 now live. Thank you, Ms. Moisten. Good evening, everyone. And I am going to call the meeting of the CSWG for April 21st, 1921 to order. Start with a roll call of the membership. And I'm just going to go around the screen. Mr. Vernon Jones. Here. Welcome, Ms. Ferreira. Here. Ms. Walker. Here. Welcome, Ms. Bowman. Here. Ms. Pat. Yeah. Ms. Owen. Here. Is that everybody? Mr. Cage is not on right now, correct? No, I do not see Mr. Cage and he's not in the attendees either. Okay. Okay. Thank you all. And good evening. And good evening to folks who may be attending this meeting from the community. I see we have a few people here. I want to pre-acknowledge the fact that we do have at least one member of our consulting group in attendance here. And I want to thank them ahead of time for their work. I want to quickly go through the agenda for tonight. And, you know, with the group's permission, I would like to first thank Ms. Moisten for continuing to articulate our minutes, both on the website and to our meeting. And we have a few items, a few minutes items on it to approve. But with respect to the time and starting late, I'd like to postpone those to the next meeting and go forward with just an overview of what our meeting is going to be for tonight and go from there. So typically for those of you who may be viewing for the first time, I think some of you may not be viewing, but our agenda is going to be, it's going to start with reports and comments. And in that particular segment of our meeting, we do the public comment segment, which we, where we allow and welcome certainly people from our community to make comments to this committee within the opening of the meeting. We, as a group, typically listen and welcome your comments. We don't engage, but we do take your comments and input very seriously and integrate it into our thinking as a group. In addition to that, I will open it up to our members of our working group who may from time to time have some opening comments that they want to make that have relevance to the work they're doing currently or relevance to the work that the community safety working group is doing. And we allow that to happen as well. Following that, we're going to get into our, the meat of our agenda. And that will be this evening a conversation with the Amherst Police Department. And at that point, I will welcome them properly. And we will have a conversation about a motion that was created with respect to community responders, our Crest Program that we will discuss as well. In addition to that, we will cover upcoming events and establish our next meeting date. And as always, if there are other items that are coming before the chair that did not get into the agenda, we'll consider those and make a determination on how to proceed with those particular items. And then we'll take the motion to adjourn. For all those in attendance, our meeting typically lasts two hours. We try to keep to that schedule as much as possible. And I just want to re-welcome everyone to us. Welcome, Mr. Cage. Glad to see you're here. Glad you got in. Are you there? Yeah, I'm here. Okay. I have one question for you real quick. How's school? It's doing good. I'm getting ready to go back in next month, I think. Good. How's football? It was not as planned. We lost a lot of games, but it was good, good exercise and good fun. That's what we want to know. Are you having fun? Yep. Good. That's the bottom line. Glad you're here and thank you for all your work. Thank you, all of you for all your work. And so I want to open it up to our members of the community safety working group. Any opening comments that not agenda items, but things you'd like to mention in advance of our discussion and action items, I'll just open it up to the group. If you can raise your hand, I'll try to recognize you. Ms. Ferreira. So this is to our group. So you're skipping the public comment right now? Yes. This is to our group first. Yes. All right. Yeah. I mean me, you know, obviously I've made some comments prior, you know, you know, this week it was the George Floyd, the verdict against police officer Chauvin. Obviously it's been a very tough week for everyone. Everyone was on pins and needles. In regards to it, I was on pins and needles. My kids, I have a 17-year-old black male and a 11-year-old son who have been basically traumatized through this whole process. And obviously we're very anxious about what we're going to inspire. So now we're going to see, you know, it's going to come out of it. Obviously this will be vigilant. You know, for me, thankfully, there was a verdict that we were all expecting. But it's continued to be vigilant and we'll make, you know, some changes, some positive changes. Also, I did start reading the draft that the 7th generation did a report on, which I had a lot of good information in there just in terms of informing our work. But obviously, you know, at the end of the day, it was just a very emotional week. And that's what I want to say. Thank you. Appreciate the comment. Other members of the group? Ms. Bowman? Hi. Yeah. So I agree. It was very, it's been a very trying week. I refuse, like I said last week, to watch the trial at all. Would get occasional updates from the news, but really even try to stay away from that as much as I could. And then I burst into tears when that verdict was, when the verdict was read. And I held my breath as they read each account. And I made my kids come and watch this, watch the verdict as well. Because I, you know, even though they were like worried about it, like I was still like, we have to be on this, like everybody has to be on the same page with this verdict. And if it's not what we want to hear, like, it just sucks. Like I had to prepare my kids that, you know what, you know, this is not the first time that police brutality was like filmed and that the police have got off. Like they know about other cases, but they don't know, you know, they don't really know Rodney King, the Rodney King case so much. And so I was like, you know, you have to understand, like, if he, if he, if this man gets off, it's going to be bad. And, you know, and that's what I was holding my breath for because I was, you know, I saw the verdicts for the Rodney King case. And that was like, and then I saw the result of the verdict. And that was really, really, really hard for me. And I think that a lot of that came up. And I'm sure that a lot of that came up for a lot of people. So as much as I am like sitting here being like, thank God, that is the verdict that came through, I'm still extremely sad that one, a life had to be lost for this. And two, I definitely don't think he's going to be handed down a sentence that seems like appropriate for what he did. So, you know, that's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Bowman. Thank you. And Ms. Herrera, Ms. Pat. Hi, everyone. In addition to what Ms. Herrera and Ms. Bowman said, as most of us, it's been a difficult week and month. And as a black mother that I have five black children, three boys, and a black husband, black nephews, brothers, in-laws, I have just been numb since yesterday. I have not concentrated at work today. For me, it's not, I don't even feel like celebrating, celebrating for what? I continue to ask myself, what will make a human being take somebody else's life? It's just beyond me. What would hate in people is beyond me. So, I'm struggling. Let's put it that way, just like most people are. And then I just want to also comment on the work that the subcommittee, budget subcommittee, where we did this past weekend. We won't have enough time to discuss it tonight, but I just want to acknowledge people that helped out. The subcommittee members, Ms. Alicia Walker and Ms. Brian Owen. We also got substantial input from Darius Cage and also from community members, including Ms. Vince O'Connor. And thank you to the town manager. I had to bother you during the weekend to give me some formula, to give us some formula about the budget. So, I don't think we will have time to discuss it tonight, maybe next week. I could be wrong. I'll defer that to the chair and see what he says. Thank you. I have a comment, but I will defer to my membership before, and I'll make last comment before we go forward, unless there's another comment coming in. Ms. Walker. Hi, I just want to echo what a lot of the other committee members have said. I apologize. Background noise. But I just want to echo what a lot of the other committee members have said and feeling mixed emotions of relief with the verdict of the trial, but still feeling very much like this is very small baby steps. I went to sleep a little bit relieved and then woke up to the news of another young black child being killed at the hands of police. And so, I just want to remind everyone that our work is far from over and that this is continuing to happen. And so, that accountability, if that's what the verdict is, does not stop it from happening. And so, we still have a lot of work to do and I feel very thankful to be able to meet with you all every week to discuss these things with like-minded people. So, I just want to thank you all for your time. Thank you for the comment and I don't know how we got another attendee in this meeting, but she's really cute and that transformer was incredible. Okay, I want one. Thank you very much. And I would like to make a comment unless someone else on the committee would like to go before me, then I'd like to move into our action discussion. And Kate, thank you all for your opening comments. And in light of this, if you haven't noticed or don't know me, I identify as an African-American man. I've been in the work around diversity and social justice for years. And to see this verdict come through today is monumental. But in reaction and response to what Ms. Walker and others are saying, I was kind of numbed by the decision, numbed in this way that this is the first time in my lifetime that I've seen this kind of a verdict in this fashion go forward as it did, which said for me that one, we reached a different pinnacle with accountability. And this is just a moment of justice. There are a number of other places where justice need to be served. There are a certain number of places where other places where accountability has to be called into play. And I don't want to dwell on that as much as the saying that while I have different feelings about that as an African-American man with four black children who are all adults right now, we've had that conversation in our family. We've been having it for a number of years and we've had it since that verdict. I think what for me is, and I'd like to pass this on as hopefully an encouragement to folks who are working with me on the community, is that we understand that how this world works. We understand how systemic racism works. We understand that yes, there are good people and yes, there are bad systems that put good people in bad places. And I can tell you for an experience that systems win, systems win over good people. So I don't want to dismiss that necessarily and just say like, hey, we're going to be good. But one of the things that the charge of our group is to look systemically as what is happening in Amherst. What can we change in Amherst to make it more just? What can we make it? How can we make it more safe? How can we make it more like a community that is integrated and cross supportive and understanding of each other than what potentially could or is happening within our own town? So I'm mixed like Ms. Pat said. I don't know how to respond to this. At one level, I'm excited about it. On one level, I'm saddened about it. And on the third level, which I'm at right now coming into this meeting, is that I'm energized by it. Because my energy tells me that this is, we are at a point as a community safety working group. And in conversation with our community and conversation with our police department, that we have an opportunity to make some substantive change for all people, but particularly for BIPOC people. And I think this is our moment. And I hope we can stay the course on this as a group and meet our charge. I am hoping that happens, praying that happens, and bringing all the energy I can to that, even in a moment of sadness and celebration and everything all mixed together. Sometimes you just don't know how to react to that. So that's my comment. And I appreciate all the energy that everybody on the screen and in our audience brings to this particular moment. And I'm happy that the, very happy that, to welcome the police department here to begin our conversation. So I thought I saw a hand, but then it disappeared because I want to move to our invitation to the police department to speak. If I missed something. Was Ms. Bowman, was it you? Yeah, it was me, but I changed my mind. So it's fine. Okay. Appreciate you all. Thank you. And Ms. Moyston. Mr. O'Connor is in the audience and has his hand raised. That's definitely the next question. I almost forgot. I said, like, where is he? He's got to be there. Please acknowledge him and we'll welcome Ms. Bowman. Hi, Mr. O'Connor. Welcome. Yeah. Hi. So is this appropriate time to comment? Yes, it is. Okay. So, yeah. So I guess my concern is that, you know, if you view the police killings of murders, a public health issue, you know, a subset of the gun violence problem that the United States has, which, you know, that's a good way to look at it. Then convicting what amounts to maybe one, I mean, even though many officers are dismissed, but convicting one officer out of every hundred who commits murder, for whatever reason, you know, every police involved shooting that's inappropriate has got its own components. But convicting one out of a hundred and spending millions of dollars to do it, I think is needs to be viewed as a way to approach this situation that needs to be changed. We need to do prevention. And prevention involves removing armed police officers from as many activities as possible in the community and putting up rigid controls over, you know, eliminating as much discretion as possible from police officers for the remaining activities for which we employ them. Prevention is what saves lives, not prosecutions. And, you know, just as with any other public health problem, you have to get to the source and eliminate the source of the pollution, you know, whether it's the pollution in a civil action, the book or air pollution from, you know, in Louisiana, the pandemic. And the problem is you have the police in every community in this country involved in too many things. And the police need to be barred from many of those things. And the remaining things that they are engaged in, their conduct has to be strictly overseen and circumscribed so that there is no discretion when they stop somebody. And so forth. No discretion. And this will eliminate people who act inappropriately. But anyway, I look forward to, you know, hopefully to the reports of the two committees and to some very substantive change in how the police department in Amherst conducts itself. And the introduction of a new group of people who can deal with social problems in the town without guns. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. I think I'd like to move forward right now. Ms. Moisten and Lester, if there are any other hands, I'd like to move forward and get going. We're good? No, Zoe Crabtree has her hand raised. And Lauren Mills had her hand raised first actually, and then Zoe Crabtree. So I'm going to bring in Lauren. I missed them earlier in the comment. No. So I don't know. Lauren Mills hand went down. So Zoe Crabtree. Okay. Welcome to comment. Thank you so much. My name is Zoe Crabtree. I just wanted to say that I read through the draft motion that's in one of the versions of the agenda for today. I know that you're going to be reviewing this is one of the main things on the agenda for this evening. And I just wanted to let you know that I'm really excited about it. And I really hope that we're able to make this program happen and that it can be fully funded so that it can be successful. So thank you so much for all of your work. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any others? Ms. Moisten. Yes. Ms. Lauren Mills. Is there any others beside Ms. Lauren Mills? No. That would be the last one when I'll take the novel to our action items because I want to invite our police department into the conversation. Yep. Yes. It's great. I'll be quick. I'm reading. I just wanted to say that being a resident of Amherst or about I can't even sometimes I can't remember the exact years but in less than five years. But I've always been a resident of Massachusetts. And I've kind of gotten thrust into as all of us with these events that have occurred you know into activism and honestly my first like jumped into like feeling like some change has to happen is when my son was injured at school and the response to that injury. And so I bring that up because I feel like when things are not addressed when small issues happen this is why you know lives are taking taking the way they are. You know with just no no conscious no no no no no you know humanity. And so I I recently presented a survey with the school equity task force to the school committee and recommended that we declare systemic racism a health crisis. So I was hoping to just again share that with this group and also in the future with the human rights commission so that we can we can move together and realize that you know as was said systems are put in place that not one person can dismantle and so we need to continue to work together there. The different entities in the town to really address systemic racism. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Okay. So so thank you. I guess that's it Ms. Moisten. Yes that's all. Okay I I want to take a moment to welcome our our Amherst police department. I want to welcome Chief Scott Livingstone, Officer Ron Young, Officer Gabriel Ting to this meeting. This is this is the meeting and an opportunity to begin a conversation with the department about their work and also how this work interfaces with what our charge is as as a working group and rather than going through the the actual the list of our charge one of the things that this this community service working group is charged with is to be able to examine all aspects of our community and I'm generalizing here but we are charged with one taking a look very carefully a careful deep look in fact at what is happening in our community with respect to policing with respect to potential alternative safety initiatives we might take and looking at currently what we're doing and where we are our goal as a community service community safety working group is to be able to recommend to the town manager in the town proposals for how we see community safety working in our community. I want to acknowledge the fact that the seven generation movement collective is also currently involved even as we speak in this kind of research in our community they are all reaching to to our community and getting information. I want to acknowledge the fact that we this community safety working group has also been in contact with the Amherst police department prior to this conversation on two separate occasions to seek written information from from the department and with the support of the town manager which we've also received but at this point as we're starting to funnel down into proposals for what our budgets may look like what proposals may look like it would be irresponsible let me say that for us to not include certainly the the conversation with the police department. I do want to say that it's a little odd that we're having this conversation with the police department at a time when we just came up with a big decision at the worldwide level around Dr. Sheldon and in full disclosure I had a conversation with Chief Scott Livingstone about this earlier and we shared our sentiments about this but I think hearing from the police department at this particular time would be important what you have to share with us and numbers of your staff would be important for us to know and what would also be important for us is how we can interact with you as we go forward we have a number of questions that we want to propose later but we welcome you and your staff and thank you for making the time for us and we'd like to open it up for you for your presentation and you know we'll go from there as you said I won't I won't I won't let you ramble on too much so thank you Paul appreciate your presence and Ron Young thank you Gabriel Ting thank you glad you're here welcome and we're ready to hear from you right great Paul and excuse me thank you you know to you Paul and in the discussion we had earlier today and to all of the members from the community safety working group for having us on tonight and making time for us I truly appreciate that I would just like to say you know this discussion that Paul and I had earlier about the Chauvin Floyd murder trial verdict I can't imagine or understand completely what it would feel like as a person of color to have to go through that I can tell you as police officers we were traumatized probably in a different way but I think you know recognize that the verdict of guilty was what we had all hoped for as well and the right verdict as well it's the beginning I certainly recognize that and there's a lot of work left to do and continued conversation about how do we improve policing not only just not across the country but in our community of Amher so we're hopeful that this you know gets us moving in the right direction as far as having these conversations and making things better across the country and specifically in the town of Amher so I certainly echo what a lot of the members already said probably from a different perspective but certainly feeling the same way that we were very very hopeful for the guilty verdict and really respect that decision so thanks for that you know I did promise Paul that I would not ramble tonight because I know you guys were on a time schedule so I'm going to try and you know have comments and a little bit of overview about the very specific first paragraph and an opening presentation and then Captain Young and Captain Ting can maybe touch on some of the questions or topics in the second paragraph that was presented to us you know earlier in the week so you know I'm going to try and follow the agenda I guess is what I'm trying to say so you know looking back at where we are now as a police department and as an agency I've been a police officer here in the town of Amher since 1978 believe it or not I don't remember in you know I said 1978 I don't remember members of the committee here probably we're not even born yet so I've seen a lot and I've seen a lot of changes some good some have not been so good but you know the evolution of policing has changed a lot since I became a police officer and you know we're transitioning into things that society really hasn't been able to figure out and solve and what I mean by that is you know the types of calls that we're responding to are very very different than the types of calls I responded to as a young police officer you know issues of excuse me homelessness and unemployment issues that people call the police for issues with mental health people in crisis you know those were never issues that we previously respond to do landlord-tenant issues you know substance abuse issues with drug and alcohol programs or problems that are extended you know 911 and the communications lines that we have really have kind of become the catch-all for people to call in times of need and you know we respond and the best of our abilities but we've certainly had to adapt as those requests have become more on the agency you know and I told Paul this and he thought it was kind of weird to hear this but I told him a while ago that if we never had to respond to another mental health call in our careers we would probably all be you know dancing in the streets because it's it's burdensome and it's it's difficult calls to respond to many many times but you know we you know with that being said we've done our best to adapt and to train our officers and having to respond to those types of calls you know we've created crisis intervention officers have very specific training and roles and how to respond to those and do follow-up people are in crisis and that's not something I would have ever believed we would have done as an agency you know we have very specific officers who are trained for drug and alcohol response and follow-up in that venue as well you know we have liaisons that are specific to the craigsdorff shelter who we work very very closely with so you know those are some of the things that we've been doing as an agency try and adapt and do a better job I happen to think we do a really good job we are certainly not perfect and we continue to evolve when it comes to responses of that nature you know I know there were some questions and wanted me to discuss basically you know about our BIPOC citizen commuting members you know how to better respond to their needs and I think the important thing that I'm going to need to know and our agency is going to need to know is what is it that makes the people feeling unsafe and not feeling safe that they can call us with issues and or concerns so I mean the communication part in the outreach is going to be important to us moving forward so that we can understand you know why it is that they are afraid to call us or don't feel comfortable reaching out to us because I don't always know the answers and the reasons for that I know that we have scheduled future listening sessions post COVID and you know those are going to be organized from our facilitators from our recent racial justice and anti-racism training so we look forward to being able to have those conversations and see how we can be a better police officer to respond to those types of concerns that they have because you know I don't recognize and I don't always know what it is those citizens and those members of our community need from us so those listening sessions are going to be very very important to us as officers in his agencies you know we're also looking at expanding and reintroducing our citizens police academy we used to run citizen police academies for many many years and the interest in those kind of waned so we're going to bring those back as well post COVID and you know tailor the tailor those academies that are specific to what people want to hear and they want to understand about why we respond to calls the way we do and what we do as police officers so that there is better understanding and potentially where we need to change as responders to those types of calls so those are other things that we're looking at to reach out to our BIPOC citizens and community members you know we we started a ambassadors program several months ago it's been extremely successful the COVID ambassadors response roles were just that they were very specific to dealing with issues of COVID and just educational types thing but it's been so popular and so successful that we're looking at methods to expand you know their roles and responding to calls so it may what other types of things can they be engaged in and I was speaking with the town manager you know would it be possible to have unarmed civilian people responding to things like noise complaints and that sort of thing so you know we're really having those types of conversations about what else can they do you know can they be facilitators for response to mental health and I know you have a draft that's going to be voted on if not tonight soon about the Crest responders and I see this is a team effort you know whatever comes of your recommendations to the town manager for civilian responders you know we as an agency want that to be successful we will assist and facilitate that as best we can with whatever requests are made of our agency so you know we look forward to those conversations and the potential of what that may bring as an agency I'm very familiar with the you know with some of the other roles that are being brought about in other parts of the country whether we're talking about the STARS program or Eugene Oregon you know I've spoken to the police officers that have been charged with overseeing some of those response teams as well and they've talked about nothing but positive things about that so you know we're looking forward to having those conversations as well you know I'll kind of stop there I don't want to keep going on Paul I know you were going to hold me to a very specific timeline but I'll I'm more than happy to be willing to turn this over to Ron and Gabe so that they can talk about you know the questions and topics that the other members of the community safety working group had as well but also I'm more than happy to entertain questions with anything that I've presented or said tonight so Paul I'll turn that over to you thank you thank you Chief Livingstone and thank you all for being here just so you you the the three that you and me and your others the staff members who are here the community safety working group had worked on some questions that we have for you that you know pre-presentation that we want to talk to you about and we were going to we're going to forward those initially when you're done I do want to respect the time that both Captain Young and Captain Ting I can't believe Ting's a captain already but anyway I've known him for so long I can mess with him but anyway that they're here and I want to honor their time and what you expect them to present to us that might be in form our work and then I want to give full attention to the questions that our community safety working group has come for so with your your permission I'd like for you to just acknowledge and recognize either Captain Young or Captain Ting to go forward with this I'd like to since they're here here from both of them and then we'll we'll dive into our questions if that's okay here and again we were just kind of follow your agenda so the bullet items that you had specific to protocols and practices about community outreach and and traffic stops and search and more of types of things and Captain Ting would be more than happy to talk about those thank you appreciate it Captain Ting welcome thank you for having me everybody good evening first of all and you know and taking a look at the agenda one question here was that was asked was to describe the challenges currently facing the Amherst police department as it seeks to serve the Amherst community so I'm just going to give a quick overview of some of those challenges that that our agency faces on a daily basis and some of these challenges are our ongoing challenges and some of these challenges I think will always be here because of the nature of our town and community and some of them hopefully we will have a resolution to um so first and foremost I just want to mention the challenge that we have uh our department is maintaining our accreditation process you know we are an accredited agency and we have been since 2003 and for those of you who don't quite understand or know what accreditation is what that is is it's a three-year assessment from uh from the Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission so it's a state uh governed agency they review our policies and procedures and our rules and regulations essentially it's a process to professionalize and standardize um best practices and policing and that's something that uh that we are very proud of um we try to hold our agency at the highest standard so that's something that we are consistently working on um again we are assessed every three years so that's something that is um it's it's a challenge um certainly this past year one of our largest challenges was dealing with COVID-19 issues um we've had to create a lot of different protocols to keep everyone safe and healthy as well as our agency so we can help our community um one thing that's a constant is quality of life issues you know this being a college town um that's a constant you know from noise complaints to large parties to public drunkenness OUIs and uh disturbances that's something that's a regular occurrence due to us being a college town um we've worked really hard you know the chief had touched upon you know the evolution of our police department you know something like quality of life issues we used to uh kind of use arrest as our as our main form of education and we've learned over the years that that's probably not the best way to go and that's kind of kind of how we view a lot of our issues you know we used to arrest our way out of it that's kind of the terminology that we utilize and we learned that there's other ways of doing that uh so we've partnered with the university to try and create other positions we have a neighborhood liaison officer community outreach officer to try and educate versus going through punitive measures and that's been highly successful um that's just one snippet of some of the evolution changes that we've been going through in our police department another uh staple is homelessness you know we've partnered up with craig's doors we do have officers who are liaisons to our homeless population and we also coordinate with the bid and the local businesses that might be affected to try and mitigate some of the homelessness issues so that's something that's been uh at the forefront in a couple with that certainly we've already discussed that a little bit dealing with uh the uptick in mental health related issues um it seems like you know in the past the chief had mentioned that you know we never really want to cause like that although the problems that were probably there it's just that it's a lot more recognized these days um so we've been trying to find better ways of trying to handle those calls to try and minimize uh physical contact and minimize use of force um so a couple with that comes with a lot of training and a lot of recognition of of de-escalation processes and whatnot to try and make sure that we come up with a better product another challenge that we have is um making sure that all of our schools and our public buildings and private entities and religious congregations are all trained up for active shooter training so we have a process called alice what that is is um it's a system to try and coordinate with the police department so all is our dispatch center and our fire departments in the event of an active shooter situation so um that's something that's an ongoing challenge to try and get everybody trained up on that um a couple other things uh certainly traffic enforcement is a huge issue in our town um the chief didn't allude to it but that's probably one of the largest complaints that he gets is for traffic issues and that could be from our main roads bay road north pleasant street or specific neighborhoods you know one neighborhood that we've been dealing with a lot for traffic issues is grant wood drive uh elphill elphill road and that association uh certainly like i said bay road and amity street are big ones as well as amherst woods um a couple other challenges i'd like to mention is certainly recruiting uh it seems like nationwide it's been really difficult to find quality candidates it just seems like nobody really wants uh to have any interest in this profession as much anymore so that's really a challenge um it's also a challenge to to basically enhance our agency to be a lot more attractive to the BIPOC community that's something that's at the forefront and it has been for a long time um a couple of that is our retention of officers um you know there's a lot of uh competition out there certainly nowadays in this field uh if you want to become a police officer there's a lot of opportunities out there you know we just can't we have a hard time hanging on to them we have a hard time recruiting for them so those are some of the issues that or challenges that that our agency is facing on a daily basis um so that's just a quick overview uh in the biggest challenge i think we have is you know something that i learned from one of our past meetings you know when in our past meeting somebody had mentioned that that a lot of times community members find it difficult to be able to communicate with the police department and that's something i i don't understand because i am part of the police department so my question is you know if that's the case and if there are barriers i want to figure out what those barriers are i want to try and open up those lines of communication and give everyone the opportunity to come in and ask us questions and to collaborate and try and figure out you know what those problems are and what solutions we can find for them that's why i truly appreciate you know being invited into this process thank you thank you um if if you if you see our our heads down uh folks we're not ignoring you we're writing furiously at this point uh thank you chief living stone thank you captain ting uh captain young you are here as well and i i would defer to uh mr cap to chief living stone introduce you to see the what you're offering might be for this evening's meeting yes so specifically captain young part of what he's responsible for is an administrative captain is all of the training that goes all inside this agency and it's pretty extensive so he can talk about briefly how an officer gets trained as to be a police officer what follows up with that and but he's also very very important role he oversees a lot of our grants and is the facilitator for our crisis intervention team members those are the guys and gals that specifically respond the crisis is for those individuals who need it and he also sees our you know drug and alcohol response team members our liaisons to the the craigs door shelter pretty much everything you know goes through ron when it comes to next steps and trainings and being responsible and overseeing oh those types of things responsible for all of the requests that he gets for um records request and there's a lot of them right now ron well he used to have hair um but he's been pulling it out lately so um in any case rod i'll turn it over to you now to speak a little bit about you know your responsibilities i appreciate that he's been pulling it out more than lately i've known him for a long time mr wiley i haven't had hair for 30 years tell me um thank you here and thank you for you know helping us understand that this whole context and uh we appreciate all of you please please present i thank you sir just to echo what gabes said i thanks for the group i know that your time is precious and having us here is uh is important and um it's it's kind of humbling a little bit to be to be very honest so um i'll be very brief and then you know perhaps you can answer follow i can answer follow up questions um in terms of training um as the chief alluded to there's a process when we hire a new police officer um i think everyone's familiar with the you know the academy process here in massachusetts that takes 26 weeks so it's about half a year before somebody can actually get out of training um we also have a 14-week field training program so once so once we've hired somebody once they've been vetted they've gone through the hiring process a background investigation is completed a psychological um process has been completed then they go to the academy and then subsequently they have a field training process we really don't get somebody out on the street for about a year it takes about a year from beginning to end um um our but that's not really where the training ends and quite honestly i think that's really where it begins you know the the mptc mandates specific trainings that we have to do on an annual basis that amounts to somewhere between 36 to 48 hours depending on the fiscal year and they do run on the fiscal year um we augment our training here based on departmental needs so you know there are certain skill sets that people need um we try to rotate through and keep it fresh um like like this past year um we spent a lot of time talking about uh people who have disabilities elder abuse types things like that we try to rotate it through so that the people actually out on the street have some work knowledge about a better sort of the community um training training is tough um sometimes simply because we have to make certain that that we we adhere to what the mptc requires of us and that's as you would know that that's that is a state mandate um and it can be challenging sometimes because we do a lot of our training in-house but we have to farm it off to people have a better skill set or a more deserving skill set to bring to our agency so it's kind of training in a nutshell um like i i certainly would answer or entertain any questions about it in more depth and just to kind of parallel onto that the chief alluded to the fact that i i oversee cit and dart um so cit really i've been a cop a long time not quite as long as the chief but but a very very long time and i'm in my fourth decade of being a cop it's probably the biggest paradigm change in our agency since i've been here um gave it alluded to it earlier it was the old cliche we go to you know the vast majority of people who suffer from behavioral health issues or more specifically substance abuse type issues we would respond and we'd arrest our way out of it you know a lot of those calls come from or the genesis of them or underlying criminal acts they may be minor in nature disorderly conduct disturbances things in that nature and when we got there as a young cop i really was wholly unprepared on how to deal with that my training was limited um i had no training at all i'm not a clinician um and i just knew i had to solve the problem and quite frequently we'd investigate minor crimes and make a rest for very minor crimes the cit program is the antithesis of that it is more appropriately it's a jail diversion program we train a small number of police officers to respond to those calls and we train the entire department to recognize the symptoms for when we would need a cit officer to respond the idea behind it is that it's a resource driven program we don't want to arrest people we actually arrest a very very tiny number of people who suffer from behavioral health issues and drug abuse issues these days sometimes we can't help it you know the crime is so overwhelming that an arrest is deserving but it happens very infrequently we try to outsource that we call our we call our clinicians we call our our people our crisis response people to come or if need be we bring them there um that's that is that's the whole substance of the cit of program and it's it's what we try to accomplish dark kind of falls a similar programming uh while very infrequently that's actually a crisis situation once it's overdosed or a medical type problem we we farm those out pretty quickly we we we work through a variety of different programs most notably Hampshire hope in Northampton based in Northampton where we where we hook people up with resources we hook people up with recovery coaches things of that nature we do do follow-up sometimes um but it's more wellness type follow-up um we've you know as we know the state is to criminalize a large portion of the narcotics loss anyways um and those that haven't been decriminalized unless it's really really a flavor violation we we tend to not bring those to court any longer if we can outsource it to somebody who could follow up at the medical end so that's kind of cit and dart and training in a very very short window um i'm as i said mr wiley i'm happy to answer any questions if the group has them so so mr mr young thank you um cit means a crisis intervention team so in jdp when i say i'm sorry if i speak quickly jdp is jail diversion program just want to just want to be clear make sure we're all in the same page may i have an understanding about some of the acronyms that come forward and dart art is a drug resistance team so so drug recovery team i'm sorry so people who are suffering suffering from substance abuse disorders most notably people of odied um we we have we have various resource avenues that we can provide for those folks thank thank you sir i appreciate the uh presence of all of you here this evening on behalf of of our group and uh as you know we we have some questions for you and some of them you know there may be some additional questions i want to say ahead of time that may be sitting with people right now based on what you just reported so they they're they're not pre known questions if you will but i i'd like to take a moment uh to just go through some of the questions we had ahead of time to see if we can give some very you know hopefully succinct answers and if these any of these responses need more time or maybe we need another conversation um beyond this meeting we happily defer to that but just so you hear from our community as a community safety working group and hopefully it reflects some of the input that we're getting from our community through our seven generations movement collective where some of these questions are coming from them as well which i'm going to present so um i i'd like to devote some time to this and and uh i would say maybe we'll put a cap on it at seven o'clock if that's okay and see how we go we can check in with everybody at that time but uh again thank you all for being here and uh let me just dive right in one of the questions that came from uh our uh our consultant group is what is the number of people and again some of these may be very discreet so if they are if there's something you can answer find something you can't we'd love to get the response from you as quickly as possible after your research but what is the number of people booked into jail who have a suspected mental illness slash addiction issue what is the average length of stay when booked ronnie you want to take a stab at that certainly chief so i don't have a number for you mr wiley you know the i can tell you it's it's it's a very small number um i i could certainly i could certainly probably mine some of that out of our out of our our system regardless the one part of that that i can answer definitively is very few people stay in our custody for very for very long um we whether they're either bailed or more likely than not if it's discovered that there is some type of underlying issue whether it's behavioral health mental health drug disorder um we we will want to get them where they need to be they don't need to be in a cell they need to be in the emergency room they don't need to the cell they need to be with cso or at the living space down at bhn or something along those lines i will tell you that a vast majority of people that we discover who have behavioral health issues it comes in with an underlying crime first so we don't just encounter people we actually receive a very few calls that come in as a as a medical problem more often it comes in as some type of disorder and there are as frequently if it's not recognized right away those people may be arrested but we try to divert them and we can divert them and to do in fact to divert them out of practice after we discover that that's the underlying root cause so there are very there are varying ways to handle that um it's a very complex answer i can try and help mine that but i i don't have i can't tell you if it's three three a week or three a year um i can tell you it's not three a week but it's it's it's a very tiny number of people and i understand and i'm speaking you know to you directly but please understand also this is coming from these questions that come in from a different from different folks on our on our community safety working group sure get it all these things aren't aren't answerable but if there's some data mining you can do on that that might be informative to us we'd appreciate a response to that so so one of the things that i'm required to do on a monthly basis is i have to report to the department of mental health the people whom that we that we divert um so that's one number that i could i could provide pretty readily um as you discussed earlier there would have to be some discretion of course because we're talking about people's medical backgrounds but if we're talking strictly numbers that's a number that i could find pretty readily thank you and i'm going to i'm going to work through this in sort of linear fashion but this is our first bucket this was on protocols and practices and the second question that came from this is a combination of my question as well as our consultant group that's working with us because they're not on our community but i wanted to to funnel this question to you on their behalf uh as was the first one what what is the percentage of people with suspected mental health slash addiction issues who are then connected to treatment and i'm gonna throw something in there rather than you know arrested put in jail you know retained how quickly does that turn around to treatment pretty quickly so more often than not it comes right from the street um you know there there are a large number of people that we offer services to that don't want them and that's you know that's fine but they're i can't give you a percentage we could try and figure that out but the i can tell you the vast majority of people that present in that fashion um are somehow wired in and sometimes it might be at the very lowest level sometimes we as i said we might actually have to transport them to a place where they can receive services immediately um we have we have i i heard the term recidivism in there we there are several people that we have brought numbers of times and they come back and we bring them again and they come back and we bring them again it is it's just a different mindset you know culturally it's a completely different animal than it was even five years ago thank you uh captain young and and by the way the the the the background context for this is we have a particular interest as a community safe to working group to be conscious of the impact that this is having on um BIPOC community so as you're you're thinking about this and responding to this any information that can be filtered through that lens as well would be important to us because that um where we're finding is a community that is is disproportionately impacted by the interaction with police and that uh you know uh systemically the way it is structured that's what happens so as you as you're collecting this data you know that's that's an additional filter i like for you to give me um uh think about as well if you would also i'm just i'm gonna go right through these questions because these are questions that people raised and they came they came to uh to me beforehand does the AP APD track keep track of a rearrest recidivism rates for a person suspected of confirmed or i'm sorry suspected or confirmed to have mental health addiction issues so so we do track all those numbers um you know i i think that we i think if there was something that jumped out that we would utilize that as a way to try and force and force perhaps force the issue as opposed to somebody who um who didn't want treatment readily so we've had a very few number of people usually people that not only have they have a you know they have a coexisting mental health issue as well as a substance abuse issue we've we've sought relief through the courts for that um more often than not we'll work with the family members because quite frequently that's that's how how we we end up quite you know honestly so but that number's tiny um we do get some recidivism but it's it's usually not criminal conduct it's it's more it's more just trying to reacquaint them or get them wired back in with a service that might help them get somewhere where they want to be um so the date is there it's captured um it's it's not it's not really anything that's really driven the program so to speak simply because we try to deal with each individual case on a case-by-case basis thank you um for those in in on the group i want to remind folks in the group and as well as people who may be in the public and uh listening to this um in addition to our consulting group we have had uh written communications with the police department prior to this conversation and it's been an email exchange of questions and answers and responses so the police department has responded to a number of questions that we've had uh admittedly and chief living stone knows this too there there were gaps in those responses so we went back a second time and there were there was a second response as well as some narrative response from the chief around this and um so we do have lots of information that we've received uh context change situations change circumstances change and uh so this this conversation also hopefully rolls into a more contemporary context of what's going on with the police as we approach uh budget time and what we have to do relative to proposals that we have to present to the town manager who in turn present these to the town so just a background information of people listening in this is not a first conversation with the police department uh and you know we're we're continuing to deepen and dive in deeply with with this conversation so this is what this is about i i want to just go through real quickly um i just miss bowman has her hand up and it's been up for a while i don't know if you would like to address that i would like to continue with the questions that i received beforehand and then i'll come i want to get through these because i want to honor the questions that people submitted i will make time for the folks who were having their hands up right now no but i can i ask my question though because the next question is my question can i ask well i'm tired of hearing my voice i'm miss miss ferrera we need to get other voices like i want to hear miss bowman i was trying to do that but i don't think it'd be good to have other voices i don't have the names at this point that the different voices so i go right ahead feel free go ahead and then i'll wait so i don't know miss bowman go first and then miss ferrera okay go ahead all right so basically i'm just gonna be forthright and very honest right now this whole part of the meeting has me extremely triggered um and i just need to put that out there because i there's it's just so complex why i'm triggered right now and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna um get into details about it because i know we have so much to get through but i need you all to know that i am extremely triggered by this part of the meeting i am extremely unhappy about this part of the meeting so that's all i'm going to say right now but you i need to make that statement thank you miss bowman um thank you miss ferrera all right so yeah so the next question i was the one that had put in the question but i guess before i asked that question i did want to kind of make a comment in terms of some of the things that uh chief living stone as well as i think uh captain ting had kind of said which was something like you know we want to and i don't obviously correct me if i'm wrong but like why do i talk to people sometimes you're not understanding why you're not totally being able to be responsive to you know what BIPOC people need and everything and i just want to kind of bring up two examples in terms of that when you ask those questions you know as a BIPOC person myself i want to say that you know one is that i remember being at a function where was majority people of color and um and there was a noise complaint right and then two police officers showed up and this was people of color you know all you know 40s in their 40s and things like that and you know and we were trying to explain okay this you know we're having a party this and any other and instead of the police officers you know just engaging with us it became uh you all better shut it down if you don't you're gonna get arrested you see what i'm saying so and i was there you know i you know i came up i was like i'm an attorney i'm just it doesn't matter who you are you know was that type of communication right so so when is that type of communication without any type of of of conversation that's why um you know BIPOC community don't want to reach out to you all they don't want and they're afraid right that's what it causes illicit fear in us and then another one was even more recently when i got a community member who contacted me who said that i guess in town in Amherstown there was this this BIPOC family so you know black family that was stopped by the police in the middle of town there was not only just one police officer vehicle there was several police officer vehicle right that had stopped them in the middle of town then there was little kids there too because they had kids then the kids were there and everything and so everyone was looking around so this community member contacted me because they were like that looked just crazy that looked just inappropriate and not okay you know to have a police a family of color be stopped in that way not just one vehicle but several vehicles so that they look like there were some type of you know terrorists criminals or i don't know what it was but it just again not a way to communicate with BIPOC people and that's why BIPOC people are very afraid to communicate with you all and don't trust the police and don't trust that you're going to take care of what it is that we need you to take care of right so i just want to put those two things out there now in terms of my question because as as mr. Wiley had said as paul had said we had asked several times in terms of the data you know like really get into the nitty gritty i want some examples right so how um so please give an actual example of how apd would respond to a call involving someone who has a mental health uh houselessness homelessness or substance abuse problem but an actual example so what would you do some you get called you know you get a call dealing with any of these issues what would you actually do so sure and thanks thanks for those comments miss fiera so as captain young pointed out the way these calls typically come in it doesn't come in as a hey there's a mental health problem going on at this location or that location there's usually something else that triggers it it could be something as simple as a shop lifting call or a disturbance or a fight or something of that nature and when the initial officers are dispatched and respond um and they start to recognize okay there's something else going on here that's when they would call in a member of the crisis intervention team who would deal with those issues specifically um so that they have the additional training the recognition and the resources to get these people these individuals the help they need so you know it it doesn't initially always come in and when officers are responding that they know what they're getting into as far as a mental health crisis call as a matter of fact it's very rare that they would go and know ahead of time that it's that type of a call you know some of them are very specific somebody may call and say you know i've been talking to my friend and they're out of state and this is individuals not doing so well you know those are easy to understand and respond to but the majority of those types of calls when we initially get dispatched to them we don't have that type of information that that's what we're responding to um we've come to learn because there are some individuals that we deal with multiple times so if there are names associated with it we definitely know what we're getting into or what are we dealing with so and again those are easier ones to get officers to respond to who have that specific training but it's not very frequent that we do know that i hope that answered your question um kind of but if you can provide like more detail in terms of like once you do know what some mental health what do you do that yeah i think captain yon can jump on there i'll give you kind of and i'm gonna miss furor i'm gonna kind of talk in general terms because it's about a real case that happened a couple weeks ago so you know for for obvious for privacy reasons right but so there was a call that came in for somebody who was loitering around the back of a building here in the center of town one of the officers gets over there he's an experienced officer he's not a CIT cop he's an old guy like me to be honest with it so he sees what's going on there because he's had mental health first aid training he recognizes this isn't a trespassing situation it's not a disorderly conduct problem it's a CIT problem it's it's somebody he's not a clinician he calls another officer that comes to the scene who has CIT training and more importantly has some has some very real experience dealing with people like at BHN or over at CDH the guy recognizes the cop because they've dealt with one another before they have a dialogue he goes on and on and on he's clearly in crisis he's disheveled he's dirty i'm going to tell you when i was a young cop that guy probably would have been arrested i'm being real right i'm being honest knowing who i was when i was a 25 year old cop they ended up it took a long time our policy dictates that the shift commander has to give them enough time to solve the problem they ended up getting in touch with somebody in Florence at CSO clinical support options they had a spot for him he didn't feel comfortable getting into a police car he didn't want to get into a police car we didn't have a civilian person to do that so we ended up getting an unmarked car putting him in there bringing him over to Florence he ended up being admitted at a later time because once he was with the clinician they were able to get him wired back in with his team and he'd had he'd had some other medical issues in the past as as the kind of the story equates to but i guess my point being is from a philosophical standpoint that probably would have resulted in arrest even 10 years ago he again he didn't belong in jail he needed to be at the hospital um and that's that's the that's my goal and that's the goal and if a good jdp program um takes off that's what it has to be based on i'm kind of echo i'm going to echo what i'm going to mr. wiley was talking about earlier if you're familiar with c it program at all it comes from like anything that's decent it comes from tragedies it came from a shooting of a person a person of color by the way in Memphis a number of years ago who was suffering from behavioral health issues so the c it model that we use here in massachusetts is loosely based on is sometimes referred to as the Memphis model so that's typically that that's in my perfect world that call went the way it's supposed to go and a call that probably would have taken 15 minutes when i was a young cop and locked up somebody who didn't need to be locked up took an hour and a half time well invested right to me thank you this walker i'm sorry i was muted um i have a couple of different questions um one i know um one of the officers spoke about the um standardized policies coming from the state in terms of and so i'm wondering if they govern the training processes like if they decide which trainings you guys administer and implement or if you guys yourselves have discretion as to which trainings you will implement or require and then that also leads me to wonder because you did state that when hiring a new police officer you guys have a background check a psychological assessment and in terms of like making bends with the bipod community or looking towards um trying to smoothen the communication that happens there have you guys ever considered implementing a racial bias assessment before hiring new officers um or have any of these things ever been considered or what other things have you guys considered as a police department to make amends with the bipod community is my first question and then my second question is in terms of the CIT training what does that entail and how long is the training chief you want me to handle yeah go ahead you want me i'll take the CIT end of it sir so the CIT so mental health first aid and CIT is required by 100 it's a 40 hour training and it's it's not done by police officers it's handled by clinicians um that are that are outlined in and are trained up as part of dmh so we get our training from the department of mental health it's a 40 hour training sorry chief that's fine and then i'll talk about the annual training that's mandated by the state so you know after a police officer becomes a police officer and they receive the initial training um there's a committee that's a state committee that i happen to actually sit on and represent the western mass region and i've been on that committee for 11 years now it's called the municipal police training committee it's going through a lot of changes right now based on the police reform act that was just recently passed by the governor by our legislators but what that committee decides annually is what trainings all police officers in the state have to go through and you know that's called it's called the annual training and it changes from year to year we try and find topics that aid the legislators sometimes make recommendations so our legislator you know being either joe com report or mendy dome would reach out to us and say you know citizens are interested in officers getting training in this so they'll make recommendations other recommendations come from police officers or police chiefs and say we need additional training in this you know specialty so and that sort of thing and those those mandated annual trainings um it's typically mandated at 40 hours right and so every police officer in the state has to get that and it's very specific topics and then our agency we go above and beyond that and we'll do additional trainings as captain young and captain ting said we're officers who have interests in other things you know and it could be something as simple as an officer has expertise in crime scene so you know if they go to a crime scene they will fingerprint and photograph or as as crisis intervention team members those are volunteers and officers who have interests in that one of our officers before the police officer was a social health specialist so that was his interest and that's what he gravitated towards um so that's kind of the annual training that all officers get and that that that is continuous so it takes the full year to get all of that training accomplished and then you start over again with some different topics and that sort of thing was there something else we missed or something else you wanted to add yes sorry so that was helpful but the second piece of my question was have you guys ever considered something like doing um a racial bias assessment before hiring an officer or what other practices or policies have you guys implemented trying to make um amends or smooth out communication with the BIPOC community gave you want to take a sting at that as far as accreditation and hiring process uh yeah i just i i guess uh miss walker i just want to understand what you mean by um a race assessment during the recruiting process i'm not quite i'm not quite following what you mean by that um so i was just wondering because you said you do a psychological assessment and what that entails and if it looks for racial biases within the officers that are applying to be um working with the department yeah i think that's a part of it part of their psychological exam we don't conduct that you know we found that out to a specialist to um it's it's actually a psychiatrist that meets with each candidate for several hours and they have a battery of tests that that they go through and at the completion of those tests they get analyzed and make a determination if uh if they're a good fit you know certainly mentally and um they do take that into consideration absolutely i'm sorry what was other portion of your question um and then if you specifically for you guys the Amherst police department if there are any uh policies or trainings or anything that you've done besides the anti-racist training um looking towards making amends with the BIPOC community or smoothing out communication with the BIPOC community um yeah you know the thing is is we are constantly seeking that type of training um you know annually uh we try and find trainings that that have to do with bias training um a lot of times the training that we have found is is kind of like we call it a box check what i mean by that is that something that's required and we're always constantly looking for something a little bit more than that just recently we actually had a training with uh mr wiley and his group the reason why he was chosen was because you know we wanted something a little bit more meaningful something that was going to be localized as well and that was that proved to be extremely extremely um successful in my opinion so that is that definitely at the forefront i hope that answers your question mr wander mr bowman um so there's a lot of opportunities for race training out there um i know harvard has a projects implicit um also there's new rock which is undoing undoing racism i mean there's a lot of things out there that could that the police department could do for themselves to really have an understanding i'm also just going to point out or actually ask the question um what kind of historical teaching do you guys do in order to understand what what the reason the original reason for police was and how that impacted BIPOC communities because the thing is it's like you guys are saying that you don't understand or you don't you know you don't know why BIPOC community is afraid of you there's there's this thing where everybody has cellular memory and so and we pass that down generation to generation you can look it up it's all scientists scientific stuff but when you have generational trauma and it's at the hands of people who are supposed to serve us and be be of service to the community but those people same people who are supposed to be of service to the community are not only killing but maiming and being part of groups like the kkk and lynching and so on and so forth to community members like why wouldn't we be scared of you i lived in this area for a long time i know i've known officers in this area that i've had absolutely no problem with that i know that if i was actually being traumatized some way that i know but i have specific officers that i will ask for if i ever had to deal with something and i'll tell you right now those officers are all people of color because because of the fact that i at the end of the day i don't feel safe in this community and i've never there's never been anything that i've done to like get in trouble so i would think that i might have like literally just driving by a police officer's car causes me to have my heart blood heart my my blood pressure raise causes my hands to sweat and it doesn't even matter if if like i'm talking a good card everything like there's no reason to be pulled over yet and still even driving by officers at who are who are directing traffic for you know the electric company or cut you were dealing with wires caused this very visceral reaction so that's what you guys need to be looking into and that's what you guys need to understand because you guys aren't going to understand the bipod community until you understand the trauma the bipod community has gone for and that is a history lesson and that's not for the bipod community to teach you that is for you to learn and you as you guys as police officers to take initiative to make your business so that's if i'm if i may captain ting let me just go back to say where i want to reel back to where we were the the the plan going forward here was based on the fact that we we had some questions that were submitted by our our committee who were asked to submit questions we have questions that were submitted and we were going to give those to you as we have them and then you know certainly because of your comments and as a result of your comments we would have other questions coming from our our committee like the ones you've just heard but i i also don't want to dismiss you know dismiss the opportunity to for you to hear the questions we you know some people have posed already i don't have the names of the people who actually proposed them at this particular point but i want you to hear those questions we certainly as i acknowledged before will have other questions to ask beyond the questions we we posed ahead of time based on your responses that's that's understood and i and i think we you know i i'd like for you to hear those right now i'd like to give those to you as you you remember you know uh miss ferrera said i know this next question because it's mine so that's fine that i i she she asked it and and we've had other questions come up as a result of that i think the residual questions coming out of this conversation i'd like to defer till we get through these questions that people have thought about and wanted to respond wanted a response from you for but also i'm a conscious of the time and the fact that it it's it's seven ten and we we've had it we we were we're supposed to be having a conversation in addition to your presentation uh which is as you know has been helpful to us but we may not get to that at this point and we're going to end up deferring it and we were you know i i hate saying this in in in a very in a stickler way but we're on a timeline to get some things done here so i you know in terms of the the the committee itself the the working group itself um i'd be happy to go through the these other questions to be uh to be sure we get them on the page and because people thought about them or either that or i'd like to suspend it at this point and and summarize because we do have some information we have to discuss as an emotion that people spend a lot of time creating for a community responder thing so um i'm just trying to get us back on track i i understand that people have these things they want to share and this would certainly not be the last time we talked to the police department you know the chief living zone i've talked about that if we can't get through all this tonight we can get through it to another night but i i don't want us to pass off the time that we need to also get information put more information forward that we need to get to the town to advance our charge and and commit to our charge so um we literally have 15 minutes based on our schedule so i i don't want to uh if we if we have any information for the police department at this point i would like to say let's defer that conversation to another point uh in in time thank them for their commitment and their presence here and uh have all of you you know chief living stone uh captains you know young and and ting respond to what you've heard from from us and and give us some feedback on that and we can present another time to go forward um i'm i'm feeling like we're we're we're way over uh and as extended ourselves in a way that's going to undermine our our our purposes for getting toward our own charge so that's what i'd like to do right now and um you know we we as a group will have other opportunities to talk but i want to thank you for being here and uh we'll be in touch and set up another time for you to continue this conversation because our community has more conference our working group has more questions for you uh going forward so so thank you for being here and uh we're gonna move forward with our agenda thanks that that sounds great paul and um i appreciate you know all the all the questions of the panel and of the group and also all the comments um and i hope my statement about not understanding the bipop community was was not taken the wrong way and i didn't mean it at derogatory i meant it as we need to hear more of the comments that we heard so that we do have a better understanding about how we move forward so miss bowman's comments and miss pierce comments you know those are good good for us to hear that stuff so um that that's what i'll say and i again thank the working group for having us on tonight and look look forward to future meetings and future discussions and future answers to your questions so thank you paul i appreciate all for being here thank you very much and um you know we look forward to hearing from you and i'm going to say on this line if you uh again to our our community safety working group if you have questions that you want to pose please submit them so that we we know going forward what we're getting into and what kind of information we need to get from the police department or anyone else so thank you all for being here and um you know we're going to move on to our other agenda item thank you thank you very much so miss moisten are we clear now um officer or captain is still here but the rest of us are here and we can move on with our meeting thank you um um i would like to move forward we we have a couple of things i want to acknowledge one that um and miss miss pat alluded to this earlier in the meeting and i want to reiterate the appreciation of the community safety working group for the work that uh miss pat and others did i'm moving the names on those miss pat right now on the the budget information that came forward but there are a number of documents that uh need to be uh read and discussed and i and i think we have to move in some way in in collaboration with our town manager to determine where where the next steps might be relative to budget in our proposals and so circling back to our proposal um we we have an emotion before us from the uh the folks who work on the honest crest proposal and we were planning to bring this forward to folks you've had an opportunity to read it you've had an opportunity to review it and as it is a motion to present it to the town manager um i i don't know if miss moisten you're able to bring that up if necessary but like to uh as this is a motion i like to bring its content forward as a motion and get it seconded and to see if there are any questions related to this motion if not then i i think we ought to move forward uh with this so we can move things forward with our town manager in our town council and thank you by the way those who put together this this motion in a time um mr vernon jones miss miss owen miss pat you had a question related to this are you are you are you asking for someone to second the motion or i want to just put it up there just if it's moistening i was giving her a moment to see if she can find it it's in our packet i know i just don't know which screen it's going to pop up on just a second i think the perfect purpose of it is a motion as as it as it exists i don't want to read through the entire motion but as it exists and i'm going to get someone to second it and see if there are any questions about it i think the the crafters of this motion were keeping close to the language and um can you see that yes i can and i'm old so i can see it but it's uh they were keeping very close to the language and intent um of the group and so as this is a motion before we have any other comments or questions about it i i would like to entertain a second to this as a motion as it exists i second it thank you miss miss pat are there any questions or comments relative to this motion before we take a vote on it miss ferrer i have quite i have questions about this one i wanted to be explicit that this is a is a separate program not a program with uh within the the police department that they have their own building it doesn't have anything that this that as far as i can tell unless it is and i missed it i am obviously point point me to that part in the motion but i want that stated that this is the separate in terms of the crest and then you know uh and then the other one too i don't want it to just be and i know that that's something that we have we had talked in the crest grid because obviously we were trying to get through the grid um because we weren't even able to get through the grid grid for several weeks but the other part too that i'm not in total agreement with is crest staff will be the first responders to cause rate mental health issues homelessness substance abuse abuse trespass fluency wellness checks use in schools i want it to be more inclusive of just like all non-violent incidents you know i want them i want disturbances i want you know noise complaints i don't want the police responding to any of them so i think that this is too this is too exclusive it's not inclusive enough it needs to be more inclusive i would even go so far as to say traffic violations i wouldn't want them doing traffic but i know that obviously that might need more discussion so i i'm good with being more inclusive thing no all non incidents that do not include that do not um have any violent or non-violent incident this does not go far enough for me oh okay thank you miss miss ferrera the the crafters of this uh motion and i know you were acting on behalf of the the community safety working group after reading it myself a lot if not majority of this information that that i see in here is coming from our conversations and discussions i i i want to hear from you if you'd like to comment mr bernie jones and miss miss owen on your um in in response to miss ferrera and then i'll go to miss walker well i i can just say that we believe dire charge was to write a motion that captured the things we had talked about last week and we stuck very close to the language that everybody had agreed on so we were only moving things that we felt everybody had already agreed on um i have no disagreement with what miss ferrera said i mean in the introduction it said in nonviolent non-criminal situations um but if if we want to add to the list now uh that's okay with me um but in general i think there may be any number of additions or further things we'd like to specify further um but given the press of time i guess i might have some preference to pass this and then make additions as we refine the program and because there may be all kinds of things we'd like to add um miss owen you worked on this as well anything you wanted to add to that yeah for me so i just went over the notes from our last meeting and followed it really closely i also don't have any objections to the comments made i do think um one thing that wasn't as specific but i don't think we talked about it as much last week was it being separate i thought that we were all on board with it being in a separate place separate cars but i do think that we should go back and make sure we're specific in the motion so it's in writing miss walker um i just wanted to speak in support of miss ferrera um and say that i agree with all of the things that she brought up um i do understand and appreciate the work from mr verne and jones and mrs owen um and they did follow pretty closely what we discussed um but i think because this is our only motion like we're not going to vote another motion for recommendations that we need to make sure we address all of the recommendations that we want to have in here um because i know it's a little bit difficult we didn't get to talk or or come to an agreement on everything but there's not going to be another chance to and so i think we need to be as specific as possible um but i also agree with mr verne and jones that it could be a possibility just to eliminate the specificities completely and leave it as nonviolent non-criminal situations and then specify later when we either do the budget recommendation or the full outline of what the program will be what exact um calls will go to the crest program um because i do think it needs to be more inclusive um and i think it would be helpful to go through the police budget if you go to the the budget that mr bachmann sent us um the community safety budget there is a breakdown of all calls received by police last year and what those types of calls were in order of the amount that they received of each call and so i think it would be helpful for us to use that as a list as a guide because that specifies what kinds of calls we would want to go to the crest program um but i think that can also be done at another time and i'd like to make a comment to both miss owen and mr bern jones uh about i think i you know i've read this and it is very very close to the um the the intent that that is come forward from the group and the language and articulation of the motion is is it is on point i agree with walker and and miss freer and others who may have some um particular deep dives we need to go into around particular things but i think the the whole idea behind the motion was to put something in place to to move forward so that we could begin to move into other areas around budget around um you know sort of the more discrete uh aspects of program development but i i think i think you know we will have we i see us having an opportunity to do that but i i also see that this is an opportunity for us to advance the the motion and um because we have an obligation to the town certainly in addition to our our deeper discussion we needed to have um and our commitment to the um uh working with our seven generation movement collective who are also bringing in information uh for a report so i i i think movement on this would be important for us to to get through at this point with the um with the agreement that we would go into further discussion with the more discrete items miss moisten yeah i do believe that if you guys can agree quickly on or know exactly what the terms are that you can do a motion with amendments correct paul that's correct we can yeah so i don't know which paul you were asking but i think that's true uh i want to recognize hands uh bernie mr bernie jones and miss miss pat let's let's have miss peck go first please so i want to thank um mr rosman and jones and miss brian owen reyanna owen for developing this as a subcommittee that worked on the budget and because we've been talking about chris being an independent agency department of its own i i thought people assumed that this is going to be an independent of police there is nothing in this land in this document that stays under the direction of the police i'm okay with what miss prada had suggested but i think the sooner we you know uh approve this maybe we can do an amendment or add more but time is of the essence basically there's nothing here that says it has to be under the police mr bernie jones thank you miss pat mr bernie jones and miss oh as as the let me move two amendments and see if they will help that we add a sentence that says the crest program will be independent and separate from the armors police department and housed in a separate location and that we change the line the second bullet under crest will have the following features to read crest staff will be first responders to nonviolent non-criminal calls we'll need us so i move those two amendments we'll need a second for that also i'll make a one one amendment one amended yeah yeah so let let me go back thank you mr bernie jones with with those amendments to the motion asking for a second to that amended motion second it i think i actually got two seconds i think miss pat was also and miss miss rara yeah miss pat just put miss back down all right miss rara and miss pat community effort yeah that would be in that amended motion is there any further discussion okay let me let me uh do a vote by just give me a high sign or the way we can so i can recognize all those in favor of that motion as amended uh i see mr bernie jones i see miss um so and miss rara or miss bowman miss i think i see miss walker you have your hand at miss walker yeah miss pat i got everybody i do thank you also voted yes is that you mr cage yes thank you mr cage miss bowman okay so the motion as amended is passed thank you very much um mr bernie jones one this motion didn't attempt to include everything but we were trying to at least mention everything that might need a budget allocation but one of the things that's not in there is the civilian oversight board and i don't know whether we need a motion but i was hoping that we might at least through some sort of consensus or agreement indicate to the town manager that we do want funds in the budget for a civilian oversight board well it isn't the motion though it's number two oh it is number two it is maybe that's maybe that takes care of it yeah it's just that i i don't think it's in the budget though in the budget that i saw that miss pat and um and miss walker and miss oan worked on but that we could obviously you know put that together but yeah it's in the motion okay all right so we're in agreement that we we need some budget allocation for that right yeah right and i want to just and i'll go to you miss pat i think you had your hand up and miss walker first after you but just want to acknowledge the fact that too uh there's a lot of information that came around the budget side of this um from um miss pat and others and they did a lot of work beyond beyond uh this committee to solicit information and input from folks um your folks said you don't probably see i mean i know mr kage was involved miss pat you can help me with that other folks who uh we have some community input so this was not an idle kind of thing but there was a lot of feedback to this and and there there is a place for us but you know i i think to really talk more about this certainly because it has implications for the budget and i i don't want this to you know sort of fall by the wayside and not get the attention it needs from the community safety working group um miss pat you had your hand up and then miss walker so i just want to mention very quickly i know we don't have time tonight to discuss the budget that um miss ferrara we did uh discuss the oversight uh civilian oversight commission board and we're recommending some sort of stipend for whoever you know the time manager you know our points so we're recommending 10k for each member for um five member commission and um a was also suggested we walked closely with the seven gen as well in developing the budget in general so i just want to i actually i actually did see that i just forgot thanks miss pat for bringing it up miss walker um thank you mrs pat i was actually going to say the same thing that we did um so it thankful for um the work of mr verne and jones and mrs owen they got us this uh motion very quickly and so we had this with us when we went and made our budget recommendations and so we we made sure to discuss every single line in this proposed motion and there is allocations for every single thing in our budget yes agreed and i i want to also add um and i'm glad we're we're coming to this confluence of agreement around this because there are you know i i don't want to be ignorant of the fact that um we are working with our our consultant group seven gen uh movement collective and these folks are you know they're they're out there working 24 seven um i see at least one of them on on the line right now and i think our next step is to really engage a converse in a conversation with uh with them about how we can merge this information merge these motions and the direction we're taking as the as a group and invite certainly and include and hear more from them about what's going on in the community because that's an important piece that's happening right now and also we just recently received a pretty extensive report from them which needs to be read by everyone here so um that includes a lot of different information i think at this point as we're having reports becoming coming due they have a responsibility to deliver something to the town manager that we have this conversation at some point very soon even if it has to happen before um our next meeting and even if it it may not include all individuals but i i feel there's an important coordination and collaboration after that needs to happen to to bring this together so that we can get a coherent and meaningful report uh uh to the town manager and so i'm saying that out loud only because we have some deadlines coming up i think ours is you know i guess what is it uh mr. bachman may 15th you're expecting it to get something from us and at the end of April we're expecting to get something from the from seven gen is that correct right is that a yes so um just saying saying that and you know next week well it's the 28th and i don't know how much time that gives us but certainly we have to have some conversation that we're we can come together at least on the 28th and have something about ready to submit to um to the town manager so that's the context i'm presenting and i'd like to hear from folks to see if um you know what your thoughts on there are as well at this point mr. Herrera yeah i guess i'm i'm just reading what um mr. Dr. Chavez and seven gents sent to us um their kind of update and they're just saying that they're they're going to give us a draft by the 23rd which would be this Friday um but that they would want us to um provide some feedback to them uh beforehand uh so they want some feedback by the 25th so that would be this Sunday by 8 p.m so that then um they can present to us they can have something for us on the 28th a presentation for us by the next meeting so that they can finish the report by the 30th so i think those are the important things for us to kind of be mindful of make sure that we're giving them the feedback uh that they miss pat so a couple things i i don't think one more meeting next week Wednesday will be sufficient for us to be ready to submit something so i think i will very much i hope we're planning to invite seven jane next week Wednesday for them to do some sort of presentation for us i'm almost thinking maybe we should have one additional meeting next week as well i at least to discuss the budget uh to make sure that everybody is on board or if they have suggestions or changes but to jam both seven jane um presentation and the budget for one night for two hours is unrealistic we need to do this right and for people to pull understand uh the work that has gone into everybody working so hard so that's not my to a sense i want to put in other comments miss walker and i have a couple of comments and i keep miss walker i just want to agree with miss pat thank you oh that was easy other comments so so um can we as a group agree to get into that time frame and give those folks the feedback they need in order for them to have a conversation with us on wednesday thumbs up and i think that conversation would be in in addition to the conversation about the the work that the people did on the budget for next wednesday question miss miss walker or um so i'm just wondering um i have no problem with the deadline for getting feedback to seven gen i'm just wondering is it just that we each will review it on our own and send them personal feedback i think it miss miss moison can it advise us on that if if they're you know it has to go through some particular funnel here for us and i think we have to funnel this information to them in a timely manner and miss moison would that go to you per individual person to um to seven gen i think the important piece there is that it's done individually versus hitting reply all if you could see see me that would be great any objection if i send you some feedback how do you want to receive it from me what um if i have feedback we're very clear if i have feedback for seven gen what's the path you send it to them and see see me got you okay just want to be clear yeah and i have question miss pat when you say send it to them are you saying send it to dr k k d i think you should use seven gen seven gen okay and we would expect to receive that you know as quickly as as you can but they want to buy what when do they want to buy eight p.m on sunday eight p.m on sunday so it's wednesday now i i would encourage us to get that to them as well before sunday well they're going to give us the draft on friday so we got to wait for the draft right yeah so if you can get it done you know earlier than sunday i i know it's a big demand on this committee on this group but uh given it the demands we have so if we can agree that we will do that and get it to them by sunday as they requested let's um give that response in cc that to miss moisten i want to go back to the budget piece that uh miss pat i want to go back to you and others who worked on that what is your expectation on the budget piece of that so the way our meeting has been going if we having seven gen come next week wednesday i'm just concerned that we may not have enough time to answer people's questions around the budget or even present what we worked on i'm almost thinking that we need additional meeting before we submit whatever to to the to the town manager you know some people may want us to tweak the budget like oh wait a minute did you think about this you know things like that so i just want people to fully understand the budget our reasoning what we you know what we did before we put it together and if people have suggestion but if people are okay to just rush through it we just submit it today for the town manager then if that's what people want but i'm thinking we should have another meeting next week in addition to the wednesday meeting in addition to the wednesday meeting yes miss walker um i agree with you i'm sorry thank you i agree with miss pat just once again and i want to say that um there was a lot of meticulous thinking and planning and other documents that we used and analyzed in order to come up with the budget and so i think that upon first glance it's a little bit hard to figure out what's going on and that it may even be helpful for us to give like somewhat of a budget presentation as to how we came up with the numbers that we came up with because it's not very clear just by looking at the papers we did try to add notes so that you guys had some type of idea about the conversation we had while going over the budget but i think that it would be very helpful and then i'm also just wondering in terms of the budget if we would present it in a motion also to the town manager or how we are passing that through um one second i just said sidetracked by a screen here there's a lot in that i had a chance to scurry through that those spreadsheets and everything there's a lot of information in there and not only to be read but to be understood again i i do know from uh some conversation with folks that there are questions about why this is opposed to that so um we're going to need some time to to work with that as as a working group um what would miss walker miss miss i don't need miss pat and others mr cage what what would work to help us get to that point what would work for you in terms of meeting and getting feedback to help with that point and i'm seeing you in the corner of my screen mr bachmann because i'm thinking about we have to come up with something by may 15 to you so i want to be sure that we're you know we're well ahead of that mark um comments mr bachmann so the may 15th is a deadline for the full report so you'll take so that that's the time frame um so i just want to make sure that that that's what the report is but the budget is submitted on may one right right okay so that so that's yes that's bad so that's my concern so i know we're already putting a lot of time in this uh group if people feel that like their schedule is very hectic next week if it's easier for people to send questions to miss moisten and forward to our committee we can try to respond i'm not sure if that's the most efficient way of doing it but i just want people to feel comfortable and that they understood the reasoning why we did the budget the only way i can think of is for us to have even if it's an hour an hour meeting or if people are willing to stay till nine p.m on wednesday i can compromise we can do a three hour that day it will be a long night you're you're you're my hero oh i don't know about that i mean did i said uh i want to go to i want to recognize i see a hand raise from miss ferrera and then miss walker i think i got that the right it's a lot of a lot of screens going on here if i'm not correct you can switch places but miss ferrera and then miss walker i think it was miss walker did you want to go first it's fine yeah uh basically i'm just saying whichever one i think we should do like an hour meeting um at least um and you know either figure out a day or just tack on the hour afterwards i'm fine either way um i agree with miss pat and miss ferrera um so i think we need another meeting for the budget because may one is next saturday so i honestly believe that if we can't add an extra hour onto our wednesday meeting it may be helpful for us to do um monday or tuesday meeting for an hour because what i think would be helpful is that if we can present our thinking behind the budget before asking for questions and feedback from the group and then that way we can make changes or edits to the budget and then it can be finalized and ready for friday which is when we need to have it to mr bachelman um so i think that we need to figure out which one of those options will work for everybody i think he needs it sooner but when do you need it mr bachelman yeah that's that was good thank you miss ferrer that's what i was going to ask the same thing yeah so i tonight was the night that i you know this is where you know the motion was tonight which is what you voted and that's that's you know that that document is what you know we are in the final throws of the budget we're into the formatting almost i was waiting we were waiting for this action tonight for you um which is and which i think is really great it includes all the content that you've talked about and so with that we'll be we're you know that this point we're moving into formatting stages of the budget swalker um and with those comments i propose we just pull up the budget right now and go over it set it again i think we should just pull up the budget right now i know it's late but i don't know can we have a meeting on friday like i don't understand if they're saying he needs it before then and they're already in the final stages of formatting i just don't know when do you need it mr mr bachelman when so um so we are literally finalized i was going to take the motion tonight and we were going to work tomorrow to take and you know i have been following you i know where you're where you're headed on this so looking at the elements that you voted tonight and say how do we address these um tomorrow this week you know we have we're literally moving into formatting stage on friday you know so um oh wow but i think you know i have the documents that you have that you have and um yeah you know here is my here is my question and i'll go to the answer back we just received um through a lot of work and this this is you know it it came in when it came in a lot of work on on folks working on numbers relative to this as a group we had not have a time to process this as a group that there are questions about even some of the stuff that we have information we've collected um and i think therein lies the need for maybe another conversation that's one thing um i think we we have a a response that we have to make to the uh seven gen by sunday with respect to what what what they they need um for me and i'll speak for myself i saw this information i do have some questions i i i do want to take more time to to look at the detail of these the budget information that was sent to us we just recently got it um i'm thinking that we need another meeting certainly with the budget numbers to have a coherent conversation with our community service working with before we just sort of just pass up on on you know kind of willy nilly to to meet a timeline so well that that that's my comment and let me go let me try to get these in order mr ronan jones miss miss bowman miss bowman had her hand up i'm sorry i had a lot of orders miss miss bowman okay so um we need to look at the budget tonight if you go back and look at last week's meeting we agreed to have that done for today so if people who looked at the budget already have questions then you need to present them tonight we cannot be holding other people up because we're like we voted on it last week and two and we had people working on it so that it could be presented to us today and if we have questions like none of the numbers are solid but the numbers are there and the numbers like if you want to vote against it vote against it we don't need to be we don't all need to agree on it but i think we need to present and see what's being presented to us at this point because we are himmin and hawing constantly every week himmin and hawing and pushing things aside and pushing things aside but you know what mr rockerman has a date the deadline and he's at the end of his deadline and we're not going to hold him up we're not going to hold him up and i i i feel like we need to i like i want to call to motion saying that like i want to hear the budget right now and i don't usually stand these meetings past 7 30 because i do have a family to attend to but i don't have time to wait more days and i don't have time to see this budget not get put in to what's going to to the town committee like what are we doing this i don't i don't um that's my vote i do not want to wait any longer let's hear what the presentation is we can talk about details later at least like i don't care if the number is exorbitant and crazy i'd rather put that number in there and then we can discuss like because we need them to come back for something we can discuss why you know okay why was this why was that why was the other thing that's fine but we need to put like we need to put the numbers in we need to put the numbers in like what are we waiting for i don't understand why there's we constantly are waiting for something we're holding other people up and we said we're trying to push things through we're trying to make things happen and we're not making things happen and this is this is this is where i feel like the disrespect comes in because my time is being wasted and people are making doing things and and and taking their time to spend extra efforts and this it's completely disrespectful to vote last week to have it read today and then not read it today especially when it comes to something that's already time sensitive so please my vote is to read this now thank you miss bowman i have a question for folks how many have of us on the committee i want to be very frank about this how many of you have had a chance to to read through the budget information i was presented by our subcommittee who did the work on this and have some questions or comment about it and understand what the content and trajectory of that that budget proposal those budget informations what the content and trajectory of what that budget budget analysis may mean for our proposal how many of you have honestly looked at that and had a chance to analyze and look at it okay i'm just asking because i think this i'm going back to miss bowman's comment because this this may have some impact i i'm raising my hand i've had some opportunity to do that but i have questions and i have concerns about it so i i just want to be sure that if that's something we're going to do you know we need to do that you know fine i want us to be and have informed commentary about this i don't want us to be just saying like hey we're just going to do this because it's it was presented to us these folks put a lot of time doing this work it's been a lot of time looking at it and there's there's some very discreet issues in there and i know people have comments and questions about it i want to welcome miss rare's comment a question comment mr vernon jones had his hand up and then i'll go after him i'm not doing good with this i think i given what mr bachemann has said about his timeline i think uh the sheen is correct that we i would propose we take a five minute break and come back and spend 30 to 45 minutes tonight uh on this our goal may not be to come to unanimity about every number but to have a general sense of this that we can pass on to mr bachemann if that's the consensus of the group i we willing to do that i i have to not only take a five minute break but i have to to defer to another meeting at eight o'clock oh okay that's that's how my schedule works i apologize for that but didn't i can come back but i can i've got a couple of computers so i can leave this one open it's that it's that life i'm sorry but if that's the um the intent of the uh consensus of the group i can come back to it but i i do have to step away for a minute to extract myself from another commitment that i have mr rara yeah so um yeah i'm good with that so what do we want to do like we want to do you know five ten minute break and then come back and i i would just say let's just be concise though you know like like let's have like a half an hour you know do the presentation and then and then you know let's try to keep it to half an hour as opposed to 45 because like we all have families i have my two boys that you know are down there downstairs waiting for me so um that that's my only plea um so what are we doing so that we have so is miss miss owen going to guide us through this next piece and what are we doing so that we can have the leadership let's move forward miss owen hi hi i know i've been really quiet this meeting i think it would work the best if we pulled up both of the spreadsheets and went line by line and if any but members of the um working group have any questions we can raise it there and then we can defer to the um budget beating notes at the end if there's any lingering questions are we taking a break though miss miss owen that works for me well it works for me because i have some i have to i have to whatever works best for you all five minutes work should be so can we get back by 8 10 what time is it 8 o'clock by 8 10 i'm just gonna leave my screen open here yes i've got to i've got to make a a shift here to come back to this meeting but let me just say 10 minutes if i'm not back on the screen in 10 minutes miss owen do you feel comfortable yeah of course i will call i'll go look for the spreadsheet so i can pull them up on screen share oh i have them already oh okay the ones that um csw budget subcommittee crest program estimate of costs yeah and same as office of diversity equity inclusion estimate of cost yes i got them thank you mr mr bacheman you need me here for this section of the meeting yes please if you don't mind it'll be good that would be good i think you i know it's a long day for you and miss moisten yes please and we live for this what you're talking about you don't have any of that life really don't it's a long day for for mr bacheman and miss boyston all right i'll see you at 8 10 okay okay i'll see you in 10 minutes and um thank you ready when you guys are yeah i'm i'm here i'm gonna turn on my camera for a minute while i eat okay i don't know how many people are still are back but i really feel like the conversation with the pd was getting really good and i think that they were really receptive to that so i really um feel like we should at another time after we get through all of this craziness but before you guys leave have another one of those because i think that they were really receptive to the things that you were saying and i felt like the conversation was just really getting good and then we had to break for something else so i just wanted to bring that back um do you want me to pull up this spreadsheet miss moisten oh i can't hear you i have it here sorry okay um so we never stopped recording okay can you see it yes i i want to see the uh the picture that's beautiful miss bowman's picture can you see the screen it says it's paused i can see it and guys i'm gonna eat a little something so i'm gonna go dark but i'm still here i'm listening okay do you guys want to do the crest program first or the second part of our recommendations first i think we should do the budget itself first if that's okay with people is this the correct one it is a correct one yes okay so um i will start i will i will start and um miss uh miss walker and and miss owen you can jump in anytime you want so so basically in order for us to develop the budget um we kind of did some research on indeed and some salaries across the state and then we looked at the town behind um salary scale i made some comparison and we decided to go with the town um salary scale even though that will go up in the school year 2022 if i'm going too fast or people want to stop me please do so and so that's where we came up with the salaries that as i go on we can also discuss our reasoning so we um this is the oh i thought we were looking at the crest can we can you show can you show the crest one first let's start with that one i just want to acknowledge um um miss walker had her hand up um thank you miss miss um oh and that was actually going to be my comment was going to be that we should start with the crest yeah let's start with crest so can you tell me which one do you see because i have two screens and and the stuff is bouncing around and so um so we have the uh the diversity equity and inclusion okay budget but we want to start with the responder okay it's just because i have the do you see it now no do you see it now we still have the diversity one is that what people are seeing now yes thank you thank you so much so um can you make it a little bit larger as i mentioned before um the the proposal the the word that the time manager submitted to us i believe last week stated half time 20 hours of our program director's position and we felt that the 24 hour program needed a full time and so we didn't change the salary scale that the um time manager wrote last week all we did was just um move the part time to full time and that's how we arrived at 85 000 one two two okay uh the next is somebody doing like pointer so that people can follow thank you any questions about the first one okay any question about that before i move on to another one for the next one and then um we felt that this work is going to be very stressful and therefore there has to be a supervisor in its shift um when the two responders will be working so basically there will be three staff on duty at all times 24 seven and so that's how we came up with the um with that position and this is just a proposal the level um and the step six is something that we pulled from from the town salary scale and then the six full time the next one please the six full time is already what um the time manager proposed last week so we didn't make any changes to that and then we felt that that a huge program like this need an administrative assistant we're calling this program a department of its own independent from the police and therefore they have to have a full-time administrative assistant and and so that's you know we looked again at the salary scale and this is what we came up with nothing is definite you know the time manager has the final authority to make changes to the salary but this this is just like a guide um and then the one that the time manager presented last um gave us uh sent to us didn't include dispatchers at all again we felt that um dispatchers also need supervisor during the shift just to prevent burnout and um high turnover to retain staff and so we put in uh three full time shift supervisors the next one um will be six just the same uh staffing pattern like the responders so we have nine uh all together nine full time um dispatchers and nine full time responders some of who are supervisors and then when it came to health insurance I have sent everybody um where I got that where we got that from from the from the town website and um I we are you we use the same um town cost for full time employee to multiply it by the total uh 10 employees so we have the the program director and then we have the nine um responders and then we have nine um dispatchers so that's how we came up with with that and then employer contribution to pension I actually reached out to the town manager over the weekend about the formula they used and he was able to give it to me um 23 percent between 23 percent and 25 percent of each full time employee salary and so we figured it out to be this amount next please and then Medicare um that is a percentage um that was being that is used to come up with this amount and then um with the furniture so we assume that the town will provide space so there is no budget for rent rental expenses or utilities um we did not change the the numbers the 15 000 is what um I believe the town manager had in his own uh proposal so we didn't change that however the next one please the 50k we had to increase it because we considered the recruitment if we're really going to get diverse staff uh to this program we have to do um it cost money to recruit and to train and so we had to increase the amount of 50k um the one that town manager sent to us says one vehicle because this is a college town and um we have students students will be accessing uh press services we felt that one vehicle will not be enough on a busy night we have to have more than one vehicle and that's how we came up with two vehicles and then supplies and other expenses we put it um for 30k our thinking around that is that um some of us remember you know uh attending a webinar where it a retired chief police in Georgia state I believe stated what his office um was doing like if they stop a motorist who has a headlight out instead of writing tickets to that person this is an example they will rather send them to a mechanic to change the headlight so the idea of increasing supplies and others when responders are doing their work maybe that would be like out of pocket expenses they might do when they encounter some people so we we kind of you know wanted to make sure that it's enough funding to like pay for certain things that is not maybe sending people yeah whatever um Bowen and um Belisha if you guys want to you know talk about the some of the reasons why we put some of the money in there so the one thing that I just want to say is I the one thing that I really stand by is there being two vehicles just because I did see that UMass Amherst is going back full time next semester so I do think that we have to make the budget for this program assuming that there's going to be an influx of 22,000 students who are probably going to use Chris so these numbers might look a little high to some people but there's an influx of students coming to Amherst that are also going to use the program so so we can thank you we came up with two million a little bit over two million actually we're very conservative about it because you know again you know Amherst as a college town I think the budget will even go up but this is a good start you know also another thing that we consider in putting this project together is that most of the calls that the APB gets are nonviolent calls and therefore we'll be doing Chris will be doing most of the of the work for them and we felt that the police budget needs to be cut in order to fund the program because they wouldn't be doing some of the work there that are currently doing like the mental health like homelessness just nonviolent activities but that's how we came up with this any questions? Ms. Pereira has her hand up yes thank you for the presentation that was very clear and thank you to all of you for putting all of this work into things and also obviously for the motion to Mr. Vernon Jones and whoever else works on that but in terms of the budget and and just want to make sure I'm on the same page for the dispatcher supervisors and the dispatchers so basically it would be one dispatcher supervisor and two dispatchers per shift right? That's correct assuming three shifts three shifts that's what we assumed but it would be eight hour shift okay okay perfect thanks that's what I just wanted to make sure I was on the same page all right thank you yeah Ms. Pat I have a question yes um and just a little bit of a subjective thing and I don't need to go into it if people don't want to go into it but what are we thinking about in terms of what is a violent as opposed to nonviolent need for response? So that's where you know training the dispatchers will be very critical hopefully you know if the dispatchers are very good question if the dispatchers are trained like properly they will be able to figure out if this is a call that the responder should take or if it's if it's a call that the police should take from the call. Understood and I think part of you know in terms of how the mechanics of it I hear what you're saying thank you you know that that explains it to me because that is a very discreet entry level response because in some cases something may start out as a nonviolent particular thing and then it could escalate either by external forces escalating the incident or it's misinterpreted. So just to be clear when our group was working on these numbers we weren't saying that um press would not collaborate with the police or EMT you know press will still do that but it's an independent department so if like say student party escalates the fighting of course they have you know the responders you know can get back up you know call the police to to help we're not saying that they have you know they wouldn't be collaborating with the police if it's a violent situation we wouldn't be risking people um to to deal with violent situations. Thank you. Miss Walker and then Mr. Russ Vernon Jones and then um I think Miss Moisten. Hard to figure out isn't it? Yeah. Yeah instead of like you're looking at these things going off and on but thank you for doing this keep going Miss Owen you're doing good. Um thank you so I just wanted to add um we did talk about things in respect to Mr. Wiley's question and how we're going to like indicate which calls are violent and non-violent and which calls will have to go to the Crest Program and I think that that is something that can be worked like that is independent of the budget what kind of calls will go to them exactly but I did take a look at the police budget like I said earlier and the types of calls they received um and like if we decided that we were going to send Crest Program people to motor vehicle violations or community outreach like would they be performing these things in place of the police because the number one thing that police receive calls for are motor vehicle violations the number two thing is community outreach the number three thing is disturbances the number four thing is reports of suspicious activity the number five thing are medical assists the number six thing is for summonses and arrest warrants and then for the number seven thing was to assist a citizen and so all of the top reasons our police are being called are reasons are things that can go directly to the Crest Program none of these are violent offenses and they can all be handled if things escalate if there are weapons then that requires further assessment which is why the budgets for the responders we raised them because they need to have specific training to deal with these things we're not just sending anybody out there these people will be trained and they will be able to deal with these things without weapons and so that is the point of not having the police be there Mr. Vernon Jones what's the level of calls that you assumed in deciding that this was the quantity of dispatch service needed so that that's a good question so this this um because we put together um I mean we thought about the students but with the COVID we really that you know we know the students will eventually come back when students fully come back definitely this project will you know will go up because the need will be greater did I answer your question no I I just wondered whether you made any numerical estimates about how many calls a year the Crest Program might get for instance well uh from what Ms. Walker has just mentioned um you know gives us an idea um of how we put the um the staffing together it's not perfect this is just a suggestion but I will imagine that as most students come back we would definitely I mean the police the APD has like 44 police officers and we're only talking about 10 employees here I would imagine it will go off because most of the calls that the APD are getting is what Crest will be doing but for the start you know this is where we came up with thank you yeah um so I'm looking at you know it might be up to 20 employees eventually when students come back or even more if Crest is going to be doing most of the work of the work that the police are currently doing oh sorry oh go ahead I just wanted to also respond to Mr. Vernon Jones and say that if you go to the budget from last year they actually have the complete number of service calls to police listed as 17,483 calls and I believe that includes when the UMass students are here so that was for last fiscal year and some near 2,000 of those calls were for motor or those responses for police were motor vehicle violations some near 1,000 were community outreach some near 900 were disturbances some near 600 were reports of suspicious activity and so those are just the top four things on the list and as I said before the top eight things were all nonviolent calls so that's just an idea of where we got those numbers for because we expect it to be a large amount of the police calls being rooted to the Crest program that's right yep so so basically we're very conservative about this budget um in reality it should actually be doubled but because we're you know under uh pandemic lockdown still and this is what we came up with I think miss moison had a question and then miss rara yeah um this is pretty thorough um thank you so I was just curious so when a call comes in and this might and the only reason I bring it up in the budget is is because I'm looking at the staffing do you send one person out per call or do just two people get sent out per call we will never send one person out to a call so that's the whole point of two person now and you um then you have the supervisor around in case they need to you know um they need questions or help or support or supervision whatever so there will be no situation hopefully unless if somebody even if somebody calls out on their shift you still have a supervisor that will cover the shift that hopefully um one person will not be going out to deal with situation is our thinking does that answer your question it it does and then I'm just curious like what happens if there's two calls and like right like how do how do like do you have are you thinking that you're going to work with cso or or specific pd people i'm just curious that's all yeah i mean that also um we thought about that too that you know since the students are you know i i'm not back like i referenced before this budget you know should go up when you know we have more students in town obviously just um 10 employees for um 10 um nine responders and the program director you know it's not enough to to cover um activities in in this town um miss rarez had her hand up for a while and then miss walker yeah i mean i was just um agreeing with what miss walker and miss uh pat um we're talking about in terms of just i think that this is actually pretty conservative and what miss moison just talked about yeah cases that is very conservative i think we'll probably even need you know more like money for like more responders and possibly you know to have in place not necessarily possibly not more supervisor we'd have to see but at least this would be something to give to the town right now and then they could make an assessment in terms of of add more oh we could add more you know i'm i'm good either way but the thing is is that i think there'll be plenty of work for them to do because as miss walker has stated and miss pat has um stated that you know the police if we put this in place the police they're not going to be responding to this anymore right it'll be this group that will be responding to it and so they're you know their budget gets decreased their staffing gets decreased and it gets moved into this program so that we can make sure that this is is fully staffed and fully resourced we're also envisioning that this may not start right away in july because it will take time to advertise to recruit i mean the fiscal year starts in july but um to get the word out and also we're also envisioning to have a simple number like people are used to calling 911 people will still call 911 but eventually you know the town manager will have to make a decision to you know i don't know how difficult you know it will be to to come up with like that is a 211 number maybe you know come up with a different you know number where people can call and know that they're calling press directly but it's not something that will happen overnight it might take months um for people to get used to calling press directly but calls that goes to 911 some of them can be routed to press dispatcher miss bowman has her hand up yep miss bowman i'm on i'm talking um yeah i think that if we're going to um if we're going to walk into this with the knowledge that the likelihood is those numbers are going to have to rate the rate uh go up because of the students being here i think that they're here what 10 months nine months out of the year we should that should be that should be inclusive we should rate we should even raise the numbers more and raise the number of employees more to reflect the students and also as part of like with looking at this budget and the recommendations of this budget we say you know if the town of amherst doesn't like the numbers then the town of amherst should put pressure on umass police to help in the umass the state or whatever to help fund some of this because hey we have what 8 000 students plus that live off campus that means we're responding to those calls and so some of that budget should come out of you know come from the universities um but i don't think we should i don't think we should keep we should stay conservative it's conservative on these numbers because if we're looking at the numbers right now that may or may not include like if we're looking at the numbers now and we're saying they that doesn't really include the students then my suggestion is to say well okay we need to add you know two more people on each level or whatever so that when the students are all here and there are partying in town and having all these like you know living in town and having all these breakdowns and crises that are not or like parties or whatever that are nonviolent we still have people that can respond to them and then we don't because what's going to end up happening is that the students are going to take off all of our resources they're not there their school is not contributing anything towards those resources and then again people in town specifically the park community is going to be at the you know the end you know the police end of it per se you understand what i'm saying where it's like well we've we've we've used all of our resources so now we're actually having to call the police to come in to deal with this because you know we didn't staff enough so we definitely don't want to i'd rather over staff and then you know i mean it's like any other negotiation or you you throw the number up high and then you get you can bring it down to what something you can work with and so i say yeah that's a conservative number i would even you know at least bring it up you know i mean i double it personally you know because then we have something to work with i mean that's the original initial initial thinking but we say let's present this to all of you tonight you know to present this and then whatever the group you know wants to do we can tweak it and then before we submit it to the town manager well yeah my my vote is to double it miss walker thank you um so i just wanted to state that the numbers are the information that i got from the town budget as to the number of service calls do include UMass students so that was all calls received by Amherst police in last year period not just from the town i don't think they even organized the data in that way and so i i did base it off of all of the numbers for the entire fiscal year last year and you can see the service calls for the last five years and they're all very similar it hasn't changed much over the last five years um but i am also in support of raising this number i i know when we met as a budget team we all proposed our own drafts and then combined them together to make this draft and my personal draft had a 16 responder model because i think that when two responders are out responding to a call there needs to be people in the center in case somebody comes in in crisis but we are also aware of the budget constraints and so i think our idea in presenting it in this way is that this program should be sufficient enough to start and it's and then the town can say that this is really working and we need to increase the budget hopefully because we we already we're already going to have a hard time pushing this number to be completely honest we already know they're not interested in giving us this much money they quoted us at 700k for this program so i think that's where our um our hesitation comes in but i am not against doubling this because i personally do believe that we would need more responders on staff also we don't want to overwork the people that are there if we're going to have the program be 24 seven and only have certain people like we don't want them working around the clock um but i but i also wouldn't be opposed to leaving it how it is so i i would be interested in hearing more from the group mr wiley thank you um and and thank you for indulging me right now i i moved actually a a training i'm supposed to be doing at 8 30 to a little little later so i had to give me some leeway so i'm gonna hang in but i'm listening to all the conversation we're having and i i guess i'm one of my questions is and and i'm with this conversation all the way around in terms of supporting what needs to happen in terms of a positive responder response in this community that's going to give service and support and security and safety to our bio community i don't want to lose that with within the numbers i i do want to ask um the group if we don't know and we didn't get a chance to police department right now um because that was one of the questions we wanted to get to at some point is where are they willing to or eager to or needing to move away from their models of policing into crest models and i think there's a potential there and i think one of the things about that i the reason i'm raising that is that i i think that um we have an opportunity here we have an opportunity to possibly redirect funding from the police department to alternative models of of uh public safety put it that way we also have to be conscious of the fact that we're there they're seeing their particular issues as a structure within in the town i think that conversation with them was important because i do believe there's an opportunity there and i think there's an opportunity in the town to redirect not divert or redirect money into this effort we're talking about to do the right thing for our community and i guess my i i guess i don't know what my question is necessarily but is but that i support the work of what people have done around the budget i support the work around what people have done around crests and everything and i think there is an opportunity in this community to move in that direction if we do it the right way and so i'm hoping that the the it's not just the numbers shifting back and forth that are going to make a difference um not suddenly about the numbers but what the what the ultimate impact impact is going to be for our community i mean i think that's it this is an opportunity here and we're we're in it and discussing it i think that's you know that's a good thing um miss frera miss vern mr. Vernon jones and then miss walker yeah so for me um yeah i don't want the police to have anything to do with anything that we're talking about here i want it anything that's non-criminal nonviolent i want it to be to go to a crest which will be an independent that's why i wanted to be the first to have that in the motion independent with their own space and their own program um i think the police had an opportunity to do what they had to do and and they weren't very successful even with their you know crisis intervention teams and everything they weren't very successful so i don't want i i don't want them to have anything to do with this in terms of that what would only be i guess the only thing that i could fathom would be again if something that the responders respond to and then it becomes violent and they you know and they need backup i guess you know that maybe that could be possibly the only place besides that i want them to be the ones to respond to situations and not the police and i don't i don't want them to have any say in terms of how they respond when they respond what they do when they respond it needs to be totally independent you know um and i want you know since they won't be responding since the police won't be responding their budget needs to be cut that's basically it their budget needs to be cut so that the money can go okay that's that's um and so when i'm looking at this based on all the discussions that people are having i do think we would need to and i think it's probably important for us to up the the money for the um responders i mean the staffing for the responders and the supervisors because yeah right now we only have two people per shift which would mean that if anyone's sick or if there's multiple um incidents happening at the same time then we would be you know in a crunch there right so i think at least we need to at least have four people per shift at least and also people take vacations and stuff like that so they're going to need people to cover them during those shifts and things like that i like the suggestion i like it i was muted sorry mr vernon jones and then miss walker i don't necessarily disagree with what's been said but i'm trying to watch the time and i think we said we were going to only go 30 to 45 minutes i wondered if we could see the rest if you could walk us through the rest of the budget before okay they're trying to make changes okay okay so okay oh wait miss walker hand up yeah i'm sorry i'm i agree with mr vernon jones so i'll try to make it quick i just wanted to say that the police spoke with us and i think it was helpful to have them speak with us before this because they did let us know that they're on board i think everything that they said aligned went along with they they don't necessarily want to be responding to these calls they want to give us the mental health calls they want to give us those calls and so i think i think they'd be more than willing to work with us in terms of turning those calls over to us and then it would be up to the town manager and the town council in terms of moving the funds that they use to respond to those calls to us so that we can respond to those calls okay so the next slide do you see it yeah i'll be really brief on this i think miss owen and miss alicia will just explain the reasoning in order to save time so can you enlarge it a little bit so that other people can see it can people say it okay so just like chris we want we talked about um having the diversity equity and inclusion be a separate department in the town separate and so um again we compared some salary skills and that's how we came up with the you know the director will be a huge responsibility and then with we also discuss about getting an assistant director as well because it's a department and the administrative assistant just like all other departments in town have administrative assistant and i'm just going real fast um with the youth center we solicited the input from some youth including the derrius cage and um we have to have a full-time um center coordinator that will be reporting to the director of diversity equity and inclusion and then scroll down please and then a three or four time youth center support services i'm just like rushing through the because of time and then um we also talked about how having bifurc cultural center um so the argument will be oh we have a ms family center we have llc we have all these social services in town the problem is that they're not accessible to bifurc families but bifurc families do not get adequate services due to language barrier due to the um the the administrators who are non bifurc it's just not working for bifurc families so um we do need a dedicated program for bifurc folks also it will benefit other residents too there a place where bifurc families can go comfortably to seek for help and yeah so uh the cultural center we we're hoping that it will help to promote by bifurc um culture um showcase um bifurc museum and celebrations like Juneteenth panza and other celebrations from caribbean africa you know um hispanic that asia hawaii all over and um in addition to that um let's see support you know i'm just like repeating the support and case management if people are struggling with paying their their rent for example currently what the town is doing is contracting that service to an agency in greenfield that is headed by Caucasian and some bifurc families have been denied the service even though they are qualified to get a rental assistance so we want that service back into the community if if uh that is a domestic violence uh these issues you know if if somebody you know somebody needs some resources and support that is bifurc or even anyone they can come to that center to get some help and i i think uh miss bone uh owen and um miss walker can talk more about that um so basically the insurance is the same formula that we used um miss hat miss walker has her hand up okay go ahead sorry thank you i just wanted to say that we talked about um some of the roles in this in this department and in this center we were hoping that these can be housed in one building like a one-stop shop for families and have all of these programs hopefully um be under the same roof and then the reason for the salaries and the reasoning for these programs to be separate from other programs that may exist in the town is that we were hoping that all of the staff and um directors of these programs will have anti-racist training they will be trained in cultural competency and that they will be trained in trauma-informed care so that they can meet the needs specifically of the BIPOC community yes yeah and um so yeah okay i just want to mention that with the youth center um what we got back from the youth uh uh input was that it has to be close to the school to high school or middle school like downtown that it will be easier for kids to walk down to the center instead of located in you know far away from from downtown in order to attract kids to use to to access the facility that people will be reluctant to take the bus if it's for example in North Amist or South Amist that people wouldn't go there that we should try to locate space in town one of the spaces that was mentioned was the gym at the same bridges or something like that you know you know for the town to explore that anyway so the employer contribution pension is the same formula that we use for the Medicare and let's see the okay so the furniture we felt that with the youth center for example they might need like gym section you know they might need more equipment with the youth center so that the kids don't want just one room for everybody to gather you know that that would be like you know people need help with you know homework or schoolwork or people just want to socialize and chill out or people just want to you know exercise so that would be separate spaces for that and we thought that you know it would need more money to do that and also of course with the the director of the the entire program need you know dedicated space with the yeah but anyway so the next please so same same logic with the training it's very important that we just don't hire people and not give them adequate support and funding that is very critical that that is enough enough funding so retain staff um mr wiley sorry i missed your hand no you didn't you didn't miss it actually you i was right there okay i'm almost done so the so we felt that sorry i'm almost done okay we okay we felt that um the uh the youth program needs vehicle the reasoning around that is you know with the thinking that the program will run from afternoon like two p.m to six p.m monday through friday but saturday maybe from noon time to six and in the evening we don't just want to send kids off if they don't live on bus route the vehicle will help to transport kids home i knew i know when i was running my restaurant i never allowed any of my high school kids to to take the bus home i made sure i arranged if their parents are not able to come pick them up that they get they got home safely so that's the reason the safety issues uh supplies celebrations that's the amount i'm done so language translate uh ambassadors they will not necessarily be uh time employees but we will hope that they will be compensated very well when they render their services so i would let um elisha and brand riana jump in i would be happy to hear from um mr wiley or other people with questions before i add anything if that's okay okay i willing to differ i have a couple of minutes i just want to say i had to to move a a meeting to nine o'clock that's supposed to happen for me at eight o'clock so um i don't know there's too many friends tonight but um if you don't mind miss walker i'll be very brief yeah absolutely as i'm looking at this this thing and in its totality i i i i believe we're on the right track here i i do believe we're on the right track in terms of what we're trying to do with with this particular program and when i look at this particular piece i see if my count is right there's probably about 10 positions in here that are full-time positions that um probably cross over into other areas of our town and our town government you know while we we may not want to relinquish that responsibility to to let's say leisure services for example but it these are positions that that are that would have to be hired and trained and financed all the way through to benefits and other kinds of things which is a cost no problem with that but to understand that that's that's what's happening in that area and i wonder if some of those things might overlap with maybe some of the initiatives that uh department of leisure services may be thinking about could this be a shared opportunity here uh the the other piece i wanted to say and and i do i apologize i have i have to get off because i have to attend to these other folks at this period of time but um there's a really strong opportunity for us to do something here and i you know i you know i i don't know how to emphasize that enough at this particular time but um if we can get ourselves to a point where we can see that we can propose something that's coherent concrete and it's going to have some traction at the town level then we're going to do ourselves well i think if we we've got to stay focused you know on what our our mission was and is and and and and what our task is before us and if we can do that and i think we're there we're on our way so Mr. Wiley i just have a quick question for you before you jump off i thought we were expanding the meeting to all agree on this motion if you leave and we all agree on these numbers is that okay with you or i have no disagreement with with the the um the intent and spirit of where we're going so i i i do have to go okay i'm not in disagreement with what what we're doing i'm just saying i hope we can say the course around what our our mission and vision is with respect to the what the time is charged is to do on you know going forward um all respect to the people who have done the work on the budget uh certainly supposed to do the work on the crest part piece of it and um you know i'm with you i'm supported all the way through as far as i can i can see it um miss walker so i'm in miss on so that's i'm fine with it okay awesome so so before you leave if you don't mind before you leave mr. Wiley what i didn't mention is that this program is prevention crest is crisis intervention this program is prevention so there is two distinct reason why we have this so that's why yeah we have prevention for this one crest there's crisis intervention understood thank you um i see miss moisten's hand then miss walker then miss burrera i'll be i'll be quick too so i'm very excited about this because i've had this whole notion in my head somewhere that we could be somewhere like the the Hampshire ymca is so successful and i understand that they have funding through a different you know system and i'm not saying that it has to be like that but i just know like the Hampshire y to some degree works as like that one-stop place and it has all of the community organizations and like these kids need a basketball court and they you know they need a some some other places for activities so i just i don't know about them like the merge if we can get all of the different youth programs to kind of merge together and work or how you guys would want to do that but i just i'm very excited about this piece of it and i um i think that it it could definitely work you could utilize some systems that are already in play as long as very good point as long as it's headed by back by park leadership that's the whole point of creating this if by park families are getting the services that we need in this town we won't have this so that's the whole point i don't have any problem margin some of the services as long as it is administered by by park leadership that's the emphasis i'm sorry to interrupt but i nine o'clock was as late as i could push my other commitment i do need to go i totally agree that these are things our town needs and really appreciate the work that people have put in i'm very sorry i can't stay so should we put my emotion or should we so let's round this up yeah um so i see miss walker's hand miss frera and then mr wiley that's okay i'm in favor of moving towards emotion so that we can get people out of here and i can save my comments for our next week yeah miss frera yeah me too um i just want to do the vote but i also don't want to forget that we we had also said about possibly adding more responders should i make changes on that should we make changes on that what about that yeah i would be in favor of doubling just what we have now in terms of the responders if that is what about the dispatchers just the responders just the responders for me okay okay okay mr wiley i think my my my part in comment is that i i don't want to abandon the fact that there have been our consultant group has been with us through this entire process and they are they are in our community doing work with our community getting feedback and at this particular point we have not fully heard from them about what their what resources they've found of or what information they've received from our community and i i think this is going to be important because it will touch on all of these items that we're we're receiving uh we're we're talking about right now but as they're spending a lot of time working on this and extended time attending these meetings and you know i'm speaking on behalf of them their voice has not been heard but they're taking in all this information i i hope we can facilitate an opportunity to have a conversation with them um perhaps the next meeting if possible um to hear more from them about what they're finding because this is going to inform what happens for us on in in may in terms of our our formal response to the to the town so i i want to you know thank you for being here i know they're on the i know they're on the on this meeting right now and they're listening but i don't want to dismiss them in this conversation and um you know with that out you know i'll i'll let it go i do have to prall about 15 people right now so so i can i say something i agree with mr wiley i think we should table the motion till next week wednesday well after we hear from the work of seven yeah but wait a minute but we we can't do that we cannot do that we can't do that because we cannot do that budget by day by friday and stuff so we need to do that i didn't spend an extra 45 minutes to then table it no no no no no absolutely no yeah we need to vote on it now i'm not asking i don't want to be misinterpreted i'm not advocating abandoning the motion i'm just saying i think we have to make space for yeah but but mr wiley we're going to do that for the report that's the whole point we're not we're not not going to listen to them obviously but but that's what i'll be included in the report right now budget decisions right got you two different things yeah yeah exactly yeah so um with all of that being oh miss bowman you had your hand up yeah um i was basically i think i know where you're going but with all that being said we need to vote on this it's after eight it's after 45 minutes we agreed to 45 minutes i need to go so can we can we put this to a vote please um all in favor to motion should we do the both of them separate together no let's do it together but just with the amendment for the responders that we double the responders that's it that was the amendment okay so i motion to move both of the budgets forward with the the responders doubled to the amherst population all in favor um raise your hand and it's seconded too by the way yeah man i'm really bad at all of this meeting like the i i have a question before we vote please when you say responders i have a question before we vote when you say responders do you mean also the supervisors or just the responders i think just responders okay got you okay are we all in agreement of that yes um miss walker oh she has her hand raised okay yes thank you sorry okay um let me pull the reading agenda so i'm really awful at this okay so are there any um events before we close out well actually so then who's going to submit that though who's going to submit it to mr mr bachman so we know that that gonna get sent out to him miss pat the chair right don't we send it to mr bachman and cc jennifer yeah miss pat why don't you just do it you all worked on it okay just do it and send it to mr bachman and cc yeah cc uh jennifer and okay when do you guys want this sent tomorrow tomorrow i mean unless you want to do it now yeah unless you want to do it now we've already i mean we've already voted on it just do it i think miss bowman's right i think i think miss bowman's right we already did it yeah didn't just send it out to him yeah did we vote already yeah we did just don't forget okay i'm tired don't forget to double the responders so yeah i went all the responders and then sent it to mr bachman with the cc to miss moisten okay perfect what do so with that being said is there any upcoming events that anyone wants to share it just doesn't know okay awesome i'll i'll take that as a consensus absolutely we will email anything that needs to be emailed at this point and i motioned that the mary meeting is adjourned everyone thank you thank you everybody thank you everybody who came have a good night