 Okay, so welcome everybody to the Amherst Community Chat for Thursday, October 29. Today we have special guest Amherst Police Captain Gabe Ting and Amherst COVID Ambassador Coordinator. That's such a tongue twister. Kat Newman, as well as your town manager, Paul Bachman. My name is Brianna, communications manager for the town. So welcome everybody who's joining us today. I'm going to give a chance for your town manager to give any updates he has. Brianna. So yeah, a couple of things happening. One is we're getting ready for Halloween, which we'll talk a little bit with a Gabe and Kat about. But also last Friday the university announced that it was its plans for February and announcing that it was going to increase the number of students living on campus from about 1200 to about 8700. And so that's given everybody a lot of time to start to think about it and they have really proven themselves over the course of this semester with a very robust testing regimen. So built some confidence in their ability to manage forward. We obviously the town has concerns, but we are meeting. We meet with the university weekly on those types of things. Also note that the Amherst College announced today that it was its plans for the spring and they're increasing their students on campus as well. So those are two quick updates. Great. Thank you, Paul. And before I ask Kat and captain gave tank to introduce themselves. I just want to remind everybody who's joined live. You will get a chance to ask questions. Feel free to start putting those into the Q&A button. If you're joining us from zoom. You may also raise your hand in zoom to be acknowledged live or pressed star nine if you're joining from a telephone. All right. So captain, do you want to introduce yourself and say hello to the room. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am the operational captain for the Amherst police department. Been here for 23 years in the department and. My local, I grew up in Amherst. So just happy to be here and appreciate the invitation. Great. Thank you. And Kat. Hi everyone. I'm Kat Newman. She her pronouns on the COVID-19 Amherst ambassador coordinator. As Brianna said, it's quite a mouthful. And I'm just really, really happy to be here and get to connect with you all. So thanks for having us. Excellent. So, um, I know we're going to talk a little bit about Halloween, Halloween safety and just some of the outreach that you've been doing generally. Um, can you guys report out on some of the recent happenings that you've, that you've been working on? And Kat, I know you have a great, um, visuals to show us too. So let me know if you wanted to start and I can have some of those things queued up. Okay. Sure. Yeah. So maybe what we'll start with, um, Is the document where the community partners. So one of the things that I'd like to talk a little bit about with everyone is on October 24th, which was last weekend on Saturday. We were blessed with a really lovely weather, which was great. Um, we did a really large townwide effort around Halloween safety. Um, and so I just wanted to have Brianna pull this up because, um, really, I think that the pandemic in particular is highlighting the ways that we need to come together. Um, right. To support communities and things like that. And so I think that this outreach, uh, day really highlights how well functioning of a, of a team we have. Um, and really it's, you know, we need to, I think pay homage just to the, the partnerships and the, and the really interesting and unique collaboration we have. So I just wanted to also say thank you publicly to all the folks from the town of Amherst. It was really great to have so many of the council folks there. Um, you know, as well as folks from inspection services, Mindy Dahmer, state rep came out, which was great. And then we also had a whole host of folks from the UMass, um, Amherst area as well. So Dean of students, Tony Merulis, Betsy Cracko, Sally Lenowski and Mora. We also had Rowan and Ann who are working over at the testing center at UMass, which was really great. Um, and then we also had a bunch of our COVID ambassadors. We also had our UMass police department. We often do outreach with them. It was really great to see them. So big shout out to Brian and Tom. And then also from our Amherst police department. Uh, we also, what was exciting about this is we had sort of our folks who are often doing community outreach with us, but also some of our newer officers. So they're getting to sort of see that aspect of community outreach and policing. Um, and then also, um, the other team that I oversee at UMass team, positive presence, uh, who are part of the walk this way crew who belong to the pure health ambassador network. Um, also helped in creating all of these materials and helping put them together. So I just wanted to take a second to sort of say thank you to all of those folks, um, as well as let our community know that it's a really big effort. And I think a lot of times, especially in COVID that, you know, we're seeing things like, you know, we're working virtually a lot of times, right? So we don't always get to see all the behind the scenes work and just a really big thank you to these folks. They volunteered on their Saturday, many of them to do this. Um, so what I wanted to do was then talk a little bit about where we did outreach. Um, Brianna, if you could pull that up. So what we did was we designated six different areas. Um, and these areas are done, uh, sort of made or identified, if you will excuse me, um, in a variety of ways. So some of it is outreach. Many of these areas are outreach that we've already done, um, knock and talks throughout the semester. And then a lot of our, um, outreach is also funneled through with the COVID, uh, hotline. And so if there's areas of concern or things like that, we sort of do follow up visits to that. So I have a student on my, uh, staff right now who's a geography major over at UMass and is really interested in map making. So he prepared individual maps for folks like while they were out in the field to see where they're going. And then I think visuals are really helpful. So we wanted to sort of share out with folks where we went and what we did. So we had six different, um, groups total. Uh, we really wanted to be cognizant of social distancing. Um, you know, in our own groups and sort of at large. So that's why we broke them up this way. And then we could also cover more ground. Um, so what's really exciting about this is that we went to total out of these six groups. We went to 386 different locations. So that's 386 different knocks on doors and chatting with folks. And one of the things that I think is also really important to highlight about this work is, you know, Paul, you had talked about UMass, you know, bringing folks back and really we're a community, right? That has students as well as permanent residents, right? And that's what makes hammer such a robust, thriving, exciting community, I think. And this outreach, um, wasn't targeted just to students or just a permanent residents. It was both. So we interacted with, um, 119 permanent residents. So little ittle-bittles that we talked about their spider man costumes that they were talking about to older residents. Um, and then a lot of college students, we interacted with 204 of those. Um, so that was really exciting. And then quickly, I wanted to talk about some of the materials and the messaging that we did during that outreach. So we're going to, if you want to pull up one of those flyers, um, I can share that. So this is something that our student teams over at UMass at team positive presence made. So we did sort of two different, there are two sided chops. I have the live version. Um, but, uh, the first page is for sort of tips and tricks. So it's a little bit, um, of safety reminders and things like that. We had received guidance, um, through the CDC, which is on the town website. Um, and so we sort of reemphasize that messaging. What's important to note about this, I think, is that a lot of this messaging is already stuff that we've been doing on a weekly basis with folks. It's just sort of with a Halloween twist, if you will. Um, we also are providing sort of alternate things to do in place of in-person gatherings. I think we're all cognizant and aware that the weather is getting colder. So we want to really emphasize to folks on ways to say safe. And then the second side of that, so if you want to scroll down, Brianna, um, was sort of a tips and tricks addition that we put out for our permanent residents, um, or folks that we would perceive as having trick or treaters. So, you know, a kind of a reminder of trick or treaters, the messaging around that was really, you know, make sure you wear a face mask. A Halloween mask doesn't really count, you know, social distance from the groups that are otherwise out, maybe trick or treating, uh, you know, basic safety, like plan a route, have, you know, good lighting, things like that, um, continue to remain in your pods, keeping things small makes things safe. And then, uh, we also had a lot of conversations with permanent residents that might be giving treats to folks. Um, so what we asked was, um, and this is all based on the information that was put out on the town website as well. Um, and those QR codes down there link directly to the town site, as well as the mass.gov site. Um, but really like talking with residents and, you know, some people are die hard Halloween folks. Um, no pun intended, I guess, with Halloween. Um, and they really wanted to, you know, still put something out or participate and wanted to do that safely. So we had a lot of conversations. Um, we spoke with my group, spoke with an Amherst professor who said, well, could I put individual things out like lining my deck sort of so people could just take one piece of candy. And that's kind of what we talked about, you know, so sort of avoiding communal candy bowls, um, doing more of a goodie bag thing, having hand sanitizer. Um, that sort of stuff. Um, and then also if you want to, uh, pivot to the next flyer, um, these were also recommended Halloween tips and tricks activities as well that we had folks put up. So again, just another way to reemphasize that, you know, we know it's Halloween. We know everyone is sort of having pandemic fatigue in a way, but there are a lot of ways that you can still sort of celebrate and enjoy Halloween around and doing that safely. So we sort of talked about some of those. Um, and then it was also exciting to highlight some of the town of Amherst events that are happening. Um, so we highlighted those and put the QR code there. And then the second side of that flyer, um, also talks a little bit more around, you know, planning your visit while you're out and what you do when you return home. Um, and then I'm going to have you actually show the last flyer as well. Um, so one of the things that I think is really interesting about this work and it's sort of, um, when I think about, you know, social justice and the practice and all of that, it's really about relationship building is at the core of that. And I think one of the things that we hear time and time again, both from our students as well as our permanent residents is that, you know, they love Amherst and they want to return to a, you know, typical life in Amherst and things like that. And there are so many people are doing the right thing, but I think that when we, you can articulate, um, compassion and care and sort of saying to folks like, Hey, we're here, you might not see us necessarily, but we're here and so many people are doing the right thing. I think that's important. So one of the things that we piloted this week was little, sorry, we missed you. Um, love notes. So just sort of reminding folks, like, you know, we know that the times are tough, but you're part of a caring community that's filled with all these people. And again, you show, you saw that list of 30 different people who are dedicated to keeping folks safe. Um, and so we left this on people's doorsteps that we didn't get to, uh, chat with necessarily and left a little, our little flyers with some candy. So some reverse trick or treating. Um, and this was really well received. We actually had an, um, two older residents stop one of our groups. They weren't really interested in, in chatting with us per se, um, because they wanted to maintain social distance and had some things, but they were so excited about the note. Um, and so I think that that's just something that's been kind of cool to see. Uh, it's great with having some visuals. And I think, um, especially for people who received that note is, it's a, it's a really positive way of connecting. I wanted to take a quick pause because there's a couple of questions in the room. Um, so we've got a question here. What are the hours for trick or treating. On Saturday. So I don't think we have really designated hours for trick or treating. There is a, um, car parade that the, uh, LSD is sponsoring, I think from three to four. And that's one way that starts at the high school, I believe. And then that's one way to participate. And it's really up to the individuals to, um, decide is there something that has an answer. Maybe. It's on our flyer. Okay. It's on there. If people want, if, you know, it's also on our QR code there. So. And I guess this, this is the kind of connects, maybe captain 10 can give us some context for this. I mean, Amherst, even before COVID didn't necessarily have established Halloween trick or treat times. Is that right? As far as the. There's, there's never been a designated time per se. Um, in general, uh, in our larger neighborhoods, you know, we've, we've traditionally seen a lot of, um, people trick or treating in the Amherst woods and Echo Hill areas. Um, and it's usually during daylight hours. And, you know, it's a lot of times it's young kids with families and whatnot. And, uh, usually ends by eight o'clock, nine o'clock at the latest. Uh, so really during the majority of daylight hours is when you'll see most of the trick or treaters. Great. Thank you. And that's a question that comes up every year, not just during COVID. I know over the years we've gotten that question, you know, wanting to know what the official time is. So. And just to be clear, you know, while the town has offered some low risk, um, options or events through LSSE. And, um, we've put out some guidance or tips are the safest way to celebrate Halloween this year is staying home or participating in those low risk activities. So, um, there's a hard hitting question that just came into the room. Name, name your favorite Halloween candy. Well, Well, that's a no brainer. I don't think it needs, everybody knows what the right answer is. So, right. That's right. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a lemon say Snickers. So if you guys won't commit. I'm going to take that kind of guy. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All chocolate though. Yeah. Okay. So let's see. I know we had some great visuals for some of those events that I'm, I'm happy to put back up as cat shared some photos, but we also have some other questions that have come in. So I'm going to grab a couple of those. One of them. And this is open to anybody in the room. Yeah. The city or the city's decision to open up the campus to 7,000 plus additional students. Will that bring added risk to the town? I've done a lot of talking. So I'm just going to be quiet to make space. That's that's not me copying out. I'm just recognizing that I've spoken a lot already. So yeah, the, you know, we tell, I mentioned this earlier. I think that, that there is any additional people in town brings We don't know where we are, we know where we are today. We don't know where we're gonna be on February 1st. So it's really hard to make a judgment at this moment in time. I think with proper protocols, things can be managed well. There's some evidence that having students on campus is one of the safest place for students to be. And so our biggest concern as a town is really the off-campus activity and the sort of migration of students on campus which hasn't been that happening that much this year, mainly because there aren't that many students on campus. So that's our biggest point of concern, I think, is off-campus and maybe, oops, Gabe's leaving, well. I will say too, Paul, like when we do doorknocks and Gabe's back so he can maybe pop in, but I will say when we do doorknocks with off-campus students, I think it's really important. And again, I'm not trying to sort of spin or promote one narrative over the other. I wanna be really clear about that. I'm just saying that this is what we hear and see on the ground is that the majority of students, including those who live off-campus, are really wanting to do the right thing, are being safe. When we do these doorknocks, everyone is like, yep, I went and got tested and they share some really interesting ways that they're being safe. Things like we have a chalkboard in our house and we have the one name of somebody who is allowed into our house and that's it because my grandma is immunocompromised and I wanna be able to visit my grandma and things like that. So I think that that's like a really important piece to hold because I think oftentimes in times of crisis and a pandemic is that, right? Like it's really easy to be afraid and to jump to that. And I think it's also really important to honor and respect those feelings but also really balance it with like Paul said, like a lot of proper protocol and procedures in place are doing that. And there's a lot of folks that are doing that and it's a well-oiled machine in many ways. So you had to add to that when we were going doorknock and we went to a fraternity and we asked about testing and they said, oh, we go on Tuesdays. It's like they all knew that's our day and that was sort of a group activity and they all went together. But I think Gabe would be interesting. I think we've noticed a pretty strong downturn in a number of large gatherings that we've had this fall, right? You know, it's been interesting, you know? So, you know, just echo your sentiments in terms of what the future holds. You know, while I understand the concerns and the future can never totally be predicted, certainly with the strategies that have been implemented from UMass, from the rules and regulations so far on campus and the amount of testing that they've been doing, their plan seems to be pretty solid and I'm pretty optimistic that we're gonna be able to work with it to try and ensure everyone's safety as best as possible. And certainly from what we've seen, what we've learned from the townside in terms of large gatherings and whatnot. For the most part, all of the parties off campus within the college community have been small. They've been reasonable and, you know, what has disappeared is the large day drinks and large-scale parties that you would normally see on any given weekend if COVID wasn't apparent. But certainly it seems like the college community has been trying their best. You know, they're college kids and they certainly wanna socialize and they do wanna gather. And both for the most part, it's been pretty responsible and the students have been responsive and I feel pretty confident that even with the addition of the students coming in in the spring that that will probably continue. You know, it just seems like the current culture has changed and it's becoming a lot more accepted and in terms of social distancing and wearing masks and just being responsible. So I'm fairly optimistic about it. And can I add one more thing to that? If that's okay. So you just made me think about it. So again, I think this partnership between the town and the university is so interesting and so unique. So while we were out in our group, I had one of the folks, Rowan, who works over at UMass at the Mullen Center for testing. And it was really great because we had stopped with some students and we had had a really, you know, a good lengthy conversation with them and they had asked some questions. We also had one of the officers in our group. So they had asked some questions around sort of how noise violations work and gatherings and specifically on testing. And we had another group of students that we talked with and they were talking about how to better community relations with their next door neighbor. Because they said, you know, we live in a house with four people. Our neighbor came up and said, you need to social distance because a birthday card was delivered to the wrong house. And they said, how do we reach out to her and sort of, you know, smooth that over? We want to make sure she's comfortable. We want her to know, you know, we have a shared bathroom, but we're staying to our pod. We were just out fixing our bicycle sort of. And from that, actually those students had asked their public health students. And so they're going to be looking for more folks, students over at the testing center. And so we were able to kind of connect them in and pass them along to Rowan and, you know, see about if they can help support that work at UMass. And I think that again, just shows this really, you know, collaborative nature and through talking with those two young women, they'd already been in conversation with Sallie Lenowski at the Off-Campus Student Center for some other things. So it's really cool to see how seamless this all is. And I think that the more communication and transparency in that way, it really helps, you know, create that wraparound approach, which I think will help procedures and policy be, you know, just better implemented. I agree, I just want to add that, you know, the collaborations that we've been making, you know, certainly with our partners at the university in trying to, you know, make this, this is an issue that affects all of us here within the community. So it really takes everyone's hand to participate in order to make sure that this, that there's a successful outcome, you know, ever since the university has allowed first responders to go over to their testing sites and to get tested weekly. I've been doing that every single week and it amazes me how much, how much compliance there is. Every time I go there, there's lines out the door full of students and, you know, it's just become a normalcy for the student body, which is just wonderful to see. So I guess in short, it seems like the efforts that we've been making as well as the students in the university collaboratively have been working. All right, so I've got another question from the room. Jeff, Jeff says he finds the statistics on the online dashboards that the town and UMass maintain to be quite valuable. The town site publishes daily townwide COVID case counts, but does not list historical data. Could this information be added to the dashboard page so that we can get an idea of the trends? That's mostly your question, Brianna, you run it. Yeah, so I mean, it's more of a, I guess if our public health director were here, it's more of been a decision on how we present that information coming from that office. That being said, if they decided to want to present the information in that way, we could add it to that space. Right now, for those who aren't familiar with that dashboard, we update it usually in the afternoon with the current active cases within the town, as well as the cumulative case count, but it doesn't really give you that perception of, you know, did we just go down or go up over the last few days unless you check it religiously, like probably Jeff and me. But that being said, we have a new public health director who's coming online. If she hasn't already, Paul, is she? Monday, she starts Monday. So I will take that feedback and I will definitely discuss that with her to see if that's something that we can kind of incorporate moving forward. Thank you, Jeff. All right, so we have six minutes left. Time flies when you're having fun. I just want to give a last chance for the folks in the room. If they wanted to pop in another question, comment. Now is the time. Otherwise, I have a couple other questions that were submitted previously. And I think it's important, this one because of our special guests here, I've gotten this question a couple of times. How does the ambassador program and Amherst police connect? Or how do they work together? Is it something that's in Amherst police? Is it a town-wide initiative? So if either of you could speak to that, that'd be great. Yeah. Gabe, do you want to chat or you want me to chat? Again, I just feel like I've been talking a lot so I want to make space. That's okay. I'll just say, I'll throw something out there and you can add to a cat. The ambassador program is, it's an issue. It's, there aren't too many of them out there. And I know there's one in Worcester and there's some out west in California, but for this area, this is kind of a new way of doing things. And it's been highly successful. I'm gonna let Kat talk about that. But in terms of the collaboration between us and ambassadors, we don't run the ambassador program, the police department, we're there as a resource and to support the ambassador program. So we kind of see ourselves as a partnership. Certainly the ambassadors utilize, what we have to offer to kind of augment their mission because ultimately their mission is the same mission as ours. We're trying to solve these problems and to try and find successful resolution. So I would characterize that mostly as a partnership. Just we're there to help each other out. And with that, if you want to add to that. No, I think that's a great way of framing it, Gabe. Thank you. And I think, we're a town program and we're housed within the police station. And I think that makes a lot of sense in many ways because we partner really heavily, as Gabe was saying, and officer Laramie has been really helpful. He's the community neighborhood liaison officer. And that also has dovetailed a lot of the work that I've done at the off-campus student center when I run the walk this way program. So a lot of that is again, just sort of building on really effective and sort of this seamless collaboration. Plus we get to hang out with Winston, which is pretty great. But we partner in that way. And I think a good example, Brianna, to this question of showing sort of other roles, our role is responding to COVID right now, right? And sort of helping create a positive, sort of entry point in COVID. So mask, education and things like that. One of the things that we're gonna be doing and a big shout out to the town clerk, Suadette, who came in yesterday along with Captain, with Gabe and our staff meeting. And we're gonna actually be deploying some of our ambassadors to be at polling locations for election day. And they're gonna basically be there in the main role of them, because they're a town employee, they're not trained to be poll workers. So they're sort of as a neutral presence and they're handing out masks if anybody has shown up to the poll and forgot theirs or if it's laundry day and they forgot it. So they're gonna do that. There's also going to be touchless hand sanitizers that are at all of the polling sites that Sue had been talking to us about and that's new this year. And so it was something that they thought people might actually just walk right by. So our ambassadors are there to kind of remind folks to do that. So that's kind of an example because again, one of our things, right, is for polling and things which we want folks to do in our community, one of the barriers with COVID was that people might not feel safe for in-person voting. So the role of the ambassadors then is to go and sort of help. How do we mitigate, how do we lessen that barrier? And that's one of the things we're doing. And again, we're doing that in conjunction with multiple town offices, and there's many of the officers and the constables will be there. So again, it'll be part of that partnership, but we're not directly, we're not directly through the police department. And I think that that's actually a really important piece and Gabe kind of spoke to this around, there's not a lot of programs like this in the country right now. And I think it's a really cool way to show how you can partner with police and not make everything fall onto police, right? It's a really good reallocation of those resources and those roles. I just wanna jump on that a little bit. So the elections thing is really important for us because we anticipate there'll be lines. We've done really well, we're at 49.4% of the registered voters have voted already. We'd like to get that up, typically in a presidential election year, we're in the 68 to 69% of registered voters. We do anticipate because of social distancing, the lines will seem long because we're asking people to be six feet apart. And there's this thing called line comfort is educating people saying, hey, it's just about five minutes from here, helping, you know, if people have a hard time parking, if there's someone who needs support, it's just so they're not election workers, but just sort of folks to help augment the current force that we have out there. And also I think what's really important is just what Kat mentioned, is that the philosophy of this is to create a culture of compliance and not enforcement. Because public health researchers know that voluntary compliance is much more effective than punitive measures. And so we don't wanna lose the sense of enforcement, but we really wanna lead with a positive notion. And I think that's been very successful for us and especially with our community. So thanks for that. And I just have to say, Kat was able to stand up this program in like record time with a lot of people employed and out on the streets doing the work within days, it seemed, it might have been a week, but boy, it happened fast. Thank you. I am as good as my team. I feel really happy and so privileged to be brought on to really good, you know, collaboration. So thank you, Paul, for that. All right, I know 30 minutes went by really quick. It's 1230. I do wanna give a chance. If there's anything else we wanna leave folks with that you didn't get a chance to say, feel free to do that now. Just be safe on Halloween, make wise choices. Yes. So we will be back next week at noon with new special guests. This recording will be up on our YouTube channel. And if you're watching this on YouTube, feel free to subscribe to our channel right now. Okay. Thank you all. Have a great day. Thank you. Happy Halloween. Have a beautiful day. Funny.