 Ready? Go ahead. Hang on a minute. I got to click on continue pursuant to the chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. This meeting will be conducted by remote means members of the public who wish to access access the meeting may do so by zoom or by telephone or via www.amherstma.gov. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time by technological means. And the meetings are all being archived for easy viewing on Amherst's YouTube channel. All right. So we want to inquire if anyone is recording this meeting at this time, the town of Amherst is doing so now. So if anybody else is recording, please let me know now. Okay. So is that true? You can attend in person. So we have, because we're a small board, we're able to have a few members in person, which we can try to do again next meeting. I just keep forgetting to ask it to make sure that we're all set up in the room. So if, if, because we have such a small board, if two of us want to attend with Teresa and I here in town hall, that's fine. We just have to have one person at home. And so we would still record. So that everyone can. Can watch our meetings. Well, he just read, so the public cannot attend. That's right. The public cannot attend our meetings. They would have to join by zoom. Huh. Is that town wide then? Yes. All the meetings are no public. Huh. Yes. That's unusual. Like New York state, I'm active in. They've opened it up to the public everywhere now. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Okay. The first order of business is the minutes of the June 16th. 20, 22, 22 meeting, which I was not at. I move we approve. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. And then we have the minutes of the August meeting. I have one amendment that I would like to add, and I don't know about you all, but at the bottom here, you see it says closed public session of the meeting at 942 a.m. And then it ends there, but we do need to add what time it was that we closed the meeting in general. And do you have a record of that? Yes. I don't have it right in front of me, but. It was not, I think it was maybe 10 o'clock. So how, how are we going to do this? So what we would do is we can vote to approve the minutes with friendly amendments. And then Teresa will make that edit before they get. Archived. So moved. Second. All right. Yeah. I wasn't, I wasn't at the meeting. No, you weren't. Lee. Have you looked over the meds? Yes, I have. Okay. All those in favor of approving these minutes. Say aye. Aye. Aye. With the friendly amendment. Okay. Let me just catch up with you for a quick second on my note. Sorry about that. All right. Okay. Then moving along on the agenda, the next thing is our motor vehicle excise abatements. So we have those here. You will see this is for the calendar year of 2022. Totaling. $633 and seven cents. You will see this one particular one with the red star and the note on the bottom here that says. That it was revised and the wrong year abated. The wrong year was abated. So it was reversed on a 22. So again, these abatements were all. Approved. All the paperwork was received. And again, the amount is $633 and seven cents in abatements. So I'm trying to understand what happened with the starred one. So, um, Tricey, maybe you can. Well, I, when I proof these every week. I look for different things. And this one obviously. The wrong year was abated. So, um, The bill 228. The bill 228. The bill 228. The bill 228. For 2022 shouldn't have been there. It should have been 2020. I think if I remember correctly. It was a bill for 2020. And sometimes when we're doing abatements, if you don't change the year of the bill. This happens. Doesn't happen very often, but. It happened this time, unfortunately. So does this person get an abatement? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know this. So what happens is when you enter the wrong year, you can enter the bill number and it will still bring up a bill. Um, but for example, if, if I'm trying to get an abatement. For the year 2020. And my bill number is 228. Um, and whoever is, is posting the abatement puts in 228. In the year 2022. It may pay, pull up Richard's bill, for example, because in order of. In the year 2020, it's not going to be a duplicate bill. It's not going to be a duplicate bill, but there might be a duplicate bill number from year to year. Okay. Um, so what happened was somebody had posted this abatement on 22. When it should have actually been calendar year 20. So this particular person wasn't actually asking for an abatement. Um, which is why Teresa reversed that abatement because that was the wrong person. And then you'll see later on. She's probably added it into this list. Okay. So, so while the math. Is correct for the numbers listed. Um, It really. I'm trying. So, so this $49 and 25 cents here. Sorry that it's red. I don't know how to change that, but, um, that actually got reversed. And so that $49 was not actually abated. So this, this six, uh, 30 307 is, um, Is, is a little bit more than what we actually gave for this week. Right. I think what you're going to see, I think on the next report, I don't remember. Um, we'll, you'll see the reversal on that one, I believe. Yeah. You will under. Under the 2022, you'll see the third one down. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It was reversed on here. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'll go back up here then again. Um, so we'll go with the abated amount of. Six, 30, 307 understanding that, that $49 and 25 cents was abated or was reversed and not abated. With the understanding, it gets fixed and the net on the next screen. That's correct. Okay. I moved to approve these abatements. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. All right. So here you will see there was one abatement for the calendar year of 2020, which I assume was probably. Could have been that bill that we were looking for. Um, for $68 and 40 cents. You will see five abatements for the calendar year of 2021 in the amount of 2000. $26 and 97 cents. And then you will see 32 abatements for calendar year 22. In the amount of $1,500, $6 and 35 cents. Understanding again that that $49 and 25 cents there highlighted in red. Uh, was reversed. In this, in this week. Um, And so the total abatements for the week of 822 through 831 was $3,600, $1 and 72 cents. I would have thought the 2020 bill number would have been the same as previous page. That may not be the actual. No, let me just, it was a 2021. If you look at the 2021. For Andrew Kohler. So it was that bill that should have been abated in the first place. Okay. So the bill numbers stayed the same. Correct. Got it. It's a lot back. I'm sure he's glad you corrected that. Yeah. I moved to approve the set of abatements. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Moving along. The week. September 1st through the ninth, you'll see there's two abatements for the calendar year 2020. In the amount of $43 and 99 cents. Okay. I moved to approve these abatements. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. That's all we have for those for today. So I'm going to stop sharing. So the next thing on our agenda is going to be the principal assessor updates. So what I have for you is. That we've been working on finalizing our information for the end of the year setting of the tax rate, finalizing values. This year we are in the revaluation, which happens every five years. So we have a little bit of different. Things that are different this year. Just because of the revaluation. So. What we've done so far is submitted our preliminary values. To the state for approval, which means. Basically what's going to happen now is Lauren, who's our, our department of revenue representative is looking through all of our data to make sure that she thinks everything. Fits our requirements for the DOR. And then once she's okay with that, we have to post our values online for one week. And then we're going to have to, you know, sign up for a post on the DOR. And then once she's okay with that, we have to post our values online for one week for people to review. And if they feel that there's something wrong with their property. They have the ability to appeal for that one week. So. What that means is you don't have the ability to come and say, I think my value is too high because. you have me for an extra thousand square feet of livable space that's actually my garage or you have one too many bathrooms in my house or so on and so forth. So there needs to be an issue on the record card of data, not just I think my value is too high. So we're hoping to, yes, yeah. So we're hoping to get that posted, I think in the next two weeks. Once that week passes, if there isn't any changes, we can immediately submit our LA4 into Gateway for final approval by the state. And we're anticipating to have the council meeting for the classification hearing on the 17th of October. In order to do that, we need to have our values approved by the state first. And then there's a couple of other things that come from the accounting office that we would like to have done, but the finalized values have to be approved before we can have the council meeting. Can I ask you what awakens me, John Q taxpayer to this posting? How am I awakened out of my slumber to look at this? So previously in years past, the DOR required that we put a notification in the newspaper. They no longer require that, they just require that you post it on your website with something on the front page of the website. So it's a lot of mouth to mouth, word to word conversations, people having passing that along. Also, if you check the website or if you get notifications of any updates on the website, that might be something that you would get. It has to be on the front page of the town website. So if you pull open the page, it's going to come up right away. So that's basically how you would find out about that. So are you under a time strain when somebody says my garage is wrong? Yes, so we have to respond. So if they, so for example, let's go with that. You have an extra 1000 square feet of livable space on my house, but it's actually my garage. So if somebody comes in and says that within that week, say they come in on Friday at three o'clock and they say, I just realized that you have my house incorrect because of the square footage. So I have, I would say a week or slightly over to be able to go ahead and fix that. Now, depending on how many inquiries you get and how many issues you may have, it may take you longer than a week, but the sooner that you can get them done, the better. So this is a little different than your typical overvaluation time where you have three months to respond. We need to get this done and fixed and entered into gateway so that we can get our values approved and we can get our tax rate set so that our bills can go out on the, by the 31st of December. Do you have what week it is? What week it's gonna be that this is posted? We're hopeful to do it, I would say in the next two to three weeks, but looking at a calendar, let's see. So today is the 22nd. I would hope to be able to post it the week of the 3rd of October. So that would be in two weeks. Okay. So we would post it at eight a.m. Monday morning and it would be removed by 4.30 p.m. Friday afternoon. So are the current property cards out there, are they after them right now? Yes. So we could go right now. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. There's no change. This is a mandatory requirement by the state of Massachusetts so that people have the ability to look at that because unlike us, many communities don't post their values out to the web on a regular daily basis because it's not a value that's approved by the state. So if, for example, we're working on a new construction, start working on it at say four o'clock, we get the whole sketch put in the computer, we get everything updated so that it looks like the house is completed. Oops, it's 4.30, gotta go. So we shut down the computer, we leave it. What people don't see on the other end is I still have more work to do on that parcel. So that parcel may have gone from a piece of land valued at 150,000 to a fully built house valued at $800,000 but it's not there yet. So there is confusion that could happen with the way we do it. But yes, you can absolutely, at this point in the game, values are not being touched at this time so you could go online and see what your anticipated value is for this fiscal year. So do you have to have this done if there's anybody coming in before you can submit the L4? Yes. Okay. Yes, yep. And the reason being is during reval you have that opportunity as a taxpayer to not have to go through the whole paperwork process of filing an overvaluation. You can have things like that fixed before. And then once we submit the LA4 to the state you'd have to file the overvaluation. Oh, so this special thing just happens during reval every five years? Yes. Oh, it's not an annual thing. Nope, so normally right now what we would be doing is we're actually ready to we would be ready to submit our values for approval from the state. So we would go in and submit our LA4 through gateway and wait for the final approval of our values. And they would be doing the same thing. They'd be looking at all the same stuff making sure that our ranges are correct in all of that. But this is just an extra step that happens. So this year were there more changes than a normal year without rebound? Were there more changes to the cards? No, I wouldn't say so, no. I mean, we've had a lot of new construction. So in when you consider that, yes, but no on a regular daily basis every year I would say it's very much the same. When are we required to sign the LA4? So you would be required to sign the LA4 when we would submit our final values through gateway. So once we post this out for a week if we have any changes to be made, we do that. And then we'd submit and you'd need to sign if we don't have any changes to be made then we'll submit and have you guys sign them. So I would say within the next three weeks two to three weeks make sure you have your gateway logins. And if you need those just send me a quick email and I can see what I can do about helping you to get those. And I will also send you the link to gateway too when I need those signatures. Yeah, that might just send me emails changing my user password and everything. Oh, perfect. I had to go in there and change the password. Okay. Like password two was what the normal password they gave me. So I don't know if there's anybody else got that? I'm my usual on this. Let's not tell our passwords to the public. The state gave me password to. Yeah, and then you had changed it, I believe, to whatever it was that you wanted to. So, okay. So let me ask, I take it that we are not gonna get or slot it into the council to do some kind of a forum before the classification hearing. So right now it sounds like I'm working on the PowerPoint presentation for the classification hearing and there's a possibility that the finance committee would wanna talk to us about, I think it was the residential exemption because if we do implement that, it could potentially cost our office more money because of the amount of work that would be added to it. My recommendation at this point for a split tax rate and a residential exemption would be it's too late because at this point in the game, we haven't done any of the legwork to get either of those things done. There's been no conversation if they wanted to do, reach out to the residents of Amherst and find out if that's something they're interested in with the residential exemption. There's a lot of work that still needs to be done and if we vote that in for this year, we're not gonna get our tax bills done on time, which means that our revenue stream is not gonna be on a regular, bills would not be due February 1st, they would all be due May 1st, which could cause issues depending on what the town's funds are, we could have to borrow to pay people. So at this point in the game, I think that that's not an appropriate decision to make but again, that's not my call, that will be the council to decide on that. But just to be clear, you've had a PowerPoint ready to present to the council since when? Last year around, just after the classification hearing. Okay, all right, so what? No, it was really in the spring when you did the PowerPoint on the residential exemption because you talked to towns and stuff. It was about this, after classification last year, we started working on that and the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint was ready, I would say, it was early in the year when we had that. I didn't get it to you guys very timely, but I did have it done then. And whoever the power is to be, I guess the town mayor, Paul or somebody's decided we're not gonna educate the council, they don't wanna be educated. I think it was more so the council not that they're not interested in hearing about it, but they had other things that they needed to get done before doing that. And I don't know if maybe it's just not of interest to them anymore or... I'm glad to hear it was the council, not the Paul or somebody. No, and I could be wrong, but I think if the council requests that information, I don't believe that he can intercept that and change the, I think if they want it, I think we have to give it to them. So... I think they said, you know, the last few years, the council, a few people on the council have really been sort of knocking our head, us, why didn't you present us more stuff? Yeah. And so this year we could say, no council, you told us you didn't want it. Right. Because I'm tired of getting knocked, and the appraiser got knocked too. Yeah. We're not having it. Yes. Yeah. So when it comes to things like that, I mean, we can prepare it ahead of time, but we have to get... Oh, no. If the council doesn't want it, that's fine. That's their choice. Yeah. But I don't want the council saying it was our fault, because it wasn't our fault. Right. There's sort of been a claim, when the classification hearing comes up, you sort of hear from a couple of council members that they've been blindsided. There are two that it's always too late when the classification hearing comes up. And so I was kind of hoping that they would sit down for a little forum in the summertime or whatever, but this time, I guess we've done the, we meaning you, Kim, have done the preparation to be ready for that. Yeah. And at this point, I mean, the numbers will be based on the fiscal year 20, I think it was 21's information, because that's what I had at the time, but easy enough to update if that's something that they want. In the defense of the council, just thinking about what's going on with them and what's happening, they did have the changeover of members. So it could be something that we do talk about this summer or this spring, if that is something that they really do want to address. So, but we do have that. And again, I'm working on that PowerPoint for the classification presentation, which is almost completed. And I can share that with you once that is, if that is something that you guys would like to have beforehand. And so my memory is the same as Ken's on this that. Yeah. It's just, you know. Yeah. Before you showed up, Kim, we were being hammered because we didn't have education material to help them. I don't remember being hammered, but it was there was sort of an implicit criticism, I would say. And one year we said, well, it was COVID or a new, we had a new assessor. She didn't have time to do it. Right. I don't want to see you get hammered either, Kim. Well, thank you. You had it all prepared and... Yeah, it's all already and easily updated. So if they do want that information, I can easily go in and get that. Well, like you said, it's too late. Hello. I mean, it's not, they can vote it in if they want to, but I, my opinion is that it's too late because it would be, it would really strain a lot on us. Yeah, it's a disaster if they tried to do it now. It could, it could be absolutely because we could end up running through December 31st and not getting our tax bills out on time. So I would recommend to do no residential exemption and a single tax rate at this point. But again, it's the, it's basically, it's the assessor's office slash board of assessor's recommendation. That's what I have on my PowerPoint presentation. But again, that's it's completely up to the council. So. My sense of the town having been here for 25 years or 27 years or what is that you would need to do about four or five public forums where people had a chance to come in and sort of see how this, how the tax burden would be allocated. And so it's a long, long cumbersome process that would involve the public and the public would have to get its brain around it. My sense of the residential exemption is one of those things that looks tempting on its face until you then look really carefully at it. Yeah. And talking to some of the other communities that have it, there are some bad things about it. So I think that would be certainly something that we would want. We certainly want to make sure that the people who would be voting on this are extremely educated in the pros and cons of this and what this means, what this would become. Yeah. And what's different now is that we don't have, we have only one select board member left from the old select board that used to think about this stuff. Oh, so there's a, there's a, there's less experience on the council with the annual thinking about this. So, all right. Well, moving on, the next thing that I just wanted to mention to you all is that on October 1st chapter applications for 61, 61A and 61B are due. It seems like we have a pretty good amount of them coming in, but I'm a little disappointed to hear that this is something that we sort of have to pull out of people. This is an application that gives residents a discount on their taxes for farming. So it's something that prioritize would, I would think would be high on the end of paying attention to, but I guess we don't normally, we have to sort of drag it out of them. So, but they are coming in and hopefully we can get- So this is an annual submission? Yes, yep. So those who are in chapter 61 and have a forest management plan with a state forester, they have to apply every 10 years. And then those who have chapter 61A without a forest management plan or 61B, you have to apply annually. Basically, all you have to do is tell us what you're doing on your property and how many acres. You have to have a minimum of five for 61A and 10 for 61B. So it's very simple piece of paper. You just have to fill it out each year at this time of year. We do send it out in the mail as a courtesy. We don't have to do that. But when you think about farmers right now, they're busy, they're picking up for the winter. They're trying to clean up all their stuff. So easily slipped through the cracks, but just unfortunate that we have to send out second notices to so many. Go ahead, Rich. Did you find us to be the case that you had to sort of come after people for their tax break when you were in Greenfield? No. A few, I mean a few, sure, but mostly no. How many bills are you talking about? Here, off the top of my head, I don't know. You're talking 100 or 50 or? Teresa, do you have a guess of how many we have? Hold on one second, I can get that. That's all right. I'm just curious, you know, I can see where it's just a hand. It's a pretty good amount of people, I would say. I would say certainly way more than a handful. Do you have to call people up? Nope, we send them letters. And the thing is to, you know, with the mail being the way it is, we don't know who gets the mail and who doesn't, because you never know where it goes. If it actually gets to their box or not. But it's also something that people should have on their calendars. If you wanna have this exemption, then you're responsible to apply for this each year. So what happens if they don't file by October 1st? So we send out notification in usually August, and then if they don't apply by the 1st of October, we send out notification again and say, you need to get this in by the end of the month because you're late. Or, you know, we pick a date that is reasonable, depending on when we have time to send out that second notification. And if they don't file, then we have to remove them from getting the discount, which causes having to remove a lien. So it's a lot of work to remove them. And then unfortunately, if they appeal during the appeal process, and they have a very legitimate reason as to why they did not file the application, such as illness, death, so on and so forth, we have to put them back in. So then it costs more money to put them back in. We have about 90 accounts. Wow. Wow. And how many times... 90 that you sent out second notices to? No, no, 90 total. Okay. So how often do you have to take them off? So if they didn't apply in October and then just, you know, didn't, we didn't hear back from them or something, then we would have to do it each year. We would take those people out for the fiscal year following. So they're applying a fiscal year ahead. So right now the applications that are coming in are for fiscal year 24. So they would continue to get the exemption through fiscal year 23. And then if they didn't apply by whatever, you know, by October 1st or by the Overval with a very good reason as to why they didn't, then they would come out for the next fiscal year. So 24. So you have to apply like 18 months ahead. I can understand why people just push it off. You do, but once you get, your first year is you have to initiate with us that you want to be involved in this program. And then after that, we send you the application every single year. And so although it's applying 18 months ahead of time, it's still done once a year. Every October 1st, you have to apply. And again, if, you know, if you don't apply, you don't get the exemption. So. Okay. So, you know, certainly understand that this is a busy time of year. And I think that it's kind of a funky time to have this deadline. But unfortunately, that's one we have given by the state. So we can't adjust it. I personally would choose something more of the winter months when the farmers are not as busy. But that's just, you know. Unfortunately, it's a busy time for you too. It is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll, we'll work on trying to get these people who don't, who get the second letters every year on a better schedule. We'll work with them and try to figure out what it is that we need to do to help them. So. Good. So, and otherwise I think we're really, you know, excise abatements, address changes, deeds, things like that are happening on a daily basis. I've been very quiet with phone calls, very quiet with people coming in. It's just, it's a quiet time of year right now because there isn't anything due. But at the same time, a busy time of year trying to get things wrapped up for the end of the finalizing values and setting the tax rate. How are you doing with inspections? We're done. You're done for the, are you done? So we're done for what's considered the revaluation. So we're caught up in all the building permit inspections and any inspections that may have popped up here and there. We do, this year was supposed to be the end of the cyclical revaluation. So that is every 10 years, every property in the town is supposed to be inspected. Now I say every 10 years, but that means each and every property in town has a different 10 year cycle. So what we do is we pull a report and say, when was the last time we inspected all the properties in town and we get a list? And then we can go through and edit. Anybody that was inspected in the past 10 years, get rid of that. And so whoever has any property that was inspected later than 10 years is the ones that we need to look at. So Ken, for example, your property may be in its 10th year and we need to come out and take a look. Rich maybe in its eighth year, Lee maybe we inspected it this year so it starts the 10 year cycle all over again. So each and every property has its own 10 year cycle. So we just have to monitor that. And so that was actually pushed back by the state because of COVID because there was basically two whole years that assessors were not able to go into people's homes safely. So they pushed it back to fiscal 24. So we're able to complete that. And it looks as though we're in pretty good shape with that. So we will be sending out a bid for that for the fiscal year 24 for someone to come in and help us. For example, Bishop Associates may apply for that. And what they'll do is they'll come out and help go through who we need to inspect and then help me do the inspections to complete that 10 year cycle. So next year you'll have that many more inspections to do because you were backed up by two years, right? Yes, yeah. And so this year, there has been a lot of inspections that have been done. And like I said, we're in pretty good shape. But we do, we may have a little bit more this year than we'd have in the next 10 years because we'll hopefully be able to get back to normal and be able to get into people's houses a little easier. So there may be, or I say people's houses but businesses and things like that count as well. So hopefully everything will even out. And then again, in the next 10 years we won't have as many per se that we have this year. So every property's been inspected since 2012? Yeah, so if there's any properties out there that have been inspected in 2011 or even 2012 and back, we need to check on those first. In the meantime, if somebody calls and says, hey, I think something's wrong with my property, I don't, I feel like the value's too high and I'd really like you to just come out and take a look and see that would, so say I go out tomorrow, tomorrow is gonna start their 10 year cycle. So, all right, well, that's all I have. I guess anybody have any thought about the success of that transfer tax on certain properties? I sent an article out, I don't know, people saw it. Yeah, I saw it. I mean, that's a better way around residential exemption to go with that transfer tax. I think there's a lot of information that's needing to be addressed through that. Well, the state has to approve it first. But we also need to know who's responsible for some of those things. Who's responsible for assessing that fine? Who's responsible for collecting that fine? Who's responsible for monitoring the deeds? Who's responsible for, so there's a lot of moving pieces that still need to be addressed because again, same with the residential exemption, if this is something that falls on the assessor's office, we're gonna need another person probably to be able to monitor all these things. However, the hard part is too, one of the suggestions was to not have the original deed recorded yet until that fee is paid. And I don't, I'm not sure the legality of that. So I think there's a lot of work that still needs to get done when it comes to this proposal. Is anyone else doing this in the commonwealth right now? Not that I know of. I love it when we do things that are near the state. Because what happens is they get sent to the legislature and then they sit there. So I think, you know, I mean, there are a couple of pending things already that we and Amherst, because we wanted to be different, well, because we wanted to try something new, I'll put it that way, that we want to try something new, that things get sent to the legislature and then they sit there. So I think that might be what happens here. It goes to the legislature and it gets stuck. This makes me slightly nervous as well because I look at it from two ways, three ways. So playing devil's advocate, as a homeowner, say in Amherst, you wanna sell your property that you're renting or maybe you're not living there, maybe you're renting it. Maybe it was your residence, but something happened and you had to move. But you decided to keep it and rent it. You've now decided you're gonna sell your property and you have no control over who wants to buy it. So if somebody comes in and says, okay, I wanna buy it, actually regardless of what you're doing with it, somebody wants to buy it, but they wanna buy it as a rental. You have no control over what that person wants to do with your property. You have no control over who wants to buy your property. So you make this whole arrangement, you agree on a sale price. That person then says, okay, well, I'm gonna rent the property. So the town says, okay, well, you have to pay a 1% and the seller has to pay a 1%. So you try to negotiate as the seller because you don't feel like it's fair for you to have to pay a 1% fee on this, right? That buyer says, well, I'm not paying your 1%. Now your deal is no longer a deal. I worry about stuff like that. I worry about the person who's trying to sell their house in Amherst. I worry about the person, and maybe that's a situation of a child trying to sell a parent's house. I worry about the situation going the other direction as you're a young family wanting to come into Amherst because maybe you like the school system and you want your child to grow up here. Maybe you grew up here, so on and so forth. So you buy a house that whatever the case is and you end up having to pay this 1% and you go, I'm not buying in Amherst. Maybe you don't understand the whole situation because if you're buying it and you're gonna live in it, then you don't have to pay that 2%. But maybe you just hear that and you go forget it. I'm not even gonna look at Amherst. So I worry about stuff like that. But then again, looking at it from the town's perspective, this is another way to collect and maybe potentially somewhat deter rentals on homes for the students. I mean, I'm not sure. You haven't really thought about it too much in that direction more as I worry about how people look at coming into Amherst and seeing this being assessed. And I worry about people who do need to sell homes. For example, parents' homes and things like that. Our deal's gonna get broken because of this, you know? So. I take it that this has a track record somewhere. I don't know. I mean, this is the first I've ever heard of this. So I'm just thinking in all directions. I think New York City has some kind of transfer tax on, you know, big end properties. I don't know if it's residential, but I don't know. The problem is Amherst is gonna become a non-homeowner. Well already 50% of the units are rental now. I mean, at what point do we say just give it all this rental? I mean, new people can't compete against these investors when they come in. So families. The other question we have is, is this in our purview as a board? Yeah. Oh no. I don't think unless it starts to get weighed that Kim has to do the work. I think, yeah. I think it depends on sort of where some of these tasks lie, which I don't think have been worked out yet. I think it's just a draft proposal of the whole and then they need to get more into the nitty gritty. But I think if there is a situation where the board can make a recommendation of what they feel appropriate about this, then yes, we can say, the board has discussed this and we believe we should do this or we believe we should not do this. So we would recommend a yes vote or a no vote depending again on a lot of moving parts right now. I think it's really in the two early stages to say whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing, whether or not this would affect our office, whether or not the board has a say in whether they think it be a yes vote or a no vote. It's very complex. I mean, housing in Amherst is the big question. What do we want housing in Amherst? And there's a report that was issued last year. I don't know what's being done to follow up on that report, but you know, when the chancellor at UMass says, we have plenty on school housing, you got to be kidding me. Yeah. So, okay. So we'll probably be up to the council to request that the board give a recommendation and we're nowhere near that. Right, right. The state has to say yes before anything happens. And I think there's also just a lot more legwork that needs to be done before they can even submit it to the state too. And we'd have to do a lot more legwork too. Yeah, yeah. Oh. Okay, well, looking at the calendar to schedule our next board meeting, right now, I have nothing scheduled in October on Thursdays. So we have the week of the 13th, which is a holiday, or we, not the 13th, but the Monday is Indigenous People's Day. Or we could do the 20th or the 27th. I recommend the 20th. I think that sounds good. I agree. In fact, I've already got a schedule. Oh. All right, and we're gonna stick with the 930. Yes, please. Okay, wonderful. Okay, then the next thing on the agenda would be the executive session. And what we have in the executive session today is a couple of personal exemptions and an overvaluation. I move that we go into executive session to address those matters and that we announced that we are not returning to public session. That's correct. That's my motion. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and stop recording.