 If you plan to speak or would like to speak, since the purpose of this is in fact to provide you with an opportunity to speak, please sign your name up there. Even if later on you decide to speak but you haven't registered, we'd like you to list your name anyway. So if you've spoken, please list it. The week, Mr. Pockelman, is there anything you would suggest that we add to my opening comments? And I'm not sure if the Finance Committee would like to make a discussion at this point or if you want to hold that to your next meeting. The Finance Committee is going to make a report at this committee meeting, at this public forum as well today. I think we should go ahead and do that. Andy? No. So we're going to reverse orders in the agenda. We are going, Andy Steinberg is now going to give the Finance Committee's report. He is Chair of that Standing Committee of the Council. Well, thank you. Finance Committee held two meetings in preparation for the meeting that we're having today. And there was extensive public comment offered at both of the meetings, and we also heard from staff about several issues in order to understand the financial costs that were involved with the various alternatives that were presented to us regarding the Station Road Bridge and the available funds and the effect on other capital projects. So those were the two things. There were two motions that were then passed unanimously after the discussion and presentations at both meetings, including consideration of all of the input from the public. I think it's important to understand two things, and this is, we'll be discussing I think when the Council comes forward, but I wanted to just bring this forward to everyone's attention so that it's available in your thoughts as you make comment. There's several premises that really were key to the recommendations in the end. One was the conclusion that despite the costs involved that there was no alternative but to do something to reopen crossing and Hopbrook for Station Road, and that we recognize that there's going to be some substantial cost that is not going to be covered by a state grant because a state bridge grant has a maximum of $500,000 and a bridge cost is approximately twice that, so that there is going to be a substantial cost that has to be borne by the taxpayers of Amherst and will have an effect on our other capital projects to that extent. And the second thing is that it has been longstanding policy of the town that if there is available grant funds that we use available grant funds to supplement our construction budgets. For example, we sought mass school building authority funds in order to build an elementary school and had come to the conclusion that financially that the taxpayers of Amherst could not bear the cost of building something like a school building without MSBA. Similarly, we applied that logic and that principle to the construction of the bridge and felt that if we're going to construct a permanent bridge that we really need to do everything possible to obtain that $500,000 funds. The following from that is the thing that we don't know when we're going to get the grant. There is a grant cycle that is about to start. If we get into the next grant cycle, we can move forward in the timetable that Mr. Moring had previously presented to us. If we don't get the grant in the next cycle because there's a limited amount of money that the state puts into the small bridge program each year, communities can reapply for those funds in subsequent years, but we would have to delay the construction of a permanent bridge if we were going to rely on the grant funds to do that. So when the realization that we don't know how long we would need a temporary bridge, it depends, assuming on the council's decisions on the points that have already made on how quickly we got the grant as far as that goes. So those were the basic factual premises behind our recommendations. So I'm going to talk about the two, just present the two recommendations to you really quickly and then leave it back to the president to proceed. The second of the recommendations is to recommend that the town appropriate $212,500 for the purchase and installation of a temporary bridge for the station road, Hopbrook Bridge, and to meet such a appropriation, transfer $212,500 from free cash. So that is the motion that was made by the finance committee relative to the information that I previously presented. The other topic that we had to discuss was that there is a sum of money that is set aside each year for essentially road maintenance, road construction, road repair, and that money was used by Mr. Bachlemann and Mr. Moreing in order to take care of immediate engineering services needs and some of the immediate work that had to be done after the road closure. And that amount of money that was taken from the road project account was $227,500. If we don't replace that then there will be a reduction in the amount of road work that could be done during the remainder of the current fiscal year which runs through June 30 and that could include substantial work on the annual pothole repair problem which is a New England reality just because we have water that gets into roads and freezing and thawing as it gets colder and warmer during the winter which we have experienced in the past week and that causes substantial road damage and needs repair. Mr. Bachlemann and Mr. Moreing will be able to provide answers to any questions that come up about the consequence of not replacing those funds but the finance committee's other recommendation is to recommend that the town appropriate $227,500 to reimburse the road repair account for the engineering service costs incurred for the station road hop bridge replacement and to meet such appropriation transfer $227,500 from free cash and my final one is that free cash is neither it's not free but it's what it is it's a state terminology that describes one of two segments of what we loosely refer to as town reserves. I'd also like to suggest that it's not held in actual cash. So those are the two motions that will be taken up at the 10 o'clock meeting when the council reconvenes in its in a actual regular meeting mode. Mr. Moreing, go for it. Thank you. Just fine. Thanks. Mike. Maybe. Yes. Okay. So it's basically the same report. We just some updates. Prices are still about the same right now. We haven't updated any of the prices even though we are pretty far just to remind you from the actual bridge construction we still are a little ways away from firming up those prices. That's why the contingency is still at 20% in these projects. So the project for the temporary bridge cost of the permanent bridge and then the schedule so far permanent bridge hasn't changed at all hardly at all. The only thing that's changed in the temporary bridge is we do have the order of conditions that's been issued by the conservation commission. It was issued yesterday. We have to file that but that's a very good part big part of this process and it's very well it's it's complete now and it's not a very onerous set of requirements because we're not going into the water. We're still waiting for mass highway. We talk to mass highway pretty regularly and ask them where they are and the answer is they're still reviewing it. So that's still going on. I believe what's happening is there's been no comments from Boston back to the district office at this time is what's why the district won't give us any comments. So that's where we are. And then that's just a picture of the bridge. So that's just a quick update. Two things have been accomplished since we last talked to you. We just need to go ahead and set some money aside to actually fund this process and then start putting the bid package together which they've already started and start getting that out there and we're still waiting for mass highways comments. So we do have to make a decision at some point whether we bid without mass highways comments or if we wait for mass highways comments. So that's coming probably within another week or two we have to make that decision. So that's where we are. Are there any specific questions at this point from the council since we are not going to view this presentation in our regular meeting we're only viewing it today then I'd like to ask for those people who would like to make public comment to please raise your hand. Okay let's start with this gentleman right here. Come forward sit on the chair press the mic and tell us who you are and where you live. I'm Sigurd Nielsen I live at 27 T. Berry Lane. I know many of you would have heard many comments at the previous meetings and I just want to summarize them of what I've heard both as president of the Amherst Woods Homeowners Association and also having attended all the other meetings that you've held on the temporary bridge. The concerns about safety. There's a major east-west route many people use it. The alternative routes are quite unsafe. Stanley Street the intersection with Route 9 people have complained about that turn how difficult it is particularly during rush hour. Also turning on to Southeast Street off of Stanley Street. Also the turn now Mill Lane at Southeast Street has become a major cut through even though it's unpaved for major portion. That intersection is a very dangerous one with southeast as well as well as if you go the other way and go over to Holst Road the Warren Wright Road intersection and its increased traffic a lot on Holst Road and also with that intersection with Bay Road. This has also affected businesses as well as residents in the area making it inconvenient. This has been a major east-west route and this by the community as seen as an emergency that needs to be dealt with right away with the temporary bridge. There was concern raised about what's the impact of this being only a single lane bridge while the prior bridge was treated by basically all drivers as a single lane bridge anyway since it was so narrow everybody would wait for the other person to pass. And as I understand with the transfer funds funding this project would have no effect on other projects in the town because the funds would be transferred from free cash if you approve that so that potholes will continue to be filled and sidewalks repaired etc at the rate they were being done in the past. So thank you all and I urge you to pass the funding for this project. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. There was a woman behind you that had her hand up. Yes please come forward. My name is Barbara Skolnick Rothenberg. I live on I do in a lane and I'm a 40 year resident of Amherst. I am in support of building a bridge even if it's temporary. This closing has had safety ecological and business retail implications. There is now greater traffic density on Route 9 Belcher Town Road making a safety hazard entering from Larkspur. This has forced us to use Stanley Street which we have in the past avoided due to the dangerous curve at the soccer fields. There is increased traffic on Southeast Street which has two very narrow underpasses and blind curves. This closing has brought more traffic to an historically much avoided mill lane with its unpaved roads and potholes. The closing has negatively impacted the use of the Munson Library Atkins Farm and many of our South Amherst businesses. Gas consumption has greatly increased as we travel back and forth to our business in Springfield as well as for work in South Hadley to travel over the notch. A visit to Crocker Farm School from our home used to be less than 10 minutes trip. Now it has increased more than double. So creating a temporary bridge is the responsible action to take in the interest of public safety, commerce and ecology. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yes, please come forward. So I'm Martha Hanner. I live at 18, Alism Dry. And so I just want to add a few comments here. Please don't take the small number of people here as an indication of the level of concern. There were at least 25 people at the second financial committee meeting and another dozen or so different people with the first one. I think now being a work day, there are many of our residents that are out driving the detours and getting to work and school and so on. So I do want to emphasize that I think all of the residents who spoke with the finance committee meetings were concerned about the safety you've heard about that year. The environmental impact we estimate between Mr. Moorings estimate and my estimate that somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 cars a day typically had used a station road and now driving what I register as an extra three miles for each trip. If you do that for 16 to 18 months, waiting for a permanent bridge that comes out to about 2 million extra miles driven with the corresponding CO2 emissions and pollution and so on. And 20 miles a gallon, that's 100,000 extra gallons of fossil fuels. So if you are concerned about environment, climate change and so on, this is an impact there. Regarding the cost, I think we all share the concern about maybe the high cost of a temporary bridge, but I think that by the end of the second financial committee meeting, there really was kind of a focus both from the committee members and the audience there of a pretty good compromise that by spending the money for the temporary bridge now, we'd have a really sturdy, pretty durable temporary bridge. And then we could certainly afford to delay the permanent bridge until we get the state grant. Mr. Mooring had explained that our application stays in the system, so if we don't get it this year, we can wait until next year or even possibly the year after. And the residents all felt that that would be a fair compromise and that then if we get that $500,000, that's more than double the cost of a temporary bridge. So in the end, we would certainly save money and everybody there felt that that was a good compromise. And so we hope that the members of the council do too. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there other additional comments? Let me note that the floor will remain open for public comment. And yes, please come forward. Is this on? Yes. Good morning. My name is Dr. Mary Ann Lohan. I live at 104 Larkspur Drive. My husband and I have been living in Amherst Woods for going on 30 years now. I'm retired right now. So I am not affected every day by going to work. However, I'm a retired radiation oncologist. I have two physicians who live on either side of me. They're not retired. And one of them also is a radiation oncologist. And I will tell you that when you have a non-call, that's an emergency. And it's a spinal cord compression or a brain metastasis or someone is bleeding every minute counts. I'm not saying this is necessarily affecting people's lives directly, but I do think that when physicians have an emergency call, it really is an emergency. And you really don't want to be spending any extra time waiting there or trying to get to your patient. And I will tell you from the patient's point of view, every minute is an hour. So I do hope you'll think about this. Everything, I agree with everything that everyone else has brought up about this issue, but I felt that I had to say something because if I were the physician driving to that emergency, I'd be thinking about this every day. Thank you so much. Thank you. Additional, yes, sir. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Kenneth Cohen. I've lived in Amherst since 1990. My wife and I were members of the town meeting, both of us, for over a decade. And I certainly echo the comments that were made by SIG and others this morning and support your moving forward with the replacement plan and funding, and specifically the temporary bridge. And I won't make any repetitive comments. The one additional point I think that deserves to be made is that this should never have happened in the first place. And in my opinion, the reason it happened is because the town of Amherst has chronically underfunded its infrastructure. Its roads are notorious, notoriously bad, the potholes. And it's been a point of frustration for me when I was on the town meeting and subsequently that we were never able to make this, our infrastructure, a higher priority. The fact that a significant public way has been closed because of a bridge failure is something that doesn't speak well of this town. It doesn't, it serves, does not serve to attract a talented people to reside here. It doesn't serve to attract businesses to locate here. So I would urge you as this new institution moves forward to seriously consider what needs to be done on a broader level to prevent something like this from reoccurring. Thank you, sir. Are there additional public comments? We are going to keep the floor open for public comment for another five minutes. We are required by the charter to make sure that half of the time devoted to this forum is for public comment and we want to make sure we comply by that requirement. Just in case you had questions. Okay. Are there questions of Guilford? Sir. Richard Morris, precinct seven. So I'm still thinking about government as a zero sum game and so there's an interest, an unseen interest of some sort of project or initiative that is going to drop off the list here with this money being spent. So I guess I'm asking, I guess I'd ask Guilford, what is the project or initiative or effort that is dropping off the list if you appropriate the money that's being requested today? Thank you. I don't think we can be specific as to the project that it's going off the list. There are others on the list that we will be considering as they come forward. But perhaps Paul Wachman would like to add to that. So the funds that are being requested to be transferred that's been recommended by the finance committee is coming from free cash. So that's not in a budget for paving or anything like that. It's coming free cash. Some people think of it as a savings account. So if you think about it that way, that's not what it is, but that's how you can think about it. You're just taking money out of your savings account that would otherwise be allocated to a future project. You just don't have as much to allocate going forward because this project has risen to the top because of the emergency nature of it. So there's nothing that's going to drop off the list that just means at some point in the future as we start, as the town starts to consider projects that can afford, it might say, oh, we can't afford whatever was at the bottom of the list going forward. Is there additional questions, sir? Yes, please. Sir Nelson, I just want to thank Paul Bachmann for clarifying that. This is an emergency situation. This is why you have emergency funds. This is a failure of a major road. It needs to be fixed as soon as possible. By fixing it, it also gives you the flexibility of making sure you wait until you can get the state funds for the permanent bridge. So this is what one of the things we pay taxes for is to deal with emergency situations. And this is an emergency situation to get a major road repaired and reopened with the temporary bridge. Thank you. Thank you. Martha, other questions or public comments? Sir, please come forward. Good morning. I'm Randy Needham. I'm not a resident. I work for Acro Bridge Corporation. My question is... I just want to say we will allow you to speak, but thank you for telling us you're not a resident. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. My question is, I was impressed by the concept of a sturdy temporary bridge to last a few years until money comes through for a permanent bridge. Has the planning for this project included the use of a temporary bridge that's then incorporated into the permanent solution? Mr. Maureen. Yes and no. Yes in the fact that we have looked at it. No, it does not seem it's going to fit right now. So we've looked at it. We've kind of gone through the calculations. What's going to be done is the bid will be a performance specifications and if someone else who has a barrage or a solution actually can work it in and then it can be taken after it's installed and worked into the final design, that's the way it'll be looked at from this point forward. But we have not laid out something specific in the bid for the temporary bridge that's planned to be used specifically in the permanent bridge. I think is what the question really was. Okay. Are there additional questions? Mr. Maureen. I'm interested in how you define emergency. I'm thinking of the intersection in North Amherst that hasn't been addressed. They're erratic lights. I think the pedestrian light now is not working. It wasn't working yesterday and the light has failed and taken several days to repair. That's a major intersection that's going to be impacted by the new development there. There's this Mill River Bridge. How long has that been unfinished or where is it in the process now? How long has it been hanging out there with no fixing? So Mill River Bridge has been probably six years from the time it was closed until the time construction started. But Mill River Bridge is completely funded by the state. We came up with the concept. They took the concept, paid for all the engineering and then is paying for all the construction with a small, except for a small piece of things we want to change for our water system in there. So that's six years completely on the state and completely funded by the state. The traffic signal you're talking about in North Amherst has been around for a long time. We've done different things to it. We were actually going through the records on the system and it was actually rewired in 2003. Little things been done off and on throughout the years since 2003. It was hit again last weekend. A tractor trailer took out one of the poles and caused a short because we replaced the controller from the last accident. The controller was able to handle the short and didn't destroy the whole intersection like it was happened the last time. That's probably be up and running probably this week. There's just some wire pulling. It has to be done, some re-establishment of the poles. That's a minor damage to the light. The intersection is a problem. That intersection was in the top 100 dangerous intersections in the first Pioneer Valley top 100 intersections of concern. There was only three intersections in Amherst that fell into that category. There was the Meadow Street North Pleasant Pine intersection which is owned by or managed by the town. There was the Route 116 Meadow Street intersection and there was the University Drive and Route 9 intersection. The University Drive and the 116 intersections are all controlled by the state. The state has made changes to 116 and the state is planning on making changes to Route 9 University Drive at this time. How will we address that intersection and how long is it? Please answer the question but I really do want to stay with the Station Road Bridge since that's the purpose of this public forum. The easiest way to answer that question is to talk about how we handle all projects. We identify a lot of projects and we bring them forward to the town manager. The town manager he listens to what we have to say. He gives sort of a first sounding board on what we think are the priorities we need to address. There's in transportation side there's also the public, the Transportation Advisory Committee used to be called public. It's now called the Transportation Advisory Committee. They weigh in with what they think is priorities and from all that we submit a post slate of projects and those projects move forward. Sometimes they move all the way forward to completion. Sometimes they do not move forward and they wait a few years and then finally move forward. But all projects are handled that way and that's how they go. We don't really set the priority in our office. We make recommendations on which ones are the priorities. Okay thank you. Are there other comments from the public at this point? Okay. I understand that you will be back with us at our February 11th meeting to talk about the capital projects and we might have some additional questions on what we think of as serious road projects at that point. Okay. Okay thank you. Any questions from the audience? Any comments? If not I want to thank you all for attending our first public forum and for your comments and your diligence to this issue. I now move that the meeting be adjourned. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor? Okay. Thank you very much.