 The purchase and sale agreement is going forward without any significant obstacles. So that means it is important for us to work on their request for proposals. So that we get something out hopefully early in the spring. Oh, okay, so I was sorry I was going to do minutes. And then I almost skipped by it again. So are there any concerns with the regular December meeting minutes? And I don't have them in front of me so I could be have them in front of me but I don't. Does anyone have any comments on those. Or can I assume that then they're accepted as submitted and draft. We can permanently put it in our in the archive or actually on our website. Okay, that's good. Then we got two out of three minutes from executive sessions. And sorry, they're not consecutive one was October. And one was December. So we have to approve those tonight. And then by next month, we should have the November executive session minutes to be approved as well. So are there any questions or comments on either of those? And again, I'm sorry, I don't have those in front of me. Okay, then I'm going to assume that they are accepted as distributed. And again, they go into the permanent archive. Where they will be kept for at least a hundred years. Okay. Then moving right along. What I wanted to do was review. The RFP. And my goal in doing so is to make sure that everyone is oriented to what we're doing. Okay. We did have a meeting of the. RFP working group, which included Francis, although she wasn't able to stay with us the entire time. Carol Erica. Rita and myself. And we'll be meeting again. I haven't announced this formally, but on January 28th, that's a Thursday evening. So we're going to have a meeting of the RFP. And then we'll have a meeting of the different blocks of time available then. And so that's when our next meeting is, and I'll send everybody a note. Tonight or tomorrow. So, John, can you put the RFP on? And actually could you first put on the, the separate. Word file. Yes. Let's see. Someday I'm going to learn how to do this, but I have to confess I haven't figured this out. Even though I know you do share a screen, but then I wasn't quite sure how you identify the file that you wanted to be shared. So there are a few things out of that that I wanted people to know about. In part because. I wanted people to know what we're going to be able to do. Let's see. So as we go over this, this John's getting to put the first item up. I wanted to say the purpose of this review, as I said, is to orient people to this task. To let you know what's coming. And where we are now and where I anticipate we're going. We're going to be able to, we're going to be able to, to weigh in if they have any advice for the drafting committee. As we go along. So those are our purposes. And. We'll be able to. I think Eric is in the waiting room. Oh, okay. Let me get Erica in here first. Okay. Okay. She should be joining us. But I'm going to move this around. And then I'll have to go over the actual soft screens. I can see why we have me and Nate. Okay. Welcome, Erica. We're just starting to go over. Really the issues that we talked about in our drafting committee meeting. So everybody else is oriented to what we're trying to do. And also has an opportunity to weigh in. Okay. So let's see. Yeah, I mentioned that after the finance committee or during the finance committee meeting, Rita noted two issues. One is that we may be constrained to work with a nonprofit provider. There were two other things that were identified then that 100% of the units at Belcher Town Road would have to be affordable up to 100% area meeting and income. And also that the town would be required to retain ownership of the property, which means we must have a 99 year lease. We cannot sell the property to a developer. So those are three constraints. We've asked Dave Zomek to talk to town council to verify those. People may recall that Rob Moria offered a conceptual plan that was provided to town council as well as to us. One of the things, again, we learned in the finance committee that the average unit is 786 or 87 square feet the way Rob put it together. Basically that's because he felt like the footprint on that property of the building had to be limited to some 13,000 plus square feet. Then he had three floors and when you add it all up together and then divide by the number of units that's what you get for average square feet. That could be fine, but I'm not sure that it is because I'm assuming as we worked on the East street school plan, we're gonna want this site also to have a preponderance of units that would be two and three bedrooms to accommodate families. If that's the case, I think an average square feet of 780 something might be too small. That average probably has to go up a bit, which means we wouldn't be able to get 40 units on the site if the footprint remained the same. I will say at the end of the day, that's gonna be up to the developer to decide. But it probably means, as I said, that we can't count on getting 40 units out of that part of the property. For the moment, we're going along on the assumption that we're really doing one combined RFP for both the Belchertown Road site and the East street school site. There are a variety of reasons to do that, which I think we've discussed, but if someone has some questions or comments about that now or at some point in the future, I can address it or Rita would probably do a better job than me addressing it. Anybody have any comments? I just have one quick question, which is that if they're, I guess if the Belchertown Road is more restrictive because it's being purchased with CPA funds, or it can only be, only nonprofits are eligible to develop the property, et cetera, all the other constraints that you talked about. Does that also limit who would, who are eligible developers for the East street school projects as well? Or like, I just, or maybe the pool of potential developers is so small that it doesn't particularly matter that much, but I was just wondering if that might hamstring our flexibility with respect to the East street school project. Well, it does, but as a practical matter, it may not make much difference. Well, the East street school, as our last RFP had included, would allow a developer to include market rate units as well as affordable units. We can't do that on the Belchertown site, but what that means is that if developer, for-profit developer came in and said, well, I wanna do the East street school and I wanna do a mix of market rate and affordable housing, then we have a question of whether we wanna let, allow the two sites to be severable. And if we do, we'd probably have to include that in the RFP. The downside of that is that neither site is probably gonna have 40 to 50 units, which is the sweet spot that people talk about or the minimum size in order to attack, to attract community investment tax credits. Which are the major way this kind of housing is supported. So it may be impractical to do, to sever the two sites for that reason. I did have a note of love. Carol asked whether we have to have one building. The answer is no. Really, it's not up to us or it shouldn't be up to us. We can decide whether we want one building or two buildings or three buildings and put that in the RFP, but to quote or at least paraphrase what Tom Kegelman always said to us when we were working on the East street RFP, don't micromanage, don't tie the developer's hands unnecessarily, give them freedom and flexibility to create what they think is the most appropriate use of the site. They're gonna invest much more in the way of resources, architects, landscape planners, engineers, et cetera in deciding how to use both sites. And so honestly, given their likely experience, they're gonna be in much better position to ultimately make these decisions. So we should try to avoid constraining the developer unnecessarily. It's gotta be really important to us to put a constraint in the RFP. Hi, John, and I'm so sorry that my technology failed me during the meeting, but in that same vein of thought, what is it part of the CPA requirements that most units be at least two bedrooms? Because I'm assuming that the number of bedrooms will impact both the size and the number of units, in addition to the revenue that the developers will be working with? No, that's not a CPA requirement. When we designed the RFP for the East Street School, we wanted, and this is a value judgment, to make most of the units or at least the affordable units available to families. And we chose a preponderance of two bedroom units, primarily because when we were acquired of wayfinders, we found that that's what their biggest waiting list was for Amherst properties. So we thought that made sense, but that's a value of judgment. We don't have to do that this time if we don't want to. Because I'm thinking that instead of putting it as a minimum requirement that, at least 50% of the units be two bedrooms that we can instead have it as the highly advantageous that more than 50% are advantageous. And then instead of having it as a minimum requirement, just because we might be constricting the number of people that can see this as a feasible development, just thinking about prior instances where that's happened with other projects I've worked on. Yeah, that's a good point. Nobody except the working RFP working group knows what you're talking about with respect to advantageous or highly advantageous. So we'll get to that a little bit later so people get a look at what you're talking about. Sounds good. Okay, I just wanted to mention that. Okay, so the decision to combine the two sites into a single RFP is not set in stone, although I have to admit my personal bias is in that direction. But if a majority of us think that's not the way to go, then we don't have to go that way. Okay, I guess when we talked about process, it's important to know that after we finish with the RFP, it's still draft. It has to be reviewed by the town procurement officer who is Anthony Delaney, and then it has to go to the town attorney, most likely Sharon Everett at KP Law. So there are things that they can change about it that are beyond our capacity. And in fact, as we go through the RFP, you'll see that there are things that we probably shouldn't bother with because they're boilerplate legal stuff or other things that we shouldn't flow with. At least that would be my sense. Okay, when we looked at the East Street School property and you can go back and see what the land looks like, there's almost like two parcels. There's a front parcel, which is where the school sits that faces right on the East Street common. And then there's a back parcel that's behind the school, behind it and a little bit to the south actually that has been a town recreation land for a long time. It was established by Stan Zomek, Dave's father, if you're curious, who was head of the DPW at the time and was very active if you don't know in town recreation leagues, particularly Little League Baseball and the like. As head of DPW, he had his troops bring fill onto that piece of property because it was a bit wet and that allowed it since to be recreation land. We cannot build on it because it is still wet, but we can grandfather in the current use. And so that's likely what we would do. It's what we did with the original East Street RFP. Any questions about that? Oh, John, this is Nate. Yeah, I will say that. We did have the wetlands re-delineated and surveyed. So that'll be going to the conservation commission pretty soon. And so John is right that if you look at the East Street school, where the building is and in front of it is developable, but essentially behind it in the field is not. So, although it is almost two acres, it's really about a tenths of an acre is really the front lot. And that's what would be the focus of a developer. Okay, so now I had a list of the major sections, which is what we're going to review. So I'm not going to go over that list because we're going to see them shortly. Is there anything else that I had in that file, John? Page down a little bit and see if there's anything else. These were the review section by section review, which we're about to do. And just making sure that the criteria, the comparative criteria was right, a part of the RFP because that is a very important part. Yeah, and we did incorporate that now into the main body. Okay, so let's switch over to the RFP. We'll kind of go through it section by section, but where there's not much to talk about with respect to a particular section, we're just going to skip through it. On the other hand, as I said, my goal is for everybody at least to be oriented to what we're doing, and particularly for people who are here, who aren't going to be at our next RFP meeting. If you have an idea or a thought, please weigh in and we'll take it into consideration when we meet. Hey, John, there's an attendee. I think it's Chad, who has his hand raised. Can we... Sure. All right, Mac user, you're... Yeah, that's Chad. Yeah. Hello, Chad. I'm not sure if this is the right time. I had two questions and two points of view to add. Do you want that at this time or at the end? It might be better at the end, because or Chad, if a particular point is related to something as we're going through it, that would be the moment to raise it. And then there might be other points to raise other points in time, other concerns that you have. All right, if there's a vote at least before that. Oh, I don't think there's going to be a vote tonight, Chad. All right, all the way to the end. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Okay, moving right along, there's a front page, which has the town logo and a few other things. Skipping through that, obviously the cover page will be updated. Then there's this section about the request for proposals and when things will happen and a little bit about the goals of the town, all of that gets changed after we've gone through and made the whole bunch of decisions we're going to make. In fact, this could be the last, even though it comes first, it could be the last thing that's actually written. Okay, so we'll move on, John. Unless somebody had a question about that. Anybody? Okay, we'll keep moving as you can see. For the most part, John or Rita has identified things that are going to be changed in red. So any of the deadlines that are in here are still the old deadlines. Obviously all of those are going to be revised and those will be revised by Anthony. Okay, so let's keep moving down. Okay. It's typical for an RFP to provide background information which are descriptions for the sites. We have the existing description for the East Street School site. At the moment, there's no description for the Belcher Town Road site. I think there are a couple of things that we'd wanna do now with respect to improving or changing the description of the East Street School site. We wanna be able to tell or prevent potential developer that there isn't a wetlands problem, that we have done a survey and an official survey and there is nothing on the front piece of property that prevents them from using the entire piece of property as far as wetlands is concerned. There is a culprit at the back that's broken. Hopefully we'll fix that and we'll make reference to the fact that the town is gonna fix that before we sign up for developer. And the other thing is the physical building. We need to do an analysis of hazardous materials. Nate already has a contract out, I believe, so it's only a question of getting the contractor to tell us what's there and then language about the school would also be included. So other than that, I think everything that's in there is probably pretty standard. A little bit about the history of the building, about what utilities, infrastructures available, et cetera. And unless somebody wants to stop, we don't necessarily need to go over that. Okay, does anybody have- I'm sorry, just to jump in that, the zoning on both properties right now wouldn't accommodate the types of design we're thinking about. So I do think it is important in the zoning section to, this would be a comprehensive permit project or two comprehensive permit projects. So I do think that's important to know. So I don't think the town is going to try to add zoning or change zoning for either of these sites. So it really would be a comprehensive permit project. And so that is, I think that is pretty significant for just to reference because- I think it's there, Nate. No, it is, it is. But I do think, I just want to, I know John said, we can go through these, I just want to point that out to the trust that it's not, in some parts of towns, like downtown, mixed use buildings are allowed by right and you can get the density you might be looking for, but for these properties we, the zoning doesn't allow that. Yeah, I suspect Nate knew it was there because he probably put it there. Yeah, I don't, yeah. I mean, I think the town is a good rep. I mean, I think the town works really well with 40B projects. So I don't see that as a barrier really actually, but- Yeah. Okay. Then we come to a section on objectives and guidelines. Again, what you have are objectives and guidelines that were written two years ago. That really only reflected what we decided to do with the East street school property. Now we're going to have both properties and we're going to have to decide what we want on Belcher Town Road and whether we want to keep the same plan for the East street school site or whether we want to change it. The other thing that's in here that Rita might need, might want to say something about is if you look the second bullet says program use and design guidelines. There was almost nothing said about design guidelines in this document. And I don't think that we're likely to produce new design guidelines for either or both of these sites. There's a couple of reasons for that. One, it's a huge task. Two, it's something that town council and the planning board are both working on. And so I don't want to do something that would compete with what they're doing. However, and Rita can speak to this, the Department of Housing and Community Development has seven pages of design guidelines. In the document that a developer will have to respond to. So we're probably at least going to want to assure any developer that we would expect them to be responsive to those design guidelines. Rita, do you want to say anything more about that? Yeah, just if you scroll down, I think we incorporated some language in that. Well, there you go. So the Department of Housing and Community Development publishes something called the Qualified Action Plan. And it is the guidance for developers using low income housing tax credits, which we assume would be a major source of financing for this development. Within that Qualified Action Plan, which I think is well over a hundred pages, there is incorporated both general design guidelines, but then some criteria if you're building certain kinds of housing, like green housing or using something called CBH, which is, I think it's community based housing, I'm not entirely sure. But anyway, so we thought we would reference those design guidelines here, rather than try to replicate them as John said, putting seven pages of design guidelines in here. Since we have an architect in the group, Francis, do you have any comment on that? Well, like Rita said, the QAP that DHD puts together is quite thorough, it lists minimum sizes. It now has green building, both requirements and what they put as suggestions for developers. And since it looks like pending what legal says, all of these will be non-for-profit developers, they should already be well versed. I think that both the QAP, in addition to the town's existing design guidelines should be enough. But again, this can be something that's from not advantageous to highly advantageous rating if we want something else. I know sometimes there's more, we can rate projects higher if they have, if they're all solar or et cetera, et cetera, or by the way they invite to the aesthetic of their surroundings. But I don't think we should, like you said, there's already a lot of work being done there, so I don't think we should add too much more on top. Okay, so we can go over them and decide whether or not we wanna reference something specifically in the evaluation criteria, which we'll be coming to shortly. Okay, moving along. Again, we have decisions to make about what configuration of bedrooms we want, and that's highlighted currently. So unless there's any comment or discussion about that, okay, we'll move along. The developers would be required to include a management and maintenance plan. And somebody, I can't remember, there was Carol or Erica, asked the question about what happens related to potential eviction. And so we talked about that a little bit. One of the things we can do is look at the Somerville Housing Stability Notification Act, which we've talked about, and see whether we wanna take anything from that to include as part of a required maintenance plan or management plan. I will say, I sent you all a note a few hours ago. Well, maybe I should, I'll hold this for later in the meeting. I don't wanna confuse this. I will say, John, I mean, at one point, we could discuss whether or not we even make this a requirement of the RFP or if this is front-loading too much. Do we ask for, we'll be put in, we could have as part of the description that if this product were to move forward, other future agreements would require certain things as part of the land development agreement or something, but maybe we don't include it here as a requirement upfront. We can always say that it would be a future requirement. It's just, we're asking a lot of a developer to submit a proposal to develop a management plan. And they're not even going through permitting yet. So. Yep. Yeah, what you remind me, Nate, you're absolutely right, is that basically we have two things to consider here. On the one hand, if we don't put something in that's really important into the RFP, we've lost our chance. This is it, folks. If we don't, if something's really important to us, from a value point of view, as much as anything else, then we got, it has to be in. On the other hand, as Nate was just saying, and as I said, earlier paraphrasing Tom Kegelman, we don't want to tie a developer's hands if it's unnecessary to do that. So with that, I'll just, we'll just continue along. I just say, I thought that when we were talking about this the other night, we talked about, yes, of course, we don't want somebody to have to make a management plan. But if it's important, there's something about eviction. We can still say we would expect that whatever management plan you do present, we'll have something like this in it. And also, as Francis has been pointing out, there are lots of places where we can have things that are, we would really like to see this happen. And if you do this, you'll get more points or whatever it is. And if you don't, it's okay, but you will be, it will be less competitive or whatever those words are that I can't read. But so it's not like, it doesn't, at least when we were talking about it the other night, it didn't feel to me quite like an either or. Either we have to say, give us a management plan or we have to say nothing. There's room in between, seems like. Very good point, Carol. Very good point. Okay, so John, can you move us along? Yeah, we're probably gonna lease. We're probably going to lease. Yeah, we're probably gonna lease, as I said, a 99 year lease. And there's a section we're not gonna go over that's an appendix, which is a likely land development agreement that the town and the developer would sign once the developer has met certain conditions, having initially contracted to work on the property. Okay, again, these are all things that are up for discussion. What are the affordability requirements that we want? As you'll see later, when we look at the old draft evaluation requirements, as Carol was just saying and as Francis pointed out before, we have one set of things that we put in what's advantageous and what another set that we put in what's very advantageous. So we can continue to do that. Although it doesn't say that here, it does say that elsewhere. Okay, stop at the very beginning of this section. Yeah, okay, so we are gonna have evaluation criteria. They're really summarized here. There are two things that I pointed out to the drafting group that are important. One is anything that's important to us should probably be evaluated. And second, we'll come to a later section which describes what the developer must include in their formal proposal. And we wanna be sure to include anything or any information from the developer that we would need in order to do a proper evaluation. That seems obvious, but when you're actually doing the task, you have to be careful to make sure that you do follow through on that. Okay, so maybe we can skip down, John, to the, yes, to the comparative criteria. Okay, so here's what they were for East Street. And I'll say one thing in general about this before we start looking at the specific criteria. And that is, we might consider having three of these columns instead of four. In looking at some new RFPs, they really didn't have four columns. They had an unacceptable column, an advantageous column, and a highly advantageous column so that really we don't need to talk about what's acceptable. Anything that is unacceptable is clearly unacceptable. And then beyond that, we can just do advantageous or highly advantageous. Rita reminded me that last time, we kind of struggled in order to complete both the acceptable and the advantageous columns, because sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. So, okay, here we are looking at what proportion of units need to be affordable at what level. And as you can see, there's an indication about what would be unacceptable. Essentially, those are the minimum requirements. And then we have the advantageous, which is now I think gonna become our minimum requirements and highly advantageous is what we consider to be a better design. And from the developer's point of view, I think the main difference has to do with financing, whether you can put the money together in order to meet the highly advantageous requirements. So, John, I just wanna reinforce that this is what we were using for East Street School and that the subcommittee hasn't gone through this yet. So I assume the subcommittee will be reviewing all of these and then make coming back to the trust with recommendations. So all of this, again, reflects that original RFP. Yeah, but again, if anybody has any concerns or any thoughts about what this could be, you can weigh in now, or you've got a copy of this. You can wait to weigh in at the next drafting group when we meet. Or if you're not a member of that, you can weigh in when the larger housing trust meets I think we'll go over some of this at each of our future meetings to show what the drafting group is recommending. Here, John, I think, yeah. So I think for the other trust members, just to cut in here that the minimum criteria and then this comparative criteria, John had mentioned what we'd wanna have as values. And so if we're thinking, whether it's a unit configuration, sizes, affordability levels, design guidelines or things, this is where we could expressly state them and have them be comparative criteria. So Carol, you had mentioned the, for instance, the management plan. So we could have something here that would, we could figure out what are our documents or other supporting things that could be part of a comparative criteria. But I think essentially this right here is really what the committee would use. So there'd be a committee of three to five people who would review proposals and they would use this criteria then to choose a developer based on everything that's submitted using this comparative criteria. So it's comparing the proposals. It's not, and we're doing it, there's no, the state recommends not using numerical things here, but these qualitative criteria. So it's a discussion amongst the committee. We could require an interview or ask for interviews of developers. And so really, if we think there's some really important things to have in here, it would be at least in the criteria and we can reiterate it earlier or have it stated earlier in the document, but if trust members, like John said, if you think of something in the next week or two, just shoot myself an email, shoot me an email or John an email saying, what if we could, is there a way we can incorporate this idea into this criteria or the minimum criteria? Yeah, there's one other thing I'll mention. People may be wondering, well, where's 80% AMI or 100% AMI in this? The reason we focus more on 60 or 50% AMI as well as a few units at 30% AMI is that in order to use a housing voucher in Amherst, a mobile voucher that might come through the Amherst Housing Authority, these have to be set at least at 60% AMI. 80% AMI is likely to be too high. Now, I will say in the development at 132 Northampton Road, a Valley Community Development did have some units at 80% AMI. They anticipated those would not necessarily be subsidized but would be paid for, I believe, primarily with the income that people who are working and living in those units would have. Okay, any issues with the numbers at this point? If not, we'll move on. Could I just clarify? I think what Nate just said, I wanna make sure that there's a way that people can make comments when they're not in one of these meetings without breaking some rule about open meetings or something. So in this case, it's okay to email Nate or John with suggestions about something that should happen here even though it's in between meetings. Is that true? Yeah, to be safe, just email me, email staff, and then I can forward it onto John or whoever's working on the RFP and just don't copy the whole trust, just send it at an individual email to me. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. And the working group can't email each other back and forth in between meetings. We can only talk about it when we're actually meeting. Okay, thank you. Okay, down to the next one, developer track record. This is pretty standard. I don't remember where we got this language. Rita probably found it somewhere. We might look at some of the newer RFPs that are available to us and see whether anybody has any better language. There was also one specific issue came up with another criteria to include under developer track record. I'm not remembering what it is offhand, but I think it's in John's minutes of the meeting. So anyway, as I said, this is pretty standard stuff. We might look for ways to improve it when the drafting committee meets. Oh, it's track record on providing energy efficient housing. Yeah, okay. Actually, I think we may have moved that someplace else, but- Oh, okay. That's where it is in my note from last time. Yes, no, that's okay, Carol. Okay, keep moving down, financial feasibility. Basically the review committee needs to decide whether the developer has demonstrated a feasible path to financing the project. So the developer has to say, here's where I expect to get money. And from the point of view of the evaluation committee, that has to make sense. John, Chad has his hand raised if you wanna call on him this time. Sure, Chad. Okay. I was just letting you know I'm still here waiting for the end. Okay. Not quite to the end. No, we got a few more evaluation criteria before we get to the end. Okay, keep rolling, John, please. Projected schedule. We wanna know that the developer isn't gonna sit on this after they get the contract for a year or two before they do anything. And so we need to get a schedule from them. And we might even say, okay, we expect that by a certain such and such a date, you'll have submitted a proposal to the ZBA for a comprehensive permit and possibly include some other milestones that we expect them to hit. Okay, moving right along. I won't repeat myself. This is an open issue. And the drafting committee will talk about it. Okay, so now we do have some design criteria. And again, this is something that we need to talk about and to decide whether these are reasonable and realistic for one or both sites. I would say the building massing issue particularly came up in talking about East Street School because it's a neighborhood that really doesn't have, I think many or any three-story buildings at this point in time. So mitigating size was an issue there and it will be again. Okay, here's our management plan. This is an area where again, we can possibly add some language around what we expect the developer to do if someone, if they believe someone should be evicted. And what else do we have? Community support. Yeah, the developer should have some idea about how to be sure that they are developing a good relationship with the surrounding community, particularly the butters. As we know, all know that was clearly an issue for 132 Northampton Road. And in the end, I thought Valley Community Development handled it really well. So they have a track record for sure. And we would hope anybody else bidding would have a good track record. Okay, I keep stopping to see if anybody has anything they want else they wanna say. Okay, for both of these development, the developer has to be working within the constraints of fair housing law and regulations. And assuring that there is equal opportunity to have an opportunity to rent. And again, a lot of this is specified by the Department of Housing Community Development. They will review an affirmative fair marketing, fair housing marketing plan, and it must meet their criteria whether it meets ours or not. John, if I can interject here, I think we had talked about demonstrated experience in terms of ensuring that those who will have access to the information, because it's gonna be a lottery system, come from very diverse communities that they really have some sort of track record or experience or can demonstrate that they've been able to do that. Yeah, I got some suggestions actually in the last day or two from Shelley Gearing of MHP around that. So we could certainly do something that strengthens that a bit. I agree, Erika, it's a good idea. We're actually getting to the end of what we're gonna talk about. Ah, we're at the end of what we're gonna talk about. Oh, yeah, all of this, we're now in a section which says, okay, here's what the developer has to include. And again, I don't wanna go over this now. After we've finished through review criteria, then we make sure that we've included in a requirement for information for everything we need in order to be able to evaluate the proposal. Last time the town manager appointed the review committee, it consisted of Nate, Connie Krueger, and myself with Anthony Reynolds, ex officio. For my money, it could have been a little bit larger, could have had a couple more people from the trust, but that's what the town manager wanted to do. If we want him to do something different, we can talk with him about that the next time he's here. Okay. Then the rest of this submission is all boilerplate. That was our last comment from the meeting. Yeah. Okay, so I'm not gonna go over the rest of it. You all have a copy of it. As I said, by and large, it's mostly stuff that would appear certainly in any RFP for affordable housing and often in any RFP by a state or local government. So if you have questions about any of these sections, we can take them up at another meeting. So if you want to take the time to go over them, and again, if you have questions, you can let Nate or I know or simply bring them up at the next meeting. Okay, Chad. Chad. You're mute, Chad. I was looking for the unmute button as it was before. At any rate, this looks like some great development since I've last been with you all. As an ex-builder, I can really, congratulate you on the idea of economies of scale. It reminds me of machines that punch out a handle for a door for five different models of cars instead of one. And in the building trades, it's mostly about purchase of materials and storage. So if you're going to have these two places, there's going to be a hell of a traffic jam over there in that area. UMass folks cut through there quite a bit. Maybe you stage the stuff on the East street common or something, I don't know. But you can still treat these as two totally different buildings with totally different purposes. It's still going to get you that economy of scale. Hopefully they don't build them identical so they look identical. But that was one thing I was thinking of. The other was if it's 800 square feet, isn't that eight 10 by 10 rooms or a 20 by 40 foot building? So that's the large apartment. You know, three quarters of a suburban tract house. So you think about who would live there? It gets to my second point. The housing production plan and the other plan that the town itself contracted said, we need 200 low income, not moderate, not the 80 and 100% but down towards the 30 and less. So I don't think that's going to be something that the build is going to build for a rent those folks can pay. So we need 200 of those. We just have what, 30 put up on the other end of town on the Amherst college campus or they're going to be put up. So that's still a long stretch, 70 more low and extremely low income places are needed. And then the last, well, two last things. One was, most places are getting away from the Ann Whalen type of, you know, three, four, five story complex. It's shown to be somewhat dehumanizing. Things like the little place I live in, for instance, Chestnut Court, things like what's the oaks up towards the college, whatever that. Olympia. Olympia oaks. These are places that people want to live instead of a high rise. So we have a high rise that's going in on North Hampton Road and then we have two more here. So there's some idea that you could consider other ways. You know, that makes almost every single place of that style. And then the last one was item seven, Roman Nouveau seven. They just left the Capitol T of trust. It's some red, it's a red paragraph and it's under a black. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about that at this point. Because we are the affordable trust for the town. You know, Francis and Rita told us about what we can't change. What is set in stone, literally stone of a building. The builders and John and Carol talked about where do we fit our morals and our values in here? And I think they come up with the, you know, under 80% the 30 to 50. We need to triage the people most in the first. Anyway, that was my comments. Thanks for the time. Okay, thanks, Chad. Does anybody else have any comments or any advice for the drafting committee or drafting working group or whatever we call it? There's another hand in the attendees. Laura Baker hands up. I'd love to hear from Laura. Okay, Laura, you should be able to unmute yourself. Hello everyone, can you hear me? Yes, Laura. Hi, quick comments. The difference between the 50% and 60% AMI tiers is not that meaningful. And I would encourage the trust to look at focusing on 30% and 60% just because it's a lot to manage so many different income tiers and it really isn't a significant difference in the population. The other comment I have is as having been the only, the soul responded the last time this RFP went out. You know, what was clear to me then and what's clear to me now is how much effort goes into preparation of this RFP. And I would just make the trust aware and encourage the trust to follow through the proposal process because when we were trying to propose to the town, we really struggled. And I just don't think it reflects how much people care about this. So there has to be a designated person who can answer questions if they're raised. None of our questions were ever answered when we raised them for the proposal, when we went for the site visit, no one had a key to the building. It was not easy to respond and get information. And it's a shame because you're obviously putting a lot of work into crafting this document and someone has to hold it through that process. And it was obvious that there wasn't capacity to do that the last time. So I'd hate to see that same thing happen this time. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks, Laura. I don't know if we can do that, but Rita and I talked about the thought that we would ask that one trust member, one trust member, likely the chair would be copied on any queries that came to the town. And so we would at least be aware of what the town was being asked and perhaps be helpful in responding. There may be other ways that Nate has in mind that we can design it so that trust members are a little bit more involved as we go through the process. No, John, I think that's good. I think typically Anthony has all questions to him just so, I think, but if we're saying that we want to have someone or two people copied, typically everything goes through the procurement officer. I do think that for this time around too, I think there are questions. If we do combine the sites, how do we apply the criteria? The sites are different, the contexts are different. How do we apply some of the comparative criteria to those? And I think as the town and the trust, I think we have to just have some answers and whether or not the developer likes hearing them or possible developers. For instance, the culverts, John, I'm not sure the town is gonna fix the culverts. So, for instance, if the town is not gonna fix the culverts on the East Street School property, so for those who don't know, right behind the building, there's a culvert that carries some water that goes on our main street further down past the property and it's been backed up for a while and so it could be fixed. And so, my thought is if it's not gonna get fixed by the town, we just have to acknowledge it and just say it. For instance, in the building, I think another question was, is the town going to put a demo delay on the building? And for the East Street School, the building itself, and we haven't gone through that process yet. So either we start it or we just say that that's an unknown and we have to rely on a developer to know that for that risk. And so, same with the Route 9 property, there's two houses on the property. It's three properties, it'll become one site. So again, what are the options for those buildings? And so, I think there are things to think through because, have with East Street before, Valley and others who are looking at it had questions and the town didn't have, we didn't have all the answers and I think sometimes, whether or not Anthony sent them around or it was sporting around, even if they weren't, we may not have had the answers ready. We may not have known what to say. And I think we should have, try to preempt any of those questions and at least consider what they could be and have an answer ready. I think we've looked at it enough now, but for instance, for the Route 9 properties, for instance, there's been discussions like could a house be moved off site to provide more affordable housing or is it just gonna be demolished or how could it be reused? And, is that something we're gonna put on the developer or is that something town's gonna undertake? And I think those are questions that we really should, we can discuss as a trust and then a staff need to look at too before this RFP goes out because I think there's probably, each of the sites have their own possible issues or challenges and it'd be nice to consider what are some ways to address them if they're asked. So, I agree. I think we put a lot of work in and Laura's right. And then we ask a lot of the developer and so it'd be nice to make sure we have a clean process. You know, listening to you, Nate, I'm thinking maybe we could identify a consultant who has some development experience but is not gonna bid on this to review the RFP and say, here are the questions I would ask. You know, here are the things that look ambiguous to me. Here are the things that ideally would be included in this draft before you finish up with it. That might be a way of seeing things that we wouldn't see by ourselves. Yeah, I mean, or we'd make a blanket statement that the developer basically assumes all encumbrances on the property and they deal with them. And then we, I mean, there's probably a few ways to deal with that. I just wanna make sure we all consider it because they all have, they present different challenges or they might affect the timeline or budgeting differently. And so, for instance, I'm still not sure what would happen with the East Street School Building if someone wanted to tear it down. You know, that's something the Historical Commission really does not want or, you know. Well, let's see what the hazardous materials assessment has to say. And then as a friend of mine used to say, we'll jump off that bridge when we come to it. Yeah, so the team has been in there. So they have taken samples, I will say, for the school. So we're just waiting on results. So they were in there last week, this week, last week. Okay, great. That's good news. Any other questions or comments? Okay, then we're probably ready to move on to our next item of business. I hope this was a useful discussion for folks. And as I said, we'll come back to it. Although we're probably only focused on sections where the working group, RFP working group has specific things to recommend and will want feedback from the full trust membership. Okay, so let's see. I'm looking at my copy of the agenda and the next thing I believe has to do with evictions. And I've got a few items under evictions. But the first one is a report from Janet Tetraut. And actually I sent everybody a copy of the report that Janet sent to me. She's here, John. No, no, I knew she was here. Okay, good. I was just saying, this is what we're doing next. I don't think Janet needs any introduction at this point. So I'll let her go forward. I was just thinking, it's like your old friends. Hi, everyone. It's been another month and you're all your faces on Zoom. So I know you have a lot of things on the agenda. So I don't want to belabor this report. And hopefully you've seen some of, got seen some of the data that I sent to John earlier in the week. I'm happy to answer questions about it. I think we continue to, applications definitely have slowed down a little bit. I think this week we've gotten three. Our processing speed obviously has increased as a result of that, because there's fewer applications. We continue to get a lot of applications from people who don't live in Amherst. And so that it does kind of skew our data. I was thinking after I sent this to John and John's comment back was, wow, the approval rate is really low. And I went back and I realized it is, I mean, it does look low on these charts. Part of it has to do with, I'm including the ineligible people and the withdrawn people who don't even really make it to the place where they would get reviewed. So I did go back and looked at, sort of took those back those numbers out just to give you a little bit of a better idea. So of the 226 total applications between round one and round two, if I take out all the ineligible, incomplete and withdrawn, we go down to 94 applications. So those are the ones that got actually looked at or in process of being looked at. And so then the approval rating is about 38%. So, perhaps not what we expected it to be, but it does, it's a little bit better than 16%, which is what it looks like when I include all of those other people. So I think that's an error in the way that I presented the data to you. So it's a little bit better than that. I thought it might be helpful. I think you would ask me this before, but to maybe give you an example or a couple of examples of folks that have been helped. And one thing that's really changed, I would say in the last two months is a real increase in coordination with other providers. So community legal aid as a result of some new money that's been available to them has hired some case managers to really work with folks from the notice to quit stage, helping them apply for financial assistance. And also we've been doing a lot more coordination with wayfinders around raft. And so one sort of success story I think is we have an applicant in the Amherst program. I won't give too many personal details, but they are a household of four, they do not speak English, they speak a language actually other than Spanish. So we've had to use the language line quite a bit. And their household of four, they actually lost their income prior to, started, they were an Uber driver who lost their income during COVID, but prior to that had also been having difficulty paying their rent. And so they have not been eligible for the CDC moratorium on evictions because their rent issues started before COVID. And there's some stipulations about that CDC moratorium you have to actually be paying, at least trying to pay part of your rent during the period and they've been having real hard time. So they have been working with the case manager from Legal Aid. So they have applied to the Amherst program, they've applied to raft, they're working with Legal Aid. We're actually assisting them with some other funds that we have because they owe about $15,000, they owe a lot. But because they're eligible for the COVID raft, they can get some help with monthly rent going forward. But wayfinders wanted sort of some more assurances that some of these other, they couldn't cover the whole thing with what they were eligible for from wayfinders. So we've been able to sort of cobble together I think three or four different programs to keep them housed with also some help with figuring out some other employment opportunities going forward. So I think they're also working with Family Outreach of Amherst on some other employment opportunities. So that's been a lot of work for our staff and all the folks involved, but it's been a lot of coordination. So it's been, I think it's been good to see some of that kind of all come together. And we're hoping that that's gonna get resolved pretty soon because they're already in court in violation of an agreement that they signed a long time ago. So they've been, they're farther along in the process than most of our other applicants because their issues started before COVID and then continued through COVID. So I'm happy to answer questions about the data or any other questions you might have about how things are going. Katera? I'm just curious about, so 38% in the way that you did the stuff that is better eliminating the people who are obviously ineligible, what about the other, whatever the difference is there? What about, what are the usual, or what are some of the kinds of things that make people not be eligible if they're in Amherst and blah, blah? So the two biggest reasons why people have been denied is they don't have a COVID related loss or reduction in income and or they have sufficient income or assets to pay their rent going forward. So these were the sort of criteria that was set up by the town. And John had asked me, well, what are some things that we could change? And the COVID loss and reduction of income is tied to the CARES Act and being reimbursed by CARES. And I know that that's of interest to the town. RAFT is really loosening up what they are willing to accept as a COVID reason. And I don't know how, I mean, they I think have CARES money too. So I'm not really sure how DHCD is sort of dealing with that but across the state, RAFT has seen an enormous number of people with incomplete applications and they're really trying desperately to get people approved. But the sufficient income and assets to pay your rent, we have this formula that looks at their income and their assets and their rent. And that's knocks people out. They just, it turns out that they looks like they can't afford it. And so then they become ineligible. I will say some of those folks, we end up helping with other funds that we have that don't have those stipulations. So it's not as if they just get sold goodbye, we can't help you. We try to help them with other sources if we have it but those have been the two barriers. I think quickly on the asset piece, we're only asking for bank statements. So we're not asking to see retirement or any other portfolios and we're not asking them to spend all their assets. So I agree there's a formula, but we're saying, it's like if half your assets can help out with the rent then we have to expect that they would contribute a little bit from their bank account to rent. And so that's why we have it in there. We're not saying that they need to drain their bank account but sometimes you might find a household that's not making any rental payments but then they have a fair amount in their bank account and it's like, well, why aren't you or have you tried to make partial payments or work with a landlord? And so I think that's a, it's a local decision. But it is, it's something that if this were being paid with block grant money it would be a requirement. And so cares and now it's no longer cares it's actually trust money. I think the CARES money ended as of December 31st. So CARES had actually had some provision, small provision in there about income eligibility. But yeah, I guess one question I had also in addition was if the number withdrawn why do you think people are withdrawing? Is it, you know, is it the lag in getting, you know, communication between community action? Are they, do they think they're ineligible? Cause it's a fair amount of people who are withdrawing. So I, you know, and I'm assuming they're not duplicate entries compared to people who have incomplete applications. So the withdrawn are separate and incomplete. That is true. So I'm just looking at the, cause I tracked the reasons. So a couple of them didn't wanna, you know they thought we asked too many questions. They had roommates that didn't wanna provide their information. Some people are like, they apply but they're like, oh, but I'm moving next month. So we're like, okay, well. So they withdraw because there were a couple of people that were moving. One ended up resolving the issue on her own after we contacted her for an appointment. So it's a little, you know, it's a little bit of a mix. I'm not gonna read these, but I did send you a note about a variety of things that are happening on a state mostly and a little bit on a federal basis with respect to trying to do eviction prevention. And one very significant piece of that are changes that DHCD made as of this Monday. So it's very fresh still in the RAF program. And for the most part, they look good. Some of them don't look that consequential. Some of them look like they might be important. They are doing some things to try to speed the process. For example, they are allowing their regional administrative agencies to look at DTA data, that's data on probably what we used to call aid to families or looking at eligibility data for mass health. And if they look eligible in those files, then they don't have to submit any income data. That's a done deal. If those files aren't available, then they still have to go ahead and submit some kind of income data. But so there is a number of things that DHCD has done to try to streamline the process in principle. In practice, my understanding is there's still way backed up and there is still a major log jam across the state and for many of the agencies that are administering the program. Hopefully that all gets resolved in another month or two. DHCD has given agencies money to hire additional staff. They're having a lot of online training. They have a center that can respond to questions. So they're trying to do what they can to get rid of the log jam and to streamline the process. And one of the things I asked Jana, is there anything that is happening with the RAF program, any changes that we might consider with our local program? And I don't know what the answer is, Jana, but I'm asking again. You know, I think they're right. So they're loosening up what they consider a COVID reason. What's my understanding from the RAF staff that I've spoken to is they're really loosening up what a COVID reason is. It doesn't have to be a demonstrated loss or reduction in income. They can be an increase in expenses. It can be something else. And they are, they're being much looser on what people will provide for income. I mean, I think they're taking self certifications. They have wage match access that community action doesn't have. They can access DTA and other data sources to try to wage match, but they're also really trying to be creative in what they'll allow folks to accept. So, I'm not recommending that the town do that, but I mean, I think potentially loosening up COVID reason could be one thing the staff asked me to bring to the meeting if we could extend the assistance for longer than three months. We have at least one current recipient who the landlord called and asked if we could do another three months and extend it to six months. Yeah, we agreed to that at our last meeting. To extend it to six months. Yes, I believe we did. I thought we'd agree that if they applied around one, they could reapply in round two. I think that's a little different than saying that they could get six months of assistance, right? I knew about where you could reapply for round two and we have had people do that, but yeah, this is a request to have like six months of assistance. I thought that's what we agreed to at our last meeting. I remember Paul saying distinctly, we need to get the money out there. And I think that was certainly important to me and it probably was important to other people. So I think we did have an agreement last time that we would allow people to go up to six months of payment if they were eligible for that. They obviously would have to reapply, but since a lot of the documentation was already provided, it would be a simpler reapply, reapplication process. Yeah, that's how I remember it, that if somebody already having gotten the money, didn't exclude them from applying again. So they could, that's what I thought- Right, so they could receive up to six months of assistance. Right, so they could go for a second time. Yeah. So whether they were coming from round one to round two or they were in round two and then- Well, whatever, yeah, whoever, okay. Yeah, right. It didn't matter about rounds, it just mattered about, that's what I remember. We could go back and look at you at the minute, say, I don't, that's what I thought I voted on. Yeah, John shaking his head, yes, so he's in agreement. Or for more fun, we could just watch the Zoom meeting on YouTube. But I think originally the three months though was considered, I don't know if that's cares, but typically that's what's considered temporary. So longer than three months usually triggers maybe other requirements for funding, either in terms of auditing or other things. So keeping it at three months and then having them reapply, I don't know, maybe that's safe, but usually if it's more than three months, it's not considered temporary. So, I don't know what that means now, but I know initially cares, that's three months was the maximum. So they were saying a three month, because that's considered temporary assistance. So for block grant and others, that's what it is. But now we're off cares fund. Now it's our money. Yeah, so we'll give a look. And do we think, Janet, do you think that you said it's slow down, but I guess at one point we thought there'd be more maybe with the evictions and other things looming that we'd see an uptick to dissipating that in the next month or so, or is that? I feel like I've been wrong about every prediction I've made. Well, I have two pieces of data regarding that or maybe three. One is I believe that I heard that Pamela Schwartz's last meeting that there were 180 evictions in the pipeline in Hampshire County, which isn't a huge number. And then I followed up with her source who I'm his name I'm forgetting, but I found there were only four evictions in the pipeline for Amherst, the town of Amherst, which is pretty small. On the other hand, I was on another call today that was sponsored by Neighborhood Works, which is a Raft administrative agency, I believe in the Southeast Coast, and an attorney who doesn't work for them but works for legal services said that she has good reason to believe that a lot of landlords are holding off on filing new evictions because they're uncertain about exactly what the environment's gonna be about the effect of new state legislation, about the effects of the change in federal legislation. And so they aren't going forward right away. And that's been one explanation why we haven't experienced, and this isn't just us but statewide, the tsunami of evictions that everybody was anticipating after the governor's moratorium ended. So that's the best I can do on that. I was gonna say, I was all... Yeah, I was gonna say, John, I think that the town had heard that there may be evictions happening with one property management company. And so I reached out to them and there were a few tenants they were discussing. And so then, I asked if they would be willing to work with the tenants. And they said, yes. So after over the course of two weeks between emails between different parties, so most of those tenants were then able to be reached and agreed to a payment plan or work out with the landlord. So it is, I mean, I almost feel like it's both goes both ways, right? So the landlord is hesitant and a tenant who may not be making payments. Some are not coming forward to ask for partial payments or a payment plan. And they don't wanna make themselves too visible so they're maybe not seeking assistance. But it was interesting when someone facilitated a discussion that they could reach an agreement. So I think it is a lot of work. And so maybe whether it happens recently or sooner further down the road, I think that there will be a lot of work that's needed to resolve all the tenancy issues because they're still gonna be back to rent or missing payments and leases will expire and landlords, at some point, they'll issue notices. So the one company I worked with, they were willing to not work issue notices if they could get conversations going and they held to it, which was good, but. Yeah, if people look at the attachment that I sent out, as I said, a few hours before the meeting, there are changes in state statute that are now gonna require landlords to not only put out notices to quit, but include the other kinds of information with that, that, for example, were required by Somerville as part of its Housing Stability Act and also to send a copy of the notice to quit to the state. So all that's now required as of, I think December 29th or whenever the legislature passed the budget, because I believe the things I'm talking about were all part of the budget language for the fiscal year that we're currently in. The legislature just got that budget passed six months after they're supposed to. Anyway, so things are in turmoil, honestly, with respect to the eviction prevention programs. Things are changing in a positive direction. I think you'll see that if you look at the note that I sent out and Janet, my apologies, I didn't send it to you, I realize. But in the meantime, there's a lot of adjusting that the system's gonna have to do before everything settles in. I'll just mention one other thing. I think on maybe Tuesday of this week, I got a note from Evan Ross. And Evan was interested in sponsoring a Housing Stability Act based on what Somerville has before the Amherstown Council. And he sent me a draft of it, really it's a partial draft and asked me kind of what I thought or asked me to do some editing of it. And this was all before I started to look at what the state has done. And so I ended up sending Evan a note this afternoon saying, well, it looks like what the state is doing at least on a temporary basis. That is as long as this crisis continues is a lot of the things that we would want in a Local Housing Stability Act. And I know when we talked about this in our group at our last meeting, people were somewhat concerned about that, particularly about fines and one other element of it that I'm not recalling. So what I suggested to Evan is that he and I should talk, but maybe it made sense to wait a few months and see what happens with the state's efforts to try to do this before we wanted to make the town go forward with this independently. So that was my response to Evan. Again, we can talk about this more, but again, if you look at the note I sent out, you'll see that the legislation, particularly legislation that was passed as part of the Budget Act, really included these kinds of requirements that landlords had to notify tenants, not only the notice to quit, but also include information about their rights, about where they could seek help, and one or two other things that I'm not recalling off the top of my head. There was record sealing also for default evictions. Yep, that one's not a done deal yet, Will. Well, I think it just got signed. Oh, did the governor sign it today? About an hour ago. Oh, that's terrific. Yeah, it was part of the community development bond bill and the eviction sealing is included in that. So Will's quite right then, if the governor signed it, that's also a done deal, which is a very good thing. I think I referenced an article that was written by a UMass student named Tim Scolona. I don't know if anybody saw it that originally appeared in the Boston Globe. And it was a reflection on his experiences as a kid when his family was evicted and how devastating that experience was for him and for the rest of his family. So eviction is a big problem, not that I think I need to tell this group that, but if you have access to what Tim Scolona wrote, definitely, it's pretty emotional. It's a very strong statement. Actually, Tim is now the student trustee for UMass and part of his portfolio with the board of trustees is about housing and security for students, not just a UMass ambush, but for the system in general. So he's a great, great advocate. Great, so that's good to know. Thank you. Erica? So I was just trying to check about the CARES Act because supposedly the CARES Act use of the funding was extended till next year, till December. But what I just saw is that the Treasury Department is has just or has $25 billion to assist in emergency rental assistance and states could apply for it. The application date was the 12th of this year. But under the criteria, it actually says that you could get this assistance as a rentee up to 12 months, and it could be applied to another three months. So I was just wondering how is it that the CARES Act only limits it to three months? I don't know, Erica. I can send, yeah. My suspicion is it's the old CARES Act that had that limit. The new CARES Act, which was just passed by Congress, may be what you're describing. And states have yet to see the money, although I think Massachusetts is gonna get $457 million or something like that, although individual counties or cities do have some right to apply themselves for that money. And that's as much as I know, I think it'll be a while before the town of Amherst settles in on exactly what it's eligible for and what it can do with that money. So you may be 100% correct. It's just gonna take a while to settle. John? I was just gonna say that I did double check and we voted to expand the emergency rental assistance program to offer a second disbursement to any applicant who had previously applied. But I guess the question remains, did we let people know that they could do that? But that is at least what I had recorded that we voted on. Well, now Jana can let people know. Well, we did let people know who had applied, originally those who from round one that applied in round two, we told were ineligible. And we did tell all of those people that they were now eligible and a couple of them actually did, we did process their applications. But so what I guess I wasn't interpreting that is that we could also for round two people if they could reapply for another three months and that sounds like what they also can do. So we at least have one person that's interested in that and I will let the staff know. That's great. Okay, good. I won't say we've exhausted the discussion of eviction prevention, but there's a lot more that we could conceivably talk about. But we do have a couple of items, not many items actually there to go to. Are there any questions about either the note that I sent out or anything else that we've been talking about related to eviction prevention? I think, John, well, one thing with Jana here, I still have to extend your contract. Well, we had said we checked back in in March, right? Is that what we agreed to? Through March. So I think we talked about extending the contract until June? Right. June, right, right. Okay. And then for the eviction one, John, I think that's another topic, but I think is the trust going to recommend something to counsel? Is that what we'd want to have happen now or at a future meeting? Is that, like you said, there are a few different things that are happening, but are you looking specifically for a proposal from the trust or recommendations to the council or? Well, I'm not necessarily looking at that. I did want to report back the email conversation I had with Evan Ross and note that Evan contacted me first and asked whether we were interested in seeing Amherst adopt some version of Somerville's Housing Stability Act. And as I said, I think it was ambiguous when we talked about it, we talked about being able to implement the parts of it that were voluntary, which is to say to ask people to do the things that Somerville required, but do it on a voluntary basis and not include fines. So we were talking about doing that, possibly making a proposal to town council on that basis, but I feel like events have overtaken us. As I said, the state has now said they're gonna do all that on a temporary basis. And so my personal predilection is to wait and see what happens with the state action. But we can also go ahead and tell Evan, we're interested in having this discussed by town council and have town council move forward with the local ordinance. So to answer your question, Nate, I think it's open and people can weigh in one way or the other right now or at our next meeting or whatever. I was just gonna say, I did get in touch with Emma Dragon, the health director and she included Nancy Gilbert, those before the holidays. And they said, let's connect after the holidays. I've re-emailed them, but haven't really heard much back. And I think it's probably because Emma is full force doing vaccination clinics. So I haven't heard anything because I think it was suggested that we check in with the board of health to see if they wanted to partner with us to do something. So I really have nothing to report, but I will if once I do. Okay. Well, we can take it up with them after I get vaccinated. Yeah. Any other thoughts about what the town might do for eviction prevention at this point? Okay, well, we'll hold it off for at least a meeting and I'll see what I get back from Evan and report on that at our next meeting. All right, I'm gonna say good night. I think unless you're done with me, right? Yes, I think we are, Janice. All right. Thanks very much. I appreciate your report. All right, I'll see you next time, I'm sure. Thank you. Yeah, oh, I have one thing to add before you leave. I was trying to figure out what the raft rates of approval are. Oh. And it's hard to tell from the data that's available, but to the extent that you could make any sense of it, my guess is it's probably between 20 and the 38% that you gave. Yeah, you know, I had some notes from a recent meeting I had with wayfinders. They were, I think 80% of the applications were incomplete. So I think that their approval rating was pretty low. I think their denial rating is, they claimed was very low. I don't know how true that is, but they claim their denial rating was very, very low. But I can try to get those statistics. We have an eviction diversion meeting every like six weeks or so. So I can try to find out. Okay. Well, I may ask DHCD. Yeah. Okay, thanks, Shannon. Bye. Have enjoyed the rest of the... Thank you too. Okay, so we've managed to go through the two main areas of business. Okay, so we're up to update on state legislation. Will's already given us one very important update. Is there anything that you wanted to add at this point? Well, there were a few things about the economic development bill that I wanted to talk about, but now that it's signed, it's not particularly relevant, I guess. But there's one thing that is, I saw at the Western Mass Coalition on Homelessness, or Networked on Homelessness, they had posted about signing on to the, signing on to the National Low Income Housing Center's letter to the Biden and Harris administration, asking them to extend the federal eviction moratorium as well. The deadline to do so is tomorrow. And I think the question for the trust is whether or not we as an organization want to sign on to that effort. So it's, yeah, that's one thing it's pretty quick asked to. But other than that, I mean, I think with the signing of the economic development bill, there's not much more to report. Not much else pending at the moment with the legislature. Well, I liked the idea personally of saying that we support extending the CDC moratorium beyond January 31st. And the last time I needed to do something like that, Pamela made it pretty easy. It was simply a matter of using a link to go to a website to say who we are and to say we support extending it. Yeah. So that's basically what this is as well. It's pretty easy straightforward. Yep. So is there a motion for us? Do it. And is there a second? Okay, so we need to do a roll call. I second. And if it's all approved, then we'll can go ahead and do that on our behalf. So I vote yes, Erica. Yes. Carol. Yes. Will. Yes. Francis. Yes. Sid. Yes. And Rob. Yes. Okay, great, great issue. I'm sure there'll be other things coming before us, but I think the legislature did a pretty good job related to housing in the last month or so. We got a lot of things that were pretty important. Not the least of which in the economic development bill was half a million dollars for Amherst, 250,000 to go to the affordable housing with no and $250,000 to the town for a development that has to be LEED certifiable. I don't know what'll happen to that one. We're gonna find a developer who's willing to do LEED silver or gold, John. That's what we have to do. Okay. So what else did I promise to do? Yep. Nate put in two items that are probably brief. Finalized the changes to the trust strategic plan, I believe in our last meeting. So that was the easy part. The hard part is going over the new things that we added and decided when and how we're gonna try to get those done. As I thought about introducing this at this meeting, I said, nah, I wanna give most of our time to the RFP and it may be that for at least the next two meetings, it's also gonna be difficult to get to this until we have resolved all the issues about drafting the RFP. So my inclination is to delay discussion of the things that we added. Not that I don't think they're important, but that I'm concerned that they are gonna take a fair amount of discussion. One of the items that I remembered is, for example, finding new sources of financing for trust initiatives, which is a big one. And then there were other things as well. So my inclination is to postpone for at least a couple of months. But if someone disagrees, then I will put it on the agenda for the next meeting. I don't care. For the summer, yeah, I just put it there for that reason too, just so we don't forget about what we said we wanted to do. And I agree there's some pressing things now, but. Okay, the other thing that Nate mentioned is that the Community Resources Committee is now hard at work on drafting a larger town policy on housing, which goes beyond affordable housing, at least affordable housing when you're talking about 80% AMI and goes to higher levels or what some people would call workforce housing. It's a little bit of an odd term, but nonetheless, I haven't heard another term than anyways used to characterize a population of people who are working, but for whom housing in town is not affordable. So they've made significant progress. They've incorporated a lot of the things that were actually in the housing trust proposal, but they still have a ways to go. While I like a lot of what they've included personally, the proposal to date is still a bit ragged. And so again, given the fact that I think the RFP is the most important thing we're working on right now, not inclined to bring that to the trust for at least another month or two. And I did tell Mandy Jo Hanneke, who's chair of the committee, that that's what I thought would happen. On the other hand, I did take an action which I believe has been successful to make sure that we do have our ore in as they go along working on this draft. And that is I strongly encourage Mandy to include Tom Kegelman as a full member of the process for developing this housing plan. And I believe that she and the community resources committee have agreed to do so. I heard that from Dave Zomek today. I haven't heard it from Mandy or Tom, but I think that's what is gonna happen. And so I think if we have Tom represented in the process, that's a very good thing. And I think it gives us some breathing space before we take up a draft that they're working on. I can circulate the draft. So if anybody wants to see it, I'll do that. I don't wanna hold it back exactly, but I think I, again, unless somebody disagrees, I'm not quite prepared to put it on our agenda immediately. No, Jenna, yeah, that'd be good if you could send the draft around. So, one reason too, I put this on for the housing trust. I was going through, the planning board is discussing 40R more now. I'm not sure they'll push to have it be adopted in town, but the CRC was discussing that and John presented the policy a few months ago, but the CRC and now the planning board are also talking about the housing policy. It's something that we, the trust brought forward a year ago, or I don't know, maybe more than a year ago, but now they're trying to actually get something adopted. So, John, I'm glad you reached out to Mandy, Joe, and we can have, the trust can review it at some point in the future. I don't think we have to be, I think the CRC is still trying to work on what they think are revisions they want. And then the planning board is looking at it on their upcoming meeting or two. So I just wanted the trust to be aware of it because there is the affordability component, but then there is just, what is, I think the policy is gonna have implications for both housing production, so zoning changes, maybe bylaw changes, it'll have, could have a number of actions that need to be taken, even things the trust might do help for the policy. So I just wanted the trust to be aware of it. Yeah, I agree, absolutely, Nate, and I will circulate the existing draft given where they are. I will say also, as far as the Community Resources Committee is it's working on both zoning and the larger town housing policy. And I think that means there's a lot of competition between those two things for their design and zoning is likely to come before housing, although I can't be sure of that. I think Mandy Joe wants to get both move the law, but I think she has a priority for zoning over housing. So any questions about that? Okay, then I guess we're ready to wrap up. Is there any public comments that we haven't heard, any items that weren't on the agenda that somebody wants to raise? Okay, I'll mention one other thing, which wasn't one of the notes that I sent to y'all. There's a hand up in the public, people. Yeah. Yeah, Chad, if you unmute yourself. Yeah, I'm sorry, John, it's late. I had my hand up back when you were talking about what does name bringing in the Somerville ordinance. Just like, you know, education is a right now, healthcare and so on, Massachusetts has housing as a right. Whether you own a mortgage or whether you're a renter, you cannot be kicked out of your home. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it's been set in by precedent and court of law, mostly through right here in Springfield, don't leave. What was the name of that organization during the Great Recession? Nobody leaves. Yeah, no one leaves. No one leaves. Yeah, it still exists. So the main point, I mean, again, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The main point to remember is in that ordinance, it says and tell them their rights because it is now a right. Housing is a right in the state. That's just one thing I wanted to say. I've been on both sides of it as a tenant and a landlord. Yeah. I couldn't get a guy out of my house. In fact, that's how I lost my house. I'm sorry to hear that. Thanks, Chad. The last thing I wanted to recall back to your attention is again, I sent this note out. There are a number of seminars or webinars or presentations that both CHAPA and MHP are sponsoring that relate to affordable housing this month and next month. And I provided the list and the dates and the topics to everybody. I could send it out again. I didn't provide the links for registration. If you go to either the CHAPA or the MHP website, you can probably find, I almost certainly find the links there. Since they cooperate, you may be able to find the links for both the CHAPA and the MHP programs. So I would urge you to take a look at those. There are a variety of things that I'm trying to get to. I missed something today because I went to the Southeast Coast event instead in which I learned a lot of important stuff about what's going on with eviction. But I was still sorry that I missed it because I think CHAPA had an introduction to 40B and I felt like, well, that would be useful for me. I kind of know what 40B is, but I've never heard a systematic presentation and discussion of it. So I missed that. Although a lot of these things are being recorded, they will be available online later. And I'll try and find out about that and send information around about those recordings. So I think- Just quickly, yeah, for members, if some of those have registration fees, you could pay them and then request reimbursement or if there's enough time, you could have the trust through the town make payment to the organization. So it could happen one of two ways, but there is funding to reimburse trust members for registration fees. Thanks, Nate, I appreciate that. So any other, anybody else want to last word? Sid, was that your hand going up? No, you were just waving goodbye. Okay, well, thank you everybody. I hope this- Do we have to vote to adjourn? Oh, yes, thank you. Is there a motion to adjourn? I make a motion to adjourn. And is there a second? Okay, Carol, I see a second. Okay, so we have to have a roll call vote. Rob? Yes. Sid? Yes. Francis? Yes. Will? Yes. Carol? Yes. Erica? Erica? Yes. Okay. And I'm a yes, so I think that wraps it up. Yes. We're done. Thank you again, everybody, for raising good issues and good questions. Good night. Thanks. Good night. Hey, John, you had recorded this too. Was it to the cloud? I did. I didn't start it immediately. That's fine, but that's fine. If I hit stop recording, it's the town's gonna be able to access it, right? That's what I'm assuming, yes.