 meeting. Let me start again. Good evening. This is a meeting of the Amherst Town Council Finance Committee meeting. Other Councillors have been invited to attend as a committee of the whole. It is a special meeting of the Finance Committee meeting. And Andy Steinberg, who is Chair of the Finance Committee, will be chairing that. So based on Governor's orders, we are allowed to hold this meeting virtually. I am going to call on each of the Councillors and ask if they can hear us and we can hear them. And then Andy is going to call on the other people who are on the Finance Committee that are not and do the same thing. So I will begin with Alyssa Brewer. Present. Thank you. Pat D'Angeles. Present. Darcy Dumont. Here. Mandy Jo Hanneke. Present. George Ryan. Present. Evan Ross. Present. Steve Schreiber. I'm here. Kathy Shane. Here. Andy Steinberg. Present. Dorothy Pam. Here. Charlie Balmille. Present. Did I miss any Councillors? Me. Sarah Schwartz. Present. I'm sorry. Sarah Schwartz. Present. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to recognize that there's a quorum of the Finance Committee just who have already registered their presence previously. And we want to call the Finance Committee to order. But there are some members of the Finance Committee who are not Councillors. And so I need to confirm that they can hear and be heard. Bernie Kubiak. Unmute. You're on mute. You're on mute. Bernie. Present. Bob Hegner. Present. And is Jane Scheffler here? I'm here. Okay, so I think we have all members of the Finance Committee who have now checked in and confirmed that they can participate in the meeting. As Lynn noted, this is a meeting of the Finance Committee. It's a meeting to review the social services section of the budget. It is found on pages 186 through 189 of the proposed budget. And it is a part of the community services function. Section 5.5a of the Charter requires the Finance Committee to, and I quote, thoroughly review the budget and make a presentation and recommendation to the full-time council within 30 days of referral, unquote. Because it was, as noted, we did not have a quorum of both committees, the council and the committee. The budget submitted to the council on May 3rd, proposes the appropriation of $130,000 for fiscal year 22 as personnel services for two community responder positions. I will begin the meeting by asking the town manager to explain that recommendation. I will then ask members of the Finance Committee and councilors who are not members of the Finance Committee if they have any questions. Members of the community services working group are joining in to the meeting. I don't know, are they on this call now? Athena? They're in the audience. Okay. I will have to ask that if they need the opportunity to call the meeting to order once they join this meeting, because it would be in then a public meeting. And I will also, there will be an opportunity for the limited public commentary meeting when the community services working group here is here. I understand that they may have something additional to present, but I have asked that they not repeat the Monday presentation since all of the present have had the opportunity to see the Monday presentation. So with that, I'll turn it over to Paul. And since he's made the budget proposal, we want to start by hearing from him. And as I say, I've been opening it up to councilors and members of the Finance Committee to ask questions as a next step. Paul? Thank you, Andy. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to present this portion of the budget. I'm glad that you've carved out a separate day to do it, because it's an important significant proposal. And I especially recognize that the Finance Committee has already had one three-hour meeting today, and we'll try to be efficient in the presentation so we can get to questions and answers and comments after that. I want to note that I'm joined here by several members of our staff, because there are a lot of people who are involved in helping to form this. First is our police chief, Scott Livingstone, Captain Ron Young, and Captain Gabe Ting. Our dispatch center chief is Mike Curtin is here, fire chief Tim Nelson, our director of senior services, Mary Beth Ogilovitz, and then our finance team, Sonia Aldridge and Sean Mangano are all in the room. I think that's who I think that's everybody that's here that I recognize. Okay. So if you want to start the slide deck, Athena? So we're in a unique moment in history. We have the opportunity to listen to our community and actually for the community to speak and align the services we provide, specifically public safety services and policing. I've been welcome to sit with the community safety working group for the intense work that they have done. What has come out of their work has created a new dialogue within the community. The work they have done shaped this revised proposal, and on a personal note, changed how I think about my role in public policy in general. Next slide. Based on the report of the working group, I believe that we are united on the goal of reimagining public safety so that every incident receives the right response at the right time. Currently, we have one tool for any issue that comes up, whether it's a kitten stuck in a tree or a person sleeping in a bank vestibule or a person with a gun in the woods. That tool is a police officer with a cruiser. These police officers are well trained with a broad range of skill sets. But it isn't always the best way to respond to a call. And I think both the members of the public have said that. The members of the police department have said that. Many people say that it's a limited tool set. The proposal in concert with the recommendations of the working group and in line with dozens of other communities who are exploring the same area, is to create a new department to be located in the community services section of the budget to offer unarmed community responders to designated calls. If we get this right, this in turn will change the role and mission of our police officers. It's important to note that this is not the first time we have looked at this type of redefinition of policing. Since the 80s, the town has moved dispatch from uniformed officers to civilians, established an animal welfare officer, has established civilian parking enforcement officers. And most recently, if you recall, a year ago, we established the COVID ambassadors because we felt that it was important for non-uniformed officers to be responding to complaints about COVID and things like that. So there's always been a willingness and an eagerness to try to align our services with the need of the time. So next slide. So why is now the right time? So it's a rare occurrence for the town to establish an entirely new department. With this proposal, budget proposal, I'll be bringing a detailed proposal to the council to take this important step. This is the opportune time to take the significant step in our government. Last year, the town council adopted goals, important groundwork, and vision has been laid out by the working group, and community support has been offered. Town staff, most importantly the police chief and his leadership team, supports delivering services on key calls in a different way. The working groups report details many of the values that should be incorporated in this program. I won't document them here, but I highly recommend that the working groups that you read, the working group's software reports, you haven't already. It really is a good piece of work. And also, there are dozens of other communities who are engaging in the same kind of work that we are now. So there's an opportunity for us to learn to look at best practices and to share our experiences with other communities as well. And then there are some other opportunities such as funding. We believe there will be grant opportunities coming our way. And then we know that this conversation is happening not just in the town of Amherst, but also on campuses of Amherst College and University of Massachusetts. Next slide. So what I'm going to do tonight, and this is sort of the direction of the slide, is I want to talk about the community responder program and talk about the elements of that and give you a timeline, update on the proposal, things like that. Talk about future fiscal years as well. I want to talk additionally about the other proposals, some of the other proposals that the community safety working group had identified in their report. And then we'll open that up for questions. Next slide. So there are many considerations to take into consideration. And we want to make sure that our plan that we develop is aligned with the resources that we have. We want it to be based on data analysis. We want to make sure that we will have adequate staffing when we put forth a community responder program, and we want to have the appropriate staffing at the police department. And we want to make sure that before we launch a program, we have all the things set up so that it will be a success. The goal for all of us is that this be a successful program and that be sustainable over time. And that includes training, policies and procedures in a long-term implementation plan. The proof of concept is what is proposed. We really want to show that it will really work. Is the new program effective at a moment of crisis? Are communication lines strong and redundant? Do all parties understand their roles and the others who may be responding? So our mission is to match our resources to our needs. And right now, I think there's a feeling that this is not the case. We want to craft a program that meets the needs of the calls being handled, which is, again, the right response at the right time. Next slide. So what I have included in this is the funding for in the community services budget. So we purposely, in listening to the working group, have taken this in a different section of the budget so we can have an acknowledgement of where it really is about a different way of responding to calls. The intention is to plan and pilot the program for implementation in FY22. And then in the process, establish baseline metrics that we can then measure and follow up on and see how the program is doing. Is it handling the right calls? Are we transferring the calls, the right calls to the program? And are they able to handle them? Does it need to be adjusted? We want to make sure that this program is recalibrated based on any kind of feedback we get from people who are making calls and how we respond to them. Also, we want to talk about the calls that aren't going into 911. We want to see if there's additional calls that might come directly to community responders and what that would look like because there is a sense that there are people who won't call 911 that maybe will call a community responder program for support. Next slide. So I'm not going to go into the details. This slide deck is in your packets. But I wanted to lay out basically a 11-month plan for how we get from here to there with some items that would happen month by month. So we would start in July. Actually, we would probably start in June because I'll talk about that in a second. And we would pull together our management team. We would request participation from members of the community safety working group if they are willing to do that. We would want to engage with other stakeholder groups who may benefit, will benefit from this program, such as those people experiencing homelessness, substance abuse, mental health challenges, things like that. We'll want to look at the data that we need to collect through the LEAP program, which I'll talk about in a second, and other social service providers who are already doing some of this work in a different way that the police department and fire department utilize currently. We want to talk to the fire department. I mean, Tim will be part of the program, but to understand they're on the front lines for many of these calls as well. And then we want to finalize that first month, the timeline. That group's really locked down the timeline so we have benchmarks and milestones that we'll hit. So in August, we'll talk about the kinds of calls that we'll need to go to the community responders program. We will utilize the support of the LEAP program who has done this for many communities. And they have an experience and sort of can make an informed judgment about what kinds of calls are good to be reprogrammed. We want to develop more of the program details. Are we doing employees, contracts for services? What's the role of the fire department? The fire department has paramedics on duty 24-7. Are there ways that we can access additional firefighters to provide support for the program? I think these things should all be on the table. And then in August also before, I want to make sure that we can have a meeting with the full community safety working group to review the progress to date and gather additional input. This is the group of people who've put as much time as anybody on this program to date. In September, we'd be looking for job descriptions for the LEAP community responder. This would be a leadership position who will be the primary person charged with implementing the program. And we'd be doing job descriptions for all the community responders. We'd want to be developing our policies and procedures. And in September is when I would make the initial departmental proposal to the town council with all the backup that you would expect. And I'd be looking to you for the kinds of information you will want for that to make a successful presentation. Just as a footnote, under the town charter to create a new department, the town council has to approve it. Next slide. So in October, I assume that there'll be a process with the town council to review the departmental proposal. Typically, the town council refers it to one or more committees. So we would be reviewing that with the different committees that the council chooses to have it discussed. We'd be finalizing our policies and procedures. We would hope that the council would approve the new department in October. We'd be setting up the training programs that these responders would need. And we would have recruited our LEAP community responder. And then in November, we have the person working. We start recruiting with that person taking the lead. We start recruiting our community responders. December, we finalize our training program. We get the all the material in place such as a vehicle or vehicles. We have to have the community responder space where they're going to be located, identified and outfitted and all the little logistics. And yet they seem small, but they take each one might take time. In January, we declare this program, the pilot program operational. And we'd start training. I think, you know, many of these programs require up to 50 hours or more of training for community responders. And so we want to have adequate and ample time for the responders because they will be taking on some difficult things. We make sure they have all the de-escalation techniques and everything that they need to make it be a successful responder. Next slide. So by February, we want to have everybody hired. We think we want to have the training being completed. We want to have the finalize all the protocols for call handling by the dispatchers. We want to, and March, and we want to keep the training going. And we want to, we will have to do training of all of our dispatchers. We have a number of dispatchers who work around the clock, so they all have to be trained and understand the processes. We will need to talk about alternative phone numbers, how we handle those, if there's a dedicated line for handling calls. There's some interest with the working group to have a line that would go straight to the responders. I think with our new phone system that is, has many more enhancements. That is more achievable with our current phone system. We have to understand, are these calls going to be recorded or not? How are they, how are we going to monitor things if they need to be monitored? What are the legal ramifications of these types of things? And, you know, I think that depending on how we work through the dispatch and the phone call thing, we set up a, just as a side note, during COVID we set up a separate call in line, the COVID hotline that was staffed many hours all day during the week and then on weekends as well by ambassadors so that there was a live person answering the call during the peak times when calls were coming in. And we found that to be a high value thing because it was important for people to, when they call, when they're calling in a crisis that they get a voice, they don't get a machine, someone says I'll call you back. So staffing that up appropriately will be important task to figure out how to make that happen. And April will be looking to present a report to the council on how the program is working because in May I'll be presenting a new budget for FY23 and I think they'll probably be talking about FY24 as well in order to keep the program up and running. Next slide please. So I'm going to ask Sean to go through the budgetary pieces of this if you don't mind, Sean. Yeah, so the first piece here is the implementation team. This is the different department heads that would be involved in sort of that first phase, the tasks that were described. We didn't quantify what this would be but obviously there's a there's a value to this. The second piece are the community responders themselves and so there's sort of a lead community responder which is the what we've labeled here as a director and then there we are proposing four actual community responders for the first year and so the value of that again these are all estimates until we actually hire people and make decisions about where they would fall on a on a salary grid and what what salary grids they would fall on but our estimate for that piece of it is 150,000 for FY22 and our proposed way we would fund this is 130 that was reallocated from the police department to the social services department and then we also identified in a at a prior finance committee meeting that there was also about $40,000 in educational incentives that we felt we could repurpose as well. The next piece is an administrative support position again so you can see there's different time frames for based on the calendar that we just discussed and so this would be a seven month position we're estimating this would cost about 30,000 this would also come from the the staffing and the educational incentives budget between the 130 and the 40,000 we identified it's about 170,000 so we're a little bit short of that target but again there's going to be a lot of wiggle there's going to be a lot of change when we actually fill these positions we're estimating the benefits associated with those positions will be around $45,000 we don't know who will who won't elect health insurance so this is just an estimate at this point and then the last piece that we're proposing is to use about $250,000 from either the American Rescue Plan Act or other grants if we identify them under the American Rescue Plan Act the criteria that this would fall under would be the revenue replacement criteria and so we're proposing that to be used for the consulting that would go on the training the purchase of a vehicle supplies for year one supplies because there would be a greater amount of supplies needed to be purchased in the first year and outfitting the space and so the total of all these these different pieces about 475,000 thanks next slide thanks John so there's two things that we're doing now in May and June of this year the first is we have had many discussions as has the members of the community safety working group with a group called the law enforcement action partnership and they have become sort of specialists in developing community responder programs and other alternative policing efforts I know the chief and his staff were on a call today with them talking about the calls that need to be analyzed and we would we will seek to contract with them it's in this fiscal year to provide some of the data that we need such as truly analyzing the calls for service understanding how we categorize calls and we will open the that's why my curtain is here from the dispatch that you can help if there are any questions along that we want them to help us with asset mapping and how other towns have done record keeping things like that the other thing is that there is a you know I talked about how we have many communities all working in the same space at the same time not not everyone but many of them and we're all at different phases so Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has reached out and they have a government performance lab and we are applying this week to to be a part of their Harvard their community of practice where they will group communities based on where they are in the process so we are sort of in the middle of the process we are we're not just thinking about it we're actually doing it but we're not at the Eugene or Aberkirk or Denver model where they're looking at the next phase and so in fact the call I was on had people from Eugene and Aberkirk in Houston Texas and places like that because they're looking for their own community of practice supported by the Kennedy School because we're all we can learn from each other and we have to create a program that's unique to our town because we are a unique town um we're a unique town partially because the university but there are other university towns but we're relatively small compared to a lot of the other communities that are building this so that has to be taken into consideration but they have other small communities that they I'm hoping that they'll group us with so they are this is a no-cost thing it's an application we have to get get approved and they will provide 12 months of support uh technical assistance as we need it um and it really is you know learning about that this was available sort of matched up so perfectly because we're in this spot and we want to be able to do this in a really smart way um so in this in this program if we get if we get admitted to it we'll begin in August of 2021 next slide so uh these are the types of things that um we will the community safety working group has a pretty deep they've identified all these things I mean quite honestly have stole a lot of this out of their report because you know they've identified the issues that we need to be talking about um you know some of the other things that might be in here is um what data is public what are the legal requirements you know if are they mandatory reporters um if they come into a certain situation there are a myriad of legal issues that we want to make sure that we don't put anybody that we hire into a bad situation legally or um through safety it's just physical safety either or and so and we also as I mentioned early I want to we want to talk about what calls are not going to 911 um and talk about the alternative um phone systems that we might have to we might look to implement as part of this program so next slide so this is you know where it becomes more difficult because I think year one we never thought was going to be a challenge but years two three and beyond will be because we anticipate that the program will grow um we anticipate that you know right now we're funding it basically for half a year we're going to automatically have to fund it for a full year even if it doesn't add any new people there's a there's a impact on the budget but we also anticipate that there will be a need for additional community responders and there's a cost to that and this is probably the most important part of the work that we need to do um so I think that we are um looking at adding significant funds and as everybody knows under the the limits of proposition two and a half we're limited to increasing our budget our property tax by two and a half percent plus any new growth that comes so this will be a important factor to see how we can fund this program um going forward next slide so I want to list some of the challenges um that are out there so and I think I've you know there is the the budget for FY 22 there is a tremendous urgency for change that we need to address and that's why we have a fairly aggressive timeline if you looked at Northampton they're taking a year to plan they're hiring a they're taking a different approach so they're we're trying to do the planning in about six or seven months um we need to have a detailed plan for implementing and piloting I think the council will require a pretty comprehensive plan in order to approve a new department for the town uh I've talked about the the budget challenges you know we want to really craft a program that matches the needs of the town and we want to create we want to recruit excellent community responders I think some of the research that's been done by the working group was that it might not be the degree you have it might be the attitude that you bring to the job and we want to understand the labor market um talking to other social service agencies who might be hiring the same types of people and so we can align our hiring requirements to match the needs of the program and the skills are readily available with our candidates and once we have this program up and running and it's successful we want to ensure that the police department's mission and purpose are aligned with the staffing provided by the town so if we have a new program in place it means we need to be thinking about what is the police department's role as well going forward and the fire department for that matter might have impact on both of those things um and then the key though again just from looking talking to people is that making sure to recognize that we always think that Amherst is unique and in this situation we truly are and we need to put the time in to craft the program so it meets the needs of our community members our goal is to create a policing program and community safety response program that meets the needs of our community next slide so I wanted to address some of the other items that were in the working group so the the working group took a broader look at the issues it was examining um it shot it sought to ensure public safety response is anti-racist equitable just and fair but they did the next thing too they wanted to offer preventive services that get at the root of assisting residents to avoid public safety involvement in the first place and I commend them for that taking that extra step and I want to address some of the things that they have talked about and because um it aligned with some of the things we've been thinking some of them have aligned with some of the things we've been thinking about so the first is um how is the town addressing diversity equity and inclusion work many people called DEI and you'll see that in this presentation diversity equity inclusion my son is um works with difficult children and and and they they call it Jedi justice equity diversity and inclusion because the kids get excited about being part of the Jedi team um so the budget proposal calls for the creation of a DEI coordinator which is already in the in the budget as presented and by reallocating an existing position and using some ARPA funds to create a new position that will be a DEI coordinator the the the budget that you have in front of you also includes a separate $80,000 request for anti-racism work that is included in the town manager's budget this is that $80,000 that was in last year's budget that paid for the consulting group and some stipends for the working group and some other work by the by the core equity team for the town of Amherst in addition uh I'm prepared to dedicate the funds allocated to the economic development director position currently that's in the town manager's budget and to reallocate those funds to a DEI director position um this is a difficult decision on my part um because both are high needs um but I feel like at this moment in time where we are um this is a higher priority for the community and and prepare to reallocate those funds to this position next slide so the proposal also addressed the need for a youth empowerment center and you know this definitely merits exploration um we think it should be done in partnership with the schools the schools already have a family center that does some of the same things but probably not everything so I think we can there's some lessons to be learned from the work that they did on their program but also um sort of gauge how this would look there and so I would ask our new DEI director and our new recreation director to work on this this proposal for this for the next budget season next slide and likewise with the BIPOC cultural center which the the working group I articulated as a high value we would be looking at this along the same lines as the as the previous options next slide and then the the community safety working group is going to be working on the next phase of their charge which is the resident oversight board and um and I'm eager to hear and work with them on what that type with that oversight board just look like so I don't want to really opine on much of this I can I believe I can speak for the chief and he'll scream if I don't but we both support the creation of a oversight board of some sort that that gives a place for people to go if they have complaints that aren't being handled well by the police department and we want to develop this the charge for the oversight group and review that with the council as well and you know there is if there are funds needed to support this this work we'd be looking at that 80 000 that's set aside in the town manager's budget for some of this work next slide so that's our presentation my presentation and so I look forward to questions and concerns you may have thank you paul um appreciate the presentation and i'm going to be recognizing both counselors and um resident members of finance committee in thordering which hands get raised so please use the hand raised function and we'll start with uh Melissa Brewer um thank you for that presentation paul and i'm so excited that you were able to share those slides with us earlier today in between all the other meetings and i'm also really excited to see the progress that we've made since the initial amount of money that was discussed for this and and just the way you've taken everything to heart and tried to figure out creative ways to approach it so this is incredibly interesting and I really look forward to our deliberation I have a small thing that I feel like is actually a framing issue that actually matters and I don't want to detract from really meaty discussions but I am really my gut instinct when you first brought this up is I love the fact that it's under community services because people complain about you know how much money do we actually spend on serving people in different ways and so obviously public safety is one of those ways but the senior center veterans recreation pools etc I really dislike dislike is not a strong enough word calling this social services social services feels like a throwback to 1950s welfare programs for needy people as opposed to something that benefits our entire community so I don't want to ask you to pay somebody for branding and I know you had to call it something and I appreciate totally that it's within the community services umbrella that makes so much sense to me but let's have everybody put their heads together and come up with another name for it because I really feel like it calls this out as a separate thing when it's not it's something that's literally for everyone far more so than the senior center is for example or veteran services is which have much narrower populations so I look forward to that just so that we can make it clear that this is a very holistic approach that you're promoting and that's intended here and sometimes those words do matter so thank you. I can answer that Andy so I think that's a really good point I think we did that because Sonya can weigh in here we hit a budget line item that was already established was that Sonya doing it I mean it was really it was more like do we create a new budget line item or do we just take one that's already in existence and so that somebody think you're right we can look at renaming that. Yeah we can we can rebrand that going forward to something else than social services the only the only thing we'll have to keep in mind is if there's other things we do in the future then we may have to create a separate grouping which is something we can do so yeah it's just a chart of account thing. So again we're opening we're open for questions Kathy. I do want to thank you Paul um you know the distance between what we saw as one little piece of a budget to this larger view and I definitely think thinking about this is a next year will be a transitional period for us um I as some people know I've have a background or for years worked on healthcare policy and we would come up with fabulous ideas and people would say how do you plan on implementing them and can you get them up and running next week and it would turn out we actually couldn't get them up and running next week you know but we could get them up and running it wasn't that they weren't doable so I I just have a couple questions about the the coming year but also as you started to look at the future years um I noticed that in our budget we just got third quarter estimates in on the current year budget and it looks like we will be running under budget in the police department probably police line at least in part because two positions weren't full so can one dedicate that amount to the new program going forward can you do it in a way that it it becomes excess in this year goes into reserves but comes back out as part of funding for a new program because we can use reserves that way so that's a question on that part of money um uh secondly and I know Alyssa knows far more about this than I do but the we just had a discussion in the meeting before about the impact fund the marijuana community impact fund and how restricted it is it does say you can buy vehicles with it it does say you can do mental health training with it again it's around marijuana and it's more around drug but at least some of these calls so can any of that and there might not be an answer to that but can any of that be drawn on because it's a part of money that we haven't touched on so I'll stop with those two questions I have a question about the current budget too but I just wanted to get those two in because I've been going back and forth with the budget trying to think of how do we get the first year program running up up and running and and be ready to build on in year two and build on rapidly but get a healthy enough start so we can really as you said be saying how well is it working can we get everything in order so I was looking for potential sources of additional money as we need them Sean do I help with that or do you I'm happy to do it I mean yet Sean go ahead yeah yeah sure so the first piece I think was can we use the the amount that the police department's coming in under budget this year for to support the program next year potentially I mean that's not an ongoing revenue source again that's sort of like using reserves to to fund something but potentially again that's going to fall to free cash and if there's a use we decided in the future that we need to pay for out of reserves that could be an option again we're going to look we were proposing to look at the grant first before we dip into that but again it's an option for the for the council to decide what was the second question Kathy you marijuana money marijuana yeah no that's something we've talked about actually we're trying to work on a you know we plan to come back to talk to the council about that money in the I think it was going to be in the summer of the fall we were going to have a more comprehensive discussion with the council about how to allocate that you know our initial thoughts are that some of that money could go to support this program it could also go to support other mental health programming in town and it can also we also are thinking it could go to support some mental health programming at the schools or in some substance abuse education at the schools as well so I think the answer is yes to that and we wanted to have that conversation in the fall about the plan for using that money going forward and I just follow up on both so if those pots become available to greater or lesser extent in what you laid out as a first I understand this is just the FY 22 does that potentially either expand to another responder position expand to and those decisions could be made in the spring because it's money that's being kind of held in a bucket to say we could draw on that money so that was where I was thinking on yeah yeah the cannabis money is something that could be appropriated again if we come in the fall and have that conversation and that's it's decided that we're going to go down the route of using it to add a another community responder that's a decision that could be made in the in the spring because that money we haven't included in the budget at all yet and then the other pots how long is the the current the new federal money that you're you've got that 250 thousand that's it that's expands over three years so is that potentially a source for not nick for but FY 23 and 24 potentially again so yeah it goes till FY 24 and it can even depend on what you're doing extend even a little bit beyond that there's going to be a lot of needs for that money and this could be one of them that money is meant for if you read the eligible uses it's meant for you know COVID response and economic recovery and a lot of other issues but this could be one of them the the eligible use that we are considering when we talk about using those funds for this program is one that's called revenue replacement and that use is capped and it's capped based on a calculation that you you can show how much revenue you actually are down compared to where you were before COVID and so you do that calculation several times throughout the grant so you know in this first year we anticipate that number is going to be a potentially a larger number for revenue replacement because our revenues are down quite a bit from where they were pre-pandemic but as we go forward in the out years and as things start to recover that number is going to shrink so we don't know exactly how much will be available in year two or year three for that eligible use but that is again that's something we were considering as part of this plan thank you Steve thank you and thank you for the presentation and I was also very moved by the community service working group the community safety working group presentation on Monday I didn't say much then but I do have some questions here some of them are kind of nerdy questions so Massachusetts is one of the most heavily regulated states regarding professions and occupations so my question really has to do with what actually is regulated by like what are the things that somebody who's a sworn police officer actually have to do or a firefighter or an EMT so since community responder it seems like a relatively new kind of a job description in the Commonwealth I'm just curious what those boundaries might be in terms of everything from licensing to union contracts to you know federal standards so that's that's not a necessary question that has to be answered now well little can we take a crack at it yeah actually I can I babble away while sure yeah yeah so a friend of mine who's been a police chief in a number of communities turned me on to Sunnyvale California and Kalamazoo Michigan obviously different states which are communities which have cross training between the various community safety groups so for example police fire EMT and maybe others especially in Sunnydale are kind of there's a unified approach where a police officer can go respond to a fire call as a firefighter and you know vice versa is how I understand that so I'm just curious because creating another department causes inefficience sort of inefficiencies I'm really I'm literally babbling here and then the last thing I wanted to say is obviously a new fire department is on the capital priority list but I hope that we as we're thinking about community safety obviously a new fire building is very much part of the community safety complex but it's possible that as we're as to this department matures or whatever matures that the fire department can be a reasonable co-located space for the community responders so that's my babbling and I'd love to hear what Paul was going to say for anyone else yeah so I just want so that you know the Tim Tim Nelson our fire chief has had some really creative ideas on how can we utilize the fire department to support this mission and his team is very open to thinking about because they're all paramedics and they're on duty 24 hours a day um what what you know and so that that's an opportunity that we should address in terms of all the legal stuff I'd look to either Scott or Mary Beth who Mary Beth's license social worker Scott of course knows everything about policing do either or both of you want to address that if you want to go first Mary Beth or there we go I guess I would I would distinguish these positions as really more focused on behavioral health management if you look at the models that are out there they are typically individuals who expertise with mental health crisis substance use poverty related issues homelessness food insecurity so they tend to be more of an expertise with social work than individuals who are trained as law enforcement and and in many of the contracts including cahoots it states specifically that the community responders are not law enforcement nor are they authorized to act their eyes so for instance they couldn't they couldn't enforce a trespass order they wouldn't do something like that they would not serve somebody with a trespass order they might respond to a trespass call to de-escalate their response and how they perform their work is very different and it's behaviorally based and so that's I just think a sort of a primer of the distinction between those two facets and what I also would know is that in all of the models that I have read and researched and I used to teach a course mental health and the law so I've spent many years it's a professional passion of mine is that these models are highly successful when they are collaborative and by collaborative it is everybody understands what the roles and functions are and the boundaries and limits and the specific expertise that each team brings so when EMT brings a very specialized medical approach and and the team as they begin to work together and call and cross train you know they learn when it is appropriate to maybe call in for assistance or to get back up but they really are collaborative and that they tend to also have round tables so once a month you would have defense attorneys meeting with the fire department, the police department, community stakeholders, behavioral health providers, the community responders and those individuals who are working with those who tend to be served more frequently by these processes so I didn't I didn't know if that makes sense or answers in part what you're looking for. Scott did you want to add anything to that? Yeah and I would just touch on Steve the specifics about a co-response or co-fire police response I'm familiar with some in the south where there are fewer restrictions and fewer training responsibilities for police and fire I'm not familiar with the column of zoo Michigan one but the mandates and licensing for police officers is extensive and I know it is to some degree with the fire and Jimmy could jump on board but you know just the initial training for to become a police officer is 24 to 26 weeks of training and then there's annual trainings that go along with that and then additional annual in-service trainings of a minimum of 40 hours annually and usually more around 70 so specific to firearms and first aid response and you know the district attorney's mandates as first line reporters and that sort of thing it would be in a very difficult process to go through for either a fireman or for a police officer to be cross-trained I don't know if we could do it. That makes sense thank you so much. From the fire park yeah. Tim do you want to add? Yeah I would agree with that you see that a lot in the south and in the southwest they're I mean they're called public safety officers and really what you get is a high a hybrid and it's almost the jack of all trades with master of none you really don't get the full flavor of the fire or police officer with that it's it's the last time I heard it heard it's broad brought up was years years and years and years ago here in in in mass and it's it's something that would be tough to get through we're a lot more really we're a lot of a lot this state is a lot more strict in term in terms of training a certain sort of occasion then you'll find down south or in the or in the the south the south southwest for each for each of those questions. So shall we? Yeah I'm also full of hope and excitement that we are really working hard and thank you Paul and the implementation team each one of you who's putting in extra hours because I know this work is so important and so overdue and so really excited about that. My question last time was around what kind of calls are going to go to the Cres program and what I heard from the community safety working group last time and then from Paul today is that Leap will be doing that work for us so that sounds really exciting to me and when I went to Leap's website that's a question I had was there are two categories of calls one were behavioral health calls and these are the ones that typically go to these programs is behavioral health which is lower risk calls related to mental health addiction homelessness and the second was around quality of life so disturbances suspicious persons trespassing so the question was sort of you know this idea that we want to make sure that this program is a success and which means that we want to be able to staff it fully because of people are feeling they don't know who to call and it's not so you know so so do we have a sense of which category are we doing both at the same time or it seems like we may want to start with behavioral health first and so which category are we starting with and the second question is do we have a sense of how many that is that do we have will a staff of five people be enough because that seems really important that whatever we decide that we have the staff to be able to respond to will five people be enough and then the third thing I wanted to say was that you know as a person of color I understand racism you know I'm from South Asia so no way pretend that I understand what Latina women go through or black women go through but I have experienced racism and I think it's a systemic thing and we cannot separate policing from the rest of you know racism in our community and so investing in a diversity officer is really important so I'm happy to see that you have that position but that being said I also heard the goal is that we want to make the crisis successful and sustainable which means we want to also keep increasing our revenues without burdening people with property taxes and so forth and investing in an economic development director is really important because revenue will not grow on its own and we really really need someone to focus on that even if you plan to commit that this percentage of the revenue that will be generated from the economic development director goes to the Crest program or whatever but but we really do need to invest in an economic development director to make sure that we are creating new channels of revenue for our town so that's all so on the calls do it Scott or Mike I mean you had that conversation recently with leap I think yes um Shalini so Captain Ting and I met for the third time with the law enforcement action partnership this morning and we have previously sent them all of our call volumes everything that we respond to so they are beginning the process of nitpicking what each call means and what it entails and they're doing this with a number of communities we might be the smallest community they're dealing with that's okay they're comfortable with that so this morning's meeting with Captain Ting and I involved trying to dig into the weeds okay what does this call actually mean now you didn't understand like noise disturbances um how does that work and what kind of a response would that be for a for a university community so we had to explain it could be anything from two people on a porch talking too loudly to five thousand people at a at a you know mega mega party so you know they're we're trying to now go into the weeds and Captain Ting is really crunchy numbers for them about what every call means what the response would look like and they've pretty much identified it looks like maybe four or five categories of calls that we might be able to divert some not all calls to a crest group so for instance not every something simple like a well-being check right so a well-being check could be a parent who's calling because they haven't heard from their student for a day and a day and a half and we get those types of calls I texted my daughter and she hasn't responded to me could you check on it that's simple right and then most recently we had one last week where nobody had heard from this person and they had been deceased for over a week so there's differences where community responders could handle types of close types of calls and and then the dispatchers would need to do more in depth I hate to use the word questioning but getting more information from the callers about what exactly it is they're looking for for a response so I think there's going to be a lot more work that the elite groups is going to be requesting of us and of probably other town department so they're going to be expanding who they're going to be talking to and you have to remind me of the other two questions Shalini yeah one was then do we feel that five people will be enough I think you have a budget for five people will be enough to so we see this as a pilot program and having it work at a small level and then being able to analyze it and evaluate it initially and that's why you know it's a several month evaluation period that then would be looked at like for higher higher level of funding for FY 23 I mean one of the challenges for us is when do calls come in it's all it's not just the type of calls but also when do we tend to see those calls we know that there's there's a pattern typically for most calls and what is the the goal that we're doing are we saying we want to answer 100% of the calls or is 80% enough or is 50% we you know we want to establish what is the right level of response that we are trying to achieve and what's the response time expectation so I think when you're building the program we want to set up the metric so that we can say is the program working or not is it not working because we didn't give it adequate resources we need to add people so it does work better it's looking at a program you know as you're building a program you want to make sure that it's again our metric is about does it make the community feel safer at the end of the day because we responded differently and I think it will I think the evidence from other communities is that it does it doesn't fix every problem and we don't claim that it will but I think this is an important step and the third was but economic development yeah you know I hear you on that and you know it's it's also an important position you know we will explore other avenues of funding to support that effort that work you know if a year ago Dave Zomek after the murder of George Floyd we just said we are woefully and ill equipped to really process the importance of this because we're who we are and we didn't and we didn't have the enough of our of the BIPOC community available and present and in a decision-making role that would would have they need we need we need that presence I hear you thank you I appreciate that thank you um so I'm gonna get back to money for a little bit because I appreciate the need to find an ongoing revenue source for funding of this and so when I was doing my calculations on the police line budget I know we froze two positions this year but I also know four to five positions are open and in the budget there's about on the policing line there's about four point eight million dollars in salaries for approximately 48 positions which averages out to about a hundred thousand a position you said for the community services that you were moving two positions over but only funded a hundred and thirty thousand which I assume are starting salaries for police officers but the positions that became vacant were not being paid starting salaries so I'm wondering why the those two positions equated only to 130,000 and not closer to 200,000 and then on top of that if we have four positions open is it possible to move those other two positions salaries over to get closer to 400,000 dollars given just the dividing of positions into amount of money in the salary line that would would give us without even having to use the replacement funds or much less use of replacement funds under the ARPA or I'm not sure whatever it's called government you know federal funds to start doing that without you know without necessarily harming the police response for the next year because I know when you've got seven months of no response at all from this Cresc program because it takes time to bring up the police by default are doing those responses so we can't you know transfer things over immediately and all but but with that you know I to follow up on Shalini's point about our four to five employees enough it sounds like you're starting with a one shift five days a week plan maybe seven days a week plan so eight hours a day of of doing this if you're going to have all four employees working at the same time if not are we only are we looking given given the Cresc the community safety working groups proposal of two two two-person teams per shift so is the plan to start with essentially a third you know sort of one shift a day instead of two or three shifts a day or is the plan to start 24 hours a day three days a week and I understand some of these might not be be notified but the question would be is one shift enough for the Cresc program to actually pilot it and then the third one is for the chief because I assume this this determination would be similar for both programs which is there is in order to do a 24-7 force response and and the our chief Nelson would also be able to do this we need a certain minimum number of people because of vacations because of you know there's just five people overall to cover 40 if they only work 40 hours a week the number of hours in a week you need a minimum of five overall but they take vacations they get sick so in general what is if you want two people on duty at all times do we have an idea of what the number the minimum number of people to guarantee to patrol officers to guarantee two firefighters or EMTs to guarantee to Cresc people are always on duty do we have an idea of what that number is and I ask that because I'm trying to get an idea for Cresc whether the community safety working groups plan of 16 responders is is a is an a reasonable number because I don't actually know whether that would be enough for 24-7 service for two shifts type thing so those are my initial questions thanks well Paul can I yeah sorry Paul can I jump in I can tell you that when we started at the dispatch center we ran two people a shift on a four or two schedule so you need nine people to cover that but we ran it there's problems you talked about anytime somebody's out it leads over time somebody gets stuck working a 16 hour shift now they're sick the next day and it kind of compiles itself we're up to 12 there's formulas out there like relief factor formulas that with our staffing it says we're supposed to have 15 people which I think would be a little excessive we'll take them if you got them but so nine people if you wanted to run a four or two schedule eight hour shifts four on two off you make it happen with that as a starting point and in terms of you know that's assuming a four and two schedule right first off which is what police typically work the other thing in terms of our the pilot we were looking at one two two responders on at a time so two not four at a time so as for our pilot we would look at two on a time so 16 hours a day roughly we probably would need we may need some part-time employees to support the weekend work and things like that the budget sort of is more complex yeah so the 130 was based off of two of the vacant positions or two of the sort of lower level positions we didn't weren't sure how the some of the vacancies are different levels so we're not sure how those are going to be filled over the coming years or some of the people on the lower level are going to get pushed into those higher positions so the 130 was based off roughly two sixty five thousand dollar positions the personnel line includes other things and sort of straight salaries so there's there's an overtime line in there there's educational incentives things like that we didn't touch because they were sort of other than the forty thousand identified that we we found that we could get rid of or shift out we didn't touch those because those are sort of unique on a year-to-year basis but that's one of the things that once these two positions are gone we'll reassess once these two positions are shifted we can reassess and see if there's flexibility there so a couple other things on that so when when a higher position person paid person leaves we always budget at the lower level so that because a new person won't be stopped they typically don't start at the beginning I think our beginning salaries are in the 40s I think for police officers some place in there so I think that that's that's one thing also just for FY 22 the reality is when you're in town employee you are not eligible for vacation for the first six months of your employment so there wouldn't be any vacation permitted during that first six months but that would have to be calculated like Mike said because that will that will catch up on us pretty quickly and then we don't want to be in an overtime situation because that's that's not the best place to be and just to add one thing real quick the the positions we budgeted in the pilot program we picked sort of mill the road near the top for those positions thinking that the skill sets might require that again there might be flexibility there when we actually fill these positions based on the experiences of the people that fill them that they could come in higher but they could also come in lower so there might be more flexibility there George thank you Andy um Paul I like the approach you're taking here it actually gives me some sense of optimism and excitement and I think I share that with a number of my colleagues I'm not always felt that way and I hope it'll stay with me for a while I like the idea of establishing proof of concept that and then evaluating after initial trial I like the collaborative approach that you're endorsing here where we're bringing all the major actors to the table and everybody's contribution is important and valued looking to other towns and communities other agencies for help these I think are really excellent ways to approach this and I appreciate that I do have no one somebody says that you know that and then the other shoe right but I do share the concern I think of a few others as they mentioned already I do think the loss of the economic development directive position is is not a good idea and that's something that that will come back to it some later point but just want to note that I understand the the pressure to find funds and right now maybe that's the only option you see but I don't I don't agree with that and I think it's not a good thing and I just have a quick question for the chief I'm just curious in this initial kind of program that you're proposing some of the funding will come from the loss of it's described as educational incentives and I just wonder if the chief could just briefly describe what that means in practice what is given up or lost when those funds are taken from the police department and get into this program can I just jump on that one real quick so the the educational incentives we're talking about here it they were literally over budgeted that that was something when we went back and we were answering a question from one of the finance committee members we found a mistake and sort of the calculation of the education incentives so that 40 thousand that we're moving out it's not a loss of educational incentives for any of the officers it's just it's getting it to where it should be. Anything else George? Evan? Yeah excuse if you can hear the lawnmower in the background. So I want to back up Jordan's challenging statement and this probably comes as no surprise to you Paul. I understand the need for the DEI director and I commend you for um working to find a source of funding for that I cannot accept that funding being through eliminating the economic development director position you know this position has been open for about a year and a half now um and you know a lot of us have been nagging you about it for that entire year and a half and been frustrated at you dragging your feet at that um I think a lot of us were willing to accept that during the financial uncertainty of COVID it didn't make sense to add a new full-time staff position when we were trying to make sure we didn't have to lay off any other of our existing staff but now that we're coming out of COVID and we're looking at economic recovery this is the exact time that we need an economic development director and my frustration is that we're sitting here trying to figure out how to fund new staff positions and new programs and the reason that's difficult is we're trying to fund new positions and new programs from a budget that is already stretched to capacity right and so we've created this zero sum game where to increase funding for one department or to create new staff positions some other department has to lose and so in this case you're arguing that we should fund the DEI director by defunding by 100 percent the economic development department right and that's an unfortunate situation for us to be in and I think what shallony pointed out is that an economic development director who does a good job who can look at increasing investment in Amherst increasing local business activity in Amherst increasing redevelopment in Amherst can help grow our budget right so instead of fighting over all of this and having to move this from here to there we can just grow the pot of money and so we know for instance you know a lot of folks might not like one East Pleasant Street but the assessed value of that land went from 2.7 million to 19 million right so we had an incredible increase in tax money that probably is about what it costs to hire the DEI director and so to me it is short-sighted to eliminate the economic development director position to fund this other position when the economic development director position is one that can help grow our budget so we can continue to fund these new initiatives so I understand it sort of the easy option because it is a vacant position that has an amount of money attached to it that's about what you want to spend I don't think it's a good option so I'm going to ask you to reconsider that and if we're we're really want to fund the DEI director position I think we need to find another source of money because I don't think that this is a good option thank you I think I'm muting helps um first of all I I'm glad to have an opportunity to look at this tonight both from the perspective of what we originally saw and what we're now seeing but more importantly to me is looking at it from the perspective of what the community safety working group has just talked about what they've learned and what they've brought to us and then starting to see that incorporated into how Paul is thinking about this some of you know my background and some of you probably don't know my background I've met I've written grants and held and used our worked with grant teams that have done 30 million dollar proposals over a five-year period and won them so what we have now is an enormous amount of research we have a committee that has already formed the thinking about this and I already know there's two state funding opportunities out there for exactly these kinds of programs so I sit here today and think of us as putting a serious base on the ground around we can now start building and I know grant fund is grant funding is risky okay because it goes away but it gives us an opportunity to take this to build on it to add to it grow it even faster than how Paul is laying out because this kind of money is now available it's not 10 years from now it's not five years from now it's available now and because of all the work the community safety group has done and because of all the work the chief has done and Paul and his staff have done and the networks we're now connected to because of this we're sitting in a gorgeous place I wish I could write a proposal today using everything that it already is on paper in Amherst about this because the pieces are all there and with this with the funding that the town will put forward we have the opportunity to grow this program not just as a pilot but as a long-standing program I say that I also have to say I do not support not funding the director of economic film so I'm going to encourage that we find other funds for that as well thank you okay I'm going to call on Pat thanks because I'm trying to get to people who haven't been kind of duplicates until the end and at some point I'll want to bring in the community safety working group but anyway thank you um I feel very lucky that we have a chamber um and a bid that collaborate with the town so directly and I feel like with their support we can continue to be creative around economic development what concerns me is um sort of the replacing that position with a position that can creatively bring our community together that can heal our community um can it seems to me to be much more important than an economic development director right now an economic development director didn't bring in the eruptor lab which is a potential possibility that we have and with that coming here we have the opportunity for other kinds of groups like that too we're going to be doing research and collaboration and innovation nobody brought that in except the guy who wanted it and Stan Rosenberg the uh we need we need to address racism that to me has much more value than anything else right now and I wish I could be more articulate I have all kinds of notes here but it's not working to try to follow them um somebody in another context said follow the money I'm going to say the money is there and getting an economic development director in a year in another year waiting another year so that this program can get off the ground so it can do the kinds of grant searching that Lynn is talking about seems to me to be the most important investment we can make in our community and so I wish I had a more detailed or specific replacement for the economic development director it is not as important a position given the willingness we have to have developers come in and everything else that is not what's going to secure the future of this community but the this program and a director of equity and inclusion will help the development of this community so I want to urge my fellow counselors to try and stick to questions at this point though I appreciate uh wanting to make statements too but we are wanting to make sure that we focus on questions also uh Dorothy well I do want to make a statement um I acknowledge the good points that have been brought up but I trust that the same practical idealism that has shaped this proposal will solve these problems I totally approve this thoughtful cooperative plan and I do disagree I don't think our budget is stretched to the max um people who manage our money have many wise ways of dealing with money so I'm just saying I accept this proposal with faith and confidence that the things that need to be corrected or ironed out will be I think it's fabulous I was shocked and surprised when I read it to get such a detailed practical plan that I can see making a great difference in the lives of many people Darcy um I just wanted to say briefly that um I agree with Pat on the issue of the the economic director I think that we you know we're one of the very very few communities in Massachusetts that has a bid um and um so we have a bid and a chamber and and um you know they provide a lot of advocacy on economic development so that is a good thing um and I just wanted to also make a comment that um uh I'm excited that we're working with this Harvard group looking at best practices in other communities and I would just suggest the possibility of Ithaca because they are on the cutting edge in this area they have a population very similar to ours their college community um and you know we're looking at them with climate action and with zero waste and I I see that they're also on the cutting edge of reparations um and they have a a new plan around that um and lastly I have a question and that is um I'm just wondering what would be and maybe you've already mentioned it forgive me if you have is what would be the projected FY 23 budget for this and how would it differ from what the community um safety working group is putting forward for for the overall budget um yeah are you looking at me through zoom I can see your eyes looking at me to to answer that um so to maintain the four community responder positions a director position and the administrative support position for a full year um we would have to add about 300 to 350 thousand dollars to the budget um the big reason why that's a little bit higher than what we're adding for FY 22 is because the pension cost associated with all these positions we don't we're not expected we're not anticipating having to pay it in FY 22 because if they're not employed as of october then we don't have to pay the pension for that year um the following year they'll be here the full year so the full pension impact will hit um and then insurances will be the full year and and salaries will be the full year so again it'll it'll vary based on who we hire and what where they are on the wage scale and if they take insurance but um we're estimated between 300 to 350 thousand to maintain the four full-time responders plus the director plus the administrative support position and then for every additional community responder that uh the town would like to add ballpark of about 90 thousand dollars if we use the same sort of um estimates as we use for the existing positions um of about 60 thousand for wages and then the the rest of it for benefits so how does that differ from what the what was being requested by the community safety working group well i look do you have their proposal i think it was 12 but i could be awesome 12 community responders yes 12 12 full-time responders four staff per shift three full-time shift responders supervisors and one director plus one full-time administrative assistant so that was just for the program that that doesn't count the dispatch things dispatch options so um yeah their their their program would be much more robust than what the pilot would look like and if we wanted to go to there in year two um it would be significant investment so year two meaning f y 23 right okay if you else uh darsie okay so we had four uh counselors who've previously asked questions i'm going to call on them in the meantime um as that is reaching its conclusion i'll ask that Athena bring in uh members of the community safety working group i know that both co-chairs have their hands up and i want to be able to have them be able to ask questions about the proposal and give their thoughts on the subject too so we'll do the four people who've previously asked questions as counselors and then in the meantime we'll be ready to bring in people from the working group uh kathy um thanks andy um i i have one is a question as i it's a two-part question one we do have two positions are removed out of the police department there are potentially three vacancies so my question is there a possibility we could hold one position for a year or for half a year to see whether we as you as or three quarters of a year to see what happens to the workload and the response um you know i was told earlier that there's a potential excellent hire a person of color trained so i'm not talking about all but hold one and does that potentially provide money toward the end of the year and ongoing then um the second is amherst college and you mass um i you haven't had time i don't think but darcy's question of looking at f y 23 f y 24 um is there some potential um from the wealthier of them is amherst college is now teaching uh anti-racism structuralism they have their own history would they in this case ever um do some pilot money i know bernie doesn't like me to use payment and lieu of taxes so just some generosity money to amherst you know so you have probably haven't had a chance to talk to them and then andy you said no statements but i do have one to make i don't think we have a proof of concept to concept for a one person economic development position when i'm looking at studies small towns with big ideas and community economic development they were often collaborative efforts with a bid a chamber a university they weren't hire one person and oh my gosh what you get i don't think there is a proof of concept in a small town of a person and we've known we've been trying to do this so i think we have more a lot of potential work we've got incredible people in town including at the university who teach entrepreneurism to put forward to think of that as a collaborative effort and we've got chris presto and daves omic we've got people that have been thinking about this i don't think we have a proof of concept that that slot just as defined would bring home lin's idea of a grant getter absolutely but so i there isn't a proof of concept on that position i think we know a program like this it could be successful so my first we're on future funding streams questions so in terms of working with the university in the colleges what i was thinking about is that i think they're going to walk down a similar path and that might there might be ways we can collaborate with them and utilize and have some efficiencies of scale i don't know if that's true or not but that's what i was thinking about and we could always you know a lot of the calls that these people the responders might be responding to might be students and that would be something that we could track and then go to the university and say pony up it's your turn you know this is this is what you need to do to meet this need i think in terms of staffing for the for the program i think we we wanted you know the first order of business is to look at the timing of the calls and to look at the volume of the calls we need to really look at dig down into those calls that we think as many as we can to divert and see how many of those are successfully diverted and and see how that's working out in real time and i think you know next year it will be a good year because we should be back to normal and we hope that that will give us a realistic assessment of what the need is thank you shall we um i just want to clarify that i am not saying that de i the diversity of the economic development director in lieu of the diversity i strongly believe we need both um and if we don't have a diverse uh an economic development director as kathy was mentioning we don't need one we need then a committee those towns that don't have the directors they have an economic development committee to just assume that the bid will do our job no they're doing their job but they're not going to do the town's job of finding up the kind of opportunities we want the kind that we're hearing about the kind of development we want bid is not going to do that they are doing an amazing job but they're not doing our job and and the other thing is we have amazing stuff but each one is the plates are so full like chris is doing hell of a job with zoning and planning and david is doing so many things so we do need a focused look at that however that should not be at the cost of because if you had to choose i would definitely choose a diversity officer there's no doubt we have a need for that but i'm saying let's look for both the question i had was about when you mentioned allocating 30 000 of ARPA funds for the diversity position and an existing half full-time position so what does that look like um so we have an existing staff person who it works part-time in the town manager's office and part-time in the human resources and what the intent is with that that 30 000 is to elevate that person to be a DEI coordinator role not the director role in addition to the director so we would have someone who's already been on the town staff who's been doing a lot of work in our equity core equity team uh and it's been just getting rave reviews and so we want to sort of carve that out as an opportunity for this person got it thank you okay um notice that we had one counselor who's uh raised her hand and not been recognized previously Sarah thank you Andy um so in thinking this out first i want to say that i do think this was a tremendous amount of work and so much care has obviously gone into this and i am really impressed um so i don't want my next comments to make it seem like i'm thinking oh well you just didn't do enough because i don't think that at all um my question is sort of a practical one in what we've heard from people who have called and written um made comments is that you know there are people in our community that don't feel comfortable calling the police and i what i'm what i'm hearing and obviously we don't know yet but is that there could be an incredible amount of people who called just for someone who is from cress so i know that we have to start out somewhere but i was i worry a little bit i'm wondering like how at what point will we start looking at how many calls are actually people who just want cress and would rather not have the police if there's a direct number and if those become an overwhelming number of people right if someone is like no i need help with i'm just going to use it you know i don't know they need help with something that they do not want a police officer to respond to that your cress officers are already out and that becomes a something that happens all the time i'm worried about the frustration that people will feel and i'm i'm just wondering how quickly the town can then start taking that information in and trying to shift things around because i i wouldn't want the opposite to happen that people are feeling like they had the option for cress but they don't really so i'm just wondering how how flexible the town is going to be in looking at the information that comes in then yeah i don't have an answer for that i think you know i think that the working group has been pretty explicit that they want a separate line that somehow gets managed i'm not sure how that would work i know that they've had independent conversations with dispatch about different ways to approach that some ideas have been just can we just have a cell phone that goes directly to a cress employee and i don't know the answer and what what that means in terms of you know just make sure that if a call comes in it's it's responded to properly and it's so we aren't dropping calls when someone's in crisis so and that's why i said i think that we may see an uptick in calls from people who have are not going to call 911 we've heard a lot of people say i'm never going to call 911 but i might call this because i do have needs and so we don't know that until we start to roll it out and see what it looks like well so thank you i'm trying to figure out how to say this fast and i really appreciate being recognized a second time i'm very happy to recognize the work of a current employee that's done and so done so many wonderful things in so many ways so pleased to see us grow our own i've shared that with paul individually as well i want to make clear that i firmly believe we don't have to choose between the two positions it pitting those two positions against each other was a mistake it should not have been presented to us this way i live in the real world where amherst college and umass in addition to all the things they do indeed bring to our small town we wouldn't exist if it wasn't for them they do not and will not ever pay what our residents wish they would pay despite all our efforts and many approaches yes certainly sometimes we come up with a cool thing and we might very well get them to invent to invest in a cool thing on a one-time basis and that has happened but we need to not depend on that we need to figure out which thing that is sort of like applying for a grant and reflecting back to what everybody's been saying about how we need money to do the things we want to do we don't bring in enough of that money with the staffing we have now yes the eruptor is welcome but it's a complete one off and i don't want to mess up the crest program i don't want to slow down this amazing program in years two or three because we say well you know we haven't had that new growth coming along we don't have the money to do the things we need to do because we've talked about repeatedly how our costs go up every year i'm also going to say very bluntly in a way that i'm sure is going to offend any number of people that we have a very poor history of diversity initiatives with our hires going back over 20 years when we had a human rights director that was a part-time position then we had combined human rights human resources directors very little progress on many issues was made amazing progress has been made with an with a current staff member and with the core equity team that was not made over many years of hires that were not clear on what they were supposed to be doing depending on our terrific chamber and bid is not a long-term reality it's the particular team we have had in the last couple of rounds it's not always been true of the chamber it's not always that we haven't always have a bid and so to say that they could just take care of it just doesn't make sense we can do better we cannot do better doing things with the way we've always done them putting out our standard job description for a diversity and equity inclusion officer is not going to get us what we want putting out our standard job description is not going to get us the economic development director that we want i know that we can do better at this i know that if we send out the standard things none of us is going to see what we want so what i don't expect to have answered tonight because it certainly wasn't part of the presentation but soon is how we're going to do a better job with that and hearing that you're going to have slightly different people at the table maybe we'll help but it won't change our track record which is poor so we need to do better and we need both positions and we can find a way to fund it and i know andi will love it when i say take it out opeb for a couple of years thank you so i'm going to recognize mandy as the last counselor for this section of the meeting and then i'm going to ask the co-chairs of the working group about whether they would like to convene their convene a meeting and how they want to proceed but so mandy thank you so much for recognizing me and i'll try to be really quick i'm just thinking about this 350 000 a year every year you know we if we fund f y 22 you've already stated we need about 300 to 350 to keep the same level of staffing in f y 23 and then adding essentially two two person shifts a year to get up to 12 people which would be you know that it looks like we're planning on finally getting to 12 people in f y 25 um assuming that we only add about 350 000 a year to this program that would keep four people at f y 23 eight at f y 24 12 at f y 25 which would be the first year that given my previous question that we could likely staff 24 7 um if i'm doing all of my math right quickly and i'm looking at the projected budget that you did and you projected out f y 23 four five and six and we're only projecting an addition of 500 to 670 000 a year on the townside in those three years um and so i i'm not sure where it's coming from to also keep all the rest of the salaries up so you know i i i think we need a i'm hoping we have a better idea in another six months where we're going to get it the next f y 23 four and five including and this is where my request comes in most years we have a surplus f y 20 it was 1.6 million dollars um according to your budget document on page 45 i i didn't have time to go back has there been an analysis of where that surplus is every year um to see whether we are actually over budgeting some parts and departments and why we keep getting i'm not upset about a surplus i'd much rather have a surplus but if we need an extra 350 000 a year and we're regularly one running one to one and a half or more million dollars in surplus a year we should be analyzing why we're running those surpluses to see if there's a reason for that that we could transfer the money paul do you want me to start yeah sure um so i think one piece of the budget is we're not predicting how many positions will be added in f y 23 um we're giving you the number we know that there will be half the decisions will have to be made in f y 23 and we imagine that the data analysis that'll be done in f y 22 will inform what happens for f y 23 so it's gonna be clear that we are not we gave you that number so you you know so that we can estimate but we're not predicting where it will go and f y 23 could go up more than two positions or not i don't know um and then the i know the you know one to one and a half million sounds like a lot but when you're talking about an 80 million dollar budget you know you're talking about two or three percent um you know sonia can weigh in if she wants that she's been here longer than i if she's noticed any trends but i would say two to three percent's not a terrible thing on an 80 million dollar budget um and that's one of the areas to where we just had our bond rating um updated that was noticed a particular strength of the town is our strong budget performance and that helped us get a maintain our double a plus and help us get lower you know a one percent interest rate on our 10 million dollar bond which will save the town money going forward um and it's also what's helped us build up our reserves so that we have funds for the four you know to do the four building project plan and all that um so we can look at it but i'm just reluctant to you know try to budget more aggressively if we see any areas where we feel like we're overly conservative we can certainly take a look at it but um i think we generally try to justify everything we budget sonia do you want to weigh in at all on that sure um in the on the revenue sides the circumstances that come from there a lot of times are for years we are getting about three hundred thousand dollars a year for medicare part d and that doesn't get budgeted it just falls to free cash but then we have to vote that for free cash into the op-ed fund so that doesn't get budgeted for and um there's a lot of things like that if we're going out for a bond sometimes we get pretty decent bond premiums um we budget all our revenues very conservatively uh for operational turnbacks that's mainly from staff turnover and also we have to budget for what the we think the cost is going to be for that year we might have like property and casualty insurance it was pretty high at one point mid-year we decided to to bid for it and we saved a bunch of money on that so that gets turned back on the savings so we try to constantly bid out things and get savings but we can't not budget for it because you can't you can't have a budget deficit so there's a lot of there's a lot of moving parts to them and we can pretty much give you the detail of what got turned back and if you go back to the quarterly reports that are on the accounting website if you go back to the end of year ones every year you pretty much get a detail of what got turned back and why I think one of our missions if wouldn't to bring this new department to the council would be a funding plan to show how we possibly could fund it and what it would look like and thank you so I want to segue to uh Breonna and Alicia as the uh co-chairs of the community safety working group you're welcome uh you get to the meeting do you need to call your meeting to order do you uh do you feel it's necessary and uh it's first question Hi Andy thank you for recognizing us I am more than comfortable to call the meeting to order if that's okay okay but before I do so I just want to mention Paul in your slideshow you included CSWG reps being a part of the implementation team so I felt a little bit offended that me and Miss Walker as co-chairs and other CSWG members who have worked months on this project with consultants were in the audience while you all were having a conversation about Cress and asking questions that we may have been able to answer more appropriately so I just want to say that before we get started yeah well thank you sorry that uh it was difficult to arrange to figure out how to do this meeting so I apologize too but how do you how would you like to proceed now because obviously we wanted you to hear the conversation and the questions from the council and we wanted you to make sure that you had an opportunity then to provide input on the information that we've received from the questions and the answers that you've heard well first I'd like to call the meeting to order and I'm sure from their community safety working group members I saw several of them had their hands up and as I can imagine some of us have questions for you and I'm sure we can answer questions more appropriately if council members want to ask us directly as we've been again working on this for months so at this time I'm just going to call the meeting to order and call each member who's here my name is Brianna Owen and I'm calling this meeting to order as the vice chair of the community safety working group governor bakers march 12 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual meeting of the working group meeting with the finance committee given that we have a quorum present I'm calling the may 27th meeting I will call upon each member at that time you should unmute yourself and say present this is going to indicate that I can hear you and you can hear me please unmute your mic after saying present miss Ferrera here mr. Vernon Jones present miss Walker present miss bowman miss pat yeah and I believe do we have mr. cage he's in the audience right now with his hand raised can we bring mr. Cajun um is he listed as a different name than Darius cage yeah he was just in the audience oh he doesn't have his hand up I see him now mr. cage sorry for your late arrival if you could just unmute your mic and say present so that we could get the meeting started present thank you so now I'd like to pass the mic over to miss Walker and I'm sure other community safety working group members have comments and questions about this budget and we also prepared a presentation emphasizing why the budget we made is so vital thank you miss Owen I just wanted to let you guys know that we came here today under the impression that we were going to be able to present our recommendations to the budget to the finance committee I also wanted to say that to host an entire conversation surrounding our recommendations without having us be in the conversation is extremely disrespectful and silencing we have spent months on this work and we are the experts we cannot create something efficient for our community if we do not listen to our community members and have them at the table this is our work and we came to present to you and so I'm hoping that although it was not in the agenda to present that we can screen share at this time so that we can have our voices be heard and have our recommendations be not interpreted by you all but given to you directly from our group as you proceeded just to be conscious of the fact that everyone here heard the presentation on Monday and we welcome building upon it and please proceed thank you Andy the presentation is slightly edited from Monday's presentation we are aware that most of you have seen it before but we want to there are some information that will be repetitive and this is for emphasis because there is clearly still a large lack of understanding so we're going to start again from the beginning and I will pass it back over to Rihanna so at this time I want to I don't want to reintroduce the entire community safety working group but I want to read their names so that you all have an idea of who is on our group and can put a face to the name so we are the community safety working group Tashina Bowman Darius Cage Deborah Ferrera Pat Oni Wipaku Brianna Owen myself Russ Vernon Jones Alicia Walker and Paul Wiley who resigned I want to I want to emphasize our charge because it seems like it's being lost in the conversations that were had before we were put on to the meeting so the community safety working group was assigned the following purpose to A make recommendations on alternative ways of providing safety services to the community and B to make recommendations on reforms to the current organizational and oversight structures of the Amherst police department we were specifically charged with studying complex issues of delivering community safety services to ensure racial equity collecting data from people's experiences and Amherst engaging the community most impacted by policing to develop alternatives and identify solutions to diagnose problems investigating existing alternative models and programs for providing community safety services examining existing town funding priorities regarding safety services exploring models of resident oversight departments and recommending reforms to the current organizational and oversight structures of the current Amherst police department again I want to bring up the intention of our recommendations because I've heard a lot about the economic position being talked about in this meeting and I just want to emphasize how important equity in the town is and how invaluable inequitable town is so we want to point out that the community safety working group was intentional about the recommendations we made the recommendations have two goals to ensure that any public safety response is anti-racist equitable just and fair and that we offer preventative services that get at the root of assisting our residents to avoid necessitating public safety involvement in the first place the CSWG finds the historical context of white supremacy and Amherst extremely relevant to our work and to the town's commitment to dismantle white supremacy the founding of Amherst is based on genocide Amherst's legacy is controversial due to his expressed desire to exterminate the race of indigenous people during Pontiac's War and his advocacy of biological warfare in the form of gifting blankets infected with smallpox as a weapon our group is well aware that Amherst was once home to slave owners was once home to documented redlining and once home to primarily white schools this history has manifested into the community we are living in now by budgeting and financially supporting these initiatives the town in the long run and maybe even in the short run will invest in the future which will be a black or brown or more linguistic diverse than it is now additionally investments in a more diverse and inclusive town assures an influx of created entrepreneur creative entrepreneurial and younger residents historically deeds were restricted to not allow certain residents to reside in certain areas black and brown families were pushed to less desirable areas like housing complexes and today the demographics are not much different modern-day redlining and the raisin rent continue to keep black and brown low-income families in these same areas if they aren't forced out of Amherst completely many social service organizations that we connected with let us know that their employees travel from outside of Amherst to work here due to the unfeasible rental prices many town staff also do not reside in the city of Amherst perhaps due to the high housing prices as well this provides further insight on the disconnect and services being offered in this town how does redlining and the rise in rental prices in Amherst influence current policing methods and outcomes the tendency of low-income working class and students with families is to access housing through apartment rentals and as you can see from the chart a large portion of APD calls are officer initiated and with the highest concentration being on one street in particular and located in apartment complexes a further breakdown of the data shows the difference in police conduct between certain complexes and single resident areas and if you focus specifically on police initiated calls these disparities are very clear the APD uses community policing models that include practices of surveillance and patrols which differ by neighborhood in terms of frequency and types of calls with one of the methods being to identify specific problem oriented areas of town and direct patrols to those areas this has resulted in the profiling and over surveillance of certain communities and in turn certain individuals nationally our research has shown that community policing has contributed to the death of BIPOC persons and not their safety and if you focus specifically on police initiated calls these disparities are very clear the APD oh I apologize that was a repetition um Brianna can you go to the next side please on May 25th 2020 George Floyd a 46 year old black man was murdered at the hands of the Minneapolis police the repetition of these egregious incidences sparked national and local movements organizations and the advocacy of local groups like Defund 413 racial equity task force reparations for Amherst and the youth of BLM have been doing tremendous work to bring education and awareness to inequities in policing and in our town as a response to the national and local uprising on June 1st 2020 the town council adopted a resolution affirming the town of Amherst's commitment to end structural racism and achieve achieve racial equity for black residents and in order to commit to the affirmation the town manager was assigned a goal that would help to specify what steps could be taken to help position Amherst in the direction of change these are the goals that were set for the town manager our first recommendation is to create a BIPOC led youth empowerment center and a BIPOC cultural center quality afterschool programs designed with BIPOC teams in mind have shown to support and increase academic achievement and play a role in reducing other disparities youth programs promote positive social behaviors and emotional development and strengthen meaningful relationships between youth and community members culturally responsive mentoring which operates within a framework of understanding of the social and cultural context in which youth live provide added benefits to support their health and well-being research indicates youth do better after therapeutic interventions rather than punishing ones and when we limit the reach of the justice system into their lives whether we intervene before or after they mess up BIPOC led spaces serve as a mean of establishing community safety and in order for local governments to strengthen community safety and reduce over reliance of the police I know we talked about the statistics on Monday but I just want to emphasize again that the district is made up of over 50 percent of students who identify as BIPOC and between 2007 in 2017 latinx students increased in the elementary schools by 30 percent one thing that really stood out to me from alisa brewer's comment is the town doing the same thing and not seeing new results I saw in the powerpoint presentation that we were suggested to work with the the school systems family center and while I think that's great I also think that there's a reason why this group was put together we are put together to make new ideas because the old ones were not giving you the new results you wanted our second recommendation is to create a well-funded department of diversity equity and inclusion a department a department of diversity equity and inclusion and inclusion elevates the role of de i into the hierarchy of town administration it prioritizes consideration of inclusion and equity throughout hiring training housing policies planning leadership the environment and the economy it improves decision making that better represents all communities and is less likely to suffer from unintentional blind spots and biases it assures a more equitable allocation of public resources to all communities not just a few reduces staff turnover and increases employee engagement and awareness and it builds community trust in town and offers more options for BIPOC and AAPI community members to be seen seen as well as heard our next recommendation is to create an amherst oversight board and I know there's been a lot of kickback as to why we are requesting $10,000 for each member to receive as a stipend and I just want to communicate with you all that not all people in Amherst are able to serve on town boards and do this work without some form of financial compensation for the shifts that they're missing at work the cost of child care and other related expenses by compensate by compensating people appropriately it will allow for diversity to be on this board including racial ethnic gender class diversity thereby allowing those who are often marginalized and impacted most by policing to sit on this board and this will play a crucial role in overseeing and monitoring both the Amherst police department and the Crest program we need to ensure that it is a critical task that isn't left to the hands of a majority white board we need to be conscious of the barriers that have stopped members from diverse groups from being able to be on the town council the school committee and other committees which most often correlates to money and time our fourth recommendation is to create the Crest program a lot went into the development of creating Crest so as you know that we did take into consideration all of the community feedback but we also did a lot of research and so the research that we started with was investigating other models that existed in other towns we did look at Eugene or the Cahoots crisis assistance helping out on the streets program we looked at Albuquerque community safety alternative and the Denver star support team assisted response in terms of in terms of getting us into the direction of assessing what needs could work specifically for Amherst and then just in regards to a comment that was made by another council member we did also look at Ithaca New York and what they are doing there in our research our fifth recommendation is to reduce the size of the Amherst police department Crest is an alternative safety service to the Amherst police department and so I just really want to emphasize this because I hear this getting lost a lot in the conversation our specific task was to come up with an alternative so that the people who the police do not work for have someone to call this is not a mental health service although it will be addressing some mental health needs that are currently being addressed by the police department this is not a social service although they will be providing social service like things to the community the Crest program once fully funded resource and staffed will lessen the need for the Amherst police department with the shifting of nonviolent calls to the Crest program the Amherst police department officers will no longer need to operate at full capacity the funding of Crest will reduce the APD and lessen profiling of BIPOC and AAPI residents and persons visiting Amherst and I we added this slide because we wanted to clarify information around the reduction of APD officers we're not asking for an immediate cut in officers this year we're asking that positions stay stay as they are so we can develop Crest which is leaving the APD at 44 officers with one officer who is in the process of retirement until the Crest program is fully funded resource and staff the Crest program once is once up and funded will take an estimated 20 to 30 percent of calls from the APD and the APD will not need overtime and absence of those positions being frozen because Crest will be responding to these calls our sixth recommendation is to continue the ongoing work of the community safety working group it is obviously crucial that the CSWG continues for a number of reasons I would say one of the biggest ones just after attending this meeting is so we can continue to connect with the community and create new ways to get new results what what has been done hasn't been working these are new ways that will get new results and we also need to stay together to be a part of the details and planning as the Crest program and other recommendations come into fruitation this is the budget that we put together to make these recommendations successful we have used a number of metrics such as the non-union town of Amherst salary scale and also using Indeed as a way to look at the salary ranges for what we're asking from Crest responders in various positions so this is our budget for the Crest program and I know you guys all have this in your packet so I won't leave it on screen for too long and then this is our budget for the Department of Diversity Equity and Inclusion and also the operating expenses for the for Diversity Equity and Inclusion and we are also able to compare the budget that we're asking to to similar town departments because there's been this huge this huge discussion over where the money is coming from and whether we're asking for too much money so I just wanted to put the side-by-side comparison so you can keep that in mind while trying to come while trying to understand where our budget was put together so as you can see it's the Amherst police department budget and then the Crest responder budget the communication center staff and then the Crest dispatch personnel and so on and so forth I'll leave this on screen for a little while I know I sent it all to you all beforehand as well um we kept this slide in order to just give some suggestions that we had in in terms of where funding can come from or where we can look more into funding these recommendations um consider decreasing the seven million dollar budget of the Amherst police department use revenue generated by marijuana dispensaries federal stimulus money from the CARES act funds have been discussed and so we would like to look more into that as well use the money held in reserves for the emergency of racism and the continued harm it imposes on our community and the four million dollars that is held in the town's free cash fund at our last meeting we urged the town council to reflect on the on the crossroads we are at in forging a new path towards our dream destination of a town that works for all of its residents and centers the most historically disenfranchised I want you all to take a moment to reflect on your commitment to racial equity personally and in your role what side of history will you be on what legacy will you leave behind and what doors will you open let me paint this picture for you Amherst is a town where all residents thrive where families young people individuals the elderly the disabled and BIPOC residents have the knowledge and access to the resources that they deem important and essential to their well-being and the well-being of their families a place where those in crisis know and trust who and where to turn where power sharing and having a seat at the table is an integral part of how our town government and community safety functions where folks feel powerful and knowledgeable to step into leadership and co-design the town we all want to live in we have this opportunity in front of us and not only is it beneficial in regards to community safety and wellness but to all other aspects of our town I urge you to think of our entire community and how we could benefit from all of the CSWG's diversity equity and inclusion recommendations in addition to crests imagine thriving families who want to and are able to stay in Amherst and build community here think about resident retention and the revenue that could be created if our community feels truly supported and trusting of our government structures and the safety programs help us make Amherst diverse and welcoming and possible for all people to live work learn and thrive let's dream here together and then our last slide is the Amherst towns town council's affirmation these are your words not mine so I'm not going to repeat them I'm just going to emphasize that the same actions aren't going to give new results so I really urge you guys to keep our recommendations in mind and make them reality thank you very much for the presentation that was very helpful um maybe what I would like to do is uh you have the opportunity to hear from other members of the working group who have their hands up is the next step and uh let's see if there are any counselors who have questions or other members of the planning committee who have questions that they would like to pose the primarily directed to you or they might circle back to the town manager whichever one but first of all um I see that both uh Debra Frere and uh Russ Frere and Jones have their hands up so Debra please unmute yeah um thank you all for having us today um I want to point out that obviously I'm glad to hear that Mr. Barkman was able to move a little bit further and I was happy to hear that a lot of the town council has kind of expressed a lot of support for our recommendations and like I said and that Paul was able to increase it but like um Brianna and Alicia said though I did feel it was strange though that we weren't in the room though for the conversation because again we are the ones with the information so that felt strange um but I wanted to kind of point that out that obviously you know I'm glad to hear that however um we're here though still as Brianna and Alicia stated to to to make a full recommendations so for me I mean I have so many things kind of flowing in my head right because obviously I wasn't I wasn't able to ask any questions so you're going to have to be with me because I have quite a few things to kind of talk about one again is it's from what we heard on Monday which is you know I don't know how to impress upon you all right that this is critical right that we you have members in the town of Amherst that do not feel safe and most of these members are marginalized members are BIPOC members you need to make sure that they feel valued that you feel respected and they feel included so remember on Monday I told you all right that whenever my 17 year old before he leaves the house I am afraid for him I am afraid for him I have to basically remind him every time be careful drive carefully I don't know if white parents in this town have to go through that process every single time not because I'm sure you have to go through that process because hey you know things but not that a policeman is going to stop and possibly hurt him so I'm a member of this this community and this is how I feel and we have countless of the members of this community that feel the same way so let's start from that basis right so even though obviously I commend you know of Paul Bachmann to to haven't gone further but it's still not far enough for me because again we have the full recommendations that we stated so for instance my questions and I'll start with crest right is around you know you talked about calls directly to crest that's that's pivotal there needs to be an opportunity for people to contact crest directly once this program starts right because people do not trust contacting the police directly so there has to be a separate ability for them to do that so that was kind of like generalized no specificity shown in terms of how to do that so that needs to happen and with that there needs to be education money needs to be marketing money needs to be that sort of thing so people know that that might that that number even exists because populations don't feel comfortable contacting the police when they're going through different things so that has to be a part that we need to to to focus on again yeah stress that I saw it in the in the in the presentation but yeah cswg needs to be involved in the conversations with the creation of this program no if and so what's about it because we've you we've seen throughout this process that you need our voice our voice is always out our voice is not included and if our voice is not included then these these these issues are not going to be brought to the table so yes we need to be at the table and we need to be part of the of the creation and the conversations period the other thing is that the program needs to be 24-7 when when it first starts out so I don't know how I don't know how the the four five people are going to be able to do that 16 hours 16 hours there only gonna be 16 hours during the day so what happens to the rest of the time people are saying that they're afraid to call the police so what's going to happen for that other amount of time so five five people is not going to cut it so I want to hear what what's the possibility for more um I was hearing a lot about you know FY 23 24 25 as as Brianna and Alicia stated for this first fiscal year yes we're not seeing anything besides the reduction and already kind of like not hiring more police and and obviously the retirement not hiring anyone into that that position and hopefully whatever monies is available and I know you all were talking a lot about that but whatever monies is available needs to go into the Crest program and all of our other recommendations right but FY 23 FY 25 25 25 why you know there should be more reduction because uh Crest is going to be responding to those calls right so therefore there's going to be less police you're going to have to be lessening police in those years therefore there should be money to go into Crest program since we will be increasingly reducing police so I didn't I didn't hear a mention of that okay the other thing too is around um you know our other recommendations critical you know our town is not inclusive our town is not equitable a diversity equity inclusion department is critical and and I heard a count you know a few of the counselors bring that up which I was very happy I mean I wasn't in the thing but I was going like this in private you know um so it's like we you know that that needs to be critical because we're not inclusive we're not diverse as a town and also when we're talking about the youth empowerment we're talking about the BIPOC cultural center which will be utilized for our families not just BIPOC families but when we're talking about that it's because there's no space that feels safe for BIPOC families in the Amherst community right so when when you're saying well why can't LSSE LSSE or other programs that already established do that is because their space is not inclusive of you know of of these other populations and these marginalized populations so we need to kind of really you know focus and hear that so I think you know sorry I mean like I said you know since I wasn't in there I couldn't ask my questions as they arose but there we go that's me Paul could I hear some is there some responses to some of my questions Paul go ahead sure thanks Ms. Farah um yeah I think you know the the call in number I tried I don't know the technological answer for that I think I tried to say that there is a I know that the working crew had suggested a call in number and that it actually if we had one it might increase the calls coming in and that because there's I think I had heard from your testimony and from others that there might be people who won't call 911 but they may call a different number so I think that that is a technological solution that we would talk with dispatch about where is that called land is it land dispatches their separate person answering that phone that that type of thing I don't know the legal requirements under calls for emergency assistance we'd want to do some research on that again I don't want to call it to be you know if it's unanswered or whatever I think you're absolutely right in publicizing the number if we put a number out there we have experience with that with the COVID hotline we need we would need to really get that number out there as a special number that people could call in an emergency and get it through trusted networks for the people who are most likely to use it the 24 hour coverage I get that I think you know this is a where I differ with where the working group is that I'm suggesting a pilot program that would begin and then assess what the need is and sort of get our we need to crawl before we walk walk before we run we need to sort of understand how this program because it's not an off-the-shelf program I don't think I think we need to customize it for our community so that's that's how I'm approaching it Russell Russ I would like to speak but I'd like you to give an opportunity to my colleagues of color to speak first please okay um thank you for having me and I want to start by really um thanking the town manager for removing the economic development director from the DEI I was one of the people that really opposed that position because I felt that the position benefits the ID and the chamber um we've had um economic development directors in the past and I don't see you know what they did in the past benefited BIPOC community I saw was however um I know that the town manager has you know moved the needle a little bit but I'm still not satisfied um which are proposal um pilot program will set Cress program for a failure period and I hear what the management team have you know have done I appreciate your time there that are some of us in CSWG group who have experienced in program development I have been in human services social services mental health field for more than 20 years I did do a restaurant as you know for a decade but I am very familiar with this field um for me to see tonight acting like it would take 11 months to develop Cress program is just ridiculous um Cress program is not a mental health um treatment program with you know we're not saying that we're going to be treating people that have behavioral health we you know uh there will be resources that we can repair people too and then to spend a whole 11 months it's just doesn't make sense to me what I what I observed what I heard is make excuses back what people done you know they're not our priority when we hear what you're saying back we will do it later it takes time we want to make it work we need to collect data we need to do this excuse upon excuse upon excuse I felt very disrespected that we spend so many months putting this together and then you know the time manager when you gather your management team you didn't even you weren't even including us anymore and just to get your report like couple hours several hours this today before we come in here you kind of threw us off um because it's not what we expected um I also want to speak uh about um the reference made regarding that are other resources in town like the school family center and not to be insulting or anything I'm sure the school staff who who um work at the family center they're doing their best but it's a disaster it's not working it's it's a white space and who is the superintendent it's a white man who is um special education director it's a white woman and so that's not our space you know bifurc families don't access services from them I don't I think you all are out of touch of what we've been telling you guys you don't get it and when we hear all the nice talking and everything but you don't leave our experiences it's not going to work we need our own space we need um the BIPOC multicultural center we need crests where people can actually feel comfortable accessing services if you're going to staff and come only four um responders it's not going to 16 hours a day and then at the end of one fiscal year you say oh it didn't work out it's not working let's move on let's go back to the old ways that it's not working I have a lot to say but I will stop it's just you know if I say I'm frustrated tonight it will be a like understatement I feel that you guys are not taking BIPOC community seriously at all I want to really uh shout out to um a part uh counselor part the angel I underwrote some other people that um you guys have to do better we pay 106 in this town we're part of this community and we're not benefiting from um from all the resources thank you thank you Tashina Raoul and Amon please unmute sorry my unmute button wasn't working um so I'm just going to turn my camera on so I'm going to say first of all that I'm extremely disappointed as are other people that are part of our group um and I'm going to call it for what it is it was it was a very racist act for you guys not to include us in the conversation and what I have to say to that is shame on you Amos shame on you because you guys try to present yourselves as if you're this diverse community I'm going to give you a quick example the first time I went to Providence I was um in the car you know just hanging out kids in the back and I looked up at a billboard and I was like oh my gosh I'm gonna live here and my husband at the time was like why and I said because I just saw a billboard that had a doctor's office that had very many different people but the one thing I noticed about it it didn't have one white person on the billboard it was made up of people of color as a woman who is a doula a student midwife in this community and who has lived here over 30 years I have never had the option to have a birth worker be a person of color to support me in my birth that is what Amos represents to me to walk into a room and be the only to have people that were on school committee back in the day because they felt like they knew my mom look me dead in my face and say to me when I was pregnant with my second son is that child going to be the sibling of that child to have the audacity to ask me that question that is an experience that I have had in this community that was someone who was a person in the government of this community looking me in my face first of all they both came out of my stomach so that's the first thing second of all mind your business like the fact that I would have to even go there I just looked at this person and was like yes and I walked away dumb founded to park in a spot with my handicap my handicap flood because I have rheumatoid arthritis I am disabled I have good days and bad days and literally and this I will say this was not an amorous but this is this is this is encompassing of the whole area there is no place in the valley that I can go that I don't feel this way and so I got I literally got harassed to tears by someone because they didn't believe that I was disabled to tears but here's the kicker the person who was with me who was who I thought was who has had my back literally made the situation about her and she is a white woman and this is this these are the things that we deal with in this community every day I've lived here 30 years I've gotten followed in CVS I don't have a criminal record I don't have there's no reason for somebody to follow me in CVS but they do I remember my friends bragging about how they could go into CVS and nobody would follow them but you know they would bring a black person in with them because they knew they would follow the black person around and not them these are things that happen in this community between the micro aggression between the mega aggression between you know not even being asked to the table or having to sit on the sidelines well a white person interprets what my feelings are or what my situation is or what they think is best for me is absolutely unacceptable shame on all of you who sat by and allowed that to happen and the thing is is that when when like at our last meeting I literally was like I would love to take each and every one of you and drop you in a community of color where you know nobody you know nothing and tell you you need to survive because the thing is is that you would feel really out of place and you would suddenly realize wow this must be just a smidgen of what it feels like but see the thing that I was like but then on the other hand I know how our community works we're not going to let anybody go hungry my door is open my door is open everybody knows that they can call me they can come by my house they can come see me at any time I will feed them it doesn't matter how little food I might have in my refrigerator it doesn't matter what is going on I will drop things to make sure that somebody else is safe and that's how we do in our community because it's not about how much money we make it's not a how it's not about what status we are in the community it's about embracing everyone in our community Amherst you're failing you've been failing the moment that you guys decided to take away the the student the kids um center that was where our Bertucci's used to be and it used to be an all glass building and all the students would swing by there after school and you all decided to sell that to Bertucci's you fail when you guys decided to bounce the boys and girls club all over town to make it every year we had no idea where it was you failed when you fail to hire and support black teachers who are coming into the point that they leave after two years you're failing you have failed the community of color in Amherst from the day it started the day it was established and anytime you feel uncomfortable it's pushback it's what are we going to do how are we going to do it but you know what I guarantee if I do a little research I can find programs that were run and offered to the town by white community members and you guys have funded it with very little questions very little pushback and it is very disappointing and it's very disgusting that you guys will sit there and think that you're doing something positive but at the same time find funds for this that and the other white spaces and you you you know I know that makes some of you uncomfortable white spaces what do you mean white spaces I mean I can't go into a store and and guarantee that I'm going to see a black owner and when they are here they're here for such a short little period of time you have to work on yourself and what you do holding a sign putting putting black lives matter up on you up on your front lawn means nothing it's performative do some actual work and it shouldn't even be the BIPOC community that has to explain to you and tell you over and over and over again how to do it the information is out there it needs to hurt it needs to feel uncomfortable because if you don't feel uncomfortable you don't you're not learning a lesson you're not understanding what's going on because every day I walk through life feeling uncomfortable and the last thing I'm going to say is another story my son is now 25 and when we had the forum for the CSWG he I had to come I had to convince him to speak he didn't want to speak and it broke my heart listening to him speak because he was in the newspaper quite often for sports he was a well known and well respected young man in this community and he was detained because he looked like somebody who did something on New Year's Eve as he's walking to his girlfriend's house and the situation escalated to the point that another student who knew him from Amherst saw what was going on was like what's up what are you doing like there's no way that this person did this they were ignored and so they started going on snapchat and facebook and everything reaching out to other students and being like they're detaining Donovan and from what I understand there was like 25 kids out there talking to this officers and being like look you have the wrong person 25 students I question what would have happened if nobody had been there I don't know it scares me because everybody says it's not going to happen in Amherst but I've been here 30 years my mom was very well known in this community I'm well known in this community and my son who also is well known in this community was detained so no I don't trust the community of Amherst very much I don't trust non-BIPOC people very much you have given me plenty of reasons not to trust you you don't you don't make it you don't make any space for us and you make that clear with every one of these meetings that happens that we've attended that you've attended of ours you've made it very clear we are not welcome and so if you don't want us to continue to feel that way and if you don't want us to continue to see you in that light then you need to make some real change not comfortable change real change thank you thank you Russ my comments were just to the slide show I did get a chance to look at it on my lunch break did you want to comment first I can um well I I do want to appreciate the amount of work uh that the town manager and I know that the town council and finance committee do weekend and week out and I appreciate your attention to detail and the specificity of your questions tonight and those of you who supported the Crest program and the DEI director um you know at the early in his comments the town manager talked about we need to address the urgency for change and I have to say that in your discussion tonight I heard a concern for getting the right responder to each call I heard a concern for relieving the police department of some calls that are really not their specialty but I didn't really hear a sense of urgency about the fact that many many BIPOC people in our community do not feel safe will not call the police when they need safety services that's a public safety problem and there needs to be a sense of urgency about dealing with that I do want to pick it two specific issues um that I think need to be changed at a minimum uh in the town managers proposal the first is that the budget slide shows whole hiring the community responders for five months now we've agreed that it's going to take two months to train them that means they're only going to have three months left in the year to be uh doing their job they're not really going to go operational until April 1st so when we're developing the budget for next year we're going to have no idea how this program works so the start to the program needs to at least be moved a few months ahead and I believe you know I've looked carefully I I understand the all the implementation questions I've you know I've been an administrator I've initiated new programs I know what it takes I don't think we should try to do it immediately but we do need preparation time uh but we can't wait until only five minutes left in the in the fiscal year or we won't have the information we want and we won't have responded to the urgency for change we won't have met the needs of our BIPOC community members secondly I think when the town manager introduced his budget to you with all due respect to Scott and Gabe and Ron he did not tell you he was increasing the police department by two positions but the truth of the matter is the police department has been functioning with 44 sworn officers for the whole second half of the fiscal year and the budget he gave you and the budget that he still is holding to tonight has 46 officers this is not the time to be increasing the level of police service this is not the time to be adding positions especially when the goal is how do we shift positions to an alternative responder model doing making that kind of shift is often really difficult because there's no way to do it without laying off people in the department you're reducing you have a unique opportunity there are four and probably five vacancies in the police department right now you can make this shift this year without having to lay anybody off without terminating any valued police officer we need more we need more community responder positions and we need them for more time the money is right sitting right there in the police budget now the other thing about that is it also makes the problem smaller for FY23 you create a bunch more police positions you're going to have you know again you're going to not be able to find the money because the money is in the police department so doing it now while there are vacancies is a real advantage and finally I know there's some concern about leaving the town short of service well you know the police chief has explained to us that he can't count on being able to hire somebody who's already been trained in the academy and it takes eight to 12 months to train somebody if they have to go through the academy I'm confident we can get cross server responders up and working considerably faster than that so if you want to relieve the police department you want to make sure there's enough police coverage for police work get cross up and running in a sizable enough dimension that we do relieve the police department of the things that are really not police work and we begin to respond to the needs of the BIPOC community I think the positions in the money are there and I think it's a realistic thing to have a more substantial start for FY22 thank you thank you Ross so what I'm going to do is just see if Paul has anything that he wants to say or after what we've just heard and wants to offer the finance committee then I'm going to quickly explain how the finance committee has to proceed under the charter and I think that will come to the evening Owen has not spoken yet and she wants to speak and I don't know if Tashina Bowman wants to speak again her hand I was assuming that hands could usually lowered the meetings by a team that I was keeping track hi Andy I would actually I still do have a lot of questions for Mr. Backelman on the presentation that he showed you all so I mean because I wasn't able to join the initial discussion I would like to ask them now if possible Paul do you want to go ahead and have the questions first yeah of course so I guess my first question looking at that slideshow is is the community safety working group staying together past September because I noticed in the planning that the bulk of the work is going to start in October I think again it is critical that the CSWG be a part of the planning process and implementing whatever needs to be implemented as this program starts so thank you Andy so I'm eager to look at your next proposal on part B of the proposal which includes the development of a resident oversight committee of some sort and so I want to see if that's in competition with what the CSWG is doing or if that's a separate organization separate group and has a different separate mission I think that CSWG's charge will be expired when you deliver your next report I did put in the presentation I would invite members of you know I didn't want to presume that anybody would be willing or interested in participating but I would invite members of the CSWG to work on the development of the program okay and my next question there was a slide on the BIPOC cultural center and it said that this center needs to be evaluated by the DEI director I was just wondering what you meant when you said evaluated because I think one of the habitual problems that this town has is forums and surveys for BIPOC people to come forward and talk about issues their experience in the community and nothing happening and so many have happened in this last year I'm just wondering what else needs to be evaluated for us to have a BIPOC cultural center if I can Andy yeah I don't really know the answer to that question I know that that's a major ask or request from the working group I am not prepared to sort of evaluate that and figure out how to fund something like that you put together a budget on what it would take to operate it so I just felt like it needed more time and I did there was just no time during this front this this this budget making process to address that okay I would have felt just a little bit more comfortable if it said that rather than being evaluated by the DEI director I understand that yeah and then I'm wondering about the Harvard School program that you talked about I'm wondering why we're not utilizing the CAHOOTS consulting that's available you referenced it in our charge and they're a program that's been around for over 30 years now and they've learned a lot and they provide consulting for different towns so I'm wondering why we're sort of a case trial for the Kennedy School but we're not reaching out to CAHOOTS so what and that would that would certainly be an option but the CAHOOTS is a different model it's the model that isn't being recommended by the working group the working group is looking at an employee-based model CAHOOTS is a contract model and so I think if we want to move in the contract realm instead of hiring employees but we want to contract with a social service agency like Whitebird then we would it would make sense for us to consult with CAHOOTS okay and then my last question was what markers are you going to use if you've developed them yet to access the effectiveness of CAHOOTS I'm really worried that because you're not fully funding it it's not going to be as effective as the group is anticipating no that's a great point because I don't think CAHOOTS can be evaluated totally in year one it's just I think Russ and you several members just said it's not going to be enough time to really even get the word out that you can call independent number I don't know what the what the markers would be I think that's something that people would have to look into I think I think it's important to create a baseline data which which has already sort of been done on a certain level but also so we can I don't know what the markers are what what is what do how do we measure whether people feel safe in their community it might be you know how many calls were actually handled it might be a call-based assessment so I just I don't have an opinion on that and I think it would leave it to the group to try and develop that okay and I would just ask going forward that when these implementation meetings are happening with the chief of police and other members of safety services that exist in Amherst that CSWG members be present because we have been studying this and we should be part of the conversation. Yes I think in my proposal I was going to invite members from the CSWG to be at the table for these discussions. Thank you Andy I'm wondering if we would be able to bring Dr. Shabazz into the actually thank you for mentioning that because I realized she was the she represents the consultant group that we worked with who helped us create the budget that's why I bring that up. Yeah I wanted to actually say we actually have public comment on the agenda and it's required as a part of all regular meetings of the council and committees so I did want to so anybody who is in the audience who would like to speak this Dr. Shabazz has her hands up already and I will call on her first as you suggested but other people and I want to because it is getting late and we need to move this along please raise your hand so I have an idea of the number of people and I ask you to limit your time. Athena will run the clock though for Dr. Shabazz because she was one of the consultants. I'm not going to do the same thing and I think that for other people I'm going to have to ask so we limit it to two minutes but I'm not limiting Dr. Shabazz so please bring her in the room first. Hello you all can hear me? Yeah hi okay I can hear you. Yes so thank you Andy and thank you town manager for reconsidering the budget. It still needs work as the CSW have of course you know outlined. I'd like to speak to two things because I think that the CSWG has done an excellent job of engaging with you in terms of a real critique of what has been presented tonight. Right first is to speak to the DEI director of position and implementation of the Crest program redesigned by the town manager as LEAP. First off the research that the CSWG is pulling from and that some of the research of course we did extensive research but and the 7Gen MC group we looked at the 2020 Center for American Progress report. Hopefully you all have looked at that. It's the community responder model report subtitled how cities can send the right responder to every 911 call. They look at LEAP and they look at the CAHOOTS program. I would really recommend that this finance committee and the town council and the town manager look at that report for some comparative issues and points that could be helpful as you again assess whether LEAP is the appropriate program for Amherst or is it CAHOOTS or is it a customized type of program that it sounds like that's where your heart is looking at something more customized but so I just recommend that. Also I'm going to agree with Alyssa Brewer and Pat D'Angelo is here about the issues regarding the DEI director position. It is an absolutely vital part of the CSWG recommendation and is desperately needed for this community. It is not an abstract good feeling type of position. It is a position that needs to be funded by a professional DEI director, someone who is trained and has a background in education to fill that position right away to be able to plan assess and implement goals outlined not only by the town manager but the work of the CSWG. It's really disrespectful to just say we're going to elevate a position whereby someone is a clerk or a position that is in the town hall already. This needs to be a newly created position. There are towns in the state of Massachusetts that are around our size that have dedicated DEI directors and it deserves to have someone with a master's at least at the very least or a doctorate to provide these needed skills and knowledges and step into this position and that a DEI director, someone that attends on all levels of community development including the economy. So diverse people bring in these types of necessary skills and what happens here is that racially and I'm saying here in Amherst, racially, linguistically and ethnically diverse persons arrive here for a short time often for educational advancement but choose not to stay because of the discomfort and sometimes hostile economic, cultural and social climate. That is a fact. I just had a conversation with someone that graduated from UMass recently and they are already looking to lead. To this end, I noticed the description of equity and diversity on the town website as of this week has expanded in the last week into two paragraphs and if I search the town website as a potential visitor or someone moving into Amherst, I would still find the statement and the work on diversity anemic that is shown on the town website. It's assumed that a diversity equity inclusion director would not attend to or consider economic investment and innovation. This is untrue. The short-sightedness is a continual problem on the part of the town and the town council. Having all kinds of people will help us make better decisions. More diverse employers can bring people from all over the world to work and build in Amherst. When people move here, they must find an environment that not only welcomes everyone but educated and skilled people need to feel that they are empowered in the places where they pay taxes and invest. A role of chief diversity inclusion officer or director would advise the town on issues to provide resources for the school department, business, staff programs, activities to promote inclusive excellence in welcoming environments for all. They would have a lead role in facilitating the development of strategies, strategies people, a plan, policies and guidelines that advance understanding of diversity inclusion across hiring, business development, the workforce, the community in total. This would also mean a person that coordinates with individuals who are overseeing diversity inclusion efforts within individual divisions within the town, the boards and commissions and develop new programs that encourage active engagement and activities that demonstrate the city's commitment to inclusion. This is not a part-time position and should not be given short shrift. A more diverse workforce and community is a more economically robust community period. The last thing I want to speak to is that, you know, when we look at budgeting, one of the things to keep in mind, particularly with the Kahootz program as a model, our research found that Eugene Oregon saved an estimated 8.5 million per year in public safety costs by reducing the need for police response. And the savings accrued and a town like Amherst would be able to reinvest those funds back into the responders program to expand its reach and promote it in a sustainable way. So again, the Center for American Progress Report also has this information. Lastly, Amherst is going to need to tailor the program that the town manager, the CSWG, has created and it points to fit like for a local context and it must effectively meet the needs of the residents. We've said that, but what that means is that the town should meaningfully involve the community. That's the CSWG. Other oversight groups as far as a review group, et cetera, fine, but the CSWG needs to remain to engage residents in every step of the process as we will be back to square one where the people and the groups who are disenfranchised will most likely have to come into contact with police or in this case, community responders that do not necessarily fit what the CSWG had in mind. Okay, so the CSWG will be your best representatives of the larger community, especially regarding BIPOC members and should be maintained as a part of the process and an ongoing part of the town government to elicit feedback. If you want to think of it as that way, who are people that can provide this liaison relationship with the community and with the program? Okay, so I think we have to remember who are the stakeholders. The CSWG has brought the information of folks most vulnerable and who would most benefit and why on earth would you exclude them from shaping this process unless you want to repeat the same mistakes? That's it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Shavaz. So, Paul, I will leave it to you to raise your hand at any point or to signal to me because I'm looking at you right now at the attendee list and I said we need to do public comment. Please, please limit to two minutes and four public comment. I'm not sure if you heard her comment, but Ms. Walker had her hand up for quite a while, so I just want to acknowledge that her hand has been raised. And I also have my hand up. Yeah, I need to draw the meeting to a close at some point, so I just have to be very careful about making sure we get the public comment and that's why I was trying to move over to a lot of the public in for a few minutes. I'm okay with continuing public comment. No, I'm okay with continuing public comment, but I would just like to speak because I did have questions and I have had my hand raised since before we started public comment. And so I do have questions for the town manager in regards to this presentation, but I can wait until after public comment. Okay. And I see that Ms. Farar has to, and I'll conclude with comment just to reminder about what the role of the finance committee and the council is under the charter that I'll do that at the end. And going to public comment, the first is Ms. Karakashian, I believe, is the last name and I'm not going to let you introduce yourself so I don't mispronounce your name entirely. Hi there. My name is Noa Lani. I would like to start off by saying one of the issues that I had in Amherst is that folks never actually tried to pronounce my name correctly, so that feels pretty offensive that you just said you're not going to try. I would also like to point out that as an outside member, I don't live in Amherst anymore, so I want to make that very clear. I just sat waiting to speak for two and a half hours because this matters to me as a person who doesn't live there anymore. I feel like what was made very clear by, I believe y'all are the council now, is that y'all are not invested in actually making change in Amherst because y'all didn't invite the people who proposed the budget, who built the programs, who are making these recommendations to speak, to present what they have been working on for months. And that's incredibly disrespectful and to Sheena named it and racist. So I feel like what y'all are showing is that you're not actually committed to making any change. And if that is not the case, if you are actually interested in creating a community where your BIPOC members feel safe, then the first thing you need to do is invite them to sit at the table. And it is wildly inappropriate that watching this meeting, I don't see any diversity. Like the first steps should have been inviting people of color to join the council period because y'all are speaking on stuff that you don't live, that you don't know, and then are interpreting it for outsiders, for members of the community, for people who are listening to this in a way that is made very clear by this group that is inaccurate. You're inaccurately reciting the work that they have done and not including them to clarify and answer questions and even ask questions about the information that you're interpreting. And I'm really disappointed to have sat here and realized that nothing has changed since I left, since I moved away. And so I would really like y'all to sit with that. And I expect y'all to just do better because if that's what you want, then you actually need to take the strides forward. And I don't know if the time is up. But the last thing I want to say that I felt very hurt by is that y'all are talking about having a budget to increase the police when that is literally the exact opposite. Like I expect to see that decrease when this group is providing alternatives to the police. The expectation is that the problems that they can't solve, which they should be trained on, irregardless, they should be able to step into a situation and say, this is out of our realm, let's hand it off to the appropriate person, which it sounds like they're not. Those positions need to be decreased so the money is going to the appropriate places. And yeah, that's all I have to say. I commend all of you on this committee for putting this together and being patient while you're being wildly disrespected, like kudos to y'all, kudos. And I want to make it very clear that I don't even live in Massachusetts anymore. And I found it important to hop on this call to defend folks who aren't being defended by the people who are claiming they support BIPOC folks in this community. Thank you. And I was very interested in your comment and I appreciated your comment at the beginning because I don't know if it's more disrespectful to attempt a name and get it wrong or to not attempt a name at all. And so thank you for that comment. Somebody who is signed in is canopy equity. Please state your name where you live because I don't know what that is, but I see your hand up. Hi, my name is Amara Donovan. And I grew up in Amherst for 28 years and also attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a dual degree in sociology and public health with a focus on racial equity. And I now work in anti-racism and racial justice, both in a community engagement nonprofit and an anti-racism consulting. And I urge the town council and finance committee to adopt all of the recommendations formed by the CSWG after countless hours of community engagement, synthesis, and meaningful discussion about our community. The Crest program is a huge and impactful part of this that will revolutionize the experiences of BIPOC and other historically marginalized groups in our community. The foundation of a thriving community is trust and safety. The Crest program provides a foundation for that and begins the work of restoration with a community that has experienced immense harm at the hands of policing in Amherst specifically. I was incredibly distraught to see the clear lack of respect and investment in the CSWG made clear throughout their entire work from being publicly chastised by a town council member lied to about funding, asked not to attend essential meetings such as the safety portion of the budget meeting, barred from presenting the information they deem important as BIPOC community members themselves and now being met with barriers to making the fruits of their labor culture fruition. This is racism. If Amherst truly wants to be a diverse and inclusive community rooted in equity and anti-racism, this must be reflected in the dollars we choose to invest and the holistic view of program services and resources we invest in. Anti-racism cannot be an add-on. It must be integrated throughout the town, safety services, mental health services and governance across the board. This is a start, but this is not enough. I urge you to defund the police and invest in the BIPOC community immediately and with urgency. Additionally, I would just like to say that the members of the CSWG are community safety and wellness. Your constant questioning of their data and asking the town to collect even more information before investment is a racist white supremacist strategy. No one asks white people to go gather more data and information and to prove themselves after years of this data being available to the town. This data is right in front of your faces and it is so disrespectful for you to say that it's not enough. BIPOC residents are not obligated to tie their data in a bow of your white supremacist perfectionist standards. Stories are data. Your response is not enough. Again, the members of the CSWG are community safety and wellness. My doula who made sure my son was born safe and healthy is on this committee. My advocate in education and in all of my life across the board as a resource is on this committee. The woman and business owner who served me and my friend's food after school from her business is on this committee. That is community safety and wellness. Y'all really need to pull out your notebooks and start taking notes. Pull out the tablet, pull out whatever privilege device you have and take notes and be active participants in this work. It is your job and how you are elected and we will vote you out. The CSWG, you all are incredible. Continue to stand in your power and continue to take up space because you and our community deserve this and you should not allow this meeting to be cut short. I have seen this town council stay on meetings because of buildings and because of mosquito spraying longer than you are willing to hear BIPOC community members out and I think that you are fearful and I think that it is cowardly of you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Allegra Clark. I live in Amherst in District 2. I am disgusted but not surprised that the community safety working group was not included in presenting the plan for press. I think we need to do better as a town. We have asked countless times for BIPOC people to share their stories and we are not listening to them. This was just another example throughout this process of how we have not listened or have not even given the space to be heard. I know I have said this before but I think if there are vacancies in the police department right now, those need to be transitioned. Those positions need to transition over to the Cress program and every time a vacancy is coming up in the next few years, that should be transitioned over to the Cress program. If we are going to follow the recommendation to reduce the number of policing and to increase the services provided by Cress and look at the kinds of calls that they are responding to, that is how we need to do it. I do want to just share some research and some data since it does seem that sometimes that does get through. Recently, I was on a webinar by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and a doctor, Rhea Boyd out of the Children's Hospital in Oakland, shared her research on policing and its impacts. She said that the harms associated with police exposure to black and brown children begin in utero with mothers who live in neighborhoods with high level of police presence having a higher risk of pre-charm birth. Additionally, there are educational outcomes of black and Latino students who live in close proximity to police killings, police surveillance of their neighborhood, and violence by the police in general. This exposure increases absenteeism, decreases GPA, and decreases the likelihood of graduation. Her recommendations include reducing children's exposure to police and police violence, including using non-police responders for 911 calls, shrinking the police footprint, and diverting resources into healthcare infrastructure. I think that also shows that not only is Cress important, but the other recommendations of having a youth empowerment center and a BIPOC cultural center are also important to create community safety. Thank you, Zoe. Hello. My name is Zoe Crabtron. I live in District 5. I had a couple of questions that came up during Professor, sorry, but a long day. Time Manager Bachmann's presentation earlier today. And one of them, or several of them, have already been pointed out. The first is that I noticed on the slides that the CSWG is not mentioned at all in the month-by-month plan. It's not mentioned at all after the August row, which was very concerning to me because I know that one of the things that they have specifically requested is that they will be continued so that they can continue helping implement this program. So I hear from Time Manager Bachmann that you have said that you've invited people and you don't want to expect that they will necessarily stay on. But it was very concerning to me to see that they weren't even mentioned after August because they really specifically have been requested for them to continue. Secondly, as Russ Vernon Jones pointed out, at this point in the plan that Bachmann put forward, it seems like Cress will only be really active for a couple of months before budget decisions will be made. And I know that right now it sounds like you're making promises about how we're going to continue funding it, even we'll figure out what the benchmarks are, and we won't be judging it too harshly. But I really don't trust that when push comes to shove next year, and you're making hard budget decisions, that you will look at something that you haven't really given a chance to succeed and have quality data, because you care so much about all this data that we've been giving you for over a year, and you're still barely listening, that you will look at this thing that hasn't gotten the chance to have the full level of data that you think is required. And it's hard for me to imagine that you will then double the budget, because it will need to be around for a whole year instead of half a year, let alone increase the number of staff beyond what you've currently allocated for. It's very concerning to me. And thirdly, as other people have pointed out as well, there's no mention of any additional police officer positions being frozen. There's the two that were frozen by the town council last year, which there's been no discussion about necessarily whether they will continue to be frozen, because the $130,000 that was originally promised was from what wasn't spent last year. So that is still, I think, an unanswered question for me. And as people have mentioned, there are additional police positions that are open beyond that, which sounds like maybe four or five. It's a lot of money, and it should be going to crest. There's no reason that we should be continuing to increase the police budget, which is currently increasing this year by a couple percent, although maybe slightly not now that you've taken out the extra money you didn't even know within the educational budget for the police. In any case, it should not be increasing when you are intentionally shifting away from police department towards a community responder model, which is specifically what you requested that the CSWG do. Thank you. Thank you. I need to keep going because it's getting like Meg. Did you say Meg? Yes, I did, and you're there. Hi. Thank you. I'm sort of paralyzed by the important comments that have been made. I appreciate Tashina's remarks. Hi, Tash. And I appreciate Paul's remarks. I really, I had another set of comments I was going to make in support of the Community Safety Working Group, which I still have great support for. I just urge everyone to be gentle and to try to find some level of trust that everybody's doing their best. As a white person, I've learned that my experiences in Amherst are not the same experiences that people of color have had. It's a fact. It's just a plain fact that if you're a white person, you haven't had the same experiences living in this town. And we need those of us who are white need to accept that and understand it and explore what we can do to change that. And I'm really sort of, I'm not going to say too much because I had, I was going to say a whole lot more, but I'm really been totally drawn in by this conversation and just urge every, all of us to be patient and to be listening and to try to care about each other as human beings and not be defensive. As white people, our experiences have been profoundly different. And it's just a fact. And so we need to support the recommendations of the Community Safety Working Group. And at the same time, we need to make sure that they'll work in the context of the town government. And I really appreciated Paul's remarks because he seemed to be putting forward a way that this could move, that we could implement much of what the working group is recommending. But I really urge people, if you have this little gut feeling of reaction like, white people, like, ooh, what do they mean? They don't notice, you know, this little gut reaction that some white people can have when they hear people of color talking about their experiences. Don't go there. Just when white people have those experience, those feelings of resentment and just let it go. Let it go. That wasn't what I was planning to say. Oh, well, but I'm totally in support of the community support. Oops, I got my earbuds. I'm in support of the recommendations. And I'm, I'm delighted to hear about this elite program because this is a real, I'll say one more thing that I was going to say, this is a real opportunity for Amherst to move forward. And I appreciate that Paul's been linked in with this group. Don't think of it as Harvard, think of it as a network of other communities around the country that are trying to do the same work that the, it's not Harvard, it's a network of communities and we have, we can learn from other communities. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm gonna make two comments here. One is on behalf of the Human Rights Commission. The other on behalf of myself. So I want to say that the Human Rights Commission is in full support of the community safety working groups recommendations and that we advocate for these recommendations to be fully funded. Personally as a resident, I'd like to commend the CSWG members for their hard work. But I'd also like to honor the Black, Indigenous and people of color on the working group for the courage that it takes to speak truth to power as a bypass person in the town of Amherst. It's a lot easier to get placated than it is to be heard. So you have my respect, my support, and I honor you. Thank you. Thank you. Marcy? Hello. I'm Marcy Sklow. And I, like May, have been feeling very moved by this process. I want to just say that in the beginning of the meeting and Paul's presentation, I was very excited at how enthusiastic Paul was and how he had worked really hard to bring money to the table to, to have it work. And then when the community safety folks entered the room, I was quite surprised at how frustrated they were. And I realized, my gosh, two hours went by and here they were waiting, not, not being part of this and not having that opportunity to just look at the screen, for me to look at the screen and not see their faces in hindsight was really, really intense. So I appreciate them coming in and sharing that emotion and that experience that they had. And it really taught me something. As a white person, I am always learning, I'm always learning the ways that my intentions are good, but I don't always, you know, do the right thing and I can fall short very easily in terms of just the simple act of having everybody at the table. That, that makes perfect sense to me now, but I didn't think of it in the beginning when the presentation was happening. To get back to the content, I really applaud what Lynn said and the enthusiasm with which Lynn's talked about the grant writing and the potentiality of helping to support some of these efforts with grants. And I know that the community safety working group has done a lot of research about grants and that they had some stuff to offer on that, on that front. And I'm really, I was going to hear Lynn talk about that. I also, I don't know who spoke of it, but there was some question about cross training and trying to save money by having it be both police and crests. And I just, at that moment, actually I was aware that there was nobody from the community safety working group to speak to that because I know that is absolutely antithesis to what they have been saying is so important that it be separated from the police and that the people in town who are BIPOC people do not trust the police as, as their safety network, as their safety resource. And finally, I agree with Meg. You know, we, we have so much to learn and culturally, I think white people often don't like being yelled at and get, get that itchy feeling that Meg discussed in, in the belly of like, whoa, I'm, I'm being attacked here. But we all, we all need to learn some stuff and hearing people share such raw emotion brings to me a very big feeling of respect for them. And, and a lot of appreciation and the community safety working group, the, the meetings that I have had the honor to attend, and to look at after the fact, I just really have, again, talking about process really appreciated their process, their professionalism, their own, the combination of their smarts and their ability to research and find things out, and also their humanness and their, their humanity, and their sharing of, of their experiences. So I'll close now, but I really am grateful to have a chance to say something and I fully support the community safety working group. Thank you. Thank you. Two more public comments and I'll turn back to the working group for a few minutes. Hello, this is Nadine. I'm District 4. I'm just, I just wanted to come on first to just say that the CSWG group, the work that they've been doing, I want to commend them also to say I appreciate their hard work. I have been a resident of Amherst for over 27 years, and I want to say how come from a legal perspective to simply state that as we had seen in this past year, one of the things that I think that when we're looking at budgeting and we're looking for future, is that it will cost more if we find the town of Amherst finds itself in a predicament like Minneapolis did or even, or even Louisville, Kentucky, what happened with Breonna Taylor. When we start paying out legal fees, when we start paying out money, is cheaper in the long run to invest in a community service group that will help eliminate or lessen the chances of there be some sort of police brutality and in addition for someone to be dead and no respect for someone's life. So I would say to the, as I know we're looking right now at the budgets and the numbers, but we also have to be looking at as a cost benefit analysis. And if there is a community service program available, as you know that there's an insurance that you pay for that cost, and then it's lessened because you have this and you show that this is the work that you're doing. So that helps with the lessen of the cost. And if there's some sort of payout in the future, we at least are prepared and we show that we're being proactive instead of reactive, which is what all these other jurisdictions have been. And so that I would say that in order to provide some sort of extra comfort level because there has to be a level of trust for the BIPOC community and placed for them to feel very open that they're heard and that there's possibility for them. I also have a, now a young adult raised a young child in Amherst and I had to have the same talks that Ms. Ferrer had to have every time he drove or every time he went out, even he went out with his friends. And still to this day, I still have that conversation with him while he's at school in Chicago. And so just wanting to say that it is important and that we want as residents in Amherst to be heard and to have a voice and for us to have seats at tables. So thank you. Hey Dean, thank you for your comments. Andy evidently lost connection and let me know that. Ash Hartwell, please enter the room. Thank you. This will be brief, but I just wanted to again say that how impressive the research and the thoughtfulness and the work that the community safety working group has put together and that really to commend that and to recognize I feel that we should have a certain level of optimism that things are at a cost and could change, but we have to do it together. We have to do it together. By that I mean the white folk and the BIPOC folk working together. And although I really respect all the work that Paul put into that, I think that what is clear unless there is integration and involvement of the dialogue with the groups, no matter how technically good it may be, it's not good because those voices aren't there. And that's the message of tonight. If any message comes through really clearly. And I would argue that what our goal must be is to establish the trust and the consensus about the way to move forward. That's tough. It's going to take, you know, work on both sides, but it has to happen if we're going to move forward and really make a structural change in this town. And we could do it. Everybody here is smart and able, but let's recognize it has to be done together or it's not going to happen. So that's really what I wanted to say. Thank you. Thank you, Ash. Meg, did you still have your hand on it again? Or are you taking your hand? No, I forgot to put it down. Sorry. I'm back. Okay, Andy, go ahead. Yeah, I think we were just going to Alicia asked, I believe, to speak after public comment and ask questions. Paul, and I see one other hand up and then wanted to see how we to draw this to a close. I did have one comment to make and it's not meant to say that the comments we heard from the public weren't very important and we weren't listening to them. But we had heard a substantial presentation at the council meeting and the goal was today to then hear from the town manager and to react to that because we had and that may have been poorly thought out, but that was the intention. Alicia, Brianna, either one of you want to ask questions. Andy, there's one more person. Vera Cage is waiting to speak in public comment. Okay, I'm sorry. Vera, why don't you conclude you would please come in. Hi, can everyone hear me? Yes, you can. Okay. Okay. I speak in total support of the CSWG's proposal. The town needs to fund it 100%. I want to read a portion of your resolution in the aftermath of the death of Mr. George Floyd last year. You said, whereas as public officials it is our duty to use our legal and moral authority to protect all members of our community no matter their race or color or where they fall in the power spectrum. It is our duty to foster a community free of fear, intimidation and violence, a community in which people are not targeted or hurt unnecessarily by law enforcement and provide equal protection under the law. You speak in this resolution about listening and putting groups together. And the CSWG is a group that is very much people of color centric and women centric. And for anyone to vote against funding this 100%, you are not true to the language of your letter. What we need to hear from public officials who have the power is that you have not wasted people's time. My son is in the CSWG group. And what lesson is he going to learn about participating and community engagement when his elders are sitting at the table carving out a space for him to belong to participate, to use his experiences as a black, a brown child growing up in this community, this is all the community that he knows growing up. What lesson are you imparting upon him about white supremacy and who holds power in this community? Dare not exclude the CSWG's work. Do not disrespect it. Please vote accordingly that you listen and you respect people's voices that have volunteered their time here. Thank you. Thank you. So then going back to Alicia, Brianna, as co-chairs of the committee, do you have questions that you were posing to pose to Paul? I also have my hand up. I've been having my hand up for a while. Yeah, I know. But I did see it. And again, I think we're getting to the point of exceeding our time. I see more hands going up and it's getting to be problematic. I did see your hand up for but I wanted to go to the co-chairs. I wanted to fur my comment to Ms. Ferrara and Ms. Walker who have had their hands up for a while now. Thank you, Ms. Ellen. So I just wanted to, I have a couple of comments and questions on Mr. Bachmann's presentation. I am thankful that he went back and did reassess his budget allocation to us. However, it is still very insufficient. And so there are a couple of things that are really concerning to me when seeing this. The first thing is the implementation team. And so I am just very confused as to we actually set out parameters for an implementation team and who we wanted to be involved in the design process. And they're not on here. And it says the CSWG members will be a part of the implementation process. However, it was also very clear to me at the beginning of this meeting that there have been multiple conversations in regards to our recommendations that we have not been a part of. And sort of the entire coming up with this presentation was, it seemed like there was discussion amongst the implementation team and none of us were part of that conversation. But none of us were also even aware that that conversation was happening. And so that's very concerning to me considering that Mr. Bachmann sits in all of our meetings and we could have been made aware that this was happening. And I'm sure that if we were made aware we would have expressed our desire to continue to be involved and for our voices to be heard as a part of that process. So that's very concerning to me the implementation team itself. And then also a lot of these slides and a lot of the questions that are open or left to left that Mr. Bachmann has stated in these slides he doesn't have the answers to are things that we have already researched. And so I'm just also a little bit slightly confused as to there was a lot of question as to the money that we spent on our consulting team. Well, a lot of money has been put into the research and it is there and it is available. And if certain things needed to be configured in order for the youth center to be implemented or for the multicultural family center to be implemented, then those things could have been brought up during our meetings because it has been a long part of the discussion that these were things we were going to recommend. And I feel like what it would really look like for this to be a collaborative inclusive process would be since the town manager was sitting in all of our meetings for him to say, hey, for us to be able to make this happen, this is the information we're going to need. And we have asked him also many times for that information to be given to us and we weren't received that feedback. So it's a little bit weird that, you know, there needs to be more research put into how we can make the youth center or the family center effective, but we've done that research. That's what we've been doing for the past six months is the research. So it feels to me like we're being we're being asked for more time, but I'm not understanding why like is the research is going to be done over again and by who and where is that money going to come from since we've already spent the money on it. And the question here is money and the lack there of funding. And then I also see that ADK was put aside to address anti racism. That's the same ADK that was put aside this year that we utilized in order to complete our charge. And I just want to say that that was not enough. We ran out of money. So we have a second half of our charge and we already don't have any money left. So I'm just not understanding how that ADK is going to be used successfully to address any anti racism. And it was also put that possibly that ADK could be used for the stipends for the oversight board, but and that possibly it could be used to help come up with more information to implement these other programs. But how is that going to happen when that wasn't even enough money for us to do the research? I'm not understanding. It's this is just not going to work out. And then my final point was that when we came up with the alternative for community safety, all of our recommendations are equally as important. So crest would be the the um responding to crime, you know, like responding to the calls to the police, but we need preventative services in order to really lessen the the calls that go to the police. We need the youth to be able to be engaged. We need them to have other activities to participate in. We need to really foster their development and their growth because there aren't a lot of opportunities available in this town to the youth period. Any youth. It is not available here. And so what is it? What is what can they do? We heard at one of our family, at one of our forums, one of the positive experiences that were shared with the police was that there was a mother having um difficulties with her child and she was able to call the police and the police responded. They were able to get her child back into the home and things were settled. And to me, although that illustrates a positive police experience, what it really illustrates is the lack of resources available to families in this community. There was nobody else for her to call. There was nowhere else for her to go. It wasn't because this was the best option. It was because it was the only option. And we need to give our community members more options, not just the Crest program. We need the multicultural center. We need the youth center and we need a whole entire department for diversity, equity, inclusion, because that is a large, heavy and weighted test. And there are so many different departments in this town that need to be evaluated under an anti-racist lens that one person themselves cannot do that. That is a very large task. And I was disappointed. This is an action plan that we've been asking for for a few weeks from the town manager. We have asked them to come up with a detailed action plan. And to me, this is not detailed. This doesn't state anything. This doesn't state how the budget is going to increase year by year in order to fulfill these things. It's just a very loose plan to me. And so I'm very concerned about the implementation of our recommendations moving forward, especially if our group is not continued to be involved in the process. I don't know if Paul wants to respond or why don't we hear from Debra first and then I'm going to ask Paul to see if he has any comments to make. I mean, again, you know, I keep on hearing like we need to shut down this meeting and everything. And you all have had so many meetings that you go on and on and on. This is a critical important meeting. I don't want to hear again that we need to shut down this meeting. I have two kids that need me, but I'm here. Why? Because they understand that I'm trying to safeguard their life. I'm trying to safeguard that they don't get harm. Do you think I want to be here at 907 talking to you all? No, I don't. But I'm here because I think it's critically important. And so you all should also feel that it's critically important. We're talking about a whole segment of the population of Amherst. And that's why I think you all are not getting that we keep on having to say the same things over and over again, because it seems like you all are not getting it. You keep on bringing up the things over and over again. It's just alarming to me. It's really alarming that this is what we're having to do to bring up these issues. One of the residents said that we're at a cost. You all have to take bold moves. You need to take the steps that's needed. Be brave. When you charge us, you wanted us to create something different. If not, then you should have told us to create the same thing. No, it's different. I know it's scary. I know difference means scary. That's why BIPOC people always get it because we're different. But we need to be brave. We need to take bold steps. And it can't just be that resolution, the beautiful resolution you all created. That's talk. What we're doing, what we recommend in terms of all the recommendations, that's doing the walk. It can't be just talking. It can't be just writing a beautiful resolution with a whole bunch of words. It has to be about putting them into fruition. I understand it's scary, but we have to be able to do it. And now in terms of my three quick points, because I do have three quick points to make, and this is to Paul. So Paul, when Brianna asked you about Kahootz, why aren't you using Kahootz as one of the places to look at? And then you said it's because they use contracts and when using employee, I get it, but that's a narrow segment. Kahootz has been in place for over 30 years. They've done a lot of good things, but they've also made a lot of mistakes. So they'd be willing to tell us the mistakes they made so that we don't make those mistakes. Right? So we can't just, just because they're a contractor model and we're an employee model, now Kahootz is out the window. No, you still have to go and consult with them because it's important because they've been doing this thing for 30 years and with a lot of success. One of the markers that they threw out there is that last year with 24,000 calls, they only had to call the police and 450 of those calls because obviously they're huge, right? It's Eugene and Springfield. They're huge. There's a lot of people in their cities. I get that. But out of 24,000 calls last year, they only had to call in the police for 150. Let me let that sink in. So yes, consult with Kahootz. I think it would be a good idea. Don't just throw them out just because they use, it's a contractor model. I'm like, I just don't get it. And then the CSWG, I said it when I said it in the beginning and Paul, you're being very kind of like general, not trying to really focus in. CSWG has to be part of putting these recommendations in place. They cannot expire on September 1. CSWG has nothing to do with the oversight board. The oversight board, the resident oversight board is totally different, has a whole different set of parameters. So for you to say that, well, you're not sure because maybe the CSWG and the oversight board is going to be the same. No, oversight board is going to be overseeing and monitoring the police department, Amherst Police Department and Crest. We are going to be monitoring the recommendation, making sure the recommendations are put in place. However long that takes, we have to be involved at every step of the way, period. So I mean, I hope I'm making myself clear because I've said it before, but then you answer some questions again, very general and not really committing to anything. And then lastly, I didn't hear from my question to you, Paul, about the fact that once Crest is fully, and it has to be because if we don't put it fully in place, what it's going to do is it's going to fail. So hopefully once it's fully in place and it's successful, that means there's going to be less police. So if there's going to be less police, that funding is going to go to Crest. Correct? I want a response. I didn't hear that response. What is the response? I stopped there. Okay, thank you. So I don't know, Paul? I'm not sure. He's looking frozen on my screen, that's I'm not sure. Am I being heard? Okay. So I think it looks like Andy may be frozen. So on the Kahootz model, I'm happy to look at the Kahootz. It's the standard that everyone looks at it. It's the longest tenure. I wasn't dismissing it. I was just saying, the LEAP consulting group, LEAP is not a program. It's a group that advises folks on programs because Kahootz is an actual program as in Albuquerque, Olympia, all the different places. So I think we would want to look at all the programs. Kahootz obviously has a ton of experience and we'd want to learn from that. The reason it is a different model than what the working group has recommended. But there are other things and it's a, so it's a, but something to learn from for sure. The, you know, I think the mission of the community safety working group was to provide advice to the town manager. That's what the mission was. The, that mission will be completed when you're, you deliver the Part B recommendation to the town manager. Then it becomes the town manager's responsibility to provide a budget to the town, to the town council. And it's, and so, and I've done that. So now the balls in the town council's court to decide if they're going to approve that budget or not. Your charge for the working group goes till September 1st. And, you know, the intent, the reason I put September 1st in your charge was that knowing that your final report was due on June 30th that you would need some time if there was reaction, if the council wanted to meet with you during the summer, if there were things that needed to be cleaned up. It was never the intention for the working group to be a continuing body. And that's not my intention. There may be a body that needs to be continued. And that's why I want to talk about the reparations group. But the continuing body is not going, is not set up to be the community safety working group. If you look at the charge, it is a time limited charge. It was set up purposely that way. And I think we, well, I'm not sure if we talked about that or not at the beginning, but we, the commitment when we asked people to participate was that it was to September 1st. And that's what was written into the charge. So, and, and if, and putting crests in place fully in place, you know, I hear that and I understand that concern that unless it's up and running full fledged, it's really hard to judge whether it's successful or not. And I think that that comes into play with whether the phone number is actually being utilized or not if there's a separate phone number, for instance. And it comes into play if, you know, you know, if it's only, you know, if it's not open all the time, people can't trust that they can call it when they're not sure. And that creates some uncertainty. And, but I really believe that we need to start with a smaller program, even though it's not up and running to ultimately get there. I really truly believe that an alternative responder program, especially in this community is well needed and needs to be put into place. And I think I don't think any programs that have been that have any of these community responder programs that have started have ever been terminated. They've all proven their worth pretty quickly. So I think that this will be the case in our community too, because our community is really ripe for this kind of program. And I think what is the impact on the police department was one of the things is, and I think, you know, we want to model that too. We want to look at what the one of my present things was to say, what is the appropriate level for police department? What is the appropriate level for for the Crest program? And we need to be looking at that objectively and with statistics so that we're building the right community safety model for the community of Amherst. Thank you, Paul. So maybe this is a good segue for me to say what I was going to say about the process and then recognize a few more members of the working group before drawing into the close. The finance committee is required by the charter to make a recommendation on the budget to the council. Ultimately, it is a council decision as to how to respond. But the council is limited by what the charter provides as the council's capacity within the budget. And this was not created by our charter commission just for Amherst, but is actually a part of state statute that applies to all cities across the Commonwealth. And that is that the council can approve a budget, can reduce the funding line, can eliminate a funding line that cannot add to a funding line. And that's what the charter says, and that's what state law says. So when the council ultimately has to act before June 30, it is within those limitations that it has to act. And I know that that's not something that makes many of us always happy, but it is what the law is. And that's kind of where we're at. But I do at least want to get back to the co-chairs of the group and then other members of the group. So Breonna, do you want to lead off? Sure. So my comment was just I recognize that our charge was to put together these reports. But I also want to remind you that part of our charge was engaging the communities most impacted by policing. And we have engaged them through hours of forums, surveys, and the consultants work. And those stories are horrifying. And I would never want somebody to relive them. So I think, Paul, just on you sitting in on those meetings and hearing those lived experiences, you would want to keep us together to make sure that our recommendations are seen all the way out, because there's a clear lack of mistrust between BIPOC community members and the town government. So I think it's critical that the CSWG stays together. And I also just want to emphasize that this conversation could have been a lot shorter if we were welcomed in the beginning of the conversation as planned. This whole, the whole finance committee meeting was supposed to be catered toward the community safety working group. We attended the community, the community safety finance committee in the audience. And we listened to the chief talk, the APD chief talk, we listened to fireman Nelson talk. But now it's our turn to present and we're in the audience hearing others talk about something that we've spent months researching and months getting feedback from the community to inform our work. So that's why this meeting is dragging out because you left us in the audience in the beginning. And we are now evaluating the PowerPoint that was said, we're trying to answer questions that others have that were answered incorrectly. And we're trying to provide clarity and also speak to the amount of people that joined us during public comment and said what's what we have now in Amherst is not working. It is not working. Thanks, Brianna. And sticking with the two countries for solicitude, do you have anything else? Yes, thank you. So Brianna stated very well what I was going to say for the most part, but I just wanted to clarify that our charge was actually very specifically to make recommendations to alternative safety to alternative safety services. Things that are being done by the police right now that can be outsourced to other agencies, to other departments, that was specifically our charge was to make those recommendations. And so you have them. And one of the recommendations that we made was to continue the CSWG. And so although I hear that you say that it was intentional that our group was ending, it is also intentional that we're requesting for it to not end. And so I think that you have the power to amend that decision at this time, because that is one of our recommendations. I also, and I also am just curious as to what the intention was like, why was it intentional that we're ending? I don't really understand that intention. And then I also heard the town manager state that he believes that a pilot is what we need. And I'm also very confused about that, because once again, we have done the research. And so we are the experts on this. And we have stated very clearly that we do not believe that a pilot is going to be successful. And we do not believe that it's going to work. And so I just don't understand what research that belief is based off of or where you come up with those findings. And I'm just really frustrated right now. And I apologize that I'm trying to work through this because we've been told a lot of misleading information. And once again, I thought this meeting was entirely for us. We actually took a doodle poll onto which day this meeting should be on that was best for all of the community safety working group members. We were instructed not to go to the first portion of the budget hearing with the finance community, because we were going to be given a meeting specifically for us. We are being silenced. We are being limited and our voices are being reduced. And it's very difficult. I also agree with Deborah. I don't want to be on this meeting so late, but I've had questions and things I wanted to say the entire first portion of the meeting. And I actually had my hand raised in the audience the entire time and didn't get any recognition at all. And so I don't know where we go with this. But I think that I think that Mr. Bachman also needs to do better. And we've been being thrown around like the town council told us we're making our case to the town manager when we ask them. The town manager told us we're making our case to the town council. And so who's making the decisions here? And why aren't we all working together to figure out together how we can make this work, since we all seem to agree that this is urgent and important, right? So why can't we work together? Why aren't you guys telling us what it is that you need from us so that we can make this happen? I'm just not understanding. Thank you. Maybe I'll not respond immediately to reserve comment, reserve response for a couple minutes so I can call in a couple other members of the working group. Pat. So I want to comment on the process tonight. You invited to come present our budget, that this was supposed to be a budget hearing. Our co-chairs presented and you never, and I'm addressing to you, Andy, you never asked anyone, the finance committee members or the school committee members and council members to ask us questions with the budget. On Monday when we were presented, there were some questions that were supposed to be asked tonight and none of them were asked. I have children who studied finance, two of them. I have a kid that studied economics. I have a child that studied accounting. Two of my kids work at Wall Street. We have a finance director in this town that is advising how to budget for Crest Program. You all are very intelligent people and you want to take what they recommended with the so-called management team. How on earth is war responders going to work? It's being set up for failure. If any of my kids perform like this, they will lose their job. If any BIPOC professional present this type of budget for a program that is clearly going to fail, they will lose their job. But the finance director is a white man. His job is protected. In fact, what happens in this town is that we what happens in this town is that some of the people who perform very poorly get rewarded. The same person that performed in the school system was special education funding that was going into the special education attorneys. It was being presented at school committees as if all the money was going to the students with special needs when it wasn't. History is repeating itself. The person was being promoted. How much has he made in this town? Millions from taxpayer money. And then we're here begging Nicola and Diamond to provide services for BIPOC people. We all pay taxes in this town. We are part of this town. We should have the same right that you all enjoy. One hundred thousand dollars is devoted to golf course for white people. We have hundred thousand dollars set aside for capital projects, temporary hundred thousand dollars and none of you. And I'm trying to like control my emotion. None of you can bring that up. What I'm hearing is we want economic development director. We want this because you guys always get what you want. You guys wasted my time for months. And to come to tonight, I'm not even asked questions. I have developed that budget. In my line of work, I have developed programs. I may have accent. I may not be as articulate as you guys are, but do not presume people the way you see them. Get to know them. This is not hard. We can get this off ground. There is money to get this done. Stop canceling BIPOC people. Enough is enough. Enough is enough. You guys should be very lucky, okay, that some of us are risking everything. To speak truth to power. I have to negotiate every single day before I leave my house because everywhere I go is white spaces. The only place that is not white space is my place of business in Hadley. It's a refuge for me and my home. My place of business is very inclusive. Anybody can ask my 20 staff that I employ. You guys helped drive me away in Ameth. I used to run a business in Ameth. It's not a welcoming community. I raised that awareness about what was happening in special education. I raised awareness about racism in business community. We should be better than this. To have a white woman, and I'm not attacking Mary Beth. She is a white social worker. She has experience in mental health, but she does not live our experience. The management team should have done better. Reach out to other BIPOC social workers, BIPOC psychologists, BIPOC people who have worked in the field to help you guys include CSWG folks to come up with proposal. And you guys are accepting something that is down to fail. And our finance director is making a lot of money. And this is what we get mediocre service for BIPOC community. I have a lot to say. And please do not rush us tonight to end this meeting. I don't care if it's the midnight. We don't get to have the platform. Please treat us with respect. I have more to say, but our yield do not shut down this meeting. Until BIPOC people says we are ready to leave. We have to speak our mind tonight. Because we won't have that opportunity again. Enough is enough. Please. Andy, I want to address this comment to you and to the finance committee first. I'm well aware that there is a law that says that the town council cannot increase any line item in the town manager's budget. But the law also provides for you to request a revised proposal from the town manager. So do not hide behind some law that you can't do anything here. I'm asking that the finance committee request that the town council ask the town manager for a revised proposal with fuller funding for the Cress program. And if the town manager is not willing to do that, there is a mechanism whereby the town council can actually make a change. And there's probably another method by which you can make this happen. So don't hide behind the law. You can make this happen. Thank you. Okay. Because I think that we've heard from a lot of numbers, Bowman. Hi. So to bounce off of what Mr. Vernon Jones said, not only can the town council make recommendations, but from what I understand, town council has the ability to not approve portions of particular monies that are going to certain places. So you guys absolutely have the ability to make change. It's all about whether or not you want to. I just, you know, and that's the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing I wanted to say is that if you've seen me on any of these meetings with the CSWG, I usually don't last this long. I don't last this long because I literally have a house full of children right now that it is now 920 or 32. They have yet to sit down for dinner. I've been trying to make dinner in between. Like every time I shut off the camera, I've been trying to make dinner in between. I'm here because this is important. This is important. And I personally am tired of not holding my white counterparts, not holding them accountable for their lack of motivation, for their lack of support. And I want to say something about that because there is one particular white person that I have thrown out props to whatever and given support to, so spoken about over and over again. And that is Mr. Vernon Jones. And I consider Mr. Vernon Jones a co-conspirator to the BIPOC community. I consider him a co-conspirator because he puts his effort, his time, his energy into making, making things different to holding his own community accountable. If you don't know the work that he's tried to do over and been doing over the years, like, I don't know if he remembers this, but he and I had a conversation right when he decided he was leaving being principal over at Port River School. And I was real mad. I was big mad. I was like, where are you going? And he said, I need to work with other white people about issues regarding racism. And, you know, we need to like look at this and hold ourselves accountable for this. What we're doing, you know, as far as like how we're we're interacting, how we're treating the BIPOC community. But, and I was like, at first I was like, because the first thing that came to my mind is a situation where it's like, oh, you're going to suck in a bunch of, you know, people of color to come in and help you feel better about, you know, not being racist. And he was like, no, no, no, no. I want to work with other white people and holding other white people accountable for their movement through this world and so on and so forth. And I was like, oh, okay. So when, when I was had the honor to have him be part of this community of the CSWG, I was like, what? Okay, I can't wait to hear the words that are coming out of his mouth. And let me tell you, he has yet to disappoint. He has been on point. He has been about it. He has been, he has not backed off at one little piece. He was like, he is holding his community accountable. And you know what, if you need as white people in this community, as white people are part of the town, about a part of town council and, you know, the finance committee and any other committee on town, you guys need to have a conversation with Mr. Vernon Jones, because I'm telling you right now, he will give you a whole new perspective. There are very few people that are white that I call a co-conspirator. He is one of them because he is looking at it critically. He is looking at himself critically. He is doing the work day to day. That's what it takes to be, to be a person who is actively trying to be non-racist and not be part of the systemic racism. They work day to day. Every day they're working with themselves, trying to be critical of how they move through the world. How are they interacting with people of color? Are they interacting with people of color? Because that's a question that I have for men. How often do you interact with people of color? How often are you actually in their communities working with them, but not working with them as like, I'm going to teach you something, working with them like, I'm going to sit back and listen. I will never forget the one thing that my ex-husband was told when he walks into a room, you need to sit down and be quiet when you're in a room of people of color. You need to see and hear and feel what is going on. You walking into a room as a white person, when there is a group of people of color, if there's even one person of color, you need to take a moment and listen. And that is what I have found that this whole community has failed. You guys don't want to listen. You guys don't want to hear because as soon as you're uncomfortable, you want to fight us. You want to make us feel bad about what we're fighting for. We're fighting for a space to be human, to feel normal, to feel like when you walk into places like Hastings, when you walk into places businesses like 30 boatwood, when you walk into these places and you don't look around and be like, everybody's looking at me. They're wondering why I'm here. Like literally that is what people of color feel walking into some of these businesses. Everybody turned and looked at me when I walked into the door. Even the family center, which is supposed to be a space for people of color. I mean not for people of color, for people like people in the community, a free space for people in the community and let their kids play together so and so forth. You know what? I stopped going there. I stopped going there with my last child. The reason why I stopped going there is because for a couple reasons. One, they moved it way out of like a space that was accessible. They moved it from the center of town to North Amherst. No longer necessarily a place where people could just go to. There's all these little changes that you don't think are big deals, but they're constant microaggression. Those are those microaggressions. Whenever we're questioned about a feeling that we have when it comes to, I'm saying this and I'm saying how this is making me feel and you're questioning me because you're like why would you feel that way or I think you're misinterpreting how you know how this happened. You're questioning me. You're making me second guess myself. You're telling me that my feelings aren't valid. Every single time you do something like that and those things build up. They build up to the point where it's like then you were yelling at you. We're yelling at you and we're telling you that like, you know, why? Why? And I just want you to understand that. And I hope you do understand that. But I'm going to stop speaking. I actually am going to remove myself from the meeting because I really do have to feed my family and make sure my family is treated. So I thank you guys all for hearing me out tonight. And I hope that you really start stepping up to the plate and really doing some honest, actual work to make a difference in this community. Because I've been here 30 years and you know, it would be nice to actually see and be part of some of this change. So thank you very much. And I, you know, I appreciate you letting me talk. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to conclude just by saying one thing that is, I'm very sorry if the choices made about process were not the correct choices, but they were made in good faith. And what we tried to do is to start with by letting the first presentation, having the first presentation from the working group at our council meeting and then asking for the town manager to make a responding response to it and hear council questions and then come back. So the first word and the last word would be from the working group. And you know, if that was a bad choice, you know, I'll take responsibility, but it wasn't the idea of starting giving the first and last piece to the working group and having the other piece in the middle was certainly made by all of us and at least what we thought was a reasonable approach. But given the time now, I do want to draw to close and just see if some of the only ones are going to recognize at this point, so I can draw to close is one of the co-chairs of the working group. If there's any concluding comments that you want to make, I'd like to see if we can adjourn all groups. So Brianna or Alicia, you last. Yeah, thank you. So Brianna is going to make our final closing comment, but I just wanted to state also that this is just a very good example of the way that intention versus impact works and even further emphasizes the importance of our recommendations. The intention around the spaces that created in this town, and I apologize, but they do not matter. What matters is the real impact that they have. And so I really urge you to keep that in mind when you're moving forward, that your intentions do not matter. What matters is the real impact that they have on the community and the community has spoken many times to let you know what the impact is and now it is your responsibility to act, not to make excuses and not to continue to push us off and say add another time, because there is no better time. This is overdue. And so now is the best time. And so I urge you all to keep those things in mind moving forward. And I wanted to end with that comment, but it's just really bothering me also that I wanted to bring up that at the beginning of this meeting, if the intention was just to give the town manager his time to the slideshow, then the APD and the fire chief did not need to be brought in because they were not even presenting. So for their presence to be there and not ours is a very highly problematic and is a demonstration of white supremacy. If there was going to be anybody else on the screen that was not presenting, it should have been our group. Thank you. Thank you. Brianna, anything else or before we adjourn? Get all the groups to adjourn? Yeah, Andy, I think just going forward when the community safety working groups recommendations are spoken about, it would be helpful for members or people from leadership to be in the room, just to emphasize Alicia's point. And I also just want to emphasize that integrity is when your intentions and actions meet each other consistently. So if your intention is to create a more equitable town, that's the time to act. Okay. So thank you. Do you want to adjourn first or would you rather have me Lynn adjourn the council first? Whatever works better for you. Why don't you go ahead and adjourn and then I'll ask Lynn to adjourn the council and I'll adjourn the finance committee. Is Tashina's hand still up? I'm sorry. Okay. Oh, thank you. Okay. I want to I want to motion to adjourn. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you for having us and hopefully in the future we can be present at all conversations in regards to our recommendations. Lynn, do you want to adjourn the council? Yes. They're the town council meeting on May 27th is adjourned. Thank you. The finance committee is adjourned. Thank you and good night all. Thank you everyone.