 Okay, welcome everybody to the community chat for Tuesday, May 12th. Thank you for joining us. As a quick reminder, this webinar is being recorded. To ask a question while you're in the room with us, please hit the Q&A button in Zoom, raise your hand via Zoom, or if you're calling in from the phone, please press star nine, and we will recognize your question. So today we have our special guest, Guilford Mooring, Superintendent of the Public Works Department. Welcome to you both. Hi. Before we launch into questions and accept your questions, are there any updates from you, Paul, that you wanna share? Sure. So we'll be, you know, the governor has announced that there's, there'll be four phases to reopening the economy. We're waiting for the specifics on that for him to come out with those things. And as he comes out with those, we'll be interpreting those and how they fit into operations in our businesses and the municipal operations for the town of Amherst. Other things, yesterday and this afternoon, what we've been talking about, what our budget looks like for FY20 and FY21. And that's not really the subject of today. Although if there are questions, I can be happy to answer them. So last night we made a presentation to the budget coordinating group, which includes the town council, school committee and the board of library trustees and talked a little bit about the path forward in terms of where we are going. We will be more specific this afternoon during the finance committee meeting about what that really looks like and the kinds of changes that we have to make in order to accommodate our budget needs for FY21. And so that's pretty much it for my end. And I'll just say to folks who are listening that to follow along with any of the FY21 budget, you can find that information at amherstma.gov slash budget on our website and we'll be adding new information as it gets, as it becomes available there. Guilford, any general, any general announcement you wanna make or do you wanna just launch into the questions? We just launch into the questions. Okay, sounds good. So again, for the attendees here, please use Q&A to put your question to us live or raise your hand and we will acknowledge you and bring you into the group here. So some questions that we have already. This is a big one that I've heard, I've gotten a couple of questions on is the transfer station still open on its normal schedule? Does it still take the same things that it normally does or have there been changes? So the transfer station is open on its normal schedule. The things we take are listed on the website. If you go to the website it'll tell you we have had to restrict what we can take. We're only taking trash that's in the blue trash bags right now and then bottle and can recycling and paper recycling. We've been doing that to minimize the interactions at the transfer station among the public and the staff. And then we also have been trying to work out some issues we have with some of our, because we're a transfer station, we send things on to other disposal sites and some of those sites have closed. So we have to figure out what we're gonna do with those items as well. But we're open regular hours, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, eight to two. And we're only taking right now blue trash bags, paper recycling, which includes cardboard and then bottles and cans and containers recycling. And then we'll make some changes probably for the 18th or the week of the 18th, there'll probably be some changes and those will be posted online and they'll be announced in the news as well. And I know a lot of people, oh, sorry, Paul. No, go ahead, go ahead. Do I think you're asking the same question? I was probably. A lot of people have been working in their yards and in their gardens with this time off. Are you guys still accepting yard waste at this time? We're not accepting yard waste at this time. We're not accepting yard waste this time. The way we set up the transfer station to operate, yard waste area is kind of blocked off and it's hard to get into the yard waste area. So as we readjust for next week, we will be able to start taking yard waste probably next week. And people should definitely not put it in the road or in the gutters or anything in between time. We've been hearing all sorts of stories about people are putting it and they shouldn't be putting it in any of those places, not in your neighbor's yard, not over the fence in the conservation land or watershed land. You shouldn't be throwing it in the brook behind your house. You should just hold on to it. It's not really that dangerous to you to hold on to yard waste. It's safer to hold on to it than to expose yourself to potential illness just because you wanna get rid of your yard waste. Great. But at some point in the future, we will open up the transfer station to accept that when we are able to achieve the social distancing goals, right? Yes. So what other ways has DPW had to change their operations in light of COVID? We kind of went to a split shift situation. Half the employees are here one day, half the employees are here the next day. That's just to be more socially distanced in the breakup than the potential passing a lot of some type of illness. It's also meant to hold, if one crew gets infected, there's another crew that can kind of fill in. So that's mainly what I've been doing is splitting up like that, trying to keep one person per vehicle, things like that. And have you got, it's been more like a seven day a week operation then? Or you've always been seven days actually? We've always been seven days a week. It's not every division has worked seven days a week. When we first started the COVID-19, we were actually working, everybody worked Monday through Sunday. Then we've rolled back to Monday through Sunday with the water and wastewater working Saturday. Wait a minute. We were Monday through Sunday and then we went to Monday through Saturday with water and wastewater doing Sundays as they are required to do by state law. And when we roll on the 18th, we'll go back to five days a week for everyone as a normal shift and just have coverage from parks, water and wastewater and the transfer station on the weekends. Who have another question here? Why can't we use the playgrounds? I think the biggest issue about playgrounds is social distancing. It's hard to have a whole bunch of kids running on a playground and socially distance themselves. As we talk about how to reopen, we're gonna find the biggest threat is the social distancing on the playground. The fact the playground is outside, it's in the sunlight, it's being kind of disinfected a little better than most things we come in contact with. So that's good. But we have to figure out and parents have to come to a, have to figure out how they want to have their kids play on it with other kids and still social distance themselves. So it's an interesting question because Gilford talks about, we talk about this on a regular basis and reevaluate decisions that we've made when we close playgrounds, but we do bring it back periodically and say, is the scientific evidence that we based our closure on still valid? And is this something we should be continuing? And as Gilford has pointed out, that in the summer, there's a lot more sunlight and so sunlight is a clear disinfectant for COVID-19. And so do we really need to wipe down playground equipment? Do we have the capacity to wipe down playground equipment? And is that even the issue? And I think the issue is more what Gilford just said is that it's social distancing that you are providing a place where you're attracting people to gather all together and that that might be the bigger concern for us at this moment in time. But it's something we look at on a regular basis. And this next question we've gotten a lot, especially in the last couple of weeks, will pools open this summer? Will pools open this summer? That's a good question. I don't think we've actually decided whether they will or not. So that's still being discussed and looked at. Yeah, so pools are really complicated because on one hand, when it's hot, you want access for people to be able to cool down who might not live in a place where there's air conditioning or anything like that. There's also a great place for people who exercise. It's a fantastic exercise. So for lap swims, and you look at it and you say, well, it's chlorinated water. What could be safer? Again, the issues that we face with this is social distancing and how do you limit the number of people? How do you provide proper social distancing for our staff so that they can work safely? And that's usually a big determination in terms of what we're able to offer. The good, the one thing about this is that we're not alone because every community is having that exact same conversation. And it's really, I've been advocating for regional answers to these questions so that they're not just town by town because what one town does influences the next town. So if one town has little league and the next town doesn't, it has an impact or if you open your pools and then one town, you become a magnet and do you wanna do that? I think that's why we've been really advocating for there to be statewide guidance coming from the governor's office. And that's why I think he, I've been on many calls with their teams and from other groups advocating for better direction. Normally we don't ask, we'd like flexibility from the state but in this case, we're looking for more direction so that it's approached regionally. So we're all in this together basically and responding in the same way. So our next question isn't exactly COVID related but this person wants to know the status of the new traffic light in North Amherst. So the new polls are up and the pieces are coming in slowly. One of the things that's happened is that before COVID hit, there was a tornado down in Nashville that wiped out traffic lights. Some other things happened and then production got closed down. So the parts are coming in very slowly. I imagine before fall when the students come back, if they do come back in the fall, the light will definitely be up and working and may have been working for a month or two before they come back. And this is circled back to the whole pools question. One of our viewers has a comment regarding the pools. They ask that you please consider opening them for lap swimming, possibly by reservation with no lingering on the deck. So just putting that out there. Yeah. Okay. I wanna remind everybody to use the Q&A function or raise your hand. We'd love to hear from you. Our next question is, how can I report public works issues right now? You can report them the same way you've always reported them. You can email us. You can call and leave a message or you can do the C-click fix. That's the third one I was trying to remember. If you go on the town website and sign up for notifications, there's a little thing that you can actually post things that are wrong. We get all three of those still and they get processed and sent out pretty quickly. So no change there? No change. Great. Okay. So are you still paving and filling potholes at this time of year? We have when the weather's been cooperating with us. We just passed, recently they were patching university drive. I think that's all set except for the university side. We've been doing patching basically around town whenever it'll let us. We're getting ready to start line painting. So you'll see us patching some more of the roads where the center line needs patching so we can paint the lines. The contractor was in and has pretty much finished paving Southeast Street and Pelham Road and there's just some small work they have to do to clean that up. And yeah, we're still out here paving away. Yeah, Pelham Road in Southeast Street looks spectacular. It's like such a relief to have nice smooth roads. It's unbelievable how expensive that paving is. So how little the town puts a lot of money into paving and you'd say, wow, we got that one road done with all that money. So does it go very far? Yeah. So our next question has to do with the fact that the university is in the colleges physically closed and for the last few months now and has that had any impact on DPW operations or the town? From DPW operations, it's actually been just like the summer. So we just went to summer sooner not having the students around. Unfortunately, we're also, we're expecting to have this. So our water production is way below what it should be right now. We're about a million gallons less a day than we normally are at this time of year. Although graduation was last weekend so that means that production should start dropping. Normally it would drop this weekend to what it is now. So we've had about a month and a half of low consumption of water which is gonna show up somewhere to be a negative revenue for us at some point. I mean, it's good for our water sources because they're not being used but it means six weeks of reduced money coming in and a renewable resource basically, right? Yes, we have lots of water to sell if someone wants to buy you some bulk water. And so are we still, this is something that we were talking about earlier on, you know, the increased use of wipes due to COVID. Are you still seeing issues with people flushing those unflushable wipes? And do you wanna talk a little bit about that? So the sewer system is still seeing a lot of flushable wipes and a lot of grease. People are cooking more at home. They're bringing more takeout home. So they're bringing more of this food into their house and putting it down the drain and it's not, the grease is causing problems. And then the flushable wipes, they really are not flushable. They go down the toilet but they don't break apart like toilet paper does in the system. So we are having a great deal of problems still with these wipes hanging up on different things and getting stuck and causing dams in the system. We probably had about three or four sewer backups in the last couple of weeks, which they all have come back to an unusual amount of wipes in the system and grease. So we just need to be careful. Grease should never go down the drain, put it in the trash, and the flushable wipes should never be flushed. They go in the trash as well. So interesting. So grease normally, if you buy it at a restaurant, they have grease traps that catches the grease right before it goes down. But at home, we don't have grease traps. Correct. So put it in the trash is what we're saying. Put it in the trash. So we've had some spotty weather over the last couple of weeks, a lot of wind. What should people do when they notice a downed limb or a downed tree on public or private property? So you can call the DPW if you see a downed limb or a tree falls down. If you know it's on your property, you can call us, but we probably aren't gonna help you. It's your tree, unfortunately, and we're not gonna come. If it falls into the wires, any type of wire, tree falls into the wire and it's your tree or our tree, you can also call ever source and report it. That's who we're gonna call. Is ever source reported and have them come out, make sure it's everything safe to work there in the electricity and electrical wires, and then they'll take it down or we'll come take it down if it's our tree. But if you see it, just call it in. If it's a very small little branch that fell on the road, you can also just go pick it up and throw it to the side of the road and tell us to come pick it up later and just tell us it's not in the road, it's on the side of the road. Those are things that you can do as well. So we had a large branch come down on our house and but it was sort of a tree that was close to the public way. So I had to call the DPW and find out if it was a town tree or not. It turns out it was not a town tree. So unfortunately, we were responsible for it. But what people may not know is that there's an inventory of all the town trees on our website. So you can go to any piece of property and see every tree marked and whether it's a town tree or a private tree to pretty high degree of accuracy. And is that through our GIS mapping system? Yes, yes. Yeah, there's a lot of good information there. Amazing. So we have another question here and you touched a little bit on this earlier, Guilford, about how operations have changed. But this person wants to know what personal safety precautions are your workers taking when they're on their shifts? So every day when a shift comes in, the supervisors check to make sure that the employees are okay, they haven't had any illnesses or feeling bad or been in contact with anybody who have. The next thing they do is just about everyone cleans their vehicle or cleans the equipment they're getting ready to use for the day because you don't know who used it or got used overnight or emergency. Everything's cleaned and then they go out and they work. Like we said, we try to keep people one person per vehicle. Everyone has access to a mask. We have face shields in case you can't wear a mask and you're working in an area where you might get splashed with something whether it's another person or whether it's something that you're working on that splashes in your face. We also have, we've been using rain gear as personal protective equipment instead of gowns or our tie-back suits. We've been using rain gear because we can wash that off and disinfect it and then reuse it again. It's not really a hospital setting. And then we've also, we have a company that comes in and cleans some of those spaces every day. The high use spaces in the main building. So they get cleaned once a day as well. And then at the end of the day, everyone's encouraged to clean again, clean your equipment up, put it away and then it's ready for the next group to come use it again. So that's basically what we're doing and we will continue to do for a while. But social distancing is the big thing we do and try to stay apart from each other. There are times where we have to get close and those times we have mask or we have the face shields we can use to keep things from splattering on us. So that's a really good point because we get calls about seeing someone on the street with an employee without a mask on but the principle is social distancing. If you can maintain social distance, meaning at least six feet and this is from the director from our health director, then that's adequate. And then if you're going to need to be closer than that if you're interacting with the public then a mask is expected and required and all employees who are out there interacting will have masks. But it really, if you see someone cutting grass and they don't have a mask on it's not because they're violating any rules. They don't need it if they're just out there cutting grass. Yeah, that's a good distinction to make because we have had some calls about that. So we do have another question that just came in from one of our attendees and they say given that there has been no sports on the school and town fields this spring has DPW made any improvements to those fields continuing maintenance at least? So the best thing for those fields has been no sports. The grass has been growing. We've done our normal things. We've aerated, we've fertilized. There's been some overseeing in some areas but now that no sports are there they can actually grow and regenerate themselves and recover from the last seasons which is really, really good. We have been mowing and keeping that up because we don't want to turn into a hay field. That would just be a loss of, that would just be too much of, that would just be a loss. But we are out there doing those things and probably the best thing unfortunately is there is no activity on them. They look great I have to say. All right, we are getting close to the end of our time. I'm just going to remind folks in the room if they want to pop their questions in to do so now or raise your hand and we'll pull you in while we see if anyone else has anything to ask. Are there any things you didn't get asked Guilford that you think might be important for the community to know right now? Just in the near future here we're going to be starting our waterline flushing program. We do that every spring. It's not something special because of COVID-19. Every year we flush the water lines it gets some of the stuff out of the lines that accumulates over the years and it's a water quality type program that helps keep water quality up. We will also like I said be line painting. Line painters will be out shortly. We had hoped, we usually have line painting halfway done by graduation but it's been such a wet, cold, wet and cold spring. We haven't been able to line paint but we will start that soon. And then you will also start seeing some work some of the sidewalks in town that we've decided to work on this year. They'll start that work here shortly. And then we're hoping to get our contractor for paving back in within at least a couple of weeks three or four weeks we'll have them back in and have them paving this year's list of streets for paving. Is that list of streets posted anywhere for people to see? Is it on? No. Okay. It will be as soon as we get the schedule and we've worked out the funding for it. There might be a few streets that are on that were bid that we don't do because funding isn't really available but the list will be posted as soon as we work off the funding and get them all set. Great. And with the, go ahead. I just wanna congratulate Gilford as a new graduate in his household from UMass. So that was a good big weekend last weekend. Yes. I'm excited. You're sure, you're excited? Yeah, no more payments UMass. What will you do now? I know. All right, so any, I don't see any new questions from our participants. So any final words that either of you wanna leave people with? The only thing I'd like to add is there are things, the people who are paying attention and watching, thanks for everybody who's logged in today and who will watch it as since it's been being recorded, you can share it out with other folks as there are ways that we can make these better, think people you would like to hear. We're, Brianna and I are talking about new ways we can communicate with the people with public and what's really out there that people would like to know about and what's a good format for us to present it in. So open to any ideas for that. Absolutely and you can send those ideas to info at amherstma.gov or you can call if you wanna talk to a real person. Not that that's not a real person answering those emails, but if you wanna call someone on the phone, the town manager's office is always staffed up at 413-259-3002. We will be with health director Julie Federman this Thursday at noon, same link, same phone number. So, oh wait, we did have a comment come in. Oh, this is really good timing for this question. So when is town halls front door going to be replaced? We have good news for you. So the workers arrived today, they unloaded the new front doors and they brought it into the building. They're in the process of putting it up today and it should take a few days I think for it to be totally in place. It looks spectacular. It's all the natural wood and it was natural wood to begin with. It was never painted. So I think that's, we're gonna be really proud of that. And it's gonna make, just gonna make the entrance to town hall look like it should have been. So it's great. We're all excited to lose the plywood. So thank you for your question. With that being said, that's basically all the time we have for today. Guilford, is there anything else? Just, I just wanted to remind people to, we come up to a worker who's working on the street. Remember he's going through the, he or she is going through the same things you are. Some of them are having family members they have to isolate from. Some of their family members might be sick. Some of their extended family members might have passed away or be in the hospital. So please remember you're talking to another human being and they're going through the same things you are. That's a good point. And they are our essential workers and they are public safety workers, just like any of the other folks that we have in town, fire or police. So we do appreciate them. All right, I am going to say that we're gonna wrap up now. Thank you all for joining us. This will be recorded and posted to our YouTube channel. So thank you and stay safe. Great, thank you.