 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise Vs and generous donations from viewers like you. Good evening. Governor Baker has allowed us through his March 12 order to suspend certain provisions the open meeting law. This allows us to hold this virtual town council meeting. We will call upon each councilor by name. At that time they will unmute their mic and say present. This will indicate they can hear us and we can hear them. Please remember to mute your mic after saying present. This is also how we conduct comments throughout the agenda, in addition to using the raise the hand function. Given that we have a forum of the council present on September 14, 2020 and calling the meeting to order of the Amherst town council. This meeting includes audio video and is available live on Amherst media. It is also being there's no chat room. We have any technical difficulties. We'll make note of that. And also we may have to stop the meeting until we can make sure everybody has been able to reconnect. So with that I'm going to start by calling the meeting and you can take the announcement down of how to connect. Okay. Thank you. Thank you Kalyne Ballmille. Present. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Patty Angelas. Present. Darcy Domont. Present. Lynn Griesper is present. Mandy JoHannackie. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Sheing. Present. Steve Shriver. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. And Sarah Schwartz. Present. Great. We have a full compliment of council here tonight. We are going to start our meeting with the announcements which are on your thing. I just want to draw attention to the council that we have a meeting next Monday night, the 21st. We do not have a meeting on the 28th, but we do have a meeting on the 29th, during which time we will have a primer at 6.30 on the master plan and a public forum at seven. I just want to note two things on your screen, and that is the call-in number that we now have for COVID concerns, as well as the email. Both of these can be found on the town website. In addition to that, we want to make you aware that the Community Preservation Act Committee has opened the call for proposals, and that can be found on the website as well. They are due on by October 12th. More information can be found there. Thank you. You can take that down now. We have no hearings tonight, and there will be only one public comment period. And it will begin momentarily. And so I'm going to ask and just state residents are welcome to express their views. And I will let you know for how many minutes once I see how many people plan to speak. And the discretion of the president based on the number, we will see how long you're allowed to speak. The council will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during general public comment. And the instructions are on this. Please raise your hand if you would like to speak during public comment. And I would like to see all hands at this time. Again, this is the only time we have public comment during the entire meeting. Okay, then I will start with Lisha Deshamasas. Deshamas. And I totally apologize for mispronouncing your name. Please unmute and pronounce your name correctly and tell us where you live. Hey, Lynn, this is Serge. I'm just having a little bit of trouble with controlling the attention. If you know, would you mind taking over for a minute? I'm going to just come in and out of the meeting real quick. Please be patient. We're just having a little connectivity problem. But there is Alicia. Hi, my name is Alicia Deshamasas. I am a resident of 180 Clark Hill Road in Amherst. I wanted to speak to the UMass Union's request for a letter of support. I'm a member of one of the UMass unions. I serve as a resident instructor on campus at UMass. I just wanted to encourage you all to consider signing. The UMass, I know that the Amherst economy is already suffering because of so few students returning to campus this fall. My partner used to work downtown and we're definitely missing the income from the students because so few returned. I just wanted to ask again that you consider signing. UMass jobs are good for Amherst. UMass jobs bring money to the community. They allow us to spend time here to support local businesses. Losing UMass jobs means losing income for the area of businesses in town that I know need it. So just as you read the letter of support and consider it, I would encourage you to sign not just because of my own interest, but because it's good for Amherst and I wanna see our town make it through the pandemic successfully. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. I'm gonna go to Jennifer Page. Hi, I'm Jennifer Page. I've been an Amherst resident for 11 years, a UMass employee for eight years and I'm currently an officer in the UMass Amherst Professional Staff Union. I'd like to urge the town council to vote to approve the letter of support for UMass Amherst Unions United, which is a coalition of unions representing faculty, staff, graduate students and student employees. The UMass Amherst administration has threatened to lay off staff members due to the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. No one doubts that the pandemic has impacted the university's operations, but the administration has not provided evidence that layoffs are necessary, nor have they agreed to investigate creative cost-saving measures that would prevent them from having to balance their books on the backs of employees. The Amherst economy is already suffering due to so few students returning to UMass this fall. If the university were to lay off workers or implement long-term furloughs, that would only make the situation worse for local businesses. On a personal note, I've been patronizing Amherst businesses during this pandemic. I'll get takeout from Bueno Isano or stop by Line Red for a bubble tea, but if I were to get laid off, all that would stop. I wouldn't have enough money to pay my bills, let alone support local businesses. We're asking you to urge the university to provide the unions with irrelevant financial data and to bargain with the unions in good faith, both of which are required by law and according to our contracts, and to explore creative solutions to the current crisis. You all played an important role in getting the university to modify its reopening plan to protect the health of our community. Now we're asking you to get involved again to urge UMass to do the right thing for the community and the Commonwealth. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, Jennifer. Ryan, go Blanc. Thank you, folks. Ryan, 220 North Pleasant Street. I just want to quickly just reiterate the comments of Alicia and Jennifer. I'm also an employee over at UMass. I'm also an alumnus of the campus. I graduated in 2016 and resided in Amherst now for three years. And I just want to reiterate the sentiments that have been expressed, but also for the reason that, you know, the campus has become such a point of pride for the town of Amherst and really for the greater Pioneer Valley community over the years. And just trying to understand that, yes, these are unforeseen times in our world, but really wouldn't appreciate your consideration of the letter of support for the unions as we navigate this really together, you know, as a campus, but also as a town. Really would appreciate your consideration on that matter. Thank you. Somebody by the name of Momenta, please identify yourself and tell us where you live. Hi, this is Brit Ru. I'm sorry, Momenta is my job's name, one my job. I live at 315 Lincoln Avenue. I've been a resident of Amherst for 45 years and I wanted to speak to you today in support of the Percent for Art program. I work as the, I'm the director of Commonwealth murals. We do public art installations. I manage a mural festival, individual mural installations and a muralist bidding for public art projects. A Percent for Art program for Amherst would significantly increase the available funding and allow Amherst to commission professional quality public art projects of which there is very, very little currently in Amherst. If you have a town or a city with Percent for Art program and regular new professional public art installations, it has been shown to public art has been shown to be a driver of economic activity and new investment as well as improved perceptions by residents and visitors of the town. So there's a direct economic benefit to a Percent for Art program for businesses and property values and professional art installations also raise awareness and increase demand for public art for all artists, both professional and emerging or novice artists. So it is a benefit to local artists as well. So I really urge Amherst to consider this as a long-term investment, both to the quality of life culture and economic viability for our city or our town. Thank you very much. Rick, thank you for your comments. Zoe Crabtree, state where you live and your name. Hi, my name is Zoe Crabtree. I'm a district five resident. I emailed all of you today. I just wanted to make sure that you could hear another voice and supported this as well. Unions are really, really important. I don't work at UMass. I'm not a member of this union personally, but I've seen how beneficial the grad student union has been for students, grad students at UMass in terms of advocating for their members. And I know that the unions on campus do that across the board for staff and faculty as well. I think that they're really, really important. So I'd really urge you to sign the letter and support. Thank you. Thank you. Demetrius Shabazz. Hello. Hello, Dee, how are you? Yes, I'm Demetrius Shabazz, as you said, of district five. And I'm actually responding to a memo that was inserted into the packet. It looks like over the weekend, entitled community safety in Amherst from the town manager. And first of all, I just wanna thank the town manager and the council for considering at least parts of our input to the town manager goals that we submitted of Rational Equity Task Force. However, the current memo that was submitted and the next steps regarding community safety, I feel is misguided for the advisory group. The town manager proposes a study of the issue and to establish a working group, which will include nine members appointed to the advisory group. And that that report would be due January 31st. We asked, however, for a community advisory group to be charged with the similar role, but appointed by residents and not by the council or town manager. By the time such an advisory group is interviewed, selected, set up, there'll be little time to educate, deliberate and design policies and practices appropriate for our town. Therefore, such a proposed process will result, we feel, in a symbolic gesture without very little outcome. In addition, community members have seen far too many town led town studies and appointments for committees, which have not listened to or served the BIPOC members. And there are examples of ones that do, such as the school equity task force, which is not under the jurisdiction of a town manager or the energy and climate action committee working group. These groups are not under their jurisdiction and they operate without the open meeting law requirement. We feel something like that would be more appropriate for what we have in mind as a community. It's imperative participants have the ability for an advisory group to speak freely and honestly without fear of retribution. Thus having what is suggested, the police chief or anyone from the police as a member of the advisory group is not engendered such openness and honesty. The memo and proposal from the town manager is a start to dialogue. However, what remains are the other items detailed in our two-page proposal as well as what shape such an advisory group might take. The town manager's memo is not a solution to what else is community, which is the ability for community members to feel more civically engaged and interact as real stakeholders. And so I just would like to refer you all to the open meeting law and bodies appointed by a public official solely for the purpose of advising the official on a decision that individual could make a loan or not public body subject to OML. So anyway, I sent it to you in a memo. I hope you all read it. And I hope at some point soon that we're all able to consider this and the town manager will meet with us as a body, the racial equity task force. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Shabazz, please state your full name and where you live. Yeah, so Milka Shabazz, district five. Happy and proud to be a resident of that district. I would just like to raise the, that I get the timeline and the reason that you're trying to get a report in sometime in January as the, in order to be able to impact budget liberations and that whole cycle, you would need to have something coming out by then. I completely get that. But I would just raise that the workload that such a committee would have or such a working group would have is impresses me as something really quite enormous. And yet you're tasking them with two projects both of which are in and of themselves quite enormous. I would recommend that whatever community advisory group or working group that has established two things. One, you might look at subdividing the work of that group into two different task force. One that would look at the issue of the work of the, the current evidence of the work of the Emmer's police department. What are the calls? What are the protocols? What are the actions they have been taking and looking toward what are some of those that could be divested into a civilian force and then to look at different models of this kind of transition that has occurred and then to develop a report, analyze that, make recommendations for what could be done in Emmer's and then write that up and get that out. That's one enormous task of itself. But then to separate that from one that would look at making a recommendation around some type of civilian review board or commission on police practices because that body is going to have a whole nother set of work to look at the internal affairs process of the police department, to look at the kinds of complaint structure. How do complaints currently operate? Where are they advertised? What is the procedure? How do they get followed up? We heard over the summer in our forum, People's Assembly with the Chief that ultimately the buck stops with him and it comes up to him. But again, to learn that full process to understand how it has operated for other complaints in the past for issues of racial profiling and other kinds of issues. That's an enormous piece of work that has to go on there. Then to look at different models of civilian review boards, different models of commissions on police practices to see what would work here and to adapt a recommendation to analyze those and then to adapt to create a, and to write up a report that makes recommendations about what the feeling is of the group that would work best here in Emmer's. I just think the two tasks are each quite enormous and to task one group with doing all of that work even with the proviso I saw in the memo of there being some support to help support research and to the working group. I just think it's still quite a bit to task one working group with work on both those by the deadline that's been established. Final point to consider is again, a working group or community advisory group that is not subject to open meeting law. My experience in the past that if you want a group that can function nimbly that can operate over email and passing back and forth information and commenting on that information to require that body to be under open meeting law with the constraints at place. I think again is to doom it to ineffectiveness or to making it very problematic that by that deadline you're going to get a really meaty report that can be convincing to you all as the town counselors and convincing to the town manager and convincing to the town at large. So those are my recommendations. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for your comment. There's two more hands up and we are going to stop public comment after those. Terry Mullen, please come forward, state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Terry Mullen. I live at 58 Northeast Street, apartment six dash seven. I am commenting today to push the council and the town manager to not only do research and to not only use data. And I'm saying that as a mathematician and someone who loves data. So get the data. But also like you collect data like your government you have these things already. You can publish that data and it will be analyzed. Like this is a hot topic right now. There's crowdsource data analysis all over the internet just search ML and it's gonna machine learning and it will pop up for you. Like there's people from 13 to 99 who will do this just for fun. So I don't understand why it would take four months or six months to get that analysis done with the data that I'm sure is already available in town records and in arrest records. So I think really something that needs to be focused on is action. You have community leaders who are ready to start programs to do things. You have $80,000 set aside and I think though data is amazing and wonderful and hopefully will change all of your minds to believe the anecdotes that you're hearing in these meetings and hopefully will prove to you qualitatively that these stories aren't just stories that they're true and that we have a real problem here. But don't just wait for that to come in. Start something. You have $80,000 set aside. Do something. I know you can. I feel ready for it. I know you're ready for it. So hopefully we can move forward with that. Thank you. The sold out or Tagal Bustamante state your total name and where you live. So that was the month district five resident. Thank you and not prepared to comment on a document shared on a Monday morning for a Monday evening meeting. So I'm gonna focus instead on the process. I think Demetriana Milker Shabazz did an excellent job of talking about some of the content involved. And what I'd like to focus on is especially considering there's residents who don't get to hear every meeting at the August 31st meeting, the racial equity task force of Amherst provided and a document that was discussed and commented on by several residents that was input onto the town manager goals recommending that racial equity BLM will then throw out the goals and not only one goal at the end. We heard on August 31st, council's initial reactions to the input. And we did hear some positive support for the goals and in general support from Dumont, D'Angelois and from our district five, Shalini, I'm sorry. And at the same time, we heard negative comments regarding how it was too difficult to weave goals in and there wasn't enough time. We were told that it was too late and that you had to go to the September 2nd DOL committee. I think it's very difficult with the process for residents to follow what happened next at the DOL committee. There are minutes available and in that DOL September 2nd committee, which you're free to clarify later, but it essentially reinforced that the racial equity goal would remain one goal, not be woven in. And it did feel like a lot of the input was shelved. I do understand that the town manager made an effort to reach out to individuals. And I understand that he was encouraged to reach out to a second wave of individuals. And you might appreciate on a personal level being included in individuals that had outreach. But I think that if you look at it institutionally and in the history of the United States and institutional racism, we really need to request a formal meeting with the task force. It's much more effective for people to have a conversation as a group and really look at proposals and goals. It's really very difficult to analyze a proposal on something as deep as a civilian review board on the same day that it's presented. The timeline is problematic for most residents. We really need a meeting with the task force for an open dialogue that doesn't rely on individual level relationships. In addition to our jobs, many of us are involved in other types of advocacy. And personally with other residents, we've been extremely concerned about essential workers in town. We're still waiting for rental assistance. We've had great support from some quarters for that work, but it's still waiting. I won't go into it in detail here, except to say that we really need a more open and democratic process to really look at these proposals. There's a very large distance, as was pointed out previously, between a standing advisory council made up of BIPOC residents and a commission. There's been a history and amours of people who serve on committees having their names not public, which is different than the city of Northampton process. So there's just a lot of questions and regards, and we really need more time to look at the proposal as a whole, not just standing alone. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Lydia Irons. Hello, my name is Lydia Irons. I live in district four. And I would like to echo what both the doctors Shabazz have said in this meeting about the needs for a civilian public safety review board to be appointed by town members and not the town manager, the town council, and have the residents of the town be involved in that process. Recently, the Defund 413 Amours Group had a meeting with Mr. Backelman where we were able to provide interpretation for not just Spanish speakers, but also Mandarin speakers, as well as American Sign Language. And I think that having that be a part of these meetings, these town council meetings is not hard and something that could really help involve more people in our town. We have many members of the town that don't have English as a primary language. And even if they did, then having that as a part of these meetings is very important and is very doable. I also think want to echo what Azalda said about we need more time. It's really difficult to take all of these things into consideration and really get the word out to residents about coming to these meetings and making their voices heard when things are put up so last minute. And I would really hope that you will take the time to meet with the racial equity task force, whether it's just the town manager or the town council members individually or as a whole, because the work that they are doing in this area is really effective and important. And I also would really, really like to make sure that you hear that if there is going to be a public advisory board on public safety or a review commission, the police cannot be or should not be involved in that process. They are inherently bias. They are part of a long standing structurally racist system and having the police chief in that room and taking up that space will inherently make it ineffective and dangerous for members of the community. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. We're going to now move on to our agenda. Having exhausted all the people who wanted to make public comments, we have no consent agenda this time because there was only one set of minutes and there were not other items that could be placed on the consent agenda. And there are no resolutions and proclamations. So based on our agenda, we are now going to move to item eight C, which is the UMass request, UMass unions united request for a letter of support. And let me just say that we've looked at this in a couple of different ways. And therefore tonight, I will introduce the item based on what was originally in the packet. However, instead of beginning with that letter, we will begin with a letter submitted like Councillor Pat D'Angeles and her motion. Pat D'Angeles has submitted the attached replacement draft letter regarding the UMass layoffs. She has also submitted a motion. Based on that, I want to make sure that you understand the process for the agenda. So first and foremost, we did seek the attorney's advice. The attorney has said that because this is a non-binding resolution that can have no legal impact. It is her opinion that there are no legal impediments for the town council participating in the vote. Any financial impact would it best be remote and speculative? She did think it makes sense in the spirit of transparency to file a disclosure or to disclose any affiliation on the record at the meeting. So having said that, some of you may want to state a disclosure unless you have filed something as well and we hope you have. If you want to recuse yourself, your vote will not count either way. For example, if three councillors recuse themselves, then there will be only 10 councillors voting. If you do not recuse yourself but wish to abstain, then your vote counts as a no. So for example, in that case, if there are 13 councillors voting and a majority vote for the motion seven and six councillors either vote against the motion or abstain, the motion passes by one vote. So based on this and also reminding you that individual councillors can certainly express their support in any number of ways that they want to, I want to ask if there is anybody who wishes to be recused, please raise your hand. Okay, I see one hand. I see two hands. I see three hands. No. No, okay. For those people at point. Point of order. Yes. Has it been recommended by the town attorney that anyone recuse themselves with from this because of their UMass affiliation given that we vote on UMass water rates and no one recuse themselves from that? I read the town attorney's statement. Let me read it again. The town attorney stated that because this is a non-binding resolution that can have no legal impact. It is her opinion that there are no legal impediments where the town council participating in the vote. Any financial impact would it best be remote and speculative? She did think it makes sense in the spirit of transparency to file a disclosure or to disclose any affiliation on the record at the meeting. She did not state one way or the other around the issue of recusing, but recusing can be done without stating a purpose. Okay. Have I answered your point of order? Okay. So I've seen two hands of people that want to recuse themselves. That is a Councillor Stephen Schreiber and Councillor Evan Ross. We are going to ask that those people be moved to the audience and they will be brought back when we complete the discussion, okay? We are now 11 councillors. Is there anybody who at this point would like to make a statement of disclosure or shallowness Balmille? You have your hand up. Do you wish to be recused? No, not recuse. I just wanted to make the disclaimer that I've submitted a disclosure that my husband works at UMass and I've been a consultant from time to time. And however, this is not going to impact my ability to make a fair decision. Okay. Alyssa? I also have a four page disclosure on file associated with the fact that my husband is a member of the, is a faculty member and is therefore a union member, bargaining unit member of the Massachusetts Society of Professors and also a dues paying member. I also work part time for the Massachusetts Society of Professors which is one of the unions being discussed as one of the unions united. But as my disclosure and numerous campaign speeches have made clear, I do not work on negotiations or on public positions of the union. I am merely a membership coordinator in terms of paperwork. So that is why my disclosure indicates that I also can act without any difficulty in this case. And it's merely a disclosure of the appearance of a conflict. Okay. George? I too have submitted a disclosure. My wife, full-time employee, is a faculty member at UMass. But I feel that in this situation that I can still perform my official duties objectively and fairly. And so I've made that statement in the disclosure. Okay. Is there anybody else? Garcy? Is this a disclosure? Yeah. I also filed a disclosure because my daughter works full-time for UMass and is a member of the professional staff union. Okay. Anybody else making a disclosure statement? Given that I will make mine and that is that up until two years ago I worked full-time for the University of Massachusetts for 31 years. Upon my retirement, I continued to work as a consultant in a post-retirement basis with an organization which for most of its existence was with the UMass president's office and has recently moved to the UMass Amherst campus. However, I no longer have any reason that this should inhibit my making a sound judgment. Is there anything else? Anyone else who wishes to state their disclosure? Okay. Then we are going to proceed. So, Pat, that was a long way of getting to the point that we have you introduce your substitute letter and we're prepared to put that on the screen. Okay. Would you like to speak to it first? No, that's fine. I think the letter basically speaks for itself. I'm very concerned about the impact of potential layoffs at UMass on our community and surrounding communities. I will say right away the letter has an error in the chancellor's name. I doubled the B, so that needs to be corrected. Okay. Serge, would you please put the letter on the screen? And we'll give people time to read it again if they have not. The letter has been in the file since this morning at about 10 o'clock, I think, maybe 11. Okay, Pat, with your agreement, we'll take the letter down and we may have to come back to it. That's fine. I do want to add one thing. The reason I am hoping that we don't refer this letter is the fact that on Wednesday, the UMass administration informed PSU and the USA that they had until Friday, this last Friday, 9-11 to accept the university city's most recent proposal or that layoff notices would be issued today. So I feel like it is imperative that we move this forward as quickly as we can. Okay, thank you. So I need a motion before we continue our discussion to suspend rule 8.4. So I need a motion and a second. I'm looking. So moved. I'm sorry. So moved. And a second. A second. That second came from, I'm sorry, who? Darcy. Darcy, thank you. I just didn't hear the voice loud enough. Thank you. Is there any further discussion about the motion to suspend rule 8.4? Dorothy, Darcy, or Shalini, can I assume that that's not why your hand is up? That's right. Okay, all right. Then I want to quickly take a roll call vote starting with Brewer. Do you support spending the rule? Aye. Okay. DeAngelis? Yes. Dumont? Yes. Reesmer is yes. Anarchy? Yes. Pam? Yes. Ross is not in the room. Ryan? Yes. Shane? Yes. Schreiber is not in the room. Steinberg? Abstain. Schwartz? And Bellmohm? Yes. Okay, so of the 11 votes, 10 people voted to support, none voted against, one voted to abstain and two are recused. Did I get that right? Okay. So now we can move to the actual motion, Pat. Okay. I move to accept the amended town council statement in support of the University of Massachusetts Unions United and to forward said letter to the university chancellor directly. Is there a second? Second, Shalini. Okay. All right. And now we will begin our discussion. Dorothy? I read Pat's letter and it mentioned a few possible programs which will employ some of the workers who would be or threatened with layoff. It really hit me with a shock that I find it absolutely shocking and amazing that UMass with its world famous food organization, with its buying food from many, many farms and cooking and making great food has not somehow with the use of state or federal funds become part of the feeding operation, not just for a local survival center in town, but for larger areas in this area. And, you know, I just would really like to know from the university, has that been considered? Is there a problem? Is this something that would be entertained? Because it seems like such a natural fit. So that's my comment. Okay. Dorothy. I would just like to say that I strongly support the proposed letter to UMass and thank Pat for rewriting it, so that it really underlines how UMass layoffs would affect the livelihoods of Amherst residents and the health of Amherst businesses. UMass is by far our largest employer. Our job as a town council is to protect Amherst residents and Amherst businesses and to advocate for them, especially considering that so many of those likely to lose income by these proposed layoffs are low wage earners and thus particularly vulnerable. I urge the council to act on this letter today and not refer it to the GOL committee. We don't need to turn it into a resolution and we don't need to refer it to GOL. We can and have before acted on a letter. This is time sensitive, as Pat said. And I'm convinced that nothing bad will happen if we vote to support it. The language of the request is very mild and reasonable. It's only asking us to do what the law already requires. It's nothing that will hurt our relationship with UMass and sending the letter may in fact, gain us some respect and stature when bargaining with them in the future. It certainly appears that was the case with the town manager's letter regarding COVID-19 preparedness. The town manager set a laudable precedent by standing up for the town in order to protect the health of Amherst residents. This is a comparable situation. In this instance, we need to step up to urge UMass to protect our residents once again, but this time to protect their financial wellbeing. I see this matter simply as one where our constituents are asking us for help. And in particular, for help for low wage earners. And I urge my colleagues to vote to accept the letter today. Shalini? Yeah, I speak with the utmost respect for our Chancellor Sabaswamy. And I think we heard that sentiment echoed in a lot of the letters that were urging us to consider this, but it is a different time. And we've seen the social crisis we're in, the economic crisis we're in, and it's not a time for business as usual. And we do need to bring an equity lens to every decision that we're making. And I think this is an opportunity for us to nudge our partners and really, really encourage our partners at UMass leadership to use this opportunity to think of very curative solutions. And we have the best minds on UMass with the different schools and research and amazing people. So this is really an opportunity to think outside the box, to pivot and to consider the most vulnerable people who are our residents as well and see the interconnectedness of how these decisions are impacting people. They're affecting their jobs. It's affecting the downtown businesses, housing, rents, health, all of that. And we're all connected. So I really encourage our partners there. I encourage our counselors today to support this letter today. Andy. So I'm gonna take a different tact, a different view from my colleagues who've spoken so far. I'm not comfortable with the letter as it's written and the theme of the letter. I am concerned about the effect that this pandemic has had on our businesses and all of the people who work in town, including employees of the university, very much so, they are a large part of our community. But I'm very uncomfortable on three grounds. One is it injects council in union negotiations with bargaining units. And I find it very uncomfortable for the council to be taking a position in negotiations that have a very formal and legal context. And it just seems to me that it's inappropriate to do that. The second thing is that I don't think that it's fair to draw any conclusions or accuse any party of not negotiating in good faith. And that is what the letter does. It is not a mild and reasonable or neutral letter when you look at the second page. And we're not a labor relations board. We're not in position to take a position on whether there's been negotiating in good faith. And it's not a statement of position that's encouraging both parties to work together to try and find a way to meet the university's needs and the employee's needs at the same time. It is very much written in one direction. And I guess I'm not comfortable with that. If it was neutrally written, I would feel differently about it. And the final thing is, is that the town, this council, the town manager requested that the university not bring everybody back to town because we were concerned about the public health of our citizens. And the university responded to that and whether it responded to that for the reason that of our letter solely, I doubt, but it certainly is logical it was a factor. And as a consequence, there is not the need for as much in the way of food service and residence hall use as there might otherwise be. And there's not the revenue that the university has. And the university therefore has to make very difficult decisions. I too wish that there was a way that they could make a responsible decision that would help people, but I don't think that it's appropriate for this council to become involved in negotiations. The reason that I abstained on the prior vote was that I actually do believe that a letter could be written, but not this letter. And I will not vote for this letter. I could vote for a letter, but without referral to a committee, we're not gonna rewrite a letter in this meeting. I move to amend the motion to remove the second to last paragraph that begins with the words, you have not responded to these proposals or to requests. Is there a second to that motion? A second to motion. Okay, motion's been made and seconded. Would you please put it up on the screen again, Serge, so we can all see which paragraph we're talking about. The next page, continue, continue. I believe it's the one that begins with you have not responded to these proposals or to requests for relevant financial data, including the total of the system's reserves. We ask that you in the spirit of thoughtful collaboration, cooperation in this effort, supply them with all relevant financial data and be arrogant in good faith. That is the paragraph, correct, Alyssa? Correct. Motion's been made and seconded. Would you like to speak to the motion? Yes, I would please. So following up on what everybody else said and remembering again, as I've stated numerous times and put in writing, I work for a union. So this is all kinds of awkward. But I wanna make clear that a couple of things. One is I disagree with my colleague who stated that we asked UMass not to bring everybody back. I completely disagree with that. I know that's the feeling of some in the community. I wasn't aware it was the feeling of anyone on the town council because I believe that what we said was, we don't believe you've planned effectively for bringing back the number of people you say you're bringing back. And most especially we were focused on how the off-campus student population was being served by testing quarantine and isolation. And we've seen some changes in that area and that's been terrific. But I absolutely refute the idea that we told them not to bring back a certain percentage of students because we did not do that. However, along the lines of why did I make this motion? Because one, I don't think we told them to do that. But the other is because I don't have following up on what Andy said, I don't believe it is appropriate for the town council to tell any employer other than the town manager that they're not bargaining in good faith. It is completely inappropriate for the town council to tell any organization that they are not bargaining in good faith. We do not expect that our partner, as everyone said, the largest employee to tell the town how to manage negotiations with our unions. And perhaps since many of you had no involvement in town government prior to your recent service on town council, you are unaware that we have had some very difficult relationships with our unions here in town. And were UMass to weigh in on those saying, for example, why haven't you solved your problem with your police union yet? We've solved ours would have been unhelpful if not damaging to our relationship. So we would not expect to do that just as we do not expect them to say, why don't your hiring practices end up with more staff of color? We expect to have a relationship that is going to be challenging at times, but not because we are inserting ourselves in hiring practices or other practices. If you look at that paragraph, I don't believe the statement loses anything by not chastising the university for what is believed to be true. We were not there. We are not part of the negotiations. We will never be part of the negotiations. I absolutely believe people who have made these statements, but it is not appropriate for us to emphasize these statements. What is appropriate is what Pat added to the original statement, which I thought was fantastic, which is all the information about this impact on our community. In fact, at one point when there was talk of turning this into a resolution, I drafted such a resolution because I was looking at, what are the things we're trying to do as a community to support our employees and to support our businesses? And those things are important to state rather than just walking away from the whole thing. But I absolutely cannot support this letter with that paragraph in it because it is not appropriate. Are there other comments about the motion, the amendment to the motion? I'm looking at hands that are raised over here, and I want to know if those are hands to speak to the amendment. I have a question about the amendment. I'm sorry? I have a question about the amendment at just a clarifying, is it the entire paragraph that Alyssa is asking to remove? Yes, it is. Okay, that was my question about this. Okay, George, you have your hand up. Lynn, you can stop me and that'd be fine, but I find it difficult to separate the amendment from the larger issue of other language that I also find concerning in this letter. So maybe I should just leave that and come back to it later. But I agree with Alyssa and I support the amendment, but I think there's other language in this letter that also is problematic. Okay, let's stick to this particular paragraph at this point. Dorothy? I do understand the concern with the statement you have not bargained in good faith, but I do like the statement about show us the reserves. If you say you can't afford something that's going to destroy people's lives, please show me you can't afford it. It's like powerful people who just refuse to show their financial records. So I do like that sentence. Perhaps you could take out bargaining and you have not bargained in good faith, but to say that you can't afford something and you have to do it, you have to fire or furlough indefinitely all these people without showing why I don't find that acceptable. Pat? Thank you. Some good points are being raised on both sides of the issue. I would like to, I'm thinking about the part about you have not responded to these proposals, but on how it might be restated, but I would like to clarify the last sentence of it. We ask that you in the spirit of thoughtful collaboration cooperate in this effort, supply them with all relevant financial data and continue to bargain in good faith. That's one thing that I see. The other thing that I just learned from Mara Keane, thank you, Mara, is that Michael Ashland is Michael Ash, not Ashland. So that would have to be corrected if this letter were to go out. I am interested in hearing other comments and I'm willing to work on that last paragraph. My, I think Pat's amendment and or Dorothy's amendment to this is to just make sure we use the word of supply information about the reserves. And the only, my background in this is that I was hired years ago by the union at UMass to find the reserves. And it took me weeks to find them. I did, and in a very indirect way. And when I got really close to the dollar amount, I got called from the administration, said, how on earth did you do that? Because it was right, but it was just knowing what is in the reserve account should be able to be disclosed. So I think there's, we had two suggestions of ways of major modification. One was we asked you in thought for collaboration cooperate and supply them with information about reserves and or with pets and continue to bargain in good faith without an assertion that they're not bargaining in good faith, but to amend that. So I don't know whether that addresses your concerns, Alyssa, but I think it would be hard in our town in Amherst, we can find the reserves. There is something called the stabilization fund and reserves, and I'm assuming that's pretty much it. And then each year we are adding to it in a university, a system as large as ours is, I can find the salaries of everybody. And I did go on this morning to look at how many people are paid more than $300,000 who don't teach, who are in an administrative position. And believe me, there are lots of them. So I think this is a modest request to just show us your reserves in the context. So that's, I would just take something that softens it and doesn't say that they haven't responded. So I'm just speaking to that, trying to modify that paragraph, but to show support that I think disclosing reserves. And then the last thing I would say is, I used to hate it when I, this was years ago in a different world than a private employer, where I'd have to do a gotcha to go find reserves. I just would have been so much easier not to find another document that said, here's this big pot of money because it made people feel like there was something secret. I don't think UMass has a lot of reserves. It's not like Amherst College with an enormous endowment. So I think disclosing it would probably be in everybody's benefit. George. Again, two objections. The first is that we're injecting ourselves into negotiation and telling another party what we think they should do. And as we talked, there's an example given earlier, imagine we're negotiating with the police union and someone from UMass says, well, I think you should do this, you should do that. So I think that's just a problem that's hard to get around. The second, I think there was a deeper issue that I think everyone needs to think about. You can point to people who make $200,000 or $300,000 and I'm not sure what that's supposed to say. But the university has a concern for its long-term liability. And that's the most important thing for this community is that there be a university 20, 30, 40 years from now. So the reserves and the long-range planning are done by people, that's what they do and spend an enormous amount of time on. University's been very successful in the last 10 or 15 years in positioning itself in a very competitive market. So the idea that somehow we can just find some magical part of money at the university is concealing money from us. I understand that from one perspective, negotiation-wise, but we're the town council. So I have a problem both with us telling them what we think they should do or shouldn't do. And I also have an issue with the idea that somehow there isn't a larger issue at play here. There's the short-term pain, which is real and the letter brings up very clearly and it distresses everyone. There's the longer-range issue of making sure that we have a university in five, 10, 15 years. And that is something that also needs to be considered and that's what the university is considering. So I don't see how tinkering with the language in the paragraph is going to help things. It either goes or it stays. So there is a motion on the floor. It has been made and seconded. There's amendment to remove that second-last paragraph that's been made and seconded. Mandy Jo, or okay, is there anybody else we would like to speak to the motion? We're on the amendment only. I'm sorry, to the amendment. All right, hearing nobody wanting to speak to the amendment, I'm going to go ahead and do a roll call. We'll start with- I need a clarification. We're voting on my amendment or Alyssa's- There's only one official amendment on the floor. The amendment on the floor is to remove the entire paragraph. Thank you. That is not what you want, then you vote against it. If it is what you want, you vote for it, okay? We're going to start with D'Angeles. No. DuMont. No. Griezmer. Upstain. Hanneke. Yes. Pam. No. Ross is not voting. Ryan. Yes. Shane. No. Schreiber is not voting. Steinberg. Yes. Schwartz. Yes. Paul Milne. No. Brewer. Yes. I get to break the tie again. I move to remove it. All right, we're moving on. We've now removed that last, that one paragraph. Get these ties, but let's keep going. Are there other, George? Yes, I'm sorry, but in paragraph six, the statement in the second sentence, this paragraph begins to summarize 100 layoffs at UMass, et cetera. The second sentence says, in recent weeks, it has become clear that the administration is seeking to lay off 300 PSU members, 150 USA members, AFSC members, and temporary workers at the university. And apparently it's clear to some people, it's not clear to me. And so I object to that statement. What I've read in the paper is the university is looking, and also there's this constant moving back and forth between furlough and layoff. And the university's been trying to find means to do furloughs and reduction work hours and negotiating with the union in that regard. That's been difficult and maybe it's failed, but that's what the strategy's been. So are we basically, is this letter saying we simply don't want any layoffs at all? Are we saying that we don't want any furloughs either? So there are two issues I have. That sentence, I think, is not neutral. And I object to it. Maybe someone who's sponsoring this can help me see the air of my ways. And secondly, I'd like some clarity of the distinction between furlough and layoff. The university has been very hard trying to do furloughs rather than layoffs. It looks like there may be some layoffs coming, but their stated goal is to find reductions in work hours and furloughs rather than layoffs if at all possible. So I find the language here in that paragraph problematic. And I have a problem with, you know, it's mostly layoff, layoff, layoff, but in the first paragraph it's furloughs and layoffs. I'd like some clarity as to what exactly the letter is trying to say. Anybody who would like Pat, do you have your hand up to clarify, I assume? Clarity, huh? I want to say right away that the part of that paragraph to summarize 100 layoffs at UMass animals will likely lead to the overall disemployment of 140 workers else in Massachusetts. I don't think that is anything but true. The university has talked about furloughs, but from everything I understand what the employees, the union members are also talking about furloughs and instead of full furloughs for shortening work hours and things like that. So that for me is why I'm insisting that both sides be willing to collaborate. And it hasn't been clear that the university is willing to collaborate with the union because they're literally not responding to the requests or ideas put forward by the union members. So again, clarity, I wish I could offer it. I think it becomes very important to me as a working class person, although my circumstances are different now, that's my roots and I understand what it's like to live through being laid off. And what I see in what the workers or the employees are doing is saying, hey, there are things that we can do to save jobs. That would include saving money for the university by shortening work weeks and things like that. So I'm just less willing to go along with that withdrawal and I also want my last sentence back from the paragraph that got removed. But anyway, that's another argument. George, was that the form in the form of emotion? I also have to say, writing, trying to rewrite this as a committee of a council is a little bit tense and difficult, George. I could make a motion that the second sentence of paragraph six be stricken. That would be my motion. George, would you please put the item up on the screen? So it would be the paragraph that begins to summarize. 100 layoffs at UMass will likely lead to overall disemployment of 140 workers in Massachusetts. In recent weeks, it has become clear that the administration is seeking to lay off 300 PSU members, 150 USA members, ASME members, and temporary workers at the university. That is the paragraph, George. That is correct, and that is the sentence that I have trouble with. So it's just the first sentence to summarize 100 layoffs at UMass Amherst will likely lead to the overall disemployment of 140 workers in Massachusetts. Is that the sentence? No, no, no, that sentence can stand. Pat is correct, that's probably true, and it's terrible. It's the second sentence where it's alleging that the university is seeking to lay off people. And that's what I object to. Lynn, I can accept that as a friendly amendment, I don't need if there may be other people who feel differently, but as the writer of the letter, I can get rid of that second sentence. I believe we, since we're into a motion and vote, we have to take it to a motion. So, second the motion. Second, the Angeles. Is there any other comment or discussion? And we have to take this down in order for me to see hands. Let's say, so we have removed, okay, Dorothy. Why don't we just say it seems, as opposed to it has become clear. People who wrote that letter, felt that that is what the actions seem to say, but of course we can't always be sure that that is true. So, I think saying it seems rather than it has become clear, I think that you need to have the list of jobs and people who would lose their livelihood. That's the point. We're talking about a huge loss of work for people, a huge loss of income in the town, and thus a huge loss of, further loss of income to whatever businesses still remain. So, I would keep the jobs, but you know, it has become clear. That's an opinion, all right? So, I would say it seems. The motion on the floor is to remove that second sentence. Not the first one. No, I would not want to remove the second sentence because the second sentence shows how serious it is. It's a very serious situation. Is there a second to the motion to remove that sentence? Mandi seconds. Okay, thank you. Is there further discussion? Dorothy, you've made your point. Alyssa. I think people are conflating two concepts here. We are not talking about not supporting the workers. We are talking about not micromanaging our relationship with UMass. I understand that there is disagreement as to where that line is drawn. I believe that line is clearly being stepped over, which is why I asked that we remove the previous paragraph. And I also believe that we remove this one. It's wonderful if an individual person wants to help write letters to the editor or help support various staff members either directly through financial support or in other ways. I don't think it is the council's job to decide whether or not we have an accurate listing of the number of layoffs. Just like we have not sent to any other Amherst-based business, including Amherst College, Hampshire College, including any of our restaurants, to say, well, I don't know. The restaurant down the street managed to keep some of their employees on. I'm not sure why you're not keeping more of your employees on. This is inappropriate for us to insert ourselves as a town council. It's not about our values as individual human beings. There are further comments about the motion to amend. Dorothy. There's a difference between UMass and the store down the corner. UMass's taxpayer supported. Is there a further comment? Okay, then we're going to move to vote. And again, Serge, just please put that up so I can see the sentence so people know what sentence we're removing. Okay, the sentence we're removing is the second one in the top paragraph. It is the sentence. In recent weeks, it has become clear the administration is seeking to lay off 300 PSU members, 150 USA members, AFSCME members, and temporary workers at the university. Okay? We're going to start with Darcy. No. Reesmer is yes. Anarchy. Yes. Anarchy. No. Ross, not voting. Brian. Yes. Dane. Yes. Scriber, not voting. Steinberg. Yes. Schwartz. No. Balmille. Yes. Brewer. Yes. DeAngelis. Yes. Okay, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight yeses who re-knows, so that sentence is removed. Kathy, you have your hand up. It was, sorry, that was leftover from before. Okay, so then moving back to the original letter, would you please put the original letter back up again? It's important that people read it from beginning all the way through. Please note that the second sentence in that top paragraph is out of the letter. Sent and the top paragraph here is out of the letter. Okay, further comments, George. So I do very much want to send a message to both parties to make every effort to minimize layoffs, furloughs, whatever, but so I think I can come to support this, though I'm still uncomfortable about some specific things, but there is one small place in paragraph five, just in terms of clarity, and I apologize, but this is what GOL does, and I don't get the feeling people want to send this to GOL. Paragraph begins the details, then there is a parenthesis and then depend upon the details. So I think the writer wanted something like the impact, either on the community or the town, right, or just the impact depends upon specific details. So this is just for clarity's sake, but again, I think there's just confusion there, at least as I read it. So I don't know what the sponsor was trying to communicate. I think the intention was to say the specific impacts will depend upon, or the impact will depend upon specific details, et cetera, et cetera, but as it stands, it simply says the details depend upon the details. So I think that just needs to clarify. And that point, and this is what we do at GOL, and I encourage you all to come and join in the fun, but this is, I think, just would help to be clear, and that's the only other comment I have. I'm laughing because George is absolutely right. I think we should strike the details and how much of and capitalize the impact will be borne by dependent in communities adjacent to UMass Amherst or elsewhere in the common, well, depending on the specific details of the reduction, blah, blah, blah. Well, it will depend. It will depend. You need to verb there. It will depend, yes. Thank you. So with that, would you please read it as a motion? I'll see if I can get a second. The impact will be borne in communities adjacent to UMass Amherst or elsewhere in the commonwealth, and will depend on the specific details of the reduction in contracting with vendors. For example, the reduction in wholesale food orders placed by dining services and on the share of lost wages and salaries that is offset by unemployment and insurance and other state and local support resources. Is there a second? I second. Okay, Kathy, a second to it. Is there any further discussion? Any none? Does anybody need that item repeated? I would like to send this read one last time. I apologize, but just for clarity's sake, if somebody could read it. I'll take it up on the screen again, Serge. Thanks. Okay, do you want me to read it again? Please. If you would. The impact will be borne in communities adjacent to UMass Amherst or elsewhere in the commonwealth and will depend on the specific details of the reduction in contracting with vendors. For example, the reduction in wholesale food orders placed by dining services and on the share of lost wages and salaries that is offset by unemployment insurance and other state and local support resources. Thank you, Pat. You're welcome. Thank you. Is there any other questions on that? All right, then we're gonna move to a vote on that. And I believe Griezmer is first and I agree, yes. Anarchy? Yes. Pam? Yes. Ryan? Yes. Shane? Yes. Steinberg? Yes. Fortz? Yes. Balmille? Yes. Rower? Yes. DeAngelis? Yes. Thank you. I'm sorry. Dumont? Yes. Okay, that one is unanimous 11, no. Are there any other comments, Andy? You're muted. Sorry, I have no comment. I thought that was a mistake. Okay, Kathy? Yeah, I didn't speak at the very beginning on my strong support for sending a letter like this because I think it does a couple of things. As Alyssa and others have noticed, it notes some areas that could be the topics that would be accrued to both the university and the towns a benefit in terms of alternatives to full layoffs. So I think that's useful because it's a public document. And when I first heard about these, I'm clearly not party to any of these negotiations, but my first thought on where to save money was take the football team down from Division I to Division II because it's a big money loser every year for the university. And it's a substantial savings. So not a layoff, but just reduce it. So there are some areas that the whole university, it's a big picture kind of item. And one of the things I think everyone should know is we heard, we got a letter from Mindy and Joe in response to the unions asking for support saying they're going to do everything they can to try to do level budgeting for the university because they understand particularly in communities like Amherst, major cuts are devastating, not just to the university. So I think that's the reason for going slowly is to really look at some big areas where there's less harm done and it's a savings. So that's something that I've thought for a long time on there are areas that with a tough look and some colleges and universities have taken that kind of big budget look and that isn't about the teaching but really what are we here to educate? So I'm strongly in support of the letter because of the amount of information that's in it. Mindy, Joe. I'm getting closer to being able to support this. I am in agreement with Andy and Alyssa's initial comments that we're skirting a line here. I don't believe we should be injecting ourselves into negotiations. And there's one more part of this letter that I think potentially does. And it is the part on page two on the, I guess it's the fourth paragraph of page two that the last sentence that starts these employee initiated proposals have included and then the list of proposals. We are not at the negotiating table. That list comes from people who may or may not be at the negotiating table. I don't know. I don't know who the union negotiators are. I don't know who was in the union. It is also a list that is very one-sided. We don't know what the university itself has put on the table. And to put into a memo that says, please consider the impacts to the town, which is where we might have a reason to say something, what impacts the town to put into that memo, something that implies we support the union side of this, does concern me. Because I'm not at the table. So I think if that stays in, I'm still not going to be able to sign to vote for the letter. So I think I'm going to move to amend, to remove the sentence that begins these employee initiated proposals have included, and then everything that is numbered one, two, three, four, and five. Is there a second? I would second that, Ryan. Okay. For the discussion. Andy. No. Yes. You know, I, I think I'm exactly where me and the, as I had thought long and hard about the fact that this letter was really troubling to me. And I had thought about whether I would do something I swore I would never do, which is go to charter section 2.1. I'll see and ask for a motion to postpone in order to force time to rewrite the letter. But I think that if we make Mandy's change, that I'll feel comfortable to vote for it and feel like we have done what we wanted, what I was hoping that we would do by taking time to rewrite. I hate this idea of trying to craft letters on the floor of the council. It is a very awkward thing to have to do very time consuming. But this would be the one additional piece that would make it. Urging both parties to get together to recognize the impact. On the people who are affected in the town. And to let us move forward. So I support the motion that Mandy has made. And I, that's why I seconded it. The further comments. Okay. Please put it up on the screen again, search so we can see what we're eliminating. So we are eliminating everything from starting with the second sentence in this last paragraph that includes the numbers. So it begins with the employee dash initiated proposals have included. Number one, two, three, four and five. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. Let me check on that. Is there any other hands up with this? I had to school up. Thank you. Thank you. So I think that this is going to be difficult in that I'm clearly hearing from some members of the council that they feel perfectly comfortable in telling you mass what to do. And some of us don't feel comfortable doing that. I do. I do think that the majority of the council is going to have to deal with that. And I think that there are some issues in the community and in the nation shifts. I admit that taking this whole section out feels difficult. When I was working on an alternate format, in my mind. A resolution. I was looking at, you know, trying to state some of the specific impacts. Like on, you know, the fact that the survival center serving so many more meals, the fact that we have a seasonal homeless shelter that only accompanies, capacity to deal with the fallout of huge job losses at UMass that we simply don't have that. We could give a little bit of our block grant money to some small businesses, very small businesses. We couldn't give in to UMass and so our relationship is very complex. I want to make clear, although press releases don't really manage that much less coverage of town council meetings, but if the council does not vote to take this out and therefore several of us feel like we have to vote against the proposal, we are not voting against workers. We are not voting against saving people's jobs. What we are voting against is telling the university how to go about doing it. I hear a counselor saying the university should open their books so that all the taxpayers can see what it says. That's an opinion that I do not necessarily share and is not what the actual question is before the town council at this time. I just want to be clear that if I vote no, it will be because the section is not taken out and therefore it will look like, oh, Alyssa doesn't care about workers and that is the furthest thing from the truth. It is simply about where the line is as to how we work and I am happy to send a message that makes it so clear how we are very tied together. I think we all agree on that. I think we just differ on the level of detail that we feel comfortable saying is the town council's role versus the average resident's role. Is there further comment? I feel that the important thing is that we all actually share the same sentiment that we want to send a strong message to the university that we are all interconnected and I don't think we want to tell the university how to run their university but we just want to send that signal and if we can remove the details that would get the whole council to unanimously sign the letter, I think that would be a much stronger letter than filling it with details and then not having the whole council supported. Are there further comments? Okay, so the motion is to remove that second sentence in that pair, Pat, you have a hand up. You need to unmute, Pat. You still need to. I've gotten some information from some of the union members and I'm comfortable removing the bullet points. Okay. Any further discussion? All right, then we're going to vote on the motion. The motion is to remove everything from these employee initiated proposals have included one through five. All of that. We're going to start with Anarchy. Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. Thank you. Sam. No. Ryan. Yes. Shane. Yes. Triber's not here. Steinberg. Get done mute, Andy. Yes. Fortes. Yes. Bellmell. Yes. Grower. Yes. DeAngeles. Yes. Humon. Yes. Rhys-Merzy, yes. So it is, I think it's 10 yeses and one no. Is that correct? That's what I have. Are there any other comments, George? I am sorry, Lynn, and I apologize, my colleagues, but this is a letter and it has to say something. I do feel that if you're going to leave, and I think you should leave the sentence that precedes these employees initiated proposals, you need another sentence that says something, which would be something to the fact that we urge the university to take these, you know, suggestions seriously, some kind of statement. Otherwise, it's simply a statement of fact followed by nothing. So it shouldn't be there at all. So what we have now is we understand that the workers on campus have been attempting to collaborate on cost-saving measures to minimize harm to the most vulnerable employees. And that's it. Then the sentence stops and that's the end of the paragraph. I think we need something that says we urge the university and maybe someone can wordsmith that's better than I in real time, but I think you need something there. Otherwise, what's the point of, I mean, we're just telling them something I already know. Matt, do you have your hand up? Is there a suggestion? Matt, you need to unmute. We can't hear you, Pat. You need to unmute. I did not want to speak right now. I'm sorry. I can please go to Alyssa or Mandy Jo. Thank you. Alyssa. Well, you know, we're all having fun trying to do this on the fly. So if we look at the preceding paragraph, which starts in addition to the impact of layoffs mentioned above, which is a little bit strange now that we have less discussion about the actual impacts, but putting that aside for a moment, that paragraph that says in addition to the impacts of layoffs mentioned above has some really important information about disproportionate effects on low income employees and people of color and residential life employees who literally won't have a place to live. I think that one thing we could do is the last sentence of that paragraph. Again, we're doing this on the fly. But the last sentence of that paragraph is already stated elsewhere. It could be replay where it says these layoffs will harm university employees and will harm our community. That's true for every kind of layoff. We could excise that sentence and then just move up. We understand that the workers on campus have been attempting to collaborate to minimize harm to the most vulnerable employees. Then we've already deleted a whole bunch of other stuff. And the final sentences, we are depending on you and urge you to consider the needs of the full Amherst community in this difficult time. I agree, it's a little choppier than we'd like. But we could just move that sentence about cost saving measures to minimize harm up to the previous paragraph that would leave just one sentence dangling by itself there at the end. So the idea is in the paragraph that begins in addition to yes, would eliminate the sentence that said these layoffs will harm university employees and will harm our community. Instead, place move the sentence up from below that says we understand that the workers on campus have been attempting to collaborate on cost saving measures to minimize harm to the most vulnerable employees. Would you go to the next page, please? And then it begins. And then we eliminated the next and it says we are depending on you and urge you to consider the needs of the full Amherst community in this difficult time. Yes. Okay, motion's been made. George, I second that. Yes, George. Any further conversation? All right. Do you repeat that, Lynn? I'm sorry. Would you repeat that change, please? Would you please put it up against surge? So in the sentence in the paragraph that begins in addition to the impact of layoffs mentioned above, everything stays until you get to the very last sentence. We eliminate the last sentence. These layoffs will harm university employees and will harm our community. And and what we do is we move our merge into that paragraph. However, the sentence that says we understand that the workers on campus have been attempting to collaborate on cost saving measures to minimize harm to the most vulnerable employees. And then the last sentences, very last sentences on the next page and is still separate in a separate paragraph. Yes. It's a closing statement. Any further questions? Yeah, Dorothy, what was the rationale of removing that sentence about hurting employees? I totally lost at this point. Was that that's a statement that's made about any layoffs? And so it's not I think it's true, though. I mean, is there going to be anything left? You take off the teeth, the claws. I mean, what is left except a little wagging tail? I'm annoyed. I understand the point behind some of these changes. I really do. But you're going too far. The motion has been made and seconded. Pat, for their come further comment. Yes, I support this change. And I don't think the letter is without teeth. It is without biting, but the teeth, some teeth are still there. I think that so I support the change. Any further comment? Okay. So we're going to move to a vote. And I believe we begin with Ryan. All right, and just clarification, we're voting on the amendment to remove and replace this specific change. Thank you. The vote is yes. Shane. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. Schwartz. Yes. Shalini. Yes. Alyssa. Yes. Pat. Yes. Garcy. Yes. Reese Mirzi. Yes. Anarchy. Yes. I think we finished, right? No, we need Pam. I'm sorry, Pam is what? No, voting. Abstaining. Whatever. Okay, so it is pen in favor, no opposition, one abstention, do not in the room. Okay, I'd like to put the letter back up and I'll see whether I can get all of the changes as they've been made. First sent the first paragraph, the second paragraph, the third and the fourth remain unchanged. The fifth paragraph begins, the impact will be born in communities adjacent to EMS Amherst and elsewhere in the Commonwealth and will depend on the specific details of the reduction in contracting with vendors, etc. Next, this paragraph includes to summarize 100 layoffs at EMS Amherst will likely lead to the overall disemployment of 140 workers in Massachusetts. The next sentence is eliminated. Averting these layoffs would preserve employment at EMS Amherst, etc. That paragraph, that sentence remains. The next paragraph stays except for the last sentences. And that is these layoffs will harm university employees and will harm our community. That sentence is eliminated. And the next sentence is, we understand that workers on campus have been attempting to collaborate on cost-saving measures to minimize harm to the most vulnerable employees. The whole next sentence and all of the numbers under it are eliminated. We go to the last page and that first paragraph is eliminated and it ends with, we are depending on you and urge you to consider the needs of the full Amherst community in these difficult times. Sincerely the Amherst Town Council. Is there any other changes or comments? Yes. Alyssa. Just because we don't have the ability to edit it right on screen and you just did that very beautifully verbally. But as Pat mentioned way back, you know, Siri or whatever had made Michael Ash into Michael Ashland and it's Michael Ash. So just to be clear when you signed that final version and you probably know that personally, but that's a change that we made just a Scrivener's error. Thank you very much. Anything else? We're going to correct the spelling of the Chancellor's name. Thank you. Are there any other comments? Any other statements? I want to be very clear. This is not a statement about whether you support people. It's not a statement about whether you support collective bargaining and bargaining and faith. It's a statement about what you want to say to the university. Okay. We will begin with Kathy Shane. Yes. I'm sorry. We are now voting on the full letter. Okay. And I'm voting and I support the full letter as amended. Steinberg. Yes. Fort. Yes. O'Mellm. Yes. A brewer. Yes. D'Angelo's. Yes. O'Mont. Yes. Griezmer's an abstain. Hanneke. Yes. Brian. Yes. And Pam. Yes. I support sending a letter. Okay. So the vote is 10 for support. Zero against one abstention and two out of the room. The letter will be sent. Okay. With the changes as made. All right. Moving on. Would you please bring Steve and Evan back into the room? Would now be an acceptable time for a five minute recess. It would be. Thank you. We'll take a five minute recess and reconvene at 826. Pat, are you back? Yes. Can you hear us? Thank you. All right, Paul, we're going to go on to the community safety presentation. And I just want to note that in your folder, in addition to Paul's presentation is a memo to you from Patty Angelis that she had shared previously with the town manager and also a memo from the League of Women Voters of Amherst. Okay, Paul, please unmute. And don't worry. Oh, no, this is not the. We're doing the community safety. Yeah. And I'm not sure if you want to show anything at this point, Paul. I don't have a slide deck for this, but why don't you just talk us through your proposal? Yeah, so this is a memo that the town council received Sunday. And so I'm sure many of them have not had a chance to read it. So this is a first one. Make a verbal presentation with the expectation that the council will have more time to discuss it and digest the information over the next course of the next week. The charge I had from the town council was to hold off on filling two police officer positions to so the town could look into alternative forms of delivering those kind of services that have been delivered by police department, but maybe they could be delivered in a different way. And so and again, this comes out of, you know, the tragic death of Mr. Floyd and other things that have been going on in our community in the country. And part of has, as I thought about this is, you know, what everybody we've been talking about is to make sure that racial and social justice values are incorporated into our public safety responses. So what I am proposing is that there would be a committee. You've heard some public comment on this earlier today earlier this evening. And one of the things that we have to do as we go down this road is to fully understand the nature of the problem by collecting data and data can mean all sorts of things. It can mean actual data that's collected by the police department or people or the town, but it's also talking with people doing surveys of people, oversampling people who might have higher level interactions with the police department, doing focus groups. That's all data as well. And so it's taking a relatively straightforward research approach to the challenge that we have in front of us online, computer world, obviously, we would, I'm sorry. So and we also and so to get to that point, I'm going to summarize this up briefly is to create a working group that will be composed of nine members and that plus the police chief who would be a non voting member as or his designee to provide the expertise on how policing works at Amherst and could serve as a resource of primarily people of the BIPOC community and that this group would be the ones who would take on this task and then move it forward into make a recommendation to me because it's my job to report to make a recommendation to you. It's an enormous task, as you heard earlier, and I think that it's a challenge for to get it all completed. But, you know, Dr. Shavas was right and he said when he said that this was trying to be timed to be in time for us to consider it in terms of the next budget and that that's why the timing is tight. And I think the council had that in mind when you set that deadline. So what I'm calling it is the community safety working group and much of this is aligned with what Councillor DeAngelo has had submitted and really appreciate her thoughts on this as well and other councillors and members of the public who I've talked with. So the idea on the community safety working group is to make recommendations on alternative ways of providing public safety services to the community and make recommendations on reforms to the current organizational and oversight structures of the Amherst Police Department. So the nine members that I have outlined is and I want to address who appoints under the town charter. The town manager is the appointing authority and the appointments from the town manager go to the town council for its review and approval or disapproval. So there isn't, you know, this is the way these committees get formed. There would be no fewer than six members who shall represent black, indigenous people of color or other historically marginalized communities of the nine. And then the working group will appoint its own chair and vice chair and lay out its own work plan. We would want people on the committee who would have subject matter expertise, project management skills, human centered design, knowledge, community organizing experience and represent the groups that are most most frequently impacted by police work. So, hello. Yeah, let me put you going in. OK, thank you. So the the deliverables, again, by this group, and I think, you know, Dr. Shavas had suggested creating two groups, which was sort of an intriguing idea to me. It's something that we I'd like to discuss with you because it is an enormous amount of work and maybe having two, as my initial thought on it was to have one group who would get his work done by January 31st. And then since that group was already ramped up and knowledgeable about how we do things in Amherst and the whole area, then they would then pivot and go to the next area. I think his idea of saying two different groups acting parallel has some merit. So we should think about that as well. So then the question became, how do you appoint these people to this committee? And it's, you know, we have a normal process for most of our normal committees. And it goes through. We have the residence advisory committee that advises if there's a vanquishing on a committee, the staff person and the chair of the committee sit in on the interviews. And then we pretty much always reach consensus on who would be the best fit for the committee. This is different. And I'm proposing a different model for reviewing this because, again, the power structure, this is looking at this is a committee that's going to look at power structures and having the town manager be the appointed authority, which we can't get around. Made me think that there should be sort of an intervening group that's a little bit more robust than our normal interview process. And so to that end, I'm suggesting that we appoint a interview team that's bigger than normal. This would include a member from the residence advisory committee. I'm thinking he should Dennis for that. And she's agreeable to that. The chair of the Human Rights Commission, Matthew Charity, another member of the Human Rights Commission and the ABC House resident director Sid Ferrara, a BIPOC public safety employee of the town or UMass, who doesn't need to be an Amherst resident. There's several people who would fit that bill. A Amherst resident chosen by the racial equity task force, an Amherst resident chosen by the Defund 413 group, and an Amherst resident BIPOC consultant who has worked previously providing anti-racism training to town or school employees. So this would be the people who would meet with the applicants and then say, and there'd be consensus. You typically these working consensus format and say here are the people we think should serve on this committee. Timelines are very short. We'd have to assemble this pretty quickly. My goal would be to have the actual appointments to you. By October 19th, it would be a very high priority. It would have to get through TSO as well. So I think we would line it up to meet those deadlines. Again, we would be really racing to hit the January 31st deadline. But I think there's a fair amount of work on some of these aspects already completed. We would put the resources that the town has at the disposal of this committee. We do have a budget, the $80,000 that could support some of the work. It won't be as this group to hit the January 31 will be very specific, but the work that this group or another group will be doing will continue and has to do a lot of community organizing, connecting, building trust, building relationships. That's a whole different effort that's gonna have to take place with people who know how to do that kind of work. So in a nutshell, that's what the proposal is. Staffs of committee and I struggled with how to form the committee given the constraints of the charter. And this is the format that we've come up with. So I'm here for questions and suggestions, things like that. First of all, thank you, Paul. I do wanna make sure people understand that we're not voting on this tonight. And in fact, it will be on our agenda next week. And so it's really an opportunity to give Paul feedback and make additional comments. And I mentioned that particularly for the public as well, because several of the public comments noted that it did not get into the folder until this morning. And we recognize that. I know it's something that Paul has been working a lot on but this is just the first discussion, okay? Mandy Jo. Yes, thank you. We've heard a lot of concern about the ex officio member you proposed to be on the committee which is the chief of police. I will admit when I first read the makeup of the committee it made a lot of sense to me to put the chief on a committee that's looking at policies of the police. That's the second half of the committees as proposed. And also at which calls the police should not handle. But I, after hearing comments from the public I have to express some concern with that. And so I'd like you to explore some other ways to potentially receive the feedback from the chief that does not involve the chief potentially sitting on the committee itself and in the meetings of the committee. Thank you. Kathy. You know, Paul, when I read this as we just got it today but I thought you did a very nice job in terms of thinking of the interview process on broadening it. So one of the things I was thinking about as staff involvement as this gets underway when we've talked about the CAHOOTS programs and other programs that's drawn public health or mental health, could we commit to at least some of the time of our public health or our health director sitting there to hear thoughts. And we've had questions. We don't have social workers on staff. We don't have community mental health workers on staff but be thinking in terms of a service NAD or the training program out of Holyoke that does mental health and things of mental health. You know, so that the committee itself doesn't have to do all the research but there's some people that are tapping into those networks. So I don't know exactly what I'm thinking. So I'm not wanting to put them as another member of the committee itself but be on tap for the committee to bring them in to say, here are some ideas. What do you think? How could it work in our area to bounce ideas off? So that was one of my thoughts that we've got in our region, some fantastic people to tap into. And you know, Sid Ferrer and some of the people you've named will know some of those that same group. So just think in terms of an apparatus that won't have everyone else having to go and interview Cahoots individually. Yeah. I'm gonna add to the list Paul before I go on and including the senior center director who is also now working with a homeless side of our work as well. And just to add to that is, you know our finance tractors already been working into how these other agencies, these fund Cahoots and the Albuquerque program thing. So we've got multiple, this is a pretty important project, yes. Listen. Thank you, trying not to repeat. To be fair, we did get it. The town council got it at 10, 13 PM last night which is way better than getting it at 4 PM on Monday afternoon. So thank you, thank you, thank you for getting it to us. I'm sorry for the public that they couldn't see it but as we said, this is our first discussion. I also wanna make sure it's clear that Lynn mentioned we will not be voting on this tonight. I would argue that we're not voting on this ever. This is not something we're voting on. This is the town manager is being a very partner like a town manager in showing us what the charge looks like rather than having us yell at him later. He's working with us now so that we can figure out if we agree with this. I appreciate what Mandy Joe said about the police chief because I too was thinking, well, by making him being a non-voting member that means he has to show up. Like he always has to be there, right? As opposed to be called in when he's needed but hearing the public sentiment and if it's, and you know, as we think about this over the course of the next week I also support the idea of maybe it makes more sense that it's just understood that he will frequently be called upon perhaps more frequently than the senior services director or finance director, but that he will be called upon rather than being on the committee itself. One of the things I wanted to thank Paul for doing is to look at how we're doing the interviews because that is certainly something that, for example, Northampton always gets brought up that they struggled with a good deal and that we talk about on all kinds of levels both for town council appointments and town manager appointments and his idea of expanding what's his usual process for doing that to really reflect how very unique this body will be. I think it was really important and in a conversation he and I had, I encouraged him to name names like as one of the other counselors mentioned, you know, here's a person who knows people and that's exactly what we wanted to see, I think, associated with the interviewing. And so I think that's really important. I think there are questions that we may wanna talk about as a town council that aren't addressed in this memo associated with Pat's memo along the lines of who does outreach to encourage people to apply. So the town manager decides who the interview team is can the rather than the interview team being the passive receptacle, which is what it is now. The interview team is always a passive receptacle at this time. Are we asking them as Pat has to do some actual outreach to encourage people to apply and what other things can the CPOs do et cetera again to spread the word far and wide about how to apply for this particular body. And then the other thing I just wanted to mention associated with the type of body that this is and I appreciate the town manager making it clear in both the memo and in his verbal presentation that this is the way the charter works the town manager makes appointments. There has been certainly concern raised in the community that it could be done a different way. I have said, as some of you will recall, I have said from the beginning of this conversation low these many months ago that I wanted it to be looked at as to whether or not it would make more sense for this body to be a body that worked just with the town manager therefore would not be subject to open meeting law or ethics constraints because they would not be a multiple member body and the ethics thing would be is less of an issue here but open meeting law is a huge issue both in terms of 48 hours notice and being nimble and it's also a huge issue associated with public interaction and being able to see what this committee is accomplishing in terms of the types of work that they're being expected to do I think one of the things that came up in public comment that maybe people aren't as clear on and maybe Paul can clarify for us tonight but the way I understood the memo was that in no way shape or form is he expecting that by next summer we will have in place some sort of ongoing community resident and I really liked the name the lead gave it and now it's jumping out of my head advisory group that won't be ready yet but they will have made great progress in terms of identifying how it will work and it for example may or may not there may be other groups as this unfolds that can work very informally to advise the town manager but in this particular section at this particular moment I am leaning toward the idea of it being an official town committee with the understanding that that committee itself may recommend you know what I think it would make a lot of sense if the town manager actually met with this subgroup of people that are not on a committee and could have informal conversations in ways that he's been doing over the last several months and that will delegate some work off to that working group that really informal working group that's not subject to open meeting law but again to be clear on the example that was given earlier it is perfectly fine to have a committee that advises the town manager on something the town manager does it is not fine to have a committee that advises something like the town council that doesn't that isn't subject to open meeting law so we could do it that way but at this time I'm not convinced that this type of work that's being done right now that's proposed to be done over the next two months two six month periods is the kind of work that should be done in private and I'm sorry that other people are feeling differently about that because they're feeling the most directly impacted but I'm trying to understand why that would be better and I'm not seeing how it would be better because I'm seeing this as something that actually would be visible to the public to show what is happening with how this is being developed through January and then through the next six month period. Shalini? Yes I just wanna say I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into preparing this report and I appreciate the composition of the initial like how do we form the committee and so I feel like just having someone from the racial equity task force having the D-FUN413 group be partners in this initiative is I think a really good idea and I was wondering if the other stakeholders that are gonna be impacted by the work that we're doing here related to public safety like for example landlords or businesses or and I'm just putting it out there if you want to consider someone who brings in that perspective or should they be invited to represent that stakeholder group? So that's one question and that I'd like the council to discuss and Paul to consider and the other thing about the police I think even though it seems counter to what we're doing here and I hear what residents are saying about their concerns I still feel that it's really important in the spirit of creating an inclusive community and working collaboratively we include the people who we're talking about especially if you want to buy in I think it really goes counter to the idea that we want to create the safe collaborative community and we create these come up with work we're doing that's affecting the police but not including them in that conversation and not having the experience and an opportunity for them to be a resource and also to be part of that dialogue so with respect to the fear that has been shared by so many people that if there's police representation in a committee like this people would not feel safe to speak up I think how I'm seeing this is that the committee would have is the committee members when they go out and speak to different communities the police doesn't have to be part of that conversation so the police will be there within the main committee which will include certain people who are comfortable and confident in speaking and leading those conversations and those people are gonna go out and speak to the Latino families or to immigrants or people of color and indigenous families so the police doesn't have to be involved over there and we will make sure and I'm hoping that the committee will make sure that that happens in a safe way but I think it's really important and having done a lot of organizational work and culture change that when you want something to be successful and you have to have the buy-in of the stakeholders who are gonna be impacted otherwise it's coming in and saying you should do that rather than having those people be part of that conversation that's all for now Okay, Darcy. You're muted Darcy. Darcy, you're muted. Okay, sorry. I wanna thank both the town manager and Pat for coming up with memos on community safety and I have a few questions for the town manager and I'm hoping that there's going to be space for him to reply to all of our comments and questions after we've made them. Either tonight or in a revised proposal next week. Oh, okay. I wanna think about them and get some additional answers. Okay, well to the extent that he can answer them tonight that would be great but anyway, I see that you consulted with a lot of people before coming up with this proposal meaning the town manager's proposal which is great. Did and I'm wondering if BIPOC residents participated in finalizing the proposal, the final draft before you submitted it to us. So that's one question. I'm wondering if we can get the words racial equity into the name of the committee. And I'm thinking of the name the acronym REPS, R-E-P-S, Racial Equity and Public Safety. Because this is why we're doing it in the first place and why we wanna ensure that a majority of the people on the committee are BIPOC. So I guess I just feel like why aren't we including those words? Also along those lines, I looked to see if in the charge there was there was sort of a mission in the purpose and it seemed like what needs to be added is that it needs to state something like the purpose of the committee is to further racial equity in public safety in the town of Amherst by and then A, making recommendations and so on and B, making recommendations on reforms to the current organizational and oversight structures. So we need to include that purpose of furthering racial equity. And as always, I would like to see a more open process of choosing the members, which is not a requirement in the charter. This is just something that the town manager could include. This current CAF process isn't transparent in that it doesn't allow the release of names of those who've applied or how many people have applied. So how will residents, how will the BIPOC residents? No, how to judge the choices made by the town manager if they cannot see who applied or how many people applied. So that's a very big question. And I saw that that was covered in Pat's memo that she was calling for that. I do see a reason for trying to create some kind of structure that would avoid the onerous requirements of open meeting law. I do see that this would be, the residents that are participating are going to be passionate about their mission and they're going to not want to just come to a meeting every two weeks for two hours and sit there and not be able to talk or do anything in between. They're gonna wanna be involved. So to the extent that we can structure it so that they can have full involvement, that would be good. And finally, I agree with Mandy Jo that I'd like you to explore ways that the police chief could receive input from this committee without being an official member and being there every time the committee meets so that there could be a freer flow of suggestions about how things should change without worrying about, you know, offending anyone. So anyway, those are my comments. Sarah? So I just wanna thank Paul for this tremendous amount of work because I think just even thinking about how we're gonna tackle this just starts to make the brain start to freak out since it's a lot of work. One thing I wanna address though is open meeting law because I understand that even as town counselors when we were first elected, a lot of people or a lot of counselors thought, you know, there's no way I can get good input or there's no way that I can, you know, really work with someone if, you know, I have to only talk to them during meetings. It's gonna slow everything down. But I think that we have to remember that open meeting law is something that, as Alyssa said, it shows how a committee got to a certain decision. And it may slow things down some, but a committee doing such important work as this committee will, I think it's really important to show step by step how they decided to do each thing. Because I think as counselors, we know that when the public cannot see how we got to a decision, they're really confused by it. And it raises so many questions for the public about, you know, why this or why that. And if you cannot show them in real time what you're doing, then I think it makes people feel more lost. They don't have minutes to show them how something was reached. And I don't think it engenders a lot of trust from the public. So even though it would maybe make it the work of the committee slower, I think it would be more genuine to the public. Evan? Yeah, I'll try to be quick. So first of all, second to everything that Sarah just said, I think it's interesting to hear an argument to make the appointments process more transparent, but then the deliberations of the committee less transparent. So I think that we, if we're going for transparency, we can't pick and choose where we want transparency. And I think that this is so important an issue to the community that these deliberations need to happen in public. They need to have public comment because there will be nine people on the committee as proposed, but there are, as we know on this council, there are far more who are interested. And so we need to make sure that this happens in public and that there's public space for it. I am speaking from my experience on ECAC, which was a baby committee that got started that it takes time. Once a committee is even as enthusiastic as people are, it takes time to get their footing, to figure out how you work together. If you all remember, we initially charged ECAC with submitting climate action goals within 90 days. ECAC quickly learned that that was an unreasonable timeline because they were starting from never having been a committee. And I have some concerns about the timeline for this committee, whether we are setting them up for failure to ask such a large task over such a short time for a group of people who have never worked together in a committee that's never existed. What that might mean for this committee is very frequent meetings. And if we're trying to include marginalized groups, we might want to be careful about what the time commitment we're asking of people is. I'm very, ECAC chose to meet twice a month. Other committees in town, such as the Affordable Housing Trust, meet once a month for a committee to take on this task. I worry about how often it will have to meet and whether that burden, that time commitment may dissuade some people from signing up who would otherwise be good because they already have children or work jobs. And so if we're really trying to recruit people who don't often get involved in town government, I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that they might not be able to meet every other week and think about that. And I don't know where you go with this, but I think it's something that we have to recognize when we're trying to do this, that we're not looking at, no offense to my colleagues, a bunch of retired folks who were hoping will do this. We're looking at people who are part of these communities who are the people who are coming to speak at our council meetings who have already told us about the time commitment involved in coming to speak at these council meetings. And so I'm thinking about that. And I think that's another reason why I think that I was intrigued by the idea of two committees, but I also worry a little bit about the capacity of staff to have to manage two additional committees. We have a lot of committees in this town, as we all know. And then the last thing I wanna say quickly is just echoing what Shalindy said about involving the police chief. One of the things I know from my experience on ECAC was Darcy and I were often invaluable to that committee and I'm sure Sarah is now because we knew how the town council worked and we could give them information about what it's like to work through the process. And I think that it's really important to have stakeholders at the table who understand that. I hear Mandy's concern and the concerns of the community and I think this is a really tricky one, but I don't think we can not have someone from the police in the room because we do need someone. In the conversations I've had with the police chief, I've learned new information and I've found out things that I hadn't thought of before that were really important to me developing my opinions. And so finding that balance is gonna be tricky, but I do think that there needs to be some law enforcement representation, even if it's definitely not as a voting member, but I do think that they need to be part of the conversation and need to be in the room when some of these conversations are happening. I agree that there needs to be some representation in a non-voting way of the police department, but I'm thinking about someone who has policing experience but is either retired or no longer is not directly involved with the Amherst police department so that because I think that we can go to or the committee can go to the chief and ask questions about certain policies and procedures, but if we have someone with some kind of policing experience that will foster work on the committee. And I think that person, I know several people in Amherst who are BIPOC community members who are also retired police officers. So that it's something to think about. The other thing that hasn't been brought up and I did bring up in my memo is if you were gonna be recruiting and we wanna reach out to the community, we need to offer stipends for family care and transportation where it is needed because there are, I can think of four or five incredibly intelligent women who have been part of creating the Amherst mobile market. Many of them would need a translator and but they also need transportation because they live on East Hadley Road or other places where transportation is very poor or it takes hours. They would also need family care. Another, so we have to be careful that we're not bypassing incredible people in the community because we're not offering support that enables them to come. That's all, right now. Dorothy? I understand Pat's point about support but this committee is gonna get started very soon. I think the support that some of the people who might be on this committee need is technical support because the meetings are gonna be held by Zoom, I assume. And so that I think, so that we could just say support and then give the appropriate support depending upon the meeting type because today I went to the first meeting of the Amherst Women's Club since the shutdown. It was very small. An awful lot of women who are members do not know how, do not have the equipment, cannot join a Zoom meeting. So this is a challenge that we have to deal with. So I would say choose the people according to their ability to contribute to the committee and then it would be up to the town to provide the support needed technologically. I'd like to wrap up comments, Alyssa. Thank you, just following up on that. Yes, normally I was going to say, we're gonna consider stipends for the first time, we're gonna look at family care. Thank you for saying that instead of childcare and elder care and also transportation except like Dorothy just said, we don't need any of that. This committee is going to be functioning in a Zoom world. That's the reality. We're not going to suddenly start having in-person meetings. We're not gonna suddenly start having small group gatherings where we do the really useful stuff we normally do, which is feed people. Everyone loves to come to meetings where you feed people. That's not gonna happen. This is in too short of a timeframe for these actions. I totally agree that one of the things that's gonna come out of this committee is they're going to recommend that any ongoing work whether it's some sort of oversight, questionable word associated with this or other committees that might exist after this time limit committee is done that part of those recommendations would absolutely be to provide transportation, to provide translation, to provide things even more regularly than we do now which tend to be confined to like annual or semi-annual forums. But looking at the reality we're in right now, people need to be able to function on Zoom. If they can't function on Zoom, then they can't be part of this committee. And it's just really that simple. That doesn't mean they're not gonna be talked to. That doesn't mean they're not important. It means that to serve on this committee under the current conditions, they need to be able to work on Zoom. And then that committee that's doing that needs to figure out who else they need to talk to, how else they can reach them in a pandemic world where they can't go and just sit on somebody's stoop and talk to them the way you might normally. And then also how that affects the coming committees that are going to grow out of this. And I just wanna make also clear to the public that that part where the town manager talked specifically about who would be on the interview committee, again, that's an expanded interview committee. That's not talking in detail about who's going to be on this committee itself. And I think one of the things counselors should be thinking about is that it may turn out that some of the people on the interview committee are people that various segments of the community would like to see serve on this committee as well. So that might be a little bit tricksy. And so just to have that conversation because that's not normally an issue, right? When it's just RAC and a department head and a chair. But when it's this larger of an interview committee, I don't think there should be a way that we say, oh, but if you serve on the interview committee, there's no way you can get appointed to the committee but they'll have to sort that out. Melanie. I think one of the things we could support the committee members is to offer them coupons from our local restaurants. So the people who need additional support and that would also support the local businesses, not everyone, but at least people who do need that additional support could be offered those coupons. And I also wanted to just bring up the idea, I know this is, it's not part of this committee's charge, but I do want to just remind us that we want to, at some point, look at systemic racism. I know this committee is focusing on just the public safety aspect of it. My hope is that maybe it's the same committee or it's the same thing, goals to continue to work. It should be the same in terms of doing business, youth, environment, and so forth. So Paul, we've thrown a lot at you. My two comments are basically find the balance between open meeting and making sure that people can still feel comfortable. And the other one is find the balance between having resource people, like the police chief there, but not in a way that they inhibit the conversation. Are there comments you would like to make now or just think about this and come back next week? I think you hit on a lot of them. I think the, I do look at the ECAC and their outreach efforts through the contract we had with the consultant to the town, which was very successful, I think, but it did not compromise, it created trusted environment through this contracted work. But ECAC maintained its public open meeting law ability to do that. So I think there's ways to do, create a trusted area for people to be in that that's called community organizing, I think. And we need to get that type of thing in there. It is a big task. I think we will look at this very specifically for the first to get to January for the budget. Is like, what about non-police services can we do? Can we get something in place? Because there's a certain amount of urgency for this too. And I think we want to have something in the budget, maybe even in this fiscal year, who knows, but something happening now so that we can get something going with the bigger picture. We can't let, you know, I think someone said that, you know, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I also do want to just say, you know, having Pat's email or her memo to sort of generate the thought on this was really helpful. And so thank you, Pat, for that. Because just structuring it the way it was, I thought it was very helpful. So, you know, and I've talked to a lot of other people and so lots of people contribute to this. I think now that we have this out, we'll send it out to get a lot other people to look at it, contribute to it, make comments on it. So I think that would be a welcome feedback on that. Get you something revised, you know, at the end of this week. So you have more time to comment on it next week. Thank you. Let's move on then to the next item, which is the COVID-19 update. And I understand that Jen Brown will be joining you as part of this. Yes. And we have a slide presentation for this. Yes. So, first of all, are you here, Jen? Mm-hmm. Okay, so Jen Brown, many of you haven't met her, but she's been with the town for a number of years. So we'll introduce her as our acting health director. You want to introduce yourself, Jen? Yeah, so hi, everybody. It's good to see you. I've been overlapping with many of you. I think really maybe the first time was with Julie. She gave the PowerPoint presentation the health department back in 2019. But you know, I do want to just take this time and say I really am, you know, I'm honored to be here and to be serving in this role as acting manager and you know, the bridge from Julie to the next appointed director. But you know, I hope that also I can bring some of my expertise and my experience to the table, you know, during this really hard time. So just quickly, I've been a nurse for 36 years. I've worked in emergency rooms and cardiac cath labs. And 10 years ago, I started thinking about how I could look at patients before they got sick. So I really wanted to get into preventative health. And I went back to school, I got my master's and then some additional coursework from the School of Public Health and the College of Nursing here at UMass. So I've been working in the health department for eight years and here I am. Thanks, Jen. Yeah, so we're really fortunate to have Jen and they have such a strong team available to step right in. And you know, you may not have seen her, but she's been working relentlessly with Julie, doing all the contact tracing, organizing all that kind of legwork for the town as well. So she's very intimate with the entire COVID-19 response. And she's attending all of our core team meetings and department head meetings at this point in time too. So we'll go to the next slide. So this will be looking very similar. We'll race through some of these slides because there won't be new information. Next slide. Again, the only thing that we usually focus on on this one is the second bullet point nine current cases in Amherst. And that was as of last Friday and Jen, do you have an update on that? It's eight today and the 144 holes. So, you know, sometimes that current case there'll be three up, two down, but it's really, it's been coming down and steady since last Wednesday. Next slide. Again, this is sort of the information that's available on the state's website. You can see where we are. We are still green. We had feared that we'd be starting to change with all the testing that was going on in town, but that has not been the case. Next slide. Similar information, they have it as a map feature. There are more communities who are turning red, but we have not been one of them. Next slide. So again, the three websites, where it is happening at the three institutions. UMass is now at 14 positives. So that's different than ours. It means, you know, some of this positive cases that UMass may be town residents, some of them may not. So they may have other people there that they're tracking. Amherst remains at three and they're still not at Hampshire College. And so one of the things that we did since the last meeting was the community forum where over 200 people were participating either on Zoom or live stream with the university. We're hoping to schedule a second forum in October. We'll talk more about that later this week with the university. They have a very robust testing program, really impressive setup over there. They're doing the fourth largest number of tests in the state. Only Boston Worcester and Cambridge are doing more. So, and that's a real credit to the university for the way they set up their testing and how they've engaged their community to come and be tested. They've tested over 10,000 unique individuals and a very low positivity rate. I think, you know, on that sheet, you can see the cumulative positivity rate of 0.04%. And it's only one case this week, whatever this was done, September 12th at 0.02% weekly positivity. And then the big news for us has been that they, while they welcomed all matriculated students to be tested when they returned to the area, they're now opening up their testing facility to anybody who's a matriculated student at any time to come in and be tested. They're not requiring it, we'd like them to require it, but they're opening up. And I think the students have been very willing and they are eager to be tested. It's not a big deal to them, it's become kind of normalized for a lot of the students. So that's a huge plus for the town in terms of managing and watching what's going on. Anything on testing, Jen, that you want to add? I don't think I have, I don't think I have. Okay, next slide. So we want to give you a quick update. The big thing here, everything is going normal. A big thing here is that our temporary health director, Jen, who's stepped in. Next slide. Our outreach continued to reach out to people in different ways, trying to think of new ways to connect with folks in a very relaxed atmosphere. We have not restarted the live call-in events, but we will do a virtual community forum, hopefully with UMass again. And the Cup of Joe is on Friday, September 25th, and we're hoping to have our Bill Laramie and Kat Nguyen from our ambassador program to talk a little bit about what's going on, let people call in and talk to them about the work that they're doing. And yes, next. So we have this call-in number, which has been very popular. We have the next slide. So we started August 30th. When I put this together, we had 95 calls, that does not include this weekend. All calls will get a call unless someone is anonymous. And we probably get about, probably about under 10 of those calls have been anonymous. People don't leave a number, aren't looking for a callback. They just want to tell us something. If the CPOs can't call them, and we have CPOs in here every Saturday and Sunday, making returning calls to people, and they'll get shifted to the inspection services or the health department or the police and the ambassadors, it depends what it is. If it's a nuisance house thing, that doesn't rise to the level of a noise complaint, it still goes to the police department and they put it on their list and they talk about who can go visit. We'd like the ambassadors to be the ones that were not quite there yet, but most of the ambassadors are students, not all, to go visit student houses to sort of help educate them if it's a smaller, not a noise complaint issue. Most of the complaints that we get are about noise. It's about gatherings. Too many people gathered together about people not wearing masks. And then a lot of just sort of information questions about how do I get tested? Where do I go to get a test? Things like that. People are using it for that function as well. The gatherings, one thing that's been interesting, I'll come right back to that, is that we have not seen very large gatherings. Most of the gatherings have been under 20. They're still loud, it seems, but we have not seen the very large gatherings that we've seen in the past. I think the message has gotten out to students. There are fewer students in town to begin with, significantly fewer. But those big large gatherings that we used to see every fall just aren't happening this year, which is really good news. Those were our worries for the recipe for spreading the virus next time. So I want to talk a little bit about the Amherst COVID ambassadors. So they work in teams. Just before the meeting started, there were two walking down the street. They have little bags of masks, and they have UMass masks. If you're a UMass student, they'll give you a cloth mask. They have Amherst masks. If you're not, they'll give you an Amherst mask. You know, working very closely with the UMass Office of Off-Campus students. We provide support through our town staff. There is a lead ambassador who also works for the university. And so that really cements the conversation that's going back and forth. Next slide. So far we've hired six. I think we've actually had more than that as of today. This is through last weekend. Yeah. So they were at the farmer's market on Saturday. And that's pretty much, they're out there walking around engaging with people. If people are confrontational, they're told to walk away. And there's really like one out of 10 might be sort of a negative reaction. But they're documenting everything. So there's a Google spreadsheet that they document all interactions. Next slide. So some of the things, you know, Jen works very closely with the university. She's been very successful at working with our school nurses earlier in the year to serve as contact tracers. We're working to secure additional contact tracers just to have people online ready to go if we need that. The events that we're starting to talk about are Mary Maple, Winterfest, Halloween. We're moving forward with a tree sale at Kendrick Park where using the farmer's market as a successful model that anybody who wants to use a facility would have to follow. They'd have to have a game plan like the farmer's market did. We want to have that documented and signed off on. And so we want to keep some of these things going if we can. The things that we're really focused on now is day space for those who don't have a home right now. And we're looking at different options for that and overnight accommodations. And there's some really good work being done by create stores on that front as well. So we're sort of excited about some of the work that's being done there. Jen, you might want to talk about what you're doing for the outreaching to vulnerable populations. And when I talk about the preparing for the vaccine distribution, at some point there will be a vaccine for COVID-19. And Jen is starting to think about, well, when that happens, how do we start to work on that? Yeah, so just talking about flu shots and the outreach to the vulnerable populations. For eight years, Julie really trained me, this was her vision when I came in, that my job would be to reach people that would normally have this access. So where would these spots be that we could just help people get the vaccine if they wanted the flu vaccine? So I have been going to restaurants. I go door to door and I'll vaccinate people in the restaurants. They go to the community, the Unitarian Church, at the community meal. I've gone to Amherst Survival Center. Other partners I join with, Center for New Americans. And the vaccine that I give is for uninsured or underinsured adults only. And typically it's about 100 vaccines per year. So that's the flu. And then preparing for COVID vaccine. It's something that, if you tell public health nurse, can you get a vaccine distributed? Typically the answer is yes, but this is obviously a very different circumstance. Really watching news, what's going on for a safe and effective vaccine. And I think we just have to be smart and really keep on top of this and be humble and really try to understand what's going on. My understanding now is that the vaccines that are in that third phase, the big phase, most of them are gonna be two doses. They're gonna be going probably to the people who are at highest risk of being infected like the frontline workers and highest risk of getting sick. So it's not gonna be just to everybody in the first rollout but I think we'll have to be really thoughtful about how we communicate this vaccine to people and get it right the first time. So that's what I'm thinking about. The last slide is just the, that's not the last slide, second last slide. Where again, the schools are preparing to reopen. They have a pretty, they've worked very hard with their collective bargaining units and with parents and guardians and so they've done a really good job on that. The big challenge coming up is going to be our local businesses, especially the restaurants. We've been very successful at expanding the footprint from many of the restaurants downtown by expanding their outdoor seating. But as the weather starts to turn, it becomes more and more challenging for the restaurants. And so two things that we're doing along those fronts. One is, are we able to have heaters that are commercial rated heaters and they're incredible demand right now. The town has funds to purchase these for our restaurants and so we're actively looking at that. And the other thing is a campaign that the bid came up with to sort of advertise the sitting inside that it's safe and healthy, that the restaurants will certify to the public and they'll put a sign in their window saying, yes, we've got the right circulation, we've got the proper distance seating, all those types of things, to try and create more of a culture of people willing to go inside because as long as it's done safely and healthy. And in terms of our town government, we may talk a little bit later about elections and a big issue on that where we know that weather's gonna be turning and we need to get people inside the town all so they can conduct their business inside, we're looking at an option for that. And then the special zoning that the town council approved that went to 180 days will be up for review for you in the fall to decide if you want to continue that or not. So the last slide is, so these are all the things that we talked about last week. So just making, keeping track of it. And so I guess we'll just open up a few questions for us. Looking for questions. Yes, Alyssa. Thank you. I have two. One is I believe that the other big takeaway from the, shall we say, how we scripted community forum that UMass presented was that as we had requested repeatedly, I believe I heard our partner Ann Becker say that in comparison to what was true until then that UMass will indeed provide quarantine and isolation space for off-campus students if they need it. Because as was pointed out, some students want to go home, their parents want them to go home, even though that takes their case somewhere else. But I believe she indicated that. So I just wanted to be clear on that because that was something we asked for repeatedly and they didn't send like a giant press release about that, like they did about the testing and the testing as you say is huge offering that. But it also is important because we know that students live with people from all different states and then they go home and live in their apartment and it's like, how do you quarantine and isolate when you're a student living in an apartment like that? And so knowing that that is available to students is really huge. So I would appreciate just having that confirmed. And the other item is more associated with our enforcement around the mask provisions or shall we say lack thereof because we are taking this educational approach, right? Just like UMass is taking an educational approach. And so I guess it ends up being more of a comment, although the question that is associated with that is historically when we find people for noise violations and we do the $300 per person thing, historically anecdotally many times we've been told that judges throw that out, that they don't actually make the kids pay the fines. So there was a big article in the paper about how all these have out, even though they were not particularly huge parties, that there were parties where people were fined given that the courts have been closed because of the pandemic, given the historic reputation of the courts not actually enforcing these fines. I think it would be helpful for the town council to hear at some point in the future how that's being looked at right now because there's all this discussion about enforcement of masking. But along those lines, we have the enforcement associated with noise violations because there's the only enforcement we're doing. And if that doesn't turn out to be effective, then I wanna be able to say, well, we're not doing that. So I don't know how you expect we'll be able to do the other with the other caveat to that being, one of the things that looking at the broader picture, municipalities always complain rightfully so that we don't get enough back of the state's money. And so when the state does offer us the ability to tax ourselves, say for example, the small percentage that we're allowed to offer associated with restaurant meals tax that will then belongs to us, some communities don't take advantage of it, but they still complain and say, the state's not sending back enough money, but they don't actually aren't willing to tax themselves to do that. So when we say we're not willing to enforce the mask requirements because we think education is a better way to do it. And I have many positive thoughts about that. But again, the state can say, hey, we gave you the option of being able to enforce this and you're choosing not to do it. So I would just like us to get updated on just how that approach evolves over time. And partly that's gonna be a fall winter thing, right? But also because of the court's involvement there, we can have education, we can have police, but if nobody follows through in the court system, then really what was the point of everybody going to all that work? So thank you. Since I'd like you, I've also visited the UMass Center and where they're doing all the testing and been in the meetings. They are offering off-campus students quarantine on campus. What happens when a student is identified, they spend a lot of time on the phone with them, talking about what the diagnosis, what kind of support they need, whether they need food, whether they have roommates, et cetera, et cetera. And so that whole big room that overlooks the Mullins Center area is where they're doing all these phone calls from. And so they have a whole protocol set up and they've been using public health students and also nursing students as part of the whole team. And so it's become an educational process as well. So I think that UMass Amherst is really, really stepped up on both testing and on handling off-campus students and on taking care of people as they've been diagnosed. I wanna sing their praises for what they've done. Paul? Anything else to add on that? Do you wanna talk about the enforcement issue? Yeah, I mean, the court's issue is always a challenge, especially at this time. So we tend not to talk about that, but we will see how the courts are gonna process all the fines that we're issuing at this point in time. I think, yes, last weekend, there were 22 noise complaints and 18 tickets issued. And so I think we take issuing tickets pretty seriously. The police officers have to document why they're issuing a ticket and it has to be grounded in reality. And so there's a lot of work for them. When they do issue a ticket, they have to do it willy-nilly. So we take it seriously and we hope the courts do as well. Let me also mention that these tickets are not only going to students. We have a problem with our other residents as well. And so again, we may be at college town, but our students are not the only people violating. They're acting quite responsibly for the most part. Kathy? Yeah, I just, this has occurred in my family where people were going to be either traveling out of state to a state that was a higher risk state or traveling in from a self quarantine. So I thought, I was checking out where you can get tested. And I thought we might, if we haven't already Paul, so maybe we have put where people can get tested. So there are a couple of places in Holyoke that will do free tests. And it's very quick turnaround time too. So if you're supposed to come in, if you're coming in from a California and you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days, you could get a test and get the test results back in two days. So we might want to just do that as we hit when I'm thinking we're going into Thanksgiving holiday season where people might have family members traveling in and out unless we miraculously are distributing a COVID vaccine and we're all safe and comfy on telling people how to do that. Cause some of the local places like Express Strip, the one on route nine, to the extent they had anything that could test, they were telling you 14 days to get the test result back, which doesn't do you any good if you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days for a traveler. So just this traveling in and out, again, it's your point, Lynn, it's not just students that are traveling in and out. And so it may be for holiday seasons or for long weekends that people are finally trying to see family people that they haven't seen for months. So, and they're not just coming from that nice set of states which you are, and it's a pretty heavy fine if you don't quarantine, although I'm not sure how the state will know that you entered the state and you did or didn't quarantine, but I'm just thinking make it easy to find. It is on our website, but it's not easy that it's not readily apparent. And it's on the COVID website. Yeah. Dorothy? I was talking about vaccination with someone who'd done some research. And he brought up a lot of issues that we should be very concerned about, which is that just as like the beginning, we're gonna, since there's no national coordination, we're gonna run out of the needles, syringes, the chemicals, and then the two shot, I hear that one of the vaccines being considered has to be stored at 20 degrees below zero and another one at 40 degrees below zero. It's 80 below Celsius. 80, oh, okay. So it's really, really difficult and complicated. And I was very excited when UMass made their own company for testing. I'm wondering what can be done in terms of that by this UMass corporation in terms of the vaccine because if we're a little town, we're not really very important as far as this world is concerned or as least as in the US. And if we don't have a plan, we're not gonna have that vaccine for very many people and we'll just be sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting forever. So I'm just wondering if there's any talk or plans about how we can get set for this with the equipment or even the storage facilities. I mean, what kind of thoughts have you had on that? Well, I can tell you that I share your concern too because that's the one drug, the vaccine by Pfizer. It's the minus 80 Celsius and most freezers are minus 20. So I don't know where these freezers are gonna be. Are they gonna ship it to us on dry ice? That's gonna be problematic. So one thing that I have been working with is our partners, the Hampshire Preparedness Health, oh no, the HPHC, Hampshire Public Health Coalition and then there's the Public Health and Medical Coalition. So these are our emergency preparedness partners. So we're beginning these conversations. Possibly, we'll hear more about that over time. Any other questions? If not, I'd like to move on to the next item which actually is going to be the percent for art. So Bill Cason who has been waiting patiently and Eric Brody who's been waiting patiently, okay. Thank you both for that very thorough update and thanks, Jen, for watching out for all of us. Thank you very much. Great, so we're gonna go for the percent for art. Let me just start by saying this is a bylaw that has history and so I've asked Andy Steinberg who was also part of that history along with others that you'll hear from as well to give us a little bit of that history and then we're going to go to Bill Cason who is presently chairing the Public Arts Commission and then Kathy Shane who chaired the ad hoc committee. So Andy. Yes, thank you and I'll try and be quick because of the hour that you had asked me to briefly recount the history of the percent for art bylaw from the select board and town meeting period. The Public Art Commission presented a proposal to the select board on February 8, 2016 to submit a percent for art bylaw town meeting. First proposal was about an amount equal to 1% of a project, the cost of a project that at 1% be allocated to art. Select board was uncomfortable with the amount but encouraged the concept as a result the Public Art Commission presented a proposal to the 2016 annual town meeting that won half of 1%. At that town meeting there was substantial discussion and the desire of some members that art supported by the bylaw include performing art and not just visual art. And as a result of that town meeting passed a motion to refer the article back to the Public Art Commission. In order to fund performing art such as music, the commission found that it would need to establish a public art fund as a part of the bylaw. However, that would require special legislation. So they proposed a revised bylaw to the 2017 annual town meeting that established such a fund and authorized the select board to petition the legislature to authorize the town to establish a public art fund. The bylaw passed and the select board submitted a request to the legislature fraction in 2018. A bill was passed in the house but ran into a problem in the Senate. The Senate committee asked for an opinion from the Department of Revenue and in November of 2018, near the end of the session, it advised the Senate committee that it did not support the request. The Senate therefore did not act on the legislation. There were reasons that it stated for that which I think Bill Kazan might talk about later. The council was elected November 2018 and the question was passed along from the percent for art bylaw then became something that was in the council's jurisdiction and the council created the ad hoc committee that was chaired by Kathy Shane. So that was basically the context of what led up to the council action on it. And I'm sure that Bill is prepared if people are interested in knowing how we resolve the problem that the Department of Revenue identified but it was resolved and so I'll leave it for there. Let me just also say we'll be hearing from Eric Brody who lives in my paths in my district and I heard from Eric Brody about this in December of 2018. So he was right on it. We're gonna hear from him later. So Bill, we're gonna put your slides up and have you start, okay? Thank you. Can everybody hear me? Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Let me just get my PowerPoint set up. Okay, thank you very much for having me. It's been a long winding road to get to this point but I'm so glad to be here and to be able to present to you on this. I start with this slide because it features Judith and Blaise's mural at the Bang Center. And to me it really epitomizes the best of what we've been able to accomplish so far regarding public art and Amherst. This was a public art commission project all the long before my time so I can't take any credit for it but we can think about something like this and even more ambitious if we do pass a percent for art bylaw. Next slide. So just to cover a few definitions and I'll return to these a bit later but what are we talking about when we talk about public art? Is art that's available to the public for free? And when we talk about the proposed percent for art bylaw like other percent for art bylaws what we're proposing to do is publicly fund the creation of public art. Next slide. So the public art commission does this already on almost zero budget with very, very, very small amount of money but we've been able to accomplish things over the years. I've been on the commission for three years or so now I've only been chair for the last six months or so right around the time COVID hit and electrify Amherst has been a real feather in our cap I think that we've accomplished since I've been on the commission it's the project to paint the electrical boxes in town and I imagine that if we do pass the percent for art bylaw the administration of it will work in a similar way but just on a bigger scale so we can talk about that in a later slide. Next slide. So percent for art programs serve according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies economic development, creative placemaking and social justice. Economic development because strong artworks and a strong arts community attracts visitors to a town like Amherst. Creative placemaking because public art serves residents and workers as well as our visitors and social justice to the degree that free public art reaches populations who might not otherwise have access to art. Next slide. So these are some big numbers put out by the Mass Cultural Council about the impact of the arts in general financially on the state. So three out of four residents participate or they did before COVID in at least one cultural event each month and certainly that will resume. The nice thing I will add about the kind of public art we're proposing is that it's very suitable to times like COVID because small numbers of people can see these things they're often outside. But anyway, in 2019 the arts in Massachusetts according to the Cultural Council generated 97 million in direct revenue, 880 million in indirect spending and $2.3 billion was their total impact on the state as a whole. Next slide. So Amherst currently gives the town of Amherst itself almost no money to support the arts really no money to support the arts. And we always compare Amherst to our neighbor Northampton, but gee, we don't do anything like what our much smaller neighbor Eastampton does when it comes to funding the arts publicly. So I would just say, you know, maybe now's the time that we could step up and stop being so stodgy and really create through the town itself even stronger arts community and arts culture than we've had before here. Next slide. So what is the proposed bylaws? Half a percent of the budget for capital construction projects over a million dollars will be used for onsite visual artworks. And this is a bit different than the way the bylaw had been proposed previously as Andy had just described. And I will go through some of the changes that we made in the ad hoc committee getting to the version of the bylaw we have now which I think is in many ways much improved. Next slide. So how are we defining in this new version of the bylaw public art? Well, the one part I don't like about it is unfortunately we weren't able to include the performing arts and hopefully the town will find other ways to do so. And we have lots of ideas on the public art commission about how it might do that. But what we mean by public art is permanent onsite art projects that are integral part of a town-owned building or site. Percent for art projects will be considered part of qualified construction projects and will be developed along with that project from the beginning. So we will select an artist who will work with the construction manager, the architect of the town to create an artwork that will be integral part of new capital construction projects that qualify. And we built in provisions to avoid delays. So let's say you never know, you get a temperamental artist or there's supply line issues and the art piece of a project is hanging up that project. Well, in the new bylaw, they can stop that project to get a building built. If we need that new fire station and we can't wait for the art because it's taking too long, well, it might have to just be set aside but that is possible with this new version of the bylaw. Next slide. Administration, how will this be administered? So the authority for administering this will lie with the town manager. The town manager will work with the public art commission in a manner that's similar to how electrify Amherst works and we'll work with the town manager and town staff to do so. Right now with electrify Amherst, we I think have very little, there's very little demand that we put on either the manager or town staff. This, the percent for art bylaw will create bigger projects so there will be more demand but we really see the public art commission doing the lifting, the heavy lifting with these projects. And there will be an art selection advisory panel appointed by the town manager with input from the public art commission that will work with us every step of the way. And the idea is that rather than a jury, this will be a commission of people drawn from the greater area potentially from around the country, real experts, artists, public art professionals, et cetera, who then will inform the decision-making process which will all be of course public and that the public art commission will actually do the final, make the final decision in consultation with the town manager about the artworks. The reason we decided on this is because the public art commission is made up of Amherst residents and so it will be residents deciding with resident input but with broader input from experts from around the area, around the country, what gets built here. Next slide. And then there's the issue of financing. Kathy will talk a little bit more about this but one of the biggest changes is that we raise the threshold for the trigger for projects from $100,000 to a million, big change. So that means only bonded projects will be eligible. The half percent that we're drawing from only applies to the amount financed from the town's general fund. This means no money will be pulled from enterprise funds and no money from grants unless the grant explicitly says that it can be used for works of art. Any unspent funds will return to the general fund which also means that if we have a huge pile of money and that we decide that a mural is more appropriate for a project than a bronze sculpture, a mural is significantly less expensive, the rest of that money would go back to the general fund. And the piece that I think is really crucial, I think now in times of COVID and concerns about finances that the council can lower or eliminate any given percent for art project what if they feel the town doesn't have the money or they feel that a particular capital project doesn't qualify for one reason or another. Next slide. So I want to end with just some examples of great works of public art from around the country that trigger our imaginations and get us thinking about what could be possible here. I've tried to pick examples that draw from fire departments from DPWs and potentially from schools because those are the three of the four big building projects coming down the pipe. So this is a really famous now mural from Cambridge, Massachusetts who has a longstanding percent for art program, the only other city in Massachusetts that has one. Way back in 1976 in Inman Square, a landmark for Cambridge, the firefighters from a fire company with the founding fathers to celebrate the bicentennial massive mural if you've ever been in Inman Square, you can't mess it, it's really iconic. Could use a new coat of paint, but next slide. Here in New York City, which has probably the biggest percent for art program in the country, not surprisingly, the artist Julian Laverdiere who did the Tower of Light tribute at the World Trade Center worked hand in hand with the architects to design this remarkable sort of postmodern or neo-modern really fire station. And he designed this light display in the front where there's a high pressure hose and a fire ax as part of the facade. Next slide. And here in New York at the Newton Creek water treatment facility, this remarkable fountain that takes that clean water from all that polluted water from the Newton Creek on the border of Brooklyn and Queens and pipes it in this water display from the outside of the building and it wraps inside the building all throughout the visitor center. So should our DPW have a visitor center or big public presence? We might wanna think about something along these lines. Next slide. And here are playful park bench in Cambridge, but you could certainly imagine something like this at a school yard, the new elementary school, hopscotch course come to life. Next slide. And one of my favorite projects actually built on a landfill in New York, but again, you could easily imagine this at a school a carousel where there was a contest where children did drawings submitted them to the contest and they were chosen as what were then turned into sculptures the sculptural animals that the kids could ride on at the carousel. Next slide. And I just would like to point out, we looked at Cambridge, we looked at New York City that's definitely out of Amherst League but the Americans for the arts describes and says public arts, it's not just for big cities percent for art programs and other public art programs are in about a third of the towns that have these programs in the country. So 150,000 people or less actually have programs, towns are 150,000 or less have programs that are similar to the ones we're proposing for Amherst. And I'd like to show you two final examples. Next slide. Here in Roanoke, Virginia, fun project a bike rack shaped like a giant comb by pop-up design the comb bike rack. Again, think about this at one of the at the new elementary school or one of the schools. And last but not least in Missoula, Montana, a sculpture very modernist looking sculpture but one that actually references the dogs that go running around it in the dog park where it was newly built. And here you see a cute little girl playing on the dog sculpture. And my last slide because it's late I will just leave that. I won't sit there and read it to you but it's a wonderful quote from the National Governors Association describing the economic and social impact that programs like the one we're proposing for Amherst has on towns like ours. Thank you for the time. And I am here to help answer questions. And I thank the members of the AdHoc Committee and the council for all the work they put in on this. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. We're gonna move right on to Kathy. Okay, so you'll search. So I get, Bill gets to do the exciting beautiful pictures and I get to do the finance side of this. And I think everyone knows you have a large package that Lynn creatively helped us put it all together. So the report from the AdHoc Committee the full report is in there the report from the finance committee as it reviewed the financial impact is in there as is the bylaw. So I'm just gonna highlight a few things from the finance committee report cause we were, we now I was the chair of the AdHoc Committee but also on finance. So it's a big we here. We're asked specifically to look at a financial impact and Bill just quickly outlined all the major areas where this revised proposed bylaw made significant changes including this raising of the threshold to a million dollars. And I just wanna emphasize that by doing that it means that ordinarily this will always be financed with long-term debt. So it'll be integral to the larger construction project and we'll go out for 20 or 30 years. And that spreads the cost. It finances the artwork but it spreads the cost to the town over multiple years. And we do have an escape clause to go down on the percent or eliminate it if we just can't. But we also have a we wanna if the delay would happen or it's not accessible in some way. So we put some safeguards in it to make sure this is public art that's publicly accessible. So go to the next slide. We were asked in the committee by a couple members of the committee to try to do some illustrated examples of the financial impact. So these are just a couple. If you were trying to finance a $10 million construction project or 20 million what does 0.5% equal? So that's the total cost that could be up to that amount allocated to art. And then what if you went out with a 20 year bond at 3% or 30 year bond at 3% and the way the town has been financing bonds it's a declining amount. So you can see illustrated in this that the cost declines you're not financing the whole 50,000 in one year you're spreading it out over time. And it spreads out even more if you do it longer and I might add that bond rates are now in the 2% range. So this would be even smaller if it was financed by a debt service override if that was the larger project it would be $2 to 250 per taxpayer per year. So we tried to show why the impact is less on the town budget because we're spreading it out. And that's the importance of this going up on the higher threshold and tagging it to be integral to the overall project. Next slide. Bill quickly summarize some of these what are the benefits of it but that we had quite a bit of discussion in the finance committee and Chaloney did some research for us on the economic benefits of it as well as the cultural benefits and gave us some citations. And as Bill came and did presentations of the kind of art we could be financing because we were attaching it to large buildings that potentially is going to attract national or international artists or the kinds of things of beauty he just demonstrated. Sharon Pavanelli who's on our finance committee as a resident member and runs a store downtown said oh, it's gonna be bringing visitors out it's gonna be people to town. And we've talked often about a two season economy and this creating these kinds of public art in Amherst contributes to that. So it's enhancing the public space but drawing residents to Amherst and drawing the residents of Amherst out to meet play and use our public art. So we got increasingly excited about it both in the finance committee which normally doesn't get too excited about things it just is costing things out but also in the ad hoc committee because the revisions really make this a solid bylaw and I'm gonna end there. Thank you. And so let's take that down and I'd like to invite Eric Brody who is kind of the father of this thing if he would like to say a few words, Eric. Thank you. Thank you to the council and thank you, Bill and Cassie I saw you made very compelling arguments to promote public art. Thanks for calling me the way you think of me as the father. I kind of think of myself now after all this time is if there was such a thing as a godfather for a bylaw I feel like I would be a godfather of this one. This began over four years ago under a different town manager and different people on the town council now with the select board then although there are three people on your council that were involved pretty much from the beginning still so they have some of the history. I was the former chair of the public art commission when this began over four years ago and I'm really excited now to see that has finally reached this stage of development after all this time. So I wanna thank again the committees of the town council that have been responsible for bringing it to this stage. I think I just wanna say a couple of words of support. I think that the percent for art concept was a good idea four years ago when we started and it's still a good idea. It passed town meeting by over 70% of a positive vote and it was clearly something that members of town meeting at that time thought it would be a good thing for Amherst and something that they wanted to see in the town. The changes that have been made that you've just heard about have changed the original idea, the original concept I think to make it more palatable to the times you're living in. Right now you've changed it so there's basically no risk at all to having this impact the finances of the town is the town feels the need to pull back on any project like this. As you've heard at the most, the percent could be reduced or eliminated entirely if you need be which I would hope would not occur with any project. There are so few of them in the works. There's probably a maximum four projects on the boards for the next decade or so and maybe only three. So I would urge you to think about when the time comes to vote on this that not to let the current financial considerations and situation of the town because of COVID control your decision because the pandemic will pass in time. We'll get through this and the town will recover and it will build the structures that the town needs. And whenever that happens the maximum of any project for art that will go for public art is still only 1.5 of 1% of the total construction costs. We said at the beginning when we began this over a few years ago and I made my first presentation town meeting that it would cost the average taxpayer no more than a cup of coffee per year. And I see from the new presentation of the finances that that's still pretty much the case. The average person, I think it's our memory just seeing those around $2, $2.50 or something like that on average. So I think it's a very affordable way to get significant pieces of work into the downtown streetscape that Amherst otherwise would never be able to afford or acquire. So I would just encourage you to think about this carefully and don't be deterred by the current financial situations. We would have, I think if this passes one of the least expensive public art percent for our programs in the country. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you. Thank you. So this is just the first reading and the second will be next week. And so I wanted to have the opportunity for people to ask questions. And we'll start with Mandy Jo. I just wanted to give the report of the community resources. Thank you so much, Mandy Jo. I goofed on that. Community Resources Committee, Mandy Jo. So Community Resources Committee can consider this at at least two meetings. The first meeting was January 8th of 2020 and the second meeting was January 29th, 2020. In between the public, the percent for art ad hoc committee went back and reviewed the concerns that the CRC had at its first consideration which related to the jury and then presented a modified bylaw to CRC on January 29th. At that meeting, CRC voted four to one, four in favor, one against, recommending the council adopt the percent for art bylaw as presented at the January 29th meeting. And I will defer to Pat DeAngelis who was the one against if she wants to expand on it. The reasons for opposing the recommendation to adopt at the time of the January 29th meeting, Councillor DeAndreis stated that she had a very much concern about increasing the tax burden on town residents, even at what appears to be a small amount to any one taxpayer for one project. So that was the vote. And if I didn't summarize that properly, Pat, I encourage you to state that for the opposition to the recommendation. Pat, would you like to make a further comment? Okay. Then we're moving on to the finance committee report which was included in your packet. We'll get to questions in a moment, Dorothy. Andy. Yeah, I think Kathy's really already given the finance committee report, so I don't need to repeat it. She's vice chair of the committee and served in that door. And the only thing I would add is it was unanimously voted out in favor. And the sense of the two non-voting, the three non-voting residents also expressed support for this. Okay. And then George Ryan. Yeah, folks can read the committee report. It's in the packet. The vote was four to one, it was on March 11th. The one vote against, it was four to one in favor. The one vote against was because the item had come at the last minute and the committee member felt uncomfortable voting without more time for deliberation. So, but the majority of the committee approved it clear, consistent and actionable. We also complained a little bit about KP law. That's the time for another discussion, perhaps. Can I also mention, so in other words, this was geared up and ready to come to the council at the time COVID hit Amherst. And so it is our attempt to try to catch up, if you will. Dorothy, you have your hand up. Okay. Well, I certainly support the percent for art and I was in on many meetings in which this has been refined and developed and the committee under Kathy has done a great job. But there were a couple of issues that I brought up that people seem to agree with, but I don't see reflected in the final report. And that has to do with kind of soft reference to local responses. I had said that I thought that the people who worked in the building in or on which the new art project was going to be should be consulted or brought into the picture in some manner. Also, I see the excitement for internationally talented artists, but I don't want that to mean that local artists, a local meaning, you know, Pioneer Valley, Western Mass or whatever, not just the town of Amherst, but that local artists feel not wanted. So it's really just to make sure that the outreach includes strong access to local artists to participate and that the people who work in the building upon which the art should be consulted. Because I really would hate to have one of these things where, you know, international committee comes up when supports a work of art and the people who work there bitch about it every day because I really want the percent art to be successful and to create, end up in creating a lot more art in the town of Amherst than everybody loves. Bill, you have your hand up. I assume you want to respond to that and Kathy does as well. Yeah, thank you, Dorothy. And absolutely, I think that that level of detail over the exact composition of who will serve on the advisory committee and what the RFP will look like is going to be part of the administrative process. But absolutely, 100% for sure, this wouldn't exclude local artists in any way. And we certainly would bring the people, the people who use the building would be, you know, when we do electrify Amherst, we always reach out to the butters and invite them to be on the jury. This is just part of what we do. So that's absolutely in our mind as being baked into the process. But we didn't want to get to that level of specificity in the bylaw because there has to be flexibility in terms of how the program is administered. And each one will be a little bit different too, so. And I just want to read, because we, Bill, you're right, we didn't get to super specificity, but we wrote in users. So the selection committee shall also include key stakeholders, including but not limited to users of the building, neighbors of the project and other members of the public. So we wanted, you know, the people that were the butters and would see it every day as well as the people who were in the building. And this is the committee that would be selecting and talking about the art. So we did try to write in a broad committee. It's not just artists who are selecting the art but people who are daily in the building. Kathy. Thank you, Kathy. Any other questions from the council at this point? Yes, Alyssa. I sometimes feel like we rush a little when it comes to our comments and questions and we say, well, it's just the first reading, but hopefully we get everything out on the table during the first reading so that with the second reading goes super smoothly. And we just hear some public comment and then we move on. But literally, and Eric Brody will probably faint when I say this, I am in full support of the revised by-law. So thank you for all the work that has gone in to making this work in the reality that we're in and in the reality that we'll be in in the future. I think the flexibility that's been built in and just every aspect. Also, excellent slide presentation on Bill's part and on Kathy's part and on everybody who put together packages. So this was incredibly comprehensive, caught us up to where we needed to be and actually addressed literally every concern that I had and that many other people had over the many years. So thank you, everyone. It's been amazing to see this come together because honestly, I didn't expect whatever happened. So yay, I think it's terrific. Pat, do you have your hand up? Please. I'm going to be voting yes on passing this. Okay. I do want to just say that before next week, we want to clarify how the Jones Library fits into this, both in terms of renovation and also in terms of a full library addition. So we'll all be working with Kathy and the town manager on that, okay? Any other comments at this time? Thank you all for your wonderful presentations and especially Eric for your work in the past and the future and Bill and Kathy and the rest of the committee, Andy, Steve Schreiber and there was one other person, oh, the other person from the commission, the arts commission for being on the ad hoc committee. Thank you. Thank you. Next week on this one, I'm going to move on to the plastic bag. Single use plastic bag prohibition. And in this case, we're going to call on Darcy Dumont and Darcy is the, let me just give you the background, although it's in the package very quickly. This was one of the bills, the bylaws that came to us for revision from the bylaw review committee. We adopted it, but then Darcy said there were some pieces that she felt were taken out and she wanted to see them put back in again. And that led to this being referred to GOL along with other bylaws where the same kinds of questions were asked as well. So it's gone through all that process and it's gone through several discussions at GOL and it's now back before the council. And so I'm going to call on Darcy for a brief presentation and then on George for the GOL report. Darcy, unmute please. Darcy, please unmute. And would you like us to put the red line copy up on the screen? Sure. Okay. So I won't go over the background that Lynn just put out. I just would like to make sure that anyone, I don't think we have very many attendees left, but I think we might have gotten a few people excited about thinking that we were passing a single-use plastic bag bylaw when in fact it's been, we've had the bylaws since 2016. So, but I won't go into how this all transpired. I was asked to bring my case to the GOL committee to bring up the original objections that I had back in January to including it in the general bylaw. So, you may know that in March, Governor Baker issued an executive order lifting local single-use plastic bag bands and then vacated that order in July. In the middle of that, the GOL took the issue up in June. And the main objections I had were that the bylaw review committee had removed language encouraging the use of reusable bags. So, if you see in on this on the screen, the former section three in the use regulation, which I think you see, where it says retail establishments are strongly encouraged to make reusable bags available for sale to customers at a reasonable price. That sentence was the reason why the, bylaw review committee felt that because it was just words of encouragement and wasn't enforceable, then that should come out. And as well as all of the definitions of alternative types of bags that retailers could use, again, because they thought and they in fact were not, that was not an enforceable part of the bylaw. So, they remove the language, they also remove the language regarding the purpose in section A. And that language appeared in the finding section of the original bylaw. You don't see it here because this is not being amended from the original bylaw. If you wanna see that history, you can go to the other memo in the packet, which gives several other versions since 2016. So, I argued that these changes were substantive and shouldn't have been made by the bylaw review committee. The GOL committee in January, or no, in June, pardon me, agreed four to one that a slight variation of the original bylaw language could be retained. Mandy Jo voted no, based on still wanting the language to be enforceable. The GOL committee also decided on its own to remove the last paragraph about deferments based on the fact that years had passed since the enactment of the bylaw, enough time for retailers to have noticed of its existence. So, as noted in George Ryan's report on this matter, GOL met one more time on the issue in order to try to counter arguments about enforceability. I researched and found Sierra Club model language that provided enforceability, but is conditional on retailers choosing to provide alternate bags. Once this language was added, the GOL committee voted unanimously to support it. That's the language you see in section C2. If any retail establishment provides a checkout bag to customers, the bag shall comply with the requirements of being either a recyclable bag, a compostable bag, a biodegradable bag, a reusable or a reusable bag. So, adding that sentence in C2 also negated any objections to including the definitions, putting the definitions back in, the definitions of alternate bags. So, I know we're not voting tonight, but I hope that the council will vote for these changes when it comes to second reading, rather than putting it through any further process. I think, thanks. I believe we can take this down at this time, and I'm gonna call on George to give the GOL report. Well, I think Garcy has pretty much given it, which is fine by me. I'd only point out one other small thing. If you were looking for the exemption, there's still an exemption for certain permissible single-use plastic bag, moved from the use regulations section to the definitions section. So, that's one thing that you might have been looking for and couldn't find. Otherwise, Garcy's pretty much given you the story of what you all did with it, two votes, and how it was revised the second time to meet the objections of one of the GOL colleagues. And that's what you have now. This by-law is the first reading. Because the by-law that was posted on the town website was actually incorrect, we will not be able to do the second reading until October 5th, because it has to be posted for 14 days before we vote. So, we were allowed to discuss it tonight. We just weren't allowed to vote next week. So, it will come back on the agenda on October 5th. Evan, do you have a question? I have comments. So, I guess reading through what was in the packet, my understanding of what was being done was what was being referred to GOL was a request to add back in what by-law review had taken out. What we've gotten is something different, which is a by-law that's been changed substantively in two ways. I would argue that what by-law review committee did were non-substantive changes. I would argue what we have today are substantive changes. And so, my first concern is process concern, which is that the moment that the by-law started to go into substantive territory, it really left the jurisdiction of GOL and really should have gone over to CRC. We saw that with the noise by-law, which GOL sent over to CRC once that conversation became substantive. I'm not quite sure why that didn't happen with this. And the reason for that is based on the two major changes. So, one is that, I think it's C2 about if any retail establishment provides a checkout bag, it shall comply with the requirements and then it gets some requirements. That's a new requirement that didn't exist in the by-law that's been on the books since 2016. That's something brand new that potentially could impact our businesses. And so, you can argue that's not a substantive change. And in fact, when I read that, I thought, do all the businesses already comply with this? You know, I went, I've been doing a lot of takeout in the past week and I went and looked at all the takeout bags and I was thinking, well, you know, like this one from Formosa is probably recyclable but doesn't meet the criteria that it say it's recyclable on it or say please recycle, but maybe it's considered biodegradable. And I started to get a little bit confused about, does this bag that I got four days ago from Formosa meet the new requirement that's being put in this by-law that says that if they give out bags, they shall be required to do these types. And I thought if I'm confused, there's a chance a restaurant owner might be confused and might be surprised that this new requirement is being put on these businesses without them ever knowing because it was done through GOL. The second thing was the removal of the deferments. Pat and Alyssa will remember our conversation and by-law review committee where I brought up the question of why, should we get rid of the deferments since I always understood it to be a transition provision and certainly we've been long enough. And what we heard from the other members of the by-law review committee who had been there in the original by-law review committee where that when they talked to the health department they found out that they're still giving deferments to some restaurants who have shown a burden. And in fact, they cited one restaurant in particular who has a delivery driver who is disabled for whom available non-plastic bags are very hard for him to carry because he only has one arm. And so they've been allowed to continue to use plastic bags, at least at the time that they had talked to them because they saw that that was a burden. They didn't wanna put an undue burden on one of their employees with a disability. And so my question to GOL would be, did you talk to the health department to ask whether there are any active deferments and whether any restaurants have continued to seek deferments because if they are, then this is a pretty major change to take that away. And this is where I come back to, I don't understand why it didn't go to CRC because that would have been the place to say, hey, local businesses, there's a new provision being added that wasn't in there before, is this going to affect you? Or to bring in the health department and say, what's going on with deferments? Are there any active deferments? Because in Baila review committee heard that there were still restaurants that were requesting deferments and that should be part of the conversation. Perhaps GOL had those conversations. I imagine they didn't because it's not in their purview. And so I'm not saying I'm not supportive of these changes, but from a process perspective, I'm concerned that it went through GOL and that these conversations might not have happened. Is there anybody who would like to respond specifically to that? Darcy. I was expecting Evan to bring up both of those points. And he did. And I would say that that's, they're probably valid. I would disagree that the original problems with the Baila review committee were not substantive also. But, and I would just like to point out that the, this has been, I feel like the entire process has been pretty much unnecessary because the original Baila review committee that Paul appointed, which was three residents, which I objected to, if I recall, but which they were the three residents, Bernie Kubiak, Bob Ritchie and someone else, they had a very light hand and they proposed the exact same words that was in my proposal. They didn't propose taking out any of the stuff that the later Baila review committee proposed taking out. So I'm sure you have something to say about that, but I beg you all not to send this to another committee. Please, the next time. That's why I said previously, please don't add any more process to this. If you think that it's okay, the way it is when we have our second reading the next time, but I do agree with Evan that GOL can have the tendency of getting substantive when they shouldn't be. George. I guess all I can say in defense is this was sent to us by the council. So I'm gonna blame the council. You sent it to us and told us to deal with it. Told Darcy to go to GOL with her recommendations. So we dealt with it. Council wants to put it somewhere else now. Go ahead. But we gave what we thought we were supposed to do and you sent it to us in the first place. Okay, Andy. Yes. Speaking only on the deferment issue, I was the select board liaison to the Refuse and Recycle Management Committee, which was the committee that proposed the original bylaw to town meeting. And the deferment section was added in the development of that bylaw for a very limited and specific purpose. And that was that if establishments had problems getting recyclable bags that were appropriate for the establishment or had an undisupply of purchased already bags or for other similar reasons that it could ask for a deferment for a limited period of up to a year. If you look at the language for the deferment section of the original bylaw, it applied to the entire establishment being able to defer its participation in the bylaw risk requirement. It was not to a specific type of bag. So the original purpose was no longer served and the suggestion that had been made to eliminate that section, therefore made sense at the time that it was made, which was really before GOL. I'm gonna just ask straightforward, is anybody gonna make a motion to send this to CRC? Alyssa? That's not why I raised my hand. Okay. Is anybody gonna make a motion to send this to CRC? Okay. Alyssa, would you like to comment, please? So given that I'm not making a motion to send it CRC, I share the chagrin surprise that even though the sponsor said they totally expected the questions Evan brought up, they didn't bother to address them because I don't understand why we wouldn't have had the petitioner check-in. This goes back to perhaps some conversations. We're gonna have it TSO as to whose responsibility is it to do what, right? How much is GOL? How much is CRC? How much is the petitioner? And I would argue in this case the petitioner's responsibility to ensure that restaurants do in fact understand this when we went back as Andy just said, we had there's a lot of history here as to how they understood it. And I in fact used to take Jeff Kravitz, my takeout bags and we're written in Sharpie where they came from because they were clearly not in compliance. And so we've dealt with this over the years. We are focused on education, not on finding people. And so a change to the by-law that says we're changing the requirement without actually letting restaurants know that just seems incredibly odd. I'm not gonna send a CRC at this point because it's been through enough of a mess. I do not know exactly what the problem was with the bulletin board posting but I will reflect to the fact that I had already emailed George about the fact that just as when we discussed this briefly at a previous meeting this was in unintelligible when it was presented to us last time. The big report this time really helped in terms of sorting out what changed and when. It's been incredibly complex. I can't imagine that most members of the public have been able to follow it. And what was submitted as the change to the by-law is in at least three different colors and different styles. This does not even comply with our own rules and is certainly far less transparent than what we did with representative town meeting and warrants. We need to get our act together in terms of how we're presenting by-law changes in a very simple way. We need a good report like we had this time and we need a clear key at the top of the item that says this is pink, this is purple, this is why this is underlined, this is why this is green which seems to combine more than one version of the by-law. It was a mess. It was extremely difficult. And I'm actually thinking of voting against it just because it's been such a mess. But I appreciate that people tried their best to work around things. I don't expect to see something this messy brought to us again. And I don't expect us to see something that impacts the business community not having been discussed with them because it just wasn't, I don't understand that. Evan. Yeah, so I will say, I think this should have gone to CRC once it became substantive. I am not going to move to refer it to CRC because I sort of feel like horses out of the cage or whatever that's saying is. I don't want people to keep horses. The barn. Barn, sure. Horses out of the barn. So I'm not going to try to sense that. I don't think it's the appetite of this council to do it. But I will say, I'm glad it's not on for a second reading next week because that gives time. And what I am hoping for is between now and the next reading essentially one, some action on the part of the petitioner to actually make sure maybe through the bid or the chamber that businesses that could be impacted by this at least know it's happening. So when we come to public comment if this is a concern to any business they have an opportunity to express that. And the second thing I want to know is if there are any restaurants that have active deferments right now when this was before by law review committee we were told there was at least one. And I don't want us to change the by law strip the deferments and then have business surprise you don't have that deferment anymore. So I don't want to make any changes without people who this is going to impact knowing those changes are coming. And I'll feel comfortable not referring to CRC if we can have that those two things done by the next by the second reading. Okay. Got it. Andy. So just coming back to the deferment thing one more time. The other question then comes up to what Evan just said is to if the board of health has been giving deferments on specific types of bags to restaurants then it is in violation of the prior language in the deferment section of the by law which is what you really have to go back to at that time because it really does say upon written application from retail establishment the board of health after public hearing may temporarily defer application of this by law for retail establishment for up to a year upon a showing by the retail establishment that the conditions of the by law would cause undue hardship. So if a deferment section is appropriate I think that it's now too far down the line and if there are establishments that have that feeling that a suggestion should be made to add a deferment section back that is appropriate but the deferment section as it was written in the by law should not be used now. It was not the intent and it is not the wording of the by law. Are there any other comments? Then Darcy I'll work with you to make sure we get the answers to those questions, okay? Yes, too well, we'll also make sure. Thank you. Okay, we're going to move on to the D which is the North Amherst Library expenditure of gift. I'm gonna ask that Paul speak to this and then we just have a brief thing to show you on the screen. Thank you Lynn. So you saw the presentation before and at that point we were still searching what was required from the town council. So the town council doesn't have to vote to accept the gift but the town council does have to vote to expend the gift. So before we move forward on this there is a proposed motion for you to actually expend the gift. And so this is the addition for the North Amherst Library. This is for the first phase of the design and outreach into the community that will come up with plans that are construction ready. At that point we'll pause if the anonymous donor wants to give additional funds to do the actual construction that offer of a gift will come back to the council and you'll have the ability to make the decision if you wanna move forward with the construction or not. So the action tonight would be to accept the gift of $200,000 to do the construction plans for the North Amherst Library. So in your packet is a memo from the town manager. So I'm gonna place in motion to authorize the acceptance and expenditure of the following grants and donations. Donor name anonymous amount $200,000 purpose design, engineering costs associated with improvements to the North Amherst Library. Basically it is on the page you see right now. Is there a second to the motion? Second. You can have a pat. All right, I've got that one. Are there any other questions or comments? Okay, seeing none then we're going to move to a vote. And I'm just gonna pick somebody. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shalini Balmilm. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Matt DeAngels. Yes. Darcy DeMarc. Yes. Lynn Gresemer. Yes. Mandy Johanicki. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Passes unanimously. Moving on, next topic is the town council performance goals for the town manager. And we're going to put up on the screen the show the version that shows the modest changes and I'm going to call upon George Ryan. So can you all see that? It's on my screen is very small. Yes. I'm trying to open it up so I can see it more clearly on my screen, my other screen. Again, the GOL report describes the discussion. We spent a fair amount of time with the question of whether we should interweave racial equity and social justice goals into policy and management goals. And I tried to capture the sense of the committee was that that was not appropriate or that was something that we felt that all these goals are important and that trying to pick out one and interweave it into all the others basically would require us to prioritize goals and we had shied away from that from the beginning. And so what we did was introduce a sentence in the preamble actually not a sentence but a fragment acknowledging that these goals are these policy goals are deeply interrelated and overarching and then continue with the original draft actually version six. This is now draft seven. And so that was an attempt to acknowledge that all these goals are important and interconnected and overarching. But we did not have a formal vote on this but one member of the committee felt strongly that we should still nonetheless interweave racial equity and social justice into all the other goals and the majority of the members of the committee did not agree. So that fragment or part of the sentence was introduced into the preamble. The other changes are there before you they are not particularly, I don't think substantial but they're there for you to review. What we did under goals was simply strike the under management goals we took out the management word just to highlight the goal, bring it out. And I do have a question. I don't quite understand myself what happened to the title. It now reads town council performance objective goals for the town manager. I think you can read town manager performance goals. Yeah, perhaps in strike objective is that was what we suggested that. Okay, that's. Thank you. For that. Are there questions from the council? Kathy. I think George just addressed my question. Did he take the word objective out and leave the word goals? Yeah. Okay, cause I kept thinking, is that as opposed to a subjective goal? So we just, I kept. This change was made, shall we say remotely? And I don't think I understood what I was being asked when I agreed to it. And this evening I thought, what does this mean? Okay, that was my only question. I just wanted to make sure I understood that the word objective is going and the word goals is staying. Thank you. But it's not. So that's why I was confused. So yes. Okay. Pat, you have your hand up. Yes, I wanted to say that during the GLL meeting we did put in this sentence about interrelated and overarching, but I feel strongly and the reason that we didn't accept the proposals presented by the Racial Equity Task Force or the Energy Climate Action Committee goals was because they had not all been voted on by the council. And therefore it was agreed by the committee that they did not specify things that hadn't been voted on would be inappropriate. And there is some accuracy about that. However, what I suggested then and I'm gonna suggest now is both the Racial Equity Task Force goals and responses to the town manager's evaluation and the Energy Climate Action Committee's proposals be put in sort of as an appendix so that both Paul and community members could have access to the kinds of thinking that we're working on. So I would like to propose those be added. Pat, I need to clarify. What are the two things that you wanna add? The Racial Equity Task Force put out, I apologize, I don't have it in front of me. They put out a series of recommendations about racial equity in Amherst. And in reference to the town manager's evaluation goals. And how, and what are, I'll bring... I wanna know what the other document was. The Energy Climate Action Committee has also created a document at another time that listed all the potential proposals they were making to the council and that it was felt that those were also goals that could be interspersed or intertwined. And the decision was that that wouldn't be appropriate either, but I would like to see those goals also added as an appendix, does that help at all, Lynn? Yes, so I'm gonna ask you that you put that in the form of a motion. I hate doing that. I move that we amend the town council performance goals for the town manager by adding, as an appendix, racial equity task force goals, recommendations for the town manager goals and also the energy and climate action committees, recommendations about energy sustainability. Help me to hear Darcy to also be included in this appendix so that as we vote on them, it could be clarified and seen. I don't know, does that help? I hate doing that part. Is there a second? I can do that. Is there any further discussion about the motion to attach these two documents? Alyssa. I was originally gonna speak about something else, but since that motion came up, I will not vote for that. We will not add appendices. I think both those documents are very valuable, but they are not adopted by the town council. They therefore are not part of the goals. Darcy. Yeah, I just wanted to say that the document is was officially sent from the ECAC to the GOL committee to request town manager climate action goals. And they were based in large part on last year's goals, which were much more extensive and detailed than this year. So they repeated a lot of those. And so they are goals that were already, they've already been in our set of goals last year. So yes, they were officially requested by ECAC. Is Kathy Shane comment? Yeah, I'm uncomfortable unless I had a list of what we're specifically talking about to include it as an appendix. I would be fine with saying, you know, these are evolving. I think Alyssa at one point said this is a living document. So, you know, if as we go along, we say, yes, we endorse doing this, yes, we endorse doing that. That can be broadening it, but I know what was in last year's performance goals. I just didn't wanna rework and rework and rework these. And so I don't know which specifics were in last years and we didn't do them all. So I would just be very uncomfortable having an appendix see these specifics on either topic. And I'm not saying I disagree with any of the specifics. I just haven't heard a discussion about them. And I'd wanna be saying, is this the right set? We've got these very general climate action policy goals and that are overarching policy goals that I think are pretty strongly worded that should be then taken into account in each of the other activities. This is a restructured way of doing performance goals. So I am very uncomfortable about putting an appendix on of things that I would have to go through each one of them. And I don't think that that would be a good use of our time. Jelani, any further comments? I would want to know what the purpose for adding the appendix is. Yeah, I'm not sure why we are adding that. I mean, if there's specific things we want from those documents, we should be discussing those. For example, I'm still interested in having, I don't know, discussion or what at this point, but more like a consensus amongst us as a town council, how important is the equity, racial equity goal for us. And given that this is the first year we're talking about it, to me it feels really important to include it as a lens we bring to all the goals. And just because it's a new thing, it's important, and if you don't do that, then it doesn't create a measurement around that. If it's not part of the economic goal as well, and we're not considering it, then it's not gonna make Paul look into it specifically because it's not part of the economic goal and therefore there is no measurement around that. And so, I don't know, to me just feels important to include it, and I'd love to hear what the other councilors have to say about. There's a motion on the floor to amend, and there's a motion to attach to the town manager's performance goals, two documents. One is a document that came from the Racial Equity Task Force, did I get the name right? Yes, and the other one is a document that came from ECAC. The document that came from the Racial Equity Task Force was sent to all of the council, but has not ever been discussed by the council. The document that came from ECAC was sent to GOL, but has not ever come before the full council. Is there further comment on the motion to attach, George? No? Doris C. I think attaching is just a way of acting as if we have paid attention and listened to them, but it means we haven't really done the work. We haven't gotten to the arguments and the fights that would result if we went through each of those and decided, do we really want to put that in that here or that there, which maybe is work we should do. But so I think attaching, although I might be very interested in many of the ideas in them is a meaningless activity, so I would be against attaching them. Alyssa, any further comment on the amendment to attach or the motion to attach? Alyssa, your hand keeps going up and off. It's like I'm that kid who keeps doing that. And no, it's my computer. Thank you. Then I'm going to ask that we vote on the motion to attach those two documents. Your vote is yes, it means you want to attach the documents. If your vote is no, it means you do not. I will start with Steve Schreiber. He's asleep. Somebody call him. Sorry. Andy? No. Why don't you call Steve and wake him up? Andy, please unmute. He already said no. I said no, I did vote no and then I muted myself. I'll try and find the phone number and see if I can call him right now. Okay, Sarah Schwartz? No. Jalony Balmille? No. Alyssa Brewer? No. Pat DeAngeles? Yes. Darcy DeNant? Yes. Reese Merzion, no. Anarchy? No. Dorothy Pym? No. Evan Ross? No. Georgia? Lin is punchy. He's been a long night and it's getting, not getting any younger. A vote is no. George Ryan? He'll no. Kathy Sheing? No. Steve Schreiber? I'm a no. Okay. So it is two in favor and 11 no's. So the motion dies. So now we're back to the original performance goals and the motion is to adopt the town council performance goals for the town manager July 1st, 2020, June 30th, 2021 as amended. Is there a second? George? I second. Okay. Do you have a further comment? Yes. I think that we have consensus on six strong goals that we have tied to specific council actions that we are all committed to. We think they're all important. The attempt to take one or two of these and try and make them rank them or interweave them or however you wanna describe it is going to be extremely difficult, painful and I think extremely unproductive process. This is the seventh draft of these goals. They're well overdue. Paul has now a clear sense of what we think are the six important policy areas and specific goals we'd like him to accomplish same in the area of management. I think time is now for us to adopt these goals and let Paul set to work implementing them. And in the course of time, we can come back and revise them, rethink them and discuss them. But at this point, I think it's time for us finally to vote and make a decision. Okay, Alyssa? Thank you. While I would have preferred a way to interweave, I hear George's strong statement and I stand by what I said before about re-looking at things as time develops and we certainly will take that lens from both the energy and climate and also the racial equity and social justice goal and we will apply it to the other things as we are going along. And it's important, I think maybe this helps encourage us this discussion about the attachment, et cetera to not just say, oh my gosh, we finally finished the town manager goals and now they sit on the shelf until it's time to figure out how to do the actual evaluation except for the mid-year report from Paul. So maybe this will encourage us to continue to reflect on what's actually happening associated with these. The one question I did have that I didn't see addressed in the report so I must have just missed it because like you said, George, you've done this like a million times now. On page three under what's now called finance instead of financial management, the last sentence says talking about reflecting, looking at fees every so often and saying the cost of providing services and you crossed out are in line with other municipalities. Why on earth would we remove that? We had a good reason and hopefully my colleagues can help me here. Can any of my colleagues help me? I think we just assumed that that was a natural process to compare. I can help with that. Excellent, maybe. There was concern that there are some services that we may have a good reason to not be actually in line with other municipalities or we don't know what that they're charging and that we shouldn't be looking to necessarily just align ours with other municipalities because that's what other municipalities charge. So that's why we changed reflect to consider so that we're looking at how much it costs us to do it while looking at what other municipalities charge but it doesn't have to be necessarily in line with what they charge if say our cost of providing services is less or maybe we make concerted decision that our cost is more or about the same as the other municipalities but we want to subsidize that and not necessarily in charge fees that would cover the entire cost of providing that service. So it was the GOL I believe felt it was too restrictive to put that sentence in there. Thank you, I think that reflects my recollection of the conversation as well. Marcy. Okay, so I can. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I agree with all these goals and I'm gonna vote for them but I'm disappointed in them because I feel like two years ago we started with that long list of over a hundred questions that we had for the time manager which none of us, we all realized that we had to get away from that and then last year we had not nearly the level of detail but we did have a fair amount of detail and I didn't feel like that was onerous to do at all as far as our doing the evaluation. I feel like this is swinging the pendulum way too far in the other direction not requiring much at all specific of the time manager and so I really would like us to go back to more like what we had for this last fiscal year. Lizzie, you still have your hand up. Yeah, I just wanted to just say that I feel rather dismissed by that explanation and that I understand that that was a conversation that took place at GOL and I appreciate the work they did but that's not at all the way I interpret the words and the sentence going back to my thing about providing services. I didn't, the sentence didn't mean that we couldn't charge more or less because we weren't in line with other communities. What the sentence meant was the reason that we would say that was because they need to be in line with other municipalities or they're needed to be an explanation for it. We have never, other than water and sewer fees, we have never received a report and the entire time I've been in an elected office that explained why we charge, what we charge for any particular fee. In some cases, MGL requires you just charge X amount and that's a fact. We've never gotten an explanation of why we would charge more or less for anything and we hear complaints from our community. It's not just a theoretical concept and so the idea that we don't need to know what other municipalities charge and that that is somehow going to automatically be included, I can tell you we have no history of including that information. So that's why I found it was important to keep it in there. Any other comments at this time? Okay, the motion has been made and seconded. It is to adopt the town manager performance goals of a town council performance goals for the town manager, July 1st, 2020 to June 30th, 2021 as amended. I'm going to start with Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shallon Delmone. Yes. Melissa Brewer. No. Patty Angelis. Yes. Darcy DeMont. Yes. Riesmer's, yes. Hanneke. Yes. Sam. Yes. Ross. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Chang. Abstain. Driver. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. 11-4, one against one abstention. Okay, we're going to move on to the town manager's contract compensation discussion. Let me just say this is a result of our meeting in executive session two weeks ago, 31st of August. And I just want to point out that in the, let me make the motion first and then have a second. In accordance with the town manager's contract to grant a 2% cost of living increase effective September 1, 2020. Is there a second? Second, Hanneke. Okay. The town manager's contract basically says in section 6.2 in subsequent years of this employment agreement, which was made a year ago. The town manager shall subject to the provision of 3.5 of the town manager of the town charter receive an annual increase in salary equal to that provided to other non-union union employees for cost of living and at the sole discretion of the council based upon the annual evaluation of the town manager by the council any additional performance-based adjustment as approved. So in our executive session, we decided that we would go ahead and do the 2% as required by contract as much as we are absolutely appreciative of the work that Paul has done and especially in this last three months during COVID we felt that financially we did not want to add an additional performance-based. So that was the discussion. Is there any further discussion at this time? Okay, this is to confirm this cost of living increase and I'm beginning with Balmille. Yes. Brewer. Yes. DeAngelo's. Yes. DuMont. Yes. Griezmer's, yes. Hanneke. Yes. Cam. Yes. Ross. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Jane. Yes. Driver. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. Schwartz. Yes. Yes. The Julian. All right, we are going to skip the council liaison discussion. I will be in touch with you by email and bring that back on September 21st. We have no appointments, so we're going to move on to committee and liaison reports. CRC, Mandy Jones. Tomorrow CRC and it is labeled as a, it is posted as a council meeting, full council meeting at 2 p.m. We'll be discussing zoning with presentations by Rob Mora and Christine Brestrop and a presentation, not presentation, but the new chair of the planning board, Jeff Gemsick will be there to talk about the planning board memo too. We hoped it will be a good discussion and a start of a discussion on zoning priorities. And I hope everyone that can make it can come. Finance committee, Andy Steinberg. Yeah, I really don't have much to report. We had one meeting since the last council meeting and have one scheduled, not this, not tomorrow, but a week from tomorrow, so they won't be a report next meeting. We did begin work on the discussion of the inventory and that, to propose back to the council. And that was also reported then to discuss to JCPC as Kathy might report, but there was no decisions made to report to you. Well, George. We'll be meeting on Wednesday and our focus will be exclusively on the wage theft bylaw. We have gotten the written comments from KP Law and we'll be going through those in detail and hopefully making a decision finally, that we'll see. Great, JCPC, Kathy. Just unmuting. We met, JCPC met on September 9th and I'll just point out that it's unusual for JCPC to meet in the fall at all. So this was a meeting we'd set up because we had unfinished business and the main report is we set up a reserve fund in the capital area and none of it has been tapped so far that the town has been able to build some of the capital expenses to the CARES Act and during the JCPC meeting, we were told we'll get a full report on how much money we have potentially available in CARES but how much we've spent. So both in schools and other parts of the town, we did get the same amount of road money and the grant program. So that was what we had predicted, but it was flat. So roads come in. And then the other thing we did, we quickly reviewed inventory, mainly on categories and decided, was talking about what is the goal of having an inventory and to extent there are any comments that are gonna be sent to finance. And the final thing is we were gonna be looking at a five year capital plan, but because we're in the mid stretch of everything, we don't know what the revenues are gonna be and that Sean and staff are gonna be giving us alternative revenue forecasts for how much we'll have available for capital. So there's going to be a way of presenting capital to us that we'll have what do we need to do to maintain existing buildings, maintain equipment and then have something I called below the line to say new projects in the waiting room. So in the attempt to get to a balanced budget, we'll have some things that we don't have to do because they would be considered new. That was presented conceptually. We don't have a list yet of what would be considered new. And so we didn't have specifics. And we will not be having another meeting, I think until we start to discuss the forecasts and send indicators. So I think that's all we have. Some of us had expected more detail and there was a pretty good explanation of why we couldn't have it yet in terms of we don't quite know how much money we've got in any of those years, including the next two years. Okay. TSO, Garcy. We are having, am I on mute? No, we are having a meeting on this Thursday at 8 p.m. just to look at the two town manager appointments, one for human resources director and one for health director. So that's all that meeting is going to be about is just those appointments. And then we're going to have another meeting on the 24th where we'll be talking about Lincoln Avenue and or other more town-wide parking solutions and other town manager appointments. And then the following meeting will be on October 8th when we're going to look at the facial recognition part of the surveillance technology by law. Okay. Are there any liaison reports besides the fact that, yes, CP AC Kathy? I just wanted to, Lynn put up the announcement that the, the proposal period is open, but to send any of you in other districts can let people know in a strong way it's open because we've got over, well over $1 million that it's only going to be open for a one month period of our tax dollars, but it's under CPA. And there was a reserve fund set up last year, the most recent fiscal year because there weren't sufficient projects that weren't in spending all of it. So encouraging people to apply and letting people know it's open, I think it's important not to forget that that is a source of money. It can only be sent in certain categories, but that the guidelines are up and it's only a four week window when this is open right now. Okay. We have one set of minutes and that is to approve the August 10, 2020 special town council meeting minutes as presented. Is there a second? And a few seconds. Is there any amendments or changes? Okay, then we'll move to a vote of Brewer. Stain. D'Angeles. Yes. Goumont. Abstain. Rees-Merzi, yes. Anarchy. Yes. Ham. Abstain. Ross. Yes. Ryan. Yes. Stain. Yes. Treiber. Yes. Steinberg. Yes. Twartz. Yes. And Balmille. Stain. Did you say abstain? Yes. Okay, so I have one, two, one, two, three. Nine in favor, none against, and four abstentions. Okay, we're going to move on to the town manager report. Thank you, Lynn. So I don't really have anything on the town manager report. You have a second memo in there that talks about the voting from the primary election. The town clerk will be at our, I can't remember if it was our next election or next meeting or the October meeting doing a report on the polling locations and the experience that happened there. She is meeting with the, our temporary town clerk is meeting with the wardens on Wednesday. So she wants to collect that information before she comes in. So she will be available to talk about the, and I can answer any questions that I can on the information I've provided to you. If you have any questions. Any questions? I just, I have one question. I'm sorry to just, but neither my husband or I ever received a mail ballot, even though we requested one, the official tracking site shows us having been mailed a ballot on August 8th. And then we went down on early voting and voted and it shows us having voted with our mail ballots on the 24th, but that's not what happened. You know, we actually never got it. So is there any way of tracking just non-receive? I mean, we did vote in a ballot, but it wasn't a ballot that we ever got in the post office. And we called the secretary of state saying, how do we register? We don't even know where it went. So Paul, it's just a question and it's probably not a big detail, but I didn't know whether it's just a handful of people never got it. And early voting was a savior here because there was nobody there when we went to early votes. So we early voted, but on the website of the secretary of state, it makes it look like they mailed it, we got it and we voted, which was not what happened. I can check into it. I don't know the answer. Mandy Jo, you have your hand up. Yeah, I'll just do a couple of quick things for consideration as we go into November. I visited a number of the polling locations and some of the things that were said were, it's my understanding that mass law requires that the early votes and the absentee vote ballots get counted sort of during the day at the polling location and they were feeding them in and all. Well, they're fed into the machine's day of. That's what I was seeing. They were tracking them and they were feeding them into the machine's day of and there was concern that if polling locations are busier and the absentee and early votes are larger, that there may not be time to do so. So really thinking about how that stack of mail and vote ballots will be counted on election day, I think it's gonna be important going forward given that the polling locations might be busier. The request for better signage at the locations, especially those that have multiple parking lots or multiple entrances and exits that you might not be able to see so that it's clear where you go in, where you go out and where you find that. Better messaging, a lot of the polling locations had people bringing their early voting ballots to the polling locations. So we need to have better messaging around where you can drop them off on election day so that people don't have to go differently. It's okay if they're bringing their own to the right polling precinct because they can just essentially void that ballot and have them vote in person. But if they're bringing their family members, they then have to go to another location. And then for the ballot drop location, maybe as we gave you the authority for temporary parking, create more five or 15 minute slots in front of that during the course of early voting drop off so that it's easy to just stop and drop a ballot off. Let me just add, I agree with a ballot drop off and also do want to say that I thought for the precincts that were being changed, particularly precinct too that the signage was very significant and it was there early. So thank you for that. Sorry, Paul. So the state doesn't require that the ballots be counted at the polling location. So we were going to have a centralized tabulation facility that again has to be visible to the public that didn't work out. So the backup plan was that the ballots were taken to the polling locations. We will have a centralized tabulation facility at a different location this time. And we anticipate that will be a dedicated crew just handling all those mail-in ballots and they will sequentially go through it precinct by precinct. So that's why that happened that way. And it wasn't intended to be that way just sort of happened that way. But it was happening in every precinct where the folded ballot pile up but then they would jam. So. Any, Alyson. I just wanted to thank Paul for the comprehensive report because I had said to him, the report better not be limited to, it went well because it did go well but I wanted more detail. And it was really interesting to see that so many people got absent, requested their ballots and of course Kathy is a separate situation and then how many people actually returned them, right? Because we were all guessing how this was gonna work. And the fact that this was a contested election made a big difference. So I appreciate everyone's comments about signage, et cetera. And also we'll pile on to the idea of needing to maybe have some additional spaces for the ballot drop off based so that we don't clog up that driveway behind town hall because that's what I did when I turned ours in into separate batches. So that would be very helpful to have. And I do appreciate also the concept about, I'm sorry, I'll skip that. So thank you. Okay. Any further comments at this time? Any questions of the town manager? Okay. Then we're moving on. I have nothing further to report. Are there any future agenda items that have not been mentioned? Darcy? Alison. Darcy, you had your hand up. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I, as a result of a conversation that I had with a constituent, I am interested in having a discussion with the council about increasing our salaries. And I know from the charter that we may not be able to do that after 100 days from the beginning of the, the, this but it moved me that she said that, you know, low and moderate income people can't even contemplate running for town council because they can't afford to. So I think that it requires a discussion. Okay. So I've noted that. Alyssa, you have your hand up. I'm so sorry. I remembered the thing I choked on earlier that I was going to ask Paul, if you would just pass along to the town clerk and we heard this content earlier today about data management and getting other people to crunch data for us. Given the concerns that were raised all through our discussion about polling consolidation, we know, we all know that there are books, except now there are iPads, but there are still books that show whether or not somebody voted, right? So there are records that I don't see how you voted, right? But it says whether or not you participated in the election. And I wonder if we've ever found a way or we've asked a partner of some sort to crunch data for us on apartment complexes, participation, because we talk a lot about, oh, this is an easy place to walk to or this is an easy place to drive to. Oh, but wait, now we're in a pandemic so you can't take the bus or you're not as comfortable taking the bus. Have we ever actually analyzed? It's great that we always do these great pushes. I've been part of voter registration before, but if people aren't actually submitting their ballots, especially given the conditions we're under now, is there a way for us to do a check-in to say, you know what? All these people are registered fairly recently. None of them actually voted in the election. Is there a way we can do some additional outreach, some targeted outreach to different areas, especially if people are having difficulty with, they're concerned about the mail, if they're having difficulty with transportation to get to drop off their ballot, et cetera. So. Thank you. Are there other councilor comments? George. Just very briefly, Lynn, but as many of you know, I go to the campus and community coalition meetings and I wanted to end on a positive note because at those meetings, you've got police department, fire department, Hadley, you've got a whole group of people together. They tend to be fairly frank and direct with each other and their initial take on the first month with students returning is very positive. They've had good interaction with students. Labor Day weekend was obviously a busy one, but this was after the Labor Day weekend and Captain Tang and Bill Laramie said, the students aren't the problem. They're getting good cooperation. When they go in and have these conversations, they're being listened to. So I was very positive message. The campus is very quiet. Not surprisingly, the fire department has very few calls to the campus right now. So their calls are way down. That's not surprising either, but it's a very positive message at least in this first month that came across at the CCC meeting. And then maybe Paul, go ahead, Paul. Just a quick note. This is the first weekend where we didn't transport someone for alcohol from a student or anything like that. Unheard of is really remarkable. And then just very briefly, Evan and I both were invited to attend the IFC meeting which is the Interpreternity Council. This is the Greek body. And Evan can speak for himself if he wants to, but I was impressed. They're very strong on having, these are off campus houses. One of the kids, one of the heads of the house said, try to convince his peers. He said, look, it's wicked easy. Those are his words to get tested. So they were pushing that. They're very conscious of their responsibility. I'm always impressed. They're also doing some outreach. One of them went on 9-11. One of the houses went with donuts and coffee to the first responders. Another house is doing some kind of a tutoring with one of the local elementary schools. So we're gonna also hope to meet this week with the Pan-Atlantic Council and get their input. Cause we're also asking them, what's it like for you? And obviously it's very different academically, socially and so on. But I least was very impressed by their positive attitude and their willingness to do what's needed in this time of crisis. And Steve Schreiber. So there's an old saying that nothing good happens after midnight. And so as you know, our last council meeting went after midnight. So the next day I got a couple of emails regarding what I may or may not have said during the discussion of the planning board candidates. So I just thought it'd be useful to make it clear to the counselors that I was very upset that letters, what I call testimonials or letters or reference were being read about some candidates but not all candidates. But I did not mean to infer that any particular candidate had solicited those letters. So I think we need to discuss that process but I did listen to the tape as to what I did say and I see how that could be inferred. So I do apologize for any candidates that think I was inferring that. Okay, thank you. Any further comments at this time? We have no issues that are under the 48 hour rule, no executive session. Although I believe we may have one next week to approve previous minutes. And so the meeting is adjourned at 11 27. Have a good evening. Thank you, Lynn.