 It is 6.37 p.m. on February 3rd, 2020. And we are recording this and I am calling the special meeting of the community resources committee to order for our retreat. I believe this is the first time a council committee itself has actually held a retreat. And because this is a special meeting and it is a retreat, we do not have any public comments scheduled for tonight per hour rules. We are allowed to choose not to do that and we have. It follows similar guidance and practice from other council retreats to keep it an inward focused meeting in that sense. But it is still open to the public and we are recording it and minutes are being taken. So the first item, I will go over the whole set of the agenda with some timings before we move on to the first item at about 6.35, which is about now. We will talk about goals of the committee for approximately 45 minutes. And then we will move on around 7.20 to the evaluation of measures when making recommendations to the town council with a couple of different discussions related to that. And that should last about an hour at 8.20. We'll begin talking about collaboration with town committees. Since this is the community resources committee that tends to have to deal with stuff that comes from other committees and all we should talk about how we collaborate and who we might need to collaborate with. Around 8.55, we will move to ways to increase responsibilities within the committee itself for about 15 minutes. And then at 9.05, we'll try to identify with Dave Zomek's help documents that might be useful to consideration of measures and see if I've created a draft and then I publish that and then I saw a whole lot more and found some more. So, but we can talk about that. Pat had her hand up, hold on a second. And then at 9.20, if there's any announcements, we'll take them and items not anticipated. If there are any and at 9.30, we will adjourn. And one other thing, since it's a retreat there will be no business and votes tonight on anything. Pat. Well, I don't know whether it goes in items not anticipated, but GOL has been talking about separating this committee into two committees. And I think that should be part of our discussion this evening. Let's take that with goals of the community resources committee because I think that's best where it might fit. And then it can also be threaded into potential documents for our work and committees to collaborate because it all kind of interrelates. But we can focus on that a little bit with the goals of the committee. So that does move us onto our first agenda item, which is goals of the community resources committee. I don't really have a plan for how to run this portion because this item was requested by others. So I would love to hear what people's goals are. That's sort of the point of this discussion is to figure out what other people and what our committee members are seeing as potential goals for this committee. So I'm gonna let other people talk. When they're ready. Feel free, someone to start the conversation off. Please use the mic. To preserve the heart of Amherst, the history, culture, tradition, and livability quality of life of the town, which means we touch on many things but don't have to get too deep in others. For example, we don't have to get too deep into the capital projects, except in so far they affect neighborhoods and whatever. So for example, I was talking today with Gabriella from the bid about the ban shell on the green, town green. And she knows that I had said, I love to keep a New England green green to have very little on it except green things. I would say I'm more open to considering it today. But as it goes forward, we will always be thinking about what the impact will be on the people living around it, the institutions, the college, the church, and not just on the businesses, which is her responsibility, right? And we would think about some of the culture, but we don't have to run everything, we don't have to do everything, but we have to think about how the many new things that we're doing, we're doing so many new things and new things are being done by private enterprises and developers. We just have to think about how do they affect the quality of life, the residential neighborhoods and the history and culture of Amherst, which will keep us pretty busy. Because this is a retreat, I feel like I can be a little different about how we're talking. I will frame this by saying I went Saturday, I spent the day at Osborne Prison and on Sunday was in Boston, Cambridge actually, for an inter-help, which has to do with Joanna Macy's work. So those workshops were both very impactful emotionally and stuff, so I'm kind of in a space where when I hear the heart of Amherst, I get kind of nuggly, I get uncomfortable. I know what you mean by preserving the history, the character, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. But I also know in the heart of Amherst is an ongoing disregard for working class people, people of color, and those are things that we need to address when we talk about the heart of Amherst. So when we're looking at impacts, we really need to look at the social impacts beyond is it pretty, is it, you know, and I don't know, so that's kind of, one of my goals is for Amherst to directly begin to reflect on its real history as well as the history we like to say that we have and that we use and to be able to begin to move in new directions around housing, community gardens, all kinds of things that would affect transportation and food access, and so in, but I would like us to keep a broader social lens. Well, I'd like to just quickly respond that the historic district in which I live, the local historic district acknowledges black working class, Irish people, the basis of the historical district wasn't that there were beautiful houses on Lincoln and Sunset, but that it was an integrated neighborhood that represented a longstanding working class and black and cultural community in the town. So I don't see, I understand what you're saying, Pat, but I don't see that what I'm saying is in contradiction to what you're saying. I'm not sure if it's a contradiction as much as a difference in what we want Amherst to be. Steve. Yeah, so really good, really good starts. So I see as the, I was trying to look at what the term is, so bumpers and a bowling alley. So the ball in the lane and not to do, make sure it stays in the lane, make sure that, because things will happen, things have happened for several hundred years without us and they'll happen if the form of government changes again. So I think that our job is to, so for me Amherst is synonymous with progressive. So that's to me, that's the Amherstness that Dorothy, so a place that's willing to experiment, a place that's willing to embrace, to be inclusive. And I think we have a maybe imperfect history that way, but I do think that that's the Amherstness. So, but I also, so Preserve is a hard one because Preserve can also mean go back to some sort of a history that wasn't as inclusive. So, but I definitely think there's physical parts of Amherst that need to be inclusive. But also we have to wear that state-owned institution that's completely. I guess, I hear what you're saying about being progressive and I would love to claim that mantle for Amherst. But if we go to look at what the process has been and the response of neighbors to 132 Northampton Road, there's no way you can say that Amherst is progressive. We have, I'm not gonna be reelected because I'm gonna be starting to talk about all this stuff a lot. There's such a thing as white fragility and so we don't like to be told that we're not progressive. And I apologize because I'm not sure how all this fits in with this committee and I will say that. And I think there are ways that we are tied together in our values about preservation of land and buildings and the kinds of development that might happen. But I really want Amherst to begin to take a deeper look at itself. And I think we can help that in this committee. So before I recognize Andy, I wanna say I think it does and it'll tie directly into our next item on the agenda. So I think it's perfect we're having this part of the conversation now, Andy. I guess I'm a little bit confused because we seem to be jumping ahead on how we do something as opposed to starting with what we do. And the what we do, I felt with all of our committees is to inform the council to assist the council to have decisions about issues. And that we therefore shouldn't be necessarily injecting our views as the leading piece or not that they should not be included or guide what we do, but that we should know what it is that the council is looking for advice on to help it efficiently make decisions when it's meeting as a group of 13, how to inform it, how to give the range of options that might be considered the pros and cons of each option and possibly to make recommendation which then gets into the values. That comes in at the end, not at the beginning. So I would start with what is the purpose of our committees and what kinds of issues do we expect to be referred to us and how do we develop the research to help us to do the job of informing and possibly advising the council? As always, Andy is very informative. Does anyone have, let's start with the purpose of the CRC, this topic of conversation is on the goals of CRC which I think Andy distilled down to. What is our reason for existing to help the council? And so let's see if we can focus on that. Of the couple of questions Andy proposed, the first one is the purpose of the committee. And so what should we be, what do we think we're created for to help the council and then how could we do that? Dorothy? I mean, we've said this before. Where do we all are different? We have different things that we value in different orders but as a committee we look at the impacts of possible actions and hopefully from among us we will cover most of the important bases. And that fits in with what Andy is saying that we talk over things. We don't have to agree as a committee. We just have to have looked into, thought of and reacted to and said okay if we do this then what happens that and how does this impact that? So that's how, for example, in the discussion about performance ban shell today I was thinking about parking and I was thinking about okay a lot of people love to walk and they'll love to walk from this new private parking garage we're gonna have but I wouldn't. I have a very bad knee and I go places because I drive in my car so I wanna make an arrangement with Amherst College to have access to some of their parking lots when we have an event in the ban shell and I wanna make sure that we check with the church, Grace Church on the green on the common to make sure that they're not having a sacred music concert when somebody's gonna schedule a rock band thinking about the lighting. What kind of lighting needs to be in the park? I was there for the luminaria and the fire event was it one or two nights ago and it was very successful but going down to the fire event there were a huge number of peoples but you couldn't see them it was pitch black and so we're kind of stumbling along in the dark and I'm thinking oh this new redo we're gonna do the commons needs to have a really new great lighting system of I hope beautiful light lamps all around which are modern and can be controlled so you can turn off this turn on that part to provide lighting where it's needed and not to have it getting in the way of a fire performance which the children adored by the way I couldn't see the children but I could hear their crazy laughter every time he would do a mock fall so we just have to think about and then take it out further like into all the implications of what we do and there's so many of them so Dorothy talked about impacts we look at the impacts of possible action is there a way we could quantify what type of impacts we look at I know later on I have a list of them but I think that's where sort of our conversation first started with Dorothy talking about a tradition culture history Pat talking about moving in different directions broader social lens and all so is there a way we can quantify the subject matter of impacts and should we be doing that Dorothy? I mean one of the reasons that the bid is interested in this is because it will help business in our what do we call it our committee description economic activity is mentioned but if we're thinking about what Pat is thinking about people from many groups it's free we're talking about free activity in the center of town which is a positive in terms of it's very democratic so we kind of depending upon whatever our particular lenses is at that moment we have to kind of follow our ideas through and see how it goes and then somebody else might say I'm concerned about safety we have to think about that so you would argue it's a fluid moving sort of target in a sense where it's not always the same subject matter of impacts I like things fluid yeah Pat you were about ready to speak I agree that we need to study the impacts of different things but I think there needs to be a framework in a certain sense that we go to each time and that has us look at the economic impact the social impact the impact on transportation or development or economics but my feeling is that that framework within that framework we need to bring in something that's unique for this issue or any particular issue and that is the way that I could step forward to fluidity as long as there's some skeleton structure to me is pretty important I'll agree with that I just don't like things to get too rigid if it says well it's not on the list we can't talk about it that's when I don't like that but I think you're right a structure and we might say well this doesn't really apply here but then we stop and think say and maybe it does the other piece for me since I'm spouting opinions left and right is how do I bring neutrality to the investigation of the issues when I look at impact I can have an immediate reaction but that doesn't make it true and so how do we open up ourselves to make sure that we're not just responding from our own personal tastes that likes dislikes et cetera and so that somehow or other needs to be embedded in the structure as well brings an interesting question do we need to be neutral to the issues thoughts well I mean the idea of a democracy and a freedom of speech is that if enough people say what they think that somehow the truth is comes out now we're not sure if that how that works right now you know I mean this is something that we're all thinking about but I just the way and I referred to this the other day the thing that allows me to put up with the excessive demands on time of what we're undergoing with the council is that the people on the council are different and they're interesting and I have the feeling the hope that between us coming at it with our own idiosyncratic and perhaps opinionated thoughts that we will come to the truth that's my hope I guess Andy so I still want to turn us back to the committee charges or our leading point because I pulled it up after I spoke and then I realized that pretty much what I spoke was earlier is our committee charge we're not here to try and necessarily just create policies because we think they're right the charge was review and make recommendations to the town councils on matters regarding and there is some of that in there so I but a lot of it the rest of it has to do with referrals and it also ties into very specific policies so we do need to be very cautious about making sure that what we do in our vision of what this committee is about is consistent with the charge that we've been given and knowing that the charge might be modified and in some sense narrowed by subsequent council action the other thing I will notice we were given a piece of paper by Meg Gage at the beginning which I think most of us seen before because it was a part of a committee that was established by Tom Needing and then became defunct but it's interesting that proposed actions, options and impacts, number three really is covering a lot of the things that we've just talked about so that committee may have done our listing for us. And it goes to what we'll get to next which is the process for evaluating measures and all and when we get there around eight, 20 or seven, 20 or so I'll explain how we got that but yeah so the goals back to the goals Pat wanted to discuss the potential modification of the charge does that modification necessarily change our goals if transportation is removed from our charge say because that's one of the proposals does it change the goal of how we report something out versus just what we get referred? I've got to know it probably doesn't change the goal so I'm gonna try and summarize the conversation I know we've got about 20 minutes left in this one but so far what I'm hearing is one of the or if I try to translate it into goals one of the goals would be to try and report out on referrals or in when making these recommendations under our charge to report out comprehensive benefits, pros, cons on impacts whether those impacts are positive or negative on something that isn't necessarily neutral but isn't that isn't necessarily completely biased in that it tries to have that comprehensive discussion but then the vote will be based on what our opinions are if we're making a recommendation and that we're going to bring all of that but that recommendation would be based on trying to have a comprehensive discussion that reports on all the impacts we can find whether or not we agree with those impacts is that sort of what I'm hearing is a potential goal of this committee for the reporting out? I'd like to clarify by neutrality I'm not saying that we eliminate our opinions because I don't think we can do that but what I think that we can do is place them to the side and look at what might be a value in a position that's different than ours and if there's real collaboration and thinking and talking going on in the committee we may get to a very different place which would impact positively the referrals that we make or recommendations that we make. Any other thoughts? I am always as chair happy to move on if we are exhausted on one avenue I'm not gonna take it for 20 extra minutes if we're ready to move on but yes Dorothy. Just a quick thing about transportation when if the new committee reorganization takes place I still think that saying something like parking as it affects residential neighborhoods we would still have some concern we would still report on that that would be one of the impacts we could talk about but we wouldn't be in charge of we wouldn't be doing the part that is a town service which is a more complicated thing to do with the money I mean I was very shocked when I heard how much money we get from parking costs per year we make a lot of money the town makes a lot of money. So I think if the committees are reorganized something like Lincoln Avenue parking or even what we currently have in our committee we have a Spring Street parking we have some speed limits none of that would be in front of our committee that would all be in a different committee so we wouldn't in this committee be talking about it although what we're doing tonight and potentially any sort of thoughts we have and all could be potentially forwarded to if there are other committees that are doing this type of deep dive into certain areas forward and say we've come up with a framework that we think might be helpful for when you guys are evaluating things too. Steve. Parking as it relates to zoning for example would be part of this committee so there would be cases when parking. Yeah. Certainly. It wouldn't be the sort of day-to-day operation of parking it would be more sort of long term embedded within land use laws. Any other discussion on this item of conversation goals of the CRC? I like the way you said that Mandy. I mean we would report on what we thought was in our purview and we would report what we thought were the impacts without us saying that this is really the most important thing but we would just report on it. This is facts or guesses about what would happen but you also added that if we felt that some other thing that was not strictly in our purview was relevant we could say it. So that leaves it open. We're not in charge of it but we can make a comment if it's something that we have come across in our study of the issue. So we will move on. Note this down. Our next item on the agenda is a discussion for process for evaluating. So this sort of actually evaluation of measures when making recommendations to town council this sort of portended what the goals might be and then how do we get to that goal of making these recommendations because our charge says we have to make recommendations when things are referred to us and I have two sections under this which is identify underlying values of the council and community for inclusion and consideration and then a discussion on the process for evaluating. I have drafted a community impact report template that is part of the packet for tonight. It was based off of the TMAC report that the council received a little over a year ago from the town meeting advisory committee which as Andy referenced earlier, Meg Gage came in and actually distributed one portion of that report to us which I will have Athena add into our packet. It has already been distributed to the council so I felt okay with accepting it and saying yes, put it in our packet, we've seen it already and it's what I based the draft off of actually. So we can start with the community impact report template if we'd want or we can start by trying to identify council values that we might want to, we have in our council rules, the very last page and the appendix that has a set of sort of values. We could, I don't know whether we'd want to restate them or have that or whether we just wanna move into a discussion on how would we evaluate measures? It might just be better to say everyone has different values but we've adopted a set of values, a statement of values in our council rules, maybe that's where we get our values although those might not really go towards, those values are more interacting with each other I think now that I think about it instead of values for the town, say built environment and how to evaluate things. So let's start with is there a way we could identify underlying values of the council and community for inclusion and consideration? Is it possible to do that in a manner that is comprehensive and not necessarily biased in any one direction? Do we think so? Yes, Pat. I'm wondering if, given that we have a master plan for aspects of town and that that field in the community, that feels like a relevant document in terms of what are the goals, the town or the council's values and very different. I've got, I don't think is in there and that is when I think of housing which I'm thinking of a lot of, I'm going to a lot of meetings and thinking about housing that my goal is integrated housing which means income levels and it means students, older people, families and some people and total across the board inclusionary zoning, some people of very low income and of moderate like 50%, 60% average income so that we're not putting all the poor people here and all the rich people here and all the students here, I mean, we have students amongst us and it works very well when it's done properly and it doesn't work well when it's not done properly and there's been a lot of effort in town to create a situation where students can live amongst our neighborhoods in a way that's mutually supportive of students and the residents. So when listening to that, what I hear is potentially that each of us bring our own values. I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with that as a value but that we might as elected officials because of who our constituents are or what we ran on bring our own values and so we might not be able to identify a clear set of here's the values we would evaluate something on versus here's the topics because I think we can identify topic of housing. How does it impact housing? However, each of us thinks about the value of housing and the value of social justice or sustainability or yeah, where that value of that you pointed out of integration inclusivity, which is part of social justice versus someone else might have a completely different value on that. But it's also practical. Remember that for 132 months they wrote here. Pat, my stand has I think helped bring about some changes in the plan. I read through the whole plan. I see changes made in the level of supervision and the hours of supervision and the placement of the house and I am not opposed to it. But so I feel my being to me hard headed, which I was, I believe was a good course because I'm happier, much happier with the plan as proposed but I do want to make sure that's what they do. That means I don't say yes to everything. Okay, I mean sometimes I'm a bit of a fuss. So that's a specific issue but it goes to can we actually identify underlying values of council and community or do we just bring our own Dorothy? Well, Pat mentioned sustainability. I think that that's very clearly in that is in the master plan and whether we strengthen it in the revision, I don't know but that is something that we've all agreed that we share and that we think that many people in the town share that value. So it's not like the council goal necessarily. It's just us reflecting the people. Is it though a council goal because we did adopt climate action goals as a council? Does that then change how we as a committee identify impacts and benefits? Should we, you know, it goes to what documents are important later on but is that part of the evaluation of this would further goals adopted by the council or this would not further goals? Should that be part of how we evaluate measures when the council itself has specifically adopted certain goals like climate action or when we finally get around to adopting the actual master plan versus it being just the planning board's document is that, I mean, you started Pat with the master plan of that seems like it could be a goal, a council, you know, sort of value. Once it's adopted, is that then does that help form the basis of our impact evaluation? I've got Dave over here nodding almost vigorously here. So, feel free to chime in. Just thinking of the discussion we had last Wednesday about a housing policy for the council. So I would think that would fall right in line with this. If the council adopts a policy for housing overall in Amherst, then that would inform, you know, you in the same way as you evaluate all anything to do with housing. So yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I really, I'm kind of staring at what Mandy put together in terms of the, you know, clearly identify the purpose. I mean, I like structure. So I think with everything that's come at the CRC in year one, you know, I think we've all been longing for a little bit more structure in how to review these. So, you know, I really like the document at least as a conversation starter that you put together asking all of those questions and really kind of framing what is the purpose of CRC and if it is, which I think we all agree, as Andy said, to advise and make recommendations to the full council and having some sort of consistent way to review every proposal or every issue that comes to you. Andy is always very clear about when it's the finance committee has to look at something. So we're talking about sustainability and it's the topic of electric buses comes up, which turns out to be a complex topic. And the finance committee is going to look at it in terms of the budget, but still all committees have to think of sustainability, but still they're gonna look at it in terms of the budget. We might look at it in terms of how does it work in terms of delivering children to school or does it mean that we can only can't buy enough buses or, you know, in terms of people and people's needs as well as being some concern for sustainability. And I don't know where we're going with the electric buses, but I've been reading some, they've been some things in the paper that made it sound as if it wasn't as easy as some people thought it was. On to that sort of second item under discuss the process for evaluating or evaluation of measures. The second item is discussion of a process for evaluation. So as I said, I drafted a community impact report template based sort of on the TMAC one for the purposes of those that are in our audience if they have not been able to find where we put documents if you go to amherstma.gov slash town council and then find our committee name, community resources committee on the sidebar on the right. There will be a packet link and that link will have these documents in there. And the one we are going to pull up now is entitled community impact report template so that you can look at it while we're discussing it. And so I have no particular, feel free to tear it apart mainly is what I'm gonna say. But I since joining this committee in my own brain was having some difficulty thinking about how do I evaluate something like Spring Street parking in a way like how do I go to look at it and figure out what those impacts might be. And so I went back to that TMAC template and framework and said maybe I can do something with that. And so this is sort of what I came up with and before I published it here, I actually sent it out to Dorothy for some comments as vice chair of this committee. And so it's kind of been modified a little bit with that but let's have a discussion on whether we think this. This document. Yes, that document Pat, there was not a new one. No, no, it was revised and reported on by Dorothy a while ago. So the one that Pat just showed me, but let's start with in reading this, did committee members think this might be a way to frame discussions and look at matters? Is this something worth pursuing in other words or should we scrap it and think about something else? You covered up your mic sign. I felt like it was well designed and that and really workable. And Steve, do you have something? I have a question on B, which is like the discovery portion where we have to find out, do we have enough information? And if we don't, where do we get it? And it looks like that's a lot of work and we don't have any staff to speak of. I mean, we do, we do, but can we come to you all the time? Okay. They're taking an early evening because of that Dorothy. Do you know what I mean by staff? Staff means somebody I can say, would you please do this for me? We don't do that with you guys, we can't. No, I mean, I can't keep up with the work connected to this job and committee at home because there's things when you have absolutely no staff and you go every place yourself and try to find all the documents and read all the documents and then remember what you read, that's a lot. And then we go to 20 hours of meeting a week. Well, every other week. Only 20? No, so I think, yeah, we have to be realistic, but it is honestly part of my job as your staff liaison to try to bring you resources, bring you people within reason to answer your questions or come and come to your meetings, whether it be, you know, the chief of police, the fire chief planners, developers, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I think within reason, that is what we can try to do. And I think that's why I do kind of favor a structure as Mandy has kind of outlined here to kind of keep it because we have to be realistic. How far a field can we go with our inquiries? And I think you'll reach kind of a comfort zone on whether, you know, whether it's, you know, our Capellago coming in to talk about parking on Spring Street or speed limits or a CPA proposal. So that is part of our job and we'll do the best we can to bring you those resources. Steve. So a couple of things. So one is the planning board, zoning board of appeals when they do site plan review, special permit, they have a checklist not unlike this, which is required to, you know, to get a response. And some of it becomes, some of it's incredibly important and some like we did a tennis court resurfacing that had to get a site plan review and then it becomes sort of ridiculous, right? So because of course the tennis court should be resurfaced but still we have to go through. So there has to be an expedited review and actually then we started an expedited review that we believe that this meets the intent of that. So I think it's great that it's like when we get to zoning. I would also, one of my favorite reads is a book called How We Decide or How People Decide or something this and it has to do with exactly this. How do people make decisions? And an example given is that of cupcakes. So you, if you, anyone know, do you know anyone know this? No. So there was some talent study where people are asked to evaluate cupcakes and everyone felt totally confident and saying this is my favorite, this is my second, third, fourth, fifth. But there has been a checklist that rank each cupcake for its texture, rank each for its flavor, rank each for its aesthetics, rank each for its blank, all of it. And so they did that and then they are again were asked to rank the favorite cupcakes in the order completely accepted. And it's not because they weren't, it's not because they were making a better decision but because of the ability to make a decision. So that's, I love orderly decision making, but I think that we also, we also have to trust our instincts. I think what you're saying is really important. Do I think? So did you mean that their original, what's that word, blink decision was in fact better than when they had the checklist? Not a book by Gladwell, but I'm sure it's on the bookstore right next to Gladwell. Jonathan Lehrer, who had some problems with plagiarism or something like that, but still this study is a good study. So I'm going to give you the other one, Atul Gawande, and he's got a really good article on the medical checklist, and it's really hard asking a surgeon to do a goddamn checklist, but when they don't, then there's a glove that's forgotten and diseases get transmitted. So we're not surgeons here, but and we do trust our instincts, but Pat says, right, that we should kind of move it a little bit more towards the checklist. So I think we can kind of do both. Okay? Steve, so that's sort of a task. That's a task kind of a checklist, like a pilot's, pilots have to know about our experiences. However, you want your pilot to, or your brain started to have enough self-knowledge and knowledge of the field to be able to make a decision without the task checklist. When it's really important. So you have to do both because you're right, my brother was a pilot and he fired and got fired anybody who did not do the complete checklist before they went up in the air. And there's also, you're supposed to go rub your hand over your plane and you supervise the washing of it so that you can see anything that's there. And my analogy is, why does the mother have to give a baby a bath a lot? It's not that dirty. The skin actually does fine, but you do it so the mother in fact doesn't expect that baby and covers the whole thing with her hands and she checks them out. So I think we do need a checklist, but we do need the knowledge that that pilot has to all those thousands of years of hours of flying and we have to be able to trust that too. So I am for checklist and our own lived experience. We've got sort of something like that here is what I would say. Why don't we go through the main parts of this? Cause Part A was clearly identified the purpose of the committee's review. So yes. Make up something, not. Oh, I was going to do something we've already done. Like we had the downtown parking, working group priority recommendations referred to us. And I'm taking that because we're done with it. And the council's already acted on that. So if we screwed it up, well, it's not gonna come back to us anyway, right? So we had that referred to us. And I think we actually somewhat struggled with what are we supposed to do with this? And so if we had had something like this to start with, the first thing I think we would have done, initially I think we brought people in to talk about those priority recommendations, but I think the first thing we would have done was try to identify what we were supposed to do with them. I don't know what that identification would look like, but would that, would say Step A, clearly identify the purpose of a CRC review, have helped us in that instance focus our questions to the people we brought in, our discussion, all of that. Is this a good sort of part of the review to have? I remember you said that so many times, you said what are we supposed to do with this? And since we were new, we didn't know, but yeah, that is the question, right? What are people expecting us to do? And how are we supposed to do it? What is the finished product supposed to be? And so we ended up just making a few recommendations. I don't remember what we did in fact anymore. We ended up writing a memo that said, incorporated into the town manager's goals, but... I was wondering if, you know, the finance committee has very specific area that it looks at, and CRC is broader. But I'm wondering if, is there a process like that of determining what you're trying to decide about an issue, Andy? Well, finance committee is looking to inform the council about the financial impact of something that is proposed, and try and be as objective as we possibly can and providing that information. So that's sort of step one. And then sort of step two, which I think is important, but not as essential as if we have a recommendation to explain the, to make the recommendation explain why, but it really needs to tie into the first, which is if the council doesn't have the basic knowledge of the financial consequences of doing or not doing a proposed appropriation, then it can't assess whether it likes the recommendation or agrees with the recommendation. So I try very hard to keep us out of additional things and like the housing, for example, to our report, which I need to get back to now of the final draft, but you've pretty much seen the draft already, really gets into what the potential costs are of various approaches and makes a couple suggestions that come out of that understanding, but then things like the type of housing, some of the things that Dorothy's just mentioned earlier this evening, we included some of that because it did have some relevance, but it wasn't the major purpose and I tried not to make it the major purpose of what we did. I'll add something here. In our discussion of the Centennial Water Plant, we finance committee looked at the financial implications, it's very expensive, but then we did, I believe we did this anyway, went outside that and said, but in terms of our goals of self-sufficiency and sustainability, although this is very expensive and we could certainly, many places might not do it. They might not do that and they would just say, well, we'll just get by. We decided not to do that, even though it's very expensive because it was felt it was safer in the long run for the town. So we never just do one thing. We always have to think of what is the lens of our particular committee and that we're trying to do, but what are some of the overall values that we need to recommend to the town. Andy. I mean, it's a good example because what was happening, what we realized was that if we didn't fund the Centennial Plant Rehabilitation that we were gonna have to shut down that watershed and cut off one of three major sources of water for the town and that if our goal was to assure that there was an adequate supply of quality water as circumstances changed either in growth of the town or demand on water supply in other ways or environmental aspects that might cut down on the water that came from the other two sources that we needed to do that. So we recognized that there was a cost to not doing it. It wasn't a quantifiable cost in the same way that you could cost out how much it was to replace the old Centennial Water Treatment Plant with a new one, but it was a cost and there was a values piece in there too because I think that we recognized that having an adequate supply of quality water was something that the town valued and didn't want and the desire not to get into a drought crisis situation which Dave and I are only too familiar with is not something that we necessarily thought was good but at least we put all of that out there for the council so that the council could understand that there was a consequence of not doing it. And it was partly a values piece then because of the way I just described it. Thank you. I think when I'm hearing Andy is that your purpose, the committee knew what the purpose was and yet there was the ability of the committee to reflect on the value of clean water, et cetera that so you still did your job but you went further because of a natural sort of consequence of not doing. So the doing and my doing was still in the frame of what you were trying to study, but I don't know. Let me try to rephrase that. So I think what you're trying, my, feel free to correct me, I think what you're trying to get at is that the committee took that, finance has a much easier what is the purpose of the review and you can start with that without necessarily having to figure out why it's in front of your committee. So A, on this document, A is a lot easier to determine sometimes than it is in this committee but then once you did that and you were discussing the impacts, you went beyond, you discussed the financial impacts to the town and all but then you said what's the impact if we say this financial burden is too much and you went and said that impact is something else and that kind of went beyond say the specifics and the nature of the finance charge but one reason it may have done that and finance might have felt okay doing it in that instance is it was not sitting in front of any other committee. So that was the only committee reviewing whereas housing might, this housing priorities policy might have been a lot harder because of, we know it's sitting in two committees and you don't wanna duplicate the work. I like the phrase which I'm sure other people have heard but I hadn't heard it in this context, a values piece, I like that phrase so that we figure out what our, or agree upon what our purpose is and that we see what we need to know and that we try to answer and we try to go through a checklist to make sure that we don't leave something on some rug not lifted up or some thing that looked at but that we understand that there are times when we go beyond the list to a values piece. I think that I'd be fine and happy with that. Andy. And we did start earlier talking about values and we made a list in a way, the list was values are incorporated in the master plan. They're incorporated in our own appendix A to the council rules and they're incorporated in some of the policies we've adopted such as the climate action plan was the one that was given, I thought of several others. So there are various places that I think that we know to look for what our, what the values are that something is being measured against because in the end, a proposal is made to do or not do something and the impact comes against is being measured against something and we kind of did a good job of, I think identifying to the extent we could where to look for those values. So let's move on to B because I think given this discussion we actually believe we need A. At least some of the time we need to be able to clearly identify because sometimes we struggle with what does the council actually want from us. And so B was one of the things that I think and Dorothy maybe Steve pointed out as, ooh, this could be really hard or how would this one be accomplished? Which is identification of stakeholders information needed in prior recommendations. So this is where maybe we identify all those documents that might provide us those values to get ourselves up there. But if it came from a committee like the housing trust what did they do? What did they complete? What were their recommendations? If it came from the planning board let's make sure we have their report in front of us. And then what questions did they have? And all of that the second one under this is do we need or want information or recommendations from other town associated people or committees? If it's a zoning proposal on, I don't know, if it's or this percent for art bylaw or something if it's something from the Public Art Commission on art well do we want something from the trust because it might relate to housing or do we want something from the planning board because it relates to the master plan or that's sort of what I was thinking with number two and then number three is and so if that's the case if we want that information well maybe they considered it already or do we want something from TAC? It hasn't been to TAC, do we want something from TAC? If they considered it already let's try and get that information before we talk about it. If they haven't maybe we send it off to them and say hey, can you look at this before we talk about it? But what we can talk about is that simultaneous? Is it not? How do we make those decisions? And then the third one is do we even have a clue about what we're discussing or do we need help figuring out of getting a little more expertise or knowledge so that we can have a discussion about impacts and all? That's sort of where number three is for me. Yeah. Right, yeah. Andy. It strikes me that there might be a four or one or whatever it is but we really need to know whether town meeting is the prior legislative body or the select board is the prior administrative body has expressed an opinion that are adopted any policy regarding that issue that is before us because we should be informed by past action. Well, that has been most of the process for me this year is in conversation with people I find out there was a report, there was a decision and it's all new to me trying to find it and there's a lot of stuff out there. So how would we, and yeah, part of later in this meeting is trying to identify as much as we can of things that have potentially been done but how would we go about any suggestions on figuring out how to identify a prior town meeting action or whether it's important to identify, say a prior town meeting action town meeting has existed for 200, it existed for 200 or so years. Going to the extreme does something town meeting enacted in 1885, that's a real extreme, but maybe not, right? If it relates to the common and there really desires for what say the town common looks like, it may or may not impact our decision, right? At how far back is it logical to go number one? Or is it really just relying on our staff's memory and our own councilor's memories? We've got some committee members here that have been involved for decades in town that have a very good memory. I think it's really important, like Steve, your background and your work on planning and zoning, Andy and Alyssa on select board, et cetera. But I also think that we need to, you know, I've had meetings where Lynn and I met with Connie Krueger or you've done that also and got some of the history. So I don't think we should just rely on those three in very specific instances. But I think that what I do appreciate is when I hear the history, but we also have to remember that because it's history doesn't mean that's what should be recommended, but should be looked at and built from in one direction or another. You wouldn't be swayed by the fact that buggies were parked on the common in 1885? Nah, cause she won't let electric vehicles park there. So I learned these things only by accident and people tell me and it's always like, oh wow, that's really exciting. And there's no way to go to a place on the website, the town page and say town meeting and then Google a topic and find out what's it, I mean, like you do, like today I was searching up a topic that was very dear to me, Sunnyside Gardens, found there's a lot of good stuff with a lot of big holes on the internet right there, but we can't search town meeting as far as I know. And some of the people who tell me about things in town meeting are not very young and it's really hitting me that do we have that history? Is it written down? Is it accessible? It is written down, it is written down and you can search the website and it's actually a pretty good search engine. So if I were to search funding for some project that I worked on in 2004, I probably could find the town meeting action that was taken to either thumbs up or thumbs down authorization for funding or whatever it might be. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good search engine. Do we know how far back the online records go? How far have we been digitized? I know we have them back as far as they go, but the oldest ones are in handwritten scans and so those are more difficult to search, but they are available. The annual reports are on there, but before they were produced in electronic format, they only exist because they were scanned and then they're just scanned documents and they make for fascinating reading and sometimes if you know approximately when something happened, you can go and look for it and read it, but it is not always easy to know and which year's annual report you should be looking at and wearing the annual reports, but you just really have to be playing with it for a while to find out. I was just doing it in the last couple of days because I was trying to find out about when we got onto the INET and the history of the INET since we're gonna be asked to appropriate money to replace the INET. And I found of course very useful is what you, what keywords you use. So town meeting results will cut through a lot of other things because of course there's the warrant and there's all the committee reports that go into town meeting and really if you wanna cut to the chase and see was that project funded, the school project or a capital project going to those results, a CPA project, did we ever fund acts? Have we ever funded, what was the first ball field project that we funded with CPA dollars? I think I know that one and I think it might be Plum Brook which Andy and some other folks will remember was a little bit controversial back in 2005 or six somewhere in there, four, five, six, so. So I wanna take us back to the question that Dorothy sort of brought up at the beginning was how do we get the information if we come up and are referred a topic and I'll put out there a housing priorities plan or housing plan because that may be referred to us in a week or so. I don't know if anyone on this committee feels confident enough that they know enough about housing to be able to be drafting a plan. So how do we get the information that we need and some of the basic knowledge we need to do that when, as Dorothy put it, there really isn't a lot of staff support for individual counselors and how much do we need or do we just start drafting stuff and then ship it off to random committees? What are people's thoughts, Dorothy? So maybe we could, you know, putting our heads together draft something and then we give it to Dave who would give it to planning or various departments and get some official feedback or they would come in to speak to this particular aspects of it. Before we get ready to pass it on to town council, hopefully they would have more knowledge of what we're looking for. Is that a fair statement? I might reverse the order on that a little bit. My preference would be to have staff come in and do a little presentation and then have you do a Q and A to inform, help inform your discussion moving forward. For instance, on housing, we've got the housing production plan, we've got the housing market study, we have the master plan. So to have staff come in and maybe give you an overview of where we've been, where we are and where we might go and then I've found bringing in Rob Mora, Chris Brestrup, Nate Malloy, Chief Livingstone to be very helpful to you all and I think it would be more effective than individual meetings. You all are meeting doubt as our many department heads but getting them here so the five of you can pepper them with questions and I think frankly, we're very open to that and receptive to that. So staff I find want to share information with the council. They're very proud of the work they're doing. Whether it's a grant we just got or a program we're working on or whatever it might be with committee A, B or C. So I might front load that. Then you all develop your draft plan and then we could send it out through, if you wanted the housing trust to comment back on it if it was a housing project or the planning director or the building commissioner, something like that. Yeah. And then I think likely once it reached the full council then you would have public comment, well of course people could come to your meeting at this stage at this level and then they could also come to the council meeting whether there would be a full public hearing on something like that or it might just be a public meeting where the full council accepts comment. So I think we'd welcome something like that. And again, we don't, there's so many resources to tap from. I don't want you to think you need to reinvent the wheel on these. I think there's some really good framework to pull from. So that's my thoughts. Well, I would say that that sounds good but I would like us to first meet and think of, get our kind of real brainstorming session and we would give you topics or things that we were thinking about so that you could maybe target what your staff says to us. So we haven't really done that and I think that would be, that's something I would talk about a retreat but I'd like to go do it in a more comfortable place maybe but talk about what do we think we would like to have as part of this thing and then send it to you and then they would say, oh yeah, well we did this or no that wouldn't work or whatever it was. They would come and give us some stuff and then we'd go back and talk about it some more, come up with something then. That would be fine kind of more of an iterative process but even if you spent that early session as you said Dorothy brainstorming but then came up with a list of questions. I think the CPAC does that quite routinely for applicants and it's very helpful to know what the committee, what are their questions? What are their outstanding questions about Project A or B, what are their issues on moving forward with this project or that? So knowing where the five of you are and on housing I imagine they'll range from what can the university do to help with student housing to how do we get more over 55 housing, affordable over 55 units and Amherst and everything in between. So from a chair's point of view, what I'm hearing is if something's referred to us maybe the first meeting is to work on identifying what our purpose is and then doing portions of B, making sure we've gotten all the reports from whatever committees have already heard it. Trying to identify what other people may have information that might be in written form to bring that in and then also at that meeting talking about what we might also want or what questions we have and once we've identified what our purpose is before staff might come in to answer those questions to have a mini conversation first and then at a second meeting would be when the staff could come in to have that question instead of trying to do that at a first meeting. Is that what I'm hearing? They know so much, there's so much to say. Gives them a way to pick and choose what they're gonna say. After we can give them a report of well here's where our questions lay and all. So let's talk about C since I've got an idea on B. C was the discussion essentially. How do we frame our discussion that in finance Andy talked about is identifying the impacts on the finances of the town. In here where the community resources committee so we're kind of set with identifying a whole lot of stuff. So I had two sort of options as ways to assess stuff. So I'd like people's thoughts on whether two options are necessary and I put them both in there because I could see potentially where one option A which I used what I heard from the people who sat on the town manager goals ad hoc committee the smart method for town manager goals could potentially be the way to start a discussion or manage a discussion on say if we had been referred to climate action goals something that is non specific, non overarching say policy versus a specific bylaw proposal. They might require completely different evaluation methods I don't know whether I got them right number one whether this is the way to go about them but are there potentially more evaluation methods out there does this cover what people see as potentially the main ways we might need to evaluate stuff based on what we've already had referred to us or can suspect we might get referred to us. I definitely see a difference in the smart method and the impact benefits and drawbacks. So I like the idea of having to not articulate but. Answer's the question. Other thoughts? Andy. I think that they both serve a purpose but somewhat of a different purpose because when you, if you start with number two and you come up with what are the impacts benefits and drawbacks some of that gets incorporated into the values that are there because I suppose that the fact that it's not achievable or realistic or relevant is a drawback. But the idea of measurability is important too because how do you assess anything if you don't know what your measures are? So I would tend to leave them both in the committee as it looks at various kinds of assignments that it has been asked to look into may have to choose the method or blend or elements of each method that are most appropriate for the particular assignment. And so the discussion and identification of impacts benefits, drawbacks, and proposed measures is the right discussion and everything that's under it in one and two really are options that should be considered each time but that we need to assure that the committee understands what is being assigned to it, the purpose for the review, the information needed and then gets into that discussion of what the potential benefits cost impacts are. They're not all equal. We can look at all of them but they're not all equal. Something's gonna be more important than others. Which gets into a recommendation in a sense that you've identified them all and then I'm voting this way and recommending this way because these are so much more important than that one in my mind or something. So under the 1B, the impacts, I think the smart method the specific measurable achievable, realistic or relevant time bound or time oriented are fairly specific in terms of what they're asking. The B, the impacts benefits drawbacks that I used, I added a couple, the one I specifically wanted to highlight but I'd love to hear thoughts on all of these options is the financial one that I added in because we do have a finance committee but one of the reasons I put it in here is a recognition that maybe not everything that gets referred to us also goes to finance. Or even if it does go to finance, it might still be appropriate for us to at least acknowledge what some of those impacts may be. And so I'd like to hear people's thoughts specifically on that sort of subcategory of impacts but certainly on all of the subcategories are some of these appropriate, inappropriate, unable to be determined too broad, too specific, all that sort of thoughts. I think it's a grab bag and I think you look through it and you see what sticks and you follow it up and make sure you have some thought on it but we don't have to fill in a dot in every grid. It doesn't have to be that rigid, I don't think. And then not everything has these impacts but I think it's always useful because when I'm trying to do something, I don't do it right away and as I go around doing the other things I'm doing, one by one things pop up, oh, I gotta do this, oh, I gotta do that. And it takes a long time to think of all the things that you have to look at when you're doing something. So this saves a lot of time, I think. Andy, do you have a thought on the inclusion of the financial section? Well, I think the financial is part of everything that's, as I was saying in the finance committee, we recognize that sometimes it's easier to find costs than the value of paying that cost. And so when we get into the centennial plant, we can, as I said, we can very easily figure out how much it costs to build it. What we couldn't figure out is how do you put a dollar value on the question of diminishing the amount of water that's available to the town and whether there's an easy measure to put in there. Housing one is actually even a better one because we can assess from prior experience the amount that we've invested to save certain kinds or to develop certain kinds of units, whether it was preservation of existing or creation of new. But there's a values element that is the other side of it. And I think that's why it was referred to committees because the values judgment really had to come from this committee. So do you think it's worth leaving the financial item on this document? Given that we do have a finance committee, is there a good purpose in keeping it here? Or is it sort of overreaching for this committee? I don't think it's overreaching. I think that one of the, whenever membership on this committee is set up, there really does need to be finance committee member on it. I think because we do wanna look at the costs of things and having some way of reflecting on that instead of waiting for another committee's report to us, I think would be valuable. But I also feel it's like Andy saying, what if the finance committee had not thought about the value of clean water and access to water? What if they just went with the costs? Then we would be looking at the lifetime value is longevity in the people who are drinking clean water or whatever. I don't know. So I think it should be there. Another one was a little bit easier. The housing one I think is a little more difficult because in the end it was referred to committees. And I think it was referred to committees for a reason. And it was a recognition that there were housing policy pieces of what was being proposed that needed to be considered along with the cost of accomplishing them in the two fit together. And in the end, I always come back to the point that we don't make policy in committees. The council makes policy. We can recommend policy, but we can't establish policy. I would just say I think that housing one is potentially a good example. I'm not sure this committee was prepared to go into as much detail as the finance committee went into in terms of what that cost would look like versus just a recognition. And maybe that's where that referral difference is appropriate. This committee could certainly recognize that's a lot of money that accomplishing these would be a lot of money. And maybe if the committee recognizes that and it hasn't been referred to finance, part of that financial analysis is oh, we're realizing this would have a huge impact if adopted, maybe we need to send this off to finance if the council already hasn't for a more in-depth analysis. I would perhaps change some of the wording in number seven. It's a little bit too specific financey sounding. Maybe say relevant financial, it's something vague. I think keep the word finance because I think that we would do that. But it's sounding like real expense cost to town or residents. Well, we might not know the details, but it could be relevant expense cost or something not as if we're gonna have the numbers. We're not gonna, we don't create the numbers. We don't go collect the numbers. I don't think. But we can say there may be a problem here or this is something that has to be looked at or that the council has to think about or as you said, the finance committee needs to deal with. So it would not be potential revenue changes but effect of potential revenue changes. How do these things affect the people? So maybe find a way to change that wording to recognize sort of a big picture cost instead of the small picture cost. And then potential recommendations on whether more in depth is needed on that. Right, because somebody else might come and find this and say, what is this doing there? So, and we don't really wanna get into a big discussion. We know what we mean that there are some financial implications which might be appropriate for CRC to look into or at least to talk to people about. But we're not in charge of this. Steve. Yeah, I think it's critical to leave it in and financial could simply be adopting a report by another committee, by the finance committee. That's true. Let's move to number two in this section, the policies, goals and regulations that might help guide recommendation given our prior discussion tonight. Maybe that's in the wrong section. But we touched on a lot of it up in sort of B. Maybe B is the appropriate spot to do that identification instead of after we've had a discussion under C which is the discussion of the impacts and benefits maybe before we even get to that discussion. It's appropriate to identify what policies the town has adopted that frame that impacts and all. I can tell you when I was drafting this I probably had it in both sections multiple times and was trying to figure out, well the consideration I guess as I was drafting it was when do you peg those impacts to the policies? Is it at the time you're discussing the impacts or is it once you've identified the impacts and are trying to make that recommendation on do we support passage or not of this policy or this bylaw, is it at that time that you peg the, I think that's what I was struggling with is at what time do you say yes or no this measure is recommended for passage or not at what time do you say because it doesn't support that goal or it's why I probably struggled but where do people think number two should be? The purpose, I think I did it as identify policies or goals that the recommendation should consider and all so maybe it does belong up in B. So I've needed clarification on this. I have somewhere amongst my piles of papers many of the reports that are this other piece of paper that have been done but what I don't know is who passed it, when they passed it is this still a policy of the town because I started reading the housing production plan and right away I came across stuff I said what and I don't think we think this way or believe that way now I don't think it's necessarily quite what the master plan said though it might relate to it. So just because the fact that there was a report done at a certain date adopted by somebody or group does that mean that that, it doesn't mean that that's a policy we have to follow does it? Well it's guidance because it is established policy but the council is now the governing body and so if the council believes that a policy that has been previously adopted does not continue to make sense, it's certainly always able to make a change. That's why we were elected. And I also had that there are policies and then there are simply reports and there are plans. So something like the housing production plan is not necessarily in my mind a policy, it is a document that was created in time and at that time we believed what was articulated in the, not everybody I'm sure there was disagreement but at that time the research was done, consultants came in and assessments were done and so at that time goals might have been articulated in the housing production plan or any other plan that we have. For instance, the open space and recreation plan, it may, I wouldn't call it a policy document, I would call it a guidance document for the town relative to our open space and recreation goals. So we refer back to it for instance with the CPA proposal right now for further work on a multi-purpose field at the high school and community field. We would refer back to the open space and recreation plan to say, well, was that identified in that plan or was the need for more quality fields identified in that plan, my answer would be yes, even though that plan was last updated, I think in 2017, so it's fairly fresh. So I think it's important to identify time it was completed or adopted or approved by the relative committee or board. That is information which I don't think, well, maybe it's not, I'd like it on the cover on the top sheet with the title, but it's very interesting to have. Was it commissioned by people who voted for it? What was the date? So that we know if this is just, because I like to read what people thought and did, but I wanna know how much weight we have to give it. So if you could identify the documents a little bit more background on that. So I do wanna point out at least as it relates to the document, we've been discussing the impact report template or whatever I call this. One of the things as part of identifying those policies, goals, regulations is also identifying their applicability, which I think goes directly to, well, how long ago was it? Is that something the council is still seeking to sort of aim for or not? But yeah, so let's talk more about that when we get to identifying documents that are relevant to CRC's work, because I think it goes directly to that attempt there. The last thing, if I don't hear any more about this. I just wanna quickly say, and it's probably not important, but I'm looking, I can see why you kept moving it around to the top, to the bottom, because it's the bridge statement. Identifying the policies and goals and documents, blah, blah, blah, that clearly goes into big. But this discussing the applicability and whether the proposal of herderies or fails to further compliance, that's part of C, discussing and identifying the impacts. I mean, is this document applicable, could also happen in the, is it so old that, or it's so new that it doesn't matter? But whether the proposal would, in these policies and guidelines, further or fail to further compliance with, so I think that is somehow a revenue bridge. So maybe it needs to be in both. In the end, that means. Okay. Yeah, some sort of split where B gets identify the documents. And that the recommendation should consider and then to keep in this sort of section, discuss their applicability or even, and whether they, this. Because I can say, hey, we need to look at the 2017 fire study, and it's applicable. And here's, has information, but if I go back and see the 1947 one, maybe that doesn't have much applicability. It might be saying the same thing, given that we're amateurs, but. Right, yeah, okay. D is the vote. This is sort of the recognizing the final step. We've in A identified what we were supposed to be doing. So D to me would directly go back to A and vote on what that purpose of the review is. If it's to make recommendations versus, is it just to identify impacts without making recommendations? Did they really just wanna general survey or something? So D sort of finishes the process and would be the last sort of step in before. We send it back to the council. And then that's where we would get to, you know, it says here why the votes the way it is. You know, here's everything, but why did people in taking all of that, get to yes or get to no, what were of these 30 things we identified, which one spoke the most to people. To take it to, as I'm writing the report for, this coming council meeting on the percent for art, we identified a couple of negatives. We identified a bunch of positives, but the negative that spoke most to say your vote, Pat, was that impact on taxes. Not, well, it might be over broad, which is what I identified. It was really that impact on taxes. And one of the things that spoke most of me on my vote was, yes, it has that impact, but we can ignore it because we can vote it out. So I'm okay. You know, but it's identifying. Way to get out of the issue. But identifying of these 30 things we talked about, here's the three that really impacted how we got to our recommendation. Sort of pointing out the right, those specific ones. I would simplify the phrasing just a little. Sure. So that would make a formal recommendation to the council some little phrase as to how the council should act. Or to, as using, I think Andy's phrase, to inform or to guide the council in there. It's because we're talking to the council because the council's gonna take a vote and gonna do something, right? We're not just, the whole purpose of our doing this recommendation of the council is because the council is going to take it into consideration and the council's gonna vote. In theory, there's potentially a time where they might refer something to us. Then council take action. How's that? Take action. To guide the council in its actions. I mean, I know that we know that's what we were talking about, but I had to read this sentence a couple of times to just parse the phrases. Any other thoughts on this document? Given the discussion, it sounds like it might be something we want to potentially try to adopt or acknowledge as here's sort of a process for dealing with referrals. So I will come back with changes, maybe potentially even at our next meeting for another discussion and potential vote on a process if that sounds good to people, does it? Yup, Pat. I think it would be wise to talk to, when we present this to council, talk about the relationship to the community impact framework because we're trying to bridge this divide that exists in town. And if we're saying this document helped us create this document, we're not gonna have the residents on it that they want, but we don't need to say that part. I'm just trying to think of how can we begin to think when we report about bridging certain? God, I wonder if that's my word of the night. I hope not. So yeah, so I don't necessarily intend as chair unless this committee asks differently to put it up for a council vote because I see it as a process of the committee, but certainly as OCA has done with their internal process, they presented something to the committee and said, we've done this. I can certainly present this in a report and say, hey, we had our retreat. This is what we discussed at the next meeting. We hope to potentially adopt this as one of our processes for evaluating referrals. And this document started out, the basis of this document started out from the TMAC community impact report framework. So I can do it that way. If the committee thinks there's another way, I should do it. I'm certainly happy, but I did not necessarily intend this to go to the council for a vote. But certainly, yeah. Yes, I agree. But in terms of recording it, so that that. Okay, so discuss the value or the, I'll come up with the wording there. Yeah, I'm sure. The TMAC proposal. Okay. If we couldn't find the places across. If the council can find places where? Sounds good. Sounds like we're ready to move on. We are right on time. Do people want a break? We're about two hours in. Do people want a break? We'll take a five minute break. I'm going to pause the video started. So we are on to our 820 item, which is collaboration with town committees. And the first item is identify the town committees for likely collaboration as it relates to our charge. And then the second item is a potential discussion on what that collaboration should look like. And that discussion might be too much for tonight, but I threw it in there. We've already sort of started that with how to collaborate on a master plan. But let's start first with, I created sort of a list of committees. I took this from the committee list that the ad hoc rules of procedure group created for terms of liaisons. And then I deleted a whole bunch from that list. That I deleted anything that was not a town committee of say, so all of the regional things, the PVTA type committees. I deleted and I think that's a lot of, and then all of the council committees, our own committees, the CRC committee was on the list, or finance was on the list, I deleted those. And I was left with then a list of 41 committees, which is kind of scary. So what we can do, I think the way to do this is to just start at the top. They're in alphabetical order per how the appointing authority is. So not complete alphabetical order. And maybe what we can do is just start at the top and say, yes, that one might relate to our charge. And as we're doing this, maybe we should identify current charge or potential future charge. Like I'd make an identification that says if this TSO and transportation is set out, that one no longer necessarily, that one might not relate to us for likely collaboration. So does that sound like a good plan for how to go through this list of 41 committees? Sure. And I apologize, I should have looked this up already. What's the difference? What is the Amherst Reed Development Authorities? Like I know what the Housing Authority does, but what is the Reed Development Authority? Dave. I just met with them. So I don't know a tremendous amount about the ARA, but I think their statutory power comes through state law and essentially they have the authority to work with any municipality on redevelopment of blighted land. So essentially land within a town or city needs to be deemed blighted and they can, they have quite a bit of power. I believe they have the power to buy land, take land, buy eminent domain. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, they were part many, many years ago, predates me working for the town on the development of the garage over near banks. There's certain areas of town that I don't even, Steve may know. Certain areas of town that Steve might know the answer, where they gain the power to make decisions on what is done with that piece of land, whether it is developed or acquired for other purposes, use purposes, and my recollection is also parking garage. So I think most recently they were involved in the gateway project, the area down Phillips and Fearing. And I think that there was a study to see whether or not that could be declared to be blighted. And I believe that the study came up short. So it didn't meet whatever the standard was. So they're really almost on call. They don't have, like sometimes they don't meet. For a year or more. Yeah, yep. Oh, and I guess this, I never fixed this town committee list. They are no longer elected. They are town manager appointed. The redevelopment authority, they used to be elected. The charter changed there from elected to appointed by the town manager. Potentially, partially because they rarely do meet because we don't have a lot of blighted land in town that qualifies for things they can do. So let's start with the housing authority. And I guess I would actually like more explanation on the scope of the housing authority. I know they are in charge of section eight vouchers sort of in town in a sense. And they sort of have a board or oversee the executive director that deals with the Ann Whalen apartments. But do they really deal with any policy? Like housing policy in town? In general, my experience and Andy can chime in here. In general, they're not involved in the town's housing policy. I mean, they're a separate entity. They oversee units of affordable housing in town. And for instance, one of their members is actually a representative to the CPAC. We fund them, they are eligible for CDBG funds, for CPAC funds. We've funded a number of renovation projects at housing authority properties, but they're not active in the same way on policy and the development of new units like the affordable housing trust is. So they have their own executive director, their own staff, and they do not, the executive director, nor the staff report to the town manager. He's on the board. Oh, thank God you're on time. Yeah, Andy? I mean, housing authority property is property that's built for benefit of low income, elderly, disabled people. They're identified certain properties that are in town. I think that basically they own and manage property. They have a management and maintenance staff. They establish rules for their properties. There was a controversy several years ago about the question of banning smoking in properties and sort of the interests of the individual tenant to be able to use their apartment as they appropriate and the larger interests of the neighbors or I shouldn't say larger, the interest of the neighbors and how that balanced out and other policy decisions that they make. As does any landlord. And then they, as Andy indicated, they hold thing with, they have certain number of assigned section eight certificates that they manage. And they have a policy to do that. There've been various times when they've searched other functions. I believe that several of the inclusionary zoning apartments where landlords do not have experience of selecting low income people for inclusion in affordable housing that they have got those developers presidential apartments. Barry Roberts have entered into contracts with housing authority to help them make those management decisions. So, yep, was that, did they pay for that or did the town pay for that? Who's the they? They built developers because I think the developers The developers paid for that service. It's basically for them to run the state mandated lottery. And they do that with Belcher Town too. Belcher Town's contracted with them. Because part of me thinks that maybe if we want to encourage inclusionary zoning if they didn't have to pay for, but if the town said, listen, we're just, this is what one of the things we're gonna do to help you do inclusionary zoning. We will do this at no cost to you. I don't know how specific, I don't know, how deep we're going into a very brief answer before we move on. Yeah, I would not go there right now because I think we might have some different opinions on when we're talking about affordable housing potentially later on a housing policy. I think the question is, is that cost a barrier for developers to do it? And I think that's a discussion we should have at some point. So let's say we're gonna go through this list. The first one on the list I have is Amherst Housing Authority. Do we think that someone, given our charge that we might need to collaborate with? Given what they do and what we're charged with. I heard one probably not. I guess I have a slightly different view but still it comes into the probably not. And my point is that it's a judgment call you make on a case-by-case basis. On this particular issue, are there any committees off the list that might be helpful? I could conceive because we're talking about inclusionary zoning, but you might wanna talk to them about their experience in managing. And then, yes, you are collaborating with them, but it doesn't mean that it's likely to happen but I don't wanna say no. So it's one we should keep in mind at least. Yeah, that's why I was wondering, except for the possibility of knocking something off the list because we can't conceive that we would ever consider that we would, an issue that would relate to them, aren't we really just identifying a list of committees that we always wanna look at to see if there's anybody there? So that's why I thought it could potentially be a quick run-through of are there some that there really aren't much of a possibility of consulting because of what they do or they're totally out of our charge? Things like that. So redevelopment authority, given what we've heard they do? If there's a read, yeah. If we say, which one can we kick out, it gets... Okay, so I'll read through the list and yeah, but that's what we're gonna do. The school committee, the school committee, you know? I mean, it's hard to guess what we'd see but housing and zoning and stuff is something. Yeah, so I don't see us dealing with public buildings that much. Like the fire station, the schools, the library. However, the library of the school, the fire station may require a zoning change or a zoning tweak or so, but I would not say that the school committee or the school project is really our purview. So we're in general kicking out the school committee from this list and the trustees, library trustees? Diddow? The library is a major place for the homeless. Austin gives a really strong speech about the library as the most democratic place in town. I don't want to kick it off the list. Planning board is a yes. Zoning board? Because their primary job is, the planning board has both quasi-judicial and a planning side. So we really collaborate with them on the planning side. The zoning board doesn't have the planning, the all they do is render judgments basically. So I would say no for them. So even with a zoning change, you wouldn't think they might- The planning board consults with the zoning board of appeals, but I don't think that needs to be our job. In fact, it comes awkward if we're... Any disagreement with that at this point? I'm seeing some potential. Is the zoning subcommittee listed on here? That's part of the planning board. Yeah, so I won't kick it off the list and delete it from the list. You will not. I will not. I think they're long been a stand-up. No, I'm not sure they all are. Give me a second. It'd be good for one if you wanted. So then we've got participatory budgeting and ranked choice voting. At this point, I'm not sure either of what they're doing will come to us at all. So those are two, I would say, can go off the list. Because I think they would go to GOL or if this committee splits, they would end up in town services. So I'm kicking those off the list. The Affordable Housing Trust is definitely a yes, I would say. The Ag Commission. And then we've got the Recreation Working Group. Board of Assessors. See, there are some, Andy. Everyone yelled at it. Okay, it's not really in existence anymore. Okay, even if funding is provided for things, it's not really gonna go through them. So you wanna know where Board of Assessors might fit in when you're getting around saying mixed use development and how is mixed use development taxed? Who are you gonna ask? You're gonna ask the Board of Assessors. That's why I think that the game of removing unlikely, you might ask either. It's a fair point, but I'm just not sure what we're gaining by this exercise. That's fine. Well, I guess there's 42 on here. And, and I... Well, 41 on here, sorry, there's 41. And I think it's, to me I think it's helpful to hear what people think about how we might be able to use them. Because that gives us a framework as we go through the prior framework. We just said we'd like to consider to think about what committees might be useful to us. So this new committee, is it gonna take health and aging, or do we keep them? TSO. TSO, I think she's talking about. Let's not go there right now. Yeah. So Board of Health. She was getting to that question. Board of Health is important for... Especially with housing. Exactly. Yeah. They deal with housing, they deal with things like marijuana policy. Yeah. Board of Licensed Commissioners. Yeah, CDBG Advisory Committee. This is when I have a question for Dave. They are the ones that evaluate grants for the CDBG money we get. Do they have any policy making stuff that we might, as we're forming policy, seek to consult their, you know, like we've talked about with assessors as well if we're dealing with something, we might have a question on assessment. I think the only thing that resembles a policy would be similar to what CPAC has done is come up with a guiding document for evaluating proposals. And their goal is their advisory to the town manager. So they make recommendations to the town manager on CDBG projects, both social service and capital. And we don't, as a town council, ever have any say in that money being spent because it really is truly just a town manager determination, right? So unlike CPA, when they make a recommendation, that has to come to the council, so we might see them. Your say, I think, would be in the town manager's goals to say, you know, we support, you know, we support, you know, the programs that you and your staff develop and oversee that are supportive of the following social service goals or something like that. CPAC, we've already had stuff from them. CONCOM, Council on Aging. Yeah, Council on Aging, a possibility, yeah. Yeah, I don't understand exactly what the Council on Aging does separate from the senior center. They're age. They're age. Council on Aging is a statutorily required body in every town. And it advises, I think, on policies on how to provide assistance in programs that are needed for the aging and has oversight responsibility for the senior center. So they could potentially be useful as we're looking, if we look at end up looking at parking and parking removal and location removal and stuff on how that might affect seniors. Well, I've definitely had an interest because they talk frequently about people being able to park or using the senior center and elders being able to have sufficiently accessible parking just generally. And the new sidewalk repair that's supposed to go through. So I would delete the cultural council. It is a state agency that gives out money from the state request by nonprofits and all. That's what it does. Yes, they do nothing else. DRB certainly is something, I think, and DAAC, the Dog Park Task Force. That's pretty much finished. I think so, they're building right now. Almost, you're in the middle of winter. DPW Fire Station Advisory Committee, didn't that dissolve? I think that dissolved. We could ask Lynn, she would know. I think Lynn said they dissolved, she was on it. I wasn't sure, but I know that they were in suspension because they couldn't do anything more until the DPW site location was resolved. So then there's the ECAC, which we would keep on. What's the Hampshire Regional Emergency Planning Committee? That's a body that, to Nelson, our fire chief is a lead member to, there used to be a select board member to it. Might have been slaughter, but they try and have developed emergency plans that are coordinated across towns. So probably not something we would need to discuss anything with. Seeing that it's regional. It's probably, if anything ever comes up under how the town is going to respond to critical emergencies, it's gonna fall under that new committee. Historical Commission, Human Rights Commission, Local Historic District Commission, LSE Commission. We still have recreation in our charge. Is the marijuana internal working group in town review teams still in existence, Dave? Okay. If we end up reviewing bylaws on marijuana, if they ever get changed and that would come to us, if it comes to us, that would certainly be how we would interact with them. Months in Memorial Building Trustees, does our charge, we don't really deal with the buildings themselves, right? No, that's just a town-owned building. Right. That has their own trustees. That's required to have their own trustees by some of the historic documents that work with it. And they have to do with management policies for the part that's not the library. Yeah. They meet like once a year. So personnel board, Public Art Commission, Public Shade Tree Committee? For the network. Probably, I don't know, with our charge? Probably not. It doesn't seem like it's something. Andy, can you think of anything that might need to go to them with our charge? I put it in a very unlikely category. They can go on a separate tab. Public Art Commission, Public Shade Tree Committee. I think the Shade Tree Committee we've given some of the stuff we're reviewing could come in handy. Recycling and Refuse Management Committee, does that still exist? It's gone. The, just so everybody's aware, the home pickup, if you contract for pickup at home is actually regulated by the Board of Health. And the regulations are under the Board of Health. The Refuse and Recycling Management Committee is sort of a policy committee that was looking at what we could do to have more sustainable trash policies and recommend them to the Board of Health and more directly to provide advice regarding the transfer station. Register of voters, I don't believe falls under our purview at all. That's more a GLL thing. The sister cities? I can't imagine. One of them is to fund anyone. Right, La Paz is. La Paz Center dissolved, they ask. Did they, they did formally dissolve? Okay. Oh yeah, we approved the select board and request from them to dissolve less in the effective last summit. Okay. CHAC, yes. Water Supply Protection Committee, I can entirely see that. And Wayfinding Internal Working Group it's not really in existence anymore. We've got Dave to consult on Wayfinding anyway. Okay, so that helps when we're framing questions that will give us a shorter list at least. So I appreciate that. Collaboration looks like was also part of this discussion. I think we might not need to have an extensive discussion at this time because it sounds like from what we've discussed previously that all of that would look specific to whatever we're considering. So it might not be something we can create a sort of standard template for what collaboration looks like. Does that, is that agreeable and sound logical to committee members? Yeah. Which brings us to our ways to increase responsibilities within the CRC discussion. So I added this into the agenda based on a couple of things. We at the council meeting in early January had a nice discussion about responsibilities of president, vice president, and all and ways to sort of increase leadership responsibilities and leadership development. And then I heard, and so that was one of the reasons I put this in here, but then I also heard from Andy that in finance, Andy is not the only person that writes the reports. And as chair of this committee, that sounds fantastic as ways to decrease the chair's work. So this went in here not only to increase the responsibilities of others, but as a, hey, maybe I can diminish my own workload. Let's be clear though. The chair, the finance committee writes most of the reports and has to make sure that they all get written. So there's no escape. But still, so there was a two-fold reason for putting this in here that I'm just gonna be upfront about. But I would seriously, I would like to hear from this committee. We have a vice chair sitting over here, Dorothy, that I will wholeheartedly admit I have problems figuring out on a committee like this how to best use you as vice chair. I have a suggestion. I am very happy with organizing our agendas and going through them. And I'm happy with the fact that you seem rather quick to be able to write your reports. I mean, you turn them out. At a faster rate, say than I can with my schedule. But I will step up and offer to be of more help in working on a writing or helping write housing policy with you, okay? I don't know if that's, I think you probably wanted more than that, but I think that's the best I can offer. I will just point out, I'm not looking for just what you can offer. We just went through a wonderful conversation about the use of a community impact report template. And if that's how we're going to use for discussion, in theory, that's also potentially how we could produce our reports with that as a template for the report too. And one of the things in thinking about this agenda item was instead of creating sort of a report from all of my notes, maybe as we go through the discussion, one of us can be assigned on this referral, you're gonna take the notes for that report and put it into that template. And so A was figure out what our responsibility is. And so once we decide that, someone can be assigned to put that under A, the committee decided this was what we needed to determine. And then with all the impacts and benefits, that's one idea I had, and that could maybe rotate around to different people on the committee, not always fall to me, not always necessarily fall to the vice chair. I fully appreciate, and I think at some point, if housing is referred to us, someone's going to have to draft that initial policy, right? And so I appreciate the offer of help with that. But does that sound like a potential possibility where we could spread that creation of that template and report from that template around? Are there other ways we could spread work? Are there other would people right now when I create an agenda, I kind of go through, see what's been referred, send it off to Dave to make sure he can get the right people to the meeting before I post it. There was talk in the council meeting of people really wanting to be in an agenda setting meeting is that something people would like to sort of be involved in with a CRC meeting where instead of it just me sending it to Dave, and randomly each month someone else on this committee, I'm just throwing out potential ideas here, like what might people think about in terms of, or just desire in terms of increased responsibilities, but increased leadership opportunities, increased involvement in all of this? Or do they not care? I do not need to be on an agenda setting committee. I don't have that much time for an extra meeting, and I figure if I really felt something should be on it, I would email you. And I don't worry about you thinking, oh, she won't let me put it on or anything like that. So that's not something that I need, somebody else might enjoy doing that. I'm not sure I would enjoy doing that. But I feel like since I'm relatively inexperienced at all of this, that it would be helpful for me and to learn, to be in sitting there talking with you even maybe before it got sent to Dave, or talking with Dave afterwards, and what do you think, and what are, and I would like to see it move around because the committee is gonna change over time, and especially if we have a split of responsibilities and create a second committee, then I think the more experiences we each have, the better. So I would be willing to do that. I would be willing to take part of a report level. I think that that's important. I would go with that. Curious to what Steve think. Rotating agenda setting, that seems reasonable. I was just thinking every agenda has the agenda on one page and then the supplemental page, which has items that have been referred, items that have been tabled, et cetera, et cetera. And I wonder at the end of a meeting, might it be helpful to do kind of a, I don't know if it's a five minute preview from the chair. What I'm thinking, as I look at the next agenda, I'm thinking X. And then there might be five minutes where they could give you input, not get into detail because that discussion shouldn't happen in that meeting, but more, Mandy, you're thinking, well, I'm looking at what the council needs coming back to meetings from now and we need to address this topic and that topic before. And then maybe that gives everybody a chance to kind of get inside your head and say, and somebody might go, well, is there any chance of sneaking this on the agenda? And it would obviate the need for either extra emails or extra meetings, as Dorothy was thinking. Or even more emails flying around, necessarily. So I wanna say something, that sounds reasonable. I like you, knowing that you are focusing really, really strong on what CRC is doing. I have my own intellectual agenda on the council, like different areas that I'm really concerned about. I've got about four or five of them. And that's my focus, I'm doing this, I'm following this issue, I'm trying to have influence on that thing. And so I don't wanna get my brain too confused. I like the fact that I know you are totally focused on CRC. So, and many of the things I'm doing are all CRC related topics. Any of us, Andy? As a fellow chair of a committee on how to sort of distribute responsibility roles workload? It's a hard one because I find a lot of times it's sort of individual discussions that happen either outside of a meeting. Can you help with more than anything? I like Dave's suggestion of saying, having sort of a last piece to the agenda even if it's only just a couple of minutes of agenda preview. And this is clear and if it's not to be discussed at the meeting, it invites people to call or send an email if they're upset, if there's not time, frequently we're squeezed at the time because there's another committee seeking to take the room. Yeah, any other thoughts? If you got any, I'm welcome to suggestions and totally open to them. So don't, it probably will not show up on another agenda but feel free to, if you come up with anything, mention it to me because I am very much open to figuring out a way to use committees as leadership development, Pat. Right, so I agree that Dave's suggestion for agenda setting is better than us rotating because then we're all active and involved with each but I'm wondering, I still would like to see some of us when we can take on aspects of the recording, learning how to do that. I will work on that. That brings us to, unless there's anything else on that topic, it brings us to documents helpful to our work. So I attempted to create a document and then I posted that one and then I figured out some more search terms for the website. I used the search on the website and just started searching for random things and so I got a lot more that I have not posted. Besides what's on there, I'll go through some of those but this was not necessarily an attempt to say these are the ones that we need to discuss. This was my attempt to try and come up with what I could find, most of these I've never even read so I have no idea how relevant they may even be. But it was more of an attempt to sort of start that discussion of what might, we've obviously mentioned some documents but many of us have no clue exactly how much is out there and as Dorothy was saying whether they're even relevant but it would give us, I thought it might give us a start. And so housing and homelessness and then I tried to sort of break it into these sets of topics are from the charge. That's how I got the topics was pulling them from our charge. So people were wondering housing and that's sort of the way they were listed in the charge I think, I don't know. No priority order but in housing and homelessness from searching the committee, the town's website I found the housing production plan. I did not write the year on that. I'm not sure whether it's because I didn't come up with it or whether I just didn't look for it. The draft policy, priorities policy that we've been dealing with which I didn't bother to find a link for and the housing market study again I don't quite have the date, the year for that but I tried to put years in when I could find them. Does Dave, do you know of anything? Besides the master plan which obviously deals with housing but I only put that under planning. Do you- It sort of covers all those. It pretty much covers the whole set, right? It's an overarching document. Do you know of, does anyone else know of any other housing or homelessness policies, plans, documents that might be helpful that the town has implemented or has come up with in the past? Yeah, so in the packet it was documents relevant to CRC charge areas and I tried to get the links to them on the webpage listed too which may come in very helpful to our clerk of the council for some other time for other website issues. There's a town policies page. I don't know whether this is helpful for that or not but off the top of your head at this point for housing and homelessness, we as a group don't know of any others. So if no one else has any others, Steve, you can't think of any others from planning or anything. Yeah, UTAC, that's true. And something, I can't locate it right now but there may be one or two more documents. No, certainly send them on. I intend this sort of as this sort of, not necessarily comprehensive but a list we can always refer to when something housing comes to us. Hey, have we checked with this document or that one? Okay, so UTAC might have something. So we'll have to look at UTAC too and Dave will look, public ways and public resources. You can't look, they usually freeze like you're old. Yeah. Okay, at least I know what to look for then to get the link. Public ways and public resources. This is one that I added a whole bunch of stuff to but I'll go through what I added. So downtown parking map, the downtown parking study from just this year, the transportation plan was from 2015. There is a watershed management plan which went into public resources, not necessarily public ways. The ones I was adding, the complete streets policy from 2018. I do not know whether it was formally adopted. I think it was formally adopted by some sort of committee. There is a street lights policy from 2001. There are parking permit regulations from 2005. There are parking regulations I think that are different than the permit regulations and I will put up a modified document, Pat. So don't worry. I just, I didn't wanna add a second one in and confuse people. I will send one out. Public shade tree regulations from 2018 and the DPW policy for approval of major transportation or roadway projects from 2010. I found it. Like I said, I was like plans, policies. I would just randomly do search and I was like, if you page through enough pages in those search results, you get some interesting things. If you go to like result number 80. But could you find out whether they were officially approved or whether they're just there for our thoughts? So the DPW policy, so it depends on what you mean by officially approved, right? That we have to follow it now. So the council only in theory has to follow council policies and then obviously bylaws laws. The charter laws, stuff like that, but the town staff in their daily operations are kind of following many of these plans, right? The water managed watershed management plan, concom is certainly complying with and so it depends on what you mean by who has to follow what, I think. And that's a hard question to really answer. For example, if we put forward something that was the opposite or different from something in one of these plans. Are we opening ourself to be yelled at in a council meeting because we're going against official town policy? Well, we as councilor, Try to avoid that. The council is the chief policy setter of the town. So what we said is kind of what the town policy is if we've adopted it, but that doesn't mean we're not opening ourselves up to being yelled at. So, I mean, if people don't like what we said, they're just going to yell at us. Can anyone particularly Dave think of any glaring omissions from this? Or any that I've cited that might not really town staff or departments might not be following anymore? Okay, since I named like six that aren't on that list too. Right, that means we should probably put the climate action goals on this list somewhere. So to planning and zoning, the master plan from 2010, the inclusionary zoning feasibility review from 2014, flood mapping, flood maps, we're getting new ones presented to the council on Monday, I think. So that will actually be 2020 eventually. There's the, I don't have one, even in community and economic development. The study that was done by the Planner Valley Planning Commission with state funds that we received through the governors. So flood maps, open space and recreation plan, community field master plan from this year. That's from the downtown field recreation group, I think. Climate action plan from 2000, which will be supplemented by one this year. The climate action goals I just added. And then there's trail regulations. That I don't know whether it's your department, Dave, or conservation commission, or there were a whole bunch of regular, down at the bottom, in this new document, there's a whole bunch of health department regulations and a whole bunch of inspectional services regulations and conservation rules and regulations that I've added into this list. Right, watershed rules, wetlands rules, puffers pond rules, conservation areas. So all of them, when you get a new document, a lot of that, and we might have to sort some of this. I was amazed at how much exists, believe it or not, as I went through this. Community and economic development. Dave just mentioned an economic development plan. Andy mentioned the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission study. Do you know last year, the year before? No, that's kind of one of the same. Oh, they're the same? Okay. I also threw in the open space and recreation plan, community field master plan and Amherst preservation. From the planning section, the Amherst preservation plan from 2005 and there is a fuel efficient vehicles policy from 2011. DPW policy for approval of major transportation or roadway projects. I mean, I have 2018, did it ever get voted on? I have a link to it in the new one, so the link probably indicates it. Yeah, I'll send it out to everyone. Yeah, I'll send it out to everyone. Many of them have links. Preservation plan from fuel, and then arts and culture, public art installations by private developers. Oh, yep, Pat. They probably have a lot of internal documents, but if you remember, it's an independent body. Right, now I understand that, but. Sometimes independent bodies put on public reports. Yeah, they might have something like an annual report or something, but I've never dealt into it. So arts and culture, I came up with public art installations by private developers, which was proposed, but I do not believe was actually adopted by the Public Arts Commission. I think it dealt with installations on public land by private artists or something. I don't know. I was the only one I could come up with that I found. Like I said, I did random searches on the town website. And then I didn't know of any for the relationship between town and institutions of higher learning. Maybe others can think, I mean, there's obviously the strategic partnership agreements as we get through those, but that's not necessarily policies versus. I remember you asked about the joint study for the, wasn't there for the North Pleasant Corridor between UMass and. Mm-hmm. I was gonna ask whether we should put the UMass, the Amherst College, and the Hampshire College Master Plans. Amherst College has a master plan. They just put a new one out this year. So they have a brand new one. The Amherst College one. Treats policy was adopted by the select board. Okay, thank you. Oh, yes, in 2018. Yep. Amherst is a unique community as the first start of it. Do we know if, well, does Hampshire College have a master plan? I'd like to make a request of Dave. I have so many pieces of paper and I don't relate in a living way to the computer. I can, it was useful in this meeting to look at things, but I, you know, is it possible that some of these major plans that we're talking about could, we could receive bound copies of them? For example, I've got zoning plan in a book and I can find it. Different colored covers, of course, would help. So we'd know, well, that's the red cover, the gray cover, the blue cover, that kind of thing. It's gonna get really long. Well, I mean, the major ones. And maybe as this list grows, we at some point identify here are the big ones. And here are, for your knowledge, other ones that happen to exist. Well, I think the ones affected, I mean, housing production plan, housing market study, complete streets project. The RKG, inclusionary zoning feasibility study. You would need a whole shelf. I've got some of these in paper in my house. It's just, it's very hard to find them. Let's compile a list first and then at a later meeting. Let's see a little, I'll take my first. We can just have a whole set of them back there. That's the documents that pertain to the charge, potentially. Then part of this was what documents of this, which we're not ready to necessarily get to, do we want to discuss in more detail at a meeting versus read and learn on our own? So the point of that one was, are there, it's sort of a follow up to, I think what CRC was doing before I was appointed to CRC, which was sort of getting an overview of certain areas of town, certain policies or plans that exist. Do we have any more of those areas that we want to get more education on in a general sense? I know the last agenda potentially had, I think a holdover from this sort of intro period that Steve was running well on getting people up to speed. That is presentation on the Economic Development Plan, probably should have done that before Jeff left. The discussion and present transportation issues, public infrastructure, public-private partnership agreements, so P3s were some of the ones that were outstanding from that initial list. What I guess my thoughts in putting on a discussion on what do we need more information on that we want to have that discussion is, are those still topics that people want a generic discussion on as the committee gets time? Are there others that as we've dealt with stuff, the committee is thinking, oh, we need more background on X to help me with some of this unscheduled stuff. Steve. So for example, P3s, we had made contact with the folks from UMass about coming to speak to this group, but at the same time, Lynn had contacted them about speaking to the whole council. So it made more sense, of course, for them to speak to the whole council because we didn't have a specific issue that we are, for us it would have just been for information and then they would have had to repeat that to the remaining eight counselors. So I think the information sessions got us out beyond the waves, but now I think it's sort of as needed. I'm not sure, what do you guys, yeah. Dorothy. Well, what I learned at the beginning of this committee was when you come in knowing almost nothing about what Amherst has done, you know, it's a spiral recursive process of the learning. So, and I'm learning things every week. I would like some, going through some housing documents in detail, what is good here? What do we want to keep? What, how does this relate to some aims that we might want to do? What is difficult to these things cross each other out? I mean, we'd find that useful. I'm working at doing it on my own, which is hard. Yeah, it can be tricky to keep all the information in all these different documents about housing or something separate, but I think there's great value in doing it, even if we're gonna do it as a body, that we're going through it first on our own because that's when you notice things when you have a question of interpretation or you start to know what you need more information about. It's like reading a novel in a literature class. You read it on your own and then you come in and then there's this discussion that brings out richness that you might or might not have noticed. So, I think independent work is critical. So, when I get a general overview before I've had a chance to really go through the document, it's interesting, it's helpful, but it's much better for us to come prepared as to a class, having read it, marked our text up and be ready to talk about it and ask questions. I do agree. So, I guess that becomes our responsibility as we look at the agenda, like, oh, I better get on that housing plan because I'm confused or I haven't finished it or whatever, does that make sense to people? I was just gonna say maybe that's the benefit of having a document like this set out by different areas is as we go through and potentially implement what Dave suggested at the end of each meeting of here's where I'm thinking, that then gives each committee members two weeks to go, oh, if we're really gonna be dealing with transportation issues, maybe I really need to read the transportation plan and refresh my memory as to what that is and all, so that we've got this document that says, here's things that relate to transportation, brush up on that. And if we really then, at that first initial discussion of say, housing that we've talked about with relationship to the impact report, still have a lot of questions. Maybe that we're bringing in people not specifically to that referral, but for more general discussion and stuff like that, maybe that's how we can use these documents more instead of scheduling specific discussions on things that can help us prepare for those referrals that have come to us. Other thoughts? Seeing none, I'm gonna move on. Normally seven minutes behind schedule, but that seven minutes is gonna be made up in the next three. Any announcements? No! Any items not anticipated by me? Ah, Pat, would you like that on, I have not fully set next meeting's agenda. Would you like that on next meeting's agenda? I think so, I think we need to talk about it in the role as GLL talking about sort of because with little wisdom we have in this committee and there's actually a lot of, we need to bring that to that division. As we look at those agendas, I'm reminded of how many meetings you and I have had over the last couple of months and the word bandwidth, committee bandwidth, planning board bandwidth, zoning subcommittee, so as I look at all of these topics and what might come before you, there needs to be some prioritization of what you and we together can accomplish. So as we think about the master planning process that you outlined for the council and for the planning board and I believe we're gonna have a similar discussion of zoning, we just, I think we need to be realistic about looking at 2020 and say, so what is the bandwidth of this committee and what are the highest priorities that the council wants to hear from you on? So I'm also kind of hoping that the five of you bring to the council when they're considering something, how quickly they need it back from you, how time sensitive it is and how does it fit into the context of the workload that you are gonna have on your plate for 2020. So I'm kind of mirroring some of the words that we heard from the planning board too because I think they're feeling it as well. So that's what I would really appreciate is knowing that anything you do about the future that gets changed is a kind of future cast of what items are gonna come before us in the order you think they might come. That would really help me be prepared. And Sanders. Okay, anything else unanticipated? Then we are adjourning at 9.29 p.m. 9.31! Not on my, I go by what's on my computer here. 9.29, oh, now 9.30. But I wanna thank Athena for coming in on an extra Monday night and Dave for coming in an extra Monday night and you guys too, because we're getting three in a row this way. So thank you, have a nice night.