 You're all set. Go ahead. You need to get back to my. Until we're really into the exciting stuff. Nobody's attending. Even though it's. I'm going to call. I heard Andy was going to do a strip tease. So. There'd be more people. You know, we're recording that. Oh, well. Don't make the front page of something. So I'm going to call the finance committee meeting of June 29, 2021 to order at 2pm pursuant to chapter 20, the acts of 2021. The meeting will be is being conducted by a remote means. So in order to do that, I need to. Make sure that all of the members of the committee are present can hear and that we can hear them. So I'll just go through the. Committee list. Lynn. Present. Yes. Yes. Here. Dorothy. Here. Here. Pat. Present. Bernie. Present. Bernie, can you hear us? Yeah, I'm present. Okay. Jane. Okay, great. So thank you for being here on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being there. For us relatively short notice, but it is an important topic. And. What I thought would be a helpful start. And I did. Some. For warning of this. Hopefully. He said, but I wanted him to give us a. Sort of a brief explanation of ARPA and then. Answer any questions that we have about ARPA. Because what we really need to then get into. Is a pose process. For how we divide up. Me or $11 million of ARPA funds that are coming to Amherst. So Sean. Yeah, do you mind that I put together and you'll. See how brief a notice I received by the type of PowerPoint. I have a really brief one. It's going to share. Okay. Do you see that on the screen? Yep. So some of this you probably all have seen or pieces of it. But the American rescue plan act. Is about a little get to the allocation a second, but it's meant to help with the pandemic addressing the. The impacts of COVID, the economic fallout. And then the part that's sort of exciting about ARPA is. You can also use it to help repair the damage and set yourself up for a strong economic recovery going forward. I put some of the funding objectives here on the screen. Is this large enough for people to see. Yes. Okay. So these are sort of the four big objectives. And then there's like another tier of like, within these four, then there's even more detailed examples. I'll send this out to the, to the committee after just so you have it. But the four major uses are to support the COVID-19 response. And help get the pandemic under control, which cares as we use cares as a separate grant program to do most of that. So really we would only look to ARPA, you know, if it's beyond December 31st and, and there's more things we have to do that cares no longer can, can pay for. The second one is to replace lost public sector revenue. So town government. Revenue replacement is an option. However, there are some restrictions on how it is used. And to help retain public service sector jobs. There's a lot of, there's a lot of federal programs, some state programs, but there may be other things or areas of the, of the community that we're not aware of. And this will get to the process and a little bit of, of how to assess that. There's some types of programs like that, but ARPA funds can support. And then the last one is to address the systematic public health and economic challenges that have contributed to the. Inequal impact of the pandemic. So again, trying to gauge what areas of the community were hit the hardest and direct ARPA funds to help resolve that, whatever issues they're experiencing. And so this is all from the quick reference guy that the Treasury has put out and I'll send that link out. For Amherst, we are expected to receive 11,933,556 dollars. It's coming. We just received our first piece of that, which was a little over 2 million. It's, so they're, they're setting out the funds a year apart. So we just received their first payment. We'll receive another payment a year from now. And then Amherst is in a, a situation where we are receiving. Because we don't have a county system anymore, a county council of governments or anything like that. We're receiving another piece of money, which is how we get to the 11.9 million. So we received the first payment, which is just our local share. And then we're going to receive another payment sometime in the next several weeks, which will be the share that would have gone to a county government if we had one, but because we don't, it comes to the town. These expenditures must be incurred or obligated by December 21, 2024. However, there's, you can even the, you have to have it obligated by that point, but there's still two additional years after that, where you actually can pay out the funds. So this is a grant program that's going to span, you know, somewhere between five to six years potentially, depending on how the funds are allocated. And guidance is trickling in from lots of different sources. We've received stuff from the treasury, the state administration or finance, the national league of cities has taken an active role in sort of helping explain the, the whole grant to people because it's very broad, very high level. They give some examples, but a lot of it is sort of up to individual communities to figure out whether it, whether it's eligible based on how the grant is written. And yeah, so we, you know, I'll, Andy, I'll follow your lead on how you want to talk about the process. If you want me to share, you know, what we were thinking, or if you want to pause now and, and open it up for questions. I think basically I'm going to. Pause and ask for questions first and then go into the question of our process. But one question I just wanted to ask is you referred in the memo that you sent to the council that was then what was referred to the finance committee. About what you were referenced to two tranches of funds. And how that works. What is the separation between the two pieces? So it's, so again, it's 50% now and then 50% a year from now. But again, because we do not. So the ARPA grant itself, if we had a county form of government, the county would have gotten a bunch of money from the ARPA grant and there's some Eastern Mass County governments that did get a bunch of money, but because we no longer have a Hampshire County council of governments or anything like that. They broke up that allocation of funds among all the towns that would have been part of that. And they gave them additional. Direct aid essentially. I don't know if there's any additional restrictions on those yet. They haven't, again, they haven't paid that piece of it out. He said that's going to be a couple more weeks. The, the person we work with at the state. But yeah, so there's, so we receive, there's going to be two tranches, one now, one a year from now, and we actually just received the first one this past week. And then we're within each of those two tranches, there's two payments. One would be our local share. One would be the share that would have gone to the county, but it's going to go to us instead. So my last question, and I'm going to start turning to the other members of the committee is. Do we need to have a process. It is really two different processes one for each segment, or can one process allocate funds for both. If you wanted to. I think one process could allocate for both. You know, it may make sense. It may make sense, depending on, you know, when we start talking about what the specific allocations are to revisit it, you know, because of the nature of this grant and how long it is. I don't think it necessarily makes sense to come up with a budget for all $11.9 million this summer and say, this is exactly how we're going to spend it. I think we want to come up with what we think are the greatest areas of need and fund those things. And then if that uses whatever percent of the grant that uses the rest we might want to revisit. So I don't think we have to, to necessarily resolve it all this, this summer, we could come back and revisit it in the next year, potentially. Okay. Thank you. So. We have now four members of the committee when asked questions. So I'll just do it in order that they appear on my screen. Kathy. Thanks. Sean, you may, your next slides may start to talk about this, but I looked at on what you'd sent us earlier. And then the link to ARPA in terms of potential uses. So I have a few questions. One is this the total total amount for Amherst, or does the schools also get a direct allocation because of schools? Yeah. So this is the direct amount that's coming. This is the amount that's coming directly to the town. There are additional. ARPA funds that are going to the schools directly. Okay. So when, so when we're as a town making any decisions about nearly $12 million, we, we would not. I'll should frame it as a question. We would not. Would we, we wouldn't think of what. Putting money over into the school systems. The school systems will get their own allocation or would we say that might be a place we want to. Look. Yeah, I want to say. We definitely would not. I would say we would want to see how the grants work together and what the school's plan is for their funds first. They have a very prescribed process where they have to do a hearing and they have to spend certain amounts on certain things. And their grant is a little bit more. There's a little bit more work to do around just the use of their grant, which I'm sure they're going to start. You'll see some of that coming out in the fall probably. So I want to say it's a definite no by any means, but we would want to understand how they're using their funds before we would make a decision about our funds. Okay, so my next, and I'll turn it over to others, but on the slide you just did and also on the list on replacing lost revenues. We clearly, we clearly can estimate and Sonia's, and you have given us great, you know, what's the fall off of the local receipts. We know when the water fund and what the fall off was. Do we have any guidance that because the big bulk users for water left town and that then left us with a shortfall, whether that kind of revenue replacement is a, is a potential use. And then if we went over, not as specific to the water fund, but we would say, you know, local receipts from sales, taxes and other things that nothing was open for business. We can quantify that. Do we know whether that is an eligible use of it? And then I have a question. So that's just stop on the lost revenues. So there, the, the GFOA, the governmental finance offers officers association, they released a workbook to help communities calculate revenue replacement because it's a, the definition of revenue replacement in the ARPA grant is really sort of unusual and things that people aren't generally, it's not the typical language people would think of. And they have very specific rules around how to calculate it. So the GFOA put a nice workbook together that allows us to sort of input stuff and then it calculates it for us. And so water, my understanding is no, we cannot do anything with water because utility systems are not part of what they call general revenues. And that's what they're looking at for revenue replacement is what they consider general revenues. And that's a sort of unusual term that we don't use very often. It's something that comes out of like the census and then they have a definition for general revenues in the census. But water is one that they specifically called out as not being eligible in the guidance I've seen. Sewer is sort of up in the air. Originally they had said utility revenues were not eligible, but when I went to this workbook and some of the guidance I've seen has made it has made it seem like sewer could be eligible, which would be good for us because sewer is an area where we took a big hit this past year. So we're leaning towards sewer would be an eligible use. And you know, especially this year looking at our revenue deficit we have this year that could be a possible use for those funds. And then the other one would be transportation is another one where we didn't think it would be eligible because we treat it like a utility or an enterprise fund. But when I look at this workbook that was put together, I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that our parking facility revenues are eligible. So that's kind of good news because we thought they were going to all be ineligible. And then all those other things you talked about. License revenues. Sales tax meals. Those kinds of things. Those are all eligible. You know, pretty much all of our general fund revenues would be eligible. Now again, within the revenue replacement. And then we'll get clarity. When you're using something for revenue replacement. My understanding at this point, but again, we'll get clarity on this. Is you need to use it to match it up with an expense. And there's, and it has to be an allowable governmental expense. You can't just use it to fill in the revenue hole. To net to replenish reserves or something like that. So that's an area that I still need to get a little bit more clarity about. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And in terms of the sources that you mentioned, yes, we think those would be eligible. Okay. So I think I understood what you just said. I'm going to let other people ask. As, but if we have an expense. That we don't already have covered in the budget. And I'll just use when we voted on. If we're putting it, bringing in a community. Responder program, which is also a crisis. I think that some of the revenue from local receipts would have gone to fund that. And if we replace that, it's funding that. So can you make, can you. Yeah, so, so this workbook, it calculates how much lost revenue we have. And then once you have, you know, you know, how much lost revenue you have, you can then use the grant to support allowable government expenses up to that amount. So that's sort of the broadest bucket is this revenue replacement bucket because you can use it on, you know, unless I see something different, the way it reads is that you can use it on governmental services. You know, the examples they gave her please and fire, but I think what we've talked about during the budget process is that it could potentially support the community responder program under that category. Okay. I have a bunch more, but let me let turn it over to other people and maybe they will ask the question, other questions. There's one follow up to what you were just saying with Kathy on the water fund. Normally our enterprise funds pay an overhead expense back to the town for administrative expenses related to the particular enterprise fund. Did the water fund was pay anything to the town or, or not pay anything to the town? I guess this was the correct way during this year. So it did pay this year. However, it also has a six or $700,000 deficit. So again, that's one of the ones that that might be maybe a potential loophole that we could look at with the grant. If it's, you know, if that's the way it's decided we want to use it is, you know, what happens at the enterprise fund doesn't make that payment to the general fund of indirect charges. And then use the revenue replacement bucket to make that up for the general fund. So that would help out the general fund, but it would also help out the enterprise fund because their deficit would be less than what it's going to be. So that's maybe a possible use. Okay. Yeah, I've got a bunch of questions. I read through the ARPA and I read through the, the interim final rule of that treasury put out. There's the funding that's the funding mechanism is quite unusual for federal funding. Typically you don't get to get federal funds in advance and then sit on them for two years. And collect interest. We get to keep the interest on it too. So that was the question I had was whether we can, we can actually get interest on it because typically. Yeah, I know what I've read so far is that, is that we can retain that interest that we're not going to have to send it back to this. You know, normally when you collect interests, you have to send it back to the state. If it's anything significant. And I believe I came across something the other day that said you do not. It's, it's quite unusual and it's, it's actually quite good because. Even though, I mean, this money is enough to be a potential problem for a cash flow for the town. If we had to pay it out and then wait to get reimbursed. So that's good. Looking through the documents that appears that, you know, in the disaster recovery world, the money that you pay out directly for, you know, to businesses to reimburse the town or something is called direct program costs. I mean, that's the dollars you pay out, but there's a lot of other expenses that have planning, implementation, you know, working on applications, designing applications and doing administrative costs or doing administrative actions. These appear to be eligible. In other words, you could charge someone's time for working on the, the applications to a business reimbursement program. Is for any, first of all, is there any guidance that says they're not eligible? And then is there any limit on what percentage of the total award can be spent on these activities? So I haven't seen anything that says they're not eligible. And so for example, like with cares and for FEMA. We do have overhead costs and indirect costs from just managing the grants. The grant applications take a ton of time to report on. And so I imagine that will continue with the American rescue plan is that either we'll have a person that spends a portion of their time to manage it and manage the reporting. If there are any significant sort of staff, other uses of staff time, potentially we could allocate that, but I'll double check. I don't usually, there are some limits on how much you can charge. I haven't seen a specific percentage, but I can look and see if there's a specific percentage on sort of that indirect. Portion. Yeah. On CDB GDR work, the, the total of planning and administrative costs is 20%. That's the limit. The program implementation. They like to see it. No more than 15%. But I don't think we're going to get anywhere near that. I don't think they're going to be anywhere as difficult as that. But anyway, I don't think we're going to bump up against sort of the norms. Or any kind of recovery program. One of the things we're going to have to think about is. Whether non residents of Amherst are eligible for any of these funds. In other words, if there's a plan to. To a program to reimburse workers. Do the workers have to live in the town to be eligible? Or do they just have to work in the town? Similarly, do we have to do the businesses have to be fully in Amherst? I mean, like big Y is partly split between Amherst. And Hadley. I mean. How's that going to work? And then do the business owners have to live in Amherst, or do they just have to own the business that operates? So I wanted to answer these questions now, but I think they're going to be questions that. We should address or needs to be addressed as part of these programs. And the other thing that. I don't think is a problem with the ARPA funds. Except for the money went to FEMA, but it's called duplication of benefits for the Stafford Act. Basically. The Stafford Act, which is a federal law prohibits the federal government for paying twice for the same benefit. And so if. Say a. A business owner has gotten, you know, PPP funds. Is that considered a duplication of benefits of any. Things we could. Provide under ARPA. So again, I don't know. I haven't seen anything. In the, in the final rule that, that even mentions it. But it's something we should be aware of. And we should think it through and maybe get guidance on, you know, how to deal with potential. Benefits. The other thing we should think about is. Double dipping, if you will call it. So suppose someone is a Uber lift driver. They may be eligible for benefits under a small business program and also under a reimbursement of wages program. And the question is, should they be eligible for both? Or should we say that you can apply to both, but you can only get one award. So we need to think about. You know, how all these different programs that may be designed. Work together and what the eligibility requirements are. Across all the programs as well as within the program. I just follow up to a couple of points. So the duplication of benefits is a huge issue. You know, with CARES and FEMA in particular, and I don't know how ARPA is going to work, but with CARES and FEMA was a huge issue because CARES actually had a rule that in order to submit anything to CARES, you have to submit it to FEMA first. And that CARES would only pick up the balance. And then FEMA kept changing their rules about how much they were going to reimburse. So first they were only reimbursing 75%. Then they started, so they were going to reimburse a hundred percent, but that was well after we started submitting costs. So it's something we're well aware of. And for CARES and FEMA in particular, it's going to be a huge thing to untangle. Because of all the changes with FEMA and with what's eligible and not eligible and having CARES be like the second source of funds for those expenses. And I imagine that will also continue for American Rescue Plan Act just based on the emphasis they put on it with CARES. And in terms of the specific programs. So what we're thinking is, you know, we're not looking for specific ideas yet for how the funds will be used. We're thinking of opening up a process where people can submit ideas where we can start to assess where the problem areas are. And then once we have a sense of what those areas are, we can work with the state to figure out how these programs should be structured. I mean, like with the, we did a program of CARES for rental assistance and the duplication of benefits thing came up with that as well. So on the application, we had to make sure that we asked, you know, have you received any other forms of rental assistance before the CARES funded rental assistance could kick in. So, you know, a lot of the programs you talked to, you described probably have heavy sort of administration costs on our side, you know, if we're going to be, or we'd have to contract out that administration piece. But I think the first piece is we want to hear from the community to see like, is that, you know, is that even something that is going to be proposed as a possible issue? No, I understand that. I was just putting out things that that, you know, from my experience in disaster recovery, you kind of have to be aware of, right? That's helpful. Can we go into Bernie or do you have anything else, Bob? No, that's it. Bernie. Hi. I think Bob's questions are, are good. Well received because the guidance documents that I've seen make it abundantly clear that there's nothing, there's going to be no second guessing on how the town spends the money until somebody comes back and doesn't audit some years from now. And I know from my dealings in disasters, you send everybody out with notebooks and everybody keeps records and you're just very careful. I didn't, I don't know, can't you refer to a document that was sent out? I didn't get anything. So if I'm, I maybe had a little bit of a disadvantage here, but looking at some guidance for the coronavirus state and local fiscal recovery funds, which is where this $11 million is sets. One of the potential uses that's been mentioned, the guidance documents is water, sewer and broadband. Water infrastructure. Water infrastructure and broadband infrastructure. But not the utility revenue though. Not the utility revenue. And I, you didn't, you didn't mention that in your overview, but that's a, that's a potential source of use for these funds. Yeah. So again, just for today's meeting, I just want to be clear where this, the, what was referred to finance committee was not. To talk about how the funds will be used. It was to discuss a process for determining how the funds will be used. So yeah, you're right. There's lots. You got to know what you can use them for before you can, you know, there's an overlap there with all the respect. No, I totally get that Bernie. I just, I think what we're trying to do with this process, because it's so much money in this, and there's the uses are so broad. As we're first trying to assess where the need is. Before throwing out our own ideas. I mean, we've talked about some things as part of the budget process. That are related to town council goals, but. You know, we're trying to structure a process that focuses first on assessing. How the town has been impacted by COVID. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the community responded program also came to mind, but again, it's confusing because the, some of the guidance I've seen on the interim final role, I love that phrase interim final suggests that you have to, it has to be an ongoing effort. Not a new one. And so there's a gray area there. So that, that's, that's my 92 cents. Anything else for any of those? Okay, Dorothy. I have a couple of questions and comments. 11 million dollars is a lot of money, but on the other hand, it isn't. And so I don't really want to see a really active thing where everybody in town, it gets together and about how they want to spend it. And then they find out that it's going to be spent on two things. And that's that. That just gets up a hopes. I'm also not interested in using it on something that is an ongoing problem so that when the money runs out, we don't have the money for it. So that's why Cress is not really at the top of my list on this. I felt Kathy was edging around the cuts, the school cuts. I've been waiting to hear how we're going to, those cuts are going to be restored in tech and art. I'm assuming that somehow they will be. Because as I've said before, I think that they are particularly relevant after students having been on zoom and remote education, that they have the fullest hands on programs that they can. But one thing you mentioned, which I liked was broadband. If the money could be used as I mean, the whole idea of matching funds and whatever, that's very technical. Obviously that's got to be done. I don't see my making a contribution to that, but something where we could use it for something that, that relates to equity and COVID. And certainly we discovered that we were on zoom, that we did people did not have equal access to the internet. And then that was a major cause of social inequity. If we could do things that were permanent that weren't part of the, you know, yearly costs of whatever broadband is, but we're setting it up. And I think that would be really great. So I was putting in my two cents there. Thank you. I don't know. If you have no comments on it, then I'll go ahead. The only thing I've heard on broadband and, and again, there's constant guidance coming out is that the broadband bucket is. Is meant for areas that don't have broadband. You know, areas of the country where there is no broadband, it's allowable to potentially put in broadband. All right. With Amherst. I don't know if it could be used to put in like a competing broadband or a municipal fiber. That's the area I need to find out more about. Okay. Okay. I don't know if we have any questions next on the list. I think in the Kathy. Can we get back to Kathy's Lynn. My comments really build on. Things people said, but. I think it's very. For us to say, you know, do we think. Town needs. In other words, reimbursement of funds. Should take priority. I mean, I mean, I think we're, say for example. Contributing to some small business program or. To something else that's not. A town need. And because I could see as I think. Was. Speaking to. You know, people looking at this thing and saying, whoa, look at this, you know, We as a town have to be with ourselves. And I really want to make sure to think about the priorities. For now. Yeah. I would get to that in a few minutes. Sean and I did have a beginning of a conversation. That involved then Paul. Not directly, but through Sean. And I was, I was, I was thinking about. What might be a process or sort of to get an outline of process going to put up for you. But I wanted to make sure that there was an opportunity to. Really understand what ARPA. Is and what it could fund. And then get into the core question of the day, which is really what our assignment. Was to make a decision. And then the council, which was to propose back a process. So it's sort of. It's understand ARPA a little bit. And before we talk about a process for how we're going to. Propose to make those decisions. To make sense. Lynn, and do you have any follow up. Before I go back to Kathy. Okay, Kathy. I do have a follow up because I, I'm a little bit. I don't know. I don't know. I just want to figure out how we're supposed to focus. The finance committee discussion. Cause I like Bob and Bernie, I went out and read what ARPA. The kinds of lists in addition to what you'd put in a memo, Sean, you know, where what we could be doing. And thinking about a pot of money. And then a process. So Lynn's comment on a, so if I'm going to call it 12 million, because I tend to when it's 11.9 roundup. So 12 million. If we got half of that. In the next year, a year and a half, we're looking at $5 million. Do we. Do we start out with a general, give me your, all your ideas, which is what this memo says, you know, there's a group. Give me all your ideas. Or do we say. Half of that will go toward. The town side replacement of revenue, some other, you know, big pots and then half of it's to community. So I think, you know, I think, you know, I think that would you, are you asking for this committee to be formed to make those kinds of process decisions? And I'm, I'm partly asking this because the mobile market came up in my mind is something that we could be funding. The, it looked like broadband. If we didn't define it as an absolute not in the community, but if we said there are affordable housing projects in town that we could, you know, we could, we could talk about pockets of need because social equity was a very big screen that ARPA puts across. So we could stretch the definition. But again, I would want to match it up with a million dollars here only gets you so much. And so my, my comment is about leading into the process, Andy. We had a presentation last night on the participatory budget world. And one of the things they places they've had that is they know what kind of pot of money they've got. They've solicited ideas from the community, but with, with some restrictions on one time expenses. So Dorothy, you know, not an ongoing expense, some pockets. And then some places have set up a voting mechanism for among, you know, we just spent, you only had five million, but we figured out $10 million worth of, you know, how do you treat it? So would we be putting it to a subgroup? The proposed thing would be some kind of advisory committee, an ad hoc committee coming up with, we could do it this way, we could do it that way. And then coming back to the council, because the list of what it could be used for is very exciting. But I didn't want to focus right away on specifics as much as where Lynn was going on when we say half of it would go here. And the other half would be for businesses and workers and town services, or we're going to leave all of that to a community process. And I don't have a this way versus that way, but who, who makes, when does a committee be thinking about those kinds of questions? You know, mental health, behavioral health, I can think of pockets that are clear need, but you want to do it just one time to get us over a hump and then absorb that back in our budget. So I don't quite understand what, what the idea is for a process on, and nor the timeline for it. So is this like two months? Yeah. So Andy, would that be a good segue into maybe reviewing the process that we discussed? Yeah, I mean, that's what I would propose to the committee unless there's people don't feel ready for it is to let John talk now a little bit about the process that you thought you kind of sketched out after a conversation that the Cova's had and that I referenced earlier. So if nobody objects that I'll say go ahead. Do you, are you, do you have something to share? I have it on a word. Yeah, I got it in that PowerPoint so I can just, I can share it there. Okay, to go ahead Andy with that. Okay, so let's see. Okay. Yeah, you want to go. Yeah, I'll make this a little bigger. Is that large enough? Yes. Okay. So, yeah, we, so we tried to take sort of a rough process that we put in the memo and try to fit it into how it might work over the summer and the different committees and how, however thing would intersect. So the first piece on here is today's meeting with the finance committee to discuss the sort of the formation of an advisory group. Whose, whose role would be to solicit and evaluate possible uses for ARPA funds. And then finance committee would report back to the town council. And then we have another potential finance committee meeting if needed. So on the 12th, which is the next town council meeting. They would receive the report from the finance committee. And I'm not sure what the agenda looks like on that meeting, but assuming there's time, a discussion with the town manager on the process. So that we walk away from that meeting with a sort of a mutual understanding of what that process will look like. And then the town manager by the end of that week would finalize the advisory group membership. And so, you know, this group were, this advisory group were envisioning would be, you know, key staff, you know, we were thinking a member of the finance committee would be part of this group. Another member of the council would be part of this group. And, you know, people who would be charged with sort of evaluating these proposals and how, you know, how the government might be able to do them potentially. Then the next piece would be the advisory group's work, which would start theoretically on the 19th and would go for a couple months through the end of September. We have a process that's sort of similar to what we were thinking for the advisory group, which would be something like the CDBG process that solicits proposals and kind of puts a framework out and gets proposals that are sort of consistent with that. So, you know, the advisory group, the first thing we envisioned they would do would be sort of what we kind of started doing here, which would be to review the terms of the grant guidance from GFOA on, you know, how it can be used. Sorry, GFOA, National Lagos Cities and other sources. How it can be used. What are some of the examples, but again, the examples don't cover everything. And then also just like best practices for the grant, you know, we could talk about the duplication of benefits. We can talk about not funding things that can't be, you know, don't fund operating expenses that we don't have a plan for how they would be rolled into the budget in the future, things like that. The next piece they would do would be to establish a framework for how to evaluate our proposals. And so some of the things, some of the categories we've already talked about a little bit would be, you know, does the proposal, you know, address a hard hit area of the community? Does it help with the town government with a revenue shortfall? Is it related to a specific COVID response? You know, something for the Board of Health, for example, or does it support equitable economic recovery? So those are just examples. This group would kind of, you know, I'm sure they would have different variations of what that would look like. Once they have that framework in place, they could solicit proposals from the community and key stakeholders. We were thinking this would include staff as well. So staff would also, I'm sure have ideas on things they've seen and heard from other towns of what they're using their funds for. And, you know, when we talk about solicit proposals, it wouldn't just be like an open solicitation, you know, send anything you want. We would try to give the framework, give direction. You know, I was thinking, you know, we're not really necessarily even looking for like a proposed budget. We're really trying to assess the needs, the possible needs out there because, you know, until we see what's out there to have a bunch of people submit budgets or amounts, it will make it difficult because then you'll feel like you're, you know, you're taken away from what they're submitting. I think it's more important for this piece to really, really focus on assessing the need or different ideas that are coming in. And then this group would evaluate those proposals and provide a recommendation to the town manager. And then on the 10th or the, sorry, October 4th town council meeting, the manager would sort of present an initial plan for ARPA funds to the council for feedback. And then the next meeting would finalize a plan. And this plan may be for all of the ARPA funds and for a portion of the ARPA funds, you know, we won't really know until we kind of gauge the gauge what type of ideas come in for how to use these funds. But yeah, so that's sort of the, that's sort of the rough outline of a process for what we were thinking at this point. Did you say anything about anything of who would, who would be on the working group? Yeah, so the advisory group we were thinking would be either the finance committee or both the finance committee and the full council would make sense to help evaluate the proposals that come in. And that could be a resident member of the finance committee or, or not, doesn't, I don't think we had any preference on that. Okay. So then let's go back and give reactions to the process and let's start with Lynn. I'll just go down to the list. Kathy was the last speaker in the last round. So. Do we know if the town manager or the town council makes the final decision? Right. Yeah. Please. Yes. So our understanding is that the council had to accept the grants, which they did at the. At the meeting on the trip. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So our understanding is that the council had to accept the grants, which they did at the. At the meeting on the trip. And that it's up to the town manager to allocate the grant. You know, we've, I've checked that with the auditor. However, again, I was just saying that guidance is still coming out, but that's what our auditor has given us as the process so far. And I've talked to a couple other towns and that's what, what they're planning to follow as well. There is an exception where if we potentially down the road, if we want to use ARPA funds as a funding source to the budget. Then it might be something that would go through the council for whatever portion we wanted to use as a, as a funding source for the budget. If that's how ARPA funds are divvied up. So. Again, this just reinforces for me. The need for the town. To be very clear about what its needs are. And either. Up front about that. And take it off the table. Or you set up a situation that we do with the CPA. Where the town is an applicant. And then, you know, people feel like, well, gee, you know. Why is the town. The biggest applicant here. You know, we heard some of that this year. So I'm trying to figure out how to strike the balance. Between what of this is more. I mean, you know, I keep wanting to say. Revenue lost money kinds of things. Yeah. How much of it is really for new entrepreneurial. I use that word. Not as a business sense, but as a publicly on entrepreneurial. Kind of way. And so I'm just very concerned about. How that whole dynamic sets up and having. Counselors. On the committee. Fine. There's pros and cons to that. But I, I just think we need to. Be clear about some of those other issues that I've mentioned. That's all. Yeah. You know, there, there's a, there is a small portion of the grant that we've sort of already considered. Allocated to an extent because it was part of the FY 22 budget. Proposal. So the, again, the money that was. Identified to support the community responder program. Was about 250,000, I believe to support. And again, that's the support sort of one time. Cost, not the operational side of it, but it was to support some of the sort of initial startup and training and consulting related to that. And then there were some also proposals. As part of other proposals for potentially capital projects manager. Diversity and equity coordinator. There were some other pieces that were presented in the budget. That I think total between all of them total about $500,000. If they are all followed through on. But other than that, I would say, you know, the rest of it is, is sort of up for this group to look at. And I, I understand where you're, sorry, you're concerned. And I think the part I'm struggling with is. You know, it's trying to get a sense of from the community of where the greatest need is because that's really what this grant, you know, everything I've read about this grant is sort of the first piece is to assess the damage to the community from the pandemic. And that's really where the funds should go to first and trying to assess that. And then once you feel like, you know, you've got things to a good place, then the rest of it is really sort of that looking forward. And set it up a strong framework and all of that. So, so that's really where sort of the outreach to the community comes from is to just to try to get that piece of it. And give people an opportunity to say how they've been impacted by the pandemic. And we know some of the ways, whether it be sort of rent, you know, loss of job or things like that. But to give people an opportunity to kind of communicate that to this group. So I'm wondering if in fact, even before the kind of dollar amounts or the categories are established, whether there should be some listening process. And that's a tough thing to fit into this schedule. But it seems to me that if we're looking for. You know, things that we already think are the issues and name some of them. And it's not that we don't believe them. In fact, they are the issues. But are there other things that we're not seeing that are the. Hidden. So it's teasing out what. The priorities will be for funding. I think it's going to be critical. Peace before we put the money out there. Yeah. I mean, just another example throughout there that's sort of one of that, you know, we all have heard a little bit, but it'd be interesting to see what the community says about it is like childcare, for example. We know early childcare is a problem. And it'd be interesting to see how the. I imagine the pandemic probably made it worse in a lot of ways. And so, you know, the listening process, you know, we were thinking as opposed to the listening session, again, that's where we would solicit have a solicitation, whether it be electronic or, you know, could be in writing where people can kind of communicate those things to this group. But it could be in the form of a listening session instead. Or in addition to. I mean, there's many ways to do it. Yeah. So I will, I'll just point one thing out and then segue on to Dorothy. So because I know a bunch of hands up right now. And that is under advisory group. The first bullet is. Or the second bullet is. This is reviewed terms of grant aid guidance and then the sub bullet under the second one addresses hardest areas in the community and town government. I think would. I get Lynn talking about is. That addresses hardest areas in the community and town government. Well, if that's some sort of process that the advisory group has, how does it know what those hardest areas are. Dorothy. Okay. I really want to warn against. Expectations that will not be met. And instead of people being happy, they'll be sad. So I'm suggesting something that was mentioned earlier. That the money be say perhaps divided in half and people know about it. And one part of it would go to town and that would be dealt with. By key staff. And, and the town manager. And that the second part of the money. Whatever proportion it should be. Would go to the community needs that we've just been talking about. We've just been through a lot of community processes where a lot of people spoke and, and, and we have a lot of people talking about it. We've just been through a lot of community processes where a lot of people spoke and, and have been ignored. Some a little bit of what they wanted gets through, but a lot of it what they want has not been listened to. So I mean, when you open it up and say, tell me what you want. And then people tell you what they want. And you don't do it. You don't make them feel involved. You make them feel angry. So how you get the community. Part of this I'm saying this to the town half separate. And that'll be done by the people who run the town. The community part can either be done through the two members of the committee you were talking about who are from the town council. And the council represent community. Or as Lynn is suggesting, going and doing a listening session. But if you have a listening session, it has to be quite clear how much money and what kind of things that money can be spent on before people get excited and come and tell you and testify and do that. Because there has to be a reasonable expectation that some of what they want will happen. So I'm recommending that the two sources that the two sources of need, the town and the community be separated before you do any kind of listening session. Or using town councils to represent the town members, whichever way you do it. Thank you. Thank you. Bob. Yeah, I agree that I think it's important to separate out the town needs and the community needs. And I agree with the kind of general approaches there. The only concern I have is that some of the community community needs are actually pretty acute. I mean, mental health needs are very acute. Maybe income needs are acute. Maybe some business. Grant needs are acute. And if we sort of say, well, we're going to take the first one. And use it for government. And then the second tranche and use it for community. Well, then that's two years off or a year off before we can consider that. So I don't have a problem with saying we're going to use X percent for government. But maybe we say we're going to split it. You know, 50 50 in the first tranche and 50 50 in the second tranche or 60 40 or 40. You know, so that we start to. We allow some of the more. Acute needs to begin to be addressed. Sooner rather than later. And. I think the other. Thought I had was. One of the ways that we can. We should. One of the things we should maybe think about doing. Is. Writing a report that's. Kind of similar to. What they call the action plan for disaster recovery. And basically. The action plan. Does three things. It first of all. Identifies what the. It's with the baseline of overall impacts are. I think we're. That's one of the things that we're. We don't have all that information. But it kind of lays out. What are we going to do. We're going to. We're going to do some of the things that were. We don't have all that information. But it kind of lays out. What are the actual impacts. The second thing, which may not be as much of an issue here, but you know, are there other sources of funds to deal with some of these impacts. And then what is the unmet need after you subtract out all those funds. And then you would lay out programs. For addressing the most. The needs that rise to the surface as being the ones that are most important. And you don't have to address all the needs. You can say we've got. You know, we've got. 80 million dollars worth of need. And we only got 12 million dollars with the funding. We've got to make some choices. And that's what happens in every plan. So you don't have to. Address every need, but you, it's, I think it's important to try to. Identify as much of the overall impacts. As you can, in order to then say, okay, now we can prioritize which ones we want to, we want to address these funds. And just to go one point further. There is guidance for that that HUD has put out and I can point people to the, the, the guidance on how to do an action plan. And there's even guidance on how to evaluate. And, you know, you know, needs and, you know, it's very qualitative. But it's, it's, there's some, there's some guidance there that. That's a starting point that I think could be very helpful. Thanks. It sounds good. Thank you. Bernie. Yeah, I'm going to end up, I think. Largely echoing Dorothy and Bob. I think Bob suggestions are again, are good ones. And they, because I think the process that's in front of us is much too open ended. And I also think that what needs to happen is, you know, first things first, look at the town's revenue loss. Look at where some of the towns capital needs in terms of water and sewer can be met broadband. And that doesn't mean you set aside all the money, but you set aside some of that and you make those, you make those priorities because. You want to be able to then say to people, we have this amount of money or we have these areas and this reasonable amount of money, not 11.9 million. That we can then appropriate and try to use and come up with programs. And I think the idea of forming an action plan is a good one. But I wouldn't, I'm just, I'm really, I guess I'm just tired of open ended committees. And I think that's one of the things that are open ended processes that end up with a lot of ideas being thrown out, very few implemented. And which don't necessarily benefit the greater good of the community. I mean, making sure the communities fiscally sound, making sure our capital, whatever capital needs, we have our, our, our met. Is just solid policy for everyone who lives here. And then we can go on and look at what else might happen. And I think that's a substantial amount of money that should be left over. Pat. Thank you, Andy. I want to say that I'd love Bob for you to send us the action plan guidance that you spoke about. That would be really helpful. But I want to jump back to the advisory group membership. We talked about key staff, possibly council members, possibly finance committee members, but I don't think it's intentional. I think we would have residents on this committee as well, but that we need to do direct outreach to the BIPOC community. To gather membership. Because we have, I don't know whether there is any person of color who would be on the finance in the finance department. Who would be key staff. We have Jennifer moisten. Who is key staff on a lot of other things. We really need to reach out in some way that. So that. There is an equitable committee. The other thing is I'm getting more and more. I'm realizing more and more as possible election action by counselors, including myself, come to the fore that I don't know if I want counselors on this committee. I do think that the finance committee could be represented very, very well. By resident members of the committee either. And Bob, Bernie and Jeff. So I want us to think really carefully. About how we create and who is part of this advisory group. Thanks. Kathy. I definitely agree with what Pat just said. You know, to try to not make this political would be a huge goal on it. So that you can, you know, it's circling back. I think I started out with the 50, 50 and Bob, I didn't mean, you know, spend it all here and then the next 50. I meant some division. Is, is there Sean away? If we said town, town-wide needs, you know, in terms of budget, you know, is there a way of saying if we say the first $6 million, so that's, if that's 50% of our tranche, however, we're defining that, you know, we can identify a million. You said we can get up to 500,000. We can identify something that. The advisory committee would already be handed that. So I don't know what the right number is. And then the rest is the broader and the least. You know, between healthcare expenditures, behavioral health, mitigating the spread of, it goes on, you know, and on and on, but that would be the larger community. So that was a question. Could we. From the get-go come up with some division percent. For at least the first half. And you said, we're not trying to make a decision for. All 12. So we can come back to this a year later to make a decision for the second half. That's a question. And then the second Pat was suggesting, we make sure we get some diversity on the advisory committee. Is there a way of pulling someone in from the community? That's not town staff. And it's not on one of these. That could be eyes and ears. And maybe it's, you know, it may be our community participation officers, but I think we use them in every which way, you know, so I'm not thinking they're the right person, but is there a way of at least bringing someone else in? And then my final thought is that if we're really talking about. By greatest need. Some kind of ranking, some kind of decision making, trying to really make that very transparent. And to the extent there are gray areas in it, would we ever consider a way of, um, you're going to hate people will hate it when I say the voting, you know, what people have actually weigh in. We've come up with, um, We've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the, we've got the vote and we've got the vote. Um, and we've come up with, um, we've got $3 million to spend and we'd come up with $6 million, um, given what our criteria is, I get down to three this way. I get down to three that way. So you're not just getting this advisory committee, um, doing it, but you're getting some buy in. Of people in the town. your ideas, but you're not going to be part of the decision. So would we want to think of a process that made a broader group part of a decision? And there's some very cheap we identified that resources available for that kind of voting. We wouldn't have to reinvent it, but there are some. Once you've identified some actual, you know, this $100,000, this one. So I don't know whether we would want to consider that, but that would be a way of saying that we're not just sitting in a room, rank ordering, and whoever the us is in this advisory committee making this. So I don't, that would be potentially pretty exciting for people. And you would also be limiting Dorothy's concerns about limiting expectation. We only have this much money. So we're going to have to be priority setting. So that's my, can we identify a part that would be a bucket that would be called town. So town is not coming in and saying, I want most of it. We've earmarked that part for town. And then here's the part for the broad air mass community with with a needs assessment. That's two, two questions to do give this more structure. So I'm, I want to agree with Bernie. This is too, too loose right now. I think for a process, I would like to give it a little bit more structure. Okay. Jane. Hi, so I guess, so one that I had going back to what Pat had said about the makeup of the committee and maybe not needing a town counselor on it, I think I like the idea of having a town counselor on the committee while we're determining this, not necessarily that they have to be like a voting member, but I think that it's really interesting. I think it's really helpful to have the perspective from you guys as the town counselors. I think you guys understand open meeting law in a way that a lot of community members don't. And I think that it's important if we're reporting back to the town council, that we have someone who can, who is a member of the council who's heard all of the information first. I just that's kind of my plug. Like, I just think it'd be really helpful to have a counselor as a member of the committee, even if they're not necessarily voting hands on in the process, but just so that there's someone in the, there's an extra set of ears in the room to make sure that people are really being heard. The other thing is just with, with talking about this and looking through all of this, I think we want to be exceptionally transparent about what our process is for determining needs base, and then for actually distributing the funds, because I feel like, especially when it comes to the rescue plan, people have such an emotional response to what the financial need is that they can't necessarily see logically around whether or not the need that they've assessed as being the most important is the most important. And I think the more transparent we are with the process, the more we can go back if people are like, but we didn't want you to spend that money, we can say, but look, we went through this entire process and this is how we determined that this is where the need is. So I guess those are just my two cents on that. And can I just add to that real quick, Andy? Yes, go ahead. I mean, that's one of the things that I was thinking when we like, you know, came up with this initial framework was I'm a little concerned about, we say this money's spent and then we find out there's this huge need, but the money is already spent by the time we find out about it, or we find out about it too late, or so that was one of the reasons why this is a little open ended. And again, it's open ended on the gauging the impact on the town. And I agree with you, you know, we want to provide a framework or guidelines for the how the funder spent in the specific programs. But, you know, it was sort of specifically open ended so that we can really get a sense of what's happening in the community and so that we can allocate the funds in a transparent way. And I'll look for, you know, after we go through the next round of hands, I was going to look for maybe get big into how we redo restructure this process a little bit so that everyone feels comfortable about it. Yeah, I was hoping to get there in a couple minutes too. Dorothy? I just want to make sure that we don't poison things. People in this town remember every vote that town meeting took that they didn't agree with. And that's why I really don't want this voted. I think the action plan, Bob's idea of the action plan, followed by research as to where's the greatest need. Then the funds will be rewarded by this advisory committee, whoever is on it, by their analysis of facts and doing that rather than greatest want and not letting one group get pitched against another and saying, we always lose, we always lose. So I want the money to be a happy thing. And something that seems safe and sound. So my suggestion is not voting, but an action plan and following up the ideas that we've been discussing about making it clear that the town has a part, community needs have a part and that different groups will assess it. Thanks, Dorothy. And thank you for starting us off by saying, which did at the beginning, which is 12 million dollars is a lot of money and it's not a lot of money all at the same time. Something you need to remember, Lynn. Yeah, am I unmuted? Okay. Paul, I really feel like Bob demonstrated some serious knowledge in the source around recovery and from other individual conversations. I hope we can continue to tap into that because structures and framework you've used in your previous work life is, I think, enormously valuable here. I totally agree with Pat. I don't think counselors belong in this. It's an election year. If we're seen as quote rewarding constituents trying to favor votes, it's just dreadful and absolutely inappropriate. And as much as I think, Jane, thank you for the high compliment of, you know, we know what we're doing. God forbid, I'm not sure I do it 11 o'clock at night. But I really, more than anything, there's other people in town hall who know how to run public meetings and they can do that. But I really strongly urge that we not put chances on this. Sonia. Yeah, I just want to be my typical self and just kind of try to ground everything here. I want to remind everybody where Sean said, these are grant funds. We don't need a council, though, to expend these funds. And I think they need to remain somewhat flexible because there are needs that we might need, you know, it could come up in a day or two that we would put this directly to that grant. So I don't think we were looking for, I mean, everything is always transparent in the town anyways, and you're always going to see what we're spending money on, but we shouldn't have to go to a committee or a group every time we need to spend a few hundred dollars or something like that. So I just want to make sure we keep that flexibility with this. The other thing is that I want to say is that the town is not the bad guy. If the money goes towards the government or to the town budget, that helps the community as a whole. That reduces taxes or fees that they have to pay. If we can use some of these funds to relieve some of the borrowing that we need to do so we don't have that debt that we're putting on residents now and in the future. That's all a good thing. It's not, so when you're saying town portion, community portion, I know there's needs out there in the community and I get that, but the town portion is not a bad thing. It helps everybody. I just want to make sure that that's understood. That was my point. Thank you. I don't think that there was disagreement about that. I think that what was concerned was is that we'd be clear about what our other needs, how we identify them and that we have a fair and considerate process that the advisory group is going through to get there. That's what the concern was is that encouraging people to come forward with their assessment of needs would not do it in such a way that we set up expectations that done or dashed. Lynn, did you have something else? Because I was thinking about our process now too as a committee. So I guess you took your hand on. So yeah, one other, though, when I talked about this with Sean, the analogy we came up with was kind of the CDBG process and trying to do something that mimics the CDBG process. Actually, Sean, it would be helpful if you put that back up because I was going to go back and try and confirm the big bullets. So because I think what I want to suggest first was that when you go below, when you start with the advisory group, actually go and just look at the bold and finance committee, finance committee, town council. There's a series of steps here and what we're getting at is the first two, of course, are our process and we're going to send this back to the town council as a proposal. But from that point going forward, that the town manager would have finalized an advisory group membership, that the advisory group would be assigned functions to do between July and the end of September, roughly. And I'm going to skip the bullets underneath because I think that's what our conversation has been about that we need to do some more work on. But the end one is that it evaluates and provides advisory recommendation to the town manager. Then the town manager comes back with a plan to the council for feedback. And then after getting feedback, the manager comes back one more time with a revised version for the council. So just that piece, just those bolded pieces. Does that seem right? Is a general construct to make it parallel to something like the community development block grant and how it's done? And can I add to that real quick, Andy? Yes, go ahead. And it probably reads a little clunky because normally things that do that go back for a council vote. For these funds, they don't require a vote, but the town manager feels really strongly that he wants to keep the council, he wants to stay, keep the council abreast of everything that's going on and keep them involved in how these funds are utilized. And so that's why there's getting feedback from the council a couple of times here. Kathy, use your hand up. Andy, the flow makes sense to me. I think the CDBG analogy is CDBG says we've got $150,000. And we can take proposals in the following four or five categories. These are all eligible, unlike CPA. It just says CPA has more money to spend. And you all come and make proposals. I think the question has been, and I definitely, Sonia, I totally agree with you. The question is, you know, are we talking about, let me, I'll just get, if 12 million, if I divide it in half, I've got 6 million. Are we talking about a pot of 6 million? That this process with proposals would come in? Or are we saying the town at a minimum will need 3 million of that, 4 million, whatever numbers. So the pot we're talking about that goes through all the different proposals would be other. Or Lynn started out with, is the town itself making a proposal? We have the following five things we want to do with it, which happens with the Community Preservation Act, where the town is there. So that's my only question about CDBG, because I understand Paul will make a decision, but telling people how big the pot of money is for what range of things we're looking for will be really important. And not then saying, oh, well, the town, there's 6 million, it turns out the town is identified 5.5 million dollars worth. And the others got ranked lower. So just avoid that scenario. So that's where, and I don't know what the right number is. So that's what I'm kind of looking for from for Sean, because I can think of revenue replacement and things we're doing as a town that I could spend most of that money. And I wouldn't be asking, what else is there out there? So that's just, do we need to, does finance need to, the committee report asked some guesstimate of whether the whole pot of money, a major part of money or whatever would set up, this is what the advisory group then is doing the listening sessions, the community needs. And I don't have a, this is the way I would do it, but I think it's just how much money are we putting on the table? And Kathy, maybe we need to, maybe the order of how these things in this list appear is what we need to change around. I mean, the town could spend all of the money. If we, we could figure out a way to spend all the money. I think the thing we're looking at is there may be things that are better uses of that money than how the town would spend it. And we're not going to know what those are until people, until we hear from people directly. Again, this is, this is focused on how they've been impacted by COVID. Primarily is what we're looking for. It's not sort of anything and, you know, any, any program that might come to mind. It's really sort of how they've been negatively impacted by COVID or what programs might help those that have been impacted by COVID. But, you know, I think that's the hard part with me, think of a number. I mean, I'm sure we can do some work and try to think about what are the things we definitely want to do. Or, you know, like I said, the enterprise funds are ones that jump out to the extent we can use the money for that. The enterprise funds have had a couple of bad years in a row. So there's, you know, there's sort of a baseline amount that Sonya and I could think about with Paul, that we would want to use that for the government side of it. But I don't know, I don't know if the right percentage is 50-50 or 75-25. I think that's hard to... I'm raising it as a question, not a, I know, because I'm just, I think of affordable housing that I can imagine if the housing community will come in and say we can, two million dollars of rent subsidies are needed right away. We can identify a long list of people that are in a rear with paying their rent, you know, that their landlords haven't evicted them yet. And I wouldn't want a scenario where we said, yes, but I don't think that is as great a need as the water enterprise fund. Or the sewer and, you know, I'm just trying to avoid that kind of, you know, pain in our community. So, and that's what I said, I don't know what the number is, but CDBG avoids that by saying we've got this much money for this set of things. And then you do competing needs within that, with an action plan. I mean, I think Bob's right. So I don't know whether we need to do that framing at the very start. So I'm, I'm posing that as a question because I would hate to Dorothy said, we want people to feel good about this, not, not that they thought it would go toward these needs. So that's it. And do we need anyone from the community, you know, an example would be the head of the survival center who is in contact with a broad group of people. Would you want someone on that to do the evaluating and providing advisory recommendations? So I don't know. And so that's a question. That's all Sean, that's, you know, because I can imagine rent subsidies, you said the town could spend it all rent subsidies could easily spend it all. Yeah, and I think I mean, that specific example, we did a rental subsidy program. And I know the state has a pretty robust rental subsidy program. So that would be a good example of one where, you know, we would like to see if there are other programs that exist for something like that one specifically, because I know that when I've heard that one in other places and I just know that I've heard that there's lots of money for rental subsidies. And maybe there are other barriers that that I would need to learn about. But I've heard that's a program that has a lot of funding at the state level. When Sean and I were speaking about this yesterday, sort of to get our minds together for today's meeting, one of the things we also talked about in this little bit of it alluded to in some of the comments today is that it didn't seem that it would be advisable to have somebody who ultimately is going to be a seeker of funds or an advocate for a component of funds serving on the advisory group. And the example I'll give is the housing advocate. Would we want somebody who's known in the community and very actively in advocating for housing to become a member of the advisory group because that then mix that person's role and poison the process. And so I just want to share that we had that conversation a little bit yesterday. Lynn, you were next. I want to see the list, Sean, where you could spend all the money. I want to know what the town's needs are before we go saying, hey, we're going to give this money to this, that and the other. I mean, as a town counselor, I need to know where we're hurting. And Sonia was absolutely right. There's nothing wrong with spending this on the town. It benefits everybody. So I'm really, I'm asking for that list. Yeah, I mean, so we've talked about it a bunch with water sewer. I mean, the three areas that come to mind as sort of the biggest areas are the sewer fund, the transportation fund, well, really the sewer fund and the transportation fund. There may be other areas and Sonia and I can talk about what other things she's seen in the in the budgets, but those are the two big ones that jump out where we have large revenue shortfalls this year. So I mean, if you if you tell me you could spend 12 million for shortfalls in the town before we start doing anything else, I think we at least at least need to understand that. And the other thing is, you know, Sonia, I've talked about this a lot. And again, this comes down to priorities as operating budgets took a zero percent increase in FY 21. And they're taking a two percent increase in FY 22. So again, those those two years alone are sort of below our normal level that we increase operating budgets. So that's another area that if that's how the town wanted to allocate its funds, it could allocate just operating budgets in general because we've had to take the schools you've heard about the cuts there and operating budgets have gone below their normal level for the last two years. So this is a follow up. So the transportation fund is below. How does that impact the town? What services would be provided only if we took some of this money and put it in that fund? And the same for the sewer? I'm really happy. This is a real question I'd like. So the transportation fund. So the first thing we will likely have to do if there's not an offset of funds and Sonia, you can correct me if I'm wrong or add to this is we'll basically have a zero reserve in the transportation fund. We've got a pretty small reserve in the transportation fund to begin with. And we would have to use all of it to close the deficit. And then the other piece would be looking at whatever indirect charges the transportation fund pays to the general fund. If there are any budgeted this year, those would probably be zeroed out. So that would create a revenue loss on the general fund side. And then if there's still deficit to make up, we would have to look at whether there are certain expenses that have to come over to the general fund or be produced all together. And to be specific on what it pays for, it pays for bus services, town share of bus services. Yeah, that's a small piece of it, but yeah. But that's part of what it is financing is bus services part of that would you actually have to cut the buses is what I'm so. In other words, the answer you gave me was interesting, but not one that I would give to somebody from the public because they would lose interest. If the fund is down, how's it going to hurt people? If we give money to the fund, how's it going to help people? If you're so and if it's hard to explain, although we all understand why you want to have money and reserves, you want to be ready to handle things, you want to be able to not shortchange the general fund by stopping giving a payment that they're used to getting. Then I suggest as several of us have said in the beginning that you set a percentage of money that would go for town things and some for other uses. But I also want to say I don't want to see people having to parade their wretchedness before a committee. So that's why the people you said you don't want the committee are so important. The people who run the whatever services we have, the agencies that we have in town, which aren't that many, but you know the health department, survival fund, the homeless shelter, affordable housing, they should be in contact with the element of need. I really don't think we want people saying coming and telling us the real truth. I had a horrible year. I had nobody for childcare. I think I'm going crazy because they're not going to come and tell us that. It may be totally true, but they're not going to come and tell us that. Can I interject something? Sure. Again, so your water and enterprise funds, how would that hurt? If we deplete our reserves completely, then that's going to affect the rates pretty significantly because we have a lot of debt out there and everything. So we use those reserves to kind of smooth out rate increases. But when you get rid of the reserves, then those rates are going to jump up because we have to cover the expenses. So it will definitely affect that people can understand. So that's a good example. Yes, it's easier to do on water and sewer. What does it do in transportation? Will it require us to raise our parking charges? That's the only source of revenue in transportation. So our parking fees would have to go up drastically or we would have to reduce some public transportation or expenses out of there in some way or another or subsidize it with general fund money. So there are impacts. Yeah, PBTA is so complicated. I don't get in there. We'll be there for half an hour. Bob? Yeah, I just wanted to kind of maybe clarify a point about what might be in the action plan and what it might, I think what typically is done is the authors look at not only what the need is, but how the proposed program will address that need and what is the outcome of spending this money on this particular problem. And I think if one could do that ahead of time where even if we allocated 50, 50 or 60, 40 or 75, 25, but if you could do that, I think it would provide, I think Dorothy mentioned it, a sort of evidence-based approach for saying, look, we really need to do these five things. And we can maybe do two or three of these other things and then have a debate about what those two or three other things should be. So I think, again, the action plan gives us the opportunity to lay out, here's the need, here's what else we could get to fill that need. And here's what we can do if we spend our money on these five things. So I think the purpose there is to have this really evidence-based approach where you've got a kind of a cause and effect for distributing the money the way that you lay out in the action plan. Andy, can I ask a quick follow up to that? Yeah, go ahead. So Bob, so one of the things you said was the first piece of the action plan is sort of a needs assessment, correct? Yeah, you want to, you want, well, it's not so much a needs assessment as you document the impact. So it's really an impact assessment. Right. So I guess that's the piece that, I mean, where I feel like a lot of the conversation is, is how do we do that? Or do you think that's something that staff do internally? Or is that a process where we reach out to the community to gauge the impacts? I think that's because I agree that I like the way the action plan format sounds. And I feel like when we structure this, not exactly, but we sort of, we're sort of structuring in a similar way of gauge the impact compared to sort of a framework for how, for what we think is most important and then explain what ones were, what impacts we're addressing. So how would you, what would be your thoughts on how you would gauge the impact? I don't think it needs to be a highly quantitative effort. I think typically you could take like, you know, the director of the senior center and have that individual kind of assess, well, what are the needs here? What are the needs there? What are they, you know, how many people does, does she think is impacted by this and what's the severity of the impacts? It can be a qualitative analysis. And you can kind of use a qualitative rubric, I think the word you use was, you know, sort of, are the impacts high? Are they impacts medium? Are the impacts low? You know, that kind of thing. Or are they high for certain individuals, but the number of individuals is small. So you can, you can do that. You don't have to do, you don't have to get like a survey of the town and, and, you know, have people fill out a form or something like that. Because, you know, that's a lot of work and it's not going to gain you much information. I mean, you want to go to the people in the town who understand what the impacts have been and get them to kind of put that down on paper in a way that can be used in a, in a evidence-based process in order to help decide how to allocate these funds. Does that answer your question? Yeah. I mean, I think to the extent that I guess the question is just, will that capture everything? And maybe that's the first pass as we do that and see what we get back. Yeah. And, and, you know, again, there are two tranches. I mean, one could, you don't have to allocate all $12 million in the first six months, right? I mean, you can, you can, you can look at, you know, the needs of the town that have to be addressed now. And then there may be needs of the town that can wait a year or a year and a half. And that, that money could be, you know, that, that in the second tranche, that money could be set aside for the second tranche, you know? And, and, and then you, you could say, well, we know there are these two big needs in the community, but that may not be all of the other money left. And you don't have to necessarily allocate all that money left. You can say, well, we're going to, we're going to do this now, and then we're going to see what happens. So I don't think we have to think about by September where we've allocated all $12 million somehow. I think we can be flexible. And I think, you know, I think, I think that is probably a sensible way to go because, you know, Sonya mentioned, you know, things come up. Well, you know, we want that flexibility to deal with things that come up without having to reallocate money from one program to another. So yeah, once again, I'll, I'll end up agreeing with Bob. I just also noticed, you know, going back and forth the state debate on this, the legislature is going to have its programs that it will be rolling out. So we're going to want to look at that because I think it's important that we don't duplicate what what state efforts are. The administration of finance just put out a one pager of programs available to individuals and small businesses. Sean, I sent you a copy of that, I think. Yeah, thank you. You know, that's a that's a list that you you work against. So that you, you don't end up replicating what's already out there. Admittedly, but those, you know, you can look at that list too, and you can see those are also to get to Bob's point. Those are also points of contact where you can use to to judge the impact the pandemic has had on other portions of the community without having this process where people come in and, you know, what I uncharitably sometimes referred to was the Queen for a day process. I'm old enough to remember that show. You know, you want to avoid that. You want to get some you want to get there's there's plenty of data kicking around out there that will give you some ideas of where to head. And again, the point that has been made repeatedly, we don't have to spend all this money right away. We do have to have some goals. And I will again insist that using this money to offset town expenses, capital expenses, using this money to restore those those depleted funds is a very positive thing that benefits everybody. I mean, we've heard time and time again in discussions about the water rates about how water rates impact people. If we can do something to restore that those funds and take some of the capital future capital burden away, we're helping a lot of people. That doesn't mean that you use all 12 billion, 12 million dollars in it. But thanks. Hey, Dorothy. While I was talking, I thought of something that used to be done in the past, of summer jobs programs, because when we talked about how the community leaders, people who run the agencies can help assess needs, I totally agree. But I think that you do see that maybe we don't have enough agencies that at this time, directly deal with people of color. So a summer jobs program targeted to but not limited to BIPOC people, those are usually funded year by year. And it was a great thing. It was a wonderful thing back in the day. I have I taught in some of those programs. It was a time when any kid was a college kid had a job on a playground helping other people do it. There's so many things that the town needs or could have done. And I think it would make it would be a very positive thing. So I'm just throwing that into the barrel. So where I think that we are at is that there's some agreement on several things. One is that we don't allocate all of the $12 million at once. We do it really is two separate pieces as it was defined at the beginning as tranches. I think there was a lot of feeling of the action plan as being a good right process to go forward. There was a think of feeling that we should consider town needs and find a way to get them to find early so that we don't create expectations of what we don't shortchange the town and we don't create expectations for other users of the funds that we set up a process that is open and transparent and people have confidence in. There seemed to be you know it was a little bit of discussion about whether a counselor should be on the working group. I was going to throw one thing out just to remind people of this that not every counselor will run for reelection. So if you have a counselor who's decided not to run for reelection puts them in a different place than the counselor who is running for reelection as far as what the community perception might be as well as the time that they have during this period to talk about it. I think that there was generally the big structure what I called the bold letter structure. There seemed to be least agreement that that seemed to be okay and the good structure what we're trying to do is figure out that big bulleted section of what it is that the advisory group is really trying to do and that's its composition and what this is about is what we're trying to get at. So if that summary is correct maybe the thing we should do is have Sean and I try and come up with a revised version of this that fits and then get it to you in advance of the next meeting and then we go ahead and have a meeting next week to then go over what we've come up with so that we have sort of a better agreement to go forward to the council on 12th. Andy can I pose one change to the structure based on what I've heard and see if it's consistent with what people are saying. So based on what I've heard it feels like the advisory group doing all this work over the summer is maybe not the right time for that to happen that maybe this advisory group bullet point would be replaced with preparation of an action plan and I assume that would be a Paul task and that this group would really maybe come in later once the action plan is complete and there's sort of a preliminary amount identified that could theoretically be opened up to the public for ideas then this group would come in which could potentially be in the fall or in the spring and I guess I'm looking to see if that's consistent with what people are saying because I don't I don't see the role of this advisory group if we need to do I don't think this this piece with the advisory group can happen the way it's proposed here if we're going to do an action plan first and we're going to come up with the town needs first I feel like then this maybe needs to come later. I think that makes a lot of sense. I believe between what Andy just said and what Sean just said we have a strong sense and meeting of you know a week from now look at that would be terrific. The the other just to react to Sean's piece taking taking a pause might not be a bad idea because it gives us the opportunity to see what the Commonwealth is going to do. Right right right and you know they've got to they've got to consider the legislature as a considerable change that they're going to be dispersing as well. Sean do you think we have enough to work with? Yeah I think that was that was helpful. I think we can rework this to capture pretty much what people have said today. And Sean you might want to look at timeline Sonia when we get for the first quarter of the next fiscal year when we will know what that is so we'll be closing out this year but you know just for the action plan can get informed by what's the world looking like too so not only the state but but pushing that off a bit timing wise makes a lot of sense that way too. Yeah I think that's right and I think the one other thing I would maybe just ask this group quickly to weigh in on there may be some immediate needs that we need to use these funds for for FY 21 and if we wait till the fall it might be too late at that point because things will be closed out and again I'm thinking the sewer fund the parking fund primarily are people do people think it's okay for us to go ahead and use those these funds to fill those revenue shortfalls and those are true revenue shortfalls where we budgeted a number and we're not going to hit that target so to me it's a very clean use of the funds and we'll do a lot of the things that people have said today. You know I'm trying to walk the line of getting feedback before using these funds but also using these funds where they're most needed which some of these impacts are going to happen before we can come back together with a final plan. If it stops the bleeding if it helps immediately then that's certainly an appropriate way to go about it and again first things first if the town is if the town isn't if a solid going concern we're not going to be helpful to anybody else so yeah good yeah I think I agree with that we might want to as we develop the revised plans actually flush it out a little bit we don't have to do too much but it might want to come back to the finance committee and then to the full council for feedback to the town manager before the town manager makes that decision but to certainly have a process that allows him to get to that decision and act on it sooner rather than later right so if we're going to meet a week from today we do have one thing we have to agree to because the council said we should each committee has to make its own decision as to whether it wants to meet in person or by Zoom and the first meeting was left to the chair but after that it was supposed to be a decision that was made by the group so the group's got to make that decision for next week Sonya and Dorothy have hands up I just have a clarification question why are we meeting in a week I think because I think that what Sean and I is are taking on in trying to make take today's conversation and frame it is you know fairly significant piece and before we say that this is the end product of the finance committee to go to the council I feel like it would really be good to have the finance committee have an opportunity not just to review it but to discuss it it may be a short meeting but I would feel more comfortable if all of you saw it and had a chance to comment discuss it and revise it okay as long as now I'm looking for numbers final numbers it's Sean's slide level of detail but just reformulated with no numbers in it need us to vote on the whether we meet by Zoom or not yes I'm trying to say something oh sorry sorry the only thing we might want to add to make next week if we're going to meet anyway just to make it productive or more even more productive would be to um I'll bring a list of what we anticipate maybe using the funds on now um the things that were in the FY22 budgets um the enterprise funds you know there'll be preliminary numbers but what we were thinking so that you guys can have a sense of that as well that would be helpful I have an opinion about meeting um in person or by Zoom and my that is that um I think we should continue by Zoom some committees benefit by meeting in person particularly if there's really our big arguments and you want to see who may be nodding and signing with you but that's really not how the finance committee operates and I I feel we fully express ourselves by Zoom and I think it is more convenient that's my two cents anybody want to uh put in a plug for meeting in person I prefer it but I can go either way do should we have a vote no oh okay we did ask the committee to choose to vote and decide and you can say you know through September 1st or whatever you want to do wasn't that what the request was to do it through September 1st as I recall that's it and then we start again so somebody want to offer a motion I move that the finance committee continue to meet virtually between now and July and September 1st 2021 I second okay so the motion is that we continue to meet in a Zoom type format not even going to bother with discussion I'm just going to go through the entire list and ask our resident members to speak up to on the issue but let's start with Kathy yes Dorothy yes Bob yes I I support it um Pat hi Bernie I'm in support of it Jane I'm also in support of it okay and and I'll support it also so we'll just make it unanimous to support of all members of the Lynn is I vote yes I think she made the motion which it remains unanimous to give me the first one that I've done in a while who made a motion and voted against her own motion but it does happen um so is there any unanticipated business here there have been no attendees so I'm not going to I just recognize that there've been no attendees that it takes care of the public comment question which was on the agenda is there anything in on an additional business that we didn't I just want to say to Pat's request I did send the link to the toolkits to Athena if you guys can't find it otherwise just google cdbgr d cd cdbg dr toolkit and it'll take you there thank you and and I have to confess that the company I worked for developed the toolkits and a lot of it is stuff that I and my staff had discussed for years so my fingerprints are on it I think I think you just volunteered for future I want to make sure that it's not copyrighted no no it's on the hot exchange okay it's free it's yeah in fact the company did it under a grant and not under a contract but the company policy is always that the whatever things that we do for our clients are the property of our clients we don't have copyright I mean that again thank you very much Bob and you said you sent it to Athena yeah I mean I just didn't think I should forward it to everyone now yeah just taking care of it she's forwarding it okay yeah I want to communicate with everybody by email don't blame me I don't either it should end up in the packet for today's meeting since it was discussed so if there's nothing else then I think that we can adjourn and we convene a week from now and Sean and I will do our best to do our work and get something back to you thank you thank you bye bye all thanks everyone bye Sonya bye thank you everybody