 I want to call the finance committee meeting to order for finance committee for May 7, 2019, 2 of 3 p.m. and welcome everyone a couple things first of all ignore the place the names in front of us because we didn't move the labels from last night's meeting which lasted pretty late at night but anyway I'm Andy Steinberg I'm chair of the finance committee there are four out of five members of the finance committee present here today and I'll let them introduce themselves in the moment when they're in front of microphones one member was unable to attend because she unfortunately had to attend a funeral today and therefore is out of town and then we have one additional member of the council present Pat Daniels and is sitting actually in their correct position according to your name played from last night and we have posted this as a council meeting if more counselors come and there ends up being a quorum of the counselor then president of the council will call a meeting to order of the council but otherwise this is just a meeting of the finance committee and I appreciate everybody being here the process this year is our first time for the council in establishing the budget process and I appreciate seeing at least one friendly face from our old finance committee present here the the rules that we will be operating with this year are a little different when we get to actually considering the budget because the voting procedure at the council is under different rules than the cat then applied at town meeting but the finance committee is trying to do a fairly similar role of reviewing the budget section by section and then being making a recommendation to the council as a whole so having with that introduction now here to just let my colleagues in the committee introduce themselves shall any better male member of finance committee and district five counselor Kathy Shane on finance district one Lynn Greece were town council president and district two and I previously introduced myself the only thing I didn't say is that I am a counselor at large which meant that I'm one of the three people who has elected townwide as opposed to in a district going then to actually the review of the budget I don't know if town manager did did you have a recommended order that you would like to suggest that we review departments in and do you have any introductory comments the order we would like to do is police fire and then I think health and council on aging and the LSE or no LSE is going to go earlier because there's a commitment here so we do have a volunteer minute take her for the moment this is none going I'll take care of minutes for Margot will be here shortly okay as we noted earlier we're not calling a council meeting at this point because there's not a quorum present and we don't know whether we'll get one or not and I explained that already so we're gonna start with the police department I guess I'll chief Livingstone in the team in case so I think that which you're probably gonna be talking about is actually several sections of the budget starting I assume with the police department itself communications animal welfare and I don't know if you're gonna do the police facility building if any comments on it but those those are they're actually four sections as there have been in prior budgets so that's correct Scott Livingstone police chief I've brought with me captain Gabe Tang who oversees operations and captain Ron Young who is the captain of our administration so they may they're open to questions or answers as well as myself so do you have a preference mr. Steinberg do you want to do animal welfare no I know I since you have two officers senior staff with you who probably have other things I want to get to why don't we start with the police budget itself okay sure so starting out with the police budget and facilities the facilities part of it I can probably answer questions if there are questions about the facility but I don't actually have too too much say over the actual budgeting of the facility other than to give input about what types of things need to be replaced and at what time frame but if there are questions about that I'd be more than happy to answer those as well to the best of my ability from the purposes of the police budget going through you saw in the pie chart about 95% or so is directed towards personnel we are currently budgeted at 48 police officers and we have one that is a grant funded position through a domestic violence grant that we are in our fourth year I think of domestic violence grant quam quam it's a grant that we work with the University of Massachusetts with the town of Hadley which funds a full-time police officer and also funds a civilian advocate that we use in our facility to deal with domestic violence issue so 48 budgeted and one domestic violence grant funded position for a total of 49 police officers currently though we have four vacancies three of those vacancies are attributed to officers leaving for other agencies captain gun Jen Gunderson left for the South Hadley police chiefs position officer Sam have left to take a position with the Rhode Island state police officer Mike Boyle left to take a position with the United States Postal Services so that's where we stand as far as personnel if there are specific questions mr. Steinberg did you just want to stop at any time otherwise I'll just go through some of the quickly I know we want to keep this to five minutes or so but that is updates of objectives that sort of thing yeah I would say why don't you proceed and then afterwards there I'll turn to my colleagues on the committee and the council to answer us to see if there are any questions when you've completed your presentation sure so just as far as long range objectives quickly when we get up to full staffing we have three officers that will be attending the police academy on June 4th in Springfield that academy lasts about 22 weeks so it'll be some time before those officers actually graduate and are on the street working so we'll be with those vacancies for the better part of 2019 when we get up to speed you know some of our long range objectives just get up to staff and we get a lot of request for traffic issues and that sort of thing so officers running radar responding to accidents those really aren't being fulfilled to the ability that we want to do so as far as update on objectives from 2019 a lot of our community outreach which involves our crisis intervention team and our work with the University of Massachusetts to diffuse and reduce the number of quality of life calls is going well have accomplished both of those as you see conducting comprehensive review of our policies that's something that we need to do and we will do with quieter time in the summertime comes that's an internal process just something that we know that we need to do and will accomplish over the summer we know with the upcoming licensing of recreational marijuana we're going to be dealing more with crash-related instance specific to impaired driving having conversations with our colleagues out in Denver and Washington in Oregon State we know that that's going to happen more frequently officers are currently being trained as we speak about recognizing impairment specific to marijuana usage and other impairment so that is something that we are aware of and we are training for and constant will be concentrating more directly with continuing to work with all of our town departments school departments of Alice training active shooter training response to critical incidents we are doing that on an ongoing basis a matter of fact we'll be down at the Crocker farm schools this week next week tomorrow okay that is the last school that we have to get up to speed as far as our active training active response training in regards to school safety and sept head continuing our work with the officer Bill Laramie in our community outreach officers just to again reach out to neighborhoods that are affected by student activity and student housing we've had great accomplishments and great successes in North Amherst we've filtered that down to the Philips and Faryon Street area and now our next location that we're going to be working with is lower Main Street and the Main Street corridors where we've been seeing an uptick in student and quality life issues so that is next on our objective as far as work to do on neighborhoods that we're having issues with so overall though you know that the work that Bill Laramie is doing with UMass administration is going outstanding I couldn't be happier with the way that's going so questions anything you want me to hit more specifically about well one one comment just from having been many years no longer but many years on the campus and community coalition I really do appreciate officer Laramie's work and the sept head program I think it was one of our really great accomplishments and it's really he deserves tremendous recognition and appreciation for that effort I think that I appreciate you bringing up the marijuana concern because that was one major concern going forward about changes and whether there were any obviously we'd also be interested whether there are any budget concerns that come out of any of this the other things that I was always interested in is whether the challenges of working with the homeless have in any way changed in how they've affected the department and its operations and there's the additional question that we is beginning to come before the council and that is whether there's going to be any known concerns about the if the proposal goes forward for the SRO residential single residence occupants program project that Valley CDC is proposing for College Street and whether that causes any concerns for the department and for either workload or staffing you know from you know speaking about the home is an issue issue and it's not one that I just intentionally kind of left over because it's an area that we have officer Casey Nagel who's assigned to the downtown district and we have four officers who are liaisons to the shelter when the shelter is open the shelter is now closed there's probably not a day that goes by where we don't respond to a call that involves a homeless individual not always a you know a problematic type call but sometimes issues of where they're sleeping where they're staying sometimes being a nuisance but there are specific individuals we deal with constantly who you know sometimes are arrested and you know we deal with those individuals and do the best that we can to get them the help that they need that being said I think we as a town and it would be very beneficial to the police department and EMS people as well if the individuals have permanent residency and however we reach that will make everybody's lives easier of course those individuals who are homeless first and foremost but what we see is once the shelter closes for the season there are no there are no places for the individuals to stay so they end up camping out in various locations whether it's the West Cemetery or the rear of the Jones library there's a little outpost behind the big white shopping center and those are areas that we patrol and we sent to so I think long-term goals as a town we need to really do a better job of trying to find permanent residency for these individuals so whatever we can do as an agency to whether discuss that talk about that or be involved in that certainly we would want to be part of that solution. Lynn if you were to look back over the last five years or so would you say that our homeless population has increased or remain steady decreased what would you say is the trend? I'm terribly sorry one of the things is kind of an interesting dynamic is because of the way our shelter is set up we receive almost a daily influx of people that come to town because they can receive services and then they'll stay for the evening hours and then they'll leave town and go elsewhere so that's a long way of saying I think there's been an increase but it's very hard to quantitate simply because it really has by definition it's a transient population but it's even more transient because it happens on a per diem basis over the course of the season so I know that our co-activities definitely increased that is those are numbers that we can produce the number of you know actually people who are impacted by homelessness I think it's increased but it's it's hard to kind of modulate and really define what that is. So one thing I'm really happy to hear that you also you feel that having providing a home to the homeless is actually going to be not only good for them but also for you good for you one additional question would be if there's a concentration of people living in these SROs does that impact the neighborhood in any way? I think the best way to answer that is looking at past histories that we've had with problem properties and very successful properties and from our perspective what it comes down to is management so if we have good management at these sites who work cooperatively with the police fire health department and we'll have a successful location it's really about communication and just working together to make sure those properties are successful. I want to stay with this topic a little bit but I want to build on one of the other questions Andy should we stay with homeless? You're called. Okay well one question I had and you might not know and I saw Ella social services was also raised this. Do you have any sense of are most of the homeless that are in Amherst fairly long-term Amherst residents that something has hit them and they've lost their home or is it a more transient population? Is there any way of knowing from what you're seeing who's using the shelter do we see them year after year after year kind of thing and or do even the people change? Gabe what would you say I mean? So our liaison officers really tried to do a good job in getting to know each individual that are at the shelter they kind of make it their their purpose to get to know what their background is where they are in that way in order to develop that relationship we can kind of steer them in the correct direction and try and gather the correct services for them so unfortunately you have a you have a huge array you have a mix of different people you know the programs that we have here in town are so good that news actually travels and we get a lot of transient people oh I'm sorry sorry about that we gather a lot of different transient people from many other communities and you have a vast array of circumstances from each individual homeless person some of them are coming from situations where they may have lost a job and it's a temporary solution others have much more complex issues such as dependency issues that have helped to foster the situation that they're in so it's that's that also is really difficult to quantify it's almost on an individual basis but one thing that's been constant is we do see every single year a whole host of new faces and they're literally coming from everywhere outside of the state as well and nope she didn't I was going to kind of move to a larger observation when I look at your the chart of the different kinds of violations and so forth it ends at FY 18 but some of them show some trends upward and to just ask you you know what do you see is the growing areas of concern when it comes to violations did you have one specific no even even the first line goes up yeah yeah so just general calls for service you know that fluctuates from year to year and you saw FY 15 be one of our lower ones we've been as high going back 9 or 8 9 or 10 years or just when I was about coming on board as chief believe it was in the 20 to 21,000 calls annually a lot of the types of calls and or arrest you may see in that chart are sometimes officer driven so if we're trying to establish better behavior we may flood an area and request is you know that people behave better and in the course of trying to get them to behave better sometimes it involves arrest or more outreach than necessary so the fact that you may see alcohol arrest up doesn't necessarily signify bad behavior it may be that we're concentrating our efforts trying you know get better behavior in a specific neighborhood so I don't get too too alarmed about that sexual assaults fluctuates a lot again our domestic violence advocate does a fabulous job and she's there for us all the time 24-7 so those are hard to give an explanation from one year to the next about why there are more do you on a topic like medical assist I was also looking at ambulance was gonna ask this on this is that senior senior related homebound I mean I don't know when the when you get called in a medical assist versus an ambulance in an EMS well not necessarily I mean we have seen a significant uptick in the number of medical mental responses that we're having in these are more types of calls for people in crisis and some of the calls that you see there will be there's a let's say there's a specific individual we probably have respond to this in this past year over a hundred times so one individual may make a big uptick the types of calls but that being said medical mental calls have increased significantly not just in Amherst but when I speak with other police chiefs and you know colleagues that's pretty much consistently at least in Massachusetts an area where we're seeing a larger number of responses there are a lot of services out there so the first thing people do are call the police to get the ball rolling on trying to a get somebody out of a dangerous situation or be trying to find a problem as problem solvers that's kind of where they start so that's when you when can I follow up now when you get a concentration like that a person do we have an Amherst I mean that after you is you know the community service or is there a linkage where you can let's get someone in the middle of this to try to figure out how to prevent it becoming an emergency sure run and you want to speak on our CIT officers who are specifically trained to try and find resources we do it and it kind of ties into the question about the numbers as well a large part of the members of our CIT our crisis intervention trick team they respond sometimes when not sometimes very often a call driven 911 driven but we also have a program in place where we go back when people are not in crisis and that's kind of a service-gathering thing and it really had great fortune with that not only does it kind of forge a relationship with people in the community but we've been able to tie them in depending on where they're from and where they work with things that can actually give them real assistance in the future something more than a police officer arriving as a result with 911 so some of the numbers that we see that are related to medical mental calls are actually not as responding to people in crisis but responding for aftercare just you asked a question at the beginning Andy on about marijuana and I had both you said you anticipated some issues marijuana gets treated differently than alcohol in terms of driver's license is that correct or you know if you you driving well under the influence well not any longer what they did when they changed the marijuana marijuana laws about just mere possession so it used to be if you had it on your possession not driving nothing to do with operating a vehicle you know there was criminal charges that could be brought and they've done away with it it's not now non-criminal it was now non-criminal now it's actually legal to possess certain amounts where it becomes a problem is when people are people are operating a motor vehicle now and the penalties are going to be the same the problem we don't have the problem we have is a officers aren't trained yet we are in the process of training officers how to recognize it and what further makes it a more a bigger issue for police departments is how to test for it so you know it's pretty easy to recognize when somebody is under the influence of something then trying to prove that in court and get the help that people need is another story so that's the area where we haven't really figured out what we're going to do and by we I don't necessarily mean the police department but the common well just to add to that real quickly one difference when you compare alcohol impairment in comparison to drug impairment or impairment with marijuana is at this time you know there's a breathalyzer machine to try and test the blood alcohol content with drugs or marijuana there's no instrument there's no medium for that so the training and basically the observations are made are purely from the officer in making a determination what type of influence that they're under makes it a little difficult yeah one other concern I've heard from people is about the new developments if that has added to calls in downtown or other areas where the new buildings coming up if that has increased the number of calls police calls the as far as the downtown buildings very minimal very minimal anything else okay I appreciate it we should go into the other parts of the budget and there's enough here so sure I'll speak quickly on communications again personality in the major part of the communications center budget let me first say you know from a perspective of professionalism we probably have the best communication center in the state of Massachusetts if not New England and I think you know they need to be recognized by that we tell them frequently but it's nice for them to hear that from other individuals as well that being said as far as staffing levels again 90% 7% of their budget is personnel most of which comes from the town however we do receive grant funding and we get EOPS 9-11 grant monies annually we have one grant that's brought a little over 80 and you have this information 84,000 that pays for a full-time position with benefits and it also supplements our overtime budget in the communication center we have a supplemental which is relatively new budget item through the 9-11 cell phone reimbursement so when 9-11 calls come in we handle those and now it's switching over to texting we get money from the state for handling those calls as well the money is used also to supplement the overtime budget the overtime budget budgeted part of it is not is handled mostly through the grants so that's how we pay for overtime in the communication center and then finally the $12,300 annual training grant is the money that is used each dispatcher needs to go to a certain amount of hours of training annually for EMD emergency medical dispatch for CPR conflict of interest training that sort of thing and that grant pays for all of the training that's 36 hours of training they receive annually so from a perspective of everything else again update on the objectives they've accomplished just about everything we had lined up for them again the switch over to handling of the 9-11 cell phone calls directly to the communication center is ongoing but they're doing a fine job with that the next thing up is you're going to be able to text the 9-11 center if you have a call or a request for emergency services we'll see how that plays out but we will be receiving additional funding for handling those calls as well it's based on geographical locations in area again that's relatively new so we don't know quite where that's going to take us but it is an area that is going to impact communication center there's no question about that again we're one of the regional hazmat response or dispatch centers so we handle everything Chief Nelson would know the geog feel a little bit better than I do but I think it's Worcester and everything West is that right Tim entire state alright right thanks so so for the entire state except for backups in those types of things there are two centers that handle that Amherst being one of them I think that's it and I shall question I have one and then I'll see if my colleagues have anything and I was just curious when I was reading through the book and reading the mission statement for the communication center with Chaz the last sentence this expectation of excellence extends beyond the Amherst borders to neighbors and Pell and Leverett and Schittsbury and I was wondering how since we don't have regional dispatch we're interacting with those other three communities as far as the dispatch service where that where that correlation lies and whether there's any hope for real regional dispatch so there's lots of hope for regional dispatch and we've been having this conversation for I think 20 years when it comes to regional overall police dispatch we've had no locket finding partners fire services and EMS we dispatch and make calls for the area fire departments so that's where the regional part of that fits in but when it comes to just police dispatch not so much luck how does that fit in with our high-rate institutions are you also the dispatch center for them we are not so UMass has their own dispatch center Amherst College has their own dispatch center and Hampshire College has their own dispatch center and this is the obvious question that Chief Nelson might be the better one to answer which is how the flow works when a call comes in for EMS services from something on campus that's the one place I think there's something I could answer it yeah no I'll wait I'll wait for Chief Nelson to answer that but any further questions on communication sir right and then last but not least animal welfare is there anybody in this room who doesn't know Carol Hepburn again Carol does an outstanding job she is our sole full-time animal welfare officer who handles everything what people probably don't realize is how much time she spends doing investigations with that their dog bites or animal complaints specific to people walking dogs off leash where they shouldn't be you know she's a 40-hour employee who probably works 80 hours a week even though we tell her not to she deals with dog dropping dog droppings in parks all the way to dog bites she inspects all the farms in town make sure people have what they say they have that if you have a cow farm and you have 20 cows you're not supposed to have 40 she checks that actually goes and inspects and counts so she works right out of the police facility she's extremely popular in our building and I don't know what else to say about Carol well I think Carol's great of course and less last August had a severe dog bite situation ended up at Cooley Dick and Carol was on it the very next morning and I appreciated her problem this yes she's outstanding she has chased my chickens back to their coop and given me lectures but like star setup so she's been wonderful yeah she's fabulous she's very active in the regional dog shelter now as you know and I know that's in your packet we contract with North Hampton and with Hadley as well she's looking for additional partners you know she means she does it all so this is really a question I think for the town manager but if we have a serious violation with a pet to the point that they have to be euthanized she makes that decision I hope it's the town council because those are afraid you were going to say trees and dogs are the two most controversial decisions that you will ever yes I've been told that by close member of the family so yes Carol would present evidence in a case like that in the town council would be the judge jury and executioners yes I have to say that I thought that I had escaped it when I served my term on the select board for all those years and never had a dog hearing and then find out that I didn't escape it at all questions and I don't think there's unless you have something to say about the facility I know that we are going to have to be thinking about it on a continuous basis we talked about it this year as far as preparation for roof work that needs to be done and it is just a building that gets 24 7 use and is not as young as it was when it was built and so it is a capital certainly issue operationally I know you yeah I mean operationally in the facility itself is in really really great condition you know it's not one full-time employee who actually is with the maintenance department and other than that the officers themselves do a great job keeping the building itself clean and stuff but yes there are areas that will need to be addressed of the boilers were just recently replaced the original boiler so 30 some odd years so you don't be some savings coming down the pike for heating and cooling again the roof does need to be replaced and I had requested after many many years of being questioned about my electric bill why don't we have solar because the heat is unbearable sometimes on the south side of that building where the sun shines so I mean it would make sense that we look at ways of getting solar installed on the roof line once it's replaced so just on building on that I I saw the electrical bill line yes in terms of dollars so at the point the roof discussion comes it would be useful to have those numbers because it's half million dollars on electrical bills so it's an offset for what we might have to invest to offset this more than a half million dollars you know we're up 700,000 yes I mean Deb Cormier is our our head maintenance person and she's fabulous and does a great job and we've done everything in that facility that we can kind of do as far as light bulb changes and using everything that's efficient you know switches that turn off after you haven't been in the room for a minute or two so all of those things have been done and now it's just a matter of trying to find a better way to reduce cost I guess that for my colleagues who are new to this since I've been had been previously on the finance committee and been involved in these discussions I know that your staff has to think hard and be very careful about health and safety issues for themselves and for the others using the facilities because of health risks that come from having to hold prisoners for a period of time and it is not just cleaning a building is normally cleaning a building that there's a lot more to it than I think I realized until I heard that presentation in a previous finance committee role so if there's nothing else I really appreciate it but thank you all for and thank all of the officers for all they do for us every day we on behalf of the community appreciate it thank you Mr. Schreiber thank you all thank you Mr. Chairman yes we'd like the chief Nelson is accommodating Steve Conner a veteran services officer who will make a brief presentation now so he has another appointment if that's okay with you that's fine if that's page 102 no 104 102 to 104 on your in your book okay which takes us into a little bit of community services but it really breaks into a very thing I apologize thank you I have to be somewhere at 325 so so you can actually might begin with a 60-second commercial about the regional program that we worked so hard and so successfully to set up and how that has benefited in your observations town of Amherst okay thank you yes so back in fiscal year 2009 I believe is when we created a district of for veteran services our original district included the towns of Pelham Amherst North Ampton Williamsburg Chesterfield in coming Tim oh wow I still remember it since then we have added five additional towns of Hadley no problem Hadley Chester Middlefield Worthington and Goshen so we have a little bit about half of all Hampshire County and one hot one town in Hamden County and the reason behind doing a district is it's a very particular type of operation that we go to training two to three times a year to keep up on all the changes what we provide beyond doing filing for the VA for service connected disabilities or the pension or getting seniors aid in attendance money that's through the VA but we also offer a program through the state under mass journal law chapter 115 and under that law we provide financial assistance to both veterans and their surviving spouses who are on fixed incomes disabled or in some cases just coming home and transitioning or out of work and so what we need to do is provide financial assistance we do that we go through the state of Boston main office and tell them why we're doing it all the documents we have that say according to the laws and regulations we can do this and they give us a thumbs up and next year send us back 75 percent of that money the one exception is is when we ever have to deal with somebody who is homeless whether here in Northampton Amherst Hadley that we get a hundred percent back so if somebody's at Craig's place which has happened we have assisted them that comes back in a hundred percent but everything else is back at seventy five percent regulations and the rules change all the time so by us managing it for all these communities it saves the town money rather than having every single town send somebody to training all the time we do it as a unit we go to the training and we come back and provide that service since we have taken over I think there's been twice out of all the times that we have not gotten our 75 or a hundred percent back according to regulations and it's minimal amounts of money so that is what we provide for the town of Amherst we're also involved with the American Legion and VFW for both Memorial Day Veterans Day or any other kind of patriotic ceremony event that we're having in the community so it's kind of the gist of our job as well as and I should say also under veteran services there's a lot of tax abatements that citizens who have a service connected disability are eligible for or gold star families are eligible for for both excise tax and property taxes there also is the veterans tax write-off program so you know that there's a senior tax write-off program the veteran also has a program that we assist with here in town and that one is not income-based that's just are you a Massachusetts veteran or not and if you are you could do this so that's kind of the gist of what you get from our office on a weekly basis daily basis annual basis so just so it's obvious to everybody when you look at the budget numbers page on 104 it's divided into operating expenses and veterans benefits which is the much larger number comparison and the operating expenses is really largely been entirely our share of the regional approach which I think has been one of the great successes of regionalization and Steve you work for Northampton at the time we started this right you've been at it for a while and yeah I just I just got over the 15 year mark that I've been doing this I'm now considered the wise old man in the in the department around the state like I kind of went wait a second I'm the new outsider no those work that way anymore not after 15 years so questions from others how do veterans find you it's you know if it's not someone you've already been working with that's a really good question so you'll see in my narrative that's that's a big mission we have going forward this coming year is back when we started when we had six towns I was able to go to Ann Whalen House and do a presentation I was able to go to certain places and talk to folks just like I had done in Northampton and we found a lot of people through that because they would then say oh well such and such her husband was a World War two vet or we'd go to the BFW in the American Legion and drop off materials and we we now run about 300 clients district-wide which is a lot Northampton alone because of the VA hospital we have the largest case load per capita in the state just in the city of Northampton so it got really big and everything was doing well and now our numbers are going down and I don't know how much of it is the World War two generation and their spouse is passing on and waiting to see what happens with the Vietnam veterans or how much it is just there are less veterans and less family members in need however I'm not going to know that until I do another push and so that's my objective starting this summer is to go back to some of the same places go to the library make sure I have materials at the council on aging all those opportunities to let people know what we do and what we can do for them to see if I can bring our numbers back up because I really feel like they should be but I don't know that until I really make a push again but it is we have the materials we also have a little extra money in our budget so we're going to buy some marketing stuff you know little stuff that just has our name and number on it in the outreach and how to get to us so that's my intention this coming year who do you work for now so who I work for is a board so there's representatives from every single town that meet twice a year to go over what we're doing what my staffing levels are and what our budget is so that's kind of who I work for it's all through a contract that gets paid into the city of Northampton then Northampton sends me the you know pays our expenses through that account so it's contractual but it really is I work for all 11 communities and if I don't do something right I hear it so okay well thank you very much we appreciate it and glad we could work out the timing thank you very much I greatly appreciate it and thank you for all you do Chief Nelson's we I guess afternoon so for me us Lindsay Stromgren assistant fire chief Jeff Olmsted assistant fire chief I'm the guy that they tell what to do so you work for them pretty much yeah yeah pretty much glad I got the order of the truck right I just yeah they just kind of point point point point in the right to the director for us I'm just gonna hit you know or you know some some some somewhere high high lights some change changes that we've had and then some of the some of the challenges of the challenges that we're looking at for the next the next year and the country coming here and then just kind of dive dive then we can just dive dive dive into our budget just a couple of high high high lights this year we're doing which we're still we've still done well with grant grant act acquisition we've got most most of them are emergency management grants we've got got gotten we've been been able to acquire radios and generators you without to out sit sit at our search search group with with equipment and train training and then now we've been been been able to out out to outfit our river rescue to the task force which is a new the new thing last year with them equipment protected detective equipment and it's like last piece is sort of a high high high high high light and a challenge of chum chum challenge just through I guess you'd say bad bad luck since February 1st till till now we've had about 225% of our line line staff has been out for you know the illness injury surgery that that that type of thing so it's been a long long term issue so that's as I said it's about 25% of our staff our line line line line staff was a big big chunk chunk chunk for us so we've been challenged in trying to you know maintain our shift flow levels and that type type of thing but on the highlight side side of it the staff has steps steps steps up we're working a lot of a lot about x addition to the additional hours coming coming you know work we're working a lot step stepping up come come in or early staying staying late picking up days here here here and there it's tainted it's tainted it's taken it's tall but at the same time I see that as a as a net net plus for just how to dedicate kated art our staff staff staff is so the big change it changes that we're seeing we've we've got two very vacant positions that were we're in the proper process of filling right right now one one was a retirement one one was the river raising the nation we've added but there's been a movement so seven about seven thousand thousand dollars dollars to to our operating budget small cap capital it came came from small cap capital items and that's and that's gone gone so we can for the main maintenance and up and up keep our buildings our two to build the buildings which runs into our our challenge challenge challenge challenge piece piece again but and I'll talk about that in a second and the other piece is just our budget in in in the grease side is as come come come out because we just says settle a con con con con check for the bar bar bargaining unit so there's those those attend attendant right rise in the in the inner budget due due to that so big challenge challenge and so come in the congregate come come come come a year I just a little a little to our staff so staff staffing it's issue right right now that's that that's an acute issue but of course but then there's our chronic piece about our staff staffing well levels being where we're where they are in light of of our in in our stead is steadily in increasing activity over over the last one to 25 five five years so and just trying trying to keep keep up with our base line response to the spawns of the bellies becomes increasingly more difficult so and as as and it may it may come come up but you know we lost the AMA ambulance contract with Hadley last last last year so we so we've lost some lost some some of that activity I think as we've shown in in the past our growth our activity to activity growth has been within the town the town of Amherst the other three three three towns and the three three yes the three three schools grow at a very small small small rate that they almost stay stats that status static but the the main the main growth has been here here here in town so that's that's one the other thing is of course maintaining maintaining our buildings since central is 19 2029 and north states stations built in 1975 so the up the up even maintenance those those buildings are being are becoming increasingly expensive expensive expensive and and on on top top of that our staff are on duty staff are the ones that take that pretty much do all all the cleaning the main maintenance my minor main main maintenance and up and upkeep of the building that's an additional duty so we do all all our own stuff you know it's it's on on us I mean we live a little live there so that's it that's a fun function of that so that the other thing is the we have a lot of truck that's it's third third third 30 year year years old which is beyond now now now and actually accept accepted stance and stand stand it for that type we did it did some rehab work on it through capital capital expense about five years ago but it's still a 30 year old truck any parts parts we need need for it have to be fabricated they really don't build this this this type of type of a lot of truck and anymore you know and we've you know we've we've got to got some concerns because it's it's been pushed put pushed out out a year so we've we've got got some expensive expenses that are going to come up this this year Jen Jen Jen the generator that we were holding off off on pending what what what what what we would receive in capital and plus there's a brief breathing air system that needs needs needs needs be inspected inspected and and main main main tank so that's that is that it that'll bring some pressure honestly this is in the coming year so and you know again as a function of of its age we get the your aerial inspected every year it's a 30 year old ladder and we do the best we can to you know maintain maintain but we're crossing our fingers fingers this year when it comes up for for inspected. So with that I think that that's sort of you know you know, quick overview, so we'll walk many questions you might have. I guess I did have one question to start with, to follow up on something, one of the many things that you reported on, and that gets back to Hadley, and I noticed in your statistics page, which is page 58 in the budget book, under EMS calls of course it ends with 18 in the report, and it's really I think 19, it's the first year affected by the Hadley change in service. Right. Do you have any initial information or observations about how much it's affected, the number of calls that we handle overall? Sure. We stopped service serving Hadley as their primary provider on July 1st of last year. So what I did, I asked one of our folks, can you check and see what the change has been? So from, here it is, yeah, so from, so what I did was compare the year per prior, July 1 says 17 to April 30th of last year, and then compare that to, and then while this, the same thing, this year of course we didn't respond there except for mutual aid or something like that, but I also took our total calls for those same two peer, so July 1 says 17 to April of 18, we went to Hadley 822 times, all right, and we got that, now our total calls for that period were 4,400, 669. Total calls for, from July of last year to April of this year was 3707. You would think that we would have dropped by 800 to 22 calls, but that's, actually there's a 662 call difference, meaning more calls that we picked up. So in our activity level, when we had Hadley, we figured out that it would mirror what it was in 2013, and that would take us about five years to get back where we were just by growth. Looking at these in Alaska for a couple of days, it'll probably take us about three years to get back, just to grow up the growth we have here, here, or here, or in town. How has that affected the operations side? Has it alleviated some of the stress or not? Well, it's kind of tough, because we're keeping our head above water, but then I guess you've got to contrast how high is the water. It has relieved some of the stress, well it has, true, but we're still getting to the point where we're going to make critical mass, hit that critical point, we're really close, close, close to that, because the growth, the growth, the growth is still, still there. So, you want to address that? Yeah, I just want to follow up, if I said to you our average EMS call volume was, say, 17 calls a day, and then after Hadley had dropped us 14 and a half or 15, over a period of 24 hours, that doesn't necessarily translate into a great big relief. It still means a group of folks who are doing a high volume of calls, made worse unfortunately by the surgeries and the injuries that occurred over this winter, and the likelihood is we'll be right back in the same boat in a couple of years. This is our opportunity, hopefully, to try to make some kind of change, and we've tried to educate and tried to provide information, but we could really use some help. I'm going to call my colleagues before I do it, I just wanted to add one thing from a slight chief, you presented to the select board when we still had a select board, and I was still a member of it, about the fire staffing study, and one of the observations that I wanted to just share with my colleagues, because I had heard this at that time, and I thought it was significant, is that a big growth and pressure factor on our service is actually caused for elders, and it's an age related thing, and it is not the university driving the stress, and I just wanted to share that. So, Kathy. That's a perfect lead into my question. When I look at, and I'm not sure which of the lines, whether it's total EMS calls, which are up about a thousand over the time period you've given us, advanced life support, which is flat, or patient contacts, no transport, you know, the categories you've got them in, do you have an estimate of how much that is specifically the elderly or the big service centers like Applewood and the Orbers? I don't need the number right now. Well, we have those figures. We've kind of dived down into the end zone. And then, Mike, follow up. Do people get charged for that ambulance call? Is there a fee? Sure, yes, yes. Why don't you talk about the demographic? So demographics, if you look back at the presentation we had done for the council, we had a very specific chart we can share with you again at any time, and hopefully that's on our website. And that had an age demographic on it. And so it was very interesting to see, despite the fact we've seen the increased growth, particularly University of Massachusetts over the last 10, 15 years, there's a slight growth that comes with that. But the real dramatic growth was in our over 60 population and the level of needs that that group requires over time. And as that group has gotten bigger, we've done more and more calls. So there's a strong correlation between the age and the services. And we do collect when an ambulance goes out, even if it doesn't carry them to the hospital, is there a charge for- No, I want to separate those for you. Okay. So if we transport somebody to the hospital, we do charge a bill. If we don't transport somebody to the hospital, and what we get is we call the refusal of treatment or a no trip, then we don't actually charge for that. So we are finding, we are doing a high volume of what we call, if this is where someone say at the Arbor's Falls, and they're not sure if they're hurt or not. They may even say they're not hurt, they just need help getting up. We've seen a shift there where the staff used to help pick people up. And now they don't, and they call us to come down and help them lift them up and evaluate them and see if they want to go to the hospital. That is a sort of private apartment style residence with assisted living oversight. So that means just like if I spoke to any one of you is if it was your domicile, if you would fall in and we talked to you and ask you if you'd like to go to the hospital. I'm happy to take you to the hospital. And you may say, no, I feel okay. I just needed help getting from the ground up. I slipped when I got out of bed, those type of things. And we're doing a lot of those right now at that residence. I just want to stay with this a little bit. I mean, my background was in nursing home healthcare. But if an assisted living, I always thought would do that, that they have staff capable because the people who are in it are paying for that extra. They used to. Yeah, they think. So this sounds like it's shifting it to a municipal budget when it should be coming out of a facility budget. There's a work shifting, a workload shifting that's occurred. And I think really when you talk to them, it would come down to liabilities. So picking people up, people are heavy. There's potential for injury. Sure, yeah. You're familiar with this work in your background. And so they've shifted that burden to the municipal, this case, part of our department to provide them. There are a fair number of folks that will fall that do have some level injury. We're just trying to find that balance where we could work with them to figure out more of the people who need transport and care versus the people who just need to help up. But so if the staff were trained so a skilled nursing home is trained to lift and know how to move someone because there's supposed to danger to the person who's fallen, but also the person who's trying to lift them without training. So if these facilities had trained staff, it would be a relief to your budget. So that's an interesting balance between the regulatory side of assisted living versus a nursing home format. So there's some opportunities there to hopefully we can improve on. We've tried to meet with them to work on those. There may be need for additional assistance trying to create that communication and get things done. Because right now I've been unsuccessful in creating any sickness been changed there. Thank you very much along the same lines. Thank you and for us, it's a case. It's also a case of trying to get them to assist their clients. Because if we go for a lift assist and it remains just that, then we've taken an ambulance and it's crew out of service for a particular amount of time. When we believe that the staff there is very well suited to do the lift and do an assessment so that the ultimate goal is to get to the point where when they call us, it's because they need a transport. They need that pre-hospital care, not just to pick them up off the floor back and then. So it's not, I just want to follow up, they have a dementia unit. So there are patients there that are very difficult to assess because of the dementia. So there's a certain number of patients there that when they fall, we have a high suspicion that we need to take them hospital. So even working out some of these protocols or trying to engage with them more doesn't give us 100% change because certain type of patients that they have there that it will always be challenging. But I think there's room there and we're trying to find that room to make this a better situation than we have. Maybe taking a similar idea now to a different context of fire. Could we identify what are the main causes of fire? For example, is it the building's not up to the fire codes or is it more related to accidents? Can you identify what the cause is of? Generally, the biggest cause of fire is here and across the board is cooking. Cooking, either not paying attention, that type of thing. Cooking is the leading cause of a fire. And then smoking has become more prevalent as we see the changes. Certainly in the off-campus college age students, cover detectors are a big problem for us. We've engaged in a number of activities related to off-campus housing and on-campus housing and engaged with the Dean of Students to try to get some assistance with cover detectors we find there. And that's been successful. We're working on that. We've done off-campus work in both fraternity sororities and some of the other off-campus facilities. We work doing community outreach with Officer Laramie and John Thompson from Inspection Services. In that process, I'm very involved in that. And we do work on some public education, particularly within that group. So we're trying to expand our access into the younger groups of oncoming students at UMass. And we're hoping to see how they maybe change their orientation and get in there at an earlier stage. And I hope we're making progress on stopping students from disconnecting smoke detectors. That's actually a big problem. Sure, absolutely. Do they get fined if you find that they didn't have to remove the smoke? There can be a criminal process and even a non-criminal process that we use. We're actually looking and hoping as the council gets their feet underneath them. There's a draft by-law out there to look at smoke detectors within the community and make it a similar by-law fine to what you see for open burning. So when that comes across the council's opportunity, that would be great. Other questions? So this is a group I know well. I guess the only other thing that I was going to ask you and then I have one question for the town manager. I noticed that you're doing a lot of recruitment on call fire, the call force. And I was wondering if we've had a turnover or what would happen there? And how does that affect us budgetarily? We're not successful. Well, since the assistant chiefs are on strong and strong and then turn in charge of the call force and a former call force member. So I think he'd be that best answer. Thank you. So yes, as most will probably know, but I'll summarize this so everybody does know. We do have three forces in town, our full-time firefighter paramedics, that are on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, doing the majority of our daily calls. We also have a student volunteer force, which runs out of the North Station. Approximately two dozen to 30 UMass students, they're volunteer, they're not paid. And they actually staff an engine company during the academic year, three nights, seven days a week, 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. and 24 hours a day on weekends. So they're an additional engine company that we are using more and more as our full-time staff, yet tied up on calls. They're running medical calls in the engine. EFR is waiting for an ambulance to respond. They're doing alarms to campus, things like that. And we actually recruit for them twice a year to keep their numbers up because the nature of the group is, unfortunately, they graduate and go on to do other things, so we are recruiting constantly for them. The call force is a little bit different. They are part-time firefighters, they are paid. They are typically towns, people, people that live in town and or work in town. And they are called in to do station coverage when the full-time firefighters are tied up during those times when the students are not in quarters. So that would be a day times throughout the year and also nights and weekends during the summer and intersession. And everybody in the department, both all groups are called in if we have a working fire. So the call force, we try to keep staffed about 20 up to a maximum strength of 24. Unlike our full-time people, we do not do a one-for-one hiring. So in other words, when we have a vacancy for the full-time force, as we do now, we have two vacancies. We'll go out and recruit and interview and hire to fill those vacancies. We keep those full all the time for obvious reasons. The call force, because of the nature of the training, we're typically hiring people that have no fire background. Occasionally we're lucky and we find somebody, but typically it's somebody with no training. So the training program is fairly intensive. It takes three to six months to train somebody new to be a call firefighter before they can be of service to us. So we will actually let those numbers go down one by one until we reach a threshold. And then we'll do a singular big hiring, a singular training class, and get the numbers back up again. So to answer your question, we're at that point now where due to attrition, people moving on to other things, moving out of town, we're now down quite low. So we need to actually take on about eight or so, maybe even as many as 10 call firefighters to bring our numbers back up to the 20-24 mark. So we plan to run that training class this summer once we hire those individuals. We're actively recruiting now the deadline for applications. If anybody's interested, it is May 31st and no experience is necessary. I'm not interested, thank you. However, this might be a question both for fire, but also it would have been for police. And that is, once we have footed the bill, if you will, for somebody to either be trained for EMS fire and or police, what is the contractual relationship in terms of how long they must stay with the town after that? Actually, there's nothing to keep them from leaving after we've trained, trained, trained them, outfitted them and all that type of thing. There's nothing, if they want to leave, then they leave. There's nothing contractual to keep them. Is that true also for police? Hi. Thank you. I would just add that having been part of the interview process for all groups, the students, the call-in full-time, it's one of the big things we try to ferret out from people as to whether they see their life plans being. In the case of full-time firefighters, we want them to be committing to a 30-year career here. So that's one thing we're looking for. Call-ins, students, it's more the time commitment. We know they're only going to be here for three years. We just want to make sure they're going to be able to give us the time we need because it's pretty intensive. Call firefighters, that's a huge part. We would like a call firefighter to be committing to 10, 20-plus years as many have as they live and work here in the community. So again, it's something we try to get to as part of the interview process, because we're not looking for experience. What we are looking for is commitment and hopefully longevity. I'll look real quick. The majority of folks that we're looking for that will score higher in our process will likely be paramedics and have some experience as paramedics already. So the majority of our training with those new hires on the queer side will be at the Fire Academy. And I just want to add about this, especially about the call force. It gets tough to recruit crew folks because they're doing this in addition to their full-time jobs. And a lot of time, they have to have a commitment from their full-time employer to allow them to leave during the day to come and serve their community. And I think across the board, you'll find our call force personnel, they're not doing this to get rich. It's because they care about their community. They want to get back to their community. And the great degree of commitment is inherent with that value system. They really want to be part of this. They really want to give back to the community. So we have folks that have been there for years and years and years. And that's the kind of... But it's still getting tougher to recruit crew folks, because the way the world world is now, some employers are a little reluctant to allow their folks to leave because they're in business. So... Jeff, would you agree? No, I just... Building on Lynn's question, I just... Do you have any sense there is actually an issue of people coming... Some percent coming and getting the training and then leaving? The hope is 10 to 20 years. Is it rare that people leave... The emergency in the family, something happens. You're moving out of the area. But do most stay? Yeah, yes. This is... We're different, I guess, is what I like to say. You do this job because you care and because you're committed to it and you want to make a difference. And it's been rare. I mean, I've been here, here, here for a period of time. I've worked on the whole fire for 28 years. And in both places, it's been a case of extremely rare that someone comes for a short time and then just says, I'm out of here. And sometimes it's a case of folks trying to realize that this is just not for me. And that's okay. And some folks come and it's just a stepping stone, but I found it rare. I mean, it happens, but it's been rare here. My question for the town manager gets to... So you can get to the right place on the bottom of page 59 in the box on significant budget changes. I thought I... I think I heard the chief say that there's a contract settlement and with one of the bargaining units. And so what your statement there indicates is that personnel services does not include cost of living increases for contracts not currently negotiated. Is that... That's true statement. There are some non-union employees in there that work at the fire station. All the fire contract has been settled for this year, but not all the contracts. So there's nothing in the... Nothing is placed in the general fund for salary reserve that hasn't been transferred that isn't already transferred in the way you've written the budget. No, there's a... Most of the contracts are not settled. And are sitting in the general fund budget. The only contract that was settled for fiscal year 20, actually for this year, including 20, is the fire contract. But they have civilian employees that are not settled. So okay, I just wanted to make sure that there would be no changes between now and when we adopt the budget. It'll be really slight. But it won't be a change here. It'll just be moved out once the contracts are all settled. Thank you. Other questions? Pat, yes. I want to thank you for the support you've given the sanctuary at First Church and particularly for willingness to support us in the appeal process in Boston. Thank you very much. And thank you, and please convey our appreciation to the entire force for all that you do for the community. Thank you. So Paul, do you... LSE will be next. And joining me today is Donna Roy, who is our operations manager. So let's start with the leisure services budget, the LSEC budget, highlights, changes, challenges. We'll start with the reduction. We've recently reorganized the department staffing, which resulted in a close to a 5% reduction in the budget. So we're doing that to... We did that really just to enhance our operational efficiency. And to this date, it's worked very, very well. Let's see, some of the other issues. We, let's see, are working with professional design firms, community volunteers, and other department staffs, as far as accomplishments, to we finish the master plan for Grock Park, and that is under construction now. With a completion date, which is tentatively July 2019, so we're hoping to open that part relatively soon, whether permitting. Let's see. Our challenges remain pretty much in terms of our part-time staffing, just being able to keep the necessary staff to participant ratios so that we're providing safe programs and adequately staffing our programs effectively. So with the continuing increase in the minimum wage, which is important, it still has resulted in us kind of thinking outside the box, making some adjustments, and then having the town step forward and also to help provide additional funding for, for instance, the pools and Cherry Hill. And you'll see that in the other budgets. We've, you know, some of our other accomplishments recently have been, we've completely redone their registration process, upgraded a lot of our technology, made it much more easier for people to register online, which I, you know, as resulted in a lot of positive feedback and ease of folks getting into the programs that they're trying to either get their children into or get into themselves. We've been very happy about that. We've also done multiple collaborations with different businesses, social service agencies, and educational institutes to provide recreational opportunities to people in our communities who might not otherwise be served in terms of recreational programing. I spoke already about the activation of Grot Park. I'm really excited about that. We'll stop. Do you have anything to add on the leisure services? Do you have questions on the leisure services budget? Yes. I noticed your reference to a strategic plan. Yes. And did that last year, or when was, when was that? Right now, we put it out, a request for quotes and qualifications. The amount came in higher than we had anticipated. So I'm working with a procurement officer of the town right now to get that out again with reduction in some of the requirements that we had addressed in that. So we hope to see that happen in the fall. And besides the, could you just talk a little bit about the use of leisure services in the Bang Center? And reference to? We do youth programs there. We have performing arts programs for children and teens. In addition to that, we have some others trying to think up top. We definitely have lots of adult dance programs. Let's see. There was just recently a writing program for children that took place there. Community theater uses that as a space in which they do some of their rehearsals and auditions and things like that. Not a lot, but occasionally. Do you think there's anything else you'd like to add? But what? Yes, we do run a program. That's a good one for special needs adults. And we do that in collaboration with UMass. It's been a longstanding relationship. Very, very good program. And that happens two evenings during the week, while the university is in session. Thank you. Noticing the volunteer hours dropping. And can you have you identified what the reason might be? And is there anything we can do to support that? Yeah, that's a good question. We have seen some of our, particularly our special events. It's been more and more difficult to recruit volunteers. And I think that's why that number has decreased. On the other hand, we have a great outpouring of volunteers for our sports programs. So really, it kind of depends. But at one time, we used many more volunteers for special events. And now we are tending to rely not only on volunteers, but on part-time temporary staff that work in other programs that come help. For instance, in the 4th of July. Just on the volunteers or the potential to volunteer. Is there an age limit on the lower side? You know, on you have to be at least this old. You would probably depend on the event. We use high school students, for instance, for our Halloween event. We use high school students for the 4th of July as well. I would say it's probably high school and above, for the most part. And I'm partly asking because I was just with two middle schoolers over the weekend who have been promoting the idea of a youth council to get middle schools more involved. And they're thinking about art and performance. But they both are the kind of people that could staff an event and might love to. So I just don't know where, when you think of where you might go for people. And if you've got them young, they might still be there with you when they were in high school or if they happen to stay here and go to UMass. I'm trying to think of a pipeline of volunteers. Well, I think certainly they would need to contact either myself or Stacy Laquieve, one of the program directors. And we could sit down and talk and we'll take advantage of any kind of volunteer commitment they would like to offer. And I had a, I can see how tight the budget is. So it's not like, what else could you do with this money? But a couple of programs outside of Amherst that I've seen tied a leisure service and some private money to after school programs. Particularly around skill and performance at the same time. So one creative one I saw in New York was STEM with dance. And they were using dance to teach analytic skills at the same time. But they weren't always doing it in a school. They were sometimes doing it outside. Would leisure service coordinate programs like that? Or would you usually leave it to let the high school, in terms of where the locus would be if? But we currently run an after school program at Crocker Farm. And we collaborate extensively with the Amherst School Department, depending on their needs. And then there is also a program called Achievement Academy, which gives children extra help after school, which we also are linked with. So between our camps and after school, we are doing some of that and doing STEM work as part of our curriculum that we do with those programs. We're licensed by the state and they do have now pretty specific curriculum requirements. And a lot of that is enhancement to what goes on in the classroom. The only reason I mentioned this one is it was attracting kids because they were coming to dance. When coming to dance, they were getting something else. And one or two that, like STEM, came because it had the STEM piece and they actually discovered they loved to dance. So it was a nice synergy of what happened when people were exposed. It was pitched particularly at young women, I mean, high school age, middle school age kids. That sounds interesting if you have some more information. You could just forward that to me. Yeah, go ahead, Shalini, and then I'll just give you a... Do you offer scholarships? Do we offer scholarships for families who can afford to pay? Yes, we have a significant thanks to a town meeting as we're almost $170,000 that is available to any Amherst resident who has need, obviously, either on free or reduced lunch. And they can just basically show that piece of paper and then they'll get financial assistance. We also use a portion of that money to do outreach programs at the different housing areas throughout the town and that's been extremely successful. I think the model of the big community center where everybody tries to come to you is not, doesn't work for all people. And in fact, because of all kinds of barriers, transportation, just to name one, but family circumstances and so on. So we've made a commitment to do outreach, program outreach to these different housing areas and it's been extremely well received. And that program has now just continued in the budget. It goes on each year. So it was added by a town meeting several years ago and Sandy Poole was still here but is now just built into the budget. I know that you'd been working on trying to do a strategic planning process all together and kind of look at all of the programs and make thoughtful analysis of each of the programs that we run and it seems to be from what it said when the FY19 objectives, it was labeled as rescheduled, is rescheduled to something definite or is it rescheduled to indefinitely out there in the future? Now it's definitely rescheduled. I mean, we did put it out already. There were three, excuse me, different consulting groups that responded. Unfortunately, the number that came back was more than we had in our budget and it wasn't, there just wasn't a match. So I have to reduce some of the services I'd requested as part of that strategic plan. Okay, thank you, because I really appreciated your taking that on. The one question that I have and then we'll move on to the other budgets, unless there's anything further that goes to, I guess to Sonia is that I was a little bit confused by something on page 109 of the budget book. It's gonna go to Paul too, but you indicated that six tenths of an FTE for the customer assistance position was moved from away from LSSC into finance. But the chart that's a little bit higher on the page looked like FY20 is six tenths higher, not six tenths lower. I wasn't a little confused by that. I guess I'm understanding your question. The top of the page, the chart at the top of the page? In the chart at the top of the page under positions, it lists as for FY 19, 5.85 and 6.45 for FY20, which is six tenths increase. And then that's why I was just confused by the match. I'm gonna go back and we'll get the back up and get back to you on that. Okay, another day. Shall we go on to polls? Useful polls, certainly. So we have seen about a 10% increase in participants in our swim lessons from last year. And that number seems to be continually growing, which is, I think, a very positive thing and I think I would just like to put out there that our ultimate goal, if we had one, was to make sure that every child in Amherst learns to swim. So we are working toward that with, we put out there that the share will see a 10% growth again in that number. We also provide a number of free swimming passes to the survival center and also to the family center at the middle school. And those have been extremely well received and utilized, so we're proud of that. At least we did over 600 swim passes that were distributed and we'll continue working with those groups and probably expand that more to the children that we're working with in the program outreach as well. That's a good thing. And we're trying to get those kids also involved in swim lessons as well. Let's see. Changes. We've talked about graph parks, so we won't go into that again in the swim lessons. Those are pretty much the major things that come to the surface. Anyways, no pun intended, yeah. All right, I think that's it for pools. Yes, questions? Just your goal of having every kid learn to swim if our children age population is going down. In terms of your denominator, maybe lower than it used to be, which is why this isn't increasing. It's a backlink to the elementary schools. Do you ever go in and just send a note home to your parents? Do your kids know how to swim? Do you do a kind of... We certainly do a lot of promotion, more social media than we probably do with flyers now these days. We've changed our kind of, the way we're doing things. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of a note home to the parents or stuff. It's important every kid learn to swim. Click here, or just something that's more of a push notification rather than I have to sign up. Sure, but we are doing, like I said, we have done promotions in the schools. We've even thought about having our aquatics coordinator and we're trying to actually do that this spring, go out and talk to different groups. It's hard to come directly in the schools. They obviously have their curriculum and then their requirements that they need to do, but certainly there are other ways we can reach children directly. And their parents, no, importantly. Anything else? Yep. Questions? Yes. So your eagle eye has found one mistake. We put one mistake in the budget book and you found that if you go to page XII, it is correct, which is the total personnel list. So they just transposed the 6.45 should be an FY19 and the 5.85 should be an FY20. So it should be a negative point six. Okay. I don't know about that there purposely, I think. I don't know. If I were you, I'd go collect that position right now. I don't know. And I guess finally I'd just like to thank you for the increase to help offset the cost of the increase in minimum wage. So we did get a $10,000 increase to help with that this year and that will be definitely used and appreciated. So what is the minimum wage we're paying? We're paying currently $12 an hour and that will go to $12.75, I believe January 1st. And this is consistent with the state guidelines. Yes, and I'll go to $15 eventually. Right, thank you. Okay. Just for the record, I assume that anything we bring in indoor pools is actually under a lot of sissy and not me in the school pools. Correct. Okay. Golf course? Golf course. Right. So same sort of challenges that are quite obvious. The weather has impacted Cherry Hill this year. It's just continuing from last summer. We've had it down here because of the weather and we were hoping for a dry spring to help make up some of that revenue. Although we're holding our own and that's due I think to a variety of issues. When we saw a fairly good April in terms of revenue, we're still not above where we should be right now. So that has been a continuing challenge. The other thing I think that's important is that we've worked hard to provide a variety of different programs and especially capitalizing on the winter programs at Cherry Hill and the availability and accessibility of groomed cross-country ski trails up there. And again, very well received by the community. Great turnout. Sometimes you can go up there after we've had a fresh snow and the parking lot is literally filled. So it's a means that people are using it in the community is very appreciative of it. Let's see. So in terms of where we're going, what we plan to do next fiscal year is to have an advisory group that will put together a committee to really look at the operations and potential uses of Cherry Hill. So that will happen most likely again toward the end of the summer of the fall and that group will come up with recommendations. I know that there has been some community been put. Someone came to the JCPC, an individual from the community requesting, you know, I think it was $300,000 for clubhouse improvements. So, you know, we'll be looking obviously at all of that but trying to do it in a more directive way that we'll have a planful way, I should say. That's pretty much it. We did get a small increase for minimum wage increase, about $3,000, so a slight increase in the part-time seasonal health up there. Does the close of the golf course in Southammerst have any potential for us for picking up play? Yes, I think we have already seen an impact. We picked up several, we did a promotion for new members this year for memberships. We, anyone who is a new member to the club got 20% off that membership. That seems to be fairly successful and picking up some of those members from Hickory. We've seen some daily fee players from Hickory. So, an increase there and certainly a tournament that's forthcoming that might have happened there is now going our way. So, I think we'll see more of that as we go forward. Ben? You know, I wanna go back to your comment about the proposal that came to JCPC and understand the, if there have been discussions between you and that individual and kind of where you would see that going. Yeah, he actually, this individual did come with another council person to our last commission meeting and gave a presentation. I think it was, everybody was in agreement. Those are all great things. The question remains where we get the funding. So, you know, and what are the priorities of the town in terms of, you know, using those, the monies that we have, you know, for recreational dollars and how would they be best spent? And in that process, I sit on the ACPC and mostly it was discussed with relationship to golf but not necessarily to skiing. I think he, in this particular case he was looking at better if we could improve the clubhouse, for instance, let's start with insulation, bringing it up to it. The way we heat it is probably not at all efficient. It's electric heat, it isn't efficient. There's probably some things we could do for solar that we could, so that we could use it on a year-round basis and not have a huge utility bill that requires us now to shut it down until we hold Winterfest. So we really shut down for four months. Is that answer? Thank you. You know, I looked for it so I probably, my eyes are not as sharp as Andy's but I didn't see the, I saw the youth side, I didn't see the revenue side and I saw way up top revenue that I think combines school and golf, so maybe, you know, in terms of revenues but one of the ideas of the clubhouse in relation to the golf course is that it could become a community center and potentially be making enough of a margin that it's subsidized reduced fees for golf for high school, middle school families to think of it as an outdoor activity, notness, it's golf but you're actually walking around doing some things so that you're not thinking that this is gonna be, I'm gonna become a golfer. So the person who had proposed this did talk to me and he's actually probably gonna, he got linked up with an architect who was gonna take a look at the building, you know, just to get an estimate of is there anything there to start with or not? But the idea was bigger than, what you just said was bigger than golf. It just happens to be at a golf course and it's a year round recreation, a thing that feeds into the winter side but also feeds into you could gather in the evening and hear music even, you know, and it's thinking of it being, there's nothing in Northamper's like. Right, I know, no, thank you. That's good, good point. Councilor Shane, Councilor Shane is a district includes golf course. I'm a district one, we're always looking for community space because there's no place that but even a district one meeting, that library is clearly we can get a person in there but we can't get 15. You know, so. Sure. So if I missed it, I can get it later just on revenues, golf course and revenues, the pool. I was just looking at separating those two streams. It's probably there when I just didn't see it. Yeah, why don't we come back to that at a later point? And. I don't need it right now. No, I'm not. I was just curious if it was. Cause something you can help us with that too with at a later time. Any other questions? Okay, if there's nothing, if there's nothing else looking around, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. I think we should need to get to your two colleagues and community services and see if we can still finish it for just going to be a challenge but appreciate all you're doing and thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. But so though we're a public health first or is it having you, do you guys come to an agreement? We're at public health. Good afternoon. I'm Julie Federman, the health director. So I am going to take to heart my directions which were to make this about five minutes to leave you time for questions. And I would say in my budget this year the biggest change is the six hour a week increase for the public health nurse that comes to an amount of $10,827. I can start out with that historically for many years the nursing position was at 26 hours a week. So this restores it to what it was for many years. One of the things that this increase in hours will do is allow us to do a lot more health education in the community. A couple of things that have been identified is the need for health education around the safe use of marijuana for those who are over 21 and also education with youth and families around the effects on the developing brain. So we really want to partner with the schools around this as well as other venues in town. We had hoped to be working on that last year and you can see that that objective was rescheduled because I just didn't have enough staff time between myself and Jennifer Brown, our public health nurse to accomplish that. We also were sort of in a holding pattern because the State Department of Public Health was planning to launch a statewide effort and we wanted to be incorporating their messages so there really was consistent messaging throughout the state. That hasn't really completely been finished at the state level. So as we see that our first recreational facility will likely open in the next week, we really want to be moving ahead with that. So that'll be one of the things that our public health nurse will be working on. Our objectives for FY20 are to be researching current trends in tobacco control. We've been meeting for several months now about our current tobacco regulations with the Board of Health. We are updating them to address vaping and that will also be part of what we're working on in terms of education, partnering with the schools as we're seeing vaping become an epidemic among our youth, not just in Amherst, but really across the country. I've been working with other town departments and the Board of Health for a few years now as we're looking at the siting and opening of our recreational marijuana establishments that will continue to be ongoing. We meet regularly to discuss the various aspects of what goes into the siting of a facility to keep it something that is secure and safe for the community and then give our feedback to the town manager. Another thing I'll point out in the budget is Amherst is part of a 27-town tobacco coalition that gets grant money from the state in order to enforce our tobacco regulations. Last year and part of the year before, the entity that was holding that grant lost their health director, so that meant that compliance checks were not being done. So in FY17, there were only nine compliance checks done in Amherst that increased to 17 that will be going back up to in the 30s to 40s. That is the way that our tobacco regulations get enforced is by all these towns pooling together and hiring enforcement officers who actually go out and do educational checks at all of our retail tobacco stores and also do attempts to sell as they actually contract with the state to use youth to attempt to sell. So that's how we find out if people are checking IDs. I have a fairly small budget, so there's not a whole lot in there that's changed. So I'll open it up to questions. Could you talk a little bit about your observation with regard to the utilization of the Muse anti-center and the relationship to your services? Yes, so I have been part of the effort to develop and open the Muse anti-health center. One of the ways that our department dovetails with them is we have a strong relationship with the health department with the school nurses. We also provide immunizations on a regular basis to folks who are newcomers to town, don't have health insurance, have come from somewhere else, need to find a medical home. So we link people up with the Muse anti-health center. What's great is it's right in our building. So if they're coming to us either to access getting hooked up to health insurance or to get immunizations to get into school, we can actually walk them right downstairs and show them where the facility is. We also were part of promoting the health center before it opened. Now that the health center is open, they're seeing their enrollment rates for patients climb but slowly. It takes time for an entity like that to really get incorporated into the community. So we are a bridge to that partly because I helped share the Human Service Network and that is a meeting once a month where various nonprofits get together that serve Amherst residents and we talk about the needs that we're seeing in the community and how we can promote services to people because it can be complex especially if you are relatively new to town to find out where to get various types of services. So this health center is a particularly desirable thing because it has dental care. So that's often how we're getting people to take that leap to try a new healthcare facility also. I noticed also in your challenges you mentioned mental health and homelessness as we also were discussing with the police chief and though we didn't discuss it with EMS and fire I know they deal with the same thing and it just would be useful to hear your observations on this issue. Yes, I would say that is one of the biggest challenges we face and that's not unique to Amherst at all. It's not unique to Massachusetts. We have our own issues around this because we are moderately rural here. So the number of healthcare providers may be a little less who provide mental health services. You may have to travel further but really this is a problem of our healthcare system. So in terms of folks who are homeless we see a lot of folks who have comorbidity between substance use disorder which could be alcohol or drugs and mental health diagnoses. So on top of the fact that people who are homeless also have other medical issues that's like a triad of really difficult problems. And then on the side of folks who are housed we see a lot of people who, well they may have housing, they are mentally ill and are not seeking services or are not staying on their meds. They're sickly being hospitalized for short stay. This is true for homeless folks also. Then they're back out in the community and they're not sticking on their medication which can make a difference for them to be able to function in the community. So the police as Chief Livingstone mentioned are frequently the go to when things get really bad. So to elaborate on what they spoke about in terms of the CIT team we also there are some people in the community that may be known to various departments and so frequently between the police, fire, senior services, veteran services and public health we'll be checking in with one another when someone is popping up in one of our departments. So sometimes the police will be calling us, sometimes the senior center will be checking with the veteran services. So we do have a really good linkage between all the town departments. That being said, there are not enough outpatient facilities. There's not enough outreach for folks who are experiencing this continuum of what they call the diseases of despair. So people struggling with anxiety and depression, people with substance abuse disorder, folks who are homeless. Some exciting things are happening recently that we're hoping will perhaps develop into some service for some people in the regional area. But it is an ongoing challenge with no easy answer. Good, Paul. I'd just like to add to that. One of the things that Julie is an expert in this area and one of the things that she's reframed the way I think about this is that's not just a town of Amherst challenge. You have to look at this as a regional challenge because they're homeless people in all communities. They're people suffering from these diseases in all communities. We happen to host a shelter, but it's a seasonal shelter and other communities host shelters as well. But looking at it as a system of services and responses is really important. I'm sure if you want to comment on that, Julie. Yes, thank you for bringing that up, Bush. Okay, awkward for me. So I talked about the strength we have within Amherst between our departments, but we also have a large strength in the wider region, partly through our homeless service networks. So in Amherst, I share a homeless systems meeting where we bring folks around the table from Amherst and also some folks from outside of Amherst in Northampton or folks who work regionally. And we also participate in regional discussions, meetings, trainings, so that we're looking at this not just as an Amherst issue or problem because some of the answers will lie in what can we do regionally? For example, having policies that are sort of region wide among our shelters, improving communication between shelters, improving communication between mental health providers, things like that. So we're trying to build that up regionally. And I think it is a strength out here in the Pioneer Valley that people do work well together regionally. There's not the territorialism, you'll sometimes see that is often fueled by funding. Here we work well together. Moon. I'm sorry to keep going on this one, but since you've been identified as probably one of our experts in the community, there were conversations going on about having our homeless shelter become part of a larger organization, which in my mind would have led to potentially better services and oversight. I understand those conversations are not continuing, but do you see them reviving at any time? Well, that's about a particular piece of service. I think conceptually, yes, I think conversations with some entity, I don't know which specific entity that would be could happen. I think it's very hard for there to be a one-off shelter that's trying to support itself. So I agree that I think that's a good thing. I think that the shelter wants to stay strong and viable. So I think they're very open to pursuing that. Yes. Are the people who are in our shelter or in regional shelters are most of them on Medicaid or would they have a Medicaid card or potentially have a Medicaid card? Well, there's eligibility for Medicaid. And yes, I would say most people are eligible because if you don't have any money, you're eligible. And most folks do not have any source of income. There are some folks who are in social security and that makes you eligible for Mass Health. I think one of the things that's difficult when you're homeless is keeping track of documents and also being able to go through all those procedures. Locally in Amherst, most of our folks are on Mass Health. Part of that is really due to Craig's Doors. They do a great job with storing people's documents for them if they want to. You know, they now have a trailer system that's open all year round. One of the real strengths of that is just having a bin with plastic dividers. So if someone is in jail or is in rehab or has gone off for several months and left their documents behind or even knowingly said, hey, I'm gonna be away for a while, can you hold this for me? So that some people are really able to hold on to their documents longer. It's difficult when you're homeless. Yeah, I should have given you a little context. The Medicaid program under the reforms that happened a while ago that we call ACA had a revision called a health home that states could apply for that particularly looked at mental health and homelessness and the interaction. And then there were some initiatives in pockets of the country that got hospitals and primary care, including providing shelter, but it was trying to do what you're talking about, creating networks that were supportive to deal with the mental health, the substance and also the chronic disease issues that were contributing to the homelessness, but the homelessness was then contributing to the mental health, as you said, the disease. So I just didn't know whether, because it's a little bit easier in a pocket in an urban area, so I didn't know how much people had looked into grabbing the dollars that might be available if there are innovative people in that. Yes, there are folks who work full, well, I may be seen as an expert, it's only because this is something I'm very involved in right in Amherst. So I'm constantly learning from those folks who are doing this full time. And there are people who are trying to grab onto those dollars, that's right. Yeah, it's a very useful thing when you can get it. This is about SROs again. And I was reading something for these SROs to be effective, that they should be trauma-sensitive, like they should be designed that they are trauma-sensitive. Is there something you can say about that? I do know that Valley CDC, who's designing the SROs, has a great reputation for being trauma-informed. I think that's what you're referring to. And the people again whom I am able to work with who've worked in homelessness for years feel that they are excellent at what they do. And having been part of meetings, one of the staff people from Valley CDC attends our homeless systems meetings. And over the past few years, I've been really impressed with her knowledge about how to do just that. And I think that is very important. You can't just take a house and put people in it. It's more having the thought around how people will live together. So I feel really excited that they're the ones who are building the SROs. Yeah, we should come back for a moment and talk about the Community Preservation Act proposal and our committee's role and the other committee that has been referred to the community resources because I think the issues we'll look at are probably gonna be different from the issues they're looking at but this is all they do connect. So appreciate you bringing it up. Anything else from members of the committee appreciate it and appreciate your report and all you do. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry if I'm a little rusty up here. It's especially impressive when you said we're not a very big department. That was a very, that was an understatement. Small but mighty. It's gonna be interesting to see the challenges with marijuana in the year ahead. I know you and I have been through our prior service together on the campus community coalition and thinking about that for some time but it always seemed very distant and now it's here. Yeah, it's here. Thank you. Thank you. So Mr. Chair, last but not least we have Ms. Nancy Pagano who's gonna after 47 years be presenting her last budget to the town and also wanna make sure that you have on your calendars June 14th, which is gonna be a major farewell party for Nancy in the afternoon at the Banks Community Center. But today you're gonna be talking to her budget for FY20 that she's setting up for her successor. Hello. So yes, my retirement is the last of three big retirements that have happened in the last two years from a full-time staff of four who each of us that are retiring have been there several decades and because we fell in love with the people we serve and the job. So long-time social worker Mora Plant retired who I had worked with since she was hired a few decades ago and then Karen Ehrman retired last year and now me. So big changes afoot. So we have besides the four full-time staff we have two grant-funded staff members. We have a lunch site coordinator paid for by, we get a dollar for every meal that she delivers from her program and that pays for her wage. And we have a nurse who has her PhD and she works about 10 hours a week and she's totally funded by grants as well. In fact, there's a wonderful possible change coming in the, it started this year. You know, our whole budget except for $1,775 goes to personnel. And the $775 was the fee for being part of the mass council in aging but now that's gone up to 803. And the other thousand was for office supplies. And so there's a grant offset, as you know for our personnel funds from elder affairs. So elder affairs distributes money across the state to people who write grants, cities and towns based on the federal census which in Amherst for 2010 was 4,015. So last year they were giving $10 for every elder. So we were expecting 40,150 to go toward our new as social worker. But the governor at just at the last moment before he signed the budget, he cut that back by 1,200. But anyway, now we are expecting because of the campaigning by the department of elder affairs mass council in aging to get $12 per elder, which will give us an additional 9,250, which Paul has been very gracious this year and has let us put that toward our nurse. So I want to speak about the funding for the nurse. Every year a resident at Applewood has given us $10,000 toward the nursing center. She's 97 and a half now. So I want to speak about the funding for the nurse. Now her husband died. The two of them are philanthropists around the community in other ways too. So anyway, augmenting that for several years now has been 7,500 from the friends to help pay for our nurses outreach. We are really trying to wean the funding for the nurse off of the friends who struggled to maintain all our other needs. So this year I was able to write two grants that were funded. One was from the Florence Banks Community Grant Program. We got $1,170 and from the Amherst Club we got $250. So I'm so thrilled that I'll be able, at least this year, to use that extra 9,000 above the 40,000 for our nurse who's so important to us. And I'm hoping in my ask for the next fiscal year to have that continue, our nurses very, very important to us. The biggest growth in our department is not in education and recreation. That changed several years ago. When I first started, that was the focus. Now the focus is social services. I would say that the needs of people as they grow older and they have suffered with various ailments on including depression has taken so much of our energy and money and time. Food stability is the biggest program that we have. We delivered to people 16,475 meals last year. That includes our UMass Meals Program and our Home Delivered Lunch Program. And we also served about 6,000 people at the bank center for lunch. The value of the food that we distribute in a variety of other programs comes to $213,533. That is the value of all the food from the various programs. One of the programs is our Wednesday free food giveaway where we have volunteers that go around the community and they pick up food and we lay it out and people bring their shopping bags and go through. We had 2,930 visits by people in the community last year. People from foreign countries like China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Iran, Cape Verde, Russia, Germany. We are challenged by the languages. We are doing our best to have translators because not only is there's a cultural challenge about getting the food and fairly, so we are trying to protect civility in that program. That program is our most challenging food program of all the others we have, including the survival center food box and the Western Mass Food Bank brown bag program in our emergency pantry. Amherst, well, there are many people that are well to do. We also have a tremendous amount of people who are insecure around food, and so we focus a lot of energy on that. Two new programs we have are trying to help people who are grieving. We have a new program called Life After Loss, and there are 43 people that have begun to participate. And then there's the LGBTQ program that has about a dozen people, and we try to get them connected with other gatherings in the community. Back to the food a minute just to let you know that the growth on all our food programs is around 10% and is only going up. So another big program of ours is our Convalescent Loan Plaza program. Last year we donated, we distributed 460 pieces of equipment like wheelchairs and walkers, that kind of thing. It's a very well-used program. We struggle with the space we have, but it's very popular. In general, the in-kind total of all of the services and products and donations that we get, we add up for our elder affairs report comes to 550,161. The Friends Group has donated, and I have their spreadsheet about how much this year, this in FY 18, they paid out of their money 35,744 dollars. So that went for things like buying Convalescent equipment, conference fees and dues, postage, the newsletter, cups, plates, coffee, food, all kinds of things, presenters. The Friends, as you know, the law has changed apparently. The tax law has an incentive for donors to have a break on their taxes, and we are still monitoring how we're gonna be impacted. It feels to me like our donations are down a bit, unfortunately. And we don't have a professional fundraising group. We have devoted group. They have many, many fundraisers, try to have one a month, but we aren't big time like the survival center, unfortunately. We need to find just that right hook, and we just haven't found that yet. Maybe I should let you all ask me questions, and I'll try to answer. I do wanna, I noticed you asked Julie about the impact of the is the Anti-Health Center. And to tell the truth, I was very worried about it because we're the open door when you walk in to the bank center. And I thought that we would have a tremendous impact on our elderly receptionists, but we've had almost no impact at all. So we had Eliza Lakeover for our council and aging meeting and she assured us there that she's pleased with the turnout and the different zip codes represented. So I guess even though the signage is a problem on the front of the building, folks are finding their way there. So that's a good thing. Just today I met with their psychotherapist who is planning to start with taking over our clinic room one day a week and we'll move to two days a week after she assesses the need. And that's okay. We have a number of clinics, but so far we're not using the space every week on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so we are happy to oblige. But if you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them. Anyone? Another one of the things that you've talked about for many times over the years has been you've been monitoring the aging population in town and how you projected affecting the center and the future as you hand over to your, the problem to somebody else. Well, between 2000 and 2010, the number of people in town grew by 34.8%. We know already that in the 2020 census already, we have grown from 4,000 people in 2010 to about 5,000. And we expect the census will show somewhere between 5,300 and 5,500 people, 60 and over. We know from our own survey that people do not want to leave Amherst. They love the services. And you know from Greenleaves and other developments that the issue is always affordable housing. There's a big problem in Hammers with low income housing where the waiting list for Clark House and the unwilling numbers in the hundreds. And there are some people who have almost no income. And so extremely concerned about that. I thought that when I participated in the charrette about that space between us and UMass, I thought maybe I planted a seed for low income housing for elders. I think that's a huge need and documented need. And I'm very concerned that we don't have that. I think that the rise of the Hadley senior center and some of the other senior centers in Northampton where the facilities include a gym, adequate counseling space and space that is designed for older people without long hallways on one level. I think that makes those places attractive and when people can drive, they shop around. And I hear all the time people say to me, I was gonna come to your yoga class and I drove around and around and I couldn't find any place to park. And I gave up. I would like to come to your programs but parking is a huge impediment for me. We know that when we build a new senior center and we're on the list behind the other big projects that we will probably quadruple in size. We are considered a very unique regional multi-purpose senior center. 25% of our participants come from other communities. We mail our newsletter to Pelham because we have a grant from Highland Valley for that. I know people are clamoring to come here but they're held back by the fact that our parking sticker is only available to people 65 and older who live in Amher. So a lot of our volunteers are from other towns, people who deliver the meals and do all kinds of things. So that reality holds us back. And I just know that when we're in a better spot we're gonna grow a lot. And we're grateful for what we have. I don't wanna sound ungrateful. I'm so happy that we have the space we have and it doesn't come out of our budget. And we have IT and they give us our computers and phones and we don't have to worry about that. But I really wanted my legacy to be a new senior center. And I can only say I planted the seed. I appreciate that, thank you. Anything else? Well, I appreciate it. I'm sorry that we kept you so late but we're glad you came to meet with us and thank you. And thank you for all you do. And I'm gonna miss having heard many of your presentations in my various roles over the years. It's gonna be quite a change. I love my job. I am so lucky to have found it right out of college. And I have a bittersweet feelings about retiring. Thank you so much. I'm sure, but. Take it from a few of us on the board. There is a great opportunity out there somewhere. Well, I'm only to be an ally. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Okay. So, the only other thing that was on the community services budget that wasn't covered by presentation is just really nobody but Paul to make a presentation on it as the community services grant process. And so just to make sure that we. There's the one small line called social services that doesn't seem to be linked to it. That's the. It was like a free floater. Yeah. So do you have a vision for, I know you have a, you've been working on the last year's amount of vision for next year. So this is something I alluded to in my town manager report. So this is the 20,000 that's been in there for a long time. We've always had concerns about it because of the anti-aid amendment. Last year, the town meeting put in an additional $60,000 for social services. I did not include the $60,000 in this year's budget, but I do think that it's something the council as you start to discuss your goals for coming years, is it something you should put on your agenda to discuss because clearly town meeting has spoken towards funding social services more than we have in the past. Right now we do the $20,000 plus we do the 10% max that we're allowed to do under CDBG. And then town meeting would put in the last two years, put in an additional $60,000 and then we would sort of scramble and figure out how are we going to spend that money. There's limitless needs. I think what the town had done in the past was to dedicate it to certain non-profits. We're not allowed to do that, that's illegal. You can't just say here's taxpayer money going to this non-profit. That's called the anti-aid amendment. I think we've shared information about that in the past. But if the council feels like putting more money into social services for whatever purpose and you wanted to say yes, we want to do that, I'd appreciate the guidance from the council as a goal going forward. Or if you say no, that's really not the function of local government because, and I'm looking for direction from you as you start to go through your goal-sending process next in the fall. I assume it's when you'll start to get involved in doing new goals for the coming year. But just to be alert that for two things, one is three things actually. One is we can't just say we're going to give money to an agency because they do good work. The second is that we are anticipating next year's budget to be much more difficult than this year's budget. We had some one-time benefits this year that helped us solve the budget challenge that we had, such as a virtual 0% increase in health insurance. That won't happen again. We had one-time money from a court decision called the Hopkinson case that allowed us to tax construction earlier than we normally would. That was a one-time deal. And then the third thing is that if we put money into something else, we're going to have to take something out of something else. It's kind of a zero-sum game. So it's a big decision. And again, look for the policy guidance from the council on how you want to approach that. So long and short of it, I kept the $20,000 in there. I'm not going to let Sonja opine on that because I know what she thinks. But I did not include the $60,000. Yeah. Kathy and Linda. I have your request that we think about this. I think it's a good one. Because even as we heard police, fire, senior, leisure service, public health, we heard social services, little pieces of it everywhere. And we're not even hearing about WIC, the Meals on Wheels. So it's not because of Amherst's nationally. It's this fragmentation of lots of little pieces. And often, it's services to the same human being. Just accept if everyone happens to meet each other when they walk through the doorway. They don't necessarily even know they're visiting at different times of day. So figuring out if we only have a small amount of money, where it might be best used is what I, you know, that's why it struck me, even if it was 80. But when it's 20, it's like, would it be better in? And then look at one of the other things we have, but earmark it toward a population. You know, is it part of servicing the homeless? Is it part of servicing seniors who are homebound and falling and can't get up? So the ambulance is helping them stand up. So trying to think of how would it be best to be used, as well as you said, who gets that money? You know, I mean, is it to what, where would you, could it be glue that helps pull something together? So I've had those conversations just staff-wise. You know, we've talked about there's endless needs and you could say easily put a lot of money into any of these services because the federal government and the state government have pretty much walked away from their responsibilities in this area. It's fallen on local communities and we are a caring community, so we do care about these things and invest money in these things. You know, Julie, during the budget process, she and I would say if you wanted to make a dent on, the challenge of people who are suffering from homelessness is really big because it impacts every one of our departments. It's the thing that I hear from all of our staff from conservation to the library, to the police, to fire, the DPW, they all are impacted in one way or another and we're providing a lot of services or responding to challenges from the homeless population. So we talked about what if we had $100,000 or whatever, what would we do with that money? Would that have a tangible impact? And I think that's where Julie kept saying we can't look at it as just amourst. We have to look at it as a system and yes, we might be able to put some money and her advice would have been to, she had some ideas, I'd rather have her articulate what they are, but there were some things to hire someone to do stuff and I think what my sense from the town meeting was when they voted was they wanted the funds to go to people, not to hire staff. And so I think that's the type of conversation that we would wanna have with a broader conversation with the council. And when I asked the question of Medicaid, it wasn't so much can we get them rolled up, but there it's a big pot of money that with entrepreneurial creative people in some communities is being used for some of these issues because it's much looser than Medicare is, but even on the Medicare side, there's some expanded, better people at home where they live so we don't see them in the emergency room. So just trying to think of, I don't like to think of it as other people's money because it's all of our money, but it's pulling in resources to help hold things together. I wanna just go back historically. Some people here may remember this, but there was a time when the town of Amherst budget actually included a nice chunk of change that went to service agencies. And then we hit rough times and town meeting couldn't afford to put it there. And it became very difficult for those agencies that were dependent on that to wean away. And some did, and some did not. So, and I having, as some of you know, I've kind of spent some of my life on both sides of this issue now in government, but also on the other side of nonprofits that provide serious human services to lots of people. And when you start mixing the dependence on local dollars particularly, and even state and federal with that, I get concerned about the ups and downs that that creates for that organization. And I think we see it, for example, our homeless shelter is totally dependent to almost completely on a state line item. And what happens if that state line item goes away? So I really, as much as I appreciate the fact that this is in here, what I also am hearing, Paul, and that is next year could be tougher. And if we're gonna do something, let's do something that helps us figure out how to help others do something, not that we can take this on, but we can help do whatever we need to do. I guess my summation, unless this has been troubling for me too over the years, because I was director of non-profit service provider for my career, town can't afford to do, to pick up where the state and federal government are failing. We just aren't financially strong enough to do that. Education is already a major pull and is gonna continue to be, it's not gonna get better. We do know that the town meeting there was a strong element in town meeting that felt very strongly about this issue, that town had a responsibility to do something more. In a time, some years was successful in pushing that argument forward. I bring this forward to our committee because when we hold our hearing, I wouldn't be surprised if we heard it. But there is a reality that we all have to recognize in the charter. We don't have the ability that town meeting had to make an amendment to create funding for a program that wasn't proposed already in the town manager's budget, which is different from the prior process. And so we have to be prompt to remind people of that. But on the other hand, we have to be very attentive to the community when we hear from them, because that's what our job is, as well as our own sense, which does get into the question of next year's goals and being realistic about it, but at least being aware of it. And so I appreciate the comments that were offered. I wanna touch on one other thing, just in that's planning for the next couple of meetings. I would like to propose that we amend the agenda for next Tuesday, a week from today, and add to the agenda the topic of the short-term rental law community impact fee as referred by the council to this committee and one other committee. And if there's agreement, then I will work. I will work with Sonia and we will do an amended agenda for next, for a week from today to add that item. And then if any of you have specific pieces of information that you think would be helpful to have for that discussion as well as I pointed out, if you have questions about future presentations where you think that the staff will be presenting could provide anything in advance, we were very fortunate today, we had staff who really were just on top of everything, so we were left with questions, but don't hesitate to send me questions on any of that topic, Paul. So we weren't quite on top of everything, I gave you not a complete answer on the question about police in terms of being trained. So what happens is when they go to the academy, we withdraw the money for the cost of the academy from their paycheck, and then after they've been here for five years, we reimburse them. So it's $3,000 for the cost of that. Thank you. I was gonna, after we broke, say that would be a way to think about it, that you've, exactly. I mean, that's what a lot of private employers do when they're paying for the, that we're training you, but. So I thank Sonia for pointing that out to me. Yeah, that's great. You're welcome. Maybe why they rarely leave quickly. And is that okay, Paul, for you, if we add to the agenda for next Tuesday, that item? Now we're meeting on Thursday. We're meeting on Thursday this week, but I didn't want to do it without having three days notice possibility because as I thought about it, there could be owners of homes that are being rented out as Airbnb's or other people who have vested interests. And if we haven't provided notice as required by the open meeting law, I think we've opened ourselves up to something unnecessary. So that's why I would like to propose next Tuesday. I had, you actually thought it would be next Tuesday because of that, you know, just an up-advanced notice, so. Yes, but I need, I haven't, I needed to just disclose it to the committee of the thought and make sure that Paul was okay with that too. So. I assume that we do, when we do our hearing that given the topic of the hearing, this would not necessarily be something on the hearing agenda. The short-term rental, I don't think that's on the agenda, no. No, because it's not part of the FY. Right, exactly. 20 proposed budget. We did post it for public comment for last night's meeting and when it comes back to the council, we'll post it again, but I agree with Andy that this is a useful time. Yeah, I just don't want to put it on an agenda without statutory required notice. Okay, anything else? Motion to adjourn. I move. Okay, so. Second. Everybody's agreed, so we're adjourning at 4.45.