guests. So this is the written parking plan drafted as it is. There would be some more detail to it as it were on site. Any questions there? Yeah, I have a couple of questions. The first is, in your experience, it seems to me there's several factors that affect how much parking you need. Because if you don't have enough parking there, it's very difficult to park in the neighborhood for people that have cars. So this may not be the same as other properties you manage. But in your experience for these efficiency units, there's probably a difference in the needs, the number of people that have cars depending upon, their percentage of median adjusted income in the area. That 30% or less, probably a less likely to have cars and 50% to 80% of median income are probably more likely to have cars. The examples you showed were they of very, very low income, low income or up to 80% income. The example here that I'm showing, these have got a similar tenant population to what we are planning for on 132 North Hampton Road. There are tiers of income restrictions at this property that everyone is at 30% or 50% or below. I would say that in my experience that living in cities where there are and affordable housing is located near public transportation and there is not necessarily a correlation between the income level and whether folks have a car. There are a lot of people who choose to not have that expense even if they have some income to support it. But I would say this is a very comparable building at Sargent House to the resident population that we're looking at. So you have 14 spaces for residents? At the Sargent House. No, but at 132 North Hampton, you have 14 spaces for residents? I don't have that note in front of me. So. It was in the last slide, I think. Oh. Let's go back. Oh, there we go. You're 14 parking spaces. Yep. You're 14 parking spaces. You have. And 28 units. 28 units. And I think you have 16, do you have 12 units that are at 50 or 80% and what percentage of the people do you, how do you plan this out? There must be a formula you use to figure out how many parking spaces you need and how do you use that other places or just kind of, it's experiential. You know, it's really, it's not, it's not so much that there's a formula. It's really just that it is very rare that in studio size housing, in our family housing, we will typically see a car for every household. In SRO housing, we very, very rarely see that there is cars beyond, I would say 40 to 50% of residents. You know, that's gonna be my best guess. That's at a range of properties. Some of them would be in inner cities and where there's a whole different set of considerations. But really, as I'm saying, anytime that you're in the city, residents coming into these types of units are typically finding that the expense of having a bike, riding a bus or utilizing other means of transportation and walking are the more common means of transportation. There isn't a formula that is income-based that we use. It's really just that, and this is a very typical question at during development about parking and the capacity for parking. But, you know, the need for the housing in relation to the parking is based on that experience so that we're not overpaving a site for spaces that are not needed. Okay. I'd be happy to address, I'm not, you know, I'd be happy to address any concerns about the plan, but that would not be a formula that would be available. All right. Can I, can I make one clarification? Please allow her. We're providing 16 spaces, two of which are handicapped. So 16 spaces are available for residents. Oh, okay. So it's the 14 closest plus the two handicapped. Plus the two, right. Okay. Thank you, Rachel. Other questions regarding the parking plan? Yes, I have. Mr. Linesfield. The Sergeant House that you showed us as an example of the same kind of living conditions is located on very flat ground. 132 Northampton is very hilly. So walking is going to be much more difficult, especially in the winter and in the summer, like we've been having, it's 0.6 miles to the big Y further to stop and shop and then up the hill, coming back, it's the same distance for carrying things. And then going into town is very starkly uphill. And then coming down is, of course, downhill, but people who take the bus have to walk up into town to catch the bus. So I'm concerned about, given that you're having, that this is an SRO and that you're going to have people there who have disabilities and problems, physical, emotional, that there is not, it doesn't seem to me that there is a plan for helping these people navigate this really strong hill to get what they need in terms of food and other things. I really would like to hear that talked about. Yeah, we will go into that in detail. In the center of this parking plan, we mentioned that the staff working, the resident service coordinator position and property management on site, in a moment when we get to the resident services plan, we talk in great detail about the additional assistance that this resident service coordinator will give residents to work with their options around transportation. And I think it will address some of your concerns. Okay, we've, in the last, I believe it was the last presentation, I brought this up and was told that the resident services coordinator will not be providing transportation. The property management person will not be providing transportation. So I still haven't heard anything about what kind of service will be available for people with disabilities, whatever they may be, in terms of dealing with this terrain. There's a PBTA, this will be, I'm sorry if that was unclear. I was mentioning that the resident service coordinator, as mentioned in this plan is staffed on site, not to give rides or provide direct transportation, but the details related to the transportation services that are available to people with special needs is outlined in the upcoming section related to resident services coordination. We could add that to the parking plan. Let's leave it in the services. Yeah, I think that's where it belongs. Yeah, okay. Ms. O'Mara, you had your hand up. Thank you. Just to piggyback that idea is those two handicapped spots are occupied if there's a wheelchair van coming to pick up or transport a client to a medical appointment, where will they park? That's another question. I believe at the entry we have an area that is going to have a... The loading zone? Yeah, there you go. Thank you, Rachel. It's nine feet wide, 20 feet long. So that's another one of the case where you can come back to us with a drawing, a specific answer to Ms. O'Mara's question for the next meeting. Well, I think what we're saying just, we can bring a drawing back. I think what we're saying is that a van picking someone up would not need a parking space, but would need a loading zone for a person to load and unload. And so the space, an additional space would not be necessary if those two spaces were full. But we're at the disadvantage of not seeing the plan in front of us. So just provide a piece of paper, a plan and show us where the van would go. It would be the right way to solve that problem, I think, or at least answer the question. Great. Okay. All right. All right. Any other questions? Yeah. All right, let's move on. All right. So then the board asked for some photographs of some similar low income housing. Projects that would be comparable. And we do have some interior and exterior building photographs that we'd like to share here. This is the recently completed construction, Sergeant House on 82 Bridge Street in Northampton. As we mentioned, 31 studio apartments with kitchenettes and bathrooms, so very similar to the unit configurations and sizes that we're proposing. This is the front exterior shot of the building. We have a few different takes on this to just sort of show you that this is some context with neighboring houses. This is the fence of the Sergeant House and the Sergeant House building. And then you can see the neighboring houses and the context there. And this is this kind of pale cream colored house is on the opposite side. So here behind the trees, here's the fence here of Sergeant House next to its other neighbor, a budding. And then here is the, from that angle. Here's another shot of the front of the building. Here is the parking shot that I had showed earlier. The front door and then there are entries to the side. These are the common areas or some common areas and just a few features that are reminiscent of the plan that we brought to you for 132 Northampton Road. So this is the foyer. Here is the built bike storage area. And here's another shot of the parking. Here are some interior units. And again, the unit size comparable to what we have proposed. Here's a kitchenette, a little detail of a sink. So you see a fridge, stove and microwave cabinets, uppers and lowers. And then here's the living area, a couple of community space, some restoration of existing fireplaces that were in the building that we did, some sitting areas for residents. Here's an occupied unit just to show some commenters have been concerned about sizes of units and how they're occupied. Here's a resident who just moved in, was a resident in the past and moved back into a unit at Sargent House. So here's the kitchenette area. Here's a bathroom. This shows a small table, a bed, a couch. So this is how this resident has set up their unit. This is another property that Valley owns. It's called Valley Go West in Florence. This has some commercial space downstairs 17 studio apartments with kitchenettes and bathrooms. Again, very similar. This was built a while ago, but it has the kitchenette area. And then here's a common area, another interior shot. King Street in Northampton. This is 10 studio apartments. So again, just a couple of shots of exterior and interior to give you some ideas of the way that these units look. This is on Maple Street in Florence. These are 11 single rooms with one shared kitchen, so not a direct comparable unit, but just another property in our portfolio that houses single independent living residents. So those are the comparables. Are there any questions on that? Yes, on the Valley Go West, the kitchen photograph, back up one, go further. No, yeah, okay, that's fine. The one of the kitchenette on the left side, what is the door next to the refrigerator? This door here? Yeah. This is a closet. This is the entry door here, and then this is a storage closet. Okay. Does 132 Northampton, do they have the same kind of closet? I'm sorry, Mr. Langsdale, that I don't have Laura's depth of understanding of the layouts. I don't know that it would be this type of closet, but for instance, I'm trying to see if we have some closet shots here in these units. These have some bifolding at the Sargent House. One of them is not in an interior shot, but we have bifold doors with a closet for storage. Where are they? They're in different locations because each of these units is different layout, but sometimes you would come in, so here you would come in from the left, you'd be entering this door that you can see the opening of is the bathroom, but the closet is right here in the doorway, the little foyer area that walks into this main room. If I could, I do remember this being discussed before, and I think the architect from... Is it... I think one of the architects. Yeah, I'm here. Can you... Is that Mr. Chalmers? Yeah, I'm here. I don't have a camera at the moment. Sorry. We did talk about it before, and few of the units do, but most of them do not have a full separate closet. We have cabinet-built closets. It is definitely... It's different than that space. They're the kitchen cabinets, correct? Well, it's a cabinet light. It's not a kitchen cabinet, it's a closet, but it's built out of cabinet materials, not a stud wall and drawing wall. Well, is it big enough to hang? Yes, it's the same depth. It's 24 inches deep. It's similar to what you might call a pantry closet, except it's the same height. It goes up to the top of the same height as you would see. I haven't seen that on any of the proposals for 132. So I'd like to see that. Yeah, well, I think what we have in the drawings thus far is they're design drawings, early design drawings, and they show it in plan, but we don't have elevations of the kitchens. Like, so... Okay, well, I would like to see elevations because otherwise we're gonna go over this again until you come up with elevations. So we can produce, I mean, that would be helpful. I see it on the top down views where the closets are on some of the units for 132, but there's nothing that shows the height. So that would be helpful. Yeah, okay, yeah, we can do that. Okay, other questions regarding the comparable units? One more. What is the square footage of these apartments? These I believe are about 150. There's a range of sizes, but I think the average is right around 150 square feet. And that compares to what at 132? 180 square feet of 132. 230. So at 132, we have an average of a low of 230 and a high of 266 for standard units. And it's just under 400 square feet for the fully accessible unit. Thank you, I'm sorry. These are just stats that I'm getting up to speed, but... I know you're doing the job. Thank you though. Yeah. All right, any other questions on comparable units? If not, go ahead, Ms. Lechler. Excuse me, I mispronounced her name, Ms. Lechler. Lechler, very good, thank you, Steve. So now the questions were about some further construction details on the dumpster area, the storage shed, and the bike storage shed and the smoking pavilion. These are some preliminary drawings and just so I don't put my foot in it too much, I'm just gonna make sure I keep this very open. I'll show the slides and make sure that Tom doesn't have anything to add. These are some exterior, very small exterior buildings to facilitate the dumpster enclosure is not pictured here, but the dimensions are 8.2 feet by 17.2 feet, so large enough for an eight and six yard dumpster. And then here's the storage shed, which is just a small standing shed, eight by eight feet with a poured concrete pad. I see no questions. Okay. And then we did show the bike storage shed last time, so I think we're good there and the dimensions were on the bike storage shed slides, I know. And then at this point, the proposed structure from June 25th, again preliminary, but the smoking pavilion dimensions here we have are, so we have a prefabbed pavilion with the roof on it, so 5.7 feet deep by eight feet long. We have the roof dimensions and the base dimensions, seven foot by five foot, five inch approximately. I see no questions. Okay. Great. Now the question here was that we bring the site plan to show all lot and building coverages for the RG and ED zoning districts. I don't know that I can make this bigger on my screen. I know that it is something, oh, I can. So here we've got, now I'm gonna be out of my depth here, so I don't know if Rachel or Tom, if this is something you could describe, I think Laura would do well, but. Sure. Can you describe or who can do this best? Rachel can. Okay. The lot, yeah, the lot has two zones on it. The majority of the lot is the RG zone, which is where the building is being placed and where the parking is falling. There is a little L-shaped sliver on the Amherst College side that is in the ED zone, which is a little over 1600 square feet, but the majority of the parcel is in the RG zone. So the ED zone is that green? Yeah, the green color is shown there. Okay. Any questions? All right. Yeah, I have a question, but I don't know. Mr. Langfield. Okay. Dealing with the smoking pavilion. On this dimensional chart, it says new five, eight by eight foot smoking pavilion with bench. The picture you showed did not have a bench. Then there's the question of, it's only 18 feet from the property line. And it's supposed to be, I believe 25 from any building and it's 11 feet from the building. And that puts it about five or maybe six feet from what is the garden planting area. So if you get five or six people sitting there smoking, 11 feet from the building and you've got four or five people in the garden working, the smoke is overwhelming, I would say. Is there another place on the property for the smoking pavilion, which is not so close to the building and or outdoor areas? Have you looked at other areas and what have you considered and what have you found? Do you want me to take this one, Jane? I know some about it, but go ahead, Rachel, please, yeah. I will say one of the big considerations on the project is just how the residents will interface with the neighbors and also how we can retain the front character of the house to the street. So we were, the area on site that we have the most spaces in the front, but that is also the area that has the most visibility from the road and a smoking pavilion in the front of the building would not look like a residence. And then Amherst College, as we get further to the back corner of the site where the courtyard is, that gets closer to Amherst College area and also that's the biggest usable space for residents who want some privacy outdoor area. So we wanted to preserve that area for people who were not smoking and wanting to hang out outside. And then as we get to the other side of the site where the parking area is and the neighbor is currently being proposed to be screened by trees and fencing, that also seems that our area becomes quickly congested with our bikes covered bike storage and our turnaround area for dumpsters and service vehicles. So it is a tight site for placing a pavilion and Jane, I'll let you weigh in also. Well, I would ask if you've considered moving the pavilion to the north side of the building, you have a row of trees there that it could be behind those trees and which puts it much further away from the building and further away from the walkway. At the moment, the pavilion is right up next to the walkway for anyone walking past there. The fact that it is on the north side which you consider the front of the building and you say there's not enough cover there, then perhaps what you need to do is consider what ways you can cover that pavilion if you move it to the north side of the building which would put it much further away from the building and not anywhere near anyone else, including the walkway. Yeah, we do want to provide accessible pathway to the smoking areas. We do need some sort of paved surface to it. And then also that front lawn area I should also mention is serving as our stormwater management area. So it's a depressed area that will be very wet and squishy during heavy rains. And then I saw that Ms. Hardy had her hand up. Did you wish to speak? Mr. Chairman, I was actually going to address an issue about the RD and ED zones and we've moved on to that from that. So if you're not interested in a comment on that I can hold off, but I just had one thing to say about those two zones. Proceed and just give us your quick thoughts on it. Yes, I just wanted to point out to the board that the zoning by-law states that it is presumed that the edge of the ED district follows the property line. So the fact that this parcel is zoned both as a residential zone and also in the ED district is a little bit of an anomaly. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you for your attention. Any further comments? Yeah, if you put the smoking pavilion north of the building you can add a path that goes directly to it and the path would be only for those people going to and from the pavilion. As it is now, people, the path goes behind the pavilion and is the part of the main walkway. So people have to go past that if they are going in those directions they have to pass the smoking pavilion. I would think that we would recommend that you investigate what needs to be done to move the pavilion to the north because where it is now is, to me, unacceptable. And what happens if Amherst at some point goes smoke-free? If this is to be a smoke-free area, the pavilion to have one, I think needs to be in the remotest location to all sides concerned. And I, as I said, to me it's unacceptable where it is now. And I would like to see some investigation into how it can be moved or if it needs to be there at all. Well, I will say that certainly we can investigate that further. I know a lot of deliberations have been done to find the right location on the site for a pavilion. I will say that is more and more common and certainly something that Valley is willing to do is to make it a smoke-free site and to remove the pavilion for that reason. So we can come back with that option as well as any possible other location on the site but we will bring back any known concerns or issues such as something like the water retention area or any other concerns that have prevented us from putting it elsewhere. I think the way to resolve this is to come up with two or three options drawn on the site plan, list the pros and cons and the board can decide whether it wants to make that a condition of the project or not, okay? That sounds great, Mr. Chairman, thank you. This is additional information on the zoning. We'll pause here to make sure that there are no questions. I'm not going to read all of the data on this slide. I believe that the description of the site plan covered the questions but I'm happy to see if others have. One place you, if I'm reading this correctly, the one place you exceed the zoning is the maximum lot coverage for hard surfaces, right? Is your 45.29 and the maximum is 40%. So you're looking to be relieved from that limitation. Yep. And that's a lot of us do the parking that you had the hard surface in the driveway because your building is only 12.8%. Okay, other questions on this? Yeah, I have one. I still don't understand why this is designated two and a half stories when there in fact, there are three stories to the building. I think Mr. the architect. Yeah. So it's a difference between floor and story. So the definition of story because it's built into the hill and if you look at the way the grade works out, the lowest floor counts as not a full story above grade. So that's where the half story come in. Yes, it's three floors but technically the way the grade average is that the lower floor is a story below grade. I understand about the grade but you have apartments in that lower story. Right, but that's not part of the definition. It's not saying it's not a floor. It's just by definition in the building codes is that it's a story below grade. So it does not count as a full story in terms of what the building code is. So you can look at it as a question of semantics. There are three floors, three occupied floors. Mr. Trommers, that's the only way that can be called a three-story building is if you raise it up by six or eight feet so that it would then be on the ground. I'm not sure what the number is but but you'd have to raise the whole building. It's a building code definition of story and that comes into play and mostly in a code analysis of the building but yes, it's three floors. Okay. I would also add that the mean height is less than the limit that's in the zoning bylaws. But the maximum height is above the... Well, there isn't the maximum height. The zoning bylaws has a mean roof height is what it gives. It doesn't list the maximum height for the roof. The mean height is calculated based on the maximum and... Right. I saw a drawing that had this on it. Yeah, there's been a couple of drawings and it's not in this package but there's one in the original set and then there's one in the slide in the original slide presentation. It has all the heights. It has all the heights. I was in the neighborhood if I recall correctly. Yep. All right. Are we going to get that then? Well, you already have that I think in a couple of places. I think it's in the original submission. It's in the first packet at the first PowerPoint that was submitted and it's also in the, I think it's in the second PowerPoint submission also. Thank you. It's in the plans here. I'm sure we can find it. All right. Mr. Chair, Ms. Brestrup has raised her hand. Yes. Ms. Brestrup. Hello, thank you. I just wanted to, Chris Brestrup, Planning Director point out that three floors, three stories are allowed in this zoning district. So it's sort of in terms of zoning, it doesn't really matter whether it's called two and a half or three stories because three stories are allowed. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you. Let's go on to the next subject. Yep. The board had asked for some additional photographs to illustrate the line of trees along the driveway and from the college and then from Orchard Street and a budding properties. We have several here. I will try to increase the size a little if that increases on your screen. So this is 132 North Hampton Road at the, this is coming into the site. Here's the line of trees. Here's our neighbor and the existing houses behind the trees. Here's the front yard. Again, driveway of the house. Existing trees, the existing building behind the pole here. This is from the Amherst College parking lots. Oh, so here's those spaces, the Amherst fence, and then the site over here. This is a picture of the tree line. And then I believe that this is the tall hedge at the center of the yard for lack of better description. Here is the existing building. So the East facade, these are from the North facade, two different views, two different angles. Here we've got from the South and Southwest facade looking from the Amherst field from Pratt Field. This is looking from the site to the field house. This is North Hampton Road at the standing right at the front of the lot. So looking East toward University Drive, looking West towards Amherst Center. Here's the abutting house at 126 North Hampton Road. And there are multifamily private residences on nearby on North Hampton Road. Excuse me, the pictures you had before going into Amherst is East and West toward University Drive. Okay, we'll correct that. I see no raise hand. And then here's some additional street views. This is from North Hampton Road, looking at Dana Street from Woodside, looking towards the college. This is Orchard Street, Woodside Avenue again, the other direction, Orchard Street and Hitchcock Road from Pratt Field. And I believe there's, oh no, I guess that's the last one. I see no questions, move on. Okay. There was a question, a request for section elevations along Route 9. These are beyond the scope of design. The cost would be outside of our scope and from a time perspective as well, if it were not even only for the cost would take a great deal of time. We did want to bring some information which is about the change in elevation along North Hampton Road. So this is just measuring from the corner of university in North Hampton and then at 132. So the difference, there's a change in 86 feet and over this distance. So then we're giving you the average grade from that direction. And then we're doing the same measurement from the property to South Pleasant and North Hampton Road, a change of 47 feet over a distance of 1771. So then we've got your average grade of 2.94%. Then you've got the measure from university in North Hampton Road, the Southeast corner, same as above, to the intersection of North Pleasant and North Hampton Road. So that's a change of 133 feet, an average grade of 3.2%. Just like what's the grade that's used to, by the ADA as an accessible grade for a person in a wheelchair or on the handicap? What is that? So that would be, for anything that does not require a ramp, that would be 5%. Would be 5%. Yeah, so these are under five. Of course, there's probably gonna be places along them where this is an average, but it's under 5%. I'm just trying to understand how to walk into downtown or the walk back up from university drive would compare to what's required for the ADA. And I know it's an average and it varies, but I'm just trying to get a sense of that. 2% is what's generally used for a flat area at a landing or a parking area. So you have anywhere from two to, obviously it's over 2%, but an average of under four is not extreme. And while that may be the case, I walk that often and I find that I'm out of breath on the way up to the top of the hill at times. So it's not an insignificant grade, even though it's beneath the limits. Also, I would like to say that it may be under the average grade for a wheelchair, person in a wheelchair, but what is the grade for someone walking for over half a mile with packages in their hand? Up a grade that's 3.67%. I mean, that's where for me, we're kind of skirting the issue of, it's not that bad if you just walk it, but if you're handicapped and if you have to carry packages, it's a significant grade. And I think it's important for us to discuss that because the places that you've shown us in Northampton are flat and therefore much easier for people to get around it. Plus, this doesn't take into account how far one has to go to get on a bus to go to the places that you wanna or need to go. I just think this is a very important point. It's one that merits through the discussion. We will have that. So here is some further detail on accessibility slopes. So the zero to 2% that I think Tom was just describing, Tom, do you want to talk through this any further? Or would the board members like to hear further at this level of technical detail or is it more the discussion that Mr. Langsdale described? I think this will be valuable to have and we have a further discussion on accessibility, on services, on transportation. Those are all gonna be wrapped up, I think, in your supportive services presentation. But this is an important point. We wanna make sure we address that because the real question is accessibility for the residents, not just the definitions of slopes and grades and accessible, okay? Okay, great. A request here was for a detailed section and a 3D model. These are both beyond the scope for the design team. Both scope and cost. So we are not able to provide those. Unfortunately, I understand the desire. No, so let's just go back to that for a second. The question here, I didn't request this, but I wanna help whoever did. Please provide detailed section showing height from Orchard Street and the entry. Did you have pictures that did that? The original, the submission that was filed with you did have a sheet that had views, photographs compiled along the street that showed each, it was a photograph of each house and they were spread out along the street to see the relative, you could see the kind of vague, relative heights of the different buildings. And a lot of the difference had to do with what the setback from the street was, obviously, because of the perspective. It didn't show the slope because it was presented flat horizontally, but obviously the ones uphill would be higher than the ones downhill. I think what's incumbent upon us is to recognize two things. Number one, that we need the information we need to be able to make a vote and decide on this. At the same time, we ought to prioritize that which we think is most important because at some point these do become very expensive for the applicant and may be something that could render that may be more than we should be asking for. So I think what we should do is, as a board, decide what is the most important. If there are designs that you feel are beyond your scope that we really think we need to have, we should discuss that amongst the board members to decide what that is and we can deal with the consequences of that, but I think we have to be aware of these things cost money and only ask for that which is most important to our decision-making. So it'd be helpful for us, and Maureen, if you would, there'll be other cases where we ask for drawings, 3D models, other things. We should keep them in, we should collect those so we can judge which ones are most important, if any, that we wanna ask the applicants to fulfill. Okay, all right. Understood. Also, I think it would be helpful to us if there is maybe an alternative to a request that would be costly from a design standpoint, but maybe there is some way we could enhance the photographs that Tom just described or something like that. So. If you can come up with some things that'd be helpful and then we don't have to make a decision on that item. But I think it's important if we're, the point in this I think would be the building height and the building height does comply, that both the building height and the number of stories does comply with the zoning regulations. So it's not that it's exceeding what is allowed. I understand. It is set back far from the street. It's also not up in front of the street. But I understand the desire for members to see what it, you have an idea what it would feel like if it, once it's sited, once it's constructed. And so we'll have to figure out how we can do that. Maybe it's just another site visit. So let's move on to the next, to the next thing we're excusing up a lot of time. I'm sorry, Steve. Mr. Langsdale? Given what has just been said, I would propose that the board members, the people from the CDC and Mr. Chalmers take that walk from University Drive all the way up into Amherst. That way we get, is that's the only way we're gonna get a sense of what that grade really is and what effort it takes to go up that hill. The pictures flatten it out. Pictures just don't, that's why there was a request for a detailed section showing. So my proposal is that we, before the next meeting, we choose a time and together, we all walk up that hill. And that's why, can I say one thing? No, we'll just deal with it this way, Keith. I understand it, I walk that a lot. I'm not gonna, I don't wanna entertain a question to the forest members to do that, but I think people should go out and take a look at it, and if they can, they should walk it. I walk it often, and I know it's a hike up that hill. Yeah, I just wanna add, just for clarification, the intent of those drawings that we submitted was not to address the slope of the hill or the difficulty of the walk. It was looking at the relative buildings on the site. So it was not trying to minimize, we presented it, it was not presented to minimize the slope or the walk, or it was looking at the, trying to compare the building's heights relative to other buildings. But we also were talking, in the earlier slide, we were talking about the slope. Yeah, we understand. Okay. All right. Next. All right, so the next request was to do a summary of the property management plan. This is a summary of the plan that, with some additions to, what is, the plan that was submitted was a format that I believe was requested in the application package. I've added some additional information that has to do with our known relationship and daily business of running property management at affordable housing sites. So the summary is that we would have on-site property management staff, on-site approximately 20 hours per week. Housing management resources is our intended property management agent, supervising the site staff. They have been a manager for Valley for multiple properties since 2016. They've got a great reputation. They're a multi-state property management company. They've been in business since 2001, over 8,000 units. They maintain a 24-7 call service to respond to residents' site emergencies, and they have a local office in Northampton. Typically the duties of site management include rent collection. There's compliance with our regulatory agencies, which include our funding sources, making sure that residents and applicants are income-eligible, and making sure that we adhering to the standards of decent, safe, and sanitary housing, and then scheduling of maintenance and resident relations related to the business of leases and residents' behaviors. So I think that one of the things, if I may, one of the things we will do is we wanna look at your, you've amended your management plan. Is that correct? We have not amended it. It's just that the plan that was requested for the application, there's what's, is requesting sort of some information that is, this question came out of what the staffing, as I understood it, that was there when the conversation was happening. So we were interpreting the question to mean what is property management going to do on site? I don't have the actual, I could pull it up, but it would take a minute. I've got it in the background. The plan that was submitted with the application was in response to a format that outlined a lot of things that had to do with overall property factors. So, but go ahead, Mr. Chairman, I'm, I was just trying to say that if, that if you've submitted something new, we should, one of the things we will do is we will look at the management plan. And so if you're, if you could just, if this is the highlights of your, of the response to the question, that's great, but we don't want to go through the whole management plan tonight. No, no, this is just two slides. Yeah. Okay. So, so 20 hours a week, the staffing plan does exceed the typical industry standard, which is in affordable housing, a half an hour of staff time per unit per week. So that would be 14 hours per week. We wanted to make sure that we had adequate staffing to make sure that the residents and the property maintenance is being done adequately and, and then some. And then asset management is a part of the property management plan that would be provided by Valley CDC as owner. The difference between property management and asset management is that asset management is a longer term view for operations of the property to make sure that there is financial health and that capital needs and improvements are being planned for. So some examples of an asset management role would be that we would be on site doing regular site visits and inspections of units, exterior, mechanicals, et cetera, advise property management on best practices, review for, review their management practices. We would handle lender and funder communications. We would ongoing review financials and operating data. And then we would also oversee and participate in the resident experience and neighborhood relations as owner. So that's a, that's a recap of what was submitted and it's not an additional plan just to clarify, Mr. Chairman, what you were just asking so much as just some additional facts of what we know our relationship with it, Jamarra's. If there's an additional request, we'd be happy to provide more detail on this particular topic. Good. No, I have nothing else on that. And then we have a few more sections here. This is a, this is a one aspect. So we are going to go into further detail. This was the request made was to provide a summary of the supportive services plan and an explanation about how the proposed development is intended for independent living, not a group home. And then the roles and responsibility of the resident services coordinator. Since this question was posed, we changed the agenda tonight to spend more time. So what I'm going to do here is just focus really quickly on the points about the proposed development and the definition in relation to supportive services. And then we can go into more detail about the entire plan after we finish this presentation. So this distinction, this is a summary of the main points of the plan that we submitted. It's 35 pages in the package, but it describes Valley's approach to providing a resident services coordinator, the acronym, which is commonly used in the industry is RSC for that role. It describes referrals of residents for set-aside units. The plan describes the role of the resident service coordinator on site, the hours of that staff person and job description. The plan describes after hours access to services. It describes our community partners and then some facilities and services in proximity to the site. It describes transportation options and how our resident service coordinator would help residents with that. It describes community integration. And then we are also adding, again, later our research and development process for the plan. And then we just have a brief mention again later of the tenant selection plan and screening. That's a summary of what is included. And that is, we'll come back to more detail on that. What we wanted to clarify in response to the board's question here, specific to the definition and tenant population is that the federal and state funding sources for this that we are anticipating for this project require that all units are used for permanent and non-transient housing. This is an important distinction for many of the concerns and questions that are coming up around the services. There are no HUD loans. There's no project-based Section 8 or other funding sources that bind the project to provide direct onsite case management. There is no requirement for 24-hour services because the site is not a direct care facility. So there are no regulatory requirements for onsite services or 24-7, but Valley has elected and responded to concerns in the neighborhood, but we elected from the beginning because we know that a resident service coordinator helps our residents and helps the property to function well. So these units are set up as apartments for independent living. So all participation in the services and the coordination services is voluntary for the residents. There are other resident service models that are not comparable to what we're proposing because these facilities do have different regulatory and regulatory requirements and standards that exist to describe what is required. So these are not with all respect to these facilities and their residents and their staff. 132 North Hampton Road would not be any of these, a federal or state-administered direct care facility. It is not a congregate living or treatment site. It is not a residential behavior health facility. It is not assisted living for elderly or disabled persons. And it is not transitional housing, a group home or a halfway house. So we wanted to make sure that these types of examples would make it clear that independent living for residents, even with the referred services is a different model than any of these. So our approach here is that coordination and access to community services as a common best practice for mission-based affordable housing providers like Valley CDC often opt to provide residents and this is available to all residents with the benefits that come with having a resident service coordinator on site. This again, we're gonna go into more detail of the plan but in summary, this person helps residents connect with outside agencies and support networks that help them with financial education, self-sufficiency, health or wellness centers. Some residents opt to use this and others do not. Some residents have case workers which we'll talk about later in the detail. This resident service coordinator also plans and organizes activities that encourage a social atmosphere amongst residents as neighbors to each other and to the neighborhood. And then this person also enhances an environment of peaceful enjoyment for all community members. Supporting the strength and stability of not only the residents experience but also financial operations because it helps residents to maintain their units and pay their rent on time. So that's the summary. I don't want to stop any questions here but I believe Mr. Chairman, you want to- Let's delay them, let's delay the questions on supportive services until after you've completed it. Yep. Yep. All right. There was the question about explaining how much storage is available. And this came up earlier. So we'll just really quickly show the dimensions here in written form. So the closet here, two and a half feet by four and a half feet by seven and a half feet high. And then we've got the refrigerator storage space, a medicine cabinet in the bathroom and a second bathroom wall cabinet. The kitchen layout is still being designed but anticipating 48 inches of base cabinets, 24 inches of full wall cabinets and a 30-inch cabinet above the fridge as well as a 24-inch cabinet above the microwave. Any questions on further questions on storage? Let's move on. There was a request for a list of job types at the various income levels and so what we did here was we went out and looked on some job seeking sites and looked at what was available in the area just to give some examples and hopefully there would be some familiarity with some of the companies that are listed here. It was a rather open question so I'm just gonna show what we pulled together but we wanted to also bring in an example of the types of income at hourly rates. A person working part-time at this hourly rate would make $12,000, 480 a year and that would be 21% of the AMI full-time, 24,960. That would be at 42% and then this just shows their monthly gross earnings so this helps to sort of get a sense of translating the AMI into hourly rates, part-time or full-time. And then here are the restrictions at 30 and 50 and 80% to compare to these charts. Here are some of the job descriptions and postings that we found. This was a while back so we have kitchen staff, a lot of support and janitorial types of work. This was a seasonal summer job. This was at Big Y, working as there were stock, stockers and inventory clerks. So those are some of the examples that we found. And briefly you have kitchen staff from $14 to $18 an hour. What is the seasonal summer labor amount? $14 an hour, $12.87 for $14.99. Big Y, overnight stocker is what? The overnight stocker, that one says 21 to 34 per year but that's a Zip Recruiter estimate. That's not a part of the posting. Okay, so it gives us a feeling if you just go back one slide, okay, one more. We don't have, there's no, this is just what's available. This is not, you don't have the wages associated with these positions, do you? Or are they all below? No, this was a posting that showed a list of. Available jobs. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Okay. So then this was a question about the proposed budget. And we will show that in a moment but the question was just about how much revenue comes from rent, from grants, how much of their revenue goes to building expenses and how much to Valley CDC overhead? What would happen if the project, if, what would happen to the project if state or federal government change the levels of housing support with the project stay in business? And the question was asking for some reassurance of what would happen if Valley CDC should go broke and what would happen, what would the town be responsible for? There was also a question that related to a butters asking about some apartments for families and what would happen to the economics of the project if there were family apartments? And that would definitely reduce the SRO units. So we are going to spend a, if not a whole session, at least a significant part of the session talking about the finances and the budget. Okay. And I think that this is, I've gone through this. I think this is valuable. It's insightful. And I don't want to dismiss the question. It's a good one. Both questions are good ones. But I think this is something you should have available for us when we discuss the finances of the project. And that will be at a time in the next couple of meetings. Absolutely. Going over it briefly tonight and then spending the time doing that and not dealing in detail on it. So let's move on to let's, we have this in our packets. It's material we've gotten. We can look at it. So just go ahead and just, just would you like me to say anything or just continue? Okay. So the two budgets are, the first budget here is the construction budget and the second budget is an operating budget forecast. So we can go into that later. Okay. These were some points. Do you want to continue that to that future discussion as well, Mr. Chairman? These are related to the budget and answering the questions that were posed. I'm just looking through the materials. It's all about, this is all deals with how you, how these are financed and the subsidies and let's, I think this is part of the next. That makes sense to me. I'm what you just said. Yeah. Okay. All right. So then that concludes where we were at until we move on to the supportive services. So I just put a pause here, but I can continue moving as well. Ms. Parks, did you raise your hand or were you just stretching? Okay. All right. Let's go to the supported services plan now. And if I may, I think what we should do is allow you to run through this with being aware of the time we have. It's 8.15. We try to be done at nine o'clock. I don't think we're going to make that tonight, but I'd like to get as close to that as we possibly can. So run through and then we will have, we will have questions at the end of your presentation as opposed to interrupting you during the course of it. Let's let you do provide it. And then I'd ask board members to write down your questions, make notes on the supportive services paper that you got and we can ask, I'll make sure that we can ask questions after it's done unless it's purely for a clarifying purpose. Okay. And then I believe I will run through the slides. Thank you for that guidance. And John Hornick is on the line as one of our advisors on this plan. And he does have a very short statement that he would like to add just to describe from his experience and professional opinion, a couple of points that would take up about three minutes. Okay, Mr. Hornick, identify yourself, please. He may not be quite queued up because he knows he would come at the end, but. Oh, hold on one second. I need to. Oh, he's at the end. Okay. He just raises, you wanted him to speak now or later? No, he would speak afterwards. I just wanted to make it clear that when I get to my last slide that we were gonna have John just present a quick statement that he's. All right. Okay, sure. You can identify yourself then. Okay, great. All right. So here what we've done is, as I mentioned earlier, is we're describing supportive services and we're gonna go into more detail here that gets that I think some of the concerns that have been brought up by public comment and the board members. I already went through this slide. That's the same bullet points earlier that was the summary of the plan. So I'm just gonna go ahead right into each topic. Again, Valley, this is a repeat of what I described that Valley does bring a resident service coordinator to the project to provide these overall benefits, but we'll now go into some of the details of how that works in our experience. And again, as is common in affordable housing, long-term, permanent affordable housing, such as the project proposed. We're going to start with what happens with the residents for, we have the homeless set aside units that have been a topic and have been presented previously. So for 10 homeless set aside units, there's a process of referring agencies who identify candidates that they are already working with who would be a good candidate, a good fit for independent living. So those referring agencies, and those will be listed shortly, would identify applicants who would come and be screened under the property selection criteria to fill those homeless set aside units. The referred residents are operating under agreement with their referring case workers who are service providers. And this is the distinction just to educate the nuance of this in our industry, a service provider is directly providing services, whereas our resident service coordinator is coordinating residents to connect with those types of service providers. But for these 10 referred previously homeless applicants, they would be working with an individualized service plan and this is a clip from our resident service plan that just describes a typical individualized plan that is created to identify the needs for each of these individuals. And they are addressing areas such as maintaining successful tenancy, securing or improving educational or employment goals, maintaining or improving behavioral or physical health, improving financial and asset management skills, increasing community connections and supports, and including measurable goals and outcomes in their individual plans. Many of these bullet points mirror similar goals that our resident service coordinator brings. The difference between these referred applicants and residents is that they have an agreement to work with their case workers on this. So they have services being provided there outside of the site. So the resident service coordinator also offers that additional presence of that for not only these residents who might find some additional connections there, but for all residents to engage with these types of services in the community. So the resident service coordinator serves all residents in that capacity. So it includes those who are under those external case management relationships, but they provide overarching guidance to help build community and to set expectations for residents to remain in good standing. We may have residents who are not referred but are recovering from homelessness either in their past or immediately who meet our selection criteria. But if we find that residents have not yet established a relationship with a service provider and they would want one, that is of course something that a resident service coordinator brings to the table to introduce them to those staff at those agencies so they can build that relationship. The resident service coordinator hours would the original plan provided for 20 hours a week in response to the concerns of neighbors. We voluntarily increased the number of hours to 27 and a half to 30 hours per week to reassure the community that we have a concern for our residents success and we also have a concern for the community and for neighborhood safety. There are no regulatory requirements and this number of hours is far and beyond what is typical for the size of property and for this resident population. By handling these tasks, the RSC will allow property management staff to focus on operations, maintenance grounds and their administrative duties. We wanted to provide a comparison to some known properties that Valley is either owner of or a co-general partner in and then just a couple of other properties in the area where you can see by the unit counts where we have 10, 11, 17 different types of sizes here but you see that the hours per week, in this case at King Street, there was a resident service coordinator going there but the residents did not feel a need for that person's time so they stopped going and things are going fine there but we're always watching that to make sure that we're providing anything that is needed by the residents. But in other cases, we've got one to two hours, we've got four hours per week, nothing is coming anywhere close to this. The VOC housing is 78 single rooms and they have 15 hours per week and what we're proposing is double that for almost a third of the size of number of units. So we feel that not only the content of the plan but the number of hours that we're putting on site will really allow the residents to access and connect with a lot of good support. So the resident service coordinator also works side by side with property management because the communications about how residents are doing in their units, how they're doing paying rent, any other issues that are coming up, property management may be aware of some things and the RSC may be aware of some things. So there's constant communication between the two and also a lot of times there will be a need for just help to translate, to communicate, to coach residents on how to budget and pay their rent on time to help with things like housekeeping support. Again, those are things that without a resident service coordinator on site, property management would simply give people these violations and kick them out and the purpose here is to allow people a chance to really improve these skills and learn to or have the opportunity to live by the house rules and the lease documents. So residents, we hope and in our experience with this type of support, many remain in good standing and of course that increases their options. They can stay long-term at this site or they can move on to other opportunities. And then what's important to know is that if residents are not cooperating or responding to issues that are happening with either following the lease or adhering to the site policies, property management then does notify those residents and pursue any legal remedies to make sure that either the resident is on a corrective action plan that is court ordered or takes eviction action if necessary. So all of those rights and responsibilities of landlord and tenant are stated in the lease documents. So in addition to those descriptions above the resident service coordinator provides orientation for residents, conducts some assessments of what those tenant needs are so they can connect them to the proper folks out in the community, coordinates transportation options and then plans and facilitate some onsite activities which can be some workshops, social group activities that can be a range of things but those are all determined by what is the right fit for the tenant population and then social integration activities to foster connections between the larger community including neighbors and Amherst College. They help to maintain a jobs board so that folks can connect to local jobs, offer support for smoking cessation and then assist or mediate if there are conflicts that come up between tenants that need to be resolved. So the value that's added by this role is that it really creates an encouraging atmosphere for residents, we see that time and again that this is very commonly a role that is added by nonprofit and mission oriented owners and managing agents. So an encouraging atmosphere makes a huge difference in how well a property operates and so then the opportunities that come from that for community integration are helpful to everyone. That's where you have the chance to have the diversity and integration of affordable and multifamily housing in a residential neighborhood. So the framework for providers and organizations to work smoothly and collaborate with residents is something that this role brings and a presence that fosters wellness and independence, a respect for privacy and peaceful enjoyment to maintain decent, safe and affordable housing. These are expectations for all residents and staff and these are at our properties. This is a standing expectation at our properties. The resident services coordinator, this is from the plan that has a much larger job description but just to keep it simple for the moment, the primary responsibility has been described enough but it is to coordinate services, initiate referrals, advocate for tenants and assist formerly homeless residents to maintain successful tenancy and maximize self-sufficiency. So the requirements are that we do prefer someone with a social work or social services degree, we do often see there are folks that have come into this field and through their experience working with low income or at risk populations have got really good success. And so that combination of the either training, certification, degree or experience are what we look for in a resident service coordinator and then some other, a quarry clearance happens and then they need to have a driver's license so that they're able to move freely from to and from the site for their hours. And there would be cases where there might be some use of a vehicle in their job that would help some residents with daily activities. So, but it is not a part of the plan, it was just something that we do require for that position. We also prefer someone who is bilingual and then another piece of the plan is the budget. I wanna be clear that in this aspect of the budget what we're laying out is the amount of resources being made available for these residents. So these services in the circle is what's included in the operating budget. So this 45,000 is the resident service coordinator and that is paid for out of operations. The rest of these are estimated times of how much clients would spend working with these outside agencies that we have MLUs with. And so the overall cost of services we're estimating at 166,000 with 45 of that covered by the site. And for after hours access understanding that there is a concern in our experience at these types of sites, it is just not a requirement by any program or funding source, but it's also not our experience that it's necessary to have 24-hour staff or services available. We do expect that residents will have their own support networks if they were to come up with, if they were to have some needs in the night after staff were there. The important distinction here is that if residents were to have needs during the day that require actual service, the resident service coordinator is not a service provider. They would need to go to outside service providers to get that actual help. But after hours, we do wanna make sure that residents have access to some other service providers. So we have clinical support options that would provide a 24-hour line. And then for the DMH or service net referred residents, they have a 24-hour access to help with those clients. Property management also has a 24-hour call line to respond to any emergencies or maintenance after hours. The community partners that we have reached out to, I think this is one of the reasons why this plan has been looked at as robust is that we have really good partnerships and ongoing relationships with community service providers. And we have already entered into preliminary memorandums of understanding with the Department of Mental Health, with service net, Elliot Community Human Services, the Amherst Community Connections, local veteran service officers in Amherst and the Amherst Health Department. And those MOUs are included in the supportive services plan. We described the proximity to some local services and medical supplies first. There are many services that are located within walking, biking or convenient access. Board members have pointed out the concern about the grade to get to this site. I will say that, again, with this population, I'll do respect to the concerns and we will continue to discuss them, but this resident population will be very happy to have a home to walk to and from their grocery store or their services, six-tenths of a mile, no matter how steep the hill is. But this is just pointing out many of the centers here are close within that half-mile to six-tenths of a mile range. We could do on-site visits with an Amherst public nurse. Residents can get to the pharmacy and then the bus route is nearby and then there is the Valley Medical Group and then in near Northampton additional service net, CSO and the hospital and the VA Medical Center. The proximity to shopping and meals, we've just listed some of the Craig's Doors, I think is familiar to many of the board members. Big Y is a grocery store, several churches that offer some weekly or several days a week food or meals that are available, stop and shop at eight-tenths of a mile and some additional churches that do free community meals in Northampton. To address this transportation question, I just want to say that what the resident services coordinator does here is help residents to connect with what their right fit is for their needs. So we feel, and this is based on experience, that this is a very walkable site, that the proximity to reach the stores and services just pointed out and others in addition to that, six-tenths of a mile is a very good walkable site from the determination of multifamily housing and the scoring that's done to locate it near those amenities. On the biking front, we do have the bike covered storage, as we've mentioned. There's a bike trail very nearby at a quarter of a mile and the access point a little bit beyond that. There's a Valley Bike Share program, two locations within six-tenths of a mile and then the bike exchange for bike repairs and purchases at eight-tenths of a mile. The higher transportation, there's more detail about this for both the PVCA paratransit fans. This is a service offered by Amherst for seniors and persons of age with disability that prevent them from using typical bus services. So this would be, I think, the thing that to the concern of people needing to get around, I do not believe that people would be in wheelchairs going to local services but using this service. It is available and it is used by people who have those particular special needs. There are other transportation services that are coordinated also with the service providers that some of these residents might be working with. This is the Route 33 PVTA. The red star shows the location of the site and then it shows the gray. Each of the gray arrows is showing connecting routes from the 33. Community integration is very important to us and we see it happen often with studio units with our family housing but with independent living situations of combined or studio and single room occupancy units. We see community integration happening and it happens in a way that oftentimes, one of the comments that gets made is people are surprised they think residents haven't moved in yet because they think that when the residents show up, there's gonna be problems and it's the exact opposite. Here at the lumber yard is an example of that where people thought there was going to be problems and instead there is a very quiet presence, very integrated presence of this building in this neighborhood and we see that all the time and well situated and well managed affordable housing properties. So the RSC's role would facilitate and promote that we are identifying the right and appropriate ways for residents and neighbors to connect and for residents to also have the privacy that they want which oftentimes is what they want. A lot of residents simply want to have a home where they go home to and do their own thing, they don't and that's the whole story but for other residents they want to be social with each other and in the neighborhood. So the RSC would help to connect that with neighbors and Amherst College students who have expressed interest in being a part of those community events. A welcome event would also be something that would be planned for people to meet and then there would be opportunities that would be sponsored by local groups that would also be community events just as they're happening in any community. And conversations and friendships happen all the time. This is just a very common experience that we see at our properties. We did research and development to create our supportive services plan and in the course of preparing that we went to materials that are commonly used in the industry. This is referring to best practices known with a long standing history of providing these services over the last 20 years. So we've interviewed a number of different agencies that run SROs and we've got the list of names here. So Alex Jensen, I'm not gonna name the list, I'm not gonna read the entire list here. I think you guys can see who were, we can read on the slide but Chris Zabak has given us a lot of help and we're gonna look a little bit at some additional slides to just give you some of the credentials of some of these folks that we talked with and the background that we use to come up with this plan. So prior to submitting this draft plan to DHCD, we went to several folks and three of the local professionals that we went to received and reviewed and commented on the draft and then we amended the draft based on their feedback. Jay Levy lives in Amherst, serves on the board at Craig's Doors, holds a master's in social work from Columbia. He's a licensed social worker and a regional manager at CHS. He's published numerous articles as well as four books on the topic of homelessness and he has years of experience working with homeless tenants placed at Valley Properties that are located in Northampton. And he provided public comment to the zoning board during the July 2nd public hearing saying that he could bear witness to the great work of Valley and HMR. That's the property manager I mentioned earlier. Christopher Zabak is the housing coordinator for the Western Mass Department of Mental Health. He convenes regular roundtables that include Valley where we exchange what is working well and best practices, ideas and resources including service providers. And that's aimed at just a group approach where we're making sure we're sharing and coming up with the best tenancy preservation actions for high risk tenants. And he also has direct experience working with tenants at our properties. John Hornick is an Amherst resident and he's the chair of the Amherst Municipal Affording Housing Trust. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois, served as the director of planning for the State of New York State Office of Mental Health and the director of evaluation and client tracking for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. He has been involved directly or indirectly in public mental health systems in the planning, research and evaluation role for almost 30 years. Mr. Hornick directed two studies of supportive housing that were part of a national SAMHSA research initiation at six study sites in total. And the HP study sites were in Massachusetts comparing supported housing and group home programs and in upstate New York, where he compared supported housing and supervised apartment programs. Mr. Hornick has been involved with Valley on this plan over the past couple of years and he's provided verbal and public comment to the ZBA during July 2nd, saying that Valley is proposing a social service support well beyond what is normally provided for this type of housing. Lastly, I just wanted to touch on a point as I mentioned earlier that our tenant selection plan and screening is, we would have an outreach program that is based on an affirmative fair housing marketing plan. That is a plan that is very common in affordable housing that would be implemented and approved under state and federal compliance requirements. The selection and screenings would be procedures written that would adhere to fair housing law. That is the case with all of Valley CDC's owned and managed properties. It's a requirement that we adhere to those laws at all times. And all applicants would be screened for background and suitability to determine that they are a good fit for independent apartment living according to our selection and screening criteria. Between Valley and HMR, each of our staff have extensive experience as respective owners and managers of affordable housing that is regulated by fair housing law. And we do welcome the chance to continue those conversations as the board will bring up related to tenant selection, referrals, fair housing, the homeless set aside or local preference. And then I'll just, I'll leave it there and John Hornick, if he could be introduced, can make a statement. Mr. Hornick. Yes, I'm on line. Can you hear me? Yep, we can. Okay, great. For the record, just identify yourself. Yes, my name is John Hornick. You may know me currently as the chair of the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, but really my primary identity as someone who did research and evaluation on a range of behavioral health programs for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and also for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. So let's, I just wanna say that the research focused on persons identified with the serious mental illness, a substance abuse problem and homelessness, sometimes all three with medical issues mixed in as well. In the next few minutes, I will talk about research on permanent supported housing, since that's the most immediate relevant and it's one way to characterize the Amherst studio apartments. Let's see. The Northampton Road studio apartments are not the first time that these ideas have been proposed. There is literature on supportive housing that goes back over 30 years and has a major influence on public policy. The first article that I read was published 1987 and I'll be glad to provide references for this and also for other things that I mentioned. This type of housing, variously identified by federal agents that is generally known as permanent supported housing. 2010 SAMHSA identified it as an evidence-based practice, means that there's research supporting this approach and codified its definition in a manual for housing service providers wishing to implement a supportive housing program. The elements that must be included include the following, housing choice. People are offered a reasonable choice of residential options, functional separation. Services are not provided by the landlord or property owner, housing and support services are functionally separate. Affordability capped at 30% of income generally by state or federal policy, HUD has similar rules. Integration, fewer than 50% of residents have a psychiatric disability. Rights of 10 years, the lease for a unit is in the resident's name. Permanence, there are no actual or expected limits on length of tenure in the program. Service choice, resident has a choice of what services to accept, including none. Service refusal is not a reason for eviction. Service availability, appropriate services are available, including ones that promote recovery and support housing stability. Service individualization, any service plan is individualized, not one size fits all. And finally, privacy, the units are designed to assure the resident's privacy. And I can provide a link to all of that. From 1998 to 2003, before these were published, SAMHSA funded a national study of supported housing with six different sites, including, there's six different places, including Massachusetts and upstate New York. I was the principal investigator for both of these sites, as well as a member of the overall sharing committee for designing and implementing the common elements of the national research. At each site, there was a comparison between a supported housing program and a different program model. Group homes in Massachusetts were the comparison and supervised apartments in New York. People admitted to programs at both sites, regardless of program type, included with histories of homelessness, psychiatric inpatient hospitalization, and living situations that did not meet their needs. The major question of the study was, would individuals living in a supported housing program, they're better or worse than individuals living in a more restrictive comparison program? There were multiple measures of outcome. The findings were pretty straightforward. There were no significant differences between the supported housing program outcomes and the comparisons. Residents were followed for up to 18 months after program admission. There were no differences in days homeless, no differences in days of inpatient hospitalization, no differences in crisis emergency room use, no difference in days in detox for substance abuse, no difference in arrests, no difference in days working for pay, and no difference in times victimized, and levels of anxiety and depression were also essentially the same. After 12 months and 18 months, residents were generally significantly better off on all of these measures than they had been at the time of program admission, regardless of the type of residential program they were admitted to. There were no differences over time on a few other outcome measures. This study is not unique. These findings have been replicated in other studies in the US and Canada, both before and after the study I have just described. What is the relevance of these housing studies in evaluating the social services coordination plan that has been proposed by Valley Community Development for the Amherst studio apartments? First, there is no reason to believe that the social service coordination plan or any other element of the program design will result in poor outcomes for any of the people who will reside at 132 Northampton Road. It follows evidence-based practices. In fact, there is every reason to believe that people who are homeless on admission or clients of the Department of Mental Health or simply other people with low income will prosper under this living situation. The implementation of the social services plan through a behavioral health services organization is designed to be functionally separate from the management of the building while taking full advantage of the network of human services available in Hampshire County. Residents cannot be threatened with eviction if they refuse services. Through the resident services coordinator, residents should be offered a range of appropriate services, including health, mental health, substance abuse, employment opportunities, money and asset management, shopping support, social opportunities, et cetera. All intended to assure both housing stability and social satisfaction. For residents who have behavioral health problems, the service coordination plan meets all of the criteria for a permanent supported housing program. There is no reason to believe that residents would be better off in a more restrictive environment as I know some people have been concerned. Can anything go wrong? Will every resident remain permanently in their unit or move on to other preferable housing? Of course not, but the program design should assure a successful tenure for most residents and problems for the remaining persons should be appropriately addressed and minimized. For all these reasons, I believe you should be very comfortable with the proposed social services plan and with the general design of these studio apartments. Thank you for your attention. If you have any questions, I will be glad to respond to them. Okay, you've completed your presentation on them. So what I'd like to do is I've asked a lot of questions and have not had it available for the other members to ask. So I wanna first allow some of the other members of the board to ask some questions. And then I'll ask some questions as well. But first I'd like to provide the opportunity for other board members to ask a question on the supportive services plan if they have one. Or if I need a moment to talk, I can start off and give them some time to think about their questions. So the first thing I had was in reading through your supportive services plan is that the goals of the plan are really to provide access as opposed to assistance. And I don't think that's a meaningless distinction between providing access and providing assistance and obtaining these services. And I want you to talk about that difference. I think I see that as just saying, here's what's available, go get it if you want. I'm here or saying, here are the things I can help you try to find these things. And I am not as familiar with working directly with this population as you are or Mr. Hornick is. But I want you to explain to me the difference in that philosophy, because I think that's key. I'm not saying that you require, I'm not proposing a philosophy that everybody is required to have these services. But the difference between just access and assistance is I think key here, at least to my understanding. And I'd like you to speak to that, Ms. Luckler. Hope you're on mute, you've muted yourself. I think it's a really great question and one that is different depending on the context and the group of people who are talking about it. Because the conversation that we have within our industry that is about this distinction is very much about the type of plan that we've written and will implement because that access and the access to services and the assistance to getting it is so much about an ongoing relationship of trust with a resident service coordinator. It's a separation between the landlord who is the property manager, who a lot of any property that offers services or doesn't, there can be friction and tension in that relationship. There can be fear that anything could lead to you being evicted and losing your housing. The trust that residents build with a resident service coordinator goes far beyond simply here is a list of some local services or why don't you go call this person. It's about building that trust and really understanding the underlying need and then actively making sure that that person does what they need to to get in contact with those other community services and then build that relationship and continue to network through a trusting set of, like connecting those dots, residents then become a part of community and fellowship and groups that are working together on common needs and common issues. And so I would say that that's the main difference there. And one of the reasons why there is such a value to this as John pointed out in his statement, the separation there and the thing that is missing for a lot of folks who are coming out of isolated situations, whether that is homeless or not, is that they need to know that they're going to be listened to, that they're gonna be treated like an individual, that they're gonna be given relevant and specific suggestions about what might help them. And over time, what we see is that that's what allows that decision for personal growth, that decision for what the goals are that a person is pursuing. And in some cases, we're not emphasizing that residents don't need to access this because they're not going to. We're just emphasizing that it is not a requirement and the provision, as you pointed out, Mr. Chairman, the providing of the direct services, we just point that out because there's freedom of choice for residents to do this. And that's why it becomes effective, is that people over time come forward to seek that connection. I hope that helps. I think the thing I hadn't thought about is the separation between the property, the landlord role and the access role that you provide or assistance role that I was thinking about. And the power dynamic there that you described that I hadn't thought about that would necessarily exist with a more sort of aggressive approach in the part of the residential services counselor to seek out opportunities to assist people to get services as opposed to doing that once they've built a relationship with them and maybe if you're comfortable with it. So I think that's a helpful approach. And that, yeah, I mean, a very specific example is that people do need help learning how to budget. Whatever resources they have to work with and whatever they're paying for rent and you can't go sit with your property manager and tell them you just lost your job and what are you gonna do now for three months because it's to your point, it is a power dynamic and it is a fear that you cannot overshare that. And so then you have somebody to help you. And you also have a different, you have three different populations here in this in 132, you'll have the formerly homeless people. You'll have two units with people from Department of Mental Health and then you'll have people who are just frankly working in lower paid occupations and you need to be able to treat each of those differently. But I suspect that there has, how do you train a residential services counselor to, or what do you expect of a residential services counselor to provide more assistance to those populations that need it than those that don't? Now, because I noticed that the Department of Mental Health has a plan, they have much more intervention than the other two populations, tenants do, groups of tenants do, but that residential services counselor has got to make that decision between the more aggressive or interventionist approach and just the access approach. How do you, how do they make that decision? What's the work of your experience? Yeah, it actually, it's not, it's typically, it might seem counterintuitive to think of it this way, but it's actually a little bit the reverse of that, that typically good resident service coordinators quietly and slowly build an invitation. So there isn't, it's not about an intervention and it's not about coming at someone like you need this, it's more welcoming someone to come and that's why these hours, the hours that we're proposing will be effective because for the folks who are ready to look for solutions and help for themselves, those are typically the places where the help happens and then they hear from other, from their neighbors and from other residents, oh, you know, he or she, the RSC, help me out with this, you should go talk to them and then that builds. It isn't not about training, but there is an art just as there is to any social work, to people who have that empathy and have that ability to build that bridge and welcome people across it. Okay. John might have more to say about that, but I'm speaking from a perspective that is very specific about the combination of affordable housing for permanent, long-term folks who have this access to a resident service coordinator. And that's why I think that's the other thing that just as we continue this conversation, I think it's a really good one for us to continue in future meetings as well because I think that what's difficult is for people to maybe let go of the fact that services control behaviors or that a service coordinator controls behaviors. It's about allowing for a much larger relationship to build between individual residents in that person and then across the whole community. Ms. Pollock. I believe Mr. Hornek has raised his hand if you want to. Good. Mr. Hornek. Han, let me mute him. All right. John, can you hear it or can you speak? Yeah. There is a belief abroad that people with a serious mental illness or other behavioral health problems typically refuse services. That's not the truth. And I will illustrate it with an incident that occurred when I was director of planning for the New York State Office of Mental Health. There's now a law in New York called Kendra's Law and the law requires that certain people can be committed to involuntary outpatient services. And it was a consequence of the fact that Kendra Webdale was standing on a subway platform and a man pushed her in front of a train. Now it turns out the man who was accused and I think actually either pled guilty or was found guilty by reason of mental illness had a long history in the public mental health system in New York. And in fact, when they looked into the records, they found that he had sought services at two mental health clinics, I believe in the borough of Queens. It's been a while since this happened and was refused services. He didn't look ill enough to the people who saw him there but he was actively seeking services. Now if he'd had a service coordinator which he didn't have, maybe that person could have provoked brokered and appropriate relationship with the mental health services and Kendra Webdale's death could have been avoided. I can't say that for sure, but it's not always that a person with a history of serious mental illness is refuting services and that's what gets them into trouble. And so I think that if the resident service coordinator acts appropriately, builds a level of trust with the people who are in the apartment studios that when services are suggested or even perhaps more likely that a person comes and say, I feel like I'm in trouble, I'm feeling suicidal or I'm feeling this emotion or that emotion that they will welcome the help of the resident services coordinator. They're not gonna have to be forced involuntarily into treatment. And of course any attempt to do that would be counterproductive and very inappropriate in this setting. And thank you, John because I think that's a great point. I also though want to make sure that the board understands that the selection criteria and the referrals that will come to this property, it's very important to hear that the right fit and the suitability of these applicants is all about who will live here. So this is not that anyone who wants to live here can live here because they're homeless and they want to. It will be through a referral and through selection criteria that we understand that they would be a good fit. So I think some of the fears that happen around this is that anyone can come and we don't know who they are and we don't know what their issues are. And so I just want to make sure that people couple questions and conversations around this that we make sure we're talking about that combination of well-suited people ready for independent living who would benefit from and utilize this person who's a resident service coordinator or not because they might be doing fine without that person or without additional services. I want to open it up to other board members if they have a question. Because I do think coming back to the selection criteria is important. I'd like to, if not tonight, some other time come back to that because it's different for each population that you're serving and it'd be important for the board to understand. Are there other questions from board members? I know one of the things we were going to talk about is transportation. We mentioned that earlier and we deferred some conversations and questions about that. So I'd like to have that come up now. If I've, Mr. Langsdale had some questions about transportation, about the role of the residential service coordinator. And I think there are other services and opportunities for transportation assistance for residents of 132 Northampton that might be able to discuss. So if you go into more detail about the transportation opportunities available or possibilities available to the residents. Well, I think, again, and I'm going to, I would like to say what I can but also sort of reserve the chance to come back. Again, I am new in my position and new to a lot of the relationships out here. So I want to make sure I would have, Laura's thought. You know what, I don't want to put you on the spot and I don't want to waste the time of the board if you don't feel that you're ready to answer it fully and that's understandable. You're just new in the job, I get it and I've been new in the job before so I'm not going to push on that but I want to make sure that Mr. Langsdale asked the question he wants answered eventually and then let's do it that way and then we get that asked and then you can respond for the next meeting. That sounds great. Mr. Langsdale, is there anything specific that you would like her to address that we haven't already talked about or? I think the only small thing is in terms of the transportation, in the presentation you talked about the service provider helping with transportation options. So I guess part of the question is what exactly are those options that they would be able to help the residents with? Thank you. So that would be a helpful thing to provide for the next meeting. Yeah, I think that's it for now. Okay. Okay, do other board, if you have questions, board members just raise your hand. So I, I was going to say I, me and other staff members have been writing notes, capturing comments and questions and requests throughout this meeting. So we'll compile those for the applicant, the ZBA members, and to post on the dedicated webpage on the town website of what those questions and requests are. I haven't just a clarification question. In the definition of homeless individuals includes, includes several criteria, but people who lack to fix regular adequate nighttime for residents, blah, blah, blah. A lot of things where they're living in hotels or camping grounds, or they lack their emergency or transitional housing or are waiting foster care placement. Can you please describe how the situation when somebody who's over 18 years of age or the appropriate age of majority in the situation would be awaiting foster care placement? Is that? If I recall what you're, yeah, if I recall what you're citing, I believe it's an overarching definition of homeless that would include minors. There is adolescent housing for homeless adolescents. And so that would not be applicable here. So we wouldn't have, we're not having minors. We are not having minors here. Okay, I wanted to make sure about that. That's helpful. That's a great clarification. Ms. Parks, thank you. I just wanted to go back actually to the smoking pavilion. The one question that wasn't answered is if seating will be provided or not. And I am concerned about that because if seating is not provided, I'm wondering if people will start taking chairs out to that location. So when you're discussing that, can you mention what you would have for seating? Absolutely. I believe we showed a picture of a structure example, but further design, I've heard Laura talk about the seating. I'm quite sure that's included, going to be included. So we'll provide a more... Our previous presentations included a illustrative plan and the package shows on the plans of the bench that is... Oh, okay. All right, and the last picture I didn't see that. And Ms. Dela asked about the two. That is an off-the-shelf image that from shopping for a structure, we pull that image and that's the image of what it would be. In your plan, you list different service needs for different populations in the tenants. And for the low and moderate income tenants, the people that are not either homeless or formerly homeless or people who are served by the Department of Mental Health, your service plan focuses on employment training services, access to employment training services, information referral with some support for follow-up, and then skills support, budgeting supplemental resources and transportation. So some of that is the residential services counselor on a sort of an ad hoc basis, and I don't mean that pejoratively, but on an ad hoc basis, when it occurs, we provide that. But are there other people, are there other agencies that you have a relationship and how you're going to help those individuals who are with those things? Is that done through any of your partners in social services that you identify? Yeah, I would say that that is the more mainstream band of what we would make our residents available with or without a resident service coordinator. There's just a mainstream band of that type of help for around employment, around budgeting, around housekeeping. There's just a number of places and resources. Those can be evening workshops. They could be a series of events that, I don't, again, I can come back with some more examples of the types of programs that we're aware of and use along those lines. That's everything for public schools who continue education to services from churches and other organizations that you provide. Is that right? Is that what you're saying? Yep. We are at 90, go ahead. I was just going to say, I think that that's one of the distinctions that when we talk about self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency is something that is typically typically being aimed for by someone who needs a deeper level of help and is maybe working for a case worker. They're looking to get to a point of really establishing all of the tools and resources they need to have sustained self-sufficiency. For a lot of residents at this site, they will show up with those skills and those resources in place, but they doesn't mean they don't want additional boosts of different and resources of different sorts. We're at 913 and we have a couple of the things we have to do. And we haven't asked enough questions or dealt enough with the supportive services program. We took longer on the initial finishing up with the July 2nd than I thought we would. So what I'd like to do is suggest strongly to my fellow board members that if you haven't already read the draft supportive services plan and see if you have questions, I think we should continue this discussion in the next meeting. The problem with that is that the next meeting we hope to deal with specifically the need for housing in this area in Amherst, the density of the housing. We wanted to have a robust public comment period as well because we didn't have time for that tonight. And so I think that requires us more to try to look at the agenda for the meeting on the 20th and maybe change that a bit. But I think we need to have more time on the supportive services because we've only spent close to a little over 45 minutes dealing with that and this is a huge portion of it. And I also want to have a short discussion about peer review that we may or may not want to have as a board of this or other items of this application. So unless somebody has a urgent question they want to ask of Valley right now, I'd like to close down the conversations for tonight. Have John Whitten described 53G about and what our opportunities are and then have the public comment period on items other than this application which we're required to have. And we will be past 930 at that point and we've exceeded our normal time and everybody's patience. So unless there's an urgent question I would allow, I encourage that if not then I'd like to ask Mr. Whitten to briefly describe the ability of the ZBA. And then before we do that I want to thank you Ms. Lockler for on your early journey into this job doing a very good job on describing the project that you've come into the middle of. I think I understand and I thank you for that and throw all the effort you and your team has put in. So we'll come back. Thank you to the board members for all of your service and time. Thank you. And we also have, Maureen don't let me leave the meeting without going through the list, make sure that I've got, I mentioned all the list of items that were raised earlier that we want to make sure of questions that go to Valley. Okay, so Mr. Whitten, can you, if you're still on the line can you briefly describe 53G, the reason for it, what it allows us to do in terms of getting outside information and how the board, how boards would use that. Sure, thank you Mr. Chairman. Good evening members of the board. So chapter 44, section 53G allows any regulatory body in Massachusetts to require an applicant for a permit, in this case a comprehensive permit to pay for in advance to pay for the retaining of outside consultants. The subject matter for those outside consultants can be as the board deems necessary. Typically a board will seek outside consultants for a skill set that the town might not have or in a small rural town, the town might have no staff. So for example, a traffic engineer or a landscape architect or an architect are typical consultants retained to review comprehensive permit projects. In this case, the board has the right and the authority to require the applicant to pay into a dedicated fund set up by the town treasurer. And that fund would be used for the town to hire a third party consultant. So whether it's a supported services consultant or a traffic consultant or a civil engineer to review the stormwater calculations. The board, they're not mutually exclusive. The board can require an applicant to pay for seven, 10, 12 consultants or just one. The amount to be required is subject to the board's discretion. Generally speaking, especially with a nonprofit, I think the board starts small, you know, with a reasonable amount. And if the board needs additional money then the board can require that. Any unspent money by law has to be returned to the applicant. So the town doesn't get a windfall here. The town can't keep any unspent money. Usually, but not always, the board has a kind of a short list of consultants that it wants to hire. And tonight, for example, would say to the applicant, we are thinking of hiring A, B and C and X, Y and Z. And the applicant has a chance to oppose the hiring of A, B, C or X, Y, Z, but only under two reasons. One is that that consultant has a conflict of interest or that consultant is not qualified. Those are the only grounds to object. And an objection to the selection of a third party consultant goes to the board of selection in Amherst's case to the council. So the appeal doesn't rest with the board of appeals. And I think I can predict that this board of appeals is not gonna choose a consultant that's not qualified or a consultant that has a conflict of interest. So generally speaking, the applicant and the board reach an agreement on the third party consultants for supportive services, for example, where that short list might not be so readily apparent, the board might actually ask the applicant for some suggestions for a third party consultant. There's nothing wrong with that. And again, I would just recommend, Mr. Chairman, that the amount of money the board asks starts small, 5,000 is usually a good number, 7,500, 10,000 is typically the limit for the first round. If the board isn't sure of who it wants to hire now, then the board could still ask the applicant to pay into the fund subject to they reserve their rights to challenge the selection under those two limited circumstances. So let me stop there, Mr. Chairman. I'm happy to go further, but I think- I think that gives us, that's a really good brief succinct description of 53G and I appreciate it very much. So I see this as, in this case in this application and with nonprofits, there are things that are not up to the same specifications as we find with some for-profit operations, whether it's site design or other things. So they're not final in design. And that's why sometimes 53G can be very, very helpful to the board to get an other opinion on whatever it is that we're concerned about. And so I think 53G is a great tool that we can use appropriately, but only those things that are most important to us is not routinely used as a third-party consultant or peer review on things that we can use, either town staff or other people to evaluate. I was thinking very seriously of asking for some peer review on the supportive services plan because it's very important to me, but I would want to withhold judgment until we've had a chance to review the entire plan as a board before I make that request. And we may learn enough about it that we're all satisfied with it without having a peer review, but I wanted to make sure that you understood where I was coming from at this point was my first reading of the peer review without having a full discussion. But so that's where my inclination is going forward, but I want to make sure that we have time to discuss this and we'll decide that later. And of course, at this point, I don't have any, I don't have it, I don't think the board has or the staff has specific recommendations for a supportive services peer review. So we'll leave that to a later point in time after we discuss the supportive services budget in the next meeting. So the last thing that we have on the agenda is to go through the list of questions that were raised for the applicant to get back to or to get back to us on. I just want to make sure that we have them all morning and I've written some down here and I want to make sure that you have it there. So we asked about allocating parking when it snows and we're looking at some kind of an idea of alternatives to just pushing it onto the papers. Give a comparison of the SRO building valley. Okay, I know what this was about. Is there a way to give a comparison of how valley management has the ratio of tenants to parking? So just give us, just go through each of your SRO buildings and just give us the ratio of tenants to park. Oh, okay. Okay, so that gives us a measure for what you do in other places, right? Yep. You're going to provide something on the medical van where it will park and turn around when the handicapped places are occupied. You're going to have a room elevation showing the closets. I know we have the size of the closets but one of the board members wanted a drawing of what it looks like in the room. Smoking pavilion sightings, couple of different options, pros and cons of those and now we want chairs. Make sure there's chairs on there. Identifying the, we have to identify the peak roof measurements. I remember that was a discussion about the, my notes don't make sense here. Just identify what page on the application has the roofs, comparison of roofs with the peak roof and the moderate roof and I think Mr. Chalmers will be able to provide that for the, and we can share that with the members. We'll want to review the management plan and I will, I think referral and selection criteria is something we didn't get a chance to discuss but we're going to have more information on that. Is there anything else that members of the board want to have an answer to before we move on for the evening? And Maureen, is there anything significant that I did not raise? I'm sure there's some, there are some things but is there something, is there anything significant that I did not raise? I have one which is the RSC will help with transfer, transportation options and what are those options? You tell that, right? Yeah, Ms. Hardy. I have that Mr. Langsdale wanted to corner of the building to the house at 126 North Hampton Road. Is that right? But I think Ms. Laughler answered that question with, did you have the number? Yeah, it's roughly 175 feet. We have a survey that shows the existing building but it doesn't have a neighbor's house and I used all of your GIS to approximate. So it's in that range of 175 feet. We can measure things out and we can go back to the site. Not the site. Ms. Langsdale, is that satisfactory? Do you want them to go back and measure and take it and get a number? No, that's not a factor. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Ms. Hardy. Anything else, Maureen? And then regarding having a elevation of the interior units, I believe that you are proposing a few different size units and therefore, would you like an elevation representing each of the types of unit sizes or just one standard? That's a question for the board, I guess. Well, I think there are three different, there are very different styles. It would make sense with two options. You can do one and see how this is represented and then assert that these are representative of the different models of each apartment and that might solve the problem, but if they're not all the same, then I think we ought to have a drawing for the closet for each type of apartment you have. Okay, I think Ms. Brestrup has a question or comment. Yes, go ahead. I think that when you were talking about the elevations of the interiors, you were really specifically focused on the closet and is that the case? So you're really just limiting that to the closet, right? That's right. Thank you. I'm not asking, nobody's asked for an elevation of everything in the apartment, that's a much bigger job. Yeah, thanks, Chris. Yep, thanks for that clarification. All right, one last, Ms. Harding. Oh, you're muted, go ahead. I shouldn't be now. Mr. Langstill asked us to supplement a description of the RSC's role in helping with transportation options, but that should be on our list of things to do. I think Maureen just mentioned that too, yeah. Okay, sorry. No, that's all right. All right, I think we've got Ms. Laughlin. And I believe Mr. Langstill also requested a site walk up North Canton Road prior to the next meeting. We're leaving, he did, and we're not gonna require that. I'm encouraging people to do it, but I'm not gonna require that. And if you wanna get together and do it, I can't do it because of open meeting rules, but if you wanna, I encourage people to do that, I do it often, and it's a hike. All right, I think that's pretty complete list of items. And as I said, we will come out with an agenda for the next week working with the applicant, but also with the staff so that we can cover fully the items that we wanna discuss and not have to break it off in half again and disrupt our concentration on these really important matters. So that's a, that is useful to us so that we've got as much time as possible to prepare and bring back good detail. Yep, it's in everybody's best interest to do that. So we'll do that sooner rather than later and we'll let everybody know. The next meeting is on the 20th of August and everybody's indicated they can attend. Lastly, I have no other items on this application to discuss, so I would move that we suspend the public hearing on this matter till 6.30 on August 20th. Is there a second? Is there any discussion? This is a roll call vote. If there's no further discussion. I vote aye. Mr. Lansdale. Aye. Ms. O'Meara. Aye. Ms. Parks. Aye. Mr. Maxfield. Aye. So this will be on the 20th of August. We will continue with this supporting services plan and we will identify the other topics in addition to public comment that we will have on the 20th. In each of our meetings, we provide the opportunity for the public to comment on any matter that is not the subject of this public hearing. So if there's anybody out there who's attending this meeting virtually and they wish to speak on a matter not including the matter before the board tonight, we would welcome their comments. Please raise your hand and then if recognized, identify yourself and give and learn your comments to three minutes. I don't see any hands raised. Do you, Maureen? Okay. If there's no public discussion, I move that we adjourn this meeting of the ZBA and to meet again on August 20th at 6.30. Is there a second? Second. Mr. Maxfield, any discussion? The roll call vote is required. I vote aye. Mr. Langsdale? Aye. Ms. O'Meara? Aye. Ms. Parks? Aye. Mr. Maxfield? Aye. Motion is unanimous, motion carries. I wanna thank everybody for their work tonight and we'll see you all in two weeks and we'll get out to you before that agenda for that meeting and a list of questions we have for the applicants. Thank you very much. So we don't have a meeting to week, right? We don't have a meeting next week. We do not have a meeting next week. We have one on the 20th and we're trying to schedule the September meetings. I think Doodle poll has been out trying to schedule September meetings. For an administrative matter, we need to probably have several meetings on this topic in September. We would wanna get this done before, you know, November.