 and the protection of our cells, which is nonsense. To these municipalities who have created organizations to oversee their resettlement and good health and so forth. That would be, and I think a commission of an odd number of people, however many the council would think would be useful, but I think that only if we create an alternative, in other words, if you want something to be different, and I think we are pretty much in agreement that it needs to be different, then we have to create an alternative housing situation so that the federal litigators who are trying to deal with the situation can have an alternative. I plan to go to Northampton City Council and ask them the very same thing, and to encourage others in other counties across the country and so forth, because I think this is the only way that we can undercut this horrendous imprisonment situation that we've all been witness to. So I understand that the rule is you're not gonna take it up at this time and respond and so forth, but I really believe that there are sufficient, competent professionals in this community who could constitute such a committee, who could seek out and interview and so forth, the potential offers of housing, and I myself have both been a recipient when I was a civil rights worker, the only white civil rights worker in the county that I worked in in Arkansas for a year and a half at some danger to the individuals. This was 50 years ago and more than 50 years ago actually, and I have been a provider as well for the last six years of a young man who came here as an immigrant, who is a citizen, but when he and his sister became homeless, I took him in and found an older couple in town who took his sister in, who has since graduated from UMass, and finally in terms of the large scale of things when I lived in San Francisco during the Vietnam War era after coming back from the south. I was the sole signer of a lease with a number of friends who were draft resistors and organizers and so forth, and over the space of two plus years, we took in 30 to 50 AWOL soldiers, sailors, and Marines without much problem at all, and we were all really 20 year old kids, and so I think that this community is capable of organizing this effort. It is capable of putting in writing and it's capable of providing that kind of information to the federal litigators who are desperately trying to protect the lives and health of the people who are being incarcerated, the refugees and the Siles are being incarcerated by the current administration. Thank you. Comments. Yes, Meg. One very briefly, I wanna thank you. Your state, your name, please. Meg Gage, and I'll sign in in a minute, District One. I wanna thank Evan and Mandy for bringing up the contribution limit proposal and for defending it, and I'm glad it wasn't defeated. I wanted to let you know that John Boniface and I are eager to help our two counselors bring it back, providing support in order to both demonstrate the problem that it seeks to solve, which of course, if you have a solution, you need to know what the problem is to make sure you're solving the right problem, but also to demonstrate the public support for this, which I think wasn't there. And that makes me want to point something out, which is that just as you have a huge amount going on, lots of balls in the air, it's virtually impossible for the public to be able to keep up, know when things are coming up, show up at the right meeting in order to voice their opinions. And so I think we all need to work together to figure out how to do that better. I think the best way is community organizing, but that's a high bar for a lot of neighborhoods to reach. But I think the fact when people don't show up, doesn't necessarily mean they don't care. When you don't get phone calls, it doesn't necessarily mean people don't care. So I just think that's a challenge we can all work on together to make sure people are tracking decisions that are being made. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Are there any other people with general public comment at this time? Then we are going to move on. There are no proclamations or commemorations tonight, and there is no presentation or discussion. We are moving on to what is listed as 7C. This is the Community Preservation Act recommendation for Studio Parts Apartment Supportive Housing, 132 North Hampton Road. This is the remaining CPAC recommendation to be brought before the council. Since receiving this recommendation, the council has discussed it at three committee meetings, Joint Capital Planning Committee, which is a joint committee, including representatives of the council, the library trustees, and the school committee. Their role is to recommend capital items to the town manager. It's been brought before the Community Resource Committee and also the Finance Committee. The council also held a full council meeting per the charter, Section 8.1, the second half. That open meeting of the residents regarding Studio Apartment Supportive Housing, 132 North Hampton Road, was held on Monday, June 24, 2019, at 630 at the Bank Center. In addition, we have made every attempt, and I do mean enormous attempt, to post all materials, emails, letters, and presentations regarding this recommended project on the project page, which is at the amherst.gov dash or slash 3489 North Hampton Road project. My estimate is, and it's really a conservative estimate, that each councilor has spent no more than 10 hours on this issue alone, which is a huge amount of time. No less than 10 hours. I'm sorry, thank you. It is, I wrote no less than I said no more. Okay, it's no less than 10 hours alone, and that is in tending meetings, reading emails, reading all the postings, et cetera, and talking to many people, taking walks through the neighborhood. So I'm going to start by calling on Steve Schreiber from the Community Resource Committee to tell us of that committee's decision. So the only time the CRC has taken up this particular matter was on April 24th, and the vote at that time was four to zero in support of all the Community Preservation Act proposals. Okay. One absent, that was me. Okay. And Andy Steinberg for the Finance Committee. Thank you. I probably won't be quite as brief as Steve. The Finance Committee voted unanimously five to zero that the proposed project is sound, financially responsible, consistent with the purposes of the Community Preservation Act and raised no legal questions, consistent with the committee's findings on other Community Preservation Act proposals recommended by the CPA Committee. The Finance Committee recognizes that there may be other factors that the town council may consider to be compelling reasons to fund this project as recommended by the Community Preservation Act Committee or not to do so. It is noted that it's exactly the same motion that was offered for all of the CPA proposals, this year, and the only difference is the amount of time in the depth which we went into this particular proposal. Committee members did not consider other issues that were not financial. I'm not going to go into the lengthy report that is available on the website from the Finance Committee, but we identified a series of issues that are financial directly related to the town and analyzed and discussed each one of them in our report. As noted, there may be other issues that are non-financial, that did come up a little bit during discussion and members of the committee will, of course, since they are members of the council, participate as they feel appropriate in those matters. I'll respond to any questions that come up directly related to the committee proposal itself. The other thing that I wanted to note is that at the bottom of page five of the report, for those of you who have the report, it will note that the Finance Committee did not study the construction and development costs that were estimated by Valley CDC. We did not believe that it was within our area of expertise to do so, and we recognize that Valley CDC has a right to seek funding also from the State Department of Housing Community Development and the DHCD has the expertise to study that issue with a lot more depth than we would have ever been able to give to it so that that was not part of our analysis. Kathy, do you have anything you wanna add to the Vice Chair? What I would just add is Andy said there's a longer report, and we also had additional documents that had been submitted to us that looked out 10 or 20 years at the financials in terms of the revenues of the proposed project and expenses as one of the concerns or potential concerns would, they at some point be coming back to build a new roof, build a boiler system, and they built in into the way they're proposing to run it. In our judgment, sufficient reserves, and they've been actually quite careful to do that, so they answered a series of questions that I had sent over about current and future and potential related public costs such as road rerouting, and we have answers to those embedded in our report. So I think that would be just the one thing I would add to Andy's report, and they did, the project did submit to us financials on the proposed building and all the elements of the project costs that add up, and it's clear they're gonna have to go through a very tight review to get the kind of money they're asking for, they're asking for millions of money, dollars. So that's a next hurdle that they will face where it's unlikely the agencies that if they're willing to give them that money would pay for excessive costs. So that will be highly scrutinized when they submit it. We're going to move to general counselor comments, then we will have public comments, then we will move to a motion and a roll call vote because this involves borrowing, it requires nine people in favor of it. So general public comment, I mean, I'm sorry, general counselor comment at this time. Dorothy? To hold down the whole time, okay. I am asking that we postpone this vote tonight because the major discussion has not been held yet. I have voted for it twice. I voted for it at the community resources committee when it was one of our first meetings. We voted for the whole CPAC package. I didn't find out until later that the butters and residents in the nearby single family homes hadn't been informed of it. I also thought it was at a different place further down Northampton Road. I had been trying to find the address closer to the shopping on university drive. So when I had done a drive by, it had looked okay. We didn't discuss or go into any of it. We just approved it because it sounded like a good idea. I voted for it on the finance committee because as Andy said, he structured the vote in a very careful way so that we were looking only at certain financial aspects and the examination was done and the appropriate answers came forward. And I kept saying, when can we talk about the service coordination and the management of the plan? And mostly I have been told that that will happen in the zoning board of appeals. But I have to tell you, I find that very strange. We're a new town council and I think that we should be able to have this discussion now before we go forward because once we voted yes, all of the council members, we're not going to be asked again to vote on it. So I have a lot of questions and I have spoken to Valley CDC several times and late this afternoon, again, Laura called. So we have some areas where some of our ideas are moving closer, but we have nothing definite. So first of all, there's been the argument about is it an SRO or a studio apartment? And after looking at the plan as presented, I have to say it is an SRO, it can't be called a studio apartment because at present there's a rule that said that no residents can have an overnight guest. So the only place I've lived where I couldn't have an overnight guest was a dorm and there was a very strong structure of supervision and that dorm. And of course, we disobeyed the rules and you either snuck somebody into your dorm room or you went outside and stayed in nature. So to discuss that with Laura and there's a possibility that obviously you don't want two people living in such small spaces, 240 square feet, but that perhaps limited overnight stays because the workforce housing, they would be under the same rule and they can move right now, they would be very excited about these apartments because they are cheaper than many of the alternatives that are available. But do you think people are really gonna stay in an apartment where they can't even have somebody overnight or have their sister spend the evening? I think that's a problem. So that isn't even settled. We have been told that there will be 20 hours of property management and 20 hours of a resident service coordinator. Only today did I become clarified that the property management person does not include the maintenance staff, that it would be somebody in an office available to talk to the tenants. That's a good thing. Then the question of what hours? I have been hoping, and I'm not really saying overnight anymore, I had just been hoping for a regular 35, 40 hour week from a resident service coordinator. Now, why would you need that? Many of the tenants have different problems, different paths, and have a variety of service agencies that they work with, but somebody has to know what their plan is, and to have some idea are they following through. We discuss people in recovery. I have spent a good deal of time this summer teaching people successfully, some of whom successfully in recovery, and it's a long road, it's a difficult road, and it takes a clear plan, and it takes concentration for the person and the people around them to make sure that success is possible. So, I think we've come some distance, but the original moment that people raised questions, there was shaming and guilt, how can you question this? Oh, you must be against affordable housing, you must hate homeless people. Well, that's not true for me, and I don't think it's true for the residents, but there is a great desire that if this is going to go through, and it looks like there's a strong chance that it will, that it be a success, a success both for the people living in it, the workforce people, that they have a quiet, orderly place to relax and sleep after hard days work at a rent that they can afford, and for the residents, some of whom are coming, that are coming from homelessness, some of whom may have had substance abuse problems. But to be told that it's independent living without enough supports, I think is really a nightmare, not a dream. And so, I really recommend that we postpone the vote tonight until Laura said that there was studying and issues that they're looking at and certain financial things they have to know. Okay, to me it seems like we've been doing this a long, long time, but I think it'll continue longer. I think let's wait and see until they confirm up their plans and come with us, come to us with a good plan. Are the latest letters that have come in support from a wide variety of people have said this should be a good project if properly managed, if there's proper supervision. And I think that's what we need to know more about before we can vote yes. Are there other comments? Alyssa? So, I'm presuming that that was not an informal recommendation to postpone, but rather invoking the right to postpone in the charter, which would be an incredibly unwise move to make at this point given all the people who have come to talk to us. If you wanna decide at the end of our deliberation that you wanna postpone a vote, I think that would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but you have now just shut down all discussion of this measure by invoking the right to postpone and there's no way of us taking that back. The only person who can take that back is you and I just don't know why we would do that to all the people who are trying to participate here. I certainly do not wanna postpone discussion. That's what I'm interested in is discussion and that's what I've been asking for is discussion. So if I have to say I rescind my request to postpone the vote, I'm not really into this formality stuff. I wanna talk about it. I want answers. I don't really wanna play legal games. Steve? Yeah, so I was just gonna ask a point of order that this is councilor comments to me that would sound like a motion, which would be more appropriate. She has rescinded the motion. Okay, she's rescinded. So I also need to point out, I mean, plus one to what Alyssa said, but it's been de facto postponed already. So all the other CPA proposals were heard two weeks ago and so we as a council or really USR president decided that this should be postponed to today so that we could get more information, that we could have this public meeting that happened a week ago. So I feel it already has, I mean, I get what the section two point, whatever it is, says about the right to postpone, but I feel that we've already done much of what you've asked what councilor Pam has asked for. Are there other comments from council? Kathy? I had a chance to talk on the finance, I was gonna talk on non-finance issues, so I don't know whether Pat wants to jump in before me. Pat? I was just gonna make a comment in that when I went to the King Street property to look at an SRO that Valley CDC had created, one of the things that I got to do was to meet with the man who manages Northampton area and Amherst area. He knew tenants by name, he knew tenants by habits, he knew which tenant to go talk to because the person could address their envelope, but for whatever reason couldn't put it in the mailbox. And that seems like an odd little thing, but to me it really opened my heart that this young man had such an awareness of the tenants in the building, and not just that building, that he could converse about them, that he could make decisions on how to support them, and his position is property management, not service coordinator. I think there's been a lot of misstatement by counselors, by public, in all directions, in all directions, and I think that we need to move forward with this however the vote comes out and to delay any further would be ridiculous. Are there other comments? Kathy? Yes, I knew because I was on the finance committee that we would focus just on the finance issues. I did ask a wider range of questions, and I decided both to visit the homeless shelter here operated in Amherst, and then we were given tours of two small studio apartments that are operated by Valley CDC, by the general property manager, but we met people who lived there, we pet neighbors, and what you instantly feel when you're visiting places is these are adults living independently, and one of them, they were actually starting together to share some pizza and other food together that one had gone out, and they invited us in to have a bite with them, and we went downstairs to the cafe that's in the lower part of their building, and she talked about how wonderful it was to have the group upstairs, and one of the things they have is in this speckled Fox cafe is they have a little voucher you can buy yourself. You contribute another cup of coffee, and it goes up on a chip so someone can come in and drink a free cup of coffee, and the people upstairs contribute free cups of coffee so other people can drink a cup of coffee, but it had a very community feeling to it, and the design of it felt like a community as well as the outdoor gardens, so we'd gotten some letters of support by neighbors and downstairs people, but it was a good thing to see because I had asked about in direct support as well as property management support, and so we had a long discussion on the other memorandums of understanding where, and I have a healthcare and welfare background that if you're getting help with food stamps, you're getting help with healthcare, you're getting help with housing, you have to reapply every year for all of these, so one of the things you've got with groups is experts who know how to do each of those, working because not everyone living is gonna need each of those pieces, so they're augmented by these external services as well as the person that Pat was talking about or helping you manage a budget or you can't get your phone bill straightened out, so it was a good thing to be actual seeing it in action, and these are small spaces, and actually the proposal here would build a larger space than what I saw, but very nicely and beautifully laid out, these are beautiful buildings, is the other thing I might add. Other comments? Evan? So I wanna speak just a bit to Dorsey's concern about the process and the length of time that this has been discussed, so I first learned about this project, the specific project from the Gazette's article on it on January 16th. On January 24th, I attended the CDBG hearing on this project, which was the first time that I heard from neighbors and the butters of the project, some of whom are here today voicing their concerns, so starting on January 24th is when I first started hearing concerns from the neighbors and saw then have the opportunity to start asking questions, including questions directly of Valley CDC. The meeting for the broader neighbors, so not just the butters, but broader community, was April 24th, that's now over two months ago. Since then, this has been a persistent conversation topic for the council. It has dominated several meetings, including lengthy public comments in the finance committee meeting that discussed CPAC. The budget hearing, which I believe was May 29th, I believe the budget hearing was, which became a de facto discussion about this project. We had a four hour meeting a week ago about this project that included over two hours of public comment that in many ways represented the dialogue that we've been asked of. I find it incredible that anyone would say that this has been rushed, that people have not had time to air their concerns or ask their questions, because I've been hearing about this since January. I've seen Valley CDC, which is a fairly small nonprofit that has also been in the process of opening up another property and moving, so they are not saddled with abundant free time. Very intensely respond to questions, answer questions. I know I was at the finance committee last week when Kathy referenced that Laura Baker's response to her questions were incredibly thorough when she exceeded what she expected. So any contention that questions haven't been answered that we haven't discussed this fully, I think is frankly absurd, because we've been talking about this fully. It's been consuming more time than any other singular issue and there has been no issue in front of this, granted this council is still in its infancy, but there's been no single issue in front of this council that has been more thoroughly vetted, debated, discussed by the full council than this issue. There are other comments from the council. George. First of all, I wanted to express my gratitude to our president who has worked extremely hard. And if we spend 10 hours or more, she spent three or four times that time in making sure that information be accessible to all of you as soon as possible, often working under intense time pressure. So I'm very grateful for that and for her leadership. I'm also grateful for the work of the finance committee, whom once again has provided us with a very thorough and thoughtful report. I think the issue that lies before us this evening, and I've built this way for quite some time, really focuses on the question, two questions really, is this an appropriate use of CPA monies? And secondly, would this borrowing in any way lessen the town's ability to borrow given the impending capital projects that are coming up or would it seriously limit or hinder the CPA from doing its business? If I were to find out that either of these things were true, I would not vote for this under any circumstances. But I think that has been answered fairly clearly in the finance report, and I encourage people to read it with care. This is an appropriate use of CPA monies if there ever was one. And secondly, it's been made very clear that this will not affect or hinder in any way of the town's ability to bond for the capital projects upcoming, nor will it affect or hinder the CPA committee from doing its work over the next couple of years. So I think that issue has been addressed as to the matter of location, size of building, number of units, parking, management plan, impact on neighborhood, public safety, et cetera, et cetera. All good questions and appropriately have been asked. I think they have been answered to a large degree, but these are matters with the ZBA. There is a robust and very public process with ample opportunity for community input, both pro and con, to address these issues. I don't think this body possesses either the experience or the training or the expertise to decide matters involving zoning. That's why we have a ZBA, and that's why they're advised in these matters by a very professional planning department, and that's why they follow very strict and careful guidelines in making these sorts of determinations. We would in essence, it seems to me, be substituting our ill-informed opinions and judgments in matters that are carefully delimited by law and subject to legal challenge and potential lawsuit. I don't think this body would like to be in that situation. We have a robust and open process, and I think we should follow it. Additional comments? Man, did you? So this has been an interesting issue for me to think about because until about 10 months ago, I lived approximately 400 feet away from the property, and I no longer do because of the landlord's rules on where I was living. So I had to move within two years of a certain incident, but a certain happy incident. But so I lived in the neighborhood for seven years, and so I feel like I know it fairly well. And that is why it's been a tough issue for me to think about because I've heard some things about the neighborhood that I don't necessarily agree with. At the same time, some of the items that have been brought up by individuals, I absolutely do think are legitimate concerns, and I'll mention them in a minute, but our role at the town council is to figure out whether this project should be funded, not the specifics of exactly what the project needs to look like in terms of its permitting. This project, if you look at our master plan, ticks a whole number and a whole lot of boxes for what our master plan is seeking in housing, not just affordable housing, but housing in general. It is a mixed income project in and of itself. It is a project that, where it is cited, will bring diversity to the neighborhood in which it is being cited for both housing type, but also avoiding enclaves of poverty or wealth, which is objective H1 in our master plan. It is located in downtown close to services. At the same time, it is easily walkable to a large grocery store. I've walked both directions from that neighborhood on a regular basis, and they're all affordable, including some units that would provide housing for special populations. Also an item, both that, the homeless, and the Department of Mental Health ones that are called out in our master plan. The relative amount of money that Valley CDC is seeking from Amherst and the CPA grant, as it relates to the number of units is within the goals of our affordable housing trust in terms of cost per unit for the town. And our town has a large commitment to affordable housing. Now to the concerns that I have. Since I lived in the neighborhood, I recognize that if built at the size it is being proposed, it's a large building for the neighborhood. It's hard to say it's not. It is, it may be out of scale, it may not be, but it is large for that neighborhood. And there are some concerns about the service plan, but including that they may not, that the current as proposed may not be adequate to serve some of the residents that may end up living there, mainly a portion of those that are coming out of homelessness. But both of these concerns, in my opinion, are more properly addressed, as George said, at the permitting stage. And I have to put my trust in the fellow residents that this council just appointed to the permit granting bodies that they'll thoroughly consider the project and these concerns. And given that, I think we need to make a decision not just on whether there's concerns that could be addressed later on, but what the good of the town, what is the good for the town I was elected as an out-large counselor. So that's where my thing says, but we've heard arguments about the property taxes won't pay for the cost that the town would be doing. But you know what, we as a council don't analyze projects on only is there a good return on investment, including money. If that's how we analyze projects, we'd never build single family homes intended for students to live in because the cost of educating a student in any one year out costs the amount of property taxes collected from any one resident. And then another argument that was made is that it won't make a significant dent in the homeless population. If we were to only fund projects that were gonna make a significant dent, we wouldn't fund projects because it would be really hard to make a significant dent in our affordable housing needs in this town in just one project. That said, I will point out that this project would provide 28 units and our housing production plan aims to add 50 units per year. 28 of 50 is a good 64% of an annual goal. So that is actually a significant dent in our housing production plan for a year. So I think we should be voting and I think we should be voting yes because the CPA funds are appropriate and it's a good value for the community as a whole. Additional comments. Andy. So I'm gonna take a slightly different but still consistent position of my, most of the people who've spoken. Just say that his former member of the select board former member of town meeting said I've looked at these kinds of processes for quite a number of years and I don't recall ever having been put in a position of voting that we've actually voted on a proposal like this at this stage of the process where we're voting on the CPA. The closest probably who was the Plum Brook development, but that's been quite some time and was overturned by the voters in the end and the voters made the final decision to go forward. But I think that the major thing that strikes me from the experiences that I've looked at is that there have been numbers of times when we've relied on the permit granting bodies, the ZBA and the planning board and every one of those times I think that they've really done excellent job for the community. I look at what happened with the beacon proposal in North Amherst for North Square and they had an extremely robust process. They ended up granting the permit but with 130 conditions. It was not lightly done. I've looked at what they've been doing with some of the proposals for marijuana dispensary facilities and it's not just been an automatic lock. They have looked at each one very carefully. It made sure that they were putting on the kinds of conditions that were appropriate for the business that was being proposed to be run in a responsible manner and that were location specific and appropriate for the location. And I look at what the planning board has done with many projects, including the retreat which was the one that ended up not being built after the planning board process but it was an extremely thoughtful and thorough planning board process that went forward. So I look forward if we, regardless of how this goes to having the zoning board of appeals, assuming that that is going to be the body that hears this, to have the opportunity to do it. I think our permit granting bodies have always done and I think have done extremely well to the benefit of this community. Additional comments? Pat? This has been a difficult process for me in many ways but there's been something very powerful for me embedded in it and that's the attendance here and at other meetings of people both opposed and people who were for the project. I think that we need to find ways to talk across difference and I felt there were real attempts on the walk particularly to talk to me as a mother, as a counselor, as a woman, as a resident of Amherst and to share concerns. It was a learning process for me and I value the relationships I've started to make with some people both again for and against. So while it has been an incredibly difficult process for everyone, I think we need to move forward and move forward finding ways to move forward together. And I do think that's possible. Additional comments? Let me make a couple comments of my own. So I kept wondering, well, what can we do as a council? Not unlike what Dorothy's been asking before we pass this on to the next phase. Could we put conditions on our vote? And I explored that and found out we can't. We either vote this or we don't vote it. But I wanna point out that this is a legislative process and this is a record. Tonight is a record, our minutes form a record, our video forms a record. So even if there are issues that we still feel unsettled about, they're on the record and we've stated what those conditions and situations are, whether it's because it's too big or whether it's because it doesn't have enough support services. In the end, I'm very supportive of this and I hope that we as a town will put our money where our mouth is and go forward. Are there other comments before we go to public comment? Okay, public comment. This is three minutes and I would prefer that to the extent we become repetitive, we just keep moving on, okay? Please, absolutely. It's hard to talk and sign at the same time. Elisa Campbell, Pine Grove, representing the League of Women Voters of Amherst, which supports this project. And basically because the league has for a long time supported having housing for as many different kinds of people and income levels as possible. And this is an example of an attempt to do that. I have been paying attention in the last several weeks to additional information that's come out about the costs of housing in the country and versus incomes in the country, also in the state. I don't have specific numbers for Amherst, but in the state with a minimum wage currently of $12 an hour, the fair market rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1,425 a month. Someone making $12 an hour would have to work 91 hours a week to pay for that at fair market rent. For a studio, the fair market rent is $1,272. That tenant would need to earn $24.46 an hour and 46 cents an hour to pay for a studio apartment at fair market rent in Massachusetts, meaning 30% of their income. And we have a minimum wage of $12 an hour. I think most of us are aware that the cost of housing has gone up a lot and recently it's gone up even more. The basic reason is because we haven't built enough throughout the country and specifically here as well. Last year I read a book called Dream Hoarders about the way that zoning and rules and regulations and building codes have been probably not intentionally, but nonetheless have had the effect of raising the drawbridge that those of us who have a place to live, who already own a place, may be doing just fine, but people who need a place who are younger or got into the housing market later for whatever reason often don't. So I think it's really urgent that we do what we can in this town. Thank you. Thank you for your comments, additional comments. I'd like to call on people who've not commented yet this evening, if I could. Yeah, please. Okay, I'm Barbara Graven Wilbur. I am an immediate butter. I wanna state for the record that I have never been against affordable housing. I have spent some time, perhaps not as much as you all have, but some time on this, and it's been a real learning experience, affordable housing is an issue. I have some concerns about the size. I won't go into that because it's repetitive. I also have concerns that looking at data that I saw and it wasn't extensive, housing for homeless singles has remained pretty steady since 2007 through 2018, whereas family housing has more than doubled. The need for homeless families has more than doubled. I would like to urge the town when they're considering affordable housing that they do a couple of things. One, that they start focusing on families as well. If you're single and you need a place, is it not easier to find another single that perhaps you guys can go together or three or four and get together? Maybe not ideal, but it's certainly a lot easier as a single than it is for a family. Secondly, I think that what Alyssa just said about housing, the town needs to be better about enforcing quotas on developers that they do build affordable housing and not the big mansions. The same is true with renters, either independents who are renting their home out that they take in more low income or create affordable housing. And I look forward to learning more about zoning and being quite active in the zoning board. Thanks very much. You guys have done well beyond and I do appreciate it. Thank you for your comments. Additional comments over here. Yes, please you may come forward but you do not bring your signs forward. Oh, it's my nose. Okay, that's different. My best. Please sit down, state your name. I totally support it. My voucher runs out in four days and my choice was between a place that has a lot of people that you want to put into diverse housing and I chose it was better in my car. So quickly that the rainbow gathering actually separate. They do a segregation. I'm into diversity but I'm not into segregating problematic people with. They have an ACAMP and so the people who need high maintenance are not with the other people because the people who don't have problems deserve a proper normal right to their property and use of enjoyment. I wish that the information was not a download. I could never get it but I don't like the lumping of homeless. I am homeless but I am not low life and there was no way I was gonna live at the one apartment complex that has become a place where people are not independent. So I really wish people would lump character and lifestyle because they really, you can't not homeless. I do think that there should be some incentive which is maybe that people should have to be in some program before they get in. I've been on the streets for a year and there are a lot of people, they're not wanting help and I really, okay I better read because there's time. Okay, both house and house could have negative or positive impact and yes, one person could totally impact not one complex but two complexes and they're not even someone who's technically needs a babysitter. I think that the police calls, I think there's problems that should be addressed before people pre-think new problems which are police calls and visits from APD indicate such areas. I think that money, that those places should be fined or have some sort of reward program for not having calls. I don't think on-site patrol. I am in my situation because I was a victim from both white collar crime and blue collar. The last thing I wanna do is be treated like an inmate or also be left to deal with the people that everyone is so nicely wanting to embrace. I don't know why they have to go together. Okay, incentives and repercussions, good behavior rewarded. I think that saving them money by actually not enabling so much belating alcohol use. Like you know what, if you wanna get a place you have to at least care enough to try. I'm distressed to hear that marijuana would not be legal but drugs and alcohol are. Am I have four days for my voucher? I'm in North Square a lot are really close but I probably won't be able to find out in time before my voucher. I was offered a site Unseen Valley Development Corporation thing which is not suited because I'm chemically sensitive and upstairs and no air is not gonna work. However, I'm starting to wonder, is this gonna be an apartment where I'm gonna have extremely troubled neighbors again? Meaning that I will not be allowed proper normal use of enjoyment. Okay, overnight guests, yes. Nothing like more like being treated like an inmate or if that you can't have a guest. Hello? Yes, people blow that and they have permanent roommates but that can be looked at like any property management should. Okay, okay, five months. Should it take me five months to get a place? Broker fee is really what is one of the main things people need of a path to homelessness. If you don't have the broker fee and so to that end, I think some of the organizations should be a little better looked at that supposedly help the homeless because they feel they're doing a very inefficient job and perhaps hindering. Thank you. And I really want the project to work and I have faith in all you good people that it will. Thank you for your comments. Who else would like to speak? Come forward. John Page, 683 East Pleasant Street. I grew up in affordable housing so I was glad to see that we actually got to hear from people's experiences who live in affordable housing at the 24th meeting. Their voice is often lost in the conversation. I would also like to make a bold statement that Amherst needs the people that need affordable housing from school teachers as somebody referenced to firefighters, seniors, people with disabilities, working in professionals trying to get their start. If we're going to continue to be a dynamic and diverse community that is economically viable and that welcomes people of all walks of life, addressing the housing affordability crisis in our community must be a top priority of this body. And this project is one piece of that puzzle. I am proud of the outpouring support from community members and social service organizations that this project has received and hope that the council takes this important step to addressing just one piece of this critical housing need in our community. We will still have a long, long, long zoning process to go but I look forward to the prospect of welcoming 28 individuals, maybe 28, into Amherst, whoever they are, to a place where they can now call home, where they can enjoy our act of downtown and maybe even stroll through Pratt Field. I hope the community invites them to their neighborhood brunch and cares for them as neighbors as they do each other, as we should, with dignity, respect, and compassion. Town council, I implore you to delay no further, to show policy leadership and unanimously approve the CPA funding for this project as recommended by the CPA committee, the municipal housing trust, the housing authority, lead by example and do what is right for all there. Thank you. Thank you. Additional comments at this time. This woman right here, yes. Good evening. My name is Amy Gilbert-Loinas. I live at 14 Orchard Street. I do have a lot of concerns about the citizen participation process and all the way going back to the CBD committee meeting where there was no outreach to neighbors before this was voted on in January. There was no immediate outreach to neighbors when it calls for pursuant to a mandated citizen participation plan at all the stages of planning and implementation. This may be something that I need to bring up later during the zoning board process. So as Barbara said, we look forward to looking at the zoning board of appeals and that whole process and getting familiar with that. As I was doing my research, I didn't have a chance to go so much into the consolidated plan. But right now I wanna talk more about the lack of services that have been detailed for this project. I am a public health professional and I had just learned last week that there were no resident service coordinators at any of the four sites in Northampton. And while I appreciate that the property manager knows the residents and knows them and can help them in their daily living, they are not social service experts who can deal with crises or deal with the needs of this very vulnerable population in transition from homelessness or dealing with mental health issues and really being able to direct them in a professional way. So I've heard about all this expertise of Valley CDC and I will give you that they seem to be construction experts, but I ask you, where is the programming expertise? We're asking for services recommended by all the relevant federal and state agencies as well as true expert clinicians who work with this, the vulnerable population that is within this targeted group. Valley CDC has not been responsive to our concerns. We're asking for 24-hour care and accessibility seven days a week, which is the standard of care for high needs populations in permanent supportive housing. Valley CDC also states that the supportive services agency that recommends tenants are responsible for their care. That these services are offered up to 12 months on average for those receiving federal funding from HUD, HUD stipulates that tenants are to be offered services for the duration of their stay. Not 12 months, but for the duration of their stay. When I asked Valley CDC what would happen if those providers couldn't offer services the particular applicant needed, I was told that they wouldn't accept the applicant. We were all here when members of Amherst Ford lectured the town council about your obligations under the Olmsted Act. In fact, it's not town council that is at risk of being in violation of fair housing, but it's actually Valley CDC if they decide to cherry pick their vulnerable population to meet their limited services. I implore the town council to obtain a detailed service plan from Valley CDC so that it can be properly evaluated. Please wrap up. Okay, we've heard from AMHT staff that you should not worry about the details of this plan that there are safeguards along the process in the ZBA. If you vote yes without understanding the service component of the project, you are saying yes without really knowing what you are saying yes to. Additional comments at this time. Back here. So I can't identify because I'm a victim of domestic violence and I have an open case with the district attorney's office because the abuser violated a condition of a restraining order. So I can't do that right now, but I tried to talk last week and I just wanted to sort of finish up because it's important. But I will show anyone my ID and give you information about the case if you need it. I'm just asking the press to respect that. Smith College donated 550, this was not alone, $1,000 to the Valley CDC for project development costs for the 96, 98 King Street Apartments in Northampton. $100,000 to the Valley CDC for an affordable property on Pleasant Street that just opened. And in 2008 gave $220,000 to subsidize the development of four new apartments at 4648 School Street, which not only a butt Smith, but a neighborhood park and green space frequented by skaters, children, animals and families. I tried to talk about how difficult it was for me to read the critiques and the information being disseminated by some of the Amherst College professors last week. It's really painful. So I care a lot about this issue and I'm really mortified that 11 or 12 people that don't represent Biddy Martin, the chair of the board, or the alumni. Please do not go personal. Well, they don't are saying that access to Pratt Field is gonna be restricted because it is sort of a criminality narrative and a doomsday prediction for a small group of potential tenants that have not even been selected, chosen. You know nothing about who they are. They could be a victim of domestic violence. It could be anyone. It could be you. It could be your daughters. And I'm really sick of the stereotyping. So I just, it is so painful to hear that. Amherst is not 50 people. There are thousands of people in this town that you represent. This is a minority and what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing in the paper is abhorrent. And I urge you to pass this. These people need protection. They are not all drug addicts or alcoholics. They don't need to be infantilized. They need to be loved. Pratt Field is not gonna close. Period. It's fear-mongering. It has to stop. I mean, we need you. They need you. It has to stop. And I'm gonna do something. I will take it out of here and I will go to Biddy Martin's office. This is ridiculous. The dean of faculty needs to be involved. UMass would never do this. Never. Thank you. Thank you. All the way in the back. The gentleman here. Excuse me. I'm Nate Buddington. I live in North Amherst and I'm a chair of the CPA Committee and I sort of wanna take off on what the last speaker just said. I think in this debate that we've been in the middle of there's this belief that a lack of in-house supervision immediately invites trouble. And I think we need to be clear that this isn't a halfway house and it's not a mental health facility. It's housing for low-income people. Some of whom are struggling in ways other than financial but not everybody. And the prospective residents or clients are pretty thoroughly vetted to present those, to prevent those living in this space who may be violent or disruptive or otherwise criminal. And I think like other successful Valley CDC SROs this facility is designed as a complement to the neighborhood and not as a distraction. And I think they've been pretty clear about that. To get to what the previous speaker said floating around this discussion and this demand for this request for 24-7 staffing is the idea that low-income people left to their own devices revert to a kind of default set of behaviors that degrades the neighborhood. And I don't think there's any evidence to show that that's the case. These are predominantly people who are low-income, who are struggling, who are single, who may have some mental health problems, who may be veterans, who may be victims of domestic violence, who may be transitioning out of homelessness. They just need a place to stay. They need a place to make a meal and to be housed. And there's zero evidence that bad behavior comes from low-income people living together based on the experience that Valley CDC's programs in Northampton generate. They haven't generated any neighborhood demand for in-house supervision. And there's been no significant demand for it since those projects opened. These projects work. So I mean, you could say we'll approve this project but we need, we're gonna ask you to provide 24-7 in-house supervision. But I remember at the open forum, the chief of police was asked, what do you think of these kind of projects? And his response was, if they're well-managed, I'm okay with it. And I think in Valley CDC, we have about the best, most experienced, most invested management possible. I mean, it just doesn't get any better than Valley CDC from what I've seen. Mike Giles, who's a neighbor of this project at the open forum warned us that you could easily kill this project by delaying it for quote, further study, unquote. And I don't think this needs further study. This isn't a pilot program. It's not an experiment. It's been done multiple times in Northampton and it works. I hope you'll see this project for what it is, well-located, appropriately scaled, exceptionally well-managed, desperately needed. I urge you to approve this project as proposed without delay. Thank you for your comments. Chairman Wayback, yes. I'll be very brief. I'm Peter Jessup and until recently, I was a long-term resident of Amherst and for a member of the Community Preservation Act committee for 10 years, and I think I chaired it for six or seven, way too long. More than I probably should have. I just wanna say thanks to Nate for his comments. I'm not even gonna talk about that, but I do wanna support Mr. Ryan's comments, Mr. Steinberg's comments, that the focus I think of the council, it's interesting because all the work I did with CPA was before town meeting, and I supported the charter completely. I'm glad to see you here. I'm glad to see you performing these roles. I get how it's a little different from town meeting though. I get how you might think this is the place where you can or need to intervene, and I actually agree with Mr. Ryan. I think the questions before you are, should you support this CPA appropriation as a beginning step towards moving this project forward? And I think the answer to that is yes. I think that's your responsibility. I think that's your obligation, and I hope you do do that. Thank you. Thank you. Additional comments? Yes. Again, Vince O'Connor, Summer Street, and I am a low income tenant, and I have been for the 45 years I've lived in town. And so what I would caution the council, even though your decision is really about the money, not to buy into the assurances that you've been given about the zoning board of appeals. As a tenant, I made a number of suggestions regarding the North Square project. In that project, the zoning board of appeals granted 134 exceptions to the zoning bylaw, and did not take into account any concern for the tenants who were gonna live there, the family tenants, because 104 of those 130 units are gonna be student housing. So, and I attended and provided written testimony about some of the five story buildings on One East Pleasant Street. And in that process, I listened to the proponents allege that all those tenants were gonna be new age people who didn't drive automobiles. And that every bedroom would only have one resident, even though the one bedroom apartments were priced at $1,800 to $2,000, and the two bedrooms at $23 to $2,500. Believe me, I think you may have one, one, I think it is a mistake to demonize neighbors who have concerns because some of those concerns are legitimate. I spent a lot of time in Cushman, where Mr. Steinberg lives, addressing those issues by knocking on the doors of almost all the homeowners in that place eight or 10 times as a member of the building committee for the Housing Authority for their duplex programs. The neighbors have legitimate concerns. They need to be listened to. They don't need to be turned over to a board who is simply going to demonize them, ignore them, ram the project through and do it because I will just say, the only project of this nature where significant changes were made to the project was at Long Meadow Drive. And that resulted from 10 years of litigation and appeals. If you don't want that process to go on, I strongly recommend that you not demonize the neighbors, that you listen to what they say, and that you make absolutely certain in whatever way you can that whoever hears this, whether it's the planning board or zoning board of appeals, takes their concerns seriously and renders balanced judgment, not the judgment that I have been seeing for the last 10 or 15 years out of both the planning board and zoning board. Are there additional comments at this time? Please come forward. Make gauge, district one, I'm going to be super brief. This is definitely not one of the issues that the public hasn't heard about. So that's good to note. I want to make, I'm strongly in favor of this project. I am not going to repeat the arguments that have been made before, but I want to make three very quick points that I don't think have been made. I live around the corner from the survival center and people in our neighborhood had initially some anxiety about that and nothing has, there've been no problems at all and it's been only a source of pride and a highly functioning and so wonderful experience to live near the survival center. It's very heartening for me to see the very broad political support behind this and it's one of the most hopeful things about it that people on all sides of previous debates are agreeing on this. And I think it's important to have reconciliation and people trying ever to get together, but the best way to have people get together across a broad political spectrum is to work on policy together. And also, I just want to remind people that we have had a very successful small studio apartment project in the downtown which was the Drake and I made, I had printed for you to look at this iconic, this is now art picture that's on a graffiti that's on the side of the Amherst Cinema because this was a huge battle many decades ago to save the Drake for willy in humanity. This studio, small studio apartments was in the middle, right in downtown, very near Lincoln Avenue, very near high end homes on North Prospect Street. When we, the board, I was with the Amherst Cinema, when I was the chair of the board, partnered with Barry Roberts, one of the big feedback that we got from everybody was to save this art. Although that's, anyway, I think it's just good to remember we've had this before and it was very successful. Thank you. Are there other comments at this time? Please come forward. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Tim Adderidge and I live at 143 North Hampton Road and I've heard a lot of comments that I really liked coming from the town council, a couple that I wasn't pleased with but that's the way it goes. The comment that Councillor Steinberg said that the finance committee looked at this and this was a sound business proposition. Although I have agreed with him on many of occasion at town meeting, I have to disagree on this one. Who would get into business with someone who buys a piece of property for $407,000 and doesn't have a plan for it? At the time of purchase, they did not have a financial plan. They've approached the CPAC for $500,000 and for the CBDG for $250,000 and they've already received $53,000 from the town to do the study. I question the validity of getting into a business partnership with someone who operates like that. Now one of the previous speakers said that VCDC got, I can't remember the totals but a lot of money from Smith College. Now I've often wondered how VCDC can run a successful business as a nonprofit and now I can understand it that they get money from a lot of different places and as a matter of fact, I think that when you, if you approve this, that will trigger them being able to receive other monies from either federal or state organizations. My point being, however, is that I doubt if they're so forthcoming with their business dealings and if in the future is the town of Amherst going to be on the hook for costs that may be at that time considered unintended consequences. So I asked the town council to think seriously about approving the CPAC funds. Now, someone said earlier that there was a question about this is the appropriate use of the money. It is the appropriate use of the money, no doubt about it. There's only so many categories you can use that money for and this is one of them. So I just wanted to make sure that my thoughts on this are on the record. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Are there additional comments at this time? Okay, then I'm going to move back to the council. We have a motion which I would read and it is based on the item up there and the motion that I need someone to make is to adopt appropriation and transfer order FY20-10 and order appropriating CPA funds as a grant for Valley Community Development Corporation. Amherst studio apartments is recommended by the finance committee and shown on page seven of the document entitled town council finance committee recommendation on community preservation act proposal. Do I hear a motion? So moved. A second. Okay, any further comments at this time? This is a roll call vote with requires nine votes. Athena. Councilor Brewer. Aye. Councilor D'Angeles. Yes. Councilor Dumont. Yes. Councilor Grusmer. Yes. Councilor Haneke. Yes. Councilor Pam. Abstain. Councilor Ross. Yes. Councilor Ryan. Yes. Councilor Shane. Yes. Councilor Schreiber. Yes. Councilor Steinberg. Yes. Councilor Swartz. Aye. I have 10. 10 with one abstention. So the vote is 11, four. One abstain, no, no against one abstain and one absent. I'm sorry, 11, zero, one. Thank you. We're going to take a break at this time. Thank you. We'd like to continue our meeting. We're going to reconvene. Okay. We're going to reconvene. Certainly know how to clear a room. I said I certainly know how to clear a room. Okay. We are reconvening and I just want to mention that Amherst media actually was able to connect back up, but unfortunately only partway through the public comment. So we will be figuring out with them how to mesh the two sets of. So we back live? No, we're not going over it again. I promise you. I just want to know if we're back live now. We're back live. We are back live. Rerun. Replay, replay. I already have to have two adjournments. Okay. We are moving on to item C, seven C. It's to establish a process for candidates to publish statements regarding their candidacy on the town bulletin board. And let me just state, this is a requirement of the charter that under section 7.6, publication of candidates statements that the town council shall establish a process compliant with state campaign and political financial laws for candidates whose name will appear on the election ballot to publish statements regarding their candidacy on the town bulletin board. And given this, rather than us sit here and discuss, well, what do we think that means and how are you going to go about it? Well, we are more than glad to hear public comment. And the council will discuss it. The motion tonight is to refer this to GOL to put some meat on the bones and come back with us. I will say that it's important that we do this since we do have a fall election coming up. So council comments at this time. Alyssa. So I had a couple of quick ones out, associated with just the way we word the motion when it eventually gets made, just to make it clear that we're not referring a process, we're referring an idea, just as we did with a couple of the others. And you know, this is all words, but I totally understand. So like to make sure we reference Charter section 7.6 in it, just to show that yeah, we're doing a thing that we're required to do rather than just, we just thought we wanted more work. But the other, and of course, then my concern is that the other, so wordsmith a little mentioned the charter and I'm trying not to laugh hysterically at the idea of this being done by July 22nd because this is gonna require actual count attorney look at this. This is gonna require ethics people to talk to the attorney, et cetera. This is why we don't do it already is because it's complicated. And so I appreciate that fall would be awesome, but I don't think two weeks is gonna work. Additional comments. Yes, Dorothy. Just to say, I think it's a good idea. Okay. Darcy. Just wondering if the process is going to end up being in our rules. Is that the ultimate goal? The rules of procedure? Yes. I guess my question is, where is this process gonna end up? Good question, Manny Jo. So I'll try to answer it as potentially that, well, I am the chair of GOL, but I don't think it would be appropriate for the rules since the process would apply not just to town council elections, but all municipal elections. And the rules are rules only apply to us as counselors. Potentially it would look similar to what GOL put forth to the council and the council adopted for the public ways policy, just a sheet of paper and then you would adopt, it could look like just adopting a policy or whatever the charter wording is, a process for having candidate statements on that's just a separate document is one possibility. I'm sure GOL could come up with a few others, but that would be what I would think it might look like. So where would such a policy reside if anyone were looking for it? Manny Jo. GOL could make a recommendation as to where on the town's website that policy could reside. GOL also currently has under its referral to discuss where all town adopted policies will reside on the website. So the charter reads it's to establish a process. And when it says compliant with state campaign and political financial laws, it really is a matter of what are we willing to put up? What do we think we legally can put up and what can we not put up? Okay. Are there other comments? Yes, Kathy. One thought and I like referring it to GOL to develop how would this work is when we were running, so I'm assuming it'll happen again, there was an elections page, so there was a place you could go to how to file where you've got information. So if we made it very prominent, it's not clear where you would go right now. I'm on the town website, would you? For example, but under government there could be something saying elections and candidate statements. So my thought on this, I think it's a great idea and there was no place to go last time. So I also, if I would hope that GOL will come back with a little bit of guidance on what can be the content of that. So not just I'm running and I'm a great person, but the issues, few issues I'm running on and a bit about me, so a little bit about background of each so we get a fairly standardized form with a section on each with some suggestions, you write something there so people can go across and look at people instead of getting some person does a paragraph and someone does two pages. Any additional comments from the council? Yes, Andy. Yeah, I'm going to vote in favor because I really look forward to the study that the committee will give to it. It may be that the town website in fact is not the best place for this to be and it may be that organization like, and I'll just pull it out of there, the League of Women Voters might be a more appropriate website because they have as their role in forming voters and there may be less of the legal issues the GOL might discover, but without doing the study, we're not going to find out. Okay, Dorothy. Well, of course I thought of the League, but and you would have to then do a link, but I think I would like it on the town website and then I hope that when sometime in the future we agree that we'll have videos or websites on the town page that we would be in a process. Obviously this is going to take a long time to work out, but I think that's, we talked about making a more level playing field. I think that's one way to do it so that the candidate would know, okay, I can put a statement, I can have a video, I can have other things, or maybe a brief website on the town website. Or links too. Okay. Additional comments. Yes, Andy. Yeah, just to follow up on that, we are back to the OCPF question, the Office of Campaign and Political Finance as to whether the town can use any town resources for political purposes. I think that the rules, as I understand them are fairly clear on the subject and I look forward to the committee's thorough study of those rules and making sure that we only go forward with something if it meets those tests. Evan. So I want to echo what Alyssa said. I'm mostly concerned about the July 22nd date. I just heard from Andy and Kathy the words thorough study. And right now, GOL has one meeting scheduled between now and the 22nd. Also, I am gone for a week in July and then our chair is also on another continent. So we have some limited flex, we're limited in our ability to schedule additional meetings. Depending on how thorough you want us to look at this, July 22nd might not be reasonable. Of course, the question then becomes the next meeting is very likely August 19th. We have people who are pulling papers now. What, I think the date that we choose needs to both be reasonable for GOL but also needs to keep in mind given that people have already started pulling papers, when would we want to see these profiles or whatever go up? Because that might also dictate when we look for them. So, Alyssa, I hope you're working on crafting the motion. And second of all, let me just say all that would be expected on July 29th is just an update. If you expect to come in with a fully cooked process, good luck. The second thing is that I also urge the committee to stage that maybe there's a minimum amount we can do for this election, but then there's more we can do by the next election so that it's not likely have to come up with a full and complete process at once. Just to think about it that way. Are there other comments? Yes, Mandy Jones. I just wanted to see if we knew what date papers were due back to the clerk's office. Athena. It's September 17th. So we have a little time in there. We have a meeting on August 19th. We have a meeting on August 26th. Then we have a meeting on September 9th. Alyssa. Just to be a further wet blanket associated with this. So on the 19th and the 26th, we can do almost no normal council business because we're gonna be focused on the evaluation. I think that it is entirely fair to manage expectations associated with this as a brand new thing that is in the charter and that is supposed to be reported back on. I think that we can't get it done in time for this election. I appreciate the stage and comment and it is theoretically possible that a minor thing could be done but no candidate should be counting on this being available to them this fall. It's just, it's unrealistic because the office campaign political finance idea, like I said, if this was possible to do, it would already be being done. So we're gonna have to find a way to really find our way along an edge of something that might be possible. So along those lines, what I'm hoping is perhaps just to boss GOL around a little bit here that when they take this into account, maybe you could have a brief meeting and then throw it over to the attorney. And while you guys were away, let them work out if anybody else in Massachusetts has been able to figure out a way to do this. And that way they're busy working away while you're off on vacation. That sounds like a really good way of managing it because sitting down and saying, well, we'd really like to have videos. Well, we'd really like to have charts. It doesn't, none of that matters. What matters is what we're allowed to do. And then we can flush it out. Dorothy. So again, this is what we're allowed to do. Can we have a link to the League of Women Voters page with the, with the candidates thing? Or is that something that's very difficult? I think at this point, we'd rather not sit here and debate what we can and can't do. Let the attorneys figure that one out. Are there other comments, questions? Are there comments from the audience? Okay. Melissa, I want to hear this magical motion. You see, this is the punishment I get for speaking up. Evan, by the way, has the right to chime in on this one too. If, if Evan has a better idea, I'm all for it. I was looking at just basically trying to pull the language out of section 7.6. So it could be something like, I move to refer to GOL. Recommendate, let's see. What I'm trying to do is have GOL bring a process back to us. We're not sending a process to them. No one's written a process yet, but we're trying to get them to recommend a process to us, but then we still have to agree to it before it can be implemented. And it includes charter section 7.6, because it has to be compliant with state campaign, blah, blah, blah. But we don't have to say all those words. I think that is a clear motion. So what about I move that the council charges GOL with advising the council on a process for candidates to publish statements regarding their candidacy on the town bulletin board per charter section 7.6, comma, with a report to the town council on July 22, 2019. Athena. Initial report, Paralisa. Okay. Do you have it? I move that the town council charges GOL with advising the town council on a process for candidates to publish statements regarding their candidacy on the town bulletin board pursuant to charter section 7.6 with a report to the town council, with an initial report to the town council on July 22nd, 2019. Okay. So that's, are you making that motion? Sure. Okay. Second. There's a, some motions been made in a second today. Is there any further discussion at this time? All right. So Athena, just to make sure that you've got it and we've got it, okay? I move that the town council charges GOL with advising the town council on a process for candidates to publish statements regarding their candidacy on the town bulletin board pursuant to charter section 7.6 with an initial report to the town council on July 22nd, 2019. Okay. The motion has been made in second. Is there any further discussion? Yes. Is it necessary to limit what candidates? Let me just say. No. I don't think so at this time. That's consistent with the charter. All right. All those in favor, please say I and raise your hand. Aye. Aye. Opposed, abstain, 12, 0, 0, 1 absent. Okay. Moving on. The next item is actually Mandy Jo, you have three proposed committee charge changes, BCG, JCPC and GOL and we're prepared to show them up here. And I believe that the first two are pretty much straightforward but why don't I just turn it over to you at this time? Yes. I'll speak to BCG first and then we can vote. And then I'll speak to the next ones after each vote and discussion. So BCG, this council on January 7th, 2019 actually referred to GOL when it adopted the original BCG charge to fix the formatting. And so we have come up with a revised BCG charge, budget coordinating group charge. The main changes are the addition of a purpose section completely because there was not one we could just transfer over to the new template. This charge was mainly revised to put it in compliance with the template that the GOL committee had adopted. We turned the type to town from council, given our learning on types of committees. And beyond that, there really weren't any other changes. So the thing to look at is the purpose section. The GOL committee on May 22nd, 2019 voted unanimously to recommend the council approve the revised BCG charge as amended at the meeting. At the meeting, there were some copy editing amendments. Okay, are there questions or comments? The motion is to approve the revised BCG charge as recommended by GOL on June 24, 2019. Is there a motion? So moved. A second. Second. Evan is a second. Any further discussion? All those in favor, raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. 12001. Okay, the next one please. The next one is the JCPC charge. This one on May 22nd, GOL also voted unanimously to recommend the council approve the revised JCPC charge as amended at the meeting. Again, this one looks like there's a lot more amendments, but basically it just put it into the template and added a purpose statement again because the original charge that the council had passed did not have a purpose statement. The purpose statement tracks very much the charter language, and so that was the biggest sort of addition to that charge too. Any questions? So the motion at this point is to approve the revised JCPC charge as recommended by GOL on June 24, 2019. Do I hear a motion? George? Aye. A second. Second. Andy Pat D'Angelo's any further discussion? All those in favor, raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. One absent. Okay. So it's 12001. The next one please. The next one is the governance, organization and legislation committee charge itself. So our GOL committee is bringing to the council a revised GOL charge. This one is in your packet and the goal of the revisions here were to bring the charge into compliance with the template that GOL adopted and also simplify the wording of the charge to ensure that there's precision in what the charge says and says we can do. Our original charge had two bullet points and we have extended that or separated that out into the three bullet points if I counted correctly. And essentially what we did was split the first bullet point into two bullet points and then a separate one in there. And so that was in order to clarify what that first bullet point actually meant. There was a lot of clauses in that first bullet point and there was a lot of confusion by the council as to what was actually charged to GOL. And so the goal of this charge, this revision is to clarify all of that. The report that I was submitted on June 24th details all of that and the discussions that went on. And we voted on May 22nd unanimously to recommend that the council approve the revised GOL charge. Are there comments on this charge at this time? Yes, Garcy. I just would, I have a question for you, Mandy Jo. Could you just give me an example of where you would advise the town council on matters of town governance and organization? Yes. That one would be most easily described as if the town manager submits a reorganization plan for the government as a whole. It has to come to the council for approval. And so that would under this charge be referred to the GOL for that review under the charter and advising of the council for that review. So a reorganization plan submitted by the town manager is one. Another one is the organization of committees that the town, that GOL has already undertaken to think about and look at the structure of town committees is another example. Thank you. Questions and comments? Kathy. It's a comment more than a question. You've added a sub bullet annually to review the town council rules of procedure. And as you know, cause we were on that committee ad hoc committee together, we have it at least once a year. We're coming back at a minimum and looking at our committee structure and we can just be affirming it but the council needs to do it. So I just, you know, thinking this through, it's, I think it makes sense. Like if it's something not working, is it working well? But I think we should remember that we wanna have the whole council take at least a quick look at it each year. So it's not just that it's the document that you look at it and say, how we doing? Yes. So is your, each of the bullets, the first two bullets begin with the word advise. Right. And this one says annually review. So that's the way it's written would be like just geo. So I'm just looking at it. It doesn't mean that just geo L is reviewing it but it implies that their review process is only happening at geo L. So may I respond? Please. It is a sub bullet of advise. And so it was meant to clarify that geo L would be the initial annual reviewer to bring anything back to the full council after that to make sure that no one forgets that we need to do it annually. But it wouldn't be geo L adopting changes to rules or anything without bringing them back to the council. It's part of the advise, the town council on matters of town council rules. And that was intended to just say, and you gotta do it annually at a minimum. Third question, Alyssa. So I appreciate that you're trying to separate things out because as we do this more, we come up with more examples of different things that we might be doing or that you haven't been given or that you could be given. I'm uneasy about the fact that it includes resolutions theoretically all town committee charges, not just committees that the council is affiliated with but that's a conversation we've had another time. And so we'll talk about that again when it comes up. But it does say not including proclamations and citations. And I think that it's really important as a new body that we know that someone has looked at proclamations and citations other than putting all that burden on the president to do that because we will get random things like college student painters asking us to give them a citation for the excellent work they did in Amherst, speaking from direct experience. And I don't want that to have to come to the council to at first draft that way. I'd like it to go somewhere else first. And so I can appreciate that you don't want to necessarily have to meet just for that sort of thing. But then on the other hand, why can't people do things ahead? Also when it comes to proclamations like our annual proclamations or a brand new proclamation I'd like to see them come. I'd feel more comfortable if I knew that another body of the council had looked at them before we did. Particularly if it's on something new because we have had in the past other kinds of things that ended up having religious affiliations that not all of us are aware of and all kinds of complex things that for all 13 of us to scramble around wondering what those things are I'm feeling like there would be a place that people could go so that when they contacted our president and said I think I want to do a proclamation she could say go talk to them. I guess the real issue that has come up and this is one I think you're addressing and that is the anticipation of these before that gives the committee time to do that. That's young and young. So one of the committee's thoughts on removing proclamations and citations from the review requirement was the timing issue. Unlike and sometimes resolutions have a timing issue but resolutions sometimes have something say the council will do something for example the resolution on 100% renewable energy was a sort of adopting a position versus a citation of just citing someone's service. And so GOL is currently looking at per referral rules around resolutions, proclamations and citations and timing but we were concerned if this charge continued to require review that there might be issues with timing that doesn't mean we're open to not it's just the council needs to realize if they want it reviewed before it comes to the council there's timing issues. I will say that I think some guidance regarding proclamations and citations would be useful as far I felt mostly comfortable with them and some of them have come up really at the last minute. I'd like to think that as we mature as a council that that last minute function will become smoother and not the last minute. So the one question I would have is there a way for GOL to advise the council on some guidelines like you did for example on public ways with regard to proclamations and citations. Because I do see it as an area where we could find ourselves in somewhat of a awkward situation if we didn't have some guidance. Evan. So I think the question here is there's sort of two things that we're talking about one of which falls under bullet point one and the other which falls under bullet point two. So with the president was just talking about sort of guidelines for proclamations, process timing, all of that. That's something that is currently on GOL's future agenda as part of point one which is matters of town council rules governance and organization how the town council receives and deals with proclamations and citations. Bullet point three that really has to do with that key point there of reviewing for form, content and organization to make sure it's clear, consistent and actionable. And I think the one thing that we have to consider is that so GOL can't stop anything from coming to the council, right? We were just advisory and our purpose is we envision it as a committee is to work with sponsors to make their legislation essentially workable before it comes to the committee. And I think there was a feeling that because proclamations and citations don't really bind to the council in any way to use Kathy's terminology from a previous debate that review of clear, consistent and actionable didn't necessarily apply here. So if we're using a listed example, if student painters sort of came forth and said we want a citation, GOL under how it operates wouldn't say no, we would say, okay, let's make sure that it makes sense or it reads clearly, right? But that wouldn't actually address the underlying problem of do we want to give them a citation. That would more actively fall under bullet point one which is sort of the process by which we receive and how we do that. So I think it's just clarifying which of these bullets we would talk about. If you want to include proclamations and resolutely proclamation citations in bullet point three what you're asking for is a report from us that we actually look at is it actionable, right? Is it legal, does it, is it consistent with how we've done things in the past? And we sort of felt like that wasn't necessary for us to do for proclamations. But of course, if the council has a different opinion we're open to it. Yeah. Andy? And I was just trying to think back on some of our experiences on the select board and because Alyssa and I were both smiling and I think of exactly the same point. At least my experience and Alyssa even has more years of experience than I do it that is that we would frequently receive requests for all sorts of proclamations and resolutions. Some of which were very valid and some were more questionable. But what we should do about them when it's a valid one, but it's really a group that needs assistance and we, you know, the intent is good but the expertise is not there and there has to be a full range of assistance that's available and I hope for wording that's general enough that allows for full range of assistance depending upon what's appropriate under the circumstances, each individual situation including at times recommending against. Okay. Are there ways that we wanna see this clarified or changed at this time? Evan. I hesitate to say what I'm about to say, especially given it hasn't been discussed by the committee but I do wonder if this is a point of concern among the council if perhaps we should wait to vote on a revised charge until after we've come forward with a recommendation on rules for proclamations and citations because that is on our agenda and maybe that would allay some of the concerns or maybe it wouldn't. But I also, I have concerns about revising this to include proclamations and resolutions and putting it into effect before we have rules on proclamations and resolutions. And so I sort of feel like the two things should probably go together. So in other words, we're probably gonna table this for the moment and just come back, okay? Is that acceptable? Okay, thank you. Then we're going to move on to the next agenda item. So the charter has two additional requirements, three additional requirements according to section 1012 topics for study by December 31st, 2019, the town council and town managers shall investigate the feasibility of taking the following actions. The list below is in no particular order of priority. So the first one is creating the position of American with Disabilities Act coordinator. B is to permitting non-citizens to vote in town elections and to seek and hold town elective office. And C is lowering the voting age for town elections. So in preparation for this, since we basically are now six months out from the deadline, you have before you two draft charges. One is to deal with the ADA or American with Disabilities Act coordinator. And the second is to combine the two that deal with voting into one. So the first one is a draft charge, if you will, to study the feasibility of establishing the position of ADA. And the second one is a charter requirement to study the feasibility of permitting non-citizens to vote and hold elective office and lowering the voting age. So the voting ones are all put together in one. So let's take the first one. It's basically a draft charge. And the plan is that it would be referred to GOL, but if there are comments from either the council and then the public, this is the time. Mandidja. I just wanna comment that I drafted the charges, sort of putting on my charter commission hat when doing so. But that I was hoping the discussion here wouldn't necessarily be to come to GOL with GOL to come up with either, you know, you could, if you like the idea of forming a committee, you can refer the charge draft to the GOL with guidance on is this good, is it not? And then come back with clear, consistent and actionability or any changes here. If you don't like that idea, it'd be great to hear what the council might want to do about these charter provisions and how the council would like to work with the town manager to investigate the feasibility of these items prior to December 31st. It does not necessarily have to be in these forms. It could be something else, but we need guidance. If you're going to refer to GOL, GOL definitely needs guidance on what the council wants. And in putting these together, they're actually fairly parallel in terms of kind of membership, if you will, and so forth. So let's just stick with the ADA one and see where we get to, okay? Are there comments? Yes, Alyssa. So we have long predating this town manager struggled with this issue in terms of having an American with disability act coordinator, it's been given short shrift by the town for a long time. And so it's great that it's in the charter that we should be looking at it. At the same time, I appreciate that we were given the allowance to say that maybe it wouldn't necessarily be a committee like this. I actually feel like this is something that should just be advising the town manager. I would like it to not be subject to open meeting law. I would not like it to be a committee, but with the caveat that after they came up with some good ideas, whoever the town manager wants to bring into the room, which I'm sure will include members of DAAC and other activists throughout the community, is that then he would do some outreach before he ever told us more about it and say, oh, well now that we've talked about this, I've talked to the community participation officer, I've talked with somebody from Stavros and I've talked to some other members, long serving members on DAAC. This is where I think we need to do now. Let's go talk to some people in this community. Let's go talk to some people in this community. Let's find out what so and so is doing over here and then bring that back to us. I'm not seeing that as an open meeting law necessity for a town position to do that. I'm seeing this as something that advises the town manager, but that I would hope he wouldn't do entirely behind closed doors, but do some outreach after working with various stakeholders in the process. Comments. Dorothy. I have a question. In the new sidewalk and road work, you're following some kind of federal guidelines on disability access. So how would this committee interact with the sidewalk and road process beyond what is being done already? So there already is a disability access committee. This committee would examine the role of the idea of establishing a position as ADA coordinator is required by the charter. So it wouldn't really interact with the sidewalks or anything like that. That's anything that we do like that has to comply with ADA laws anyway. Andy. I think my biggest concern is the dynamics of what could occur here. Finance committee is not represented and I'm not saying that it needs to be, but we have been trying to look at what the town's capacity is to just support the positions that we now have, see if we have actual capacity to do anything else. And the answer is that I'm not sure we do. We also know that we have in the public safety realm some real concerns from our public safety staff that we pay attention there. So we're under a lot of financial stress. I hesitant to set up something that is so structured that it leads a group of advocates to come in and advocate for a position and then create an unfortunate tension that I don't think any of us want which makes it appear that financial responsibility and being responsible for compliance with the law and addressing the needs of a very important group of individuals in our community will battle, go against each other. And it's just a dynamic that I fear coming out of the way that this is proposed. Additional comments. We'll get to public comment in a moment, sir. Yes, Kathy. I had a similar reaction when I read this into the formality of it. And it seems to me it's a study group. And I just don't know, you know, we were wrestling when we were writing the rules. You know, what's the study group? What's an advisory group? What's an ad? Because it's, you want a few people to go out and figure out, do we need this position? What would they do the person do? Does any town have one? And what do they do that's different than the committee we already have? And just talk to a lot of people to try to figure out the role and to set it up with a counselor this way with lots of meetings doesn't seem like the right vehicle for it. I mean, I actually want people go out to do some interviews and gather some information and come back and, well, form nuts, sit around a table chatting. I mean, they're gonna have to come together and talk, too. So I don't know what our other alternatives are. That's not what I'm, what can we call it that is make sure it happens, make sure it's not the town manager only point of view that there's some people advising and thinking about this. Does it have to have a counselor on it? Would be a question if a counselor's on it, what does that trigger? So I don't know the answers to those questions. As soon as we put a counselor on it, does it make it something else? Okay. Evan. So this and the next one are probably the two issues for tonight's meeting that I've struggled with the most. And I think the reason is, one, I am loathe to create more committees for the town or for the council. I think that we are already, that all counselors feel a little bit strapped and I also think that we're working really hard to fill all of the vacancies we have on our existing committees. So the charter, I mean, the charter language is pretty vague. It just says the town council and town manager shall investigate the feasibility. So we know that, what we know is two things, right? The council has to be involved in some fashion and the town manager has to be involved in some fashion. And beyond that, I think we have a lot of flexibility. Looking at the charge, I'm assuming we're saying the comptroller is sort of representative of the town manager and that would be, because the town manager's not actually on this committee even though it's stated in the charts, I guess, just seeing the comptroller is representing the town manager. Although I think there's a little bit of a weird dynamic there, one current counselor makes sense that the council has to be involved, but I think there's a big debate then of who that counselor should be. Given that this is about creating a position, it seems like it would have to be finance committee. But then I think there's also a lot of really good perspectives of others of the council could add to this, but that financial component needs to be there. And then the disability access advisory committee seems useful, also that's a committee composed of residents. And so the additional two residents at the end there, to some extent, I'm not sure is necessary because you already have a resident represented that has some expertise in this because they serve on the committee. And so I guess I'm wondering if it could just be the town manager or Designee as he chooses, the counselor and a member of the disability access advisory committee, a committee of three people which would maybe simplify it or if there's a way to do it without making it so formal like Alyssa suggested and having to create another place where we have to post meetings and all of that. Okay. Pat. If you would respond to what's been said so far and share your thinking about this. So I think Evan sort of summarized that it has to be the town council and the town manager. The, I agree with creating committees that have to be posted meetings and the recruitment of membership according to our process that would then get appointed through the YOKA process. You're taking about two months through the summer to make that happen. I think that you could delegate to the town manager to pull together a group to start to investigate. And then what I would look for is who do I talk to at the council? Would it be GOL to have that dialogue to say bring it back so that there is that interaction between a committee of the council to say, well, you didn't do a thorough enough job or you didn't look at this perspective or someplace where people can comment on it. Cause I think one of the things that we need to ensure is we need efficiency, but we also need a public process. So I think delegating out, I've heard what you said in terms of involving lots of different people, but then to have a prompt place where it goes to have the conversation would be a useful approach. Mindy Joe. So is this something that instead of creating a separate committee, this one, and then I'm gonna make a suggestion for the other one, the investigating the feasibility of creating the ADA coordinator position could just be referred to finance to investigate them. And then finance gets to control how they investigate it and how they, I mean, I guess if you read the charter closely as not reading it myself and just hearing Evan read it, the town council has to, the town manager has to, doesn't say they have to do it together. So could we just say, well, that's creating a position that kind of relates to finance. Let's refer our responsibility to investigate to finance. And they can work with the town manager if they want. They don't have to. The town manager has to do maybe his own investigation, maybe not, somehow, and just leave it to finance to figure out, and I'm suggesting finance because it's a financial thing in a sense, but leave it to a council committee to figure out how to do that investigation. Dorothy. I'm confused. What is the need, you have a citizen's advisory committee. I mean, I don't know much about it, but what is it that they can't do that needs to be done with this new position and committee? Paul. I think that's the question for the charter. I mean, the voters voted to do, to investigate this. I'm not prejudging whether this is a position that's needed or not. So. That's the question. Yeah, that's the question. Steve. So it seems like maybe we've already completed the work. Maybe we are the feasibility committee. Yeah, so I'm not a big fan of the sort of prescriptive based directives and performance based. So I would see the latter two as more performance based that we shall increase the number of voters be more inclusive in voting. So for this one, it's just not clear, like it's kind of an odd directive to say there should there be this position. I would, I mean, I wish that had been written that next step that we shall look at the issues of accessibility or something like that. But maybe there doesn't need to be. See now we're doing the feasibility study as we speak. So one of the thoughts that I'm, go ahead, Darcy. I think that the obvious advocates for this, and I'm really glad that Mandy Joe put this together because it's in the charter and it makes sense to deal with it. But I'm wondering if the current members of the Disability Access Advisory Committee are even aware that we're discussing this now and they would be the obvious people to be here advocating for it and have be the people that would be pushing it forward if anyone did. And so it seems like they need to be part of this process of discussion. So one of the possibilities is that that the town manager in consultation with appropriate other people, whether it's the advisory committee or whatever, come forward with a proposal, not necessarily for a position, but how this function is addressed in town, how this responsibility is met through the town and he'd come forward and communicate that to us. And if there is a need for something from a budget standpoint, it then comes forward, obviously not until next year's budget would be, which would then come through the finance committee as well. So that I'm hearing, don't form another committee. Let's take people who already think about this, have them talk with the town manager and how do we either fill this position or not fill this position, but we still accept the responsibility and make sure we meet it and does that have any financial implications and then just bring it up that way, Alyssa. Yeah, I find that very helpful. And I think that although we like doing things, here's a new committee charge and here's people on it, I think that we could do exactly that and we could just ask for a particular timeline. We could say we'd like to hear back from the town manager. We don't have, there are other towns that use orders for this purpose. We haven't started doing that yet, but that would say we would ask the town manager to report back to us in X timeframe about what that conversation was with DAAC, possibly more than one conversation, talking with the building inspector about things he's had, because one of the things that I should have mentioned earlier and I don't want to misspeak and Mr. Merloy would correct me if I have the terminology wrong, but there is, because he's been the staff support to DAAC for a long time, is there is actually a plan that community users are supposed to have and so one of the purposes of this person is to sort of ride herd on that plan, just like one is supposed to have a master plan implementation committee, that's not quite ever happened. So it's something that can be helpful, but whether or not it's gonna be another position, right, as opposed to the people who are cobbling it together out of their existing jobs, because we're getting the work done. It's just a matter of looking at refocusing and so I think that just asking that we get a report back from the town manager seems like it should be adequate and I'd really love to just stuff it over and finance committee as just like, it's a position to fill or not. I just don't think we're there yet. So given that I'm going to make a suggestion and if anybody seriously objects, let me know, that on the meeting on the 22nd, that we come back with a motion that basically says, here's how we're gonna address this and it includes working with the town manager, et cetera, and getting back to the council by sections at your time rather than going through a charge at this time. Yes? Dorsey? And that the motion would be around looking at the feasibility of hiring a coordinator? We do need to be responsive to the charter. There's no question about that. You know, yes, public comment, I'm sorry. Was there a comment? Which just could say if, you know, I like that approach in private sector places where I've worked, the human resource person took on a part of their job and had to regularly be reporting on that but was looking town-wide, company or entity-wide. So there might be ways of saying, how do you interact with the disability committee and are we doing enough and how to do more? Is there public comment on this? Yes, please come forward, sir. You've been very patient. Massage anything up that they were given. Unfortunately, you've been given something in the charter that doesn't list tasks, responsibilities, objectives, job descriptions. But somebody like that already does that sort of thing. They work directly with age, gender. This is another one of the big six as I label it. So that might be a place. Thank you for your comment. Okay, so we're going to look at this in a more, yes, Evan. Sorry, I think I just missed something. You're coming up with the motion. I'm more than glad to hear anybody's idea but what I was going to do was talk to the town manager, see about his ideas for how he might approach this and what's a reasonable time and then come back with you with a motion that is something that allows us to address this. I'm more than glad to refer that to a committee, Alyssa. I don't feel the need to have you bring us back a motion. It's fine with me if you just talk with the town manager and say, let's look at our agenda schedule together. Can you report back to us about this at such and such date? Okay, we'll report back to you in the future, okay? Now on the voting one, which may be a different one, this is the one where we have to, by charter, look at permitting non-citizens to vote in town elections and to seek and hold town elective offices and lowering the voting age for town elections. I'd just like to state again, I drafted it. I think it was just a starting point and the previous conversation. There's plenty of options, ways to do it. This is just one. Thank you. And we needed to get this on our calendar. Have it discussed and move forward. Dorothy. This is a question. In school board elections, are non-citizens allowed to vote now? Well, we could do what you were saying before, do something in staging. I know in New York City, non-citizens have been allowed to vote in school board elections for 30, 40 years. Alyssa. That's illegal in Massachusetts. That's why it's not done in Massachusetts. So there have been home rule petitions that Amherstown meeting has passed over and over and over again that Ellen Story and Stan Rosenberg took to the legislature for us over and over asking that non-citizens be allowed to vote in local elections, Cambridge and others who you might guess have done this as well. And it never gets anywhere in the legislature. So that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It's just that this is a new attempt at trying to address that issue. There is always some renewed interest associated with presidential campaigns, et cetera, around these issues. So we can't just do it because we want to. We have to get special legislation to do it and the legislators have been unable to get that through a special legislation. So while we ask for this, I think this one maybe does make more sense as a committee, but I would hope that if we do make it as a committee that we definitely designate someone under the age that we're looking at as being one of the members. Yannick. And I'm following up on Alyssa's point that this has been processed for decades now with multiple attempts to get the legislatures never acted on. My concern is that having a committee, we may need to recognize that the committee may need to have some duration because its work will not expire on January 31, 2020. The odds that something will be proposed and magically approved by the legislature are pretty close to zero given our past experience. And the turner only says we have to investigate the feasibility it doesn't say we have to have it in place. Yes, Evan. So despite not 10 minutes ago talking about how much I don't want to create any more committees, I do actually agree with Alyssa. This is probably one where a committee makes sense. I think there's a lot to talk about with this committee and I do have some concerns about just referring it to GOL because I think that some of the questions about the committee such as who should be on it are beyond really the scope of GOL and it really should be something for this council. For me personally, and I haven't fully thought this through, I would actually be interested in looking at the option of removing the word charter from it and removing ad hoc and having it be sort of a more long-term electoral reforms committee that can look at beyond just these things mandated by the charter but look at many of the other things that many people on this council at our last meeting expressed interest in seeing our elections improved. I think there's been a lot of energy. I know that the town clerk for a while had assembled a voting coalition. I'm not quite sure what's happened with that since but there was a lot of energy around that and maybe this is an opportunity given that we already have to do these things to take a broader look beyond just the charter mandated things that we have to do but I think that's a bigger discussion and also has a bigger conversation about membership. For their comment, yes, Steve. Yeah, so I support this one also and my only change would be to remove the word reform because it may or may not be reformed, it's changed and it's really addressing the two bullets that I mean some may see it as reform some may not see it as reform but I think it makes it less makes it more inclusive but we just keep it more neutral. If so, we're not talking about a couple different things. First of all, this is the charter requires that there is two issues that we've stated here that have to be studied or looked at the investigate the feasibility of taking the following actions. Whether or not we make this into a longer-term committee that looks at any number of electoral issues or not, its first charge is going to have to be the feasibility of those first two and I truly appreciate both Alyssa and Andy sharing with us the historical efforts that have been made both in Amherst and in other parts of the state and the extent to which those have gone to the legislature so, because feasibility may be all we can look at. But making it into a bigger committee I think we have to look at this charge much more seriously with a much bigger eye toward what all we wanted to accomplish and therefore what should its members should be because I assume that you're saying this would be the committee that would look at campaign finance. This would be the committee that would look at some of the other issues that were brought up during the campaign finance. Yes, Evan? Yeah, I think potentially and I think many of the other issues around just our elections. Again, kind of building off what the town clerk had started. I do have one question. So by December 31st, 2019, the town council and town manager shall investigate the feasibility. Is the implication that that investigation needs to begin by December 31st or conclude by December 31st? Andy, Joe? I think the charter commission intended it finish by December 31st. And they make include that by December 31st I can't conclude, but it's the reality is it's are there further comments about the expansion of this committee's charge? Because if that's the case, then this charge needs to be worked on. Alyssa? Instead, I'm going to make it more complicated by saying maybe we can consider narrowing it not unlike the other issue we just dealt with, which is that we could ask, yes, we will be involved eventually again, but as time ticks away here with the summer, if the town manager wants to get together with the town clerk, that previous group that the town clerk had brought together that was excited about various elections, some young person who's probably come and talked to us before and talked about what would a committee, even if that group wants to talk about what should a committee look like, what would we do to explore this feasibility and then come back to us with that, rather than us trying to charge them and trying to recruit people for this particular thing and how on earth will we choose between people? I'm just one more posted committee. Whatever comes out of that could then grow into a larger reforms or changes sort of committee. It may be that the feasibility is this very tiny thing that says, well, it's not very feasible right now. So let's have a long-term committee where we try and do X, Y, Z, and that committee should include people from the legal women voters, from the high school, student body, president, whatever. But for us to try and figure all this out in this short period of time as a larger committee or even as a small committee, just feels like a lot of work and not necessarily going to get us any closer to getting it done. So I would tend to want to push this one over to the town manager and say, talk to your staff and come back to us with a suggestion. Mr. Brockman, given that we have just lost our town clerk and we have an interim town clerk and we're searching for a town clerk and we're understaffed in the town clerk's office, how would you like to respond? We'll figure it out if that's what the council wants us to do. There are certainly staff is stretched, especially in the clerk's office at this moment in time. But hopefully that will change pretty short and then relatively near future. It's an aggressive timeline to address. These are pretty complicated major topics. Other communities have addressed them, so there is some learning that we can do from other communities who have submitted legislation for younger people to vote in things like that and non-citizens to vote. But I think we have talented staff who can take on additional things and we'll work on it. Okay, Evan. So the reason I asked whether or not the December 31st deadline was the date we have to start or end by, and it sounds like end by, because I actually do think that that really matters here. Because now I'm thinking, right, if we are going to make this a committee, we refer to GOL today. GOL ideally finishes talking about it and all the other things. And we can vote to create the committee on July 22nd. Now it has to be posted. We have to recruit people. We have to appoint people. The committee gets going maybe what mid-September in like a super ideal situation. And now we have a committee that's meeting for its first time and has from mid-September to late December, a time that is filled with holidays, to come forth with a recommendation. Currently serving with Darcy on energy and climate action and trying to deal with the 90-day deadline for goals and recognizing how difficult it is to come together as a committee and have an immediate deadline in front of you. That might not be something that's fair to put on a new committee. So at this point, we're not expanding the committee. We're questioning whether we're creating a committee. And we're reverting back to, let's see what the town manager might do. Yes. So. Is another option, just us asking the town manager to ask our town attorney whether it is feasible to in this current state and law to, is there any way we could and how that would happen? Is the feasibility that we would need to file special legislation? Would that then satisfy having investigated the feasibility of doing these three things if we get an opinion from the town attorney that says, in order to do it, this is what you would need to do? Sounds very reasonable. Mr. Backelman. Okay. This is going back to the town manager. We'll speak to the town attorney and we will hear from you all later. Okay. Anything further? Yes, Darcy. I would just say just like the previous issue, I think the people that are really most interested in this, again, they didn't really have noticed that we were going to talk about it. They probably don't know what was in the charter. They don't know anything about this. So to the extent that they can be involved in this process, that would be helpful. Okay. There were a couple different groups besides the league that came forward as we were looking at the earlier of campaign finance reform and spoke to us who are residents in town and perhaps the manager might also talk with them. Okay. And there are a number of groups in town that work with different refugee groups or undocumented immigrants, et cetera. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yes, Pat. The charter is not clear. Yes. You shouldn't have left the room. We might have assigned you something. Yes, Andy. I think that it's a good question. I was just asked and that we need to have a group eventually address that issue, but to get back to what has been done previously in the multiple town meeting resolutions, it was people who were legal, essentially green card holders. They were not undocumented and he was very clear on that subject. I point that out in part to remind you that the legislature, even with that limitation, the leadership in the legislature was clear that it had absolutely no interest and wouldn't allow the vote to go forward. Okay. All right, Henry. Any further discussion on this? All right. Then we're moving on to appointments and the OCA has been very busy. Town manager has been very busy. So we have six different committees and Evan as the chair of OCA. Let's just start down the list. I'm going to try to keep these very brief since there are six sets of appointments coming forward tonight, but would be happy to entertain questions. And if any member of the committee feels as though they want to add something about the deliberation, please don't hesitate. So starting with historical commission, OCA debated this on 6, 17, 2019. We did note that for historical commission, human rights commission, local historic district commission in public art commission. We had an initial conversation with the town manager where we gave him some feedback about the appointment memos that he's been providing and the information that was provided in them. The town manager then submitted updated memos to us. And so what we voted on and what we're recommending were the updated memos that were received by the town council, I believe on June 14th. Yes, so originally filed 6, 7 updated 6, 14. And so that update, because you might be wondering what, why is there an update on the update was predominantly to expand the information that was available on the background of the appointees and also to fix some clerical errors. So on historical commission, OCO is unanimous 5-0 recommending approval. Questions on this one? And have, do you wanna go ahead and make the motion? It's right up there. Thanks. Sure. Then I will move to confirm the following town manager appointments to the historical commission effective July 1, 2019 as recommended by the Outreach Communications and Appointments Committee report of July 1, 2019 for three-year term to expire June 30th, 2022. Patricia Oth was a reappointment. Robin Fordham, another reappointment. Theodore Parker, reappointment for two-year term to expire June 30th, 2021. Jane Wald, who's a reappointment. Jane Scheffler, and for a one-year term to expire June 30th, 2020. Heady startup. Is there a second? Second. Mandy Jo seconded. Further questions or comments? Then all those in favor raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain? 12001. One absent. Okay, next one. Local Historic District Commission. On June 17th, Oka voted unanimously to recommend approval of the town manager appointments to the local Historic District Commission. Questions at this time? You want to make the motion? I'm going to make you read all these comments. I see why you did this. I'll do it. All right, so I moved to confirm the following town manager appointments to the local Historic District Commission, effective July 1, 2019, as recommended by the Outreach Communications and Appointments Committee Report of July 1, 2019, for a three-year term to expire June 30th, 2022. Peggy Schwartz, Greta Wilcox, and Karen Winter, for a two-year term to expire June 30th, 2021. Maureen Adams, who's a reappointment, and Jennifer Taub, also a reappointment. Any questions? Second. Second. It was George. Any questions? All those in favor, raise your hand, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. Okay, so it's 12, 0, 0, and one absent. Okay, I'm going to relieve you. I'm going to suggest that somebody else from your committee do the next one. I'd be happy to do that, manager. Joe Bridge. So I would like to make the motion. This is for the Human Rights Commission. And I would move that all the council confirm the following town manager appointments to the Human Rights Commission. Effective, July 1, 2019, is recommended by the Outreach Communication and Appointments Committee reported July 1, 2019. For a three-year term to expire June 30, 2022, Matthew Charity, that's a reappointment, and Romaren Speck. Two-year appointment to expire June 30, 2021. Benjamin Harrington, Deborah Newbauer, and Ghazid Kaya-Nikosi. One-year term to expire June 30, 2020, Sid Ferrara, that's a reappointment. And just for clarification, what was the vote of Verroca? So, Verroca voted on June 17th unanimously 5-0 to recommend these appointments. Okay, are there any questions? All those in favor? Raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. Okay. 12-0-0 and one absent. Who wants to do public art? Which OCA member? Excellent, Alyssa. So, the motion is in front of you to confer, I'll tell you the vote in a minute, but to confirm the following Town Manager Appointments Public Art Commission, effective July 21, 2019, is recommended by OCA as a report of July 1, three-year terms to expire June 30, 2022, James Barnhill, Jacqueline Sheridan, and Shoshona King, who has a reappointment, then two-year terms to expire June 30, 2021, both of which are reappointments, Amy Crawley and Ellen Kiter. The vote is as stated on our report, which was 5-0 on June 17th. I do just want to point out one thing here associated with this one, and that's that we still have a vacancy. And so, for those of people watching out in the audience who said, wow, wouldn't it be amazing to serve with those people? Yes, please put in your CAF. And please apply, because we do still have a vacancy. Okay, the motion's been made. Do I have a second? Pat's a second. Any further discussion? Any further points for the report? Andy. Somebody remind me, I think that it calls for seven members in the committee charge. I know that there's one position at least remaining to be filled, that you mentioned, are there two remaining to be filled? No. They aren't up for reappointment. Thank you. I was just gonna say, I thought there was a name missing, but got it. All right, any further discussion on this? Thank you for that point of clarification. Bill Kayes in this continuing. As a member, his term expires next year. Thank you. Okay, motion's made. Second, they're all those in favor. Raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain? No. 12, zero, zero, one absent. Okay. Evan. Sure. Excuse me, Lynn, before you go forward, I need to recuse myself from the Affordable Housing Board of Trustees, because I have a personal relationship with one of the possible appointees. Okay. Thank you. Evan. So if you read the OCA report today, which perhaps you did, you would notice that this is not in the OCA report. The reason for that is OCA voted on this set of appointments this morning at our meeting today. Normally we would try our hardest not to vote in the morning for something that you have to do in the evening. However, because this was filed on June 20th and because we don't meet again until July 22nd, if we did not take this up tonight as a council, we would lose out on our opportunity to weigh it. So apologies for not having a written report. OCA did discuss these today and we did vote 5-0 to recommend approval. There was one, two points that were made that committee member asked would be brought up. One of which was disclosure that one of the candidates is the spouse of a current town counselor. I think we figured out who that was. And the other one was that you'll notice in the memo that the two of the reappointments, Thomas Kegelman, Nancy Schroeder, does not list their initial date of appointment. Although we did learn that later on and I hope although I don't have it right in front of me, I don't know, listen, do you know what their initial date? I'm sorry, Kegelman's actually does list it, but Schroeder's does not and it was 2017 and I re-sent that email and if anybody needs the exact date, I'll find it. So in that case, I'll move to confirm the following town manager appointments to the Affordable Housing Board of Trustees, effective July 1, 2019 as recommended by the Outreach Communications and Appointments Committee verbal report on July 1, 2019. Two-year term to expire June 30th, 2021, Rob Crowner, Carol Lewis, Erica Piedade and William Van Quavelen. And one-year term to expire June 30th, 2020, John Hornick, who's your reappointment? Thomas Kegelman, who's your reappointment and Nancy Schroeder, who's your reappointment? Is there a second? George, is the second? Any further discussion? Although, yes, Mandy Jo. Could I just get clarification from the town manager on what's going on with, I think the town manager is technically a part of this committee, does it have nine members and you're one of those nine? That's correct. Okay, and who's the ninth then? There's seven listed there. Oh, Sid Ferrara is continuing. Okay. Thank you. Any further questions? Motion's been made and seconded. All those in favor, raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed. Abstained. So it is, how do you count somebody who doesn't vote abstain? Absent, okay. So it's 11, zero, zero and two absent. I think she needs counted as recused. Recused, thank you. Okay, thank you. The public shade tree committee. All right, Evan, why was your voice hold down? So I wanna start by saying that of the six sets of appointments in front of you today, this is the only one that's not coming to you with a unanimous vote. Again, we voted this one this morning, so apologies for not having a written report. The vote for this was four, zero, one. There was one abstention. That one abstention was because a constituent asked that counselor not to vote for one of the appointees put forth by the time manager, so there was an objection by a constituent who asked that counselor not to vote for that appointee and so that counselor abstained. So the vote again this morning was four, zero, one. I'll read the motion. We move to confirm the following time manager appointments to the public shade tree committee effective July 1, 2019 as recommended by the Outreach Communication and Appointments Committee verbal report July 1, 2019. Three year term to expire June 20th, June 30th, 2022, Claire Bertrand, Bennett Haslip and Gordon Green, who's every appointment. Two year term to expire June 30th, 2021, Shoshana King, Henry Lappin, who's every appointment and one year term to expire June 30th, 2020, Nani Burak, who's a reappointment. Is there a second? George, question. Okay, Shoshana King is on both on the Public Art Commission and the Public Shade Tree Committee. Is that unusual or? Sid Frearer's on two. Sid Frearer evidently is on two as well. So it's not unusual. Darcy. Just have one question I forgot to ask this morning and I actually didn't even notice it because I was focused on something else, but just have a question for you all of, how do you decide who gets a three, two and one year term and why? I think Nani has been on the Shade Tree Committee for a while now and I am just wondering why she got a one year term. So it's a good question. The typically what I do is look at, if it's for a reappointment, how many years they've already served. And so Nani has served a long period of time. So I gave her the shortest time, mainly because we didn't have other applicants for this committee at this time. So if we have new applicants and the policy of the handbook policy of appointed boards that we've been working under encourages turnover. But since there was no, there were no other appointments or applicants. Nani was able and the same with Henry Lappin. You can look in the memo, talks about how long they have both served. Henry is the chair. So that's why I gave him a slightly longer term and Gordon Green had just, he had one term so far. So he is entitled to a full second term. And then other than that, my logic on this one was because Shoshana King also was appointed to the public art commission. I gave her a shorter term as opposed to the other two candidates who were given three year terms because they interviewed and were very enthusiastic about serving. Further questions? Yes. I'm trying to find the answer to this on my own, but are there continuing members of this also? This is in the reports that the town manager gives us, but yes, yes, Rachel Laughler's continuing as a member. Yeah, so the math does add up, but it's important. I understand. Yes, the math does add up that that person is continuing and the town manager was clear in his report on that. So thank you. Are there further questions? Then hearing none, the motion's been made in second. All those in favor say yes and raise your hand. Aye. Opposed? Abstain? One abstention and absent one. So it's 11, zero, one and one. All right. Yes. I'm sorry, Lynn. I should have said this earlier. I was pulling up that email again. If we could just have the minutes reflect since it wasn't in the town manager's report that the date that Nancy Schroeder had started serving on the trust was August 14th, 2017, then it's like we covered everything that's normally in the report and it's... Thank you. That would be great. Yes. I just would like to acknowledge the hard work of the town manager and the people in his office and also the resident advisory committee who have worked very hard over the past couple of months. They've given my committee a lot to do, but we're very grateful and I'm appreciative of the hard work. I just want to recommend them for that. Thank you. I have to say I was pretty impressed by how many came forward. All right. The second and under appointments is clerk of the council at this point, Athena O'Keeffe is presently serving in a temporary row, as her fiddle sign says. So there may be a step I missed in here and if I did, I am totally apologetic. What I did do was review the sections of the charter we did advertise a vacancy, though we did not advertise quote a position since we are allowed to hire a town employee and we honestly do not have sufficient funds to hire a full, full-time new total position. We developed a draft much to thank you Margaret for this of the accurate job description. It is a draft. Before two weeks ago, Mr. Bachman appointed Athena and also appointed another member of the town as the clerk of the clerk, town clerk as well. But for the town clerk of the council, it was Athena. I've met with Athena. I've talked with her about her interest in the position and I have to say what most impressed me is some of her innovative thoughts about how to help the council in our own visibility and coordination, working both with us and with the rest of the staff who has been supporting us as well. This position is not going to be shared as the town clerk position, which I think Margaret did an amazing job doing both and she would probably tell you never to do it again. So let's have questions at this time and then we'll see whether we go through a motion. Yes, Dorothy. So what percentage position is it? It's a very good question. We at this point estimated to be somewhere around 60% but it fluctuates and it fluctuates for example, I'll just give you an example. This is our fifth Monday night meeting in a row. That's not normal, we hope. And so that makes for instance the month of June pretty exceptional with regard to number of meetings and yet other months don't have as many and sometimes the issues are not as complicated and so forth but it's somewhere around 60%. So is the rest of Athena's time, will it be a town clerk? That is really something to be worked out with the town manager because there's also an issue of the position not being a union position versus what other responsibilities. So that has to be worked out. That's why their charge reads the way it does. I also wanna thank Alyssa for making sure that we did the statement that we did that consisted of advertising a vacancy because we had to have 14 days on that I believe. Yes. So then I'll take the blame as well because I don't think that what we put up was adequate notice to comply with 6.2. I think any plain English reading of 6.2 would indicate a vacancy, some form of job application that someone could put in that a position was going to be filled in XYZ time as opposed to what we ended up putting up which was a very fine press release that talked about the work that Margaret had done for us and we put at the end that it qualified for that but I'm not really feeling it but that's a conversation we can all have and this could possibly be put down to a beginner's luck sort of thing as we're trying to sort this out. Along those same lines, I think maybe some of this got copied and pasted from a previous job description in that item six says manages staff assigned to prepare minutes of committee meetings and I think all of us on council committees would be thrilled to know that there were staff assigned to prepare minutes of committee meetings but since those staff do not currently exist I'm wondering what that means. So I'm going to turn to Mr. Backeman because we've been having this conversation, please. So it's our intention to have staff and we've actually had this conversation with the school superintendent who has a similar need to do minutes for your committees. It would not be, other than the full council meeting would not be Athena doing those minutes, it would be someone else who would be responsible for those minutes but we understand the need to have some standalone person or people who would be dedicated to doing the minutes for you so you're not trying to work as a committee member and do minutes at the same time. So we've looked at some shared positions with the school superintendent because he is experiencing similar demands on his staff and our intent is to have something set up as soon as we can, either part-time positions who will take on a committee who will do the minutes for you or one person who'll do multiple committees. It's kind of important for us to understand the rhythm of the committee structure so we can talk to people about what the time commitment is expected to be. I think we're getting a sense of that now and I think that will help us recruit people to do this job. And so the reason, so the clerk would be responsible for making sure the minutes were done in a timely manner, were posted appropriately. These would be minutes takers but the clerk of the council would be responsible for making sure all the minutes were up to code basically and distributed for approval and then posted online as required. And they would coordinate to make sure that every meeting was covered, okay. Is there another question? Yes. So aside from the notice for crime on a 6.2, my other question, and again, this is brand new to us, is you had indicated at a previous meeting that you would talk to the town manager about this and you obviously did because there's a huge amount of information here, including a position description. I guess I'm trying to understand since as a select board member, the only person I ever got to hire was the town manager. As a school committee member, I had a couple more choices. As a town counselor now, we're doing this hiring. What's, since we only have two people, one in a part of a person that we own, it's not like we need like a personnel committee per se, but how does this work? Does everybody just feel good about, okay, good, there's a job description, we're done with it? Or is there something that I don't want to hold up this process necessarily? But if she were to ever leave us, what's our read on this? I'm just trying to get a sense from the council what our shared expectation is here. Let me add to that. I also have raised the issue of how do we evaluate and feel that that's something where we all have things that we might add to the evaluation. I think it might be done a bit differently than the town manager. Thoughts? Dorothy? Can you clarify? What are we talking about right at this exact moment? My question was, is the town council just accept that somebody wrote a position description for the only other person we hire other than the town manager and we're fine with that. I'm assuming we don't need a committee to look at it, but can we move forward with this now? Do we feel the need to study it more? We did get a chance to read it since Friday. It's just new, right? It's a new thing for us. Things can be changed. I mean, we're going ahead and we're trying to find somebody and hire somebody. Once you see people, sometimes you decide to change the description. I don't think that a description is a legal contract. Yes? So I think it's important that we're not hiring someone. You're using, under the charter, you have the provision to appoint someone who may be an existing town employee. So that's the action under the charter that you're acting under, that you're appointing someone who's an existing town employee, just like you did with Margaret when she was an existing town employee. If this were a new position that you were hiring for, it would go through a much more rigorous hiring process with a posting advertisement. We'd go through, the council would need to decide how it was going to interview people, review resumes, do all those types of things. That's not what this is. This is, the charter allows you to appoint someone who's an existing town employee. Now, when you appoint someone who's an existing town employee, there are things to work out. We were fortunate at the last time when we hired, the town clerk was hired with the premonition that the council might use the town clerk as the clerk to the council. We didn't know back in July of a year ago when we hired Margaret that you would actually appoint her, but we had laid the groundwork saying, if you get hired, and I interviewed all the people, I said, if you get hired, you may be appointed by the council, so be prepared for that. That's where we'd like it to go. We think it made sense. I think our experience has been that the clerk serving as both the clerk and the council, I think Margaret did a terrific job on it. I don't know if anybody else could have. She's a unique character. And so her advice to us, and I think was to separate those positions somewhat, but whether it's a clerk to the council is a full-time job or not. If it was a full-time standalone job, then we would advertise it and go through the interview process. We think it's a lot more than what, it's a lot more than what we allocated for Margaret to do it. So I think that that's the idea today is you would tell me, go and make this happen. I would meet with the union, talk about the position. The clerk to the clerk of the council has to be able to go into executive sessions and take minutes so it can't be part of the union. So we negotiate the position, that this role out of the union, but also maintain other responsibilities that the clerk could have currently. So I think that there's a little work to be done in discussing with the town clerk and with the union. I think we can make it happen. We've had some preliminary discussions. I think we'll be on the same page and it'll work out okay. That's okay, thank you. Additional questions? Dorsey? Does it seem like this is something that should be going through the OCA committee as per the charge? That was something actually I did discuss with Alyssa, the town manager discussed with Alyssa and it was felt that it was not, but I'm... The charge seems to say that it is. Make recommendations of the town council regarding all appointments by the town council. Serve as the committee to review and advise the town council on all candidates forwarded by the town manager for employment as department heads. Not sure that's what it is, but just wondering why it isn't going through OCA. Alyssa? We had a five minute conversation standing here. When we were trying to figure this out, this was not a big elaborate thing. This was a, oh my gosh, we have a whole bunch of dominoes falling and can we get this up so that we would be able to capture the person we wanted to do the work. I'm not sure what would go through OCA because this is not a committee appointment. This is a town council appointment, not a higher as you point out. It is perhaps the only viable unicorn of all the unicorns we've discussed in terms of being different. Then it literally is different than everything else. And I think that I feel more comfortable with the notice that we used given again that it's not a full hiring process, right? That's not what you would do when you talks about the typical because of course, one part of the charter talks about the fact that this person works for the council. A different part of the charter says whenever a vacancy occurs or is about to occur in any town office or town employment, not talking about the department heads, but just literally anybody who can work here whenever we have a vacancy. That's a 14 days vacancy is kind of a funky word associated with this in terms of our real ability to appoint a sign working with the town manager. So I apologize if I didn't ever take it back to OCA. I literally waited to see what was gonna happen next. I was actually quite amazed that such a full package was put before us this weekend to look at tonight. And so that was why I just wanted to make sure everybody was good with where we were. And like I said, I couldn't see a personnel committee coming out of this or OCA necessarily having any role in this because it's not the same as committee appointment and it's not something we're confirming of the town managers. It's a suggestion just like it was a arguably, I would say a very strong suggestion that we have Margaret as the clerk of the council because that was the condition that he hired her under. But this seems like a really good fit and everything. And so I'm not arguing about the person at all. I'm just wanna make sure we're all on the same page for our expectations. Evan. So the OCA charge make recommendations to the town council regarding all appointments by the town council, specifically references Charter Section 2.9. And of course the very first thing listed under Charter Section 2.9 is appointment of clerk of the council. So it actually does seem like it's in OCA's charge. That said, of course, it's always within the ability of the town council as a whole to waive that. And so if the council, I would argue this maybe should have gone to OCA. But if the council feels as though, given the situation we're in, there is no need for OCA review where OCA cannot provide something meaningful to this discussion beyond what we've already had, then it's fully within the right of the council to say, we're not going to have OCA look at this. But I would imagine it would have to be a formal vote of the council. Sarah. So actually, when I saw this, one of the things that I thought was that it did fit under OCA, not that we want to take on anything. So two points I would make on that is one of the things that was brought up is that perhaps we want to take another, the council itself would like to maybe review what we're putting in for a job description because that might evolve. So that might be something that OCA could take up the initial work of and could also do some of the looking at candidates and similar to the process that we already have and then bring it to town council. It could be that that's just an unnecessary step, but then again, I'm looking at consistency. So to me, it seems consistent. And the other thing is that, while I incredibly respect the institutional knowledge, Councillor Brewer, I do think that maybe some decisions I think is something that would be good for all of us to talk about while taking into consideration that some people know way more about how things have worked and do work well. I would just make that point. Yes. Given that this is an interim position that we're talking about and we've had direct, no, we're talking about a pointing car as the, given that. She presently holds the interim position. Right, yes. Thank you for the correction. I'm tired. We have worked with Athena. We've seen the quality of her work and I feel that this is one of the few times that we could comfortably bypass OCA. Kathy. I just want to say real briefly that people may or may not remember, but when we adopted the rules of procedure, we have a whole section called the clerk of the council, which has a job description in it. And this was actually at the request of Margaret because we'd said, what does the president do? What do other people do? So she's, and I just cross-checked that the brief description matches this. So we did spend time thinking about, aside from taking minutes, what was the role of the clerk and we spelled it out. Not to say this is perfect, but it's in writing and we adopted it. Okay. Sarah, did you have your hand up? So I was just going to make the clarifying point that I didn't mean that we, that OCA would need to take it up right now. I mean, I'm just saying that if it's something that the council decides that it just, it was brought up that maybe the council would want to review or change or in the future, it could be something that does fit with the OCA charge. But obviously I don't think we need to do it right now. Is there any other comment? Yes, ma'am, did you? So while we're talking about this, I'll always put a plug in for GOL. In terms of job descriptions, you could argue that GOL's charge is where the job description of the clerk of the council falls because it relates to organization of the council. So I'm just going to put that there. I do want to say that I'm comfortable avoiding the OCA process on this one or skipping it. We already, as a council, have sort of stated that the current OCA process is not working for appointments. And so right now OCA doesn't really have a process to go through trying to figure out how to appoint or recommend an appointment for the council, number one. So I don't believe OCA may be ready to do that right now for the clerk of the council position. And the second one I wanted to make is when I think back to when the OCA charge was adopted, I don't recall considering that clerk of the council or the town manager would be automatically put to the OCA committee. And so I'm not sure this council made a actual decision when passing that charge to say yes, OCA gets the town manager appointment. Yes, OCA gets the clerk of the council appointment in terms of who the recommendations come from. Maybe I'm remembering things wrong, but I don't think we had that conscious decision being made versus just talking about reviewing town manager appointments and then the committee appointments that we have to make. So I think that's a discussion to have later, but I would argue tonight to go ahead and appoint Athena as our clerk of the council and maybe then put on a future agenda. I don't make real discussion about the OCA charge as it stands right now about a whole bunch of things similar to the discussions we've had about the GOL charge, another one that was done really early on. Maybe it's time to have one about the OCA charge. Any further discussion? Yes, Evan. So again, I do just want to clarify that the council did when we wrote the charge, actively put in the reference to charter section 2.9, which includes clerk of the council town manager, appointment of the town manager is 3.1. So that charter reference appears nowhere in the OCA charge. So I don't think there's any assumption that OCA would weigh in on the town manager hiring a town manager, but it does feel to me as if the council actively put in a reference to a charter section, which is fairly brief relative to some sections of the charter that we'd expect that OCA would weigh in on any of these. That said, I don't envision that OCA would use the process that we have been using for committee appointments for this appointment. And so I think our advisory role would be fairly limited. I think in the future, it would make sense for OCA to be involved beyond just one member consulted individually. But in this situation we're in right now, unless I hear otherwise from my committee members and I hope I hear something from them, I don't necessarily know what OCA could offer additionally in this moment. Okay, we need a motion. Mandy Jo. I move per section 2.9a of the charter to appoint Athena O'Keefe an existing employee of the town as clerk of the council effective July 1, 2019, further to instruct the town manager to take the necessary steps to ensure that the council's decision is carried out. Is there a second? I second it. Any further discussion? All those in favor raise your hand and stay high. Opposed? All right, well just on that chance, Athena come forward please. We have to swear her in. May I ask a follow up to that? Please. So perhaps given that there are little things that need to be worked out in terms of how exactly this position is gonna work from the town manager, which he will report back to us. Once we have that information and then we take that plus what was in rules plus what the charge says then Oka could have a conversation about where we fit in this process perhaps separate from our full charge and we're looking at the whole thing but to be able to put all those piece parts together just so that we don't lose track because like we said, we worked on the rules with Margaret specifically for this. Now we have a job description. Now we may have a little tweaking that happens associated with town manager's part and then Oka could look at that and report back where we are coming next if that sounds reasonable. Okay. Committee reports. Many of these we have taken care of tonight because they have led to actions but very quickly audit. Nothing. By-law review. Evan. Nothing new. Community resource committee. No report. Goals at hot none. Finance committee. We will be taking up the percent for arts at our next meeting matter referred to us. We have not had the opportunity to really discuss it and we did have a discussion at our last meeting with the chair of Oka about the appointment process for resident members of the committee but that's turned back over to open. I understand Oka will report on that in this next meeting. Let's give something to say now. Evan. Oka did vote today to recommend three people to be the non-voting resident members of the finance committee. You can expect to see a written report on those for our next meeting. An emotion. Okay. G.O.L. I just want to point out the report we have 45 days to report on the rules and so that is up soon. So we, on what was referred to us from the rules committee and the council, our report says we're still working on it. We hope to have draft revised rules by the 22nd and then the other stuff will continue on. Okay. Oka. Okay, okay. We're on to approval of minutes. We're going to do a joint thing on June, minutes for June 17th and minutes for June 24th. The motion is to approve the minutes of the June 17th town council meeting and the minutes of the June 24th, 2019 open meeting of the residents as presented. Is there a motion? Second. Further discussion? Changes? Corrections? Then all those in favor raise your hand and say aye. Opposed, abstain, and absent. So there's one abstention and one absent. So it's 11-0-1-1. All right. Town managers report. Thank you. Happy new fiscal year. I know everybody's a little groggy from fiscal New Year's Eve. So we have a lot of searches going on right now for the director of senior services, for the town clerk, and I will have a recommendation for the director of senior services that I will deliver to you on Monday, July 8th. That will, I talked with the chair of Oka this morning about the timing of that. That allows the council to be able to weigh in prior to the 14-day expiration of the department head appointment. So we have a candidate. I've made a job offer contingent on the review by the town council. And the search for the town clerk is ongoing. We basically just revved up the machine that was happening a year ago, and they're up and searching for the town clerk for that as well. The third position that you may have seen is David Burgess, who is the principal assessor who's retired, but his intention and my desire is for him to come back on a part-time basis to fulfill the function of the principal assessor on a part-time basis, which he has permitted to do under the retirement laws. He had intended to work for another year or so, and due to some other situations, he decided to retire now, but wanted to continue working, and this will give us some other opportunities to transition, give us a little bit longer glide path into a long-term transition. The Independence Day is the next big event, which is on July 4th, obviously, and South Amherst Common has a major event, which is always a terrific event that people like to go to. The fireworks and the festivities at UMass will be a little bit different this year because where we normally have the event behind the stadium is a construction site now getting ready for a new indoor football field, and we will be, if you are on University Drive, this will be to the left of the stadium. The thing that will, the two major changes this year is there will be a beer garden that's available, much like the taste of Amherst. This is located in the town of Hadley, so they're the permitting authority for this, and the university owns the property, and there will also, the town of Hadley and the state police will be closing Route 116 from about six o'clock until about 10 o'clock. They have experienced previously for the Amherst fireworks that a lot of people would like to stop on Route 116 and observe the fireworks, and the police found that that was a potentially dangerous situation in terms of cars and pedestrians mixing on a road that's a divided highway, so they will be closing that. That will cause some inconvenience to people, but they will be, we've added police direction officers, both in Amherst and in other part in Hadley as well, to help people get around that situation. This morning, I had the privilege of having the town clerk swear on three new firefighters who have started work today, and that's really good news for us. We have had some unexpected retirements or resignations, and when that happens unexpectedly, it creates a crunch for our firefighters because it takes about 10 to 12 weeks to train a new firefighter. We had already been in process for hiring these officers, these firefighters, and we had a list that we could choose from, so this is opportunist, opportune, they won't be fully available as a standalone firefighter for a couple months though, unfortunately, but they start their training today, they were out there doing all the things that they were supposed to be doing, learning to drive our ambulances and things like that. So good news, three new firefighters on duty as of today. The Ranked Choice Voting Committee is having its first meeting next Tuesday, and you're all invited to come if you'd like, but it's a pretty strong group that will be organizing itself, the town clerk, the temporary town clerk is a member and will be managing that process, and so that meeting's been posted and they have a pretty big task ahead of them because they have a deadline to meet, and I think that they have a lot of people who have experience in Ranked Choice Voting, there's also a discussion on Ranked Choice Voting later in July at UMass, which I'll share with you, so if you're interested in that, people can go through that, that's open to the public as well. We've done a lot of appointments, but we still have vacancies, so we're going to sort of recognize where we are in terms of where our vacancies are, we're gonna make another push for advertising to the public, say here's where we still need people, for instance, we talked about participatory budgeting commission, public art commission, so we'll go out and sort of advertise to folks again to say we still need you, and we often have vacancies throughout the year, so it's always good to have a pool of candidates who are expressing interest in serving. The Kendrick Park, the Planning Department had a public meeting to explore the idea of having a playground in Kendrick Park, this is something that the town had looked at previously, we intend to go for a grant to pay for this playground, and we're hopeful that it'll be funded, it's the only way this park at this point and time would move forward is that we'd receive the sizeable grant for it. One of the things I've heard multiple times from people as we talked mostly about the North Common was the lack of play space for young children downtown, people come downtown with their children to get a slice of pizza or get ice cream, and there's no place really to go for them to expend some energy, and so that's something we hope to address. Station Road Bridge, we've, if you've been down there, we bought a bridge, it's sitting there, we have poured the concrete, and the way it works is the concrete has to cure, it has to, they pour the concrete and then they pour some test cylinders, and then they take out the test cylinders and they put that, they subject that to pressure every week until it can survive 4,000 PSI, and so they tested one today and it broke at less than four, they tested, they test five at a time, they tested less than 4,000, so next Monday they'll test again, they're fairly confident that these will test, they will all survive the 4,000 PSI test, and in that case, we have everyone lined up next week to install the bridge, which requires a crane to do the paving that allows people to get up over the bridge to install the guardrails and to install signs, so whether permitting and are these concrete cylinders surviving will be doing that next week and that should take about four or five days to do, so we're optimistic that that will move forward pretty soon. The Puffer's Pond is closed as of today, they tested the water again, we will know tomorrow if we're allowed to reopen, this happens periodically during the summer, it's usually because of runoff, it's not because of human behavior, it's because of heavy rains and runoff, and this weekend wasn't helpful necessarily, but because of a heavier than normal concentration of E. Coli, we closed the both sides of the Puffer's Pond. The traffic has, people have been learning about the new one-way traffic, we've added signage to help guide people, we've had police patrols up there and more as an educational tool, and so I think that that's gonna work out pretty well, people are getting used to the new parking alignment, they're taking advantage of the nose-in parking, which increases the number of cars that we can have on the roadway, so I think that's all working pretty well. I think fourth of July weekend will be a real test, especially because it's supposed to be hot, there'll be a lot of people coming up, it's a place that a lot of folks come from over Western Mass to take advantage of Puffer's Pond. So it's very popular and we have added patrols up there from police and from our conservation officers, and we have one of our parking enforcement officers swinging up there periodically as well, and also working the beach a little bit more than we have in the past, to make sure that people are abiding by the rules that are at Puffer's Pond in terms of no alcohol and things like that. So that's what I want to report on. Questions, yes. Amanda Jo. Do we have a timeline on when ops renovations might be done? What, Groth Park? We started to see some vertical, it starts going up. I don't have the timeline on that. It's probably a couple of weeks, so. Darcy. I just want to say that I really looked forward to the town manager report and enjoy it very much and think it's one of the most valuable documents that we have. I've been sharing it at my district meetings because it just tells everything. And I have one question and a comment. The comment is that I did like it back when you had a section that was entitled sustainability. You always have stuff in there about sustainability, but I think it would be great to have that label. And I also wanted to ask you about the contract with Amherst Community Television and that you said in the report that the contract was going to be adjusted as per needs of the town council. And I just wondered if that's more detail about that. Sure. So we did have a meeting with members of the board of directors and the director of Amherst Media. Basically, because the current contract had provisioned it that allowed us to reopen it if we changed our form of government because it calls for a coverage of the select board and things like that. And we want to reach clarity with them about what meetings that they are actually going to be covering and what their capacity was to cover them. And I think it's a very productive meeting. Where it stands now is the balls in my court where I'm going to make changes to the contract, send it over to Amherst Media. They're going to review the changes. They're pretty straightforward instead of where it says select board. Or town meeting, it will say town council. We want to call out the public forums that are required in the charter. All the things that are required in the charter, we want to make sure that it's in the contract that they're going to cover. So there's no question going forward. So they're not covering the committees of the council? No, they have a hard time covering daytime meetings because they rely a lot on volunteers to record the meetings. That currently they're required to cover the finance committee meetings. That's the only thing that's in the contract itself. If we were to contract for additional meetings or committees, we probably would probably look for some compensation on that. One more. Yes, go ahead. So is there a way that we could get some kind of agreement with the IT department about how fast they can get up the videos of the council meetings? So we talked about that as well with Amherst Media and about who can do that the best. I mean, Amherst Media has the best equipment to put in the taglines that you want to see. So you know what you're watching and things like that. It takes several hours for them to do one of those things. So after there's a meeting, it gets downloaded. It takes time for them to do it. And they've laid off a person in their recently. So it's just about staff capacity at their level in terms of being able to turn it around. They prioritize this meeting and being able to turn this one around as quickly as possible. Committee meetings are lower priority, quite frankly. Evan. So regarding Session Road Bridge, obviously we got a little bit behind what we were hoping for for the temporary bridge. I'm looking at the permanent bridge schedule which has advertised bid award beginning August 19th. Is the delay for the temporary bridge also pushing back the permanent bridge schedule? Or is there an anticipation that this will stay on schedule? Right. The intent is not to move on the permanent bridge until we get state funding. So we'll be putting funds requests in and the state bridge program is a little messed up, now, honestly. And so once they are looking for applications again, we'll be putting in for this bridge. Any other questions at this time? Alyssa? This almost falls under unanticipated and I'm actually gonna look to our new OCA chair for this, but we just heard a report much to my surprise that we are going to be getting a department head appointment that has the 14 day clock and OCA doesn't have a meeting between now and the 22nd. And so that means it wouldn't be possible for OCA to give you a recommendation on that except if we meet that morning, the 22nd. And so I guess I would ask, although I would defer to you, my initial instinct would be to ask if the town council would, we're not gonna have a written report for you. There's no chance of that. We're not gonna be able to schedule an additional meeting based on it coming out next week. And so what is the town council's pleasure associated with? My assumption is that an oral report will suffice. We literally won't have time to talk about it at all until that morning for the first time. That's fine. We will have the town managers memo because that comes to all of us. And so it's not as if we'll be working with no knowledge. So what we will ask for is an oral summary of OCA's discussion and your recommendation because we're not scheduling any more meetings either. Any other questions? Okay, very quickly, there are two things. There's an updated evaluation timeline for the town managers evaluation. I mentioned earlier that we took a little longer to get it moving out but it does not affect your timeline. But the reason we did that was because of converting things to use of Survey Monkey, which allows us to compile stuff a lot faster. And then, Lisa actually did some editing on it. So I just wanted to mention that everything is still on track and you were provided with the timeline. The other thing that has come up recently is the whole issue of timeline and key milestones for adopting zoning bylaws and other bylaws. And using a piece of a document that actually is part of a book that our Bob Ritchie is writing, we've now met and started adding into that the pieces that are part of our rules of procedure and also the charter and hope to be able to present that back to the council. But in the process, let me just say that is why we delayed because in doing that, it was determined and also before that was determined that because we did not hold a joint hearing with the planning board regarding the zoning bylaws, we had to go through the complete process of re-advertising with all of the same people that the planning board had already advertised with. So this in no way reflects on the bylaw review committee. It's just a matter of abiding by the law. Other than that, I have nothing else but going on to future items, I do wanna mention that we do at some point need to figure out how to address the issue of permission to fly additional flags because it was not specifically mentioned in the policy with regard to public ways. And it did come up though we went ahead and did approve it to fly the flag that we're flying now. And are there other future agenda items? Mandy Jo. I just wanna state that as chair of GOL, I've received a couple of comments on that. And so it will go on to our future agenda items to review the public ways policy to make sure to figure out a recommendation on flags on the flag polls and also commemorative flags throughout town. Thank you. Other comments on future agenda items? Okay, councilor comments? Yes. I just wanted to remind people about the Google form that the OCA sent out with regard to councilor outreach. We have five of us have completed it so we're waiting for everyone else to get that in so we can just get information out to people about what everybody's doing and what we can do better. Okay, thank you. Other questions, other comments? Do I hear a motion? There is no executive session. There are no other topics. Do I hear a motion to adjourn? George doesn't wanna adjourn. Come on. Second. Second. Second. Andy second, all those in favor? Raise your aye. Opposed? Abstain. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.