 I'm going to go, so I'll make you host. Okay. You're all set. Have a good night, everyone. Bye, Athena. Thank you. Okay. I'm seeing that we have a quorum. I am calling the August 20, 2020 meeting of the town service and outreach committee to order at 632. Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual meeting of the town services and outreach committee. I'm now going to call each member by name to confirm that you can hear me and we can hear you. Alyssa Brewer. Yes, I'm Percy Dumont. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Dorothy. Oh, okay. Sorry. Sorry. No, I'm unmuted. Yes. Okay. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes, I can hear you. I'm here. Okay. I will be monitoring committee member connections and if necessary, we'll pause the meeting if we have connectivity issues. We requested everybody be patient with the process. Okay, let's see if we have any, I don't think we have any public today, do we? No, we do. Probably Art, I'm guessing. Hi, hi, Art. It doesn't look like he has his hand up though. Art, can you put your hand up? I'm thinking not. Okay. All right, so moving right on. First on the agenda is the town manager appointments to the Human Rights Commission. We just have that one set today. The town manager is on vacation this week, so he isn't in person to answer questions, but Jennifer Moistens here, who is one of our community participation officers. She participated in the interviews and I believe your staff to the commission, right, Jennifer? Yes, I am. Okay. So he and the town manager did offer to answer any questions and writing that we had, but to my knowledge, people didn't have questions about the the recommended people anyway. And so Jennifer, would you like to offer any information that you have about the recommended people who are Sid Ferrara, Cedric Gonnett, Elizabeth Haygood, and Erica Loper? Sure. Well, Sid Ferrara has been an HRC member for some years now, but he kind of is our he holds the history for the most part. He's our institutional knowledge when it comes to specific things in the HRC. He's also very well connected with the Cape Verdean community, which is really nice when we're trying to do outreach and engage community members. Cedric Gonnett is he's not a new Amherst resident, but he has watched a lot of the children in the community grow up. I know that he's coached football for two of my sons and one's in college now. So he's got a great relationship with the youth, which we always enjoy someone who can stay connected with the youth and keep us engaged with the youth as well. Liz Haygood has been in the community for I'm going to say over 30, 40 years. She raised her two sons here and she is in a lot of the different organizations that are going on now with racial inequality and racial equity. And she brings an awful lot and Erica Loper as well grew up in Amherst and went to the Amherst Regional School System and has raised her son in Amherst as well. And she is connected to the school now. So she's also another parent person who has a lot of roots to the community. Great. And there's a blurb about each one of the people in the memo, in the packet, if people are interested in looking at that. Do any of the counselors have any questions for Jennifer? Yes, I do. There's a heavy school involvement. Okay. So Cedric Goddard is a presently a paraeducator and Erica Loper is a paraeducator both now. I'm wondering, is Elizabeth Haygood retired or she's still working in the school system? I think she's in the process of retiring if she hasn't already retired. It's the usual question that we ask sometimes whether people who are working for the town might feel constrained. I think this group is, at least from my perspective, is a great group who's motivated. And so a lot of the events and different things that happen at the HRC fall in my lap. And it will be nice to have people who are ready to go and engage with the communities and be active and have lots of nice, lots of new ideas. Yeah, I would just say that I, the people that I talk to about these prospective appointments were all very much, you know, supportive and in favor of them. So that convinces me that they good recommendations. So I have one comment there. It sounds like a really great group and a positive group for the fun activities that you do, which bring attention to different aspects of the community and try to get us kind of intersecting with different groups. But would the group that is critical of Amherst police or police processes or whatever, would they feel that they have no voice on the human rights committee? So I mean, it's a really tricky topic and I know that, but I'm I can't really speak for how anybody's going to feel, but I did at most of the events that I've been to that were, you know, funded by the Black youth leaders and the BIPOC community and the Defund413. I did spread the word that the HRC was accepting applications at that time and so whomever has applied has applied. And I did, I did reach out to people in District 5 of which a number are in the BIPOC groups and they were supportive. So I feel fine about that. So unless we have other questions, I move to recommend that the town council prove the town manager appointments for a two-year term expiring June 30th, 2020, for Sid Ferrara, which is a reappointment, for three-year terms expiring June 30th, 2023, Cedric Gonnett, Elizabeth Haygood, and Erica Loper. Do I have a second? Dorothea. Okay, roll call vote. Alyssa. Yes. Dorothea. Okay. Yes. Yes. Evan. Yes. George. Yes. Okay. That's a unanimous five zero zero vote. So we will forward that recommendation to the council. Probably will be taken up at their August 31st meeting. Thank you very much, Jennifer, for attending. Sorry to take your time up. No, no. Important vote organizing. Have a good evening, everyone. Thank you. Okay, so moving on. On the agenda, we have under the presentations and discussions, we have listed three preliminary presentations of different measures that are coming up. And so the preliminary presentations are as per our new review process, which requires one of us to present a measure to the committee to see if we have or are planning to have all the information we need in order to proceed. So first up was going to be the preliminary presentation of the long-term public way policy change request sponsored by the council president, Lynn Grismur. But in the meantime, Alyssa Brewer volunteered to take that on and present it and what maybe you can speak to that. Alyssa, your request to put that off for a while. I could try. So I'm sorry, I'm trying to do 40 things once here pulling up our documents. In regards to that, I saw how full our agenda was already. And as Darcy had sent us the email that said somebody should work with Lynn and connections made, et cetera. But Lynn and I connected and I said, yeah, given how busy we're going to be with surveillance technology and Lincoln, and given the immediacy of everything else Lynn's doing, for example, working on revising our composite town manager evaluation that we just met about earlier this week. And I said I didn't have time to deal with it this week. I asked Darcy that we put this off for another meeting or two to give Lynn and I some time to work together and think about the recommended way forward that we would bring to all of you. So anyway, thank you for volunteering to do that, Alyssa. So we're going to put that off to a future agenda. So the second preliminary presentation that we have on the agenda is the Lincoln Avenue parking topic and Dorothy and George had volunteered to do that. And they had the opportunity to meet with Gilford Mooring, the superintendent of the DPW. And they are going to provide our first actual preliminary presentation. I'm going to make a suggestion that written up a little history piece. Tell us, do bring us up to date on the history that I would talk a little bit about the meeting and then George is going to show you the slides and the numbers that they gave us. But I will talk about them before he puts them up a little bit. Okay, my question is, I mean, it sounds a little bit like you're making a presentation as opposed to the preliminary presentation. So I'm assuming that you're going to cover the questions in the process, right? I can't look at a list of questions and talk at the same time. I have taken notes, which I have in front of me. And I think that the way I suggested would work, and then if either one of us misses a topic, we have a good place to say, what about? What about? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, the one of the first questions is the need for doing this. So I'm trying to go by the book here, our new process. So I think that we don't need to get like deeply into what is actually being proposed, but just sort of like overview. Okay. Anyway, why don't you just go ahead and do what you were planning on doing? Oh, you need to unmute, though, Dorothy. I am. I am. So look, you'll see there's no muted thing there. I'm unmuted. You're fine, though. But now we can't, you muted yourself. The need for the parking, when we finish the presentation, you'll see what the need is because Wilfred gave us some stats, some statistics, some numbers that showed us how you look at a road and to see what it can handle. Right. So that's part of the answer and the solution. The need is that residents on Lincoln have felt that it was very unsafe for residents and drivers, because the road has not been able to handle two-way traffic and parking on one side. And sometimes it's not been on two sides. And there's also, which you'll get to later in terms of widths, buses and transit and trucks do use it too, which should require a larger width. So people came to us because there were accidents, many accidents, near misses, people whose little mirrors were being knocked off, people who felt they couldn't exit their driveway. And that seemed to be a dangerous situation, partly because Lincoln is a heavily traveled road. So that, the need was presented, residents came to us and many meetings were held and a presentation was put together, because residents felt that this was an unsafe situation. So that's the need. Now I'll move it to George. So in a moment I'm going to share the screen. I'm going to try and share the screen and we'll look at the maps that show the current parking in that area and just give you a very quick sense of what we're proposing initially and get some feedback from you. As Darcy said, we had a conversation with Goughord and with Chief Livingstone and it was very helpful. Goughord sent us some materials that we'll mention later in our initial presentation here. A little bit of history. Listen knows this very well. Back in 2015, a very similar proposal was put forward. I think it was actually planning that put it forward. And there were a number of public hearings and the select board at the time listened and finally decided not to adopt what the planning department had recommended, which would have pretty much given what the residents are now requesting. And instead there were a number of other smaller changes made to various intersections and rights of way just to give a little people a little bit more space to turn and so forth. But it was the planning department, it's in the documents that Darcy put in your folder. I don't imagine you, I mean you've seen them before because they were given to us at the public hearing. But in those documents is the 2015 presentation and proposal by planning. And so this has a history and I'm sure it goes back, probably Alyssa could say it probably goes back a lot further, but in the more recent history in 2015, proposal was made and was not acted on. The select board decided that they did not want to accept that and they made some other minor changes. So fast forward to 2020. We've all been through this. We I think you all remember the public hearing quite well. And so the residents have come again. It seems this time motivated by some changes on Lincoln in terms of people using it more frequently for parking access to the university and perhaps some to downtown. So we had this conversation with Gilbert, we had this conversation with Scott. And so I'm going to try and share the screen if I can. Let's is that so I'm going to hit share screen and we'll see what will happen. Maybe only the host can do it. Well, it's it's showing it as an option for me. And so I'm going to hit screen. And we'll see what happens. You should be able to do it. And then I'm going to hit this, which is okay. And if you should see a map or part of a map, and if I don't hit the wrong button, I'm going to slide it a little bit. So this is the existing parking for the north end of Lincoln. That's just the end that is closest to the university. And then we're going to there are three separate maps that we're going to look at. Red just to orient you again, just reminding you is no parking. And parking prohibited Monday through Friday, eight to five PM is the yellow. And the colors that we're particularly going to be concerned with are going to be yellow and green. So green is unrestricted parking. Yellow is restricted, where it's prohibited Monday through Friday, eight to five PM. So in essence, what we're going to propose, no surprise here, is changing, excuse me. So we see yellow is eight to five, and that is from fearing all the way to McClellan. Once we reach McClellan, oh for God's sake, sorry. Okay, this is the second map. Once we reach McClellan, yellow turns to green. On the eastern side of Lincoln. And on the western side, as you can see, there's no parking permitted. And what we're going to propose is to change green to yellow. In other words, change unrestricted parking on the eastern side of Lincoln to restricted parking, eight to Monday through Friday, eight to five PM. Now that raises, as was pointed out in the meeting, that raises the question of sunset. So you see sunset here to the west. It is unrestricted on both sides. And so the concern is that there may be spillover. In other words, people may simply move one block over and continue to use, they'll use sunset as their parking. So again, the suggestion is to, as I said, basically changing green to yellow to make both sides of sunset restricted Monday through Friday, eight to five PM. George, wouldn't it be the west side? No parking. Wouldn't it be to mirror Lincoln that would be red on the west and green, yellow? One could do that. But I think traditionally the street has not been heavily used. It's not a minor arterial, which is, I think, the term that Guilford's, the DPW uses and a belief applies to Lincoln. It's not a major road. Obviously, it's called a minor arterial because it's used for people who want to get from Amity and or Northampton Road to the university. They can't, they don't use sunset because it basically ultimately dead ends. And so you'd have to turn it out and go up to Lincoln anyway. So traditionally it's not been a street that's been heavily trafficked. And traditionally it's not a street that's been heavily used for parking. If you were to, and we're trying to make a minimum number of changes. So again, you could make it mirror Lincoln if you wished. The proposal at the moment, just for your consideration and just to get the conversation started is to change both sides, change green to yellow. Clearly there would need to be outreach to all the residents on sunset. So that would certainly be something that would have to be done before any kind of change like this could be moving forward. But that's at the moment, that's the proposal. That's the middle map. As you'll see, all the other streets, minor streets are yellow in this area. So they're all restricted parking. It's just Lincoln on the eastern side in this stretch and then sunset on both sides. So I wanted to add something, the chart that that I'm able to access it, I was able to access but not to print it. So I don't know if George can show us Excel sheet that lists the width of every street and I think- Dorothy, why do we get to the widths a little later? That raises a whole other set of questions. So right now I just want to show everybody the map and show them the layout. And then, yes, if you could address what Guilford told us about street widths and that adds a level of complication that's very important. But I think for the moment, let's just finish with the map. This is the third map. This is the southern end of Lincoln, which if I can get it in the screen, I hope you can see it. I can see it fine on my computer, but I have no idea what you all are seeing. But that's good. If anything. But on the southern end, at the moment, you can see green on the southern end of Lincoln on both sides with certain areas, setbacks at the intersections. And again, what we're proposing is to turn green to yellow. Now, in the 2015 proposal by the planning department that I mentioned earlier, this whole area was proposed to become a red, no parking at all. And then in the Lincoln section, that section above the middle map, that would have been eight to five. So at the moment it's parking on both sides and we're proposing again that change the green to yellow. And that's as far as we want to go. Or that's at the moment, what we're suggesting. We're not going to touch Kendrick Place, but that is obviously a place for some consideration, whether that should be left as it is. I think there are a number of residents there. It's not a through street. It's a place that the traffic flow is obviously not much. People either drive on to it to go to their residents or they drive onto it to park and walk up to town. So at the moment we're not touching that, but that would be a potential area for consideration. So that's what we're proposing initially just to get things started, essentially changing green to yellow, the length of Lincoln and changing green to yellow on both sides of sunset parallel to Lincoln. Alyssa has had her hand up for a while. Sure. Thank you. I know this is hard. I've literally had my hand up the entire presentation because I'm really confused about where we are. I appreciated what Darcy said at the beginning of the item, which is that we should be following our process. I agree that it's a brand new process, but I think the overview was helpful even though it wasn't done according to the process. It was an overview. What I'm trying to understand is I have now heard you say several times turn green to yellow to turn the where's this written down? I can't say that because I don't see that this was in the packet for today. I understand the overview of the history. I don't understand why we're not talking about a proposal, which we finally heard several minutes into the presentation was probably a proposal, but I don't have that written any place that I'm confused about. I appreciate us pulling all this old history over, but none of this is new information. This is all the information. I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm trying to understand what we're doing here today. If all we're doing is reminding people of what we did at previous Town Council, that's cool because it's good to be caught up and a lot of people who are watching this might not know that, but as a person who was there, I'm not seeing anything different and I'm not seeing a written proposal anywhere except what I'm hearing as part of the verbal presentation. Am I missing a document somewhere or what am I not getting about this? I have my hand raised. Yes, I think that normally, if someone is designated to do the presentation, you can actually take charge during this part, so you can decide whether George or Dorothy wants to take charge here. I may regret having said that, but you can always step in as chair. Yeah, no, I just think that this is a very good question. This is the first time out of the gate. I frankly haven't had time to sit down and do anything, believe it or not. I'm sure all of you have been very busy too, but so maybe part of what we are learning is that it's expected quite simply, matter of fact, that in addition to a kind of oral presentation, just giving you a sense of what we need a written presentation that basically says what I just said, that given the history, given the presentation to the Town Council, we're proposing to change and then I would have to write it in a slightly more precise way. We're proposing to change these sections of Lincoln and Sunset to restricted parking, money through Friday, 8 to 5 p.m. And we can do that. We can stop this right now and when I get five minutes, I just got home literally from a vacation. Anyway, that's beside the point. If part of the process is a written presentation at the initial, whatever we're calling this, preliminary, then we should stop and Dorothy and I will sit down. When we have five minutes and we'll put together something written and we'll do this again. So I did ask Darcy whether we could make an oral presentation at this point or whether it needed to be written. I look at the what we have written and it does not say that the preliminary one has to be written. And I have more information to share with you. Our aim was to let you know what has happened, what happened in our meeting with Gopher and Scott, and the next step where we get input from you because they are very willing to come and speak to the group. And so the biggest decision, besides giving us information and different thoughts of things to look into, would be the decision of this group, whether we want to have more discussion or more of the next week or whether we want to have Scott and Gopher to come before the committee. They say we were careful to not ask them if that would be a burden and they said, oh no, they want to come. So that's where we were. And what has to be a written report, then I guess I don't see that as a preliminary presentation. It's getting awfully formal, but we can take a vote and you can vote to do it that way if you want. I mean I think from the point of view of the committee, it's not an unreasonable request to have something in the packet that gives them an idea of what they're going to be hearing and seeing. I understand Alyssa's concern seems legitimate one. I think Dorothy and I were hoping to do it somewhat more informally, but I can certainly see that maybe in the future and including this presentation, we need simply to have something a little bit more formal written presentation states and what we are considering, which as I said would pretty much be what I've just shown you. And Dorothy and I were thinking at this point we'd like to get a sense from you all what you think. And if what you think is you need to have something in writing, then that's where we'll go next and we'll come back and try this again. If you think that you can offer us some constructive, thoughtful comments based on what I've just said and what Dorothy said and on this one little map in front of you, we could proceed. But I think we probably now need to hear. I mean I think Dorothy has one thing she'd like to say about what we heard from Guilford and particularly from Guilford and what we got in terms of information. Maybe at this point we just need to have the committee decide what they want us to do. George can you can you see the hands from where you are? No, I cannot see anything. I just see the map. I'm happy to call on people. Evan you haven't spoken before. So I think I'm having maybe this is because I was out in the sun all day, a little trouble following. My understanding going into this was what was being presented was just a refresher of what the town staff had presented. But now my understanding now is you are presenting something that is different from what town staff presented. That's correct. We're going a little bit farther. And so I think with that in mind, we're talking about oral versus written, but for me this is really a maps issue. I think all the maps we were provided last time were really useful. I'm having trouble, you're showing us this map and you're saying okay look at this map but pretend that this color is this color and this color is this color. And I've already forgotten which colors are which colors. My understanding is the map we're looking at you want to turn everything that's on screen right now. Everything that's green would be yellow, correct? Yes, that is correct. And yellow is restricted or no parking. By Monday through Friday. That's correct. Okay. I think that's literally just a clarification that I needed. Right, I understand. And you're not proposing any what about the other part of Lincoln? Well the northern end already is restricted. The southern end again we're proposing changing what is now unrestricted green on both sides to yellow. Yellow. So basically everything that's currently green on any of these maps becomes yellow. If the maps you're seeing that is correct except for Evan when you come down to the bottom map. You're seeing Dana Place, you're seeing Street, obviously ignore that and you're seeing Kendrick which for the moment we are not discussing. So yes just Lincoln green to yellow and sunset green to yellow. Okay thank you I just needed that clarification. I understand. But Evan I mean I really it's a fair question. I'll just raise a good point and it's for the future of how we work. How important is it at a preliminary presentation and I'm asking this in all honesty. How important is it to have what a one or two paragraph description of a proposed of a proposal but you know preliminary proposal that you would see in advance or you'd be in the packet and it wouldn't be buried in you know I mean that what Darcy's done is great but as you all know that Lincoln packet is full of stuff and only a madman would work their way through the entire thing. So you'd need you'd have an identified written proposal and then I just couldn't get to it and I'm not sure I could figure out technically how to get this map into that document but that's what you should have. You should have the maps and you should have the proposal in one piece and so you can look at it in advance and that's the way I think it probably should work but Dorothy and I just haven't been able to get that together in time so we're doing it informally orally which again the question for you and Alyssa's already raised it and for Darcy and really for also for the two of us is is that adequate or should there be something a little bit more formal so that at least in theory you could read it before today's meeting and you wouldn't be completely like oh so that's what they're doing that's what they're proposing. Yeah so Alyssa. Thank you and I appreciate you feeling all that in George because again I'm not trying to be the bad guy here we're all incredibly busy and so I think we need to rethink our process that we just barely adopted as to how realistic it actually is because in no way shape or fashion did I ever agree that those questions in preliminary presentation of a measure would only be addressed orally because if I'm hearing them for the first time now luckily George you did a great you and Dorothy did a great job explaining it in this particular case we're all familiar with what happened before and it was great to have a refresher of as you said you could talk about it for hours and so a refresher of the particular high points of the decision-making over time but now I'm supposed to process that sitting here at this meeting in order to tell in order to contribute to a conversation by the TSO this says the additional information we need is xyz pieces otherwise I'm going to have to stop today and say now I have to go think about this before the meeting which to be fair to me I asked for at our last TSO meeting I asked for a commitment from you and Dorothy to do this and so I understand that that didn't happen just like Darcy had originally thought we'd talk about public ways today real life intervenes but then we need to think about what our process tells us for when real life intervenes because I would argue that arguably in this case we know enough about it plus we had all the refresher materials that we could possibly do this on the fly for the next section but what I don't want to hear is that we treated someone who's not as you know who this is a very I would argue this is a very isolated case and so when somebody else comes in and gives me a very impassioned exciting summary verbal because they didn't put anything in ahead of time I'm be like well this ain't like Lincoln baby I'm I can't I can't process this this way I that's what a meetings for is to be able to then offer input so I you know it's our first time out right and that's what's required and what I specifically asked for what couldn't happen due to timing we weren't told couldn't happen due to timing we weren't given the option of saying should we postpone you know we're finding that this isn't going to work um or or you know what do we as a group want to do with that because I don't want to say to the next people well I know we cut Dorothy and George some slack but we're going to hold you to this particular thing and if we're not going to hold them to it either because now we feel bad about the precedent then why do we even have the process right and I just want to finish with saying the paragraph you were talking about George is exactly all I mean I don't mean like a big honkin report I mean like a paragraph that just hits all the things you eventually said just in the paragraph because the public sees this and they're going what are they even talking about like that's a lot of cool Lincoln stuff what's the thing I think that I can't imagine that we don't all agree that when we're putting forward a proposed measure as it's called in our review process that it's going to be in writing okay it's going to be a proposal in writing to us so I'm assuming we all have consensus on that to me a formal proposal is in writing well it's the preliminary presentation is just a presentation of what the formal what what the proposed measure is there's more to the proposed measure you haven't even heard that's why I thought why don't you I think your hand's been up for a while Dorothy why don't you I know I was confused because I had an understanding that that the proposal was actually coming from Guilford and it had something to do with the width of the information that he's given us so just his background just you know and it actually raises a question that we would like to raise with you but maybe it should be postponed to to the next meeting where you have something written in front of you because at the council meeting you know the alternative was you know you can't act that the thought was but more than a few you can't really deal with Lincoln without thinking about parking in general and so the other consideration is is thinking about the parking regulations across the town and that's where Guilford's information was was valuable because what he gave us is something that is town-wide it creates some other issues but one response to this is look can't deal with this right now first you've got to deal with parking all over you've got to get the regulations clear what's allowed what isn't and then apply that to various cases rather than do it piece meal and so that's but again maybe that's best discussed when you have something in writing in front of you including what Guilford gave us we could add that to the to the preliminary presentation in a written form I think you're going to find most of it's just you know numbers in streets yeah she's been waving patiently go ahead well um okay Guilford brought up first of all he talked about widths and the the the preferred widths and what Amherst feels comfortable with 12 feet one car to travel 12 more feet two lanes of travel 10 feet parking that comes to 34 feet but he said that they're comfortable with 27 to 28 feet in other words they don't need quite that's the maybe the desirable 34 feet for two lanes and one parking on one side but they can get along with 27 to 28 feet and then the chart the excel chart gives you the foot measurement of the streets that we've been looking at and you'll find that they're nowhere near 27 or 28 in this area Lincoln is 24 to 25 feet and there's one small block where it's 26 feet sunset is 22 to 21 to 22 feet okay so sunset is a little bit smaller most of the others are 21 22 they're very narrow so according to their own standards it is not safe to have two lanes of traffic and one lane of parking but as Gilbert said it's never just the foot measurements traffic is also consideration and he was debating whether we needed another traffic study with a consultant and getting a grant for that which was something he didn't see as being too difficult but then he said maybe we should go to the Schreiber plan which is what about my street and high street is um let's see about the same width it's 23 feet okay so there are a lot of other streets in town which according to the um rules that Gilbert has adopted which he thinks are safe for the town cannot take two lanes of traffic and parking on one side they certainly cannot take parking on two sides and two lanes of traffic so that was the question did we want to kind of do a more holistic look at this and that's what I wanted to ask you so that you'd have time to think about it so I don't you know before George and I write up this huge report we wanted to present to you the local impact of of the Lincoln streets and George's changed the colors and then the question do we want to do what was brought up at the town council meeting not just look at this area but apply the criteria with adjustments for traffic flow and whether transit goes through because you have to add even more feet if some if transit or trucks go through so um which means that's that's part of Lincoln's problem I'm now when you see a bus and you say what I can't believe that's on the street but it is there because it's a main thoroughfare so we really just wanted to get feedback from you and then to see what you wanted from us whether you wanted us to write it up firmly whether you wanted Guilford and Scott to come to the next meeting um or how you wanted it to proceed so that was the aim rather than spending all the time writing something present and to get some input some some response from you I I hear you saying that there are a couple of alternate proposals here that it could be just limited to Lincoln and Sunset or it could be a larger proposal that the town that Guilford seems to want to put forward that would have some kind of consistent regulation that applies to all all the streets or it would be traffic studies would mean that some streets are different than others but Guilford would like to have a safe safer streets and that's one of our aims was is to have safe walkable streets and he realized that what happened at the Lincoln hearing after they put together the proposal and done a lot of work was that other people who lived on similarly narrow streets said what about my street and he thought okay um so he thought maybe this is the chance to do something that I think he's wanted to do because it might increase safety in the town so that was really the question to you guys whether you think you want to be involved in that which is a bigger issue okay it's it's going to take a little bit longer or whether you say let's just see if we can just do the Lincoln one and we really wanted your feedback is I just have one question before I call on Alyssa and that is my recollection is that when we got this referred that the council asked us to look at it in a broader way than just Lincoln that was the interest is that is that people's recollection or do we need to look it up I think we're gonna have to look that up I mean that's that's one of the issues when things get referred you know it's not always it's not at all clear to me often what the actual language is yeah there is even if there is actual language other than look at this you know deal with it that's the recollection that that we were given the direction to to look at at least all the surrounding streets not just Lincoln I don't know about farther than that but Alyssa I agree that that was my recollection of the sense of the council at the time I share George's frustration that we sometimes have a tendency to want to refer things and not say what we're referring them to do I did not think that was the the case in this item and therefore it should have been looked up to see what we said at the time but I and and I think that Dorothy weren't not actually at the cross purposes you think we are in terms of writing up a long report we said this is the process after we beat each other up about it for several weeks of how to do a preliminary presentation you did not follow that process but what I would argue you did just do very effectively was give us an overview of the situation and say in order to make our written one to two paragraph proposal of what we think is essential now right given what we've learned because you and George have been working on this since the town council referral it isn't that you're just suddenly taking it up again right you've already had conversations so this is actually the before the preliminary presentation discussion and that's a perfectly viable thing to have we didn't include it in the process but I think it's a perfectly viable thing to have but this a written report is not just for something eventually it's the process we have is to look at a measure we haven't been provided a measure at all except verbally in today's presentation so this is just like the pre preliminary presentation which is okay too but again just like when we left our last TSO meeting and I said we're going to have something in writing ahead and people are like yeah probably um we need to know before the next presentation right what our next thing is and we are way too early to be having Guilford come in when we don't even know what the proposal is unless unless right unless what we actually say is you know what it's so early we actually do need that larger presentation from Guilford before we even really get to the point of what's work what our process calls a preliminary presentation because it is a very complex problem that you could attack from a number of different directions so I don't think we're like wrong I think we're just you know we kind of added a step in this case and so that should inform what we decide next because we didn't we can't really go through item four super well because we didn't have enough information to do that but we could certainly start it and then you know the next time you have a one or two paragraph explanation of what you're proposing now and Dorothy did you want to add something um well I thought Alyssa's question was very good um and I think it's worth discussing um because if we decide to go big it would be helpful because Guilford thought about this a lot and he really knows way more than we're ever going to know about the streets and traffic so I'd be interested in what other people thought whether we want because this is the proposal we had a Lincoln Avenue proposal Guilford in the meeting with George and me said let's make it bigger and there was when the town council passed it there was verbal statements of making it bigger but they didn't mean high street they meant just the contiguous streets in this next to UMass area so it's bigger I need to take this call um Evan so um I don't know if anyone else has has looked so I'm looking at the actual referral motion yeah thank you um and it just says to refer the following proposed parking regulation changes to the town services and outreach committee with report back and it's the specific changes that were proposed by Guilford so although I think a lot of the town council conversation centered around we we need to look bigger we need to think about the larger parking ecosystem the for my reading of the motion the referral itself only included um it's very specifically uh the reparking changes that we did not already vote on in the the downtown parking working group study no no no for this is in the public hearing yeah yeah so this was march 9th thank and the motion is to refer the following proposed parking regulation changes to the town services and outreach committee and it's um essentially it's the the ones that were proposed by Guilford less the ones that we've already approved so we technically the referral did not include looking at the larger parking ecosystem even though that was part of the council discussion so what we do with that I don't know but just as a clarification on the referral itself but didn't we inherit the didn't we inherit the downtown parking working group as well even though that wasn't part of that motion because that was a different conversation yeah isn't that why that's on our work plan yeah um so yeah it might be good to actually watch the council meeting and see no no no one should have to do that ever that means not unless 2020 has been rough enough let's not make it worse no one has to rewatch a meeting no um but I think what's becoming clear to me is that first of all the referral should have been in in your hands it Evan has done what we should have done um that referral should be cited um we should be answering the specific questions in the process even if they're just one word answers or short phrases um and then we should be making a as Alyssa pointed out a paragraph whatever presentation in writing and there should be a map in this case um and then I suppose there is the larger we could in the written proposal we could say and there's the larger question that could be considered of you know the larger parking ecosystem but this proposal is strictly in response to the referral and and that I think you deserve and so um and it should be in writing and it should be in the written record and you should be able to read it before the meeting um and so um I think that Dorothy and I have a little bit more homework to do before we can go much further um because I think as Darcy pointed out um and I think also Alyssa made this point um when people come to us I mean I have another uh from another counselor a request as just a resident for parking change on history that I will share with Darcy and at some point I assume will make its way to this committee um and there may be others eventually come along but whatever comes to us if we in the very first time out start making you know exceptions we're starting down the wrong path so um I do think and Dorothy will speak for herself but it's listening to Alyssa listening to Evan listening to Darcy it does seem that you have a right to have those questions answered explicitly though we can do it orally it should be written in the process and you should have the referral I'm sorry the proposal needs to be written um and you never know but I part is yeah I think it's also the questions and the referral given and I think that was a very clear that was a really good comment the referral is a formal thing and I I don't know what it said and if it's I mean when when when the notes are taken was somebody being really firm and getting saying what is the exact referral or was it just kind of oh you can look into this well Evan Evan read the referral so we can we can quote it yeah um so I think that we should um we should move on and um I hear George and Dorothy saying that they'll come back to the next meeting with a proposal of the measure and in specific answers so that we'll do like part two of the preliminary presentation at the next meeting does that make sense let's just call it part one okay part one and so it should not come before you again until you have a written yeah document to look at right so will we expect that at the next meeting or I hope so I think now that my vacation is over such as it was but yeah um um but if we don't get it to you then it's not on the agenda so it won't come to you until you have something written to look at I am interested myself in hearing uh getting information about what Guilford is proposing to just I guess I just have a little concern about uh proposing a measure that might somehow be inconsistent with an overall plan um but so I'm interested in in hearing both myself Alyssa I was just going to say in terms of feedback you know because like Dorothy pointed out one of the points you know the way she was viewing this is what well what's your feedback the rest of TSO before we go down this road any further and I think that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask it's just earlier in the process than we thought and so we're learning and I would say that while it you know had we rewound time arguably it could have just been the referral that was from town council as George said would be on our hand saying these are what the exact words said yes I know they talked about other things but these are what the word said this is our proposal in response to that if you on the other hand choose I don't have a problem with if you choose saying we did that's what we thought our assignment was but we were also thinking about the downtown parking working group and all the neighbors who have come to us since and everything we've been hearing at our district meetings and so we we have two suggestions to TSO we could do a or we might go down path b and this is what our recommendation is right now since you guys have been putting a lot of effort into this I think that's totally fine if you want to I don't want you to feel constrained I just want you to be clear on what you're offering in response to the referral and then just you've learned a bunch of cool stuff so you might actually recommend we go down a slightly different path and that could be your proposal or you can even just make two separate ones but again short just short not like massive proposals and then just be ready to answer the questions to writing so you have it and then answer yes yeah it has to be in rhyme that seems to be a legitimate and important part of this yes Evan yeah so I guess from like a process perspective I'm trying to wrap my mind around this weird thing that we're muddying through right because we were referred we weren't just referred parking changes on link and f we were referred three very specific parking changes and what George and Dorothy are bringing us are different than that and so it seems to me like the council said we want you to look at these three changes and we're saying okay but two counselors on our committee they'd like something different and so we're going to look at those instead and I think that we can argue why we're doing that but it feels a little weird to me to do that and I think Alyssa articulated that complexity nicely but I'm still a little bit confused and I feel a little weird about saying well we referred these but actually the sponsors now are George and Dorothy and they're going to come forth with something different as opposed to maybe saying they have their idea of what to do and we have this and we're going to have a presentation on two proposals and consider both of them and what we want to do I don't know it just it just feels because and for me personally I have my own idea that's not either of those two right so like should I be bringing it's just a weird environment of how we deal with referrals and I guess I'm trying to get some clarity on on that well Alyssa has her hand up you have your hand up Alyssa yeah sorry right exactly trying to keep it muted exactly I mean what Evan and I are both saying is how do we decide in there like at what point should we just say to ourselves you know you know we're not rewinding time so now so moving forward like we got this very specific referral but we also heard all those comments that didn't end up in the referral and we also have the downtown parking working group things like we can't pretend we don't know those things so it seems like we're required by the town council to respond to the three things they very the motion specifically said we have to respond to but what does that response look like is the question is the response us just telling the town council next time we had a preliminary conversation about your referral on those three items and based on what Dorothy and George have learned since then they think that we should look at something bigger than that do you you know you can tell us if you feel differently about that but our our initial report to you is thank you for referring those two three things to us we're in process of looking at a bigger picture and then the town council can say no I only wanted you to look at those three things pretend you never heard any of that other stuff or the town council can say sure have at it and let us know how that works but it is true that at some point we have pretty soon if we're not going to do exactly what the referral says we should tell the town council we're looking at something else so we just have to how does that fit and and we haven't envisioned that happening yet in our process so fun for us to figure that out but we get back to them on that specific referral and we don't want to go like six months into this and say well by the way we were never actually looking at the actual referral you gave us we decided to do a much bigger thing Dorothy and George just so we can try to wrap this up do you think that you could integrate the questions and the referral into the proposal somehow so that they are included in in what you're you're going to be you know bringing to us next time I think that's the point of having the referral and that's why I apologize it really should be in this formal presentation and what we're doing because it's that's what it's based on so yes it has to be in response to that I don't think we are then limited to just dealing with that we can on the basis of that we should be able to make an argument either for just dealing with that fine or dealing with that and maybe doing something more but it's based on that referral so I don't think I'm not worried about what we tell the council we're in the process and we're not doing something totally different we're not ignoring the referral we're not you know just saying oh that's a stupid referral we are using the referral as the basis for our argument but we're not just limited to that I don't think and ultimately this is the committee's decision I think both Dorothy and I agreed that you know whatever presentation we finally make it's the committee that decides and if the committee decides that you know three to two or four to one or whatever that they just don't want do anything with this that's where it dies okay we have to convince you to you know and then you make make changes you may say what about this what about that and hopefully by consensus we come up with something that we're prepared to take to the council maybe in the end we'll just say to the council look we we chewed it's over for three months four months we looked at this we looked at that we finally just threw up our hands and said there's nothing we can do we couldn't come to agreement we couldn't come to consensus okay I think we're ready I think we're ready to move on I think that that Dorothy and George you understand what you're going to do for the next time can somebody please forward me the exact words of the proposal that was a doctor's call I had to take it we'll find it we'll find it it's given us the day and we should have found it first so and he found it in like five seconds all right so we're going to move on to man is not human the the other the third preliminary presentation which is the surveillance technology by law which I don't think we're going to have to spend that much time on because we actually already had a formal presentation a long time ago and we had a practice preliminary presentation but I will go over it again and because we didn't really get have adequate time for the committee to to flesh out all the answers to all the questions of what we need to do so I am just going to pull up the the the status document that's in the folder oh wait a minute did I do that yes I did um this does not look right the correct thing why don't I have all my tabs here that's not it that is not it I have it well I have it you know it's in it's in the folder I can see it here we go yeah surveillance tech by law status of presentations 722 2020 it's one of the three files that are there it's a middle one now our viewing public gets to see here no there it's a middle one that's it you got it all right so this just kind of gives the background of what we've done up to this point on the surveillance technology by law um if you look at number four um it was referred on May 4th um and Mandy Jo did a formal presentation on June 1st with the other sponsor Pat D'Angeles and then on June 29th we tried out doing a preliminary presentation um and basically this is the the bullets are what we went through on that day and I think the only thing we didn't cover was because we hadn't yet adopted our review process I think the only thing in the review process that we didn't cover was Alyssa's suggestion that we state the need so and we we can we can talk about that but just to go through the bullets um the surveillance technology by law is sponsored by Mandy Jo and Pat D'Angeles um uh the the reason that our we're we're doing it in the TSO is because under our charge it's a measure quote measure that may affect the provision of services by a town department um and because the bylaw specifically is addressing uh surveillance technology being used by the town um it was referred to this committee by the town council on May 4th we've already passed the report back time um and um as a bylaw it'll also need to be reviewed by the GOL and KP law our our lawyer um the sponsors would like to be heard on the proposal as soon as possible um they specifically mentioned that they thought it was relevant to our conversations about racial equity because of the effect of um facial recognition technology the unequal uh use effect of using it um we have three documents now in the packet regarding surveillance technology bylaw if we could count this document um and the bylaw and a fact sheet so there's currently no town bylaw pertaining to surveillance technology and no state law though Boston just passed an ordinance on June 24th um and um it's uh uh there are multiple bills in the legislature so um it's not known right now what stakeholders will be interested in this bylaw uh possibilities include um Evan had said that he didn't think the Chamber of Commerce would be an appropriate stakeholder that's that um is up for discussion but um they they may not be uh downtown business owners customers the ACLU and individuals interested in protecting privacy interests um I have spoken several times now with the town manager manager about getting staff feedback and um about the operation of the bylaw and uh he suggested the IT department and the police chief as possible either presenters or you know they could they could weigh in in writing um as far as best practices the sponsors modeled the bylaw after Cambridge and in addition Boston Springfield Northampton Brookline and Somerville have either enacted or are looking at passing surveillance technology ordinances so we did discuss it a bit um and like I said Evan suggested that that the Chamber of Commerce would not necessarily be a stakeholder and um that was when we were talking about the review process and George said the sponsor didn't need to be present so um we can uh talk a little bit about the actual I'm going to take this off now um uh questions or if you want to also look at the fact sheet there's a really good fact sheet um or if you want to look at the sections of the bylaw to get more of an idea of the need but I think that's more of a part of the formal presentation um so questions we could just go through the um we did already go through everything but um uh we could I need to ask you I guess again what additional information and if you think that we need anything additional other than what I said from town staff or additional stakeholder input um or additional best practices any of those things there's a section of the bylaw that deals with the police department and a section that applies to departments other than the police department but um and it does have a special section about facial recognition um so I think that we're probably ready for day two uh well we we're ready to hear from the town is I think that would be the next step because we did already have a formal presentation unless you think you need to be refreshed um so I'm kind of thinking that the next step would be the town manager or somebody from the town coming to talk from you know town perspective about it um and if we have any counselor questions since we already did have one formal presentation if we have any counselor questions any any you know having the sponsors come and answer the counselor questions um so any thoughts at all because otherwise we'll just go to step two yes I don't know what order the hands went up but I'm up Alyssa's up and George is up oh I can't I'm not seeing them sorry sorry uh okay Dorothy I don't know what order they went up go ahead Dorothy that's basically a Dorothy Alyssa George okay Dorothy they asked some questions about really about remember you said you wanted to do this as a practice one okay when you referred to documents the I want to I had trouble finding which document you meant and it was because I want to make it clear that if we're presenting documents the title of the document is what you should use and refer to it so this first one you have you call status of presentations I don't know what that means um so I kept I read the title says surveillance technology bylaw status of presentations and then the two one and a half page thing from Pat and Mandy Joe is that what you're calling the referral the referral is the actual proposed by bylaw draft and so this is they have a fact sheet that is sort of a memo in support oh documents I have a big surveillance technology bylaw so I write the title things at the top so I can find them and I have federal study confirms racial bias I have NIST study evaluates effective sex age or whatever I've got memorandum proposed surveillance surveillance technology bylaw and I have surveillance technology bylaw status of presentations so sounds like you have everything what is the referral which one is the referral the draft bylaw proposal okay so that's Mandy Joe and Pat right yeah it'll it's all Mandy Joan no the proposal is the is the bylaw itself it's not their memo the memo goes with that yeah they're the sponsors though I had all the paper which then I don't have it then you don't have the bylaw itself I have the proposed surveillance technology bylaw which is quite long by from eight pages that that's it so that is that is the oh god I'm getting so lost here okay you said we have to do the referral is this the referral I'm just really needing to know the pieces of the of the of the work so this is this is the bylaw so I should write the word bylaw at the top right they're proposing that that that we that the council adopt that bylaw do we have do we have that they don't have to write a proposal if they're proposing a bylaw they just are they just write the bylaw and give it to us and that's their proposal but George and I doing on Lincoln a bylaw no parking is not bylaw no it's a regulation you're it's good to separate these things right because we're figuring all these things out yeah so theirs was a bylaw and it went as a complete bylaw to the town council and the town council as as Darcy has outlined in her may I say incredibly helpful status presentation memo from July incredibly helpful how we got to this point right how did we get here and the way that it's different Dorothy is that you know we don't yet have the how did we get here from you and George although we heard it tonight which is great and you're not offering up a bylaw you're going to be offering up changes to regulation of the public way which are going to require hearings that kind of thing but it won't show up in our general bylaws whereas what Mandy Jo and Pat have proposed and has been referred to us is an actual addition to our general bylaw and so why is this called status of presentations that that was a memo from me Dorothy just informational to this committee to outline what has happened with the surveillance technology bylaws since it was referred to us I was just pointing out the different times that it has come up and that it already had a formal presentation so is this going to be the category of paper that we present you know no you don't have to do that that was that was above and beyond the call of duty so I really want to know would you call it status of presentations would you call it something else I'm dying in paper all over my house is paper so it's important to me to write the name of the thing at the top and just say yeah this that's not relevant to the actual substance of the of the proposal that's just that was just procedural that's all just procedural so I'm going to add a question here there is a new aspect in terms of stakeholders I'm unfortunately I read it today quickly but there is there's a some some place wants to have everybody who's got a camera register with the police department so that if and this was in the paper in the last two days or last week anyway so that if there's a crime that they could go to you and say we'd like to have your footage and I see you or somebody is saying maybe that's not a good idea so there if we're talking about surveillance bylaw there's a lot of surveillance that's going on all over the place and private property and garages and whatever and that that aspect is something that should be included in this consideration it's it isn't though this particular bylaw proposal it only is pertaining to surveillance by the town so that's something that you could bring up when we're actually having the formal presentation when we're talking about the substance of it Alyssa so I appreciate that a huge percentage of our time at literally every meeting is going to be sorting out how we're approaching things and what we're calling documents and which documents we get when and eventually we'll become a well-oiled machine and then we'll reorganize our committees again she said sarcastically but in the meantime Darcy's document was incredibly valuable and is in fact absolutely essential to the TSO process in terms of how we got to where we are and what we have next to do the only actual action we are required to report back to town council is as she clearly included in her statement which was that we were referred this bylaw the bylaw is the measure in front of us what you're talking about Dorothy has nothing to do with this bylaw because this bylaw is just about purchases or or arguably redeployments of existing technology that the town has so this is talking about for example as has also recently been in the news the idea of grants for body cameras this is one of the many aspects of this particular bylaw at this particular moment is as police are talking about body cameras what's the town council's role if this bylaw didn't exist our only role would be to try and pull it out of any budget requests it would not what this bylaw says is this bylaw says you have to talk to the town council before you even apply for that grant that would not be true if we don't pass this bylaw if we don't pass this bylaw the town manager can absolutely have his department go ahead and apply for body camera technology grants without any further discussion with the town council until it gets to the point where he might need matching funds or he wants to shift money around so i'm not saying that's the only thrust of this i'm saying in response to news articles it doesn't deal with the news articles about asking people to register their personal property cameras so that the police can say oh cool that would be helpful to us just like it would all be really cool if we all just turned our phones over to the police so they could have everything too but now i'm getting kind of cranky so the other thing about surveillance there are many other aspects to the surveillance technology bylaw but body cameras is obviously one that's in the news and again without a bylaw like this the town council has no say until much later if ever in the process as to whether body cameras get deployed in our community i think one of the things if i could then just switch to what i really intended to talk about which was where are we because that's what darcy you asked us where are we with this you know we've answered since we've had a formal presentation we've had a practice presentation we again you know this isn't that we're coming to this cold this isn't a brand new concept and it is something the town council wanted us to report back on right so they want they want some process some progress from us even if not a finished product is that i think the thing that actually enables us to move more quickly on this now that we've kind of had it for a while while we worked out our process is this concept that's described at length in the bylaw itself that's called a surveillance technology impact report and because that's part of the bylaw i think that's a critical critical part of the bylaw and that is what by having that in the bylaw that's going to have the town staff do all the stakeholder outreach before it comes to the town council to tell us why they want to make a purchase of a particular thing whether it's body cameras or something else if that wasn't part of the bylaw then i would be more concerned about the community stakeholder outreach we do as part of our tso process now because if we didn't do it now it would be too late whereas i think that this particular bylaw is very clear in demanding that impact report and that impact report is where the town council can easily say to the town manager we have a bylaw that says you're going to do an impact report you're going to talk to stakeholders you just told us you only talked to these two stakeholders that's not sufficient and then he can say well the bylaw just says a report and then we can say well we meant these other things but so that's where like the real discussion about stakeholders will take place in my opinion as opposed to having in some other circumstance us feeling like we as tso have to do some immense amount of outreach now to community stakeholders before the bylaws put in place because every time a purchase like this is going to be considered staff is going to have to come up with an impact to report now the other thing that might happen obviously is that tso could say oh yeah what elissa said that's fine that's let's move on evan george dorthy put all this input it's all great darcy thinks it's all wonderful and then when it gets to town council the town council says you know that technology impact report is stupid we don't need that then i would say well wait i would have wanted to have other stakeholders be involved in crafting this thing but as it stands right now i'm feeling much less worry about ensuring the kind of stakeholder input we've talked about on numerous occasions both here and at town council because that stakeholder input is actually part of the bylaw once we pass it and it's not tso's responsibility it's the town manager's responsibility to convince the town council thus the community that adequate stakeholder input has taken place thank you um george can't hear you sorry um we have background noises shut myself off which is probably a good thing in general um first of all thank you um darcy for doing this while bylaws and and regulations are very different things what you've done here is certainly i will give dorthy and i a good model for addressing some of the questions that we need to address in in our preliminary presentation but also just is very helpful to us so thank you for doing this um i just a question for maybe you guys can answer this is there anywhere written down the current location level of actual surveillance that the town does it's probably in there i just didn't read it and if it is just tell me and i'll go read it i'm just curious what you know do we have a list of all the places where we surveil the public and we have cameras um or maybe it's a very short list is a long list or is it just assumed that there are some places where we do this and so i just a question factual one maybe it's best at the formal presentation but if there's something in all that we've been given i'll go read it but that question just what is the current level and location of town surveillance that then leads to my third point which is i still need to be convinced of the need for this but again alissa's addressed that a little bit i think with talking about body cameras and that the town manager could do certain things without this bylaw that perhaps we wouldn't want him to do or her someday whatever um so maybe that's a reason i i'm not come at the moment overwhelmingly feeling that somehow we need to do something like this but again maybe that will come up in the formal presentation i'll certainly be listening all years to get good reasons why we should go to such great lengths um to address what i'm not it's not clear to me that this is a really pressing problem in amherst but that's just me and i'm all i'm willing to to be changed or to be persuaded um and that question of the need leads to the legal exposure we're already getting this with jol from kp law with the wage left this one even more so it seems to me because it's fairly new there's no state law at all and so we are potentially exposing ourselves to a whole host of uh legal issues um and we're just a small we're a town i mean we're a city legally but we don't have huge resources we don't have a solicitor right um so i am worried about the level of legal exposure when you have a complex bylaw like this that is all these moving parts that has not really been put out in state law there's no state law at the moment that that governs this and um you know so that's my just concern so preliminary presentation time is not going to be a time when we're we're debating the merits though right good um so uh dorothy yes i think that i have very simple suggestion that the bylaws name be changed to add and this is the tricky part um you're talking about only surveillance technology used by the town of amherst i think that should be in the title because things go around very fast we do this is not a general surveillance law this is only about what is done by the town of amherst which you know so maybe just propose surveillance technology bylaw for town of amherst property it is tricky because people will think it means the whole time we mean the government uh otherwise it's going to get us in trouble somewhere down the line because it's not a bylaw about all surveillance technology um elissa can't hear you oh are you that's a leftover hand okay so no hands left um i what are you shaking your head evan because you're agreeing no hands here i have no hand i look forward to hearing from both it and the police chief on this okay so let's plan on that for the next time and um i'll talk to the town manager to try to get that arranged and um i don't know how long that will take i'll just let the sponsors know that that their second formal presentation will be um um i think at the next meeting the only two things we have are this and um and the link in evan right um and we might possibly i don't know elissa sounds don't be ready so um maybe i should should get the surveillance technology sponsors to do part two of the formal presentation too because um because we'll have enough time i mean that's kind of my question i'm sorry to speak god of order yes thank you george again in terms of process what what are we doing i mean it sounds like we're ready and maybe we're not we're ready to go to the formal presentation or continue the formal presentation i don't know what to call it um clearly there's some people who want to hear from evan's points well taken um isn't that is that part of the formal presentation and we're inviting them along with the sponsors to to move this along or is the the sense of the committee that we still have questions um that are at a preliminary level and so we want some people to come in to talk to before we say okay we're ready now to go because i believe we don't we vote to go to the formal presentations isn't there we actually have to make a decision to say okay now time for formal presentation um we don't it so then second question if that's true is that what is happening next week or next meeting is it is it a formal presentation or is it more to chat we said that we would we try to get the town people the it and the police department to come that was the plan all along they were going to come like two meetings ago um and um i'm just saying that that's possibly like a half an hour or something i mean i don't know i can i can check with them and i'll just i'll just see how much time everything's going to take how much how much time do you think you'll need for Lincoln Avenue well i'm asking a different question Darcy um what i'm hearing and i think i understand now is that we're still in the process of gathering information we're not yet ready to go to the formal presentation so whatever happens next meeting is more of us gathering information asking questions da da da da and then we're going to then decide let's then go to the formal presentation what i'm hearing from you right now is well maybe we'll throw the formal presentation in two uh if we have enough time and i i don't want that to happen um if we're going to formal presentation let's all agree and that's what happens next time if we're still in this process of gathering information fine let's all agree so next time when i come to the meeting i won't be going why with a formal presentation um so what i'm hearing is no formal presentation next time more question we're going to invite some people more questions that's what i'm hearing is that correct that's what you're hearing from yourself george yeah that's what he's hearing from me too okay so um what is he hearing from everyone else so can i just refer back to our process for a minute so i think where we are despite the fact that in some ways we've already answered future things right i think we are still in step one and we are near the end of step one we're in item four right additional information needed what additional information will we need from town staff and at what point in the process so that second part of the paragraph sentence matters what additional community stakeholder input may be needed at what point in the process that was what i address whether there's a need to research additional pest practices in other communities next steps projected to highlight at this point the committee may decide it has sufficient information and vote to move to step four so i would argue that darcy that does not empower you to have the formal presentation at our next meeting unless the committee decides either by consensus or by voting to move to step four which is what i think george was referring to just now i think we one path might be to say it sounds like some people have said we need to hear from it and the police at what point do we want to do that do we want to say that happens at the next meeting and then after we hear from them we look at four again steps a through d and decide if we're fine and then we say okay now next meeting after that will be formal presentation or are we looking at kind of a hybrid which i would argue was what darcy was saying which was that because we've had so much information on this would we go ahead and say yes we want to hear from the police and it but because it says at what point in the process we could do that during the same meeting we're doing the same the formal presentation so i think we have the flexibility i think we tried to build ourselves some flexibility that's how i perceived it at the time and so i think we just need to decide as a committee it sounds like darcy's leaning one way it sounds like george is leaning another way given this particular scenario and where we are in the process which path do we want to take for surveillance technology do we want to say the next meeting is hearing from from staff and maybe something else somebody's been thinking about or is the next meeting about that and about the formal presentation because we feel like we've gotten far enough that we can move to step four and we'll hear from staff during the formal presentation yeah i don't think that we're going to from what i can tell from the town manager it's not my understanding that the town has problems with us or anything so i'm i'm not i'm assuming that that it's not going to be something that's you know that's going to flag the committee to say oh we're not going to do this um but um i'm just we've gone through these questions in the preliminary presentation which is basically information gathering and getting input from all of you and um so i asked you all the questions we've already answered them once before we got a few more answers tonight and um we know who we want to hear from from the town we uh talked we we thought elissa suggested i think rightfully that we may not need to do too much stakeholder outreach if we have that section of the bylaw that remains in it and um we're going to hear about more best practices stuff from the sponsors so i guess my main my main concern is just you know efficiently using our time in the next meeting and um so that's and it's i'm not you know i don't it doesn't matter to me one way or the other i just would like to if we have two hours and linkin avenue is going to take one hour that's my main concern i just don't want to waste our time i think this issue is not as easy as you think so i'm i'm looking at it i could see how you read what's here that we don't have to know what they would say in step four we just have to know who we want to talk to but whether there's need for additional research i don't feel i would know that until after we have indeed talked to them so um i i don't see it as being that simple so that that's where i guess i would like to talk to the people before the formal presentation is i'd like things to be pretty much more lined up before the formal presentation is done but hi evan yeah i so i might disagree from some people here i i think we're ready for the formal presentation because i would like to hear the formal presentation from the sponsors before talking to it and the chief of police um i know we have had the sponsors come in that feels like it was about four years ago at this point and um i read the surveillance technology bylaw in full for that presentation i honestly i skimmed it before today's meeting but i couldn't tell you everything that's in it and so i i actually think i would really appreciate a refresher from their response from the sponsors and the ability to ask questions um my my suggestion would be with respect to dorothy and george to push link and av off a meeting and spend the entire next meeting just on surveillance and have the formal presentation from the sponsors followed by a discussion with it followed by a discussion with the police chief so at the end of that meeting we can basically say do we have enough to make a recommendation or do we need to send based on what we've heard from the sponsors the police chief and it do we need much like we did with wage theft to send the sponsors back to consider things and bring them back another meeting but i think trying to do link and av and um surveillance they're both complex and i worry we'll just we won't be able to dig into either and i kind of love to just get one completely off of our plate and my preference right now is for surveillance just because i think that link and av is a bigger question that's going to take a little bit more thought so that's my suggestion i endorse that idea um okay you too oh well that's majority and george i can't hear you george sorry um i have no objection i just want to be clear on what we're doing and so again that's why i'm just describing it to myself to make sure that what i think i'm thinking is in fact what everybody else is thinking which is we really are in the formal presentation stage and we are going to have a formal presentation continue next time and we will have at least it and the police chief present and to ask questions yeah we'll try to have the meeting should just be before um this issue i think that makes sense and the only question i have is when do we have the time do we bring the time manager into this um i i would like to hear from him directly um what his thoughts are what his concerns are yeah i would too um uh so he'd be invited i i would be glad to invite him um the committee want him to be present along with the it and the police chief sure um he i mean normally he's going to come to our meetings anyway the only reason he's not here is um because he's on vacation right elissa i actually don't think it's necessary for the town manager to come to all of our meetings as as a as a base expectation i think that's actually unreasonable um but i agree that under many circumstances he's going to need to be there at least for part of it because just like when we had okah process right for appointments but it was only for that part of the process and that had to be arranged i don't think it's reasonable to expect that any town council committee necessarily has staff added at any given time including the town manager himself but this one obviously we do need him and i appreciate the clarity around that because what i'm trying i'm trying to hold us to our process right so items for a through d again like i said we have the flexibility of saying at what point in the tso recommendation process so i'm willing to vote to move to step four with the understanding of the following that we are agreeing that we're saying we don't need some things to be decided before that formal presentation and with the agreement that we are going to communicate to darcy as the chair who in consultation with the committee shall assist in preparing the measure for presentation by communicating with the sponsors so she's going to tell them what we said right reaching out to the town manager regarding staff input which she's already done and she's going to just follow up on reaching out to relevant town and community stakeholders let's come back to that for a minute in a minute and d in some cases seeking input on best practices from other towns you've just assured us Darcy that that's going to be part of the presentation so we don't need to reiterate that here you'll reiterate it to the presenters and it says we expect to receive the answers to the questions and the information requested prior to the formal presentation so we have to decide before we leave here tonight what we as a committee want Darcy to communicate to town staff and to the and to the sponsors what they have to provide us in writing prior to that formal presentation and then they could say oh man we don't have time to do that you guys asked for 50 million things and that would like change the course of our trajectory here i'm confident we're not going to ask for 50 million things it will not change the course of our trajectory and that's fine but we have to communicate to Darcy so that we don't second guess her at the next meeting as to what it is we're expecting under this preparation for the formal presentation so we've said it we've said police we've said town manager is there anything we're expecting Darcy to communicate to Mandy Joe and pat about reaching out to relevant town and community stakeholders or is everyone else fine with the thing i floated earlier which is that because it's an important part of the bylaw itself as long as that stays in the bylaw i'm not hot about insisting we have every conceivable stakeholder group have information in the formal presentation and if we decided after the formal presentation we still did need that before we made a recommendation to town council we could decide it then i just don't want to be second guessing people saying well i thought you were going to bring us this but you only brought us this that's all i think we're just at the stage right now is preparation for the formal present first i think we should vote that we're ready to move step four and then i think for preparation for the formal presentation we just need to give direction so we're all managing well this is not a vote to move to step four that's that's different that's that's if you're skipping the formal presentation this is no vote necessary but if you i would really appreciate it if you all would decide how you want to submit to me any questions that you have and by what time you would want to get the see that's what i'm confused by is because if these questions are not this goes back to our entire functioning as a town council the questions people have should be the questions that this committee has which should be discussed at this committee meeting the question should not be what evan goes home and thinks of between now and some date in the future what i go home and think of between now and some date in the future or like the other night when we were told give george feedback in the next three hours before his next meeting i mean we this is what we are supposed to be talking about as a committee is what is that we want you to ask them to include and we should tell you that right now and then unless we get off the call in like in five minutes go oh my god i can't believe i didn't say that it's not up to me dorothy and george and evan to have five different sets of questions it's up to us to tell us each other right now these are the questions we agree they will address i don't think that we are prepared to do that right now i mean i think that if we're if we're asking questions about the bylaw of the sponsors i doubt if many of us right now are prepared to come up with all of our questions then why are we scheduling the formal presentation we can't prepare for the formal presentation we can't have a formal presentation if we didn't do the preparation step i'm just saying that if you if we agree that we're going to look at the bylaw and submit questions to me by a certain date then i can submit those questions to the sponsors um so i don't think and if they overlap then i'll just you know i'll i'll deal with that our committee is supposed to prepare for the formal presentation not us individually right but are we do we want to go i mean i i personally am not prepared to do that myself because i would want to look more carefully at the at the at the bylaw i that means you're going to be asking them to provide answers to questions that you personally have or that dorthy wants to ask them about recordings by private individuals which is not a question this committee's asking that's her personal question i'm really confused right so i think we'll we'll be able to to i i think i can handle that you don't you don't get to do that we as a committee do that we as a committee decide what are the questions they need to be asked the problem is that it's 8 22 and evan well i was gonna say i mean i i think that my my understanding of what we were doing was that we'd have the sponsors come in for the formal presentation and based on our preparation for that presentation and what we hear in the presentation we as individual counselors on the committee will generate questions that we will then ask of them during the meeting itself in open session at end of public meeting and then hear from the town staff and then at the end of that if we have questions remaining then we will we can decide as a committee will you know this will all have been discussed in open session and say that we could say the sponsors we're not ready to vote on this here's our outstanding questions we'd like you to come back for a continuation of the formal presentation with responses to those yeah that's still not answering step two how do we do preparation for the formal presentation right well i think that's only if um if we are prepared to put questions together to send to them in advance of the formal presentation i this is just drawing it out longer that's all i mean it's a part of our process it's not that it's a pain it's part of our process what we aren't voting we don't have a place that says vote to skip to presentation without doing the preparation step it says in consultation with the committee in consultation with the committee does not mean individual counselors send the chair questions right but it can no it cannot that's not what the words mean well well i think that they could mean that but i don't it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter to me one way or the other if you have questions now that we that you want to put on a list i can skip c which is reaching out to relevant town and community stakeholders if if one of the reasons for not using the town not using or doing certain things with this surveillance is the fact that it doesn't read email faces and black faces very clearly and allows for frequent misidentification i just don't see how we can reach out to some maybe the human rights commission or some part of the black community we have some women on the committee you don't have any black people on the committee i mean they're definitely stakeholders so i think we have to be sensitive to that um and name name some group that we should be reaching out to do with black faces not being read well by this surveillance i think that some of those stakeholders would be black people who might have had with surveillance i i agree but i mean that doesn't tell me who to reach out to right we're supposed to be giving darcy direction and we can't just say go figure that out darcy we have to say darcy we want this thing and we can't expect magic start with our outreach community outreach people well we could outreach to the human rights commission what are we asking them to say see darthy i think we i don't understand darthy what are we asking them to say we're not we know that fact about brown and black faces so are you saying we need the human rights commission to write us a letter that says surveillance technology is bad for brown and black faces we already know that so why do we need to ask them to write that down for us although there's a problem they wanted the surveillance technology used if you're using people as an excuse for doing something or not doing something you should talk to the people that you're talking about otherwise we're just speaking for them again um well we have three organizations that have shown up at our town council meetings that i i bet would weigh in on it and they'll be very pissed if they're not asked okay um evan so i mean again going back to our charge i mean our primary reason we exist is to look at measures that might affect the provision of town services so i guess my my thought and my request is for our next meeting just sponsors it and police and if at the end of that we say you know what we really feel like we need to hear from some other stakeholders then we can do that but since our the basis of the reason we have this is the it affects town services and in that case it's it and police i feel like that should be our starting point inviting more groups into that two-hour meeting i think is going to be overly ambitious i think two as as presenters yes i agree because there there's only so much we can fit into the meeting um i think the reaching out to stakeholders um i think to some extent is more about just notifying them that something is going on in the in the town and that they might be interested in they might want to provide public comment or um but uh not necessarily to be presenters um so um did did people have other ideas about stakeholders george not about stakeholders so if someone wants to speak to that i will wait we didn't finish with the questions he's i will speak to that but is there someone i i don't think i agree with evan that we should proceed as we've already agreed um we should not be um if we decide later we want to do this fine but for next meeting i think we have come to some agreement as to who we'd like to have present including the sponsors i want to go back to elissa's point which is that um it does seem at this stage that if counselors have specific questions that they want the sponsors to address that that should be communicated to you in this public forum um we could discuss and maybe we should whether there's also a way it could be done you know outside of this forum but i think right now i have raised two one is the question of legal liability and what thoughts have been given to that this seems to put us in i mean i'm going to have this question i'd like to the sponsors respond to uh the concerns about the exposure legal exposure to us in creating a bylaw that pretty much is is not does not exist in state law the second one is a more specific one back to my earlier question could i have a list or do we have a list or could i have some sense of what current surveillance is being done by the town and maybe as i said maybe the answer's there and i just didn't find it but that's a second question i'd like them to address if it's not there i'd like to know what actual surveillance this town does um in some in description you know how many cameras roughly where are they what do they do and the second is legal liability those are two things that i'd like them to address at this meeting um other counselors may have other questions and they should speak up now um if after the meeting three days from now i have like oh my god i forgot to ask x elissa race is a good point is it okay when you all for me to send and darcy by the way also ask them this this and this or should i just i shouldn't do that and when we have the formal presentation then i can as an individual why would you not be able to send me that when we do that with all of our other committees well that's what i'm asking so um the processes right elissa's made this strong argument in our process is the committee as a group agrees that these are the questions we want to be asked of whomever these are the stakeholders we want to be brought in these are the town staff people we want you to invite and if elissa or i four days later says oh gee what about so-and-so and we send you an email privately says by the way would you also invite x y and z and so we show up at the meeting and x y and z are there we're all looking at each other like why are they here well the answer is because ryan emailed you privately and asked you to invite them so i think that's problematic and so if that's problematic then it seems also um the other is problematic so i think elissa has a problem it's not problematic in other committees it's not committees this is our committee this is our process no we can't we can't have a more restrictive process than the other committee since we have the process we have no we can't we should decide our own process it i i invite anyone to send me questions and i will forward them to the to the uh to the sponsor that's not appropriate that's not the process we agreed to you can't decide to not follow the process we agreed to where is that process we did never agree to that it says in consultation with the committee the only way you can consult with the committee is in a public meeting darcy let's say that three days from now i think i really would like matthew charity to be present at this formal presentation so i send you an email saying would you please invite matthew charity to come to this presentation and you think gee george that's a great idea i will and then elissa dorothy and evan show up and there's matthew charity and they didn't invite him they didn't that right there he is and that's not appropriate it seems right that's just not right so we have questions i have a little comment george and i were talking about lincoln avenue and his checkered past and we decided that our aim is to get our committee to agree because we figured if we can't get a unanimous agreement from our committee it's not going to pass the council so i think that there's been some strong statements that we're really interested in consensus and sometimes it does take longer okay it's not the most efficient use but it is it ends up with a stronger instead of redoing lincoln avenue every couple of years and having to go down in flames we're trying to say let's do this so it'll work and i think that you know this is going to be true for a lot of other issues so we don't have to be known for speed so i i'm agreeing with the interpretation of the chair or the chair's designee in consultation with the committee i'm sure that if something really big comes up or whatever and something is done without consultation that you know we won't all die but our rules say we can't agree outside of public view so that's the issue okay well does anyone have any other questions that i should be forwarding to the sponsors uh elissa yes my other question following like kind of follows on george's questions um and and evan may have specific it questions too but the george question that i was following up on when he was saying what technology are we using now and i don't know how specific they're going to be willing to give us but i think we should definitely ask the question and ask for as much specificity as is normal practice to tell us and then of course when they get that give us that information we may decide we want more or different information but the other part that i wondered about for technology because technology is constantly evolving is is there something um the professionals whether it or police have heard about right you read articles in the paper that they think oh well if that happens it's not covered under this bylaw like is there some other emerging technology that does this bylaw sufficiently covered not only all the things we know about now but things that are similar is it you know is this bylaw too loose or too restrictive in terms of emerging technology i guess that's my question emerging technology is this bylaw too loose or too restrictive and um anybody else well i would have three questions um camera the body camera thing i guess um i guess i'd like them to somebody to walk me through how this affects that and how that would affect what the town does how how what affects what as i i read it in detail last time i didn't refresh the details this time you're saying i think you said that they could not order body cameras without the town council's consent did i did i hear that correctly i i would argue it if i read it correctly which i may not have either but it's that you have to have told us about it you could still end up putting you still could you could like you could do the presentation that it says you could do the community impact report that it says the council could say wow that's a terrible idea and us town manager could still do it and then when the budget decision came that would impact our receptiveness to that particular part of the budget but if it was just free grant money then arguably it could be done without town councils because that's the executive power in the charter but what this bylaw does is it says we know we don't get to make all the decisions but we want to have we want to be informed we want our community to be informed there would be people who would argue because we're not going to have the merits right but there would be people who would argue you don't need this bylaw because you should never infringe on the executive that way that might be an argument against the bylaw but what this does is it doesn't actually give town council powers we don't have into the charter but it does add to the information that's being provided out there about possible purchases which without the bylaw would be up to the discretion of other people to tell us about and you may or may not agree that that's necessary but that's part of the function of the bylaw is to let people know that something's happening so I don't know so how would I word that question about the grant grant money is it is it maybe a confirmation that their understanding how what their understanding is of what I just said right is you have the does the bylaw just say you have to tell us but you can still decide to decide whatever you want or does it actually place a an actual constraint I think it just presents a constraint in terms of timing I don't think it presents a constraint in terms of actual executive final powers and maybe that's part of the legal thing that George is wondering about I don't know if you want to put some more flesh on your liabilities concerns George that they can maybe try and answer for us ahead of time okay say that again elissa does this confirm your understanding that what that the bylaw serves to inform the town council and the public of potential grant applications potential budgetary expenditures but does not prevent those expenditures from taking place unless we vote against an actual budget item which in the case of a grant that's free money which is rare usually they have strings but if it's free money would be would mean it would never in theory it might never come to us as a council because we always are telling staff to go after grants right we never say turned out money so okay I might have to run that by you okay any other questions because otherwise we'll just go ahead I'll get the three presentations for the next time I really appreciate that Darcy I just wanted to I'm putting Evan on the spot if I could really quick what does he want to hear from it I'm just curious like are there specific things that we want it to address to be perfectly honest at this point I don't have anything and that is because I haven't actually gone through and fully read this for several months but I do think it would be useful to have them there because having read it or just in conversation with the sponsors I see it as definitely possible if not likely that questions will come up that would be best fielded by it okay George as quickly as a matter of process do you all feel we need to have a vote that we're going to a formal presentation or can we simply agree by consensus I'm just wondering because we're going to a formal presentation is my understanding for next time that's what we're doing we're moving to step three and it's not Darcy's correct it's not in the process that we have to have a vote right we only have to have a vote if we're skipping past the formal presentation on the other hand I think we're quite prepared to do right so by consensus I think disagree that we're moving to a formal presentation yes that's my sense good okay we're all on the same page yay and it's time to adjourn past time do we do we want to vote on the minutes did did did people get a chance to look at them there were no amendments to the first set I amended the second set a little bit and the track changes so if do we feel ready to to adopt them if I move to adopt those of them also on the second because I'm going to move that right now I move to accept the minutes of July 23rd 2020 and August 6th 2020 as amended um has anyone prepared to second that second that uh roll call vote um Alyssa abstain Darcy yes Dorothy oh dear uh Evan yes George yes oh good well you got plenty you're fine um okay well so we know what we're going to do in our next meeting um I just wanted to make a brief announcement and that is um that I've been working with this new group in town called Zero Waste Amherst and we we are working with Guilford to uh he he has made a grant to DEP to to use the local recycling assistant person for western mass to do research on best practices on um hauler systems so they're they're looking at um haul directly hauling and also looking at systems where the hauler directly um contracts with the town rather than with the residents and you know different things systems with curbside composting and pay pay per bag or pay per weight um a lot of different options that different other communities are doing around the state and also around the country so it's very exciting and I hope eventually it'll come to this committee in some form or another you know I don't know when but the woman who's doing the the research is going to be doing it within the next like six weeks or so so hopefully we'll all get to see the results of it anyway uh George sorry I'm just quickly as I mentioned earlier I was approached by uh actually a counselor with a request for public ways change I just want to know my assumption is what I do is I forward that to Darcy and Nick goes from there um is that right uh yeah I guess um if you get it I guess because I'm asking if someone sends one of us a public ways request for a change it obviously comes to our committee um my sense is I simply forward it onto Darcy and ask her to um consider putting it on the agenda at some point or at least I guess so um it still looking for help here TAC we're still in in uh you know working order that might also be something that would go there right ECAC I'm sorry in here TAC right I don't I don't think we have well I think the fact that we don't have a process for public ways yet is the public way is why you don't know the answer to the question George I think it goes to Lynn and then Lynn calls Darcy and says well since we don't have a process yet what do you want to do with this and I think it's gonna that's what's going to happen until we have that process is it's going to be on a case-by-case basis if TAC had been meeting regularly right because we weren't having a pandemic and TAC had been meeting regularly through all this they might have already gone to TAC right and if we had more time we might have our public way policy ready which we don't so I would think this is currently a Lynn and Paul and Darcy question as to given we don't have any of those formal processes ready what should we do next I don't think it's it's on Darcy to schedule it at this committee meeting I think it's you it's Darcy talking to Lynn and Paul about well what are we gonna do maybe and maybe TAC can do it maybe TAC is that is the place for you can forward it to me and I can bring it up at the next meeting that I have with Paul okay um anything else um is I wonder if art is still here I don't think so oh it is art I'm I'm amazed that you're still here uh but it doesn't look like he's got his hand up um for public comment oh wait a second oh um so um yeah no I think that's I think that's it for tonight no items not anticipated by the chair for eight hours in advance so I'm going to declare us adjourned at 847 thank you thank you all good night