 So Stephanie, after you hit record, you want me to read this thing, right? So now we are in record mode. OK. I need to read this. My name is Laura Drucker, and I am the chair of the Energy and Climate Action Committee. Welcome to the meeting of April 22, 2020, based on Governor Baker's executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, GL Chapter 30A, Section 20, and signed Thursday, March 12, 2020. This meeting is being held virtually using the Zoom platform. I will now take a roll call. Committee members, as you hear your name called, please unmute yourself, answer affirmatively, and then place yourselves back on mute. Berger? Here. Drucker here. Zemont? Here. Der? Here. Ravi Kumar? Here. Roof? Here. Rose? Here. And Salman? Here. Great. All right. I also have to identify myself. So I'm Stephanie Chigorello, the sustainability coordinator for the town of Amherst. This meeting is being recorded. Minutes are also being taken and will be available on the ECAC website as they are approved at a subsequent meeting. So members, during this meeting, if you could keep yourselves on mute and for better stability for the meeting, it would be best if you actually turn your video off unless you're going to speak. I mean, I think it's probably going to be OK if there's not that many of us. So we can see how this goes. But if you feel like your own personal connection is pretty tenuous, best to turn off your video. And then if you want to be acknowledged, you can raise your hand. Does anybody not know how to use the raise your hand feature? OK. So then you can just raise your hand to be acknowledged. And Rachel, I'm sorry, Laura will identify you to speak. And then you can unmute yourself. And then when you're done speaking, mute yourself again. So if there are any technical difficulties at all, I will let you know that I've been in two Zoom meetings where I've been dropped from the meeting. So I'm hoping that I, as a host, don't have that happen. Should we run into technical difficulties, things will just basically be on hold till we get it fixed, get it put back together. But don't continue conversations just in case. You should just put everything on hold until we resolve the issue. So I think pretty much that's it for the public, which we see. You don't seem to have anyone who's attending as public because I've pretty much elevated those who are in the attendee frame to panelists, because Ghazi Khayyam, including you in that, because you're with Lanayan. And at some point, you may want to introduce yourself. So I think we should be all set. If we do get public for the public portion of the meeting, they'll have three minutes. Lori just announced that we're in the public session of the meeting, segment of the meeting. I'll unmute anybody who is there if they wish to speak. And then we'll go back. They'll all meet them again. And then we'll continue the meeting. So with that, I will turn over the agenda to you, Lori. And I'm going to start sharing my screen. So you'll see very little of me. You're going to see a lot of all our documents. Thanks, Stephanie. Sure. OK, so the first will be a review and vote to approve the minutes from our 3-11 meeting, which feels like five years ago. And I don't know if any of us remember anything that happened to that meeting. So the minute review will be helpful. OK. I'll get that up in a second. Everybody can see this OK? Yes. Thumbs up for good. If no one has any comments, someone can motion to approve. So moved. Anyone want a second? I can second that. Great. I'll second that. Great. So, motioned by Rabbi Kumar, approved by Breger. So, Stephanie, do we need to do a roll call vote? Yes. OK, let me find my list of names again here. OK, any comments before we vote? Sorry, I've got two screens going, so I'm looking at you even though I'm not looking at you. I want to be able to see everybody's picture. OK, so Breger. Hey, hi. Hi. Draugr, hi. Zemont. Hi. Der. Hi. Rabbi Kumar. Hi. Roof. Hi. Rose. Hi. Zemont. Hi. OK, so that's everyone approving no abstaining and no absent. OK, excellent. Can I ask one question? And apologize, just because it passed by before. I've been on many, many Zoom calls like five today, but I've never raised my hand. And I can't figure out how I raise my hand. OK, so there should be. It's easier if I stop sharing my screen so I can see. There is a panel that you have. And you should have some options at the bottom. Yeah, I see that. I got lots of. Participants, participants. Oh, I go. I do. Yeah, I check this. I go on participants. Oh, there's a. OK, there's three three dots there at the bottom of participants. Gotcha. Does it give you the option to raise your hand there? Yes, yes. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, all right. So and then and then you can disable it as well once. OK, OK. Or if you want, you all can just physically raise your hand because Laura can see you. If you put your video on, you can raise your hand. So those are the two options to be acknowledged. So so Laura, at this point, you're just sort of taking over. For the agenda, so. OK, so. Public comment doesn't look like we have any one. Is that still true, Stephanie? Yeah, we can. So we can skip that. So staff updates. So updates. I've asked Rachel to update the greenhouse gas emissions inventory to include the information from from Hampshire College, because that was the data that we were missing. So although she wasn't able to obtain all of the data, she was able to extrapolate from other years information. So did the best she could. And thank you, Rachel, very much for doing that. So we do have an updated inventory that will be useful for our purposes moving forward. We will have her to take minutes for us until it sounds like May 20. So May 20 would be Rachel's last meeting with us. I also wanted to let you know that the town hired a new facilities manager. He started today. His name is Jeremiah LaPlante, and were things not in the state of chaos that they are. He would actually be situated in the cubicle right next to mine, which is lovely, because it means he and I will be able to be frequently. And that's great. And he will be doing building assessments. And he's got an extensive background, apparently, in energy systems, building energy systems. So really great, really exciting. I'm excited to have somebody who's going to be that close to me so that we can actually work together and more collaboratively, which I haven't been able to do as easily in the past. And he will be reporting directly to Rob Laura, who is the building commissioner. So that's all really exciting. I'm really happy that that's happening. I just wish I could physically be there so I could meet him. But hopefully, this will be over sooner than later. Those are my updates so far, other than also to say that the CCA process is moving forward. The committee is meeting now as sort of staff from the three communities with additional members who are essentially the members that have been involved all along. But we are moving that effort forward. And we have a meeting on Monday in which time I'll give updates to that group about where we are with the funding. It's all good news. So we'll be moving that effort forward. And it's very timely while we are moving this process forward at the Climate Action Adaptation and Resiliency Planning process. So that's my update. Are you still on? Great, Laura. There's a child screaming downstairs. So having to mute a little bit. Any questions for Stephanie? OK, then I think we can move on to the meat of our agenda for today, which is the presentation by our new consultants. And so Jim and Lauren, it'd be great if you could introduce yourselves. Maybe Jim, you could give a brief overview of your org. And then we'll launch into the presentation. Great, I'll let Lauren do the talking. I'll just start. So hi, Jim Newman. Nice to see some old friends and some new folks to meet. It's a pleasure. Lauren. Sure. So my name is Lauren. I am a UMass Amherstville alum. So this project has a very special place in my heart. I was lucky enough to be a student of Dwayne's and work with Stephanie and Andrew both while I was at UMass. I graduated in 2018 with my MS in Sustainability Science, which is the same program that Rachel's in. And I focused my studies on green infrastructure planning and climate action planning. So this is really my passion. It's very exciting to be here. What else did I want to say? While I was in grad school, I was a summer fellow with the city of Somerville. And I helped them to update their greenhouse gas emissions inventories and launch their climate action plan. And since then, I have worked with about a half dozen other municipalities in Massachusetts through the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program that Amherstville has just finished the planning process through. And that this grant is a part of. So that's sort of background about me. And then once we launch into the slides, Laura, we do have a slide that just is an overview of Lene and as well. So we can speak a little bit more about the firm. Yeah, so Stephanie, I know you were going to share your screen with our slides whenever you're ready. Would it be possible for you to share the slides with the members, too? Yeah, of course. Absolutely, yeah. We could. I can send them. Yeah, I was going to say, Stephanie can probably send them to you now while this is coming up. Yeah, not as easily. Yeah, probably not. Never mind. You can all look along now. And then I will send them as part of it. And I'll include them in the packet when I post that on the town's website. So while Stephanie is pulling the slides up, I'll just introduce myself. I've met a number of you. I'm Jim Newman. I run Lene and Solutions, a principal and charge of this project. As many of you know, Lene has worked on a number of projects similar to this. Projects, towns are different. Projects are different. Different issues come to the fore. And there are different ways that towns work on things. We did do a climate, what was it called? The resilience and regeneration plan with Wayne Fiden and Northampton. We are currently working on a really interesting action and adaptation plan for the cities of Portland and South Portland, Maine together. And have done, we work in Medford. We work in a bunch of other cities doing similar things. We also do a lot of building related work. We are lead homes providers. We're passive house consultants. So we're working on four passive house projects right now. And so have a lot of expertise around buildings. We have some expertise around infrastructure. And we have some expertise around greenhouse gas inventory, carbon mitigation of various types, including a lot of experience around embodied carbon. So Lauren, why don't you go ahead and jump in? Sure. So this is just a quick overview of what we're going to go through today in the midst of introductions. And we'll talk a little bit more about our project partners in a moment. And then review some of the background work that's already been done in Amherst round climate planning, including all the documents that we've been reviewing. Then launch into a discussion about the vision for the plan. And then talk about the process and timeline for the plan. And then last but not least, some next steps. So Stephanie, if you could go to the next slide. So we already covered most of this. I think one other relevant thing to mention is that we're also, so Linnea is facilitating the campus climate resiliency planning process for US Amherst as well right now. So this is kind of a cool opportunity to tie together or to fit that work into this process as well to connect those dots. And then I think we also forgot to introduce our third team member who's going to be supporting this project, Holly Jacobson. She's not with us today because she is deep into the Portland and South Portland work and has been deadlines. But she was deeply involved with the MVP planning process in Amherst and as a resilience consultant on the team. So Holly I'm sure will be a familiar face by the end of this process too. So next slide please Stephanie. Thanks. Jim, this is you. So our partners, we have several partners on this process that bring different sets of expertise. A part of our goal as we do a project like this and we're looking at each project trying to understand what's going to be important here. Where do we need expertise to fill out a really solid team? And so we have partnered on this project with Niche Engineering. We'll be represented by Isabel Cowbish, who is a planner and engineer that we've worked with in a couple of different settings. We've worked with Niche a number of times. Niche is a women-owned business based in Boston that does infrastructure planning of various sorts. They're a civil engineering firm primarily. And so come with a lot of infrastructure expertise. And we'll be helping us with infrastructure and with some of the infrastructure procurement issues as we move forward in the project. We also are partnering with the Regenerative Design Group based in Greenfield. RDG is a permaculture and landscape and agriculture planning firm that does work amazingly all over the world, but does a lot of work in the Pioneer Valley as well. And we're actually currently working with RDG on the Healthy Soils Action Plan for the state of Massachusetts. And so RDG will bring some of that soil, carbon, soil health experience to this project. And then Gazikaya, as Stephanie mentioned, Gazikaya and COSI is working with us as a community participation community outreach consultant to help us to really connect with a full range of community members and organizations throughout Amherst and the surrounding area to make sure that this work really serves a wide range of needs. Thanks, Stephanie. So we wanted to start by reviewing a lot of the great work that has already been done in Amherst to set the stage for this plan. Of course, there's the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, which it's awesome that Rachel is working on updating with the Hampshire data that sort of set a baseline, looked at municipal and townwide emissions across stationary energy, transportation, waste, and agriculture, and gave a sense of where the community is moving without a bold plan for action. And this is really sort of the basis for future Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions and goal-setting progress tracking. Then the MVP planning process focused on identifying priorities and sorry, identifying and prioritizing actions that can sustain strengths and reduce vulnerabilities to increase resilience in Amherst. Then, of course, there's the work of the Community Choice Aggregation Task Force, which is moving forward. It's very exciting, advancing the intermeasurable agreement with Northampton and Pellum. We looked at that report and are really inspired by the 3.0 framework, which is ambitious, not just about municipal aggregation, but also energy efficiency, renewable generation and storage, social equity, energy democracy. These are all really great values to be bringing into this process. And then, of course, there's the work of this committee, which has not only set bold goals for the town, but has done some really great outreach to get a sense of community knowledge, opportunities, barriers, and support for climate action. So the goal here is really to merge all of these processes to address mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. And for that plan, ultimately, to drive bold climate action. So as we start to sort of dive into this process, I just think it'd be valuable for you as committee members and us as well to just stop and think for a minute and get a picture in your head. So when you think about Amherst in 30 years, in 2050, what do you see? Like, what are the things you see as part of what the community is and looks like and feels like as your plans start to take hold, start to really happen? What does that change look like? So let's take a sec and just imagine that. And then I'd love to hear a little about what you think. So let's let it sit for a moment. So what do you think? What do you think you see? What is it you have as an image of Amherst in 30 years if our work is successful? I'll go. Yeah, I have a hard time believing nobody has an image in their minds. We all do. I see a well-developed plan being implemented step by step based on clear priorities and the next steps already being planned in to, what are you saying, 30 years? I'm thinking of 2030. I'm saying 10 years. So in 30 years, the whole world economy has to be completely clean and drying down. So there's our vision, right? I have to admit that I have part of my vision of Amherst in 30 years is a really vibrant. I have this vision of a series of mid-sized agricultural operations with people arriving to take care of fields and do planning and do processing, and then that food being going out to distribution processes, different centers and buildings sort of within the community and primarily staying within the community as a way that the community feeds itself. Does that work in a really climate-positive way and has transformed the economy of how one piece of what people do in Amherst? That's the little vision I have in my head. It's driven by a number of different things, but do others have similar visions? Jesse, you had his hand up. Oh, good. Sorry, I'm not. Hi, Jim and Lauren. Jesse, Salmon, I'm a Amherst resident. I want to maybe just say quickly that as so we all can get to know each other, maybe if we have something to say, we just give a quick little. I also went to UMass. Go Miniman. And I live in town, as you know. I think admittedly, it is hard to jump to 30 years with the sense of urgency. And I think a couple, two points I'd make about trying to push myself to be 30 when I'm 76. I think very important that this vision that I'm having, the idea that it's Amherst feels tricky to me. And I think anything that we envision in Amherst, if it's going to be anything even close to what we want, that vision has to spill regionally, globally, et cetera. And so thinking about our neighbors near and far is one. And the other vision I have is I think is very much not sure what it looks like the physical space, but in our hearts, a different culture potentially, and a different way of being, and a different understanding of different expectations of what we deserve, what we should have. I think there's a real inner change that I think I would love to see that is generous and loving and kind and courageous. And I'll leave it at that. It's a pretty beautiful vision. I have to say, Jesse, that it's the first highest and I see it. The idea of leadership not to leaders, but leadership to help move the things that need to move, I think is a really, really fantastic vision. So often we sort of think of the process of leadership as, OK, we're going to be recognized as leaders. And to some extent, town of Amherst doesn't need to be recognized as a leader. It's got lots going on. But to be a leader in how things, how communities are moving, how the valley is moving, how the region is moving, that's pretty valuable. Great. So I see Steve and then Darcy. Great. OK, the vision that popped into my head was sort of centered around downtown, but a much more walkable downtown without cars, or very few cars, and efficient light rail or like public transportation. And I sort of thought about the trolley that we had about 100 years ago, how nice that would be to have back again today, something that runs through town and allows people to easily get from one edge of town to another. So I'm visioning a spring day in downtown Amherst with trails leading from one shop to another and patches of gardens and trees and people walking and bicycling and every now and then some kind of a quiet, deficient public transport vehicle rolls on by. That's a great vision. That is a great vision. Darcy? I just wanted to mention that I'm one of the now one council members on the committee. We're hopefully going to get another one, but that's another issue. But I just wanted to let you know, you probably do already know that we conducted an outreach process that kind of goes to the question that you asked. So I think everybody really has had a lot of time to think about what is our vision for 2030 and 2050? And for me, a lot of it has been around just trying to figure out how we can make a pretty wholesale culture change, getting people just to think about what we're doing in a different way. And electrifying everything, electrifying the transportation and the building sectors is huge. I mean, I think that's as far as mitigation, that's going to be what does the most is just transitioning everybody out of fossil fuel powered cars and heating. And in our area, having a lot of this kind of spearheaded by the new CCA entity that is going to come online and is going to hopefully regionally organize a lot of these efforts that we're going to have. Great. Ashwin? So hi, I'm Ashwin, Ravi Kumar. I teach at Amherst College. I've been living in Amherst for over two years now. And thank you for your work on this. It's great to hear from you. It's interesting because we, in some of the outreach events that we did, framed the activities that we did with participants in a similar way. We really asked people in town to tell us about what their vision was for the future. And that was instructive, and I think it informs some of what my own vision would be, although, as others have said, 30 years is a long time. But in a version of 30 years from now, that is humane and has not succumbed to the worst excesses of unfettered climate barbarism that we might all kind of collectively dread, I would envision the town of Amherst as being a welcoming refuge for people from around the world and for people who have perhaps been displaced for climate and other reasons from nearby cities to live in abundant, high quality, dense public housing that is close to amenities in town with the universities and colleges serving as resources to train people for growing new economies for a sustainable future that are hard to foresee right now. I foresee agriculture being part of that. I would like to, I guess, emphasize that the vision of the future that I have for 30 years from now is not everything as it is now, except with more renewable electricity and electric cars instead of normal cars, but rather something much more fundamentally different. Well, then that gets on our way, maybe. That's a great description. And we're, as Lauren and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about, we spent quite a lot of time looking at the material, the outreach material, the information that came out of the process, the surveys. That was great work. And as clearly the committee has done a lot of work getting to the point where we kind of walk in, we are very clear that we're not starting a process. We are part of continuing a process alone. And that work is quite a beautiful and there's just so much information there. Lots of feeling and heart as well, which is fantastic. Thanks, anybody else? Yeah, I've got one more, Dwayne. And then I think that's everybody. Can we move on? Maybe, Sarah, I don't know if you have anything to say. No need to say something, unless you feel. Yeah, just quickly, I'll pile on with all the other divisions as well and just say hi to Lauren. It's great to see you out there. And hi, Jim, Dwayne, I live in town, work at UMass. And we may have crossed paths. I was at DOER for 13 years before being at UMass here. I bet we have. Yeah, so great to have you guys on board. I guess one thing I wanted to bring to the vision was, to some extent, I hope things just physically don't change that much. I mean, I live here because it's a beautiful town. It has history and it has modern stuff. And the aesthetics of the town are very drawing. I hope the town commons is still a robust town commons. It's been one for 400 years or whatever. And the downtown core is very quaint. There's certainly some upgrades and so forth. I do see a robust work that needs to be done. And that's part of the vision over, hopefully, pretty much done in 30 years. But it's going to take probably most of that time to retrofit all of the buildings we got in town. I do see new construction, but most of the buildings are already built and need a lot of work. So it is this electrification. Though, to some extent, I hope the aesthetics don't change that much. It doesn't need to. But again, I think it sort of has been mentioned. A lot of the change in vision is not so much physical, but psychological and emotional and just people's relationship to energy and climate and really an opportunity for this relationship to be much more direct, where people really understand and take pride and ownership in a very financial way as well in energy activities and assets in town. That can be done through the CCA, for example, is what we're looking at. But also just have a consciousness about them that is not necessary explicit. And we don't wear it on our sleeves all the time, but it's just part of the way that we go about doing business. I do. My vision is that there still will be a lot of car-based transportation, as opposed to public. I don't know if we really have the wherewithal to every time I want to run into town to have food, to jump on it on public transportation, but quiet, small, personal, maybe autonomous vehicles, maybe on-call vehicles that come to us when we need them would be super. I could use one when I'm 30 years older. Yeah, I think of how old I'm going to be when I'm 30 years. And that gives you, I'll take that autonomous vehicle. Is that everyone? Yeah, I think we're good if you want to. Awesome. I just wanted to add my comment into the mix, which was as I was reading through some of the interviews that the committee has done with various folks around town, I remember reading a quote from Gabrielle Gold, I think, with the Business Improvement District about a vibrant and thriving downtown, supporting local businesses, while also furthering climate mitigation goals. And I just thought that was pretty inspiring because Amherst does have so much great culture and history, as we mentioned. And having that as a cultural gateway into some of the cultural changes that we're talking about, I think, is something inspiring. I certainly feel like the arts has a big role to play. I take a sec and just say, in this funny moment, and this funny moment has shown us a few things. It's shown us where we're lacking, the things are not working well. It's also shown us that we can do things that we didn't think we could do. And it's shown us that things can change very quickly. And I think we just need to keep that in our minds and kind of in our approach, that we're looking to do some big things. Those big things may be hard to imagine, but if there's one scene in the last month, things can happen that nobody had any idea might be able to happen. That works on many fronts, but it's good and some are bad. A lot of them are not so great, but it's very true. And I just appreciate everybody being up for this and ready to take on. Some really don't know where we're going. And that's the perfect segue to our next slide, which is you. So Lauren, you want to talk about this? No, I don't want to talk about it. Yeah, I think this is it. So we're trying to do this in a very interactive way. If you remember the MVP process, Holly and I were very good at this as well. And so we all have this sort of system back and forth. So the vision here is there's several things that have come out of both your work and the setup for this process, which was then expressed in the RFP and expressed in the process of getting here and then in our initial kickoff conversation with Stephanie and Laura that really brought that forward. So the idea is to really build this process into an integrative planning framework, which has strong, obviously we're focused on and we need to be focused on resilience and adaptation. If there's one thing we have seen in the last month is that resilience and adaptation is not a joke. This is serious stuff. It's also been very clear both from the MVP process and the documentation out of that, as well as from the work that you did already around outreach that this needs to have a strong equity focus and to have a strong community drive to it. And so that's something we're very focused on doing in ways that are probably different than what you're expecting. I'll talk a little bit about what that means. But our goal is not to have a giant community participation process, though there may be some of that. Our goal is to get authentic participation in the process of defining what a plan means and then defining what the strategies are so that it's not a surprise to anybody. It's something that means the meaning is built as we go along. Obviously, a key part of this is the tracking process so that the plan's updated over time. That's key. That is always key. And then we want to make sure we identify goals and strategies that are meetable, that we can make our way to and that drive us forward over time. Part of that is identifying what are the changes and actions that need to happen with town budgeting and potentially staffing. It sounds like some of that work has already started to move forward. And then also, the funding process for a lot of these is going to be a trick for a town with sized vermers. But it's not impossible. And there's many different ways to approach these, the things that everybody sees needs to be done. Great. Steve and Ashwin, do you guys still have comments or have new comments or questions? Oh, no. That's OK. I can't figure. I don't think I can turn your hand off, so. No, you have to turn your own. OK, I'll drop my hand. You're welcome to speak. Please. Absolutely. Please feel free to unmute yourself and holler to stop us if you need to or raise your hand or any number of ways to. It's a small enough group. I think we can stand everybody talking. Lauren. So as Jim mentioned, of course, we're focused on mitigation in this plan in a big way. These are just the goals that the community has recommended to the town. The town is adopted, 50% reductions townwide by 2030, with an interim goal of 25% reductions by 2025, and carbon neutrality no later than 2050, but preparing for carbon neutrality sooner than that. And that will involve a lot of different strategies that will be developed over the course of this plan, as well as advocacy of state and federal levels and adoption of new technologies. These goals are really clear. They're well-defined. They're based in science. They're measurable. They're actionable. And they have time frame, which makes them really great goals. So Stephanie, if you could go to the next slide. So we wanted to tee up a bit more of a discussion around resilience in Amherst and what that means. In the context of this plan, obviously, the MVP planning work will be feeding into this in a major way. And we'll talk about that in just a minute. But we wanted to start off just with this definition of resilience from the Rockefeller Foundation. Lauren, I'm sorry to interrupt. Your sound is coming in and out. It's hard. It's a little hard here. Also, I'm sorry, Lauren. Everyone else should make sure that they're muted as well. I think I'm just going to take my headphones out because sometimes they are not the best. OK. Can everyone still hear me? OK. This should be a little better. So just wanted to tee up a conversation about resilience in Amherst with this first definition from the Rockefeller Center Foundation, which is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city or town to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. So we're talking about acute shocks and chronic stressors. So how do we face sudden hazards, but also new daily stresses as they arise? And then we're talking about surviving, adapting, and growing. So how do we increasingly thrive as a community, not just recover when things happen? Some aspects of resilience are going to fall entirely outside of the realm of mitigation. The classic example is stormwater infrastructure, which doesn't really tie in with carbon reduction, unless maybe if you're talking about green infrastructure, but it's so critical from the resilience standpoint. And whereas other resilience considerations will overlap with mitigation, such as passive survivability in buildings and energy efficiency. So Stephanie, if you could go to the next slide. Thank you. So what does resilience look like for Amherst? These are drawn directly from the MVP Planning Report. So in purple, we have infrastructure resilience priorities in pink. We have societal resilience priorities. And in green, we're environmental resilience priorities that were identified through that process. And I thought this would just be a good way to sort of spring it back to what came out of that process, what were the priorities that were identified by the community during that process. And it was things like resilient food production and distribution systems that we talked about. A lot of these things are related to everyone's visions. Empowerment of vulnerable populations, sustainable and resilient buildings, water infrastructure and water security. These are all things that we're going to want to be addressing over the course of this process. So before we get into talking about resilience goals, we wanted to give a couple of examples of what resilience goals might look like for Amherst. Since we have these really robust and clear carbon reduction goals and resilience goals, we want to start to think about how to frame resilience goals in ways that are as actionable and time-framed and reflective of the community as the carbon mitigation goals are. So Stephanie, if you could go to the next slide. I just have a couple more slides that are examples that we've pulled from other contexts that we've worked in of resilience goals and then some of the potential indicators that we could look at to consider whether those goals are being met or how we will know that those goals are being met. So in this case, the sector that was being explored was social equity and governance. And an example goal could be that decisions at the local level involve extensive consultation with stakeholders, residents, community partners, and others affected by decisions. And the decision-making process is transparent and accountable. And potential indicators to track how that goal is being met are things like the town has a protocol in place for consultation with stakeholders and the local community reports that decisions are made in a transparent and accountable way. That's just one example. These are examples from other settings and I'm not necessarily reflective of the goals that we want to set, but they provide really good ways to think about, well, what does the goal look like and how do you know whether you're getting there? Exactly, thanks, Tom. So Stephanie, if you want to go to the next slide, it's just another example from another context for infrastructure and environment resilience goals. So that could look something like a goal where the natural environment and the built environment in town work together to make both the local community and local ecosystems more resilient. And some indicators of that might be the percentage of applicable areas in town that use nature-based solutions to address stormwater, high heat, resilience to wind and storms, and improvement of air quality or water quality. And maybe the percentage of applicable areas in town where the design and management of open spaces support healthy ecosystems and healthy soils. So these are really just examples, as Jim said, to start thinking about how to frame resilience goals and potential indicators that can help us track progress over time. And I guess this is probably a good place to stop and see if anyone has any initial thoughts on that, initial reactions to that framing around resilience goals. Does that resonate for folks? Everyone's still not over. No news is good news, yeah. That's the answer, yeah. I'm gonna try not to be too irritating. It's not easy. Jump in, yeah. I think in general, I am feeling, and having reviewed a lot of the material, the previous plans, there's a certain generality to a lot of the language, which I find challenging. And I think you're gonna find this is a smart group that's thought about this a lot. I think we're pretty well along. And I know that what we're looking at might not be something for us as much as for a town, but the general language to me is displacing a sense of urgency. And I think that's gonna be my phrase potentially of this is I am craving extremely actionable, extremely nuts and bolts, extremely not planned on a shelf. And I'm not accusing you guys of doing this, but one of the things I had said at a previous meeting was like, if we could have our climate action plan be five pages long and not 50, that sounds like a win to me. I'm nervous about getting buried in language. And I don't really know, as you can see as I ramble on how to finish this concept. And I'm betting Ashwin has a better end to this than me. So I'm gonna stop, but I feel general. I will feedback. Thank you. I don't know if I have a totally better suggestion coming out of this. The generality of the language did strike me as well. And I mean, I think part of maybe what's not here and maybe this is something that will be clear in the document, but I would just want to emphasize it would be great to make sure that it's really clear is how do these goals depart from past trends and future projections under status quo? What is the problem that we were trying to fix? Because that's how we get pointed towards specific alternatives that we want to implement. And it's a little hard, or it's really hard to see what that gap, what those gaps might be between the alternatives, between our desires and what we project will happen given past trends without positive interventions from justice language. So I would very much look forward to seeing more specificity around that. Yeah, I think that's an important note for a few different reasons, but one of which is just that resiliency goals, as you've both pointed out, do tend to be a little bit less sort of concrete than carbon goals. And I'm hearing that specificity is really the name of the game for this committee. So that's awesome. It's really great. Yeah, and I mean, I think if I am reading your presentation correctly, this is just to note that you haven't seen in our initial goals resiliency, which is true. It's not in those goals specifically and that we do need to include resiliency in our action plan, which I think we all also agree with. So I think in that sense, we're on the same page, but our goals will look different and be more specific and actionable to the extent that they can be and we'll build in resiliency to the extent that they can as well. I mean, I think that you, that's exactly right. So yes, the work so far out of the committee does not really have much to say about resilience goals. And that carbon and carbonation is very countable, makes it very easy. Things that are not countable directly are a little bit harder. As I used to say, the easy parts of this are you need bigger culverts, we'll give you a storm size that you need to design to. You can do that. The hard parts are social issues. It's really hard to count that stuff. And Ashwin did a great of elucidating what social issues are we talking about? So we're gonna wanna set some really pretty specific goals and ways to count those social issues as well because we know that social resilience is a key to how a community moves forward. Ashwin, you were about to say something. Oh, sorry, no, I don't think I was. I think we're good. Okay, good. And so obviously we need to set those goals. Part of what we're doing here is we're just kinda pushing and saying, okay, here's some other things. It's like, all right, you don't like those so good. Well, let's pick some better ones. That's great. Yeah, Stephanie. So I just wanted to say that, you know, the resiliency piece is important, especially in light of where we are right now. And some of the things that it has really brought to the forefront and what I've experienced and I'm sure others are is just the incredible inequity of how we're communicating right now. So I feel like one of the pieces of resiliency in terms of, you know, it's a piece of what we're doing in terms of climate action is that we do have to look at communication, which came up as a very primary issue for a very definite segment of the town's population saying that that piece needs to be addressed as part of resiliency. And this is important because if we're talking about climate emergencies as we move forward, communication is a piece of that. And even though it doesn't seem like it's specifically a carbon issue, it most certainly is an equity issue. So it is related and it is important to build that into the resilience. And again, a reminder that this process is funded by MVP. And so resiliency kind of has to be a piece of this. And some of those issues should be addressed because they were identified by community members. That's fine. Can I just add real quick there that, I totally think that resilience in the plan, having resilience in the plan is essential. It's incredibly valuable. The vitality of it is on display right now. In some ways, I actually think that we might even be able to think bigger with what we mean by resilience than what is in these goals. Because for a long time, a lot of conversations about adaptation have turned on green infrastructure. I love green infrastructure. Green infrastructure is great. But given the magnitude of effects that climate change is likely to have, it's not just having culverts and green infrastructure to be resilient to more severe and more frequent flooding events, but also potentially disruptions to supply chains, events that knock things out in town. And what will the municipality be able to do to deal with those kinds of situations? How are we gonna build capacity for again, potentially refugees? Is that something that we can be thinking about? And another thing that just kind of came to mind in terms of resiliency during the current crisis is that a lot of like kind of informal, mutual aid networks have sprung up in Western Massachusetts, also really around the country and the world to provide services, peer-to-peer help for people that like need groceries, to have wellness checks, lots of stuff like that. And I found myself in trying to find ways to plug in right now, kind of wishing that I could plug in through the municipality without having to rely on these sort of informal mutual aid networks, which as much as I laud them, I think tend to replicate existing kind of structural inequalities and exacerbate some of the inequities that come with a pandemic or any kind of an emergency. So are there ways to also think about having robust data and information on who's where and who is vulnerable and how we can come together to help our most vulnerable residents in times of crisis? Yeah, totally. And I would add to that the infrastructure of people, like Culver, like I'd rather have 10 more Stephanie's than a Culver and I think realizing that this human beings who are trained and capable and communicative and understand this like ready to go. Yeah, thanks, Jesse. And just flagging that, and it was in the slides earlier, but communication and robust communication networks was definitely brought up during the MVP workshop and it's part of that document. So I think that's only being further recognized during this time. Absolutely. And to Ashwin's point too around broadening the definition of resilience, thinking about things like food security and food justice, which is another thing that came up frequently in the MVP process. So these are all really, really great. Okay, any last comments before we move on? Awesome. Then next slide. So this slide is intended to sort of outline and TIP discussion around phase one of this project, which obviously has had to be recast given our present circumstances with COVID-19, but we learned when we had our initial conversation with Laura and Stephanie that the ECAC has already been thinking about working within a sort of working group structure to advance sector analysis for the plan. So we are proposing maybe four task groups based around four broad sectors, which we'll talk more in depth about in a moment. And the idea is for each task group to be co-chaired by two members of the committee. With Linnae and staff, she can care of the logistics and facilitation for meetings. And we probably aim to have somewhere around three meetings over the course of the next few months, starting in late May, early June. And other task group members might include folks like other town staff, resident experts, community organization representatives, and other community members who are interested and excited about this work. Those task group members would probably be identified by the town and the committee with support from us and from Gazikaya as the community outreach liaison. And I'm gonna just go through the rest of the slide first, but then circle back to this idea of sectors for a little bit more discussion. So phase one, we'll have the task groups as a focal point. We're also aiming to do a lot of community participation planning to be ready to really hit the ground running once that becomes feasible again. And then we also are proposing two other analyses that will be led by our partners that we think could serve as meaningful compliments to the existing plan framework that the committee has drafted. So the first is a soil health and soil carbon analysis led by regenerative design group that we've talked about at the beginning based in Greenfield. And that is meant to look at soil health and soil carbon in the town and lead to a series of recommendations for integrating soil resilience into land use planning efforts, like the master plan, open space and recreation plan, zoning and bylaws, things like that. And to provide a framework for Amherst to be able to become eligible for participation in programs like carbon credits and payment for ecosystem services. And that kind of ties into this examination of alternative and innovative funding models. Then the second analysis that we're proposing is an infrastructure resilience and procurement analysis which would be led by niche engineering. And that would lead to strategies and recommendations that would support resilient low carbon infrastructure planning. Then that would also help to inform task group discussions and further conversations around resilience. So that's our sort of initial proposal for phase one. And I wanna just circle back to this idea of sectors because we looked through the initial Climate Action Plan draft that the committee has put together. And we're trying to think about how to structure some task groups, working groups in an integrative way that makes sense, that makes it easier to set goals and track progress over time, makes that process more intuitive and also covers all the bases that the committee has already identified as being critical to this plan. So these are just proposals and they're definitely open for discussion. But sort of our initial thinking was that we could have four task groups built around these sectors. So buildings and energy which would include community choice aggregation which is obviously going to be a critical component of this plan. Transportation and other infrastructure. So that would include things like water and wastewater infrastructure, communications infrastructure, which of course as Stephanie just mentioned is critical from the resilience and equity standpoints. And then land use and natural systems which would include agriculture, of course, forestry, open space, things like that, ecosystem health and then community and public health which was something that we proposed as an addition to the framework that the committee's been working with especially in light of the current coronavirus pandemic but then also thinking about vector-borne disease and other infectious diseases and how those relate to climate change. And then potentially some more work around food systems less from the agricultural side of things and more from the distribution and systems perspective. So I guess we can open it up here as well for the committee's feedback on these draft buckets. You see Darcy's hand? I think you're muted. I was just wondering if your vision for the sector-based task groups with the first meeting in May is designed sort of like the MVP outreach only targeted to those four areas or something different from that? Jen, do you wanna comment? Yeah, so the idea of the task groups is that there are a couple of things that have to happen. We're just talking about goals and indicators. That's something that the task groups are gonna have to really drive. That's not something that we as consultants can drive. We're here to help the decision process happen and to provide as much information as we can and sort of facilitate the process. And then we'll write it up and make it look cool. But the task groups really need to do that work around, okay, what are the things we think are important and how are we gonna track them? And at least deciding what we think are important, it may take a couple of shots to figure out how we track them. But that whole question of how we make the goals and actions specific and actionable and yet big, that's also the task group. So the first part of those is gonna be that and then there's gonna be a process of reviewing information as it comes in to make sure that we're making the correct sets of decisions. So how do you see this group fitting into the task groups? So I can answer that. Yeah, go ahead, Laura. So my thought is that there's eight of us and four sectors, so we would have two co-chairs of these task groups as two members of each of our committee. And then there's ongoing committee meetings, right? In which this process is brought back into the committee for a general discussion by the committee as sort of on regular intervals. I'm not super sure what the committee schedule is. At this point, I'm guessing that nobody does. But that's sort of the model. So there's these satellites that are the task groups which meet, as we were saying, two, three, probably three times sort of over the course of the whole process. And then there's the sort of mothership of the committee and Stephanie that are sort of holding the whole thing. I just want to quickly add that from this point on, we're going to meet regularly every other week as we have been. It's just going to be virtually. So our schedule is back on track in terms of our meetings. Everything else that happens will happen outside of the, you know, on the off weeks. Okay, great. Dwayne has hand raised and then Andra. Yeah, thanks. This looks good and I wouldn't necessarily, there's nothing here that I don't think is important. But I did want to sort of just bring up the issue of sort of proportionality in terms of, you know, where to put more effort than others. And I think I'm always sort of drawn to the task in front of us, which at least from the carbon mitigation side is how do we get from where we are now to essentially carbon neutral in 30 years or so. And so there's a few things here that, particularly in these sectors that stand out much larger than others in terms of what, both in terms of the magnitude of carbon, as well as to some extent the complexity of scrubbing it out. And while all, and I think all of them would need sort of community participation for sure and the sector-based task force, but I would just like to, you know, suggest that there really needs, I would like to sort of see more as we move forward some sense of proportionality and I'm not suggesting you're not thinking along those lines, but just in terms of where we put more effort than others in terms of getting to an actionable plan to get to where we need to go. That's great, Dwayne. The one that, I don't know how to say this, but I'm just gonna say it, heck with it. So obviously, buildings and energy is like, is the key sector from the carbon mitigation perspective, although transportation is also a really big sector. So those two are really big in terms of mitigation, but the other thing is that this whole idea of soil carbon really lands in the land use section and if you look at soil carbon and soil carbon potential for sequestration, it's about as big as the transportation sector in the town. And so it turns out that those three are actually pretty well-weighted in terms of mitigation potential and that, you know, we haven't really talked about the soil health thing, but there's a lot of work going on in this right now and Amherst is in an interesting position where it has this very diverse land use structure that makes it, makes it is the wrong word, but allows it to do a lot in this realm of land use and understanding carbon sequestration, conservation and what development looks like in terms of carbon sequestration that I think is going to turn out to be pretty powerful in this process. And so the place where probably mitigation really does not play is in community and public health, but if you think about community and community design, which is really about land use, there may be some issues there as well, but certainly those three categories are the strong ones in terms of mitigation. Yeah, and I would add that I think my vision, sort of what I've been envisioning and what we've talked about as a group and to Jesse's point earlier, like I really want our plan to have a very concise executive summary that has like in the next three years, these are the main things we're gonna focus on and that's gonna pull, and it may be that all of those come from just one or one and a half of these sectors, right? And then the rest of them are looking at longer term things or things we need to do that are more collective in nature and or things that we need to push for policies at the state or national level to do. So Dwayne, I think that's a really important point you noted there. Yeah, Andra, you had a question. All right, could I say one thing on that before we move on? I also just wanted to add as we're thinking about the procurement analysis, that that's another place where carbon mitigation is gonna come into play. A lot of the work that we're hoping niche will do or envisioning niche will do is around low carbon procurement, which can actually have quite a significant footprint. So I think that's another important thing to note. And then Dwayne, you brought up community participation and I really just wanted to touch on that and also like smack myself on the wrist because I wanted to say this from the beginning of this discussion and because it's by no means an afterthought but community participation as well as equity are really things that we've heard from Stephanie and Laura and from the work of the committee are things that really need to be embedded within all of these sectors. So that's something that we're very cognizant of and we'll make sure is that the forefront of the process. So sorry, Andra, I cut you off. Yeah, yes, very much along the same lines as everyone else saying here. I do think that we should consider the timeliness of each of these in terms of how much of the committee members' energy should go into it. If we want to have a lot of detail in the building and energy section then we should have more people involved in that and if some things are more long-term and dependent on other factors. For instance, transportation is really a regional issue here. Amherst doesn't have its own transportation system. We have a regional bus system and anything we do has to be done in that context. So I'm just not sure about the four groups. I don't see them as equally weighted. So Andra, so just to clarify because I don't know, maybe this wasn't super clear. So the idea here is, if I understand it, is that we've got these four groups with two members of the committee as co-chairs but the groups are actually gonna include people from our community. We've talked for a long time, I think even from the first meeting about the need to bring in other experts from our community. And so, yeah, so we may find, and we've had people in our community interested in all of these areas and we may find that the building and energy group requires a lot more input but I don't think that I would necessarily say there should be only one committee member as a chair of one of these groups and three of another. So does that answer your question, Andra? And I think this also means that maybe our consultants are spending more time with those groups than they are with some of the other groups. If we come to find out that we're feeling like we're overwhelmed in one area and underwhelmed in another. I think that probably buildings and energy will need to be broken out in order for us to get a handle on it. It may well be true. The one thing I did wanna add to Laura's comment there is just that we're talking about the proportionality from the mitigation standpoint but I think it's also important to bring resilience back into the picture in this discussion because resilience is going to play a bigger role in things like public health and possibly land use and natural systems and even in buildings and energy of course but I think we can't forget about that piece of the puzzle as well. Jim, are you gonna say something? I was just gonna say that I'll sort of make the point I made before in a little bit different way that if you were, in fact, we can do this to sort of lay out the sectors of carbon emissions for the town with a wider view and added soil carbon losses and or gains and added procurement and embodied emissions which of course, the nice thing about embodied emissions is that there are emissions that were released before you started. And so embodied emissions happen instantaneously as opposed to reducing building emissions which happens over 30 years. And that what you'd find is that those three things that I just outlined were about equal in size and that while we're thinking about buildings and we're thinking about energy systems there are some things out here that are gonna have as least as much effect as those are in terms of overall carbon emissions at the large scale. And the concept of procurement and I know that it's a topic that's come up because we've seen it in some of the notes as a concept of procurement at the town level is something that is actually quite the timeframe on that could be relatively quick. And so it's sort of an interesting opportunity to have a pretty big effect relatively easily without all. I mean, it's not talking about spending money to do it either. And there aren't a whole lot of things that fall into the category of places where you can have a huge carbon effect without spending a lot of money. Although, I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about community choice aggregation as well is that it has a big effect and it's not like you really have to spend money to achieve it. There's probably some, but not much. But we totally hear the thought about sort of building systems and energy systems being the things that the committee cares the most about. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure. I would just put a quick plug in for, I'm not sure I necessarily agree. I agree with the concept that the building systems and energy systems are huge and they're complex and will require a lot of time. I think I'd like the way you guys have put it together because I don't see any positive change in that sector without the community sector as well. This is, what percentage of this is in private hands? Most. And the municipalities, what, 3%? So I think I would just, nothing against the comments about the buildings but constantly reminding ourselves that the community is going to do that. And so that communication and that engagement and that justice and resilience piece, I think I just see them as all kind of going together. Oh, nice. Darcy, you had a comment as well? Yeah, I just wanted to, I hear what Jim is saying about the value of doing things that we can do quickly and easily and for low cost. But I think that the level of, and Jesse just said this to the, the level of complexity around the building's issue when you're dealing with new construction and you're dealing with retrofitting existing construction, building code issues, et cetera. That's really big and complex about where to go with that. And then the energy is equally complex. So I also find it difficult to think of having them together. But I also hear what you're saying about, and maybe that just we have, we're hopefully going to have nine people on our committee so maybe we can have five of these task groups. And one of them have one chair or something like that. I don't know. Thanks, Jesse. Anyone else want to weigh in before we move on? I just, it's definitely here. I just, one thing I wanted to add to is to be thoughtful about the time that this will take. So for any one person to take on a specific group is going to be a lot of weight and the lift on one person. So that's, I think, why when we initially had the conversation about how these might be broken down, it was identified as having two people because maybe you have a buildings and energy group, but maybe there might be ways that there could be sort of a subgroup of that sector that sort of works on a specific piece. But overall the effort is to work together, but there might be some work that one of the members could take on and one of the other members could take on. So it doesn't necessarily separate them, but there may be specific pieces they can do individually and then bring them back to that sector group as a whole. Let's go on to the next slide. And then I want to, we'll go ahead through this stuff, talk about the timeline, things like that. And then we can just sort of come back to a general discussion about this and figure out how you guys want to make these decisions. Stephanie, go and get to the next slide. Please. Thank you. So this is sort of a diagram about community participation. And what we were saying before is that concept of community participation is, you guys did a bunch of outreach and it's hard. It was one of the things that was clear from sort of the material and discussions that you shared and some of the notes. It's like, this is hard work to do. And so part of what we're trying to do is to make it a little bit easier. And part of what we're trying to do is to make it a little bit more direct in a sense. So the idea is that there are a number of community organizations out there who are working on topics that are relevant to this plan and this planning process. And that the initial process that we would go through working with Gazikaya primarily and Stephanie as well, would be to reach out to a number of people, representatives of those organizations to either participate in the tasks or to feed information and interaction of the task groups. And there may be ways that we support that as well through our contract. And that's the sort of initial way of interacting with setting goals, with some of the work that's gonna take a little thought and some interaction with the committee and with other staff members. So before we go to the process of really talking to individual community members, that we wanna build some trust. We wanna build some sets of relationships. Those relationships could be durable because they're participating in decision-making processes and try and build authentic relationships in the process. They will serve the rollout, the actions that happen out of this plan. Jesse, I think made an Ashwin made really great points about the buildings that we're talking about, 90% of them or 95% of them are privately owned. So there's gonna have to be people who wanna participate and the way transportation works within the town and within the region is really upset of individual decisions and family decisions. And there's gonna have to be ways in which we build relationships to drive the kinds of changes we're looking for forward. And the other real point about that is that we really to set the goals of what is it we're looking for with a pretty wide set of ears, right? We want lots of people participating in what those goals are that we're trying to solve, that we're trying to reach in this process. And so the model is we start with organizations, we start with representatives of organizations that can participate in a sort of small scale way. And then we move on later in the process into a much wider, more sort of regularized sort of engagement process. Stephanie, you wanna move on? Time, project timeline is always a good one. Woo-hoo. All right. So, sorry for the small font. Everyone will be able to review this in more detail when Stephanie sends out the slides afterwards. But the basic gist. So we've talked about phase one and sort of what we see there. Oh, great. Thank you, Stephanie. So thinking about initiating outreach to some of these potential community partners, forming the sector task groups, and then having these other analyses by our partners around procurement and infrastructure resilience around so carbon and so health, and doing a lot of the groundwork to set up community participation in phase two. So phase one, we really see as sort of developing the framework for how this plan will move forward. And then phase two, which will start mid June, mid to late June, will be strategy development. So this is where the meat of the, I'm vegan, I shouldn't say meat, the bulk of the strategy development will happen. Most of the task group meetings, you wanna kick them off at the end of phase one, but the task group meetings will really mostly be happening in phase two. And then later in phase two, if feasible, hopefully it will be by then having some of those larger community meetings. And then throughout that process, thinking about evaluation, monitoring, tracking progress, and how we're embedding that into the plan, and of course consolidating all the outcomes and feedback from those meetings, which will then all feed in to phase three, which is really about plan development. So that will start around, I think we have it set for October, November, and that's where we take all the strategies that have been developed and prioritize them, present that to this group and really start drafting the plan. So that's sort of the timeline that we're working with now. Of course, things may shift given the situation with the pandemic, but this is sort of how we see things unfolding. Yeah, I think that's probably good for that. Any questions? Quick questions about schedule or any of those? So I think where it differs from the original schedule in our proposal is really that phase one, because we're not in a position right now to be able to have meetings right now, public meetings right now, we're concentrating that in phase two. But otherwise, pretty much aligned with the original proposal. So yeah, great. Go ahead, Darcy. Is there any reason why we can't have virtual meetings, outreach meetings? And I'm asking that because it's not out of the realm of possibility that we won't be able to have outreach in-person meetings in the fall either. I would agree with that. And the answer is no, but the thing we're concerned about is that in order to really bring people into the process, there has to be some time of building relationships. And because we can't pull groups of people and go visit different things and go visit churches and all those ways in which you build trust, that we're counting on this working with organizations process to build that. And I also think that will happen virtually. And the other part of that is I also think that it's a process that gets and set representation, if you will, although it's sort of a silly word in this case, but gets representation into the process of setting goals which is gonna be very hard to do at a public level. And so it has two advantages. One of them is that it builds the trust that we need in order to do bigger sort of gatherings or meetings and whether this happened virtually or not. And the other is that it actually works well for this process in the same way that the committee itself is effective because it's not huge. It's the people who really care that that sort of same process works in the tax group formation. I'd like to jump in if I could on this issue because I've been involved in meetings that have tried to be inclusive and include translation and it has been virtually impossible. I don't think there are any, at least available to us at this time, there is no real platform that works well to incorporate inclusivity in a way that is meaningful. And my personal hope is that working with stakeholder groups engages us with the community, with folks that work within the community in ways that are direct, that can bring some of that participation to the beginning of this process while we're in this situation. But also I'm hoping that over that time, there will be ways to engage like some of the technology will evolve very rapidly because I think there are some opportunities out there. I just don't think we've been able to incorporate them quite yet. So I'm hoping that there'll be time to, it gives us, buys us a little more time to work on that, to try to make it a more inclusive process so that when we get into sort of the phase two of the next fiscal year and we're a little further on, we can bring more to the community and make it a more equitable process. But we just, literally, I just don't think the technology is available to us right now. I, like I said, I've been in meetings that have attempted it and it's failed pretty dramatically. So it's pretty noticeable. And it's frustrated, like to me, this piece is one of the most frustrating because I feel like the whole point of this, especially after what we did with the MVP planning process was to be very inclusive. So it's struck me how this digital divide is really, there's a lot of inequity just by the virtue of the technology we're having to use to be able to communicate and even hold meetings. So that's just my two cents on that. Thanks, Stephanie. Yeah, and I can tell you that in other settings, so really specifically, we're working on a project which is completely about community interaction in Medford and we are trying like hell to make it happen and it's just not gonna happen. And for just this reason, it's like working with Haitian families in Medford and it's like, can't count anybody having internet connections, much less multiple computers in the house in order that the kids can do schoolwork and the parents can be on a Zoom meeting. So it's those kinds of issues really weigh heavily on a process like this. So we're trying to work a process that gets us some real authentic interaction and participation, but is less weighted by those issues. Does that make sense? Gazette, Shaya, you have your hand up and then Andra. Oh, there you go. Everyone, I don't have video right now but I was just gonna throw in another two cents echoing what Jim said about access to technology, access to internet, and also there are cultural barriers to folks having the presence of someone else in their home via video or audio that there are more complex than are worth going into right now but there are cultural barriers to that. Yeah, I think that's a great comment, Kaya, that we sort of have this vision of what our world is like. And as we've seen, boy, have we seen it. The worlds that we think are like, oh, it's just me and I happen to be in my office right now. You get to see the nice office. What kids and spouses on the phone and even our world is not what you would think it would be and there are plenty of things in everybody else's world that are probably not ideal either. Andra, do you have something to add? So, yeah, I don't think that we should be trying to work with fancy technology. I think we should get on the phone. That's the way to organize right now and everyone has a phone and it is more chaotic time, but if you get somebody for 15, 20 minutes on the phone with a real directed kind of conversation, you can make some use of it. But I'm thinking about how right now, yeah, you can't reach everybody. I know that teachers are having a hard time reaching all of their students and the teachers may be a really important resource for us to use because they are reaching out to families, at least in all different, every possible circumstance. So, I'm wondering if we might need to, given what our situation might need to shift some resources into actually getting people who are already making calls, trying to reach out to families they are working with, not just organizations. Most people are not actually affiliated with an organization, so yeah. I think we mean working with, I think like you're bringing up teachers, this is a good example. I don't think anything that was discussed is saying that the initial stakeholder meetings are gonna be the one that make the final decisions or provide the only input. It's just a place to get started to maybe identify some things to bring out to more community members. I love the idea of the telephone calls, but again, I think it's gonna be challenging because again, in my mind, these meetings have to include interpretation and we have to make sure if we're gonna be inclusive that we provide translation for people. So, it's gonna be challenging and I think that's why maybe starting with these stakeholder groups where that might not be as much of an issue and I would consider teachers a stakeholder group at this point that they are. So, I think that's a really good point, Andra. I just think we have to, these are details I think we can sort of work out as we move forward, but just things to bring up but that's a great idea. Yeah, I love that thought. Yeah, I think there's a couple of hands up. I think that the first step here is, we've got about 10 minutes up to the meeting so I wanna move forward a little bit. So we've got, our first step here is really, you know, identifying these task groups and what community members, individual members or groups we wanna bring in to these groups. And we have no idea what, we had no idea a month ago when we last met that we'd be in this situation. We have no idea what a month from now is gonna look like. So I think we may end up needing to do outreach over the phone and through other means. And I think those are all good ideas that we need to keep in our plate but I don't think we're gonna solve those today. No, but the ideas I think are valuable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope that we can do these meetings in person or at least some of them in person but I also don't want, I think Darcy reading in between your comment, I don't want us to wait to hold something in person and hold off the process. So I think we need to balance those things. Absolutely. Jessie, you're good. Okay, any other comments? So Stephanie, you can move on to the next slide. Given that we only have 10 minutes left, this was really a discussion about next steps. To identify potential task group leaders from the committee and maybe start some brainstorming around task group members. That could also happen offline. And then another next step will be to reach out to potential community partners which will be identified in that brainstorming and that will be led by Gazikaya. And then to schedule the first task group meetings. So that's sort of what we see as our immediate next steps. But I know we wanted to leave some space for more discussion at the end. So, Jeff, you... Laura, I was just gonna say, Laura, this is sort of, I'm gonna sort of hand it back to you. We did talk some about the task groups and I'm not sure how you wanna handle that, whether that's something that you wanna finish up here or whether you wanna have some other vision of it. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, I think that we should, if you could put back up the list of the slide that had the task groups on them. Yeah, so that's... What I'd like to ask the committee members to do is... There you go, that was it. Sorry. One more, yeah, there we go. Is SINME maybe like your first and second choice of what group you wanna be in, you'd like to be involved with? To reiterate, I think the vision here is that we'll have ideally two committee members sort of working in each of these task groups and then we're coming back together as our full committee to share out and help each other. And let's just start with these groupings and these task groups. I think as we start to identify community members, we may decide we need to switch these up a little bit or something, but let's start here for now. So if you guys could email me in the next couple of days, just your first and second choice, I'll try to make sure I get everybody linked up to a task group. And then we'll need to start and I'll need to talk with Stephanie because we still have to abide by all the open meeting walls about how we sort of move forward from there. But my hope is that at the next meeting we've got some task group leads, we've got sort of our initial list of both individuals and community groups that we want to include in these task groups so we can start reaching out and scheduling our first meetings and working on the agenda for what those meetings would look like. So Laura, that's a great point too. We did send Stephanie a draft agenda for our first meeting, something that, you know, an idea of what that meeting could look like and we were gonna take a quick look at that at the end of this presentation as well. And that was something I think we had talked about in our first meeting just to get a sense of what that could look like. Also Laura and probably Stephanie, do we have a sense of what task groupings might have to do in terms of open meeting? Yeah, I, Jim, I think that we're probably going to have to advertise them if they are, have two members, at least as a minimum, if there are two members on the sector group, then we're gonna have to advertise them. But I've been understanding that that's probably gonna be the case. So I expect to be posting a whole lot of meetings. Yeah, but that's part, you know, we'll just have to have that. That's why I'll have to have a lot of communication with each group. Yeah, okay. And we can think a little bit about how, what email communications look like and, you know, how structured that needs to be. And whatever is, what has to happen. That's great. Well, you know, that's, that's, it sounds good. We did collect a list of local community organizations. Yes. Our outreach process. Hopefully you already have that. Yes, indeed we do. And we also have the ones that we included in the MVP process as well. So to be pretty comprehensive. Yeah, I don't know if this falls well. Yeah, I don't know if this falls within something that Lauren or Jim, you could do, but if you wanted to take a first stab at splitting those groups into these sectors, that would be helpful. Sure. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And we have been looking pretty carefully Darcy at that, at that list and understanding who everybody was. And, you know, sort of dig me into who, who all the groups were. A number of them we know, you know, we know pretty well already. And then as well, the groups, the folks from the MVP process. And then we've been also looking at some other, other sets of folks around. Around town. And around the area. I'd like a little more about the. Community and public health piece. And I think that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. And I can't imagine the full range of what that might include. Like I can the other ones. Say more about that. Or I can jump. When we did this. We've done this in a couple of other places and. The issues that fall into that, that sort of general set of categories. There's a lot of stuff around. Disease vectors. Which is a hot topic with in the public health world. And then there's also. Things. COVID is a great example of that, right? It's like, you know, what, what does it mean to be able to sustain a community in a situation where, you know, that something is super contagious? But sort of community strengths and community activities, community organizations, things that, that create a strong community or create a vulnerable community, those fall into that category as well. They'll learn anything else you want to say? Um, yeah, I was just thinking about, you know, as I think Laura said, there'll be some refining and defining of these sector groups, but other things that come to mind for me are things around like waste and sustainable consumption. We're talking a lot about culture shift in this conversation and what that looks like. And then also potentially food justice and food systems, although that does intersect with the land use agriculture piece as well. But like thinking about the sort of more societal components of those, those issues and addressing those from the perspective of the community, I think will probably be important, especially in Amherst. Where does consumption and waste reduction fall in this, in those sectors groups? Yeah, we've been debating that one. I think a case could be made for multiple different areas. When you think about waste infrastructure versus the impacts of waste on public health, you know, land use, it's either, from our perspective, waste, so consumption is definitely within the community and public health realm. Waste itself as a, is probably in that category, although there's probably some argument to me, you know, from the, from it, from the city. If, if, if the town of Amherst is dealing with waste as, you know, sort of one of the sort of services that, you know, is kind of like roads and schools and that, then, well, it probably falls into infrastructure. So there's probably, we might, you know, as part, as a committee, we might decide, oh, waste really falls in community or the waste really falls in, in infrastructure. But, and this is always the case, you know, you're always in these situations where you always end up back at the point where you sort of say, well, why don't we just have one committee that has everything? And because it's too much to do. Yeah, it goes back to Jesse's diagram. I liked that a lot. All connected, so it's very hard to sometimes break it out into specific categories, but. So we do our best and, you know, we do what we can and, and try and make sure that, you know, there's enough communication that things that cross boundaries are pretty well handled. And I've written up anything. I can't remember, Lauren, if you had written up anything more, that included the pieces that you think would be in each of these sectors. I did send Stephanie an overview, which I'm sure we can share of what this first phase would look like that has a little bit more detail there. Yeah. Okay, maybe we can circulate that. Yeah, definitely. With the, with the names of the, of the sectors and then, and also task you if possible with, with sort of the first stab of, of breaking into the, the different community groups that might, or stakeholders that might fit into these different task groups. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, Azika has already been doing some great thinking about that. So I think we're off on a good fit there. Great. So I'll follow up with an email with, with that, or Stephanie will. And so in terms of the agenda for the next meeting, it will be really sort of working forward to have our first task group meeting and narrow down those task groups a little bit more. Does anybody have anything else they want to add for the agenda for next time? We might want to just figure out where, where the town is with the budget and see if we need to do any advocacy on our budget request. Good, good idea. Anybody else? Some of us looked at other climate action plans. I think we should probably have some highlights from each of us, what we read. Yeah, great idea. We were going to do that at the beginning. We totally, totally forgot about it. So sorry. That's okay. We can, we can do that. All right. Anything else? I'm about to get kicked off. Thank you so much, Linnean, for driving out to Amherst. You know, I really miss driving out to Amherst. It's really a bummer. But thank you, really, to see everybody. And thank you. It's, you know, it's a very exciting process. Yeah, great to meet everyone, see familiar faces and next steps. Good to see you, Lauren. Yeah, too. Yeah. All right. Thank you all. Laura, you and I should follow up on Friday? That sounds good. Okay. Okay. Bye, everybody. Nice to see you all. Be well. Bye.