 So I am calling the meeting, the Thursday, September 24th meeting of the town services and outreach committee to order pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. This meeting of the town services and outreach committee is being conducted via remote participation. So I'm gonna go through and make sure everyone's present that they can hear me and that I can hear them. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. I am here and can hear. And George Ryan. Present. Okay. So we are going to start with general public comment. Interesting, we have some attendees. So if there's general public comment on any matters within the jurisdiction of the town services and outreach committee, residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes. If you are interested in making a public comment, please press the raise hand feature. Okay, seeing none, we will move on. We have another public comment section at the end. We will now move on to agenda item 3A, which is town manager appointments. We have four appointments, four sets of appointments that are on our agenda for tonight, LSEC commission, the disability access advisory committee, affordable housing trust board of trustees and the community preservation act committee. So why don't we go in that order? We have the town manager here with us tonight. If we have any questions for him, Paul, I don't know if you wanna speak to any of these or if you just wanna field questions if we have them. However you wanna do it, I'm fine either way. Why don't we've had the memos for some time now. So why don't we just see if we have any questions? So we will start with the LSEC commission, which my computer is being slow tonight. So apologies for that. There is one appointment to LSEC, it is a new appointment. Are there any questions or comments from the committee regarding the LSEC appointment of Carolyn Maylor? Seeing none, we will move on then to the disability access advisory committee. There are two appointments to the disability access advisory committee. We have Christopher Blount and Xander Crowley. Does anyone on the committee have any questions or comments on the appointments to the disability access advisory committee? George, you might wanna unmute. My computer is also playing games with me. My memory, my notes tell me that these are three year terms, but I believe the year on the memo is for 2022. And this is from memory. So please, pardon me if I'm missing something, but I should be 2023, I believe. Is that correct? I don't have it in front of me, so. You're absolutely right. That was my mistake. It's all right, I just wanted to catch it. So I believe you meant 2023, okay. So it's a three year term, but I had the wrong year and there's this 2023, good. Right. Thank you. In my understanding, this puts the committee at full strength. Yes. Good. I think that's also true of LSEC. Yes, there's a vacancy there. Great, thank you. Alyssa. These are terrific appointments. I am totally pleased with them and thank you for the information. I just want to make a quick note. And as I pointed out to Evan, I have kind of a short timeframe tonight and may have to leave the meeting early. But of course I need to say the thing I need to say, which is that we are still struggling and particularly now with COVID, we're obviously struggling to have any extra time to do any nice things like update committee charges. And I would like to add to a future agenda, the idea that maybe TSO could help work with CPOs or whoever the town manager wants associated with that. And the reason I'm asking that we insert ourselves is one, GOL inserted itself in the past and now it looks like it's under TSO. But arguably this is part of our outreach. So whenever we publish a packet like this, it shows people, oh look, here's what the committee charges. Oh look, here's how they advertise. Maybe I could do that next time around even though I'm super busy right now. And so that's why I would ask the TSO insert itself in there. And I'm asking that I insert myself in there because there are numerous errors in the charges, even the ones that have been updated in December of last year. There are misunderstandings about the use of how to list special municipal employee, how to list the legal reference. And then for DAC, in particular, this is not a technical fix. It is something that DAC should probably work on in terms of the kind of language that we use now. When we created a disability access advisory committee, it was before the state suggested disability commissions. So we were way ahead of the game. Unfortunately, we probably haven't updated our language since we were way ahead of the game. And just the way we refer to people who currently have disabilities is a little dated and stilted in here. So that might be something DAC itself could work on. But in terms of the technical references, like legal reference, those are all wrong. It's not the home rule charter that's the legal reference. It's whether or not this was a town meeting action, a mass general law action, the town bylaw action. It has nothing to do with a generic reference to multiple member bodies in the charter. So as part of our outreach, it feels like something TSO might be able to be helpful with. But again, obviously it's not the highest priority. It's just that when these things come in front of us, that's when we notice them, right? Because we don't look at charges the rest of the time. And we want them to be as inviting to people and as currently accurate as they can be. That said, again, I'm terrific with the appointments. It's just the technicality of the item in the packet, which the obvious solution would be to not include the charge, except then the town council wouldn't know what those committees do and the public wouldn't know what those committees do. So thanks for your patience on that. And I hope we can have a future discussion about it. If you're offering to help review those, Alyssa, which I think- Yes. I would love that. That'd be awesome. And we can just kind of do it as they come up kind of things. We've got a stack of them that need that kind of careful look. So yeah, that'd be great. Thank you. That'd be great. That's great. Thank you, Alyssa. So if there are no other comments on disability access advisory committee, George? Just quickly, and I don't know what to do with this. I'm wondering what, Alyssa, if you may not have any thoughts on it either, but two of the members of disability access have been serving for quite a long time. And I don't know, is it our place to just encourage it? I mean, I'm sure he's looking as much as he can, but I'm asking the committee this. When we have people who've been serving for a long time, what, if anything, do we say? Other than pointed out, and Paul of course is perfectly well aware of it. He doesn't need to have it pointed out to him, but do we encourage him to try and find fresh blood? I guess that's basically it. But we have one who's been serving for 13 years and one for nine years. And that's well beyond what we normally expect. This is a particularly narrow focus committee. It has very specific requirements. So that obviously presents a serious challenge to Paul in searching for people. Limits the pool to some extent, I guess. Any thoughts from my colleagues or is it just something we note? And that's all we can really do. I will let Paul respond and then we'll go to Alyssa. Yeah, so the two seats that these are being filled are Jerry Weiss and Joe Trangalli who had been on for a very long time. Jerry Weiss was the long-time chair of the committee and he had served an extra year actually just to help with the transition as we were adding new people last year. There's another, there are two new people this year. And so I think there is a transition happening on the DAAC, but you're right, it's specialized knowledge. Myra Ross is the new chair of the committee and she's very strong and will be helped to drive the committee. But they were worried about losing such institutional memory with Joe Trangalli, especially with Jerry Weiss. And so I think this is a league of faith that they can keep moving forward. They have good staff support with Maureen Pollock and they've done some, there's a big agenda coming up with our sort of self-analysis of our access for people with disabilities at different levels of the town that we just got a draft of. Great, thank you. Alyssa? What Paul said. I knew that history, so. Yeah. Great, thank you. But there are no further comments on disability access advisory. I'd like to move on to the affordable housing trust. There is one appointment to the affordable housing trust that is Francis Goyas. Are there any questions or comments from the committee on the affordable housing trust? George? I think we have the same issue here that Alyssa's raised earlier with the charge being out of date and needing attention. At least that's my reading. And I also, and again, I may be misreading this, but these are appointments for three years. But according to the charge sheet and per mass general law, appointments are two years. So maybe something's changed or maybe I'm misreading something, but it seems like this is governed by mass general law and it says one thing and the committee charge says something different. So the appointments, not only these appointments, but I think some past appointments have been three year appointments. But what I'm reading on the committee charge sheet is there's supposed to be two years per MGL. So I just point that out and maybe it's something I'm not getting, but also there's the issue of the charge itself that needs to be looked at. So this would be another one where we could help Paul perhaps. And I think it's also in front of GOL as well. So, but anyways, is there a problem with MGL versus the committee charge? It seems to be an issue, but I'm not sure. Ask the town manager to respond. Yeah, so typically we do three year appointments, but you're right that this one is in conflict with that. So I don't know if Melissa has insight on that. I'm looking that up now. So while we're waiting on that, I'll ask Dorothy and I'll call Dorothy. I do think this is a good idea to take a look at all the charges across the board and to have some consistency in the appointment times because if this one has two and that one has three, it gets kind of crazy. So I think that coming up with some good ideas to look at them and examine them to make sure that they're legally correct, but also consistency, unless there's a reason for there to be an inconsistency. Yeah. The bylaw, I just pulled up the bylaw 3.6 for affordable housing trust does say it's two years. The bylaw follows MGL, but the committee charge is different. And so I think we just got to sort this out at some point sooner rather than later. And I don't know what to do about these particular appointments, Paul, I'm sorry, but there seems to be a conflict. We should make that two years, then. Be quite for the while. So I'll call Melissa. Yeah, the charge says two years. It's just a typo like the first one was. So it needs to be two years. Dorothy's right that it's confusing. And she's also right about the larger issue, which is that we've had three year terms for a lot of things for a lot of years. And partly there are some things that in MGL are three year terms, but partly it's that we always had three year election cycles. We don't have three year election cycles anymore. So there's literally no reason to do that with any committee that isn't, you know, so argue, you know, one could have that question or appoint any why are they three year terms when town council committees are only two year terms now? I don't know. That's a bigger question I think that we're gonna solve today. But in terms of, as George pointed out, yes, the mass general law and our local by law both control in this case. And so Paul will just change the data on this one. I'm afraid there's another complication though. At least I think there is. And this is the fault of OCA in part. We I believe appointed three people in 2019 to three year terms, at least on the sheet, on the affordable housing website, they their terms ended in 2022. And they were appointed in 2019, which was I assume under the OCA. And again, I think the same, I just, I didn't catch it then and we didn't catch it. But unless again, I'm mistaken, their terms should only be two years and they got three year terms. If I could just say, I don't think there's any enforcement mechanism associated with this and we just don't do it again. Is what it comes down to. No, we're not gonna take terms back from people. But yeah, if we overlooked it, then we overlooked it. Are there any other questions on the affordable housing trust? Questions or comments? Dorothy? Yeah, I was just gonna say that the appointments have all been looking good and this of this appointment looks to bring a new voice. So I think what they were very lucky in what is being presented to us for appointments. I had just one question, which was just a clarification. I went to the website for the housing trust to just try to figure out, is this a vacancy? Is this an expiring term? Will this put them up to fault and I couldn't figure it out. So if there's, is this, did someone leave? Is this someone's terms expiring? Where, what seat is this filling? Cause I couldn't figure it out from the website. So one seat, trying to think who it was. So there is currently a single vacancy on the affordable housing trust? Yes. Okay. And so this will put that. Usually on the website when there's a vacancy, there's, it says, you know, one vacancy, but it doesn't on the affordable housing trust. We're not consistent in how we present that information on the work. So I was just trying to piece that together. Was that Nancy Schroeder perhaps? Yeah. That's what it was. Okay. That's what I thought, but I couldn't figure it out. Okay. So if there are no further questions on the affordable housing trust, we will move on to the Community Preservation Act committee. Are there, I'm opening it up now. So we have several appointments, two of which are the at-large appointments, four of which are the appointments from various committees. I'll call on Alyssa. It's just the technical piece again. And I, you know, again, very grateful for the people for the process. So if you would just make a note at the TSO report, which I guess you're stuck writing, indicates that we are aware that the, you know, TSO noticed and discussed with the town manager that charges need to be updated. I mean, on the previous one on the trust, it's still quoting the old bylaw. The CPA is still quoting the old bylaw, not the current general bylaw that's on our town website right now. And that we're aware of that and that I'm not saying that Paul's gonna fix him in time for this particular town council, because realistically, I'm not sure that's necessary, although we could give him that guidance at this point. I would argue it's probably not necessary, but that we are aware of it and that we will work harder together to try and make sure that we don't take stuff to the town council that isn't current. But given that he has a whole crunch of appointments to get done at this point, I'm a little hesitant to say we need to go back and fix everything before it goes to town council. But I do want it to be called out so that somebody on the town council doesn't think, wow, TSO didn't even notice that that still says select board and that that number is wrong and that that quantity of terms are wrong. It's like, yeah, we figured all that out. We're just gonna deal with it better next time. Thank you, Alyssa. George? Again, I was looking at the bylaw 3.5 and again, it's a technical thing. I wanna echo what Alyssa has said and what Dorothy has said. These appointments are really good. They're strong. And so again, it's kudos to you, Paul. So it's just a technical thing. It sounds like from the charge that you appoint somebody from the housing authority, but the bylaw says that the housing authority is the same as the conservation commission, historical commission, et cetera. So I'm just wondering as point of fact, do you simply appoint somebody from the housing authority or do they send you a name just like the other bodies? Because the bylaw says one thing and the charge says something different. We go by the bylaw, that's the law. But yes, they send me a name and that's what we put forward for all the commissions that do that. Alyssa? Yeah, whoever corrected this in November just got it wrong and they copy pasted from someplace else because it's exactly supposed to mirror the others just as Paul indicated, the historical conservation and planning board. The other slightly different piece about this one is that it mentions Dave Williams representing the Amherst Housing Authority until 2022 and that is also not factually correct. He's only going to do that for a year as is indicated as he should have been initially appointed because you don't get appointed to CPA based on how long your elected housing authority seat is you get elected every year. You get elected by your peers every year and then it gets forwarded on to the town manager. So that is something that was a point of confusion, not contention, but confusion in the past but it is again considered good practice. It is not somewhere in the law but it is considered good practice that every year the planning board decides who they're going to send. They can send the same person six years in a row if that person's still there, that's great but they have to make a fresh decision every year because otherwise if you tell people oh, you're appointed for the next three years oh, you're appointed for the next five years then nobody else ever gets a crack at anything and that somebody's performance is never considered. So I'm sure that whatever David Williams has been appointed to is again water under the bridge at this point but the sentence about representing them until 2022 wouldn't be accurate because they should send a new person to Paul every year. Even if it's the same person they should send it to Paul every year. Thank you. Any further questions or comments on community preservation at committee? Okay, we did receive about 45 minutes ago design and review board appointments. Athena was kind enough she said to add it to our packet. I have no intention of taking those up under 48 hours because we have the opportunity to do it on the October 8th meeting which still gets it to the town council in time for the October 19th but I just wanted to acknowledge that we did receive those and that we will be taking those up I assume at our next meeting. Paul? Yeah, so hopefully by then we will have a name from the historical commission because that's still out there as well as hoping to get the historical commission before tonight but it didn't happen, so. Okay. So seeing no further questions and I heard some comments about wanting to see updates to some of the charges and bylaws but no one suggested that we hold off on any of these appointments based on those. We will then move to a vote. So I will make a motion for each of these individually. Bear with me. So, I move to a point. I'm sorry, I'm out of practice, it's been a bit. I move. Go for it Evan, go for it. I move to recommend that the town council approve the town manager, the following town manager appointments to the Community Preservation Act Committee for one year term, for terms expiring June 30th, 2021, Anna Devlin-Gothier, Robin Fordham, Sarah Marshall and Andrew McDougal for three year terms expiring June 30th, 2023, Sarah Essinger, reappointment and Katie Zogel. Is there a second? Hi, Dorothy seconds, Dorothy. Dorothy seconds, further discussion, Alyssa. Before we vote, I would just ask that we also ask the town manager to circle back to the housing authority and point out to them that they are one year terms and that David's continuing right now but that next in 2021, they will need to send his name again if they want him to continue to serve until 2022 because I know that's not on this appointment sheet but it's just not accurate that we've done that and we talked about not revoking people's appointments but they're being sent by a committee they're already serving on. So that doesn't feel the same to me as telling somebody who was appointed to some other committee, oops, we appointed you too long because there's not some other home committee they're still part of. Any further discussion on the community preservation at committee appointments? Seeing none, I'll call the question. Start with Alyssa Brewer. Hi. Dorothy Pam. Hi. Evan Ross is an I, George Ryan. Hi. That's unanimous with one absent. We'll move on to the affordable housing trust board of trustees. I move to recommend the town council approve the town manager appointment to the affordable housing trust board of trustees. Francis Goyus for a term expiring June 30th, 2022. Is there a second? I second, George. We'll give that one to George, George seconds. Is there any further discussion? Alyssa, is this a card hand or a residual hand? Residual. Thank you. Seeing no further discussion, I'll call the question. Start with Dorothy Pam. Hi. Evan Ross is an I, George Ryan. Hi. And Alyssa Brewer. Hi. That is unanimous with one absent. We will move on to the, excuse me, disability access advisory committee. I move to recommend the town council approve the following town manager appointments to the disability access advisory committee for terms expiring June 30th, 2022, 2023, right? Was this one we messed up? Christopher Blount and Xander Crowley. I second. Seconded by George. Is there any further discussion? I'll call the question. I'll start with myself. I vote yes, George Ryan. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Yes. And Dorothy Pam. Yes. That is unanimous with one absent. And that leaves us with the LSSE commission. So I move to recommend the town council approve the following town manager appointment to the LSSE commission for a term expiring June 30th, 2023, Carolyn Maylor. Is there a second? I second. Okay, that's George. Any further discussion? I'll call the question. We'll start with George Ryan. Aye. Alyssa Brewer. Aye. Dorothy Pam. Aye. And I vote yes. That's unanimous with one absent. And that is all of the current town manager appointments on our plate. We'll be expecting to take up designer review board and it sounds like historical commission at the October 8th meeting. Alyssa. I was just gonna ask the town manager if other than appointments to design review board, which I thought the historical commission was an appointment to design review board, not historical commission appointment. I messed that up. So DRB appointments, if he has any others that he thinks will be ready for us next time, just to give us a sense of where he's at. So we're interviewing today and tomorrow for CDBG and cultural council, I think it's next week as they get scheduled. Angela does basically does that as we get moving forward on them. I think there's a few others moving through the process. So we might have more. You will have more. Yes, for sure. Dorothy. Okay. With all of this appointment, are these committees going to be allowed to meet? Will they have the staff support? Yes, they are meeting. Many of the committees are meeting already. They can be meeting for a while. Great, thank you. Thank you. Are there any final questions or comments with the time manager regarding appointments at this time? Okay, then we will move on to our next agenda item. Thank you, Paul, for joining us. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Thank you, Paul. Do you want me to see the rest of the meeting or not? I don't personally see a reason why you have to, but if you just can't take yourself away from it, then you're welcome to stay. Happy to go. Thank you. Okay, so our next item. Lincoln Avenue. That's probably why he's going. So the next item is for A, that would be Lincoln Avenue. My understanding is this is our preliminary presentation on Lincoln Avenue. So I have open in front of me our adopted TSO process. So we are in step one of the process, the preliminary presentation. George and Dorothy have provided us with a memo that went through these questions. And I think that was appreciated. But at this point in time, I will hand it over to George and Dorothy to deliver their preliminary presentation on Lincoln Avenue parking. Well, George put the memo together. I made a point of reading every word and adding my input. So George is going to make the presentation and it is a little bit complex. Yeah, I'm hoping that the memo plus the email that I send everyone, if you had a chance to look at it, is giving you a sense of both how this came to us and why it falls within our charge and the timeline, which is I think somewhat ambiguous. It's not, I mean, Dorothy may not agree, but I don't think this is pressing in the sense that it was perhaps when school was in session and even then you could argue it wasn't pressing, but I think it depends partly on what this committee decides to do. We would like to move ahead with this. That's our personal preference, but part of it is convincing you that it's worth moving ahead. And so the timeline is there. I think the issue there is really whether you wanna try and tackle the larger question of parking in general and the sort of what the guidelines are and then turn to individual examples of cases like Lincoln or whether you wanna deal with Lincoln and then turn to the larger question or maybe not turn either one. I mean, it's really up to the committee. We would like to deal with Lincoln now and we make a case for that, but there's obviously a case to be made for another approach. In items, I'm just going through the preliminary memo and part of what I'd like to get from my colleagues is a sense of what's missing. And I'm sure you will, because that'd be very helpful not only for this presentation, but for future ones. So I followed the guidelines that Evan has opened in front of him to some degree, but I didn't answer every single question. And so if there are questions that I should have answered that are not answered here, let me, I'm sure you will let me know, but please let me know. The problem that this seeks to address is probably the longest here and somewhat wordy, I'm sorry, but there's a history to it. Alyssa knows this history, I think pretty well. And I sort of paraphrase it. I'm not sure it's a completely accurate paraphrase, but my sense of the history is that select board decided to punt on this and I'm not sure quite why. Good, I'm gonna get a read. Did you hear that? I think I should mute myself for that. That's just, I'm just saying, that's my impression that the planning department made a presentation. Okay, good. We're gonna hear the true story in a moment. So I'm gonna shut up. There's history to it and we'll hear the true story in a moment. Fast forward to 2020 and some of the same issues seem to bubble to the surface compounded by a kind of persistent parking issue on a certain stretch of Lincoln. Anyway, it's there, there's the history. So we have brought this forward to you again afterwards brought forward to the council and again, the council, I wouldn't say it punted, but it basically said send it to TSO for further review. So from our perspective, the problem that this addresses is an issue of public safety, of whether in fact this actually meets the criteria that we set for streets that have parking on one side, issues of proper flow of traffic on what's called a minor arterial and a major connector. Those are the terms that DPW uses to describe Lincoln. It's not just an ordinary, it's not like Dana Street or Blue Hills. It's treated differently than many other streets just by the nature of the kind of traffic and the amount of traffic and what it connects. So items six or items five is our proposal, which essentially, first of all, is resubmitting what was proposed initially to the council items one, two and three where the original items four or five, I think it's what was it four, five and six that were referred so that the three referred items we would like to include in our proposal. And we also add items four and five. And the idea here is that right now the Southern end of Lincoln has no restriction on either side of that portion that is from Northampton Road to Amity. You can park on either side. There are certain setbacks, but otherwise it's you can park on either side. And in the original planning department proposal back in 2015, they were going to restrict parking eight a.m. to five p.m. on that stretch of Lincoln as well. So this is not a new idea, but it's one that we are resurrecting. And so that's included. Item four is to keep, is to add that restriction to the Southern end of Lincoln that we're also adding to the central portion of Lincoln on the Eastern side of Lincoln. And then finally, the final suggestion, as we mentioned last meeting, is because of the fear or the concern of overflow or people moving from Lincoln then to sunset, we suggest that you also include that restriction on sunset from Amity to Elm Street. So why does our proposal go beyond what the referral, and this is a question that Evan asked. It was a very good question. And again, you may decide that you don't want it to go beyond the referral, but we felt that given the nature of the referral and given what we're trying to accomplish, these two additions were actually necessary. So we added them. So it goes beyond the referral and we give our reasoning for why. Then I try to help you with the maps. Obviously, if I were more skilled, I could perhaps make the colors the right colors. I don't know how to do that. Evan probably knows how to do that. I have no idea how to do that. And I didn't want to bother DPW in the short time frame that we had. So hopefully you were able to, with my guidance, see that we're just basically changing the green to yellow in a couple of specific places. So the maps are not ideal. They don't show exactly what this is proposing. And for that, I apologize. And eventually, assuming if we go forward with this, I will go to DPW or whoever it is in that department who does this sort of thing and ask them if they would just make that change. But I didn't. I just described it. And then I told you, use your imagination. And then I listed what I took to be some of the major arguments. I didn't go in great depth, but I tried to be as exhaustive as I could. What are reasons why people would say this is not a good idea? Most of this came from the minutes of the original council hearing, the public hearing. And maybe I'm missing one or two. So you could add, you may have one or two, you want to add to this list. And then next steps is, you know, I really need to hear from my colleagues. Is there more information you want? I would think at very minimum, if this were to go forward, if assuming that were the case, we would have to reach out to, there'd have to be another public hearing. We would probably have to reach out to the residents on sunset and find out what their thoughts are on this. And I would think, I didn't mention it here, but we probably should talk to TAC. I would very much like to hear what TAC thinks about this. So they were not included in this at this point. I haven't reached out to them. I think Dorothy's already raised the question whether they're even, I'm not sure they're meeting right now. Is TAC meeting? Dorothy can't. It is not meeting and they're getting ambiguous answers as to why not, because Tracy Zafrian has been wanting to meet. And Paul's answer was, he thought the town council might want to take over some of it. So it's a vague kind of area there. And it's something that we need to sit down and have a talk with to clarify, whether we want to take everything or whether we really would like that committee to do certain things, but to maybe firm the charge up. So there's not confusion and overlap because originally we were told they didn't really do parking, but they did other things. Yeah, they do other things that I think impact on our argument is addressing. So I would very much like to hear what they have to say. Right, absolutely. So I would assume TAC should be consulted at some level. The neighbors and sunset. What I'd like to hear from my colleagues is two things really. One is, first of all, is this what you wanted? And if it is great, if it isn't what still is missing? Because going forward in the future, if you or I or anyone in this committee has to make a preliminary presentation, is this kind of the format you'd like to see it in? I did not answer every single question on that process sheet because I thought some of them were not appropriate or relevant or whatever. I kind of used my judgment. But so the first question is the practical one overall. Is this what you wanted? And if there's still stuff that's missing, it would be really helpful to know not just for this project or for any preliminary presentation going forward. And then the second obviously is, you know, your thoughts on this in general. George, if possible, before we get to that, which is a good question, I just wanted to stress some things that Gilford had said. When we talk about Lincoln as an arterial road, the big thing is it is a through road from Northampton all the way to the campus. It seems to be the preferred road of many, many people who work at UMass and it is the preferred road by the town safety and the fire department to get from here to the campus. So that makes it a little bit different from some of the other roads. And sunset is not as direct. Normally you don't see that up at this point, sunset has not had a parking problem. And Gilford thinks, well, people don't prefer to use it that much. But I think George is right. We don't know. There could be an impact. So he wanted to put the eight to five restrictions on sunset just to prevent any kind of overflow from happening. The other thing that you included in the package, which you didn't refer to, George, was the memo from Gilford on street widths. And he talks about how much a travel lane is 12 feet, 10 to 12 feet and parking is nine to 10. And he said in Amherst, they use the travel lanes as 10 to 12 and parking eight feet. And that's without, if you wanna have a parking on one side, you need to add, if you have two lanes and parking, you need a minimum of 27 to 28 feet. And I believe the map that he sent us of the road widths, Lincoln is in most places. It varies a couple of places between 21 and 23 feet. So in terms of that, that's why Lincoln is the particular problem. And there have been a lot of accidents, but keeping a major arterial road open and safe is really important. But now I'm gonna go back to George's question to the rest of you. Is this what you want? Okay, so I'm going to open the floor. And so a couple of things to guide us. So George has asked some questions regarding specifically whether this is what we're looking for from our preliminary presentation and what else we might need that also fits in with, if we're looking at a step four? No, step one four. I don't know why we numbered it like this. Step one four of our process, which is additional information needed at this point in the process, the Chair of Charities, Designee will solicit TSO input on what additional information TSO will need from town staff, what additional community stakeholder input may be needed, whether there is a need to research additional best practices and next steps and timelines. So those are all of the things that I'm hoping that we can get through today. So we have George's question of, do we like what they presented as far as this is what we want from preliminary presentation? We also want to make sure we can check off those boxes because I imagine our next step will possibly be a formal presentation. I want to go now to Alyssa. So I said I might have to leave the meeting. So obviously I should not talk for a long time, but that's going to be difficult for me. I am the select board in no way, shape or fashion decided to punt. The select board completely disagreed with what staff sent us as being a necessary thing to do. We made an active decision that they were wrong in their proposal. So that was what the select board did at the time. We made several changes. We did not go as far as staff asked us to go. That did not arise from the neighbors that arose from staff. We appreciated the safety concerns that were enlisted. We addressed many of the safety concerns by increasing setbacks at that time. And then we said, that's all that needs to be done. And part of the reason we said that is for the same reasons that you saw when we had the hearing back in March. In terms of what we expect for a package, I think, and obviously that's that. In terms of what we expect for a package, I think that this is very much aligned with what I expected to see in a package. I did not expect to see draft minutes from a town council meeting when we have approved minutes. So that's just an error that we need the approved minutes in this package for the next time we have the present, the next part of the presentation because it is important history. It is odd to me that this presentation states twice that it doesn't think town council acted when George, you seconded the motion on April 6th to do the setbacks. So yeah, we did do the setback stuff. So that has indeed been addressed. So luckily, this is a preliminary presentation. So yeah, when it comes to maps, it's typically either planning or IT that makes the maps, not DPW, I've never known DPW to make maps for us on request, but that certainly could have changed at any rate you'd want to go through Paul. And like you said, you need to figure out from Paul what the timing is that he expects on that sort of thing. So thank you for suggesting we use our imagination. After our last TSO meeting, when TAC came up then, and then I sent along to the entire because it was not an expression of opinion, it was just some historical information on TAC. We should probably have included that in today's package. Sorry, I didn't think about mentioning that to Darcy. And I would argue that TAC does need to be part of the long-term discussion if we do anything with parking because their charge needs to be changed if it doesn't. But I think that reflects back to what Dorothy just said and what was said at the last TSO meeting, which is the tax just been kind of hanging there because with the town council, having a different relationship to the public way and with the town council having TSO, Slack board didn't have a TSO, right? Town meeting didn't have a TSO. Therefore, town meeting had TAC, which was previously several other things before it became TAC. So if we're gonna have TSO, then that is the question is, well, then what is tax roll? And so that is something we need to figure out. In terms of reflecting back to the specific things that Evan said, what else do we need to know? I would argue the things that we would still need to know beyond including the minutes from the actual approved minutes from March 9th and then also the minutes from April 6th that show we did act on the setbacks is additional information, what we would want is we'd wanna know is TAC doing before the pandemic, right? Cause they haven't been meeting. Was TAC doing anything with this stuff? I suspect not, but it would be really good to just check in with them and make sure that they hadn't started something associated with anything associated with Lincoln. Like I said, I don't know that we'd know either way if they had. So just checking in with them and letting them know, yeah, we're gonna have to talk to you about how we all fit together in the future, but we just wanna check and make sure that you didn't start some Lincoln project. We don't know anything about. And then the other new piece of information I would think that we would wanna know about is do we have any sense, and I assume we'd have to do it anecdotally rather than with any real study. Everything changed with the pandemic, right? So we had this conversation. We had the hearing in March, then we had, then we changed the setbacks in April and then I was all worried about how long it would take to put the signs up and then like nobody was here. And so, and that's still true. So what is our sense of, are people even parking on any of these streets at this point? What's that been like? I think maybe just hearing, checking back in with the neighbors and hearing from them what that's been like, because obviously I would expect it to change a lot for next fall, although I'm not convinced it would change for next spring, this coming spring, I mean. Okay, thank you, Alyssa. I guess I'm the only other person in this meeting who has been on the show. It seems like I should say something unless I wanted to first give Dorothy or George a chance to respond to anything that Alyssa said or brought up. Just, you mentioned I was typing a number of things. Thank you for the point about the minutes. That's my fault. I knew we had done something, but I couldn't find it and I was looking at, but that's because I wasn't looking at the right thing. I'm not sure that we actually, and Dorothy and I don't know this and I need to check whether in fact anything did get done, but you're right, we did approve it. So I will check on both and I will make sure the right minutes are in whatever next packet if there is one. The minutes are there and then the approve minutes. Thank you. You mentioned something, I just didn't catch it that you said just before you talked about TAC in long-term discussion about parking, right? Reach out to them. There's a document that you wanted included and I just didn't catch it. Oh, I'm sorry. It was the email and it's part of the TAC conversation. It really has nothing to do with Lincoln per se but is the email that I sent after the last TSO meeting on the 17th that went to us and that's just part of the TAC conversation, not so much the part of the Lincoln conversation except for the fact that if it so happens for some bizarre reason they were working on something associated with bike paths or just parking in general associated with Lincoln, we wouldn't wanna not include that information. I doubt that they were based on a quick review of their minutes but I don't know that for a fact. But did you wanted that email in the record nonetheless? Is that correct? Yeah, I think it should be in our packet just as a reference to remind us of where we left TAC before the pandemic and... And where is that? I mean, I hate to ask but I just... Oh, I'll just send it again. It was an email from last week, the 17th. Okay. Okay, I can find, okay. If you would that'd be kind but I'm sure I can find it. Thank you. Dorothy, you have your hand up. Okay. So one of the changes that's in this is increasing some of the setbacks at the intersections. So for example, on the east side of Lincoln, from, let's see, the tow zone from, on the east side of Lincoln from the distance of 200 feet north of Amity Street. It was 120 in February in the proposal. And then to 60 feet from McClellan, and that had been 30. One of the, this issue first came to me basically on terms of people trying to turn onto Lincoln from small side streets. And this is both the main section from Amity up to Fearing, the McClellan turn. Is some setback, but it wasn't big enough and everybody said it and I went out and I found you could not, you can't see to make that turn. And then the other one with the people who are just speaking to us at the hearing from the south part of Lincoln, from Northampton to Amity, the exiting from Gaylord, almost completely impossible. So whatever we decide to do in terms of the no parking Monday to Friday, whatever, those things have to be dealt with because they are pure safety issues. I hope that the whole package, I do hope that this will be approved. The whole package that George has typed up, but there are some things that come first. And the first one is to make it so people can turn from a small street onto Lincoln, which is heavily traveled. And we have the figures on that from Guilford. A lot of cars go by on Lincoln all the time. And the question about parking, nothing is as bad as it was, Alyssa, you're absolutely right. But parking at the part of Lincoln from Amity up to halfway to McClellan is very, it's there again. So it's not totally quiet. The place that's quiet for me is when I go downtown, I look on the town parking lot and I say, there's nobody here. There's still people on Lincoln. So that has not gone away. It's not as bad, but they're still there. Thank you, Dorothy. So my, I guess, preliminary presentation is not a time to necessarily discuss the substantive issues. And so I'm trying to steer clear of those. But I guess one of the issues I'm having is we will refer to DPW or a proposal, essentially that originated from DPW. And we had the option to just advise the council on that proposal. We're now looking at an expanded version of that proposal. And to some degree, I feel like that opens a little bit of Pandora's box of, well, if we're all just coming up with ideas of what we think we should do, I have ideas too. And that's where I'm struggling a bit on how to proceed with this. And so one of the things that I would like to hear, George was kind enough to include, although I think the reason that we initially had all this information probably is due to Alyssa, all of the documents from 2015 of what was proposed. But we also know that there's been other proposals that have been floated for Lincoln. And so when we had the public hearing back in March, I asked Gilford at that time, well, have you thought about, because we love to do this as counselors, right? We love to say, hey, expert, have you thought about this? And I said, have you thought about making Lincoln one way and sunset one way in opposite directions so that you could maintain parking, but keep them as essentially arterials? And he said, yes, that was something that was actually proposed. I think he said in the early 2000s, but was rejected at that time because neighbors didn't like it. And then he also talked about, they had talked about making those dead-end streets with like a little parklet or something at the end. And so the history that has been provided for us is the past five years, but what we heard in that meeting was that there's several decades of history and of proposals. And I'm always hesitant to throw out a proposal because it was rejected by the residents on the street 20 years ago, because certainly the residents could be different now. And so I guess what I'm curious about is, and I'm not necessarily sure if this is for something for you all to do, but I think for me, when we get to the formal presentation, I would like to have DPW back here to hear a little bit more about what else has been proposed. Because I think the problem that's been identified is, which I think George articulated in the memo, which I knew George wrote because I could hear his voice as I read it. It was so characteristic George in how it was worded. I literally heard him in my head. But he articulated that Lincoln's this weird hybrid of it's sort of a neighborhood street, but it's also a minor arterial and a main connector. And if you remember from the debate in the council, Steve said something like, either it's a neighborhood street and you have parking on it, or it's an arterial, in which case, no parking, but get rid of the speed bump, it's speed bumps, increase the speed limit, treat it like an arterial. And we're kind of trying to figure out what it is and what that middle ground is. And so I guess I'd love to hear more, I guess, from Guilford about how DPW envisions that and what it makes sense for it to look like. And so I think to give George feedback on the presentation, that was, you gave me everything I was looking for. I was, it was so logically ordered reading through. I had kind of forgotten all of the pieces of our process and then I was reminded of them as I read through. I appreciated the history, I appreciated the rationale. I think now we're looking forward to potentially to a formal presentation. And I guess what I'd like to see is what other alternatives have been considered because I don't think it's just takeaway parking or not. We've heard that there have been options considered such as making it not a through street and that gets rid of it being an arterial. There's been options considered of making it one way. So it maintains it's an arterial, but you don't deal with the cars trying to go around each other. There are other options other than just taking away the parking. And I'd like to hear more about those and why taking, I think you did a good job justifying why you want to expand, but why taking away the parking is the right solution to the problem that's been identified. Cause it seems like there are potentially other solutions out there as well. Although perhaps taking away the parking is the simplest and simplicity is nice. Dorothy, I see your hands up. I just wanted to say it's not as simple as saying it's either an arterial or a neighborhood street. It's a very important through street in a neighborhood with lots of children. Right. It's not as wide as Amity Street. I live on an arterial where there's no parking on either side. And the big issue is how do we get across the street? And I get letters all the time about this. And so we need a few more crosswalks which you will have. We need to slow down the traffic on Amity Street. But this is a wide street. Lincoln is not that wide. So it is the size of a neighborhood street which happens to be very convenient as an arterial. So that is why I think the proposal as put forward in this memo is a good one because it deals with it as a neighborhood street. It definitely, but it also makes it possible for the necessary through traffic to get there in a safe way. And I think removing the speed bumps would not be a good idea. Those were long sought. No one says, well, okay. I'm sure some people say they hate the speed bumps but that's because they're going too fast. You know, but as somebody who uses those streets often the speed bumps are really good. They do what they were set to do. They're traffic calming without stopping the flow of traffic. So I understand what you want. And I think that it's good to hear from DPW. My only fear and my fear when seeing the memo as put forward is this is a complex situation and the maps are complex. And I'm afraid that if we keep adding more layers to it we get so that some council members are just gonna say, I don't wanna go into this. I just don't wanna hold this. You have to hold so much in your head to grasp this issue. And then people at the hearing, they're all gonna hear the little part that they want. So I guess my desire is to actually make it simpler because if we're gonna get anything changed and I think change is necessary we have to be able to see it, think it. And those were helpful thoughts. I forget whether it was you or Alyssa that said who makes the maps, okay? But we're not gonna ask people in the future. This committee can do what George asks an act of imagination to imagine the colors changing. But when we get to the larger council of 13 or any kind of hearing, we cannot ask for that kind of act of imagination. We have to have this clear and simple. And we have to kind of agree with it. So I think what we need as a candidate committee perhaps is to explore the other alternatives because I think Evan really would like to see, well, what would be the impact of this and why isn't it a good idea? And to kind of hear it and have a big discussion which I think would be a good idea because you're right, there is a lot of history here. Yeah. I wanna make sure that no one in the public heard me say I think we should take away the Lincoln speed bumps because I'm not recommending that. I'm just saying it's something we in theory could say make it an arterial, take away the speed bumps, but I'm not recommending that. I don't want emails about the Lincoln speed bumps. No, I just think that complex conversation, the details and the degree, if we can do that in TSO and come out with an agreement and understanding that is simpler. But I don't wanna take this conversation at this level to the full council or anything like that until we've kind of gotten through all of these things. And I guess that's why I recognizing that it's not, now that we've opened this box of, we're not just considering that, I would like us to be able to discuss the other possible alternatives. And we can say, we'd never take the speed bumps away and make it main arterial, but my preference is for us to have that conversation here so that we go to the council and they say, well, what about we go, we talked about that, we talked about that. And here's why we didn't recommend that, which I think means we need a little more preparation for the formal presentation what are the alternatives that have been considered or could be and so we can actually have that discussion. I mean, it's possible that we'll be shot down by the council after we come to our understanding. But I do think that on the whole, the council would prefer a committee to go through this kind of stuff before it comes to the council. I see George has his hand and then we can go do a list after that. I think first of all, if we really do our job and I think it may involve this taking a lot longer than both Dorothy and I would like or at least certainly some people that are our constituents would like. But if we do our job, when it goes to the council, it shouldn't be an issue because we will have done, as Evan suggested, we have looked at all the options, we have done the hard work and we'll have a presentation or a proposal that all five of us can support. I think Dorothy and I both believe we can't get the five of us to agree on whatever it is we finally come up with that probably we either have to keep working on it or we just have to give up. And so I'm thinking that we might have a small silver lining in this dark period in that because of the current situation, there is no immediate pressure on Lincoln, okay? We're not getting any complaints from anybody. Yes, people are still parking there occasionally, but it's nothing like what it was for obvious reasons. And it's gonna stay that way, I think, for quite some time is my guess, which is unfortunate. But it gives us an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I think Evan is asking and maybe Alyssa might also want, which is let's put this in a larger context. The memo from Guilford lays out what are the DOT recommendations for any street where you have parking on one side and through traffic on the other two lanes. And Lincoln doesn't fit that, but a lot of streets in Amherst don't fit that. It's not like we have lots of 28, 30 foot wide streets. A lot of streets have parking on one and sometimes even two sides that don't fit the DOT guidelines. And there are reasons for that. And I think in many cases those reasons make sense. But I don't think there's any clarity, at least in my mind, and I don't think in Guilford's mind and I don't think in the council's mind as to what sort of, and it's certainly not in residents' minds as to what the basic criteria are. And that might be something in working with Guilford and DPW over the next couple of months that we could devote ourselves to to see them come up with a set of guidelines that replies not just to Lincoln, but to the town as a whole. Because we certainly heard at the council meeting, individual councillors saying, well, I've got this issue in my district, right? How come we're paying attention to Lincoln? What about my district? And there was a sense from some that it's something we should address town-wide. And so that was why I put it in the memo. I think there is a real question before us whether given the current situation, we focus on the larger picture of which Lincoln is part. So in a sense, I'm arguing a little bit against myself, but I think it's a serious objection that Evan has raised in a way the Pandora's box and also the idea that we're going beyond the referral. By going beyond the referral, we're really raising questions that apply to the issue of parking in general, residential parking in Amherst as a whole. So maybe part of what you're saying to us or you want to say to us is help prepare future discussions of that larger issue. And then we can come back and apply it to say on Lincoln and maybe some other streets as well, but certainly to Lincoln. So I think that's kind of the question I have in my mind for the rest of you. I think Dorothy and I have suggested we'd like to move quickly, but that's partly from constituent pressure. Understandable, but would you prefer that we start thinking about this in the larger context? Clearly Guilford has expressed an interest in this. Now that we address the larger issue, so what is it? What are the basic criteria we use? So street like Lincoln, you might in fact restrict parking in the way we suggest, but because there are certain clear criteria that we've established for all streets in Amherst and it fits that. So it would be minor arterial, major connector, doesn't fit the actual widths that are recommended, though that by itself is not determinative, et cetera. And then we could apply that to other places in Amherst. So there's consistency, ideally, and also clarity about what the criteria are and also residents then know who to go to. And that's another issue we need, I think, to get clarity on. Do they come to TSO? Do they go to TAC? Right now it seems TSO is your best option. So we could go to Guilford and in addition to some of the other things that you've asked us to do, initiate this discussion along the lines of the larger issue of parking in Amherst and what the basic criteria should be. Also Evan's question about Lincoln and the vision for Lincoln over the last 20 years, that's a legitimate question. Do you want us to focus just on Lincoln? We can do that. And I can bring Guilford in. We can have a formal presentation. Guilford can tell us the history of Lincoln, tell us what his thoughts are about various options. Or do you want us to go back to Guilford and say, this is part of what we're gonna be asking you, but we really wanna begin this conversation about that you yourself have raised with us about thinking about the larger picture. And that would take a couple of months. All right, I wanna give Alyssa a chance. Thank you. So yeah, this is complicated and I appreciate how you both are trying to both sponsor what you feel obligated to sponsor and what you also feel that you wanna sponsor and then also looking at the bigger picture, which is something that an individual resident doesn't have the pressure to do. So thank you for trying to weigh all of this. So I wanted to make a couple of comments. One is that again, one of the reasons you're gonna hear me pushing back, whether it's because of actual history or because of just the way things are phrased, I don't believe there are, now this is gonna irritate your neighbors, but I don't believe there are a lot of accidents. I believe there are accidents and I believe there are accidents all over town. And I'm not sure that we have data that there are a lot of accidents, although any accidents are too many and I certainly don't ever want anyone to ever be in one. So this really strong sentiment that it's incredibly unsafe is a really strong sentiment that people have had for over a decade, if not longer. And part of the reason we didn't make more of the changes that staff recommended back in 2015 is because we weren't convinced that the safety was that big of an issue in comparison to some other streets and in compare. But of course, when it's your house and it's your kids and it's your dog and it's your neighbors, then obviously it's a really huge issue. So finding ways to classify, right? That's like a really good theme for the future. How do we classify things? How do we say this normally fits in this classification, but you know what, this one's an exception. There's gonna be an exception. It's the main thing to the university. It's gonna be different anyplace else in town, but to be able to express that to people I think will be helpful. I wanna also mention that staff is not, staff is the expert on a lot of things. Staff isn't necessarily going to value exactly the same things that the neighbors or that the town council is going to value in that I can speak from my select board experience on that. In that staff didn't want to put speed bumps on Lincoln, no matter what, they were not interested in doing that. When they finally agreed that if they were told to do that, that they would be designed and they would do that, they didn't want to put them on the other streets that were by Lincoln, even though it was obvious to what we refer to in my house as to even the most casual observer that of course it would impact other streets just as you've talked about in your memo that you make changes there, it's gonna flow over to other streets. And we had to insist that staff go ahead and put speed bumps in additional streets, not just on Lincoln, because of that overflow that we were creating by putting them on Lincoln. So yes, no one's talking about taking away the speed bumps, but staff never wanted to put them there to begin with. So I caution us to be a little careful about saying staff wants this, staff thinks that, staff says that this is the thing to do. There's not one thing to do, there's expertise and there's working within that expertise to try and make the best decision. I don't think that anyone that lives on Lincoln now would say, I really wish we just let staff say, no, we can't have speed bumps. I don't think they would say that now. So what are we trying to accomplish at this point? And so I revisited some history there, but when I look at this, I was a little confused by the fact of the renumbering, please don't do that, these are items four, five and six. They're not items one, two and three now. You wanna talk about confusing town council, you're not even gonna get out of the gate when you change your order, say, well, remember four, five and six, well, they're now one, two and three like now, okay? That's not gonna work. So four, five and six, how important are they? Cause I'm not really sure I got that out of the memo and I heard some more from Dorothy about this, but how important are four, five and six to safety right now, given that factually, we don't even know if the changes we put, we voted on April 6th have actually been implemented. We obviously, even if they have been implemented, which I certainly hope they have, but we have no way of knowing cause that's not covered here, is it wasn't like a real test, right? Because the regular population wasn't here. But if they've been implemented or not, we need to know. If they've been implemented, is it still really important to do four, five and six at this point? Or like we, cause, how can I say this? On April 6th, we decided that those setbacks were so important that we should go ahead and do those, even though we've referred other things to TSO, right? So are you now saying that four, five and six have also risen to that level of, even though we don't know if the other things have actually been implemented, we think they're so important. They're still safety issues that you wish had been addressed, April 6th, and that you think are really impactful, because I don't have in theory, a problem with going back to town council and saying, you know what? Ideally, we would have done four, five and six to begin with. They really can be separated out, just like the changes we made on April 6th could be separated out. And then we're gonna have a bigger discussion. Or given, assuming that these things have been implemented, or even if they haven't, whatever, I guess we don't have a lot of pressure on us, that we chose on April 6th, do we put these three things, items four, five and six, in that bigger, larger picture? Because as you saw with, you know, surveillance, I'm just like, just do the thing, we all can know what we're talking about. Let's do that thing and get that part done, and then let's move on to the next part. So a lot of this depends then back on you, George and Dorothy, how do you feel like, given what we said was true, the new reality on April 6th, whether or not it got implemented, given the weird pandemic we're in, are the items four, five and six worth doing in isolation? Can you make a case to the council that they're worth doing in isolation, or are they really part of the bigger picture? Because you clearly felt that, you know, they shouldn't just be done on their own, right? You wanted it to be part of a bigger package. So how important are they right now? What's the appetite here for doing that? Because of course, if you take it to the town council now, they're gonna say, well, why didn't we just do them before? And they're gonna say, oh, because we've learned XYZ, that's why we need to do them now. That's why we need to not put them off. So I just want to hand it over to Dorothy, but I just wanted to check in with Alyssa. Are you sticking with us for a little bit longer? Yeah, yeah, since I talked so long, I should certainly listen to other people talk. Okay, because I want to make sure we do circle back to George's larger question about next steps. Dorothy. Okay, so this is a question. We were given a charge, and the report as written goes beyond that charge. I don't know this kind of history. This is not my kind of area. Are they gonna say the town council, Andy Joe, whatever you're gonna say, you can't do that. You have to come back to us and ask for a larger charge in order to even present this proposal. That's my question. So I can try to say, I think there's a chance that some people might say, well, first I should say this, I never know what they're gonna do in the full council. So we're all just guessing at this point, right? We always surprise each other. However, I believe I'm looking really quickly at our charge is review and make recommendations to the town council on measures related to public ways. Never said that that measure had to technically be referred that we couldn't consider anything that wasn't referred. And so my interpretation of that is that it is within our power to say, we will refer to something that has to do with the public ways and part of our recommendation is to expand this. That doesn't mean someone won't say something, but my feeling is that if the recommendation is, we're gonna come back and say, we think we should recommend the DPW's proposal plus or we think we should reject the DPW's proposal and recommend this alternative proposal. I think that's all within the boundaries of what our charge is and even within the boundaries of the referral. And so I'd love to hear from Alyssa on this because she is a keeper of memory. Whoa. Go ahead, Alyssa. And I'll go to George. I mean, I appreciate you putting me on the spot, which I deserve. Thank you, Dorothy. I agree with Evan in that to a large degree, we're guessing. I agree that our TSO charge gives us latitude. And I also agree that there are going to be town counselors, including truly myself, who are saying, why are we going beyond the three? And so if you can make a case for the three on their own, I think it might be a better appetite from the town council to say, we gave you these three, you're telling us that you want these three or you want two of the three or you want one of them to have a different amount of footage or something, rather than that, you're coming back to us with a big plan. I think the report could very much be, we think these three are important. We saw the implementation and what that means, even in the pandemic conditions, we still believe these three particular things are good. And we are going to have a larger conversation. So expect us to come back with more. But I think combining these with more right now is not a particularly easy sell, simply in terms of the town council bandwidth and why they need to be coupled with something else. I haven't quite heard a strong case, although I know that that was part of the intention of the memo that they need to be combined with some other items in order to really be effective. And so it might just simplify things if TSO goes back to the town council and says the three things you sent us, we made slight alterations too or their verbatim the same because the three of them are a good package or two of the three are a good package, do those, but understand we're keeping on moving on this as a bigger issue. George. What I'm hearing is that I need to convince, and rightly so convince Alissa and maybe also Evan that there really is a problem of safety here that needs to be resolved right now because that's exactly what the council is going to be asking us. And I think right now the answer is there isn't. Okay, there isn't, you know, because of circumstances that are all beyond our control right now, it's not a problem. And it may stay that way for quite some time. So I think, you know, if I can't convince Alissa in the next, say, if we meet again and we have another presentation or a formal presentation or even right now, I just don't think I have enough good reasons to convince her or Evan for that case and that means the council that there is an immediate public safety issue that requires one, two or three of these to be done. So, and I guess what Alissa's saying to me and to Dorothy is you've got to come back and convince me, talking to Guilford, looking at the safety numbers, looking at what's going on right now. You've got to convince me that there really is a problem that needs resolution in the short-term. And if you can convince me, then I will vote to take this to the council. But if you can't, I'm not going to vote to take it to the council. And if we, it's a three to vote, you know, it goes to the council, I'm going to argue against it. So I think my feeling is I can't give you an argument right now that this is an immediate safety issue. I certainly will talk more with Guilford and Dorothy will do the same with me about the numbers and the data and so on. But right now it's not a problem, okay? It's just not. I think it will become a problem again, but that's in the future. So where does that leave us? I mean, what you're saying to us is reasonably, you've got to convince me that there's really a problem here that these three or two or three or one of these three items addresses. And if you can, then I'll support it and then we can go forward. And so basically asking us to go back and come up with a strong argument for what we've presented. And argument is pretty much based on the past. It's based on what was true in April excuse me in March and February and so on. It was true then, but it's not true now. So to me, it seems like the larger issue is the one that's worth pursuing because in the end when we come to the council, I'd like to put whatever proposal we have for whatever street we're talking about in a context of a larger set of reasons and criteria that the council can then acknowledge and talk about as opposed to just say, we want to convince you that right now Lincoln is in just as bad a situation as it was in February or January or December of last year of the year earlier. It's not, there's no way you can argue that. And so I guess we're kind of at a point where there's some things I can do over the next couple of weeks in terms of getting some answers to some good questions but the larger question of whether we want to pursue just Lincoln. I think in the short term, my in Dorothy will speak for herself. I don't see how I can make a reasonable case that this requires action right now or next month or the month after that. Long term, maybe yes, but that raises all the larger questions that Evan has raised and that Guilford raised and when we talk to him. And so I guess I'm asking for you all to think about what would be the best use of our time. I certainly will go and find the answers to the specific questions that were raised today and bring them back to you. It's in some form, but I don't see going to a formal presentation because Alice is right. I can't make the case that right now this requires immediate console action. So I want us to sort of wrap up this conversation which is going to mean figuring out next steps. And so I think what I've heard is that there's potentially three different things we can do. We can move to a formal presentation on the proposal that's in front of us in the near future. Once Dorothy and George feel as though they are ready to make that formal presentation, we can say we are interested in this formal presentation but do not think this is a pressing concern right now. And so we're going to table this issue until whenever or we can say we don't think that we have any appetite to tackle Lincoln as an isolated action and we want to have a larger, more in-depth discussion and perhaps policy about public ways in the town in which case we would be holding off on any type of formal presentation and figuring out a way forward with that. So I'd just like to hear from all of the members of those three options, which one you think you are interested in pursuing and I'm going to start with Dorothy just because she has had her hand up. Okay. I would like to do the third option. Now that has been clarified to me that we do not need to have a charge to look at this that of course it is in our charge. We're in charge of the public ways. Then we can do this as we see fit. We've been granted a period of time where there's no big rush or power because we certainly got three, six months, eight months more of this situation. Okay. I would like to move forward and do the coherent plan so that we haven't given up on the issue. But as George says, it's not pressing at this moment but I also don't want to drop the ball. Work has been done, thought has been gone into this and there are issues that matter. So in addition to finding out what happened to those setbacks that we, Alyssa said, we acted upon, George and I will follow up on that and see if anything has happened on that. I would like to move forward on a coherent policy which will take some time but which will deal with how should parking, now whether it's the whole parking problem which involves the downtown parking or whether we're talking about residential parking, it probably is the whole parking issue. But anyway, I will stop at that point. Okay. George and Alyssa, where's your preference on next steps? I'm here from Dorothy, perhaps hold off on a formal presentation on this proposal so that we can have a conversation about parking larger, perhaps just residential, perhaps more. Alyssa? I guess for me where, I mean, as I spun through this during both reading ahead of time and then tonight's discussion is if the two of you aren't feeling and George keeps making it crystal clear, given the weird time we're in, right? This would be so different if we weren't in this weird time that has obviously severely impacted the use of parking spaces on these streets. Given that that's not going to change as Dorothy said for potentially eight months, then it sounds like these three are not critical because literally they're not going to be happening as opposed to they're directly impacting the people living on those streets right now who are still there, right? They haven't left. And so if there's one of the three that really is a safety issue that you really wish we deal with now, I'm still open to that. But I'm not open to combining the three with other things without a broader view. So I would say at this point in variation of what the options were that Evan gave me is to either proceed with the next step associated with some portion of these three because some portion of these three is so critically important and then leave the rest for future. Or simply report to town council at this point, hey, sorry, we missed the 90 days, but pandemic. And while these three things are still quite important when we haven't lost sight of them, we are going to fold them into a larger conversation because given the conditions we are under, we are not seeing that these three will prevent a particular safety threat at this point. But we are cognizant of the fact that if classes are going to start back in person a year from now, then we would wanna have made these changes potentially before the fall semester starts. And I know that's not something we've brought up here, but you know it's something I ride Guilford about every time we have a conversation is that it takes us time to implement things every time we vote something. And so pandemics aside, we do not wanna be putting people in the position of finally, yay, coming back to UMass in fall of 21 and then developing habits of parking on the one of the ends of Lincoln and then pulling the roll out from under them, the road out from under them in November. So there is some time sensitivity here, but to say to the town council, there's not so much time sensitivity with these three unless as you go back and look at them more, Dorothy and George, you think they are, but it sounds like Dorothy's saying, now it sounds like it'd probably be okay to leave these three as part of the larger thing. So we should report back to town council so they know what we're doing, but it sounds like the option that might be palatable is to say, while those three things are important, we've come up with even more things that are important and we wanna present you a larger package, it just won't be right this minute. Okay, so I'm seeing nods as Alyssa was talking, so I'm thinking that we probably have consensus around that. Do we feel as though we want to vote on this or is this sufficient to report to council that this is what we're doing? Because we were asked to make a recommendation within 90 days, so we could say, hey, we're just not doing that right now or we could vote, we could take a vote that we are not recommending the town council take action at this time until TSO presents a more comprehensive solution. Is there a feeling either way, George? I don't feel the need for a vote, I'm perfectly willing to have one. I think what you just said at last part kind of captures where we're at and if you put that into a report that would pretty much tell them what we're thinking. So I don't feel the need for a vote but if people want to be happy to vote but I think you've got it. I think Alyssa's right, we do need to get back to council and tell them what the heck happened to the referral. So we do need to say something. Okay. I would like a vote because the referral was formal and a vote is formal. Sue, would you prefer a vote? You're muted. Yes, I would prefer a vote. Okay, Alyssa, do you have a... I'm okay with closing the loop with the vote. I just don't want to make the motion because I thought you came up with some pretty good language there and I think George agreed, so. We did agree. Okay, well, what did I say? We're not gonna act on four, five and six at this moment but we'll be coming back to you later with a more comprehensive plan. Okay. So I think, so phrasing this as a vote that would be a recommendation, correct, is that where we were? Yeah, we move that the town council not take action on, and then we'd give them the actual referral they gave to us at this time because... Okay, so I will try to make this motion and if I mess it up, someone will yell at me. I move that the TSO recommend that the town council take no action on the Lincoln Avenue parking referral. We'll just put insert the language of the referral but I'm not gonna read it at this time until TSO presents, what was the language you used? A more comprehensive policy on parking. That doesn't work either. I'm struggling with why we need this in a motion and a vote. It's not as if the council is chomping at the bid to do anything, they haven't, quite frankly, I think they have the slightest interest in Lincoln Avenue right now. And so they're not waiting for us to tell them what to do or not to do. I think all they wanna know is what we've done with the referral and the answer is we're still working on it. And you're gonna tell them at the moment, we don't feel there's an immediate pressing need to act on the referral because the safety issues are not pressing and that we are looking at the large, we'd like to look at the larger picture of which Lincoln is parked. Something along those lines, but I guess, Dorothea, I'm trying to see why we need to put this into a motion because the council, you know. I'm agreeing with you. Tell them where we're at, right? I'm agreeing with you because I don't like the language, not act on these things because that sounds like a negative. I'm agreeing with you now. Now, I don't think we're recommending they do anything. We're just telling them this is where we're at at the moment. Okay. And if they wanna recommend it. They'll be satisfied and know that that's what we're gonna do, that's fine. Yeah. So then I will withdraw that motion that I so beautifully crafted. Beautiful motion, Evan, but I just don't see the need for it. Okay. At this point, I want to open our second public comment period. I do see we have some participants, including some current and I think former members of TAC. And so we will have our second public comment period. If you are interested in making a public comment, please raise your hand. Public comments are up to three minutes. Okay. So we have two people. So we'll start with Eve Vogel. Evan, could we actually have Tracy go first? Oh, I certainly can. So let me, let me do that. Okay. Tracy Zephyon. Hi. Okay. So I actually had a few comments but it was related to the Lincoln parking proposal as well as to the question about the TAC. But I can, so I'd like to speak to both of those, but I can split them if you'd prefer. So just in terms of the Lincoln parking proposal. So that is a road that I travel on a lot. I live on Blue Hills Road. I work at UMass. I walk downtown all the time. I'm often on Lincoln. I did have a few different questions. One was, and I am somebody who I've worked professionally and also been a volunteer on a number of transportation committees over the years. I'm currently, my salary is paid by the Mass Department of Transportation right now at UMass. So I did have a question on the safety issue about, you know, if there is gonna be this parking limit and it's just gonna be weekdays, like do all the safety issues disappear on the weekends, particularly like with some of the road widths and so on. Like if we're allowing on-street parking at non-peak hours, you know, is there still issues? Also just the fact that the proposal that George and Dorothy wrote is, it also talks about restrictions on sunset and like all the agenda items, including George's and Dorothy's memo. It just says Lincoln, right? So you just wanna make it clear to the public that you're also talking about changes on sunset. You know, the issue that I heard in the comments from the public, including people who live on these streets is like one of the issues is the sight lines with driveways. And so, you know, there are, you can't have enforcement. I don't know if this is, I don't know exactly what rules are on the books for Amherst, but in terms of like people are not supposed to park like right up until the driveway. You know, there's supposed to be a setback and you couldn't actually ticket people. I do remember being at one hearing about Lincoln. It may have been a few years ago where I heard that sometimes the police are actually ticketing, but I don't know how often that's done and what exactly the rules are on that. So Dorothy raised a couple of other things. Dorothy raised some good points about the setbacks at some of the streets. And when I look at the maps, the Lincoln and McClellan setback, you know, in terms of no parking near the intersection is 60 feet. In the maps that George presented, the setback at Gaylord and Lincoln is only 30 feet. If you look at the Mass Department of Transportation like road design guidelines and the setbacks you should have for good sight lines, they should be larger than that, particularly given the fact that it is a minor arterial road and that there are speeds, the average speed I think was, you know, 15 to 20 miles an hour or faster. So I would urge that, you know, maybe even as an interim step that you could look at having more setbacks there. I'm also concerned when I looked at the map that at Amity and Lincoln, on the Lincoln side, not on, I mean, I'm sorry, on Amity East of Lincoln, it shows that the parking, I wasn't sure exactly what the setback is there because it shows like blue that shows that it's like allowed parking but it really should be setback more East of Lincoln. I'm just because, and I agree with Dorothy, as somebody who walks and bikes and drives in that area that there are issues at Amity and Lincoln for a variety of reasons. And in my research at UMass that we've even used the Amity and Lincoln intersection in some of our safety studies and training. You know, the idea came up here about... Tracy, did we lose you? She shows us muted. She doesn't show us muted on my screen. Tracy, for some reason we can't hear. I'm gonna mute. I'm gonna try unmuting after. See if that makes a difference. Now let me try. I'm sorry, my connection is not that stable. I can call in if that happens again. Okay. Right, so I was just talking about the one, if it was a dead end, that fairing in Lincoln. I mean, the other thing to keep in mind if you're talking about like a bigger approach is that I don't know if the university has shared what's happening on Lincoln with the Lincoln Apartments, you know, but that could have an impact on traffic on the street as well. And that is something that a while back the tact did send a formal letter like asking information about that project and also what the university's plans are for Lincoln because I have heard some proposals where the university would cut off access to Lincoln. And so that might not have to be something that the town would have to do. Okay, so just, I know I just took a bunch of time, but in terms of the TAC and its relationship to parking policies, planning and so on. So I am a pretty new member of the TAC. I think I only joined a few meetings before we stopped meeting. Our last meeting was March 11th, but I was serving on a subcommittee that was lead at a project prioritization plan for town since last summer. And I have also served like two summers ago now and I've also served on TAC predecessor committees. So one of the things that happened in terms of the TAC, I mean, in the parking is, so I think with the downtown parking study that was completed earlier in the year that it sounded like that that was one reason that even though parking is in the TAC charge that we were told not to focus on parking and that the council would be looking more at parking. But I think it is important to note that the tax charge, well, one, our role is always just advisory. I mean, and members of TAC are citizens who have demonstrated expertise and experience and interest in transportation. All we do is focus on transportation and the TSO has like so many other responsibilities. And also a big part of our charge is to look at transportation comprehensively, you know, in terms of overall for town. So in terms of the TAC meeting, so over the summer I was contacted, all the TAC members were contacted by a staff person about setting up a meeting and then that meeting never happened. I mean, when I contacted a Guilford train in August about the TAC and I said, you know, when might the TAC be meeting and can we set up a meeting? And I was told and he emailed me back and he said he didn't think that the TAC would meet again and that the council wanted to be more involved in the matters that are under the TAC. So, I mean, again, I see the TAC as an advisory role. I mean, the, yes, the town council are the keepers of the public way, the select board were the keepers of the public way. I mean, the TAC doesn't have much decision-making power. We're just advisory and that per the tax charge and you know, to Alyssa's point earlier, the tax charge might need to be updated along with that and many other committees but overall the role of the TAC is just to help the town to address transportation matters and a comprehensive holistic matter and to advise the council, the town manager on transportation regulations, policies, initiatives and so on. At the time of the TAC's last meeting on the TAC and the subcommittee that I had been a part of along with EVO Goal, you know, we are close to completing a plan for evaluating future transportation projects and other developments with transportation impacts and also for prioritizing future projects based on factors related to safety and access, connectivity and also other values that are supported in AMERS such as equity and sustainability. And so that work has been on hold since we stopped meeting and we were getting very close with it. You know, we had planned to share the work with the council, get feedback and then also have public meetings about it. But again, it's like been at a standstill since March. And we also, you know, there are another, a number of other documents that the TAC has been involved with some of which have been adopted by the select board including the complete streets policy which was approved by the select board in 2018. There is a bike ped plan that's new. There's also crosswalk design standards and things. So it's seen, I mean, yes, I say this as a TAC member but also just as, and as somebody who's focused a lot on transportation but I mean, all these sort of background documents can help inform if the TSO and the council do decide to go with a larger townwide parking policy. So anyway, thank you. Great, thank you, Tracy. Eve. Great, thank you all. So as many of you know, maybe at least two of you probably know, I was on the TAC for about, well, off and on for nine years and I was the vice chair up through April even though the TAC stopped meeting in March. I was also chairing the subcommittee that Tracy was just talking about. So I don't have a lot of specifics to respond to about the Lincoln thing but I wanted to sort of put it in some of that broader context and I actually just wanna say I really appreciated some of your conversation about thinking about the broader context and having your conversation about that during your conversation about the fact that you have a little bit of time to think about it when in the strange time and Alyssa's comment that what staff want isn't necessarily what citizens want and you all should be aware of that. Anyway, it's really appreciative of a lot of the things you talked about. I wanted to mention a few things. So first to clarify, the TAC didn't, the TAC decided that it would deal with parking outside of downtown. So when the Lincoln issue came up we actually did have two hearings in the TAC or two sort of public discussions about the Lincoln project in the TAC but it was a little ambiguous whether it was our sort of jurisdiction because it's in the downtown even if it wasn't part of the downtown parking working group. But I would say that there were a couple of issues that even if we weren't talking about parking come in. One is that parking has other functions besides parking. It slows traffic. And actually, so one of our key questions was that the neighbors were saying that the parking makes things more dangerous. We wondered whether taking away parking would make it more dangerous. And so just to jump ahead to another comment to add to your idea, George, that you have some time I would suggest that one of the things you might consider is doing basically an experiment. And we had worked with Guilford to set up an experiment in the South Amherst Common about temporarily redirecting traffic in a way that some people were proposing and actually collecting data. And if you do what you were talking about of figuring out the criteria that you're trying to achieve, say the traffic speeds or the number of cars that are going through that way or whatever the criteria are that you think are the most important. I mean, certainly safety is crucial and lack of accidents is crucial, but hopefully that'll be zero no matter what you do for your experiment. But do an experiment, take some data and figure out. You can find out if it's gonna put stuff onto Sunset, for example, if you do an experiment. Besides that, parking also obscures sight. And so Tracy's numbers on expertise on that are much better than mine, so I'll just point that out. The third thing is that you guys wanted to know if the TAC had particular ideas for Lincoln. The, Tracy mentioned the pet and bike plan. That was actually never finalized and a crucial piece of it was never finalized which was the map of the routes for pedestrian bicycling and transit that we wanted to develop and prioritize. And that was actually in staff's hands and it just never came back. So I would love it personally and as a former member of the TAC, I think it would really serve the town well to prioritize getting that map of the pet and bike routes finalized. The second thing is as Tracy was talking about about the prioritization plan, we work close on that. And as the chair of that committee and someone who did a lot of the work to develop that, I will just say very honestly that I think we needed some help. We needed some help from planning, maybe from sustainability and a little more from DPW for some data and a little bit of technical assistance. And we got some from the PVPC, but anyway, I think the prioritization plan would also really help situations like this to figure out what's the priority in terms of projects. Another thing is that Guilford's memo on lane width, you should just know that in other cities and towns, they accept the lanes as narrow as 9.5, even for buses and other large vehicles. And in towns where they wanna really add space for pedestrians and bicycles that narrowing lanes a little bit like that actually against those traffic, which this unit's a positive thing. Let's see, I think that's it, everything I wanted to say. And I guess I just add that I would second Tracy's point that the tech functions are important and I don't know that you, we were already overwhelmed that all we were doing, I don't know that you wanna bundle all we were doing into what you're doing. Thank you, Eve. Okay, so at this point, we have hit our action items and our presentation discussion items. We have decided that we are not going to move forward to a formal presentation at this time with this proposal. And so I will communicate that to Darcy and we can start to put together what a larger conversation about parking will look like in this committee. So I will talk with Darcy about that. The only other thing that we have left on our agenda are the adoption of the September 3rd and September 17th minutes, were there any comments or changes to those minutes? Let's size your hand up, although I haven't seen it, it's not about minutes. You know the feeling, you know, for sure it's not about minutes. You know I'm not gonna talk about minutes. Don't care about minutes. I care that they get done, not what they said. So you're gonna communicate to Darcy, but one of you, I'm assuming you, is gonna have to write the report that reports back to town council. Thanks for the referral. Here's what we've done with it. And that as well as, you know, talking about committee appointments, right? It can be the same report that covers those things. And then if you would also communicate to Darcy, the idea of having TAC as an agenda item, because it's always making notes, and I really appreciate that both Tracy and Eve could come. But one of the funny things I'd like us all to think about is how is it that a committee's advisory, but they're doing all their own things? And then their advisory at what point? So they're not just taking direction from somebody and like a referral per se, right? Their charge shows that they do take referral type things, but they also do their own things. And so how does one manage that relationship and what is an effective use of all the expertise on that committee versus some things TSO might wanna throw their way if they were willing to accept them versus TSO saying what it sounds like maybe was somehow communicated to TAC that the town council just wants to take over all the TAC stuff because I don't think the town council has ever had that conversation. And in fact, we've never been given the opportunity to have that conversation and we've now been in office for a good long while pre-pandemic. So if we could start that conversation, then I think we could help the town council have an effective conversation about that at some point in the future. So if that could be on a future agenda item for us. Okay, thank you. Seeing no comments about the minutes, I will move to adopt the September 3rd, 2020 and September 17th, 2020 minutes. Is there a second? Dorothy seconds. Any further discussion? I will call the question. Alyssa Brewer. Abstain. Dorothy Pan. Yes. I'm a yes and George. Yes. Okay, that is three in favor, one abstention, one absent. The on our agenda are the future, the next meeting agenda preview, which lists on here the facial recognition technology bylaw, the next steps on Lincoln Ave, which I have a feeling will not be on our next agenda. And also transportation advisory committee discussion. Look at that. So look at that. Darcy's four steps ahead of us. All right, so that is all of our agenda. And so unless there's any further comments, I see none, I will adjourn us at 827 PM. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Evan. Good night. Thank you. Okay.