 And if you ever have trouble, if you ever have trouble finding the link, search your email for panelists. Well, I found it on the ten site. So yeah, yeah, but the panelists will get your write in. OK, OK, thank you. All right, we're all here. We have a quorum. So. I believe it's time for me to open the meeting with our lovely preamble. Good evening, everyone. It is February 27th, 2023 at six thirty six p.m. I am Robin Fordham, chair of the Historical Commission of Amherst, Massachusetts, and pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020, order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. GLC 30A section 18 pursuant to Chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021 and extended by Chapter 22 of the Acts of 2022 and extended again by the state legislature on July 14th, 2022 and signed into law on July 16th, 2022. This public hearing and public meeting of the town of Amherst Historical Commission is being conducted by a remote participation. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted. But every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time by technological means. A hyperlink to the hearing will be posted on the town's online calendar. And so we're going to move this meeting consists of one public hearing. So I believe I'm moving to the next part of our preamble here, which is that in accordance with the provisions of MGL Chapter 40A and Article 3.60 of Amherst General Bylaws Preservation of Historically Significate Buildings, this public hearing has been duly advertised and notice there has been posted and mailed to already as an interest. The Amherst Historical Commission is holding this public hearing to provide an opportunity for interested citizens to be heard regarding the following demolition application request and the property is 260 Leverett Road. And this is a request to demolish and Nate, I'm sorry, I don't have that exact language in front of me. Here's a request to demolish a circa 1830 single family home and any attached structures. There it is. I didn't have anything. So with that, I'm opening the public hearing and taking the testimony first with a report from the applicant. All right, Kevin, I'm promoting you to panelists. That means you can share your screen and just speak at will. And then I have all the documents available if you need me to share screen or anything. Good evening. Oh, you know what, Nate? I forgot to take a roll call of attendance. Do that now. OK, so a roll call of attendance when everybody's name in front of me. But when I call your name, say I for present, Madeline Helmer. Present. How do you start up? Present. Becky. Oh, my God. Lockwood. Present. It's not on the screen. Neither is mine. Hat off is absent. And Robin Fordham present. OK. So thanks, Kevin, if you want to give us a little bit of a presentation or do you want me to follow some images? If we could pull up the house picture, that'd be great. And let's do it this way. Do you prefer Nathan or Nathaniel? Nate or Nathaniel, I guess. Like Nate. OK. So let's do here's a Google Street view from that was included with the application. That's visible for everyone. OK. Yeah, this is an old house. It's the good thing about it is it's cute little farmhouse. The terrible thing about it is it's a cute little farmhouse. It's just not tenable right now. It's freezing cold. You have to run the heat almost nonstop or get a fire going to keep to make it comfortable. The bedrooms are upstairs. The single bathroom is downstairs. The stairs are not to code the very steep and a hazard for older people. And it's my intention to age in place here, but also to have parents stay with us periodically. So the house just doesn't fit what we want to do, what we need to do. We've looked at options of gutting it, remodeling it, but none of those address those core concerns. If we take down the back half of the house and build an addition, that could do it, but that adds at least two hundred thousand dollars to the overall cost, because the front would still have to be gutted so it can integrate it into the the new addition. We just don't have that kind of money. So, yeah, the request is that we can we take it down and build on roughly on that footprint, the new house, a post and beam structure that matches the other houses in the neighborhood. Thanks. So with that, we have any additional information from staff. Nate? Yeah, I'll say that the commission conducted a site visit today. Robin, Madeline, Heddy and myself were there. We walked around the exterior and then the interior just to take a closer look. You know, just clarify the condition of the property. And so here's an image from today in the houses and is in good shape. It's been maintained. You know, there's some work along, you know, some of the fascia on the north side in certain aspects, but by and large, it's, you know, we didn't see any visible rot or decay. You know, sometimes that's the case here where a sill is rotting or there's something structurally really unsound. Here's another image, kind of the south facing wall and then the corner, the east side facing, I guess, is kind of east facing the road. And so, yeah, I mean, it has new electrical upgraded service. The chimney on the north side of the scroll down or as you see here on the right side is not original to the house. And here is an image of that. You know, that's the fireplace that the owner mentioned using to keep it warm. There's another central chimney that was added at some point as well to incorporate a heating system. And then for other information, you know, other than the application, I didn't really, there isn't a lot for this area of town. And so in the application, we had the form, the inventory form, an older aerial photograph. And that's really about it to tell you the truth. And then I forwarded some information this afternoon to commission members regarding just a little bit more information on Boston, Loomis, a little bit of information on his family and his status as a farmer and as a deacon. OK, so the next order of business would be to take questions from commission members or minority commission members that these are questions for the applicant or for town staff. This is not where we deliberate yet. So if anybody has any questions, just feel free to raise their hand or go ahead and speak. Becky. I'm sorry, I couldn't attend the meeting today. I did drive by and look at the outside questions about the inside. What about the plumbing, the electrical system? Is are there lead pipes? Do you have to do any work on those things if you were to rehabilitate it in some way? I can't tell you for sure. I don't know. I think most of the electric has been upgraded for the plumbing. I don't know. There could very well be lead here. I don't think any effort went into changing any sort of plumbing, but I do think the electrical has been upgraded. Madeline, or have you given any questions, Madeline? Yeah, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your considerations for retaining the exterior. And you said it would add two hundred thousand dollars to the overall building costs. And can you tell us a little bit more about how you came to that? Number and maybe who you consulted? Sure, our builder is the post and habitat post and beam and the pricing that they worked out for a brand new house on the footprint is almost the same as what an addition would cost. And on top of the cost of the addition, you would have to gut this place, get the old original house to make it one comfortable again, livable, insulated, new windows, new heating system, that sort of thing. And then also to integrate it into the new addition. So you would be almost doing two major projects at the same time. Our designer is Huckle, Huckle May. And they're over in Deerfield. Madeline, did you have any questions? I don't think so. I think Kevin answered a lot of questions during the site visit. So it was really helpful to to see the place and the site as well, you know, the property as a whole. No, I'm OK. Great. Thank you. OK, so then we can move on to any public comment. If there are members of the public who would like to comment, you can go ahead and raise your hand and they will let you into the meeting. Can I have just allow them to speak or have them come in as a panelist, Robin? Oh, doesn't matter. Oh, no, not really. Just takes another second to have them become a panelist. OK, I mean, just speaking is fine. Yeah. All right. Hilda, I see your hand. You can unmute yourself. Yeah, I'm just curious. If somebody wanted to move the house, is there any interior woodwork that's equivalent to what I see on the outside or better? Or is that on replaced with no. In other words, is there any 1830 woodwork left inside? No, honestly, the place has been remodeled, I think, multiple times on the inside. There are a few older plants in the very back of the house that we'd like to save and integrate into a new building. If possible, I didn't hear you. Oh, sure. There is nothing new on the inside. Nothing in the inside of the house ties back to 1830. It's been remodeled multiple times. There are some old planks in the back that we'd like. Yes, planks, yeah, that we'd like to integrate into a new home someday. But very few, very little. Thanks. Did you have any further comments, Hilda? No, no, I was just curious about that one. OK, thank you. It's the place where it'd be difficult to move it because it's so far from any place or anybody I know has a lot. Thank you. If there are any other members of the public who wish to make a comment, they can raise their hands. I see Annie Tiberio has raised her hand. Hey, Annie, you can unmute yourself. Thank you, Kevin. I'm one of your neighbors down the road. And my purpose for being here was just out of concern for wondering what was going to happen to the property. We had, you know, fantasies of a development going in or something. So we're glad to hear that that's not the case. It's a beautiful property and it's got so much life left in it. I'm delighted that it won't be dead and gone for good and erased from the from the from the earth. It's the I understand your problem with the house. I've lived in many old houses and they aren't always conducive to modern living or economical or environmental living. But I'm just I was here to reassure myself that we weren't going to be looking at a lot more traffic and a development going in. Excellent. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. No, when we first looked at the place, that was the intent. They had divided it up into five buildable lots. And my wife and I traveled up from Washington, DC to see it. And like we came to the same conclusion you have, it's a beautiful property and it would be a sin to chop it up into buildable lots. So we bought the entire property, all the lots as one, always with the intention of making the house something we could gracefully age and hopefully. But thanks for the kind words. Well, thank you for buying the whole thing and and preserving it as it is. It's I don't know if the greenhouse is workable or the barn or any of those things, but if I could have afforded it, I might have done it. Anyway, I wish you well and I'll look forward to meeting you someday. Thank you. Yeah, I'd like to just weigh in any and I live together on Paul Cameron. We're just across the road a little closer to the lever line. We're at three sixty five on the east side. Yes, we go by there all the time. And like Annie said, we just we were curious about what's going to happen. You know, once this house, if it's demolished, what's going to happen? Of course, as she said, our fear was already stated, but I think you've put that to rest. You bought four other lots so that won't happen. Is that correct? Yes, sir. Yeah, great. Great. Now, we plan on farming. We want to bring this back to raising vegetables and fruit. That's our plan. Oh, great. That's great. There would be a welcome addition to the to the to the street. To the stop by any time if you see my car in the driveway, any time. OK, you're not living there now, are you? I am, sir. Oh, you are. OK. OK. And what was your name again? Kevin, Kevin O'Brien. OK, well, if we see you, we'll stop in and say hello. We just. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so as I see, no other members of the public for public comment. We will close the public comment section. And then, Nate, I believe your suggestion previously was that we just deliberate with the meeting open in case there are questions. Is that your general recommendation? Yeah, I think we can keep the hearing open for a bit just to see if any more information is presented or discussed. You know, then we can always close it with one motion to do, you know, but I think we can just continue questions or have a discussion with the commission. So I could say that, you know, Kevin, the process is the building has already been found to be significant. And that's what moved it to a hearing. And so the commission's role tonight is to decide whether the building should be properly preserved, and that would mean issuing a 12 month delay. And so the commission can issue a, you know, a preferably preserved order which, you know, stops demolition for 12 months or a demolition authorization, allowing you to move to a building permit to demolish. And so that's the discussion. And then if a delay is issued, oftentimes the commission likes to work with the owner to come up with, you know, different ideas or strategies. And so we would be reaching out to you to see if we could, you know, hire even hire another architect or engineer or do a feasibility study or something or see if we can move the house or, you know, what are the possible solutions? You know, it could be that it still results in a demolition, but maybe there's ways to work even with design to mimic some of the massing even or something of a new structure. So there's different ideas that could be discussed during a demolition. I don't have the guns. So it's really the commission, if they have any other questions or discussion. Yeah, so I wanted to open up to commission members for discussion. And I just wanted to remind everyone, although we've had some discussion about how the property will or won't be used, what is in our purview is about this particular building as a historic resource and its value to the community of Amherst and what did that would be a significant loss if it were demolished. So commission members wanted to make comment or deliberate at this time and go ahead and raise their hands or feel free to speak. So I think for me, I was really interested to be there today, partly because from. East Leverett Road up Leverett Road, it seemed to me that there had been a number of new builds in that in that neighborhood along Leverett Road that I they seem very new to me, maybe in the last couple of years. And what strikes me about 260 Leverett Road is that the house is really kind of close to the road and it's it's additional structures, its barns and, you know, other outbuildings and the. Greenhouse, which of course is is much newer in on the site, are quite are quite visible from the street and convey a sense of what that road was like historically in a way that some of the other houses don't. The whole thing kind of works together, you know, but it's. It's also an architectural style that is pretty important in terms of telling America's story architect in architecturally speaking, even though it's a modest example, the house has a lot of charm. Hilda, you asked about interior fittings and I think Kevin's right, there isn't a whole heck of a lot that's original. But, you know, the ceilings are commensurate with the house being a sort of small, rural Greek revival example from that time period. And the staircase up to the second floor is very charming. Maybe maybe charming isn't the word you would use if you were 85 years old and heading up to bed. But, you know, it had it seemed to me to have a lot of integrity as as a building sitting on its on its immediate site in relation to the road. So that wasn't a question. I hope that's OK. I'm kind of no, we're we're deliberating. That's actually really helpful. Madeline or Becky, did you want to jump in or I can appear? Renia. Madeline, you look like you're about to say something. OK, I'll jump in at this point. I want to echo what Hedy said. You know, it's always challenging when a demolition requests come before us. And this house in particular, its character defining features are so strong and so so visible from the public way. And so clearly a part of what is a very old part of Amherst. I've been trained recently. I've received my degree recently and I've been training to learn how to do the art. The historical research on properties like this and looking at the BAP from 1833 and the census records and finding Austin Lemus's a gravestone, which notes that he was the deacon. He had the Amherst Congregational Church in front of our CPA committee looking for funds for restoration. And I think while I didn't define it today, he was a congregationalist, I'm assuming that was his congregation. So I think the step back and the architecture in the setting are. Are just really strong, strong reasons to see this as a preferentially preserved building and to to see it as something that we would want to impose a delay on so that we could find a solution somewhere between that would not be complete demolition without any sort of attempt for a better outcome. And now, Leonard Becky, did you want to make a comment? Yeah, I don't have much to add because I just agree with what you and Hedy have said. And yeah, it is I leave as a ball and I mean, it's a really lovely house. It was it was neat to see it today. And yeah, I think it would be good to to work maybe try and work together to figure out a solution. Yeah, I feel like the full context of the house is still there, which is it's so unusual to consider. Becky, did you want to make a comment? I completely agree. Taking some time to try and help find another another way to preserve the house would would be the most preferable outcome. And was there any more comment from commission members or Nate? No, I don't have any. OK, anything I can ask members of the public again if they have any further comment or questions. If so, raise your hand. I am not seeing any raised hands. So I think at this point, we would make a motion to close the hearing and then go ahead with the votes. Right, Nate? Yeah. OK. So a couple of questions. Yep. OK, one year. Does the clock start from when I put the application in or from today? It's from the vote of the preferably preserved. I mean, yeah, so I'd have to confirm that, but it's not from the time of application. Because the commission could have voted tonight to allow demolition. So what we'll do is we the town will file the preservation order if it moves forward with the town clerk. That's a confirm with the bylaw exactly when the clock starts. But you'll be notified when that when that is. So we have, you know, seven days or something to so many days to file a to file it with the town clerk and with the building commissioner. OK, is there any intent to identify historically significant buildings in advance of someone purchasing? This just seems very unfair to find out about this five years after I bought the place. Well, I think that, you know, we have mentioned this site. Yeah, yeah, I mean, some of it would be, you know, due diligence on a buyer's part and then also on the realtor or someone you're working with. Right. So this isn't, you know, enamorous. There aren't buildings that are prevented from being delayed necessarily. So even in local historic districts or national reserve districts, buildings could be demolished depending on plans or what what the project is. So there isn't kind of a categorically preserved building in town. I think some of it would be just knowing that it's an older structure. You know, what what does a town or municipalities have in place for protections? And so it varies, especially in Massachusetts, each community may have a different level of protection or bylaw regulation. I just think that, you know, what to me, if I saw that house, I would think, well, geez, it's early 19th century. It's an older house. The stairs might be steep. It might need a lot of work. You know, what what am I planning to do? You know, do I need to research that before I purchase it? I mean, you know, there's not much more to say. I think it's unfortunate that the real the real estate, you know, the real estate listing didn't have some mention or some acknowledgement of of it. Yeah. Yeah, I think I read too much into the plaque. My neighbor has that identifies it as an old building. OK. So do we have a motion to close the hearing? I can make that motion. OK, a second. A second. OK, I'm going to go to a roll call vote. Becky. Lockwood. We're voting to close the hearing, right? That's correct. Yes. I'm Madeline Homer. Yes. How do you start up? Yes. I'm Robert Ford and I vote yes as well. So the hearing is closed with a vote for to zero. We have deliberated. Do we have a motion from the commissioners to impose demolition delay or issue a demolition permit? I vote that we impose a demolition delay and that the building be preferably preserved. OK, do I have a second? I can second. OK, I have a second and so we'll go to a roll call vote again. I just any any discussion? I'm sorry, any further discussion on that discussion? Further discussion. Among commissioners. OK. All right. So we'll go to a roll call vote. I'll start with how to start up. This is a motion to issue a demolition delay on 260 Leverett Road. I say aye. How do you say hi, Madeline Helmer? Aye. Becky Lockwood. Aye. And Robin Ford, I vote aye as well. So it's four to zero vote to impose a demolition delay. Nate, I will let you take it from here in terms of what the applicant in the town can engage in going forward. Sure. Yeah, I was just looking at the bylaw. I try to see when exactly the delay, you know, when it when it starts and I can let you know, Kevin, over email. So yeah, I think that once, you know, once the delays issued it, the commission staff try to work with an owner to like, you know, as we mentioned, come up with alternatives to demolition. And so it could be engaging and architect to have other plans or cost estimates, you know, seeing ways that the front of the house could be preserved, seeing how the massing could work together. And so, you know, even moving the house is an option, although that's something that, you know, there's there's a lot involved there. The town does have Community Preservation Act funding, CPA funding that can be allocated to private properties for preservation and rehabilitation. And so it's something that if you're interested in, we can help you apply. It's an annual cycle. So the the applications are due until the fall and then they're discussed and voted on around now, actually. So this year's cycle is is somewhat concluding. But, you know, it'll start again next year in September, August, September. And so there is, you know, CPA funding that would could support this project. It could also be used for the barn or other outbuildings as well. You know, I just I'll make mention of that in the future. Yes, can you can you clarify what I'm just I was thinking about CPA funds to as well. And I'm thinking like, I mean, certainly certainly couldn't be used to renovate the interior to renovate the interior. But I mean, I would think they could be used. It's sort of a question of what they could be, how you would interpret preservation, like I would imagine a heating system upgrade or plumbing upgrades or something like that, that would allow the building to stay. It's just it's a little I think of it generally, you know, when we look at the North Amherst Church and, you know, you've got rotting clavards and things like that that are pretty obvious preservation issues. But yeah, it would be good to explore what might apply in this particular circumstance before kind of going too far down that road, since it's already in such good condition. At the same time, I imagine there's something there that would apply. Right. So CPA is for the preservation of the structure or rehabilitation of the structure. So, you know, sometimes things that are integral like heating or cooling or plumbing may be eligible, you know, foundation, building envelope. And so, you know, I can't say exactly what, you know, what the project may be. But, you know, we have done, you know, a heating system can preserve a structure foundation work. So, you know, if you were saying there's costs to manage that with having an addition. And so depending on how that could be framed or worked out together, then, you know, there is possibility of using CPA funds for some of the work on the you know, the existing structure or structure. So, you know, without saying yes, I mean, I'm assuming there's eligibility there. Yeah. And I think I'm reminded that Jane made clear that that rehabilitation includes changes for accessibility, but that historical structures, you know, that their accessibility is an issue. And so there's the potential for that accessibility issue to be part of of rehabilitating it for for current use. That's that's a definition of rehabilitation. So that might be might be possible as well. I don't want to want to confirm anything. But OK. So at this point, I want to thank you for coming before our commission. I also wanted to thank you for the site. This is this afternoon. It was really lovely to see your property and Nate and we'll be in touch with you. And as far as the commission is concerned, I think at this point, we are just ready for a motion to adjourn. Nothing was correct me on that. No, that's good. I mean, Kevin, we'll be in touch and then, you know, we can talk about next steps or what you'd like, you know, what kind of work you'd like the commissioner staff to look into. OK. I do have a motion to adjourn. So moved. Oh, how do you so moved? Second. I'll second. So the meeting is adjourned at seven and nine p.m. Thank you, everybody, for your time and have a good evening. Thank you, Robin. OK. And Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck, Kevin. Thank you. Bye bye.