 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise V's and generous donations from viewers like you. Good evening. This we are now beginning our meeting for October 5, 2020. Governor Baker's March 12 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual town meeting. I will call each counselor by name, although I will recognize we're still waiting for a few to be connected. And they should unmute and say they're present and that we can hear them and they can hear us. Please remember to mute your mic when you go back. Raise hand function. Given that we have a quorum of the Council President, I am calling the October 5, 2020 meeting of the Amherstown Council to order at. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Somebody needs to mute, please. Okay. Thank you. So let's begin. Shallonny, not yet. Alyssa Brewer. Darcy DeMont. Present. Lynn Griesma is present. Dorothy Pam. Working on that connection. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Matthew Shane. Present. Steve Schreiber. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. Sarah Schwartz. Present. And Shallonny Balmilne is present. Thank you. And so we are going, this meeting is being recorded. It is also going to be available afterwards. And it is available by audio, video and live on Amherst media. If you would like to connect, you can either connect through this or you could connect by calling in. And if you're calling in and you want to ask a question during public comment, I mean, make a comment during public comment, please use the raised hand function. We have two, we have three very brief announcements. And these are related to, and Serge, are you with us? Don't think so. He's helping Dorothy. Thank you. There he goes. We just want to make sure you're aware that there is a COVID hotline and also a website. We want to make sure that you're aware that community preservation act proposals are due on October 12th, which is coming right up. And also that the emergency rental assistance funding has round of funds available. You can apply for those by going to community action and you can find that information on the website. So given that we are going to now go on to the rest of the agenda. And our first area is public comment. And so we're going to take that down, Serge, to later. Thanks. Okay, for public comment. At the moment I only see one hand Allison, please raise your hand. Okay, we're going to bring you into the room. Please unmute state your name and where you live. Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. I am Allison McDonald. I can see that I'm actually Allison Blylar on your screen. But I said, I'm Allison McDonald. I live in Amherst. I am. First, I want to thank you all for all the dedication and intense work that you all have been doing all summer long for our community. I'm here this evening to speak about this recent surge in COVID-19 cases in our community and to ask about the actions that town will take to address this and help slow and stop wider community spread of this virus. Our current case count as of this morning on the website on the town website was 78 most all of which were new since Wednesday of last week. The timing is important since the governor updates the categorization of communities in his color coded map on Wednesdays of each week and communities that are not designated as red zone may advance further in the governor's phase reopening plans as of today. While Amherst was designated yellow last Wednesday, the search search that's a squarely in the red suggesting that further business reopening beginning today would be unwise. Indeed, our schools will remain closed to in person learning for two more weeks due to the local surge in new COVID-19 cases. Given this, I urge you to consider the following. One, consider a halt to further reopening of businesses and services until Amherst is no longer in the red zone for two consecutive weeks. Consider also taking steps beyond what the governor's guidance suggests that can help bring the virus back under control in our community, such as perhaps moving back in the state phasing plan and implementing restrictions on indoor dining and bar service. To begin stricter enforcement of our current mask border and mandate, we have a mandate in place for the downtown area that includes stiff penalties for non compliance. But initially this policy has mostly been about education and the likelihood of any penalties was expected to be small. With local new cases putting us in the red zone. Now is the time to begin strict enforcement of that policy. Consider also taking action against gatherings outdoors and indoors that exceed the size limits included in the town and state orders, providing a COVID hotline for the community to call in concerns is great. But if nothing is happening in the moment to break up such gatherings, it's hardly helping limit the spread of the virus. Take action to respond to complaints and break up gatherings when they are happening. These are all actions the town could be taking now to enforce compliance with its own current policies and orders, independent of whatever actions that you mass maybe taking with its students. We've done really well until recently with maintaining control, to the point that we were about to reopen our schools for face to face learning for our most vulnerable and high needs students. Consider and prioritize their needs and help us do more to bring this virus back under control in our community. Thank you. Thank you for your comments Allison. Brian Yellen please enter the room on mute and state your name and where you live. Hello my name is Brian Yellen. I live at 13 Noratuck Circle in South Amherst. And I just wanted to voice my support for the wage theft bylaw. I'm not sure if there's an agenda I don't on it today I didn't see it on the agenda. So I'm offering comment now the way the bylaws written that it's easy to comply with for upstanding companies and it makes sense for our town. Thank you Brian. And Meg Robertson. Please unmute state your name and where you live. Hi I'm Meg Robertson I live at 560 Station Road in Amherst, Massachusetts. I'm also calling in tonight in support of the wage theft ordinance and really appreciate you taking it up and considering it in the town I think that it would do much to strengthen the impact of construction projects, the employment offered by our restaurants in our town if there were assurance about wages being paid as they should be by not only the primary employers but the subcontractors and sometimes the subcontractors of the subcontractors. That seems to be where most of the abuses happen throughout the state of Massachusetts. So just having been in this town now over 11 years I really think it would make our community much stronger to have this ordinance on the books and I really appreciate all of your time and attention to the issue. Are there any other people with public comment at this time. Just as a matter of information the wage theft bylaw we hope will be on the agenda on October 19. And I want to make sure that Dorothy Pam who has now joined us can hear us so please unmute and confirm that Dorothy. Yes. Thank you. Okay. We are going to go on to the consent agenda and I've asked that it be put up on the screen, because it's a fairly lengthy consent agenda. The items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy to remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting asked that it be removed. When I list the consent agenda items, the request to remove an item from the consent agenda does not require a second. What you'll do is raise your hand and I'll check all hands before we go. So the motion is to move the following items and the printed motions there under and approve those items as a single unit. The first is to suspend suspension of town council rules and procedure 8.4 for the following agenda items. 8D the rank choice voting commission charge and 8E participatory budgeting commission charge waiver of the town council rules procedure 8.6 for the following agenda item. It is the item related to it's actually item 14 and it is the item related to the whole harmless resolution, which we'll be dealing with next. And all this does is allow us to act on it tonight. 9A5 we're still waving of town council rules of procedure 8.6 for the extension of appointments to the rank choice voting commission and 9A6 extension of appointments for the participatory budgeting commission. 8D is approval of charges for the changes to rank choice voting commission charge and 8E is approval of charges to participatory budgeting commission charges. Those are both extending their dates. 9A1-4 is approval of the town manager appointments to the following boards and committees, Affordable Housing Trust Board of Trustees, Community Preservation Act committee, Disability Access Advisory Committee, LSE commission. 9A5 is approval of extension of terms to rank choice voting commission. 9A6 is approval of extension of terms to support participatory budgeting commission. 11A to B is approval of minutes. September 15, 2020 joint town council and community resources committee meeting minutes and September 20, 2020 town council meeting minutes. Just let me make sure I can see if there's any raised hands. Yes, Darcy Jermont, please unmute Darcy. I was, I would just like it if you could explain to the viewing public rules of procedure 8.4 and 8.6 because I think it's pretty confusing to people what we're doing right now. I had to spend some time figuring it out myself. So, would you be able to do that, Lynn? I will do that. And if I can, I'll ask for some assistance. Is there a second to the motion? Ryan, second. Ryan is seconded. So, let me just explain town council rules of procedure 8.4 by suspending that rule, it allows us to vote tonight instead of having this to come back for a second time on the agenda. So it's literally means we do not have to have it on the agenda twice. And if we suspend that rule, we can go ahead and act on it tonight. The waiver of town council rules of procedure 8.6 is a waiver that means we are not referring these items to the respective committees. In this case, we would have referred the resolution to GOL, and we would have referred the extension of appointments for rank choice voting and appointments for budgeting to TSL. And because they're pretty routine, both of these committees are already up and running. And basically because of COVID, they need an extension on their timeframe. And they are committees that will be reporting within the next 12 months. In fact, one will report by the end of December. The other by next June. And when they do report, then those committees will be dissolved. Okay. Are there any other questions? And Darcy, did that hit the. Yeah, no, that that that hopefully clarified it for. Yes. Kathy Shane questions. Yeah, mine is a question. I think this is just a technical question on the participatory budget commission. It's extending it to a particular date and extending all the members on the commission to that date, but it also has the word two years in it. We're not going to be meeting for two years. Even if we hadn't extended this, we didn't even start until September of 2019. So just when there's a conflict, I certainly don't think we want to meet from two years from, from starting now. So would it, the date would override the two years and the way it's worded. That's correct. Okay. There are other questions at this time. Okay, this requires a roll call vote. And you can search, you can take the screen down. And I'll start with Shelly Balmille. Yes. Yes. At the Angeles. Yes. Darcy DeMond. Yes. Yes, Mandy, Joe Hanneke. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Shriver. Hi. Andy Steinberg. Yes. And Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Consent agenda passes 13 for none against none abstentions and no people absent. So we are going to now go on to a result, the resolution. And since, and let me just give a little background. This resolution is we're the first body that's going to act on it. We are going to act on it. And then we're going to have the Amherst Pelham School Committee and the Pelham School Committee. And the resolution is a rose because of a proposal. That is being discussed. At the state house that would eliminate the whole harmless clause in school funding for chapter 70. And since we developed this very rapidly over the weekend, the one we're going to show you on the screen actually has feedback that was received since the original one was posted and so the first change in this is to split the first paragraph into two and add the word some and then also instead of just say basically state aid it says chapter 78 because there are other forms of state aid that this does not impact in the second what was the second and is now the third whereas there was basically a suggestion for rewording to make it more clear I'm gonna give you a moment to look at those okay and then if we could go on to scroll down I believe there's one more change yes this very last bullet under the fourth whereas major it's a it's just a way in which it's formatted so it has to be changed to format it correctly and then was there any or there any others just looking at my last yes at the very end it is to say losing hold harmless would have a profound negative impact on the quality of equity of our public schools hold harmless aid is essential and equitable okay so I hope I captured people's recommended changes with that I'm going to make a motion to approve the resolution resolution as amended is there a second second thank you Andy okay questions George Ryan just a very small and about an adverb this is my chio personality creeping into the four and very first whereas it says some advocacy groups seeking to implement the act quickly I guess that's what it means in other words this these groups want to do this quickly and that's why we need to buy this or one of the reasons for this resolution that is correct as opposed to just saying that they are proposing to eliminate that's my instinct but okay this is why we're working we're doing this instead of referring it to GOL Mandy Joe Hanneke yeah the the second page where you added the hold harmless in all caps it's not a repeat so I think just Scrivener wise because it's it's down at the bottom I don't know how we want to show it but it's now just repeated thank you I will get rid of it thank you for doing these things very rapidly and I apologize for that Dorothy questions comments I could not rephrase that to explain what it's about to someone and so I'm gonna ask a couple of questions we have had hold harmless for a long time in our public school I think that means you don't reduce the amount of funding is that correct or not Sean mangano is here and he is prepared to explain this if that's helpful Sean why don't you go ahead that's a big task I know all of it but so chapter 70 is just a very complicated formula it always has been it's it's very difficult to explain which is one of the issues but yeah we've had hold harmless essentially means that if the chapter 70 formula which has a number of economic variables and enrollment based variables if the formula would say that we should get less chapter 70 and the hold harmless provision would keep us flat and we would carry that forward and so the biggest thing for Amherst is that over the last 10 or 15 years our enrollment has dropped you know somewhere between 15 and 30 percent and so the hold harmless provision has kept us flat while we've seen some of those enrollment drops and there's been some other changes as well in the formula but that's one of the bigger ones so then the next question is why who wants to change it it sounds like it was connected to some other good program I mean we have this program we've had it who wants to change it why do we have to reassert it so I just go ahead and speak to all the motives but I think this gets back to a little bit about George's question about the quickly the student opportunity acts calls for a lot of increased investment in the chapter 70 program and in schools and the plan to implement that program was going to take many years with sort of small increases each year to fully implement and I think the group which is a Boston based group is saying well we could implement that student opportunity act more quickly if we got rid of the whole harmless provision that would free up some money and we could implement it faster so that I think that's sort of part of their rationale for why that's helpful okay thank you are there further questions Dorothy no I just needed to know who wanted to change it and why we were considering it because obviously you want to keep hold harmless right thank you Alyssa you have your hand up thank you just a couple of bits associated with this and because of other reasons I would have received the report that perhaps not everyone received even though I'm pretty sure we also got notice from our local senator and our state rep mentioning the specific report that we're referring to in this resolution as some advocacy groups rather than calling them out by name but if you look at that report it is just as Sean said and while one reading that report who's never served on a school committee were been involved in town finance might say well yeah that makes sense the poorest communities need the most money of course that seems socially just and appropriate but what it does not take into account is a couple of things one is that we don't have another way of making up this money I know it's already been in the press that we're talking about eight million dollars a year at this you know at this particular juncture we don't have a way of saying well that's fine we'll just ask the taxpayers for more money that means we would have to make those cuts to our school so the report implies that all the communities that are getting this whole harmless aid can just make up for it someplace else and that's just completely false so that's one reason why we have to reassert this another thing I just want to make sure I mention is as many of you know I serve on the MMA fiscal policy committee and when the student opportunity act was being discussed before it actually passed there were definitely people there who said why am I going to tell my reps to vote for my senators to vote for this this isn't going to help my community why am I going to do it it's going to help some other community it's not going to help me which is of course not the kind of thing we like to imagine our fellow municipal officials would do but it is the reality and the way they were able to convince their constituents that it was okay is that they had the health hold harmless provision in there and so you take away hold harmless the whole thing would never have passed because there are too many communities that can cannot that yes there are some wealthy communities out there who could probably find a way to make up for some of the money we aren't one of those communities for sure we're not going to be able to make that up and so if you also read that report a little carefully it also really dives into the idea of well you know there are these rural schools and they have very little enrollment so they're just gonna have to deal with that I'm not sure if they think putting kids on a bus for longer than an hour every day like they are in some communities already is somehow a good idea but while the reports imply that they're about social justice and fairness and equity that's not actually true and so that's why it's important for us to go ahead and assert this now the other thing I just wanted to ask about is if we weren't writing this particular document we were advised bar by Senator Comerford and by Mindy Dom our representative that there is this opportunity to write in in response to a survey from dls dls dr slash desi and that's by October 16th so are we planning or are the schools planning to write something additional for that October 16th are there any particular talking points that the schools are looking forward to us making you doing that in addition to this because if there wasn't a survey right this would be a letter we would write there is also a survey and so obviously we can attach this and send it in as part of the electronic survey but I'm just wondering as the sun folds and just we have a very short time period here if there's anything else in addition to this that our schools would appreciate having the municipal side go ahead and comment on the survey I'm pretty sure Paul and Sean and Mike are already working on something perhaps in addition to this particular thing Paul or Sean you might assist me with the answer I believe the plan is to put this in as our answer but Sean yeah the plan was to so we can look at the survey and there's specific fields we can try to you know answer those specifically but I think the plan was to attach this resolution which we developed in conjunction with the schools and there may be more technical arguments that we want to include in that as well we'll have to see sort of what specific areas they're asking for listen thank you Kathy um I just had a question I have no question on doing this resolution but how many cities and towns are affected by the loss of hold harmless and if we put out a press release or something are we one of you know name a large group you know so it's not just one town being affected so the way it's written it's very much logically it's just Amherst the way we've written it but um putting out something that says we're among blah blah blah of you know that account for so many thousands of students it just seems to me it makes it stronger that we're not alone Sean go ahead I looked at it um I think as a FOI 20 and it's something like 62 or 63 percent of the districts receive hold harmless a of some you know of different magnitudes it varies by community Boston I think is one of those communities which obviously is very big and has a lot of a lot of students and would represent a huge portion of the the student population in the state so it's a large population of the students in the state my point is just you know I in another walk of life I thought about the report and then the press release not we're probably not doing a press release but if you say 63 percent of districts and uh 50 000 students would have a cut if this went through it just it just puts it in a much bigger context it really hurts us and it really hurts a lot of other places so um maybe that's more Mindy and Joe's role but it it's helpful to me to have that kind of information uh Andy yes several things that I just wanted to cover that have been talked about because I spend a lot of time working on this and to help also with the drafting um first of all I want to remind the council that the student opportunity act was passed by the legislature earlier this year to try and change the formula to largely make it a more equitable formula for districts we were not a beneficiary of that but this council and our school committee both passed resolutions in support of the student opportunity act knowing excuse me knowing that because it was the right thing to do and I think one of the things that we need to be very clear about with everyone is that it is in the resolution that we did support it because it is the right thing to do but we shouldn't be penalized by its implementation the second thing is as Sean points out in his memo the act actually requires that the department of revenue division of local services and desi obtain comments on implementation issues and so this October deadline that Lissa was referring to is really about comments and when you look at the desi website which I did over the weekend it is not really a survey as much as it is a mechanism for submitting comments and so most of it is a comment box and the ability to attach documents to the comment box so I think that that was the second point that I just really wanted to bring out and I think the third reality is is that this came up so quickly and we had a lot of time constraints because of the schedule of council meetings and school committee meetings that we really had a very little bit of time with a large number of people involving school committee and some counselors who were trying to put this together and there was sort of a desire to meet the deadline to allow action in the council and the school committee this week because it was the last opportunity to do it and to get it in by October 16 so and there was a desire among some of the drafters to make sure that it was short the original request was to keep it to a page on the ground so nobody reads more than a page so that it was you know it was a balancing act and of time in varying demands but that I thought it would be help additional helpful information so thank you Andy thank you for that information and also thank you for all your work on helping to clarify and get this done over last Friday over the weekend etc are there any other questions from the council okay so the motion has been made and seconded uh it is to adopt the um resolution as amended and seeing no other questions or hands raised I'm going to start with Alyssa yes Pat D'Angelo's yes Darcy Dumont yes Lynn Greasmer yes Mandy Jo Hanneke yes Dorothy Pam yes Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes Kathy Shane yes Steve Schreiber yes Andy Steinberg yes Sarah Schwartz yes and Shalini Balmoum yes and we will make sure that the record shows it was a unanimous vote and I will make sure that we forward this uh amended copy to the other boards that will be reviewing it okay we're going to go on to our presentations and discussions uh at this point we're going to go to the COVID-19 update and the town manager is being joined by acting health director Jen Brown thank you hi everybody there's Jen sometimes you look at the screen and you don't see everything so um we have a slightly updated um slide deck so I'm not sure if there if that's up and running yet um Serge has it ready to go and I'm I'm posting it online now okay thank you ready to go yep good thank you so um this has been a big couple weeks for us and I appreciate that's why I really recognize um that we're so fortunate as a town to have Jen here working so hard she's working seven days a week um really knows her numbers and it's very confident and and digging into maven and really appreciate that um so um so I'm going to go to the next slide so oh this is the slide welcome Jennifer so this is the snapshot we show every time so um the um there's a typo on our website that had uh when the key thing here is the second bullet where it says 75 current cases that is accurate uh there's a typo on our website that said 45 that's what we just corrected and that's why there's an updated uh slide deck that just went out all the other numbers are accurate so 75 current cases and we're going to talk about how big that number is compared to the last time we presented which was when I think we were talking about eight or nine cases when I talked to you back in September so next slide so this we are a yellow community now um that is an uptick for us we you know we you want to be in either the gray or the green territory we are yellow we do not want to be in red red um indicates that you are um you cannot move forward under the governor's reopening plan it also just tells you that you're not doing so well as a community these colors these um numbers come out every Wednesday so they they will come out on October 7th next time we see them so next slide so this just shows our neighbors and what the what the map looks like and what's happening in the state and you know there's usually a lot of these things they're very um incident specific things that are driving the changes and what this looks at is that the last two weeks and how you're doing um so um we are doing we're in the four to eight cases per hundred thousand and we would like to be in the under four cases per hundred thousand next slide we also like to look at what are what's happening at it with our institutional partners the University of Massachusetts which we'll talk a little bit about a fair amount tonight about tonight they had 121 positive cases cumulatively Amherst college has four cases cumulatively this is from the beginning of their testing regimen Hampshire college has there's a typo there too there is zero cases um so far go to the next slide so this is the slide we want to spend some time on we're going to look at the bottom graph first and that's the total new cases and you've all read about the increase in cases due to a cluster and that you can start to see that tick up on where it says on the bottom graph where it says september 24th this graph shows you the number of cases per day that have been identified by the university and then you see under october 1 that giant increase and those are all cases that have come to light in terms of being tested uh covid positive the chart above it is the number of tests that are performed so if you look at that same time period september 24th you know there's the university has been pretty regular those those five bars when there is Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and then there's a drop on Saturday and Sunday then Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday um so there was a um the testing on september the week of september 24th where it was about the same as previous the next week the week where it says october 1 a big uptick in testing and one of the reasons for that is because of this um you know this the cluster that was identified and got a lot of coverage also the university sent out a email directing students to who looked off campus to come in and get tested and i think the um they had almost three thousand or over three thousand tests on that monday after the email went out um so um so a lot of things about this so this was very concerning to us as the test and gen will talk more about that um and um what jeff do you want to talk about the cluster and what has happened with that yeah is there um another slider i can just talk about that so it started um what an uh becker has reported to me and we've been discussing is that she gave me a call on friday uh september 25th she said gen we have some cases coming in so what she reported to us is there is a gathering identified and they're calling it a party and that was actually september 18th and what i understand it was just eight eight students and from that you can see what happened the waves went out um so um so here we are uh you know two weeks later almost and we have you know 92 cases you know sort of it's gone up and down since since um then or is that is that correct with that number anyhow you can see how the 80 went on the third and now cases are becoming to come come off so so one thing i can talk about and you can stop me if this is not the right time but when we identify a case one of the things we do is we really look at that case obviously you do needs assessment see how they're doing but we look back and see where they've been so we really try to get a history of what perhaps we can find out where they got it from so if we go backwards we can identify something then we can prevent other cases from branching off from that one person but anyhow so for us it started um it's been climbing these um cases get entered via laboratory values and they get reported um through um Ann uses a system called red cap and then it goes into dph and it comes to us comes to Ann and me um something called maven i think you probably know it and i've talked about it but the massachusetts first real virtual epidemiological network when cases come off and we will see cases start coming off those are done sort of manually i want to say cases go in you know via laboratory and then manually one by one we start taking people off and if if this is a good time i can talk about isolation and when people come off isolation um is that okay all right so um isolation is that period when you've been infected so i heard this the other day the eye stands for infected in isolation and typically we know now even we have more data after six months that time is 10 days so it's 10 days if your symptoms have resolved if you don't have a fever taking tile and all um so it's 10 days after your symptoms have started and if you're asymptomatic it's 10 days after a positive laboratory the pcr test will stay positive up to um it's about is it 90 days it's three months so you don't test out you really end isolation by symptoms and then just quarantine is when someone has been exposed there are contact um and i i remember seeing photographs of you know ships out in the harbor being quarantined for 40 days they keep them out there they're not allowed in because that's the incubation period for this disease it's it's um 14 days so you want to make sure no one becomes infectious in that time you go to the next slide so we want to talk a little bit what the university is doing and i do want to credit the university because they have done a lot of good work in this area um they have set up an asymptomatic testing facility at the mullen center which is really one of the um big and good ones uh great ones in the country and just i think several people have toured through it it's really terrific um they have a very robust contact tracing we do want to talk a little bit about what contact tracing is because that's really important and that's proving to be very important in this particular cluster in particular um gen talked about isolation and quarantine how they're handling that they you know as you know that they have really focused on education and outreach and trying to educate students and reaching into the different communities um going door to door in fact they also asked me to let you know that they also have university administered discipline as required they have had 195 cases handled in month of september i do not know the disposition of those cases i just know that they have brought that many to the dean of students um so in one of the reasons that so i want to talk a little bit about education and outreach and then i'll turn to gen to talk a little bit about what content tracing means because the contact tracing is very important to understand uh so on the education outreach um they they really believe that if that it's through education and i think we learned a lot of this from other diseases uh it's through education that you change attitudes um and that if you come down punitively on a lot of our on students which is what we're asked a lot of people are calling us and saying why aren't you hammering them coming down very hard on students what the net result of that is that students may become have become less interested in being tested um if they are not tested um then we won't know um if there's a case we discovered this first case through asymptomatic through an asymptomatic test so that was a good early warning uh sign for us um and they also fear that people will not uh participate in contact tracing because if you call up someone say were you at that party they're they're afraid they're going to not tell them the truth or not answer the phone because they don't want to get in trouble for having been at the party um so i think that that's a philosophy that the university has other colleges and universities have taken a different philosophy where they have come down really hard on their students one of the arguments the university makes in terms of keeping students engaged with the university is that if you um suspend or expel a student it doesn't mean that they leave the the town they still live where they're going to live it's just that there's no more communication with that student so their their philosophy is that you engage the students you try to create uh more more of a culture of where people are watching out for each other um contact tracing is so important jen do you want to talk about what that is you do a ton of that i know over the last years right yeah so contact tracing is different for each um communicable disease for covid we really start with that person and we start going through um when their symptoms started and then we go two days prior so we sit and say you know what where where were you two days ago because we want to talk to you about who were you in um contact with and then we can go down a list and say you know did you eat with anybody um you know were you sharing kitchen space were you in the room and so you go through all the different scenarios but one thing we really do want to focus on and we're realizing again we have the data to support this that it really takes 15 minutes and within six feet of being um near that person for that period of time or like a direct you know hit of a cough or sneeze um to transmit this disease um so we'll go through the day we'll go through the period where they're infectious then we reach out to those people um and once we identify someone we'll call them and we'll just say hey um you have been exposed sometimes they know who the person is if it's small but we really try to protect people and not give names if we don't need to and i've done contact tracing with covid saying not going to be able to give you the name but this is somebody that you were um you've been exposed and i just want you to know that and then there's also really this human side to it obviously you're really building relationships with people i think it was the new yorker maybe um i can't remember but there's something about emotional intelligence that you're making a connection with somebody you're really working with them they're scared they are sick sometimes i mean obviously it's many times but i've called people i'm like hey can i talk to you and they've said hey i i need to go the nurses coming in it's like i didn't realize you were in the hospital but we had this connection we were able to talk so there's this real human element to it okay uh next slide please so there's been a lot of confusion about the numbers that show up on the different websites so i just want to be clear to help everybody understand what the university reports and what the town reports they're two different things so what the university reports are cases that they have identified through the university some of them but not all of them could live in the town um but they could and they could live in other towns they may have someone who lives in sunderland or lebron or holy oak or any place like that so but they report whatever they just uh whatever they discover on their website the town reports only the cases that are in the town of amherst and the basic counting mechanism that the state uses is by by city or town so the cases that we report are from maven and that's what gets put put on our website all cases both the town and the university are working in maven which gen mentioned is the massachusetts virtual epidemic epidemiologic network which is created by the state it's used for about a dozen other diseases as well as COVID-19 and so it's been in practice for quite some time um so i just want to uh we're going to take a pause so you can so we can answer questions but i just want to mention that you know one of things that when this um cluster you know just grew very very quickly on us um you know we one of the things that we did was reach out to the state department of public health and said you guys have dealt with this in other communities we haven't tell us what we should be doing you know and we know what we know we but we don't know what we don't know and so they were very responsive us secretary of health and human services Mary Lou Sutter was on the phone with us along with the their medical director um the assistant commissioner that deals with cities and towns um and we've had the person who wrote maven on the on a call with with gen they have really dedicated resources to us and since we had the secretary on the phone with me and gen we had the superintendent of schools on the call as well because this is very important to the schools what has what is happening here and he could convey his concerns and what was happening there we also brought up other issues that were that involved the town that we're also working on that we're looking for support from this um department of health and human services so I think we'll pause there and see what this this is a big issue and I know that you'll want some time to talk you listen to your constituents as well Darcy Jumont has your hand up yeah um this is for gen um I just wanted to clarify what I thought I heard you say about um I think you said that um you're finding that people can pick up COVID by being within six feet of each other for a period of 15 minutes and I'm assuming you mean inside and if that is what you said that seems like it really has ramifications for indoor dining and schools yeah so it's it's six feet 15 minutes and that's you know that's the number that they give and they don't differentiate between inside or outside um there's a lot of work going into um you know thinking about different filters and airflow but really right now the department of public health these are the numbers I use when I do contact tracing um so when you talk about restaurants um you're talking about groups of people that are know each other and they're sitting together um but the the tables it's not even the tables the next person to person needs to be um that distance apart um so so that's what they've established we I don't believe you know I just think these these big clusters that we see are happening in in these tight gathering spots um I don't know what the data is the restaurants with schools they're taking multiple and this applies for restaurants as well it's multiple mitigation strategies and they're layered and they're concurrent and when you use all these things together um the data you know this is what they say that the transmission you've just lowered the risk did that answer your question yeah thank you oh good you glad Kathy Shane I um Paul you you showed the Amherst numbers and then you showed the UMass numbers and so I'm wondering how much I have a couple different questions how much of the Amherst numbers are UMass these UMass clusters as you know you did a district one meeting and Tony put up a slide which at that point had a cumulative UMass this was September 22nd they had 18 as of September 22nd and this slide you just showed has 121 so that's the same surge you show with the bars so you know I just wonder how much is that and then the second is the fear of people wouldn't come in to get tested or people wouldn't report contact if part of the disciplinary action is large gatherings without mass um that's less related to testing or not and why wouldn't if some of the disciplinary action has gone after repeated large gatherings if you put an email out to every student on campus that we mean don't do it and this is what will happen not with the person's name it has to me it has a preventive impact maybe it's not a first strike so I also don't know how many and this is more would be a UMass question how much of the clusters and I think there were two clusters they found that they weren't completely overlapping so then they had to at least that was one report I read they didn't all come from just one but maybe it just came from one but this notion is it mushrooms very quickly and I believe most of them were living off campus so we're up in North Amherst where we have a lot of repeated we were one of the hot spots on the UMass slide of repeated calls you know it's not just one time something's happening and fairly large groups so I'm just questioning this um not doing doing something more where the place you're going against the guidelines is large groups close together without mass well yeah so um I'll let Jen talk about the number of cases that are UMass out of the UMass I think by far the large majority are you know in our town associate with the university a very large majority so in terms of you know I hear what you're saying and I and we hear it listen to a lot of folks about the why don't you crack down on the gatherings and we um continually talk about that and you know when there's noise complaints we do send officers they do issue citations they do educate even if they don't issue citations they are educating about social distancing and the sort of expectations of the community we have talked about activating our COVID ambassadors to be more more in real-time responding to gatherings you know the university and the town work very well together in terms of addressing the households that have repeated parties and there are some and we know where they are and they go to them and so at a certain point you know we may have to look at more onerous procedures on that but right now we're working through you know this this this this cluster has been a real lesson for us and we're trying to figure out what's the next step but how do we prevent it from happening again and so we're in the town side we're having active conversations about that I know you know just to follow up because as you know the kind of emails because you're seeing the same emails we're getting and it's a sense this has real consequences for our town as Allison said the schools aren't opening because of what's happening and particularly to me if it's warned once and then it happens again you know there at some point you want to say we were serious something more would happen and and the university has certain things it can do that are much that are the heavier club than us we've got money and I'm being asked why just noise why not if it's a large group without masks go out you know go out and break it up you know it because it's and and if if the large group is formed and they're not making noise at four o'clock they will make noise at eight o'clock but can't we stop them at four o'clock before they get noisy you know it's sort of this I can see the large group and so these are clearly outdoor parties is where a neighbor would be seeing them more so it's this sense of particularly second time you know first time oh you just somehow weren't living in the neighbor you just didn't have the information second time you had the information yes I hear you on that I don't have a right a good answer for you right now well let's go on to George Ryan Paul a number as I'm sure you know that a lot of people pay attention pay attention to on our website is the total number of positive cases at any given time and on sunday getting ready for my district three meeting it said the number was 80 earlier today when I checked the number was 45 and now today you tell us the actual number is 75 it's just it's really an important number I just wondering what what happened there's a typo in the on the website and that's the 45 should have been 75 so and that was a mistake on our part okay I understand it we all trust me we all make mistakes it's just a really important number at least from my perspective and if you could just communicate to everybody that they really should be careful because it just creates confusion and potential mistrust when people look on that site and so anyway that's I know you do that I'm just I agree with you yeah seven you have a question yeah I just I wanted clarification about something that Jen said there was a statement that the cluster was linked to a gathering of eight students that's eight students that tested positive in the gathering or eight students total in the gathering eight students total in the gathering that was the original party that night okay so when we've been talking about parties when we've been talking about do we want to set a lower gathering limit of 10 or 20 this cluster started with eight low okay I think that's important information for us to consider thank you maybe Joe that that was going to be one of my questions too because I was going to ask about whether we needed to limit gatherings since we are going into phase two of phase three today because we aren't in the red yet but that answered my questions that it wouldn't would be really hard to do that but I do have another question my understanding from early on in this was that community spread is defined as not essentially not being able to contact trace people to another positive case and be able to sort of follow the links and that there's not community spread if you can follow those links because you know then exactly where everyone contracted COVID from so my question is for all of these 75 cases or particularly the ones related to coming from UMass but really for all 75 in the town are we at the point where we're at community spread now and so that the community at large needs to be concerned or are we still able to fully contact trace everyone who's coming in positive so I spoke to Ann Becker about this and what she has told me is that that the cases all but two are from UMass and have been linked to that first group so it's this one cluster but it's not defined as just sort of this tight group it's we're sort of generations out and that's how Ann described it to me but they've been related a friend of a friend of a friend and just to clarify Ann Becker has sort of Jen's role for the university and is in charge of all the contact tracing in for the university uh Steve Schreiber yeah actually Councilor Ross asked my question which is that's an extraordinary low number so eight is I mean is seems like a completely reasonable number so that's what's a little bit you know surprising and it actually kind of shows you how random this can be right so but then then I was just going to make the comment and I sent the link to my fellow counselors about the New York Times article about college campuses and of course there was a tale of two campuses in Amherst one Amherst College the other one UMass and it ended with a line about the quarantine Amherst College student who lives in a dorm right next to a house our house is full of UMass students and they yelled up from the beer pong game you know hey come on over here we don't have rules or something like that so so that's there we are Alyssa so I also want to give UMass credit for realizing that we were right about a number of things so they originally didn't want to test off-campus students and Paul talked to them and council talked to them and people in the community talked to them and they agreed that testing off-campus students was actually a good thing and they really ramped that up and it is in fact a really wonderful model that people can look to across the country and so I'm very proud of UMass for doing that UMass also didn't have any interest in providing quarantine and isolation space for off-campus students until we in the community said you need to do that now I'm sure they had other reasons for doing it because the history is UMass doesn't do anything just because we asked them to do it but that is something that did happen associated with this and so I'm very happy with those changes I think you're hearing and you are going to continue to hear that we are unhappy with the educational approach because the educational approach is great for telling people why not to bring 12 packs of alcohol into a dorm room when they're going to be undergraduate students there and educational approach is great for telling people to consider you know sexually transmitted disease it's great for talking about not using alcohol and then driving but instead taking Uber or a bus the decisions that a very tiny number of people the vast majority of people are being responsible the decisions that a tiny number of people are making are not impacting just them they're impacting the rest of the community as we've heard tonight they're impacting our ability to open our schools eight students made decisions that are impacting the ability to educate hundreds of school children so when we hear while it makes sense educationally that you know these are still relatively young people we're trying to be clear and we certainly don't want them to clam up when it comes to contact tracing but yet it's like we're living in fear that they won't cooperate with contact tracing so we're saying well we can't be too hard on them because then they might not cooperate and that's just a really awful feeling for a community member to have we want to feel like we are all in this together the vast majority of students are being super responsible and I totally disagree with my colleague who says eight seems like a reasonable number no number seems like a reasonable number people you live with are who you socialize with if you want to socialize with other people you better be outside more than six feet apart these kids were not outside more than six feet apart so eight's not a reasonable number no gathering is a reasonable number when you're impacting the rest of the community you're not just making bad choices for you you're making bad choices for other people so I don't see how we can continue to say this is okay let's also remember that this very tiny number of people some of them might very well work in some of our local businesses I mean there's that impact too right it's not just they're sitting in their rooms doing remote education they have other parts of their lives too as I'm sure the contact tracers have determined and so I understand why our community is frustrated I don't know why we think it's a good idea to send police to break up a noisy party just so that somebody can get some more sleep next door but we don't think it's okay to say you know what and again we're not talking about sending police to this because we're talking about not sending police to a lot of things but we are sending police to a noisy party so that the people next door can get some sleep we are not sending anyone with the possible exception of now rethinking this a little to talk to people while they're having a party that is clearly going to have impact on people other than themselves that doesn't make sense to me I think it's stupid to respond to noise complaints at the same time we're saying our hands are tied we can't do anything too mean to them or they might not tell us who else they were working with I just don't know how to express to the community that we can't fix that it just feels like an impossible task but again I do want to be clear I know the vast majority of people are being really responsible a handful of people often ruin things for other people I understand that but just saying eight seems reasonable is not no social gathering size is a reasonable amount outside of the people you live with and that's just a fact and that's going to get worse as the weather gets colder are there any other comments or questions at this time oh is there any further comments or parts of the presentation I have more I have more of the presentations but just this is very helpful for me to hear um very instructive for us to hear the tenor of the council so I appreciate people sharing that as you do quickly at your hand up did you want to I have a question unrelated to the UMass thing so if he's got more presentation I'll ask it at the end okay thank you okay so our next thing is continuity of operation I showed this to you previously we're all in we're in good shape on all fronts very minimal impact on our organization so far to go to the next slide so on Thursday there's a lot of things happening here but the one thing I want to highlight is on Thursday we're doing we're re bringing back the call-in show at noon if you can call in literally call in on your telephone we really are directing this one towards seniors we have the director of senior services and our acting health director who are going to be there and we've we've sensed that there's a lot of concern and anxiety among seniors so we're trying to focus this one for seniors and educate and putting the word out that we will try to address as many of the comments as possible that seniors bring because this has created a lot of anxiety and a lot of tension for seniors not just for fear of the disease but also the social isolation so we want to start to talk about ways and people we can help with people on that in that front next slide so we talked about the call-in number which is is monitored seven days a week the thing that we started doing last weekend was to actually answer the phone live on Friday and Saturday nights when we received the call the most calls to be and we still will respond to them and after the fact as well but we wanted there to be ambassadors and there's a police officer who's also able to answer the calls at the same time so we can help address things and listen to people's concerns immediately and if there's a response available we do that i will get more information about that tomorrow we have our 14 meeting tomorrow morning so i'll learn more about how that actually worked and but we do know that we have received 238 calls 150 calls 88 emails since we started the program shows that there is demand for this that people have concerns and some are repeats but a lot of individual unique calls that we've been receiving so a lot of work to respond to them but usually really good questions that people have so we appreciate people calling and encourage people to continue to call next slide our ambassadors are out on the streets they have had 1170 interactions as they call it they document any kind of interaction they have they write down notes on how the interaction went they've been distributing masks many of them are going out to university students they make house calls on off-campus housing they go as a group they carry bags of goodies that they give out to folks including masks and things like that try to do an educational component they have been going to different neighborhoods period on different times usually Thursday afternoon Friday afternoon three to five and other than make a big push on october 24th i think to do a real blanket thing throughout the throughout the area so you know a really good team being built here by cat newan who is our the lead ambassador next slide so they are working regular shifts they walk around downtown they have those yellow shirts on here they are at the farmers market listening to people talking to people explain people what their job is a lot of people are coming up to them and just saying you know why are you here you know they're handing out masks and they see people who are unmasked they um and you know just it's when you read the so some of the anecdotal things it's really interesting to see the kinds of interactions and and a lot of times they're getting really positive feedback from the members of the community who's saying thank you for doing this it's really important work that you're doing so it's it's been a really good program i think so far next slide and then this is winston on the job sleeping as usual and next slide so just have a couple recent updates and then we'll go to any questions so first one good piece of news from the university they agreed this afternoon to provide regular asymptomatic testing for all town of amherst first responders and our inspectors these are the people who are when a call comes in to the covet hotline or just a regular complaint and we have to send someone out to visit a house these are people who are walking out walking walking into these houses um uh for the police and fire they know the addresses of the people who are covet positive so they know when to wear a full PPE when they go to these houses but some houses you may not know if someone is is infected or not so we really appreciate that the university has stepped forward and offered this um their marvelous testing facility for our first responders and a press release went out on that this afternoon the other good piece of good news for us is that we did receive a grant of 129 000 plus um from the mass department of transportation to continue to work with our downtown businesses to create streetscapes that will encourage people to um utilize the downtown area um and properly socially properly socially distance um and to put in other you know we're think we're working with the bit in the chamber to think other ways that we can help um encourage people just to help our businesses survive one of the things they're talking about is a you know sort of a pledge that you pledge to buy a meal a week take out from from from uh or three meals or whatever from our downtown establishments to help sustain them during the um the winter sort of like community supported agriculture where you say i'm going to pay you a certain amount you could buy the food um we're hoping that getting enough people to do something like that will support our our local businesses providing some heat lamps where they can uh extend their season a little bit longer we're also thinking as we do these things about the spring it's not just about this short period of time when we know before too long it's just going to be too cold outside um but we're also looking at being ready for the spring so when the weather starts to break we can get people back out and start getting i think getting people outside as much as possible um we're looking at possibly adjusting some of the traffic or the the barriers so that it's much easier for people to pull up in front of a restaurant and pick up their food so there's a lot of creative thinking going on um and this grant will help us in a major way so i thank the state department of transportation for supporting this so if there are other questions that people have we can take that down i know you had your hand up earlier so please go ahead mine is about halloween um i saw lsse put out something today about a car parade north hampton and many other communities are putting out some sort of guidelines for actual trick or treating are we looking at putting out guidelines for trick or treating around town and how it can be done safely yes we will have something out this week because i know this week has probably been the first where people start really focusing on their kids some kids have been focused on their customs for a long time um and there is going to be the car parade for the that lsse is organizing um you know and i got something in the email this afternoon i did not read it yet about an update on where their plans are but i'll share that out with the council as we think but i think you know our goal is to have something out to the community this week okay thank you matt di angeles uh yes uh thank you for the work that you're doing um and i agree that the ambassadors are quite important what they're doing is important but many many weeks ago um a question was asked were any of the ambassadors young people of color and i'm asking that question again because after seeing the photos i don't see any young people of color um and i'm concerned that the town is only hiring acts hopefully accidentally only white people i don't know the answer to that because i don't see them i just see the appointment it's going to but i will double check on that for you pat and get back to the council thank you very much orthi has her hand up um i'm assuming that regular trick-or-treating can take place i mean i'm thinking about what comes to my house and their their groups small groups and i know that what many families have done is they've made a um a pod and i expect trick-or-treating would be in the pods that people have made with maybe two families who have been socializing together through this time um i don't see big random groups of kids coming um but i do want to know whether that's considered to be okay or not okay so i don't have an answer for you dorthy but you know we will put out some guidelines i mean if a street says we want to all trick-or-treat at each other's houses we're not going to put a cruiser up there until though they can't go trick-or-treating but we want everybody in the community to say yeah this is sort of the guidelines that we're working for working along um and we'll ask for cooperation for the full community to you know if we're not if we're i don't so much speculate on what would the answer might be but but we're not doing trick-or- we're not doing halloween this year or we are doing it but like for example lincoln avenue has often closed the street and had a party so i assume those kind of things are not going to happen and parades are not uh in person parades but um the way trick-or-treating has taken place on my at least on my block has been socially distanced in small groups okay marcie pine view drive has you know historically been a really big trick-or-treating area um orchard valley um generally and um a lot of families actually come from other communities and drop their kids off and they make the rounds on pine view drive um but um i did hear from at least one constituent who expressed that she didn't think there should be any trick-or-treating this year um and um i i can kind of relate to that um but you know i don't have to have my light on i i don't have to participate if i'm over 70 obviously if you're over 70 you can just turn off your light and be an old scrooge right um but you could leave your light on and put the candy bowl on the porch stand at your door your storm door and show excitement and amazement as the children come by i'm just so concerned about children and the quality of their life i think it's a serious problem tell me yeah i still have a question about the ambassadors and there's a lot like it seems like they have a lot of interactions like 1,170 interactions i'm not sure what is the like is any qualitative data on what is happening in those interactions and i'm also still not clear what happens when someone makes a call about there being a party or when they have concerns what are the actions being taken at the back end so two two questions there one the interactions you know they do little synopsis of what of any real interaction that they have many the majority of those interactions are things that are organized through the university that they're going out in with bags to um group where students are living um and they're giving them bags so that they might go to a house and making six people there um and so they might that that would be six interactions they they can't believe that way the ones that they're doing like the interactions downtown where they're walking in the mass required zone those are usually pretty much always very positive interactions um and um and they're offering masks you know they offered a mask to a gentleman in town who typically is on the street a lot and and he said they always people always it could be paper masks they don't look at it i don't want paper masks they get wet too quickly for me so they had they had cloth masks and they were very grateful to receive a cloth mask and they were like oh that's a good win for us that was a positive interaction um so it varies you know i think the way they count interactions is you know if you walked up to the farmer to the farmers market about you know three people walked up that would be three interactions right uh in terms of what happens right now um we uh respond back we if there is a call for on the covid hotline um if it's something about you know too many cars in the driveway or something report refer that to inspection services sometimes it's usually gets funneled into either police or inspection services or health it depends what what the what the actual complaint is or concern is um you know and again i have not had an update on this weekend where we had people answering the phone live these are usually things that come in overnight less than message emailed um and you can feel the tension that people have when they're emailing the calling because they are concerned um and we try to get back to them right away to say we talked to the police and we do have the the weekly meeting you know um that where the university in the town goes through every call that came into the police department they do look at the the covid line as well and they start strategizing on this this house again let's go and make another visit to that house let's start to um educate them a little bit give a little more education to that house i hope that answers your question alissa i just have to be a little um just have to interject my halloween scrooge and i already had written to paul about this that just said you know let's take the lead and so i appreciate that he said he's going to work on getting something out this week um i would hope that whatever that is since he's been clear that we don't know what it is yet that it will specify in there that it's clear that many residents who love this holiday every year are not going to participate and so i appreciate what you said darcy batman we won't i won't turn my light on um but many residents will not participate and so if people are planning to go trick-or-treating here they will show up in neighborhoods where things are not all lit up because everybody's going to be trick-or-treating and many people are not going to want to participate i also just want to push back a little bit on the fact that you know i get that kids need a lot of things i miss the costume parade the pumpkin roll the fun activities carnival lssc always does a really nice job with all these things because you know some neighborhoods have parties but lssc has always been there for the kids across the community but you can't say that trick-or-treating looks socially distanced because you've never seen socially distanced trick-or-treating and we all know what a struggle it is to tell our kids not to put the candy in their mouth before they get home they're obviously not sanitizing their hands in and out of the communal bowl every every group has a kid with a runny nose we all know this these are reality points so whatever we decide to do let's just be clear that we as a community are not embracing oh let's just pretend trick-or-treats great and we can stand at our storm doors and somehow we're that's all gonna work out i think it's great if we can specify hey there's going to be a parade and if you as a community want to do something special in your community that's your pod awesome but to say that the entire community is just going to try and pretend it's a normal year it's not a normal year thanks Robert yeah so i agree so i was thinking i'm 63 and i love hollowing and to my knowledge there's been a municipal order to cancel hollowing once in my 63 years and that was during snow tober here in amherst i think that was 10 years ago or something like that and there was a reverse 911 call saying please don't go out on october 31st you know we'll set up something a week later but this feels like that year this feels like the year that we should not be encouraging in fact we should be discouraging trick-or-treating for all the reasons stated so if we're freaking out about eight UMass students we also need to be freaking out about eight you know potential vectors going door to door i mean i can't think of anything more of a super spreader potential than groups going door to door around amherst so i i guess i kind of agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't be agnostic about this that we should take a position that it's simply not a good year for this and we are on an incredibly busy street so busy that we've been visited by the ambassadors but i just i don't see it i'm i i look forward to october 31st every year we go through bags and bags and bags of candy and i'm going to have my lights out and be in the back room it's and i am heartbroken by that but i can't contribute thanks to Shalini yeah another question that came up is the university that's providing the testing they are charging the count for it is there any was there any kind of negotiation or where we could because it is very expensive so i don't know what that arrangement is what how are we reimbursing them and second could we include teachers teachers considered first responders a teacher are not considered first responders and i know the superintendent has um has suggested that to the university and i'm sure they would think about that um i think the they recognize first responders are different than teachers i would really differentiate that um we have funds under the CARES Act to support this activity it's perfectly legitimate use of the funds the funds available and i think this is a very viable thing to to compensate the university for the university this is not free to the university um so i want to recognize that they put a lot of infrastructure in place and if this happened we would like to take advantage of it i think it's only responsible on our part to to bear the cost of the test it's not that it's actually not that much that very expensive they've got a really good deal um from the Broad Institute because they're such a big they purchase so many tests from the Broad Institute um so and it's just you know we could not get that level of service anywhere else so it's a small price to pay to make sure that our first responders are inspectors they feel that we care about their health too and there's a big concern for our inspectors you know who who are being asked to go you know we've developed all kinds of um systems in place to you know inspect houses remotely or via you know face time or something like that but there's still times when people have to go out and look at something in person and it's it's our responsibility to give them as much protection as we can right thank you that's helpful do we see just one last halloween thought um yes elissa got me with a communal candy bowl but since on my street people come as families i can do as i've done at other holidays and have little separate bags little separate paper bags which they sell in the store with some stuff on the table i do agree no communal candy bowls you really did paint a good picture there elissa are there any other comments at this time Paul any final comments or Jen any final comments no i i just think that you know we're working through this and i appreciate i really value the comments that you gave and if you have thoughts afterwards please convey them to me because you know we're as a you know just trying to make the best decisions we can for the town um and love hearing from our the members of the public um as we as we try to use our we lead with public health what is the what is in the best public health metric what's in alignment with the governor and the state we try to maintain those two things and that's why the data is so critical to our decision making so with the the lens we always look through is is this in the best interest of public health and that's why Jen who is a public health professional and Julie before her were so valuable because they forced us we we i hear all the you know concerns of all the neighbors and all the things like that they are able to focus it on what really matters in public health and and it's been very helpful to focus on that thank you Paul um we are going to take a five minute break we will we convene at eight ten when you come back please turn your picture back on so i know that you're back so i want to go back and make sure people can hear us and we can hear you um pat de angeles yes barcy mont not yet recenters yes panicky yes yes yes well uh darthy pam i think we've lost darthy vena we have lost dorthy pam i'll call her okay evan ross here uh george ryan i'm here i'm here a pam is here thank you uh tassie shane she's here she's shriver here steinberg here sports here do you want here or how about fall mill yes i'm here elissa elissa brewer can you hear us yes elissa brewer can hear you thank you okay we are moving on to the presidential election warrant uh is the warrant that authorizes the election on november third i'm going to make the motion and look for a second to authorize the warrant for the presidential election on tuesday november third 2020 the open from seven a.m to eight p.m at the following locations district one voting precinct one north zion korean church church hall 1193 north pleasant street district two precinct two the high school district one voting precinct three manual lutheran church uh district three voting precinct four amherst regional high school district four voting precinct five bangs community center district two voting precinct six court river school district five voting precinct seven crocker farm school district five voting precinct eight months in memorial library district four voting precinct nine wildwood school and district three voting precinct ten amherst regional pelham regional high school is there a second second de anchilis okay any further discussion or questions at this time okay seeing none we're going to i'm sorry go ahead shallony uh just a quick question which i uh i sent to paul earlier about crocker farm can i ask is that the appropriate time to ask about it yes please so one of the risks um in for uh poll workers said that it was crowded in crook crocker farm and i heard back from paul saying that the space is calculated based uh you know they've made the calculations for the space and i was just hoping that he could elaborate and explain that a little more so we can communicate with people in our district what that means um so yeah so um Jeremiah our facilities manager has gone to every polling location and we're actually had the fortunate the fortune to be able to see them in action um some of them have enormous space so it's not not an issue um crocker farm is in the library so it's a it feels like a smaller space because there's lots of stacks of books there but it's actually a fairly decent sized room the we have four or might be six there there are four um stand up um voting locations or polling locations booths in crocker farm and then there's one for people who you know who are handicapped or want what need to sit down to vote as well um that will limit the number of people who can be in the building at in the in the precinct at any one time so one of the things that the secretary of state's office said to use is if you're limited on space use time as your ally so we will have people stand outside they don't we don't have to crowd everybody into the same voting space until it's it's able to be cleared so we'll have people queued up outside so they can become they can come in um you know we did have a lot of poll workers and there was when there was a turnover in poll workers it seems like there's twice as many people so that's one thing that the clerk is taking into consideration that maybe we don't have the shift change all at once maybe there's some staggered shift change so there you don't have like five people there all changing jobs at the same time so okay thank you well i would like to also add uh to be placed on our website men ballots that are going to be mailed out available and how to track them sure uh the thing it is on our website but we can make it more more prominent and i tried to put a little bit of that in the town manager report but it is important for people to know the options for voting and how they can track their ballot we do not we will not um we do not have the material from the secretary of state's office to be able to mail the ballots out to people who have requested a mail-in ballot at this moment in time but everything is ready the clerk's office has every all the return all the envelopes for people who have requested ballots ready to go they just need this one last thing from the secretary of state's office thank you any other questions yes following up on rochelle and these question was one thing you didn't mention at cocker farms which is actually my largest concern about that location is it's currently set up is poll watchers and uh we don't know that uh the candidate is going to try and flood the polling places in amherst to try and sway our uh voters but the campaigns themselves frequently just have somebody there for various reasons and multiple campaigns they do so because they use it as a method of finding out if the votes are turning out that they're expecting to turn out at the on election day so um is that going to pose a problem for us no every polling location has an area for poll watchers to stand in we don't have to provide seating for poll watchers but we do and you can limit the number of poll watchers you ask the poll watchers to coordinate themselves if there's 10 people who show up and you only have room for four you can tell them you have to coordinate your activities that's as the secretary of state's office has a pretty detailed memo on that from about four years ago that we that we that we go by and jeremy has taken that into account i don't think he actually had it taped off last time i think that's his intention this time is to tape off where poll watchers can can actually be thank you uh dorsi with your hand up okay maybe i misheard but we received our absentee ballots today did you okay then i'm behind the times right so everything's in here okay okay i do other questions from the council at this one okay seeing none then i'm going to go ahead and we're going to begin the votes um dorsi domont yes then greece mercy yes man did your hannity yes bothy pam yes ebb and ross yes word ryan yes patty shane yes keith schreiber yes steinberg yes sarah schwarz yes family balmille yes elissa brewer yes patty angeles yes the votes unanimous this motion we are moving on to um the zoning bylaw 14 temporary zoning and this is a little tricky in that we're going to be looking potentially at some recommended changes but Paul will speak to that they may not be ready yet but once they are what we want to do is create automatic referral so they go to committees instead of having to come back to the council and be referred so that's what the motion will be about but paul why don't you speak to zoning article 14 so zoning article 14 if you recall was something that the council passed i think june 16 for 180 days that delegated power to the building commissioner to take certain actions um that those that power expires so six months later which would be december 16 whatever the exact date is um the council president of the counselors were asking like should we extend that what what has happened with that so far so what we're preparing the building commissioner preparing a report on how that has been utilized what has been utilized without the bylaw which would have been done under this um the governor's order what was done within the bylaw and if there are any changes that the building commissioner think would be helpful going forward and we'll have put that into a memo that will be given to the council with this vote tonight it'll automatically get referred and then come back to the council in time for you to act enacted by by december so if i'm correct paul there could be some changes asked for in the bylaw as well as an extension of the date correct okay um man you have your hand up yeah i i don't have a question i i'm more of as chair of crc wanted to let the council know but also paul know um the chair of the planning board and i have tentatively scheduled a joint hearing for whatever changes there may be made on this for the required public hearings that are required for november fourth in order to get them noticed in time the paper has to know by october 16th because of the two-week publication requirement so i wanted to put that out there for paul and the group um because we'll need it by the end of this week and all to get the right notices for the planning department to you know or early next week for the planning department to put the required public notices together um the reason it seems early is because if the hearings are held on the fourth the first reading for the council can be on the ninth and that might mean there's a little bit backwards with gol um the second reading for the council and a vote can then be on the 16th we have a meeting on the ninth and the 16th we then don't meet till december 7th um once the council votes uh the changes don't take effect for 14 days the current bylaw is set to expire on december 14th so that december 7th council meeting is seven days too late to get any changes effective including an extension before the current bylaw expires so it might seem a very tight timeline but that's the reason and i just thought about the council know that thank you community joe for also going through the process of the rationale of why we're coming to people to the council at this point with the motion that i'm ready to read unless there's additional questions although we can wait for that after the motion arcy i'm pretty unclear about this um this is because we don't think we have enough time to bring it to uh a full council meeting or the present first of all the present bylaw expires in mid december okay and in addition to extending the time period there may also be some changes however the people from zoning licensing etc have not had time to pull together their complete recommendation but they will be doing that we hope no later than the end of this week the beginning of next and so what we're at the motion tonight is to allow that once those are ready they will automatically be referred to the planning board to the zone to um crc and to um gol and the reason is is because we have no meeting on monday because of the holiday we have a meeting on the october 19th then we don't have a meeting again until after the election and we have then we have two meetings in november november 9th and november 16th and then we don't have another meeting until december 7th and so in order to meet all of the time frames of having another hearing through planning board and crc and all of the notices to have that hearing as well as then having it come back to the council to be read twice at two different council meetings we needed to backtrack and start moving the timeline along and when you say that it has to be read twice at council meetings are are we talking about a total zoning bylaw overhaul no no this is just the zoning bylaw that was put in place as the temporary measure to help our downtown businesses during covid it's all it is is bylaw 14 oh that's all this is about automatic referral etc etc this is not the big zoning bylaw reform we would never do that to you or anybody okay does that does that make sense now darcy yeah kathy question i think the problem is the way the actual wording of the motion is lin the i read it three times to try to figure out what this was it says the zoning temporary as a title but it says motion to it never says motion to refer the temporary zoning article whatever in the motion so it looks like all zoning is zipping in it's just missing so if you just read those words that's what it looks like it looks like the speed train um for everything and not only that we're going to get it all done by november 9th which would also be stunning i still understand the issue so let me try this out it's not the actual motion but i would amend it to read to automatically refer any proposed changes to the temporary zoning bylaw 14 are two zoning bylaw 14 temporary zoning recommended by the planning department to the planning board and community resources committee for review joint hearing and recommendation and to the governance organization legislation committee for review and recommendation by november 9th so i will insert what we're referring to okay all right so here is the motion to automatically refer any proposed changes to zoning bylaw 14 dash temporary zoning recommended by the planning department to the planning board and community resources committee for review joint hearing and recommendation and to the governance organization and legislation committee for review and recommendation by november 9th is there a second yeah niki seconds thank you any further discussion or questions i think those will excellent points to be made alissa i think that's what happens when i reviewed the motion sheet and once again was waylaid by the title of the motion not the content of the motion we have a tendency to do that to put the content in the title not in the motion itself so um that was very helpful the way you reworded it there so thank you the other thing i just want to point out is i mean it was clear from the material in our packet i thought but at any rate is that when you said when we put this into place and people had some misgivings putting this into place that we would get feedback about how it had worked and we've gotten zero in terms of actual substantive feedback up until this point so it is important that that they pull that together and that staff do that amongst all the millions of other things that they're doing so we can show the community that this was a smart thing to do and that's a smart thing to extend it and i hope that there isn't going to be anything in there that's going to be too startling or surprising to people in the community i hope they're minor tweaks in addition to the timing because as you point out we have this very tight time frame and i don't want to derail what is obviously from you know the general comments we've been hearing from everyone a good thing over something complex that gets inserted at the last moment so i'm assuming it's going to be very minor tweaks and timing and that if it's more than that that we get the heads up on that sooner rather than later so we can help work that through with our community in addition to the actual public hearing that'll have to be held so i really appreciate Mandy Jo keeping track of all those deadlines and all of those items will be advanced to everybody at the time that they are advanced to the planning board in CRC okay Darcy um i'm interested in seeing how it has gone in the last 180 days i was i may have been the only person who voted against it originally although there may have been some other people um but um i am not generally interested in extending it and you know i will vote to have it referred because i think we need to have a public hearing on it but um i continue to think that um i want more resident participation in what we do in our town government participation by the planning board and the design review board etc that and there isn't any particular reason why we need to change our processes so anyway but i will vote for it tonight okay Mandy Jo um it's somewhat related to zoning by law 14 but we at the same time we passed zoning by law 14 we passed a amendment to the town council policy on delegation of public ways or delegating authority on public ways i forget what the title of policy is um we should the manager i asked that the manager look at that to see if any concurrent changes are required for that too it's not as tight of a timeline because it doesn't require a public hearing because it's a council policy but it'd be good to do them at the same time and if though if there are any then those would be referred to TSL town council policies generally go to GOL public way it's it's a policy delegating a town council authority okay but no it would be but it went to public it went to both last time public way and then to GOL um comment on any of this so we will we will get those to you um hopefully this week so everybody will see what being recommended i i don't think there'll be many surprises and and and i really haven't had a detailed conversation with the building commissioner and planning director about exactly if they're they had some tweaks they didn't think it was significant though okay and any comment on the public way issue no yeah i think that's a good point on that and i'll work on i'll look at that and see what because we did make them concurrent it makes sense to stay that way um should we be amending the bylaw to include tso and on that one as well then i mean amending i'm i'm sorry amending the motion to include tso so the motion is just for the bylaw itself yeah there's a separation i i think you can refer that one if there are changes at october 19th there'll be plenty of time yeah okay i agree all right so the motion which has been made in secondhood is to automatically for any proposed changes to zoning bylaw 14 temporary zoning recommended by the planning department to the planning board and community resources committee for review joint hearing and recommendation and to the governance organization legislation committee for review and recommendation by november 9th any further discussion and we'll move to a vote and we start with greece burnett's yes hannity yes ham yes ebb and ross yes sir drine yes kathy chain yes steve schreiber yes steinberg yes sir schwarz yes shallony ball mill yes elissa brewer yes pat di angeles pat di angeles yes thank you at darcy jamon yes planet passes 13 00 we're moving on to the second reading of the single-use plastic bag prohibition and what i've asked is although you have a very extensive report that was in your previous packet and also in tonight's packet however what i've asked is that instead we put the actual motion up on the screen because the motion has now been edited search you're going to go to the motion sheet i just a second i'm making sure i have the right document certainly got it right here and you want to go all the way to 8c and that would be it right there okay so the motion the way the motion appears it shows you in a strikeout what's been eliminated it shows you what's been added in by using bold and it shows you what's the same by it being just kept as normal so i'm going to make the motion i'm not going to read the entire bylaw since you all have copies of it so the motion is to amend bylaw 3.28 single-use plastic bag prohibition by deleting the language shown in strike through and adding language in bold etc is there a second i second it that was darcy thank you so what i would like to do is um then ask uh if there are questions at this time but i want to start with george ryan who followed up with both the board of health and the business community sure thank you lin um i reached out for the request to the chamber the emerson bid and the board of health um to see what they could add to the discussion uh the results of that are in the report from to l i'll just touch on it very briefly really there wasn't much to be learned um the bid and the chamber had no objections to the bylaw they are not aware of any concerns or difficulties from their members after five years of of the ban the assumption is that most of not all businesses are aware of the restriction um i asked the board of health about enforcement matters and apparently we could own there weren't any that they could point to um there was one exemption that was discovered in those five years and that was it so um that's what i learned okay are there any further comments or questions from the council ebb and ross so first of all thank you george for following up since i was one of the people who requested that information um i found your report to be really helpful you mentioned the board of health uh in five years said that they had one deferment but it didn't say whether that deferment was in the past or currently active my assumption is it's no longer active that that is correct okay thank you garcy demont you have your hand up i just wanted to clarify that the parts of the um most of the parts that are enrolled are not added per se they were in the original uh bylaw that um preceded the ad hoc review committee so many original back in so right so this was most of what's been done here is just maintaining it in its original version with some some changes along the way that happened in the gol committee um but that was my original intent just to maintain in large part what was in the original okay and uh alissa you have your hand up well since that came up i feel compelled to ruin out that that's why this was such a mess the last time it was presented to us because someone was trying to rewind time the reality was that we had replaced that bylaw a majority of us voted to replace that bylaw so what is in front of you right now is an accurate representation as it should be unlike the last one we were provided of what has changed between the bylaw we accepted and the bylaw we are going to have now this type of this is covered in both our rules and in past practice in terms of bold and underlying i appreciate that the context is that it's returning things much to the way they were before but the reality is a change was made the bylaw changed period end of story and now it's being changed again so thank you for that George Ryan yeah the the one i think request that came from my conversations with the bit in the chamber was that there be some consideration of the fact that the ban had been suspended and now is has been removed again i don't think enforcement's going to be a big issue because essentially as far as i can tell driven by consumer complaint that there be some consideration given to businesses in the first month or two as they go back to finding replacements for the plastic bags they've been using so all related to kovat yeah mandy joe yeah i i don't i just want to respond to that and say i don't want us to get bogged down on that because the bylaws in effect right now once the governor removed his suspension we have one on the books it's still in effect we've never suspended ours so that request should go to the board of health what we're doing today isn't going to change the fact that once the governor lifted his order they had to go back to not using plastic bags because we had one on the books so if they're seeking any type of non-enforcement that should go to the board of health for a request all right any other comments at this time the motion's been made in a second to uh we'll begin the vote and i will begin with hannity yes Dorothy Pam yes Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes pathy shane yes um steve schreiber yes andy steinberg yes sarah schwarz yes chalene balmielm yes elissa brewer yes and pat de angeles yes dorsi gemat yes pre-frozen one and then grease mercy yes i'm frozen oh thank you did i unfreeze we are going to move past appointments because we've done all of those we're going to go to committee and liaison reports mandy joe um not much to report i already mentioned that the tentative hearing for if there are any changes to zoning bylaw article 14 will be um november fourth i think it's tentatively scheduled for 8 p.m but we'll be working on that over the next week and i have to make sure it's noticed in time and that it gets on the bulletin board and all in time for everything um we had a nice discussion on housing comprehensive housing policy and on moving forward with zoning bylaw priorities and we'll continue both of those discussions going forward and i'll keep you updated and probably write a report soon with more detail on both of those if you have your hand up do you have a question or a comment um my comment is just i need to leave the minute meeting early so i don't want you to think that i uh lost connection i'm leaving on purpose thank you kathy we appreciate that before you leave anything on jcpc uh no jcpc that we just had the one meeting in september and we won't be meeting again until february ish um after uh decision to make and how much the town has to spend for the following year okay andy finance committee yes very briefly uh last time we met i made reference to the fact that the next meeting will be tomorrow and gave the date it is still tomorrow that we're meeting at 2 p.m there is reference in the town managers report to information that has been developed by staff present to the finance committee for consideration regarding inventory issues uh capital issues and the the fourth quarter and year-end finance report amongst other material the finance committee packet is available on the town website and so that it can be easily found if you have problems finding it and you're interested then just shoot me a private email and i will send you the link to it to make it easy for you uh the uh finance committee has not been using share point because we have members of the committee who are not counselors so andy i just want to correct and and check the meeting is at 2 30 tomorrow not two o'clock no i believe it is at 2 o'clock because uh we had a little bit of a mix-up and it was posted for 2 p.m i think that athena caught the error and has been pointed it out to us so athena do you want to just confirm that it's 2 o'clock tomorrow posted for 2 o'clock tomorrow thank you okay um gel well george yeah um just first of all we meet on wednesday this wednesday the seventh and the hope is that we will complete our review of the two-way staff bylaws and we're also going to be looking at least on the agenda we have an item concerning uh exotic animals uh i called the wild animal bylaw and that's also on the agenda um but i hopefully you've had a chance to look the report we in the last meeting we struggled with two i called them procedural issues related to gel and i described them in great detail painful detail in the report um and i don't know if we want to get into it now be aware of them also there are two appendices in the report um one of them is the the kp law review of the way staff bylaw and i felt it was important that the counselors have access to it and they read it um so rather than have me discuss it or repeat it all now since this is not an item that we're really dealing with at the moment just draw your attention to it encourage you to read those sections um at some point before we return to that discussion are there questions of george uh our statements pat yeah i i just wanted to say that one of the things that the kp law summary says is that the wage staff bylaws aspects of them are in conflict with state law that's quite inaccurate um the other thing i want to bring up is that we had a discussion in gll about whether or not sponsors should be able to participate in voting or um discussion during a committee meeting and i was wondering whether tso is considering that as well particularly since george is on that committee um drc or anybody else and uh actually elizabeth you have your hand up i had my hand up yes thank you um i'll let somebody else address the tso issue because that was immediately what i thought of when you guys had that discussion so i appreciate you including that in your report but the reason i was raising my hand was because i really appreciate george that you included the kp law summary in there and as i wrote back to you and apal i was exceedingly disappointed with kp law's section on tax increment financing it was a cut and paste job from some other work they did for someone else and didn't relate to our tax increment financing that we've used here in amherst at all so hopefully that will be clarified a little bit before that section which is a admittedly a small section of the wage staff portion is brought back to us so that that doesn't continue to cause confusion when it was a meaningless set of data that didn't have anything to do with what's actually happening in amherst thank you are there any comments on whether tso has also had this question as to whether sponsors who are also counselors because counselors are the people who sponsor both bylaws as well as um um memorandums of you know like we passed tonight darcy yeah no we have not brought we haven't discussed that per se but it seems like if it's an issue that is being brought up in multiple council committees then it's it's a town council issue it seems to me like it doesn't fall into the category of what an actual conflict of interest is but it seems like if it if it applies if it's a concern in committees then we should have a policy for the whole council right my yes and if we would like we can put it on an agenda i will tell you exactly what i said as a member of gl and that is that a person who is counselor has a right to vote at all times we have never had any restrictions whether you're a sponsor or whatever and uh it's always been clear who the sponsors are that's my personal position and at this point gl did not um we didn't take any votes so uh but we did not make a decision to restrict voting to only people who were not sponsored either uh dorsey well i totally agree with you i think to not allow sponsors to vote would result in all kinds of gaming where if you wanted to vote for an issue you would try to get somebody else to sponsor it but you would do the work i mean it's like all kinds of strange workarounds i mean obviously we were elected to make decisions and we have ideas and we have things that we bring forward and i think that we all have an equal vote and so um since i was the one who raised the issue at the gl committee i want to explain a little bit more about it about what my concern was and why i was uncomfortable with it and it does reflect only on the single committee because all of the comments that have been made that just sponsoring a resolution does not create a conflict of interest under the state statute that defines conflict of interest and uh sponsor members um should be free to vote at the council level and i frankly um don't have any hesitation whatsoever about other committees gol the reason i was uncomfortable about it is and um i'll use a plastic bag as an example because we just talked about it there was a lot of discussion that went back and forth between uh Darcy who is the sponsor of that particular change and had made that request and the committee to try and work through a series of issues and the committee had a very clear responsibility which is to meet the charge of the committee to see that the bylaw that was are being presented for amendment was clear consistent and actionable and uh the sponsor had a very clear role in advocating to make sure that the amendment came out in a way that would satisfy the committee's interest but would also satisfy the sponsor's goal and that process worked i thought very well in the example that i just gave and uh what was feeling very uncomfortable for me and it's very hard because there are two members of the committee and the council who i really like and respect with greatly who um were in this position but they were in sort of a dual role there and that was the question that i asked the committee to consider so i actually think that it is a gol question not a it is not applicable to tso or crc because they really play very different kinds of roles and it may be that the committee comes to a conclusion that despite what i just described that that's the way it is and if so that's what the committee is going to going to conclude but i i did feel that it was very uncomfortable for me at times because i felt that i was dealing with two members of the committee who are playing two different roles yeah elissa yeah maybe we could somehow put this on a future agenda because as much as i love to put everything to the committees themselves to make decisions about i actually don't think that i can based on the explanations we've heard tonight draw that final line between gol and everybody else because we have people coming to tso who are tso members who are convincing us that not only is this a great idea but it's a great idea for tso to support it and i don't know why the clear consistent and actionable is so very very different and and if gol decided that it was so different that they didn't want sponsors to be able to take part in discussion or vote on the gol recommendation that i would want to rewrite gol's charge as a town council because i don't think any counselors should be put in that position of having to define themselves that way when they're on a committee i suggest that we do exactly what you've suggested in that on a future agenda will be the issue of whether or not um sponsors who are members of committees should be voting on those items when they're in committee and let's just move on to uh the rest of our agenda okay um in fact uh tso do you have an update um i was not at the last meeting so i'm going to in a moment ask evan if he has anything to add to this but we are um did hear about if you read his report it was very detailed about the appointments that we just approved through our consent agenda and we've heard once now a presentation about link and av and that is detailed in his report also on october 8th we're going to hear from the sponsors of the face recognition technology by law um and um we're also going to uh get uh appointments for cdbg advisory commission the design review board and the cultural council this is what we've been promised anyway uh that's what we're expecting we hope to get the community safety committee appointments by the october 22nd committee meeting um and then we're on november 5th we're going to look at um the other half of the surveillance technology by law which has now been caught in half the we're going to look at the surveillance technology piece of it on november 5th evan do you have anything you want to add about what happened in the last meeting yeah just i the council i know had the report um to read but just i guess for the sake of the public who might be watching and interested um the council had referred the link and avenue parking recommendation from dpw to tso back in march uh many of us may have forgotten that happened tso didn't um and in that time uh counselors ryan and pam were working on a proposal that sought to expand that recommendation um beyond the initial one to also include um the that part of lincoln and also uh thanks to our the ge.. basic geography um and also uh sunset after a fairly lengthy discussion uh tso has decided to um table that proposal for now we're recommending for or against we're just recommending that we not take action at this time not that we don't take action but not at this time um because we're afforded a really unique opportunity right now with uh the university suspension of most on-campus classes and most of it and much of its operations um the that provide us some relief to lincoln avenue parking and so the feeling is that there is no real pressure to do this immediately and this opens up an opportunity for tso to explore parking residential parking a bit more comprehensively um because during the public hearing we heard from other counselors in other districts who cited uh parking issues or complaints from residents about parking in their districts um and there were some questioning about why lincoln have and why not some of these other areas and so this just opens up an opportunity for us to have a larger conversation about residential parking that will allow us to better contextualize whatever decision is made on lincoln avenue and so i want to make sure that the people who pushed for the lincoln avenue uh parking changes uh don't feel that they've been forgotten don't feel like we've been we're recommending against the proposal we are just using the time that has been afforded to us by this crisis um to have a larger convert and more comprehensive conversation about parking so that we can make a better and more informed decision both about lincoln avenue but also about parking elsewhere in town uh thank you are there any questions regarding committee reports are there any reports for liaisons darcy the transportation advisory committee had a meeting after a very long break um this last thursday is it thursday yes um and uh they just um uh discussed what they want to do uh as a committee in the future and they are actually i neglected to mention that they are coming to our meeting the tso meeting on the eighth erin hayden their chair is going to present to us basically on what he sees as the um relationship of the tack to the tso the the members pretty much agreed in that meeting on thursday that they assume that they will be just starting up meeting every two weeks again um but they're still discussing okay is there any comment or question at this time all right then we're going to we've already approved the minutes so we're moving on to the town manager's report paul thank you and um so a few things one is i want to give credit to our county clerk for getting a 34 thousand dollar grant to help make sure that um our poll workers are safe that we can do make improvements into our polling locations and um you know we were and so i just heard um in in her initiative was really appreciated and she put in the grant we got a word on it right away so it's really that was really an exciting thing it's her first grant too so she's very proud of that which is really good along the same lines this week she's uh conducting uh poll worker trainings and so these are things that are going on so uh an opportunity to um after listening to the warden's to actually do the training on the on the poll workers um we'll be we are preparing to bring to the council um a sort of a revised um narrowed down um design for the north common to see if it's something that the council would like to take on as a project the money has already been appropriated for the most part um when this last came up this came up with the select board was still in office and the select board said this is not for us to decide it's really up for the council to make a decision um and so it's it's sort of had some time and now under covid and we understand what our financial situation is the project got was was um the way it was designed was too much for what our funding was so we're looking at narrowing it down um but still think it's really important to move forward on so this will be the first time the council will get to look at it so um that's coming up in the next meeting or one after that I forget which one it is but we're working on that for the council I assume you'll want to take some time to think about that um that'd be on your schedule um want to mention on um Craig's doors is making really good progress on securing places for people to be housed during the winter months starting November 1st I can't really talk about exactly where they are at this moment in time but we have some really positive developments happening on that um they have not ain't any deals or anything like that so that's why I can't really talk about that um but I can assure you that if everything works out it'll be a really good solution for the town and we're also considering uh day space in the in the winter I mentioned this before that's something that we're actively pursuing at various locations throughout the town and hope to be able to come up with something that will serve the people who need it the most um along the same lines we are looking at a number of things um that will involve the council of things that might go in the public way um we're again using some CARES money to be looking at things that we can do to improve the town both during the covid pandemic but also longer term so one of these things are these little stations that are solar powered that provide um electrical outlets for folks so there's so many people who depend on their phones for their to to live by so we'd like to put these near park benches and things like that where people can plug in their their phones and get get it charged up especially during the pandemic it's much harder to find outlets to to charge your phones um especially if you don't have a home but if you're just traveling or anything it's it's important um we're looking at some signage downtown some electronic signage that um would help convey what's going on in town for people who aren't on twitter or whatever or don't come to the town's website and looking at some options with that um we're also looking at restrooms if we can um to because we know that that there's a definite need for restrooms throughout the you know throughout the community these are all ideas whether we can actually pull them off um there's a big question whether they will be permitted to be um funded through the CARES Act or not is another question as well but it's those are the types of things that we're working on just want to give you an update on that okay are there questions and or discussion Darcy with your hand up yeah I have um a question about I have a constituent who applied to be on the community safety committee and she applied through the form the it's a like a community activity form but it's modified for this specifically for this committee um and she said that and she's been very good about like uh emailing and making sure that everybody knows that she has made an application um anyway she her form didn't go through um and the staff called her and then got information from her you know just by asking orally asking her the questions over the phone I just am a little worried about other people who aren't as you know like if they didn't write an email saying by the way this is the cover letter for my application how will you know who has applied if if they're not going through well I don't know what the issue was on that one I know um she did email and say did you get it and we didn't um so we have gotten others other it's working for other other people so that's why I had Angela call and say can you help her get through if it's not you know how can we help her if it's not going through the normal channels but you know I I mean we'll test it tomorrow but you know we have received other people applying so if you hear other people that's not that individual it's it might be something a more systemic issue than we need to jump on that okay thank you uh Dorsey you have your hand up yes um paul I want to ask some questions about public restroom um you mentioned possibly at uh Plumb Brook Kiwanis Park and I'm trying to figure out where is that Plumb Brook is on potline uh Kiwanis Park is on Stanley and okay so but you know when we were talking about Kendrick Park playground uh we had quite uh in many of the meetings and we talked about the need of a restroom there it's a it's a trap it's in the middle it's like a traffic island with road traffic all around it so crossing the street with small kids and walking quite the distance to I think there was a restroom you said at the high school which probably does not exist now for the public um and part of the cost was one of the issues and um Kathy sent me a um thing on on a public restroom which is very successful someplace else which is self-cleaning safe and whatever and it was very very expensive okay and so I know cost was a big issue so that now that we have the possibility of using COVID money I would think that the place to put one of these public restrooms would be at Kendrick Park since this was brought up by many people in the various meetings and forums on that because it's to do a good safe one that's not going to be a nuisance and a problem is expensive is there any possibility or if you've been thinking about that yeah so we've looked at you know we're looking at different locations downtown there's a need downtown for sure locating one downtown that looks nice is really a big challenge the ones in the parks can look sort of like they're they can look like a park you see it at National Park or something they don't but downtown I think people will really care what what what a restroom looks like so finding the right location for it and finding the you know a lot of these things when they come off the shelf they're not exactly what you want to see so I think you know Steve has Steve Shriver has sent some examples of things that do work but again some of these things are very either innovative and look very and or they're very expensive that way too expensive yeah but maybe good and there are other requirements you know you have to have water if they're sewer you have to all these things available to it maybe Joe you have your hand up I just wanted to say yay on finding ways to use the COVID money that can improve the town for more than just during the COVID so I like the idea of kiosks I love the idea of public restrooms so hopefully we can get approval to do that and it'll work out George you have your hand up yeah Paul I had been working under the assumption that the council would need to make a decision on the mblc grant by December but from your report it's clearly not the case um is that something that happened recently and I just missed it or is which is perfectly possible but my understanding now is then they've pushed the awards off for a year well the awards are until next June the way I understand it and Lynn has been closer to this than I am okay let me provide an update what the mblc decided to do this year because they were concerned that the new towns that they might offer money to wouldn't be able to take it because of fiscal issues what they did was they decided to go ahead and give money those towns that had already started their projects but were on the list and so that is what they've done with their money so while we were in the queue for this year meaning FY 21 in fact we will not be in the queue until next year unless they make a different decision then so the earliest we'll start hearing in the spring of FY 21 as to what their intentions will be and the earliest that they would actually make an award that would be official would be July 1st 2021 so for the moment this is not something that's going to be on our agenda no but I I think we will probably see the need to start discussing in the spring Melanie you have your hand up yes do we have a cutoff date for the community safety committee's applications for interview well um look we'll be after time we'll be targeting in October 22nd because that's when it's on the end of the end okay thank you Alyssa um I'm sorry just quickly following up on the restroom issue so I don't pretend to understand what this particular grant program is looking for in terms of using care's money for restrooms at Kiwanis or at Plumbrook but I don't have any understanding of why any rational funding agency would think that was a better choice than something downtown I realize it would be easier and I realize that a lot of kids and adults play on those fields when we're not having a pandemic but we have people downtown now who need restrooms that don't have them and so I would much rather we were spending our limited time and resources on figuring out a way to include a restroom at Kendrick than in figuring out a way to put a cute little blockhouse with a cute little roof on it at Kiwanis or elsewhere just because we have care's money to do that again following up on what Dorothy said and also following up regularly on the need that's been expressed when we talk about the fact that public buildings aren't open for people to be able to use a restroom facility that seems like a huge win for us to be able to do something downtown and I also see it as far more important than making progress on the north common I realize the money has been set aside Steve and I are going to have a huge argument about this when the time comes because we were both at the same public meetings where a bunch of people said oh this could be so cool and the select board said you know what this is not as simple as it looks and we are divided just among a select board and we are not going to touch this so yes we're dumping that over to the town council and so Steve and I can fight about that for hours when it comes back to the town council but again we have limited time so I don't want to talk about north common I don't want to talk about restrooms at Kiwanis or pot one I want to talk about a restroom downtown that will actually help people now and in the future like the information kiosk like the Chargers will I just think that's a way better deployment of our resources it's not an either or situation we hope to be able to do everything Melanie you have your hand up yeah I just want to follow up also about making our meetings accessible to people with disabilities in one conversation we've been having is about trying to get author for transcribing our meetings on zoom however I've spoken with at least three different people with disabilities and they have state shared that that's not a good enough translation mechanism because there's a lot of emotion and everything that a person is able to do but it's not captured in that and so maybe that's something we need to have a discussion as a council or just how do we send out the message and communicate to people and accommodate and make that a priority so so honor just so people know is it's our meetings are transcribed after the fact when they go up on youtube so you can read the closed caption after the fact it's not done in real time if someone wants to participate in real time there isn't a closed caption feature although that might that I think that's that's changing you know zoom keeps improving and improving and otter is this is a third-party thing that does real-time closed captioning I have not seen it in action but it's the thing that seems to be being recommended by people and so we were looking for a technological solution to making our meetings more accessible to people much like tv mrs media everybody does with or whoever with closed captioning if you were talking about American sign language interpretation which I think some people are asking for that's would require there be a significant investment and significant commitment from the town say we want it and you would have to choose which meetings you want and if you want just to calculate it's about several hundred dollars per meeting to hire someone to come in and do asl it's so just a budgetary decision I think would be a great thing to do there are people out there who do this especially in zoom it makes it super easy because people can often do it from home you usually have to hire two asl interpreters because they you know it's very intensive job so you need to trade off and and so but we have when we try to do it it takes it's about it can cost several hundred dollars per meeting Dorothy you have your hand at Holyoke Community College they have just started a contract with Kaltura and Kaltura is you you bring your video in through Kaltura and they will do um machine translating right away if you say no I want to have human captioning you ask for that and there's a delay um maybe of a day um there's been a lot of this going on so maybe two days at the most that is something that's out there so if you you could have your tech people look into it and see if that has any possibilities for what you have what you need can I just follow up yes shall any yeah I spoke with somebody who has functional blindness and she was just saying that there are different ways to communicate and some of them were not involving costs but more in the sense of like the way we write our um when we send out our emails or even the meetings the way they're posted if we can just say that we're you know just acknowledging that maybe like as of now we are putting order to make it accessible but we welcome your feedback or just like sort of letting them know that they're being acknowledged and they're being welcomed or if they're out in person I mean we don't have in person meetings but she was just saying an example like if the flyer mentioned we're so sorry we were not able to make this place um wheelchair accessible then the people at least know that and they don't have to make a call and they don't have but they know that they were thought about in the process so they're just ways to make people you know know that we are thinking about them and we are you know we're trying to work through this that's one thing and then the second thing is like as a town comes I mean you raise the question that this is something we need to figure out is a town but I didn't hear from the council whether this is something we are going to discuss as part of an agenda or where and when will it be discussed thank you and I put it on my list uh but Paul do you want to have a comment just on the first one yeah no I think the points you're making are really important um and there's um you know we do we do have an ADA transition plan we've had there's been a consulting firm that's looking at all of our buildings and things that are out there and you know I know that's come in as a first draft um which I have not really studied it yet um and on the second point our communications manager is looking at our website and a lot of it is not just functional things on the website it's how we do things and you know this will resonate with Alyssa because we often will put pictures up on the website instead of documents that a machine can read for people things like that and we have to retrain our staff to be able to do things that make mistakes that I do which is take pictures of a PDF as opposed to having something that could be read by machines and you know it's you know she's identified that because as we redo our website we're trying to make it a friendly not just for ADA purposes but also mobile first because most people access our website through their phones so um so those things are all you know being worked on um but I think you know and and these and this is something you know doing the you know just taking in consideration when you're redoing your website make it accessible just like you do with any other building so that's what we're that's our intention thank you Darcy yeah I just wanted to bring up um the public comment that was made today uh that was sent to the town council by Laura Drucker um I have a couple of things to say about it one is um or a couple of questions for the time manager one is do you envision that that part of the $80,000 that's being set aside for the community safety process um do you do you think that some of that money could be set aside for stipends for people who otherwise might not be able to participate in the process so somebody needs to be available in your courses um so that's one question is could could that that those funds be used um to pay a stipend to people who you know would could really contribute to the process but wouldn't otherwise be able to do it because they just can't afford it and secondly um you know from the very beginning we have talked about um preserving our public comment that comes in in writing and putting it somewhere so that it's archived so that the public can see the written public comments that come in by email and so those I have those two questions of like can we get a system going to preserve our public comments um and can we use funds for stipends so on the stipend front we have not done paid people to serve on committees other than the council and school committee so that would be a new thing and I think it would have we would if the if the town decided to do that we'd want to look at the broader implications and why this committee not another committee you know and I but I understand the need and the um and how people take on expenses um that being said there's there you know so it's something to consider but we don't have a policy for doing that and we don't know what the ramifications and why would you choose this committee versus you know a different you know agricultural committee or something it's like we want to make sure that um we're fair about it you know but I you know we don't want to exclude folks from serving either so um I don't have a good answer for you on that other than just we've never done it before which is not a great answer that was a huge issue and point made by the Black Lives Matter people who came to our meetings repeatedly um so and the other issue about them how I mean quite a certain the other issue and I we all received yours comment the question is whether or not every email we receive is public comment and and so there have been from time to time that we have assembled around a certain topic uh comments that we received by email what we have not done is consistently gathered emails like we received today that said if I could be a public comment I would make this comment and um I think we need to come up with a way in which we differentiate because um the issue of publishing all emails though they are a matter of public record is a whole lot different than publishing what somebody might be giving us because it was meant to be public comment I think it requires a much bigger discussion oh well I would like us to have it yes yes I'm hearing you Andy yeah and as we uh explore that question I think we have to get back to the point that we've had a long-standing policy and the council and the select board had a long-standing policy that it's not appropriate to respond to public comment because it raises something to an agenda item for if it gets discussed by the body that was not published as an agenda item and therefore we don't we don't take a public comment that we hear early in a meeting and discuss it during the meeting itself and so I I'm a little bit uncomfortable with saying that somebody sends an email saying I wanted to make this as a public comment that I'm not going to be able to be there and then we have a different approach to that than we would to a public comment that was offered during public comment period right I think that's a different I think that's a much more in-depth agenda item for a future discussion um so are there any other comments on the town managers report at this time Dorothy I had marked down things that I wanted to follow up on and one was providing some kind of child care for town staff and I think that's a great idea I think the town staff probably works hard all the time but it's certainly been working extraordinarily hard since the town council started and then double hard under under covid what are some of the thoughts that you have for how you would do that so LSE is examining that the school department is working working with the school department they're looking at their three after school programs that that are offered that are that are not working now because and not so repurposing the people who used to do that work and again using some care response to be able to offer child care during the day for people who otherwise might not have child care if we have the capacity and the interest we'd like love to be able to open that up to the entire community because it's not just town employees who need need help it's a lot of people who need help we're looking at the middle school as being a location for that we also have looked at the bank center as a potential location for that it's something that LSE has been working very closely looking at very working very hard on and looking at the state guidelines the governor has made the guidance a little bit easier to comply with for able to be able to provide that kind of service so yes we're looking at that very actively maybe Jo you have your hand up yeah I hear the middle school mentioned for something like that and the mother and me of a middle schooler starts freaking out I've got a student who really wants to go to school so I would encourage and highly recommend that whatever happens does not affect how many students in the middle school can attend middle school in person when we finally get to be able to go in person because having a child care program that the middle school parents would then have to say to their children oh you can't go two days a week or one day a week anymore because we're offering child care to so-and-so would be yet another devastating blow to that so I assume you're not going to compromise any of that and that Mike would never do that but I'm going to put a plug out there to make sure that it does not get compromised no the superintendent would have to make the decision where it would be located and clearly he knows the interest of educating our students is top priority listen I'm sorry a brief item for a possible future discussion and maybe it makes more sense for it to be at CRC rather than at full town council but I'm still not sure that if it falls under CRC one of the things the town manager mentioned in his report is he said I am reviewing the request to delay slash decrease fees for liquor license holders license fees are due November 1st and so we have a board of license commissioners they work with the town manager town staff and we've talked a lot about how to support local businesses and so it feels a little weird that town council is completely disconnected from that given that we talk a good game about supporting local businesses and so you know we have a time frame coming right up and so decisions are just going to have to be made but I feel like it's something that as we're continuing to sort out the role of town council town council committees and the very strong executive authority we have in the charter and now the separate board of license commissioners where it is that that information gets fed in so that our community we're representing them when it comes to the sort of topic so again town manager is going to have to probably go ahead and make a decision because renewals are due November 1st but it feels like something that some town committee probably not TSO even though it's a way town services perhaps CRC because of its focus on economic development is the kind of place where it feels like it should have a stopping off point at some point in the process but yet as always without slowing things down I was just thinking of something very nice I wanted to share at the end of our meeting of a wonderful experience I had walking on the silvio-cante path which I've never been on before which is down by muddy bridge and it's completely handicapped accessible raised wooden walkway and there were also some families with children on it and that immediately made my mind jump to maybe the town can put together a pamphlet of activities such as that using the resources in the town that are particularly suitable for parents who happen to be homeschooling taking care of their kids or whatever it is you know that whatever combo you call it at this time I think that you know you've got the people in the staff that could put that together very quickly Andy? Yeah just getting back to Paul quickly on the question of liquor licenses is it am I correct that that would be made up by CARES Act money or would that be a loss of revenue for the town if we relinquished some fees? I think it's not able to be made up by CARES Act at this point we can't use CARES Act we've been requesting that to be able to replace lost revenue with CARES Act funds they have not allowed us to do that we've been holding on I mean every city in town has been hoping that that's what the federal legislature would allow us to do because they have not. So it would be a reduction in revenue yes yes can I just this kind of meshes into the agenda item called down councilor comments and I think what's really nice is we've actually had some time to have some comments tonight among us and I appreciate that on my list now of future agenda items I have added sponsors can they vote on items they sponsor when they are in their committees another agenda item that's been out there for a while is liaisons and this has come up over particularly the Amherst housing trust third one is TAC and what TAC has done is raised the question of does every committee in the town understand their relationship to the council do we know what their relationship is to the council and should there be a discussion about that um another one that's on my mind is we've learned some things during this period of COVID particularly because of the use of technology at some point we will transition back to the town room and what are the lessons we need to take with us for example I wonder if we need to provide a way that people can make public comment but not have to be in the room which more people have been able to make public comment and still go on and take care of their kids so at some point I want us to discuss what have we learned and what do we want to change another one is the accessibility question which was brought up by Shalini another was the issue of stipends for committees that's been brought up particularly as it is public safety another one has been the whole issue of public comment and what constitutes written versus whatever and then the other thing I just want to mention two things that are in the charter that I need to mention and that is the following executive minutes were approved and released during the town council executive session on September 21st 2020 the executive committee June 17th 2019 August 26th 2019 September 23rd 2019 August 31 2020 minutes of August 19 2019 were approved and retained for future town council review and release all approved and released executive session minutes are available at www.amherstma.gov slash town council the other thing I want to mention is that I have automatically referred the east west rail resolution to GOL that came as a request to us I chose to sponsor the resolution and then we have worked on it and it's now at GOL I think those are the main things I needed to mention to you as president are there other councilor comments and future agenda items Dorothy a future agenda item a lot of work has to go through before it's ready is the question of having the whole town go with their own broadband system many towns in this area are doing it and as I've mentioned a couple of times that would certainly be related to social equity because there's just many many things it would have to be worked out but buildings would be wired as part of this process and all houses would be wired the town would then have to figure out the fee structure and then perhaps the people who owned apartment buildings would be the ones who would pay the fee at least in some areas so it's a big topic but it's related to the fact that we have people many people in the same house or apartment trying to go to school go to work and do all of those things all of them on the internet and we're not equal in this way in my house we can have three people working in other houses you can't and some people don't have any connectivity at all and that is very unfair we can't have a fair town until we get this straightened out so this is a topic that I would like to have worked up and if anyone who is interested in working on it with me I would love to hear from you and Lynn will tell us where it goes Darcy yeah I would I have the issues that I brought up at the last meeting I attended which is that I think we need to talk about when we we would talk about when we should talk about raising our salaries so that so that this job is accessible to a wider range of people and number two I was glad to see that crc brought up an issue that I was wanted to bring up and they brought it up on their own which is looking at relooking at the process for appointing members of the planning board which was in their report and so I'm interested to see what the next step is with that thank you and show me um I don't know this is the perfect place a time to not share it but I had sent um okay I'd spoken to a few people of color in our community and they had raised the question of renaming some of our streets locally uh on the based on uh some of the black leaders in our community and for example Baker Street or so naming it after some of the local heroes who were and heroes who were black and um if that's something the town council should do because I feel it you know in this time of despair that might be something that is doable and it might create um you know have some positive impact Julius Lester so we're not going to get into debates or topics up we have to be on an agenda are there any other comments at this time so that is councilor comments and also future agenda items and we have taken care of the item that was 48 hours which was the resolution there's no executive session and Andy I want you to note we are adjourning at 9 43 have a nice evening yay good night everyone