 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise V's and generous donations from viewers like you. Hello and welcome to the Amherst Weekly Report from Amherst Media. I'm Claire Healy and these are the stories out of Amherst, Massachusetts from this past week. As mentioned in our last show, on November 23rd and 24th, Monti Bella Monti led his 11th annual Monties March for 43 miles to raise funds for the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. Monti was joined by Congressman Jim McGovern, Food Bank Executive Director Andrew Morehouse, and others for the March, which raised a total of $58,129. Residents of the town of Amherst can expect their tax rate to increase next year after a town council vote on November 16th. The council voted 12-1 in favor of the new rate, which will be the same for both residential and commercial properties. This follows a recommendation by the Board of Assessors and the town manager. Single family homeowners can expect a rise of about $205, and the tax rate is expected to correspond to $21.82 per $1,000 of property value according to data from the Daily Hampshire Gazette. The city of Northampton is set to open a 24-hour, 7 days a week emergency shelter at First Churches of Northampton on December 4th, according to Mayor David Narcowicz. Located at 129 Main Street, this facility will expand the city's shelter bed capacity to 40 in total. Working in partnership with ServiceNet, which already has two shelters established on Grove Street and Center Street, the expansion is meant to keep those needing shelters safe amid the pandemic. The current two shelters would be an adequate alone for proper social distancing as temperatures drop below freezing. The shelter will have around-the-clock staffing by ServiceNet in addition to support by city staff and community volunteers. All parties involved, residents included, will be tested for COVID-19 prior to entry into the shelter. ServiceNet is urgently looking for staff to support the shelter and is currently hiring. Additionally, the City of Northampton is seeking community volunteers to assist in the effort to upkeep the shelter. Those interested can apply online at ServiceNet and the City of Northampton's websites respectively. We spoke with Representative Mindy Dom of the Third Hampshire District, which includes Amherst, Pelham, and part of Granby about her priorities following her re-election this past month. As an Amherst resident of 20 years, Representative Dom has a long history of working in this area on numerous advocacy projects and partnerships and served as the Executive Director of the Amherst Survival Center directly prior to her election in 2019. She listed the areas that she prioritized in her first term as support for public higher education, the climate emergency and environmental protection, food security, income inequality, voter rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, and sponsoring public transit. She said that those priorities will remain the same with the addition of specific focus on needs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Representative Dom outlined numerous areas related to the pandemic that she believes need attention, such as increased testing access and improved public health education. And she said that a second stimulus bill is essential. The federal stimulus package is essential. It's not only essential in terms of what it can result in in terms of money in people's pockets, which is desperately needed, whether it's to pay rent, buy food, et cetera. But it's also critically necessary for states and localities. We really need to be able to provide states with the money that they need to implement wide scale testing and ultimately, wide scale vaccine distribution. States will not be able to do that on their own. We're coming up to a deadline, for example, at the end of December for pandemic unemployment assistance, which is this special unemployment insurance that was created specifically for the pandemic. The expiration for that is the end of December, but unemployment is not ending at the end of December. So we need the federal government to step up and extend those programs as well as provide resources for new programs. Right now, my constituents are having a really hard time accessing testing. The state has a particular program called the Stop the Spread program, which is free testing. In particular communities that have been high risk in the past four months, the closest ones to Hampshire County are all in Hampton County. We have some in Springfield and in Holyoke. Nothing in Hampshire, nothing in Franklin, and nothing in the Berkshires. That's not tenable. That has to change. And unfortunately, that does sort of demonstrate a lack of awareness about Western Massachusetts, that there may be people who don't have their own vehicle. They don't feel comfortable being in a public bus given the pandemic, plus we don't have public buses that go from Hampshire into Hampton quite frequently. Or they don't have the time to take off from work to be able to travel down to Holyoke, wait on a four hour line to see if they're able to get tested. So we need to make testing more available. And we need to couple it with very specific health education messages that allow people to understand how to use that test result. So we need to underscore the fact that a test result is not prevention. It's information that you can use to practice prevention. We need more resources in health education in Massachusetts. When asked what she's seen as a continuous concern throughout her work both before and during the pandemic, she pointed to housing and how the pandemic has exacerbated previous housing and security. It's not just because we know that housing is healthcare and healthcare is housing. We know that housing is an essential social determinant of public health. But we can also see in this pandemic that one of the public health guidelines was stay at home, right? Go home and hunker down and stay with your initial household because we wanted to cut down on transmission. And one of the first things we realized in the spring was how do people do that who are homeless? Or how do people do that if they're in multi-family residential because they can't afford their own home? And so I think one of the issues that actually has and also people being threatened with potential eviction because they can't pay their rent because they lost their job because their restaurant closed because of the pandemic. She is currently working on an amendment that would require the governor to replace a member of Congress who needs to leave office with an individual from the same party. There's a couple of reasons for this. One, I think it keeps faith with what the constituents want. You know, voters choose people based on party. There's generally in general elections for our congressional seats. There's usually a Democratic nominee and a Republican nominee. And in Massachusetts, voters decide which person they want. And we can see actually in real time that if a person was to be replaced with someone from a different party, it would actually change the balance of power in the Senate to such an extent that it could really kind of derail action or promote actions that Massachusetts voters would not approve of. At the same time, I really do believe that President-elect's, whoever they are, should be able to assemble their cabinet without worrying about that balance of power. And you know, like it shouldn't be a consideration for Joe Biden, how somebody gets replaced. He should just be able to say who's the best person for the job and know that him selecting somebody isn't going to alter that balance of power. That doesn't work right now across the country. The amendment that I introduced, and which I'll be introducing in January as legislation if it doesn't pass, I really do believe keeps faith with what voters want, allows for that decision-making on the part of President-elect's or other people to not worry about that Massachusetts voters' decisions on what the balance of power should be would be disrupted. When asked what she would tell constituents that are concerned about the current political environment, she quoted activist Mariam Kaba and said, quote, hope is a discipline. There's two things I like to think about right now. I like to think about this expression that I heard from a very well-known activist in the police reform movement that says hope is a discipline. And for me, that means that it's a practice. We have to think about it. We have to foster it, nurture it every day, regardless of what's going on. So that's the first thing is I trying very hard right now to nurture my own sense of hopefulness, not my sense of hopelessness. But I think one of the things we learned in the past four years, and it's no different now in this transition period, is that we cannot afford to relax. You know, democracy requires vigilance all the time. And even when we think we don't need to be involved, we probably do need to be involved and we need to be engaged in our community, whether it's at the local level, the state level, or the federal level. I'm not, I look at what's happening on the federal level and I'm appalled. I get very concerned, but I do believe that there's going to be a peaceful transition to President-elect Biden. I just feel that his transition is going to be not as full or well-resourced as every other President-elect before him, including Trump. She says what she learned from her first term is that her general focus is on areas of, quote, basic unfairness that is resulting in a lack of access, and that she wants to continue working to level the playing field through legislation. And so a lot of the issues that I'm involved in look like civil rights issues, and they may be civil rights issues, but they're coming from that sense of the field needs to be level for everybody. And I'm hoping that I can continue to do that through a variety of different legislations. So whether that's closing, improving access for healthcare, or improving access to specific medical treatments for people with particular illnesses, that that's also viewed for me as a fairness issue, not only as a healthcare as a human right issue. It's a fairness issue. She also emphasized the importance of voting accessibility, saying that we need to, quote, trust voters in laws and keep actions established during the pandemic, like an extended early voting period and mail-in ballots in place. And I'll also be looking to make sure that voters, that we trust voters in our laws so that a lot of the things that we put into place as a result of the pandemic in terms of voting, specifically mail-in voting and an extended early voting period that we keep, that it's kind of like one of the silver linings that we get from the pandemic, is that we make sure that we also make voting more accessible, because look what happened. We made voting more accessible and we had the largest voting turnout ever. So we need to be mindful that there's really no reason for election day to only be on a Tuesday, and it's absolutely doesn't make much sense. And as much access as we can give people to engage in democracy, we should be open to doing that as elected officials, and we should make sure that people have that access. For anyone in need of assistance, whether that be food or housing insecurity or healthcare concerns, Representative Dom encouraged them to contact her in her office directly. She said she can be reached at her email, mendy.dom, at mahouse.gov. She said that her office will refer anyone to the appropriate program so they can get the assistance they need and help them apply for programs. Monday, November 16th, Amherst became the 13th municipality in Massachusetts to pass a bylaw aimed at preventing the mistreatment of exotic animals in circuses and traveling shows. The bylaw, titled the bylaw prohibiting the use of wild and exotic animals in traveling shows and circuses, prevents these venues from using exotic animals for entertainment. It does not impact petting zoos or the exhibition of domestic animals, including llamas and alpacas. It also doesn't apply to research institutions like universities, provided that the animals are not being used for entertainment. The bylaw was first advocated for by Rebecca Schwartz, local resident and assistant director, and head advisor of the bachelor's degree in individual concentration program at UMass Amherst. She reached out to the town in a letter, and city councillor, Shalina Bahel Mill, responded and sponsored the motion. We spoke with Schwartz about her motivation for the bylaw and the impact that she hopes it will have. She said she was inspired by a conference on animal rights and decided to approach the town council after canvassing to gauge support in Amherst. I had attended a conference a few years back that had been sponsored by the Massachusetts Humane Society and the MSPCA, and it was really about like social action around animal rights. I am particularly interested in wildlife application, just because I feel like they're just so exploited and underrepresented, as like all animals are. Anyway, I attended that conference and it was, you know, I felt like it was like a call to action. Like, I realized that in order to help protect wildlife, the only way to really do it is through policy change. And then combined that with the big E, it happened to be the year where there was really a lot of coverage about the poor conditions and abuse of like the camel rides and the elephants that had been brought by the Cumberford Zoo. And I just decided like I just had, I wanted to try to affect positive change. So then I decided to go to the Amherst town, the farmers market, and see if there was support amongst the residents. And I went there for a couple hours for a couple days. And like every resident but one that I spoke to, just their first reply was, well, Amherst doesn't allow that. I mean, of course they don't, but they actually do allow it by not having the law saying that they don't allow it. So everyone supported the concept and the idea of not allowing basically exotic and wildlife acts, which are basically considered circuses, but are more than that. It's just anyone coming to town wanting to have like a monkey on the town common during the fair for kids to see or elephant rides or camel rides. It's really more the smaller venues that Amherst would be exposed to. So I saw all the support there and just wanted to keep going. You know, we live in a agricultural area, people have llamas, they have donkeys, horses, anything like that. We're not trying to limit that. I mean, that's what our community is. And actually the original bylaw had listed alpacas and llamas and one of the council members brought that up. It was a really good comment and we were really happy to be able to make the adjustment for our community. So the intent was really just to limit these animals, which lead just hard lives. They have to travel around. There's these local zoos like the Cumberford Zoo who had the elephant Bula that died at the Big E. They're local, they're in Connecticut. Those type of places to not allow them and give them the venue to exploit these animals. She hopes that this bill prevents future exploitation of these animals in Amherst and that it encourages similar action around the country. I haven't come to Amherst in a long time. We don't have a lot of these venues, but we absolutely could. And as these entertainers and vendors are limited with where they can perform, they're always looking for new venues. So, you know, one thought was should this become a resolution in town because everyone does support this idea. But the problem with the resolution, it's honestly, they tend to be more global in intent and there's still not a law. So we could say to somebody, we don't want you to bring your elephant to town for rides, but they could still do it if it's a resolution. If it's a law, it's clean cut and there's never any gray area about it. I mean, I didn't know if it would pass up until that moment and I certainly wasn't expecting it to be unanimous. But it was really great and Amherst, you know, again, is a leader in compassion and progressive values and in creating a humane economy in town. I was just like thrilled. It's really a global issue and like Amherst is now a player in this big global issue. So, you know, people may not realize how big the effect may be for one more group of people to say like we have to end this exploitation. The Amherst Police Department is hosting a holiday gift drive to help Amherst families experiencing financial difficulties this holiday season. They are collecting winter apparel like coats and hats, books, gift cards and wrapping supplies. If you would like to donate, bring your unwrapped gifts to the Amherst Police Station at 111 Main Street before December 21st. Governor Baker announced that the town of Amherst was awarded a competitive $1.5 million grant under the MassWorks program. The grant is for enhancing traffic and pedestrian safety at the main intersection in the center of Pomeroy Village in South Amherst, specifically the intersection of West Street and Pomeroy and West Pomeroy Lanes. There are no crosswalk signs or ramps to step down from the sidewalk to the street at this intersection in South Amherst. Due to a lack of bike and turning lanes, this intersection has been deemed unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists and insufficient for buses and automobiles. The proposed improvements to this intersection include enhancing pedestrian, cyclist and vehicular safety and will encourage multifamily housing and economic development. Thank you all for watching. This is the Amherst Weekly Report from Amherst Media. We'll see you at the same time next week.