 Good afternoon and welcome. My name is John Page and I am the Marketing and Membership Manager for the Amherst area Chamber of Commerce and I want to officially welcome you to our Economic Development Panel. The mission of the Amherst area Chamber of Commerce is to create, maintain and promote a vital, thriving business community throughout the Amherst area and to initiate and support the civic, educational, recreational and economic vitality of the Amherst area. Today we're going to drill down and explore what that means and what action steps we can take to realize this mission. As you may have seen in today's edition of Business West, thank you Business West, Claude and I have spent the past year rebuilding a strong foundation but this panel represents a shift to a more strategic focus as we move forward. A focus on cultivating a community and business environment with people of all ages, backgrounds, income brackets, where family, young professionals and retirees can live, work, learn and thrive. Today we will start with a presentation on our State of Economic Development in Amherst and then a panel discussion about our community's strategic advantage, challenges and a vision for the future for economic development in the Amherst area. Peter will introduce our wonderful panelists shortly. At the conclusion of the panel we will encourage you to continue the conversation downstairs over appetizers and drinks provided by UMass dining. The conversation is most valuable if all of us lean in and engage. There are easels and a pad of paper and markers downstairs as well as index cards, if you didn't get an index card I can provide you with one, where you can document your questions, comments and ideas which will serve as a guide as we plan future chamber programming. I'd like to take this moment to recognize a few people are here. First we have some elected officials present, so will our town counselors who are present, please stand. We are also joined by our town manager, Paul Bachlun. I'd also like to recognize any chamber board members that are in the room, please stand. And then a little bit of news, I would like to mention that Lynn Gray of the Hampshire Mall, who was elected to our board of directors at our annual meeting in January, has risen to the role of vice president for our board. We could not have a better partner, especially as we seek to strengthen our ties with Hadley. A few more thank yous are in order. We are proud to partner with Barowski and Vickery LLC and the University of Massachusetts Amherst to make this event possible. We're excited for this beautiful space and I want to thank Chris Oakley of the Old Chapel for all he's done to make this day a success and a shout out to Amherst Media, who's doing our filming this evening, so there will be a recording which we can share with others and also our photographer, Brandon, who is here with us tonight. At this time, I would like to thank, I would like to invite Tony Maroulas up to the stage, executive director of external relations and university events for UMass, to give some remarks. Hi everyone. Good afternoon and welcome Mike. Welcome to Old Chapel. This is, it's a pleasure to have you here. How many of you are here for the first time? All right, so welcome and do stay for the reception afterwards. Downstairs we have an interactive video wall that we would encourage you to play around with. On the video wall there are about 500 preloaded stories that tell the story of UMass, along with a number of social media feeds that come into the wall from various Twitter accounts on campus including our Falcons at the Du Bois Library. So they have a lot to say and it's really exciting so you should take a peek at that. So a couple of things, I do want to say you know we're lucky to have John Page taking a full-time role with the chamber right now. I didn't hear a lot of applause but I'm sure like many of you it was really exciting to see that we are going to have John around here for a little while longer. It's really great to have you with us. A couple of things. It's written down as remarks. It sounds really formal and I'm not really a formally guy and so I was challenging myself today by not writing any remarks and seeing if I could do everything off the cuff. Those who know me from my old chamber days knows that I know that that could be a little bit dangerous so I'll try to keep this super brief. But I am really excited about this panel and excited about the chamber hosting it in the direction in which this organization is going again. To talk about the economic development conditions here in town and in the region is quite an exciting thing. As many of you know I'm a big advocate for this town. It's a place although I live in Pelham. I feel like I'm an honorary Amherst person. I keep asking Paul to annex my town. This is on Amherst Media. I'm getting in trouble I'm sure for saying that. Amherst owns all of Pelham anyway so please take us over. I'm glad I'm getting something here and as you all know I want that. But Amherst is a particularly exciting place with an immense amount of potential and one of the things that I always like to say is that we have all of the ingredients. We just haven't made the right soup quite yet. Today's also our panel I think we'll be able to talk a little bit about those ingredients and the ways in which we might make a better soup and one that's more tasty and that'll bring in a lot more business and people into the region. From our perspective John has asked me to talk a little bit about the university and the college's impact on economic development and I'll get to speak for our friends over at Amherst and Hampshire right now but our colleges of course share a symbiotic relationship with the town. You know from UMass alone and I'm going to bring up some old stats now none of which are updated but we bring in about 1.2 billion dollars of economic impact early to the local economy. We impact things you know such as our local farms where we buy 30% of our produce for our our dining services operation. We spend quite a bit of money in the local community on catering to our local restaurants to business that we do at some local businesses like Amherst copy at Hastings etc. We'd like to see more of that happen and there's been recent investments in the university by the Commonwealth thanks to Sam Rosenberg in some cases for for his advocacy over the years. Hi Stan how are you good to see you and you know looking at our at Isles and the the core facilities that we have and the voucher program to encourage business and business growth as well as you know MassBio we just unveiled the MassBio ribbon cutting not too long ago on April 29th which is an exciting exciting turn of events for us here on campus so we have a business we're open for business sign here at the university we'd like to think about ways and encourage ways that we can do more partnerships here in Amherst and in the region and so again we welcome you here today I'm looking forward to this panel and at this time I'm going to call up the president of the chamber Peter Vickery. Thank you Tony and thank you to the university for co-sponsoring and thank you for attending thank you panelists and to Amherst media for filming. My job is very simple this evening it is to ask some questions and introduce our panelists and before I do that let me just remind you that if you would like to contribute some questions or comments please do use those postcards that were distributed earlier on. We'll have three questions three guiding questions before the panelists start conversing and part of my job is to to ensure that the conversation keeps going what we're aiming for tonight is not so much one of those candidates debate style sequential answers but rather an actual conversation which will then continue downstairs so the first part of my job is to introduce Jeff Kravitz who will then do a presentation which the panel discussion will follow so let me tell you a little bit about Jeff Kravitz this is my impersonation of Jeff Kravitz by the way now he Jeff Kravitz economic development director at the town of Amherst was born and raised in Amherst he received a bachelor of arts degree from Colgate University in 2002 where he majored in computer science he also holds a JD from the University of Maryland School of Law after graduating from law school Jeff became the government affairs director for the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce for two years he then moved to Boston where he served as the deputy chief of staff for the Massachusetts executive office of housing and economic development in that role he worked with municipal officials to launch the Newton Needham Innovation Corridor and drafted economic development legislation as the deputy director of cabinet affairs for governor develop Patrick Jeff focused on policy initiatives in education labor and workforce development public safety and economic development where he resolved high priority issues including audit responses federal waiver requests implementation of legislation and international collaborations in 2016 Jeff returns to his hometown as Amherst's first economic development director he oversees business recruitment retention and expansion efforts advises on the economic impact of policy decisions and conducts economic research for the town current initiatives include town gam relations creating an economic development strategy participating in the steering committee for the Amherst center cultural district leading parking management efforts and coordinating the local implementation of legal marijuana so on behalf of the Amherst area chamber of commerce serving Amherst-Belchdown-Haddey, Leverett-Pellum-Schutzpree and Sunderland welcome Jeff Kravitz thank you everybody um my first notes were to say thank you so everybody's been thanked already if you haven't thank you thank you for being here thank you panel uh won't waste time with that I've been asked to give a brief introduction to the Amherst economy and so I'm going to start off with my one attempt at a joke which is a Dilbert cartoon basically saying that the first three sections are going to be PowerPoint slides they're going to be kind of boring but informative and then we'll get to some pretty pictures at the end so employment and unemployment data the first is the unemployment rate which you'll see has dropped by more than 50 percent in the last nine years I think this is up to 2018 so eight years and it's still been dropping this year and then looking a little bit more into that here's sort of the last two years or so month by month breakdown and the reason I put this slide in here was to highlight and I don't know if you can see it but the summer months are peak unemployment that's not really a surprise but it's sort of confirmation of how we know the economy works in Amherst you know faculty who are coming back for the next year or restaurants or other businesses that downsize for a smaller population over the summer so looking at employment we have added 2,300 jobs in 2010 and by the way this is my five to ten minute economic overview if we can break this data down so you know where we added jobs as well but I didn't feel like I had time so but very quickly where do people work so education is the largest sector by number of employees no surprise there healthcare is actually the largest by the number of businesses and then hotels restaurants and bars which are grouped together for Amherst this is really restaurants and bars they're the third largest sector by business count and the second largest by the number of people that they employ looking at wages the average average weekly wage has gone up $150 per week since 2010 and that turns out to about $8,000 a year or an 18 increase which is fairly significant and if you break it down by industry and this is a whole bunch of industries but $12 an hour is the minimum wage $13.39 is what I saw as the regional living wage and across all industries the average hourly wage in Amherst is $24.88 so it's over double the minimum wage there are only three industries it's arts entertainment and recreation accommodation and food services and agriculture forestry and fishing which happen to be overall under the minimum wage or the living wage so tourism this is some interesting data locally we have a 6% rooms tax and we see that generally it's been going up with one minor dip but it's also a good time to mention that recently the council adopted a 6% tax on short-term rentals which the legislature had passed and that goes into effect July 1st and there's also going to be an additional 3% community impact fee on those rentals so we will likely see the rooms expenditures go up when we track that data as well but it's unclear there are how many short-term rentals apply because there are stipulations you have to rent for more than 14 days out of the year you can't rent for more than 30 or 31 days consecutively you have to own a certain number of units within a municipality so it's unclear exactly what that is going to be but just an interesting fact here is how much people have spent on meals and that has nearly tripled since 2010 so that's definitely a good sign not quite at the pace as we were coming out of the recession but still on the upswing each time visitor data so we just I just started collecting this arts and culture I think is a hugely important part of the Amherst economy and we don't do a very good job of explaining how big and how important it is so one of the things that I wanted to start doing is collecting data about where people visit and so nine of the institutions that I had reached out to that I think hey people would come to Amherst to visit for a certain reason these are the ones that responded in time and you'll see there's half a million visitors that come to Amherst and I'm sure there are going to be questions so I'll address them now this is the number of people who walk through the door so I have no idea if these people live in Amherst or live across the country or across the world that just people counting to various events but it's a place to start and to refine the data moving forward so this is the beginning of the pretty pictures and we're going to just again to give everybody in the room some information on what's been going on so in 2017 Spring Street was permitted that's currently a vacant lot and it's going to be 58 downtown residential units and a thousand square feet and I think construction is going to begin on that later this summer South Point Apartments has 47 new residential units also permanent in 2017 six of them affordable and it's an expansion of an existing development in 2018 Aspen Heights was permitted and I last I heard it is moving forward there has been an agreement and so it's going to be 88 residential units 11 of them affordable and redevelopment of a former 1960s motel and University Drive 36 residential units for affordable commercial space and a restaurant as well and then updates one east pleasant is occupied the restaurants are in permitting I think one of them I assume should be opening by the end of the summer and North Square is under construction 130 residential units 26 affordable and 22,000 square feet of commercial leasing now and if you want to lease talk to Jennifer so that is my brief update I think the reason everybody is here is not to hear me talk about these things but to hear the entire panel have a discussion on the issues facing Amherst so thank you all once again great thank you Peter I'll get back to the other panelists so please bear with me while I read through their short bios starting with Jennifer Gannett who is director of community development for WD Coles developing the next phases of the mill district in North Amherst incorporating community enhancing elements into the mill district she's pursuing a riverwalk multi-use trail and wayfinding kiosks so mill district residents and visitors will walk to recreational opportunities including regional trails and mill river recreation area cherry hill golf course and Puffers pond Jennifer is spearheading the next phases of mill district development finding partners to create places such as a music venue alumni senior housing condos for young professionals a brew pub a brew pub great wedding venue and other mixed-use buildings on a four-acre parcel north of Coles road a 15 acre parcel west of Sunderland road and other larger acre parcels you can follow her progress on facebook at the mill district na sarah lakor is the executive director of the Amherst business improvement district bid and president of the Amherst center cultural district sarah is a landscape designer and planner with over 25 years of experience in landscape architecture regional and urban planning and historic preservation she's been the executive director of the Amherst bid since 2013 sarah previously worked as the director of conservation and planning at wd Coles inc land company and was partner at conservation works llc prior to joining Coles in 2008 sarah worked for seven years as senior project manager at dodson associates landscape architecture and planning sarah's workers range from scenic resource analysis and historic mill village master plans to large-scale conservation restrictions and urban design projects across new england and new york state from 2008 to 14 she also served as adjunct faculty in the u-master department of landscape architecture and regional planning lark teaching graduate courses in watershed planning and green infrastructure she's a full member of the american society of landscape architects in addition to her professional work sarah has served on the board of directors of several non-profit organizations including the sarah toka springs preservation foundation the star program at the hood center for children at dartwood hitchcock medical center chestwood museum and the hitchcock center for the environment sarah currently serves on the board of directors for common capital and the rotary club of amherst also in 2016 she was appointed by then senate president stan rozenberg to the massachusetts commission on the status of women she currently serves as treasurer for the commission sarah received her masters of landscape architecture from the university of massachusetts at amherst in 1990 and as a 1985 graduate of mount holiope college she has lived in amherst master since 1997 with her husband and two children an burk is the vice president of economic development council of western massachusetts she holds a ba from miami university oxford ohio and a masters of urban and regional planning from the george washington university in washington dc and has over 30 years of professional experience with downtown specializing in downtown revitalization and strategic planning management district organizational development and operations economic development community engagement and project management she co-authored enabling legislation to create business improvement districts in massachusetts authored a guidebook for forming business improvement districts in massachusetts led the successful planning and development of bids and advised numerous and other communities considering downtown management district organizational structures john delconte professor of creative economy at umass extension service is a doctoral student in regional planning here at umass amherst his main topic of study relates to creative placemaking measuring its effects and testing its relationship to other outcomes such as revitalization john's experience in arts administration includes chairing of the hillsborough arts council of north carolina for 10 years while having a simultaneous career in health sciences as a medical writer he's taught courses on community planning world cities and creative economy and placemaking at westfield state university the university of albany the university of massachusetts and new hampshire institute of art he received an ms in sustainable tourism from east carolina university and an ms in psychology from rensley of polytechnic institute and a bs in biology from union college elin tirney is the owner and principal of cune riddle architects intrigued with how architecture permeates every aspect of our lives from our homes to school and work environments elin a lead ap strives to create unique and beautiful spaces for her clients while integrating the latest sustainable design elements she became president of cune riddle in cune riddle architects in 2018 and the firm is now certified as a women business enterprise and wbe she's worked in the professional design field since since 1992 in addition to being the managing partner of the firm she's principal in charge and project architect on a wide variety of educational commercial and residential projects her greatest strength and satisfaction comes from her artful ability to coordinate the collaboration between the client design professionals and builders to realize a client's vision elin has a bachelor of architecture with a minor in architecture history from carnage mellon university and began her career as a community development peace corps volunteer in guinea west africa she's chair of the central business architecture committee of northampton co-chair of the wmaia committee on the environment and also a board member of the massachusetts board of registration of architects so please join me in giving them all a hearty round of applause and so are you ready for questions ready for questions so let me start with this one question one what are the amist areas unique assets that differentiated as a place where people wanted to live to work and to learn how can we harness those assets to promote further economic development in our community and by unique assets i mean natural resources the beauty of the natural environment education historic downtown and arts and art and culture and if you want to refer to other unique assets please do so over to you you decide who goes first well the good stuff is certainly the fact that you're and it's been mentioned a couple of times and i but i always feel that there's in some college towns there's the the opportunity to have a love hate relationship instead of really thinking about the fact that communities that don't have colleges and universities they want colleges and universities there the seniors want to live in college towns we cut to take advantage of the educational and cultural opportunities and they like to live in places that are not all seniors so that they like the students being there and they like them and and the interaction that that creates so i think one of the most amazing things is the fact that you have one of the best liberal arts colleges in the in the world here and then other wonderful liberal arts colleges in the region but also the wonderful and incredible land use land anchor institution for at university of amherst and i i say that because it's not only and it's almost like love love your college love your love the fact that you're a college town and celebrate it and figure out ways to really take advantage of that opportunity related to that if you look at the amazing resources that the university has to offer with and i was just here with on an innovation tour bringing companies to come to see the isle center and if you have not had a chance to look at the 30 core functions that the institute of applied life sciences center brings to the region and to the world in terms of people who want to the companies that are in paper who use a roll to roll technology and trying out and experiencing the capabilities that can be located at the isle center and the three 30 different core functions that they have there is really remarkable and i have to i would be remiss if i didn't talk about the creative economy in this region and what it's rich with the creative sector and i was noticing the the difference in income of the creative economy in folks working in the arts and that's one of the things that you know we feel strongly about creating wealth for this part of what makes this region truly unique and and wonderful is the richness of the creative economy here so those are just three things that i see as uh from a regional perspective in my experience in other cities and towns across the state and elsewhere and about how i think amherst can capture and celebrate that uniqueness of being a college town sorry so all your good stuff i'll maybe just do i need them okay so one of the things um to sort of follow up with that is because it's sort of the land grant university concept but what i like to call sort of rural in town one of the really unique things about amherst is the fact that we are surrounded by scenic beauty and critical natural resources and yet we are extremely vibrant viable thriving commercial core and cultural activities the kinds of things people travel in new york or boston um we we get them here on the campuses and yet you could walk any given way a mile and you're in the countryside or you're um accessing our history our agrarian economy which is why the land grant college ended up here in sort of boonie land back then so when you look at the rich history and you look at both the natural resources that we have and and the dichotomy of those with you know our downtown and our you know our new our revitalized village centers that's really pretty unique i think jump on that that wagon so talking about it has not only the historic aspect in jones family in nineteen ninth generation revitalization of um north amherst and the mill district and um just like what sarah was saying what's around there we have the mill river and the east grew up and we have the mill valley recreational area and we have um just it the growth that is going to happen there for the community and um i think is wonderful and to do we use some of this history that was there i mean it used to be called the dirty hands district because that's where the laborers used to work and um and to show it as a different light i think is is pretty exciting and having it be a different um town center well i'll jump in on the things that haven't been said already since you stole the best ones um i i think not only talking about amherst but talking about the region as a whole i i live in northampton but i work here in amherst and i feel like i have the best of both worlds and i think that is something that's unique um to this area is we have amherst northampton and all of these towns um that make it a rich place to live and offer opportunities um and i think that's why people like to come here we'll be first to talk about these questions one of the the questions following this was well why why are you here why did you come here i was actually born while my parents were students at umass but i went away um lived in boston and waster and pittsburgh and guinea west africa but i came back because um this is a great place to raise kids and i think one of the things that's important about our economy is bringing families back um and so we have really good public schools and we need to keep our public schools great um one of the things that was talked about a little bit was the agricultural surrounding we have great food here whenever i travel to other parts of uh the country i think wow we have such great restaurants in this area we're so spoiled and all of these um great farms around us is is a huge asset and then uh just going out another ring in terms of what's near us we have easy access to new york city i'd say less easy access to boston um but you can get to vermont new hampshire and mountains and and to the ocean in a few hours so that just makes us a very attractive place to live we have a great place here we can get to other great places really easily i'll just throw one other piece in there i think one of the um truly unique things around about amherst and really this region is sort of the growing economic uh entrepreneurial ecosystem that we see happening and it has happened over the past 10 years to some extent but it's really really taking shape and beginning to to become much more robust a few years ago two years ago i was working with valley venture mentors in springfield and we start we people kept saying western massachusetts is a great place to be a woman entrepreneur and we were like is that really true you know we're just saying that because you know we can and we thought we'd start to talk about western massachusetts being a really good place to be a woman entrepreneur and to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams in western massachusetts and then we started to look at some of the data and some of the data of the people coming out of spark and holy oaken and at the draper draper competition at sneth college and some of the things happened at the university and and and elsewhere and vbm we found that there were a disproportionate number of women and on their on teams and also in and women leads on on in entrepreneurial ventures coming out of these organizations and the fact that we had these three women's colleges in the region and the fact that we had a lot of renewed activity coming out of umask in particular with with the eisenberg school in the booth center happening to support entrepreneurship and if you look around and and you look around just in your close-in neighborhood that close in communities around amherst you'll see a lot of co-work spaces makerspaces new funds that are beginning to try to develop to support entrepreneurship and i think that's really you see a lot of people coming out of these educational settings and beginning to see entrepreneurship as a way to to to grow and to get their start here in western massachusetts so i think that's that's something that is a trend we've seen in the last few years in particular and something that i i think is a real asset for our region it's not boston but it certainly is a heck of a lot better than it was 10 years ago in here in western mass i think sarah was looking at my notes because she stole what i was going to say in my research doing focus groups about how places are vibrant the residents that i spoke to in amherst i think their strongest point was that just to reiterate what sarah was saying that combination of having these pockets of cultural activity combined with the natural beauty so in in essence you have the kind of big well the multiculturalism of the big cities but set in the rural settings and all the things that come with that multiculturalism you have openness to diversity you know you have your you know your political leanings etc and so i think that would be something to consider in terms of marketing the place have that combination if you throw in the cultural aspect to get a little academic and i'm not sorry i'm stuck in academics now but without getting making too many lists you might just go down a checklist of what kind of assets we have in terms of and we've already mentioned natural capital we've mentioned cultural capital one other ones i won't go through the whole list now but one that we haven't mentioned is social capital right now and so that's the building of those bonds amongst people and what you want to do is strengthen that and have to have a vibrant community and one of the one of the characteristics of arts and culture is that it can really bring people together and have that sharing and that the the good news is that that translates into other assets as well including financial economic etc so when we get the chance maybe we could talk more about i'd like to talk more about how we could strengthen that arts and cultural sector in order to build those bonds in the community which i think relates heavily if you listen to john's listening of the mission for amherst he talked about the the vibrancy of the economy but also the vitality of you know the open space and the you know the recreational activities etc so it all works together into a fabric jeff did you want to yeah very briefly um i wanted to jump on one of the hands original points which is a college town and add that i think that our intellectual capital and educated workforce i know that in looking at economic development research they when they whenever they ask businesses what are what are troubling for you what are you worried about it's finding a quality workforce and we have that in abundance here so i think it's important and just to give examples 95 of amherst residents have at least a high school diploma 73 have at least a college degree and nearly half 43 have a graduate degree or a professional degree so very well educated in amherst and the other thing that i want to mention so i'll go to your second question which is how do you harness that and i think that is that's how do you stop the brain drain in this instance um and this was a question that was posed to me two weeks ago at the secretary canyons forum in westermass and i said you have to have more you have to build a stronger connection with students before they leave you have to give them internships so that they have a boss or a mentor to talk to about where do i go for a job how do i get there because looking back at my experience which granted is i graduated no two so several decades ago everybody left after you graduated you go back home and there's no reason if you don't have a reason to come back or to to keep a touch on what's happening in amherst or in the region and so the more reasons you give them to think about having employment or staying in the area the better that is and then the other thing that i think is a unique asset is the almost universal um desire to make positive change and we may not all agree on what that positive change is or what it looks like but i i think almost universally people in amherst feel like they can make a positive change for themselves and other residents in the community at large and i think that i don't know how to harness that um but but i think it is it is an asset and you know having lived in other communities where people are more apathetic about how things happen i would much rather live in a community where people care about it and want to make positive change and so i consider it an asset and on that point before moving on to the next question which is about challenges if any of you would like to talk a little more about something that john mentioned and strengthening cultural vitality and maintaining that um entrepreneurial ecosystem and as jeff mentioned harnessing the assets we have in order to do that any ideas so one of the things that that is a that that holds us back a little bit around in the in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is we lose startups we lose innovation from this region because of lack of resources so we're trying to always think about and there have been new funds that have been developed and new opportunities for people to invest in startups and invest in companies to take that work that's coming out of the university and make it and commercialize it and find the right um uh management opportunities for people to team up with some of our some of the some of the talent that's coming out of the university to really make that happen i think that's how you harness it and help grow we know that in this region businesses grow up from from from the ground most many of our companies in the region over 70 percent are under 20 employees so we know that that that that that internal growth is a way to i think harness what's happening out here and i do believe that we've seen some some real changes around um in entrepreneurship in particular the grinsman foundation has um and 14 colleges and universities in our region they have a really robust entrepreneurship program to develop student entrepreneurs to to have them take their ideas and grow them not all these ideas are going to grow and flourish but some of them are and there's a lot of talent coming out of the university in terms of and commercialization of of the work that's happening with the faculty at the university so i think the ways that we can harness that and grow that is is a real opportunity for us here in the region i think that's beginning to happen you see a few new funds that are beginning to start up but there needs to be more that's one of the reasons that we lose people to boston and we lose companies to california because that's where the investment is coming from yeah jennifer um i want to well thank jeff cravitz for actually making amherst north amherst in particular an opportunity zone so i've been talking to quite a few people entrepreneurs that want to do startups and use the opportunity zone money in order to make programs come to north amherst and this may not have been an option for somebody without utilizing those opportunity zone funds so i've been talking to brewmasters and people who want art venues and music venues and trying to see how we can tap into that so that we can bring these people these ideas you know to amherst and create jobs and create a vibrant community so thank you sir so one of the things um that uh the bid and silva our partners particularly the town um in 2016 we were designated a the emmer center cultural district by the state and um there are more and more of these around the state but we're one of only a few in this region and it's important in understanding we we already had these assets we had as i think many of us talked about the cultural assets but they were operating in silos and there wasn't an overall combined vision for what we could leverage together and so and by the way i was the president till last week now jeff is the president of the emmer center cultural district yeah jeff thank you so it'll be his baby but that's been a really great relationship going forward because of our partners amherst college umas and all the cultural organizations in downtown amherst because now we're leveraging funds from the massachusetts cultural council who um got a significant increase again in funds this year and they're giving those in grants to us each year so you know these are opportunities that these things were already happening but we just sort of got everybody on the same page and at the same table and working together we've been able to put some great things together and leverage some funds um and then boost you know all that data that's helping us understand who's coming to amherst and the area and why the visitor center again has been really critical we keep track of everybody coming in um where they're from the countries it's been amazing the states um and then and then why they've come whether it's for the colleges and university um or uh many are looking to retire which has been fascinating to me and many more are now just coming because they saw it somewhere it popped up or it came you know they said oh you know that amherst looks like a really cool place to go um but these are things that were already happening and I think particularly in terms of the cultural organizations it's just a matter of getting everybody talking together and being one um you know one movement forward let me read the next two questions and you can continue answering question one and questions two and three together because i think they they're all sort of connected and i don't want to interrupt the flow of your your conversation more so let me just read questions two and three question two is what barriers or challenges has your organization faced or have your clients faced and what is something tangible that municipal government the chamber or other organizations could do to address that that challenge or barrier and the third question what do you envision for the future of economic development in the our area over the next three to five years and the next 10 years so whichever of those you'd like to address next in whichever order i see jeff jeff that's got his his hand there so you take first yeah i wanted to take you up on the offer to continue number one but but building off of sarah's point i actually wanted to ask john a question which is i i think one of the things that we don't do a great job of is telling the story sarah said we have these cultural institutions we have this this rich history in amherst we have visitorship but we don't really know how many people maybe individually but cumulatively we don't know and so my gut tells me that we should collect that data and when we collect it and look at it together we're going to say somebody told me that we have four times as many creatives and artistic people in amherst than in east hampton which i think for would was surprising to me because of east hampton's reputation as an artistic community so i gathering that type of information and saying yes we we are this and so i was going to ask john it am i am i right or am i it is how important is that is telling your story as part of it well you know i'm using your data and the number of number of artists that are here i think you're right and one way to capture well a couple ways to capture that might be to look toward getting representation like i'd say a panel like this i don't know how many of us are pure artists etc but one of the things i've learned in in you know teaching the course etc is those communities that have more arts led leadership not only inject that culture into the community but you know they have artists have a different lateral way of thinking and so they have it's just like that old apple commercial think differently you know and so i think you you you solve problems in a novel way so i think you look for opportunities to bring artists into the fold one way to do that one of my solutions or one possibility a menu of possibilities is to possibly have an art summit where you can bring them all together just to have a three-day charrette of open conversation you know what is your vision as an artist for the community how could you envision better ways to work together i know this is already being done in different contexts with the cultural economy or the creative economy but i just want to you know just make sure that the artists are brought to the table in the conversation that's central tenet to creative placement so i'm gonna just kind of piggyback on your question uh one of the things that i know when you had this established before and there was a conversation with rick sullivan who's our CEO talked about um the things that are barriers and one of the things that that i saw in his notes i went okay was um that it there there sometimes is an adversarial relationship between communities and um and in telling the story about this region it's it's not an easy it's not an easy one to tell because if you go you know from franklin to hamster to hamlin county you have several different stories to tell and i think the time that's it's now enough time has passed that you know we did take a crack at this and uh and got um a lot of robust feedback on trying to to to brand or create a brand for western massachusetts because we know when we look outside of the area and you call it call it asparagus valley or happy valley people really don't know what that is and so trying to figure out you know how to how to talk to an external market about western massachusetts and trying to describe and tell the story of who we are because franklin county is very different than hamster county and hamster county is very different than hamlin county but collectively we have more power if we're we're not that big of a region and we need to be talking about our region and selling all of these various aspects of who we are and and and what makes us unique but also what makes us tie together as a region and what makes our our regional economy tied together as a region so i'll give you a couple of examples of how we've successfully done that and i think we can apply that to other ways um jeff is involved with us and and and the edc convenes a group called the economic development partners and it's really all of the economic development planning people for many of the cities and towns up and down the region and we do a by every other year we do a developers conference and we work together to try to highlight the priority projects within our region toward developers and investors who want to look and businesses who want to look at locating their businesses in in the region and the idea here is that sure every community is going to fight like hell to try to to try to keep a business if they if they come to them first and to try to locate them in their community but we're asking people to those community to say if we can't find a great spot in Amherst then don't kick don't let them drift into the woodwork but to kick it back to the larger group to say where can we keep this this company to who wants to locate in western mass because our workforce travels up and down the region and this adding adding those companies within the region is is is a really important one the other another example of this is recently we did with the economic development partners in the edc we hosted an opportunity zone workshop and what we are what we're trying to do is to create this clearing house where we have the people who have the the income who want to find places to invest in opportunity zones and take advantage of this national program and having those those those invest investors looking at places like north amherst and in other opportunity zones up and down the region finding the right and then finding ready projects to have looked to and try to make those matches happen and we've already seen investors from Boston and from and from New York and from other areas and from the region frankly who have who have capital that they want to they want to plant somewhere and the opportunities on projects become a piece of that so trying to bring those opportunities all together and sell ourselves and tell our story as a region that there yes there are opportunities for that investment to happen that's going to be that the sum is greater than the smaller pieces and we and we have to tell our story in that way we'd like to go next when you talk about barriers and challenges feel free to mention natural gas for example before the panel kicked off we were discussing natural gas jeff has a great joke about natural gas by the way just so you know um you don't have to tell it but maybe you should know i won't tell the joke but i did hear that the federal government is now referring to it as freedom gas so that's uh i i think that was first announced yesterday um so you know i i guess i'll do you want to talk about barrier all right i'll i'll jump in unless he has more jokes um the the gas moratorium um for any of you aren't from familiar with it uh they're well long story short there's several lines of natural gas that come to our region there's two main companies columbia gas and berkshire gas berkshire gas feeds amherst, hadley and sunderland so it's a line that comes across under the river in a different location than columbia feeding some of the area south berkshire gas issued a moratorium on gas service to amherst and hadley and sunderland about two or three years ago now and it was relatively precipitous they had sort of alluded to the fact that they might do this but um it happened fast and it caught um quite a few projects in downtown and in amherst off-guard and literally they said no you will not get any more gas so folks that have perhaps turned their gas off to renovate were not allowed to turn it back on and anybody literally changing out a stove just for a new stove that maybe had slightly more btu's no increase in btu's and that's now indefinite and so that changes the scope of growth and development in this area particularly for downtown propane one business tried did do it but then went out of business so we don't have viable options on that yet it's not something the municipalities can fix themselves it's a broader mission but i think again as a as a team working together and working with the gas companies um you know i don't have an answer for it but it's a huge challenge that's not going away anytime soon and uh i think it's critical to make sure it's out there um that everybody keeps you know pushing Berkshire gas or whatever we can to see somewhere along the way there's going to be an answer to that and i'm gonna i have one more thing i just wanted to bring up challenges uh at least for amherst somewhat highly but only along their main drag uh aging infrastructure so um you know there are finite funds as as paul or any of the town council will tell you um and improving things like sidewalks and filling potholes those are the important things in peels minds because one they're visible one they damage vehicles um and they are problematic we have an extremely aged underground infrastructure our gray infrastructure if you will and the future because it's the last question the visioning um we need to it's not going to be a matter anymore for dpw to have to say well okay we're going to put money in the roads and sidewalks well that means it can't go into um the underground non-sexy projects so you know thinking forward about funds for infrastructure i know the town at least ten members is facing critical capital needs in building after building after building but i think in order to plan for those buildings you have to understand your infrastructure and the age of the things that are underground that might not be able to handle everything else you want to do thank you sir good quick question for my time keepers uh john tony can we go another 10 minutes till 5 20 yes great thank you then uh other panelists how would you like to address the the challenges barriers question or the uh the futuring question i was just going to say one of the um sort of going back to how do we keep uh young graduates here um i think that that is a challenge we our company has been very fortunate to have many umass graduates come from the architecture department here at umass and it's been fantastic we feel lucky to have that resource here but i also know that there aren't enough jobs necessarily um or professional jobs like that it's also very expensive to live here and it's hard for graduate coming out with a lot of debt to find an affordable place to live um and i think that's a challenge where we have a lot of young people here because of the colleges and we have a lot of people who are retired or interested um people coming here to retire which is great but i worry about the middle what happens to the middle we need the middle the movers and shakers who are generating the income and so that's a challenge and i don't have an answer for that other than being creative and investing in ways of providing affordable housing not necessarily section 8 housing but affordable market rate housing so that we can keep those young people here and and they become the heart of our communities um i think a couple of things that uh i just wanted to touch base really quickly on on the gas moratorium and i know um this isn't necessarily a popular position but uh in some ways the gas moratorium has forced us to think about how to build buildings more efficiently and um i think that that's something as a local community and the state community and a country and the world need to think about um and so yes it's been very difficult and we've had clients who have have suffered because of um that gas moratorium but it has forced our company to think about how do we make our buildings more energy efficient uh invest more in in the envelope of the building yes you have to pay more for uh higher efficiency hvc systems but um it's it's cost now versus cost later so i think that that's something that amherst is invested in we you know the whole net zero um policy for public buildings is kind of amazing i'm not sure how we're going to do it but it's it's a it's a great goal to have and i i think um like we were talking about earlier there's a desire here to make positive change locally and um and regionally and that's a good thing john oh jennifer then john okay um do you have something to say about gas first me or what was i'm glad you do what was the same topic yeah i was just gonna you know go on a lot that i agree with you with that but i also saw with my former position how difficult it was for businesses to go into existing businesses and then not be able to make the changes necessary in order for them to be viable and how hard that is and i do think that you have to think into the future about what we can do and what can we put in place to to help businesses like that you know if there was something they could do um i also think that going on what you were saying about um affordable housing as doing workforce housing and trying to maybe adjust or change some of our zoning in order to make that easier for people so that the density can be different the size of the homes could be different the affordability would be different how can we make um that middle income people stay here and raise their children here and you know in age and place here um i think that that's something that i see very much that people are not wanting to move to florida they want to stay here and have all the amenities that MRST has um within the community and how can we do that can we do overlay districts how can we change our zoning you know to make that happen on the idea of or on the topic of what we can do to harness our number one asset which is you know the five colleges the humic capital that we have here linking that to the let's say entrepreneurial spirit i one of the things i was talking with tony about before we started today is you know we have service learning with all five colleges and their mission is primarily to to kind of help social social issues and problems in the community so i i wondered if that model can somehow be widened i know if you had a some kind of social entrepreneurship it would definitely fall under the venue of of um of the the community-based learning model where you could design a curriculum to solve a particular problem so if you wanted to build those some type of renewable energy type of business it would be easy to plug in to and use those resources get a professor linked up to the project with his class and work on it but there there are barriers to that like as tony mentioned you know what happens if the project extends beyond a single year after that class turns over etc so i i just throw that out there as a possibility of opening up that model to save for-profit ventures that might not necessarily have a social mission attached i think just to flip to a little slightly different topic is is the topic of transportation i'm sorry i i think just uh to touch on one the east west rail connection and the north south rail connection is is an important one and one that you know that we've looked at thinking about the transportation system you know holistically and sort of reinforcing the the rail connections the the bike paths and the in this in the the complete streets sort of ideas and it to reinforce all of the the various opportunities from vans to uber's to buses to the east west rail connections are important because one of the things that we have observed and we hear from our companies all the time is that getting workforce to the places that where they need to be to to work is it's a challenge you know the public transportation system doesn't really work really well in our region it's a hub and spoke system it doesn't really necessarily function well so trying to really think about how do you change that how do you align the the resources that are out there and and the new resources that could be developed to to to think about our transportation system more holistically and then finally i i think that the notion and i i know that and i think uh there i know that it's always not a complete in agreement topic around housing in your downtown downtown and amherst and other communities but i think that we need to think about how do we create residential opportunities in uh in and close to where people work and in in downtowns because people want to work or to walk to work and then and and all change is not bad so sometimes looking at adding new residential opportunities in communities it's scary sometimes because you're changing the way the communities have traditionally thought about housing but building off of the comment about you know zoning and thinking about how do you take it how do you put in place the mechanisms that need to be put in place to support a variety of types of housing housing development so that you can you can keep young people here seniors can age in place and move to different kinds of of of residential opportunities how do people stay here and be here and and look at and have a variety of choices that they can they can choose from and be in your community and grow in age in your community and attract new people so i think that that requires um sometimes more of a compromise in in in communities that have very strong opinions on one way one side or the other about adding residential opportunities or changing residential opportunities and how that might happen and i think that that's a challenge for amherst but i think it's an opportunity for amherst too thank you thank you and in five minutes we take the conversation downstairs so please don't go anywhere but in the remaining five minutes zoning energy housing you've got five minutes to fix it go um well i guess i wanted to i will touch on that um jen had mentioned about business assistants and um somebody in the audience give me the if i can't say this but there was a proposal for to to do that to give businesses um some assistance because of the moratorium and and the state government didn't allow that to move forward so there were there was attempts to do that um by barcher gas so i did i did want to say that um on the energy issue you know another interesting thing they're especially in light of steel tariffs and trade wars and whatnot you know there's the ability to construct buildings at a cross laminated timber and a perfect example of that is the design building here at umass and i don't know this for sure but i think the closest cross laminated timber mill in the united states is in the pacific northwest we have um two rather large lumber companies in the region um and so if we had cross laminated timber maybe that's another uh more sustainable at look you're talking about building materials i don't know maybe i'm wrong but maybe a more sustainable um and environmentally friendly way of building um that that goes to energy as well and you don't have to ship it all the way across the country in order to use it we have the raw materials and the ability well not yet the ability to to create it here but potentially um and it could be a hub for this type of construction throughout the uh at least the northeast if not the entire east coast so um and yeah so i don't want to steal any anybody's thunder on that but i thought that was an energy related point that i wanted as a potential solution thank you jeff and who'd like the the penultimate word before we move the conversation downstairs i wanted to mention zoning um i know i i really get interested in these topics um the town i'm excited because the town is many of you know um looking at 40 r and there's another forum coming up here somewhere along the way um so i think that's really awesome that the town at least the town members is being proactive and understanding what 40 r is and how it can help a community so i think that's you know the zoning and we're selling many of you probably heard me i personally think you just toss it all out and start over because it's a mess but um addressing things like 40 r um i think is you know really it's a great great start for getting us at least somewhere into the 21st century on our zoning so i i just want to say um maybe in closing some things that i think that we can do and and that this community is already interested in is investing in our public schools investing in affordable market rate housing all those examples that went up were great there's more housing coming online building energy efficient net zero buildings to help combat climate change changing the zoning to create more dense downtowns or neighborhoods so that we can maintain our beautiful open spaces creating multi-use buildings that incorporate housing and create pedestrian friendly neighborhoods or downtowns create performing art spaces we talked about that a lot today that draws people into town who will then visit our shops and restaurants um and let people park for free after 6 p.m yeah so on that we're at a parking garage and what's needs in your parking garage and and at a parking garage so with with that please like i said stick around let's move down stairs with his food and before you do that let's give the panelists a hearty round of applause thank you and thank you you met samarist photo market thank you i just want to say a few words i wasn't expected to speak i wasn't feeling great but i want to thank john page for organizing this incredible event for everyone who's showing up tonight for our panelists who've been so patient there was a lot of rescheduling so we're really happy that everyone was repatient and patient with us and this all worked out and i really am taking to heart this conversation you know i thought this was all going to be about parking we're situated downtown and that's what we hear a lot about but today was such an eye opener i feel like we heard a lot about human capital intellectual educational creative community we have an amazing amount of capital to harness and that's a really exciting place to be and a great position for our chamber to be and to be an advocate on so many of these issues and we've already begun to partner with folks like you mass amherst right here i see emily in the audience and partnering with greg tom's on some of the issues that were mentioned tonight and really harnessing the youth and really trying to keep them here so stay tuned because we really do want to work together with you on some of the issues that you heard about tonight to really make to bring that vibrancy forward and in order to really make other people to tell our story and why we all live and work here so thank you for being here and i look forward to seeing you downstairs and if i didn't see you and greet you i'm sorry come get your name tagged from me downstairs thanks again